* * *
The night before Shavios, Surie was awakened not by the need to use the bathroom but by the sound of feet running on the stairs and Tzila Ruchel calling her name. She groggily threw on her old ponzhelo and slippers and came to the door.
“Hurry, Mommy. Hurry!”
She ran down the stairs with Tzila Ruchel to Dead Onyu’s apartment. The living room was in disarray. Dead Onyu had risen in the night and, disoriented, fallen and hit her head. She lay on the couch, wrapped in a blanket. Her turban was covered in blood and her eyes were closed. There were dark purple spots covering her arms and part of her face. The sound of her breathing was very loud. Dead Onyu had fallen before, once breaking a hip, once a wrist. Surely those injuries had been more serious than this?
“She’s not waking up. Tatie came and checked her and then he said we should call Hatzolah,” Tzila Ruchel said. And right then, there was the sound of a siren and more footsteps running up the stairs. Yidel directed the men of the volunteer ambulance service where to go. He’d been waiting downstairs in his robe for them to arrive.
Surie picked up Dead Onyu’s hand. It was very cold and it lay limp in hers. “Onyu,” she said, “don’t go.” But it seemed to her that just at that moment, a tremor passed through the hand and there was a strange gurgle and she felt something rush past her and out of the door, passing the paramedics as they came in. They dropped their kits on the floor and pushed her aside.
“Give her room to breathe,” one of them said, but then he bent over the couch and listened to Dead Onyu’s heart and it was obvious from the way he withdrew quickly that she had died. The Chassidic men who had trained to be paramedics shouted to one another and pumped her heart and forced air into the old woman’s lungs. They brought in the defibrillator and shocked her. They tried for twenty minutes, thirty, to bring her back to life, but they could not.
“What is going on?” cried Dead Opa, who could only hear all of the dreadful sounds but not see what was happening. “What is happening to Faige Bruche?” And Yidel held his hand and took him into the kitchen and made him sit down and drink some tea, and after some time, he began to sob. “No,” came the voice of Dead Opa, breaking. “No! It was supposed to be me first.”
When the Hatzolah men left, Surie went and sat on the floor next to the couch where her mother-in-law lay. She held her hand again and whispered apologies to her, sorry that she had not always wanted to come downstairs right when Onyu called, sorry not to have been a better daughter, sorry she had not seen her for a couple of days, sorry that she had not known the old woman was dying. She wished she had listened to Dead Onyu and told Yidel, so that they all could have quietly celebrated the good news together, instead of forcing her mother-in-law to keep secrets from her own family. She kissed Onyu’s hand and covered her with a sheet, and then she and Tzila Ruchel laid her on the floor with her feet pointing toward the door and they lit beeswax candles all around her. Tzila Ruchel poured a glass of water on the floor and covered the mirrors with tea towels. Toward dawn, the oldest of Tzila Ruchel’s children and the youngest of Surie’s children came in and touched the sheet that covered Dead Onyu and then sat on the floor and began saying tehillim with their mother and their father and their grandmother and their grandfather and poor Dead Opa, who though he knew the psalms by heart could not bring himself to say any. “Onyu,” Surie whispered, her hands folded over her stomach, “if one of these babies is a girl, I will give her your name.”
Early, early, the women of the Chevra Kadisha arrived and they lifted Dead Onyu from the floor and carried her into her room and placed her on boards, and there they washed her gently and combed her hair and cleaned her nails and took off her rings and dried her and wrapped her in linen shrouds and placed her in a plain wooden box, and all the while they prayed, and Tzila Ruchel, outside, prayed, and Surie, lying on the couch, exhausted, whispered all the psalms that she knew for Faige Bruche, the daughter of Miryam Chiena, born in 1929; a girl who had avoided Nazi capture inside a cave near the Tisa; a young woman who had met her husband in a DP camp near Vienna in 1946; a mother who had borne sixteen children and raised them all to be devout Jews; a woman who had treated her like a daughter for nearly forty years and taught her how to be a good mother-in-law; a grandmother and great-grandmother who had adored her grandchildren and who had lit a candle for every single one of the close to one hundred of them each Friday night. Surie prayed that Dead Onyu’s soul would fly directly to God. That her pure and holy soul would intercede with God and make sure that the birth of the twins was easy and that the babies were healthy and that Surie wouldn’t die. She prayed that Dead Onyu’s life, next time, would be perfect.
* * *
Everyone in the community shared in the death. Death was so common, such an ordinary part of life, that it was not hidden in the way that death is hidden in the outside world. The body was not pumped full of chemicals and made up with lipstick and rouge to look as if it were alive. Throughout the community women baked bread and cakes and cookies and roasted meat and chicken and grated potatoes and zucchinis and carrots for kigelach to feed all of the people who would come to mourn the passing of Dead Onyu. The young men, Surie’s sons, went with their cousins to dig part of the grave themselves out of respect. The funeral had to be held as soon as possible in the morning because that evening at sunset Shavios would begin and the body could not be held over for three days. Tzila Ruchel and Surie called as many people as they could and asked each person to call several more, and by 10:00 a.m., despite the holiday, a crowd had formed outside the Rodney shil, the men closest to the building, the women, wearing scarves over their wigs, on the other side of the street. Did you hear that the house bucher of Rabbeini Shlita is a chusson with the daughter of Reb Shulem Modche Ashkenazy? The levaya is going to di alte chelka in Kiryas Joel. How many ir einiklach did she have? How many maidel babies? The voices of the Ruv and the Dayan floated out of the shil on loudspeakers. What a beautiful yiddishe shtib she built up. Her einiklach are all going in the way. A black van pulled up to the curb and the director of the Chevra Kadisha went into the shil with some men to carry the box downstairs, feetfirst. As the men were leaving, Dead Opa came and tried to stop them by standing in the doorway with his arms outstretched. “Don’t take her yet,” he said. “Please, please, don’t take her yet.” And he said “please” in English because for this and for many other difficult things, their family had no Yiddish words.
* * *
After the eulogies at the shil, Surie sat at home with her daughters and daughters-in-law. The neighbors had brought in low chairs and bagels and hard-boiled eggs. There was nothing to do. They were forbidden to prepare for the holiday that night. They couldn’t read a book or chatter or eat, so they just sat in silence and waited for the men to return from the cemetery. Yidel and his brothers and all of the young men had gone out to the grave site in large black cars that belonged to a community service for just such occasions. They’d had a car long ago when the children were much smaller, a monstrous old station wagon, but now they didn’t need a vehicle. Strangers had picked the family up after the eulogy at the synagogue and taken them out into the country. The cemetery was on a stony hill in Kiryas Joel, surrounded by an ugly concrete fence.
Dead Onyu’s sons would carry the plain box up the hill. Directly behind the box, Yidel would lead Dead Opa up the hill. The old man had gone out wearing a thin black cotton robe. The belt would flap at his side, undone; underneath, his shirt was ripped, from the collar to the heart. Behind the family, all of the men would walk in a long line, single file because the space between the graves was so narrow. There would be no women at the cemetery despite the fact that Dead Onyu was much beloved by those who had worked with her in school and, later, in the bikur cholim.
A red hawk flew above the river, just beyond Surie’s window, circling. When she went to the window to watch it, instead of the river, the sky, the hawk, she saw the gash in the soil where Dead Onyu would be buried. How deep it
was, how dark! She stood at the window, her heart beating raggedly. Some of Dead Onyu’s friends from the DP camp sat in the living room behind her, fingering coverless psalm books that were fat and soft from use. They murmured the words of the psalms from memory, without turning the pages, but all she heard was Dead Onyu’s voice saying, “Tell him.”
Dead Opa would speak at the cemetery and Yidel would speak and his younger brothers would speak and they would all say kaddish in ancient Aramaic for the woman who lay in the ground. Even the angels could not be jealous of the humans who had such holy words in their mouths, because angels only understood Hebrew.
And so Dead Onyu would be buried with the fresh air of the country and the blue sky of the day and the tears of her husband and her sons and grandsons falling into the dirt that they threw down on top of her. Her sons would take up shovels and strike them into the loose soil piled up next to the grave and they would fill the hole, quickly, quickly, for it was almost time for the holiday and they still had to drive all the way back to the city. Great slabs sealed the graves. Carved gray stones named those who were buried in the women’s section of the House of the Dead. Not a blade of grass grew there. Not a shrub or a flower. The wind would blow and the birds would sing. Tell him. Tell him. Outside Surie’s window, the hawk circled and circled. After Surie had walked behind the black van down Rodney and watched it turn the corner at Bedford Avenue, she’d washed her hands in the middle of the street and flapped her wet fingers in the air and only then remembered that pregnant women were forbidden from attending a funeral.
By the time the men returned home, there were many people waiting inside, ready to comfort Yidel and his siblings. They would be able to mourn for only a couple of hours before the holiday arrived and then they must all pretend to be happy, for the joy of a holiday pushes away sadness. A meal of hard-boiled eggs and bread and lentil soup had been laid out on the table. Yidel mumbled a blessing, lifted an egg to his mouth and bit off a piece, and then laid it back on the plate. He chewed and chewed, sipped from a glass of water, swallowed.
Surie was not allowed to mourn, as she was not one of Dead Onyu’s children. She could not rip her clothing. She could not sit on a low chair. Tzila Ruchel was not an official mourner either. They stood together in the kitchen, brushing at their faces. When Yidel stood up to get something from the bedroom, Surie went in after him.
“Yidel,” she said, “I have to tell you something.”
He looked right past her. His eyes were swollen almost shut. His skin was as white as paper.
“I’m pregnant.”
He didn’t respond. She searched his face for anger. There was none. But neither was there joy.
“With twins. We can name one of them after your mother.”
He still didn’t respond. She touched his arm and he shook her off. “Not now, Surie. The shiva,” he said. “It’s not appropriate.” She looked at his face. She looked at his ears. He was not wearing his hearing aids.
“Yidel!” she screamed as he pivoted and made for the door.
He turned back to look at her, frowned, put his finger on his lips, and walked out to the main room.
Hands were reaching from below the ground to drag the twins from her womb. In the cemetery, the heavy stone over Surie’s mother’s grave slid off and an unrecognizable skeleton peeled back the soil as if it were a sheet and climbed from its earthen bed and walked toward her. She closed her eyes. She wished she had not gone to the funeral. She wished Yidel had been wearing his hearing aids. She wished she could go and put her head in Dead Onyu’s lap. She was tired, so tired.
Back in the kitchen, she felt as if she were collapsing into herself. A particular powdery odor that reminded her of Dead Onyu floated on the air and made her feel ill. The machinery in the Navy Yard groaned and the boats in the river shrieked. Just outside the kitchen, her best friend from school, Breina Trabitsh, looked at her second-best friend, Yitel Moshkowitz, trying to figure out how to speak to Surie. Eventually, they whispered some brief words of comfort.
“I’m pregnant,” she said to them.
They both blinked. “Have something to eat, Surie,” Breina said, steering her toward the dining room and filling a plate.
Even though Dead Onyu wasn’t a mournable relative, Leah’le Schwimmer and Chaya Feiga Weisz, Toltzie Hirsch and Bunia Posen, Frimet Goldstein and Eidel Hornstein, former classmates, all brought trays of food and pots of soup, kissed her, and said how sorry they were. “I’m pregnant,” she said to each one.
“Don’t worry,” they said. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“One of your daughters can name a child after their great-grandmother.”
“I was full of feeling when my mother-in-law died too.”
One of her friends laughed and then put a hand over her mouth. “Surie,” she said sternly, “this is no time for jokes.”
It was very close to candlelighting time when the last woman backed away and then there was just Val left, standing in the doorway, her hands clenched together, an uncertain smile on her face.
“You’re here,” Surie said, coming toward her and putting a hand out to be shaken. Instead, Val pulled her closer and hugged her. “How did you know what happened?”
“I called your number when you didn’t come in and one of your daughters answered the phone. I thought you had decided it was too much of a risk to work with me.”
“I do not put myself on a risk when I come to the hospital,” Surie said. “It is more of a risk for my grandchildren, but what can the community do to me? I’m an old lady.” It wasn’t really true. There were so many things the community could do to her. But she would not share them with an outsider.
She was inexplicably grateful that Val had come. Someone who believed her. Someone who knew that this old, old woman was, in fact, expecting twins. Happily expecting twins. And all day, from the first moment since she’d been called out of bed, she had felt a familiar dragging in her groin. She had gone to the bathroom several times to see if she was bleeding, but she wasn’t. And yet. And yet. “I felt something today,” she said. “Down here.”
“I can check if you like.”
Yidel, his brothers, and their sons were praying the mincha prayers in the living room with a group of men from the next-door building. Yidel’s sisters were on their way to their own homes. Tzila Ruchel had taken Surie’s boys downstairs to her house. Surie led Val back to the bedroom and locked the door.
There was nothing wrong. A wave of relief ran over Surie. She hadn’t known she was holding her breath all these days, worried about the lack of movement. The midwife put a hand under her arm to help her sit up. “You’re fine,” Val repeated. “You’re definitely getting ready to have these babies, though.” Val laughed and so did Surie, but then they both abruptly broke off, remembering they were in a house of mourning. “You are probably just feeling strange because of everything. Drink more water so you don’t get dehydrated. When you cry a lot it’s easy to get dehydrated and it’s been shown to exacerbate Braxton Hicks contractions.”
They sat on the edge of the bed without talking. In the other room, the men chanted the prayers.
“When you said it might only be a risk for your grandchildren if you work for me, did you forget that you will have two new children soon? Isn’t it risky for them?”
“No,” Surie said. Then, ashamed because she had momentarily forgotten the twins: “Yes.”
The chanting rose, louder and louder, and all of the men called out, “Amein.” Surie mumbled “Amein” too.
“What could happen to them?”
How the secular world loved to dwell on the ways in which order was maintained within the community. Excommunication. Arson. Acid. The journalists couldn’t get enough dirt. Young men sentenced to prison cut off their payos so that it would not be obvious that they were Chassidic before their photographs were splashed all over the newspapers. Even in their deepest shame, they stayed loyal to their people.
If som
eone outside her family found out that she was studying to be a midwife, when the time came to enroll her children for the new school year no places would be available in all of Williamsburg. Anywhere. Yidel’s calligraphy would no longer be the most popular. No one would hire him or their sons to write a new Torah scroll. A stone would come through their front window. His beard could be forcibly cut off in the back of a moving van. Playdates would be canceled. The meat from the butcher would always be too fatty and the paper bag would tear through on the way home. The cookies would be broken and taste of bleach. The eggs would have blood spots. Marriage suggestions would dry up.
But worse than that, people might try to convince Yidel to divorce her. Though they’d both vowed never to even say the D-word, the community wouldn’t allow a bad influence to remain. They’d insist he get rid of her. Her children would be told not to talk to their mother. Her grandchildren would never see her. If it went to the secular courts, they would side with the powerful community rulers. There had been other cases in the community where women weren’t following the rules. Their hair hadn’t been shaved off, or their tights were too see-through, or their high heels made too much noise on the sidewalk, or their dresses were too tight. She’d helped drive such women out of the community. Once, it had been because the woman had sewn a skirt out of men’s old silk ties and insisted on wearing it. More often than not, the women changed their minds and followed the rules. The woman with the skirt made of ties had not. She’d been furious. That woman had done some stone throwing of her own.
Surie rocked on the edge of the bed. Why had she thought bringing that textbook home was worth the risk? The job at the hospital? The clinic suddenly seemed empty, a waste of her energy. Dangerous. She didn’t trust herself to speak. Within her, this deep dragging, a sharp, slicing pain from her rib to her hip.
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