I Am Forbidden (27 page)

there between the light and the crossties, a cradle of dust for thou art dust, and Judith swung her arms back as her torso bowed forward, her knees flexed, her heels left the ground then her toes, so Judith danced off the platform.

She landed on the balls of her feet, on the first rail. Her arms lifted, she regained her balance and leaned into the two gleaming lines.

There was a loud blast of the horn, she saw the mountain smoking, saw the sound and lightning as the thunder of the Law smashed into—

T
HE TRAIN
stopped mid-station. Two bystanders advanced, slowly, toward where the girl had stood, toward the black shoe on the edge of the platform.

*

J
OSEF
learned of Judith’s end before the seventh round. His open eyes were two gray-green clouds. He grieved for the ram the Lord had chosen, his hand on his chest, he grieved until the beat of his heart fell silent.

*

A
S SOON
as three stars were visible in the sky, women from the Burial Society ritually cleansed Judith’s remains. They washed the dust and the dirt and the bodily fluids; they shrouded the remains in white cotton.

Men from the Burial Society ritually cleansed Josef’s body and dressed it in white cotton.

The women from the Burial Society came to tear Mila’s garment, close to her heart.

In the house of double mourning, the uninterrupted flow of visitors conjectured about the inexplicable death of a seventeen-year-old: Outsiders had been seen in the neighborhood, a woman had tried to follow Mila and Judith into the synagogue. Had someone abducted Judith? Was Judith trying to escape when she fell onto the track? Why else would a girl from Williamsburg find herself near a train on a Holy Day?
Baruch dayan emeth, Blessed be the Judge of Truth
.

And Josef … Josef who could not bear the news of his granddaughter’s death
—Blessed be the Judge of Truth
.

*

J
UDITH’S
mother, Rachel, went into labor when she heard that the Lord took back her firstborn and her father on one same day.

Rachel gave birth to her eleventh child, her sixth son.

Zalman ruled that it was permissible to wish mazel tov to these mourners, because the birth of a child is good news.

A little girl found Judith’s pearls in the women’s balcony, next to a prayer book.

Judith’s mother hugged her newborn and swayed back and forth on her mourning stool. “How could her necklace have fallen off?” bewildered Rachel murmured in her grief. “My Yuditel was so fond of those pearls, a gift from her fiancé, my poor Judith who came into this world on such a lucky date, the twenty-first of the month of Kislev.…”

On the mourning stool next to Rachel sat Mila. The pearls clicked in her trembling hands. “The clasp must not have held,” Mila whispered even as she pictured Judith’s fingers lifting the necklace to her lips, unfastening the hook, closing the prayer book with a last kiss.

T
HE
C
OVENANT
of Circumcision was incised on the newborn’s flesh on his eighth day, and Rachel named her sixth son Josef, in memory of her father, Josef Lichtenstein, whose name was not erased from the generations.

*

T
HE PHONE
rang in Atara’s loft. “Burn it, burn it to ashes,” Mila said. “No, don’t come, Rachel’s children must be safe. No, you mustn’t come … there is a rumor that a woman abducted Judith … some woman, a stranger, but if they recognized you— You will burn it?”

One day earlier, the girl had curled up on Atara’s coverlet, her pale eyelids flickering.…

Atara burned Mila’s notebook in a large pot over the stove, she burned it to ashes.

*

A
YEAR
later, Mila called to say that Hannah was not well.

Atara took the first flight to Paris where she had not settled even after she was of age, in order to spare her parents the shame of an apostate daughter in their city.

Mila begged Zalman: Atara should be permitted to come into the house to see her ailing mother, but Zalman rose on
his bad knees. “YEMACH SHEMEAH!” he bellowed.
Let her name be erased
—once more he made himself curse the heretic child with nonexistence.

Her siblings arranged for Atara to come when Zalman would be out of the house.

Alone in her hotel room, waiting for the phone to ring, Atara thought of the blank writing pads on her one tidy shelf, pages ivory or china white; her unwritten letters to Hannah. She had even daydreamed she might write to Zalman, and more unwritten pages had joined the stack of unsent mail, unused stamps.

Some of the pages were not entirely white:

followed by the cursive acronym for
Until One Hundred and Twenty Years
,

Below, the page was empty. If she were happy, how could she explain happiness far from her family? If she were unhappy, had they not warned her?

The window of her hotel room gave onto an ivy-covered wall full of twittering birds. One flew off, two others returned and disappeared in the dense leafage.

Atara thought of the day, one year earlier, when she had
tried to find her way back to Manhattan after leaving Mila and Judith, after the angry woman had stopped her from entering the synagogue. Atara had searched for a taxi, for the wallet she had not taken with her, not to offend Judith—muktza, the wallet was muktza on the Festival of the Law—she had climbed the pedestrian ramp to the Williamsburg Bridge. The trestle had struggled with an oncoming train, she had kept walking, half slumped over the handrail, hoping the girl might still come.

She leapt to the phone. Mila was on the line; Zalman would be out all afternoon.

Atara rushed to Hannah’s bedside.

Hannah beamed and took Atara’s hand as if no time had passed. Hannah could not speak easily because an oxygen mask covered her nose and mouth, but she pointed to her floral-print apron, draped over the back of a chair. When Atara brought it to her, Hannah pointed to the pockets. Atara retrieved scraps of ruled paper torn from an old school notebook, scraps that Hannah had filled with tight Yiddish cursive, unsent messages that begged a daughter to return to her
Jewish home
, begged a daughter to remember a mother who longed to press her child to her bosom. Atara wiped her nose and eyes. Hannah clasped her daughter’s hand and hummed,
A letter to your mother … send it express … a brief letter to your mother, my child … a fine Hasid we have for you.…

Hannah’s eyes still waited for Atara to come back, her ears still waited to hear, before the end, Atara ask the Lord for forgiveness and pledge to obey His Law.

So the river wept on the windowpane, wept the impossible return.

Etti rushed in; Zalman was on his way.

Atara kissed Hannah’s cheeks and hand, she left Hannah’s bedside and tried not to wish Zalman dead. She reached the Luxembourg Gardens. She went to the playground of her summers with Mila. Stone folds cupped the marble breasts of the queens of France who stood guard around the pond she had circled with Mila on the bicycle.

The Sénat bell rang the quarter hour.

Should she have fought for Mila? Should she have insisted that Mila accompany her to the library? But if Mila, too, had left, who would have consoled Hannah and Zalman?

Should she have fought for Judith against Judith’s will?

The sound of a rake combing the gravel soothed Atara’s disarray. Silence trailed the rake. Autumn leaves settled in the wheelbarrow.

I
T WAS
a pilgrimage Atara had long meant to make, to see how it was, back there, without Jews. She needed to feel the absence.

She told Mila about the planned trip and Mila sent the brooch that had belonged to Josef’s mother.

Atara called Mila. “How will I find her?”

Mila described a horse meadow along a train track that followed a river, a linden tree by a wooden gate, a chicken coop, a cowshed.

“But you never heard from her?” Atara asked.

“We sent parcels. For years, I ran down to the mailbox, hoping for a letter from Florina, hoping to greet Josef, may he rest in peace, with the good news. No letter arrived. We sent parcels until a recent émigré from Romania told Josef that it might not be a good idea; in Ceauşescu’s Romania, Florina might be interrogated about her contacts with the West. Josef was beside himself with worry. I tried to reassure him, corrupt
customs officers confiscated the parcels, she never even knew we sent them, thugs stole the sugar and the coffee—we never heard from her.”

After wishing Atara well on her journey, Mila added: “I accompanied your father on a pilgrimage to the Rebbe’s tomb, in upstate New York. I saw him include your name,
Eydell Atara
, on the note he inserted in the tombstone. He wrote your name on the top of the page, because you were his firstborn, then he wrote out the names of your siblings. He included you among his children, for whom he prayed that the Lord show kindness and mercy.”

*

T
HE WIND
rushed past as Atara stood near the open window in the narrow corridor. The eastbound train rumbled through places that had once been home; Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Warsaw.… She had imagined blue-black digits scarring the land indelibly; it seemed only she was scarred.

Along tracks that smelled of dust, metal, and urine, she hummed Hannah’s songs; on the worn benches of Europe’s market squares, she hummed old melodies to hush broken hearts and move them on,
Es brent, briderlech es brent
.… She
hummed softly for souls that still haunt those riverbanks, disoriented souls that cannot find trace of their existence. The tunes floated in squares emptied of Jews as she boarded yet another train to more erased traces.

She reached Transylvania and disembarked at the Satu Mare station. Small letters below the sign for Satu Mare indicated that the locality had also been known as Szatmár. She took a taxi to the main square of Satu Mare / Szatmár, to the Piaţa Libertăţii. Leaning against sooty pillars, heavily made-up women in tiny skirts crossed and uncrossed their bare legs, high heels tap-tapping the cold stone. She asked whether a synagogue still stood in Satu Mare.

Yes, but there was no congregation.

She made her way to the border that had separated northern Transylvania from southern Transylvania during the war, she thought of Mila and her parents locked inside a synagogue, packing the same suitcase thirty-one days; she thought of the night the Jews of Deseu took leave of their river, how the farmers among them worried about the seeds that had not been planted, and the mothers told of daisy-dappled fields, and the children fell asleep while the river scored their breath, one last night.

She found Deseu and its Jewish cemetery. She looked for the grave of Mila’s father but the stones leaned sideways and some had fallen entirely and she could not tell whose grave was whose.