by Alice Nelson
It must be like that for Sister Vera too, Constance thought. Setting one foot in front of another until you are far away, as if your own body wants you to be free. But Sister Vera came back. Just like she had.
Harlem
July, 1997
When Marina, Jacob and Ben walked south towards Rose’s house they passed the housing projects where Constance and Gabriel lived. There was a small knot of people gathered in the courtyard, an old woman sitting on one of the benches, clutching the handle of a shopping trolley and muttering to herself. A man with a large brown dog on a leash emerged from the building. Marina wondered if it was the same dog she had heard barking when she was there. There was a ripple of something; she could understand why Jacob was so wary. In some of the projects in the Bronx there had been reports of people pitching air conditioners and television sets on to policemen patrolling the courtyards. And always the talk of gangs and drugs, of young men stabbed to death in stairwells. In the winter a makeshift shrine had appeared outside one of the towers, rows of candles lined up against the walls, a cluster of pastel soft toys, a bunch of carnations wrapped in coloured cellophane.
Marina counted up six floors and tried to remember if Constance’s apartment was on the east or west side of the building. One of those lighted windows was hers. For a fleeting moment she wanted to dash up the stairs and collect Constance and her child, take them along to Rose’s house for dinner. But what could it possibly mean to Constance to be plucked out of her squalid apartment building and brought under the cloak of their benevolence for a few hours? She tried to imagine the girl at Rose’s dining table, eating soup, a linen napkin across her lap, her face illuminated in the flicker of the Shabbat candles. It was impossible.
Ben walked silently beside her and Jacob, his hands in his pockets. She remembered how he used to skip ahead of them so that he could turn back on the path and face them, some new story bursting out of him, a brief backwards jog while he gesticulated. These Friday night dinners at his grandmother’s house were the only thing he had not refused this last year. There was a faint dread every week that this would be the night he wouldn’t join them, but so far he had always appeared downstairs before they set off. It was heartening to see him there in his clean shirt, his hair freshly washed, a waft of cologne in the room, even if there seemed to be a faint exhaustion in him, a slight tremble in his voice.
Ben loved his grandmother. Much of his youth had been spent in her company. In the months after Leni left, Rose had put aside her own obligations and devoted herself to her grandson’s care. For a time, Jacob and Ben came to live with her in the apartment on the Upper West Side. The little boy’s life had been tipped up and Jacob didn’t want him to be left with strangers while he was at work. So they moved back to Jacob’s childhood home, the same apartment in which Rose herself had grown up. Another single bed was moved into Jacob’s old bedroom, and father and son shared the room for two years. It gave him enormous comfort, Jacob once told Marina, to be able to hear his son’s quiet breathing at night, to watch the small curve of him under the blanket in the bed across from him. When he came home from work to find Rose in the kitchen and Ben playing with the same ancient Meccano set that had been his as a boy, Jacob felt that his life had unspooled in reverse. An odd kind of rewinding, which had brought him back here to his boyhood home, under his mother’s care once more.
It was very hard for Rose, Marina knew, when Jacob and Ben eventually moved into their own apartment. That wrench, all over again, of her children leaving. She had lived alone for years before they came, but all of a sudden the silence of the newly empty apartment had seemed impossible to endure. It seemed, in its blank immensity, to be the same silence that had flooded every room in the months after her husband had died.
The neighbourhood changed swiftly as the three of them walked further south. The streets grew cleaner and more decorous. Window boxes and planters full of daisies appeared. The streetlamps glowed warmly though it was barely dusk. A woman with two pugs on tartan leashes stood beside them on Central Park West as they waited for the light to change. Ben bent down to pat the dogs and they wheezed excitedly as he stroked their heads. He loved animals. Marina could hardly remember the long catalogue of pets over the years: a pair of white mice, countless fish, a blue-winged budgerigar, a small tortoise, an injured rat he had found lying on the sidewalk and brought home wrapped in his school sweater. How he had tended all of those creatures. Perhaps he needed something to love. She thought of Constance and the tight circle of her fingers around her child’s wrist. And her own mother. That closed bedroom door, her children reading quietly at the kitchen table, whispering to each other so they would not disturb her. Having something to love, Marina thought, was not always the answer.
They had performed great feats, she and Dov, to elicit their mother’s love. Marina thought of all the cups of tea, the flowers placed on the lacquered tray with her breakfast, the incessant tending. Dov was only nine years old when they came to Brooklyn, but in some ways he was already like a small adult. He tried to care for his mother in the same way he had cared for Marina in their years in the Children’s House. But Gizela was forever ignoring the gifts they presented her, forever unloosing their hands from hers and striding ahead of them on a path. She could not stand to be close to them for too long, and often on weekends or during the summers she would disappear from the apartment for hours on end. They did not know where she went – as far as they could tell she had no friends in the city. She had found work doing typing from home and every few days a new sheaf of pages would appear on the small desk in her bedroom. Marina and Dov never saw any evidence of these transactions and did not know who gave her the work. In the evenings they could hear the clatter of the keys, racing and halting and then speeding up again. It felt reassuring to them. Gizela was safe when she was typing, sitting at her desk in the circle of light from the fringed lamp.
Once, Marina and Dov followed her when she left the apartment. They had been eating breakfast in their pyjamas but as soon as they heard the front door of the building close, they ran to pull on their clothes and walked after their mother, hanging back a block so that she would not see them. Gizela trailed slowly along Eastern Parkway, her pale-blue coat billowing out behind her, her long hair in a plait wrapped around the crown of her head. She walked west all the way to the waterfront at Brooklyn Heights. It was early on a Sunday morning and the place was empty of people. Gizela stopped by the railing of the promenade and leaned over and looked down at the water. Then she stepped up so that her feet were on the iron girder. Marina could feel a terrified panic coursing through Dov. He reached out and took her hand, but neither of them moved towards Gizela. It felt as though they were suspended there for a long time, all of them frozen into a strange tableau. They were waiting, Marina thought, for their mother to show some awareness of their watching. To glance back with that slightly startled expression that came over her sometimes when she stepped out of her bedroom in the mornings and saw them eating their breakfast. To remember that her children were there, that they were hers.
After what felt like hours, but could only have been a few minutes, Gizela unhooked her feet from the railing, stepped back down on to the pavement and strode away. As they walked home together, Marina saw that Dov’s trousers were wet. She must have been only six or seven years old, but Marina had never forgotten the tremble in her brother’s fingers, the bloom of damp on the pale fabric.
In the downstairs foyer of Rose’s apartment building Marina paused for a moment and glanced at her face in the warped old mirror above the hall table. She looked like her mother. This unnerving recognition happened to her more and more now. The past never lost its power, the force of it so strong at times that it threatened to sweep everything else away. She had cut her hair to just above her shoulders that summer. Long, it reminded her too much of Gizela. What was it about her own face now that called forth Gizela? After so many years of absence, her mother had become something drifting a
nd unshaped, her piercing, unsettled beauty a kind of myth. It was the grey eyes, Marina thought, and the pale skin. She remembered staring, transfixed, at the same tracery of veins visible at Gizela’s temples, the blue web-work almost like a faint tattoo.
Leah burst through the door behind them, an enormous bunch of pink roses in her arms. When she embraced Marina, the soft, faintly foetid smell of the flowers rose up between them. Her hair was piled up on top of her head and her cheeks were flushed from the heat. Leah often complained that all her parents’ good looks and charm had gone to Jacob. She denigrated herself constantly, not recognising her own beauty and instead railing about her gracelessness, her unruly hair, wishing she were taller, more elegant.
‘Hello, my loves,’ Leah said happily. ‘Would you look at these roses? Doesn’t it feel like they’ve just been plucked from a misty English garden? Of course, they’ll probably be dead in about two minutes in this heat. I shouldn’t have wasted the money. Sinful, I know. But still.’
Leah reached up to kiss her brother, resting her hand on his cheek for a moment. Jacob could chafe against his sister, finding her too stern in her moral intensity, her ceaseless reforming zeal. But there was a profound goodness to Leah. It seemed the most essential thing about her. She ran a migrant advocacy centre out of the wood-panelled basement of an old brownstone in East Harlem. There was a food pantry attached to the agency and often a long, disorderly queue of people lined up along the sidewalk with their shopping carts. A few times since she had lived in Harlem Marina had walked over to help with the Saturday morning food distribution, standing in a chain of volunteers and handing out tins of food and bags of rice and beans. She liked to watch Leah during these shifts; the way she darted in and out, weaving her way between the crowds, stopping to take someone’s hand, bending down to greet a baby strapped into a stroller, chatting happily in Spanish. Leah was animated, illuminated by her work. It was the place where she seemed best able to show the full extent of herself. All her flashing cleverness and competence were channelled into the people she helped, all her passion and fiery indignation. Her clients worshipped her and her staff loved her, too. They did more than she asked of them.
Leah was forever agitating for change, forming coalitions and organising marches and protests, sit-ins and bus trips to Albany to meet with senators. She spoke on the radio, her whole being enlarged by her ardour. More than once she had been arrested. Last summer Marina and Jacob had posted bail for her after she had joined a group of nuns and peace activists from the Catholic Worker House, broken into a nuclear weapons plant in Tennessee and painted biblical quotes over it. They had splashed bottles of human blood over the bunker wall and hammered off a small chunk of the uranium storage facility. Leah was held in a county jail for several days and was hit on the ankle with a police baton, which cracked the bone. The injury had saved her from more serious charges.
Jacob and Rose were appalled by Leah’s behaviour. A social conscience was one thing, Rose said, but to be arrested, to cut through three fences and wilfully damage government property. To use human blood. The whole thing felt reckless and unseemly. Leah was unrepentant. It was her job, she told them, to help hack away at the ropes of oppression in this country, and sometimes drastic action was needed for the voices of justice to be heard. She had painted a verse from Isaiah on the walls of the nuclear plant, the one about turning swords into ploughshares. At least she had used the Old Testament, Ben quipped at the time.
There were moments when Leah’s single-minded zeal and her wounded ardency reminded Marina of Dov. There was his desperate obsession with Hasidism when he was sixteen, his intense devotion to the rabbi who was his teacher then. Two years later he spent a whole summer volunteering at a cemetery in Poland, cleaning damaged Jewish graves in a town where there were no longer any living Jews. But Dov was never a revolutionary like Leah; he did not have any serious interest in changing the world. His various obsessions were all part of the ceaseless, doomed project of deciphering their mother. Even the act of cleaning graves in a country they had no connection to was a kind of atonement. They had not suffered as their mother had suffered. Although the things that had happened to Gizela were concealed from them, it was not possible for Dov and Marina ever to forget this.
Standing at the foot of the stairs, Leah seemed a milder, less intense version of herself. Long, beaded earrings dangled from her ears. She looked almost bridal with her armload of pale roses. Leah had remained resolutely single since a disastrous engagement when she was in graduate school. There had not been even the hint of a romance in the years Marina had known her. If she ever had lovers, she was silent about them. Once, she said to Marina, laughing, that she had never been a party to love.
Rose had been praying all these years that Leah would come to her senses and marry a suitable man. Children, she pronounced, would subdue Leah. Marina hoped for a more devouring sort of love for her sister-in-law: an exotic Chilean political asylum seeker or a brilliant human rights lawyer. She had hoped for love for Dov once, too; one that might steady him, shift the circumference of his world a little. But no woman, in the end, had been able to compete with Gizela.
They walked up the stairs together, a kind of procession, Jacob at the front bearing his cake, Leah behind him with her flowers. Rose stood at the door waiting for them, wearing a high-necked silk blouse and the amethyst brooch that had been her grandmother’s. She had bequeathed it to Marina, Rose had told her solemnly. By rights it should go to Leah, but she would have no use for it, and the thought of the brooch tucked away in a drawer made Rose terribly sad. Marina was the one who would wear it.
Rose took each of their faces between her hands, peering at them as if trying to decipher the minute changes of the last week, to sniff out any shadows cast. She lingered over Ben longest, staring at him until he ducked his head and put his arms around her to avoid her scrutiny. Rose looked tiny in his embrace.
‘Come on, girls, I want you to light the candles with me,’ Rose said, ushering them into the apartment and untying her apron.
Marina watched as Rose recited the prayer over the Shabbat candles, covering her eyes with her hands. There was a purity to the silence that fell around them as they watched her, a hushed reverence. Every Friday of Jacob and Leah’s lives Rose had done this, week after week, year after year. Even on holidays the ritual accompanied them, the silver candlesticks wrapped carefully in a cloth and packed in a suitcase when they drove to Cape May in the summertime. On a trip to Florida, the candlesticks were left behind in the back seat of the taxi that collected them from the airport. It became a family legend – the frantic search, the honourable taxi driver, the safe return.
Marina could not imagine her own mother ever having said a prayer or lighting a candle in observance. In their house there had been no traditions, no incantations. Gizela scorned anything connected to religion. Mrs Zelman, the mother of the Hasidic family that lived downstairs from them in Crown Heights, taught Marina the prayer for lighting the candles on the eve of Shabbat. It was something every Jewish girl should know, she said. The Sabbath is like the cathedral of the Jewish people, Mrs Zelman told her. It is the temple in time, not in space. Every week all Jews enter it and are enriched. Ours is not a God who demands holy places or lavish buildings, but holiness in time, and sanctity in his chosen people. Most of what Mrs Zelman said seemed strange and confusing to Marina, but she was touched by the woman’s urgency in the telling, her belief that Marina needed to know these things. She was welcomed into a sacred circle just because she was Jewish. Several years later, when Dov entered his phase of religious zeal and fervent observance, Marina understood the compulsion entirely. To be wanted, to be deemed a soul singled out for favour, these were no small things.
Mrs Zelman wrote out the prayer for Marina, transliterating the Hebrew words into English. Pressed into her hand, too, was a box of candles with a picture of the Lubavitcher Rebbe on the packet. When Mrs Zelman gave her the carefully printed document and the cand
les, Marina found herself crying. She must have been seven or eight years old and her tears were an immediate shame, mysterious and consuming. Mrs Zelman watched her for a moment, her head tilted to one side. She was a short, stout woman with thick, lank hair and soft, doughy features. The mother of many children, she never seemed to be harassed or exhausted like so many of the other Hasidic women around them. Often when they passed each other on the street or in the foyer of the building, Mrs Zelman would give Marina a wink, as if they were complicit in something. She seemed always to be wearing a striped apron and she herded her children around with tremendous good cheer.
In her ordinariness, Mrs Zelman loomed for many years in Marina’s imagination as an elemental, luminous creature, an object of mute veneration. When Marina saw her on the street surrounded by her children, a surge of yearning so powerful it made her tremble would take hold of her. She wanted Mrs Zelman to pinch her cheek, to touch her hair, to pass her one of her endless grocery bags to carry. Even for Mrs Zelman to look up and see her was enough.
Several days after Marina had burst into tears in her kitchen, she found Mrs Zelman waiting for her in the foyer of the building one afternoon. She and Dov went to different schools then, and he came home later than she did. Mrs Zelman beckoned Marina inside her own apartment and brought her a piece of apple cake on a patterned china plate. Strangely, none of her children seemed to be at home. Would Marina like anything else? A glass of juice, perhaps? Marina was tongue-tied and awkward; Mrs Zelman’s mere proximity was overwhelming. She did not know why she had been summoned for this private audience and was barely able to respond to the Hasidic woman’s questions.
