Forget the Sleepless Shores

by Sonya Taaffe

  She came over the sea in the skull of the student she loved, fitted between seventy-two letters like flicks of black flame and a shadow-sketch of the demon who comes to young men by night, rouses them in their sleep and sucks out their lives with their seed; all her daughters are like her and she breeds them from the young men she milks. At nights, the student tossed in dreams half delicious, half nightmare, never knowing who he really carried in the curves of his brain. Because he had sworn himself to her forever, when they clasped living hands in the shadow of her uncle’s house and did not dare kiss, she lived within him until he died: young, of a fever, in a sweating tenement in summer. He had less than fifty words in this city’s language and one of them was his name, such as it had survived immigration. By the time she parted from his ebbing spirit, cajoling it to join her, knowing it never would, she could mourn him in the tongue of the land he had chosen, golden land, paved with stone and filthy brick. Opportunity killed him, freed her. She took up residence below the memories of his sister, who had come ahead with her lover until they turned him away at the gates—his health, he was never strong; strong enough to cross wheat fields and mountains and an ocean that almost heaved out his stomach but not to step through a doorway?—and swam in the woman’s dreams of her dead brother already transformed into a saint, one of the thirty-six on whose back the world rests, sweet and sanctified and studying now in the company of the great sages of the past. Together, they shed tears. In their joined mouth, syllables of the language older than what they spoke when they spoke to God, speaking to God now, speaking life. On the mourning woman’s lips, a smile she did not feel: inside her head, the hopeless laughter of a soul that will never die.

  Now, undying, nor dead, she makes a restless circuit of this woman’s thoughts. Three generations have come and gone since that first girl covered the mirrors for her brother; this one bears the name of the student’s sister, this woman who is writing, by pencil and paper, anachronistic as the teardrop shape of stubborn life that swarms her veins, a history of her family as well as she knows it. Lashes sweep down, fence out light, lift permitting the spirit to crowd against the concave of dark irises and gaze down at the page. So many things, wrong. We never spelled our name that way. The town had another name. The border shifted; sometimes it was there, sometimes elsewhere, who kept track? Yes, he said that. No, she did not. What scraps and patches have lasted down to this time? She is a scrap herself, thought-blown in the remembrances of another. Rags like her great-grandfather sold on another century’s streets.

  The hand moves on, inscribing fact tattered into fiction: there, there, the woman hears a murmur of pain and recognition breathe from her lips, like seeing the face of a long-lost love before they wash him for the grave, like touching the stone of your house fire-blackened and forgotten, there the spirit sees the name of a girl this woman’s ancestor loved, a family legend, whose heart broke when he could not marry her, whose spirit, they swore, possessed him so that he would speak in a voice not his own and say things the gentle student would never think, almost they called a wonder-worker to exorcise their son but the spirit subsided, the possession was over, he left for America in the best of health to find his sister and her lover; the first he found, the second he never saw again, the third rode softly in his dreams until the final fever vision consumed him and she lost him forever.

  Still they are twined, like candle-wicks, like the sweet braid of Shabbos bread: remembered inseparable, impossibly rejoined. The lines of his palm that only she remembers, life, love, heart stopped and broken; woven with her own, on finer paper than ever he could afford. And she is weeping, as she has not wept since she keened Kaddish in another woman’s voice; someone else’s tears smear and spot the neat eccentric hand and when she wipes them away, graphite blurs out the name of the beloved, the ghost, what cleaves to her even now.

  She blurs away, like their names made a smoke-cloud on the white paper hatched with blue, the letters that comprise her being run away into nothing like the old story; though she does not wear a holy name on her forehead, she wears her own name in her heart, and his. Together they bound her to the world he left long ago: now she cannot help but follow. Into light, into darkness, into Gehenna, into Paradise, she cleaves to him as once she clung to his memory in the blood of his sister. She is going, now. The other side of the grave is the other side of a mirror. The way that demons go: she is not a demon anymore, she never was, though when he dreamed of Lilith he dreamed her face. What does a reflection look like from the other side? She passes through the mirror and is gone.

  This is the inside of a woman’s head. This is looking out through her eyes, which are nothing more than eyes now, they slide to the page and back, they blink, they are filling with tears that she cannot explain: someone is dead and she is weeping for joy. She lifts her pencil, bends to write again. Here, the grandfather; here, the textiles; here, the poetry; where one unravels another begins. A shame that no one knows how family stories end.

  WHEN CAN A BROKEN GLASS MEND?

  When Aronowicz married the demon, she was seven years old.

  She was not supposed to be in her grandparents’ attic, hunting for toys among the shrouded furniture and folded clothes of relatives she had never met, opening brass-cornered chests and closing them on books with block-lettered pages and peeling spines; she was hiding by exploring and it had never occurred to her that the slant-ceilinged, sweetly dusty space above the guest room would be full of old theater posters and boxes of glass slides and more china plates than she had ever seen even when her cousins came up from New York for the holidays. She unzipped a small square velvet bag and peered at the silk fringes and spilling coils of leather inside, glazed her eyes to make the sepia-tinted halves of a stereo card cross and pop into three-dimensionality. Here and there the floor was beams instead of boards and when she reached to pull down the sheet from the great gilt-framed mirror propped against a dining table with its leaves folded down, the small hands that met to help her were not as much of a surprise as the suddenness with which her reflection swam out at her, as if through a tree-shadowed, silty pond. Beside her, the other child was a thin candleflame, vague and luminous at once. Its hair was dark and, when they shook hands, its grip was stronger than Aronowicz’s, who even at seven years old did not quite think of herself as Rokhl, her parents’ throwback gift. The other child had an ordinary name. She said it was lucky and it shrugged. “Everybody’s parents are weird,” it said, with grade-school world-weariness, and Aronowicz knew then that she had made a friend.

  She never remembered how they came to the marriage, except it seemed as sensible a game as any. She was the one to propose it.

  In the bare incandescent light and the creaky silence of old houses, she crowned the child with a table napkin of linen as cracked ivory as piano keys. Pretending to pour from a grey-glazed earthenware pitcher, it gave her to drink from a tarnished silver cup with a peacock engraved on the side. Arms around one another’s waists, they stared into the freckled, shadowy glass that tilted like a fallen skylight within its time-battered frame, reflecting the dark beams of the attic and the crowded squares of sheet-draped chests and chairs and dressers like the blocks of a miniature city, fading away behind them into dim avenues and an indistinct skyline. The rings they had exchanged slipped and clinked on their fingers, heavy with stones Aronowicz said confidently were paste: a ruby like a smoldering feather, an emerald like a storm-coming sunset sky. She put a bracelet of seed pearls around the child’s wrist and a watch with a crystal face and a band of dark leather around her own. “There,” she said, and her newly wedded stranger grinned, and they spun in circles laughing until they fell to the dusty boards in a tangle of embroidered tablecloths and dust mice, costume jewelry and bright-eyed, breathless hearts.

  When her mother called, Aronowicz flailed under the dining table, hastily unwinding herself from her grandparents’ inheritance as she hissed for her co-conspirator to get out of sight. She dragged the tablecloth from
around her shoulders and the child stepped back into the mirror. The emerald ring was still on its finger; it was the last thing she saw fade into the sudden spill of light up the stairs as the attic door opened, into the city of silhouettes.

  **

  When Aronowicz was twenty, she kissed a girl and told a boy she had to be on top if anything was going to happen. He asked what she thought she was, a dominatrix? She asked what he thought he was, clever? He left her alone on the narrow bed in her cinderblocked dorm room with the clanking radiator and the loose-springed shade that never quite shut out the sodium streetlight buzzing outside her window and she stared at the mirror on the back of the door, wondering if she should have let him lie over her, weighing her breath down, pushing at all the wrong angles, just to see if she liked it as much as he had kept saying she would. She kept kissing the girl who liked her wrists held instead, who liked to be made to come slowly, struggling and shivering, helpless against the quick of Aronowicz’s fingers and her slow, deliberate, withholding tongue. One night she went to her knees for Aronowicz, and Aronowicz bound her wrists with her own hair, a knee-whisking braid like a wheatsheaf from poems they had read in translation. She dreamed that night of the demon, a dark-haired figure sitting within the frame of her grandparents’ mirror like a student reading in a window, a black-bound book as small as a siddur open between its hands. And she lives to this day on the shores of the Red Sea, it read aloud, with her consort the king of the demons, and every day their children are born from the wishes and impulses of humankind, on the other side of the mirror where all that is left-handed is right. It turned a vellum-stiff page; behind it she saw the twilight shadows of towers and the emerald in its silver setting glinted like a winking eye.

  **

  When the demon came back, Aronowicz was thirty-six years old. She had stopped dyeing her hair in grad school, although it was still shaved up the back and spiked out half from bedhead and half from intention; she had three piercings and a doctorate and no tattoos, but there were brandy-blue falls of wisteria growing up the fire escape and a seal-pointed cat sleeping among the books in the bay window and the gallery had sold two of her paintings, the small ones in oils, and she had not thought anyone would ever buy her art. Against red skies and the sandbars of a redder sea, black wings lifted into the air, a spiraling storm of feathers like outstretched hands. In the fiery blue-black of space, a thin pearl of atmosphere sheltered letters of light, its iridescence as delicately crazed as morning ice. Lately she was painting a window in an empty house with her ex-boyfriend’s face half-reflected in the panes, the white-and-black lines of his nose and mouth almost the cracks in the frame. They had been together for three years, argued ceaselessly for two; he sent postcards from London because he remembered she loved stamps, little passports crossed with ink. At the corner of her eye, she saw the demon moving in the glass-fronted cabinet where she kept treasures away from the cat: the brown-stained bones of a fossil fish, an American steel penny, an iris-grey split of flint, a sea-worn lump of Roman glass as blue as Mediterranean water; its reflection traveled over each of them and was gone, skimming on like the shadow of a seabird winging over the sea.

  It was still dark-haired, when it stood beside her at the easel; its hands were still thin and strong, its face a white burning space that Aronowicz could look at and never recall the features of, though she knew it at once. It wore pearls at its wrist and a smoky, storm-green emerald on its left hand, to match the ruby—bright as a cracked ember—that Aronowicz only took off to wash dishes and shower, talismanic as her grandfather’s watch or the thin chain under her shirt where an ancient, soft-profiled coin warmed against her breastbone. It said it liked the painting.

  Aronowicz said, because she had never been quite sure, “You are a demon.”

  “Of course.” Its bare feet were the talons of a bird of prey, clenched and clawed; its shoulders were winged, trailing feathers as dusty as the floorboards of an attic; then it was only a slight, shrugging person about Aronowicz’s height, nondescriptly dressed, the most vivid thing she had ever seen. It was looking at one of the other canvases, the violin player whose shadow was playing, over his shoulder, a melody that trailed away like smoke into a crack in the wall. “And your husband. Or your wife. Or neither. But yours.”

  She had not thought she would ever see a shy or diffident demon, but if it was human, she would have said that the way it did not look at her was yearning, uncertain: the girl with the wheat-plaited hair, offering Aronowicz her strength to master; the man who sent her postcards now, who had once cried out for her in the bedroom with birds and vines and the ten spheres of the universe painted around all the walls. She was still holding a brush, cobalt-pointed. The demon glanced around at her and looked away again, studying her art instead. The glass-fronted cabinet showed a reflection as terraced and shadowy as the skyline of a city seen through rain.

  Aronowicz laid the brush down, so that she could slide her hands into her pockets where the demon could not see them shake. “Is this where,” she said carefully, “you take me away into the mirror with you?”

  The demon put down a book it had picked up, on the little side table overflowing with a spider plant that Aronowicz’s anti-green thumb had not yet managed to kill. “If you want.”

  “And if I don’t want to?”

  “Then I will still be yours.”

  In the mirror of the cabinet doors, the air glittered like a cloud of fireworks and a thousand fragments flew together into a glinting mosaic, a glass whole in the demon’s hand. Colors moved through it like Aronowicz’s oils, from the green of hummingbirds to the yellow of butterflies, blue as a shirt, red as the sun. She did not see it where it filled from, but there was liquid inside, rippling dark as a wet street at night, and the demon was holding it out to her.

  “You won’t be the only one,” she told it. She wanted to be clear.

  Formless as it was, the demon’s face was not blank at all. “I know.”

  She kissed it then, and for a long time neither of them pulled away.

  She took a sketchpad and pencils; she took her oldest jacket, the leather hand-me-down with the old flight patches; she took the wineglass from the demon’s hand and it bowed its head to her, though she had nothing to crown it with but the flicker of desire. In the sunlit afternoon and the warm silence of a sleeping cat, they stepped into the mirror. Behind them they left the cabinet door ajar, reflecting books and paintings, posters and chairs, the feather-scrolled door to her bedroom where someday she would show the demon how painstakingly she had painted each flame-scripted name and letter its own among them, left hand to right; the china from her grandmother and her grandfather’s tefillin; the city beyond her window, broken and bright.

  ON TWO STREETS, WITH THREE LANGUAGES

  The exorcism has failed. Dead Khonen in his bridegroom’s stainless kitl lifts white-gowned Leye into his arms, into the golden ghost-light, two halves of one neshome as dark-haired and slender in embrace as twins or a trick with mirrors, their mouths annealing to one another as the rabbi cries out in despair—Too late!—and the grandmother rocks and mourns the black shawl that is the bride’s discarded body, shadows of the world of illusion. Two men who loved one another stand thunderstruck on either side of the mirror, the abandoned ghost and the forgetful survivor: their children are gone forever beyond either of their reach. The messenger from another world witnesses, blesses, shoulders an eternal knapsack and moves on. Borukh dayan ho-emes.

  Between which two worlds are you, Semyon Shloyme-Zanvl Akimovich Rappoport An-sky? Between which languages, which loves, which politics, which names? Whose voices did you call into your throat? Salt mills, prayer books, soldiers’ camps, board meetings, pages upon pages of questionnaire hidden like a genizah while the century moved over your memory and left your shtetl hauntings to speak for you instead—shape-changer, hiding in the mouths of lovers who never existed and tales you gathered yourself on the rutted roads from Kremenets to Kiev, a tall and beseechi
ng chameleon in a khasid’s kapote and a narodnik’s dream of belonging, bright-eyed, white-haired, tzaddik in spite of yourself. You stole a woman’s voice from the air, a broken skull from cemetery earth. You stole yourself from each new mask, restless as a melody. You left the clothes from your back, suitcases of books, a deskful of papers, the records of a vanished world: wax cylinders of silenced singers, kvitlekh from holy graves. Yiddish stories, Russian journalism, the Hebrew of the Haskalah. A diaspora of one, roaming endlessly through yourself. Was it Edia in that golden light, reading Merezhkovsky and Asch, or was it Chaim, lounging curly-haired as in your boyhood in Vitebsk? Who gave you earth to rest in, root into? Who did your heart wind its ivy around?

  None of us are your children, An-sky; ghosts quicken only with memories and the dead bear only grief. Dancing forever on a darkened stage, Khonen and Leye engender between them the flame of their lost and shared soul, their bodies the wick it draws to burn: all that remains is the imprint of light in the dark. The voice that goes on speaking after the breath is gone. The spirit that is neither body, incomplete so long as it lives on a single street. We are your hauntings: we learn to speak through you, of lives between worlds and bodies, words and souls, claiming for our own the voices that welcome us in. Set up your gramophone, zamler, take out your notebook and call your cousin to photograph. The language of dybbuks is the third language, An-sky, and it is not a language only of the dead.