Paper is White

by Hilary Zaid

  “Do you see her often?” I wondered if this woman thought of Betty as a model, an advocate, a friend.

  Betty’s face contracted. “Never.” She engaged the pedal, and the needle began to bob, slowly at first, then faster. “If they start out here, they can never end here. Not if they’re going to survive.” The women at the shelter had to relocate to other cities or towns, places their batterers would never think to look for them. They had to disappear. Betty fed the fabric through the machine with both hands.

  Francine’s and Sol’s voices got louder as they meandered up the driveway. They won’t be able to call her the Gray Lady anymore, Sol intoned. The low rumble of trash cans started up again like the roar of jet engines as Francine and Sol pulled another pair down toward the street.

  “So, how do you find out about people after they’ve . . . moved on.”

  “Oh.” Betty canted her head lightly to the side. I’d seen Francine do the same—a tilt of thought. “They know how to find me.”

  I watched the fabric disappear as Betty fed it under the needle, a thin, shining stitch of pale violet appearing like the center line on a long, long highway. “I’m trying to help a survivor find someone,” I said. It wasn’t exactly the truth. I was the one trying to find Batsheva, and Anya didn’t know about it. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t helping Anya, either. “They haven’t seen each other since the War.”

  “I imagine you’ve got all sorts of resources for doing that,” Betty said. She’d picked a pin out of the fabric and tucked it now between her closed lips.

  “Mmmm,” I murmured, as if I were the one with the pin between my lips. There hadn’t been any information yet from Vicky since I’d called her again. But it was still early on that front; at least finding a survivor would be much easier than finding someone who had died.

  Betty and I watched as she turned the corner of the blanket carefully with both hands, like someone turning the steering wheel of a large truck. “Of course,” Betty murmured, “it’s a lot harder to find someone who doesn’t want to be found.”

  I squinted at the woman who didn’t realize she was my not-yet-mother-not-quite-in-law, thrown off guard, once again, at one of her tossed-off remarks. I considered what little I knew about the person whose photo Anya had managed to smuggle out of Europe, whose photo she brandished like a charm, whose photo she had installed like a memorial under the leaves of her passion flower, the woman with whom Anya’s own story finally ended, the woman whom she had called, simply, “my friend.” “I don’t think that’s true here,” I told Betty.

  “Maybe,” Betty raised her eyebrows without lifting her gaze from the quilt.

  The next day, I sent a letter to the publisher of Paneriu Street, asking how to find Alina Sapozhnik, the Gandras.

  ( )

  Heading up Broadway in the detail-erasing fog, the first Monday of November, the only thing I could see as I moved toward home was the string of traffic signals, blinking green and red against the milky white of the enveloping sky, looking like nothing more, even to my Jewish eyes, than the coming of Christmas. I panted through the front door, sweaty and chilled, and cursed the pain under the ball of my foot: Spread by the slips of my scraping knife, my plantars wart had become its own little colony of warts, a small constellation around the mother wart, thick and deep, translucent yellow. Fuck if I was going to step on a glass with a big ugly wart on my foot. I peeled off my socks in the shoe corner and, trying to remember not to leave them there for Francine to pick up after me, thumped heavily up the stairs.

  The letter from the publisher of Paneriu Street sat open on my desk. Prompt and polite, it had directed me to the administrator of Alina Sapozhnik’s estate. She had died last summer. If Anya had told me about her when we first met, I might have found the last known witness to Batsheva’s whereabouts after the ghetto. But now it was too late.

  I chucked my socks into the laundry bin and sighed. The fog had started to burn off. Outside, like a new day unwrapped from inside the old one, the sky blazed blue. I hauled myself into the dark red womb of our bathroom, sat heavily on the floor, and curled in an apostrophe over my bare foot. “‘Marriage is as irrevocable,’” Francine had read to me, “‘as it is to mend the shattered glass.’ Ellen, you’d better smash it hard.”

  “Shit!” I nicked my foot again. Disgusted, I threw the scalpel—was that rust on the blade, or blood?—wrapped in the letter, into the trash, and headed downstairs to find the Kaiser magnet stuck on the refrigerator door.

  ( )

  “Do you think we should start taking the pill?”

  Francine, finally home, had fallen, exhausted, onto the bed. She spoke to me through her arms. “You do know how this baby-making thing happens, right?”

  “Shut up.” I lay down next to her on the bed. “So we don’t have our periods on our wedding night.”

  Francine sat up; she leaned her head on her elbow. “You do know how this baby-making thing happens, right?”

  “Ugh.” I pushed her over.

  “On the other hand,” she murmured, slipping my hand up under her shirt, “it might be worth a try.”

  “You know what I mean.” I slipped my hand farther until I could feel her nipple harden in the palm of my hand. “So we won’t be crazy, premenstrual bitches on our wedding day.” I whispered it like a seduction.

  “This may come as a surprise,” Francine murmured into my hair. She reached for my hand and slid it down, pulling her belly in, “but I’m a lesbian.” Francine pulled at the buttons on her jeans. “That’s one of the things I like about being a lesbian.” She bit my ear; her breath rushed into me like the sea. “Not worrying about things like birth control.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know what else I like about being a lesbian?” Francine went on.

  I sucked at the side of her mouth.

  “This,” she said, as she slid her hand down into my jeans.

  “I think you need to go into the office more often,” Francine commented, lying naked on top of the bed. She had come so loudly, the dogs had run in, barking. “You’re spending too much time reading bridal porn on the internet.” She slapped my belly gently with her open palm. I was surprised to hear that Francine knew I’d been stepping out of the office, and I was glad to hear she ascribed it to wedding planning, and not to digging up the details of an old woman’s life. “By the way,” Francine was pulling on a pair of sweatpants. Lying on my back, I watched two Francines—the Francine looking into the closet, and the Francine in the mirror, the side of her face to me. “Laura gave me the name of a rabbi.” Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, the City’s gay and lesbian synagogue, was currently between rabbis and, lacking the power of the State of California and feeling the need for a higher authority, we really wanted one.

  “You told Laura we’re getting married?” Laura was Francine’s director at the preschool, her boss. Weren’t you supposed to keep that kind of thing—getting married, getting pregnant—to yourself for as long as possible? Francine pulled a sweatshirt over her head. The hood buoyed up her hair like an Elizabethan ruff. “Anyway, I thought we were going to this thing,” I said, lifting a flyer from the corner of my desk: Congregation Ir Ilan invites our friends in the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Community to Meet the Rabbis: A Forum on Same-Sex Partnerships and Jewish Life. “Think of it like a one-stop shop.”

  “They’re really trying to get our vote, aren’t they?” Francine examined the flyer, the first official sign we’d ever seen that the East Bay’s reform synagogues knew that we existed. Clearly, other couples were out there, doing what we were doing, and the rabbis, in their own way, wanted to play a part. Or maybe they just wanted to hawk a few more synagogue memberships.

  “It’s this Saturday. After our cake-tasting appointment.”

  Francine eyed me appreciatively. She took my hand in both of hers and looked at my palm, dark and square against her light, tapered fingers, as if she could read my future there. “You have been busy today, haven’t you?” I
f only she knew the half of it.

  ( )

  At the “Meet the Rabbis” event at Ir Ilan, Rabbi Sokol, a robust man with a receding hairline and prominent red lips, stood up and cleared his throat. “I have worked with several gay and lesbian couples,” he started, his voice baronial, “to create a new tradition out of an old one, something quite lovely”—here Rabbi Sokol shaped an hourglass between his blunt fingers—“called a brit ahava. A covenant of love.”

  One by one, the rabbis went around the circle talking about how they had cadged together Jewish rituals around their own version of a new thing meant for gay and lesbian couples. Earnest and well-meaning to a one, each of them, it seemed, had worked out something that was, as far as I could tell, not quite a wedding.

  “Right. Well,” Francine said, as the Volvo stuttered, then exploded into life in the Ir Ilan parking lot, “Rabbi Loew wasn’t there.”

  “Rabbi Loew?” What did the legendary sixteenth-century Rabbi of Prague have to do with same-sex partnerships and contemporary Jewish life?

  “The one Laura recommended.” Francine made a quick turn, and we were back out on Broadway, speeding past car dealership after car dealership, heading home. I stared at her. Here we were, shopping for rabbis at Ir Ilan, when Francine had managed, through sheer dumb luck, to come up with a living descendant of the Maharal of Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, father of the Golem.

  Though the story of the Golem did not appear in print until two hundred years after his death, Rabbi Loew, whose gravestone you can still visit in the old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, has long been credited as creator of the man of clay, formed out of Vlatva River mud and the mystical words of kabbalah, to protect the Jews of Prague. Legend held that the man of clay could be called upon to rise again whenever the Jews of Prague needed help. Instead, the story of the Golem had entered popular culture, and through the inevitable forces of dejudafication, become a simple Frankenstein’s monster; we prefer our cautions against hubris to the awkward monster of genocide. But here we were, and we needed help. “Rabbi Loew?” I was amazed at Francine’s nonchalance: the opportunity of having our wedding officiated by a real, living blood relative of one of the most famous figures of European Jewish folklore, ever!

  Our freshman year of college, Debbie and I went to Hillel’s Yom Kippur services together, all the campus’s observant and semi-observant Jews packed together in dark coats and kippot under the towering steeple of Memorial Church, davening in hard pews under the lectern’s gleaming eagles, surrounded on all the church’s white walls by the inscribed rolls of the college’s war dead. Afterward, trying not to think about food, we walked along the angled paths of the Tercentenary Theatre, talking about synagogue architecture. Debbie’s maternal grandfather came from an Orthodox Jewish family in New York; her father’s parents published the literary magazine Shadows during the Harlem Renaissance. “I suspect that the driving principle in twentieth-century synagogue architecture,” she mused, turning away from a sophomore cradling a burrito, “is that synagogues never, ever look like churches.”

  “Meaning . . .” It was late in the afternoon. We felt slight with hunger, drinking in the last of the evening light, looking forward, even, to the Union’s hard rolls.

  “Meaning they look like something completely different. Like, say, spaceships.”

  Rabbi Loew’s Congregation Tzi-Li, a big, low, round building with a dark, sloping cone of a roof and a windshield of purply-red stained glass, looked quite a bit like a spaceship, poised to lift off from the Palo Alto hills into the great cosmological unknown. Smaller surrounding buildings, squat and round as native huts, made up the Tzi-Li campus, one of them Rabbi Loew’s office. Inside the doorpost hung not one, but two mezuzot: the first, made of tiny stone bricks, looked like a section of the Western Wall; below it, sculpted from colorful plastic clay, hung a second, shaped like R2-D2. I shot a worried look at Francine, who whispered, “He probably spends a lot of time with the religious school kids,” just as Rabbi Loew opened the door.

  “I do,” he said, glancing at the mezzuzah, “and I’m a huge Star Wars fan.” A small, unassuming man with glossy black hair that hung into his eyes, Rabbi Loew wore a crooked smile and tan khakis. Francine and I smiled, caught. “I’ll make sure not to mention the Force in your ceremony.” Rabbi Loew laughed. Instantly, I thought of Rabbi Loew’s ancestor, the famous kabbalist, incanting the spell of life by the banks of the Vlatva.

  “I’m Rabbi Loew. Allan.” Rabbi Loew had a round, boyish face, and a small, freckled nose. He smiled as he showed us to two folding chairs set against the wall. On the other side of the room, his desk loomed, cluttered with picture frames, Jedi figurines, and large books with gilded Hebrew letters on the spines. With the alacrity of a leprechaun, he pulled out his rolling chair and glided over to us, eager, his straight black hair flopping, as if he’d been waiting to meet us for a long, long time.

  I let my eyes wander Rabbi Loew’s office, taking in the warm sloped planks of the ceiling, the huge window on the courtyard, the long shelves of books, dark-spined volumes of Mishnah, Talmud, Tenach. Tucked beside his diploma from Hebrew Union College sat The Kabbalah of Kenobi. “You don’t have any books about the Golem,” I commented.

  Rabbi Loew cocked his head quizzically. “The Golem?” He glanced at Francine, trying to ascertain whether she, too, considered the Golem an important component of Jewish wedding liturgy. Francine shook her head minutely.

  Francine and Rabbi Loew waited. Was that a tiny Yoda on the collar of his Oxford? “You know,” I laughed, “not many rabbis can claim descent from the Great Rabbi of Prague.” Rabbi Loew’s faint eyebrows—nearly invisible, I noticed, more like the placeholders for eyebrows than eyebrows themselves—shot up in surprise. His two index fingers popped into the air—a moment, please—and he twirled his chair toward his desk, swiveled back, and handed me his card. “Associate Rabbi,” it read, “Allan Loh.”

  I glanced up at Rabbi Loh, his straight, black hair, his dark, narrow eyes, the low-bridged, freckled nose. At Ellis Island, I knew, they frequently changed the spellings of names. Rabbi Loh shook his head slowly, holding my eyes with his own. “My father’s parents came from Vienna. My other grandfather was Chinese.”

  “In Kaifeng,” Jill had told me once, “in Henan Province, there’s been a Jewish community for at least seven hundred years.” But Jill was not a descendant of the Kaifeng Jews and neither, it turned out, was Rabbi Loh, who also wasn’t related to the father of the Golem. He was a descendant of shtetl Jews, like my own great-grandparents. “I hope I can still provide you with what you need,” Rabbi Loh apologized; I wasn’t sure if he was joking.

  I looked at Rabbi Loh, a shtetl Jew, an outsider/insider, a Jew like us. The original Rabbi Loew had summoned protection with a word—Truth—inscribed upon the Golem’s forehead. And with a word, he had extinguished the Golem, too. “That depends,” I cocked my head at his little Star Wars pin. “What, exactly, would you be calling our ceremony?”

  ( )

  We were getting ready for Sunday dinner at Betty and Sol’s—the dinner at Betty and Sol’s; Francine’s desire to tell her parents had finally outweighed her insistence on waiting for me to tell mine—when my mother called. “Your father took me out for a really fantastic meal last night.” My parents, who didn’t even stock butter in the fridge, went out every weekend to fancy French restaurants and stuffed themselves with mussels and pommes frites, for which they compensated by not eating dinner the rest of the week. I spaced out while she went over the menu, thinking about what I was going to wear to dinner—normally not a concern, except that Francine had decided: Tonight was going to be the night we told Betty and Sol. “And then, in our quiet little house, without either of our children in it, he made passionate love to me.” What? My ears folded inward like bewitched cockle shells; my eyes, in the flash of the Medusa’s grin, shrunk to slits. This was the same woman who, when I mentioned Gay Pride, protested, “What you do in your own bedroom is your busines
s.” Why was she telling me this?

  When I got off the phone, Francine was dressing. “Aren’t you being a little bit prudish?” she asked. “After all, how do you think you got here?”

  “Please!” I protested. “You’re talking about my mother. What’s that?”

  Francine was standing in front of the mirror, dressed like a Hasid. “It’s called a skirt,” Francine answered, her gaze fixed on the mirror. She brushed a stray thread from the fabric, which was kind of a stretchy crepe, too sexy for a Hasid probably. A little more like a mermaid. “You’ve seen one before?”

  “Not on you,” I pointed out. Francine turned, her hands on her hips, to show me. Francine dressed up well, but she spent most of her days with five-year-olds in T-shirts and jeans. I liked her that way. “Are you hoping that if you dress up like a lady, they’ll forget you’re marrying one, too?” Francine rolled her eyes. She did look lovely, in a cute little dyke-in-drag kind of way.

  “You’re not worried, are you?” I pressed her. Compared to my parents, I thought Betty and Sol were pretty cool, a prejudice Francine attributed to my “philogeriatrica.” Though Betty and Sol weren’t exactly the PFLAG-types, they were still our ace in the hole. They loved Francine and accepted her choices (my parents had just one out of two here); they accepted me as part of the family, at least as far as Sunday dinner—and what, beyond that, would our marriage really require of them? If Francine was worried about Betty and Sol, we were in more trouble than I realized.