“Yeah,” I agreed. “But after that article came out, she decided no more interviews. She says it changes nothing, and wastes her time. Apparently, everyone applauded her when it was printed, and no one donated money.”
“That’s a shame.” He fell uncharacteristically silent, lost in thought. Then he asked, “How’s she managing with the war on?”
“You know, Dad.” My laughter hit a higher pitch than usual. “She wants to be over there.”
The background ringing of his office phones seemed to rouse him. “That’s crazy,” he declared. “She wants to go visit a war? Does she think it’s a party? War is hell.”
“She says she can’t stand watching on television and not being able to do anything. She wants to be there. She says the only reason she doesn’t just go and buy a ticket is that there’s some new program she’s got to hold together this month at the Center.”
“The woman has been, through advanced cancer, for God’s sake. You would think she’d had enough chemicals in her life. What’s she going to do, go over and get gassed to show solidarity for some country where she’s never even paid taxes?”
Once again I was guilty accomplice in the petty mockery that kept me from feeling close to my father, or accepting more than a handful of his invitations to visit in San Diego. There, beside the swimming pool his new wife and sons enjoyed, my father recalled his days in the movement as a youthful enthusiasm properly deployed, and properly left behind. He wasn’t the turncoat my mother thought, and I’d told her so time and again. He’d just become more . . . regular. Still, I kept a distance that appeared to puzzle him. The two of us couldn’t talk for long without alighting sarcastically on the subject of Hope in a way that left me feeling ashamed: perhaps her criticisms of both of us were right, after all.
I knew my mother was only half right when she said my father had no stomach for hardship. My father could be as tough as she, when he wanted. The problem was simply that it exhausted him.
When I was seven years old, my mother was too tired to do laundry, too tired to eat—too tired to speak to me right now, my father said. Every third week the chemotherapy gripped her body and she retreated to the sickroom; I was instructed to go outside and find some friends to play with. But I exited the front door only to pacify my father. Minutes later I crept through the house, going as near as I could to my mother’s room before my father reprimanded me.
Once, when my father was downstairs doing laundry, I stood in the doorway of her room. Her face was gaunt and shadowed. Her nightgown was askew and I could see the shiny pink seam of her mastectomy. Her lids were lowered, and I thought she must be sleeping.
Then she saw me. In her haste to cover herself, she knocked over a bedside lamp. It fell with a crash. She gazed at me. She stared at my face, my thin arms and legs, my pigtails, and her eyes drank me in until I was certain that, at any second, she would ask me to come to her.
“Go, Maya,” she said.
I went. Downstairs in the laundry room, my father’s long, controlled exhalation masked the approach of my footsteps. I watched him hunch his wide shoulders over the sink, wringing my mother’s kerchiefs with his fingertips as if afraid of the fabric’s touch. When he was finished, he reached down to clear the drain of clumps of my mother’s hair. I teetered between retreating to the front yard and stepping forward to offer some kind of comfort I couldn’t fathom. Time after time, I simply stood and watched.
When the doctor declared the chemotherapy a success, I was eight years old. “Remission” was a magical word: my father pronounced it like the sudden sweep of a breeze, my mother like the rain breaking through a stifling afternoon. In school, my teacher granted it to me like a prize, like “gold star” or “milk monitor” or “A-plus-plus.” And then no one pronounced it anymore. No one needed to. The word had spread like a firework, branched and hung for a moment overhead, and was gone. My father leaned against the refrigerator and cried. -
It was when “remission” was no longer a magical word, when it had fallen to the earth in ashy traces and was forgotten, that my mother went back to her work at the Center. My father, home so often during the worst weeks of her treatment, disappeared once more into what my mother called “your father’s commute suit.” Now when I let myself into the house after school there was no one in the sickroom to greet me, only the sound of curtains blowing against wallpaper. I stopped my nightly bargaining with a god I believed in only murkily, although for weeks I continued to keep each solemn promise: homework in exchange for remission, chores in exchange for remission, pretending I wasn’t hungry when my mother offered dessert. Eventually these promises faded. In their place, I practiced memory. In the Hebrew after-school program that my mother insisted I attend twice a week, we spent that spring learning about the Holocaust. The teacher sang songs of mourning, recited stories meant to keep the lost ones alive. And she taught us that remembering was what would keep this thing from happening again. Never again and never forget; we could keep disaster from recurring if only we were watchful.
Every night I whispered into the expectant darkness the story of my mother’s cancer, so it could not return. The luminous numbers of the bedside clock flipped with a barely audible pat—every minute, every ten minutes, every half-hour. I followed the ritual each night for months after she was well.
Everything my mother had always wanted to do she now embraced. A history class, extra volunteer work in Queens, a course to refresh her memory of Hebrew. No longer careful with her energy, she flung it like a net to the far corners of her world. She renewed her work at the Center, loosing her growing staff on the city’s worst illnesses as though to confirm that she herself no longer needed saving. She left the house early every morning, and continued making telephone calls hours after her return from the city every afternoon. The house buzzed with activity and smelled of carry-out Chinese food; brisk steps sounded in the entryway. My father spent his evenings playing basketball with the neighborhood fathers. As for me, I chafed at my mother’s busyness during the daylight, and after dark I was absentminded. Drifting to sleep, too old now for my mother’s bedtime singing, I would start guiltily and swear to be vigilant. I’d begin the whispered litany, and fall asleep before I was through.
I outgrew my mother’s taste in clothing, packed my own lunch for school. I learned how to join in on the other girls’ scorn for the enthusiasms of the Hebrew school teacher, and then how to cut class altogether. And I told my first lie: Yes, I’d been there, but nothing had happened worth telling. Now when my mother taught me words from the Hebrew poems she’d translated painstakingly on the subway, I forgot to listen. And on the single occasion when, coming down the hallway, she whispered a secret message to me in Hebrew, I was too embarrassed to admit I hadn’t learned the words.
Months passed. My father argued that he wanted a romantic dinner once in a blue moon, he didn’t see why my mother had to run off to work every hour of day and night. “How did you get to be a stranger?” my mother accused. I watched my father go from the kitchen into the hallway, rubbing with one hand at a tightness in his shoulders. It was a summer of heat waves and a daily paper route; with my new bicycle I ranged beyond our street and discovered the boys on adjacent blocks. I’d lost patience for stories about a ship almost taken to Haifa in ’58; over and again I promised my mother that I’d get around to writing to my Israeli cousin Dov, so we could be pen pals as she wanted. Next week, maybe. I stopped promising, started rolling my eyes instead. My father threw out his back. Classes, like everything else my mother said she loved, fell prey to her schedule; her Hebrew died on the vine. She called attention, then, to each of my father’s failings, and my father’s accusation—humorless—rang in every room of the house.
It was August, and the newspaper lay unopened on the kitchen table. “I have enough of my hair back now, don’t you think?” My mother, reattempting a wispy braid, stood in front of the mirror. She smiled, tightly, at my reflection. She’d stopped wearing her kerchief the week
before, just after my father said he was leaving for good. I watched her fit a cloth pad into the left cup of her brassiere. She turned away from the mirror and hurriedly fastened the clasp across her back. “Your father called to see how you are. He’ll call again in a few days, when he’s found a place to live.”
My father moved to Manhattan that year, to California four years later. My mother and I stayed in White Plains. Our usual movements, now echoing in the too big house, seemed fierce and unfamiliar, and quickly undid whatever it was that had made us try to understand each other. “Thanks for driving him away,” I muttered when I thought she was just beyond earshot. At every crossroads in school I picked the simpler path, at every choice I made it easier for her to give up on me. I quit Hebrew school without warning one afternoon in the seventh grade, after a guest rabbi lectured on the idea of the chosen people. Why are we chosen? Because God wants us to repair the world. What are we chosen for? To suffer. One of my friends said she was sick of all the precious gloom, she didn’t see why we needed to suffer, too, just because some rabbi couldn’t keep his lectures short. We spent our final hour of class chewing pickles in Mama Lily’s Diner and vowing never to set foot in Hebrew school again. “Let our people go,” my friend snickered when another gleeful classmate joined us.
Somewhere on the rim of the valley, a bus brakes. From down the hall I hear Ariela shifting in bed.
Dear Maya, my mother wrote only last week, I still don’t know why you hesitated all that time to tell me you wanted to go to Israel. I would have found a way to help you go years earlier, if you’d only let me know.
Suddenly my body feels clumsy, my chest weighted. Struggling to breathe in the close air of this room, I kneel on the bed, my panic growing with every second. If only I’d been more careful. I should never have strayed so far, resisted her so childishly.
Gradually, my breathing slows. I press my hands to my temples. She’s fine, her letters say. She’s going to be fine.
I know, of course, that being vigilant could never possibly have kept the cancer away. Still, recalling the magic of my childhood promises, I can’t help but wonder what I could have sacrificed, what penance I could have observed, that would have banished the sickness for good. I promise myself that I’ll double my vocabulary lists, make up word-remembering rhymes. Refuah, refed, refaim, I’ll continue memorizing sections from the Hebrew dictionary. I’ll visit the places she’d want to see, retrieve more of the missing pieces of her puzzle.
Outside, the leaves make only a dry rustle. The moon lights the floor beneath the windows, casting long shadows across the room. It lights, too, that peculiar half-hole in the wall over the desk, where the plaster is smashed. I listen for a while to the sounds of this building, voices winding faintly up the stairs, the long creak of a shutter. A radio plays in another apartment, music mixed with news spoken in a man’s low voice.
I can almost hear the breathing of the people in the apartments all around me. I sit motionless, hardly breathing myself. And I think: Perhaps it isn’t so wrong, living here in this room, with flashes lighting the sky overhead and sirens banding together across the sky. I picture a wide-open, enchanted night, the city’s low buildings spellbound. The missiles are things of strange and stately beauty, rolling and rushing smoothly through a dark sky, giving off pieces of themselves to the night. I can see it all through the window, from where I sit in this room. A patch of fire, sinking, lights a ragged trail, and the missiles, pinned against the sky for an instant like rare night, moths caught by the flash of a camera, are frozen mid-flight, preserved in black and white and shadow against any future that might deny them. The explosions, when they come, are silent too. Countermissiles hurl themselves unseen from the ground and shower the earth with debris, while families crouch face to face below.
The picture mesmerizes me, and it is some time before I realize I’ve left out all the sound. Blaring sirens and whistling air, and ragged breath in the crowded darkness of this room. I realize, too, that no missiles actually fell here in Jerusalem; the long nights of fear brought only the news of more distant explosions, in Tel Aviv and Haifa and elsewhere. And I know, above all, that what I’ve thought is terrible. That there could never be anything beautiful about living under such a sky, such a night.
Yet something about the picture holds me; I have a feeling of being so close to a simple truth that I can almost see its shape in the moonlight. As if here in this room we are larger than life—we are more than anyone outside could ever know, more than even we could have expected. As if there is nothing more real than this room, this night. As if this sealed room is the most beautiful place in the world.
I fall asleep thinking of Gil, and his voice rises and falls in my mind like a fitful wind. Tomorrow we will be together again. We will share news of our day, we will sit on our balcony in the evening and laugh quietly and watch the clouds pass across the sky. I am certain that if I am careful, we can be happy.
8
The American is gone.
Left as the sun was beginning its descent and did not return even for the awakening of the streetlamps, and still she is not back. No American footsteps above, overhead no American sounds. Without the American, the night catches its breath. Without her the pulse of the street falters.
Across a bed cold slanting bars of moonlight. Quiet footsteps, a tap runs and shuts. Night, and I cross-legged on taut covers. Night, and I trembling stillness. Night, I run palms across a blanket worn to gauze.
I must not close my eyes this night for fear I will miss her return.
For without Americans, there is nothing. Without them there is no time, without them the world cannot renew, without them there is only death. Americans promise future.
Long ago the American’s boyfriend drove her away in his car. Long ago the American’s boyfriend returned alone, turned page after page seeking comfort. Long ago, evening quieted the street, even the blacks settled in silence. And still the American did not return, my heart wept bitter tears. Into the darkness I stretch my arms: Why have you forsaken me?
And after the war, they said to me, Forget the past. They said, Put it behind you. At the bus station, at the seashore, I tried to tell what needed telling. No one would hear. Don’t think about such things, they counseled. This is a new country, a bright country, it will banish our nightmares. See how they wither under this sun. Only Feliks came to hear me, and he would not stay to hear all. He too succumbed, he fell in love with the healthy and the new. So long ago, the world wound itself around others’ hands and left me barren.
But the Americans will not forsake us. The Americans will come to start a world again. To right things, to make sense out of all. It has been promised. It was promised, in Dachau.
Rumors came of American armies, there came life to my sister Halina’s eyes. No word was spoken but a current stirred in her. Then I recognized my sister. In this typhus skeleton was again Halina, eyes the light-streaked brown of chestnuts. All around us hearts beat once more, now in these skeletons lived a future, coming closer with every American step. Without a word, without a glance to me or a look to the sky for airplanes, Halina prayed somewhere inside herself for Americans. I knew it in the lowering of her eyelids. Americans to end this death that has always been and will always be and can never end. Americans to bring a future. Americans to make time that has twined upon itself unravel, and begin again.
Bars of light on the bed, silence from this Jerusalem street. For so many days the American has lived above me and now, now just as I begin to understand, just as I see that I must prepare for her with all my strength, now that I see it is me she has come for, me she will save, now she has gone.
Her boyfriend paces upstairs, until sleep overtakes him and he is silent.
And when dawn grays this room and dissolves these cold bars, I wrap my arms around shivering knees and listen. Morning footsteps winding in the stairwell, how this building echoes without an American. How stones tumble slowly to earth, how weeds crumble to dust
, abandoned.
The last of night fades, now I hear the voices from bunks all around me, we are four to a plank and blanketed in stink. Doubt flows from their open mouths, they tell me the American has left and will not return. She has left you, they say, she is gone. She has left you with nothing to eat, nothing to drink but this moment, stink fills our nostrils with shit.
I stand to my feet in this dim apartment, my hands grope after such voices. No, I sing to them, my throat tears in anguish. You cannot take her from me, she whom I have just found. She will return. The American will come for me. I believe.
I believe with perfect faith.
And when she comes she will bring the redemption. When she comes, I sing to the voices, she will vanquish memory, free us from this past.
It is daylight when the voices fall silent. I sit by the door. My body is a withered arbor, splintering with exhaustion. Once more I reach to assure myself of this suitcase, packed with everything I will need. I am ready for my redemption. Now I wait.
The American will come. The American will come, even if she tarries.
Day is here, soon the street will be full of blacks. Upstairs the American’s boyfriend turns on his heel. We wait, he and I.
For our American.
In my dream I am onstage, alone. It is the spring recital at school in Purchase, and from nowhere comes a fast, tinkling piano melody, played only for me. Seeing no one else onstage, I step toward the audience; I mean to see what holds them there so expectant in the dark. But the music grabs me and I can’t help dancing, and when I whirl hard to the floor my hair brushes the stage. The auditorium fills with the flutter of translucent pages, and I hear, amid this strange applause, the sound of my mother’s two hands celebrating at long last. Raising myself, bruised, from the stage, I turn to her with anger burning in my eyes. But the stage lights blaze in her face, and she cannot see me at all.
From a Sealed Room Page 17
