Louisa Page 20

  Aunt Monika was bewildered by what she called “this business with the dishes.” She resented not being allowed to play her phonograph on the Sabbath. Still, she was willing to put up with inconveniences, particularly if she would get to spoil a grandchild. She was nearing seventy now, and it was getting harder and harder for her to sweep Matyas’s wood-shavings from the path. Closing the drapes against the afternoon sunshine, she would write me spidery letters, full of questions about Gabor, and I’d do my best to answer them.

  She also asked about Bela. How was he? I’d realized, then, that Bela had stopped writing his mother about the time that he stopped writing me, in ’39.

  HIS LAST LETTER had been uncharacteristic. Somehow, it lacked buoyancy. With his bum knee, he wrote, he’d become little more than a schoolmaster, a position given to people who couldn’t do anything else. Tilulit was growing too quickly, and it would be difficult to make do with their thousand dunam for much longer. Though no one minded sleeping in a tent, they couldn’t fill all of their arable land with tents. They had to grow something on that land. That was the whole point.

  It had been a hard month. First, there’d been a blight on the chickens, and he’d opened up the coop one morning and almost fainted at the stench. They burned the infected chickens and scraped the coop clean, and there was an all-night argument about whether they ought to bring in turkeys. Nathan Sobel had heard that turkeys got a wonderful price, this seemed to Bela reason enough to argue against it. Bela’s animosity for Sobel was admitted in such plain language that I couldn’t believe it ran deep, but in this letter in particular I sensed a new tone, as though Bela were a bowstring wound tighter and tighter until it hummed.

  Sobel wanted to buy another thousand dunam from Taell al-Taji and had opened negotiations with the absentee landlord in Syria. Bela’s objection to this was straightforward. “You know the village is never going to accept the exchange as legitimate.”

  “That was how we got the kibbutz in the first place,” Sobel said, “though I know you don’t like to be reminded of that.”

  This argument took place during a particularly relentless meeting, and though they were fueled by grape juice and cookies it was obvious they wouldn’t last much longer. Bela knew the vote wouldn’t go in his direction. But wouldn’t they all expect him to explain the land purchase in Arabic in Taell al-Taji, painstakingly and earnestly, until he won them after-the-fact compliance?

  Dori was on his side; Dori was always on his side. Though as ever she’d been assigned to take notes, she piped in: “We can’t keep making wounds and patching them up. It’s not good policy.”

  “Don’t you want any kind of buffer zone around your clinic?” Sobel asked her. That clinic had been built close to the gate on purpose, so it could be open to Taell al-Taji. But bandits had somehow broken in just a month before and stolen three suitcases full of the equipment Bela had brought her back from Hungary.

  Dori said, “Subjective motivations are irrelevant in this case.” There went her doctor voice again, a sure sign of retreat. Bela put his arm around her and glanced at her notes; her handwriting had always been terrible. It made him feel affectionate and sad.

  In that same letter, Bela added that he and Dori were now sharing a room. He didn’t say anything about the negotiation which must have led him to this point after the twenty-some year courtship. Instead, he described the room. It’s in one of the new concrete buildings, and has two windows with shutters. We put up curtains too.

  Bela still kept watch at night. From his place in the tower, he could see the flat white rooftops of Taell al-Taji across the gully. Ahmad had returned the bicycle because he said he was too old to ride it. Bela told him to give it to his grandchildren. He said, “Shokran gaezilaen, lae, you give it to your own grandchildren.” When he saw the look on Bela’s face, he added, “Do you understand?”

  “I don’t understand,” Bela said. He pressed Ahmad’s hand, and said again, “Take the bicycle back.”

  “Ask me a thousand times,” said Ahmad.

  “I ask you a thousand times,” Bela replied.

  “Then someone will steal it and take it apart,” Ahmad said, “and sharpen every spoke into a needle and plunge those needles in my heart and then maybe you will understand.”

  Bela forced himself to laugh, and did not let go of Ahmad’s hand. “You sound like a bad poet, my friend.”

  “You sound like you don’t want to have grandchildren,” Ahmad said. “I think that’s why you won’t let me give you back your bicycle.”

  In the end, Bela gave the bicycle to the children’s house and was stunned with how little interest the boys and girls showed in the machine. Well, of course it was old, and not in the best condition, but it was still capable of getting them from here to there.

  They were wonderful children. Raised first by Bernadette, and then by two of the Polish girls who’d come back in ’34, and finally by the whole of the kibbutz in rotation, they were fearless and affectionate, secure, Bela wrote me, in a belief that anyone could be their mother or their father. They ran from house to house, trailing behind them toys they’d made from discarded tin cans, twine, or chicken feathers, and they dug their hands into the chicken-feed or fertilizer and worked as though it were another game.

  Bela knew he should feel honored, teaching such children. There were maybe thirty of them by the year of his last letter. Their ages ranged from five to twelve years old. Once, he matched the older and the younger children, and gave them free range of the library, and the older children pulled books from the shelves at random, in a way that implied intellectual openness. Out flew the texts with their ragged Hebrew bindings: Principals of Geometry, An Introduction to Magnetic Fields, Ben-Yehuda’s lexicon, The Old-New Land, and somewhere in there that lone volume in German, Buber’s Ich und Du. Bela watched them open the books, and wondered as those same books were placed upright, or with their spines like tents, or laid out flat with their titles upside down.

  Moving in a little closer, he heard one boy of ten say to an eight-year-old, “See, if we put another watchtower here, we could see past the hills, but it’ll have to be higher,” and as he spoke, he moved his brown hand absentmindedly towards a pamphlet on pasteurization, and rolled it into a cylinder. He set it on top of three other books, and called to one of the other children, “Rena! Have you got something really thick!”

  Rena swung her pigtails sideways, and called back, “I’m using everything here, blockhead!” In fact, she and her partner had lined up a row of volumes of the encyclopedia, and they looked very impressive against the dark-red floor of the library, like a well-paved road. She saw that Bela was observing her, and she smiled up at him. “Any good ideas?”

  Bela smiled back, though he felt she could see through him. “No ideas at all.”

  “Well, it’s clear we’re not secure the way we are, with just the little path. We need a big road, no apologies.”

  “No apologies,” Bela said, and he felt the ache below his knee throb without warning, so that he had to sit down. He knew it was within his rights to tell them not to abuse books, but were they abusing them? They didn’t do anything worse with the things than he’d done many times before, when he was their age and had allowed dozens of volumes to accumulate on the floor. He had been reading for no real reason; they, on the other hand, were in the midst of a completely useful exercise. What would he have them do? Take turns riding that old bicycle?

  It was on that poignant note that the letter ended, a rare note for Bela. He’d just turned forty. He had reached, he said, the middle of his life and given his family history he would live for forty more years, unless a jackal ate him or a bandit shot him or he fell off a bridge and drowned. Did he once tell me that he was afraid of ghosts?

  Now that the kibbutz had eighy-five members, there was activity night and day. Whatever spirits floated between the concrete houses were scared away by children running up and down the stairs of the dining hall, or young men playing guitar,
or maybe Eleazar smoking one of his hand-rolled cigarettes and stopping by Bela’s open window and calling in a greeting, as if it were impossible that he wouldn’t want to be greeted or would want to close his window and sit in the dark.

  We’ve lived here for sixteen years. It has changed so much, especially since ’35, that it’s like that photograph you sent of Gabor on your knee and what Gabor must be now. They’re the same person, but that’s where the resemblance ends. The really remarkable part is that I don’t know where this place ends and I begin anymore. Maybe you feel that way about your son.

  I DIDN’T REPLY TO that letter. Or rather, by the time I got around to replying, Germany and England were at war and I wasn’t sure a letter would get through. I suppose I could have found some way around restrictions, but by then Janos was gone and I was working twice as hard and was hardly free to stand in postal lines all day. Besides: He could have written me.

  I did hear from him one more time. This was in 1944. It was a note, with no return address. The language was uncharacteristically telegraphic, to the point where I did not completely believe Bela was the author.

  It gave a time, a location by the Duna, and a request to gather up myself, my mother, my son, Adele, Matyas, and Aunt Moni. The location was some hours east of Budapest, near the Romanian border, and trains did not go there.

  I received the note by hand, and at that point was so distracted that I didn’t even get a good look at the fellow in the doorway, though when I closed the door he was still standing there. Louisa was vomiting up what looked like pieces of her own intestines, and sobbing when she wasn’t vomiting. She and Gabor were married. He could hardly leave her now. I hadn’t heard from Adele and Matyas since Christmas. As for Aunt Monika, was Bela insane? She could barely climb up a flight of stairs.

  No, we most certainly would not be meeting at the appointed spot at the appointed time. I didn’t leave this weird, scrawled note for Louisa to discover; things were bad enough. I burned it. Louisa must have smelled something in the kitchen, because she wobbled towards the stove with that horrible blanket draped like bat’s wings across her shoulder, and she whispered, “Mutti, are you cooking something for me?”

  “Now how could I do that?” I said then. “You can’t keep a thing down.”

  “Ah, no, I can’t, not now.”

  Louisa’s voice held a little of her singing voice then, light and sweet. She should have been singing in Vienna, in Paris, in Berlin, in Amsterdam, in Krakow, but instead stood in our miserable, freezing kitchen on Prater Street, watching a slip of ash drift from my fingers to the sink.

  7

  RABBI NEEDLEMAN finally admitted it; he didn’t like Louisa. He didn’t know why he didn’t like Louisa. The feeling crept up on him at odd moments, when he was walking home from shul or playing with his son. He would feel a wave of dislike overtake him, a fluttering sensation, and he’d stop at a corner or set down the red plastic block and think: She had been sent to him, bright, sincere, open-hearted. In what he felt, there was no justice.

  To his Sharon, he would say, “She’s a sweet girl.”

  Sharon would nod and go on doing whatever she did around the house, vacuuming, picking up stray crayons, lifting up their youngest son to change his diaper, washing a bowl of fruit. Their two oldest daughters would help her, good quiet girls who could already cook a chicken or mend a pair of trousers. It struck Shmuel that what he disliked in Louisa was that he could not imagine her doing any of those things. He said to Sharon, “Do you know anyone who needs a maid?”

  Sharon looked up from her mending. “You can’t expect that German to keep house.”

  “And why not?”

  “Shmuel,” Sharon said, setting down the thread and needle, “she’s not that kind of girl. She’s used to having other people do for her.”

  “Now that’s not true. She does everything for her mother-in-law. And I can’t think of a better way for her to get to know a Jewish home.”

  “Her employer would have to be a saint.”

  “I’ll find her a saint,” said Shmuel, and for the rest of the week the matter was on his mind. When he passed by the grocer’s, he looked at the face of the clerk hanging above the register, a pleasant enough face with thick horn-rimmed glasses suspended from red ears. He wondered how Louisa might do arranging the shelves. His cousin Hershel visited, not a bad approximation of a saint at that, so patient with that fat dumb wife of his that it was a wonder he had strength enough to teach at the seminary. He considered Louisa in each circumstance, rejected it, and moved on, and it was not until one morning, just before he laid tfillin, when his mind was at its most lucid, that he realized he was selecting a bridegroom.

  “This won’t do,” he said out loud, to the east window. “Not at all.”

  HE TOOK TO wondering if she’d appear without invitation, and as he wandered the neighborhood, he’d think he’d see a fair head of hair through the bakery window, or spot a slim girl by the butcher shop, and most uncannily, one afternoon he glanced into the kitchen, and there she was, shelling peas with Sharon. Sharon’s hands were deft and precise and bobbing; Louisa fingered the pods as though in a dream. But it wasn’t Louisa; it was his oldest daughter, who saw her father through the doorway and passed on him a smile which struck him as not belonging to her face.

  Later, Sharon said, “She’s not your business. She’s got every pencil-pusher in that camp making her feel at home.”

  They were in bed, with the covers over them, and he rolled some distance from his wife and looked at the ceiling. He said, “She doesn’t belong here.”

  In a rather rough voice, Sharon said, “Tell her to go.”

  “I can’t,” said Shmuel. It was far too late for this sort of conversation; they should have both been asleep an hour before. Shmuel felt torn between speaking his heart to her and protecting her from what was in that heart, which he had not yet named or mastered.

  This on his mind, he rose from bed, walked in the dark to the room where he kept his books, and at once found what he wanted in a British anthology: “Ode to a Nightingale.” Lighting the lamp, he sat and read the poem several times, returning to the lines:

  Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path

  Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

  She stood in tears amid the alien corn.

  Then he pulled out commentaries on The Book of Ruth, which led to neighboring commentaries until, at dawn, his wife woke to find his side of the bed empty and cold. She wandered out in her nightgown and slippers to his study, where he sat amidst a hurricane of strewn books, reading and reading.

  In the days when Judges judged Israel, the Lord sent ten years of famine. Elimelech, a man of Bethlehem, took his wife Naomi and his two sons and they came to the fields of Moab.

  Elimelech died, and the sons took Moabite wives. One was named Orpah, the other Ruth. The sons died, and Naomi heard that the Lord had remembered his people and had given them bread, so she decided to return. Her two daughters-in-law went with her.

  Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go. Return each to your mother’s house. May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have with the dead and with me.”

  Then she kissed them and they lifted up their voices and wept. They said to her, “No, but we will return with you to your people.”

  Naomi said, “Turn back, daughters. Why go with me? Do I have sons in my womb who can be your husbands? If I had hope, even if I had a husband tonight and could bear sons, would you wait until those sons were grown? Would you shut yourself off and have no husbands? It grieves me for your sakes that the hand of the Lord is against me.”

  They lifted up their voices, and again they wept. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth cleaved to her.

  Naomi said to Ruth, “Your sister-in-law has returned to her people and to her god. Go after her.”

  Ruth said: “Entreat me not to leave you, and do not tell me to return from following after you; for where you go, I will go, a
nd where you lodge I will lodge; your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried; the Lord do so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me.”

  When Naomi saw that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped speaking to her.

  It came to pass that when Naomi and Ruth came to Bethlehem, all the city spoke of them. The women asked, “This is Naomi?”

  Naomi said, “Do not call me Naomi, which means pleasant. Call me Marah, which means bitter, for the Lord has dealt with me bitterly. I went out full and came back empty.”

  So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabite with her. They came to Bethlehem at the beginning of the harvest.

  Naomi had a kinsman of her husband’s, a mighty man of valor. His name was Boaz. Ruth said to Naomi, “Let me go to the field and glean among the ears of corn.”

  Naomi said, “Go, my daughter.” Ruth went and gleaned in the field after the reapers, until she came to the portion of the field belonging to Boaz.

  Boaz came from Bethlehem, and said to the servant set over the reapers, “What girl is this?”

  The servant said, “It is a Moabite girl who came back with Naomi.”

  Boaz said to Ruth, “Hear me, daughter. Do not glean in any other field, but stay here by my maidens. Keep your eyes on the field they reap and go after them. The young men won’t touch you.”

  Ruth fell on her face before him and said, “Why should you favor me or take note of me? I am a foreigner.”

  Boaz replied, “I have heard of all you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband, and how you left your father and mother and the land where you were born, and how you came to a people that you didn’t know before. May the Lord reward you, under whose wings you have taken refuge.”

  Ruth said, “Let me find favor in your sight, for you have spoken to my heart.”