I Am Forbidden (2 page)

Blunt thump on his fingers. Zalman’s hand retreated, but not before tapping the skullcap to make sure it had remained in place.

The muzzle pointed to the ground. “Pick it up!”

Zalman picked up his hat, held it with both hands, not sure whether to place it back on his head.

A pair of black leather boots advanced. Two leather fingers pinched the hat, lifted it, slowly. A palm flattened the hat onto Zalman’s skull. The boots stepped back.

A bayonet pointed to his belly.

Zalman closed his eyes. If he was to die, then let him meet death in the manner of Rabbi Akivah, uttering the word
One
. Like the martyrs before him, Zalman intoned:
“Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is—”

“One, two, three. Stand still!” a voice in front commanded.

A click. A flash.

Zalman’s shoulders were hunched. He was looking to the pavement, coat gaping, hat crushed on his forehead as the soldiers around him held a triumphant pose.

The same voice in front: “Nice. One more. Don’t move!”

Click, flash.

The soldiers relaxed their rifles, the photographer folded his tripod, the squad stepped into the fog that still blanketed the façades of Piaţa Libertăţii.

Zalman’s eyes opened wide. His heart soared.

He had been ready, ready to die in the Lord’s name.

*

A
FEW MONTHS
later, Zalman Stern married Hannah Leah Shaïovits and the guilty dreams never returned. Emitting his seed as commanded, Zalman begat his first child whom he named Eydell Atara—Eydell in memory of his mother’s mother, Atara for the crowns he saw the morning his life was spared.

The story of the photograph was the only one Zalman would tell his children, to stand in for the next five unphotographable years.

A
HUNDRED
kilometers east of Szatmár, on the morning Zalman’s life was spared, five-year-old Josef Lichtenstein sat on the kitchen stool and watched his mother tie a ribbon in his little sister’s hair. He tried to follow Mama’s fingers as they folded the ribbon under, over, as they pinched a curl, but he could not puzzle out how the strip of fabric bloomed into a four-loop bow atop Pearela’s head.

A branch brushed the pane, the frames of the half-open window tapped lightly, a leaf—flame shaped and autumn red—twirled into the kitchen. Josef scrambled down the stool and twirled after the leaf.

In her high chair, Pearela leaned to the side, reaching for Josef.

“Jossela, why don’t you play with your little sister in the hall while I get breakfast ready.”

Mama lifted Pearela out of the high chair. Josef took hold of his baby sister’s hand.

“Leave the door open so I can see you.”

Sitting cross-legged on the hall’s parquet, Josef raised the hinged lid of a cardboard box and held up a Hebrew letter carved out of wood. “Look Pearela,
la-med, l-l-lamed
.”

Pearela reached for the letter. “La! La!” She fell back, bounced up, and chirping like a sparrow, toddled down the corridor.

Josef rushed to close the door to the dining room with the overhanging tablecloth, which Pearela had already pulled down, twice. “Mama said you mustn’t!”

The catch of the lock did not hold. Pearela pushed open the door, reached toward the table, toppled onto the carpet.

“Jossela! Pearela! Milk, walnut roll!” Mama called from the kitchen.

Leaning to help his sister up, Josef saw a wooden letter he had thought lost. He crawled under the table and clasped the letter’s branch. “Beth! Look Pearela”—he laid out the two letters on the carpet—“
lamed, beth
.”

“La!” Pearela chirped.

“Tatta says lamed is the
last
letter of the Torah, beth is the
first
letter, together they make the word—bring back the letter, Pearela!”

Springing up in pursuit of his little sister, Josef whacked his forehead against the edge of the table. He fell back under the table, held his breath, reminded himself that a five-year-old boy was old enough not to cry.

“Jossela! Pearela!” their mother called again.

Heavy steps. Not Mama. Not Tatta. Not Florina.

A smell of hog and swamp. Mud on the carpet.

Frayed shoes splayed inches from his nose.

One prong pierced Pearela’s cheek, the other split her chest. The green-and-pink checks of Pearela’s dress turned red. Screams rose in the yard. The shoes stepped to the window, spattering. A gritty throat clearing, a ball of spit hit the sill. The shoes left the room, precipitously.

The screams in the yard intensified. They stopped.

The heavy steps, hairy shins.

Mama’s shoes dangling from the string belt that held the tattered trousers.

The hayfork leaned against the table, prongs glistening red. A drawer creaked. All the drawers creaked. Dirt-rimmed nails clamped the foot of a chair, which soared out of sight. The sideboard glided away. The hayfork leaned against the wall. The table lifted above Josef’s head, an inch.

A grunt, the table dropped; lifted and dropped, three times. A swear word. Josef recognized the man’s voice: Octavian the smith with the armband, who often bragged about joining the Romanian Iron Guard.

The hayfork lurched away.

Josef waited for his sister’s soft warble. He clutched the remaining wooden letter and did not move. Pearela’s dress grew darker.

It was night, then it was day. A gold curl escaped the crusted, maroon sheath that now encased Pearela.

The chant of harvesters leaving for the fields.

A soft tap-tap, dusty black shoes, men from the Jewish Burial Society, stepping onto the carpet, removing Pearela, gently.

The chant of harvesters returning from the fields.

Florina scrubbing the carpet on her knees, which meant that Mama would be there to pay her weekly wages.

The brush was inches from Josef’s feet when Florina lifted her eyes. She saw him under the table, alive. Her jaw dropped. She crossed herself.

The fat bolt slid in its socket, the windows banged shut. Florina reached for him and took him in her arms.

She removed his velvet skullcap. She cut his sidecurls. She wrapped him in his mother’s eiderdown and carried him to the horse cart. She lifted a cloth bundle from the driver’s bench, dropped it onto the cart bed, set him on the bench, hauled herself next to him.

Wind gusting through dry leaves spurred the horse’s trot and Florina’s Ave Marias, all night long.

F
LORINA
had known the boy since before he was born. She had watched over him in his parents’ backyard; lying on a soft blanket, she had dug her nose behind his ears to smell his clean skin and good clothes. She had gazed into his eyes, green and prickly topside, gray and downy underside—wood-nettle eyes, she called them.

When the boy was three, his father had shaved his golden
hair, leaving the two devilish sidecurls. Still, she had daydreamed she would baptize the boy, where the river looped round the willows.

The sun was high in the sky when Florina turned to Josef. “Your name is Anghel. Your father left for the Odessa front before you were born. You are my son.”

The boy looked at the maid, her flowery scarf, her gleaming medallion of the archangel Michael slaying the dragon-Jew, which she had shown him in secret but now wore over her blouse. His hand came up to the fresh stubble where his sidecurls used to be. Never again would Mama spool them onto rollers, proudly, while he recited his bedtime prayers.

N
IGHT HAD FALLEN
for the third time when they stopped in front of a wooden gate.

“My mother’s farm,” Florina said.

A peasant raised a lantern above the cart bed crammed with furniture. He chuckled.

“They robbed us long enough,” Florina said.

The man leaned his stubbly jaw to Florina’s face. “Did you see, on your way in?”

Florina crossed herself. “The earth was swelling … scabbing … we heard groans and—”

“Prostie! They should make sure they’re dead, they should let the bodies cool.” Again, the farmhand raised his lantern above the cart bed. “You weren’t afraid?”

“Petrified. The trees were chasing us—”

“I mean, to work for them. Don’t you know Jews sell Christian women?”

Florina laughed. “Not the ones I worked for.”

His vexed grumble. “I didn’t think you’d be back.”

A silence.

“Help me with my boy,” Florina said. “He’s asleep.”

“Your
what
?”

“Hush!”

“You married!”

“I had to.”

“His father—”

“Is dead,” Josef said.

Carrying the boy into the kitchen, Florina looked over her shoulder, then she whispered in his ear, “Never take off your pants in front of anyone. Ever.”

The boy stared at his mother’s brooch, fastened on Florina’s pinafore.

“Mama is dead,” he said.

“Hush!”

Florina took off a skirt. Florina never undressed entirely, she did not have a white nightgown, a pale blue quilted bed jacket. She did not read in bed, did not know how to read. She took off her kerchief, black since she called him Anghel, my son, husband killed, Odessa front. The bed tilted when she sat on it. He rolled toward her on the soft incline, came to a stop against her wide backside. His feet nested between her calves.

In the kitchen’s four-poster bed, Florina and the boy curled up for the night. Under the eiderdown in which he still smelled his mother’s sleep, Florina lulled him:
“To live, Mama wants Anghel to live.…”

Florina and the boy cut through the cattails as bells called across the fields. She looked over her shoulder, stopped.

“You’ll sit when I sit, you’ll stand when I stand, and when the priest places the wafer on your tongue, you’ll ask Christ to forgive you. Soon we’ll go to the river and you won’t have to be a Jew anymore.” She smiled. “After you are baptized, you too will fly to Heaven.”

“In Heaven, I will see Mama—”

“Hush!”

They walked, silent, through the tall grass.

E
VERY
S
UNDAY
, the bearded priest paced in front of the pews swinging a censer that released, with each oscillation, a tangy cloud of myrrh. Behind the cloud, the cassock’s black sleeves puffed up like wings straining to unfold, the walls swelled with light, the icons’ eyes were furry bees,
In this joyous Eucharistic liturgy, in resurrectional felicity, in this bread, in this wine … burn me with longing, O Christ!

Anghel took Jesus’s body on his tongue, and His Blood, and God cried tears of gold and Anghel learned that Jews
were responsible for what befell them, because Jews refused to see the light.

Winter. Spring.

After Florina left to milk the cows, Anghel set out with the eiderdown. He picked daisies, anemones, bluebells, buttercups. As he had seen Florina do, he placed the bouquet at the base of the field shrine behind the vegetable patch.

“Pearela,” he whispered, staring at the red-brown rivulets on Jesus’s bony toes. The gnarled knees and scrawny thighs were entirely different from his baby sister’s cuddly limbs, but those nailed palms surely knew of Pearela with the prong in her cheek. He swaddled the thin ankles and rusty nails with one end of the eiderdown and wrapped himself in the other end.

“Hie lee lu lee la,” he hummed softly.

The first warm rays grazed the ridge when Florina lifted eiderdown and sleeping boy. She carried them into the kitchen. She smiled as her broad hand rubbed hot tuica on Anghel’s chest, but the boy was careful not to smile back, fully smile. If his dimple showed, Florina might think he was trying to bewitch her, she might tap his forehead to gauge whether he had grown his Jew horns, she might wonder whether he was, in fact, stealing what she was giving him.

Summer, a fence was erected behind the shrine, along the tracks skirting the horse meadow. On this side of the fence was Romania; on the other side was Hungary. On this side of
the fence, men started to wear the armband of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, the Iron Guard.

Winter, Anghel learned to hitch the oxen to the plow. He learned that he liked to lead them to the field, to feel their warm hides, that they talked in hollow moans. But he never shared his midday meal with the field hands. Instead, he went to his hideout in the bluff where he sat and watched the leaves falling together, and landing apart.

*

T
HEN IT WAS
spring again and maybe they were butterflies, the white flickerings along the sealed boxcars, maybe they were not fingers begging for water, and his name was Anghel whose father died in Odessa, whose mother was Florina who pressed her medallion every morning to his forehead and coached: “You will not be first in class. If you understand, don’t show it. Don’t answer the teacher’s questions.”

*

T
HE DOGS
barked before the rooster crowed. Anghel rose from bed and looked out the kitchen window. He saw three silhouettes emerge from the mist above the river. He hushed the dogs.

After Florina left with the wheelbarrow and the rake, he set out for the shed in the meadow—where else would the fugitives have gone without alerting the neighbor’s hounds? He started and stopped on the sodden earth to forestall its sucking sounds. He crouched against the shed’s wall and placed an eye to a chink between two logs.