by Nava Semel
We had a good laugh over it in the end. And I couldn’t help myself: even though my grandfather said it was a secret, it didn’t seem to me like such an important secret and I didn’t keep it to myself. I mean, I just blurted it out when I was laughing because she’d just come into the room and she saw us, so she started laughing too, because maybe she’d decided that it was silly to fight over a thing like that. I mean, why argue over a doll that wets herself. And Grandpa gave her a hug, which kind of embarrassed me – I mean old people hugging – and she went on laughing because if there’s one thing you can’t say about my grandmother it’s that she doesn’t have a sense of humor, although not everyone understands it, especially not my mom. My grandmother, what can I tell you, she like laughs at the weirdest things, like people on talk shows arguing about the meaning of life, or the horoscope telling you what’s going to happen to you because some comet crossed the horizon of Mercury while you were being born. And once we were watching TV together and we saw this expert talking about a technique for controlling your thoughts and your feelings, and another expert was telling the studio audience how to release anger and talking about energy points – you just have to press on the right places and you get rid of all the garbage inside. And she thought it was hilarious. She gave this strange laugh of hers. Really quiet, no sound, all you see is the way her mouth twitches, and the little muscles around her mouth. A silent laugh as if it isn’t coming from her throat, or from her stomach, or wherever people usually laugh, but from somewhere completely different.
And I’m telling you, Miri, none of the things you’d expect from someone who went through the Holocaust stuck to her. She’s a happy-go-lucky person with lots of friends too. And ever since she retired and stopped working in the x-ray lab at the hospital, she’s been going to the theatre every week and to the flea market every Sunday. And she brings back all sorts of junk, especially old necklaces. She has a whole collection hanging on her bedroom wall – she never wears them – and when I was little, she’d let me play with them. And she’s not a pain like some other grandmothers. Never tells me off for wearing a belly shirt or for debating between piercing my bellybutton and getting a tongue stud, and she never says: When we were young ... in our generation ... – which is what I keep hearing from my mom, who seems a lot older than my grandma sometimes. Even my friends say that my grandmother is cool, especially after she started getting into computers and announced that she was going to surf the net. I even screamed it at my mother once when we were having a fight, and she screamed back: I’m not in some competition with your grandmother. And I said: Why don’t you call her “my mother”?
So what do you want me to write? That she was a little girl and she was saved? That’s the whole story. My mother doesn’t think there’s much to look into either, because everyone who was a child there and who was hidden stayed alive at least, and had someone to care about them – which should count for something.
And what did they get me for my birthday in the end? Not for that birthday, I mean, but for my last birthday – my bat-mitzvah. She insisted on going to the pet shop with me, which sounds neat, even though my mother was against it, because she said animals are dirty and that she had no intention of cleaning up after one. My grandma got really mad when my mother talked about the filth that animals make, but she didn’t say a word.
I wanted a pedigree dog, a Pinscher or a Dashchund, or maybe a Siamese cat, but I didn’t feel comfortable asking for any of those because they cost a fortune, but my grandmother kept asking the sales guy about snakes and if he knew anyone who raises moles – at home, on purpose – and she asked if she could touch some worms, but he told her she’d have to go to a fishing place to get worms. He liked her a lot, and thought she was cool, so he let her open the cages. He simply knew he could trust her not to steal anything and not to kidnap some expensive animal, and he watched her when she started petting the hamsters and the gerbils and the guinea pigs, and for a second I got the feeling she was even talking to them, but I guess I was just imagining things. And when she caught the sales guy’s eye she winked to him as if they shared some secret, which seemed really odd, considering they’d never met.
Slowly, more people started gathering round, and she began explaining that the most faithful animals are the ones that you never find in a shop. And the sales guy said, You’re ruining my livelihood. But he said it nicely and you could tell he liked her, and when we were leaving he said: Your grandmother should have worked in a zoo, and he started explaining, like on Animal Planet, that some people just have a knack with animals and they could be lion tamers in the circus or jungle explorers. And I told him my grandmother could have been Mowgli.
She stood there with her back turned, halfway into the street already, and started laughing. The real zoo is right here, she said and stomped her foot. The salesman told her she was breaking up the Tel Aviv sidewalks, which were in need of serious repairs anyway, and she said that as far as she was concerned, she’d write to the mayor and ask him to remove the top layer of Tel Aviv, and then she’d organize guided tours, because there’s a Tel Aviv under the ground too. Every city has an under-the-ground city too, every place has an under-the-ground, because wherever there are people there’s an under-the-ground, and even if the under-the-ground wasn’t there before, it begins to form because of them, even without their noticing it, behind their backs, and that’s the real zoo.
The salesman told her: If you’ve got nothing to do when you retire, why don’t you come work for me, or for the SPCA, because they’re always looking for volunteers, and she said: Thanks, I’ve got lots to do, especially now, while I’m taking a special computer course for mature adults, and learning about the internet too.
But when all was said and done, she didn’t buy me anything.
When we got home she said: Your pet will find you. And I said: Come on, Grandma, what animals ever choose their pet-human? But she didn’t answer, and I thought, there goes another lousy birthday.
Believe me, it wasn’t easy to pin her down to arrange for us to meet for this school project. Every time I tried to set a time with her she avoided me. She had plenty of excuses. She had to wait for the computer guy to hook her up to the net. It was only when I told her that I was going to flunk on her account that she gave in. In the end, we made a date for the afternoon, and I even skipped drama class for this interview. I sat there across from her, all ready to go, if you get my drift, with my pen and notebook, just waiting to hear her out. Just like you said. And I had my outline ready and the list of questions I’d typed out at home, and I thought about what you’d said in class, that this is the eleventh hour because these are the last witnesses who can still tell us firsthand about what they went through in those terrible, horrible years, and pretty soon they won’t be around any more. I remembered that you said we should try to bring along a camcorder or a tape recorder to tape the story, but my grandmother just wouldn’t have it. She barely agreed to the notebook.
The first thing I noticed was that she’d made room for a computer in the living room near the window. She said they’d promised to hook her up within a day or two, and she was still waiting. I thought it was kind of funny to see people her age surfing the net.
I waited patiently for her. First she drew the curtains, even though the light never disturbs me. Then she straightened up the sofa and the propped-up cushions she’d made out of silk and lace, with embroidery in lots of colors that she collects from all over the world or buys at the flea market on Sundays. Finally she chose the armchair directly across from me and sat down, even though it was my grandfather’s chair, where he’d sit with the remote control and wind up watching just the sports channel. It was the armchair he died in, in fact. He got a heart attack all of a sudden, and took us all by surprise.
There was a bit of a distance between us, so I had to bend down to see her face. She sat there in a strange position, like a school-girl, or as if she was facing someone who has made her bow to him and even th
ough she had to obey, there was something inside her that succeeded in resisting. I didn’t feel comfortable in that position. I kept thinking that I don’t want to upset her, and that if I just do what you told me, the story will come out clear and smooth, with a beginning, a middle and an end – and a sense of progression to boot. That’s what you explained in class. You really explained it well, Miri, and you know I’m not one to butter up my teachers. I thought a lot about the way you put it, and about how one thing leads to another. Otherwise things don’t make sense, because the biggest danger is when everything gets confused and chaotic. And I did whatever I could. I thought your instructions were really super, and that if I followed them, I wouldn’t cause her any unnecessary pain, because I certainly don’t want to do that, especially now that my grandfather is no longer alive.
My grandma asked: What did you bring that notebook for? I’ve got nothing to tell you. A few words and that’s all. Why don’t you try someone else?
I said: I don’t have anyone else.
And finally she said: Darkness, a pit, potatoes, and then the War was over.
I had a feeling she was a little mad at me then, but I didn’t know why, and I figured I was tiring her out, using up her time, which may be very precious to her, because old people really don’t have enough time, and I may be getting on her nerves with my school project, the one I have to do to get a grade, and that it wasn’t fair to make her go back to when she was so little, because a little girl cannot control her life when she’s so small, or tell herself in advance that some day this will become the most important and significant thing in her life. Even I myself, seven years older than she was then, I can’t know what will become important in the end and what will fly right out of my memory as if it never happened. And she said: What a shame Grandpa isn’t alive, because he had an amazing memory, and now that she was taking the special mature adults computer course, she realized that he was hooked up to the memories of others too.
I became nervous as hell, partly because my notebook was still empty and partly because I’d been so worried about having to listen to all sorts of horrible stuff. But now I wasn’t so worried any more because I understood it wasn’t going to be that kind of a story, and deep in my heart I was grateful that she’d been too little, back then.
I didn’t succeed in getting the names of the farmers who saved her either, and believe me I did ask, as tactfully as I could, just like you taught us in class. I even remembered some of the examples you put on the board.
What did you call them, Grandma? And I made some suggestions too, just to jog her memory, if there really is such a thing as jogging someone’s memory. Maybe she called them Auntie and Uncle for example, because I figured that maybe her parents had told her they were taking her to some relatives. Or maybe there were nicknames, which would seem logical for a little girl. And for a moment I thought maybe she’d called the farmers Mother and Father but I didn’t dare mention it to her.
But nothing worked. I’m sure she tried, because there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for me, so she says, and that’s what my mother says too, bitterly sometimes, and I think she may be a little jealous of me.
And I used to think that old people are really good at remembering things that happened to them a long time ago, but they’re perfectly capable of forgetting what they had for breakfast that day. Then again, maybe that’s just a myth, and maybe people can control their memory and keep rearranging it the way you arrange your school schedule and decide what to take at what hour, and they’re also the ones who decide when the bell should ring and maybe they keep deluding themselves into thinking that memory is just one big free-for-all. Even I know there are things that I’d rather not remember, but it doesn’t help me much. Maybe some day I’ll figure out a better way, to push memories aside.
Grandma said she wished she had more control over her memory, but that unfortunately you don’t always remember what you should, and vice versa. Then she said: Don’t feel too bad. It’s not such a great loss.
But I did feel bad actually, because people who saved a little girl deserve to be remembered, and I even felt sort of annoyed with her, because the least their survivor could do is to remember them, even if she doesn’t like being labeled a “survivor”. It seemed so unfair not to remember the people who helped you the most, but I hid this from her because I was sure that not a day went by when she did not try hard to remember them but that it just wasn’t her fault that she’d been so little.
Believe me, Miri, you’re my favorite teacher, and I wouldn’t lie to you. I tried everything. I asked her to tell me about that place under the ground because I have no idea what a potato pit is. We don’t exactly keep potatoes under the ground, you know. In our house, they’re in the vegetable bin in the fridge. And if it was some kind of a basement, then the only basement I know is the old bomb-shelter in Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Tel Aviv, which nobody uses, and the city closed it after one of the wars, I don’t remember which one, and there’s a warning sign hanging there.
She said: A pit. Just a pit. As if a pit that you lower a little girl into is the most ordinary thing in the world. And for me a pit is a hole in the garden where you plant a flower or a tree – not a place you live in, not even temporarily. I mean, it must have been something special that the farmer and his wife had prepared in advance. Maybe they even planned it together with her parents to make it look just like her room at home so she’d hardly notice the difference and would feel comfortable right from the start. With a bed and a carpet, and a cupboard maybe. Because I bet her parents sent all her clothes and her games and toys with her, and her doll of course. And there must obviously have been a flashlight or a lamp, because there had to be some light down there.
But no matter how hard I tried, she kept insisting: a pit. No more.
***
I went back to the notebook. I was getting really desperate, because I couldn’t understand why she was getting so hung up on the wrong word, though I’d always found it really funny how she mixed up all sorts of things and didn’t always know what went with what. Like for instance she used to say, “come on up downstairs” or “come on down upstairs”. And my dad, last time he came for a visit, said there was no point in trying to correct her because it was her own special sense of humor. Except that now I didn’t think it was funny at all. I looked at the questions I’d prepared, and saw they weren’t worth anything, and I had no choice but to start making up new ones.
I asked her how she’d gone up and down, and whether there’d been stairs, and I even imagined a special tunnel that the good farmers had made to take her out for a breath of fresh air, or to take a walk late at night or whenever they thought it would be safe. And I guessed they must have told the neighbors they were raising the poor orphan of a relative, who had nowhere to be because of the War. Of course they only confided in neighbors or close friends that they knew they could trust. And I got the feeling that all my guesswork about her life there was right on target. And the fact that there really are such good people in the world is pretty encouraging, because all you see on TV is people who do really horrible things. And I wish I could have gotten her to remember the names of those farmers, because then I might have written to thank them, even though I’m pretty sure they’re no longer alive, or at least I would have written to their children or their grandchildren, and I would even have contacted the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum, and told them that I’d tracked down some Righteous Gentiles. That’s what I was thinking. About how unfair memory can be, and about how memory didn’t give a damn, and about what a shame it was that I hadn’t thought of asking her about it earlier. I was even more upset that my mother never bothered to find out all these details when Grandma was much younger and her brain was much sharper, because then I might at least have been able to hear the story from my mother – organized and clear, with a beginning, a middle and an end. And it just isn’t fair towards the people in that village that even its name has disappeared from he
r mind, though of course it wasn’t her fault. And it wasn’t that she was ungrateful, it’s just that she’d been too little.
She said she never ever left the pit. Only the rat did. And that’s how I found out about the rat.
And you know that I’m not one to give up easily, so I took down my grandfather’s old atlas, the one with countries that don’t actually exist any more because they’ve been split up, and I asked her to find the place. I even put my finger on the map. My finger moved from country to country, cutting across borders in no time. I flew across all of Europe and even reached Asia by mistake. I deliberately pointed to the tiniest countries in the world, the ones that you couldn’t see without a magnifying glass, like San Marino and Andora and the Vatican in the middle of Rome, just to prove to her that it’s possible. But she said she was no good at geography and couldn’t pinpoint the place. So I said it didn’t have to be the exact spot. Even something in the general area would do, and she said: Let’s just forget it, sweetheart, it won’t work. Still, I took her finger – she has long nails, and a nice manicure, with nail polish and everything – and tried to place it on the old atlas, but she said that maybe the place didn’t even exist any more or that it never had existed because everything was changing anyway at the end of the millennium and none of what had existed before would continue to exist in the next millennium, and that word, “millennium”, sounded strange coming from her, even though you keep hearing it all day on special sales and stuff.
