River

by Shira Nayman

  “What’s that?” I asked, nodding toward the envelope.

  “It’s a letter my mother got from her brother and his family in Lithuania, more than two years ago. It was the last time we heard from them. They asked us to pray for them.”

  “What happened to them?”

  For a moment, Darlene’s face went blank. She sat on the end of my cot, then opened the envelope and pulled out a sheet of paper. She spread it open and began reading—in yet another new language, which I think was Yiddish. Miraculously, again, I understood every word.

  Dearest Sarah,

  You can’t imagine what’s happening here. We scarcely believe it ourselves. Nazi soldiers are everywhere. People are being taken away. They just disappear—we hear terrible things about shootings in the forest. We have to leave our house, it is being taken, like the property of all Jews. We do not know where we will go. We will bring Chaya’s mother, who is eighty-three. How on earth will she survive?

  We don’t know what to do with Latka, our dog. He’s been a member of our family for five years. Lord knows how, but we’ve managed to keep him fed in these dreadful times—bits of fat and bone—though he is very thin.

  I do not know if this letter will reach you. I will try to give it to the postal clerk. We were friends, once.

  Pray for us. Think of us.

  In love, sadness—Dear God, in fear—

  Your loving brother Josef, and Chaya, and the children

  Darlene refolded the paper and put it back into the envelope. “We’ve not heard from them since.”

  Sarah’s voice had gone flat. The name Josef rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it. My mother had told me stories about her relatives, but they jumbled together; having grown up without extended family, they seemed more like storybook characters than real people.

  “We know what the Nazis are doing to Jews over there,” she said. “We heard about it on the radio broadcast. Some American journalists were trapped in the region when the US entered the war—they were exchanged for Germans who’d been in America. They wrote about what they had seen; one said there was an ‘open hunt’ on the Jews. Hundreds, thousands at a time. Rounded up and shot into pits.”

  I knew that before the Nazis came up with their more efficient methods—gas chambers and crematoriums—they had the Jews dig the pits themselves and enlisted local collaborators to help with the shooting. My heart pounded in my throat. I tried to stifle the terrifying images that leapt into my mind’s eye, flowing from the words—an ‘open hunt’ on the Jews—

  Darlene returned to her bed and slipped the envelope back beneath her mattress.

  “I said a little prayer for you, too, Camellia,” Darlene said in a small voice.

  “Oh?”

  “I prayed that you would find what you are looking for.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Thank you,” I finally uttered. And then, “Good night.”

  “Good night. And Camellia—” She took in a sharp breath. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  I lay back and looked up at the ceiling, thinking about how very far away I was from my own world. The cracks on the ceiling arranged themselves into animals and clouds. If Billy were here, I’d snuggle him into my arms and spin the characters that were appearing on the ceiling into a story to help him settle to sleep. How was he getting along without me? Surely all of them were sick with worry. What must they be thinking?

  Darlene’s breath slowed to the rhythm of sleep. I rolled over to see that she was curled into a ball, the sheet pulled tightly around her. I thought again with sadness about what a lonely, sad girl she was—and yet so giving and warm, and tilted toward joy.

  I tossed and turned for some time; sleep would not come. My limbs were so restless—I had to get up and walk around. Quietly, I stepped from the bed, tiptoed past Darlene and then carefully opened the door.

  In the hallway, I squinted into the near darkness and took a few steps. I trained my ears on the stillness and realized I could hear a faint crackling. Out through the window, a handful of stars sent haloes of light into the night sky. I stood still and listened; it was as if the crackling were coming from the stars.

  A beam of light at the end of the hallway spilled from a slightly open door onto the floorboards. On cat’s feet, I made my way down the corridor and came to a halt outside the door. The crackling was coming from within the room; it was a radio, the volume turned down low.

  I flattened my back against the wall beside the door jamb. Carefully, I leaned around to peer in through the crack in the door. I found myself looking into the bedroom of Darlene’s mother, back from her bridge game. She was seated at a small dressing table, leaning over something spread out before her. It looked like a map; yes, she was studying a map. Now I could hear the voice of a newscaster talking about the battles being waged in the various theaters of war, rattling off victories and defeats. A small lamp burned on the shelf above the dressing table; in its weak illumination, Darlene’s mother, pencil in hand, was making marks upon a map. A trail of tears glistened from her eye to her chin.

  The newscaster barked his news—of deaths and danger and city upon city destroyed by bombs—and Darlene’s mother continued to put marks upon her map, the tears streaming down her face. Quietly, I turned and walked back down the corridor to Darlene’s room and crawled into bed.

  Sleep engulfed me—the kind that is exhausted and blank, no dreams, no experience of any kind. And then, breaking through the emptiness was the awareness of a sharp prodding at my shoulder. I shook the dreamless sleep from my head and opened my eyes to see Darlene sitting at the end of my cot. A very bright half-moon filled the room with light and lent an eerie glow to everything.

  “Camellia, I’m sorry to wake you, but I have something I must ask you.”

  I sat up; even in the heart of the night, the heat was oppressive. I could feel a layer of sweat covering my entire body.

  “This is going to sound odd, but I sort of jolted awake with this feeling that I don’t know where you’ve come from.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

  Sleep hung fuzzily around me. Moonlight washed the floorboards white, hazing everything to immovable, ghostlike precision—the folds of Darlene’s blanket like carved marble, impossibly rendered, the dresser turned to mottled salt, and Darlene herself a china doll with perfectly painted features and glossy, lifelike hair.

  “It’s funny—I know certain things about you. That you are my cousin Gloria’s cousin from Durban, and that you’re staying here because Gloria has the measles. But they’re just facts—not things I understand, if you know what I mean. I’m confused. I’ve known you such a short time. So how come I feel I know you deep down? And how did Mr. Van Graan know your name? It doesn’t make any sense!”

  Darlene had clearly intuited something of the truth of my strange circumstances; perhaps it had come to her while she slept. I yearned to blurt everything out. To tell her about my ill mother in New York—Darlene’s own future daughter! To tell her about the extraordinary trapdoor in time I had tripped upon. How maybe this time travel had something to do with my own mother’s sadness and hope. I had an even stronger urge to tell Darlene how her life would unfold—that her dreams would sustain her and carry her halfway around the globe into a wonderful life, far away from this backward, bigoted place.

  And yet I felt a compulsion—as if it were a command from on high—not to reveal these truths; I had the distinct feeling that to do so would be to disrupt history. How could I tell Darlene that in the future, she would be my grandmother? If I revealed her destiny—the reality of how her life did, in fact, unfold—would I not be opening the possibility of changing history? I would be changing the unknowable unfolding of the future into the undoable, fixed facts of the past, and I sensed that to do this would involve a serious danger of cosmic proportions. Darlene might find herself tempted to live things differently; she might not marry Grandpa Jack. My mother might not be born. Wh
ich would mean I would not be born—and not be here to alter things in the first place! Yes, that’s what must have happened in Australia, on my last adventure with Talia! It was when I blurted out the truth—that were I to tell my mother anything, I’d be telling her, Talia, not my classmate but my future mother!—that the earth tipped over and the world fell away. That’s how I lost them—Talia and Grandpa Jack. It had been a terrible mistake, allowing my fear and loneliness to get the better of me. But how was I to know what was right, here, and what constituted a mistake? Without any clear rules, no guidance of any kind?

  My head reeled. But I did sense one thing, deep in my gut: I could not tell Darlene the truth.

  I could, however, tell her how I felt.

  Darlene was looking down at her lap. “You think I’ve gone crazy,” she said. “I’m sorry, it’s just that every now and then, since we were walking to school yesterday, I find myself feeling puzzled and wondering—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, wondering, who are you?”

  That question again. Talia had asked me the same thing, an eternity away, in Australia. Darlene was regarding me with deep and slightly baffled eyes.

  “I’m just a fourteen-year-old girl in search of something,” I said.

  Darlene seemed to be waiting for more.

  “It’s like there are shadowy worlds behind my life—worlds I know nothing about,” I said. “Well, not in their details. But I do know what these worlds feel like. It’s funny, but I feel like in a way, they are part of me—that they define who I am in some important way. And yet—and yet—”

  Darlene gave a slow nod.

  “I think I know what you mean,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “I feel that way sometimes. Mostly when I play the piano or sing. Or sometimes when I listen to music.”

  She turned away, as if overcome with shyness.

  “What’s it like for you?” I asked.

  “I’ve never told anyone this,” she said. Her voice was hesitant, and yet there was something bold and strong in it, something I’d not heard before. “I don’t know, maybe you’ll understand it—”

  “Give it a try,” I said.

  “It feels like music is—I don’t know, a person. Someone powerful—like an emperor or empress, maybe even a god. This—let’s call it a deity—breathes its life into the composer, and then, as I work through the piece and finally gain some mastery over it, I take up this same life-force. It becomes me and I become it. I feel frightened, but I also feel more alive—and less alone. Maybe not even alone at all!”

  Darlene was suddenly glowing with light; her shyness had evaporated, her voice was strong and clear.

  “And when I listen to a wonderful piece of music on the gramophone, it’s a bit like what you’re talking about. Like another world opens up right in front of me—” She gestured in front of her, cupping the moonlit air in her hand. “And all I have to do is close my eyes and tip myself into it. And there I am, far away from everything I know—from my family, from Koppies, from this place. But I’m also closer than ever to—” Darlene took in a little gulp of air and I saw that her eyes and her lips were trembling.

  “To what?” I asked, my own voice trembling.

  She closed her hand gently and placed it over her own breastbone.

  “I don’t know, to here.”

  I remembered something my mother once talked about. She often sat on my bed at night and told me wonderful things she had learned. Now, I recounted to Darlene the story of Plato’s Cave. The most famous of the early Greek philosophers, Plato had the idea that the world we lived in was really like a cave, and that the reality we knew was no more than the glimmering on the cave wall of images from another reality that we could never actually know. It intrigued me, though I couldn’t say I fully understood what Plato was trying to say.

  Talking to Darlene, I glimpsed what this might mean. I had stepped outside the cave of my own world to discover other realities that all along had been glimmering within my own reality—my mother’s life, as she’d lived it, and now also my grandmother’s. Reflections of other distant, shadowy worlds that were in fact part of the world I’d taken to be my own.

  Darlene gazed right into me with her illuminated eyes, but also through me to a distant, unimaginable world that was wholly her own.

  “I know just what you mean,” she said. “I think I’ve felt the same way myself, though I’d never have been able to put it into words.”

  Darlene shook her head, the same way Talia had shaken hers in a similar moment between us.

  “But look, there’s something else—” Her voice was suddenly urgent. Only now did I notice that she was fully dressed.

  “Darlene. Why are you dressed?” The chimes of the clock rang out. One. Two. “It’s two o’clock in the morning!”

  “I can’t live here anymore. I’ve decided to—to—to run away!” she said. “I thought—well, I thought you might want to come with me.”

  I sat up in the bed. “Where will you go?” I asked.

  “To Joel’s. He’ll help me figure out what to do. Maybe he’ll even take me in himself.”

  “But isn’t Joel here?”

  “No. He had word yesterday afternoon that his grandson is ill. Joel’s daughter, the boy’s mother, is a servant in Johannesburg. My mother told him he could go last night, after we went to bed; she gave him tomorrow—I mean today—off to take care of his grandson until his daughter can get back.”

  “But Darlene. Do you really think this is sensible?”

  “I don’t care what’s sensible and what isn’t! I’m going—whether you come with me or not.”

  “Very well, then,” I said. I was beginning to trust in the mysterious logic of this adventure; I had no place here other than with Darlene, no choice other than to go wherever she went. I threw aside the sheet, removed the cotton shift I was wearing and quickly got into my clothes. It was with some dismay that I looked at the ill-fitting, uncomfortable boots I’d had to suffer all of yesterday.

  “Do you have any sticking plaster?” I asked. “I have awful blisters.”

  Darlene opened her top drawer, where she seemed to keep what few treasures she had and removed a small cardboard box. She carefully removed its contents—only three plasters remained—and handed them to me.

  “Thank you,” I said, and put them on the worst of the blisters. I stepped into the offending boots and laced them up.

  Outside, the mild night air held a remnant of the day’s heat. The semi-darkness made my senses keener. I breathed in the unusual, pleasing scents of dry grass and unfamiliar trees and trained my ears on the rustle of leaves, the scuttling of night creatures, the soft whooshing of insects in their hectic swoopings.

  Darlene broke into a run and I found myself racing beside her across the dry grass on the slope behind her house. We reached a low wooden fence and Darlene helped me over before climbing over herself. We had no trouble seeing in the light of the moon; it bleached the landscape to shades of glowing gray. My legs felt strong and energized, though we ran for some time, and I could hear my breath coming in short bursts. It was a comfortable flight; I gave myself over to the smells and sounds, to the unearthly light and exhilarating feeling of speed.

  After a time, we slowed to a brisk walking pace. We passed by fields and here and there, modest brick or wooden homes, sometimes in clusters and sometimes alone. We came to a small cemetery. Darlene turned toward the rusted gate and reached for the latch.

  “This is one of my special places,” she said, swinging the gate open. “I come here to think. It’s especially perfect at night.”

  The cemetery was surrounded by open fields; in the far distance, almost at the horizon, I could just make out a small village of mud huts, much like the one I’d seen on our walk to and from school, though it looked to be a good deal larger. The same baked dirt walls, empty holes for windows, and heavy thatched-straw roofs. Darlene followed the direction of my gaze.

&nb
sp; “That’s Joel’s village. We’ll go there just now. First, I want you to see the Jewish graveyard.”

  We walked through the gate and Darlene latched it again after us.

  “There aren’t many Jewish families left in Koppies. There used to be more. And there are quite a lot of Jews in Vereeniging.”

  Darlene leaned down to the ground and hunted around. She found what she was looking for: two small, smooth stones. She handed one to me.

  “Come,” she said, and I followed her to a small granite headstone. There could not have been more than a hundred graves in all.

  Darlene knelt and placed the stone on the granite and then gestured that I do the same with mine. As I leaned over to place my stone beside hers, I read the name and dates engraved in the tombstone.

  Rose Selda Shapiro.

  February 26, 1928–December 10th, 1928.

  Below this were several rows of Hebrew lettering I could not decipher. I wondered whether the writing was Hebrew or Yiddish, then felt a pang of sadness that I didn’t know the difference.

  “My baby sister,” Darlene said. “She’d have been my older sister, of course, had she lived. Maybe it’s because she died as a baby that I think of her as little.”

  She knelt on the ground before the grave.

  “I like to come and visit her. Nobody else does, as far as I can tell.”

  Carefully, Darlene pulled at some scraggly weeds that were growing around the edge of the grave.

  “I feel like if I don’t come, she’ll be lonely. All she has is me.”

  “Doesn’t your mother come? Or your older brothers?”

  Darlene shook her head.

  “No one wants to remember her. But no one seems able to forget about her, either. I feel like she fills up our home like a ghost. Don’t you feel it?”

  I imagined Darlene was talking about the heavy, cold atmosphere of her home: the anger her mother seemed to push before her, like a black cloud.