The Debt of Tamar

by Dweck, Nicole

  28

  Edward Rumie

  Paris

  1958

  When Marie and Edward filed an official complaint at the old police station on Boulevard St. Michel, they were politely informed that without a cooperating witness or shred of tangible evidence, there was no way they could charge Jean Pierre Prideux with assault or any other crime for that matter. “But they’ve torn his retina.” Marie charged. “He’s blind in one eye!”

  “Madame, not to worry. We’ll head over to Monsieur Prideux’s flat and check into his alibi.”

  Later that evening, Marie received a phone call from an officer down at the station. “Monsieur Prideux claims he was at church with his father the day in question…his father confirms this. Well why would the man lie? Madame, with all due respect, Monsieur Prideux is a very well respected member of our community, if he says his son was with him at church…Oui oui! Of course we are serious about bringing the perpetrators to justice, but perhaps your son is confused about who the aggressors were. He did sustain head injuries as you yourself have claimed... Madame, I do not appreciate your tone…yes, of course we are doing our very best…We are certainly not going to drop the case. We’ll continue our investigation until we bring the criminals to justice.”

  And so it was that Jean-Pierre Prideux, son of a decorated war hero and grandson of the retired chief of the Marais district police, escaped punishment for his crime, and Edward’s dream of becoming a pilot in the Royal French air-force was snuffed out forever.

  The letter came a month after the beating.

  In light of recent events, it is with much regret that we are forced to rescind your acceptance to the National Aviation Academy. As you are well aware, the safety of our students and pilots has and always will be our number one priority. While your visual impairment restricts you from our aviation training program, we welcome and encourage your application to an administrative position within the academy.

  Edward folded each corner of the letter, until it took on the winged shape of his dreams. He examined his creation before crushing it in the palm of his hand.

  “I will never forgive you,” he whispered that evening to the empty bed where Davide had once slept. The old floral sheets were drawn taut over the thin mattress at the far end of the room, the lonely space where a brother should have been illuminated by the pale glow of the moon. “I was never a twin,” he thought to himself. “Not even a brother.”

  A few weeks later, Edward received a letter addressed to him with a foreign stamp sealed with the mark of the newly established Jewish state. He placed it in the pocket of his oversized blazer and went about his day in no particular hurry. School had ended and he was now working in his family’s bakery. Business had slowed as two more bakeries had opened just across the street. Marie and her husband left the bakery in Edward’s care and went off to work in a local factory to help make ends meet. Edward greeted the customers slowly. There was no rush. He’d probably be working there for the rest of his life now. When they asked for the usual chocolate crepe or custard croissant, he moved behind the counter at a glacial pace, eliciting the irate glances of impatient customers. He made no attempt to mitigate his limp, but exaggerated it as an expression of disgust with everyone and everything. When the sun began to set he closed up shop for the evening, then wiped down the counters and slowly swept up the powdered sugar and crumbs from the floor, before heading around the corner and mounting two flights of stairs to the family flat. In his pocket, he still held the letter from someone he considered no more real than a ghost, but no less haunting.

  It was a damp October night, but with the furnace lit in the parlor, the Rumie household was warm and quiet. He held the envelope in his hands for several minutes. Then he tossed the letter into the furnace without bothering to read it. The next week, he found another letter in the post addressed to his parents. He tore open the envelope and read it. Davide was to be married to a fisherman’s daughter and was settling in a lush region of Israel called Tiberius. He was saving up his earnings as a fisherman to buy them all passage on the steamship to meet his soon-to-be wife—and could they please write back as soon as possible?

  Week after week Edward fueled the furnace with Davide’s letters, some were about his newfound religion, some about living in times of war—at the end of every letter, “Why haven’t you written?” Some of the letters showed concern. “Has Papa thrown out his back again? What’s going on there? Is someone ill?” And always they ended, “Why haven’t you written?” As time went by, the letters turned bitter. “I know you raised me as a Catholic, but please respect my decision.” Edward kept watch for the post every day.

  “Don’t worry, Maman. I’m sure he’s just busy. We’ll hear from him any day...any day…Bien sûr, Maman, I’ll head to the post office first thing in the morning…He’s bound to write one of these days.”

  And finally, Edward wrote back. He did not mention the attack that he suffered just moments after bidding Davide farewell. He did not mention the beating he endured and the weeks of painful rehabilitation. He did not mention that he’d been blinded in one eye, that the aviation academy had rescinded his acceptance, or that his leg had been shattered along with the only dream he’d ever had. He did not mention what he needed to say most. Nowhere in the letter did he say what he whispered between clenched teeth every night. “You should have been there for me, like I was there for you.”

  He did not mention any of these things, but in neat block letters, he informed Davide that his abandonment of Christ had devastated their parents. His decision to marry a Jew and settle in Israel was tantamount to abandoning the family that had saved him from certain death. The letter concluded, “Please do not write again.”

  Months passed without any word from Davide, and Marie and her husband grew more reclusive and melancholy fearing the worst had happened to their estranged son. Perhaps he had gotten swept up in a skirmish with the Palestinians—Maybe he was lying dead in a ditch somewhere. They contacted the captain of the steamship, hoping he would have some knowledge of their missing boy.

  “Davide Herzikova? Yes, a fine fellow, was fine last time I saw him…Oh that’s awful. The boy’s gone missing has he? I wish I could be of more help. If I hear anything, I’ll send a telegram right away. Mme Rumie is that right? God Speed and good luck.”

  Months passed and the Rumie household was quiet. One day, Edward spotted a letter in the mail. His shame had begun to gnaw at his conscious as his father and mother continued to grow more depressed with each passing day. The bakery had gone neglected. Customers began to spot mice scurrying about. Crumbs and food bits were scattered all over the unswept floor tiles. Even the most loyal customers would no longer come into the bakery. Marie and her husband had grown listless from worry. They could no longer afford to pay rent on the small space and were forced to close the bakery.

  Now Edward finally understood the severity of his actions. He waited every day for Davide to write, for the opportunity to be able to storm his parent’s melancholy chamber waving a tall white envelope in his hand. “It’s Davide! He’s all right!” He dreamed of the day. He just needed to wait, just wait for one more letter. They’d be able to check the return address and contact him, and in time, his inequities would be forgiven. They would be a family once again.

  And then it came. When Edward spotted it in the mail, his heart leapt as he grasped it with the same frantic desperation a drowning man would a life raft. He tore at the seal in breathless gratitude and unfolded the letter inside. Just ten tiny letters. Nothing more, nothing less.

  You have broken my heart.

  I will not write again.

  Edward felt panic rising in his chest. He turned the envelope about a dozen times over. Nowhere had Davide written his exact whereabouts. The envelope did not bear a return address. Out of scores of letters Davide had sent, it was the only one to survive the furnace. “I’ll find you,” he promised to the empty space where his brother had once been. “I’ll
find you.”

  In the morning, Edward made his way to church and confessed his sins to Father Jean-Mari from behind a stenciled partition in a cloistered booth smelling of dust and sweat. Then he returned home certain that absolution was not his to be had. He told his parents, Marie and Carle, the very same words he had told the priest. He would find Davide, he swore. He had a lead, Tiberius! He knew that Davide had settled there. Edward found himself on the next steamer from France to Israel. He paid a barefoot youth a small fortune to lead him to Tiberius. Once there, he asked around about a young French boy. “His name is Davide,” he said in a frantic huff. “Davide Herzikova.” He held up an old photo.

  And then, a break. A thick fisherman with a Russian accent pointed Edward to a small cottage nestled atop a hill in the distance. “But the boy you look for, he left,” explained the Russian as he went about skinning his latest catch. “He went with his father-in-law. To fight. They are with the army now.” He wiped the sweat from his brow then continued skinning the fish atop his wooden chopping board. “The girl, she is studying somewhere in Jerusalem, living there with her mother,” he explained, but Edward was already pushing past overeager shopkeepers and on his way to the headquarters of the IDF, where he was certain he could learn the whereabouts of his brother.

  And yet, at the administrative offices of the Israeli Defense Forces, he faced one brick wall after another. “We don’t give out information about our soldiers,” a Moroccan hulk of a man explained. “It’s for security,” he continued as Edward, exhausted and dejected, leaned over on the counter that separated the one man from the other. “Someone else in charge? I am in charge!” the man barked. “What do you think this is…we don’t run a telegraph service…stop crying! What do I look like? I’m not your mother. Pull yourself together, there’s a war going on man!” And after another fifteen minutes of pleading “Beseder Beseder, ok, I’ll pass the message, but don’t get your hopes up. There are at least a few dozen Davide Herzikovas in the army. It will take some time to locate the right one.” Edward returned to France and waited for word of his brother.

  Six months passed until a general in the IDF phoned to say that Davide Herzikova had been discharged from service. He and his wife had moved to America. And what of the message Edward had been trying to send to him? Had he at least gotten the message through?

  “What message was that?” The officer inquired. “No, I didn’t know there was any message to be delivered, but the good news is he’s alive and well! Where is he? Records indicate he moved with his wife to America…Where in America? I’m sorry Sir, we don’t keep such detailed information.”

  Edward dropped the receiver. He looked up. His mother and father stood in the shallow doorway, eager-eyed and waiting for news. He dropped his head to his lap. “He’s alive.”

  PART IV

  REDEMPTION

  29

  Hannah Herzikova- Present day

  Hannah Herzikova looked about her makeshift studio. Sunbeams reached through the window, creating a dazzling plume of sun-dipped dust that settled gently on wooden floorboards, whose uneven planks had weathered two floods in the past year.

  The studio was converted from an old barn that, once upon a time, housed horses. It was just a stone’s throw from her home, a Norman Rockwell creation that swayed wearily in the wind, with giant windows like old oak eyes, and a splintered porch surrounded by a white fence. The house was at the bottom of a bowl-shaped plot of land, so, several times a year, it flooded. In recent years, it had been elevated onto stilts to halt the floodwaters from rushing in and destroying it.

  In her studio, Hannah left her equipment and works hanging on protruding nails that had once been used to hang horseshoes and saddles and old leather reins. The walls were dripping with countless portraits of all the town’s neighbors. Some were pitifully proud, like Mr. Glotleib from across the street. He moved like an old ugly bulldog, wobbling in all his magnificence, a stump of durability who growled deliciously when he mumbled. She painted Mrs. Rhodes, her ancient face as wrinkled and enchanting as the etchings on a treasure map, her white hair puffed in a glorious celebration of antique beauty. There was the portrait of one-eyed Mrs. Ethers, who wasn’t one eyed at all, but simply could not see out of the cracked lens in her spectacles.

  Countless portraits covered every inch of the studio’s walls. Their eyes, dark and luminous, surveyed the visitors like a thousand brooding Mona Lisas. Those gloating eyes hung high above the flood waters that seeped in through the door crack and up through the seething floorboards flooding the room just an inch or so especially in May.

  While many of Hannah’s friends lived in the city, renting out small rooms in the Village or Williamsburg, she was happy to be back home in Connecticut. The city was just a twenty-minute ride away, with trains heading out every other hour. And of course, when she’d learnt about her father’s illness, she moved home right away. Once, time had been an inconsequential factor in the life of Hannah Herzikova. She’d never worn a watch and worked without a schedule. She had a lifetime ahead of her. And then, quite suddenly, they got the news and time had become very real. Time was running out. Hannah moved home.

  The portrait did sweat a little in the warm May mist of the floods, but that did nothing to dampen its beauty. On the contrary, it lent Davide Herzikova’s image a dreamy quality, as though he were about to fall asleep, or perhaps, vanish.

  The visit with her father earlier in the day had disturbed her. She had never been under a deadline to finish any of her works. She knew that she only had a few weeks, possibly just a few more days, to finish it. And still, she could not manage to get the eyes right.

  By the third knock, Hannah stopped pretending she hadn’t heard a thing, then made her way to the door of the shed, opening it just a crack.

  It was that time of day when the sun began to dip itself into the horizon and the last bits of red and orange were squeezed from the sky. She preferred that hour best to study the shadows, the ways in which they would shrink and swell like a reveler’s reflection in a fun house mirror. It was that hour when shadows soaked the room just enough to signal the readiness of night, when her face and body would glow like sepia creating a gilded profile that left the impression of a cameo in the eyes and mind of the stranger at the door.

  “What is it?” She kept her eyes grounded, her body half-hidden behind the wooden door.

  “I’m looking for Davide Herzikova,” said an elderly man whose European accent and silver cuff links suggested he should be looking for someone else. He wore large black sunglasses, like the kind Mrs. Rhodes sported ever since her cataract surgery. He caught a glimpse of the inner workings of her studio and took a step forward to peer inside. “I knocked over at the main house.” He continued patting the moisture beads on his forehead with a handkerchief. “No one seems to be home.”

  Hannah looked past him. Outside, an assortment of chipped terracotta pots dotted the walkway up to the main house. Her eyes followed the grey stone path to the house and up to the kitchen window where she met her mother’s gaze spying upon them from behind the green window dressings in the kitchen. When her eyes met Hannah’s, she let the curtain fall and disappeared from view.

  “That’s right, no one’s home,” Hannah lied, turning her attention back to the man at the door. He was gauntly elegant, with a prominent nose, high forehead and silver hair.

  “Do you know when he’ll be home?” The man twisted his cane into a welcome mat that read, home sweet home. “Are you expecting him anytime soon?”

  “I don’t know when he’ll be back,” and when he did not budge, “I’m sorry.” She closed the door on the stranger and headed back to the canvas. She’d begun working on her father’s portrait six weeks earlier, as soon as she’d gotten the news.

  After examining the portrait, she concluded that something was just not right. The lips were thin and taut. The skin was accurately rugged and aged, a texture she’d only been able to achieve after experimenting with sev
eral different brushes. The lines around the mouth were prominent, but not sobering. They attested to a lifetime of laughter, of love too. The cheekbones were highly articulated in the Parisian sense, a clear indicator of European descent. His straight hair was smoothed back neatly behind his ears, fashioned without a part. The portrait hinted at the permanent shadow just beneath his long cheekbones that receded down the length of his jaw and above his lip. He was a handsome man, his expression austere, but his eyes were very shy, very gentle. It was the eyes Hannah could not get right, more particularly, the color. The elongated distance between them was correct, but the color-She’d mixed all the colors of her pallet, but no matter what combination she tried, she could not produce the color of a secret.

  She needed to see him. She got to her feet, slung her sack over her shoulder, then carefully lifted the canvas from the easel. She headed out to her beat up jeep, unhinged the hatchback and slid the portrait in all the way.

  30

  Hannah worked feverishly to finish her father’s portrait, his whole life captured in eyes that could see long after his would close forever. Selim watched as each day, Davide’s lids drooped a little further. After three days, Selim noticed that her tubes began to empty of paint. Still, she stayed by Davide’s bedside working, not stopping to eat or rest, as Davide’s body weakened.