Between Gods: A Memoir (37 page)

And one from Jordan, who twenty years earlier on the playground saw me for what I really was. “So it’s come to this, has it?” he writes. “You are officially Jewish. Well, welcome. Is it strange?”

Eli and I have been in touch a bit over the past weeks, and his response to my news is a single word: “Hooray!”

The last email comes from Dad. He is in Europe—in Prague, as fate would have it. He writes to tell me he went to synagogue on Shabbos morning. When he arrived, the rabbi asked about his background. Ten Jewish males make up a
minyan
, the minimum required for the public aspects of prayer. At the synagogue in Prague there were rarely enough. Today, there were nine. Until Dad arrived. The rabbi questioned him at length about his background and finally declared him a full Jew. My father’s presence made for great celebration. Because he was there, they could bring out the Torah.

nineteen

N
EWS OF MY CONVERSION
reaches my extended family slowly, one by one. They give me strange looks, not unkind, but looks of befuddled curiosity, as though I have converted to Islam or announced that I will henceforth be referred to as the king of Siam. In their minds, there is no precedent for what I’ve done, and no reason for it. The logical underpinning has been thoroughly erased. “Call me Brumhilda!” I have declared. Or, “I only have one foot!” They are, though, excited about the baby. A new life is something everyone understands.

I practise the
Shehechiyanu
for months. The prayer for firsts. The first fruit of the New Year. The first Passover Seder. The birth of a child.

My false labour starts and stops several times, over several weeks, always on Shabbat. Two nights before our daughter’s birth there is a late-summer windstorm. The sky billows purple
and howls down the narrow city avenues. A tree blows down in front of our house. Degan collects a branch and waves it over my stomach. When I finally go into labour in earnest, thirteen days past my due date, he says his magic did it.

We have set up a plastic birthing pool in the living room of our new home, a pool smaller than the mikvah but equally symbolic of change. As the contractions deepen, I square my shoulders to face a kind of pain I could never have fathomed. It stalks me silently, huge paws, low snout, and when it finally pounces, I’m torn open into screams. It rips through my insides until it has had its fill, then just as quickly retreats. It hides itself entirely for stretches of time, stretches of time that increase rather than decrease. The relief is incredible, but I deduce from my midwife Hedrey’s frown that it is also a problem. My labour is slowing. By eleven on Saturday evening, my contractions are back down to one every five minutes. I say, “I guess she won’t be a Shabbat baby,” and check Hedrey’s response shyly, like a new bride.

When our daughter is born in the hospital eight hours later, she is laid on my stomach. There is a commotion between my legs—only half the placenta has emerged. There are repeated and urgent requests for me to push to avoid internal bleeding, which I heed half-heartedly. My daughter is in my arms. There is nothing else in the world. I do not think to look at her but to learn her through feel alone. My first words I tell her are the Jewish prayer of newness, whispered into the tiny whorl of her ear.

Someone in another place tries to show me how to breastfeed. There are stances, apparently, strategic holds. I bat the person away.

I am busy falling in love in a way I have never known. With
every cell of my being. To say this is my “purpose” would be to miss the point. It is not a purpose but a self I am meeting, not a new self but a
real
self that has been lying in wait every second of my life up until now. This is not something I decide, or a moral argument in favour of reproduction; it is an irrefutable truth, like a coin falling heavily into a slot.

Her name is already waiting. Ayla.

Her middle names. Emily. Ruzenka.

And her Hebrew name. Ayala.

We drive her home in the Sunday-morning light, a little scoop of a person in the bottom of her car seat, her limbs loose like a handful of noodles. Every particle of the known world rearranging itself around her presence. We eat bean salad and mango juice and a dense dark chocolate birthday cake. I sleep on the couch for four hours while Degan holds the baby. He lays her length across his forearm, her head in his palm, the whole world cupped there in his hand.

In the same way I did not worry about a miscarriage I have not seriously entertained postpartum depression. It has not been explained to me. Or: It’s been explained, but I have not understood. I think it is something that happens to women who do not want their babies, women who don’t have adequate support. I realize with a start that I have never observed new motherhood up close, have never been in a newborn’s presence for longer than a few hours.

In the slew of congratulatory emails comes one from Jordan, whose wife is a midwife: “I hope you feel wonderful! And if for some reason you feel like you’ve fallen down a rabbit hole, that’s normal too.”

Interesting.

Around the seventh day of Ayla’s life darkness starts creeping in, a blur of black at the edge of my eyes. It is August, but I shiver. I force myself to leave the house to go out for a walk, but the sun blinds my eyes. I blink and blink, trying to clear my vision. Several times, the lights dimmed in the living room to help the baby sleep, I see mice that don’t exist scuttle across the hardwood floor.

I am shocked to discover that I will now spend the rest of my life breastfeeding on the sofa, a complex arrangement of cushions strapped to my waist, and my chest exposed for anyone who wanders into the house to see. How have I not known? I have managed to get through an entire pregnancy without anyone once mentioning this.

My breasts burn and sting. I develop blocked milk ducts, mysterious mammary ailments with flowery names like mastitis and candidiasis. My nipples tear and bleed. I take Advil before feeding the baby. There are trips to the hospital in the middle of the night with fevers. Potato poultices. Antibiotics. Appointments at every clinic in the city.

The nursing problems exacerbate my new depression, a darkness that feels different from the usual bad blood. I am not heavy and draggy so much as blown open, the blinders I usually rely on to get through the day blasted off entirely. I am unshielded, without protection. I pace the kitchen with my girl bound to my chest like a bomb about to go off. I can’t help myself—I think of the war. Of Vera being taken away from her children. Only now do I really understand what this means.

She was taken from her children. Her
children
were taken away.

In what is supposed to be the time of ultimate joy, my mind drifts to families living in hiding, behind walls, and to the mothers who smothered their own infants so they did not cry
and give away the family’s location. I pace and bounce, tears on my cheeks, trying to lull Ayla to sleep.

Mengele, “the Angel of Death,” who forced that new mother to hold her daughter without feeding her. Six days of unimaginable suffering.

I hear Hilda’s words: “We were partisans, starving in the woods. What would we do with a baby?”

My daughter has colic. She does not
technically
have colic, but she cries all evening as though enraged about being born. As though the human condition is intolerable to her, entirely unacceptable. I wrap her to my body, tying her against me with the sling. She finally falls asleep on my chest, our sweaty skin sticking us together as though we were again one single animal. Her diaper is redolent with sickly sweet–smelling excrement. I pace and pace with her, reading to pass the time. The father and child in my book are bound together in misery and love. When the father dies, his boy stays by his body for three days, repeating his name over and over.
Daddy. Daddy
. I hold the book up in front of my face like a shield.

Narrative begs an ending. The desire to wrap up loose ends, to make meaning, is human, and ancient. But things do not end. There is only progression, shape-shifting, the flow of a current that crashes and tumbles, diminishes, almost dries up, only to give birth to itself again a little farther downstream.

The baby changes my experience of depression in the same way that the conversion does. She alters it, knocks it askew. I am not fixed or healed, but I am different, as though a part of me that had always existed as an outline has now been fully coloured in. I am a mother, and a Jew, which is to say the
me
who has suffered in the past is now a new me entirely.

I know now, too, that the darkness heralds healing: that with each bout I am invited to a deeper place within myself and, paradoxically, to a deeper release. If I give myself over to depression, engage with it rather than resist it, it will take me places I never would have imagined.

For example: when
Far to Go
is published the following year, it is awarded the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction. The organizer writes me to tell me the news. The subject heading of her email is “The Beatrice and Martin Fischer Award.”

Why does that name sound so familiar?

I email Dad: “Do you know a Martin Fischer?”

He writes back right away: “
Dr
. Martin Fischer? He was my therapist when I was in my twenties. The one I’ve told you about.”

Of course he was. I’ve been given an award in the name of the man Dad thought was
good
, the man whose funeral occasioned my father’s first-ever visit to a synagogue. In a way, he was my first therapist, too: Dad brought me along to see him when I was an infant, fast asleep in my bassinet, my hands curled up tight beside my head.

Ayla’s colic improves, and thankfully so does my postpartum depression. It diminishes slowly, a balloon in the corner of a playroom, losing air until, one day, it is just a scrap of bright plastic amid the toys. Ayla thrives. Our feeding issues resolve and she grows plump with my milk, her pale skin doubling over so she looks like nothing more than a doughy Czech dumpling.

When Ayla is several months old, Degan approaches me in the nursery. The shades are drawn and the small lantern lit. Ayla is nursing, her little hands balled up at her chest and her knees
tucked in. I inhale the sweet and slightly sour smell of baby—her scalp, milk, old skin collected in the creases between fat.

“I have some news,” Degan says.

“Pass me that pillow?”

I tuck it in beneath Ayla, adjusting her position, supporting her delicate skull in the crook of my hand. I motion and he passes me a second pillow.

“What’s the news?” I ask.

“I’m going to convert.”

I pause, and feel the steady sucking right at the heart of me, our daughter growing bigger by the minute.
“Really?”

Degan smiles.

“What made you change your mind?” I ask.

He sits down on the big green yoga ball across from me, bouncing subtly, out of habit, even though there’s no baby in his arms. “I kept thinking about what Rachel said.”

“Rachel said a lot of things.”

“True. I mean, what she said about not needing to wait for a thunderbolt.”

I nod. I take a minute to switch Ayla to the other breast, clipping up the right side of my bra and unclipping the left. She latches back on and the tugging resumes.

Degan says, “I’ve decided the things that I love about Judaism are enough. The absence of original sin. The spirit of inquiry and debate.”

I move the baby to my shoulder and begin the long ritual of burping, starting at her low back and moving slowly up to her tiny wings.

“So?” Degan asks. “What do you think? Are you happy?”

I pause. The onslaught of new motherhood has absorbed me completely, removing me from myself in a way that is both
pleasurable and immensely disconcerting. I have to take a moment to dig around inside myself and sort out the complexity of what I’m feeling.

I remember the pregnant rabbi’s question at my
beit din
, the one I didn’t understand: “How would you feel if your husband changed his mind?”

I realize it only as I say it. “I guess that part of me—just a little part?—was glad you weren’t going to yield. So our old lives would still be represented.”

Degan grins and runs a hand across his stubble. “Sorry, babe.”

“We’re locked in?”

“We’re locked
in
.”

“Merry Christmas!”

“Thank you. But I’m Jewish.”

I laugh.

Ayla pulls off my breast and looks in the direction of her dad’s voice. “What do you think?” I ask her.

She makes a little cry. But it’s a cry of happiness, I’m sure.

twenty

I
T
’
S BEEN MONTHS
since I’ve seen Charlotte; I am surprised by the comfortable familiarity of her room, with its sand table and rocking chair, like returning after a long time to the house of my childhood. Everything smaller than I’d remembered, and comfortingly worn. She smiles when she sees me. “There’s a lot less of you than when you were last here.”

I look down at my diminished belly. “And a lot more.”

She nods knowingly.

We chat in a catching-up kind of way, like old friends who haven’t seen each other in some time. I tell her about
Far to Go
, about the mikvah, about Degan’s recent decision. She rocks, and asks her usual thoughtful questions, but there’s a neutrality of tone to our conversation. The urgency has gone out of it.

“Well?” she asks, seeing the look on my face.

“I was just realizing that I don’t feel the same—” I pause, searching for the word “—I don’t feel the same
pressure
as I used to feel here.”

I hesitate, afraid of hurting her feelings, but she nods to show she understands. “I used to feel that there was so much to
deal
with, to do something about. But now I have the urge to—” I falter, and she nods again. “To just let it be.”

Charlotte crosses her legs and rocks. She absently touches the earth in the small potted aloe plant beside her, then nods, satisfied it has enough water. She says, “There are times to contemplate life, and then there are times to just live it. Maybe this is one of those times.”