by Judith Frank
Malka was wiping tears from her eyes. Daniel hung back, smiling, pained as he felt the reunion from their perspective. They were wearing new matching parkas, shiny navy blue, bought for a harsher winter than they were accustomed to, and carrying shopping bags and plastic bags that looked as if they contained a hundred tin foil–covered paper plates of mandelbrot and rugelach.
They came up to Daniel and he had a moment of uncertainty: kisses or handshakes or neither? Yaakov extended his hand with a bluff, mirthless “Shalom, shalom,” and Daniel shook it, saying, “Welcome.” Malka lifted her face, with its delicate web of lines, to kiss his cheek. “I look at you and I see your brother, even though you’ve grown so skinny,” she murmured.
“Oh, not that skinny,” he said.
She gave him a keen appraising look, very Israeli, and said, “You’re really very skinny.”
Their suitcases, which Daniel hauled off the carousel, were ancient paisley canvas, pre-wheels vintage. By the time they got to the car, he was panting and sweating, cursing himself for being too cheap to rent a luggage cart. It had begun to snow.
MALKA AND YAAKOV REFUSED to take the master bedroom, insisting that he and Matt sleep in their own bed. Matt and Daniel brought every argument to bear they could. The only TV in the house was in their room. It was so much more private! It was warmer up there! They wouldn’t have to share a bathroom! But they were adamant that they didn’t want Daniel and Matt to go to any trouble. So Daniel and Matt carried all the clothes back into their closets and re–set up their toiletries in the master bathroom. “This is making more trouble,” Matt said. “They’ll be in the middle of the house all day, every day.”
“Don’t,” Daniel said. “I’m trying to keep up my morale.”
Malka and Yaakov carefully hung up their clothes in the front hall closet. Then Daniel came down and helped them blow up and put sheets on the air mattress, while Gal sat on the couch, gazing at her grandparents beatifically. “I’m so glad it’s snowing outside,” she said. “Because that’s something you don’t see in Israel very much.”
It snowed all night, the huge, silent flakes that cluster in a moment on hair and eyelashes, and when Matt and Daniel awoke it was still snowing. “Great,” Daniel sighed, his heart sinking at the thought of a day at home with grandparents and children. He called the college weather line, which informed him that nonessential personnel did not need to report to work, and as the children slept, he and Matt turned on a local news station without the sound and watched the school closure tickers. They could hear movement downstairs, the toilet flushing, the ding of the toaster. “There,” Matt said. “Closed.” There was no sound from the kids’ room, so they sank back under the covers, Daniel draping his cold legs over Matt’s warm ones, and sank back into a rare morning sleep.
Gal awoke buoyant, taking in the snowstorm and the warm, full house, and ran downstairs, where Malka and Yaakov sat at the kitchen table with toast and coffee. She buried her head in their laps and chests and let them stroke her, and showed them how she knew how to make her own breakfast of cereal and milk, with a banana cut on top. She ate with relish, milk slopping over the spoon, talking with her mouth full about snow days and the kinds of things American kids did in the snow.
AT FIRST MATT AND Daniel enjoyed the new and improved Gal, cheerful and cooperative—the “Sure!” that met her grandparents’ suggestions or requests. “I’ll get them!” she’d yell when Yaakov patted his shirt pocket for his reading glasses, and off she’d go. She talked to Noam in front of them in a fulsome loving voice, and volunteered to set the table every night.
“What!” Daniel and Matt would jocularly exclaim. “Who are you and what have you done with our Gal!” After a while, though, Matt confessed to Daniel that he was finding it a little creepy. “It’s just not her!” he said. “There’s something about it that makes me sad.”
“Really?” Daniel said with surprise. “I think she’s just happy to have them here.”
Matt shook his head. There was something about them that made you lurch to take care of them. To the naked eye, they were just old folks who drank tea, had a passion for Sudoku, and watched the American nightly news, translated by Daniel, with clucks of the tongue and shaking heads, invariably asking if this or that public figure was Jewish. Their pills and vitamins lined the windowsill above the kitchen sink, doled out carefully by Yaakov every morning. They had set up a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle of a Swiss chalet surrounded by wildflowers on the dining room table, and Malka and Gal worked on it for half an hour before bed, Malka sitting with her glasses on her nose, patiently trying this piece and that, Gal pacing around the table mumbling to herself: “There!” and “Yofi, Savta!”
Maybe, Matt thought, it was the way they never asked a follow-up question—so when Gal told them about getting one hundred on a spelling test, they didn’t ask what the hardest word was. The bottom just dropped right out of the conversation. Or maybe it was the way there was never the right amount of food in the refrigerator. When Daniel went grocery shopping with Malka, he came home with twice the amount of food he normally did, and then, when the refrigerator was full to bursting, Malka anxiously exhorted everyone to eat the food before it went to waste. “What did we buy this yogurt for, if nobody’s going to eat it?” she’d demand. She peered into the pots as Daniel or Matt cooked, and asked whether they were sure there would be enough, whether they should take a bread out of the freezer to supplement the meal. And then, at the end of every meal, Yaakov groaned, “Why did you let me eat so much?” and spent the next few hours with his belt unbuckled, complaining of gas.
It was hard, when Matt and Daniel fell into bed at the end of the day, not to attribute their behaviors to their childhoods in the Holocaust, even though that felt weirdly hushed, ghoulish, fetishistic. They knew only what they’d heard from Ilana, or heard from Ilana via Joel, who said that the information Ilana had was itself spotty and contradictory. She knew, he told them, that her parents didn’t want her to know about their lives in the Holocaust, and she wasn’t even sure how she did know; she felt as though she’d learned by osmosis. Then she pretended that she didn’t know.
They knew that Yaakov had been a child in the Lodz ghetto; that he’d survived by looking bigger and older than his ten years and being sent to work in a Nazi metalworking factory, and by running with a pack of teenagers who stole and shared food. His parents and his two younger brothers had not survived. The aura he projected around them and around Malka was that he was surrounded by a pack of incompetents—lots of condescending laughter and put-upon sighs at the way they blundered. “Do you think he acts that way because everyone around him died?” Matt asked. “Because they just weren’t competent enough to stay alive?”
“Beats me,” Daniel said. “But the food thing is definitely about having been a hungry kid.”
He and Matt peered up at the ceiling and blinked, their minds working at what profound hunger would be like for a child, imagining against their wills being unable to feed Noam and Gal.
One night after the kids were asleep, Daniel invited Malka and Yaakov into the living room to have a conversation about Noam’s developmental delays. He sat with a glass of wine in the wood rocker, while Malka warmed her hands around a mug of tea and Yaakov shifted beside her on the couch in a posture of uncomfortable readiness. He’d never had a serious conversation with them by himself, or a conversation where everyone was on the same side, and he found himself turning toward Malka; it was just impossible to maintain eye contact with Yaakov. “He’s twenty-one months old now,” he said, “and he isn’t walking yet or saying very much.”
“He’s such a good boy,” Malka said. “He seems calm and contented.”
Daniel suddenly remembered something Ilana had once told him—that Malka hadn’t grown up around other children and had never had a normal childhood herself, so when she had Ilana she was at a loss. Ilana said she remembered quite clearly that when she became a toddler demanding independence and throwing
tantrums, it was very frightening to her mother.
“I know. We love him very much,” Daniel said, conscious of using the word we. “There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with him physically. Our pediatrician wanted him tested for neurological disorders and autism.” As he said that, he saw Malka’s eyes fill with tears. “But till now, we’ve refused. We think he has suffered very badly, and because he doesn’t have the words for what he lost, this is how we’re seeing it. But now, more months have passed, and we might have to reconsider.”
“Misken,” Yaakov said. “Poor little boy. So once again, the Arabs finish what the Nazis started.”
“Yaakov,” Malka murmured.
“You’re very right in what you’re doing,” Yaakov said. “You must stand strong. The doctors have no idea what they’re doing.”
“Do you need a new doctor?” Malka asked.
“We don’t think so, but honestly, we’re not sure.”
“Maybe you should take him to a specialist,” Malka said. “To a . . . what’s it called?” She turned to Yaakov, snapping her fingers to bring on the word. “A neurologist.”
“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” Yaakov said bitterly. “They think that if they have a fancy degree, they can take the measure of a child who has suffered—who has suffered beyond what they can imagine.”
“But maybe the child—”
“The child is fine!” he snapped.
Malka sat back on the couch with a look of resignation and folded her hands. “Okay,” she said, her mouth pursed. “I just thought—”
“You thought, you thought!” Yaakov mockingly smacked his hand against his forehead. “That’s the trouble, you thinking!”
Daniel felt the blood rise and burn in his face. “I thought it would help me to have this conversation,” he said coldly, standing, “but I see I was wrong.”
Yaakov’s face worked; he put his fingers to the bridge of his nose.
“He’s sorry,” Malka said. “This is sad, about the child. And with the birthday coming up.” Ilana’s birthday was in a few days, and they were all dreading it.
“He’s not the only one who’s sad, Malka,” Daniel said.
“Shh, shh, I know,” she murmured.
CHRISTMAS CAME WITHOUT NOTICE by anyone but Matt. He drove to Derrick and Brent’s house on Christmas Day, listening to holiday songs on the radio, thinking that he didn’t really mind missing Christmas in this household of Jews but that he did kind of mind their not noticing that he was missing it. The day was gray and the streets were empty; clusters of cars were parked askew in people’s driveways. Derrick and Brent had gone to Derrick’s sister’s in North Carolina to visit the nieces and nephews, and he was supposed to stop in and feed their two beautiful and haughty tortoiseshell cats, Miles and Ella, twice a day. He parked on the street and let himself in. Their condo was in downtown Northampton, a small but pristine two-story apartment back by the fire department with a galley kitchen whose space they maximized by hanging their pots and pans from a rod they hung from the ceiling, and a living room with a bay window with a bench along it, which was padded with bright cushions and pillows. They’d left the radio on low, and it was playing classical music. Two champagne flutes stood upside down in the dish dryer; the news of Brent’s tenure had come right before they left. At the sound of the can opener, the cats sauntered into the kitchen, chirping, and wound themselves around Matt’s legs.
He watched them eat for a few minutes. Then he opened the cabinets and contemplated. Derrick was a vegetarian, and glass jars of pasta and grains, some of which Matt didn’t recognize—bulgur? quinoa? farro?—lined the shelves in austere harmony. On the top shelf there was a box of schoolboy biscuits covered with dark chocolate, and although Matt preferred milk chocolate, he took out two and ate them, then opened the fridge and swallowed some milk out of the carton. He looked at the calendar hanging on the wall and saw all the dates Derrick and Brent had made in December with other friends. Steve and Bruce—he’d met them once at a concert—were marked down three times, the third time as S&B. They were getting ahead of him and Daniel, he thought with anxious rancor. Were they still Derrick and Brent’s best friends? Well, it wasn’t Steve and Bruce they’d asked to feed the cats, he thought. Surely that meant something.
THE EVENING BEFORE ILANA’S birthday, Matt and Daniel went through the photo albums with Gal and Noam, Noam making the rhythmic scritch-scritch sound of hard pacifier sucking, Gal all interruptions and whipping hair and knees on the page and knocking the wind out of them with hard plops onto their laps.
The birthday fell on a Saturday, and after breakfast Daniel gathered them in the living room, where they sat in their separate spaces with their feet on the ground and hands in their laps, made self-conscious by the aura of solemnity. On the coffee table he’d set the most recent photo album, the one taken after Noam was born. He had set a yarhzeit candle beside it, which Yaakov objected to, since it wasn’t the anniversary of Ilana’s death. “I know, Yaakov,” he said, “but I wanted a memorial candle.” Gal was cross-legged on the floor, and next to her, Matt sat with his legs spread, Noam between them, playing with a stacking toy.
Daniel scraped a match against the box and it flamed, and nearly went out as he brought it to the candle’s wick; then they both blossomed into a glow. They watched the candle wobble in its small glass. “Can I speak about a memory?” Daniel began in Hebrew, leaning against the wall, his arms crossed. “Well, my brother was always a pretty happy guy—successful, tons of friends. But when he got together with Ilana, it was different. His eyes glowed as if he had a special secret. He looked satisfied, completely comfortable in his skin.”
They sat in awkward silence for a few minutes, until he said, “That’s all.” Then Malka reached over and pulled Gal onto her lap on the couch. “I remember, like it was yesterday, the day you were born. Of course, your ema read all these books about childbirth, and had ideas of how she wanted it to go. Very strong ideas, as she always had, you know her. She had a CD she made of songs celebrating life, and children, and the waves, and new beginnings, and when she got to her room at Shaare Zedek they told her the CD player was broken! I thought she’d be furious! She worked very hard on that CD, and wanted you to come into the world with those songs in your ears. But she gave a big laugh and said, ‘My first lesson in having children! It just doesn’t always go the way you think it will!’ ”
“Really? She said that?” Gal said, craning around to look into her grandmother’s face.
“Yes, she said that. I was so proud of her. She was such a wonderful mother. She loved you two more than anything in the world.”
“Yes, she did,” Yaakov said. “But for some reason I remember her most as a little girl herself. I remember teaching her to ride a bike, how she howled and howled till she could do it by herself. She was like that with everything—crawling, tying her shoes, every new thing she had to learn, until she learned it, she made our lives miserable. And then suddenly: sunshine! ‘And I love you, Abbaleh, and I love you, Shmabbaleh.’ ” He said that last in a high-pitched, grateful, obsequious way that made Gal laugh and Daniel narrow his eyes, hearing the derision in it, milder and more comic than the derision he’d aimed at his wife, but there just the same.
Then it was Gal’s turn; she saw them look at her. She looked at the picture of her mother, looked at herself in the picture, her hair plastered by drying seawater across her forehead. These days she was having more and more trouble remembering her mother, which she kept secret from everybody, even her grief counselor. What remained were tormenting snatches of sense memory: being lifted under the armpits and rising into the air, the pain of a comb being pulled through her hair, her mother’s arms bobbing on the water as she encouraged her to swim to her, ballooning huge in the water’s reflection, then contracting, the feeling of dark and thunder when her mother was displeased. But no funny stories. Nothing she could tell.
Matt and Daniel were looking at her with unbearable
sweetness; her grandmother’s chin rested on the top of her head. Finally, Matt’s eyes narrowed. He turned to them with a bright expression on his face. “I have a story,” he said.
They looked at him with surprise.
“I know I came late into Ilana’s life,” he said, blundering forward in Hebrew, “and didn’t know her very well, but wow, she made a big impression on me! I remember the first time Joel and Ilana came to visit us here. I was waking up, and I heard yelling downstairs. So I stayed, cowering, in the bedroom. I thought they were having a big fight. I didn’t want to interrupt. Lo na’im!” He spoke with élan and many hand gestures, stumbling over this word and that, gripping his upper arms with his fists and shivering to convey his fear, suddenly worrying even as he was telling it that his story might be a little inappropriate. It was the familiar feeling of the blurter: he was into it now, and he’d gone too far to turn back. “Finally, I came downstairs and approached the noise, and when I went into the kitchen I saw that they were just having a conversation!”
It didn’t go over very well. Malka and Yaakov were looking at him with amazed puzzlement. He was telling Ilana’s parents that their daughter was loud. He was a gentile telling Jews that they were loud.
For her part, Gal was still lost in thought, staring at the framed photograph of her mother till her vision blurred, trying to think of something to say. And then it came to her, descended upon her like an angel’s touch, and she looked up brightly. “I want to go back to Israel and live with Savta and Sabba,” she said.
In the few seconds before the din of dismay and confusion set in, Matt felt relief: This certainly overshadowed his inappropriateness! Then Yaakov slammed his hand on the table, making them all jump, stood abruptly and walked out of the room. Malka squeezed Gal and rocked her, her chin still on her head, her eyes shut. Daniel slumped in his chair with a stunned expression.
