Unravelled (14 page)

14 CHAPTER fourteen

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That Monday, school started back up after our Christmas break. Even though there was no Christmas for my family, it was still a nice respite from the droning lectures of teachers, essays and boring, dry books. After dressing, combing my hair and painting my face with the requisite make-up, I took the brass key to the desk from its hiding place. I traced my fingers over it before plunging it into the lock, hearing it snap open and pulling open the drawer swiftly. I rifled through the papers for my applications, my applications that seemed like a childhood, selfish want in the face of Aliz and Auschwitz. I stuffed them in my satchel, intending to dispose of them in the school trashcan.

I had spent all night tossing and turning, wondering what I should do about the applications. Like the Tell-Tale Heart, that Edgar Alan Poe story we had read last year in English class, they seemed to be pulsating, turning red and hot and ringing in my ears. I turned on my light around three in the morning, pulled out the papers and examined them. I ran my fingers along the rough paper, feeling more foolish than ever. Aliz had been shoved with needles that contained mystery solvents, taken from her home, had everything she owned stolen and ultimately lost everyone she had ever known. And I was complaining over lack of money to go to college. The shame in my chest started to grow like a weed. Would it really be so bad if I just did what was expected of every other girl? If every other girl did it, lived life as a housewife, how bad could it really be? I could steal away a few hours in the afternoons between laundry and cooking to read. Maybe my future husband wouldn't hate the idea of me of taking some college classes and would let me take Latin or Italian once a week.

Just as I was about to shove the papers back in their hiding spot, I heard the familiar knock at the door, the small rapping-but-not-quite-knocking that belonged to no one but Aliz. I buried the papers back in their original spot and stood up, walking over to the door.

To my surprise, Aliz stood calmly in front of me, dressed in a frilly cotton nightgown I had worn when I was eight or nine, her hand covering what appeared to be a deep wound on her left arm. Her face was rapidly draining of color, blood spilling out of the container of her right hand and spilling onto the carpet. She didn't scream or cry or even wince. She simply stared at me with her wide-set brown eyes, her hair, messy from sleep, framing her white face.

"Oh my God," I whispered, attempting to collect myself enough not to faint at the sight of it. "Let's take care of this."

I sucked in my breath and guided her toward the bathroom, my hand on her back as I steered her. In that moment, the scene of the crime became clear. One of Mother's butcher knives sat on the sink, soaked in Aliz's blood. Every color of the stuff, from pink to ruby red splashed in the sink, with some littering the floor. There was a small bottle of antiseptic, sitting open on top of the toilet. Cotton balls smeared in blood sat perched next to the bottle, in various stages of soaking it up. A gauze bandage sat open and ready for use. And then it became clear: Aliz had calculated this injury. Maybe it was to get out of school, a cry for help, a release from her troubles or a reason to send her back to Europe. Something in her apologetic brown eyes told me I may never know.

She sat down on the edge of the yellow tub, extending her injured arm to me. Precariously, she removed her right hand, showing me her left forearm, which was now soaked in blood. Most of the serious bleeding had stopped, though, so it looked as though I could keep this one a secret from my mother as well, even if it would take some cleverness.  It crossed my mind as I surveyed her wound that perhaps disguising this was irresponsible, but if my Mother did find out, she would be so overwhelmed that she might actually comply to commit her for her own safety. Small things, such as untucked shirts, corners of the tablecloth not being perfect and dog footprints on the floor drove my mother into a small fit of rage. This would be too difficult to handle for her. She'd, no doubt, call for help. The stories I heard about those places from friends and family who had dealt with them in secrecy made my stomach turn. The idea of lobotomy crazy doctors who used electric shocks on their patients or let them fester in their own mess sounded just as bad as Auschwitz.

As the blood began to slow down to a trickle, I could see that the origin of the injury wasn't as bad as it looked. In fact, it was just a simple cut, albeit a very long one, down her forearm. Wadding up some toilet paper in my hand, I spilled some of the antiseptic on it, making the hangnails on my ring finger and thumb sting. Taking Aliz's arm, I wiped up the blood, in various stages of drying, in an attempt to clean the cut a bit better. She flinched, but didn't cry out the way I did when I was a child. I remembered crying just seeing the antiseptic after falling off my bicycle or skinning my knees on the playground at school. I shuddered thinking she had been subjected to horrors worse than this, things I could only dream up in my worst nightmares. The sting of the antiseptic was nothing.

As I cleaned up the cut, the tattoo Aliz had been given suddenly became apparent beneath the blood. The slash mark was right down the middle of the numbers, as if she had tried to remove them herself. Having watched her father's steady hands as a doctor and then watching Mengele butcher children, she must have thought she had the skills to perform her own crude surgery on herself. Maybe she hadn't intended to kill herself or get sent back to Europe, maybe she simply didn’t want be the girl with the numbers on her arm. She would stick out enough, being eleven years old and in the first grade, her English warbling and accent thick. She didn't need to stand out further. 

By the time I completely stopped the bleeding and cleaned the blood off of the carpet, it was almost four in the morning. The earliest sounds of morning came from outside my window, the chirp of the birds waking and calling out to one another. The sun had just begun rising, casting a purplish blue tint into my room.

As I walked back into my room, poised to sleep for another couple of hours, I could feel Aliz on my tail. She hadn't gone back to her room, but had followed me into mine. Smiling, I allowed her to curl up next to me in my bed, her warm body comforting against my skin. In minutes, her face relaxed and her eyelids fluttered. I hoped her dreams took her somewhere sweet, to mountains made of chocolate and lakes made of honey. Anywhere but Auschwitz.

I helped dress her in the morning too, making sure Mother didn't have a chance to see the bandage. I changed it once more as the one I had put on in the wee hours of the morning had become soaked with stray trickles of blood. If she wore a dry one, maybe Mother would just think she had decided to cover up her number for school.

In the last few moments before we were to leave, I opened my plaid satchel and stuffed my college applications in them. It wasn't just the money I was concerned about, but Mother herself. When the troubles in Europe first started, my father seemed genuinely interested in igniting the spark that had been lost between them. But as time marched on, his interest seemed to wane, until it was almost nothing. His mother, a feeble woman with a humped back and shrill who lived in Napa Valley, would never approve of a divorce. At least, that was what he said a year ago when I asked him if they would ever try to patch things up between them. The answer didn't provide a solid yes or a no, simply an insinuation that he wanted to start a new life, but probably wouldn't have the guts to do it. I couldn't blame him, really. It was exhausting to live with the dead, to eat with them, sleep with them, breathe them. One couldn't live in their world and ours. He had never really ignored me, but I think he felt a little hurt by the fact that I didn't like to spend my school vacations with him. It wasn't that I didn't want to, but the idea of my mother sitting alone with no one to help occupy her time made me nervous. If no one was there to anchor her into the world of the living, I might lose her, too.

"Isabelle!" My mother cried from the bottom of the stairs. "Hurry up! We're going to be late!"

I clipped my satchel closed and made my way downstairs. Aliz sat poised in the dining room chair, her back straight. She wore a turtleneck, covered by a plaid jumper, thick wool tights and saddle shoes on her feet. If I hadn't known, I would have mistaken her for any other American girl on her way to school. 

I usually took the bus to my own school, but today I wanted to escort Aliz to her seat in her new classroom. My mother, realizing how fiercely protective I'd become of my cousin, obliged, promising to drop me off at my own school after Aliz was all settled.

The ride to the school was silent. We arrived just as the bell rang, all of the children running from the bright yellow school bus to their designated classrooms. Each child held a small backpack or satchel in one arm and a brown paper bag containing their lunch in the other. Surveying her new surroundings, Aliz looked at the brick building that loomed in front of her and took a deep breath. Her hand immediately clasped mine as I pulled her satchel over my shoulder. She took charge of her lunch, balling the top the brown paper bag in her hand. The front of the bag had "Aliz" written on it in bright red crayon, a smiley face after the "z".

Mother parked the Studebaker while I walked with Aliz into the school building. Children were rustling and running every which way to get to their classes in the seconds after the bell rang, hoping they wouldn't be marked tardy. Holding Aliz's hand so tightly that my knuckles were turning white, I took her to the front office.

"Hi," I sputtered, hoping someone would hear me. Within moments, I could hear the familiar click of my mother's heels behind me. She looked down at Aliz and gave her a reassuring smile and smoothed back her hair.

"Oh, are you the new girl?" a woman with big, black tortoise shell glasses who worked in the office asked. Her brown skirt ruffled as she moved and her hands were stained with ink.

"Yes," my mother answered with a sharp nod. "This is Aliz Stern. She's starting first grade."

"Ah, right," the woman nodded, gathering several papers in her hands, thrusting them toward my mother. "We talked on the phone before Christmas break. Sorry, my head's not on straight after all that time off. If you could just sign some of these papers for Aliz, that'd be excellent. I'll be here if you have any questions."

Aliz and I sat next to my mother on the hard, sterile bench across from the front desk in the office. I imagined students who got in trouble for talking in class or dipping little girls' pigtails in the inkwells had to sit here and wait, with their heads hung low, waiting for punishment to be doled out. Aliz folded her hands over her lap, letting her saddle shoes swing a few inches above the floor.

"Great," the woman behind the desk smiled when Mother handed her the stack of papers she had signed. "Aliz's classroom is down this hall. It's the second one on the left. All of the children were so excited to hear they had a new girl all the way from Hungary!"

She smiled encouragingly at Aliz, who returned the gesture weakly. Aliz then placed her hand in mine, grasping it so hard I thought she would cut off my circulation. I knew she was nervous. Mother had spoken to her in Hungarian about it a couple of nights ago and Aliz asked if she could just be schooled at home instead of facing all of those new American children. Mother promised it would be good for her, that she would come to enjoy school. She would learn English and then make all sorts of friends. Aliz just shrugged, used to being told what to do, used to not having a voice, having her desires and wants crushed in other's hands.

We approached the second door on the left, which had a sign on it reading "Mrs. Smith's 1
st
Grade". There were cutouts of hands in every color imaginable stuck on the door, each one baring the name of a child in the classroom. I searched for Mary Meyers' hand, a pink one much smaller than everyone else's. In messy, curly writing, it read "Mary M." with a heart around her last initial.

"There's Mary's name," I pointed to the child's artwork. Aliz simply looked at it and shrugged, thoroughly unimpressed.

As I knocked on the door, I could hear the beginning of the Pledge of Allegiance, the small voices droning on in unison. It would probably be one of the first things Aliz would learn, even if she couldn't understand the meaning of the words.

After "indivisible and justice for all", I heard the click of Mrs. Smith's heels as the door opened, revealing about five rows of children, two each to a desk. Each child had their name printed on a card in front of them, perhaps for Aliz to better memorize the names of her new classmates. In the corner, close to me, I could hear the furrowing and I looked over to see a gray rabbit in a cage, pawing at wooden chunks.

"That's Mr. Rabbit," Mrs. Smith said proudly as she noticed my stare. "Each weekend, a different child gets to take him home and take care of him. Aliz, you'll get your chance soon."

Aliz simply looked at him and then back at the teacher before scanning the rows of children. Each sat erect; their solemn, small faces staring back at her. They were a mix of races, Asian, Hispanic and white and I couldn't imagine Aliz had ever met anyone of any of these nationalities before. Her face lingered just a bit longer on an Asian girl in the front row who was wearing a plaid dress similar to Aliz's, her braids secured on top of her head. She smiled at Aliz and Aliz looked down at her shoes.

"Mary Meyers’ mother requested that you sit next to her," Mrs. Smith said, pointing her eyes down to meet Aliz's. "She's sitting right there."