Between Gods: A Memoir (14 page)

“I guess she went home,” he says.

This feels like the biggest loss of all.

We get up slowly, digging around in our bags for our mittens and scarves. Out on the street, more snow has fallen. Our boots squeak on the sidewalk. The street lights wear halos in the night.

“Oh,” Eli says, “I almost forgot. I brought you your Hanukkah gift.”

He looks me in the eye, a little nervous suddenly, and pulls a book from his bag. I recognize the title. It’s about a train that carried Jews to safety during the war, a topic very close to the one I’m writing about. “For your research,” he says.

“Wow,” I say. “Thanks.”

I give him a hard hug goodbye.

Eli flags me a cab, holds the door for me. I get in, give the cabbie my directions. At home, before going inside, back into my life with Degan, I stand on our porch in the cold and flip open the cover of the gift.

“For Alison, on your journey, and the light along the way,” Eli has written. “With love from one Jew to another.”

PART II

Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime

we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night

we drink and drink

we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie

—Paul Celan

The future is made of the same stuff as the present
.

—Simone Weil

one

O
LD HABITS DIE HARD
. The Jewish calendar begins with Rosh Hashanah in September, but I can’t deny the secular New Year, the unblemished promise it holds. On the first day of January, I pack our station wagon with books, my journal, my tall winter boots. Driving toward the Allen Expressway, I note that the street lamps on Eglinton Avenue are adorned not with Christmas decorations but with tinselly menorahs. Several hours later I arrive at our family cabin to deep snow and the sound of the river down in the valley, carving its way through the darkness. Standing at the front door, I jiggle my key in the lock, above me a wild profusion of stars. Inside, I move through the rooms, turning on the baseboard heaters, electrical filaments crackling to life all around me. The cabin smells musty, like dust and mothballs. I build a fire and curl up on the couch in my sleeping bag, quiet and calm against the world. I’m reading the
most beautiful novel about loss that echoes down the generations. I think of the breakfast tray I loved to bring to Granny when I was a girl, with a poached egg in a delicate porcelain egg cup and fingers of toast to dip in the runny yolk. I think of Granny’s mother, Marianne, whom I look so much like.
Stuckerl—
“piece of work.” Smiling into the camera in her old-fashioned bathing suit. She’s gone forever. I think of my father, to whom I can’t find the right thing to say.

When I was little, I prayed every night before bed. Mum or Dad would come to tuck me in. My prayers consisted primarily of a list of people we’d ask God to bless (“God bless Mummy, Daddy, Emily, Gumper, Granny, Lucy” and so on). This was followed by a singsongy leave-taking by my parents, a string of instructions blended into one long word:
night-night-sleep-tight-don’t-let-the-bedbugs-bite-God-bless-see-you-in-the-morning!

God bless. See you in the morning.

I think of the faith in this message.

The last time I was home in Kitchener I tried to reinstate “God bless” with my family. I got up from the dinner table and said, “I’m bagged. Going to crawl into bed early. ’Night. God bless.”

“Good night,” they answered mildly, looking at me curiously for a half-second too long.

I tried it over several successive evenings and heard “Good night” and “Love you” but never “God bless” in return. The words have fallen out of fashion in our family, like crimped hair or bell-bottoms.

Tonight, when I’m done reading, I make my way down the cabin’s dim hallway and get into the big double bed. I pull the down comforter up to my chin. From the window I can hear the rush of the river, close by but invisible in the darkness. I fold
my hands, close my eyes and try to pray. But I find myself unable to conjure up God,
any
God, even the God-in-everything that is normally so palpable in solitude.

It wasn’t Christ I prayed to as a girl: it was a vague idea of “God” as a man with a beard in the sky. But now I ask myself: what does the Jewish God look like? I strain for an image. All I can summon is my childish notion of the unshaven grandfather, only now he is also wearing a black hat and spectacles.

I recall a passage from the book I’ve been reading: “ ‘When a Jew prays, he is asking God a question that has no end.’ Darkness fell. Rain fell. I never asked: ‘What question?’ ”

I stop in to see my therapist Charlotte on my way home from the cabin three days later.

“How are you?” she asks.

“Tired.”

“Have you been sleeping?”

“More than usual.” I calculate the hours from the previous night: thirteen. And I could have gone longer.

There is nothing I like better than sleep: not TV, not chocolate. What does it mean that I instinctively group sleep with mindlessness, with escape? In sleep there is a remove that I find endlessly appealing, a chance at oblivion that renews itself daily, like this winter’s never-ending snow.

Sleep nourishes, sure, but it also absolves, removing the demands of the daily, the duties and tasks, and the pesky need to exist.

I tell this to Charlotte.

No response. Only rocking.

I quote to her from the late American poet Jane Kenyon:

Often I go to bed as soon after dinner

as seems adult

(I mean I try to wait for dark)

in order to push away

from the massive pain in sleep’s

frail wicker coracle
.

“ ‘Coracle,’ ” Charlotte says, lingering on the word.

“I think it’s some kind of boat.”

“Yes. There’s an echo of Moses in the bulrushes there.”

The radiator clunks like a ghost in chains.

Charlotte purses her lips. “Maybe you’re sleeping so much because you have a lot of dreaming to do,” she says.

I stare blankly.

“Your dreams are helping you work out your relationship to your ancestors. To your great-grandmother Marianne. A relationship that’s too painful to hold with your conscious mind.”

“We celebrated Hanukkah,” I tell Charlotte, trying to change the subject.

“ ‘We’?”

“Degan and I. My sister. My parents.”

“That sounds significant. Was it healing?” she asks.

I nod my assent. But as I do, the opposite feeling asserts itself, that there is no healing possible. How have I not realized this before?

I’m quiet, gnawing my lip.

“What are you thinking?” Charlotte asks.

“I’ll never heal it. Will I?”

She cocks a thin eyebrow.

“I’ve been lunging after all things Jewish,” I say. “People, classes, rituals. Thinking that the cure for the Holocaust lies in
the practice of the religion itself. That by finding my way back there, I can somehow save Marianne. But there
is
no cure for the Holocaust. Is there?”

Charlotte looks at me. “No,” she says. “There isn’t.” And then: “I’ve been waiting for you to make this distinction.”

I grip the chair’s wooden arms, suddenly fuzzy-headed, dizzy. “What distinction?”

She peers at me over her glasses, then speaks slowly, enunciating her syllables: “The distinction between the Holocaust and Judaism.”

The idea that sleep is a psychic defence is hardly new, but I’m struck still by its immediacy, the way my eyelids begin to droop at the first hint that a conversation may turn controversial, that someone is about to say something I might find difficult. “Did you hear what I just said?” Charlotte asks.

She uncrosses her stockinged legs, crosses them in the opposite direction. I shake my head: no.

She hesitates, uncertain whether to reiterate. She believes I have to come to the big revelations myself. But she
does
speak, and when she does, I can barely hear her words for the scream of the static behind my eyes.

“You
cannot
save your murdered relatives,” Charlotte says. “No matter how Jewish you become, they are never coming back.”

two

W
HEN
I
ARRIVE BACK
at the apartment, a big stack of mail is waiting for me on the hall table. I tear open a cream envelope to find the outline for our upcoming Jewish Information Course. Degan and I read it over, aghast. Not only is there a three-hour class every week, there are tests and a final exam. Hundreds of pages of reading. “You really want to do this?” he asks.

Faced with the schedule, my resolve is only sharpened, my desire to convert strengthened. I feel a pure, unclouded kind of knowing.

“Because looking at this—” He shakes the paper in the air. “Do you see how many holidays there are? What does a religion need with so many holidays?”

“They must feel there’s something to celebrate.”

“A package came for you, too,” Degan says. He gestures to the corner of our hall of mirrors. The box is bandaged with
masking tape in the manner of an Egyptian mummy, but a corner of the label is peeking out. The SunBox has arrived.

Degan holds the box steady while I tear off the tape and remove the giant pieces of Styrofoam. I pull the lamp out, all awkward angles, its long neck bent like some exotic bird. I hesitate for a moment with the cord in my hand and then plug it in. The light that bursts forth is brassy and bold, with the confidence of a cheerleader or a canvassing politician. We stand next to it, mesmerized. It’s seductive, viscerally undeniable. I don’t care if this is the placebo effect: I immediately feel better.

We move the lamp into the bedroom and stretch out on the futon like sunbathers on a white sand beach. “Do you
feel
that?” I ask, gesturing to the lamp.

“I do.”

But he sounds uncertain.

“Really?”

“Totally.”

I look at him, expecting to see a sly grin, but his face is slack, his brow heavy.

“How are you?” I ask.

“Okay.”

“You seem down.”

“I’m okay,” he says.

“How was your week?”

I wait for him to answer, but he appears wary, as though he’s not sure I’ll stick around to listen.

I roll onto my side and prop my head up in my palm, facing him. “No, really,” I say.

“Well, if you really want to know, I’m kind of sad.”

I look at his face again. The blue-black circles under his eyes. The first bits of grey in his stubble. I reach for his hand.

“I used to believe our love was a pure, big love,” he says. “Exempt from the world.” He searches my face, and I nod to show he should continue, that I want to hear whatever he has to say.

“Now I feel abandoned by you, with the depression, the fixation on …”

I wait to hear “with the fixation on Eli,” but instead he says, “Fixation on Judaism.”

I exhale.

“I’m worried that if I don’t convert, you’ll leave,” he says.

If part of me has considered this, that option is now entirely dismissed, as though by being pulled up into the light of day, its ridiculousness can really be seen.

“Don’t be silly,” I say, but my tone is gentle, to let him know I can see how he got this idea. Rabbi Glickman’s words echo in my head: “You’re faced with a difficult decision.”

I want to convert. Degan’s station means I won’t be allowed. But I find, replaying my conversation with the rabbi, that the decision is not difficult at all.

“I want to get married,” I say.

It is as though, in speaking the words, the conclusion arrives fully formed. It is not so much that I’ve resolved the issue with Eli, but rather that I see there was never any issue in the first place. There was only me trying to sort out my history in the worst way possible, which was also the best way I knew how. How could I have been so confused? When I think how easily I might have lost Degan, I almost weep with relief.