The Ninth Day

by Ruth Tenzer Feldman

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. How was I ever going to get enough money for the music festival trip? I heard the bathroom door close. Too tired to argue, I went back to bed.

  By 8:30, Dagmar pronounced herself presentable for municipal judgment. She had surrendered her breasts to the bra Mom had made her wear to the funeral, and she wore the same blouse and skirt. Army boots instead of those beautiful Capezios.

  ”W-what about the n-n-new shoes?”

  ”They are so totally not my style, Hopeless. Combat boots work better when you have to face the enemy, don’t you think? Wish me luck.” She smothered me in a hug on her way out. “Tell the parents I had an early class.”

  ”Dagmar is up to something again,” Dad said, when hunger drove me upstairs for breakfast. “President Kerr called an assembly of the faculty and students at the Greek Theatre for eleven o’clock. Morning classes are cancelled.”

  Heading for an apricot Danish someone must have brought us, I debated whether to tell my father about Gabriel asking me to go to the Greek Theatre with him. I still wasn’t sure whether to accept Gabriel’s non-date date. As a Berkeley High student, I had no business getting involved in campus politics. If Mr. Zegarelli found out, he could ban me from the music festival. But it would feel marvelous to be with Gabriel again, even if only for a little while.

  Dad sipped his coffee. “I’m staying home, of course. Your mother needs me.”

  We sat quietly together, until I stopped in mid-chew, my stomach suddenly unwilling to accept another bite of pastry. Two beats later, my brain registered what my gut already knew. As much as I wanted Gabriel, someone else needed me. I had to get back to Paris. Now.

  I dumped my half-eaten Danish in the garbage.

  ”Miriam Hope, have some protein at least. A slice of lox.”

  ”S-sorry,” I said. “I-I j-just…I-I…I-I’ll be b-back s-s-oon.”

  As I raced downstairs, I heard him ask me where I was going. I pretended not to hear. It’s complicated.

  ”Mon Trésor’s circumcision is today, isn’t it?”

  Serakh sat on the floor near my bed. “This very morning. Last night the rabbi and Madame Léa gave a feast in their home, where the brit milah will be. The women have prepared a beautiful garment for the baby. Today Avram sees his son for the first time.”

  ”Maybe Avram will break his vow when he sees Mon Trésor.”

  ”Perhaps.”

  Wishful thinking. Inhale. Slow release.

  ”There is weariness in your face, but determination in your eyes,” she said. “Have you found all the answers you seek?”

  ”Ha! Not a chance. Not even close.”

  She didn’t say anything, but we both knew. I stood up and squared my shoulders. “I have to do something anyway today, don’t I? We’re running out of time.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Celeste ushered us into the kitchen. The large wooden table had been scrubbed clean, and judging from the stains on Celeste’s gown, it was easy to see who had done the scrubbing.

  ”Thank the Holy One, blessed be He, that you are here. My mistress has been asking for you since dawn. Tante Rose took Mon Trésor to Madame Léa’s to prepare him for the brit milah. Tante Rose told my mistress to rest here until the baby returns, but my mistress will not.”

  Celeste looked toward the stairs. “If you please, sit by the table.” She was gone before my bottom hit the stool.

  My heart pounded in my throat. “Dolcette must be frantic.”

  Serakh smoothed my headscarf. “We will tell her that perhaps we have a plan.”

  ”Giving Avram a dose of my sister’s LSD is not a plan. It’s a recipe for disaster.”

  She arched her eyebrows and pursed her lips. I shook my head and was about to explain the dangers again, when I heard Dolcette and Celeste on the stairs. Dolcette grasped Celeste’s arm for support as Celeste guided her to a stool.

  ”You look beautiful,” I told Dolcette, despite her ashen face and bloodshot eyes. She wore a pale blue dress with long flowing sleeves and embroidery around the bodice.

  ”My wedding dress.” Her hands slid over and under themselves on her lap, as if comforting each other. “I must go to the brit milah and see Avram. Surely the feel of our baby in his arms will tell him that his vow comes from a place of evil, not the will of the Holy One, blessed be He. I will take Avram and our son to a quiet spot, and I will plead once more. If my beloved will not renounce his vow, I will give Mon Trésor to you.”

  I glanced at Celeste.

  ”She knows,” Dolcette said. “Celeste is more than my servant. She is my trusted friend. She and Shmuel have done all they can.”

  ”Shmuel? From the bakery?”

  Dolcette closed her eyes and shuddered. “Celeste, you tell them. I can’t bear to.”

  Celeste cleared her throat. “You have heard of Madame Juliane, the wife of the herbalist?”

  ”The woman with the willow bark tea,” I said.

  Celeste nodded. “Madame Juliane was sure that an infusion of horehound would lower the black bile of our dear Avram and drive away the evil that bedevils him. The monks at Saint Étienne gave Madame Juliane’s husband the leaves. She made the infusion on the feast day of Saint Adélaïi;de, exactly one hundred years after the day of Saint Adélaïi;de death. Madame Juliane said this was propitious, because Saint Adélaïi;de had been the empress of the Holy Roman Empire and her daughter the queen of France, and the royal families have been good to us Jews.”

  Saint &Éacute;tienne. Those must be the church bells I heard. I remembered now that Notre Dame Cathedral wasn’t finished until the fourteenth century. I was in Paris at least two hundred years too early.

  Celeste put her hands to her lips. I smiled encouragement and waited, because you have to give people time to tell a story their way.

  “Avram has stayed with Shmuel since the birth of Mon Trésor,” Celeste continued. “I gave the infusion to Shmuel, and I told him that this would cure Avram’s melancholy. I said nothing of the vow. That would be too great a burden for him.” Meaning he’d tell everybody and who knows what would happen.

  Celeste sighed and shook her head. “It was yesterday, during their Shabbat meal together. Shmuel put the infusion in Avram’s wine. After a moment, Avram spit out the wine and threw the goblet across the room. He cursed Shmuel. Horrible curses I will not repeat. He accused Shmuel of trying to poison him. And then he cried and said that he wished Shmuel had given him poison because his burdens were so heavy. Shmuel says that Avram’s melancholy has gotten worse.”

  Dolcette grabbed Serakh’s robe. “Have I sinned? Is horehound a cure for Christians and a plague for Jews?”

  Serakh brushed a strand of hair from Dolcette’s face. “This plant does not know the faith of the person who partakes of it. Be calm now. You have not sinned.”

  Horehound. Was LSD a better solution? I stood there, my fingers rubbing a knot of wood on the table.

  ”If Avram refuses to renounce his vow, then tomorrow I will surely sin,” Dolcette said. “Tomorrow, after Mon Trésor is safe with you, we will take a bundle to the river. Later Celeste will testify that the baby and I slipped in the mud and fell in. She will say that I recovered, but that the Seine took Mon Trésor away, out toward the sea. Only she and I—and you—will know that my child will be like the baby Moses. He will survive. Maybe one day he will return to Paris, and I will see him again.”

  I bit my lip. Serakh touched my shoulders. “Tikvah has another plan. It is filled with great risk, but it offers hope that you will keep both Avram and your son.”

  I shook my head. Serakh shouldn’t have spoken for me. I wasn’t ready.

  Dolcette’s hands fluttered to her face. Her eyes grew wide. “Oh, Celeste, what did I tell you? Our prayers have been answered!”

  Celeste rushed first to Dolcette
, then to Serakh and me, crushing us in a tear-filled embrace. How could I disappoint them now?

  I touched the right side of my face, where the bandages itched. “Dolcette, my plan will work best if I know what Avram saw that caused him to make this vow.”

  Dolcette shivered.

  Serakh squatted by Dolcette. “Tell us, child. What was his vision?”

  Tears streaked down Dolcette’s cheeks. “I begged Avram to reveal the vision to me,” she whispered. “At first he refused, but I gave him no rest.” She took a shuddering breath.

  ”Avram told me he was in a farmer’s field under an apple tree. He heard heavenly music but he could see no instruments. He looked up into the tree. The apples dripped with blood. And then a winged messenger from the Holy One, blessed be He, hovered over Avram with a bloody apple in each of her hands. She called out to him ‘Avram, Avram’ and he answered ‘here I am.”

  ”Hineini,” Serakh said, translating “here I am” into the Hebrew word in the Torah from the story of Abraham and Isaac.

  Suddenly it all fit. Avram had conjured up a cruel distortion of the Abraham and Isaac story, the binding story, the Akedah passage from Genesis. I’d read that story every year on the High Holidays. But hadn’t the story ended with Isaac safe? I felt my shoulders relax. For a moment I imagined that Avram expected an angel would stop him at the last minute, the way it happened in Genesis. It might be easier than I thought to convince him to spare Mon Trésor.

  Wishful thinking. If this were the case, Avram would have told Dolcette. More likely Avram believed that sacrificing his son would somehow restore the exiled Jews to Jerusalem, or sanctify God’s name, or whatever. A preposterous, revolting idea, but then I didn’t live in the Middle Ages, and I hadn’t witnessed the horrors that Avram must have seen in Mainz.

  ”Tikvah? Please. What are you thinking? Tell me. Is Avram possessed?”

  I couldn’t add to Dolcette’s agony, so I managed to give her a comforting smile. “I am thinking of possibilities. Let’s go to the brit milah. We will find out more there.”

  The overcrowded main room in the rabbi’s house smelled of garlic. I gagged on the collective body odor and longed to be outside. Dolcette introduced us as her mother’s friends from Falaise. We gave vague answers to a few polite questions and soon the people there ignored us, which was fine with me. Serakh and I stayed together toward the back of the group of a dozen or so people, while Dolcette and Celeste left through a small door to another room.

  Later, Avram entered through that same small door. He cradled his sleeping son in his arms and nodded to his neighbors. Avram’s face could have been cast in stone. There was no life behind the thin smile and dull eyes. He looked like a zombie. Dolcette walked beside him, just as pale and deathlike as he.

  I squeezed my way closer to the front of the room. Leather-bound books were stacked on a low wooden shelf next to two silver candlesticks, a small silver goblet, and a silver filigreed box with a lid. Avram handed a beautifully dressed Mon Trésor to the rabbi’s wife, who placed him on an exquisitely embroidered pillow resting on the lap of an older man with a leathery face and flowing white beard. Avram chanted Hebrew blessings. Another man stepped toward them, his back to me. A moment later the baby wailed.

  I winced. Everyone around me smiled and murmured their approval at the loss of a baby’s tiny foreskin—his official entrance into the covenant of Abraham. Mon Trésor was now a member of the Jewish community.

  I turned toward the back of the room. And that’s when I saw my grandfather.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  I blinked and looked again. No. I was wrong. This man’s ears were larger than Grandpa’s and his eyes a deeper brown. His face didn’t melt or his chin sprout dandelions. Nothing crazy. Not a flashback. Simply the sad duet of memory and grief.

  The old man was holding a goblet of what I assumed was wine, perhaps the same Manischewitz type of wine that my grandfather loved. That I’d served to Grandpa, what? Two days ago? Three?

  No matter which kosher wines Mom brought back from Israel, Grandpa always insisted on the Manischewitz wine you could buy at Andronico’s supermarket. I wondered if Grandpa’s father served this type of sweet red wine when Grandpa suffered through his circumcision in Bialystok.

  Tears blurred my vision.

  Serakh wrapped her woolen cloak around me and led me outside. “Surely you have been to a brit milah before. The baby will soon recover.”

  A damp wind blew in from the Seine. “It’s not that. I was just thinking about my grandfather. He was such a brave man.”

  Serakh huddled against the cold. “Ephraim had a family. He did his best to protect them.”

  I told her about the Bialystok pogrom, when Grandpa cut off the fingers of his dead brother-in-law and risked so much to bring his sister and her children to America. “I could never be that brave.”

  ”How can you say that? To overcome your fears, is that not bravery?”

  Before I could answer, Serakh cocked her head and then put her finger to her lips. She led me around the corner of the rabbi’s house. “Look there,” she whispered. “We must hide.”

  We ducked into a doorway, and she wrapped the cloak around us both. It hardly mattered. Dolcette and Avram looked so involved with each other and their baby that they would have ignored a parade. Dolcette held their baby against her breast, and Avram had wrapped his arms around them both. She buried her face in his chest. He kept kissing Dolcette on the top of her head, his face twisted in anguish.

  I touched my lips and remembered Dad enveloping Mom and me when Mom got home. Love, pure and simple; a bond so deep and so fragile. I struggled to listen to the voices inside screaming at me to take the safer way out and rip this baby from his parents. But how could I? As I watched these two lovers clinging to each other in the muddy snow, with their child nestled between them, I thought about my grandfather, about Chayim’s wedding ring, and what it means to risk everything. I knew that I had to give Dolcette, Avram, and Mon Trésor one more chance to be a family.

  I sat with Serakh on a fallen limb in the grove of trees by the river. Sunlight warmed my back. “Avram’s hallucination about the angel and the bloody apples is based on the Akedah story,” I told her, although I realized she understood this already. “The binding of Isaac. This vision of his is a gross distortion, but there’s a link.”

  I collected a handful of twigs and started to break them, one by one.

  Serakh nodded. “The Akedah is a powerful image for a pious man.”

  My head pounded. “Exactly. So Avram needs an equally powerful image to make him change his mind.”

  ”An angel,” Serakh said. “He must see an angel who will make him vow not to harm his son.”

  I rolled my head from side to side, trying to ease the tension in my shoulders.

  ”You would make a perfect angel, Serakh,” I said. “You could appear in a blue flash the way you do. Avram will be so astonished he’ll do anything you ask. He’ll make a new vow never to harm his son. Then you could disappear in another flash of blue. It’s as simple as that.”

  Two beats of silence. Then Serakh put her hand on my knee. “You are right, my dear friend. That is simple. But surely you see now that Avram needs you. You shall be our angel.”

  No. My stomach cramped. “That’s not going to work.” I frowned, digging for arguments to bolster my gut reaction. “Avram knows me too well from the bakery. I’m not magical like you. I wouldn’t know what to say. I wouldn’t be convincing.”

  Serakh’s voice was smooth and even, barely above a whisper. “I have heard you sing to the baby. Your tone echoes with the divine. But you are afraid.”

  I bent and twisted a greenish twig that refused to snap. “Of course I’m afraid. That’s not the point.”

  Serakh took my hands in hers. “Avram has seen me as well. My blue flash will frighten him
. He will think I am a witch or a conjurer. He will think I am the devil luring him away from what he believes must be done.”

  I shook my head.

  ”If you are Avram’s angel, then I can watch from nearby,” Serakh said. “I can rescue Avram in an instant if he falls into danger. I have been guided to you. You must give Avram your potion so that he does not see you as yourself. You must present to him in your beautiful voice the vision that speaks to his soul and guides him in the path that will save him. In your heart you know this to be true.”

  ”I don’t know how much of a dose to give him.”

  ”This is so.”

  ”I don’t know what words to use.”

  ”This is so.”

  ”The dreidel I gave Avram only made him more determined to kill Mon Trésor. My angel idea might be another terrible mistake.”

  ”This is so.”

  Serakh leaned over and kissed my forehead. “But still you will be Avram’s angel. You will use your potion and your powers. Now you must go back to your spot on the olam to rest and gather what you will need. Avram would not harm his child on the day of the brit milah, nor will he make a sacrifice after sunset. Shall I meet you in Ephraim’s room just before dawn?”

  I nodded. What more was there to say except the obvious? So many things could go horribly wrong. When you fight fire with fire, your whole world could go up in flames.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  After Serakh left, Sylvester refused to come out from a pile of Dagmar’s clothes. Midmorning light streamed through the window. This wasn’t right. Hadn’t I just spent half a day in Paris? My head throbbed.

  I stared at my alarm clock—10:05, Berkeley time and place, Monday. I’d already gotten Dagmar ready for the arraignment. Gabriel picked her up at 8:30. He was coming back for me at 10:30. For me. Yes. Time flexed in my crazy world, and I could make time, still, to be with him.