Invisible City

by Julia Dahl

  “They really can’t speak English?”

  “Most can, but many—the elderly and children, for example—have trouble. For boys, their general education ends at eleven or twelve. Then they begin Torah instruction, which is conducted in Yiddish.”

  “And the city is okay with that?”

  “The city tends to stay out of religious education.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then they marry. They find a job, usually within the community. As a teacher, or a clerk. Many Hasidim own property, so real estate management.”

  “What about the girls?”

  “It is different for the girls.”

  “Obviously.”

  Saul looks at me. I’m not used to being around people who are so serious. I think I’ve hurt his feelings.

  “Sorry, it just seems a little weird.”

  “No, no,” he says, again. Then he pauses and smiles. “You look like your mother but …”

  “But what?”

  “You are very different.”

  “How?” He’s set my stomach off. I squirm in my seat.

  “She was not, not so … I think you are smarter than she is.”

  It’s not what I expected him to say. I look at him, but he keeps his gaze forward. We’ve left Gowanus and are headed south toward Borough Park. I’ve never thought about how I stacked up to my mom intellectually. I feel more proud than offended, which is what I’m sure Saul meant for me to feel, but I’m frustrated by my complete inability to add anything to a discussion I would love to have. Was my mother smart? I have no idea.

  “You said ‘is.’ Is she alive?”

  “Your mother?” Saul sounds surprised. “You don’t …? I’m sorry.” He feels bad, I realize immediately. Like it took him until this moment to realize that she really did disappear from our lives twenty-two years ago. “Her family moved upstate near Kiryas Joel many years ago.”

  Kiryas Joel is the name of the town in the Catskills where a sect of super-Orthodox Hasids live. I’ve read about it. The articles said it was pretty bad: Rabbis having to see women’s “clean” panties to certify they were off their periods and thus safe to re-welcome into society. Average family size triple, quadruple the rest of us. Most people on food stamps. One article said it was the poorest town in America.

  “Do you still see her?”

  “No,” he says. He’s not exactly wistful, but almost. “The last time I saw your mother was more than twenty years ago, just before she moved to Israel.”

  “She was in Israel?” Now that’s news.

  Saul nods. “The Kagans have family there. Two great-uncles chose Jerusalem over Brooklyn after the war. I got the sense that it was to be a fresh start for her.”

  “Another fresh start,” I say. “I think me and my dad were supposed to be a fresh start, for a while.”

  “Do you keep in touch with your mother?”

  His question surprises me, and then pisses me off.

  “You’re kidding, right? For all I know, she got hit by a bus ten minutes after leaving us. I actually had myself convinced she was dead for like, a good few years. It was almost comforting. Until I realized that if she was really dead, I’d probably have heard about it. Then for a while I thought she was alive because, somehow, I’d just know if she was dead. Then, I started thinking she could be, like, dead in a ditch somewhere, and I’d never know. I totally imagined her trying to get back to me, and being murdered. But that was bullshit.”

  “You are very angry with your mother.”

  “I think I have a right to be.”

  “Your mother—”

  “Hold on,” I say. “If you’re about to tell me how fucking great Aviva Kagan was, and how she was just so tortured by her family and their ridiculous idea of God that she had to abandon her child—you can save it.” The last few words are a croak. I take a deep breath. I’ve been in therapy on and off for years and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to take a deep breath. As many as possible. “You just don’t leave your child. Unless you’re cruel. And maybe she was cruel.” I’m shaking now. My chest feels on the verge of emitting a laugh, a sob, and my breakfast all at the same time. Deep breath.

  Saul signals and pulls the car over after the next light. We’re in front of a fire hydrant on a residential street. Traffic is light.

  “Rebekah,” says Saul slowly. “Your mother was a weak woman. She was vibrant and creative and beautiful and willing to take risks. She changed a room when she walked in it. But she could not tolerate pain. Her spirit broke easily, and often catastrophically. The gossip was drugs, but I have no proof of that. I believe your mother was sick. A mental illness, perhaps. She just couldn’t make it work for herself. And of course no one wanted to marry her after she came back. I think that was what Israel was supposed to be. Find a groom far enough away he won’t mind a little …”

  “Backstory.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But she came back?”

  “Yes.”

  “And disappeared again, right?”

  Saul nods.

  I puff an exasperated exhale.

  “It must be have been very difficult,” says Saul.

  “It was, Saul,” I say, feeling like I know him all of a sudden. I look at him and he is looking at me. He’s almost smiling, and suddenly I realize how grateful I am to be looking at someone who knew her. Someone other than my father for whom the woman who is my mother is a real person. “It was very difficult. It was always there.”

  Saul nods. “I know many young women like her—and men, too. It is not always a natural fit, this life, and there are harsh consequences for failing to conform. Your mother didn’t fit. And she hated herself—and the world—for it.”

  I don’t know what to say. I suppose that makes sense. I wonder if Rivka Mendelssohn fit? I close my eyes a moment, then open them.

  “We can go now,” I say. “I’m fine.”

  Saul checks his mirrors and pulls out into the street.

  “I didn’t know Orthodox Jews could be cops,” I say after a few blocks. “I mean, you can’t go by all the rules, right?”

  “My religious life doesn’t affect my work as much as you might think,” he says. “But I do not live the strict lives many others in the community live.”

  “You rebelled.”

  Saul looks cross. “I hate that word. It sounds so adolescent. I endured a marriage that was very unhappy and which brought pain to myself and many others. Including my son. Because of all this, I was moved to alter my way of life, but not to turn my back on my heritage or my God. It was a very long process. And I know you meant nothing by it, but the word upsets me.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” I say, trying to apologize without actually apologizing.

  “What were we talking about?”

  I laugh. “Before your outburst or mine?”

  Saul chuckles, too. Neither of us can remember. We ride in silence again for a while. Finally, Saul pulls over alongside a small park.

  He turns off the engine and looks at me.

  “There will be a funeral for Rivka Mendelssohn later today. But before she is buried, I’d like you to see her body.”

  We walk in silence for several blocks, past quiet brick homes and small apartment buildings. “I know it’s cold,” says Saul, finally. “I’m sorry. It is Shabbos. I can’t be seen driving.”

  “You can’t be seen? By who?”

  “By anyone,” he says. “By the community.”

  “So you, like, pretend to be observant?”

  “It is important that I have the trust of the people in the community,” he says. “I am observant. But not so much as some.”

  I wait for him to explain further, but he does not.

  After about ten minutes, we reach the funeral home, a large low building with a parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. There is one entrance marked for men. Another for women. We enter through the women’s door and stand in a kind of vestibule. Saul s
peaks in a hushed voice.

  “When a Jew dies, the family receives the body almost immediately. Tradition forbids embalming or extracting part of the body, which is what the medical examiner would do. And the deceased is to be buried as soon as possible, usually within twenty-four hours. If today was not Shabbos, she would have been buried this morning. Instead, the service will be after sundown.”

  “But it’s a homicide.”

  “Yes,” says Saul. “But again, there is pressure from the family and the community to have the body buried.”

  “Are you telling me that Rivka Mendelssohn is going to be buried without an autopsy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that even legal?” I ask, dumbfounded. How could the police even begin trying to figure out who murdered her if they don’t examine her body?

  “There is no law that says there must be an autopsy done on a body. That is entirely up to police discretion. And in a case like this, when a member of the ultra-Orthodox community is dead, the police have been known to defer to the wishes of the family, or whoever is representing them. The Hasidim vote, and most vote for who their rebbe tells them to vote for. In Brooklyn, the ultra-Orthodox vote can mean the difference between being the current or former district attorney, or city councilman. And if a powerful man like Aron Mendelssohn calls the rebbe and the rebbe calls someone in the DA’s office and asks him to tell the precinct commander to let Chesed Shel Emes take a body, the precinct commander may let that body go.”

  “Who?”

  “Chesed Shel Emes. They are a privately funded group—some with schooling in mortuary science. Jewish law says that every drop of blood and strand of hair of the deceased should be buried with him. Officially, they prepare the dead for burial. They come to crime scenes and clean up, and then cleanse the body to make it pure.”

  “They destroy evidence.”

  “That is one way to look at it.”

  “I saw them take her away, from the yard. The M.E. and this other van, with Hebrew letters drove up at the same time. The … Chesed … they ended up taking her.”

  “Yes. And they brought her here.”

  I am about to say that this arrangement seems utterly fucked, and ask Saul how many other special interest groups get to keep bodies from the authorities after violent crimes, when a woman walks in. She is probably in her late thirties, and she’s wearing a white coat. She is petite, small-boned, and, I realize, wearing a wig. I don’t think I would have noticed that it was a wig yesterday, the deep brown hair looks very natural, cut in a bob and parted on one side with bangs that sweep across her forehead. But now that I have the idea in my head that ultra-Orthodox women wear wigs, it’s easy to see that it’s not really her hair. It’s a little too shiny, and the place where the part meets the bangs seems too perfectly perpendicular. She says something in Yiddish to Saul, and Saul responds back in English.

  “This is my cousin’s daughter,” he says, gesturing toward me. “She is considering police work. Rivka, this is Malka Grossman.”

  “Hello,” I say. Why is Saul lying?

  Malka nods. “If you want to view her, we should hurry,” she says to Saul. “Her family will be here by four o’clock.” I glance at my watch. It is two thirty.

  “Please,” says Saul.

  We follow Malka through a door, down a hallway, and into a small room, where she directs us to don paper hats and paper booties. While Malka is out of earshot, I ask Saul why he referred to me as Rivka.

  “Rivka is Hebrew for Rebekah,” he says.

  “I know that,” I say.

  “Malka won’t feel comfortable speaking to you unless she thinks you grew up in the community.” I decide not to argue and we descend a narrow set of stairs into the basement, where a body, covered with a white cloth, lies on a table. A young woman is sitting on a chair beside the body. She is praying. Malka says something to the woman in Yiddish and she leaves without acknowledging us. Saul and I keep our coats on.

  “I never allow a man to view a woman’s body. But your cousin is a friend to our family. And I hope he can help the police find who did this. Rivka Mendelssohn was a good woman.”

  Malka pulls down the shroud over Rivka’s body, and the first thing I think is that she looks dry. At crime scenes, there are fluids. Bodies leak when damaged. But here in the basement of the funeral home a day after being found, Rivka Mendelssohn’s shredded skin looks like someone has painted a coat of polyurethane on it. The gashes torn into her legs, her arms, her belly, her neck have been cleaned out. The flesh bunches against the deepest wounds, creating wrinkles. The smaller ones, the scratches, are red, but bloodless. Where there are no open wounds, her pale skin is covered in bruises; clouds of purple and blue and red and yellow. If Malka told me she had been attacked by wolves, I would have believed her.

  Saul begins to speak. “This looks like blunt force trauma, here and here.” He points to Rivka’s head. You can see the skull wounds clearly because she has no hair. Someone has, mercifully, closed her mouth.

  Malka is silent and Saul continues. “It looks like she was hit multiple times, very hard, on the back of the head.” Malka, as if on cue, lifts Rivka’s head slightly and turns it, pointing to one particularly devastating wound just above her left ear. “See the blows to the neck? Here and here. They seem to be both pre- and postmortem.”

  “She did not die easily,” says Malka.

  I can’t speak. What is happening inside my chest is not anxiety. It is the low rumble of a feeling I thought I might have outrun: sadness. Heavy, weeping sadness pulling at the corners of my mouth, tightening around my throat. Rivka Mendelssohn was about my height and weight, but lying on the table she seems tiny. Like a child. She has an old scar, maybe from a cesarean birth (or two), just below her belly button. I remember reading Catch-22 in high school and getting to the end where Snowden, the airman who gets shot, “spills his secret,” and his secret is literally his guts. Man is matter. Drop him out a window and he will fall. Set fire to him and he will burn. Something like that. I always remembered those lines. To me it felt like a carpe diem thing. Like, you’ve got this body, this life, and it’s all you’ve got. But looking at Rivka Mendelssohn I think maybe he meant it more literally. Rivka Mendelssohn was a woman, and then, suddenly, she was a pile of meat and bones. And it didn’t take a war to do it. If I had a bat, I could have done it myself.

  “I’ve seen bodies in worse condition,” says Malka. “But usually in deaths involving motor vehicle accidents. See these?” She points to marks on her wrists. “I’m not certain, but she may have been restrained.”

  My phone rings. I dig into my pocket to silence it, but my hands feel light, and as I pull it out I drop it onto the concrete floor. It bounces twice and lands beneath Rivka. I drop to my knees to retrieve it. UNKNOWN—it’s probably the desk, though I don’t know why they’re calling me. I flip the switch to silent and put the phone back in my pocket. Malka looks uncomfortable; she glares at my phone. If I were really named Rivka, I think my phone would be off for the Sabbath.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “I know this would just be an opinion,” says Saul, “but might you be willing to entertain a scenario?”

  Malka nods.

  “Rivka, perhaps you should write this down,” says Saul. I nod and dig into my bag for my notebook. My hands are trembling. “Based on what I see, my opinion is that Rivka Mendelssohn was struck from behind and knocked down. See her hands, and knees.” He points to Malka, who obliges, gently lifting Rivka’s left hand. She turns it over to reveal broken fingernails and scratching. She sets it back down and lifts the other. The knees, I can see, are scratched and bruised, though so is the rest of her.

  “The wounds to the head and neck look pre-mortem. If I had to guess at a cause of death, I would probably say cerebral hemorrhage due to repeated head trauma. But obviously I can’t be sure. Much of the rest—especially the bruising and ripping in the skin—seems to be postmortem. It is possible that much of this came from
the … material in which she was found.”

  He means the mountains of steel.

  “What are these?” I ask, pointing to deep skids on Rivka’s bald head.

  “It appears as if her hair was freshly shorn,” says Malka.

  Saul nods. “I’d say those are from a straight razor or a knife with a very sharp blade.”

  I start to conjure pictures of what happened to Rivka Mendelssohn in my mind. Someone ties her up. Then shaves her head. Then kills her. Then takes off her clothes and drives her to the scrap metal yard and throws her in. That is some sick shit.

  We all stand silently for a few moments. If I focus on the injuries—the torn flesh, the bruised skull—I can trick myself into thinking that the body lying before me is some kind of science project: just a cadaver ready to be cut open and explored by medical students or researchers. But when I look at her feet, the second toe longer than the first and the remnants of polish on her toenails, her breasts fallen flat and crooked against her chest, I see a mother who bore four children and breast-fed them. I see a woman bent over in a bathroom, painting her toenails. Did she have to keep that secret? Are ultra-Orthodox women allowed such adornments? I have the urge to touch her, just to make sure this is all real. Three hours ago I was eating a breakfast sandwich and watching Goldie Hawn yell at Kurt Russell.

  Finally, Malka speaks.

  “And she was pregnant. I’d say about twelve weeks.”

  “Fuck,” I say.

  Saul and Malka both look at me.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I just … so the police really aren’t going to see her?”

  Neither Saul nor Malka answers my question.

  “If that’s all …,” says Malka, “The service is at six.”

  “Thank you, Malka,” says Saul. “You’ll keep this visit between us?”

  Malka nods.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Saul and I strip off our hats and booties in silence. In the entryway, I check my phone and see two more missed calls from the desk.

  “Do you need to return that call?” he asks.

  I nod. “It’s work.”

  “Better take it outside.”