I Am Forbidden (4 page)

Once more, the horse’s shoes struck the earth; the wheels once more climbed the lane to the Jewish cemetery.

By the open grave, Zalman tore his coat on the right side, it was already torn closer to his heart.
El maleh rachamim, God full of compassion
, he chanted.

In the birch grove overlooking the cemetery, Anghel watched the Jew’s bent silhouette through the drifting snow-flakes, then he scrambled across to his hollow whose very tightness made him feel more secure. There, where memories were not forbidden, the boy curled up and listened to the Jew’s shovel and to his chant.

Beyond the falling snow, a cloud, a white damask cloud, lifting … his mother’s hand reaching for him. “Mein eigen kleiner Yiddeleh!”
(My own little Jew!)
Coy, the boy wriggles
free, but the cloud is drawn aside and his mother takes hold of him and crushes him to her heart. “Mein sheiner Yiddeleh!”
(My beautiful little Jew!)

The cloud draws shut. Another memory, beyond the drifting snow, another damask cloud … his baby sister’s dimpled knee, her lace sock with ruffled edges, her tiny black patent shoe … the heavy steps … not Mama not Tatta not Florina. The rusty prongs glistening red—

A twig snapped in the wood. A lurching farmhand, breath reeking of cheap tuica? A Jew’s body could not hold its blood. The boy huddled tighter, leaned forward, his nose almost touching the decaying leafage under the snow.

“Anghel! Anghel!” Florina called across the bluff, her voice muffled by the falling flakes.

Anghel rose, climbed the knoll toward the farmhouse where Florina had already lit the kitchen lamp.

*

Z
ALMAN
returned home and told Mila that he had buried her father properly, so that his journey would be less difficult at the End of Days. Mila received the news in silence, and then she uttered the first words she had ever spoken aloud to Zalman.

“The farm boy is a Jew. His father is dead. His mother is dead. Pearela is dead.”

“The Lord have mercy! What are you saying? What is the boy’s name?”

“Anghel.”

“What sort of name is Anghel?”

Ordained rabbi at eighteen, Zalman could resolve intricate points of religious law. He could pronounce on agonizing cases—women whose husbands were not returning from the camps yet no one bore witness to the husbands’ deaths: Could the women remarry?

Men, too, came grieving. “Reb Zalman, my wife was taken prisoner … she was forced, alas she was.…”

“Are you a
cohen
? A Jew of priestly descent is forbidden to stay with his wife even if she struggled.”

“No, no! I’m not a cohen!”

“And she struggled?”

“Her cries, Reb Zalman.…”

“Your wife struggled and there were witnesses; there is no doubt at all: Your wife is permitted to you.”

Zalman could determine who was forbidden, who permitted; who could remarry, who must wait longer; but when it came to Mila’s claim that the farm boy was a Jew, Zalman sought the Rebbe’s guidance.

*

N
ow
AND
then, the Jew came. He stood by the grave of the little girl’s father, stood and chanted. Anghel turned his head toward the chant. The reins loosened, the oxen stopped.

The Jew looked to the wide field, to the motionless plow.

The boy plucked the reins.

The oxen started, the sod rolled over without breaking, drafting another furrow. Vapor rose from the beasts’ hide, denser than the fog that soon enfolded the oxen, the plow, and the boy.

*

Z
ALMAN
examined the stamp, the block capital letters:
U.S
.
POSTAGE
. His thumb brushed the plane’s vigorous wings. He inserted the paper knife in the crease of the envelope, took out the thin, airmail paper.

“America?”

Zalman remembered the Rebbe’s harsh warnings: “Do
not
leave Romania, Hungary, Poland. Do not abandon lands where our traditions have survived, where our yeshivas have flourished; do not abandon Torah lands for the treifenah medinah, for the Americaner den of novelty and assimilation.”

The Rebbe knows best, Zalman reminded himself. He read on.

*

T
HE LONG
harvest days came when the oat whispers before the blade. As during his previous trips, the Jew went to pray beside the graves. Anghel watched him from afar, but this time the Jew did not leave when he finished his prayer; he crossed swiftly into the field. “Hallo! Hallo!” he called, gripping his wide-brimmed black hat.

The call rippled through the oats.

The field hands halted their sweeping strokes.

“Hallo! Hallo!”

Florina in her clogs hurried down the embankment. She placed a hand on Anghel’s shoulder, pulled him back into the tall grass. The stalks closed on woman and boy.

The dogs growled when Zalman’s horse cart stopped by the gate. They leapt the fence when Zalman climbed down. He scrambled back on the cart. A woman crossed the yard but did not quiet the dogs. Zalman lifted the reins, the horse trotted across the tracks and across the dismantled border.

On the driver’s bench, Zalman queried in the age-old singsong of Talmudic disquisition: “Whether it is permitted to entrust a child to unbelievers when no one knows if he will be reclaimed. If the child is not hidden, surely he will die, ruled Rabbi Oshri. Moreover, the parents may live and reclaim him, or the unbelievers may return him to a Jewish institution—

“And if the child ends up living like a Gentile, God forbid?”

Zalman tugged at the reins and turned the cart around. Once more, he stopped by the farm gate.

Erect on their hind legs, the dogs widened their circles, retreating to better pounce. Zalman recoiled on the driver’s bench, his umbrella parried and thrust, but he held his ground and the cart did not budge.

“Cezar! Dracul!” a thin voice called at last.

The growling dogs backed into the yard.

From behind a bale of hay, Anghel watched.

The Jew stood in the shadow of the linden tree. “Doamna Florina?” the Jew called. “Doamna Florina!”

The Jew peeked into the hay barn; he peeked into the cowshed where the tip of Florina’s black scarf flitted between her shoulders. “Doamna Florina? I have come.…” The Jew’s hands splayed and closed as if in dialogue with each other; they pressed against his chest. “May I ask where you married?”

Florina pulled a stained armband from a fold in her black skirt. She thrust the emblem of the Iron Guard under the Jew’s nose. “My husband, what’s left of him.”

The Jew drew back. “Ah … your husband is deceased? I’m sorry, Doamna Florina, what I am seeking must be elsewhere. Good day, Doamna Florina.”

The Jew climbed back into the cart.

Talmudic singsong kept Zalman company as he headed toward the town hall. “This is the question: Must a Jew in
hiding repent for smothering a crying infant if it was done to protect other lives? Rabbi Shimon Efrata said, If a person chooses to die rather than take life, that person shall be called holy. However, the one who smothers a crying infant to avoid detection and save Jewish lives must not have a bad conscience, may the Almighty.…”

*

A
NGHEL
cut across the horse meadow and climbed the bluff overlooking the river. His feet dangled from his hollow as he reached for a wild anemone. Stem between his lips, he leaned back. His gaze drifted with a cloud and he thought of Florina, who called the color of his eyes
wood-nettle
, green and prickly topside, gray and downy underside—

A black disk blotted out the sky; the disk leaned closer, spoke.

“Are you a Jew, yingeleh?”

Anghel pulled his knees to his chest, sprung up, clambered across the bluff, disappeared behind a ridge.

“Aha,” Zalman let out, “a Romanian lad suspected of being Jewish would spit, curse, charge with his pitchfork.”

“He is here!” Anghel panted.

Florina’s back stiffened. Her eyes crinkled to a slit.

The boy’s lower lip trembled. “I didn’t say anything.”

A tear gathered in the boy’s lashes and he confessed that two winters back, he did approach the Jew.

The dogs barked. Flick of Florina’s hand, the boy disappeared.

Florina led the oxen to their stalls. She poured a bucket of water on the barn floor. The bristles scoured as Zalman paced the yard, careful to keep his distance from the dogs pulling at their chains. Florina poured a second bucket. A third. Zalman’s head and beard filled the small opening in the thick mud wall. “Is the floor not clean yet, Doamna Florina?” When the brush lifted again, Zalman said, “Doamna Florina, for whom did you say you worked, in Vişeu de Sus?”

Zalman had established that Florina had worked for the Lichtensteins, that Iron Guard legionnaires murdered the Lichtensteins in 1939, that the Jewish Burial Society inhumed the parents and a baby girl, but the body of a five-year-old boy was never recovered.

“The boy,” Zalman whispered, “what happened to Josef, the Lichtenstein boy?”

At last Florina came out of the barn, bucket dangling from her stiff arm. Zalman followed her to the farmhouse. The door closed on her.

Zalman knocked and stepped into the kitchen. “Tell him, Doamna Florina, tell him what awaits him once your neighbors find out their suspicions are grounded.”

When Florina did not answer, Zalman turned to the boy.
“They will kill you if you are a Jew and usurp a farmer’s inheritance.”

Zalman’s eyes adjusted to the half-light. He saw the crucifix above the four-poster bed, he stepped back into the yard, where he paced determinedly, back and forth.

Florina looked to where she and the boy prayed every night.

In the kitchen with the four-poster bed, Anghel saw Florina’s love and her helplessness, and it washed over him, too. They shared this moment of losing all, of having already lost.

Anghel strode out. “What about Florina?” he asked.

Zalman stopped pacing. “Doamna Florina is a righteous Gentile. God will reward her a thousandfold.”

“Florina is my mother.”

“
The Lord have mercy
, you have forgotten your own mother, Josef, son of Yekutiel and Judith?”

“What will you do with me?”

“Do with you? You’ll live as you were meant to live. You’ll study in the Rebbe’s new yeshiva in America.”

“And Florina?”

“Doamna Florina will have her share in the next world. In this world, she will not lack a thing.”

“She will not come to America?”

“Doamna Florina will not be happy where you are going.”

The boy hesitated. “If I go with you, will I see Mama, Tatta, Pearela?”

“Child … surely you know that your mother and father.…”

The boy tried again. “If I go with you, I will not fly to Heaven, but if I don’t fly to Heaven, will I see Mama, Tatta, Pearela?”

Zalman strode past the boy. He banged on the kitchen door. “What have you told this child?”

Florina, in the semi-dark, did not look up. “To live, I told my Anghel to live.”

“Doamna Florina, for a Jew, there is no other life than to live as a Jew.”

But there had been another life for Florina and Anghel. Seven years, Florina and the boy had dwelled in the kingdom where widows are faithful to their departed spouses—dead to this world but alive in Christ. Florina had been constant to the memory of her fictitious husband, she had rejected Calin’s advances and Petru’s, she had worn the widow’s scarf, for her son, Anghel, seven years.

O
NE LAST NIGHT
, Florina watched over the boy’s sleep, then she opened the door onto the dark and went to milk the cows.

The boy lay furled in fetal position under the eiderdown, his nose burrowing the soft peaks and crevices, hunting for his mothers’ scents.

Zalman was waiting in the yard when Florina returned. He did not enter the kitchen with the crucifix but pointed from the threshold to the open suitcase. “He won’t need these where he’s going.”

Florina removed the boy’s new wooden clogs. She snapped
shut the cardboard suitcase and tied a string around it. She flattened the eiderdown, rolled it in a tight bolt, tied a string around it. She placed his first mother’s brooch in the boy’s hand.

The boy clasped the brooch and wrapped his arms around the eiderdown, disappearing behind it.

Then Florina let go of the boy with the wood-nettle eyes, green topside, gray and downy underside—in the right light. She watched her Anghel and the Jew walk to the gate. Standing under the short, tin awning, she waited for her son to look back over his shoulder one last time.

They had reached the gate when Zalman told the boy that it would be better for Doamna Florina if he kept his eyes straight ahead.

Zalman spread his coat on the cart bed.

The boy huddled between Zalman’s coat and the eiderdown, between black wool and white cotton as the wheels crushed the gravel, turning, turning from Florina.…

The cart was clattering past the Jewish cemetery when Zalman said, “Already, without any learning, you have done a good deed—the remains of Gershon Heller are in Jewish ground, ready for the End of Days. For this alone, the Lord will reward you with eternal life.” Zalman glanced back at the hump of boy and eiderdown. He looked to the road ahead. “Vatome-er Zio-on,” Zalman chanted. “That’s how your haphtorah begins. Will you be ready for your bar mitzvah, Josef, son of Yekutiel and Judith? Bar mitzvah means son of the commandment; it means that soon, when you turn thirteen,
you’ll be an adult in the eyes of the Law.” As if Josef had responded, Zalman intoned the cantillations boys learn when they prepare to read aloud the Torah in synagogue: “Zakef kato-on.… Let your voice rise, deep, from your belly! Zakef Gadol.… You think I’m making these up? You think man can create such blissful modulations? No, God Himself taught them to Moses on Sinai.” And to the vast silent fields, to the road ahead, to the boy between coat and eiderdown, Zalman trilled, “Paze-e-e-e-e-er!”