Between Gods: A Memoir (38 page)

She checks my reaction. I see she does not want me to feel pushed away, wants me to know this isn’t a rejection but an option, an invitation.

“Is the work over?” I ask.

She laughs; in all our time together I’ve never heard her laugh and I am surprised at the brightness of it, like sunlight sparkling on a lake.

“To be continued,” she says.

“Okay.”

“Go live your life,” she says.

She sends me away with the instruction, of course, to pay attention to my dreams. That night, I find myself in a café with Marianne. It is Prague, before the war. An aproned waiter pours coffee from a tall silver pot. The cups are bone china. Marianne wears a blue hat with a veil of sheer netting over her face. I have the sinking feeling that I know something she doesn’t, that I alone can see what is coming. She sighs, and stirs a cube of sugar in her coffee. The delicate clink of the spoon. “I wish we had more time together,” she says.

I sit up straighter. “How do you mean?”

She lifts her veil so I can see her full face, her rouged cheeks and pink lips, and cocks an eyebrow in reprimand. As though to say:
We both know how this will end. Why pretend otherwise?

The waiter comes with our bill. Marianne gathers her things. “But wait,” I say, panicking. “I wanted to ask you …”

She stops, half up from her chair, and says Charlotte’s exact words: “Go live your life.”

My eyes widen.

Marianne is opening her makeup compact now, checking her look before going down into the street. She opens the café door; the little bell jingles. She turns back toward me, looking over her shoulder, but when her voice comes, it is directly in my ear, as though she’s standing next to me. “Don’t suffer for me,” she says. “For us.” I know that by “us” she means Oskar and her; Vera’s children, little Jan in his bathing suit, Eva with her halo of curls. Marianne holds my eye and says, for emphasis, “There are better ways to honour us.”

twenty-one

I
’VE BEEN GRANTED MY WISH
to not have to face a circumcision. We have a simple baby-naming, instead. On a snowy morning in February, when Ayla is six months old, we clean and tidy, tucking tiny spit-up bibs and washcloths no larger than my palm out of sight. When the kitchen is spotless, I bring out a lace tablecloth that belonged to Vera, who died peacefully in 2001. I spread its elaborate pattern out on the table. I hang my framed photos of her lost children in the living room for everyone to see.

At eleven o’clock the doorbell starts ringing. Our family and friends arrive slowly and assemble in the living room, gathering around Rachel and Shayna, who will officiate together. Shayna begins to hum, softly and hypnotically; the crowd falls silent. I look out at their faces: Dad, my sister, Aaron and Sylvie, Debra. The faces of the many people who have been with me on this journey.

Ayla has been cloistered away with my mother, who has been given the honour of carrying her into the room. When they enter, a gasp of pleasure rises from the assembly. She is a beautiful baby. All parents think that of their child, but I am certain it is true. Pale-skinned and blue-eyed like her father, her fat limbs announcing the space she takes up in the world. Shayna’s humming blooms into full song, and when she lets loose the first high clear notes, Ayla’s body freezes and turns toward my friend, every bit of my daughter aimed at the beauty. A string of clear drool hangs from her plush pink lips; she blinks. Her first experience of being fully transported by art.

Ayla wears a white smock dress that was mine as a baby. Maybe it was the dress I wore to my christening.

Rachel explains that Ayla has entered the room to the same melody she will enter to on her wedding day. I can no more imagine Ayla getting married than I can imagine her speaking or walking, but there is something about Rachel’s certainty—her
faith
—that makes me trust it is true.

Rachel leads us through the parents’ dedication, but I am so overcome I cannot hear her words. I have to stop partway through the blessing because my throat is thick with feeling. I look into Rachel’s eyes and hang on.
She
has been the one to shepherd us from a place of absence into presence. When she recites the prayer welcoming Ayla, Rachel, too, has tears in her eyes.

The centrepiece of any baby-naming ceremony is the parents talking about the names they have chosen. Degan starts, telling our friends about the first time he heard the name Ayla, and how he immediately fell in love with it. It was a Scottish name, but later, after I got pregnant, he began to harbour the idea that it was an old name, a name with other roots. Hebrew roots.

It was. It did. Ayla can be short for the Hebrew
ayala
, meaning “deer.” Lithe and delicate, with light in the eyes.

Degan then speaks about the name Emily, passed down from both my sister and his paternal grandmother.

Then it is my turn to speak.

Ayla’s third name is Ruzenka, I say, after Dad’s paternal grandmother. She loved my father fiercely. She suffered the worst thing anyone can suffer—the deaths of two of her children in concentration camps. She grieved, and adapted with grace to what life dealt her. She believed, and taught Dad, that the most important thing was to have faith—of any kind—in God, the world and humanity.

But Ruzenka also believed in the particularity of religion. While the rest of her family pretended to be Christian, she held her Judaism close her entire life. She fasted on Yom Kippur. She lit candles on Shabbat. It is the light from Ruzenka’s candles, I tell our family and friends, that we want Ayla to grow up in. A light that, despite great adversity, has shone down the generations.

I look out again into the faces of everyone gathered. Dad and I lock eyes. I smile. He smiles. It is done.

Somewhere rain falls into the open sea. Genocide continues. There are no easy answers. Snow falls on a tombstone, furring it over with memory. My great-grandmother is buried in an unmarked grave in the sky.

My Christian mother holds my Jewish child in her arms. The rabbi, full of love, blesses the baby in Hebrew:
bruchah haba’ah
.

We repeat the blessing in English.

Blessed is she who comes.

acknowledgements

Acknowledgements play a particular role in a memoir. I’m grateful to have the chance to thank some of the many people who helped me with the writing and also who lived through various parts of this with me, who supported me in ways to numerous to list, and who offered conversation and company along the way:

Nicola Holmes. Aviva Chernick. Adam Sol. Rabbi Karen Thomashow. Rabbi Elyse Goldstein. Aaron Talbot and Miki Stricker Talbot. Hartley Weinberg and Sarah Margles. Rabbi Esther Lederman. Helen Bramer. The Traub-Werner family. Allan Kaplan and Cheryl Reicin. Debra Bennett. Jordan and Ilana Stanger-Ross. John and Nora Freund. George Feldman and Deborah Orr. Sasha and the Mamas. Christine Pountney. Sonya Teece. Alexi Zentner. Matt Neff.

In many ways this book was a collaboration with my father,
Thomas Pick, and I am particularly indebted to him, to Margot and Emily Pick, to Rabbi Yael Splansky who went above and beyond, to my longtime and beloved editor, Lynn Henry, and to Degan Davis for his incredible fortitude and compassion.

I could not have written this book without financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. I was grateful for a fellowship from the Corporation of Yaddo during the final stages. Thanks to my agents Anne McDermid and Martha Magor Webb in Toronto, and to Zoe Waldie, Stephen Edwards and Margaret Halton in London. And thanks also to Kristin Cochrane, Zoe Maslow, Nicola Makoway and Sharon Klein at Doubleday Canada, to Claire Wachtel at HarperCollins in the US, and to Mary-Anne Harrington at Headline in the UK.

Between Gods
is an emotional record, a spiritual and psychological snapshot of a particular time in my life. In order to highlight the essence of the events, I have taken artistic liberty with chronology. I have changed some names and distinguishing details, and I have also amalgamated some of the characters—rabbis, guides, friends who welcomed me to their tables. That I had to do so is a testament to the amount of support I received; I hope the work is taken in this spirit.

My final thanks goes to you, my reader.