Authors: Anouk Markovits
Mila closed her eyes to better see her parents depending on her for warmth.
“The children will be late,” Hannah whispered to Zalman.
“The Lord is giving us one more chance. May He free us from the enemies that surround us, may He deliver us from exile, Amen.”
“Amen,” the children echoed, adjusting the shoulder straps of their schoolbags.
The bell was ringing when they entered the yard. Mila and Atara dropped off their younger siblings with the nursery-school teacher and ran to join the line already disappearing into the main building. They marveled at being in the same grade even though Mila was almost one year older and had finished first grade in Sibiu, but Zalman could obtain only one segregated class; the school of heretics permitted that boys and girls study together.
Tall windows took up one wall of the bright room. The teacher stood in front of a lined blackboard; she was pretty even though she wore pants. They must not tell Zalman about
the pants. Children’s paintings of blue stars on white paper were taped in a continuous frieze on the remaining two walls.
Mila and Atara were shown two empty desks in the back of the room. Some of the children turned their heads and smiled, others leaned close together and whispered.
Every morning, the girls’ eyes shone when they opened their
cahiers d’école
, notebooks with pages white, smooth, ruled and cross-ruled by pale blue lines. They dipped their new pens into the glass inkwell, how lovely it was to trace, meticulously, the new French words, the ascenders and descenders.
T
HE TEACHER
announced there would be a celebration of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Mila looked up, to the frieze of blue stars. Her nib caught and scratched the paper, spitting a drop of ink on the white page. Once again, the two girls would be set apart. Mila flushed when she remembered that three times already Atara and she had been the designated robbers during recess. Their classmates’ war cries encircled them, and Atara and she cowered against each other, then fled inside the building where pupils were not allowed during recess. The pretty teacher came down the stairs in her pants. Atara and Mila lowered their eyes, ashamed to tell that their classmates ganged up on them. The teacher looked at them lengthily, at their long skirts, their thick stockings. She
asked whether it was true that their father would not permit them to study for the baccalauréat, later. The girls answered they did not know, they did not know what the
bacca
—what it was.
Atara stared at the spot of ink on Mila’s page.
Mila whispered, “We must find out when the celebration will take place.”
“Quiet!” the teacher called.
If they could find out the exact day, surely Zalman and Hannah would let them stay home—Zalman would
want
them to stay home.
T
HE BLUE
Star of David fluttered in the bright May sky, above the classes assembled in the schoolyard. At a second-floor window, holding a megaphone, the principal gave an impassioned speech: There were lessons surviving Jews
must
learn from history and one such lesson was that powerlessness was not an option. The euphoric voice bounced out of the Zionist megaphone. “No longer
next
year but
this
year—
this
year in our new State of Israel!”
The yard roared. Teachers and students joined hands. A classmate reached for Atara’s hand, to invite the two girls in the giant round, but Mila and Atara shook their heads and pressed harder into the back wall, to meld into it, even as their eyes did not lift from the linked hands and stamping feet, even as their ears could not help but learn the most prohibited
of songs:
Our hope is not yet lost
,
to be a free nation in our land
.…
But boys and girls holding hands, singing together, dancing together, celebrating the End when the End had not come—all of it was forbidden.
Walking home, Mila and Atara were silent. All week, Mila could not look Zalman in the eyes. She begged God to examine her heart and see that she had not intended to force the End. She, Mila Heller, would wait, patiently, to be saved.
*
H
ANNAH
and Zalman hired Leah Bloch, a nineteen-year-old seminary graduate, to foil the traps of the impious école and give the girls additional instruction on modesty and religious observance. Pale, thin-lipped Leah Bloch, who fantasized that the new Hasidic family from afar was hers, instead of her own ordinary French family, explained that Mila and Atara must be proud of their lineage, of parents who were not dupes of the French
lumières
. She taught the girls to read Scripture the proper way—never the words of Scripture alone, but always accompanied by the revered commentators’ interpretations. She sang fervent, pious songs to counter the songs the girls were hearing in school. Every Sabbath afternoon, Leah Bloch and the girls danced to the tune:
“I want the messiah, now!”
Leah Bloch informed Hannah about Mila and Atara not partaking in the forbidden celebration. Zalman called the girls into his study. He looked at one then the other; he smiled. “Nu?” Every afternoon that week, he taught them to sing in harmony a passage from the Days of Awe services, a difficult prayer tune he had been teaching the boys who would accompany him in synagogue, but Mila and Atara had fine voices even if they could not sing in public, not in front of men. Mila was not yet twelve so she could sing in front of Zalman despite not being his daughter.
*
E
AGER
to assume responsibilities beyond tutoring the girls, Leah Bloch ran errands for Hannah and took the children to the park. When Leah Bloch held the hands of the younger siblings, Mila and Atara could sprint ahead, over the arcing bridges, to the gold-tipped arrows of the Luxembourg’s gates.
And so it was that one radiant Sabbath afternoon, Mila and Atara entered the gardens alone. Giddy leaves peeked out of every bud, on every tree.
The girls dashed forward.
“Aha!” the combed gravel let out.
The rusticated columns of the Palais du Luxembourg folded inside the pond’s ripples, swirled around the fountain, vanished into droplets of water-sun—
“Atara! Mila!”
Across the terrace, straddling her bicycle, the girls’ new playground friend, Nathalie, waved. “You want it for a lap?” she yelled.
Mila and Atara ran to the bicycle. Mila straddled the frame; Atara perched on the rear rack.
“One lap only!” Nathalie called after them.
Mila’s right foot weighed down on the pedal, the left foot weighed down. The spokes cast their spinning shadows as the bike overtook the toy sails in the pond. Mila leaned into a curve; Atara clasped Mila’s waist. Mila pedaled faster; Atara’s arms flew up. Mila slowed by the sandpit where toddlers rapped each other’s heads with plastic spades—on a bicycle,
even decelerating was a thrill. Mila’s shoe slipped on the pedal and the bicycle tipped to one side; Atara leaned to the other side and the bike regained its enchanted balance.
The other shoe slipped on the pedal, the leather sole of Mila’s black patent Sabbath shoe—
Surely there had been no bicycles on Mount Sinai, Atara thought. Had there been one, then riding it would never have been forbidden on the day of rest, because it wasn’t work at all and one was meant to rejoice on the Sabbath—“My turn now!” Atara called.
Mila slowed and the girls switched positions. Atara stood up on the pedals. Flowers and hedges blurred past as she accelerated. Children’s cries speckled the air, soared with the swings, bounced on the slide’s hump—
A shriek.
Tearing across the lawn, Leah Bloch, followed by the toddlers.
Atara braked. The back wheel skidded.
“Sabbath!” Leah Bloch screamed with all her might.
Mila and Atara tumbled off the bicycle before it fully stopped.
“You’re still touching it!” Leah Bloch cried out.
Atara let go of the bike, which fell to the ground.
“Sabbath!” Leah Bloch let out again. “You must tell your father, you must tell him what you did on the Sabbath.”
Mila remembered that if Jews kept
one
Sabbath only, if they kept one Sabbath perfectly, the messiah would come and
her parents would live again. She wiped the tears from her cheeks.
Atara went to look for Nathalie while the bike lay on the gravel. Atara tried to explain: No, she had not fallen off the bike, no, neither Mila nor she was hurt, no, she could not bring the bike back—she could not
touch
it.
Mila and Atara left the Luxembourg through a gate they had not taken before. Would Zalman find out? Someone from the congregation might have seen the new rabbi’s children transgressing the Sabbath.… Would Leah Bloch tell? A sibling? The girls wandered along the quays, far, until hoarse seagull calls carved the setting sun. They reasoned that eight and seven was too young to run away. Hair bows limp to the sides of their faces, they began to retrace their steps.
Perhaps if Zalman saw them first in the synagogue, he would be less angry?
The girls lingered between the pews of the unlit women’s balcony.
Soon Zalman stood in the doorway; Zalman would not enter the balcony even though no grown woman was there. He signaled to the girls. They advanced. Atara was closest to him; one spank sent her flying down the vestibule’s three steps. “Go home!”
Zalman had never spanked his children.
The girls made their way home.
Hannah turned from them.
In their Sabbath dark room—it was forbidden to flick a switch and turn on a light on the Sabbath—the girls sat on the same bed.
Zalman came back from evening services somber, intent. He lit the braided candle, poured wine to the brim of the silver goblet—to inherit this world and the next.
“Where are they, the transgressors of the Sabbath?” he asked.
“In their room,” a child whispered.
“Go fetch them. A God-fearing Jew is obligated to hear Havdala.”
The girls appeared, gazes cast down. Zalman intoned the prayer that separates Sabbath from weekday, sacred from profane. When he finished, the room was silent. Mila started for the kitchen, for the sink full of dirty Sabbath dishes.
“Stay!” Zalman commanded.
He slid off his belt.
Mila froze in the doorway.
Atara plunged under the daybed.
Zalman pulled the bed from the wall.
Atara swerved to maintain cover.
The bed jerked right, left; Atara ducked right, left.
The bed lurched and seesawed and Zalman grew angrier.
“You’re only making matters worse! Get out of there!”
Atara stilled. Zalman’s hand reached for her, his yad chazakah molded on God’s own mighty hand. He dragged the girl out, bent her over his knee, pulled down her pajamas.
Even toddlers did not crawl naked in Zalman’s house.
“My child mocks God’s word in public? ”
The belt lashed the air and Atara’s buttocks. Her legs wriggled, trying to escape, but her feet did not reach the ground.
“A profaner of the Sabbath—a man who gathers sticks on the Sabbath, all the congregation shall stone him!”
Mila shuddered with each blow.
“Stop, Tatta, stop!” the children sobbed.
“The rebellious son, his parents must do the stoning.”
Belt belt belt.
“I will instill fear of Heaven in my children.”
Belt. Belt. Belt.
“Zalman! Isn’t it enough?” Hannah pleaded.
“Do not intervene! I will break secularism.” Belt. “Zionism.” Belt. “Modernity.” Belt.
Atara was no longer screaming.
“Repeat after me: Never again will I transgress the Sabbath, not the Sabbath nor any of the Lord’s Holy Days.”
The girl hiccuped the commanded words.
Zalman let go of her.
She slid under the daybed. Zalman rose and took a step toward Mila, coiled belt in hand. Anger dented and swelled his forehead.
He saw the spreading stain on Mila’s white tights and the puddle around her shoes, widening. His head turned away. His raised arm dropped to his side.
He stopped in the doorway. “You have disobeyed the Lord and you have shamed me, deeply. You have shamed the
family. Now the apikorsim
(nonbelievers)
mock: Here goes the pious Hasid whose children transgress the Sabbath.”
Zalman left the room. In his study, head in his hands, he recited the texts affirming what he had done.
“Shush now!” Hannah said, wiping the toddlers’ noses. In the next room, the baby squealed. Hannah looked at the puddle at Mila’s feet, she hesitated. “Go, wash up, then take the younger children to bed.” The children gripped Hannah’s dress. The baby’s shrieks grew louder. Hannah pulled away but the children held on as she started for the door. She leaned over the crib, lifted the baby, paced back and forth with the baby in her arms; the sobbing children followed her back and forth. “Quiet!” Hannah said. “Your father and I are trying to protect you— Mila,” she called to the next room, “get a hold of yourself. I need your help.” Hannah leaned sideways and wiped more noses. “It’s important to watch over one another, to shield one another from sin. It’s important not to encourage wickedness—the baby is
hungry
, let go of my dress. No one will punish
you
if you say
no
to your evil inclination. Mila! Now, I need help
now
! Put the children to bed and say HaMapil with them. I’ll see to Atara.”
The children held on to Mila’s hands and followed her to their room. They climbed into the same bed.
“Talk to us,” Etti whined.
“At-Atara!” Schlomo stammered.
“Can you hear us, Mila?” Etti asked. “No, she doesn’t hear us.”
Little Etti’s hand stroked Mila’s shoulder. “Please Mila, Mama said you must say HaMapil with us,
Lay me to sleep in peace and wake me
.… Mila? Mila, look at Schlomo!”
The boy’s face twitched.
Mila’s hand came to his cheek. “When my parents live again they’ll take care of us.”
“I don’t like Tatta,” Etti said.
“Halilah, you mustn’t say that!” Mila shot out. “You must
honor
Father and Mother.”