From a Sealed Room

by Rachel Kadish

  I followed him to the living room door and stood watching while, singing under his breath, he closed the last tube.

  When he caught me staring, he raised his eyebrows quizzically.

  “It’s been so long since I’ve heard you sing,” I explained, “I’d forgotten you can’t carry a tune.”

  Softly Gil began to laugh. He rested the tube against the wall, then came and stood before me. “It’s finished,” he said. “It’s really, really finished.” I placed my hand against his chest and felt the rise and fall of his ribs. Looking up into his eyes, I was met by his steady gaze for the first time, it seemed, in months.

  And now it’s Friday morning. I didn’t want to leave our bed. All night Gil cradled me, and as he slept I lay awake. I touched my fingertips to his temples, felt the hopeful flicker of his dreams.

  I sit opposite him over the breakfast table. We are too far apart; I lace my legs with his under-the table.

  “Maya,” he says solemnly, his words like jewels on a string. “Thank you for being with me while I did this. I couldn’t have dreamed how hard it would be. On both of us. But it’s over now.” He doesn’t try to hide the emotion on his face as he speaks. “I’m sorry,” he tells me.

  Then a grin, irrepressible, steals up on him. “Things are going to change.”

  We finish our breakfast iu silence. The sky outside the kitchen window is hazy, and it’s hot for so early in the morning, but I don’t let these things bother me. Today is a fresh beginning. I won’t remember what’s past; I won’t remember anything. I sit at the table and watch Gil rinse his dishes, then set them in the drain. He gathers his work from the living room and opens the front door.

  “What’s this?” Cardboard tubes tucked under one arm, he bends to hit a folded cloth from the threshold.

  Dreamily I look at the rag in his hand. At first I don’t recognize it. When I do, I have only one thought: I want her to go away.

  Gil flips the cloth to the kitchen counter. “I must have dropped it. Would you mind putting that with my things?”

  You see? I argue silently to the woman downstairs. He doesn’t remember that I lost it. He doesn’t need to cling to wrongs that have passed. Why should I?

  Gil turns back to look at me. “Thank you,” he says.

  I follow him to the street and wait until the bus arrives. As he moves down the aisle with his arms full of tubes, I step onto the bus to pay his fare, and after the driver has accepted my coins I linger. I see passengers make way for Gil with curious glances. Gil is blessed, beautiful, shining amid this crowd. I thank the driver and step to the street, where I watch the bus power its way to the corner and disappear.

  On the way back to the apartment I check the mailbox. I’m relieved to find the letter from my mother; it’s been two weeks since her last, and my theory of a postal delay has rung false for days. Opening the envelope, I fight to calm the panic in my gut. Could someone have told her my letters are full of lies?

  The apartment is starkly silent; I head for the living room. The floor is littered with scraps of torn drawings, and here and there a whole one that survived Gil’s laughing run through the room. The string droops bare from wall to wall.

  I make my way between the discarded portraits, as if treading on one might be sacrilegious, or at least bad luck. I reach the sofa and sit and unfold the letter. Before I read I breathe deeply, bracing myself for a blast of fury.

  August 30, 1993

  Dear Maya,

  Your travels sound wonderful, as does your plan to stay for the fall semester. I’m so pleased you’ve been spending your time wisely and happily.

  The children are making everyone crazy with their griping about the end of summer vacation, but the volunteers are holding their own. And it will be a relief to know that for at least a few hours a day some of the kids are in school and off the street. Meanwhile I’m planning to take the younger ones out of the city for a day in early fall. Faye and I are thinking of an excursion to Bear Mountain. Many of these kids have never even been out of Brooklyn.

  I’m sending you a photograph of a recent outing to Coney Island.

  Here all is well.

  With love,

  Your Mother

  Folded inside the letter is a photograph of a line of black and Latino children holding hands on a beach. They seem to be shouting something in unison. The sky behind them is blustery, and at one end of the line a dark-skinned woman looks to the clouds, as though doubtful the rain will hold off even for the length of the shutter’s snap. Wind whips hair and clothing, raises the skeptical brows of the women struggling to keep this wavering line of children in order. The children are wild-mouthed and joyful, their clothing impossibly colorful against such an indifferent sky. My mother is not in the picture.

  I look at the scene for several minutes. Stubbornly I wait for her to appear in it.

  The sun has climbed higher; I wipe sweat from my forehead. Birds peck at the balcony tiles. I imagine Gil at the gallery, racing to install his exhibit before this afternoon’s opening.

  It is only when I feel I can put it off no longer that I rise and retrieve the folded cloth from the kitchen. I stand, holding it, in the front hall.

  I don’t want to know. Whatever it is she has in store for me this time, I don’t want to know. The woman downstairs is replying to what I told her about Gil, but she’s wrong. Gil’s anger is past. The words I spoke in her stifling apartment now seem deceitful, as false as the smoke my crazy neighbor dreamed up. I picture her walking in on Gil and me mid-argument, and in my mind I slam the apartment door before she can reach us. The force of my gesture creates a wind that blows her away like so much dust; she disappears, and with her go that terrible chanting and the irritating clicking of her door. There is nothing but silence in the stairwell.

  Inside the folds of the cloth I feel the cracked surface of a photograph.

  I don’t want to know.

  I walk through the living room to the balcony. My approach startles the birds, and they beat upward in a flurry of small brown bodies.

  It is an old black-and-white photograph, curled and stiff with age, and it fits naturally in my palm. The picture shows a covered porch crowded with people. It’s a party, I assume—a birthday or homecoming. The group spills over the porch railings and threatens to wash onto the front steps. The people appear close to my age, and their expressions are unnervingly familiar. They look mischievous, bemused; one boy has been captured with his face contorted with laughter. I think of Orit and Michal and the others at Mount Scopus. But in this photograph the girls’ hair is rolled and bobbed in shiny waves. Some wear hats, and their arms, in short-sleeved blouses, are white and soft. The boys wear dark pants and jackets; one of them pushes his spectacles higher with a finger.

  At the center of the photograph is a young woman who appears to be the focus of this gathering. Friends sling arms around her, incline their heads, cluster near. She is beautiful, blond and square-jawed. She gazes levelly at the camera. To one side, apart from the main group and just barely included in the frame of the picture, stands a younger girl. Even in this small photo I can see that she has light eyes, and beneath them dark hollows. Unlike the older girls, this one has pale hair falling in wild wavelets. She looks haunted, with those eyes, and two figures in the shadows behind her seem to swear it true: a portly mustached man leaning on a cane, a thickset woman in dark buttoned dress, her weight angled toward the girl, ready to snatch her arm and pull her back. The girl herself looks insubstantial enough to float away.

  Impatient, I shake out the cloth. There’s nothing else in it. Just this single photograph.

  Did she hear, did my neighbor hear the happiness in Gil’s voice this morning, echoing down into her mean, dusty apartment? Did the message penetrate to her single room with its faded, gnarled possessions, chewed on like so many bones in a famine? Didn’t she understand that the past is over, that a new future has begun?

  The picture is streaked with age. As if the photog
rapher had focused through a fine sheet of rain or snow.

  I tuck the photograph roughly into the cloth. Then I stride across the living room, my feet trampling scraps of sketches, and stuff it behind a stack of my notebooks on the dusty bottom of a shelf. “I don’t want to be reminded,” I say aloud. “Do you hear me?” My words quake against the blank walls of the room. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want your damn reminders of what’s already past.”

  Now. Even the stones of this city will tremble with the cry of Your shofar. You have bent the sky, You have come down in order to lift me from the dust. The wailing will reach across the heavens, shake the scorched air. How this city will quiver, called to its final reckoning.

  I turn the knob. I open the door.

  The stairwell towers above me, I wind up and up. I never saw before such light, such brightness as comes in from these windows. I never saw before: This passage is a chute whose narrow tip might release me to blue sky. My suitcase drags behind me, l am ready. Hope rails at my mind, stuns my ears; at last it is time. Every story I will tell.

  I knock at Your door.

  You open.

  You are strong, Your arms will be fierce in their sheltering embrace. You are beauty, water-blue eyes, Your hands speak miracles.

  American, I cry.

  You regard me. You hesitate, am I worthy? Your mouth shapes words, You invite me in with a gesture. The king has lifted his scepter I am admitted.

  You dwell in a house of breezes, fragments of souls scattered at Your feet.

  You are waiting. Beholding Your visage I tremble, I must not fail. I open my mouth, with all my strength I praise You.

  Only You can erase past and bring future, American. Only You can start time that has stopped.

  Now I begin, and my soul goes out to You in words.

  Floods, torrents of words. Crashing sounds, clanging vowels, the screech and silence of such tales. I show it to You: the clenching walls of ghetto, the beating of Karol’s great heart when we stood together under branches and did not know this would be the last. The machines he dreamed of for his farms, drowned out by motors plowing lives, the locking of metal doors. The clatter of Uncle Hayyim’s dancing feet on cobblestone, he held his arms high as if lifting a Torah to the skies. And Halina, finding tears in camp when we had no more tears. Yet she came to me and wept. Shifra how can you forgive me? I will tell you now the truth, I will tell you now what I did to keep Mother and Father from forcing me to marry Turkevich. Halina’s penitence streaming up from these barracks to vacant sky.

  The words tear at my throat as I force them forward, they wrack my body but I speak and speak and speak to You American. Everything, You must know. After the war, Feliks, grown tall and full of rage, repeating his questions for he believed repetition would bring sense. Were you with Lilka when she died, tell me. Feliks, saved by a miracle woman leading children through ghetto sewers. Feliks, saved, with his arms full of withered potatoes; Feliks in Israel, grown tall with his rage, his shame, his gift of a photograph. See there, he paused in his torment of words to point. See there at the center. Lilka with her arm around Halina.

  How long the sound of my voice carves air. Only when I have told You all will You set the past to rest. How long I confess under Your roof, among Your fragments, before Your watching eyes. How long.

  I am here, I say to You. I am here.

  Standing just inside the gallery door in black shirt and black pants, Gil looks even taller than his six feet. As he watches guests arrive off the street he shields his eyes against the glare. I can hear people in the main room behind him. I kiss Gil, and shake hands with a rail-thin man who introduces himself to me as Roni, then turns back toward Gil and regards him without speaking.

  A twist of Roni’s mouth releases cigarette smoke. “There’ll be results from this,” he says at last. He claps a hand to Gil’s shoulder and raises a plastic cup of red wine. “You’ll be getting invitations to show your work elsewhere, that’s for certain.”

  And Gil, after a pause (Forgive him, I urge silently), nods his acknowledgment.

  “It’s quite shocking.” The man who has just walked over to Gil wears a tie, and I guess him to be the gallery’s owner. “What possessed you to choose the blacks? And where did you come up with the idea of drawing them on the very flesh, as it were?”

  I wait for Gil to laugh at the owner’s pretentiousness, but he is nodding, serious and intent. Standing beside Roni, I see Gil’s dismissive acceptance of the owner’s praise, followed by the smile he cannot stifle. Gil is explaining something about visiting an ultra-Orthodox scribe to learn a technique for using a quill pen. In the middle of Gil’s discourse, the owner winks at me. “Stick with this one,” he counsels. “He’s a find.”

  Gil is wrapped up in his conversation; he doesn’t seem to notice when I excuse myself. I walk alone to the gallery’s main room. My feet, confined in the black pumps I haven’t worn since leaving Purchase, tap across the smooth white floor. After a few seconds I summon the nerve to look.

  From every point in the gallery, religious men and women and children watch me raise my head. I stand in the middle of a ring of solemn figures, drawn in simple dark lines like the ones in the apartment. Gil has positioned the drawings so that each face is just above eye level. With clamorous indifference, the blacks look over the heads of the gallery crowd. The men, with their expressions of anguished faith, of wariness or condemnation, wear hats and clutch books. Some have opened their mouths in fervent prayer, others nod consolation. Their eyes, burning and demanding, are suspended between dream and life. The women, their gazes averted, rest heavy hands on the heads of their children. Boys pull at wispy sidelocks or balance their weight on one foot; girls wear their hair cut in bangs across their foreheads, in imitation of the wigs or kerchiefs they will wear when married. But instead of being sketched with charcoal on paper, these faces are drawn in sharp ink lines on parchment.

  I step closer to the drawing of a boy and see that Gil has done his portraits on the same stiff yellowed hide used for Torah scrolls. At the edges of the drawings are elaborately penned words, snippets of newspaper headlines copied out in the calligraphy of the scribes.

  These figures have been living with me in my home, scenting the air with their parchment fingertips, their heavy ink brows. Now, gathered in one room, they are an army of the haunted. They stare past me, preoccupied with their own knowledge. We are not free, their expressions insist. None of us. There is nothing in this world but suffering, there is nothing in the present that matters, there is only hope for the world to come.

  Something about one of the portraits along the wall is familiar, and as I near it I realize the face is that of a well-known Israeli politician recently under investigation for corruption. Turning to the nearby drawings, I recognize other faces amid the depictions of men and women from our street. Now two visitors in the gallery are laughing; one of them points at the portrait of a black-hatted man who resembles a conservative general I’ve seen in the news. Farther along, people are gathering around the drawing of a kerchiefed woman with the face of a left-wing government minister. There are nods of appreciation, stares of disapproval. Walking the wall slowly, I examine figure after figure until I come to a drawing of Yitzhak Rabin, uncomfortable in a black hat that fits poorly on his high forehead. At a neighborly distance, looking more at home in his own black hat and peyes and with the same faraway gaze as all the others, is Yasir Arafat.

  “Can you imagine,” a woman near me says, “the two of them standing next to each other?”

  Her companion laughs. “Can you imagine the two shaking hands?”

  Of all the subjects pictured, there is only one who regards the viewer head-on. I cross the floor to study this drawing, placed lower than the rest so that she alone addresses viewers directly.

  It is the woman from downstairs. Gil has drawn her peculiar wasted face with perfect accuracy, he has not forgotten the raised hands and slightly open mouth. Her kerchief lopsided, s
he seems a comic figure. I stand before the portrait, uneasy—Gil has hung her on these walls for mockery.

  But gradually, something else emerges from the drawing: her face is vivid with hope. In this drawing she, too, looks to her redemption like the rest of the blacks, only with an eagerness unlike any of the others’. She looks as if she’s in love. I want to take Gil aside and tell him he’s gotten her wrong.

  I start as Gil catches me by the waist. “Say something. For heaven’s sake, Maya. I’ve been following you for ten minutes already, you haven’t done anything but stare.”

  Gil laughs, but he isn’t smiling. Seeing how closely he watches my face, I wonder how he would draw me, which of these figures praying for salvation I would most resemble.

  “It’s brilliant,” I tell him.

  He frowns. Scrutinizes my face. Then he grins.

  The gallery is filling with people; Gil takes my hand and coaxes me to the entrance to greet newcomers. “This is my beautiful girlfriend, Maya,” he informs them. “You’d be best off talking to her, she’s my better half.” Soon it becomes a game between the two of us to see who can step forward first, meet the proffered handshake and introduce the other with grander flattery. And the guests play along, complimenting me on the show and congratulating Gil on finding me. Everyone is looking at Gil and at me; everyone is eager to talk to us. Even Roni comes by again to make conversation. “Damn heat wave,” he says, wiping his forehead with a napkin. “I hear it’s going to lift soon.”

  From the walls the blacks keep silent vigil.

  “You’ve implicated the whole country, making us out to be like the blacks.” I can’t tell whether the man talking to Gil is praising him or has taken offense. “What, you think we’re all just waiting for God to fix things for us? You think we’re all so powerless?” He has taken offense. But Gil nods energetically—its clear he’s pleased. I assemble a plate of cheese and fruit for him, and pour myself a cup of white wine. “I wanted to do it on a single scroll, like a Torah,” I hear Gil explaining to a young woman. “But I didn’t have time to learn how to sew the parchment.”