by Hilary Zaid
There were rumors of legal marriage in Hawaii, but they were only that: rumors. “Hawaii hasn’t happened yet.” My boring tendency to cling to reality would inevitably keep disappointing her.
“So then . . .?” Fiona popped the question we ourselves hadn’t answered yet. How would we be married, exactly? What were we going to do? We didn’t have a clue. But logistics had never troubled Fiona too much, especially in the face of large emotions. She turned to me with glistening eyes. “I can’t believe it.” She took my face in both her hands and stroked my cheeks, an intensity I did my best to bear. “We’re getting married!” she announced to the house. Francine and I laughed, awkwardly. This was why we were doing it: We wanted to be celebrated. But we had learned to expect so much less.
Fiona and I walked slowly to the kitchen, arm in arm. “My li’l segotia,” she crooned, squeezing until my pinky knuckle popped. Then, as if she suddenly remembered something important, she pulled on my hand hard enough to spin me toward her. “Who were you on the phone with before?” Her chin jutted, accusing, but her voice had dropped to a confidential murmur, a voice obviously meant not to be overheard, a reassurance that, marriage or not, she would always take my side. “In there. On the phone.” Jealousy sharpened her words.
“Huh?” I stepped toward the kitchen, eager to exit the spotlight. “I baked you cookies,” I added quickly. I told myself that Fiona liked to make a bigger deal of things than they were. I’d managed to conceal having a girlfriend from her through most of high school.
Fiona knew me well, but emotions moved rapidly through her. At the mention of cookies, she shot me a shy, hopeful glance, her eyes huge with desire. I had seen boys cross the street for those eyes. “Gramma Sophie’s?” A fixture of my childhood home, Fiona knew that creaming together butter and sugar was the way my grandmother and I had marked the change of every season, that our Hanukah miracle came from the cookie press and that we frosted every birthday with yellow buttercream. My Gramma Sophie may not have been a religious person, but she was religious about baking, and springtime always reminded me of her delicate hamentaschen, the little “three-cornered hats” she spooned with strawberry and apricot jam. (Pressed together by sticky little fingers, these were the sweetened, condensed form in which, each spring, Francine’s preschool students celebrated good Queen Esther and her triumph over yet another plot to make the Jews, as the under-five set called it, “go away.”) From the time she was seven years old, Fiona had walked into my parents’ kitchen every March, headed directly for the corner where she knew my Gramma Sophie kept the tin lined with waxed paper. These were the baked treats Fiona in the full fledge of her baby Irish pride called “your grandma’s St. Patrick’s Day cookies.” I nodded. Fiona shrieked: “Those are my favorite cookies on the entire planet!”
Mine were also the messiest cookies on the planet. I hadn’t checked them while they were in the oven, distracted by my ghost on the phone. Now, on the tray set cooling on the counter, my ’taschen’s sharp edges sighed apart, golden islands in a sticky sea of molten jam. These were some kind of mutant, late-twentieth-century descendants of Gramma Sophie’s tight little triangles jeweled with a single, glittering dollop: bigger, more impulsive, indiscreet. The usual disaster. I had overloaded the centers with jam, as Gramma Sophie—“No more than half a teaspoon, doll!”—had warned me a thousand times not to. On the radio next to the sink, Alanis Morissette was singing a familiar song: “Isn’t it ironic?” On the cover of the Newsweek Francine had tossed onto the kitchen table, the ceasefire in Ireland had blown apart again.
Grabbing a mitt from the stove, Francine bent over the hot tray. Francine has the most beautiful hands of any woman I know, pale and small and bony at the knuckles. Carefully, with a single slender finger, she lifted the drooping lip of a hamentaschen and pushed it back up to form the edge of an equilateral triangle. The dough was still soft, dewy with heat and butter, and the fallen side re-formed without a crack, without any evidence of its breaking. One after another, she repaired the entire, limping tray. Because Francine is practical that way; she doesn’t believe in leaving a mess. She straightened up, compact and lithe as a dancer, though she no longer danced, and licked hot jam from her fingertips.
“Strawberry or apricot?” I lifted the spatula to Francine’s face. It was damp outside with early spring rain, but the kitchen was humid, and the windows in our little bungalow had misted over with the heat from the ancient Wedgewood stove. In the kitchen, the air had filled with the burnt-sugar sweetness of memories. We leaned against the counter, blowing on our cookies. The crumb, I had to admit, was perfect: moist and just vaguely citrusy. The kitchen smelled like my Gramma Sophie, warm and sweet.
Licking jam from her fingers, Fiona opened the fridge—a privilege of friendship, she’d always said: unfettered access to the food. Her green eyes twinkled. “Got milk?” At the top of the fridge door, right next to the cream, a small, chilled black Kodak canister shifted instead of rattling. “You still have that?” Fiona’s huge eyes got huger.
The canister was a souvenir of Ponar, a small village outside the Lithuanian city of Vilna, where the Nazis had dug huge execution pits. A glade fringed with trees: a blank in the forest, a million leaves scattered on the fall earth; the pits, perfect circles upon which the forest, just held back, impinged. My parents had visited that part of Europe on a “roots trip” arranged by my mother. After the guide’s perfunctory historical coda on the site, as visitors wandered the vale in silence, something had possessed my unsentimental father, drifting to the edge of the pit, to crouch down and, in a move more Jewish and unconscious than anything he’d ever done, scoop up the dirt in which a billion atoms of our tribe had returned to the earth. This was the film canister in which my father had spirited away a tubeful of dirt. One hundred thousand murdered souls blended with the Ponar dust.
“Of course I still have it,” I answered. I suppose there are people who live entirely in the present, as if the past were not available at the merest gesture, the small familiar touch, but I had never been one of them. If you’ve ever ridden one of those black coaches through the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, you’ve seen the specters that appear when your coach passes by the mirror: a third figure between you and your friend, a Victorian ghost, laughing and smiling, someone you otherwise can’t see between you, but only when you look in the mirror. I am the kind of person who knows the spirit of the past is right at our shoulders on our ride through this world, and I’m the person who is always looking for the mirror.
Francine, of all people, knew that about me best.
Who called? Francine mouthed. But in the hubbub of Fiona’s chatter, I pretended not to hear her.
And that’s how, seven years into our relationship, on the night we told my best friend that we were going to get married, I lied to Francine for the very first time. A lie, like so many, of omission. As the three of us stood in our kitchen, Francine, Fiona and I, eating my grandmother’s cookies, I wondered: What would the Jews of Ponar have said about that? I imagined I could hear them sigh as the refrigerator door swung shut.
I know what my Gramma Sophie would have said.
Nothing. She would have been the first person to tell me to keep my mouth shut.
( )
When I was twelve, my Gramma Sophie overheard me on the telephone, reporting that my sister was having her appendix out. She didn’t wait for the phone to hit the cradle to wag her finger in my face. “That’s not to share outside the family!” Her hazel eyes, huge behind the huge, round frames of her glasses, were round more with fear than with anger. It was one of the only times in my life she scolded me. I had been talking to my uncle.
She practiced her own rule religiously. In the twenty years after my grandfather died, how many days and hours did I sit out on the back patio of my parents’ house by my grandmother’s side, my legs skinny and brown, hers knotted and blue and stretched out in the sun, while she lovingly, tenderly, never once mentioned his name? I never took her re
ticence for distance. My grandmother, more than my parents or even my sister, was the person I spent the most time with as a child. Across from each other behind a fan of playing cards, at her elbow breaking eggs into the mixer, side by side on the couch watching Let’s Make a Deal, most of those fond hours were spent in companionable silence. Only once in my life had I seen my grandmother cry.
But it wasn’t just terrible things. It was the good things—maybe most of all the good things—that we had to hide.
People often assume, because of my work, that I’m a daughter of Holocaust survivors. I’m not. My mother’s family left Europe, fleeing pogroms, in the Great Russian Jewish exodus of 1882. And my father’s family made it out of Ukraine just before the Russian Revolution. Those who didn’t—two of my great-grandfather’s brothers, who stayed behind in Zhitomir with their wives and children—died at the hands of their neighbors; the one brother who escaped fled to his end in the service of the Czar. All three brothers, bare, truncated branches on the Margolis family tree, typed up on smeary onionskin. My family had survived the erasures of a different time and place. But the immigrant tradition of keeping quiet about the past, of keeping quiet about sorrow, of keeping quiet about joy, that had been sown in our shared blood centuries before, as old as the Evil Eye, as old as the dybbuks, as old as the ghetto and the shtetl as well as the Camp, was something we shared: the conviction that, if we only stayed silent about the things we loved most, no one would come for them to take them away.
Though I would have said that my longing for my Gramma Sophie was the reason I ended up working at the Foundation, the truth was more complicated. I was drawn to my survivors not only because they were old, but because they were ancient treasure boxes, as beautiful for the jewels of story inside them as for the silence whose strength they proved by breaking it.
As a graduate student doing research at the Foundation for the Preservation of Memory, I had occupied a dark carrel down in the media room, crammed with notebooks and loose paper, working on my dissertation research. Then, five years into what the University of California calls “normative time” and three chapters into a dissertation provisionally titled Ikh Ken es Nisht Fargesn: Mother/Daughter Holocaust Narratives, The Persephone Myth and the Recuperation of Memory, on a Friday afternoon in spring, I stepped through a turnstile at the Strawberry Canyon pool and discovered that my graduate adviser Annie Talbot—the smart young professor who welcomed me every week into her home to read through my pages, my guide and companion through the War’s dark thicket of loss, my only real link to the university I was finally seeming to pass through—had gone home the night before and killed herself.
It was early spring—all those little white flowers in all those trees blending so sweetly with the smell of chlorine and the watermelon-rind whiff of fresh-cut grass. My hair dripping with salt and bromine, a towel snugged tight around my waist, my shoulders bare in the atomizing late afternoon light, I saw her picture on the front page of the Daily Cal. Pert, blond, intelligent. “Renowned Professor Annie Talbot Dies Suddenly at Home.” I read the article fast, and then slow. Then I stepped into the dirt and vomited.
At the funeral, students and professors queued up outside the black-shingled Episcopal church, chatting in dark clothes under a bright spring sun. The small, dark beds huddled against the black church were crazy with poppies. Behind me, a man I didn’t know leaned close into my hair and whispered, “How did she do it?”
Inside the dark church, Annie’s sixteen-year-old daughter Camille stepped up to the lectern, her mother’s doppelganger down to the blond ponytail and the soft patrician lilt. I wasn’t the only one whose mouth dropped. Perched above the lectern’s golden eagle, Camille spoke fondly of movies under the covers. Her mother, she said, had been more like a best friend. And then she said, “My mother had dark times, too. In her academic work, she was becoming drawn to the post-War suicides. In death, she thought that she, too, might find an end to her suffering.” Camille spoke with Annie’s impeccable timing, her absolute grace. She was a sophomore at Berkeley High. Would academic understanding, I wondered, be enough to inoculate her against the legacy of a suicided mother? Not long after the funeral, I saw Camille chatting with a friend outside of Semifreddi’s. She looked just like an ordinary sixteen-year-old. I hoped she would rebel against Annie by staying alive. I wondered, glancing at her fresh, teenage face, where she hid the scar.
I was barely hiding mine.
The year ended. The History Department didn’t bother to assign me another adviser. I turned from Ikh Ken es Nisht Fargesn to game after game of computer solitaire. Jeweled faces against a field of green. The solemn, one-eyed Jack had Annie Talbot’s nose. The next spring, on the anniversary of Annie’s death, I joined the hordes of dispirited doctoral students in the humanities and quit the program ABD, “All But Dissertation.” And, then, because every new loss invokes the first, I started following old ladies down the frozen foods aisle.
The first time it happened, I trailed the woman all the way to the Mrs. T’s frozen pierogies. Francine and I were doing our Saturday shop at the little Safeway on College Avenue; sometimes, they played disco oldies late Saturday afternoons. Francine had gone ahead to pick up cheese. (Though we liked to laugh secretly at my sister Rebecca and her husband, Ted, and their rich, stinky French raclette, I often found Francine looking for a “not too salty, not too smelly taleggio.”)
I was drifting behind Francine, draped over the handle of the shopping cart when the woman pushed past. I recognized her instantly. She was small, her back rounded. She wore plum slacks and a gray wool jacket with loops circled around knotted silk buttons my mother called frogs. Her hair was dark gray, streaked white at the temples, brushed sensibly back to reveal a lightly powdered Semitic nose. She examined a jar of marmalade with an age-spotted talon, the label up close to her glasses, then set it gently in the child seat and rolled past, trailing a single deep inhalation of something floral. I knew her right away: She was part of my tribe. I followed her to frozen foods, where Francine found me, dazed.
The second time it happened, the same Safeway, a different woman, Francine saw me, saw my stare lock on the little humped back drawn up behind the chipped red cart handle, the taupe purse draped over the swinging, doughy arm, saw my hands swing the cart into line behind her, saw my feet lock into step at her heels, mesmerized, all the way to cat food, pulled after her by invisible strings. Francine watched me, unconscious, breathe in her wake, my lids half-closed, dreamy with desire. If it had been a younger woman, Francine would have pinched me. Since it wasn’t, she just stared. Because it was obvious: What I felt toward that woman was longing.
That afternoon, Francine and I had a “talk.” “Call Wendy Rosenberg,” she told me. It was an order.
“Why?” I wasn’t too depressed to be petulant.
“You’ve been walking around here for weeks like a fucking zombie. That’s why. Tell her you need a job.” I resented the hell out of her; I knew she was right.
A child of close-mouthed people, I had always craved the hidden. Preserving Holocaust stories gave that craving a name, an urgency. And I believed passionately in the need to save these truths from annihilation, from deliberate erasure. But I had preferred the safe distance of a book. The fact was, I didn’t want to meet another old Jewish lady, the loose skin at her throat sunk in the center to a flour-soft bowl; I didn’t want to consider the plump, polished fingers, the brown blotches contoured like countries on the back of the hand, to smell Jean Naté and hair spray, to hear the smattering of Yiddish words and remind myself, Like her, but not her, while, inside, the big, dumb dog of my heart following an old, well-known scent, tumbled heedlessly along toward something primal, familiar, old as life. Let’s just say, I know how that story ends.
In the end, I took the job. I convinced myself I could maintain a distance.
My clients, after all, were Titans of emotional containment, the poster children of Silence. One of the first survivors I worked with was
Elizabeth Landau, a member of our Speakers’ Bureau, whom I met up with on the campus at UC Berkeley where she was going to speak with a class of undergraduates about her experiences during the War.
We met on the marble steps of Wheeler Hall. She was petite, well-coiffed and articulate, a woman who had served on the Foundation’s Speakers’ Bureau for years. Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen. She walked through the doors beside me, her short legs set squarely apart.
“We still have the four,” she told me. “My brother, my two sisters, and me. We used to be thirteen.” I hoped that my conversation with Elizabeth might lead to an interview with at least one of her surviving siblings, but Elizabeth was not encouraging. “They never talk about it, you know. My sister, whenever she hears about it, she faints.”
How was it, I wondered, that after thirty-five years, Elizabeth had decided, “I’ve still got time left, and I’m ready to talk,” while her seventy-one-year-old sister passed out cold when she saw trailers for Schindler’s List?
“Some people want to make these kids cry,” she confided on the way to the classroom. “I don’t believe in that,” she rasped with the coffee-thick traces of her Polish accent. “They have to have hope.”
The instructor who had contacted the Foundation to invite Elizabeth, a graduate student named Emily, met us at the door of Wheeler 21, excessively polite, profusely grateful. I thought I recognized her large front teeth from campus, a lifetime ago. Twenty students gripping ready ballpoints sat in a murmuring horseshoe; their voices dropped when Elizabeth walked in.
