by Hilary Zaid
“When she died, I looked through her things. There were the two letters. And a photo of my mother as a young girl, and another girl. A school friend, I think.”
Anya. It had to be Anya. “The person I interviewed,” I tried to keep my voice steady, “might be able to identify the other person in that picture.”
“The Gandras?” Anat Singer asked.
The Gandras, like Sheva, was dead. But why complicate things? “I’m not sure,” I lied. “Can I get your number?” I’d leave it in Anya’s hands. Francine and I had agreed: This had gotten way too complicated to keep hidden any longer. If Anya wanted to tell Anat her story, she could. I had already done too much. “Is there a country code?” I pictured early light, a cool, modern apartment block, a bowl of oranges, the sky outside bright, the world already slipped into morning, spinning fast.
Anat Singer cleared her throat. “I live in Chicago.” Not Tel Aviv. A woman in a dark apartment, late on Erev Yom Kippur, overlooking the black, windswept shore of Lake Michigan. My mind whirled to catch up. “I grew up in Tel Aviv. But I met someone here,” she added. “It would have been awkward to return together to Israel.”
A non-Jew, I guessed. She’d met a Gentile, with whom her marriage would not be recognized by the State of Israel—possibly not by her mother, either. So they’d stayed here. Francine and I didn’t have that choice, I thought, to live in a country where we’d be acknowledged. But then, I thought, tamping down my righteousness, Anat Singer was also an exile. So I asked, “He’s not Jewish?”
Anat Singer didn’t say anything. Had it come out wrong? Like an accusation? All she knew about me was that I worked for the Foundation. Probably, she assumed I was judgmental—the voice of institutional Judaism, guarding its past, lamenting its future. “I mean,” I added, trying not to get into any more trouble before the hour of repentance, “I know that can be tricky.”
Anat Singer corrected me. “My partner is a woman.”
( )
“Surely,” Anat Singer cleared her throat, “this can’t make any difference for my mother’s case.”
How could I explain what kind of difference it would make? My mind raced, but my mouth stayed shut.
Misunderstanding, Anat challenged me. “You live in San Francisco.” The words came out thick. “Do you mean to say, Miss Margolis, you haven’t met any lesbians?”
“No—no,” I rushed to correct her. “I mean, yes, of course.” Some of my best friends are lesbians. “Anat,” I started over. “My partner is a woman, too. We’re getting married in two weeks.”
“Married?”
Inspiration struck. “Come,” I told her. “To the wedding. It’s short notice, I know. But it would be wonderful,” I told her, “if you could meet Anya.” I got it, then. Anat, Anya. Batsheva had named her daughter after Anya.
“Anya. That’s unusual. Anya is your partner’s name?” Anat asked politely.
I squinted through the blinds, peering through the endless, small, stiff fronds of the redwood tree outside the window. “Anat, Anya Kamenets is the girl in the picture. Your mother’s friend.”
She didn’t get it. Just like I didn’t get it about her. Just like she hadn’t gotten it about me. How many opportunities for happiness, I wondered, had disappeared in these misperceptions, how many histories vanished, unwritten? “You’re her namesake.”
“Perhaps she’ll know who sent the letters.”
“Yes. Bring the letters.”
“I was right about my mother, you know.” My heart stopped for an instant. Did Anat already know? “There was someone,” Anat told me. “Someone who burned in my mother’s heart. A ner tamid. An eternal flame. The person who wrote in the letters: ‘All these years, Sheva, I have dreamed about the Gandras who carried you away and wondered, would another stork ever carry you back to me?’”
All these years? I’d assumed that the letters came from before the War. All these years?
What the ever-loving fuck? All these months I had been searching for Batsheva, when Anya had already found her.
( )
That night, Francine and I stood up in the pews beside her father and her brother as the violin cried its first, stirring lament, as the long, pleading voice of the cello stretched out its supplication, a note long and low enough to reach across generations, across worlds, and I couldn’t help thinking, again, of the folktale about a woman who knew a song she wouldn’t sing, who knew a story she wouldn’t tell. I lay awake that night, the Gates of Heaven open, this one night, somewhere in the universe, and I couldn’t sleep.
( )
“I’ve got to go into the City.”
“On Yom Kippur?” Francine looked up from the paper, the little kitchen table for once empty of jam jars.
“It’s Anya,” I told her.
Francine looked at me like I’d just said I was meeting my dealer. But we’d already been through so much. She let her hand fall to my shoulder. “Do what you need to do.”
I needed to see Anya. I needed Anya, finally, to tell me the truth. I needed to extract confession.
The halls of the Rose of Sharon Home had emptied for the day, their occupants drawn into the converted dining hall by the call for prayer, the call for redemption. Who knew whose last chance this might be?
I didn’t expect to find Anya in there.
I took the elevator up, instead, to the eighth floor, walked alone down the empty hall. “Warning, Oxygen in Use,” read the black and red sign outside Mrs. Linde’s door. The door stood open, her oxygen line lying on the floor inside her doorway, a thin, transparent vein, while, ten paces away, Mrs. Linde leaned against the wall, sucking a cigarette between hungry lips.
As always, Anya refused to seem surprised to see me. “Cake?” she asked, stepping into her little kitchen.
“It’s Yom Kippur.”
Anya frowned. “I had no idea you were so pious.” She squinted, the corners of her lips turned down.
“You’re not at the Museum today,” I observed.
“It’s Monday.”
I wandered over to my usual place by the window. My wedding invitation lay on the table where I had left it, untouched, unopened. That wasn’t like Anya, to leave something lying out on that table. She’d left it to tell me she couldn’t be bothered. It stung enough to make me careless.
“Tea?” Anya asked.
I picked up the photo of Batsheva. “I spoke to Anat Singer last night.”
Anya’s shoulders, upright in front of the sink, filling the kettle, went rigid. “I don’t know this person Anat Singer,” she said.
“Batsheva’s daughter,” I offered quietly. I was tired of evasions.
Anya, pausing over the stove, seemed to freeze. Underneath the kettle, the gas starter clicked, like a bird’s small, fast heart, over and over. The smell of gas rose up, started to fill the kitchen. Anya’s hand turned with a jerk. The flame spurted up, blue. I’d already waited patiently a very long time. “You knew Batsheva was alive. All this time. You wrote her letters.”
Anya’s head whipped around. Her fierce squint bore into me, her eyes little curved daggers of pure hatred. “What, gives you the right—” her hand flew out over the countertop. She slapped it down so hard, I thought she might break it. “What gives Wendy Rosenberg,” she spat the syllables of Wendy’s name out like bones. “The right,” Anya spat, clattering the kettle down against the flame, “to go, dig up old people’s past? Is that what your Foundation is for?” She stepped out from behind the counter and into the living room. She was staring at the wide open sky. “Preservation of Memory,” she pressed her lips over The Foundation’s name as if she’d spoken a curse.
Anya’s anger frightened me. I had wandered over to the coffee table and picked up the photo of Batsheva. The frame of the photo, tight in my hands, cut against my palm. Then I realized: She’s afraid.
My heart raced unevenly. “It wasn’t Wendy. Or the Foundation. It was me. I looked for Batsheva. I thought you wanted me to find Batsheva.” I wa
s shaking.
Anya turned from the window with incredulity. She thrust out her hand. The photo. She wanted it back. “Why?” She frowned, all the lines of her face pointing down toward the center of the earth. “Why would you think that?”
Why wouldn’t I think that? I stared at the photo I had laid, face up, in her palm. As if the photograph were proof enough. “You loved her,” I whispered, fiercely, as if not wanting even Batsheva, in my hands, to hear us. Anya herself had never exactly acknowledged this. “I did it because I knew you loved her.”
Anya’s face folded inward. “Hm!” she said. A thousand upwards parentheses sprung up around the big, down-turned parenthesis of her mouth. “Well.” She reached for a dish towel and plunged the corner into the corner of her eye, as if wiping away something that had blown into it, an ember, a little floating piece of ash. She pressed the dish towel into her mouth and didn’t breathe.
I held my own breath. Like the third Chinese Brother, the one who had swallowed up the sea, I was afraid of what would happen if I tried to speak. Love, fear, devotion. We never spoke about these things. Except, I had. I had broken the rules. “Anya,” I whispered, willing myself not to cry. “When you wrote to her. What did she say?”
Anya shook her head. I didn’t understand. Anya had been meant to go, Anya, to fly with the Gandras—Anya with Alina Sapozhnik, two blonds, two blue-eyed Jewish women who could pass, who could blend in, who could disappear. What fervent, whispered negotiation at the gate, what transaction had persuaded the Gandras to take this other one with the raven-dark hair, the girl she’d have to hide? What else, besides her own life, had Anya given up? Anya shook her head, a curt, final shake and glanced up, not at me, but at the big blue panel of sky. I looked up as a gull crossed the window: a brilliant, chalk-white mark sketched against the pure blue slate of Anya’s sky. White as a letter on which no words are written, the bird sailed on.
She set the photo down. Anya and Batsheva stared back at us, islanded in the past. And then I understood. I stared at those beautiful girls whom neither terror nor death had parted, could not part, and with a terrible, sinking sadness, at last, I understood.
The one Batsheva had found herself thinking about most was her father, the shochet, the butcher; he’d showed her once how he held a blade, not a single nick on it, to the thin parchment of the chicken’s neck, how he drew it across, one swift line, barely visible, before the dark ink of the body beaded up across it, how he drained it of its life, completely, and according to the laws of Moses. Anya didn’t understand about that. Anya’s father had written stories for Yiddische Stimme. Sheva thought of her father’s veined hands, and the whiteness of that thin line, just before the blood flowed, and thought about what she owed him. A husband. Jewish children. A return to the Promised Land. A life lived according to the traditions of Moses and the Jewish people. One thin, white line.
I drew a long and painful breath. Then I blew it out toward the blank, white ceiling. Anya had written to Batsheva.
But Batsheva never wrote back.
I would have liked to pretend I knew nothing about these endings. But I had grown up, too, in an age of shame. When Liz and I had parted, there’d been no last words of love, no promises. So why did I feel that my heart was breaking? What had I done?
Downstairs, eight stories down, in the big, carpeted dining room, where the janitors and nurses had set up rows of folding chairs, Avinu malkeynu, the melody of the reconciliation, the plaint for mercy, swelled over the hiss of Mrs. Linde’s two-pronged oxygen line, leaking into the hallway. Blocks away, across the City, under the great dome of Temple Emmanu-El, the melody rose up before the jeweled ark. Along the boulevards, across the Bay, under red-shingled roofs, under arches, under the spires of converted churches; inside the homely clapboard of prairie shuls; across the cool marble floors, before the panels of blue and gold glass of the Chicago Loop; under the perched, gold eagles of Harvard’s Memorial Church; across the oceans, around the world: Voices rose up, the three-thousand-year cry, Imaynu malkateynui, the eternal plea.
Our Father our king, Hear our voice.
Our Mother our Queen, We have sinned before you.
Be gracious to us and answer us.
Our Mother our Queen,
Hear our voice. Hear our voice…
“Anya—,” I started, but I didn’t know what to say. My face burned with a thousand kinds of shame. This was my fault. I was getting married and I had wanted my grandmother. I had wanted her to bless me. And so I had made a terrible, heartbreaking mistake. I had done this. Not Anya. But me. “Anya. I’m sorry.” Avoiding Anya’s eyes, I stared down into the depths of the coffee-table glass, even though I knew I would see nothing there.
In it, I caught sight of my reflection: my dark eyes, my black bag, my dark coat. I glanced at the picture. At Batsheva’s dark eyes, her dark hair. I felt, suddenly, as if I were trapped inside the glass, as if something Anya had said or done had charmed me, had caught me there. Why hadn’t I considered that seeing ghosts could work both ways? I wondered, suddenly, whether Anya had sought me out because she wanted me, or if she really just came for Batsheva. We were trapped, the two of us, wanting the love that had left us.
I shook my head. My reflection moved. But Batsheva, all those years ago, remained frozen in time. I was the woman in the glass. But I wasn’t the girl in the picture. Everything—past and present, present and past—had become so horribly confused. But I wasn’t Batsheva. And Anya wasn’t my Gramma Sophie. And maybe that was what both of us had needed all along. Not the women we had lost. A way to do something different. A way to repair a broken heart.
Batsheva had been trapped, a woman who couldn’t tell her story, couldn’t sing her song. But I knew something Anya didn’t. “She kept your letters. Even though she didn’t write back to you. She treasured them. She thought about you,” I told her, “all the time.”
(What had Liz done with my unanswered, final letter, I wondered. Had she read it and thrown it quickly away? Or, had she tucked it somewhere away in a drawer, its pale leaves crushed, like the faded petals of the sweet pea I’d saved all these years?)
Anya shrugged.
“She had a daughter,” I reminded Anya. “A daughter she named after you. Anat. Anat . . . ,” I paused. I was searching for the words, words you could say without saying anything, words you could hear, if you wanted to, without hearing anything, words that would fall, if you wanted them to, like a stone disappearing without a ripple into the sky—the only kind of words I thought Anya could hear. “Batsheva’s daughter is . . . a friend. She’s coming. Here. To meet you.” My legs were shaking as I rose for the door. I had to let her be, to measure in her own scales the weight of silence against the weight of words, and decide which was heavier to bear. But I believed she was tired of disappearing.
I was tired of disappearing, too. I had been a coward and a liar. I had told myself that, if only my Gramma Sophie were alive, I would ask for her blessing. But I would never have asked. Because I didn’t believe she would have given it. She was the one person in my life whose love had been unconditional. But in my heart, I knew there were conditions. I was shaking harder when I told Anya, frowning to stave off tears, “She’s coming. To my wedding.” I bent and lifted my invitation from the table. For all I knew, Anya thought I was marrying a man. Not because I loved one, but because, like Batsheva, like so many others, I preferred lies to the truth. I ripped the back flap open and held out the card so Anya could read it: Ellen & Francine. “I want you to come, too.” It was all I had to offer, and I offered it for my own ravenous heart. I couldn’t fix the past. Just like Anya couldn’t fix mine. It was never mine to fix. I could only be here, and be myself.
I waited until I stepped out of her apartment, out of the elevator, out of the building, out onto the street, until I started to cry.
( )
Right before the wedding, Francine cut her hair. I found her with Debbie and June in our living room, sorting through cardboard boxes
full of vases, tall vitrines in which, filled with small pomegranates and leaves, we’d float white votives. June had read about it in Martha Stewart Wedding. June held one of the vases, scrutinizing it in the afternoon light, squinting through her glasses, wrinkling her nose. “Wash,” she declared, and tucked the vase into a carton half-filled with vases just like it.
I looked from June to the back of Francine’s head. I could see the dark line of hair at the pale nape of her exposed neck. “Ahh . . . ” June’s mouth hung wide.
Francine turned her head slowly. “Don’t freak out,” she said.
I stumbled over Francine’s clogs and my butt hit the door with a thud.
“She freaked out,” Debbie announced.
Francine, pleased with herself despite me, shook her head, sending the curls in a jumble behind her. “I needed a change,” she said. This wasn’t just about the hair. “Sit down,” she said. “I’ll get you a drink.”
“Big change,” June commented, heavily, as Francine walked out.
But Debbie hissed, “What’s your problem?”
“Shouldn’t she have asked me first?”
June’s thin, feathery eyebrows rose.
“Warned me, then,” I corrected myself.
“Goddammit, Ellen.” Debbie smacked her hands down on her pants with a vehemence that stunned me. On the rug next to her foot, two of the vases wobbled dangerously. “I introduced you two. I told you to stick it out when you thought she didn’t like you. Francine can shave her head if she wants to. But you are damn well going to get married, and you are going to thank me for helping you do it.”
