River

by Shira Nayman

  How I’d miss these Australian tea ceremonies, I thought, making a mental note to carry on the tradition, which Mama had let slip, back home in New York.

  “No goodbyes, my darlings,” Grandma said as Uncle Michael packed our suitcases into the trunk of the car. I could see Grandma was fighting back tears. “After all, I’ll see you again so very soon!”

  Grandma had already booked her ticket to come and see us in New York, six months from now.

  “By then, your mama will have a new head of hair!”

  The engines did that lurching roar that comes before the taxiing, when you know that the plane is about to take off. We were both buckled in, but Billy managed to press up close by my side, as had become his habit. He craned his neck up to whisper in my ear.

  “We’re going home, aren’t we, Sis?”

  “Yes, Billy,” I said, pausing to plant a kiss on his cheek, “we’re going home.”

  Billy gave me his highest-wattage, full-nose-crinkle smile, then looked out the window at the fast-moving tarmac. The engine went into full throttle and I, too, leaned back as the plane tilted upward, lifting first its nose, then its full length, up from the earth.

  I wondered if I would ever again encounter the Storm. For now, I felt perfectly happy at the thought of staying firmly put in my own time and place.

  Looking at Billy lost in the magic of our liftoff, and feeling his trusting hand in mine, I was suddenly baffled at the thought of my own recent grief—as I sat weeping, lost and alone, in my final adventure by the waters of the Euphrates. Yes, I’d been crying for home, but there was something else, too. An ache I’d felt when each companion had asked—Who are you? I thought about the girls I had met on my journey, the girls I had listened to and accompanied, with whom I’d eaten and traveled and learned—with whom I’d fled and cried and hoped. I marked them off again in my mind. Talia in Australia. Darlene in South Africa. Sarah in Lithuania. And finally, in Babylon, Rachel. Four girls whose question I’d not been able to answer. Not only because of the strong feeling that it would be wrong to tell them I came from the future, but also because I did not really know, within myself, how to begin to offer a reply.

  We both drifted off to sleep. I awoke suddenly as if an alarm had gone off, alive with dream fragments, iridescent shards from other worlds that were yet an intimate part of me. Billy was cuddled up asleep beside me, breathing slowly and gently; how peaceful and trusting he looked. I edged the window shade up halfway; we were suspended in a black sky. The red glow from the wing light pulsed in short little bursts. I peered into the night, black and flat and close up against the double pane. As my eyes adjusted, I was able to see faint pinpricks, hundreds of them, poking through the darkness, opening the flat sky into a depth of heaven. The cosmos surrounded us: a proliferating of eternal space, vivid and vast.

  One pinprick drew my eye—faint, yes, but somehow more piercing than the rest. A single star in the heavens, I thought, calling me to take note. Since Grandma told me that my mama’s treatments had been successful, I’d walked around feeling like I was clutching a tiny and priceless treasure that made me gasp with gratitude. I stared and stared at that star. My thoughts washed within like a slow tide, and then a single thin voice emerged. I knew it immediately; I was remembering Jimmy, in the wild Outback after our terrifying crash landing with Grandpa Jack.

  I heard him again, talking about the waratah, the red heart flower from his story, heard him say that I, too, was a flower that needed water to blossom and grow—but of the sky, not of the earth. Jasmine: white, he’d said.

  Like a star. You are Star Flower.

  Was that tiny white star in the sky somehow mine?

  You travel in the sky, but you search for your place, Jimmy had said.

  How little I knew then of the journeys I was yet to take! And now, here I was, traveling through the sky. What else had he said? I struggled to recall his words, scrabbling in my mind through the impossible adventures I’d recently had. Something about roots—yes, Jimmy told me I was looking for a place to put in my roots: a place with water and land, so that I might blossom and grow. Talia, Darlene. Sarah, Rachel. I closed my eyes and their homes rose in my mind’s eye, each one nestled on its unique little parcel of land spanning our globe, Mother Earth, and more years than I could make sense of—Australia in 1974, South Africa, 1943, Lithuania, 1905, and all the way back to biblical times, in Babylon. Staring into the night at the one star I felt certain was mine, Jimmy’s words spun a silky web of meaning. In each adventure, I’d been led to a river. Could it be that each of those wonderful girls—my forebears, mothers, all of them, who in a precious flesh-and-blood daisy chain had led to me—were my land? For Jimmy, the word land was the same as the words mother and home. All the lands of my foremothers … my foremothers themselves … were they my country? In knowing them, had I been led back to—and found—a new, true place of home?

  The last two hours of the long flight were a blur. And then, after landing at JFK Airport and disembarking, we caught sight of our beloved Papa, whose shining blue eyes were electric with love and joy. We waited impatiently for the luggage, then loaded up the car, pulling out onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, watching the city unfurl alongside the highway in all its variety, finally catching sight of Manhattan, beside us, accompanying us in our approach to home.

  Finally, finally, we were making our way beneath the BQE along Hamilton Avenue, alongside the side streets of our neighborhood, brownstone Brooklyn. First the smaller, more ramshackle two- and three-story buildings, some built of wood, veering off at an angle. The houses became stately and more uniform: four- and five-story town-houses with their distinctive brownstone facades.

  Somehow, against all the odds, I had made it back home.

  Here we were, the three of us, standing in front of the beloved house in which I’d so far lived this life that is mine—this moment in the river’s passage.

  In my thoughts, I turned silently, for one last moment, to all the fourteen-year-old girls I had met on my journey—the girls who would become the women who were my ancestors. At last, my vision was clear—I could see my way toward an answer to their recurring, disorienting question. The answer I could not, on my journey, give them suddenly glimmered in my mind, vivid and mercurial, like a quick-moving silver fish in crystal waters.

  I am all of you.

  I am part of the river.

  I am myself.

  I glimpsed, for an instant, another girl in another time yet to come: a slender girl, about my age, with an unfamiliar, and yet mysteriously known face. My own future daughter? Or her daughter, even further ahead in time? Would I ever have the experience of wondering if a new friend I was meeting was in fact my own future daughter or granddaughter, having herself traveled backward in time, on her own strange river journey, having come looking for me, as she searched for her origins, searched for herself?

  Billy’s eager, piping voice drew me away from the future and back to the present.

  “Mama! I want to see Mama!”

  He could not keep still; he was literally bouncing up and down on his little legs. “Come on, Sister. What are we waiting for?”

  “Nothing!” I said, taking tight hold of his hand, which was sticky, as always, with something he hadn’t got around to washing off.

  “Come on, you little monkey!” I said, and together we bounded up the stoop steps. With my free hand, I pulled open the metal outer door and waited for Papa, who was striding up the steps behind us, to unlock the front door. Then, I knew, we would run even faster up the long staircase to the second floor, where Mama awaited us.

  EPILOGUE

  I STEPPED INTO THE SHOWER AND turned my face to the hot stream of water, exhausted from telling Ray about that summer half my life ago, depleted from reliving it all through the long night, yet also filled to the brim. It was five-thirty in the morning. We had to leave for the airport at eight.

  Grandma’s words from last night returned to me. That she’d rememb
ered everything from when she was young. I’d had no idea what she meant, yet her remark triggered my memory, taking me back to that summer, and way, way back beyond that, as the whole impossible adventure swam back into my consciousness.

  I had to see Grandma one last time.

  I dressed in a hurry. Since we were packed, we were out the door in no time. We pulled up in front of the nursing home at six-thirty.

  “I’ll be back at eight,” Ray said, leaning over to give me a kiss.

  We gave each other a lingering glance. It had been an extraordinary night. At around one in the morning, I’d decided not to think about how crazy it all sounded but rather to just tell the story that was pouring from me in such vivid detail. I told myself to trust in our faith in each other, in the vows we had made long before our wedding day. When I was recounting my meeting with Nahum, something wavered in Ray’s eyes—the same expression I’d seen on the faces of all the girls I had been with on my impossible adventure. I didn’t know what to call that look, I only knew that it cut to the deepest mysteries of human connection, that it spoke to how much we don’t know about life, as much as it also captured what for me felt like one of the greatest truths of all. Now, in the car, about to see Grandma one last time, Ray and I looked even more deeply into each other’s eyes. Ray, who I felt I knew so wholly, though of course we were also just at the beginning of what I hoped would be a very long life together. But also—Nahum … it was as if he were also right here in the car in Melbourne, Australia, millennia and oceans away from Babylon. Nahum was Ray, and Ray was Nahum, one person, as if through all of time—my bashert.

  Visitors were not allowed before nine, but Michelle at the front desk knew I was leaving this morning and buzzed me in.

  “She’s waiting for you,” Michelle said. “She said you might drop by on your way to the airport. I guess she read your mind!”

  Grandma was propped up in bed, her hair neatly combed, a little lipstick dabbed on her lips.

  “I was expecting you, darling,” she said. “I’m so happy to get the chance to say goodbye properly.”

  The lump leapt into my throat. She was saying it so casually—goodbye—but we both knew there was nothing casual about it. This would be our final farewell. The doctors had said she was failing fast.

  “Grandma, I remember everything,” I said. “I was up all night with Ray. It came back to me as I was telling Ray all about it. But Grandma, something you said to me last night has been going around and around in my mind. You said that after I left that summer, you remembered things too.”

  She nodded. “Yes, Emily, I did say that.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “I told you many things over the years, about growing up in Koppies.”

  “Yes,” I said, “you did.”

  “Sometimes I think I told you too much. That maybe it weighed on you …”

  “No, Grandma! I wanted to know everything.”

  “Yes, you were a curious child, and with such a lively imagination. Just like your mama. Well, there was one thing I never did tell you—of course I would have, if I had remembered it. About my cousin’s cousin, who came to stay with us from Vereeniging. The peculiar thing is, I forgot about it. Not in the usual way of forgetting. As if some strange force of nature had erased it from my memory entirely. When it did come back to me that summer you had meningitis, after you’d gone back home, part of me thought I must have imagined that it had even happened! And your mama was recovering, my mind was on other things …”

  I glanced at my watch. It was almost seven. I felt a sudden panic that I wouldn’t get to hear everything Grandma had to tell me. I only had one more hour!

  “Do tell me, Grandma. What you finally remembered. I really want to know.”

  “You know that Koppies was a tiny little place.”

  “A one-horse town …” I said.

  “Yes, that’s what I always said, didn’t I! You know I felt suffocated there. So much smallness—in every way. Tiny town, narrow minds, narrow lives. So, it was a real event when this lovely girl came to stay. Her name was—”

  “Camellia,” I said.

  “Yes, Camellia.” Grandma’s brow ruffled, but she didn’t ask how I knew.

  “None of it was very clear, the memory jumped around, the way things do in dreams. At the same time, it all seemed—well, normal and right, the way the most outlandish things seem normal and right in dreams. Well maybe that’s not the best way to put it …”

  “You mean—inevitable?” I said.

  “Yes, that is what I mean. Inevitable. I knew it all actually happened. That it wasn’t a dream. Because of how I felt here.” And now Grandma placed a hand over her heart.

  “Please go on,” I said. My own heart leapt about inside my chest. I had the feeling it was all going to slip away before I had the chance to grasp it. To lay my hands on what felt like an important treasure.

  “Camellia and I hit it off straight away. This was so unusual for me. I didn’t have friends growing up, not outside of the occasional cousin who would come to visit. Meeting Camellia was one of the shining moments of my life. Those first deep connections—they can actually determine the course of a young person’s life. Feeling seen, heard, and seeing and hearing—really knowing another person, with whom you share so much. It can become a blueprint for how you live your life.

  “My cousin in Vereeniging got the measles while her cousin Camellia was visiting them from Durban. Camellia couldn’t stay there, so they asked if she could come to us for a few days. We were both delighted, of course. She wanted to come to school with me, so we went together. It was an awful day for me, but so much less awful as I had a friend with me, my new friend, Camellia.”

  Grandma looked at me with such love—and gratitude—that it made me want to weep.

  “We visited Joel,” I said. My voice was a whisper. The room went silent. “In his village.”

  Grandma nodded.

  “We sat in your tree.”

  A tear trickled from Grandma’s eye and she nodded again.

  “And much later, when you were my Grandma, after I was so terribly sick, we went to buy pastries. A whole plate of napoleons.”

  “Just like you promised,” Grandma said, her voice as shaky as the smile on her face.

  I took her hand. “We’ve always been so close, haven’t we,” I said.

  “Yes, my darling. And how lucky I have been to have you in my life.”

  “And how lucky I have been to have you in mine.”

  Grandma’s eyes fell on the Star of David sitting in the cup of my throat. Until last night, I’d had no memory of my mother giving me the necklace; I knew it came from her side of the family, but that was all. I would wear it on occasion, aware of a vague confusion, since it was a Jewish symbol that had no real connection to my own experience. Last night, as I was telling Ray about the plane crash in the Australian Outback, I remembered that at the last minute, before leaving New York, I’d grabbed the necklace from my jewelry box and put it in the satin jewelry pouch Grandma once gave me for my birthday. I retrieved it to show Ray; he placed it around my neck and fastened the clasp.

  Grandma smiled. “Your Mama gave you that.”

  I nodded.

  “I remember how puzzled I was, after we brought you back from the hospital, to find that you had it, along with those other items …”

  My hand flew to the little star.

  “You know, my own mother gave that Magen David to your mama when she was young, on the one trip she made from South Africa to visit us in Melbourne.”

  “Yes, she told me,” I said.

  Grandma let out a long sigh, as if her exhaustion were crushing her.

  “One day,” she said, her voice weak and so tired, “you can give it to your own daughter. One day, you can give it to Rose.”

  I gasped. No one but Ray and I knew about the name we’d chosen for our baby.

  Grandma’s eyes drooped, as if she could no longer keep them open.


  “I’m sorry, darling. I’m just so tired. I wonder when I’ll stop feeling this exhausted.”

  My heart squeezed, knowing she would never again feel energetic. It was a miracle she was still alive at all; for four and a half years, she had defied the statistical odds for living with terminal pancreatic cancer. She was finally succumbing to the lethal illness.

  “Grandma, I don’t have to leave for nearly an hour. Why don’t you sleep. I’m going to sit here and hold your hand. We’ll still be together.”

  “Thank you, darling. I’ll just take a little snooze.”

  She closed her eyes; her breathing slowed. Just as I thought she was fast asleep, her eyes snapped open—fully alert, urgent.

  “Your mama is going to lick this thing, just as she did before. She’s a fighter.”

  This was the second time my mother’s cancer had returned. Both times, my mother had done well on the chemotherapy and the doctors were optimistic; they’d caught it at the first sign.

  “Yes, Grandma, just like you!”

  “She’s the best mama in the world. Just as you’re going to be the best mama in the world.”

  “And so are you, Grandma. The best mama and grandma in the world.”

  There—that radiant smile I loved so much, fully animating her face.

  “Rest now, Grandma. I’ll be right here.”

  She fell asleep, her breath at first even and deep, and then slipping into something more shallow and troubled.

  I sat beside her, the tears flowing down my face. I couldn’t keep my own eyes open, having stayed awake the whole night. I leaned back in the chair, holding Grandma’s hand, and with great relief gave over to sleep.

  Images flashed within, feeling both like memory and dream.

  There, again, that beautiful green-eyed girl I had glimpsed in my mind’s eye on the long flight over, a girl with skin halfway between the color of Ray’s and mine, with light brown hair that fell to her shoulders in a cascade of curls. She was laughing—and now it was both of us, girls together, running down the stairs of the house I grew up in in Brooklyn, then down the stoop and onto the street. Headed off somewhere together, both of us fourteen, I knew this, filled with the giddy, almost fragrant excitement of an age when the future lay ahead in all its promise.