Authors: Chaim Potok
I was asleep when the meeting ended and did not hear them leave the apartment or the door harp singing.
My mother slept late the next morning and did not go to work. I went out of the apartment and walked to school. She was in her room when I returned in the late afternoon. I found her on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. She told me to close the door and leave her alone.
In the weeks that followed she seemed to grow old before my eyes. Her face sagged and became strangely dull, her eyes took on a pinkish, inflamed look, her mouth became a hard, ragged line between perpetually pursed lips. An odor began to rise from her, sour, fecal. Her skin became dry and flaky, her long hair scraggly. She seemed to be growing smaller and smaller. She went to work, prepared our meals, wrote letters, worked on Jakob Daw’s book—but all the light was gone from her, and I barely knew who she was.
There were no more meetings in our apartment.
One day in early October I went shopping with her, and in the grocery store we met the woman who had regularly attended the Sunday afternoon study sessions. The woman—short and thin and plain-looking, with straight brown hair and moist brown eyes—turned on her heel and walked off without a word. My mother’s face reddened; her lips trembled.
There were no more study sessions in our apartment.
A letter arrived from Charles Carter. My mother read it and read it again and then went with it to her room. I heard her choking sobs through the closed door. When she emerged she looked ill.
“Mama, shall I ask Mrs. Helfman to—”
“We will not be going to Chicago, Ilana,” she said.
I stared at her and felt a slow turning of the world.
“Can you make supper by yourself? You’ll find things in the icebox. No, we won’t be going to Chicago after all. What shall I
do now? I think I’ll go out for a walk. Can you take care of yourself for an hour or so, Ilana?”
Every weekday morning she went to work. Every evening she returned. At night she would wander about the apartment like a shade. She favored the darkness and would sit for hours in the living room without a light. One night I went into the living room and turned on a light and saw her in her nightgown in an easy chair. She jumped, startled, and threw up her hands before her eyes. “Turn off the light!” she screamed. “Turn it off!”
Sometimes she would begin to hum melodies I had never heard before. She fell asleep over books and newspapers. “What shall I do?” I heard her say at times as she wandered about the apartment. One day I realized that she was no longer listening to music. I went by the bathroom once and saw her, through the door she had left open, asleep on the toilet, her panties pushed down to her ankles. She sat there in her nightgown, which had been pulled up over her knees, her hands clasped together in her lap and her knees slightly apart. Her head had fallen forward over her left shoulder. I did not wake her. I went quietly to my room and closed my door and lay on my bed and put my hand over my eyes. Some minutes later I heard the toilet flushing and my mother’s footsteps in the hallway to her room. The image of her on the toilet asleep would not go away. Like the image of her naked. Like all the other images burned into me over the years.
It was autumn now and cold. My father’s book had been published, but its birth had gone unnoticed in the aftermath of the Nazi-Soviet pact and in the din of death now coming from Europe. Germany had invaded Poland in the first week of September, and the Second World War had begun.
I remember the frenzy into which the neighborhood and the school had been thrown by that invasion. Nearly everyone in the school had relatives somewhere in the war zone. What had Jakob Daw written? Yes, I remembered—and I lay awake at times imagining the curtain of darkness being drawn across the sky and the barbarous drums beating to the rhythm of war. I hated that word.
War. How many bits and pieces of arms and legs would now litter the world?
A letter arrived from Jakob Daw. It lay for days on a shelf in the kitchen. My mother would pick it up, stare at it, and put it down. Finally she opened it one evening and sat at the kitchen table, reading. She wore her nightgown. Her hair was scraggly, uncombed. A strange dry stale odor rose from her. I wondered when she had last bathed.
“What does Uncle Jakob say?”
“He says he heard someone mention that on the day Germany invaded Poland all the lakeside beaches in Berlin were crowded. He says that Goebbels told the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra that war is the father of all things, and a musician must play and not be silent. He says other things too, but they’re personal.”
I asked who Goebbels was and she told me.
“Jakob Daw is not well,” my mother said. “He was in the hospital for a while.” She was silent and sat staring down at the letter. “It’s all ended,” she said. “All the dreams. And what shall I do now?” She slumped in the chair and let the letter fall to the top of the table. “I think I’ll lie down now, Ilana. I’m very tired.”
“You didn’t have supper.”
“I don’t want supper. I’m not hungry. You ate enough for both of us.”
She went to her room.
I noticed that she was eating little and losing weight. She drank a great deal of coffee. Her face was haggard. Tiny wrinkles had appeared in the corners of her eyes and around her lips. She continued to grow smaller and smaller.
Mr. Dinn had begun to visit us again. He would sit in the kitchen with my mother late into the night, talking. She cried a great deal when he was alone with her. Often they talked in Yiddish.
In the first week of November my mother collapsed in the office where she worked and was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital. Mrs. Helfman rushed to the school to tell me about it;
the police had come to the house, looking for a relative. I moved in with the Helfmans and shared Ruthie’s room. In the synagogue a prayer was said for my mother’s health and people told me they wished her a speedy recovery.
The Helfmans were warm and kind. Mr. Helfman loved to tell stories about famous rabbis and Jewish heroes. He told about the Maharal of Prague who created out of clay a huge manlike creature called the Golem to protect the Jews from persecution; about the Gaon of Vilna who would study Talmud with ice on his head so he would not fall asleep; about Rabbi Amnon of Mayence who wrote religious poetry and accepted torture and death rather than let himself be converted to Christianity.
“Where is Mayence?” I asked him.
“In Germany,” he said.
One day when Ruthie and I were alone in the apartment, I wandered through the rooms and on top of a wooden file cabinet in her parents’ bedroom found a pile of newspaper clippings with stories and pictures of the past few years of Akiva Award winners. The stories talked about the award as the ultimate recognition of achievement given by the school, as a mark of permanent membership in the annals of the yeshiva community. All the winners were boys.
My mother returned home from the hospital in the middle of November. She would not eat. I was afraid to look at her eyes, they seemed dead. She began to talk to me one night about dead dreams being like dead children. Her words frightened me.
That Friday night before supper she saw me light candles and asked me brusquely what I was doing. I had set candles in two small glass dishes, first heating the bottoms of the candles and fixing the molten wax to the glass.
I said I had seen Mrs. Helfman light Shabbos candles when I had stayed with them and weren’t they pretty.
“I don’t want those candles in my house,” my mother said.
“Shall I blow them out?”
“No,” she said, after a long moment.
“I’m sorry, Mama. I didn’t think they would upset you.”
She said nothing. From time to time during the meal she glanced at the candles. She fell asleep at the table. I helped her to her room and into bed. How white and gaunt she looked. I was very frightened. Her life had suddenly swerved, and she was bereft. Had something like this happened to her in Poland and Vienna, this kind of bewilderingly abrupt change?
I asked her one night why none of her old friends came to see her and she said she had no friends, she was no longer a member of the party.
“You didn’t have any friends outside the party?”
“Friends outside the party? Real friends? No. Who had time for that, Ilana?”
The days went by. She grew thinner and weaker. One night she fainted in the kitchen as I sat eating supper and I ran to call Mrs. Helfman.
It seemed to me that my mother was slowly dying of loneliness.
I read and studied a great deal. I talked with Ruthie and her parents. I talked with David in the corridors of the school and on Shabbos mornings outside the shul. I wrote a letter to Aunt Sarah.
Late one night in December Mr. Dinn came over and was in the kitchen with my mother for a long time. I heard the rise and fall of their voices, and at one point I heard my mother laughing. It was a strange, harsh sound.
• • •
Mr. Dinn came to see my mother two more times that week.
The next Sunday morning he pulled up to the house in his black sedan and helped my mother inside. She was dry-eyed and looked docile, defeated. Mr. Dinn loaded her bags into the trunk. Then he kissed my cheek. I stood on the curb with Mrs. Helfman and watched the car pull away. My mother looked at me through the window, her eyes wide and haunted. I stood on the curb, crying. Later that day I moved in with the Helfmans.
Mr. Dinn drove my mother to Newton Centre, and Aunt Sarah brought her from there to the farmhouse. Aunt Sarah had asked for and received a leave from the Boston hospital where she worked. A family emergency, she had explained.
Aunt Sarah wrote me often; my mother wrote infrequently. I imagined my mother in my bed in the farmhouse, the silence, the vast sky, the quiet sea, the long red curving beach, and the birds circling, skimming the water, calling. She was being cared for by my Aunt Sarah as my father and I had once been. I hoped they prayed together. I thought my mother needed the comfort of words uttered in prayer.
Aunt Sarah wrote, “Your mother is ill but she will be better soon, I promise. Davita, how can you know what it means to have your dreams collapse all about you? Your mother has the soul of a poet. Such souls are easily broken by the real world. She is in great spiritual pain. We will help her. She loves you very much. Be patient. Such illnesses take time before they are healed. She speaks a great deal about you and your father and about her mother and grandfather. And about Ezra Dinn, whom I found to be a most decent gentleman, indeed.”
She wrote, “Your mother has begun to take walks with me along the beach and through the little forest near the house. Remember the forest? It is deep in snow but the farmer cleared a path for us and we are able to walk and see the sky through the dense bare branches. How lovely it is up here in the snow—a white world of untouched snow stretching as far as the eye can see; and the ocean, gray and wintry-looking and rolling on and on to the horizon that seems to be on the very edge of the world. I am taking good care of your mother, Davita. You take good care of yourself. Your mother is a very special person and I am glad she is in my family. I will send her back to you healed.”
My mother wrote, “Darling Ilana. With every passing day I grow stronger and stronger. What a remarkable individual your Aunt Sarah is! If only all Christians were like her. She is so kind,
and very devout. She tends to my needs, is strict with my diet and medication, and listens to me talk. And I talk a great deal. I do love this place—especially the quiet all about us, the utter silence. I can
feel
the silence. It is like an enormous and very gentle healing hand. I am so sorry to be away from you and so happy to hear of your grades. Your Aunt Sarah prays for you very often. She believes with all her being. I envy her. I had such belief once. It is the finest of comforts. I love to watch the birds over the sea. I sit at the window and watch them circling and calling. Some of them make strange sounds, like
hoo hoo hoo hoo.
A flight of gray fowl flew by yesterday afternoon low over the water; a beautiful sight. Horses often come down to the beach and wander about. They remind me of the photograph in my room, the one with the running horses that your father loved so much. I don’t know when I will be coming home. Aunt Sarah will tell me. I am tired now and will conclude with words of love to my darling Ilana. Your mother.”
My mother remained at the farmhouse with Aunt Sarah all through December and into the second week of January. Mr. Dinn brought her back in his car. She had regained most of her lost weight and looked rested and well. Much of the light was back in her eyes.
“Your Aunt Sarah is a magician,” she said to me one night after supper. “Wasn’t it clever of your father to have such a sister? I love her.”
We settled back into our lives. As the winter wore on Mr. Dinn was in the apartment more and more frequently. One day my mother brought home a set of glass dishes and some new pots and pans and silverware. A sale, she said. How lucky! That evening Mr. Dinn and David joined us for a fish dinner in the apartment—my mother shy, a little flustered, worried about the fish; Mr. Dinn shedding a little of his austere and courtly manner and looking gracious, solicitous, relaxed. David and I kept glancing at each other and not knowing what to say.
One Friday evening my mother lit Shabbos candles without saying the blessing and covered her eyes and stood there in the
flickering light and wept. The candles burned evenly in their tall twin silver candelabra—a gift from Mr. Dinn, who had brought them to her the day after she told him she wished to light Shabbos candles. I will never forget the images of that night—the candles, the weeping, my mother holding me, and our meal together afterward. The next morning we walked together to the synagogue and she sat next to me near the curtained wall. I noticed that she did not pray but sat with her head slightly inclined toward the wall, listening. People kept glancing at her but she seemed not to notice. I showed her the tear in the curtain and how she could see through it to the other side, and she laughed softly but would not use it.