If I Told You Once: A Novel (13 page)

Familiar, perhaps. I could not be sure.

I thought I saw a massive dark head, slick dark hair.

The figure was growing smaller every second; I would never know for sure.

I turned away.

Shmuel standing behind me said: Look, someone’s trying to race the boat.

I stared out to sea.

Guess he didn’t want to pay for a ticket, Shmuel said. He was waiting for me to laugh. When I did not he said: Not out there, back
there.
He raised his arm beside my cheek and pointed to the white foamy spot in the water, tiny now.

I didn’t want to look.

Shmuel said: Didn’t you see him? A great tall fellow, he comes running down the docks, knocking people down, he saw the ship leaving and jumped right in. You can still see him, barely, he’s not swimming back. He’s following us out to sea.

I can’t look, I said, it’s making me ill.

So I turned my back as the land slipped away, I took no final ceremonial look as the continent where I had been born slipped out of sight. Shmuel watched, and waved for the both of us but I turned my back and looked only at him, at the frayed collar of his shirt and the underside of his jaw.

I did not want to see that spot of white in the water, that last reminder of what I was leaving behind.

I did not get ill on that voyage though most of the passengers did.

I found the rocking motion of the ship soothing. It was like a child’s cradle, an old woman’s rocking chair. Rhythmic and endless.

Shmuel did not fare so well. Sitting together in our tiny berth I watched his face turn ashen, then greenish. I brought him water and did what I could. We were traveling as brother and sister, and we were never alone, so I could not do many of the things I wanted.

One early morning he sat up and said abruptly: My sister was not sick.

What?

My sister. I lied. She was never sick, she was ready to make the trip, but when I went home to collect her, I took her papers and left without telling anyone in the middle of the night.

Why? Why did you do that?

He took my face in his hands, roughly. I felt the calluses on his fingertips all up and down my temples.

Why do you think? he said.

He turned his head to the wall then, and closed his eyes.

I went out on deck, which I did as often as possible to check our progress. No one else came out, the wind was fierce and cold and during choppy weather showers of spray rained down. But I liked to go out, and get my bearings as the wind pushed me back against the door.

Every day looked the same: no land to be seen behind us, and none before.

Only the same gray flatness, with our ship in the exact middle.

After a week of this I said: I think I should tell the captain. We’re not moving. The ship is stuck.

Shmuel laughed and stroked my hair. The room was so clamorous you could not hear the bells. Day and night there were loud voices, laughter, babies crying, sounds of love, sounds of retching. Men gambled and smoked their pipes and the haze rose to the low ceiling and curled in corners.

He spoke again of his family, saying: I’ll write to them as soon as we arrive and explain. I’ll work like a dog, I’ll raise the money and send it and arrange for them all to come. Where we’re going the people love music and they love to throw their money away, there are theaters, dancing-places, I’ll play in the streets if I have to.

Will your parents be angry? I said.

He laughed bitterly. What do you think?

He mentioned them again and again, sometimes even in his sleep. This was the only way, he begged in the night, it had to be done, there was no other way.

So you see we both had ghosts from the old world following us to the new one.

Happiness touched by guilt.

We held each other as the ship rolled and dipped.

We tried to hold each other as a brother and sister would. That was difficult.

I was impatient all through the long hours. I wanted to learn English. Shmuel tried to teach me a few words. But all the words he knew came from songs and love poems, so they were of little use. Later I could use them in the bedroom, that was the first place I became fluent. In our new bedroom I recited the words to him over and over until he cried
yes, yes, that’s it, that’s perfect, oh yes
and the floorboards shook.

But on the ship the most powerful words he taught me were
yes
and
no
and
thank you
and
America the Beautiful.

*   *   *

By the time we arrived Shmuel was a skeleton with a ruffian’s hair.

There were no great golden gates to welcome us.

Instead there were endless rooms, hordes of people as confused as us clutching their possessions and trying to shape their mouths around questions.

There were long lines in which we waited endlessly, only to be told to wait in other lines. People assigned numbers to us, pinned paper tags to us as if we were animals or packages.

I was inspected by a doctor who peered into my eyes and mouth and was mystified by the jingling in my hair. He said he had never in his life seen anything like my feet.

I took this to be a compliment.

An inspector spent an hour shaking Shmuel’s violin, peering inside, holding it up to the light. He thought there might be something smuggled inside.

Nothing but music, Shmuel said.

Later we stood before two inspectors who peered at our papers through thick glasses.

You do not look twenty-seven years old, one said to me suspiciously.

She’s kept her youth well, hasn’t she? Shmuel said.

The other inspector said: Is she really your sister?

Of course. Unless my parents have been lying to me all these years, Shmuel said and worked his eyebrows up and down.

I did not think it was a time for joking, but the inspectors only glared and waved us on.

We spent four days waiting in lines. We were given new papers, with strange new names written on them.

And then we were taken outside and set free.

*   *   *

The apartment was two narrow rooms in a tall crooked building on a street that was crowded day and night. There were only two windows, each the width of a single pane of glass. But every afternoon the sunlight fell through those windows and lay in golden liquid bars on the floor. I loved it, I wanted to sweep it up and save it for another day.

The sounds of the city crept in everywhere, street traffic and horns and the cries of vendors and children, and a deep subterranean rumbling that seemed to arise from the cobblestones.

The stairs were impossibly steep, you had to lift your knees to your chin to climb them; they moaned and reeked of garbage. At first I felt uneasy living so high off the ground, but I grew accustomed to it quickly, as I did to so many things.

Everyone in the building had come here from elsewhere, like us.

Many spoke a language that was familiar to us, and the cooking smells that wafted in the alleyways smelled of home. I saw women who wore their skirts as I did.

And then there were those others who spoke in fantastic tongues, who had eyes and skin like I had never seen before.

Where are the Americans? Which ones are they? I asked Shmuel every day.

And every day he said: Look around you.

The city was far too vast to see all at once. I had to concentrate on one corner at a time. The street where we lived, the neighborhood around it, occupied me for years. The shops and bicycles and men on stoops and women calling in the night. Stray cats that screeched like children, children who bit and scratched like cats. Bread baking. Blood from the butcher shop running red in the street. Ash bins and organ grinders and laundry strung high across the street. Buildings like ours full of apartments, each window wearing a different set of curtains, each window pouring forth different music, a different conversation.

In the summers we slept outside on the fire escape. The black struts and beams were like tree branches against the sky. They cut the sunset into pieces so that it looked like a stained glass window.

No one knew us when we moved there; we lived as man and wife and no one questioned it. Why should they?

Later, when we had settled and Shmuel was working, he told me he wanted to get married. Officially.

But how? There was the matter of our identification papers which declared us brother and sister. How would we get around that?

They might send me back, I said.

He said: Don’t be ridiculous. Then: Don’t you
want
to marry me?

More than anything.

Yes, I said. That was all I could say.

He knelt right there in the kitchen and pulled me closer and buried his face in my dress. Marry me, he said. My hands were covered with flour. I looked down at his dark tousled hair.

I said: All our neighbors already think we’re married. What will they think if they see us getting married again?

They’ll think we’re mad, he said and lifted me up, spun. My head grazed the ceiling.

I gasped: If we say we’re married, then we are. We don’t need papers. Saying so makes it real. We don’t need to do any more than that.

I had my floury hands on his head now to keep from falling.

He was waltzing us around in the narrow space between stove and table. Up, down, up, like a stormy sea. He knocked over a chair. I was laughing too hard to breathe. Our neighbor below knocked at her ceiling with a broom for the tenth time that day and shouted for us to be quiet.

We’re married, I said, it’s done.

He stopped his spinning and let me slip suddenly so that we were face-to-face. But what will we do when we have children? he said.

I guess we’ll just
have
them, I said. And enjoy having them. And have more.

Yes, he said.

I looked at him and saw that his hair was dusted with flour from my hands so that it looked gray. This is how he will look as an old man, I thought.

To see him as an old man. That was all I wanted anymore.

*   *   *

Those years all blur together.

That golden light everywhere.

There was a roundness, a fullness to things.

I forgot the egg, it lay deep in a drawer. I did not need to look inside it to see happiness.

It is only with bad times that you remember every detail.

Those good years do not make for good stories. You are bored already, I can tell. You like to hear about the friction between people, the heat. It’s the harsh words and rough edges that snag your attention.

Shmuel found work in the theaters. He accompanied musicals, vaudeville acts, ballets, anything he could find. He learned the music quickly, practiced in the apartment in the afternoons before heading out to the shows. He had no proper suit; I had to piece one together from cheap cloth thin as paper. From a distance you could not tell the difference. We covered his brown boots with black paint.

These theaters were gaudy as palaces, everything gold, red plush seats, fat cherubs holding up the stage, heavy velvet curtains. I did not like them; the finery was false, the gilt paint I could chip off with a fingernail and beneath was plaster. The red plush of the seats was worn thin in the shape of people’s hindquarters. And I could not see Shmuel, he sat in the pit and I could not pick out the sounds he made from the rest.

I liked to go to the tiny theater in our neighborhood where plays were performed in the old language. Shmuel acted in these when he could. The closely packed benches, the heat, the crying babies and smell of wet wool, all so familiar. The man I knew became a stranger then, he was a king and a pauper and an angry father and once, in an emergency, a vain stepsister in paper curls and a purple gown. I saw him sing and dance and weep, I watched him take a woman in his arms and speak words of love. I saw him die, over and over. I knew it was a play, it was all artifice and tricks, and yet I thought there was something real in it, something more pure and true than the life outside on the street.

I slept with my ear to his chest at night.

He grew a mustache. He still looked like a boy to me.

He still left his curly dark hairs scattered on my belly after he had lain against me. Whenever he noticed this, my belly like a field sprouting in spring, he would say as he had before: Be fruitful and multiply.

He liked to say that.

And soon I was. And soon we did.

My belly swelled and my skirts grew tight. I hitched the waistbands higher and higher to accommodate the ballooning, until the day I realized I was wearing a skirt with the waistband just beneath my breasts, the hem barely reaching my knees.

I made adjustments then but still my body expanded like dough rising. I recalled my mother’s indiscernible pregnancies, and I could not understand it.

I thought of my mother when my back ached and my feet swelled.

I remembered the time I had seen her give birth. I remembered it too clearly; I wished I had forgotten that. It was one of the many memories I wished I could pluck out.

At least I would not have to watch it this time, I would have my eyes on the ceiling above my bed.

My belly was enormous. I had to stay in the apartment, I could not manage the stairs.

It was summer, and I had never known heat like this. Drops of sweat crept over my skin like insects. I was baking bread, the kitchen was like a furnace. I had knotted up my hair but half of it had escaped and lay plastered to my face and neck.

I could not imagine a world of snow.

Strange how we adapt so quickly to a new climate, and the old becomes a dream.

Earlier in the pregnancy I had thought of my mother’s punctual certainty, the way she laid down her work and headed for the bedroom moments before birth. How had she known? I had worried that I wouldn’t know when my time was about to come. An idle fear.

When the time came I knew, I have never been more sure of anything in my life.

I was lowering myself to the bed when Shmuel came home. He rushed to my side.

I screamed at him to get out.

I’m going to stay right here with you, he said. I’ll hold your hand.