I Am Forbidden (6 page)

Mila and Atara looked up in surprise. They had heard Zalman yearn for the great yeshiva towns of Pressburg, Slobodka, Lezhinsk—never for
Paris
. Mila reached for Atara’s hand, relieved that if they were to go, they would be going together.

The children were not to be sad, there had been far worse partings; nor were they to delight in being condemned to wander. When their playmate Marika called from the yard,
Hannah warned that there was no time for games or farewells. The children heard Marika’s pebble strike the cobbles, and her count as she hopped over the chalk lines. They listened to her silence as she picked up the marker. “Atara, Mila, I won!”

One last morning, Mila and Atara woke in their shared bed. They listened to the swallows’ twitter under the eave. They helped carry the cardboard suitcases and cloth bundles, helped load the horse cart.

Hugging the baby to her chest, Hannah climbed on top of the luggage, on top of the flatbed. Zalman lifted the toddlers and placed them next to her. Mila and Atara followed the cart on foot. Behind them walked Zalman and the eldest boy, five-year-old Schlomo.

Marika jumped rope beside the girls until the cart turned the corner. “You’re not coming back? Ever?” She stood at the corner, hopping from foot to foot and calling after them, “Ever-ever?”

Mila and Atara helped load the bundles and suitcases onto the train. The family settled into a compartment. The train pulled out of the station. The weathercock on the copper dome flew away. The clock tower shrunk out of sight. Apartment blocks gave way to cottages, to thatched huts, to kerchiefed women tilling vegetable patches. The children waved to the women, to the horse harnessed to a lumber cart, to cheese bags tied to porch beams, to the southern Carpathians, to nightfall on the Cibin.

Darkness rattled past the window. The baby whimpered and Hannah placed him at her breast. The suckle filled the
compartment. Atara leaned her head against Mila’s shoulder and Mila leaned her head against Atara’s head. The girls, who so wanted to stay awake for every moment of the journey, were soon rocked to sleep.

“The hen! It’s running from the train!” Mila cried out.

Hannah leaned toward the girls. “Shh, it’s a dream, only a dream.”

“The hen doesn’t want to die!” Mila protested.

“Shh, you’ll wake the baby.”

Atara whispered into Mila’s ear, “We’re safe. We’re on a
passenger
train, we’re going to Paris to live.”

Mila whispered back, “Do
you
believe I saw the Rebbe on the train?” Her tone was urgent, as if she feared her memories, too, might be left behind.

Atara hesitated. “But if the Rebbe was there, how come there was no miracle?”

Mila pulled away and leaned her head against the window. “I
saw
him. He was wearing a white coat. He never looked up from his book but I saw him.”

Mila fell back asleep. Her head bounced against the rattling pane. Atara tilted Mila, gently, until Mila’s head came to rest on Atara’s shoulder. Atara listened to the compartment’s door clicking in and out of its socket: her first sliding door, her first blue bulb casting shadows on Zalman’s beard, and everything she would encounter now would be a first, the conductor’s strange accent—she looked to Zalman to make sure he had not noticed her excitement, she looked into the speeding night.

They changed trains in Oradea and Budapest; they crossed the Austro-Hungarian border, which, a few months later, would shut for forty years. They changed trains in Vienna. As the stations went by—Linz, Munich, Stuttgart—cities, towns, villages emptied of Jews, Zalman and Hannah recited psalms that streaked their cheeks.

T
HE
S
TERNS
moved into a fourth-floor apartment on the rue de Sévigné, in the Marais, the Jewish quarter. Mila and Atara still shared a room but now had separate beds. Their first night apart, they placed a chair between the two brass frames for their joined hands to rest on, so they would not uncouple in sleep.

“Françoise!”
a voice called across the courtyard and the girls’ fingers gripped as they sounded the new vowels,
“Françoise,”
and once again they practiced their new address in the
qua-tri-ème ar-ron-dis-sement
.…

Sound by sound, the neighborhood fell asleep. The girls, too, were drifting off when they heard Zalman leave the master bedroom. Rather than settle into his study, as he would many nights in Sibiu, Zalman walked down the long hallway stacked with moving crates. The kitchen door scraped open and closed.

Swish, the blade skimmed the whetstone, swish swish … a high-pitched blade for circumcision, and lower-pitched ones for animal slaughter … swish … swish.…

The girls squeezed each other’s hands, to see if the other was hearing. Zalman was sharpening his ritual knives by the kitchen sink. Surely this was not something the Law asked of him, not right away, not in the middle of the night. It must have been Zalman himself who needed to do this. Swish … swish … the knives accelerated and he breathed intently … or was it their own breaths the girls were hearing?

The sounds stopped. Zalman retraced his steps along the crates. A drawer in his secretary slid open, then the key of the secretary turned in its lock, and the girls’ hands, heavy with sleep, let go of each other.

Swallows singing new French songs woke them. Atara opened the window. Mila leaned into the light as it poured down silver roofs and cast ringlets of shade on peeling shutters. The younger children’s laughter in the next room almost drowned out the bolt of the front door clicking open and shut; Zalman leaving for morning services. The girls tiptoed past the dining room where the flowered oilcloth still released its travel folds, they tiptoed into the master bedroom and climbed into Hannah’s bed. Soon the younger children scurried in and they all snuggled against Hannah: Mila, Atara, Schlomo, the two toddlers, and Hannah’s bed was a wide, white barge, her eiderdown a sail that steered them through the foreign morning.

A bead of light filtered between the shutter’s slats and
came to rest on Hannah’s nightcap. Little Etti tried to lift the pearl of light between thumb and index. Hannah laughed. When the baby whimpered in his crib, Hannah said, “Milenka, my eldest, will you know how to carry, carefully, little Mendel Wolf?” Mila leapt out of bed, leaned over the crib, lifted the baby. Hannah unbuttoned the top of her night shift. The children watched the tiny fists closing on Hannah’s breast, the tiny, avid lips; once more, they settled in their warm hollows.

Zalman returned from services and Hannah hurried out of the room. Zalman sighed as he placed his black hat on the coatrack. Lingering in the warmth of Hannah’s bed, the children heard the note of anguish in his voice. He told Hannah about the congregation: Would there be anyone with whom Zalman would share again the passion of Torah study he had shared with Mila’s father? How far they had come from the Rebbe’s court—there a Jew felt alive!

At breakfast, still perplexed by the new French bread, Schlomo insisted every hole in his slice be
filled
with butter. “Please, Atara, this one too! It’s looking at me—”

Zalman entered the room; Schlomo fell silent. Zalman took his seat at the head of the table and sighed.

Schlomo watched the butter sink downward into his bread. He reached for the knife, trying to spread even more onto the slice. Giving up on the knife, he scooped the butter with a finger and squashed it into a hole. Atara suppressed a giggle. Schlomo looked up, reproachfully.

Zalman’s fist thumped the table.

“Goyim can’t control their bodily inclinations but a Jew thinks of God’s will only!”

The children stilled.

Zalman turned to his eldest son. “Nu? When the Lord tells Israel
You shall be a holy nation
, what does
holy
mean?”

“Separate,”
Schlomo replied. “It is written in the Midrash Rabbah that holy means separate.”

“Good.
You shall be a holy nation
, you shall set yourself apart. As we wander through this Parisian wilderness, remember: When we Jews behave like other nations, God punishes us.” His tone grew sharper. “Surely the messiah should be here after all that we have endured, but some among us are holding the messiah back.”

Etti started to whimper.

“In the so-called Jewish school where, alas, I am sending you, you may hear—God forbid, you may hear—of a blasphemy that calls itself
Jewish Enlightenment
. But the Chassam Sofer says the Torah forbids innovation. You may hear of
Enlightenment
’s sinister offshoot: Zionism. Our Rebbe says Zionism was responsible for the terrible destruction. A Zionist army will protect us?” Zalman’s fist slammed the table.

The milk in the children’s bowls lifted in curls that collapsed over the rims and onto the oilcloth.

Etti burst into sobs.

Zalman’s brow furrowed. His pulse galloped. It was essential for children to fear their father so they would grow into God-fearing Jews. His voice rose above the toddler’s sobs.

“Who are we to stand up to the nations when God wills
us to submit? Who are we to build a Jewish state when God decrees our exile? God made us swear three oaths.” Zalman turned to his eldest son. “What is the first?”

Schlomo hesitated. Zalman scanned the other children’s faces but they did not know.

“The first oath: That we will not storm the wall of exile. The second: That we will not rebel against the nations amongst whom we are exiled. The third: That we will not force the End.

“We must not build the Promised Land with our own strength. Our deliverance will come through wonders and miracles and whoever doubts this miraculous redemption doubts the entire Torah. May HaShem free us from the enemies that surround us, may He deliver us from exile, Amen.”

“Amen,” the children echoed.

Zalman rose and treaded heavily toward the door.

T
HAT AFTERNOON
, flying over the slide’s hump in the Luxembourg Gardens, it was hard for the children to remember they were wandering in the desert; soaring in the boat-shaped swings, it was hard to remember they were chosen to set themselves apart. When the children did remember, they shrilled louder plummeting down the slide and tore back up as if this descent might be the last before they were gathered out of exile. Mothers on benches shook their heads. Surely this brood with sidecurls and long skirts was the loudest the Luxembourg had ever heard.

“Why so much joy in the wilderness?” Zalman reprimanded when the children clambered up the flights home, cheeks flushed with play. “Where do you think the Jewish children are, who lived here before you? Which of our neighbors handed them over? ”

In Sibiu, Zalman had tolerated that his sons toss marbles in the yard, but he no longer permitted it in Paris. “Bitul z’man” (
waste of time
), he scolded the boys who followed him to his study, ears crimson from his angry clip. Girls were permitted to jump rope or play hopscotch when Hannah did not need help, but boys old enough to read were to sit in front of the holy books.

Mila and Atara could sense that Zalman, so valiant in the desolation of back there, was afraid of Paris. They wanted to reassure him. They vowed that their piety would console the ilui who had lost his world. At the close of the Sabbath, when women were not expected to attend services, they accompanied him to synagogue. Like Zalman, they stepped down the curb to avoid coming near a place of idol worship, a church. Like him, they turned their eyes from the graven images that adorned façades and fountains—had God saved their bodies so their souls might perish? Zalman seized the girls’ hands before crossing the street, that is, he wrapped his palms around their wrists, slowed them with a tighter clasp. Zalman touched his children so rarely that his firm hold circling their wrists filled the girls with an exquisite sense of protectedness.
Sometimes Zalman forgot to let go when they reached the opposite sidewalk and then it did not matter if people stared and knew he was their father, the Jew with the untrimmed beard who would not shake women’s hands; it did not matter if someone snickered
sales juifs
, dirty Jews. Zalman leaned toward the girls. “The same clothes that point us out to the hatred of the Goyim also point us out to Him who dwells in Heaven.”

Swish … the knives skimmed the whetstone.

Swish … the girls’ jump rope whisked the corridor’s floorboards.

Zalman stepped out of the kitchen, the blades’ gleam secure behind felt cloth. Pressed against the wallpaper, Mila and Atara knew not to upset his course. When the door of his study closed, their skipping resumed, solemn, as the ancient desert threat cast its shadow and flew past.

T
HE CHILDREN
were in the entryway, preparing to leave for their first day of school, when Zalman emerged from his study. The girls bit their lips, afraid to be late.

“You will watch over yourselves,” he instructed, “and you will watch over one another. If the puppets of Satan gather to
celebrate their new mirage, their
State
of Israel, you will stand apart, separate. Blimela, you are the eldest”—Zalman always called Mila by her Yiddish name—“you will watch over the younger ones.” Mila nodded. “Remember, Blimela, when you observe HaShem’s commandments, your parents’ souls, up there, come nearer to His presence, but when you stray, they are banished to a cold desert where souls freeze and shatter.”