The Sacrifice of Tamar (17 page)

“Ma!”

“Look, you know the only reason I sent you there to begin with was so you’d have better teachers, nice little Jewish girlfriends. But don’t you start acting crazy on me!”

“But it’s not crazy. You just don’t understand.”

“So explain it to me. I’m listening.”

“Well, the Bible says that six days you should work and the seventh you should rest.”

“Well, I’m not working. I’m relaxing. I’m enjoying myself. And if I cook up a meal or go to the beach, that’s not work. Let me
tell
you, honey—work is typing those damn briefs. Work is filing those mountains of carbon copies that stink to high heaven in those horrible gray metal filing cabinets. That’s work.”

“But it’s not that. Ma, do you believe in G-d?”

Her mother lowered the light under the frying pan and cracked the eggs with thoughtful care. “I don’t really know. Maybe. Okay, yes. Let’s say yes.”

“So do you believe He made the world?”

“Okay, for argument’s sake, let’s say yes.”

“And everything He made was good, right?”

“I suppose.” Her mother smiled, thinking of a few things she could live without, like roaches and mice and dust, and her fat, disgusting boss Mr Arnell.

“Well then, He made the Sabbath day. He says not to light fires or cook, or… well there’s a whole bunch of things,” she said, flustered, finding it impossible to repeat the very complicated explanation for all the minute do’s and don’ts of the Sabbath day she had learned in Ohel Sara. Jenny really didn’t know how the don’ts translated into such a special day. She only knew that once you started doing things, ordinary things, like cooking or watching TV, the plug was pulled and the Sabbath feeling drained away, leaving behind an ordinary hot Saturday morning, full of cartoons and cigarette smoke.

“I know it sounds silly. But you’re supposed to do what He tells you to do. You’re not supposed to make deals and think up your own ideas. He’s giving you this great gift, a day off to be with Him. And if you don’t keep it, then it’s like throwing it back in His face.”

Her mother stared at her.

“Ma, my friends and their parents have so much fun, and it’s so beautiful. They light candles and drink wine and dress up. It’s so, so quiet and clean and nice. I like it better than anything. Couldn’t you try?”

“So how do they eat if they don’t cook? And what do they do all day? Sit home?”

“They cook the day before and make so much they never have to worry about what to eat. All the best foods—lots of cakes and roast chicken and potato and noodle puddings and big desserts. And they stay home but not all day. They go to the synagogue in the morning, and then eat lunch—the whole family together—singing, telling stories. And then they go to classes or
rest or read. And the kids play games and drink soda and have fun. Beaches are so noisy and crowded, and the subways and buses are so dusty…”

“You’re happy?” her mother asked her, puzzled and strangely touched. Most kids were so silly. She was proud her daughter even thought about such things. But also defensive. It made her nervous.

“I like it, Ma. Come with me to synagogue once, please?”

“I don’t know. It’s my day off. I don’t know any of those people…”

“You know Hadassah’s father!”

“I don’t know him. I only met him once, that time… you remember.” It was an uncomfortable subject.

“Well, Tamar’s parents are nice. You’d like them. Come with me once. You’ll see. It’s fun.”

“Hmm. We’ll see,” her mother answered, calmly scrambling the eggs.

They tried it the following week. And never again. Once was enough for Ida Douglas.

Chapter twelve

It started with Elvis. Ed Sullivan tried valiantly to focus his cameras on Elvis’s face, but the girls in the live studio audience focused on his hips, and girls all over America (and their mothers, who were not as disapproving as they seemed) hated Ed Sullivan. And although the adults pursed their lips and shook their heads, secretly they too were glad, bored with the sunshiny, miniature-marshmallow-and-Jell-O upbeat fifties, which had come to seem like a long, wearingly optimistic commercial for new refrigerators.

They were happy to see the era begin to crumble, glad to have someone like Elvis to bring it down. The era of fathers in white shirts and respectable hats with suit jackets slung over their tired shoulders as they made their way home to little suburban tract houses on commuter trains; the era of mothers in aprons who were dull and pleasant and smelled of cookie dough and Ajax: the era of dress codes in public high schools, where boys wore ties and girls skirts and blouses. The era began to fade as subtly and silently as photographs in a picture album.

In 1960 the American people said good-bye to their balding, gray-haired general and his dowdy wife and turned over the keys of the nation to a relative youngster. Handsome, charming and dark haired, with a stylish First Lady and a beautiful child, John F. Kennedy fertilized expectations that bloomed—depending on your point of view—like wildflowers or like dangerous weeds, all over the staid, carefully cultivated Republican lawns.

The residents of Orchard Park also felt some of that wild spring growth, but reserved judgment, viewing Kennedy the way their tradition had advised them to judge any man claiming to be the Messiah: Wait and see. If he was the Messiah, he would bring about the world’s final redemption. If he didn’t, then he wasn’t. It was really very simple.

So they waited to see if Kennedy would be good for the Jews or bad for the Jews. Would he be for merit, against quotas in jobs and education? Would he keep Christ out of public classrooms and government ceremonies? Would he preserve the social order, laws, and bylaws, by which Jews felt themselves protected from the hostile goy? But most of all, would he support the little sapling state of Israel, planted in the desert, surrounded by woodcutters?

And then Kennedy was killed.

Aaron Gottlieb hung heavily on the subway strap of the overheated, rush-hour IRT express train. He felt the sweat pouring down his forehead from beneath his respectable black felt hat and wondered whether he would manage to keep his balance if he let go to wipe his brow. The train lurched, the wheels screeching against the old metal rails, filling the air with the smell of burning rubber and filthy hot metal.

Better not, he thought. Better wait. Maybe someone would get off and he’d be able to sit down, and then he’d use both hands to take out a handkerchief and lift the hat brim to wipe his face and neck properly. But as station after station whizzed past and
the stops in between brought a crush of new passengers who squeezed him between them in a way that hardly seemed possible, he began to lose hope that the near future held anything better. Hardly able to move, he began to regret not having taken the chance earlier of locking his briefcase between his legs and using one free hand to tend to his need.

What was going to happen? he thought hopelessly, the sweat gathering in his eyebrows and dripping down the sides of his face. Kennedy was dead. He still could not believe it. Gunmen, murderers. In America. In America. Blood again, on the young widow’s pretty suit. Blood on the streets. In America. He shook his head. Thought, different people. A different place. But that is the way it started in Germany, too. The Jews so comfortable, so assimilated. And then the murders. The political murders. He felt his heart racing ahead in fear. This is the way it begins. Kennedy, then Oswald, then Ruby. On television, they showed it. Murders on American television. In America. He felt his heart begin to beat, heavy against his ribs. Loud and lumbering, like heavy feet running down a staircase.

He looked down at his watch to see how much longer the ride would last. Then his mind wandered and he looked around at the people near him, searching out their watches. If only he had gone with the watches instead of with perfume. He sniffed the rancid air filled with the sweating vapors of too many tired bodies. Perfume was a luxury.

He thought of the black and red numbers on the papers in his black briefcase. How much longer could he go on? Orders were down to almost nothing.

A mistake, a real mistake. America. The Goldena Medina.

He felt his knees begin to buckle and with a great effort, he stiffened them. He thought of the wallpaper in the kitchen, all stained and peeling. Ruth kept patching things up, pasting down the frayed edges, scrubbing off the dark spots. But it was
just a matter of time until they went from respectable middle class to shabby poverty. They were skirting the edge already.

He could live with that, but Ruth… the girls…

He closed his eyes, suddenly transported to another train on a track thousands of miles and a lifetime away.

It was the summer after the war had ended, staggering to a strange, disorganized close that had left millions stunned, wandering in the direction of homes that no longer existed. The railroad train rumbled on its old tracks, its aisles and seats a human carpet of agonizingly thin refugees flooding from Poland back to Czechoslovakia. She was sitting near the window, her chin in her hand, her auburn hair thick around her painfully thin face, her long-sleeved blouse rolled up to her elbows, revealing the blue tattoo of numbers on her arm.

He glanced at her for a second, struck by the modesty of her outfit among the women in sleeveless summer shifts. He watched the horrid blue dance of the numbers. A religious girl, he thought, aching. What she must have gone through.

He was on his way home, or what was left of it. Word had reached him through that network of friends and relatives that his wife and two small children had been taken early in the German occupation along with the rest of the Jews of Usti. The end of the story had come in a rush from a distant relative. How his wife had held their baby daughter in her arms on the platform in Auschwitz, and how their three-year-old son had held on to his mother’s skirt crying and how she had bent down to dry his tears and had nearly fallen over.

Menashe Goldman, a cousin from a different town who’d been picked up months before, had been on the platform to help herd the Jews into trucks that would take them to the gas chambers. He’d recognized Genya Gottlieb and helped her lift her son onto the truck and she had thanked him.

“We weren’t allowed to talk to the newcomers. Germans
would shoot you on the spot if they caught you. But I told her anyway. I told her… begged her… to leave the children and to go back to the selection. She was still young.”

Even now, so many years later, he could still hear the man’s voice crack with emotion as he spoke. “But she didn’t seem to hear me. There was nothing I could do…” The tortured voice of the man, long dead, rose up inside the subway car like a ghostly echo. Wife and children, lost forever in a moment of telling. The man had wept, and Aaron had comforted him.

So there was nothing left to go back to. Just the wood and metal and fabrics that were his belongings and which he somehow wanted to see again. Also, he could not think of anyplace else to go. And in the back of his mind he thought: Maybe… just maybe Goldman was wrong. Maybe some miracle. Maybe someone would have heard something, would know something. A further telling in which maybe Genya had left the children after all and had worked her way through the war in some factory complex in Auschwitz.

He knew the idea was preposterous. There was no way Genya would have left the children. But still, a small shred of hope. (Was that what it was called, to wish your two children had been left by their mother to be murdered among strangers? he thought. What other word would you use? And what else can a person do but hope for life, however partial, however tainted?)

And so he’d taken the first train.

He looked up at the subway billboard, at the smiling, bleached-blond secretary who was this month’s Miss Subways. A pretty girl, he thought, his bones aching.

He got off the train in Usti with only a handful of others. The rest of the passengers were traveling on to larger cities and towns where there were refugee agencies and soup kitchens. Here there was only a small relief agency room staffed with medical supplies and food, a few beds and toilets.

His hometown. He saw again the grove of poplars near the soccer field and heard the shouts of the students of the gymnasium echo through the green fields. Young boys together, Jew and gentile together. They were the boys he’d grown up with. Alex, the baker’s redheaded boy, and fun-loving Karel, the ironmonger’s intelligent eldest, his best friend. They all went to the cinema together and dreamed of wearing a white straw hat like Fred Astaire and dancing with some lovely young lady in a filmy ball gown.

They’d all been drafted together into the Czech army. But when the Nazis took over, they’d been separated, the Jews going into units that provided slave labor to the advancing Hungarian troops, the gentiles remaining with their unit. The Hungarians had put them into open cattle cars in subfreezing weather with no food or drink for two days. Cold like that. Never even imagine such a thing. Like sitting in an ice bath naked for a week. Oddly enough, it was a German soldier who’d saved him, just some private who happened to be on the same train platform. “Please, we are soldiers too. We are cold. Could you get us some hot coffee?” How had he had the courage to ask such a thing from a German soldier standing on a train platform? A soldier with a gun? And why had the soldier returned with a whole thermos of boiling hot coffee when he must have known they were Jews? They were gentlemen, some of those German soldiers, much more than the Hungarians or the Ukrainians… Strange.

He must have been cold too, that German soldier straggling back from Stalingrad.

The smell came back to him of dark pine trees, unpruned apple and pear orchards, budding wildly in the spring air. He left the train platform and walked on foot toward the town.

There was the tree beneath which he and Genya had first held hands. Soft buds, pink and green and yellow. Soft young hands, yielding and yet alive with resistance, with personal need. She’d rumpled his hair and made him laugh.

Genya, of the dark blond hair and flashing dark eyes. Genya, the warm, young body in the white wedding gown, circling him seven times beneath the wedding canopy held up at four corners by her four brothers. Genya, Genya.