The Belief in Angels (27 page)

With her passing, however, life became nothing but an expanse of nothingness once more. The same way it is when I arrive in America all those years ago after the war. I have become unable to control my thoughts or my actions toward others with any consistency. I can’t fully breathe. My sorrow forms a thick blanket over my body, protecting me but also isolating me from my own experience. I felt broken all those years ago, and the pain is doubled now.

Oh, Rose, here I am in my grief, my
tsar,
mourning the loss of this child. Please let the World to Come be a good one. This life has been hard for me to shoulder on my own. Or join me there, in our World to Come. I am certain that with you by my side I can walk forward without fear or anguish.

I am reminded of a time, long ago, when I made a similar prayer. I stood at another gravesite. I functioned as
cantor,
singing the prayers for the ceremony. I prayed with many Turkish Jews who came to pray by the grave, spoke the Prayer For The Dead, and sat
shiva
in a Turkish synagogue for the days following the ceremony. I arranged for the service when I got released from the hospital.

The
keyver
held the bodies of several hundred bodies drowned nearly two months before, stacked, one atop the other, in a shallow grave. As it had been at the camp.

The survivors of the blast and the Jewish community living openly there in Turkey begged the British officials not to burn the bodies, which had been their custom in these situations, but instead to honor and respect the religious practices of these people, these Jews, for whom cremation is a sin against G-d. Despite their terrible cruelty against these people, the Brits listened and for once behaved in a civilized way, allowing us to bury them.

But I do not want to think about another terrible day. This is the terrible day I must live now. The death of this sweet child, the death I mourn today. My hands tremble in my pockets. The bottoms of my pockets are shredding with wear. Perhaps I will repair the pockets. But why? Why should I repair a coat I never want to wear again?

This life is filled with too much sorrow.

I pray I will not wear this coat again,
kehnahore.
I pray I am the next to go.

I stare across the gravesite.

The mother of this child stands on the other side of the rabbi. She has brought the
nebish,
the one called Jack. She wears a short black dress. Too short. I can see the skin of her arms and her chest through the lace on this dress. This is a dress for a party. The mother of this child dressed like a
kurve
for her child’s funeral. I feel no surprise. I have no anger. I am through being angry with this woman. I have no feeling for her left in me. I have given up on feeling where she is concerned.

I remember a time, long ago, when she brought joy. She was as young then as this child in the ground before us.

I treated her as my daughter. She is the child I helped to raise, first in my parents’ apartment, then with Yetta. She is the child her mother named Wendy, after the Wendy of
Peter Pan.
This was Wendy’s mother’s favorite book.

She is the brilliant child, the prodigy, who taught herself to read English by asking the vendors who came to my parents’ apartment to translate words. “How do you say?” is the first English phrase she spoke.

“Ice. Not ayz.” She corrected the family when we made errors.

I wanted her to become fluent in English to improve her life. I didn’t realize she planned to ignore her heritage, marry a Catholic, and denounce our religion once she could abandon the language we spoke. My parents said that by the age of five she read the entire dictionary from cover to cover and refused to speak anything but English with the family. They indulged her. Yes, it was
fehler
to indulge a child, and we knew. We all knew. We could see her
iberfim zikh
before our eyes, like an overripe fruit, but we all wanted to give her all we had been denied. She became our light and our reason.

She grew to be a plump and pretty child. A healthy girl. My mother, a wonderful cook, fed her well. Then, Yetta.

This woman who was that child has never resembled me. She is more like the woman who bore her. She does not know this. She does not know the woman and never will. We never spoke of it. It is done.

She came to live with us when she turned ten. We didn’t understand that ten is old enough to understand the world, and we treated her like a child. A brilliant child, yet still a child.

She realized she’d been adopted by my parents when she turned seventeen and applied for her driver’s license. We forgot she would need her birth certificate for this and at first refused to allow her to have it. I told her we didn’t want her to drive a car to keep her from suspecting our motive.

Rose convinced me to tell her the truth. “Samuel, are you going to forbid her from getting married too? She needs the certificate for this.”

We thought she would never have to know. We were unprepared for her questions and the hostility that followed when we refused to provide the information she wanted about her true parentage. This was the first time in her life she did not receive what she wanted from us. We realized we hadn’t prepared her for this disappointment. It was never the same with us after that.

Now, she visits to collect money. There is no love in our meeting. There is disappointment for us both.

Standing here over the grave of her youngest child, I have no sorrow for her. I grieve for the child, the one who reminded me of Idel. I also grieve for the other children, who will be left with Wendy.

The children who are not here.

The father decided it would be wrong for them to see their brother in the ground.

“It would give them nightmares,” he said when I asked why they wouldn’t be honoring their brother at the funeral.

He is a fool. I suffered these losses at their ages. There is no avoiding the suffering. There is no avoiding the pain. The children now know a sorrow unlike any other. It will shape them in ways that will affect the rest of their lives. It is the phantom pain in the heart where a muscle should be beating but is gone. Even now, the pain is present.

I think about the suffering my family and I have endured.

First, the devastation of losing my elder brother, Gershon, to typhus, in the same year our beloved
Bubbe
Chava passed. Then the murder of Idel and Berl by the Russian soldiers. And a different kind of murder with the loss of Sura and Ruchel. The camps, the Mefkura murders, the separations.

Now this, the loss of this child, Moses.

Where is Idel’s angel for all of them?

Perhaps Idel’s angel is a vengeful angel?

This new rabbi from our synagogue teaches that there are
no
angels. Angels are modern-day pagan idols, he says. He says it is time for us to recognize what we create here in our life on earth, that it is our own creation and not the work of an otherworld. When we take responsibility for our misdeeds we will create a better world.

I like this rabbi. I like his new ideas and that he speaks about the
Torah
in a way which takes us out of the Middle Ages and into modern times.

I know I am alone in my age group in these thoughts. I have heard the grumblings of the community sitting with me on the left side of the synagogue, up at the front, where the learned sit. I smile to think I am included in this group of learned men. I never studied the
Talmud.
I never went to college. I attended school at my father’s table back at the farm. These men accepted me into their group knowing nothing about me. I am Mocher’s brother-in-law, and this is good enough.

Yetta. Poor Yetta. It seems I have only recently finished saying the
Kaddish
for her. She died of pneumonia after a long illness and hospitalization. I hated all the visits. The smell reminding me of the time after the Mefkura when I spent months recovering in a Turkish hospital.

Yetta and I found a quiet peace between us those years after Wendy left and started her own family. It became as it always should have been.

She was a great money saver. I discovered this after she passed. She kept her money in a shoebox stuffed away in the back of our closet. Until her death I had no idea how much she managed to save. When I found the box with all the cash
rubber-banded and stacked neatly into fives, tens, fifties, hundreds … I am astonished to learn she had saved over ten thousand dollars.

I gave her such a small amount each month. I always expected she would ask for more, but she found a way to maintain the same budget for twenty years, even as prices for everything spiked up. She began saving market stamps toward the end of her life. The markets worked out ways to entice their customers’ loyalties, and she found a way by collecting these stamps to cut the grocery bills in half. She walked miles to save a few pennies on a loaf of bread or a dozen eggs.

How she managed to save such a great amount could be explained by her behavior, but the thing I wondered about, the biggest mystery of Yetta and her hidden treasure, is why? What was she saving for?

I will never know.

There were no one-dollar bills. Yetta knew I never liked the American one-dollar bills. The eagles on them remind me of the sculpture at the entry to Majdanek—the insane, mocking sculpture with the three eagles imprisoned in concrete.

Yetta’s body lies here. Her headstone, which was installed and unveiled recently, is to the left of this gravesite. I purchased plots for the rest of the family this week. We would be together in the earth, if not on it. Wendy told me she planned to be cremated when I told her of the purchase today.

“This is a
shanda,
to be burned. You want to bring a horrible shame in your death?” I asked her.

“I don’t give a shit. If you buy me a plot I’m gonna sell it and keep the money.”

If only.

There. The truth of how I feel about this girl, this woman Wendy has become. Why did I agree to take the girl?

I cannot remember all of the reasons my family gave for why I should take this responsibility. She has always been a burden. Like her mother. Anna.