Barren Island

by Carol Zoref

  The building where my relatives lived was busy with children playing on the stoop and in the lobby, in the stairwells and in the hallways, making games out of wood boxes and jump ropes out of knotted cord. Despite all those children, the building had an old-people smell to it, the walls and floors and doors, I now know, releasing the scent of remembering.

  The rabbi and the man from the funeral home announced they would come back for us in two hours. My father guided my mother up the steps to the second floor landing; my uncle and Noah carried up our carpetbags. I was clutching Mrs. Paradissis’ cookie tin so tightly that the rim grooved lines in my skin. And Helen? No one said a word about the little coffin, or where it had been taken.

  I expected my cousins would be waiting when we arrived, but my Aunt Sara had sent cousin Ruthie to take Flat Sammy for a walk. My aunt led my mother into the bedroom to lie down; my uncle led the rest of us into the kitchen. A pound cake, still warm from the oven, was cooling on the table. Did this woman ever stop cooking? My uncle cut slices for Noah and me, served glasses of milk. He did not ask if we had eaten. I set Mrs. Paradissis’ melomakarona next to my plate. For himself and my father, my uncle poured shots of Canadian whiskey. I looked at the clock; it was 10:00 a.m. “You kids eat in here,” said my uncle. “Your father and I need to talk. Make the plans.”

  My mouth was already full of pound cake, but Noah did not touch his. An angry blush was rising up his neck.

  “What?” I asked. Little bits of half-chewed cake flew from my mouth; I wiped my lips with the back of my hand. My uncle had not thought to give us napkins like my aunt certainly would have. It was a small omission but noticed.

  “You kids?” he whisper-shouted.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I asked impatiently.

  Helen was dead and Mom’s arms were burned and Dad was drinking whiskey in the morning and now Noah was looking to pick a fight.

  “I should be there too. Out there with them. Making plans.”

  My cousins, it turned out, were not coming back to the apartment before the funeral, which was to be held graveside. A friend of my aunt and uncle’s, Mrs. Aryeh from the building—the same one whose husband took the family photo before my parents moved to Barren Shoal—was riding with them to the cemetery on the streetcar. Mr. Aryeh would be at the cemetery as well. There was only room in the funeral car—and barely that—for my parents and aunt and uncle and the rabbi. Noah and I sat on jump seats.

  I was relieved to see cousin Ruthie and even Flat Sammy, who greeted Noah and me with happy, sloppy hugs. Ruthie, almost eighteen, had grown so tall in the year since we had seen them. She had bobbed her long hair. She was beautiful. Sammy was still short and flat-topped. He seemed to be growing out instead of up; he had an ample, spreading center. He was holding hands with Uncle David’s brother Sam, his namesake, who had come up by train from Philadelphia.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked Ruth. I had assembled a whole congregation of people in my mind.

  “There is no everyone,” said Noah. “Last night on Barren Shoal: that’s as much of a funeral as Helen’s getting. All that’s left is the burial.”

  Last night, all those people, all that food had been last night. Sofia sleeping over was only last night. And Helen: Helen was yesterday.

  I stepped between my cousins so they could bookend me. Noah pulled me back.

  I gave him one of those Why? looks.

  “Later,” he whispered.

  Maybe Sammy and his faraway grin made him nervous. Maybe he was over-awed by Ruth’s new beauty. Maybe the only reason he pulled back was because he wanted to. All I can do is guess.

  The rabbi started the reading from his prayer book. My father and uncle read with him in what I thought, at the time, was Hebrew; the old prayers, it turned out, were said in Aramaic. My mother’s face was still grey, like the headstones on either side of the newly dug up grave. She was no longer crying, nor was she was sedated like the men with their shots of whiskey. I do not know what she was.

  The men continued saying Kaddish, even though there were not enough adults to form a minyan. Again.

  “We include the Lord, Adonai, our God, in our number today,” assured the rabbi. “And Sammy.”

  “Can he do that? Don’t we always count God,” I asked Noah, “if God’s always here, if God’s everywhere?” That was how it was supposed to work: we believed in God, and God was everywhere. What kind of everywhere? Here is what my dear Walker, rest his soul, used to say: if God exists, he is a war criminal. So tell me: was he wrong in thinking that?

  “Not now, Marta,” said Noah.

  My father, my uncle, my uncle’s brother, my brother, the rabbi, the funeral director, Mr. Aryeh, and the two gravediggers. If they included God, they got what they needed.

  Then, as I now know always happens, professional mourners appeared from the broken paths between the gravestones. This is a job? Apparently so.

  The mourners’ prayer contains not a single word about death. No wonder the rabbi went ahead and counted God, since that is what the prayer is all about:

  Magnified and sanctified be His great name in the world which He created according to His will.

  And may He establish His kingdom

  During your life and during your days, and during the life of all the

  House of Israel, speedily and in the near future, and say Amen.

  May there be abundant peace from heaven and life for us and for all

  Israel, and say Amen.

  May he who makes peace in the heavens, make peace for us and for

  All Israel, and say Amen.

  It is a tricky business, this prayer and this translation, this business about what God makes in the heavens, versus what he may make on earth. Was the moment of Helen’s death in that scalding tub of water God’s choosing too? But the divine should bear no resemblance to the impulses of human will. After setting a world in motion, why would you make such a mess of your creation?

  The rabbi filled the back side of shovel with dirt, emptied it into the grave, and handed the shovel to my father. My father shoveled and passed it to Noah, who shoveled and passed it to my uncle, who passed it to his brother Sam, who passed it to Mr. Aryeh, who must have come directly from the newspaper because he had his camera box with him. Mr. Aryeh then firmly handed it to Sammy, who grinned and swayed. The coffin was not yet fully buried.

  My mother dropped to her knees. Fistful by fistful she filled the grave. She refused the shovel that Mr. Aryeh offered.

  “Let the men finish,” my father offered.

  She ignored him, remaining on her knees. She was swaying and moaning, her body lonesomely trembling.

  Everyone was crying now, including Sammy, who could barely know what he was crying for. Not that it made any difference, this being a loss that no one else understood any better than he did. What was there to understand? Some things do not deserve our understanding. Helen dying that awful way, in such agony, such a betrayal by life: that deserved nothing but outrage.

  My mother threw endless, exhausted handfuls of dirt into the grave. It took forever; it took no time at all. We had all the time in the world; we had none. Sammy was soon rocking like my mother and humming like the men did in prayer and now my father was kneeling beside my mother, folding his arms around her waist, pressing his face into her back, his own back throbbing against the rhythm of their swaying. When the whole gaping hole had been filled, my mother pulled away from my father’s grip, crawled over what she had done and lay down, pressing her mouth into the soil the way my father’s face had been pressed into her back.

  Some neighbors were already gathered in my aunt and uncle’s apartment to prepare for our return. Mrs. Aryeh handed a pitcher to my aunt and she poured water over my parents’ hands, still stained with dirt from the cemetery. My mother stared off into the somewhere of anywhere while my aunt used a muslin towel to whisk the dirt off her bandages. I can only imagine that my mother’s burns were throbbing, yet she did not wince
or say a word.

  On a side table near the door was my aunt’s prized possession, a small Limoges porcelain bowl. In it were hardboiled eggs. The bowl had scalloped edges, a gold rim, and a decorative spray of orchids on a bone-white background. My aunt had carried this bowl with her from Europe, much in the way that I had vigilantly carried the tin of melomakarona cookies all the way from Barren Shoal.

  My father ate a hardboiled egg, according to custom. My mother refused.

  “I can’t, I won’t,” she moaned. She slid into an empty chair.

  “Rachel,” my father pleaded.

  My father spoke my mother’s name more times in those 36 hours than I ever heard him say it before or after all added up, as if repeating her name would call her back to him.

  “Noooo,” my mother moaned. She refused to eat the egg and the challah or take part in any of the other rituals of loss and symbols of ongoingness. She wanted nothing to do with any of it or any of us.

  “Let me,” offered my aunt. She guided my mother to the bedroom and closed the door. My mother’s renewed wailing was soon penetrating through the walls. Everyone could hear her crying Helen’s name.

  I started for the bedroom, unable to stand the sound of my mother crying even a little, which always set me off too, not that she cried often. I would not be surprised if I had been crying along with her all morning without knowing it. I was just that way.

  “You don’t want to go in there, honey.” The voice behind me belonged to my uncle, who might have been absolutely right from his perspective on things. From mine, of which he knew nothing, he was completely wrong. He won.

  My uncle herded me back into the kitchen.

  “There’s bread, eggs, cheese, sprats if you want, in one of those cabinets are some cans. Milk’s in the icebox and more pound cake. Mrs. Mendelssohn brought a noodle pudding, under that towel there, still warm. Mrs. Aryeh roasted chicken, you should have some. Ruthie, please take care of things. Sammy, keep away from those knives.”

  Ruthie, evidently, was to be stage manager of some after-tragedy eating frenzy, much in the way that Noah imagined himself running our lives when we returned to Barren Shoal. As if someone stepping in that way could change things.

  I could not eat, would not eat, did not want to eat. I could not stand the crowded kitchen, the endless food, the closed doors. Noah ate some noodle pudding, picking the apricots out; Sammy wanted to set his aside too. “Like Noah,” he said, because Noah was a ‘regular’ boy who was nice to him when other boys were not. Someone had put up a pot of coffee, which perked so long that it burned. I climbed out onto the fire escape for air. Like a terrace. There was no such thing as window guards, child guards, whatever they call them.

  “No!” cried Sammy. “No, no, noooo!” I turned around and there was Sammy, leaning out the window, stabbing the air with his fork.

  “Sammy!” yelled Noah. He grabbed Sammy from behind, bear-hugging him until he stopped writhing. Sammy dropped the fork, which fell the two flights to the street. Seconds later, Sammy was cuddling in Noah’s arms, safe and newly contented.

  “We’ll all go to the roof when we’re done eating,” Ruthie told Sammy, which pacified him even further.

  The roof looked exactly like it did in the family picture from the day my parents announced that they were moving to Barren Shoal. That was so many years earlier, but the view was unchanged. In the distant background of that old photo is the Brooklyn skyline, a scattering of wooden water tanks, and the upper floors of the Williamsburg Savings Bank downtown. Anyone seeing the picture—especially back in Europe—could be persuaded that this was the brilliant, insistent skyline of Manhattan.

  Mr. Aryeh was there too, changed out of his work clothes and cleaning his pigeon coop. He was sweeping the coop with a straw broom, the bristles of which had worn unevenly, so that the lip of it cut to a slope, sort of like Mr. Paradissis’ moustache. The temporarily emancipated pigeons were dipping and swooping over the nearby rooftops.

  It took Mr. Aryeh time to work up to what he wanted to say. “Your sister died,” he finally said matter-of-factly, addressing Noah.

  “Me and her,” my brother answered, pointing in my direction. “Her sister too.”

  “It’ll be rough,” said Mr. Aryeh, like he was giving an instruction and making a prediction all in one.

  “One of my boys died.” Brush. Brush. “Influenza.”

  Ruth took a seat at the furthest possible point on the parapet wall. She had obviously heard this story before. Flat Sammy, meanwhile, busied himself with a toy truck someone had fashioned out of tin cans. The wheels, made from wine bottle corks, were loosely screwed into position and defiantly turned.

  “A friend of ours, Joey, he lost his parents to the influenza...” said Noah to show he understood.

  Sammy, still wheeling the tin can truck, sang the rhyme that children were singing all over:

  I had a little bird

  Its name was Enza

  Opened the window

  And in-fluenza.

  “Cut it out,” said Noah.

  “Awwww,” Sammy whimpered.

  “Your friend’s parents died last year?” asked Mr. Aryeh.

  “When he was seven,” explained Noah.

  “Six,” I corrected.

  Noah shot me a cross look. He hated being corrected.

  “After the war, over 600,000 people died in the U.S. from the Spanish Influenza,” said Mr. Aryeh. “An epidemic. That’s what they called it here. They say 20,000,000 people died all over the world. Maybe 40,000,000 by 1918, 1919. And that’s just in the places they were counting. But die of influenza like our boy did? When the epidemic was long over? Ha! That was something special.”

  “My father’s whole family died except Aunt Sara,” said Noah.

  “The world’ll never get crazier than that,” said Mr. Aryeh.

  He stuck his arm out of the coop and offered Noah a cigarette.

  “We thought our boy had a cold. Then he got the fever, the delirium. We’re wiping him down with towels, wrapping him in ice. This goes on for a couple of days.”

  Mr. Aryeh stepped out of the coop, mopping his face with a handkerchief.

  “We’re up with him all night. He finally sleeps. We sleep. He never wakes up. And so, just like that, he’s gone.” He was leaning on the broomstick now and the pole was swaying beneath his weight. “I’m the lucky one: I go to work every day, I take my pictures, I talk to the people. My wife? All day in the house except when she takes in the sewing up on Carnegie Hill. ‘Let’s move, May,’ I say to her. ‘Let’s go to The Bronx. The kids will make new friends. Better for the new baby when it’s born. We can move near Mosholu Parkway, it’s beautiful with all those trees. Do we have to stay in Boro Park forever?’ Ahhh,” he said in disgust, whipping his hand through the air.

  He must have told this story a hundred times. I was embarrassed by this, for him needing to tell it so much that he was telling it to children.

  Mr. Aryeh stepped back into the coop. He swept up the pile of bird droppings into a mop bucket and disappeared down the staircase into the building.

  That night, when everyone was asleep, I was woken by what I was certain were pigeons cooing. Then Mr. Aryeh’s voice, which I could also hear through the open windows. “Are you hungry? Do you want some water? Oh, I see: you want to go out on the town?” He was talking to them like they were people. It was the middle of the night. He sounded crazy.

  I slid from my spot on the living room floor and padded past Noah and my cousins. Mrs. Paradissis’ cookie tin was on the kitchen table and inside remained eight or nine melomakarona. I smelled the sticky honey from Mr. Paradissis’ hives. I could smell their house and Mrs. Paradissis baking bread. I longed to be back on Barren Shoal with Sofia. And for Helen to be in our room. I ate a second cookie, then a third. I went on eating melomakarona until there were none.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Marta, wake up.” My mother was on her knees, her elbows balanced on the floor ne
xt to my head. Her bandaged forearms were raised at an angle to her chest, her bandaged hands raised to her temples. Her breathing hummed across my skin. The smell of the disinfectant that Miss Finn had coated over her scalded arms sent stingers of information up my nostrils and the taste of something rotten down my throat.

  “Mom?” I said. “Mom, I’m sleeping.”

  I licked my lips to moisten them and tasted the cookies that I had eaten in the middle of the night. The flavor of honey came alive when I circled my teeth with my tongue.

  “Wake up,” urged my mother. Her breath had a sourdough smell from hours and hours of crying. She had wept herself to sleep in my aunt and uncle’s bedroom, by which point my aunt had fallen asleep as well. From my bed on the living room floor, I could hear my uncle telling my father to let the women stay that way for the night. It was my aunt, I imagine, who helped my mother out of her blue dress and into the nightgown she was now wearing, something ivory-colored, sleeveless, and unfamiliar.

  I wiped my eyes with the heels of my hands, uncertain if the light through the living room windows was from a gas streetlight or from the new morning. Nights on Barren Shoal were so dark, but days were bright even when it rained. Every kind of light reflected more light off the water, even in the long winter hours of dusk.

  “Come,” she whispered. A conspiratorial tone threaded her voice and I sat up, ready to be included again. I would have done anything she asked to regain her attention, to restore our world, the one that in a single morning changed into an ancient, obsolete globe like the one in Miss Finn’s classroom.