Jerusalem Maiden (37 page)

Snowflakes falling on her face, she continued to limp toward Montparnasse.

“Where are we going?”

“To pack. Then I'll take the train to Marseille.” All she wanted was to hold Gershon in her arms, to tell him that from now on she'd be his legs—

“You must be strong. At least until tomorrow. Tomorrow we'll plan what to do,” Asher said. “Today, the biggest hours of your life await you. I'll be with you, at your side.”

She stopped and looked straight at the familiar face. She had grown fond of Asher years ago without knowing. But he didn't have children; he didn't know the pain. She couldn't live through the upcoming hours of glory, taking accolades, smiling at people she had never met and would never see again, answering collectors' and reporters' questions, while her son lay in a Jaffa hospital, dismembered and possibly dying.

“Hashem gave you the talent. He's led you here, you say. He'll protect you and fortify your heart to go through this day.” Tears glistened on Asher's cheeks. “I'm certain that these are His wishes. How can they not be?”

Pierre would be at her other side. Mlle Thibaux, too. They'd take over the chats, the answers—even the smiling. With Ormaz, they'd sell the paintings and collect money for her ship passage to Jaffa.

Yet, could she wait through the agonizing hours, not knowing if Gershon was alive? She wouldn't know through the overnight train ride to Marseille, the days of waiting for a ship and the eight days of her sea voyage. What difference would one evening make?

Asher pressed on, speaking in his old, effusive way. “Esther, only I know how far you've come. I've made the same painful journey from our
klal
, turned away from our rabbis' incessant demands on our bodies and souls—”

The fog in her head suddenly cleared. Esther knew what must come next. She took out a notepad from her satchel, tore off a page and scribbled in French. “Asher, go back to the bank and ask the manager for money for me; take as much as he'll give you.” She waved her hand toward the street corner. “Meet me at the gallery. Two blocks up there.”

After years of suffering, Mother Rachel hadn't been granted her most desired wish—to raise her two sons. After forty years in the desert, Moses had been denied the joy of seeing the Promised Land. Having guided her here, God had never intended her to enjoy the fruits of her labor.

T
he gallery was still quiet. By two o'clock, it would be a beehive of activity in preparation for her opening, but now, only a lethargic clerk huddled in the foyer next to a coal stove.

A long table covered with white linen was set in the center hall. Clear, tall-stemmed glasses awaited champagne. A large wooden tray would hold the mounds of crudités Mlle Thibaux had ordered. A giant wheel of cheese had already been delivered; its yellow waxy skin awaited the ax-like knife that lay on top.

She didn't have much time. Asher would return soon. Esther picked up the cleaver. A curious thought of Raysel crossed her mind. The woman had been so excited to attend the opening. Her first Parisian society event.

The first slashing was hard; the stretched canvas resisted, and the heap of fruit on the cart of a Le Marais vendor wearing a skullcap trembled before Esther changed the angle and jabbed the tip in.

As she moved to the next one and then the one after, she was surprised at how easy it was to destroy her paintings. A flash of a bond with Cha'im seized her, a kinship with the grotesque artist who had found humanity, and through it, in spite of himself, found God. He, too, had been making amends, she now understood. She'd ponder it all later, during her sea voyage. Right now, there was comfort in the act of sacrificing, offering her work so God would spare Gershon's life. Jephthah could have burned himself as offering, but the sacrifice of his precious daughter had been the greater demonstration of his faith, for he had to suffer the pain forever. This was the lesson that had eluded her all these years when she had believed that her sacrifice to save Ima's life had been for naught, while in fact she had done it on condition, bargaining with God, demanding that He prove Himself. This time she was just paying for her sins, both of art and of coitus.

Verses from Psalms flashed in her head.
Against You, You alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in Your sight, so that You are justified in Your sentence and blameless when You pass judgment. . . . You will delight in right sacrifices. . . .

“Blameless?” Esther stopped her prayer. Not her God. Not anymore. The realization jolted her. As He had done before, God had punished an innocent bystander for her sins. No! “Justified in Your sentence?” How could she ever accept such agony of a child as justified? How could God be so merciless? What had Gershon done to deserve this torture—now and for the rest of his life?

Esther faced the empty spot awaiting Mlle Thibaux's painting. Its neighbor, numbered
23
, of Ruthi under the
chupah
, hung in tattered ruins. Something cracked in Esther's heart.
You are not the compassionate Hashem I revered. You are a cruel, capricious God toying with the lives of my loved ones. I was a child when You took my Ima from me, when You inflicted untold suffering upon my brother Naftali.
“You will not do this to me again!” she yelled, sobbing. “You don't get to harm my little boy and still keep my devotion! Hear?”

At her shouts, the clerk rushed in. Esther dropped the cleaver. It clattered to the ground, its echo reverberating in the stillness of the high-ceilinged gallery. Forget God and His plans. Test of her faith or not, her indulgence in her urges had come too late. She was a mother and her children needed her more than God did—or cared. They had her heart even more than her love for Pierre or her passion for art.

Like Naftali who had once returned home merely a shell of the boy he had been, so would her family get back the shell of the woman. But that was the mother they needed, even if her heart, her whole being, would forever remain in Paris.

She limped out, her ankle inside her boot throbbing as it swelled, like another scream stuck in her throat.

MAY 1968

A
s always, board meetings at the Louvre are a series of heated discussions. I leave my colleagues still arguing in the conference room and turn to take the stairs to the east wing when something catches my eye through the open door of one of the offices:

A canvas clipped onto an easel. Flat blotches of red and blue in the painting look like a child's work; the faces are unpainted, showing the original yellowed canvas.

My breath catches. I'd know this painting anywhere.

As though pulled by invisible strings, I walk in and approach the easel. A slim woman whose name I can't remember studies the painting while smoking a Gauloise.

“Bonjour, Monsieur Thibaux.” Her cigarette waves toward the easel. “Picasso? He has a similar finished painting, but there's no record of a study of it—”

I now notice a girl standing by the wall-to-ceiling shelves groaning under the weight of art tomes. The girl is a hippie, like those fighting “the establishment” these past few weeks, ripping up cobblestones to hurl at policemen and setting campus buildings on fire. A ribbon tied across the center of her forehead fails to tame long, dark tresses.

“Is it yours?” I ask her.

She blushes. “Oui, yes,” she replies, and adds quickly in accented English, “No, not really, it's—”

I cut her off. “Where are you from?”

“Israel.”

My eyes search the girl's face for familiar features. It's in the almond-shaped eyes and perhaps in the widow's peak. There's something else, incongruous, in the arched cupid mouth. “What's your name? How did you come to possess this?”

Her fingers twist the net of her crocheted calf-length vest. “Sharon. Sharon Bloomenthal—”

“Are you related to Esther Kaminsky-Bloomenthal?”

The familiar hairline rises in astonishment. “She's my grandmother,” the girl exclaims, and extricates her hand from the vest's web, which is designed with brilliant aquatic creatures among tangled seaweed.

I must take a moment before I react. I lift off the table the cardboard tube in which this canvas had been rolled. My finger traces the faded writing. Finally, I nod to the curator. “This is a Picasso. I packed it myself in 1924.”

I
lead the girl to a café on Rue de Rivoli, and we talk, alternating among my rusted Hebrew, her untrained French and our accented English. Suppressing the thrill inside me while I struggle with how much I should ask—or tell—I learn that, having finished her military duty in a parachute-folding unit, Sharon is hitchhiking through Europe. Her parents died when she was an infant, and so her grandmother and grandfather raised her as their own. Esther gave her the Picasso to sell in Paris; their riches dissipated with Nathan's long, terminal illness.

The girl seems levelheaded, as one would expect from a young Sabra. Eleven months ago Israel won the Six-Day War. When a band of agitated students marches down the street, blocking traffic and shouting slogans, the smile that curves Sharon's lips is that of an older person's forgiving the youth its follies. I imagine that for her, grievances against the educational system dwarf when compared with the fragility of life dependent upon the capriciousness of folded silk and twisted cords.

“So how do you know my grandma?” she asks.

I pick up my burning Gauloise from the ashtray and pull hard. “My mother was your grandmother's French teacher in Jerusalem,” I begin, but it's the ending that bears the weight, and I am uncertain of my willingness to revisit it. Even if the pain of those last days when I accompanied Esther to Marseille—and the years of mourning our lost love—has dulled with the passing decades, the memories have leached into my heart.

“Let me show you something,” I finally say. I pay for her croissant and our coffee and lead her back to the museum through a maze to the painting I still visit from time to time.

“Your grandmother gave it to my mother,” I explain as I look at my mother's young profile against the monastery ruins. How well I remember that day in the open Jerusalem mountains, the first time I met the woman who would be forever claimed and reclaimed from me by her God. “It's been hanging here for fifty years.”

Sharon doesn't speak as we wind our way outside. She drops onto a bench at the rim of the plaza in front of the Louvre. She breathes hard. I try to grasp what this window into her grandmother's life may mean to her.

Finally, she points at the vest she's wearing. “See these miniature sculptures? This is the amazing stuff she does with needles and yarn. But imagine—she could have been a world-renowned artist!”

“Yes, she could have been.”

We fall silent when, connecting the dots, she asks, “How come you packed, in 1924, a painting that belongs to my grandmother? Was it a gift from your mother?”

It is not my place to reveal to this girl what Esther has kept secret. How could I explain Esther's sojourn in Paris? “I guess the painting remained rolled because your grandma couldn't hang graven images at home.”

“Oh, she has her needlepoint pictures all over the place. My father's photos, too. She only pretends to be religious. She observes kosher, reflexively, out of habit. She ignores my transgressions that turn our kitchen
traife.
” Sharon giggles. “She plays cards on Friday nights at a club, then a taxi drops her off a couple of blocks from home so the neighbors won't see her in a car.”

“When did she change?”

Sharon shrugs. “Since my father's death, I heard.”

There was time, perhaps until the Holocaust, when the Earth was the center of the universe, man the center of Creation, the Jews the center of humanity—and my Esther their representative. It hurts to think of the blows that finally shook her out of the delusion that she mattered to God.

I get up and fish a card out of my multi-pocketed vest. “I'll help you auction the Picasso to private collectors. I also have a Soutine drawing that belongs to your grandmother. Would you come to my atelier tomorrow?”

T
he girl is far smarter than I imagined a twenty-year-old would be. “I checked you at the library yesterday afternoon,” she announces when I open the door. I motion her in with the flourish of my arm, but she's already entered and now waves the familiar cardboard tube. “You're the most famous sculptor in France.”

I laugh. “You're sure you served in a parachute unit, not in intelligence?”

“And since you evaded my questions, I called my grandmother.”

My heart catches. Esther's sixty-eight, I'm seventy-one. The maps of our lives are filled with dead-end roads, uncrossed seas and uncarved mountainsides. “Did you say hello from me?”

“Would she remember you?”

The way Sharon cocks her head and the flat tone of her question, more like a tease, tell me that she is fishing for more. What did Esther say at the mention of my name? What could she possibly have said?

Just then, my assistant turns on the pneumatic gun to blast the lines I marked on a stone. Glad for the eardrum-piercing distraction, I put down my chisel and take off my leather apron. “I'm about to have lunch. Will you join me?”

Sharon follows me to my house, which stands past the sculpture garden. “I've lived alone since my last companion left,” I say by way of explanation while our feet scrunch the gravel in the path. “I have a son, and he's inherited his mother's estate in the South, growing grapes and making wine. Good wine, I must say.”

She asks me about the sculptures we pass, and as I respond, her eyes examine me with more scrutiny than they did yesterday. I am no longer just an old man with skin cured under the harsh sun, even as my arms and shoulders are strong from years of lifting stones, chiseling and sanding.

The kitchen is my favorite room, with its wooden beams and polished copper pans. At the industrial-size stove where I left a pot of meat soup simmering, I turn off the flame.

“Would you like to know what I found out?” she speaks to my back.

“Sure.” Stilling my heart, I ladle soup into two earthenware bowls.

“She planned a ‘European grand tour' with my grandfather in 1924.”

I make no overt reaction as I slice country bread on a wooden board. I open the cutlery drawer, and, without asking or being asked, Sharon takes out utensils and sets them on the checkerboard tablecloth.

“But somehow she got stuck in Paris,” she adds when I still do not glance her way. “For a long time.”

My back to her, I rinse lettuce leaves. From the alley leading to the Sorbonne, a concert of honking car horns sounds a semi-organized protest.

“She had a son in August 1925,” Sharon goes on, her tone sharp, accusing. “Eight months after her return.”

I wheel around and stare at her. The faucet continues to run. A lettuce leaf is dripping on the floor, then falls out of my hand.

“Amiram. His name was Amiram,” she says.

My head snaps up. “Was?” The blood drains from the roots of what used to be my thick hair. “Was?”

“He was killed in the War of Independence. In 'forty-eight.” She adds the clarification, as if twenty years make it too late for mourning. “I'm sorry. I don't know how to tell you this.”

I turn off the faucet and pull over a chair. I sink into it, and my head drops into my hands. The girl knows. Her silence soaks up my heavy breathing.

“It's my fault.” My fist pounds the table with such force that the soup splashes. “I'm such a fool.”

I notice the “why?” question in Sharon's brow I could have sculpted from memory.

“Amiram. He'd still be alive if only I'd gone after her and brought her back,” I say.

“Not in Vichy France,” Sharon replies, her tone softer. “Both he and my grandmother would have perished in a Nazi death camp.”

“Yes,” I whisper. How hard it was to rein the emotions in those black years when so many of my Jewish artist friends were hauled to concentration camps, never to return. Soutine died during stomach surgery while in hiding. Esther's musical prodigy cousin, Asher, with whom I kept in touch, disappeared into a Nazi incinerator along with other homosexuals.

“Amiram was my father,” she adds just as I hear my own brain synapses making the connection.

My eyes welling up, I take her hand across the table and then cover it with my other palm. My callused fingers feel rough against the dry skin of a girl who, her resourcefulness notwithstanding, bites her nails. Young or old, we all carry time on our bodies.

I smile through my tears. “My granddaughter. Esther's granddaughter. You must be an artist, too.”

“I asked her why she never told you she had your child,” Sharon volunteers, and I cannot begin to imagine the conversation over the crushing cellophane-like noise of an overseas call, of the pressure she must have exacted on my Esther.

“And?” I ask. I am already proud of this magnificent girl and her inquisitive mind.

“She wouldn't officially declare her son a
mamzer
.” Sharon grimaces at the absurdity of the statement, unaware that this was my status growing up. Her voice turns angry. “Amiram means ‘My nation is rising.' My grandfather Nathan named him as a tribute to the Zionist dream. Instead of rising, though, my father cowered in a field of dill and thistles, where he and my mother were shot by Arab
fedayeen
.” She looks straight at me, and I can finally place that familiar cupid mouth: it's my mother's. “Why didn't you follow her to
Eretz Israel
?” Sharon asks, using the archaic name of the country I haven't visited since my youth.

“She knew where I was. I waited for her,” I say in my unsteady Hebrew, then switch to French. “I had to let her make peace with her decision to put her children first. She was struggling with her sacrifice.” I sigh. What man has ever won a competition with God? I recall how I couldn't promise my Esther that God wouldn't inflict His mighty wrath on anyone else, as I now know He did. “Life is not simple, Sharon. It's not like separating yolk from white. We all start out expecting fairness, but nothing is clear-cut. Had I been handed a world that ran in ways that pleased me, my Esther would never have left, and Amiram and your mother would have raised you.”

Sharon tears a piece of bread and dunks it into her soup.

We eat in silence that is surprisingly comfortable, as if I have known this stranger for a long time. My granddaughter. Esther's gift to me. I want to take Sharon's face in my hands, but instead grab one of the drawing pads I keep strewn around the house and begin to sketch her.

“What ever happened to your great-aunt Hanna?” I ask.

She shrugs. “She drives her family nuts.”

“Her family? She had children?” I ask, and when Sharon nods, I refrain from my usual tirade about the tragedy of organized religion. Instead, I say, “You and I are connected by a man neither of us knew.”

“The stories about him are family lore,” she replies and, while I sketch, regales me with tales about her father, who was killed when she was only six weeks old. Her aunt Ruthi, probably named after Esther's childhood friend, told her about the water bombs he dropped on passersby; about his attempt to fly, resulting in a fall onto concrete that broke his front tooth. He had been their Ima's favorite, Ruthi said, even more than the amputee Gershon, who required constant care, and the twins, the youngest, who were always ailing. If she could, she would have singled him out with a striped multicolored coat as Jacob had for Joseph. It was Amiram's beautiful drawings she hung in the kitchen. “He was a talented artist, too,” Sharon tells me. “No wonder.”

Has Esther retained her French better than I did my Hebrew? I rub the stubble on my chin and rise from the chair. “In addition to the painting in the Louvre, there's another one your grandmother made and gave my mother.”