Bridal Chair (6 page)

“I’m sorry, Michel. The Métro was slow.”

She uttered the lie effortlessly. She could not tell him that she was late because she was slowed by the heaviness of her heart. She would not tell him that she had crossed broad avenues slowly as though daring the speeding cars to run her down.

Je voudrais mourir.
I
want
to
die
, she had repeated to herself as angry drivers blared their horns and shouted epithets at her. But she had not been run down. She had arrived safely at this small café where Michel awaited her, love in his eyes, tenderness on his lips.

“It’s all right. You look beautiful, wonderful. That blue becomes you.”

He fingered her cape, lifted the beret from her head, and kissed her cheek.

“I don’t feel wonderful.”

“What’s wrong?”

The waiter approached.

“What will you have?” he asked.

“A pot of English tea,” Ida said. “A brie platter and one baguette.”

She ordered swiftly, authoritatively, as she usually did, rarely bothering to ask Michel what he might prefer. He felt a brief stirring of annoyance and then realized that Ida, as always, had known exactly what he wanted. Tea, cheese, a bit of bread was all he needed, Smiling, surrendering to her self-proclaimed authority, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her fingers one by one, always his affectionate tactile celebration of their new togetherness. But today she withdrew her hand.

“You asked me what was wrong,” she reminded him.

“Yes. I did. Was there difficulty at the studio?”

“I didn’t go to the studio today.”

“Oh.”

He waited.

She bowed her head. He leaned forward because she spoke so faintly he could barely hear her.

“I’m pregnant, Michel. Pregnant with your child. Enceinte.”

He stared at her as though she had plucked a word from an unfamiliar lexicon.

“Pregnant?” he repeated, his voice aquiver with fear.

She nodded.

Wearily, for the second time that day, she explained the reason for her certainty, adding that she would take the test Elsa had told her would be definitive.

“But I have no doubts,” she added.

The waiter arrived with their food, and Michel marveled that Ida could so expertly cut the brie, that she could slice the baguette in half with such accuracy, and then he marveled that he himself could eat it, that he could even relish the crusty dough still warm from the oven.

“Have you told your mother and father?”

“Yes.”

“What did they say? What do they want you to do?”

“What they said, what they may want, is of no importance. The decision must be ours. It is we who must decide what we are going to do.”

“What will you do?” he asked. “My God, what will you do?”

“What will we do?” she corrected him, her voice steady.

“Yes. Of course. What will we do?”

Swiftly, he recognized the enormity of his responsibility. His head spun. He would have to leave the university and find employment if he and Ida were to marry and raise a child. He thought of his parents, his mother who laboriously counted out hard-earned franc notes for his tuition, his father who pasted strips of cardboard beneath the soles of his own shoes in order to pay for Michel’s boots, his textbooks, his clothing. Their hopes were fixed on him. How could he betray them? But then how could he betray Ida, his beautiful radiant love? There were choices to be made, but he was so stunned he could neither fathom nor articulate them.

He pondered their options. He did not remind her that she was eighteen, that he was twenty, that they were both students, dependent on their parents. It occurred to him that Ida, ever the romantic, might see their very youth and the onset of poverty as a dramatic challenge. His foolish, brave, wonderful Ida. He looked at her tenderly.

“Whatever decision we come to, we will come to together,” he murmured.

“Together,” she repeated.
“Ensemble.”
The very utterance of the word comforted her. She placed her arm on his, and he stroked the soft wool of her sleeve.

“I love the way you look in white,” he said. “And I love the color of your new cape, your beret.”

She smiled. She did not love the way he looked in his shabby brown jacket, his shirt collar frayed, his dark cotton trousers worn thin. She would buy him a new jacket, as elegant as the leather cloak he held in reserve for special occasions. She would fashion a shirt for him of the heavy broadcloth her father favored. How reliable he was, how caring a son, how tender a lover. She lifted his hand and kissed his fingers one by one.

“We will manage,” she said softly. “Somehow we will manage. Together.
Ensemble
.”

They drank their tea in silence and left too large a tip for their surly, ungrateful waiter.

* * *

It was Elsa who arranged for the definitive test and reported, some days later, that the results were conclusive. Ida was pregnant.

“What will you do?” Elsa asked.

“I don’t know.” Ida spoke in a monotone.

She was pale, her eyes dull, her hair carelessly twisted into a lank knot. She did not drink the tea Elsa had prepared. All food and drink nauseated her, she said.

“You must speak to your parents,” Elsa said firmly.

“Tonight,” Ida promised. “Tonight.”

Dinner that evening was a tense meal eaten in silence. Marc criticized the dessert. Bella spilled a glass of red wine. Ida waited until Katya had cleared the table and closed the kitchen door behind her, and then she turned to her parents.

“The laboratory tests confirm my condition,” she said, staring down at the crimson wine stain that was slowly spreading across the white tablecloth.

Marc pushed his chair back so forcefully that it fell to the floor. He did not pause to pick it up but left the room without looking at her.

Bella pierced a strawberry tart with her fork and watched it bleed onto her plate. “I have a headache,” she said plaintively. “A very bad headache. I must lie down.” She lifted her hands to her temples, her eyes bright with tears, and hurried away.

Alone in the dining room, Ida set the fallen chair in place. She paced the floor, pausing to stare hard at the photograph on the mantel, a beloved portrait of her parents sitting side by side on a divan. Suddenly, she saw them as strangers. The mother and father she had known and relied upon with such certainty, such hopeful expectation, no longer existed for her. She looked around the room, at the walls hung with her father’s paintings, the crystal chandelier, the windows draped in the green velvet. The fortress of beauty and permanence that her refugee parents had defiantly furnished in celebration of their new prosperity, their new security, was no longer her safe haven. She felt herself an unwelcome stranger in a home that was no longer her own.

She and Michel met the next afternoon in the Tuileries Garden. “There is no doubt. I am pregnant. I told my parents last night,” she said, her voice quivering. Tears streaked her cheeks.

He drew her close, stroked her hair. “What did they say?” he asked.

“They said nothing. I think that they were too angry, too disappointed to speak. It was almost as though I had betrayed them, as though I was no longer their daughter.”

“It will be all right, Ida,” he said. He held out a handkerchief and dried her eyes, buried his face in her hair.

They sat in silence on a bench and watched a group of schoolchildren at play. A bright green ball skittered away, and a small boy and girl danced past them to retrieve it.

“Do you want to have this child, Ida?” he asked quietly.

“I want to want it. I want to be brave enough to have it. But the truth is I do not want a child, not now, and I am not brave enough. This was not how I saw my life, Michel.”

She spoke very softly, each word a pellet of pain. She did not tell him how she had awakened in the night, her body damp with sweat, her stomach heaving. She rode nightmares of terror, her dreamscape altered. She ran, as she had always run, but her restless sleep was haunted by the amalgam of cells growing deep within her body, crazily morphed into a malignant imp. Faceless and infinitesimal, it pursued her, an internal invader that chased through her organs and caused her to writhe in pain. Twice she had awakened and shouted, “
Je
voudrais
mourir
.” Bella had hurried into her room and stood sorrowfully by her bedside, her hand on Ida’s forehead, until the terror passed. She had shaken away her mother’s hand and turned her face to the wall.

“What I want is to be free of this pregnancy,” she said at last, her voice sad but firm.

“I know.”

She heard the relief in his voice and was comforted.

“You can be free of it. This is Paris, not Vitebsk,” he said. “There are skilled doctors who know how to terminate a pregnancy.”

He spoke with certitude. He had spoken to a fellow student whose fiancée had opted for a termination. “
Très facile
, very easy,” his friend had assured him.

“We must speak to your parents together. Tonight.”

“Yes. Tonight,” she agreed.

“Ida, my Ida, I hope that you do not want to be free of me.” He smiled at her, inviting a new complicity.

“Ah, Michel.” She smiled, placed her hand on his cheek, pressed her lips to his, and then hurried away.

He did not realize until she was gone from his sight that she had not, in fact, answered his question. He did not return to the Sorbonne for his afternoon seminar. He went instead to his father’s shop. He too had to speak with his parents.

Ida called her mother from the Métro station and told her that she and Michel would join them for dinner.

“Yes, of course,” Bella said. “We will be expecting you.”

She replaced the receiver and turned to Marc.

“They are coming for dinner. Ida and her Michel. What must we say to them?”

“We know what we must say to them,” he replied impatiently. “Ida cannot have this child. She’s eighteen, a child herself. A foolish irresponsible child.”

“Our child. She is our child, foolish as she may be,” Bella said. “But I agree with you. Of course she’s too young. Too young. Still, I worry that an
avortement
is a dangerous procedure.”

“Dangerous?” he asked, his voice cold, his eyes shards of blue ice. “I will tell you what is dangerous. It is dangerous to bring a Jewish child into the world at a time like this. Hitler is bellowing threats against Jews in Germany. Dizengoff wrote me from Tel Aviv, describing how the Arabs are rioting against Jews, killing them in the Galilee, killing them in Hebron. In Russia, they are burning synagogues. Why should a Jewish child be born into a world filled with such hatred and danger?”

Bella stared at him angrily. She closed the door that led to the kitchen. She did not want Katya to hear them. She wheeled around and looked hard at Marc.

“It has always been dangerous to bring Jewish children into the world,” she said coldly. “Weren’t you yourself born the night a fire was set by anti-Semitic hoodlums in Vitebsk? Didn’t I give birth to Ida during the Great War when Jewish boys were being conscripted into the Russian army? Has there ever been a time when it was safe for a Jewish child to be born? Should we stop loving each other, stop having children, because there are those who want us dead? The danger I worry about is not the danger that might confront a Jewish child. I worry about whether having an abortion involves a risk to
our
child, to Ida. Is such a procedure dangerous? It is a simple enough question. I did not ask you for a lesson in current events.”

He flinched, startled by her retort, her unfamiliar, barely contained fury. Always, he anticipated her acquiescence, her acceptance of his pronouncements. But of course, she was fiercely protective of Ida. As he was. He went to the samovar, filled a glass with tea, and placed two sugar cubes beneath his tongue, willing their sweetness to counter the bitterness that caused his heart to burn.

“All right then. I should have told you that I spoke to Dr. Hollander this morning. You recall him, that wealthy gynecologist who bought some etchings last year? I told him I was asking about it on behalf of a model. He assured me that the procedure is routine, far less dangerous than childbirth.”

“And of course, you have always been terrified of childbirth,” she said wryly.

“I never denied that.”

He had told her of how he had been frozen with fear, watching his mother give birth to his sister Lisa. He had stood too close to her bed and when the spongy, bloody mass of the afterbirth catapulted from her body, droplets of blood spattered onto his face. He had been certain that the blood signified that she was being drained of life. He had recorded that memory in the series of works he called “Birth.”

Bella realized that just as she worried about the dangers of abortion, he was terrified that Ida’s life might be endangered by childbirth. His fury masked his fear that his family was like the acrobats he so often painted, uneasily balanced on the trembling high wire of life that might, at any moment, snap and betray them.

He turned to her and spoke very softly, very slowly.

“You are right. It frightens me to think of Ida having a child. She is so young¸ so unprepared. But as I told you, Dr. Hollander assured me that this early in a pregnancy, there is little to fear from a termination. Women come to Paris for the procedure because the physicians here are so skilled and well trained. There is an excellent clinic at Neuilly. Ida will be safe.”

“I suppose you’re right,” she agreed sadly. “According to Raïssa Maritain, abortion is a mortal sin.”

“Raïssa is now a Catholic,” he said harshly. “We are still Jews. We do not believe in mortal sin.”

“And what do we, as Jews, believe about abortion?” she asked.

“I don’t know and it is of no interest to me,” he replied impatiently. “Judaism does not dictate the way I live my life.”

“No. It only supplies you with subjects for your paintings. Your bearded rabbis, your klezmer musicians, your floating synagogues,” she retorted. “What kind of a Jew are you, Marc?”

He stared at her in surprise. She had never before questioned his artistic integrity, the sincerity of his themes, the contradiction between his life and his art. He could not answer her question. He himself did not know what kind of a Jew he was.

“I’m going to my studio,” he said. “I’m completing a painting of a Jewish wedding.” He smiled to show that he had not taken offense. “And you, what will you do today?”

“I am going to visit my brother Yaakov. And then, of course, I will help Katya prepare dinner for Ida and her Michel.”

“Her Michel,” he repeated, tainting the words with his contempt.

He watched from the window as she walked toward the avenue, moved as always by her grace and her fragility. He had not asked why she had decided to visit her Orthodox brother. He did not want to know.

* * *

Yaakov Rosenfeld welcomed his sister into his shabby apartment on the rue des Rosiers. It was redolent with the remembered odors of her childhood, onions and potatoes frying in rendered chicken fat, meat simmering in a pot of boiling borscht, pirogen browning in her sister-in-law’s small oven. Marc would have been repelled by the aroma, but Bella found it comforting. It transported her back to her childhood in Vitebsk, to the memory of her girlhood as the pampered daughter of a wealthy jeweler whose meals were prepared by the family’s cook.

Yaakov’s wife, Hinde, bustled in with a pot of tea and the almond horns she had baked using her mother-in-law’s recipe and then left brother and sister alone.

Bella and Yaakov sat in companionable silence, the taste of their mother’s pastry sweet upon their tongues. Bella glanced about the room, her eyes resting on the bookshelves filled with Yaakov’s Talmudic and medical texts. He had filled the crates with his library, leaving behind in Russia the sterling silver tea service and place settings. Pious Hinde had not objected. Her husband’s books were more important than her silver.

Yaakov filled their glasses with tea and tucked a sugar cube beneath his tongue. He took a sip and turned to his sister. Her visit was unusual. The Chagalls ventured into Le Marais only for the Passover seder and the kindling of the Hanukkah candles.

“What is it, Bella?” he asked gently.

He had noticed at once the pallor of her skin, the trembling of her hands. It had been Bella’s way, from earliest childhood, to retreat into illness at the onset of any disappointment, any difficulty.

“It is Ida,” she said.

“Ida.” He sucked on the sugar cube and waited.

“She’s pregnant.”

Tears streaked her cheeks, and he took his frayed white handkerchief, wiped her eyes, and waited yet again.

“Who is the father?” he asked at last.

“His name is Michel Rapaport. He’s a law student. Jewish. His parents are Russian. He is twenty years old.”

Yaakov sighed. “They are young. Very young,” he said sadly. “I understand how upset you are. Still, they are not the first young couple to find themselves in such a predicament. Arrangements can be made. There are choices.”

“Marc says there is no choice. He says that Ida must have an abortion.”

Bella fingered her necklace, rose from her chair, and wandered over to the window. School had just let out, and the rue des Rosiers was crowded with children. Two young mothers pushing prams, baguettes tucked beneath their arms, chatted with each other.
Were
they
older
than
Ida, younger than Ida?
Bella wondered. The irrelevance of the question shamed her. She shrugged and turned to her brother.

“Ida’s choice is more important than Marc’s. What does Ida want?” he asked softly.

“She says—oh, Yaakov—she says she wants to die. Last night she had a nightmare, and the night before as well. She dreams of death. She does not sleep. She barely eats.”

“Then she must not have this baby,” he said gravely. “The Talmud forbids it.”

“The Talmud?” she asked incredulously.

She sank back into her chair as Yaakov surveyed his bookshelves, plucked out an oversized volume, and flipped the pages until he found a particular text.

“Here is the ruling,” he said. “The rabbis discuss a pursuer, which in Hebrew is called a
rodef
. If a pursuer, a
rodef
, threatens someone’s life, then it is permissible to kill the threatener. Such an act would not be called murder but would be considered to be an act of self-defense. By extension, if a pregnant woman’s health is threatened, either her mental health or her physical health, then the fetus is construed to be a
rodef
and may be aborted to save the pregnant woman’s life. You say that Ida is making herself ill, not eating and not sleeping, that she speaks of wanting to die. Her life is indeed in danger. The child she carries is therefore a
rodef
. It must be done away with, aborted.”

Bella stared down at the text that she could not read. Her heart beat rapidly, and her cheeks were flushed.

“You have heard of such a situation before, Yaakov?” she asked.

He nodded. “Do you remember Malka Feinstein from Vitebsk?”

“Yes. The fishmonger’s daughter.”

“You were too young to know the entire story. But the poor girl was unmarried and she became pregnant. Some said the father was a Russian peasant who raped her; others said it was a yeshiva student who took meals at her parents’ home. No matter. She was pregnant and ill with shame and grief. She wept, spoke of taking her own life. She wandered the streets barefoot and half dressed. She plunged into the Dvina River and was rescued by a passing schoolboy. Clearly, she was descending into madness. Her parents went to a rabbinic court and it was ruled that the child she was carrying was a
rodef
. She had an abortion.” He tapped his spoon against his glass and sighed.

“What happened to this Malka?” Bella asked. She remembered her vaguely, a slight girl with watery blue eyes and lank hair the color of straw; the piscine odor of her father’s shop seemed to cling to her tattered dresses.

“She married. I believe her husband was the same yeshiva student rumored to be the father. They went to America. If, in fact, he was the father of that child, the rabbis may have considered them to be already married. Some rabbis rule that sexual intimacy, the very act of intercourse, is the equivalent of marriage.”

He looked at his sister, her chiseled, delicate features a mask of sadness, tendrils of her gleaming dark hair escaping her black velvet cloche, and he was overcome with pity. He knew that it was not easy to be the wife of the great Marc Chagall, nor was it easy to be the artist’s daughter. He thought of his niece Ida, so beautiful, so vibrant, so naive, and grieved for her.

When Bella rose to leave, Yaakov took her hand and pressed it to his lips. “You will do what is right,” he said. “Of that I am sure.”

“Thank you, Yaakov,” she said, her voice so faint that he had to strain to hear her.

She left then, closing the heavy front door quietly behind her. The autumn day was warm, and she lifted her face to the gentle cooling breeze. Her decision was made. She paused at a very expensive patisserie and bought a selection of gâteaux, choosing the napoleons that Marc particularly liked. She knew his weakness. She would cajole him with sweetness.