Paper Bride

by Nava Semel

  I didn’t know if Imri sometimes thought about his father and mother, who were also my father and mother. He never mentioned them, as if they had never existed. When Aunt Miriam talked to the air, Imri ignored it. Maybe now, at this very minute, he was telling Anna what hurt him and who he missed, and he was close to her, closer even than he was to me, closer than to any other living soul in the world.

  I wanted to sleep. I wanted not to remember. I wished I could think I had gone into a movie theater and seen the wrong movie by mistake. I hadn’t meant for it to happen. I wanted somebody to believe me. God, I wanted to say I’m sorry, because I still didn’t know how to write it.

  My father was a beekeeper. My grandfather was a beekeeper. I will never be a beekeeper. I’m going to make movies.

  I was so young when it happened that I didn’t listen to the warnings. I remember my father yelling “Don’t touch!!!” but I still opened the cover of the hive. I didn’t know you had to wear a mask. It was the most wonderful feeling in the world—to do what you weren’t supposed to do. The bees burst out all at once and stung me all over my body. Sometimes I try to remember the pain, but I can’t. I was unconscious for two weeks. I almost died from the bees’ poison. Mohammed says that the poison stayed in your body forever, and it actually make you stronger, but I think Mohammed was just trying to make me feel better.

  Chapter 21

  Light is a spy that sneaks up every morning to check out the territory. First, the closest things are revealed. The house with its tiled roof that Imri hadn’t had time to repair since the last rain. The toolshed and the tin shack covered with leaves, and the castor tree that would have to be pruned soon before it spread over the whole yard.

  Then the sky becomes completely pale and a gentle mist rises from the earth, like a final yawn. I could see the water tower that overlooked the village, and further away, the English air force base. Barbed wire, pegs and posts, nails and screws. At that silent sunrise time, you could hear the soldiers going out for their morning drill. Our beehives were hidden behind some cypress trees. My grandfather had planted one of them on the day my father was born, but maybe that was just a made-up story too.

  From where I was sitting, I could see the Hawkers taking off and landing. Bugs in the sky getting into formation to chase after some unknown nectar. Maybe Major Charles Timothy Parker was at the head of the formation, leading the swarm forward.

  Then I started hearing the sounds of the people in the village, waking from their sleep and going to work. Zusia harnessed his horse to the wagon and told his wife to go to the devil; Alter started his van, hurrying the workers to the groves, as if the tangerines were plotting to run away from the trees; and the truck that delivered fresh bread to the villages in the area was parked in front of Aharonchik’s bakery. Aharonchik had already managed to tell the driver all the news from the world of the

  “Truth.”

  The birds on our trees could wake the dead. That’s what Aunt Miriam said. They were so noisy, and because of them, the chickens in our coop were already crowing. Only the Zionist duck in Zionka’s yard was still sleeping. It was very tired from the hard work of helping me that night. Even if the English plucked out all its feathers, it wouldn’t tell them where the guns were now.

  I also heard Johnny Weissmuller barking from my room, looking for me, only to discover that no one had shared his dog dreams that night in my bed.

  Early in the morning, that time when no one’s fully awake yet, I had taken Anna’s stolen candlestick out of its hiding place again, and had rolled it under my bed. Johnny was snoring.

  I’d whispered to him, “You know, Johnny, something that has a mate in the world and is still alone, always makes people suspicious.”

  Now, the whole village was awake. There were sounds coming from Zionka’s house too. Zionka was getting dressed. I waited a while on purpose, so I wouldn’t catch her without any clothes on, heaven forbid. Whenever Herzl Fleischer came to visit me, he always looked for an excuse to peek into her room from my window. Our string was hanging over my head, and the tin cans on both sides were clattering. Anna said that the telephone reminded her of Chinese wind chimes. I’d love to try the real thing, but they kept the door of the committee house locked, and it was hard to break in through the window.

  I was crouched in the same position, unable to move, absorbing the light and watching. I was part of this place, and it was part of me. I knew it so well that sometimes I couldn’t really see it, and didn’t notice the little details about it, even though I saw them every single day.

  I never stopped and looked around, the way I was doing now, to see if there was anything beautiful here, or to tell myself exactly what I loved about this place. What colors there were, and which smells and sounds stirred up a quiet humming inside me—usually the colors and smells and sounds that didn’t affect anyone else at all.

  This was the only place I would always call “mine,” no matter where I was.

  I couldn’t imagine myself living in some Polish town called Lutsk and feeling the same way.

  Now I was curious about what Anna felt when she opened the window in the morning and looked out at all of this, a sight she had seen for the first time only six months ago. I can’t believe she called it “mine.” How can she feel the way I did?

  And maybe I was wrong.

  I picked up a stone and threw it at Zionka’s window. I was a champion thrower from all my practice with the Jewish National Fund blue box. The stone hit the glass with a thud. Zionka’s curls appeared. I signaled her to go to the tin can on her side, and then climbed up the tree that grew on my side. I still wasn’t ready to go into the house. I reached inside my window, took the can, and held it next to my mouth, covering half my face, “Hello, Zionka, can you hear me?”

  “Uzik, what are you doing outside so early?” Zionka said, surprised, She knew I liked to sleep in the morning.

  “Don’t ask too many questions. I hid two pistols. In your duck pen, behind the tub.”

  “What?” Through the can now pressed up against my ear, I heard her swallow a few breaths, and it made the echo louder.

  “Don’t worry, Zionka, it’s for the sake of the homeland.”

  I quickly took the can away from my ear so the shouting wouldn’t make me deaf. Zionka always shouted when she was scared.

  “Uzik, come down immediately!”

  Aunt Miriam was shaking her fist at me. She looked really menacing this time. I slid down quickly, landing like a sack of potatoes, and I could feel the scratches on my knees.

  “Since when are you so conscientious, getting up so early for school?” Aunt Miriam had a special sense that told her when a prank was being played.

  I said I’d gone outside for some fresh air, that I didn’t feel well, and she immediately put her hand on my forehead and ordered me to open my mouth. In the end, Aunt Miriam had no choice but to believe me, but she grumbled quietly, “He probably has a reading test he wants to get out of.”

  Anna was in the kitchen. Again, I looked at her through the window. Her back was to me, but now she was dressed. All her buttons were buttoned and her hair was again rolled into a bun on the back of her neck. She was arranging the eggs she had gathered that morning in a pail. It was strange that I hadn’t seen her go out to the hen house. I’d been outside all night.

  Anna was so startled when I threw open the door that she dropped an egg. She knelt down and scrubbed the floor hard to get rid of the sticky egg white and the yolk. She didn’t say a word, not even “Good morning.” She was mute again. Maybe she’d used up all her words at night. The poison in me was coming to life. That white back, the curves of that body and those hands that touched and caressed, his body, her body, to suck honey ...

  Enough! Enough already! I heard myself screaming inside.

  Anna stood up. I saw that her eyes were red and swollen. My anger had its own voice. It would be good for beekeepers to get stung once. You had to pay a price, and I sounded to myself like on
e of the agitators who stirred up the people in Mohammed’s village. Nectar for nectar—poison for poison. There was the taste of spoiled honey in my mouth. If this was what happened after a man and women slept together, I was not going to get married. Not even “fictitiously.”

  I raced up to my room and threw myself down onto the straw carpet Mohammed and Fahtma had given me on my birthday once when we came back from the cemetery. Johnny Weissmuller drowned me with slobbery licks.

  Imri knocked on my door and came in without waiting for my permission. “I came to say goodbye. I’m going away again. What’re you doing on the floor?”

  My anger was raging. I didn’t want to answer.

  Imri knelt down. Just the way he had at night. Except that I wasn’t Anna.

  “Won’t you give me a hug, little brother?”

  You don’t have any hugs left, Imri. You gave them all to Anna.

  I avoided him by rolling over on the carpet.

  “You’re going to get married again?” I asked. “Aren’t two wives enough for you? Do you have to write a third wife’s name in your passport? You’ll be famous all over the world. Even more than Johnny Weissmuller. The man who got married more times than anyone else.”

  “You’ll understand when you’re grown up, little brother.”

  I rolled around again, and kicked him, as if by accident. I wouldn’t understand more later on than I did now. Grown up. It sounded like a dirty word.

  I said, “Did you manage to get divorced last night? Did you get a divorce on your straw mattress, or did you give one, it’s so confusing ...”

  Imri looked so fresh and healthy. Nature had gone crazy. The male bee was saved, and it was the queen who was hurt.

  He sat down on the carpet near me, plucking off pieces of straw.

  “I want to tell you a secret. Swear to me you won’t tell anyone. I trust you, Uzik. I’m not going to Europe to get married. That’s not the real reason. I’m going to buy weapons for the Jews in our homeland.”

  “You’re not going to sell our honey?”

  “No. You’re right to be angry at me.”

  I said, “So many lies.”

  Imri tried to hug me. My body was rigid.

  “We have a weapons cache in the village. I can’t tell you where. Not because I don’t trust you, little brother, but because I don’t want to put you in danger. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

  “And what about the things you do know?”

  Imri didn’t answer.

  I said, “I wish it could all be erased.”

  Your cache, Imri, is not mine. Only I and the Zionist duck know where the weapons are really hidden.

  He promised this would be his last trip. He said he made that promise to Anna too, and when he said her name, his eyes glowed. Everything would be different when he came back, he said.

  But I wouldn’t give in. “Sweet words. Why should I believe you? After all, you do everything ‘fictitiously’.”

  Imri didn’t get insulted. He pulled me to him as hard as he could. I almost choked.

  “I understand you, little brother. Alone with Aunt Miriam . it’s hard .”

  I interrupted, “I’m not alone!”

  He looked under my bed.

  “So you have a cache too,” Imri pinched me affectionately as he looked at the blue box on the door and the socks piled on top of it. He liked my target. He pulled a dirty sock from under my bed and hurled it at the box with all his strength, but he wasn’t a champion. Instead of hitting the target, he knocked the box off the nail.

  “I hope Johnny Weissmuller gets well. And make sure he doesn’t cross any fences to run after English females,” he said.

  And I replied quietly, “Or Polish ones.”

  Imri stood up. I stayed lying on the carpet. I didn’t have the strength to lift a finger. From my crooked angle, I could see the rope and the candlestick under the bed. I didn’t know if Imri had seen them. He just got up and left.

  Chapter 22

  The rabbi said that because Tonka Greenbaum refused to give her husband a divorce, he had to find a way for them to get divorced against her will. Maybe because he liked Anna, or maybe because Tonka’s refusal was a disgrace to the homeland. I had a few clever pranks I could have suggested, but Anna refused to cooperate. She said that no one had the right to interfere. Imri and Tonka had decided to get married of their own free will, so they also had to decide themselves to get divorced.

  The rabbi mumbled, “And sometimes we have to help a bit. A little push, and all the problems are solved, right

  Uziel?”

  Mohammed was lucky, rabbi. He could be married to four women at the same time. If the English ever decided to put a quota on the Arabs coming to Palestine, Mohammed could actually enter the names of four wives in his passport, for the sake of the homeland. One of these days, I’d have to find out once and for all if Mohammed’s homeland is the same as mine.

  Aunt Miriam was pouring tea for the rabbi again, the kind he liked. I’d once secretly put a few leaves from Fahtma’s garden into the kettle, and the rabbi had praised the tea so much that Aunt Miriam blushed. She took a jewelry box out of the closet and spilled onto the table a gold bracelet, a string of pearls and two wedding rings. She said to the rabbi, “This is my sister’s jewelry, may she rest in peace. Give it to that woman in exchange for a divorce,” and she didn’t mention Tonka Greenbaum’s name.

  The rabbi sighed and pushed away the jewelry. Aunt Miriam shoved the jewelry in Anna’s direction, saying that she had taken the wedding rings from my mother’s finger before she was buried. I was seven hours old then, and no one expected me to remember her. Sometimes, though, I thought I did remember something. Crawling through a dark tunnel towards a place flooded with light, hearing a great shriek, and then silence.

  I had no idea why Aunt Miriam had never sucked honey. She’d never gotten married, not even once, for the sake of the homeland, or even for her own sake. Once, I heard her tell my mother in the air that Zusia the wagoner deserved a better wife than the one he had.

  Anna returned the jewelry to the box, arranging it gently and placing my mother’s wedding ring next to my father’s. I didn’t remember them taking my father’s ring off his finger after his heart stopped beating. I had no idea how far back my memory went.

  “Some day, Uzik, you’ll give them to your wife as a gift, “ Anna said as she closed the box.

  I don’t plan to get married, Anna. Even if Zionka begs me. Because if we have a baby, she might die. How lucky the bees were. After their male dies, the newborn is left with lots of mothers.

  Imri’s queen had become an ordinary worker bee. The day after he left, Anna scrubbed the house from top to bottom. I thought she might be suffering from sugar poisoning, a disease that attacks people who suck too much honey. Maybe Imri was also suffering from it now, shaving on the deck of a ship on the way to Europe, humming stupid songs to the empty sky. I felt relieved. The rabbi said that God created man in his own image, “Male and female He created them and blessed them,” but I knew that Anna would be saved. For the time being, the danger had passed.

  Anna polished all the brass objects in the cabinet. No one had touched them in years. She straightened out all the closets, except for the closet where my mother’s clothes still hung. She washed out the hen house, threatening to douse the chickens, and she even watered the castor tree, which didn’t need water at all. The toolshed was the only place I wouldn’t let her into.

  Aunt Miriam asked her what was so urgent, and Anna said that she had to get everything done. She had to fulfill all her duties before .

  “Before what?”

  “You have to learn to at least write my name, Uzik. It’s so simple. Only four letters.”

  “What for?”

  “So that if I’m far away some day, you’ll be able to recognize the letter I send you and open it.”

  I whispered, “It’s a waste of time,” but Anna insisted. She took my hand in hers and walke
d it along the page. The pencil shook. I wanted to stop. Anna, don’t force me. If you made that second wife practice writing one word for a whole day, Tonka Greenbaum would finally surrender and beg to give Imri a divorce.

  Aunt Miriam reported to the air that Imri had gone away again. She was still hiding the fact that there was a second wife, maybe so as not to worry my mother, who was liable to think that, with so many daughter-in-laws, she wouldn’t have any grandchildren. God created the male and the female. I would’ve liked to have a few words with God, blessed be His name, about that prank of His, separating the sexes.

  I just hoped that no baby would be born. It would have two mothers, and wouldn’t know which was the real one. A child with two mothers is just as bad as a child who has no mother at all. A child is a dangerous thing altogether, Johnny. It could kill its mother without meaning to.

  But if there was a child, would I be its uncle? I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of being someone’s “Aunt Miriam.” Johnny Weissmuller, tell me please, whether Tarzan and Jane have a child in the next movie.

  If our winter was in a movie, we wouldn’t suffer from the cold. Even when terrible things happened in a movie, I felt safe and protected. Harry the hunter’s shot didn’t kill Tarzan. If it had, the movie would have ended too soon and the audience would have gotten mad. The people who made movies knew you couldn’t replace Johnny Weissmuller with someone else.

  We’d sat in the third row in the Beit Ha’Am. Imri said mockingly that it wasn’t a real theater, just four walls made of wooden planks around a large open area. He also saw mice scurrying around among the squeaky wooden chairs. He’d suggested that we go across the street to the Gan Rina cinema, where it was much more pleasant in the summer, but “Tarzan, King of the Apes” was only playing in Beit Ha’Am.

  At first, I wanted to sit in the front row, but Imri objected. It wasn’t good to sit too close, he said. I argued with him. and remained sitting alone facing the screen. But the minute the lights went off, I hurried back to sit next to him, only because I still didn’t know what to expect in that unfamiliar darkness.