by Ragen, Naomi
Chapter Six
Bow Park, Brooklyn
Monday, May 6, 2002
2:00 P.M.
LEAH RABINOWITZ HELFGOTT closed the living room windows and pulled the curtains against prying eyes. True, things were quiet this time of day, but you never knew what yenta might be passing through the streets of Boro Park looking up at windows. She pulled her robe around her and turned on the forbidden television set so frowned upon by the rabbis of the neighborhood. It was a fairly new addition to her household. Five years before, at the age of sixty-eight, she’d decided she needed a little entertainment. “At my age, what harm can it do? Will I go running to bars, start affairs with men?” she’d scolded her pious, scandalized husband, Yossi.
He was gone now—a good man—and she was left with the television and Mendel (he called himself Marco, her son) who lived Out West in yenimssvelt with the cowboys and was raising his children to be Yankee Doodles. He called twice a year. Came to visit once in a blue moon. Once, he brought her pictures of his blond wife, the cowgirl, who he claimed was a Jew from Montana (such a place had Jews?!) and his daughter Kristy (God should watch over us, such a name for a Jewish girl!) and his son Aryeh (they called him Liam—but she couldn’t remember that, so she remembered lion, and translated it into Hebrew) the skateboarder, rolling around on the streets, he should live and be well. She hardly knew them. He wasn’t a bank robber, her son, and he didn’t beat his wife. But he was a stranger to her, as strange as if he’d died, this Mendel-Marco person that had been born to her and her Yossi and brought up in the strictest tenets of their faith.
But as the Torah teaches, each man has freedom to choose his way, and her son had chosen his own. She didn’t understand it, but she couldn’t say she was angry—at least not anymore. The anger and grief had passed. There were worse things that could happen to a child.
She sat down on the couch from which the plastic slipcovers had only recently been removed. For years she’d let her thighs stick to that gluey, transparent material in the hope of keeping the impractical white upholstery clean enough to impress her guests. But a few months ago she’d realized that she didn’t have any guests. You know what the world says: when you laugh, the world laughs with you, but when you cry, you cry alone. Becoming a widow had chased most of her casual acquaintances away—the women in shul who invited them to kiddush, and expected to be feted in return; the women from Emunah who wanted her to help them fund-raise . . . And now, year after year, her close friends wound up in funeral homes, until so few were left it wasn’t worth keeping up appearances.
She took her daughter Miriam’s wedding picture off the table and dusted it a little, as she did every day. Elise looked just like her, the beautiful mother she had barely known. Such things a person has to live through. Such things in the world . . . A young mother goes to buy a coat at a factory outlet in Brooklyn one afternoon, a woman eight months pregnant with her second child, and not even late, not even dark yet! And on the way down the elevator, some animal . . . a teenager yet. He was sitting rotting in jail, a lot of good it did anyone. With her tax money, food they bought him.
She dusted off the picture, sighed and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. Elise had been a year old. Her young son-in-law Moishe had sunk into a deep grief. But she had not let that happen to her.
Perhaps, she thought, her son-in-law had been horrified at her cool acceptance. Perhaps he’d thought her cold, unfeeling, that she was able to prepare chickens and stuff peppers and check the rice kernels one by one for hidden bugs. That she had been able to wash Elise’s hair and teach her to sing Yiddish folk songs.
He had never begun to understand her, she knew. And how could she explain it to him, her nice, religious, American-born, yeshiva-boy son-in-law, so bookish and kind? There was no point, she thought, in talking, explaining, telling the old horror stories of Auschwitz. Instead, she’d let him think whatever he wanted of her. The important thing was that he raised his daughter in happiness. Because this was the only answer she’d ever found to evil: to go on living and to help others live in happiness. This was her only weapon—the one she’d used to fight all her wars. So, she’d helped to find a shidduch, a new wife, for her son-in-law—a rabbi’s unwed daughter past her prime, willing to take on a young widower and his child. And at the wedding, which she arranged and paid for, she’d danced with the rest of them. No one had seen her tears.
Elise, Elise. My pride and joy, she thought, picking up the picture album that lay next to her prayer book.
When Elise had decided to move to Israel, her father and stepmother had been horrified, but she, Leah, had been prouder than anyone had a right to be. She’d made sure Elise had money. And when Elise found her young man and invited her to the wedding in Israel, for the first time in her life she’d found the courage to get on a plane, even though for her it was the same as being strapped into the space shuttle and hurtled toward the moon. She’d been back a second time for liana’s birth, and when the new baby was born, she planned to fly in again. For the bris.
Of course it was going to be a boy. Elise already had a girl.
She turned the pages of the album. There was her son-in-law and his second wife—such a sweet girl. So nice. They’d been very happy together until Moishe’s gentle heart, finally damaged beyond repair, had given out, not long ago. If he’d only survived, he would have gotten to know his granddaughter better, perhaps even held a boy child in his arms, a grandson. She shook her head.
She had no sympathy for weakness, physical or mental, convinced that health was a decision you made, not something that happened to you. It was too easy to give up. To lie back and be a victim. So much better to choose not to be one. So much better to fight, to live and to hope.
Ever since her granddaughter had settled in Israel, she had been glued to the news reports. NBC, ABC, CNN—all those blondes with the white teeth, all those goyim in the gray suits—she had no choice but to depend on them for the latest news. Not that she believed a word they said.
It was Waldo and Emily this afternoon, and that ugly, beefy, red-faced shlub (this you put on television? Someone a little handsomer you couldn’t find?) reporting from Jerusalem. This morning they were showing aggravated Palestinians complaining about the long lines to get into Israel from the West Bank.
“Try to go on a ride in Disneyland, you’ll see long lines,” she informed the flickering images. They taught their children to be animals and murderers and blow themselves up, then were offended when people weren’t so happy to see them, wanted them to please, pick up their shirts and take off their pants to check they didn’t have ten tons of nails and a bomb in their underwear. Was that Israel’s fault? Who told them to wear explosive underwear? “You don’t want long lines? You want to walk into a country of decent people and no one should check you? Then go teach your children a little respect for human life. Why don’t you tell them that, Waldo? Shame on you!” She wagged her finger at the assorted talking heads.
She put her hand over her heavily beating heart. Dr. Rosenbloom was right. These television shows were not for her. She shouldn’t watch. She glanced malevolently at the dark screen of the Sony. Comes into my living room to kill an old Jew. Just like Hitler, she thought, walking heavily toward the china closet. She reached back past the silver candlesticks and the seven-branched menorah, taking out a silver esrog box in the shape of an ark. It was meant to hold a citron for the holiday of Succoth. So you used it maybe one week a year. The rest of the time, why should it go to waste?
She’d explained this to Joyce, the nice volunteer from Meals on Wheels who wanted to buy her one of those plastic boxes with the days of the week and times of the day on it to keep her pills. She didn’t need it. She opened the silver cover, taking out the two green pills, and the big pink one—her heart medication. She knew exactly what day of the week it was, and the time: 2:00 P.M. in Boro Park and 9:00 P.M. in Jerusalem.
They’d be getting ready for bed just as she sat down to lunch
. She wondered how Elise was feeling. But it wasn’t her day to call. She called on Thursdays to wish her a good Shabbes. She glanced at the clock, trying to calculate if Elise would maybe call her. Once a week she called, bless her, although never at a regular time, so Leah could make sure she’d be home. But it was all right. She was home most of the time. Where did she have to go since the queen of England stopped inviting her?
God should just watch over her Elise, so dangerous it was now. So dangerous. The world was full of maniacs. You had wars, millions died, and fifty, sixty years later, again you were back with the same maniacs who found joy not in winning, but in killing. Winning was only the second prize.
She headed toward the kitchen and took a glass of tap water, swallowing the pills. From the corner of her eye, she saw a roach scurry behind the stove. I have to remember to tell the cleaning girl, she thought, shaking her head. She knew where the spray was, but the truth was, she hated to kill any living thing. A fly, a bug, even a mosquito. To take away a living spirit, to crush it . . . just the idea sickened her.
Life was such a precious thing, so fragile. And to give life, the most wonderful of miracles. Such a hard time she was having with her babies, Elise, but still she remembered to call. She remembered birthdays and holidays. God bless her, God bless her. She is the light in my life, Leah thought, she and Jon and liana. Her religious grandchildren and great-grandchild in Israel. Pioneers, building a Jewish country where no one could ever knock on the door and round up Jews and ship them off to the gas. A place where Jews could defend themselves. Only lately, they weren’t doing a very good job . . .
Just thinking about her granddaughter and her husband made her heart slow into a healthy, peaceful repose. Such a good person, he was. A tzadik. The way he gave out free medical advice, not like those puffed-up American doctors in shul a person could never stop and ask a question during kiddush after Shabbes prayers; who rolled their eyes and told a person to make an appointment . . . Make an appointment! This was the only advice they gave out free . . . And they called themselves Orthodox Jews . . . Whether sugar-coated or marinated, an ignoramus is an ignoramus.
Jon was nothing like that. Such naches, her grandson-in-law, the doctor, she sighed, heading back to the now immensely comfortable couch in front of the television, her slippers shushing along the linoleum. I sound like an old lady, she thought. An old kvetch, that’s what she’d become. Could you believe it? After all the incredible horrors and miracles she’d experienced, something as banal as old age would finally do her in, sapping her life, her strength, making her—ordinary.
She smiled. Except for another member of the Covenant (closer than family, than flesh and blood), no one would ever know the terrible irony of such an end to Leah Rabinowitz of Uzhorod: a boring, peaceful old age.
Not so fast, not so fast, that was all she asked of the kindly reaper who came in the form of placid sunrises and sunsets that nipped gently away at the precious remnants of her life, spiriting away pieces no larger than grains of hourglass sand, until her life would not be drained away, as much as transported, molecule by molecule, to another form of existence.
Not that she was—God forbid!—complaining. It was a blessing to go this way, she thought. And she should know. She was a connoisseur of death, a critic, having witnessed its endless faces and forms.
The worst were those that made you suffer while you waited, helplessly, for it to be over. This was why in the camps some people considered cyanide capsules such a treasure. Better than diamonds. They gave you the power to choose, to say when the suffering would end. The worst were those that came to people who weren’t ready, who still felt life flowing through them like clear streams that could flip over boulders. To die unwillingly, with that feeling that you still had so much you wanted to do, so much that was still precious left behind, that was the worst.
Most had been spared that. They knew they had no one left to go back to. You could see it in their eyes, the light suddenly dimming, already reconciled, willing it to be over. In the camps, she could always tell just by looking at the eyes who was about to die. It had nothing to do with their weight, or disease—she had weighed forty pounds, suffered typhus and dysentery—it had to do with will; the desire to live on.
She wanted to live. She wanted to go to Israel to visit Elise and Jonathan. To bring liana bags of Hershey’s candy kisses. (They will ruin her little teeth, and stain her clothes. She shrugged. Teeth you brushed. Clothes you washed. A child needed candy.) To be at the bris for the new baby or (in the unlikely event it was a girl) to attend the party the Israelis invented, the Mesibat Bat—the Girl Party.
She already had the trip all planned. She would pray at the Kotel, and stay in a nice room in the Sheraton Plaza and overeat glatt kosher food at their Saturday buffet. Such delicious food! And so much! She would talk to her great-granddaughter, her little sabra, in Hebrew, and teach her how to say a blessing over the rain and over thunder and lightning. For everything, she thought, there is a blessing. But no one bothered to teach children that.
She felt her stomach rumble. It was always the same. The green pills you needed to take an hour before eating, but she never remembered them until she was hungry for lunch. She flipped the channels. Oprah wouldn’t be on for at least another hour.
She always spent her afternoons with Oprah. Such a good person. Not skinny, not white. She tried to help people. Overweight women, children caught in the middle of their trashy, divorced parents. Wild teenagers who gave their parents heartaches. Depressed housewives. Husbands who liked to watch dirty pictures on the computer. She always gave them good ideas, and she never made fun, although she often laughed with them, not at them (not like Jerry Springer—that disgrace to the Jewish people, such a show, such freaks). No, Oprah was sincere. You could hear that in a person’s voice. And if there was one thing Leah Rabinowitz Helfgott had imbedded in her genetic makeup like a microchip, it was a phoniness detector. Most people set it off like a five-alarm fire.
Often she felt Oprah was speaking directly to her when she told women to cheer up, to write about what was happening in their lives, about their past, in order to help them—how did she say it: “Rekindle their spirit”?
Lately, she had often felt her spirit, her neshamah, sputtering like a daylong yarzheit candle at the end of its twenty-third hour. The dark ghosts of her past often swept through the room, poking her with their annoying, inconsiderate fingers, prying loose the tears she had held back all these years; tears for her murdered parents and sister and nephew and brothers and daughter and for the grandchildren that had never been born; for the Jews of Israel, people she didn’t know, black Ethiopians and blond Russians. They were all part of her blood, and they were being murdered and harassed and frightened . . . Most of Oprah’s solutions didn’t really work for her. She’d tried jogging, but her feet began to hurt even before she crossed the street. She had tried using Oprah’s “Favorite Things,” but all those butter cookies and rich cocoa drinks clogged her plumbing. As for keeping a journal, she wasn’t much of a writer, and her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be. But she’d kept it all in her head.
That’s why making the videotape for the Shoah Foundation, that movie director, that Spielberg, was such a good idea. That nice girl had asked the questions and a man had filmed everything, making a movie. After Leah had gotten over her disappointment that Spielberg himself wasn’t going to be directing, it had all worked out fine. Often, early in the morning, she would watch the tape. She looked old and overweight, she thought, her face bloated and angry, not like herself at all. But sometimes she was surprised and secretly pleased at the things she heard herself say, things that brought back such memories. She slipped it in now. She had an hour to kill until she could eat or watch Oprah. She pressed play, staring at the screen, listening to herself describe the house in Uzhorod surrounded by woods and fields; the visit of the tzadik of Munkatsch who had come with his whole yeshiva and raised his hands above her head in blessing; her fath
er baking Passover matzohs for the village, his beard dusted with flour; baby Shmilu’s blue sun hat left in her hands when Mengele sent him and her sister left, and her right . . . And Esther, Maria, and Ariana, who had been with her in Auschwitz, saving her life countless times. Her three block shvesters, closer than sisters of flesh and blood, united forever by their experiences and their Covenant vows . . .
Never liked to talk about it. What was the point? Like opening a sewer cover, allowing all the filth, the degradation to send up its stench to pollute her life and the lives of those she loved. But now the world had gone mad again, denying the past, claiming the facts were not facts but a deliberate lie or an exaggeration. And people were such ignoramuses that they actually listened. If we don’t open our mouths now, before we die, then we let the liars win, she’d told the others.
Esther was making her tape now, already planning the big party they’d have when all four tapes were done. She shook her head fondly. Esther and her big cosmetics company and her big parties, her Hollywood parties. Like Zsa Zsa, with all that fancy makeup and the fancy clothes. But maybe it would be fun. She hadn’t seen Ariana or Maria for years. A reunion, to see what it had all come to, all their struggles for life; where they’d all ended up, close to the end of their incredible journey.
She didn’t add: and if it had all been been worth it.
She heard the phone ringing. For no reason, a small dart of fear pierced her calm and she thought, without hesitation: Elise.
Chapter Seven
Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem
May 6, 2002
11:40 P.M.
“BUBBEE?” ELISE WHISPERED. “I need to talk to you.”
The effect of the sedatives still coursing through her veins gave her a sense of floating on water. She looked at her watch. It was almost midnight. Why did I do this? she thought, listening to her grandmother’s urgent stream of exclamations and questions. She was filled with sudden panic. So many people had offered to make this call for her: her neighbors from Maaleh Sara, Jon’s friends from the hospital, the sweet young social worker from the army, a very nice English-speaking policeman . . . So many people were out there wanting to help, her doctors told her. There was a news blackout, but of course everyone knew anyhow.
