I Am Forbidden (8 page)

“Atara …” Schlomo whispered.

Etti and the toddlers started to sob again.

The children heard Hannah’s step outside, entering the dining room, and they fell silent. Her ear pressed to the door, Mila held her breath.

“Atara, are you still under there?” they heard Hannah ask. “You can come out, the other children are in bed.… Atara?”

When there was no reply, Etti started:
“Michael is to my right, Gabriel to my left, Uriel is in front … Raphael … Above is the Presence of the Lord. Michael is.…”

In the dining room, Hannah sat at the table, a few feet from Atara under the daybed. Her weary eyes closed. The teething infant had cried all afternoon.

“Atara, your father, he was only … Do you hear me?”

Silence.

Hannah gazed at her open Book of Psalms but her lips whispered another prayer, that the Lord remember her exile, she too an orphan, may the Lord remember Hannah-Leah,
daughter of Zissel-Malkah, she who was so tired, and Zalman so lost and angry in this Paris of lights, may the Lord shield the children from temptation—

“Atara?”

Hoping Atara’s stillness was sleep, desperate to fall into bed while the baby was quiet, Hannah turned off the light and left the room.

The door shut.

There, under the daybed, in darkness cramped with shame, pain, and chattering teeth, a seed pierced through, a seed as vigorous as Zalman’s belt-swinging arm, a seed rising to the commandment scored on her buttocks as on two stones: If God cared that Atara Stern rode a bicycle on the Sabbath, then Atara Stern did not care for—

“Atara! It’s me.” Mila’s hand tapped the floor under the bed. “It’s me, Mila. It’s going to be all right, please come out.”

Silence.

“Please,” Mila whimpered, “it’s me.” Mila stooped down and looked into the dark under the daybed.

Atara rolled closer to the wall. “Go away.”

“Atara …” Mila called now and again, and waited.

Eventually Atara slid out from under the bed and they stood facing each other in the moonlight that fell across the parquet. They lowered their eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Mila whispered, “I also rode Nathalie’s bicycle, I also committed the sin. But he’ll still come, Atara,
the messiah will come and my parents will live again and you and I—”

Atara, who had prayed every evening for the messiah to bring Mila’s parents back to life, heard herself proclaim: “Dead people do not live again.” Then Atara moved past Mila—past Mila’s need—and holding back tears, walked herself out of the room.

Mila clutched the table as she listened to Atara’s receding footsteps.

“
Michael is to my right, Gabriel to my left … Uriel in front … HaShem
.… HaShem, I won’t ride a bicycle even on weekdays.… HaShem? ”

A shadow plunged down the windowpane, Mila held her breath. Was her prayer falling backward? Was the room packed with wingless prayers that could not fly to Heaven and tumbled upon each other, dead?

*

N
OW THAT
HaShem was angry with her, Mila did not recite her prayers by rote, nor did she mix in her own words. Leah Bloch had explained that rabbis had weighed every letter in the prayer book to inspire sincere prayer, and God listened more carefully if one prayed in Hebrew even when one did not understand all the words.

Mila’s eyes fixed the black ciphers, but her ears tracked each of Atara’s movements. The toddlers ran rings around her, trying not to bump into Mila’s house of whisperings. When Mila’s eyes met the line indicating End of Morning Service, she brought the open page to her face and kissed the frayed prayer that affirmed her parents
would
live again.

During the day, she clung to the ancient rites of separation: Sabbath, weekday; sacred, profane; pure, impure. She shined and buffed all surfaces; she folded her undergarments into perfect squares, and to improve the odds that Atara would be with her when her parents returned, she disentangled the clump of undergarments in Atara’s drawer and transformed it into perfect squares.

At night, the girls lay in their two beds, but the chair between them sat empty of hands. Mila stared into the dark, afraid of the bad dream: her mother shot, her father dragged across the rails.… Sometimes, when Mila had been a good Jew, she dreamt the good dream, in which her mother called
“Rebbe!”
and the Rebbe looked up from his book and sprang to his feet signaling them to hurry and they climbed into the open boxcar: her mama with her big belly, she in her tatta’s
arms, and when the train started again, they were all going where the Rebbe was going. But after the good dream, too, Mila would weep because it was only a dream. Atara would console her: “Best friends, sisters for life.”

Now Atara was silent. “Speak to me,” Mila murmured in the dark, but not loud enough to be heard.

On their way to Sunday school, Atara hurried ahead of Mila. She stopped on the bridge’s crest. Her palms cupped the railing, her knee edged between two uprights. “Wait for me, wait for me.…” she whispered, her gaze racing with the current.

“Rivers don’t care,” Mila said when she caught up with Atara.

“My river cares.”

*

O
N THE
S
ABBATH
, Leah Bloch arrived to take the children to the park but Atara would not go. In the girls’ room, the sun played on the freshly laid, spackled linoleum but Atara reached for the dog-eared book left at the bottom of a crate of toys the community had gathered for the new rabbi’s children.

“You can’t read a Goyish book on the Sabbath,” Mila whispered.

Atara turned the first page and scrutinized the illustration. She tried out the new French words:
“Ca-nard, jau-nes, oeufs.…”

“Please, Atara, be careful.”

Atara kept turning the pages. “I think you’d like the story.”

Instead of protesting that she would not like a Goyish story, certainly not on the Sabbath, Mila said, “I can sit next to you?”

Atara slid toward the wall to make room for Mila on her bed and continued to leaf through the illustrations.

A mother duck lining up her happy yellow ducklings. A big gray egg, opening. White swans gliding on top of their reflections. Staring at the last page, Atara said, “The mother duck is here and the yellow ducklings are here and the swans are here, but where is the gray duckling?”

“Hiding? Behind the tree?”

“The gray duckling is hiding. He comes out at dark, when the swans sway their long necks and wave the day goodbye and when the swans tuck their bills under each other’s wings,
the duckling nestles in there too, like you and me they sleep on the dark lake—”

“But we are Jews,” Mila said.

“So?”

“Jews can’t be ducks or swans.”

Atara pulled back the book. “Yes they can!”

Revived by her Sabbath nap, Hannah took in the girls’ laden silence. After Zalman left for evening services, she made them sit next to her, one on each side at her head of the table. Holding the girls’ hands, Hannah sang:
“Oyfn veg, steyt a boym, shteyt er ayngeboygn
—
”
Hannah turned to Mila. “Did your mama teach it to you—yes? Sing with me, Milenka.”

Mila joined in:
“Oy, Mama, I so want to be a bird and lullaby the tree through winter …

“Ah child, take your scarf, galoshes, fur hat, long underwear …

“Mama, my wings are heavy with so much love.…”

Hannah shot up, clasping the girls’ hands, but Atara pulled away.

Hannah took Mila by the waist.
“Oy yadidadi yadidadi yadidadi, YADIDADIDAM!”
In the room filling with dusk as Queen Sabbath bowed her adieus, Hannah and Mila turned to the melancholy rhythm, to the old broken melody asking the young girls to bind up its wounds and carry it forward.

Hannah turned to Atara. “Come, Ataraleh, dance!”

Atara pushed back her chair and clasped the doorknob.

Why were they singing
I so want to be a bird
the way they
sang
I trust in the messiah’s coming
? The bird song was different; it was about how she and Hannah felt, not how HaShem felt.

“Ataraleh!” Hannah called again.

Atara curled tighter at the foot of the door. The bird song was a trap, all of Hannah’s songs were traps—Atara wanted neither Hannah’s Sabbath magic nor her weekday exhaustion.

F
OUNTAIN
nymphs and dolphin-straddling putti became the confidants for all the things Atara felt she could no longer tell Mila. Atara’s hands reached for walls as if stones returned caresses, her lips whispered to crack and moss as if they whispered back. To the polished stones, Atara confided that one day, courage might call for a bigger self, not for making oneself smaller.

*

A
T THE CAFÉ TERRACES
, sparrows skipped from marble tabletops to pavement, stubby beaks pecking the sun-swept cobbles. Crossing the church square on the way to Leah Bloch’s Sunday class, the girls turned their heads to a loud voice: “Here, Synagoga.” The girls’ brows knitted in bafflement as their eyes followed the tour guide’s finger pointing to the church portal, to the forbidden likeness, the stone maiden.

“Synagoga stands to the left of the Father, she looks away, blindfolded by a snake. Her staff is broken. The tables of the Law slip from her hand.”

The girls’ gazes lingered on contrite Synagoga, her slim marble waist, her heavy chiseled hair, her tall forehead cast down, forever in the wrong.

“To the Father’s right,” the guide continued, “crowned Ecclesia upholds the Redeemer’s cross and His blood.…”

Cameras clicked as the girls walked on, closer one to the other, through medieval lanes now vaguely threatening in their dominical silence.

That evening, Mila stood on her bed, nightgown cinched at the waist, a blindfold over her eyes. She giggled as a book slid from her hand. “Whoohoo hoo am I?” Cheeks flushed, she jumped up and down on her bed. “Whoohoohoo?”

Mila’s giggle rippled through Atara, who climbed onto the bed. She, too, jumped up and down.

“To the Father’s left!”

“Right!”

“Left!”

Mila jumped higher still. “They hate me! Whoowhoo who am I?”

*

M
ILA
found blood between her thighs. Hannah calmed her; there was no reason to be afraid, the blood was Eve’s punishment for making Adam mortal. Mila learned a new prayer:

Atara was not satisfied with Hannah’s explanation. She decided to go to the forbidden public library and returned with a different explanation of Mila’s blood, and with a book bag full of other stories.

Atara wanted to prefer Hannah’s stories to the forbidden books. Hannah’s stories started full of promise, with multicolored Yiddish words that Hannah did not speak in everyday life, but just when the bird was trembling on a winter branch, or the impoverished Torah scholar had met a spirit, the prayer
words, and then HaShem himself, pushed their way in, and it seemed to Atara that Hannah’s multicolored words had been a ploy to introduce God words about punishing the wicked and rewarding those who feared. The evening when Atara realized that the lively words would
always
vanish from Hannah’s stories, she stormed out of the room.

In the forbidden books, the colored words sometimes continued inside her even after she had finished reading the story; then Atara wondered whether a secret passageway might link her to the outside world.

Soon Atara was reading all the time. She read on the way to school and back from school; she read under her desk in class; at night, she read by flashlight under her eiderdown.

In his study, Zalman swayed to the ancestral singsong of Talmudic disquisition; under her eiderdown, Atara read soundlessly, urgently. Only during Zalman’s midnight lament over the Temples destroyed did his moan shear the lines off Atara’s page. She raised her head, listened to his plea—waited for the shuffle of his slippers in the corridor. Silence? The words realigned themselves, once more drew her in.

Zalman’s Talmud folios and Atara’s books were like neighbors who share a building without knowing each other, except that now and then Zalman searched the girls’ room for secular writings and tore them up. “I will not raise a Spinoza, not under my roof!”

Always, Atara found a way. She slid the forbidden books between her belly and the waistband of her white underwear,
she climbed on the wooden toilet seat and stashed the books on the outer sill of the high, narrow window.

Hannah was too busy with the younger children, too tired by her latest pregnancy, to watch over Atara’s reading.

Mila peered at the ghostlike hump of eiderdown in Atara’s bed. Just last year, the two girls still laughed with Leah Bloch at their poor grades in literature’s trivialities, but now the teacher of literature called on Atara. Mila tried to remind Atara, timidly, that the books were forbidden, but Atara shot back that free will was a right in Judaism too; Atara’s
free will
wanted to read books.

Leah Bloch reassured Mila: Atara’s books were merely about pleasure, not serious matters. When you give in to forbidden desire, despair sets in, and emptiness; the secular world was full of mental illness. When Atara would be depressed and lonely, Mila would be there to save Atara.

Next to the glowing hump of eiderdown, Mila prayed:
“Michael is to our right, Gabriel to our left, Raphael.…”

At fourteen, Atara found her way to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève as if she had always known that such a space must exist and that she must be let in. In the hushed, tall reading room where lamps of milk glass inside green shells cast bright ellipses of light on rustling pages, she read contemporary authors. She did not read them in any order: One day she came across
Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs
, the next day she found
L’Être et le néant
. When words or concepts escaped her, she did not put the book aside; the more enigmatic the formulation, the richer the promise of freedom. When she left the library, pearly threads linked roof to roof, dormer to dormer, a luminescent web under which everyone was equally chosen.