I Am Forbidden (5 page)

*

T
HE NIGHT
Zalman set out to retrieve the boy, Mila tossed in bed. Her agitation grew when Zalman did not return the following evening. The same fear kept awakening her. “What if they were caught?”

Atara tried to reassure her, the war was over and Zalman expected the trip to last a few days, especially if, at first, the boy did not wish to leave.

“Your father is stubborn,” Mila said. “The boy will have to come.” She did not voice her confusion about whether it was right to take the boy away from his new mother.

The two girls were leaning over the balcony’s railing, eyes searching the road to Deseu, when the cart turned the corner.

“They’re here!”

They rushed down the stairs: Mila, Atara, Hannah, and the younger children.

Hannah welcomed the boy exuberantly, “Shulem Aleichem!” She lifted the eiderdown from his arms, insisted that he wanted something to drink, to eat.

The Stern children marveled that a farm boy could be standing in their entranceway. Zalman’s big, black skullcap looked odd on the boy’s shoulder-length, honey-colored hair. His face was tanned, not like the indoor complexion of yeshiva boys. While the other children escorted him into the kitchen where Hannah readied a meal for him, Mila slipped away. The boy had not caught sight of her; Mila knew better than to add that encounter to the strangeness that surrounded him. Sitting on the bed in the girls’ room, her face held a relief not seen
during the two years she had been with the Sterns. She rose, turned eastward, and prayed for the messiah with renewed fervor; surely this first reunion with Josef was a sign of the reunion to come when her parents would live again.

Zalman whisked the boy to synagogue for evening service.

Mila and Atara were in bed when they heard Zalman chant in the stairwell, and the key in the front door. Mila listened for the boy’s footsteps and her body turned as she tracked him around the house. “He recognizes it from when he was little, the smell of chicken soup and the smell of starched Sabbath clothes. He hears the plop-pof of your mother’s fists kneading the challah dough. He knows the quiet part when she removes the sticky paste from between her fingers.” Mila rose out of bed and pressed her ear against the door. “He is going to the kitchen but it isn’t his mother. It isn’t either of his mothers.”

In the morning, Zalman called from the study: “Hannah, is Josef up? Make sure he rises properly.”

Hannah coached the boy: “
I give thanks before Thee for returning my soul
.… You didn’t wash your hands before getting out of bed? How will your soul know that you are ready for it? When you are asleep, your soul rushes up near its Creator and, without a soul, your body becomes impure. Take hold of the cup with your right hand, good, now switch it to the left. Pour the water over the right hand. Switch the cup back; pour it over the left. Now repeat after me,
Blessed art Thou Adonaï
.…”

Hannah set in front of the boy a glass of milk, two slices of buttered bread topped by two slices of tomato sprinkled with salt. “
Blessed art Thou Adonaï
.… Now eat, Gutten Appetit.”

In between oven and baking board, Hannah turned the pages of little Etti’s aleph-beth.

Etti pointed her chubby finger to the black letter. “Aleph!”

“Josef, surely you remember your aleph-beth?” Hannah said.

The boy stared at the pink ribbon in Etti’s hair. He pushed back his chair, walked out of the kitchen, to the front door.

Zalman called from the study: “He went outside before saying grace?”

“Don’t push the child,” Hannah said.

“You call obeying God’s command pushing a child?”

Josef was banging his foot against the stone stairs in the courtyard.

“A Jewish boy doesn’t stand idle,” Zalman called from the window. “Come inside.”

The boy did not budge.

It was then that Mila hurried down the stairs and stopped a few treads above him.

“Anghel? It’s me, Mila.”

He took a slow step toward her. He blinked. She turned on her heels. He followed her up the stairs.

• • •

During the Sabbath meal, when Zalman handed him a slice of challah, the boy thanked him in Romanian, “Mulţumesc.”

“One speaks Yiddish at the Sabbath table. Yiddish is the language God considers his own,” Zalman coached.

Between courses, Josef stashed a challah bun into his pocket.

“The poor boy must have gone hungry,” Hannah whispered in the kitchen when the girls cleared the table.

In bed, in the dark, Mila whispered to Atara, “The bun is not for him, it’s for Florina.”

Sunday, Josef argued behind the closed door of Zalman’s study. “What does she tell the field hands? What does she say happened to me? Who was I?”

“The Eibershter will reward Doamna Florina a thousandfold, in this world and the next. I will also see to it, she will not lack a thing. As for you, our people in America are moving Heaven and earth. It won’t be long before your affidavit arrives.”

“I don’t want to go to America. I don’t need to. Florina baptized me.”

Zalman leapt out of his seat. He struggled to take hold of himself. He leaned forward. His nose almost touching the Talmud tome, he inhaled deeply. When he lifted his face, it was serene again. “The Rebbe is planning a holy community in America. He is asking for you.”

“If I plow the big fields in America, I can bring Florina?”

“A boy your age thinks of Torah study, not of plows and fields.”

“I will not see Florina again?”

“Only the Riboïne shel Oïlem knows such things.”

“What’s Riboïne shel Oïlem?”

“Why—the Master of the Universe Who saved you once and Who will save you again by returning you to a world of Torah. Be grateful, Josef Lichtenstein. In time, you will send the woman money, parcels. You’ll send her coffee, sugar, but a boy your age belongs in yeshiva. Only Torah study will bring the messiah and only the messiah will return our dead—yes, yes, our martyred ones will live again.”

“My mother, father, Pearela?”

“They will rise whole as if nothing happened. The Trumpets will sound. At the first blast, the world will shake. At the second blast, the dust will break up. The bones will gather at the third blast.” Taking in the boy’s wide-open eyes, Zalman smiled. “Your great-granduncle Reb Elimelech was a renowned Torah scholar. People traveled days just to glimpse at him, and you, too, can grow into a ben Torah; you, too, can hasten the coming of the messiah, Josef, son of Yekutiel and Judith.”

“Anghel.”

“Forget Anghel. Anghel is a name of fear. A Jew who fears God need not fear the Goyim. Be grateful, Josef Lichtenstein, our Lord saved you once and then He saved you again by bringing you back into His fold.”

Curled under the eiderdown, Josef clutched its faded tassels and chased his memories. “Be grateful.…”

He hadn’t thought of telling Florina when she whispered,
Mama wants Anghel to live
.… Every night, hands nestled between her hands, feet between her calves, he had clung to the sound of Florina’s breath, but he hadn’t thought of telling her that he was grateful.

Zalman informed the family that there was no time to waste in getting Josef ready for his bar mitzvah. Every morning, he took the boy into his study. Mila and Atara could hear, behind the closed door, Josef’s thin, startled voice repeating the name of each cantillation, and Zalman coaching: “In the holy tongue, cantillation signs are called
taamim
, which also means
flavors
. These little flourishes above and below the letters not only score the melody of the text, they bring out its essence. In time you, too, will savor the holy verses.”

The boy’s uncertain voice chanted after Zalman: “Kadmaah munah zarka-a-a-ah.…”

Zalman bellowed: “Let your voice rise, come out of hiding, Josef, son of Yekutiel!”

In Josef’s sleep, the black-limbed curlicues scuffled and spun threads he could not unravel, Zalman stories within Christ stories amid which Josef searched for a last letter, a first letter, that spelled a lost word.…

T
HE WEEK
before the High Holy Days, Zalman sat an uneasy Josef on a chair placed on top of unfolded newspapers and called for the children. He untied a knot above his ear
and let down a thick dark curl. “The Lord tells us,
You shall not round the corners of your heads
.” Then, picking up a razor, he said to Josef: “You, too, must wear God’s mark if you want Him to recognize you as His own. In Egypt, Jews maintained their traditions; they did not adapt dress, language, or names, and the Lord recognized them and took them out of bondage.”

The boy’s hair fell on the newspapers as Zalman shaved him to the scalp, leaving two sidecurls.

That night, Mila and Atara heard the boy steal down the stairs. From their open window, they saw him run down the dimly lit street, to the church at the end of the block. They watched him huddle against the dark portal that so disquieted the girls.

Later, lying in bed, they heard a thin, continuous wail. They held their breaths. The wail persisted. Mila rose. Her bare feet fluttered on the parquet as she left the room. The wail stopped.

Mila held the boy’s shorn head between her arms, pressed it against her heart, warmed him with her whispers:
“Shayfeleh … Shayfeleh.…”

T
HE
D
AYS OF
A
WE
came. In Zalman’s modest synagogue in the ancient city of Sibiu / Nagyszeben / Hermannstadt, they gathered: survivors from Transylvania Bukovina Galicia, and Slovakia Bohemia Moravia, and Podolia Volhynia Silesia.… They rounded one another up, Jews who wished they could
forget they were Jews and thin bent shadows who knew someone would remember; Jews who spoke no Romanian; Jews who spoke only Romanian.

Zalman’s voice rose and they pressed forward. From the front pews to the last standing row, in the men’s section downstairs, in the women’s balcony, on the stairs leading to the vestibules, they thrust toward the raised platform where Zalman pleaded in his white robe that Jews, this year, be inscribed in the Book of Life.

And some of the sobs were asking not forgiveness but redress, as Zalman’s voice billowed,
El maleh rachamim … God full of compassion.…

During the service for the dead, children with parents slipped past the tears and skipped outside the synagogue. If, by accident, an unorphaned toddler was found inside, caught between grown-up legs, a cry went up, as if evening a score: “Let this child out, this child is not a mourner!” Atara and the younger siblings played in the courtyard during the service for the dead, but Mila and Josef stood within.

And Josef recognized the chant Zalman had sung by the graves,
El maleh rachamim
.… In Zalman’s synagogue, it was not silent furrows that met the boy’s loss, not harvesters leaning on hayforks, jeering at Florina’s bastard, but wails and incantations to turn absence into meaning. In Zalman’s synagogue, everyone wept with the boy as he remembered the smell of woolen prayer shawls and yellowing books in his father’s pew.

And the boy sensed that part of him longed for the name that was his when he had mother, father, sister. Like Zalman at the lectern, he, Josef Lichtenstein, wanted the lost world to live again.

A few weeks later, Josef’s papers arrived.

T
HE ENTIRE
family accompanied Josef to the station; Zalman, Hannah with the new baby pressed to her bosom, Mila and the Stern children holding hands.

The train doors clicked shut. Josef reappeared at a window, half hidden by the eiderdown. His face was still tanned but it looked bare, fragile, without the frame of hair.

Pipes gasped. The train started to roll.

Josef’s eyes were fixed on Mila, on her braids flying about her face as she ran to keep up with his car.

The train faded to a dot, vanished. Arms limp at her sides, Mila stood at the far edge of the platform, above the bed of cracked stone.

Z
ALMAN
gathered the family in his study. The Talmud tomes that ordinarily lay open on his desk were wrapped in cloth. “Children, you have come to think of Sibiu as your home, but until the Almighty delivers us from exile, we Jews have no home.” He lifted a stack of folios and placed them in a wooden crate. “The government is closing down our schools, the communists—let their names be erased—want you to forget you are Jews. A small congregation in Paris needs a cantor. We are leaving.”