If I Should Die Before I Wake (6 page)

"Truth is, she scared me. So tiny like that. Scared me so much I couldn't go near her. Roy got his mother to come live with us. Just until I got over my fears. But the longer his mother stayed and the more she took over, the more frightened I became. I was no mother to Hilary. She didn't need me. None of them did. And when Roy died I begged her grandmama to stay on. I begged her to take care of Hilary, but she was too ill, too old."

 

Yeah, I remember that sweet scene. You and Grandmama start fighting after the funeral. Right after the stinkin' funeral. The taxi's waiting to take Grandmama away and you're fighting over the stupid luggage. You're tugging on the suitcase like you want to make a trade—you'll keep the luggage if she'll take me. But both of you want the luggage. Too bad you lost, huh, Mother?

Then like two nights later you run off to some hotel for three days. Three days! And I'm left alone in that house with just your crusty old jar of mustard, less than half a loaf of bread, and some old sour milk for food. And get this, Grandmaw, she leaves me a note on the refrigerator door. A note! If she knew anything about kids, anything at all, she'd know a five-year-old can't read some letter written in cursive.

I spent the whole time staring out my bedroom window, singing and talking to my stuffed dog, Whimper. Really. I still remember the songs. One was about Daddy's flowers bent over crying in the backyard, and another was about Grandmama's sweater with the hole hole hole left in my room room room, and at night I sang about Mr. Funny Sunny Sun.

I stayed up through the first night right there in that chair and watched the furniture and toys grow so big I thought they'd swallow me. The flowers on my wallpaper turned into these lips with fangs that dripped blood, and the toys and dolls on my shelves became live, breathing spiny creatures that whispered and laughed: You're all alone, there's no one left. No one.

By the third day I knew she wouldn't be coming back, but I couldn't leave my place at the window. I was waiting for Daddy. I just knew he'd come. He always came. Always when I needed him. I knew he'd come back before I finished all the bread. But then the hours of that third day passed and I was so hungry I just kept eating. I was down to a little square of bread and I was just picking at it, eating just a crumb at a time, giving Daddy time to get there. But then she comes back. She comes rushing into my bedroom and finds me staring out the window.

I was watching this little boy, this baby, laughing and clapping hands with his father. They were the new people who had moved in behind us. I couldn't look away. Mother kept grabbing me and shaking my arms, but all I wanted to do was watch that baby—baby Simon and his father with the funny little beanie cap on. I kept trying to twist away from her. I knew if I didn't keep watching they'd disappear, and while she was holding me,
holding my face, they did, they disappeared. That happy laughing father just disappeared.

She didn't care. What the hell did she care? She wanted me to listen to her. She kept talking, with her eyes all shining like silver spoons and telling me all about some Gideon's Bible in a hotel room and something about suicide, like I knew what that meant. Telling me how the Lord made her see the light and how she was forgiven and how she was going to make it all up to me. How she was never going to leave me again.

Right. She could never make that up to me. Never. She can't get off so free and easy-breezy like that.

 

"Of course the children at school teased her at first, with her wearing all that white every day, but then they just forgot about her. She simply blended into the schoolroom like a forgotten piece of chalk. You can imagine my first parent-teacher conference, with me sitting in one of those tiny chairs pulled up to the teacher's desk while the teacher sits towering above me in her teacher's chair.

"'Frankly, Mrs. Burke,' she says in this hoity-toity voice, 'I can only show you her work, I don't know your daughter in any other way. Dicky Reilly, now, he and Pete Dennis are troublemakers.
Then there's the little girls' social group that has its ups and downs throughout the day that I've got to supervise and, of course, the class projects. Well, as you can guess, it's quite easy to overlook a quiet little miss who does what she's told and turns in a neat paper.'

"Really, that's the way she talked, all superior and making sure I understood it wasn't her fault she didn't know Hilary even existed. So whose fault was it? Mine? Then I ask her if Hilary has any friends, and she's real cagey, not really answering me, just saying, 'She doesn't seem to talk, now, does she?' Saying it as if she thought Hilary couldn't talk, like she didn't know how! Then she says how she felt Hilary needed to see the school psychologist. A psychologist! At six years old, mind you. Well, I told her. I said I didn't believe in any of that psychological mumbo-jumbo, and if my baby was in trouble she could just talk to the good Lord. God would show her the way. And you know what? I never went back."

"To that teacher?"

"No, Nurse—what is it—Fulbright? No, I never went back to that teacher, that school, or any other school. I hate schools, always have."

See what I mean? My mother doesn't go to school to see how I'm doing because she's always hated school. It has nothing to do with me. I don't see a psychologist because she doesn't believe in them. I'm expected to talk to the "good Lord," but why? What good has it ever done? He's never talked back.

 

"Thus says the Lord:
Stand by the roads, and look,
and ask for the ancient paths,
where the good way is; and walk in it,
and find rest for your souls."

 

I don't want to hear it, Mother. I hear the clinking of glass and a quick ripping sound. Something inside me shifts and shivers as though a cold shot of quicksilver has gone surging through my veins.

"Look at her. I always liked it best when she was asleep. I could look at her then. I could know her then, or at least pretend I could. She's so small and thin, and pale. Not because she's dy—hurt, but just naturally. Just like Alice in Wonderland, she is. People always said that. And until she met up with Brad, she always lived on that other side of the looking glass, in her own world, never bothering to look out at us—at me."

You got that right, Mother. I always felt like Alice on this crazy, mixed up, upside down, inside out planet. And why should I have looked out from my world? Would you have been there if I had?

"When I'd come home from work at night I used to stop outside her bedroom door. It was always closed. I could hear her though, singing. She and her father were always singing together. He sang bass in the choir at church. When Hilary was born, I dropped out of the choir, but he kept going, and on those Sundays when he had a solo, even when she was an infant, he'd have someone bring her upstairs to hear him sing. She loved it. She loved the sound of his voice.

"Now I sing in the choir at a different church. She's never heard me. She has my voice, not his."

Daddy dies and suddenly you're in that wacko church all the time, drooling over every word Reverend "Hi-call-me-Jonnie" bellows. Then you start parading around with a Bible and quoting Scripture, and going on retreat and to choir rehearsals and anywhere but home to your empty house. Empty except for that white lump of nothing crumpled on the floor upstairs.

You took God away from me. I knew God when I was five. I could hear Him when I was five. But then you turned religion into a performance, a three-ring circus with a new trinity—Father, Mother, and holy "Hi-call-me-Jonnie"—clowns, all of you.

"It's the church that saved me. It's God who's given me strength and courage. If Hilary makes it, I hope she can find God someday. She thinks she's so powerful, so indestructible, hanging out with those hoodlums. She doesn't know how weak she is. All that hiding behind her clothing, behind her 'Heil, Hitlers,' behind her fear. She's weak. Like I was. She's just like I was."

That's crap, Mother. Pure crap, and I refuse to listen to it.

 

"To whom shall I speak and give warning,
that they may hear?
Behold their ears are closed,
they cannot listen;
behold, the word of the Lord is to
them an object of scorn,
they take no pleasure in it."

 

Grandmaw, are you here? I can't see you. Everything is fading. Everything is spinning. I don't want to go back there—please!

EVERYTHING WAS AT FIRST MISTY
and unclear. I was walking through a thick, steamy grayness and all around me I could hear the footsteps of others, perhaps hundreds of others. Out of all of those footsteps, I began to pick up my mother's very even, rhythmic steps, and my grandmother's, quick, and heavy on the heels. I kept walking, not seeing, only hearing and smelling and feeling. The air, with its sharp odor of souring decay, stung my eyes and made tears stream down my face. I blinked and blinked, squeezing out the stinging and trying to focus on what I was pulling behind me. What was I holding? My hand was hot and sweaty. I felt skin against my skin and realized I was holding little Anya's hand in mine and pulling her along, following the sour odors like a dog.

My back was bent with the bundle I was shouldering, and my right hip felt bruised by what could only be the end of my violin case thumping against me as I walked. I wanted desperately to set the bundle down and plunk myself on the ground, but I could not. There were soldiers. I could hear their sturdy boots slamming down on the cobbled road behind me. I could hear their shouts of "
Schneller, schneller!
" as they tried to hurry us along, faster and faster. I picked up my pace and Anya groaned beside me. I looked down and I could see her. Through the clearing mist and my own tears, I could see her dark head bobbing up and down as she trotted along, trying to keep up.

"It cannot be much longer," I whispered to her. She squeezed my hand and looked up at me, her eyes wide, her lips pressed between her teeth. I tried to smile.

"Poor Zayde," she said after a little silence. "Will he die, do you think?"

I looked ahead of us to search out Zayde's small gray head in the crowd of weary people trudging along in straggled lines. I found him at last, lying huddled against the wall of the cart we used to carry our belongings. Jakub was pulling the cart and carrying a bundle on his back as well. Beside him, on either side of the cart, were Mama and Bubbe, each with her own bundles and suitcases, whispering prayers for Zayde.

At seventy-one, he was twenty-one years older than Bubbe and looked even older. Like Tata, he had a weak heart that would beat frantically against his chest anytime he strained himself or whenever he was overtired. We were all surprised he'd lasted as long as he had, all of us except Bubbe, who said that his will to live was so strong he might bury us all first.

I hurried up alongside Mama and the cart. "Mama, he is lying so very still," I said as I looked down at the thin gray man who resembled my grandfather only slightly.

"It is all right, Chana. He will be all right. It is just rest he needs."

I was not sure I believed Mama, but I wanted to and I tried to sound cheerful when I said, "We will all be all right as soon as we can get to our new home and wash this mud off."

I frowned at my cold and soaking feet. It was early spring and all around us the snow was melting and had turned the ground to mud. As people dragged past us, their feet would splatter the mud onto our legs. At first there were apologies, but as we continued to walk on the uneven pavement, everyone with their loads on their backs and in their arms, the apologies became fewer and fewer, until people neither noticed nor cared. All around us people kept tripping, stubbing their toes into the cobblestones and broken pavement, and landing, with their bundles flying, in the clinging black mud. By the time we arrived at our destination—the poorest, dirtiest part of Lodz, called Baluty—we all looked as if we belonged there.

I swallowed hard as we squeezed along the narrow streets past rows of ugly, crumbling, sagging houses. Which one would be ours? I wondered. I heard Anya whimper, and I saw her worried expression as she looked up at Mama.

Mama patted her head. "Just think, the people who used to live here all survived, and if the Germans had not chased them out, they'd be here still. They have had to live in poverty all their lives. They have no money and no education. They could not take care of their homes. But just wait and see how we fix up ours. If the Nazis want to stick all the Jews into one little corner of the world, well ... we will show them what we can do with the garbage dump they have put us in."

At last we arrived at our apartment. Had it been assigned to us? I wondered. By whom? The new Chairman? I had heard about a man here named Chaim Rumkowski. As we scrambled and trudged through the mud and the streets, we caught bits of conversation about this man—our new leader. He was called the Chairman of the Jews, but the Nazis were the ones who gave him the position. Would he work for us, or for them? Everyone wanted to know. Already there were rumors good and bad about this man, some people spitting as they said his name and others speaking of him as if he were a king—"So good to the little orphans," they would say. He frightened me. Anyone having to do with the Nazis did. He would take orders from the Nazis—how could that be good?

Zayde was struggling to climb out of the cart, while Jakub was struggling to keep him in it and carry the cart upstairs.

"Jakub, it is too much. I am not dead yet. Now let me walk."

Jakub's eyes teared up. "Please, Zayde, let us do this. You are making it more difficult and already you are overtired."

"So,
now
it is you decide to think of this family.
Now
you think of me. Let me out, I will walk."

"No!" Jakub burst out as he dumped the bundle from his back onto the floor. "I am thinking still of me, Zayde. If you die, I will be—I will be the man of the family." He paused and then whispered, "Please, Zayde, I need you."