by Rita Gabis
Three months earlier I’d shared a plate of beets with a friend in a restaurant; wood, dim lighting, a step down in the foyer that could trip you up if you weren’t looking. The next morning my urine was pink-red. I didn’t know that could happen with beets. As a child they made me gag, though I loved the look of the borscht my Jewish grandmother made with the swirl of sour cream and so clamored for it right up until the moment the spoon was at my mouth. My mother’s Lithuanian version was different, sweeter somehow, equally loathsome. Every year I picked the red beet slivers out of her winter salad. Then suddenly—like my stepdaughter, who overnight lost her hatred of onions—I wanted them all the time; roasted, steamed, turning my hands the color of roses.
And eventually the right beets at the right time saved my life. The pink-red urine set off an alarm; I was sure it was blood. My internist ordered an abdominal CAT scan. The results were insignificant but for “an isolated 0.4 cm pulmonary nodule.” We had an aha moment in her office when I talked to her about the beets, the timing of the tinged urine. But now there was the nodule; it was most likely nothing, but protocol required a chest CT in three months. It had been three months. If I left for Lithuania without doing the test, the “probably nothing” would needle me the whole time. In Lithuania I’d dream of tumors and labored coughs. Anxiety is its own brand of self-absorption. Get rid of it, I thought, and scheduled the test.
My internist (her grandparents, as it would turn out, were from Rokishok, or Rokiškis as their Gentile Lithuanian neighbors knew it) is usually prompt and scrupulous. This time, however, she was late with my test results, even though she knew my plane tickets were squared up next to my laptop. There, one early-summer morning, while I squinted at the too-bright sun through the one long window in my study, my CT results from New York-Presbyterian hospital appeared in my e-mail.
I logged in and began to read, from the top of the report to the bottom, then from bottom to the top. Over and over, like the Pimsleur language drills I was doing twice a week now during the New York City reality show known as alternate-side-of-the-street parking, which from time to time results in usually docile people screaming at one another from car windows, ramming fenders, swearing at the neighborhood traffic cop who has heard it all before. Ar Lietuvos? No, I am American. There was more than one small node. There were several. But the nodes weren’t the headline.
I had a bicuspid aortic valve: two leaflets letting blood flow in and out of my aorta, instead of three. I had a 4.9 cm thoracic aortic aneurysm. (Actually, 5.0 cm, my trim, remarkably dedicated cardiologist would tell me after my echocardiogram.) It was ready to blow apart like an overinflated balloon. Kill me. “You have a time bomb inside you,” someone helpfully advised me a few days later.
At my desk, I called to my husband. He came to my side, tall, stooping in the light to read what I was pointing at on the laptop screen.
“The trip is off,” I said.
“No,” he said.
“Yes.”
Then I called my internist’s emergency number so I could yell at her for not returning my calls, and she, beloved and practical but never stern, raised her voice so I would shut up and listen. She’d seen the report. She’d put a call in to her go-to cardiac person so she could refer me to the right thoracic surgeon or cardiologist or both, instead of simply calling and saying, “You have a time bomb inside you.”
The day before I read the report, I’d dead-lifted a hundred and fifty pounds in the small, ratty gym ten blocks down Broadway with my high-octane Italian trainer, who believed all women should attempt forty-pound lat pulls and fifty-pound chest presses and dead lifts—just the kind of physical activity that places inordinate stress on the heart and the aorta. I was lucky a hundred times over. I’m breathing, I started saying to myself. I’m walking. I’m reading. I’m turning on a light. I’m brushing my teeth. A mantra of my luck that continues to this day. I’m writing this. I’m remembering: Carthage. Lietuvos. The low bench in the gym, my trainer spotting me while I lay on my back and heaved the barbell up, straightened my elbows, my face turning—yes, beet red.
A little more than two weeks later a very talented surgeon used a special saw to cut open my chest. His father had been a mechanic, I’d learned from a newspaper piece about him. In our first brief meeting he leaned close to me and listened with his stethoscope to the little whoosh of a heart murmur I’d had all my life, then lightly touched his index finger to my skin at a place below my clavicle and told me where the scar would begin and how long it would be.
CHAPTER 15
* * *
WATER
Ten weeks later, at nine in the evening, I opened a spiral notebook. “I think I can start again,” I wrote, then closed the notebook, turned out the light, and fell into one of those deep, cushiony sleeps still new to me postsurgery.
I heard my husband’s voice. Yelling. In a dream that wasn’t a dream.
He was in the living room, the room with the large chairs where I had, indeed, sat for many hours, quietly, not speaking or reading or even looking out the window, just—being.
In the not-dream I woke up and padded into the living room. The sound of a river was coming from somewhere. I looked at the television, thinking my husband had wanted me to see something, but he was pointing to his feet. Water was up to his ankles. I’d once lived near the Bay of Fundy, where the tide comes in with one long, loud rush, and that was the sound I heard. It displaced me. But the Bay of Fundy is numbingly cold, and the water rising quickly over my ankles was warm, almost hot.
My husband’s face was frantic. He and I stupidly looked around. Up at the ceiling. Out the window. My stepdaughter appeared on the stairs, and in the teen voice she used with us then—a voice of condescension and affection, and in a crisis, utter calm, said: “I think you two should know that water is pouring out of the light fixture in the kitchen.” She paused a half second for effect. “And the light is on.” Then she looked down at her feet; the rushing river. Water splashed down the stairs to the first floor of our duplex. It wasn’t coming from the most obvious place, the upstairs bathroom. The hallway to that bathroom was, in fact, the only dry place upstairs.
In two or three minutes our super, who was in his car ten miles away, began racing back to the building. Robin, who was running the elevator that night, got Zaico, the super from across the street, to come over. Our neighbors, some we knew well and loved, some we’d hardly met, immediately started a bucket brigade—not small buckets, but large utility trash cans. People began giving directions. My husband quietly unfroze and went to the fuse box. Someone brought flashlights; a young woman appeared with mountains of towels. Sanjay, father to a new infant daughter, said, “It’s going to be a long night,” and rolled up his shirtsleeves.
In my study, I picked up my laptop—an idiotic choice, as it was on my desk, high above the watermark. All my books about Lithuania and the war, all my research notes and papers in Lithuanian and Russian, were stacked on the floor. Along with them, the red flash drive I’d used on my first visit to the archives of the Holocaust Museum. That night, someone would inadvertently step on and crush the flash drive, proving true at least part of my mother’s liturgy about the propensity of the people and objects of this world to vanish.
The neckline of my nightgown revealed the ragged train track of my sternum scar.
“It will be all right,” our super kept telling me when he finally arrived.
Later, he confessed he was afraid I would have a heart attack.
Everyone on our floor worked while the water poured. It took a long time to pinpoint the origin of the flood. Water rose into electrical outlets. Our neighbor’s son, terrified of dogs, bravely took our dogs away into someone else’s apartment. His mother, a friend and journalist, had the good sense I didn’t. She grabbed my papers from my study floor. One was my grandfather’s file from the Office of Immigration and Naturalization. Soaked.
“It’s ruined,” I told her. Even in the chaos, I was aware that I half
wanted it to be ruined. All of it. Thrown away. “You’ll have a new apartment,” our super kept saying to me, directing me to a chair each time I got up and joined the brigade. His words made no sense. Mopping, I thought, a few days of fresh air from open windows—the rugs hauled off and cleaned … but he knew the subfloor would rot, mold would take over the walls, doors and cabinets warp, come off their hinges.
Long after midnight, the right riser found, the water shut off, the initial mop-up over, I heard a crash downstairs, put my boots back on, grabbed a flashlight and made my way to the kitchen. There, a large, open set of shelves had buckled. It hung precariously half off the wall. The long, partially collapsed shelves were laden with books and irreplaceable pottery collected by my husband’s father, but one small copper jar, handmade in Russia in the days of the czar, given to my Jewish grandmother by her parents, bore all their weight. The bit of copper was wedged somehow in exactly the right spot, so that although a few books and bowls had slid off, one end of each shelf rested on the tarnished jar that was as small as the palm of my hand. I stood on a stool and item by item, took everything off the waterlogged shelves and then finally held my grandmother’s jar in my hand, marveling.
The day after the flood, our apartment already stank. Only our bedrooms were untouched. Downstairs, on our long dining room table, neat rows of the pages of my grandfather’s A-file from the immigration archives in Kansas City were the only sign of order in the room. In the rank air, they were already almost dry—yellowed, but my neighbor Susan had salvaged them. They included at least three or four copies of the two photographs that came with the A-file. I’d scanned the photographs as soon as I received them, then made copies, because, well, you never know what might happen … I looked at one yellowed set of photographs in particular. Senelis looked back at me. A man already in his fifties. Ravaged. You think you know me; you don’t know me.
The source of the flood turned out to be in a wall of my study. A hot-water pipe there had been closed off when the upstairs and downstairs apartments were joined and my study was turned from a kitchen into my stepdaughter’s bedroom and then, when she outgrew it, my workroom. The pipe had blown out. There was a hole in my study wall the size of a small suitcase. When I picked up the books piled on my floor, they were sodden sponges. The carpet squished. If I’d been superstitious, I’d have thought it was a sign. Whatever you’re doing in here, stop.
II
The crime scene encompasses all areas over which the actors—victim, criminal, and eyewitnesses—move.
—JAMES W. OSTERBURG AND RICHARD H. WARD, CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION
* * *
Of all the places I lived, emotionally I am attached to Święciany, which I carry in my memories and heart (and often miss). That is where I was born, my parents were born, my extended family lived. On my father’s side the family name was Rudnitzky and on my mother’s side Chermetz. There, in my hometown, while walking the streets between the small one story wooden houses, where here and there a brick one- or two-level house sticks out, I felt “heimish” (there is no exact Hebrew word for this Yiddish word, but the word heim means “home” or “homely,” “homeland”).
—YITZHAK ARAD
* * *
Erev Sukes (Sukkot) 1941 returning from work at four o’clock I met the Jew Yudl Khartaz running. I asked him where he’s running and he answered, “It’s not a happy time.” Other Jews were running also. Shloime Shmirt with an axe, Yisroel with other Jewish boys on the street. There was a lot of noise. A Christian, familiar to me, called out, “Khone, leave me as a memento your shoes because tomorrow will be your end.” Coming into the house my mother asked me, “What are we going to do?” I looked through the window and saw many families … One woman was carrying her paralyzed husband on her back. The Lithuanians just stared and didn’t do a thing. People ran without a plan through fields and forests.
—KHONE ZAK
CHAPTER 16
* * *
YITZHAK ARAD
He is eighty-six. The wood, the tools, the worktable—all younger than he is. A man of contradictions: his compact build is slight now but sturdy. He is sweet but fierce. Focused, but easily pulled this way or that by a quick greeting and a bit of gossip from a friend, a phone call, perhaps from his children or one of his grandchildren.
He lives next door to a cemetery. The sun throws white heat across the graves; it’s summer in Ramat Hasharon outside Tel Aviv. It is cool and spacious inside the elegant residence where he lives, an assisted living complex full of his contemporaries—some old dear friends, one his beloved wife for more than sixty-five years, Michal. You can get a coffee and a savory and sit in a comfortable chair. You can walk out on the patio and drink the mineral-rich water to balance out the sun’s work on your shoulders.
In the craft room at the complex other people create animals, wonderful landscapes, perhaps toys for their grandchildren. He admires their work, but it doesn’t interest him. His own efforts are slow. He is creating those who vanished, using photographs and memory. His efforts are painstaking and utterly absorbing. He has waited many years to do this, years in which he lived as a fighter and a scholar.
Over time, the extraordinary happens with each figure whose image he works into the wood. The past spills into the present: a callus on the thumb of his grandfather’s hand, faces in summer by a lake, soft skin at his mother’s neck when she bent to whisper over him before sleep, nuanced timbre of voices, a song his mother sang, the sound the scissors made during his father’s first career as a barber (later a cantor), his schoolboy dreams, even snow, falling lightly again. In the wood, those he loved returning.
A BOY AND his sister in the snow. Rachel and Itzhak Rudnitzky. She’s fifteen; he’s thirteen. It’s December 1939. The snow has a blue cast under the moon. Sometimes it has a glassy crust they have to break through with their heels. The winters of 1939 and ’40 are notoriously brutal. Where there is no icy sheen, they sink in the cold white powder up to their knees. There are wolves. They each carry bundles of clothing and food and a bit of money, maybe a trinket that could be traded for something, small gifts for their grandparents in Święciany.
Their parents are smart. They have prepared their children for the trek as best they can. They are headed from Warsaw to Święciany, Poland, the family’s hometown, the town where Itzhak was born. Their father, Israel-Moshe, cantor at the Moriah Synagogue at 7 Dzielna Street where the family lives, and their mother, Haya, have promised to follow in short order. They hope to be repatriated back to Święciany, now in the Soviet sphere of control.
7 Dzielna Street, Warsaw, 2013
The Germans and the Soviets are not quite at war yet. Warsaw is under siege. Correction: Warsaw is taken. During the taking the bombs create so much smoke that the Luftwaffe bomb their own troops on the ground. The bombs are deadly versions of nested Russian dolls: bombs within bombs that cover a vast area and ignite, bombs with relay boosters, magnesium, gunpowder, and shrapnel. On the streets there are fires, dead horses, bodies of those who didn’t run for cover quickly enough or whose cover was blasted into flame.
Poland falls without aid from Britain or the United States. Suddenly you can be killed for owning a radio, or just killed. A wave has begun that will spill into Lithuania. The Germans want the money of the Jews, the goods of the Jews, the houses of the Jews, the free labor of the Jews, but more than anything they want the Jews removed, along with other segments of the population deemed Untermensch, “subhuman”—Poles, Russians, Byelorussians, and Communists among them. The Germans need room for Germans. At the same time, they allow a small number of Poles to be “Germanized”—many of them children and infants who have Aryan features and are taken from their parents to be raised by real Germans.
In 2013 in Warsaw, I spoke to several people unsure of their ethnic identities—Polish, German, Jewish? Family histories contained vagaries they were afraid to try to clarify. Some of the fear had to do with a possible discovery of Jewish heritage. This fe
ar was not strictly anti-Semitic; things had been very bad for the Jews once, and they could become so again.
But it’s still 1939, and perhaps Rachel and Itzhak’s parents will be allowed to leave. For now they pay a Polish smuggler—who suddenly has a new source of employment—to transport their children (an older couple they don’t know is also on this trek) to the border of Soviet-controlled territory, from which the two will make their way to Święciany. The smuggler charges 250 zlotys—roughly five hundred dollars in U.S. currency at the time. The Germans have frozen the bank accounts of the Jews in Poland, first requiring all Jews to deposit most of their money in these same accounts. The 250 zlotys is part of the 2,000 zlotys allotted to each family to subsist on. That leaves the Rudnitzky family, after paying the smuggler, 1,750 zlotys, unless they have hidden money away—a crime for which they could be killed. Some of the allotment has surely gone into the snow with the two young people, or has already been spent on food, or given to those with nothing, or parceled out in a crucial bribe.
Rachel, the older of the two children, has already, in late fall, gone on a reconnaissance trip to Święciany to see if the town, under Soviet influence, is safer than Warsaw. It is, she reported back when she returned. The Soviets have even given some of the local Jews positions in government, a fact of prewar Sovietized Lithuania that the Germans will skillfully exploit with the help, early on, of the Lithuanian Activist Front (Lietuvos Aktyvistų Frontas, or LAF).
Though ensconced before the war in Berlin, the LAF actively disseminated radically anti-Semitic, anti-Bolshevik, and anti-Polish propaganda inside Lithuania—often mentioning the ruinous Jews and Bolsheviks together—calling upon Lithuanians to “do their duty” when the time came. But the time hasn’t yet come, and the extended family have instructed Rachel to tell her parents that they should all leave ravaged Warsaw as quickly as possible and come to them in Święciany.
