by Alice Nelson
Mrs Zelman sat down at the table and smiled at her. ‘Meir and I have talked about this. We’d like to invite you to come to the Catskills with us for the summer. There’s a bungalow colony we go to every year. A lake and woods. And activities for the children. Some study, too, but we make sure there’s a lot of time for fun.’
Marina was stunned. The thought of spending an entire summer in Mrs Zelman’s presence, living in the same house as her, seemed like an impossible fantasy, something conjured by a sorcerer. A whole different life unfurling in front of her. The summer transfigured. A lake and woods. Sitting there at the table across from Mrs Zelman, Marina could hardly breathe.
Mrs Zelman looked hard at her as she cut another slice of apple cake. ‘We know,’ she said, pausing for a moment, ‘that you are alone quite a bit. And that summers can be lonely times. Do you think that your mother could spare you?’
Marina was unable to speak but eventually she must have communicated that she would like to go to the Catskills because Mrs Zelman took out a writing pad and composed a letter to Gizela. She folded the letter in half, put it in an envelope and wrote Gizela’s name on it. How they decided between them that a written invitation was the best way to put the suggestion to Gizela, Marina could not remember. But she walked upstairs with Mrs Zelman’s letter in her hands and placed it on her mother’s pillow.
Gizela gave no indication that she had read the letter. She made no reply and the invitation was never discussed. Marina did not dare ask about it. To raise the subject with Gizela, to say that she wished to spend the summer with the Zelmans, felt akin to some terrible heresy. A betrayal of the small circle of their existence together. And yet how desperately she had wanted to go. Even the very word ‘bungalow’ took on a mystical cast. Marina whispered it to herself in bed at night. Three whole months in Mrs Zelman’s company. It hovered over her, the spectre of her longing, tremulous and hopeful. While no answer was given to the invitation, its possibilities still seemed alive, however unlikely their fulfilment.
Mrs Zelman asked Marina several days later whether Gizela would allow her to come with them, and Marina was stricken. She and Dov never spoke of their mother to anyone; how could she explain that it was not possible for her to ask Gizela for an answer? That it had been almost too vertiginous a leap for her to have passed on the letter in the first place? It would have been easier for her to lie and tell Mrs Zelman that her mother had said no, that she wanted Marina with her for the summer.
Mrs Zelman was standing in the shadowy stairwell and in the shaft of morning light that fell through the old casement window her skin glowed. Strands of her hair slipped out from under the scarf she always wore. Marina could not lie to her. At last she whispered that Gizela had said nothing, that she did not know if her mother would allow her to come or not.
‘You leave it with me,’ Mrs Zelman said to Marina, patting her cheek briefly. ‘I’ll speak to her.’
When she came home from school that afternoon, Marina knew immediately that Mrs Zelman had been in the apartment. Gizela’s bedroom door was closed and she did not emerge from her room that evening. There was a general sense of agitation, a feeling that their small, sealed world had been intruded upon. Marina sat down at the table and stared at the room around her. Had Gizela invited Mrs Zelman to sit down? Had she offered her a cup of tea? It was hard for Marina to even begin to imagine what might have passed between them. What Gizela might have said to her. Marina sat there for a long time, seized with terrified dismay.
Two days later she bumped into Mrs Zelman on the street. It was a Saturday and Mrs Zelman was walking to shule with her family, a cluster of the smaller children holding on to the stroller she was pushing, the older boys ahead with their father. When Mrs Zelman saw Marina, she disentangled herself and walked over to her. ‘I’m so sorry, sweetheart,’ she said. With that she leaned forward and took Marina’s face between her hands and kissed her forehead. She pressed her lips against Marina’s skin for a long moment before pulling back and hurrying after her family. As she walked home Marina lifted her fingers to her forehead where Mrs Zelman had kissed her, half-expecting to find her skin emblazoned. They were children so unused to being touched. Marina could not help feeling that Mrs Zelman’s kiss was a message. She had tried, the kiss seemed to say, and now she could do no more.
Marina sometimes thought of Mrs Zelman on those Friday evenings at Rose’s house, the fervent way she had whispered to her all those years before about the meaning of the Jewish Sabbath. Jacob’s family was not religious in the way the Zelmans were. They observed the Jewish rituals as a kind of continuity, a long and consoling chain of tradition. The patterns they provided were a comfort, and a commemoration too, of all the other women who had lit Shabbat candles, all the other men who had bowed their heads and blessed bread and wine.
‘Shabbat shalom,’ Rose said, kissing Marina again as she stepped back from the candles. ‘Now, come and help me with the soup. I’ve made the pea.’
Leah followed them into the kitchen. ‘Oh, you know I’m crazy about the pea soup.’
‘Well, if you’re so crazy about it, you should learn how to make it so you can have it when I’m gone.’
‘That’s awfully morbid,’ said Leah. ‘You’re only seventy. Hardly about to shuffle off your mortal coil. You’ll probably be making pea soup at my funeral.’
‘Don’t be so sure,’ said Rose, her back to them as she ladled the soup out.
Marina carried the bowls to the dining table. How enchanted she had been when she first came here, how delighted by Jacob’s family and by the apartment itself, with its reassuring air of permanency. There were muted Persian rugs and glass-fronted bookshelves that locked with a tiny key; the long narrow kitchen with its hand-tatted lace curtains and perpetual smell of baking; the lounge room with its faded velvet ottomans and haphazard stacks of books; the lordly ginger cat curled up on an armchair. Everything in the apartment had a story: the chain of dried rosehips on the mantelpiece that Leah and Jacob had made as children to decorate the sukkah at the Feast of Tabernacles; the goose feather that Rose’s own father had used to ceremoniously dust the apartment before Pesach to make sure that not one crumb of bread was left behind; the leather-covered collection of Chekhov’s plays that were rumoured to have been given to Rose by a love-sick Russian conductor.
Marina was amazed at first by the ease with which Jacob and Leah inhabited the place, their casualness about all these hallowed objects, this vast and mysterious treasure trove that was their childhood home. Four generations of Jacob’s family had lived here across nearly eight decades. A substantial accretion of American years. It seemed improbable to Marina – so much time in one place. Jacob’s father, Max, would have liked a big house across the river in New Jersey or out on Long Island where his brothers and their families lived, Rose had told Marina. It was the only thing in their marriage that Rose and Max ever seriously fought over. This had been her parents’ home, with its glimpses of the leaden slick of the Hudson and the green burst of the park, and Rose could not for one moment imagine leaving it. She was afraid that she would not know how to remember her parents if she left the place where they had all lived, she confided to Marina. Her mother’s walnut writing desk with her letter opener still in the top drawer, the brass hook in the hallway where her father’s hat had always hung, the corner of the kitchen bench where the yahrzeit candles stood – every memory of her parents was anchored here. Marina recounted this to Jacob and he told her that it was exactly the same for him, that he could still feel his father’s presence every time he stepped into the study. Sometimes, he told her, he was even convinced that he could catch a whiff of Max’s pipe smoke.
There was a portrait of Max as a young man above the dressing table in Rose’s bedroom. It was a drawing that Leah had made from a photograph of her father in Israel, holding a scythe aloft as he stood on the back of a tractor. The image was portentous, heroic. Max was not just a young farmer in the fields, but a valiant new kin
d of Jew reclaiming his land. Nationhood itself was partly an act of planting in those early days of the tiny new country. Making the desert bloom was at the heart of the Zionist project, and so Jacob’s parents became farmers.
Rose and Max met during the war. They were both part of a Zionist youth group. In 1948, when the state of Israel was declared, they moved to a kibbutz in the north of the country. No one had been more surprised than their own parents. Rose was a gifted pianist, already in her third year at the Brooklyn Conservatory, Max a medical student. Promising futures stretched out before them, futures that had not been available to their own parents. They were not expected to give all that away for a place that was barely a country yet, where settlers lived in makeshift camps in the desert alongside thousands of Europe’s refugees.
But Max and Rose believed that what they were doing was necessary and heroic, that they were engaged in a creative endeavour the like of which was not to be found in the whole history of mankind. Marrying quietly on Rose’s twenty-first birthday, they set out for Haifa a week later. Both of their mothers wept on the docks the day they set sail, and begged them not to go. But the young couple was resolute, inflamed with idealism. They wanted to be part of the rebirth and rehabilitation of their people.
They joined a small kibbutz, working as farmers on the edge of the Jezreel Valley. Rose was offered work in the kitchen or the laundry, but she refused. She wanted the hard turn of the hoe against the dirt, the righteous pain of hunching over in a field all day. It was difficult for her to explain the passion that had driven her then, that had driven them both. And they felt a new desire for each other in their tiny one-room cottage with its too-small bed, a desire that seemed inseparable from their love for the country itself.
There was a searing heatwave during their first summer in Israel, and Rose would drench sheets in cold water and hang them beside the bed, hoping for a filtered cool when the desert winds swept in. As exhausted as they were after the day’s work, they were freshly enthralled by each other’s bodies. It was a completely new world they were making; they felt their bodies, their very selves, made anew too. They were so young, so stridently idealistic, so very far from everything familiar.
When they first arrived in Israel Rose and Max decided to delay having children, but in their second year on the kibbutz Rose fell pregnant. It was like the seasickness she had felt on the boat coming over. She knelt among the rows of newly planted seedlings and retched, clammy and dizzy. One of the women brought her ginger tea in an enamel mug and she lowered her face over the pungent steam.
Rose felt sure, from the beginning, that the child would be a boy. In the dining hall, the men clapped Max on the back. A pregnancy was a shared celebration. Under the strict socialist philosophy that governed them, children belonged not to their parents but to the kibbutz, to the new nation and its future. They were raised communally in the Children’s House, living in dormitories under the care of a nurse. The truck that brought the new mothers home from the small army hospital where they gave birth delivered them straight to the steps of the Children’s House to hand their babies over. Mothers did not sing their children lullabies, or wash their clothes, or clean their faces, or rock them to sleep. These kinds of intimacies were discouraged –for the sake of the children and the country. It was believed that the ties of the nuclear family would divert energy away from the communal project, distract people from their larger work.
During the long months of her pregnancy, Rose thought she could do what was required of her: she could come home from hospital and hand her baby over to the nurses in the Children’s House. She could allow the kibbutz members to vote on the child’s name, could content herself with the single hour a day that children were allowed to spend with their parents.
On the kibbutz they were surrounded by stories from the Torah and, walking in the dry hills that rose from the newly irrigated fields, Rose found herself thinking about Abraham, who had been willing to sacrifice his own son to God. She thought about the parents who had sent their children away to safety during the war, had put them on trains or placed them in the arms of rescuers, knowing that they were unlikely to ever see them again. They must all do what was asked of them. Her child would not be killed, would not be lost to her. He would grow strong and proud among his kibbutz brothers and sisters. He would have a hundred mothers to care for him.
But when Jacob was born she knew none of this was possible. She lay in the narrow camp bed in the hospital holding her baby against her breast. Every part of him seemed miraculous: the tiny questing mouth, the curling hands, the curve of his nose. He had her father’s chin, Max’s long fingers. He was their singular creation, hers and Max’s. She did not want him to be a communal child, did not want others to hold him or care for him. She did not even want to pass him to the nurse so that she could rest. Something had happened to her during the long hours of labour, and in those first moments when they placed the baby in her arms. Rose wondered how the other women could do it. How could any mother give her child away, even if it was only a partial relinquishing? It seemed so cruel, this forced separation. The socialist philosophy, appealing in theory, had a deep coldness curled in its strict heart. Holding her baby in the crook of her arm, his small mouth searching for her breast in the darkness, Rose was afraid.
Her mind was already made up when Max came to visit her and the baby early the next morning. They would leave the kibbutz. There was nothing Max could say; he knew that there was no swaying her. Rose did not even want to go back to retrieve her belongings – their departure would need to be swift. She was terrified she would not be allowed to leave, that they would somehow take her baby from her and force her to stay. She did not want to see anyone from the kibbutz, did not want them to try to talk her out of her desertion.
She felt queasy on the bus that took them away. In her arms, the baby stared up at her with a strange, knowing look. She could not help feeling that it was a kind of rescue, that she had spirited her child away to safety.
They lived for a time in a small apartment in Tel Aviv. It was a surreal place, a new city without its own past, yet mired in history. Forty years earlier there had been only sand dunes where the new white city now stood, with its squat Bauhaus apartment blocks, its straight roads and wide boulevards. From the window of their apartment they could see all the way south to the port of Jaffa, where Jonah had set sail, where King Solomon had shipped the cedars of Lebanon that were used to build the first Temple. To the north the city slipped away and became an Arab village. Everyone seemed to have come from a mysterious elsewhere. The air was searing, the summer evenings long and uncomfortably hot. It had been there on the kibbutz too, this scorching heat, but in the city it was unbearable, the glare of the sun too dazzling against the white walls of the new buildings. When they walked along Rothschild Boulevard with Jacob in his pram, the streets seemed illuminated by a harsh radiance. Rose loved the high, clear sky of the north but in Tel Aviv it felt as if there was too much light.
The streets of the new city were full of the Jews of Europe, those who had slipped in before the war, and those who had come after. They were a sombre, bewildered presence, their faces marked with a terrible, stunned despair. The facts of the war were still slowly filtering through then, the full catalogue of horror not yet known. Rose remembered the first time she had seen a tattooed number on the arm of a German man at the market, the sudden chill that had moved through her.
There were too many refugees and not enough apartments, not enough jobs. They had to write and ask Rose’s parents to send them money until Max found work in one of the seaside cafés, washing dishes and clearing tables. The café sold Viennese tortes, cherry strudels and cheesecake. Sometimes Max would bring home leftovers and they would eat cake for dinner, sitting out on their tiny box-like verandah and watching the sun slip down over the water, the night hot and still. Rose’s days at home with the baby seemed to stretch endlessly, a strange haze of feeding and rocking and sleeping. Time contract
ed and expanded in odd ways. She would look at her watch, sure that it must be time for Max to come home from work, to find that only an hour had passed.
It was not the life they wanted. They had come to Israel to farm the land, to create a new world, to be part of a grand project. On the kibbutz they had felt heroic, their lives full of conviction and purpose. In Tel Aviv they were poor immigrants, scrabbling to survive, stumbling over a new language. They could hardly manage to pay the rent on their two-room apartment. Every time Rose opened a letter from her mother with money slipped between the pages, she felt deeply ashamed. They were not here to be supported by others as if they were irresponsible children who had run out of money on a holiday abroad.
In every letter, her mother implored her to come home, to give up this foolishness and return to New York. In one letter she sent a clipping about a concert at Carnegie Hall. Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto in C Minor. It was the piece that Rose had played for her end-of-year recital at the Brooklyn Conservatory the month before she had left New York. She pinned the advertisement to the wall of their tiny kitchenette. She found herself staring at it often, standing in the kitchen with the baby held against her shoulder. There was a photograph of the Russian pianist who would be performing, her long dark hair curling perfectly between her shoulders, her fingers poised above the keys. Rose stretched out her own fingers. How many hours she had spent practising the Rachmaninoff, how intimately she had known the piece. It had once belonged to her and now she seemed permanently excluded from it. She could barely imagine sitting at a piano.
