For a moment, I thought, Yes. I recalled the looks between us. Me and him. Me and him and the boys. And a clear picture of a real family. And a leap in my heart.
The magic made me dizzy.
But then, the shadow came and laid its hand on my heart. My husband’s hand, the one I’d felt on the nights I do not want to remember. My body began to shudder and I was unable to breathe.
My son was alarmed and fluttered around me, saying something about a queen locked in a tower. And that night, his father the Angel appeared to him, his face as black as coal, standing on a roof and shouting, How dare you bring a stranger into my house, into the house of the dead? And my son awoke from his sleep and told me about the dream. And I comforted him and I said that nothing could be done.
After that night, we both accepted our fate and what was to come.
I knew that I would never marry again. Shalom returned to Chernobyl to wed the daughter of Rabbi Nachum.
He was a child of almost nine, whom with my own hands I gave to a man who did not understand his feelings.
And there he stood dressed up like a groom, as if for the Purim carnival. At his side stood a girl in a wig, a wig with braids, and a veil over it.
He had lost his father. He did not know it, but very soon he would also lose me. And I stood next to the bride, who had lost her mother.
I am a widow in a black dress, and on the other side of the wedding canopy stands Rabbi Nachum, dressed in a festive white robe. He is also a widower, and above us there is an awning of white silk.
We stood there, me and my small son, and my elder son was also there with us. Yisroel-Chaim was ten years old and he was also engaged to be married. I wanted to hold them both, my two sons, and to wrap them in a white cloth, to swaddle them in it as if they were babies. But I could not do what I wished.
My own will surrendered to other things.
I looked into the eyes of my son, the groom, and saw that his will was also overcome.
He sat with Rabbi Nachum over the ketuba, the marriage contract, and the rabbi laid his large forearm on his shoulder and drew my son to him. My son must surely have felt he was being crushed, and must surely have smelled the wine Rabbi Nachum had drunk in honor of the occasion. But he was silent and did not run away.
And the little girl bride, what was she feeling? What did she know?
Her mother had died the previous winter. And my son Shalom was full of dreams.
He wore a white headdress like the one—he said—the Messiah would wear. They were both orphans and they were wed. They were husband and wife.
And I had a stall, I worked like a dog, and I dreamed about a far-off land.
No one knew my dreams, no one knew my longings, only I knew that very soon I would part from everyone. I would even part from my children and I would never see them again.
The wedding glass was broken and my heart was also shattered.
Every parting is a shattering, and my heart was in pieces. I looked at the glass wrapped in white fabric and I heard it breaking. I heard the shouts of happiness. Facing me were a boy and a girl, and the boy was my son. He was my younger son, and soon he would never see me again. He would have an adopted father who did not understand him. And this matter of understanding is delicate and elusive. This matter of comprehension complicates everything. And what would my son think of me? For there was understanding between us, but now he would cease to know me. Even if he wished to and tried with all his might, he would never understand.
Will he hate me? It’s a question that I should ask in the past tense. Did he hate me then, when I left him all alone?
And if my sons spoke of me, what did they say?
And even worse than this was the possibility that they did not say a single thing. Nothing about me, about me leaving, about what might have befallen me in my new place.
Now, when I am old, I do not know if I am still a mother. Or why it hurt me so much when I heard that my younger son had died.
A wedding at joyous Purim, but a wedding full of sadness. The groom in the miter of the Messiah and the bride with a wig plaited into braids.
A wedding is the happiness of the living and the dead, of the dead mother of the bride and the dead father of the groom, who was called the Angel. A wedding full of sadness, death waiting to ambush us all. And the dead do not rest, but descend and move about the world. And the world was created by the hands of God, so it is written in the holy books. And those holy books are the threads that connect the living with the dead.
My father, Meshulum Feivish, was a great Torah scholar and he loved the sacred books. He loved me, his daughter, but would have loved me more had I been his son.
When I met the great Maggid, I already was his daughter-in-law. My soul was entwined with his soul and, while he was alive, I had a home in the world. When he died, my home was destroyed and I was left exposed.
After that, my husband took flight; he did not die but spread his wings and took flight. Surely he is sitting now on the chair which once I saw empty.
At the age of twelve, a short time after my marriage, I ascended in a dream to the Sanhedrin, the mystical Jewish council, and I presented arguments to them which I did not remember afterward. My father-in-law, the great Maggid, saw what happened and remembered it all.
He knew me far better than I knew myself.
He was a man with splendor, with a light that touched the hearts of human beings. And since he died, I have not seen any such splendor in the world.
Once I thought that I would see many people like him in the Land of Israel, but I was very wrong.
People here are like people everywhere, only poorer and more lowly than those outside the Land of Israel.
When I arrived here, I fell sick, and while I lay on my deathbed, I heard the voice of God. Since then, I see the glory that lies under the pain. Glory hides under the abscess, it glints through crumbling stones and from the dry earth cracked open by thirst. And the people, and the land, they are as one dough. And glory hides inside it like a raisin, like sweet dried fruit.
When I was a girl, I held my brother’s hand and we set out walking to the Land of Israel. Many years later, I reached it alone. I entered my childhood dream and I never left.
My lifetime was divided into two: wakefulness and dreaming. When I set out on my journey, it was like sinking into a deep sleep. I forgot the respect that I had been given, the family that I’d had, and I was no longer concerned about earning a livelihood. In my sleep, I entered a deserted land, I laid my pack down on its ground, I laid my head on a stone, and I lay in the field. And I heard a voice calling me: “Gittel!” And I saw a ladder.
There was no one climbing it and no one descending it. It stood alone like a palm tree, the sun glinting between its slats, and by night, the stars.
A terrible sorrow engulfed me upon seeing it. I sat at its feet, and I wept.
A creature of the field came up to me and I stroked its head. After that, people came to me and I stroked their heads. And slowly, slowly I felt gladness seeping into my hands. And that happiness filled my veins and choked my throat.
The happiness burst from my eyes and the ladder looked different to me. It was rustling with life.
My words are the words of a dream. They fly like wild bees from place to place, trailing drops of honey, hovering aimlessly in the blue air.
EPILOGUE
When I put down my pen, Gittel left me. In her place was my great-grandmother with her wrinkled face and her toothless mouth, smiling among the trees.
And my home was in Jerusalem with its gray sky, adorned with miracles. And my great-grandmother disappeared in the trees. I waved to her and she whispered, “Who are you?”
And Gittel was no more, and my great-grandmother vanished, and as for me, I returned to a shady corner in the garden of writing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2016 Debbi Cooper
Born in Tel Aviv, Smadar Herzfeld initially came to Jerusalem to work with und
erprivileged children. She is the founder of 62, a boutique publishing house that specializes in books on women and religion. Herzfeld, who writes about characters with strong spiritual and religious beliefs, has penned four novels and a book of poetry. Her novel God Isn’t Me won the Jerusalem Foundation Award. The mother of two adopted sons from Vietnam, Herzfeld lives in Jerusalem. Learn more at www.publishers62.co.il.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © 2016 Debbi Cooper
Aloma Halter is a writer, poet, translator, and editor. She was born in London, studied literature at the University of Cambridge, and came to Israel in 1980.
Halter has translated four novels by Aharon Appelfeld into English, including The Story of a Life, and edited many novels, which include recipients of the Koret Prize and the National Jewish Book Award. Her edit of her father’s memoir, Roman’s Journey, was acclaimed in Publishers Weekly. She lives in Jerusalem with her two daughters.
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