by Alison Pick
Her name is already waiting. Ayla.
Her middle names. Emily. Ruzenka.
And her Hebrew name. Ayala.
We drive her home in the Sunday-morning light, a little scoop of a person in the bottom of her car seat, her limbs loose like a handful of noodles. Every particle of the known world rearranging itself around her presence. We eat bean salad and mango juice and a dense dark chocolate birthday cake. I sleep on the couch for four hours while Degan holds the baby. He lays her length across his forearm, her head in his palm, the whole world cupped there in his hand.
In the same way I did not worry about a miscarriage I have not seriously entertained postpartum depression. It has not been explained to me. Or: It’s been explained, but I have not understood. I think it is something that happens to women who do not want their babies, women who don’t have adequate support. I realize with a start that I have never observed new motherhood up close, have never been in a newborn’s presence for longer than a few hours.
In the slew of congratulatory emails comes one from Jordan, whose wife is a midwife: “I hope you feel wonderful! And if for some reason you feel like you’ve fallen down a rabbit hole, that’s normal too.”
Interesting.
Around the seventh day of Ayla’s life darkness starts creeping in, a blur of black at the edge of my eyes. It is August, but I shiver. I force myself to leave the house to go out for a walk, but the sun blinds my eyes. I blink and blink, trying to clear my vision. Several times, the lights dimmed in the living room to help the baby sleep, I see mice that don’t exist scuttle across the hardwood floor.
I am shocked to discover that I will now spend the rest of my life breastfeeding on the sofa, a complex arrangement of cushions strapped to my waist, and my chest exposed for anyone who wanders into the house to see. How have I not known? I have managed to get through an entire pregnancy without anyone once mentioning this.
My breasts burn and sting. I develop blocked milk ducts, mysterious mammary ailments with flowery names like mastitis and candidiasis. My nipples tear and bleed. I take Advil before feeding the baby. There are trips to the hospital in the middle of the night with fevers. Potato poultices. Antibiotics. Appointments at every clinic in the city.
The nursing problems exacerbate my new depression, a darkness that feels different from the usual bad blood. I am not heavy and draggy so much as blown open, the blinders I usually rely on to get through the day blasted off entirely. I am unshielded, without protection. I pace the kitchen with my girl bound to my chest like a bomb about to go off. I can’t help myself—I think of the war. Of Vera being taken away from her children. Only now do I really understand what this means.
She was taken from her children. Her children were taken away.
In what is supposed to be the time of ultimate joy, my mind drifts to families living in hiding, behind walls, and to the mothers who smothered their own infants so they did not cry and give away the family’s location. I pace and bounce, tears on my cheeks, trying to lull Ayla to sleep.
Mengele, “the Angel of Death,” who forced that new mother to hold her daughter without feeding her. Six days of unimaginable suffering.
I hear Hilda’s words: “We were partisans, starving in the woods. What would we do with a baby?”
My daughter has colic. She does not technically have colic, but she cries all evening as though enraged about being born. As though the human condition is intolerable to her, entirely unacceptable. I wrap her to my body, tying her against me with the sling. She finally falls asleep on my chest, our sweaty skin sticking us together as though we were again one single animal. Her diaper is redolent with sickly sweet–smelling excrement. I pace and pace with her, reading to pass the time. The father and child in my book are bound together in misery and love. When the father dies, his boy stays by his body for three days, repeating his name over and over. Daddy. Daddy. I hold the book up in front of my face like a shield.
Narrative begs an ending. The desire to wrap up loose ends, to make meaning, is human, and ancient. But things do not end. There is only progression, shape-shifting, the flow of a current that crashes and tumbles, diminishes, almost dries up, only to give birth to itself again a little farther downstream.
The baby changes my experience of depression in the same way that the conversion does. She alters it, knocks it askew. I am not fixed or healed, but I am different, as though a part of me that had always existed as an outline has now been fully coloured in. I am a mother, and a Jew, which is to say the me who has suffered in the past is now a new me entirely.
I know now, too, that the darkness heralds healing: that with each bout I am invited to a deeper place within myself and, paradoxically, to a deeper release. If I give myself over to depression, engage with it rather than resist it, it will take me places I never would have imagined.
For example: when Far to Go is published the following year, it is awarded the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction. The organizer writes me to tell me the news. The subject heading of her email is “The Beatrice and Martin Fischer Award.”
Why does that name sound so familiar?
I email Dad: “Do you know a Martin Fischer?”
He writes back right away: “Dr. Martin Fischer? He was my therapist when I was in my twenties. The one I’ve told you about.”
Of course he was. I’ve been given an award in the name of the man Dad thought was good, the man whose funeral occasioned my father’s first-ever visit to a synagogue. In a way, he was my first therapist, too: Dad brought me along to see him when I was an infant, fast asleep in my bassinet, my hands curled up tight beside my head.
Ayla’s colic improves, and thankfully so does my postpartum depression. It diminishes slowly, a balloon in the corner of a playroom, losing air until, one day, it is just a scrap of bright plastic amid the toys. Ayla thrives. Our feeding issues resolve and she grows plump with my milk, her pale skin doubling over so she looks like nothing more than a doughy Czech dumpling.
When Ayla is several months old, Degan approaches me in the nursery. The shades are drawn and the small lantern lit. Ayla is nursing, her little hands balled up at her chest and her knees tucked in. I inhale the sweet and slightly sour smell of baby—her scalp, milk, old skin collected in the creases between fat.
“I have some news,” Degan says.
“Pass me that pillow?”
I tuck it in beneath Ayla, adjusting her position, supporting her delicate skull in the crook of my hand. I motion and he passes me a second pillow.
“What’s the news?” I ask.
“I’m going to convert.”
I pause, and feel the steady sucking right at the heart of me, our daughter growing bigger by the minute. “Really?”
Degan smiles.
“What made you change your mind?” I ask.
He sits down on the big green yoga ball across from me, bouncing subtly, out of habit, even though there’s no baby in his arms. “I kept thinking about what Rachel said.”
“Rachel said a lot of things.”
“True. I mean, what she said about not needing to wait for a thunderbolt.”
I nod. I take a minute to switch Ayla to the other breast, clipping up the right side of my bra and unclipping the left. She latches back on and the tugging resumes.
Degan says, “I’ve decided the things that I love about Judaism are enough. The absence of original sin. The spirit of inquiry and debate.”
I move the baby to my shoulder and begin the long ritual of burping, starting at her low back and moving slowly up to her tiny wings.
“So?” Degan asks. “What do you think? Are you happy?”
I pause. The onslaught of new motherhood has absorbed me completely, removing me from myself in a way that is both pleasurable and immensely disconcerting. I have to take a moment to dig around inside myself and sort out the complexity of what I’m feeling.
I remember the pregnant rabbi’s question at my beit din, the one I didn’t understand: “
How would you feel if your husband changed his mind?”
I realize it only as I say it. “I guess that part of me—just a little part?—was glad you weren’t going to yield. So our old lives would still be represented.”
Degan grins and runs a hand across his stubble. “Sorry, babe.”
“We’re locked in?”
“We’re locked in.”
“Merry Christmas!”
“Thank you. But I’m Jewish.”
I laugh.
Ayla pulls off my breast and looks in the direction of her dad’s voice. “What do you think?” I ask her.
She makes a little cry. But it’s a cry of happiness, I’m sure.
twenty
IT’S BEEN MONTHS since I’ve seen Charlotte; I am surprised by the comfortable familiarity of her room, with its sand table and rocking chair, like returning after a long time to the house of my childhood. Everything smaller than I’d remembered, and comfortingly worn. She smiles when she sees me. “There’s a lot less of you than when you were last here.”
I look down at my diminished belly. “And a lot more.”
She nods knowingly.
We chat in a catching-up kind of way, like old friends who haven’t seen each other in some time. I tell her about Far to Go, about the mikvah, about Degan’s recent decision. She rocks, and asks her usual thoughtful questions, but there’s a neutrality of tone to our conversation. The urgency has gone out of it.
“Well?” she asks, seeing the look on my face.
“I was just realizing that I don’t feel the same—” I pause, searching for the word “—I don’t feel the same pressure as I used to feel here.”
I hesitate, afraid of hurting her feelings, but she nods to show she understands. “I used to feel that there was so much to deal with, to do something about. But now I have the urge to—” I falter, and she nods again. “To just let it be.”
Charlotte crosses her legs and rocks. She absently touches the earth in the small potted aloe plant beside her, then nods, satisfied it has enough water. She says, “There are times to contemplate life, and then there are times to just live it. Maybe this is one of those times.”
She checks my reaction. I see she does not want me to feel pushed away, wants me to know this isn’t a rejection but an option, an invitation.
“Is the work over?” I ask.
She laughs; in all our time together I’ve never heard her laugh and I am surprised at the brightness of it, like sunlight sparkling on a lake.
“To be continued,” she says.
“Okay.”
“Go live your life,” she says.
She sends me away with the instruction, of course, to pay attention to my dreams. That night, I find myself in a café with Marianne. It is Prague, before the war. An aproned waiter pours coffee from a tall silver pot. The cups are bone china. Marianne wears a blue hat with a veil of sheer netting over her face. I have the sinking feeling that I know something she doesn’t, that I alone can see what is coming. She sighs, and stirs a cube of sugar in her coffee. The delicate clink of the spoon. “I wish we had more time together,” she says.
I sit up straighter. “How do you mean?”
She lifts her veil so I can see her full face, her rouged cheeks and pink lips, and cocks an eyebrow in reprimand. As though to say: We both know how this will end. Why pretend otherwise?
The waiter comes with our bill. Marianne gathers her things. “But wait,” I say, panicking. “I wanted to ask you …”
She stops, half up from her chair, and says Charlotte’s exact words: “Go live your life.”
My eyes widen.
Marianne is opening her makeup compact now, checking her look before going down into the street. She opens the café door; the little bell jingles. She turns back toward me, looking over her shoulder, but when her voice comes, it is directly in my ear, as though she’s standing next to me. “Don’t suffer for me,” she says. “For us.” I know that by “us” she means Oskar and her; Vera’s children, little Jan in his bathing suit, Eva with her halo of curls. Marianne holds my eye and says, for emphasis, “There are better ways to honour us.”
twenty-one
I’VE BEEN GRANTED MY WISH to not have to face a circumcision. We have a simple baby-naming, instead. On a snowy morning in February, when Ayla is six months old, we clean and tidy, tucking tiny spit-up bibs and washcloths no larger than my palm out of sight. When the kitchen is spotless, I bring out a lace tablecloth that belonged to Vera, who died peacefully in 2001. I spread its elaborate pattern out on the table. I hang my framed photos of her lost children in the living room for everyone to see.
At eleven o’clock the doorbell starts ringing. Our family and friends arrive slowly and assemble in the living room, gathering around Rachel and Shayna, who will officiate together. Shayna begins to hum, softly and hypnotically; the crowd falls silent. I look out at their faces: Dad, my sister, Aaron and Sylvie, Debra. The faces of the many people who have been with me on this journey.
Ayla has been cloistered away with my mother, who has been given the honour of carrying her into the room. When they enter, a gasp of pleasure rises from the assembly. She is a beautiful baby. All parents think that of their child, but I am certain it is true. Pale-skinned and blue-eyed like her father, her fat limbs announcing the space she takes up in the world. Shayna’s humming blooms into full song, and when she lets loose the first high clear notes, Ayla’s body freezes and turns toward my friend, every bit of my daughter aimed at the beauty. A string of clear drool hangs from her plush pink lips; she blinks. Her first experience of being fully transported by art.
Ayla wears a white smock dress that was mine as a baby. Maybe it was the dress I wore to my christening.
Rachel explains that Ayla has entered the room to the same melody she will enter to on her wedding day. I can no more imagine Ayla getting married than I can imagine her speaking or walking, but there is something about Rachel’s certainty—her faith—that makes me trust it is true.
Rachel leads us through the parents’ dedication, but I am so overcome I cannot hear her words. I have to stop partway through the blessing because my throat is thick with feeling. I look into Rachel’s eyes and hang on. She has been the one to shepherd us from a place of absence into presence. When she recites the prayer welcoming Ayla, Rachel, too, has tears in her eyes.
The centrepiece of any baby-naming ceremony is the parents talking about the names they have chosen. Degan starts, telling our friends about the first time he heard the name Ayla, and how he immediately fell in love with it. It was a Scottish name, but later, after I got pregnant, he began to harbour the idea that it was an old name, a name with other roots. Hebrew roots.
It was. It did. Ayla can be short for the Hebrew ayala, meaning “deer.” Lithe and delicate, with light in the eyes.
Degan then speaks about the name Emily, passed down from both my sister and his paternal grandmother.
Then it is my turn to speak.
Ayla’s third name is Ruzenka, I say, after Dad’s paternal grandmother. She loved my father fiercely. She suffered the worst thing anyone can suffer—the deaths of two of her children in concentration camps. She grieved, and adapted with grace to what life dealt her. She believed, and taught Dad, that the most important thing was to have faith—of any kind—in God, the world and humanity.
But Ruzenka also believed in the particularity of religion. While the rest of her family pretended to be Christian, she held her Judaism close her entire life. She fasted on Yom Kippur. She lit candles on Shabbat. It is the light from Ruzenka’s candles, I tell our family and friends, that we want Ayla to grow up in. A light that, despite great adversity, has shone down the generations.
I look out again into the faces of everyone gathered. Dad and I lock eyes. I smile. He smiles. It is done.
Somewhere rain falls into the open sea. Genocide continues. There are no easy answers. Snow falls on a tombstone, furring it over with memory. My great-grandmother is buri
ed in an unmarked grave in the sky.
My Christian mother holds my Jewish child in her arms. The rabbi, full of love, blesses the baby in Hebrew: bruchah haba’ah.
We repeat the blessing in English.
Blessed is she who comes.
acknowledgements
Acknowledgements play a particular role in a memoir. I’m grateful to have the chance to thank some of the many people who helped me with the writing and also who lived through various parts of this with me, who supported me in ways to numerous to list, and who offered conversation and company along the way:
Nicola Holmes. Aviva Chernick. Adam Sol. Rabbi Karen Thomashow. Rabbi Elyse Goldstein. Aaron Talbot and Miki Stricker Talbot. Hartley Weinberg and Sarah Margles. Rabbi Esther Lederman. Helen Bramer. The Traub-Werner family. Allan Kaplan and Cheryl Reicin. Debra Bennett. Jordan and Ilana Stanger-Ross. John and Nora Freund. George Feldman and Deborah Orr. Sasha and the Mamas. Christine Pountney. Sonya Teece. Alexi Zentner. Matt Neff.
In many ways this book was a collaboration with my father, Thomas Pick, and I am particularly indebted to him, to Margot and Emily Pick, to Rabbi Yael Splansky who went above and beyond, to my longtime and beloved editor, Lynn Henry, and to Degan Davis for his incredible fortitude and compassion.
I could not have written this book without financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. I was grateful for a fellowship from the Corporation of Yaddo during the final stages. Thanks to my agents Anne McDermid and Martha Magor Webb in Toronto, and to Zoe Waldie, Stephen Edwards and Margaret Halton in London. And thanks also to Kristin Cochrane, Zoe Maslow, Nicola Makoway and Sharon Klein at Doubleday Canada, to Claire Wachtel at HarperCollins in the US, and to Mary-Anne Harrington at Headline in the UK.