One evening we were sitting in the living room. Roy was reading the newspaper and I was holding a book in my hand. His eyes were stuck on the same word for a long time. Thoughts were running around my head like a dog chasing its tail. I finally said, “I’m going back to school.”
Roy looked up from his newspaper. “Where?”
“Here, at the college I studied at before.”
“Did you register?”
“Yes.”
“Psychology?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Great,” he said and got up from the sofa, pulling me up too. We stood facing each other, our separate bodies becoming a whole. “I love you,” he whispered into my hair. I leaned my head onto his chest and circled his waist with my arms. I knew he was waiting for me to say it back. But I didn’t. I still couldn’t.
***
We planned to go to Cypress Beach on Saturday. We packed a small basket of food and decided that after the visit we would have a picnic by the lake.
Mother Nature had summoned wonderful weather for us. The sun warmed the earth, and its warmth penetrated our bodies and heated us as well. We chatted gaily the entire way. Roy said he had never heard me talk so much.
“You’re really a chatterbox,” he said fondly, and I was beholden to the love in his eyes.
“Somebody needs to do it,” I answered and stroked his arm. The journey seemed short for some reason. I was awash with joy and was hoping the ride would take longer, allowing me to luxuriate in my happiness. Happiness, a word I had never allowed myself to dream about, that had never had any room in my vocabulary. So, this is what it feels like to be in love, I said in my heart. Everything seemed beautiful suddenly. The landscape rolling by my window looked especially enticing. Every few minutes I suggested we stop a bit by the side of the road to enjoy the sights, but he just hummed and said that if we felt like it we could do it on the way back. Every now and then he looked over at me and smiled.
“What?” I asked, trying to stop myself from laughing out loud.
“Nothing,” he said, “I just love looking at you.”
We reached the beautiful boulevard, Main Street. For a moment, I thought I recognized the guy who offered to help me the last time I was here. The cypress trees welcomed me with a slight bow. We passed number 16 and I told Roy to keep going a few more yards. We reached number 22, the address given to me by Josh. The house looked exactly like the one I had been in before. The garden was well-kept, but not as nice as the one at number 16.
Roy parked the car in front of the house. We walked up to the front door. We could hear muffled voices coming from inside and knew the tenants were home. Roy signaled me with a nod of his head to knock on the door, but I wanted him to do it. I don’t know why, but I was suddenly attacked with a sense of fear. If it weren’t for Roy, I would have picked up my heels and run away from the place. Roy looked at me in puzzlement. To the side of the door, on the frame, I recognized the mezuzah, like the one at Mickey’s house. A clay pot with fresh red geraniums sat on the step.
Roy knocked on the door, but no one opened it. He knocked again, harder. We heard brisk steps approaching. The door handle turned and the door opened. A woman who looked to be in her seventies stood before us. There were only a few wrinkles on her face, and her eyes were round and green like two sparkling emeralds.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Hello,” I said, but I couldn’t say any more than that. Roy came to my rescue. “We’re looking for someone who may have lived here once—”
“Sonia Schwartz.” I completed the sentence. “We’re looking for Sonia Schwartz!”
The woman lost her balance for a moment and held on to the door as if it would save her life. Her green eyes changed color, suddenly turning gray. “Yaakov,” she screamed excitedly. “Yaakov, come here.”
The shuffling of footsteps was heard and a man of roughly the same age as the woman appeared in the doorway. His hair was white, his body bent a bit, and his eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. He stood behind the woman. We expected her to explain the purpose of our visit to him, but she was silent and her body seemed to shrink; I imagined her disappearing altogether. Only the slippers on her feet would remain.
Roy came around first. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Roy, and this is Eva. We’re looking for someone who perhaps used to live here. Her name is Sonia Schwartz.”
Yaakov, like his wife before him, lost his balance for a minute and held on to his wife who was still leaning on the doorframe. The door opened wide, and I caught a glimpse of the inside of the house. It was tidy and warm.
“Who are you?” the man finally asked in a gravelly voice; I noticed a tear dripping under his thick glasses. Roy wanted to answer, but I beat him to it, saying, “Sonia lived in our house once and I found some things that belong to her. I’d like to return them.” The woman pulled herself together. She held on to her husband’s elbow and pulled him back.
“Come in.”
Roy and I exchanged glances and I walked inside, Roy following behind. The living room was large, and, as I had seen in my glance from outside, it was neat and clean. The geraniums, which must have come from her garden outside, were arranged in a small vase on the center of the table. The sofas were adorned with throw pillows. At the far end of the living room stood a large dresser with framed photos on top. The husband shuffled after his wife, who was still holding on to his elbow, as if she were afraid that if she let go he would collapse and fall down. She helped him sit down in a wide armchair at the end of the table and with a wave of her hand invited us to sit down on the couch. She arranged her hair, which had come loose, with her hands and smoothed out her cheeks, like she was trying to get rid of the wrinkles. “Sit, please,” she said.
Roy sat down, and I sat close to him. The feeling of fear that had attacked me before remained, and I needed the touch of his body to feel protected. Roy laced his fingers with mine and squeezed them in an attempt to calm me down.
The woman perked up a bit. She left the room briefly and came back with a pitcher of cold lemonade and four glasses. She poured the drink for Roy and me and left the other glasses empty. Afterward, she sat down on the chair next to her husband, turned to us and said, “Now, tell me about this woman you are looking for.”
Roy waited for me to begin to speak. He understood that I needed to do it in my own way.
“Roy and I live three hours away by car. As long as I can remember, I have lived there with my parents, Maria and John. They were killed in a car accident about three years ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said the woman. Her words sounded sincere.
I nodded and continued. “One day, a short while after their deaths, the telephone rang at my house, and someone asked to speak with Sonia Schwartz.”
The woman’s body tensed, and she held on to both sides of the chair in an effort to steady herself. Yaakov let out a long sigh and bowed his head to his chest.
I told the elderly couple everything that had happened to me recently. When I got to the part about the bed that was bought for me, the woman interrupted me. “For you? Why for you—what is your connection to her?”
I felt Roy’s fingers clenching harder on mine. I lowered my head to them for a moment and then said in a weak but firm voice, “I found out that Sonia Schwartz was also known as Maria Brown.”
“I don’t understand,” said the woman in a shaky voice.
“I knew my mother by the name of Maria, but I found out that before that, her name was Sonia, Sonia Schwartz. And now I’m looking—”
A scream interrupted my dialogue. For a moment, I had no idea where it had come from. Then I saw the woman fall from her chair and realized it had come from her. She sat on the floor with her body folded over her bent legs. Her hands covered her face, and I could hear sporadic sobs. Yaakov tried to get up from the chair, but was unsuccessful. He sat back down and cried. The tears streamed down his face like tiny waterfalls filling the cracks of his wrinkled ski
n. Roy and I watched the two of them in alarm, stunned by the scene playing out before us. We didn’t know whether to leave the house or continue to sit and wait for them to calm down. We felt helpless in the face of the grief pouring out of them.
The woman recovered first. She held on to the side of the table to get off the floor. Surprisingly, she came over to the sofa and sat down next to me. She turned to me so that her wet face was close to mine. Her hands separated mine from Roy’s and took them in her own. I felt a chill run down my body like a winter avalanche and froze in my place. The woman pressed my hands and, in a soft and calm voice that was completely contrary to her behavior just minutes before, asked, “What did you say your name was?”
“Eva,” I whispered.
“But Sonia’s daughter was named Ethel,” she said in a quiet voice.
“Ethel?” This time it was Roy’s voice.
“Yes, named for my mother, rest her soul.”
“But who is your mother? But why would Sonia call—”
“Because I’m her mother.”
“Whose?” I asked, not understanding.
“Sonia’s. Yaakov and I are Sonia’s parents.”
My body became weightless air. The knowledge cut off all my airways. Roy read my situation immediately and forced me to drink some of the lemonade, grown warm in the glass. I heard him say something to the woman but couldn’t understand what. After several seconds, someone put a damp cloth on my forehead. Roy was there. I was aware of mumbling next to my ear, but I couldn’t interpret a thing. Roy used the wet cloth to cool my face, and slowly I began to feel myself rising from the deep black hole into the light above. The voices and figures became clearer, until finally I was able to stabilize myself and leaned back on the sofa. Roy looked at me with concern.
“I’m OK,” I reassured him.
“Can you stand up?” asked the woman next to me.
“Yes.”
Roy wrapped his arms around my waist and helped me get up from the sofa. The woman led us to the other side of the room, where a large dresser stood, covered with framed photographs. There were about twenty photos, each with the same girl in them—sometimes by herself, other times with another boy and girl by her side. In one of the pictures, she was being hugged by her parents. One of the pictures showed her with a young man about her age standing behind her, hugging her with his head on her shoulder. The smile on her face was enormous, and her eyes were shining with joy. The woman next to me moved closer to the photo and said sadly, “That’s the last picture we have of her.”
I asked Roy to let go of me and moved closer to the pictures. I bent forward and scrutinized the last photo. I examined the facial features, the smiling eyes, the posture. The face was that of my mother, but the expression belonged to a stranger, someone I didn’t know. I felt dizzy and asked Roy to help me back to the sofa. Yaakov remained sitting, hunched in his armchair. The woman poured him a glass of lemonade and brought it close to his mouth. His lips shook when he took a sip of the drink. His face was stony and his breathing was labored. He didn’t take his eyes off me. He followed my every movement while his lips mumbled, “Nichka, Nichka…”
I took a step backward, moving away from where he was sitting and the nonsensical words coming from his mouth. The woman moved toward him, took hold of his shoulders, and whispered words into his ear. Little by little, he appeared to relax, and his glassy eyes became clear again.
Suddenly, like a rock hitting the bottom of a well, I knew the name he was saying. The name rang in my ears so strongly that it felt like the rock had hit me straight on the forehead. Nichka. He said Nichka.
“Why did you say Nichka?” I asked. “Who is Nichka?”
“Nichka is Sonia,” his wife explained. “That’s what we called her, ever since she was a young woman. At first we called her Sonichka and then gradually it became Nichka.” She smiled as if she was remembering a happier past experience.
The things I learned in the last hour connected the links in the chain. Each link had been there, but it hadn’t been clear how it connected to the one before it. My heart was pounding like a jackhammer, my blood was racing through my veins, and I was hit with a sudden terrible stomachache. It was obvious that the turmoil I was in would decrease only after I received answers. I turned to the woman, whose name was Leah, and asked her, “Nichka… Sonia… Where did she give birth to Ethel—what hospital?”
Leah and Yaakov exchanged a look. She cleared her throat and finally said, “She gave birth to Ethel at the Jesuit Hospital for Unwed Mothers.”
“I went to that hospital. I tried to find out who this Ethel was—I had found her birth certificate in a box in the kitchen pantry.”
“What did it say on the birth certificate?”
“The name Ethel Weiss was written on it.”
“I see,” she said and became silent.
“Who is Ethel Weiss?” I asked.
“She is Nichka’s daughter.”
“And who was her father?”
Again, the two exchanged a look. Then she said, “David, David Weiss. He was killed in a car accident.”
“When?” I asked with a fading voice.
“A few months before Nichka gave birth.”
A glimmer of understanding sparked in me suddenly. I asked if I could use their phone.
Roy and the elderly couple stared at me in confusion.
“Yes, of course.” She led me to the hallway where a telephone hung. I took out Officer Peter Jenkins’ card and without hesitation dialed his number. The office told me he was not working, but after I explained that it was an emergency they agreed to give him the phone number written on the base of the telephone on the wall. It wasn’t five minutes before the telephone rang. I picked it up immediately.
“Eva, this is Peter Jenkins,” said the voice on the other end of the receiver. “How can I help you?”
“Peter, thanks for calling me back. I’m sorry if I scared you, but I need one answer from you.”
He waited for me to continue.
“What was the name of the man killed in the phony car accident?”
“David Weiss,” he answered right away.
“Thank you,” I said. I didn’t let Peter ask me anything.
I went back to the living room. The three of them sat in the same position and silence prevailed. Roy tried to read my expression, but it was obvious he couldn’t guess what was going on in my head. “We have to go.” I turned to Roy and urged him to get up.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Leah’s surprised expression. Roy also looked at me questioningly but got up from the sofa. I took his hand and forcibly pulled him from there. At the door, Leah called out to me, “Wait—just a minute, please.”
I turned back and yelled, “Thanks for the drink,” and quickly left, begging the earth to open its jaws and swallow me whole.
“What happened to you?” Roy let go of my hand, turned toward me and with an angry look on his face waited for me to answer. I ignored him and got into the car. He followed me and sat behind the wheel.
“Go,” I begged; I couldn’t stay at that place one more minute.
Roy complied. He hit the gas pedal and the car bolted from its spot.
He drove in silence. When we reached the main road that led to my house, I spit out what I had been holding in. “My father murdered David Weiss.”
Roy didn’t react. I suspected he was trying to make sense of the pieces of information he now possessed.
“Is that what the policeman who came over told you? Is that who you called?”
“Yes.”
“I understand. He told you the name of the driver who was killed.” He was pondering out loud.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Eva.”
The rest of the journey was made in quiet.
***
We entered the house. Roy made me a cup of hot chocolate and helped me sit down on the chair in the kitchen. I was functioning like a robot. My head was full and empty a
t the same time. Thoughts were stopped by the questions I still had not answered—I had left that horrible meeting more confused than before. So many bells were ringing in my head that it had become unbearable. I held my head with both hands and closed my eyes. Roy sat across from me and quietly watched me.
That night, as we were lying in bed, he pulled me to his body. It felt as though he was trying to pass his strength on to me and erase all the horrific feelings of guilt left me by my father.
37
The days that followed were difficult for me. My guilt grew to unbearable proportions. I walked around bent over, carrying a burden too heavy to bear. It seemed that everyone who passed me by knew my father was a murderer. Every look directed at me was accusing. People pointed at me, their eyes glaring. I closed myself off in the house, not leaving from the moment I came home from work. Roy coaxed me to go to the office, because I didn’t want to show myself there either. The actions of my father and my own actions became one. I was living like a hunted animal.
I was convinced that someone was looking for me. When they finally caught me, they would hurt me, punish me. I wanted it all to be over, to find peace—death sounded like an excellent solution. But the will to live was stronger. Many days went by in this state of complete numbness, until one evening Roy said “Enough.” When I came home from work, he was already home. He usually arrived after me, in the evening, when it was already dark outside. I went inside, threw my keys on the dresser, and hung my coat up on the hanger by the front door.
I ignored Roy’s surprising presence and gave him an apathetic hello. Then I went toward the bathroom to see if there was hot water for a shower, but Roy got up, blocked my way and pulled me to the sofa in the living room.
“Sit down!” he ordered me.
“I want to take a shower.”
“Sit!” he ordered again.
I sat down where he indicated and leaned back. I was exhausted and as limp as a marionette.
Life in a Box Page 30
