From a Sealed Room

by Rachel Kadish

  No, Halina’s secret and mine is in these papers, these tables and charts. Letters and formulas. Halina studies, late at night. No one else knows she is learning chemicals, symbols and signs that she says are blocks to build a world she and I will escape to. Halina will pass the examinations, she will go to University despite Mother and Father. She has saved money, tutored after school, no one knows but me. She will be a chemist, when she scores higher than the boys on the examination Mother and Father will have to let her go. And I, I will join her as soon as she has earned her first salary.

  You’re not dull-witted, Halina tells me. They’re wrong about you, I know that.

  There is a knock at the door.

  I stand ragged with alarm. Groping to the entryway I search for words, I cry out Yes, Mother?

  “It’s Maya,” this voice speaks. “Your neighbor from upstairs.”

  I cannot remember any neighbor upstairs, in our house on the town’s main road. The basket of emptied peapods sits now on the doorstep beside our muddied shoes; in the parlor, green curtains shut out sunlight. On the second floor;, our bedrooms, and no one living above, I am sure of it.

  “I live in the apartment upstairs,” the voice insists. Someone is come from the roof, then, a dangerous thing. I slide away from the door.

  There is another knock, louder. “It’s Maya,” the voice says in a light and timid Hebrew. “The American,” it adds.

  The American. An American. I know about Americans. My fingers trembling, I unlatch the door and open it the width of my shoulder. Peering into the stairwell I can see pale brown hair and a heart-shaped face. Her eyes are a clean strong blue, they are cat eyes, delicate hollows underneath. High round cheekbones. Her hair like honey in a knot, her legs strong and suntanned in short pants that stop at the knee. She is as beautiful as I have always wanted to be. She is, I see, almost as beautiful as Halina.

  I press my head against the door. “What is it?” I ask her, humbly. My eyes are brimming.

  She smiles at me, laughs. Embarrassed, the American is. “I’m so sorry to bother you, especially for something so . . .” She is searching for a word, she is bashful, and I help her by thinking of words myself: Feverish, salty. Matchbook hiccup kerchief bread.

  “For something so idiotic.” She smiles again, and I crack my lips in my own smile. I nod encouragement, my neck stiff. “I was putting out laundry on my balcony, and while I wasn’t paying attention, the breeze came and blew a”—she pauses, and I think to her sparrow, balloon, flatulence, liberation, push-broom—“a rag off my clothesline, and dropped it right down onto yours.”

  She waits. I wait also, watching: the lacing of the American’s lashes when she blinks, small knobs of lint on a shoulder of her cotton blouse.

  “So my rag is on your clothesline. I was wondering if I could just get it,” she says. “So it’s not among your things.”

  I nod to her, once. She nods back to me, encouraging. I shut the door tenderly in her face.

  The porch shutters scream with rust as I open them. I step, into sharp sudden day. The balcony sunlight pierces my eyes and I reel back, I fall to my knees and my forehead bows to dusty tile. A lizard streaks in front of me.

  Hanging beside the rail is the cloth, a rough white square. I pick it from the line and rub it to my cheek. How warm it feels against the skin, it is an American touch and will comfort. But such whiteness in the sunlight looses Halina’s voice in my head. “Shifra, be nice to Pan Gre-gorow, last time he complained to Mother that you wouldn’t say a word to him, only stared. Behave yourself this time.” Daydreaming girl, even Halina grows impatient. But I do not like my father’s partner Pan Gre-gorow, who goads me for my silence and pinches above my knee when no one looks. I cling to the sash of Halina’s dress; today I will be good, I will do everything as she does. Gently she unfastens my fingers. “It will be all right,” she says. “Don’t worry, I won’t let him touch you.”

  Once there was a Yiddish theater performing in the square, Father said Shifra can mind the shop this afternoon, but I locked the store and stepped down cobbled streets toward the sound of the crowd. The play was ending. A man, his chest draped in cloth, knelt and exclaimed his love to a girl whose hands fluttered emotion. A woman with face painted white, black circles under her eyes, wandered blindly in a circle. I see before me a dybbuk, she sang out, I am haunted, then she fell to the pavement, only at the last flung out a hand so her head did not hit ground. She stood for bows, soon the crowd started to spread from the square into the streets. Father would be returning. I ran toward the shop, slapping shoes on cobblestones, but the neighbor children Lilka and Feliks had seen me, they ran to catch up. Help, it’s a dybbuk, Lilka called and pointed. I faint! she shouted, and as I ran I turned to see Lilka fall giggling into her brother’s arms.

  I knew what Lilka and Feliks’s parents said about my family, I heard them, afternoons on their balcony. “Feldstein drek. But what do you expect from such a family as tries to marry its sixteen-year-old daughter to a rich man almost three times her age? They say she put up so much fight even her wretched father couldn’t bear it. That one, Halina, she’s got promise. A strong-headed girl, to resist such a family. Some good may come of her.”

  “Unlikely,” a soft titter. “She’ll just marry the next rich one who’s only twice her age. That family would do anything to advance themselves, she’ll give in to them soon enough.”

  “You’re dirty liars,” I screamed up from my hiding place below the balcony. “Liars all of you and pigs.”

  Silence, then laughter fading as I ran.

  There was more they did not know, if the truth had been seen they would have called the police to our house. They would lock away Father and even Mother, and it would be my fault. For only I held the secret, and the terror of speaking it aloud in sleep kept me staring awake into blackness at night, reaching for Halina’s hand across the narrow space between our beds. And even Halina I did not tell, although Halina knew everything, every fairy story I made up and every lie I told Mother to hide Halina’s studies. Still I would not speak when Halina asked me why I did not sleep at night.

  Only I had seen Father beating the neighbor’s son. Father told us later, The boy stole, such is what happens to children who steal. But Feliks Rotstein did not steal, I was behind the flour barrel and I too saw what Feliks saw: Grandmother finishing her monthly Sunday inspection of the shop’s goods and leaving through the glass door for her train to Bialystok. Father slipping Grandmother’s envelope of bills into Mother’s purse, instead of the register. Feliks bumped against a crate of candlesticks and Father heard the noise, he saw the fear arching across Feliks’s forehead and he crossed the room in two steps, his palm raised high.

  Feliks told his parents he had been beaten by a Gentile boy whose face he couldn’t recall, behind a building he couldn’t point out even when driven in his father’s car through the neighboring villages and into the countryside. The son of the head of the kehillah has been beaten, word went out through the community. Orphans from the institution the Rotsteins sponsored, the poor elderly men Mrs. Rotstein sewed for with her own two hands: all wrote cards and sent handmade gifts. Talk of the wealthy Rotstein son’s bruises spread for days in the courtyards, some eyebrows danced too over the simplemindedness of such a boy who couldn’t even describe an attack. My mother says this is what a family like ours gets for living in a backward village, Lilka confided to the schoolroom, and abashed sympathy flowed all around her, children whispered on the way to their seats.

  Even Halina whispered. Halina, her skirts rolled shorter, laughing so often lately. I had seen her across the square with three girls from the gimnazjum, there they stood locked together by talk. All that spring these bright-faced girls visited Halina, included her in hikes with boys to the mountains, took her to swim in ponds with the Jewish Sports Club. And Halina laughing. Halina knowing things about cinema stars in pictures she had never seen. My sister has escaped the Feldstein curse, I thought. Soon she will sho
ut names at me too, I will have no companion.

  Halina humming, folding Father’s shirts one by one.

  “When will you tell Mother and Father?” I ask her.

  “When classes at the University have already begun,” she answers. She will live in Warsaw and become a professor, Halina repeats, and I will keep house across the street and write stories. I will look after her children if she has them. “You’ll marry too,” she tells me. “Don’t you worry. Maybe I’ll be locking after your children and I an old maid, who knows?” A skirt lifted, shaken, laid out for ironing. “I’ll tell Mother and Father my plans when it’s too late for anyone to stop me. I didn’t work for so long just to let Mother and Father rule the rest of my life.”

  “Halina,” I say. “Why did you never tell me they were going to make you marry Turkevich?”

  Halina looks at me in alarm. Then averts her gaze, tosses her wavy hair.

  It is true then, she has gone to her new friends and will forget me. She has poured out her secrets for them, my ears are stunned with silence. “Halina why did you never tell me? Why did you never tell me, what did you do to make Mother and Father listen to you?” My voice is breaking with my heart. I turn from Halina and weep to the parlor wall.

  Halina kneels beside me, she calls my name then she takes me in her arms. With one palm she presses my head to her shoulder. Rocks me, and hope breathes into my spirit even as tears blur the parlor lamp. “You know I don’t mean to keep anything from you. Just don’t ask me that question, my Shifraleh, please? Any other question, but not that one. You know I can’t lie to you, so please don’t make me answer.”

  I pull away and wipe tears with the back of my hand. “Will you forget me for your new friends?”

  Halina regards me sternly. Then she smiles. “What, the Kino girls?”

  At the miracle of these words I look up. I have found Halina’s copies of the cinema magazine in our bedroom, have pored over each for clues of how these new fairy tales enchant her.

  “Oh, some of them are all right, a couple of the girls will be friends at the University perhaps. But what does that matter, Shifra? You’re my everything.”

  I lace my fingers into the clean warmth of her hair. “You are mine.”

  In late summer came the letter from University, which Mother tore open in the entryway. For weeks then, Halina did not leave the house, Mother barred the door with extended arms. Grandmother was summoned from Bialystok, she slept in my room and snored in the bed alongside mine. Day after day my sister was forbidden to me: Halina, accepted to University, curled pale in a sheet on the parlor sofa. She would not speak to anyone and so I did not speak either, day after day I uttered no word. Grandmother was the only one who noticed, after each night of threats and promises to Halina she lifted her glass of bedtime schnapps to me. “L’chaim,” she said. “May birds fly from your mouth when at last you open it.” Although the weather was mild all week, the Rotsteins took their tea indoors; Mother’s and Father’s shouts reigned on the street. In the parlor Grandmother offered in a low voice dowry, curses, bribes; tuition for a trade school—a nurse or seamstress in the family, a compromise for all. At the end of six days Grandmother boarded a train for Bialystok. “The girl is as stubborn as I,” she told Mother. “Let Hayyim bring his wrath of God on her, perhaps to that she will listen.”

  Next week came Uncle Hayyim from Bialystok, sent by Grandmother with his black hat and peyes and his smell of unwashed laundry to pray for Halina’s benefit. O Lord let her not go to University, a girl at University will never marry. Hayyim, with his limp—he reminded Father the hour he arrived—from the Gentiles. From the pogrom Father spent hunched behind a barrel of kosher wine, Father a boy hiding behind wine as dark as the blood flowing in village gutters that spring clay.

  Father would not let Uncle Hayyim inside the house. Your God-soaked ways are the one thing worse than a girl at University, he called from the parlor. So Hayyim stood on the street, aiming words at the window a neighborhood boy said was Halina’s.

  The Rotsteins withdrew from their front parlor, their porcelain teapots steamed behind shuttered panes.

  No one knew when Hayyim slept or ate. Father said the momzer could camp out in a sewer pipe for all he cared, even if he, was his own brother. And Halina should remember this because that was where she would be sleeping if she did not forget this University madness. Halina, dreaming in the parlor, how drained her face in the moonlight. How like a crow Uncle Hayyim looked from above in his coat and black hat. At dawn and dusk and through the night he stood on the cobblestone street and chanted his psalms meant for Halina to the window over my bed.

  Give ear to my speech O Lord, consider my utterance.

  All night, all through the night.

  Have mercy on me Lord, heal me, I am weary with groaning, every night I drench my bed in tears. My dreams twined with his words. Away from me, all you evildoers, for the Lord heeds the sound of my weeping. All my enemies will be stricken with terror; they will turn back in an instant. I will praise the Lord for His righteousness, sing a hymn to the Lord Most High, for happy is the man who has not followed the counsel of the wicked. Like a tree planted beside streams of water he will flourish.

  Threat and promise and comfort filled my nights, I woke in the mornings to the echo of Hayyim’s exultation. I will bring before You copper and gold, cedar and sandalwood I lay at Your feet.

  One morning I wrapped bread saved from breakfast in a paper and dropped it to the black figure below. Hayyim did not cease his prayer though he stared with longing. From the parlor I heard rushing footsteps. Mother raced to brush me aside and wave a bucket of water from my window, below us the front door flew open and Father emerged on the stoop, shouted My brother whom I do not call brother, this is not a house of mourning. Go pray for someone who needs psalms, take your cursed blessings and go!

  Uncle Hayyim closed his prayer book and sighed a sigh of the ages. How his black shoulders sagged. From the parlor Mother’s hoarse monologue stopped short as Halina erupted in sound. “Complain about me, Mother, but leave Shifra alone. She isn’t dim-witted, curse this family! If she walks in a mist it’s because she chooses to dull herself to your lies, and you like to think her dull so you can set her to work like a drone all day in the shop. But don’t ever think she doesn’t see and understand everything, and better than most.”

  From the stoop Father’s shout, Good-bye and good riddance, Sir Hayyim of the Dark Ages!

  “I’m going to the University,” Halina said in the parlor, and this time Mother said nothing.

  That evening Uncle Hayyim limped along the street toward the train station with battered suitcase in hand. He did not look up as Halina strode past on her way to the market, basket swinging against her skirt. When Halina had disappeared and Hayyim was far down the street, then Mother came behind me in the front parlor and clutched my shoulder. “What will you do when she leaves?” Mother asked. “She’ll be in Warsaw, you know, she’ll come home only for weekends. You’ll need a friend. Why don’t you find someone from school or visit Lilka Rotstein next door, or join a club?” Bitterly Mother stared at my motionless form as I stood before the window, my fingertips resting on the window frame. “Of course you don’t answer me. You never answer.” Then she seized my hand and was crying into my open palm, kisses and hot tears. “You were always my most beloved child,” she said, “can you believe me?”

  I made a party for Halina’s farewell. Invited all her friends. They hardly knew me, but when I said I was Halina’s sister they looked in my face, and when they asked what time was the party some of them smiled. The day of the party it hailed, the sky dark as if it would boil Everyone said cancel, even Halina, but I laid the plates on the dining room table and set a flower on every napkin, one for each. Halina said she shouldn’t bother, still she put on her best blue dress when I asked. She bound my wet hair in a braid and when it dried I loosed it so it shone in ripples and waves. Mother said it wasn’t a decent way for a girl to
wear her hair but I said to Mother, Mother I do not care. Mother touched her heart and said nothing.

  And they came. One after the other they came. While I brought tea, Halina rose to greet each. Cakes with lemon, cakes with berries, crumbs to wipe on cloth napkins. Boys held chairs for girls, girls held their chins high with attention. So gentle, this sound of cups lifted and set. Then after tea we sat on the steps beneath the balcony, we sat all of us together with Feliks’s mandolin and we sang songs of longing as ice danced solemn patterns on the roof. Ice sang songs of longing on the roof, I danced a solemn good-bye for my sister.

  The pounding of hail on a shingled roof.

  Knocking.

  The American, knocking at the door. Knocking at the door, and I stuff the cloth square into the pocket of my housecoat, run from the porch into the dizzying dark of the apartment. A bed, a suitcase, a photograph, a soup tin, an American. There is an American at my door. Through the walls I shout at her, “Rude American!” I fling the door open. She stands on the landing, her face so eager it pains to look on it.

  “Rude! American!” I shout at her. “Do you think you can just come here to this place and expect us all to fall to your feet with gratitude? Don’t you know we had lives, we had whole lives without you?” I wad the fabric deeper into my pocket, I shoot out a fist and this American steps back, I see she can’t understand that I have tried to hit her. She is confused, and I see I have spoken in Polish. Americans cannot hear Polish, I recall.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks, she reaches out a smooth American hand to touch me. “What’s happened?”