If I Told You Once: A Novel (14 page)

Get out, get out, it’s bad luck, I cried.

That’s an old wives’ tale, he said, stroking my head unconcernedly. When are you going to give up those old superstitions? You’re living in the dark.

You can’t stay here, I said. We’ll be cursed.

Can you prove that? he laughed.

My mother giving birth in the street. Frozen bodies piled up like cordwood, the village a black scar in the snow.

To him I said: No.

I’ll help, he said and went to the stove to boil water. He did not know what to do with it, only remembered from his own childhood that boiling water always accompanied a birth.

He boiled pots and pots of it, lined them up on the floor beside the bed.

Get out, I said when he staggered in with the laundry tub filled with hot water.

He shook his head.

Out, I screamed and hurled one of the pots at him. Steaming water splashed the floor and the pot clattered against the wall beside his head. He stared.

Out, I said again and heaved another pot. This one glanced off his knee. He let out a bark of pain then pressed his lips together. Why couldn’t he see that I was trying to save his life?

I picked up a third pot and then dropped it with a cry because the contractions had begun.

I said: I’m not having it until you leave, I swear. I’ll hold it in.

He looked at me, and for a moment I saw an expression on his face that reminded me of my father.

I’m going to find the doctor, he said, I’ll send in one of the neighbor women.

He backed away and I heard his running feet on the stairs.

I was glad when he was gone. I could scream as much as I liked without frightening him. Screaming felt very fine. My lungs felt strong. The floor was awash in hot water; the uneven floorboards sent the water rolling to one corner of the room.

The neighbors both above and below were knocking with their brooms.

My belly had a life of its own. It bubbled and boiled. It was a sackful of puppies.

Things were shifting, sliding around. Things were not lining up correctly.

You see, there were two of them. I should have guessed before now.

There were two of them, and each was fighting with the other to be the first out of my womb.

The struggle went on a long time, and as no doctor appeared and no Shmuel either I saw no reason to stop screaming, since it seemed to clear my head. Water rolled from one corner to another, as if the entire building were swaying. As long as I kept up the noise, my neighbors up and down kept up their knocking, and I watched a hairline crack appear and grow in the ceiling plaster above my bed.

As the afternoon passed the sun fell through the windows and lay across my belly, and I thought it turned my skin translucent, I was sure I saw two heads within and the tiny raised fists.

Incredible pressure then and my hipbones creaking in protest. I felt their heads. Side by side, they were trying to butt their way out of my body. Simultaneously.

Such pain then that I thought it could not go on. It could not go on. It was not possible.

But it did. For quite a while.

I am telling you these things just as my mother told me when I was your age. I can see that it repulses you, just as it did me. You are making a sour-lemon face. But I am telling you for your own good.

I watched the crack widen and branch out across the ceiling, like something about to hatch.

The two heads battled for entrance to the channel. They were at a stalemate.

Suddenly there was enormous pain and then relief, as the first shot out of my body with the second on his heels. The two of them were lying in a stew of juices between my legs, and chunks of plaster began raining from the ceiling, and just then there were drumming footsteps and Shmuel burst into the apartment with the midwife from a nearby neighborhood.

She had dark skin and a deep voice that was like music though she spoke too quickly for me to follow. But her hands were wise and capable, they smacked the babies and made them squall and then cleaned them with brisk efficiency. She laid cool hands on me, and did what she could with the soaked, plaster-strewn bed.

Lord, she said.

She bundled the babies in blankets and laid them both in Shmuel’s arms. He stood amazed and terrified as first one and then the other began to cry.

I took them then, and my arms were full.

In all the confusion no one had seen which was born first.

They were black-haired boys, and we named one Eliahu after Shmuel’s grandfather, and we named the other Wolf, which was my father’s name.

One named for animals, one named for prophets.

One for the body, one for the spirit.

They were identical in appearance but opposites in everything else. They had entered the world wrestling each other and never stopped.

When one cried, the other cried louder.

Whomever I nursed first would drink all the milk and leave nothing for his brother.

*   *   *

Time passes quickly when you are watching children grow up.

While I’d been pregnant I’d pictured myself doing my work with my future child propped on my hip, as my mother had done, as women have always done. But I had not planned on there being two of them. I did my best to hold them both, one on either hip, a balancing act. By the time I mastered this trick they had grown too big for me to manage.

It seemed Eli and Wolf went from sitting to crawling in the time it took to blink, went from crawling to walking before I could catch my breath. I turned my head for a moment and when I looked back I found them in short pants and button shoes, shouting and dueling with sticks.

They were fierce, my boys. They had thick black hair at birth; it fell out the next day and grew back even thicker, hair like a crow’s wing. They had dark eyes like mine and Shmuel’s sharp features. How quickly they grew. I would piece together a shirt for one of them, and by the time I finished sewing it he would have outgrown it. Great hairy wrists sticking out of the sleeves. Brand-new jackets, straining at the shoulders. I grew accustomed to the sound of ripping cloth.

How they ate. They devoured everything like wildfire. I did what I could, but it seemed they were always hungry. There were many evenings when I had not prepared enough, and Wolf and Eli prowled about scraping the bottoms of pans and licking their fingers to trap the last crumbs, and casting dissatisfied glances all around, and Shmuel would joke that he feared for his life. Don’t bother with me, boys, I’m all bones, he would say.

They grew so quickly. Sometimes in the night I would hear them moaning because of the growing pains in their arms and legs, their growling stomachs. First one would shoot up, then the other. It was as if they were racing, to see who would be the first to bump his head against the sun.

Shmuel could not understand it. He was a slight man, narrowly built. Me, I had stopped growing early. And here we had two sons who towered over us. Shmuel often said: Where in the world did they come from?

I thought of my family, my father and brother. It all made sense to me.

Shmuel said: It’s because we’re in America. Everything is bigger here.

Then he said: We should have another child.

He said this often.

From the beginning he played his violin for the boys and they would listen enraptured. He played theater music, waltzes and dance tunes, and when he played fast jigs and reels the boys danced for him, jumping up and down imitating the organ grinder’s monkey with their caps held out for coins. Even when they grew much older, and forceful in their opinions and impatient with everything, the music still had the power to tame them.

They adored their father.

Partly, I think, because they saw him so little. He had to work so hard then. Every moment he was home was an occasion.

I want a house full of little monkeys, he said.

The boys were still small then.

Another time, apropos of nothing: Are you ready yet?

And later he said nothing, simply asked with his eyebrows.

At night we shared our bed as we always had, and his body seemed to grow more beautiful to me as time passed and the years polished his bones. We were happy with each other, and regular in our habits; night after night he emptied himself and then half jokingly addressed my belly, imploring it to be fruitful and multiply. So he could not understand why I did not conceive.

I knew why. My mother had taught me well.

I did not want another child.

You see, I did not want to have to share my attentions.

I wanted to give all I had to my sons. I did not want to divide my love among a horde of children so that each got only a splinter. I did not want a houseful, a shoeful of children, children whose needs would overwhelm me, whose names I would forget.

I wanted to know my children. I did not want a faceless litter.

I tried to explain this to Shmuel.

Let’s just have
one,
then, he said. One more won’t make a difference.

Shmuel’s eyes were unfaded, still that startling blue. I had hoped our sons would inherit them, but no.

Just one more, he said. Eli and Wolf should have a sister.

He said nothing more, and I knew he was thinking of his own.

A month after our arrival in this city, and every month thereafter, Shmuel had written to his parents and sister. He had sent them money regularly, had begged them in the letters to come join us. He offered to arrange everything if they would give their consent.

For a year they did not answer his letters.

He continued to write, and to send money though there were times when we could have used it.

Eventually he received a note from his sister. In two blunt sentences she informed him that she had married a local man, and that her parents wanted to live near her rather than with their irresponsible former son in an unknown land.

At the bottom of the page she had added as an afterthought that she was expecting her first child.

Shmuel read me the letter and then never mentioned it again. But he continued to send money to his parents, and perhaps also wrote to them, and in his sleep he argued with them endlessly.

We had photographs made of our boys, uncomfortable and scowling in their best clothes. I had seen photographs in the newspapers, but never seen photos of people I knew, never held them in my hands like this. Shmuel took them all from me and sent them to his parents.

*   *   *

There was no forest here, no snow like that all-encompassing snow.

There were no journeys to be made.

We never left the city. This city was all of America to us.

We began to accumulate things: cast-off furniture from our neighbors. A radio that almost worked sometimes. Shmuel saved for years to buy a violin, all golden wood and graceful curves and smooth varnish, though he still cherished the old one and played it sometimes so it would not feel left out.

My hair. I trimmed it. You could still hear the bells, now and then. Though that part of my hair should have grown out long ago.

I grew herbs in little pots that I lined up on the windowsill.

In the summer evenings women gathered on stoops and fire escapes to gossip. I never thought to join them, but their voices were comforting; I remembered my village and the women talking over fences, whispered confidences.

Shmuel and Eli and Wolf were my whole world then, and it was all I wanted. I still looked at my sons sometimes with awe and wonder; to think that I made these amazing creatures, they came out of my body. Look how they run and jump and think for themselves. Never mind that their faces were dirty.

My boys had made the city their playground. They ran with other boys in packs, shouted and fought and stole rides on the streetcars. Nine years old and they were smoking cigarettes and picking fights with boys twice their size. Shmuel forbade them to do these things, but I knew they did them anyway and I was secretly proud.

I wanted my boys to be ready.

Ready for what?

Anything.

They spoke one language in the streets and another to their parents and did not think it strange. I was trying to learn but slipped back into the old language when the new one failed me.

Watch me, watch this! Wolf said as he balanced on the railing of the fire escape, and then hung by his knees, six stories above the street.

I applauded.

My daredevil.

No, watch
this,
Eli said. He stood on his head till his face turned a rich mahogany color, legs pedaling.

Very good, I told him.

He had always been the more cerebral of the two.

I could hug Wolf, briefly, perhaps kiss his brow before he ducked. Wolf liked to be touched. Eli was more aloof in that way. I could hug him only at bedtime, lights off. Both were stiff and manly in their father’s presence, brushed off my caresses. Out in the streets I was not allowed to hold their hands.

I would have smothered them if they had let me.

But I was also proud of their pride, their uplifted chins and boxer’s stances.

At home they argued incessantly, pummeled each other. But on the streets they were inseparable, they were each other’s staunchest defenders.

They were like that from the start. When they were a few weeks old Eli began choking, turning blue in the middle of the night, and Wolf screamed and screamed until I woke and came running to help. By the next morning Eli had recovered and his brother was kicking him in the head.

I was so happy then.

Perhaps the contentment made me less vigilant. Perhaps I let down my guard.

Perhaps I was careless with my mother’s preventive medicine.

Whatever the reason, I discovered I was pregnant.

The boys were nine years old then.

I did not want it.

I could have gotten rid of it, but I did not.

I did not want to have the baby, but I wanted to be able to tell Shmuel and see his face light up.

So I did, and Shmuel, who had given up hope, was beside himself with joy. I had never before seen tears in his eyes. He brought out his violin, tucked it under his chin, but was too overcome to play.