Hush (3 page)

I don’t know why. I had forgotten you for so many years. I liked it that way. I know you are angry at me, so angry. I know, because lately you started to come at night and I can’t seem to make you go away. I found a picture of you last week. It was by accident; they had forgotten to throw it out. The picture was buried underneath a pile of old books in my mother’s closet. Maybe she kept that one on purpose. Maybe she looks at it every now and then. It was so strange to see us together again. We were only seven or eight then, dressed like brides for Purim. Every year we dressed like brides. Remember?

Please stop coming to my dreams. Please stop. I can’t sleep anymore. This morning, I went up to Kathy first thing. I haven’t been up there in years, since right after it happened. I spoke to her. I spoke to her for a long time. She is just like she was. Nothing changed about her at all. I told her everything. Kathy said it was good to write letters to you. Kathy said that the dead could know and understand everything.

I have to go for now. My mother is here.

Your best friend,

Gittel

Devory and I strongly disagreed about adults. She thought it was fun being a grown-up; I said it was exhausting. Adults had to smile all the time. From the moment they walked out of the kitchen, no self-respecting adult dared not to smile. I knew that because I saw adults smiling at each other day and night. When they wanted to cry, they smiled. When they wanted to be alone, they smiled. When they were angry, they smiled. They all smiled and shook hands and asked each other how they were doing, and then walked away and cried, and frowned, and were angry.

Adults who only smiled when they wanted to were considered strange by others, and then everyone would smile at them more than ever. I always knew how lucky I was that Hashem made me a child, and I pitied the smiling adults. Devory said that I’d be an adult one day too. We would both grow and grow until, poof, we would wake up one morning as adults. I was horrified at the thought. I said that I couldn’t be an adult because I smiled only when I was happy. Anyway, either you were an adult or you were not. There were simply no two ways about it.

Kathy was a child. I knew that because she wasn’t just another smiling adult. I also knew that because she never told me how big I was, and she never told me my pictures were pretty when they weren’t. When she told me that I was beautiful, I knew she really meant it. When I told her that I wanted to climb the tower on the roof from her attic apartment because then I could touch the heavens, she told me that I could touch the heavens from the ground too. She said that if I closed my eyes and spoke to Hashem and reached inside of me really high, I would touch the heavens—even if I was in the basement or in bed.

When Devory and I went up to visit Kathy, she was always happy to see us. She showed us pictures of her family, and we spoke strictly nonsense. Kathy told me that I was special and that when I prayed Hashem listened and smiled. I wondered how Hashem looked when He smiled, and she said that you felt it inside.

Kathy’s attic apartment was small and cozy and crooked, with a sweet smell that always reminded me of the three bears’ cottage in the woods.

Her kitchen was tiny and yellow, the chairs were wooden and creaked, and the refrigerator whined like an old man whenever she opened the door.

But my favorite room was the small living room with the mysterious
goyishe
pictures. Once I asked Kathy about a picture on her wall that had a man attached to a cross, bleeding all over and looking half dead. She said that it was J—, whose name we weren’t allowed to mention—and that he was a saintly man, like Hashem, who did all sorts of miracles. I knew not to believe her. The goyim believed all kinds of nonsense and they made up miracle stories that could only have happened to
Chassidish
Jews. But I didn’t want to insult her, so I kept quiet but laughed inside where she couldn’t see.

I also loved the little Mary and baby statues, which I never told my mother about, and the big black TV, which I never told my father about, and the not-so-kosher candies, which I never told anyone about.

I stopped telling because once, when I was only six, Kathy gave me a square coffee candy and told me that it was kosher. But then my mother saw the candy, and when I told her that it was from Kathy she told me I shouldn’t eat it, just in case it wasn’t kosher enough. But the candy looked so good, and I was sure Hashem wouldn’t mind if I ate just one candy that was just-in-case-not-kosher-enough. So I locked myself in the bathroom and hid behind the shower curtain. I knew Hashem couldn’t see me behind the shower curtain. My teacher told us that Hashem’s presence didn’t rest in such places. I unwrapped the candy quietly, so that Hashem wouldn’t hear from the other side of the door. I then made a loud blessing on it, just in case it wasn’t kosher enough, and put it in my mouth.

It wasn’t even good.

I was devastated. I had taken the pains to hide from Hashem but He had seen me and made the candy taste horrible. I was never going to eat a just-in-case-not-kosher-enough candy again. And I didn’t—at least, not until the next one.

It was Kathy who had told me I must come forward; it was her fault I was here now. She had said, “Go, Gittel, you must go. You are only seventeen and already you are dying inside. Nobody who saw what you did can live this way. God wants you to tell what happened.”

But Hashem did not want me to go. He had stated clearly in the Torah that it was a violation of the divine, a transgression of the commandments, to speak evil of other Jews. I was only here because of that, to spite Him.

My parents did not know I was here, only two days after finishing high school, sitting in the police station of Precinct 66. I did not want to hurt them, to break them down, because it wasn’t their fault, only Hashem’s, how He allowed children to suffer.

A woman came into the room. She sat down behind the small desk. She held a pen and notebook and a file labled “Gittel.” I told myself not to cry; I wasn’t going to cry. I would only answer her questions exactly, precisely, and then I would go back home. She looked at me kindly. Then she looked at the form that I had filled out earlier saying that I was seventeen and a half, lived in Borough Park, and wanted to give evidence about what had happened. On her desk lay another form. It said “Devory Goldblatt, age nine.” There were some lines scribbled underneath. No more. The woman raised her pen. She held it over the notebook. It hovered, poised, ready to write.

“Gittel,” she said. “I’m Miranda. I am a social worker for the Department of Special Investigation in Brooklyn. So what is it you want to tell me?”

I began to cry.

Right at the start of fourth grade, Devory and I realized that our friendship with a gentile, however nice she was, would hurt our social status, so we made a pact of secrecy. One Sunday we crawled under my bed and chewed furiously on the pack of gum we borrowed from my sister’s drawer. My sister never let us have the gum but her drawer did. Pulling the stringy gum around and around each other’s hands so that they resembled a mummy’s, we swore that Kathy the goy would remain a secret known only to our souls and dreams till death do us part. Death, though, Devory said, yanking the gum off our hands, didn’t apply to children, so it didn’t really matter. I did not understand what she had said but agreed wholeheartedly.

We tried scrubbing off the gum with soap, but then my sister arrived home while we were still guiltily doing so and we fled the scene. We walked down my block, sticky hand in sticky hand, looking for adventure, and Devory said she wished she lived on a block like mine.

“Look,” she said, pointing. “You have so much grass around your house. Only rich people have grass.”

“I know,” I said. “I like being rich. My father even told me that he has more than one thousand dollars deep inside his bank account.”

Devory’s eyes widened. She said, “Wow, I have only fifty cents.”

Devory also said that all gentiles were rich because they all had grass on their front lawns.

Where I lived on the corner of the avenue, there were mostly gentiles. When my parents had moved into the house, my father had been the only Orthodox Jewish
Chassid
roaming the streets of the neighborhood. All of my parents’ friends, huddled closely in the safety of Borough Park where all decent Orthodox Jews lived, could not understand him. But the house was huge, white, and cheap, and my father liked it—so he bought it right then for fifty-three thousand dollars.

There was only a narrow bridge separating Borough Park from Flatbush, but the two neighborhoods were worlds apart. My classmates were in awe of the
goyishe
world across the bridge, and I never disappointed them with my tales of goyim dancing around fires in their backyards burning Jewish books, and of Christian youth with long bloody knives searching the streets for Jewish kids. Devory once told them how she saw a priest walking down my street as I vigorously nodded my head. Everyone wanted to know what a priest looked like, but Devory, looking momentarily confused, said that a priest looks like a priest and that’s all there is to priests.

Of course, none of it was true. Life in Flatbush was dreadfully boring. The streets of my neighborhood were wider, greener, and quieter than the crowded streets of Borough Park, and the goyim living around us confused me. My teachers always said that all goyim were evil inside, and I could hardly wait for the fiery explosion of blood and hatred so I could report back to my friends. But nothing ever happened in the goy-filled neighborhood, where my neighbors were quiet and clean and would smile at me when they helped me cross the street. Devory said that that niceness was all a lie. The goyim were secretly planning and plotting all the time and that one day, when the priest incited them, they would finally do something terrible.

But some of my friends were jealous. One day, after much huddled discussion in the corner of the classroom, Sarah Leah approached me with a large group. She indignantly informed me that none of my prayers mattered at all because I lived in a
goyishe
neighborhood and Hashem could never hear me from there. Hashem was settled firmly in Borough Park and only when you
davened
—prayed—there could the prayers reach the heavens. I told her that it wasn’t true.

“My house,” I informed her, “is three floors high and the peak of the tower on the right-hand side facing the avenue reaches the heavens. If I sat on the metal spire on the top of the tower I could touch the heavens myself, so my prayers definitely get up there.”

“Nuh-uh,” she countered. “It isn’t true.”

“Uh-huh,” I retorted. “It is so.” (Except that my parents never let me sit on the metal spire on top of the tower on the roof of the third floor, so I never reached heaven.)

“It can’t be,” she said, rolling her eyes. “My father even said so, and you could ask the teacher.”

So I asked my teacher if it was true, and she said that it was nonsense. Hashem can hear you wherever you are as long as you are a Jew, but even she looked suspicious about where I dared live.

I stuck out my tongue at my ex-friend, but deep inside I was terrified. I hadn’t told my teacher that there were goyim living on the third floor of my house. They were a secret hidden safely in the attic. Kathy Prouks was classified information. Only Devory knew, but that didn’t count. And my twin neighbors who lived down the block were sworn to secrecy over a bar of white chocolate. We went to the same school, and they came to play with me all the time, so I couldn’t keep them from seeing Kathy. They were a grade younger than I was, and I knew that none of my classmates would dare speak to girls a full grade younger than they were and certainly wouldn’t believe so horrifying a secret from such an unworthy source.

For now, though, I hoped my secret was safe. My conscience, however, was not. For I knew without even asking my teacher that there was no way my prayers ever got up to the heavens with two goyim blocking the way up. And it broke my heart thinking of all these endless prayers I had prayed throughout my life rotting up there in the floorboards between the second and third floor.

Yet, if the sorrows of my troubled youth weren’t enough, my friend Chani came over to me during recess one day and proudly whispered into my ear that she knew I had a
goyishe
neighbor living in my house and she was going to tell the teacher. I said it wasn’t true, but she said she knew all about it from the twins down the block and even had a bar of white chocolate to prove it.

I shrugged my shoulders and walked away, trembling inside, but Chani ran after me and whispered that she promised she wouldn’t tell the teacher or our classmates if I let her see the goyim when she came to play with me the next day after school.

Chani’s mother and mine were good friends, unfortunately, so sometimes she would come over to play, and I knew I didn’t have a choice. I told her all right, but only if she would give me half the bar of white chocolate. She did, and I happily munched on it. I would have forgotten all the world’s problems if not for the mysterious glances Chani kept beaming in my direction until everyone wanted to know what was happening. She said she couldn’t say because it was a secret, so I knew she would.