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Authors: Cathy Lamb

The First Day of the Rest of My Life (33 page)

BOOK: The First Day of the Rest of My Life
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Annie stilled, tight, tense.
“Why . . .” I envisioned a woman leaping from a second-story window. “Why did she jump?”
Granddad sighed, his shoulders slumping. “She jumped because she was trying to escape.”
“From . . . ,” Annie asked, but she knew, and I knew, too.
“The Nazis were coming.” Granddad’s voice crackled.
Like locusts, like hate on feet, like death. He and his family were human targets. Human Jewish targets.
“Granddad,” I said, then stopped, fighting back a rush of despair.
“Oh, my God.” Annie didn’t cry because she never did, but I knew she felt this pain. “Oh, my God.”
“Madeline and Emmanuelle’s parents had been tipped off by a neighbor. He was a bookseller, and he learned from someone else who was passing notes back and forth to him through the books that the Nazis were coming to arrest all of us in our homes. When, we didn’t know, but it would be soon, so we packed and tried to prepare.”
Granddad put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. “It is like yesterday,” he whispered. “As if these other years, these decades, have not happened. I can see everything. I can hear their boots, the screams, that guttural shouting, the smell of fear. It was rampant, it invaded every corner of Paris. I wasn’t there at your grandma’s parents’ house that evening when the Nazis came, shouting, demanding, threatening. Their parents, Madeline and Emmanuelle’s parents, how shall I say it? They
stalled
them.” He laughed, so bitterly. “They stalled them so she could escape.”
“How did they stall the Nazis? I thought they were sick?”
“Their father had a gun. Eli could barely stand. He spent most of his time in that wheelchair, but he stood when the Nazis came in, five of them, and he shot off his old rifle before he himself was shot dead. They turned on your great-grandma, on Frieda, and she had a gun, too. She was so ill, but she raised that gun in shaking hands and pulled the trigger. She was killed instantly by returning gunfire.”
I envisioned that—a man, a
real man
, protecting his family, barely able to stand, but stand he did, knowing it was the end of him, the end of his wife, and his wife, a
real woman
, dying, still fighting, a gun in her hands, shooting to kill to protect her family.
“My first wife, you look so much like her, Madeline. That’s another reason why your grandma gets confused on who you are. Your grandma Madeline was hiding behind an armoire. She told me what happened later. The Nazis who were still alive, and not hurt from the gunshots, immediately searched the house, and she waited, waited with Ismael—”
Ismael—that name again, always that name. It had darted in and out of my childhood.
“Wait,” Annie interrupted. “Who is Ismael?”
“Ismael . . . oh, Ismael,” Granddad moaned.
I drew in my breath, so did Annie.
“Ismael . . .” Granddad patted his heart and we both put an arm around his shoulder. “Oh, Ismael.”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to talk anymore, Granddad,” I said, worried about his health, his weakening, sliding health. I pictured his life draining out of his body, inch by inch until he was no longer there.
“No. I must speak of this now, before it’s too late.”
“Rest, Granddad, your heart,” Annie said.
“Please, breathe, Granddad,” I said.
He breathed, in and out. “Ismael is . . .”
Behind Granddad’s back, I held Annie’s hand as Granddad took one more rattling breath, as if he was sucking in air to drown the pain.
“Ismael is my son.”
I felt Annie gripping my hand tight, on reflex.
“Your son?” I asked.
“Yes, your mother had a brother.”
“Our momma had a brother?”
Annie and I said together. I remembered, again, when I was a girl, how Momma had said, “Ismael and I used to play together, now you and I can play together, Pink Girl.” I had asked her to tell me more and she’d said, “Some stories are not to be told for years, until the listener is ready and the storyteller can tell it properly . . . so that no one forgets who we are, who we were.”
Here was the story, told properly, the secret, the mystery that had been wrapped up in French, English, and German and carried through three generations.
“Madeline and I had a son, a beautiful son, a wonderful, wonderful son.” My granddad did not bother to wipe the tears from his wrinkled cheeks. “We loved him so much, as we loved your mother. Ismael loved sports, loved his microscope, loved being outdoors. He loved animals, like you, Annie, and he loved helping people, like you, Madeline. He had a stamp collection.” Granddad’s voice broke. “Who did he love most of all, though? He loved your mother, his little sister. Everywhere he went, he took her by the hand. It was he she turned to when she hurt a knee, or needed a hug, or help finding her lost stuffed elephant. It was he who read her stories at night and tucked her in. It was an uncommon bond, strong as steel.”
I thought of our momma with an older brother, tucking her in, reading to her, and overnight, he was . . . gone.
“Not a day, not a day has gone by when I have not missed my son, and my daughter. Every day I am tortured by the loss of my children.”
I closed my eyes as a torrent of pain shook me. Two children. He had lost
two
children. I had seen firsthand my grandparents’ unending, raw grief after losing my momma. It had been horrendous, that would be the word for it,
horrendous.
The wailing, how they muffled their cries, shut doors, screamed at the ocean when they didn’t think we were within earshot, screamed into the fir trees on The Lavender Farm. Those memories had scorched my mind for years.
“And, and what happened to that son?” I said, my voice wobbling. “Your son, Ismael?”
“He died.”
“But . . .” Dare I open that pain, that endless, eternal pain? Did I have that right? Would he want to talk about it? Would it help, finally, after all these years?
“
How?
How did he die?” Annie asked.
There was, again, a long pause while the leaves ruffled, the trees swayed, the hawk dove again to stab another mouse.
“Your grandma, your grandma Madeline, she held him in her arms and jumped from the second floor as the Nazis were pounding up the stairs. We don’t know how she survived. She landed first, cushioning Ismael. Her injuries were so extensive. She was bleeding internally, she’d shattered ribs, hit her head, broke a bone in her leg. Ismael’s wounds were equally bad. She crawled, Ismael in her arms, and hid under a rowboat in their yard near their pond.”
“Granddad,” Annie interrupted. “The pond with the swans, right? The one that Grandma talks about, paints in her books?”
“Yes, it is those swans that your grandma drew hundreds of times for her books. It is why we named the stores Swans. That night the swans strutted around the rowboat, which was partially in bushes. They had never done that. When the Nazis came outside, they tried to peck them, they chased them. But miraculously, as your grandma always told me, the Nazis did not see the boat where Madeline and Ismael were hiding.”
I had that image in my head. A black night, a panicked mother with her son, jumping from the second story to escape from morally indefensible vermin who wanted to take her life.
“Madeline carried Ismael, limping and bleeding and broken, to the house of a friend of ours, a doctor who was not Jewish. She had to hide, to dart here and there. Luckily it was dark. The doctor sent his son to find me, then he sent him to get your grandma Emmanuelle and your mother, who were hiding at his friend’s house, a librarian, in her basement, with a suitcase and Madeline’s violin. I had been frantic with worry, but by the time your grandma and your mother—” He stopped to pinch his nose, but the pinching did not stop the tears. “Your mother, so young, she was wearing a blue coat that day . . . blue shoes . . .”
I rubbed his back, devastated for him, for us, for our whole family in that awful time.
“By the time I got to the doctor’s house, Madeline was dying. It was hopeless. Only a hospital could have stopped it, and we couldn’t go there. I held her on one side, your grandma on the other. She told us about jumping from the second story, the rowboat and the swans and . . . before she died . . .”
He stopped, his lips trembling.
“Before she died . . .”
His lips trembled again, his body shuddering.
“Before Madeline died she took off her wedding ring and put it on her sister’s ring finger, your grandma’s ring finger, and said, ‘Go . . . go . . . you must go now. Use the papers. She can be your wife.’ She was so brave. Even when she was dying, her last thoughts were for us, how to save us. I refused to leave, so did your grandma, but Madeline was insistent. We refused again. She said, ‘Save my daughter, save yourselves.’ We wouldn’t leave her, we refused, and she . . . she . . .”
Granddad choked on his misery, his loss.
“Madeline knew we would not leave her, so she grabbed a knife on the table . . .
grabbed a knife
and stabbed herself in the neck. I have no idea how she had the strength to do that, I don’t know, I don’t understand, she was critically injured, already bleeding out, but with that . . . it pooled, it rushed out as she died. Her blood drained, her life drained.”
Good Lord.
I sank back against the bench again, that horrific scene blistering my mind. Annie leaned forward over her knees and coughed. I knew she was feeling nauseated—and emotionally sick.
Madeline hastened her death to save her husband, her sister, and her daughter, who was my momma. . . .
“She knew that Ismael wouldn’t make it,” Granddad said. “He was in a coma, hardly breathing. Our doctor friend told us that our sweet child was dying, there was no hope, he had minutes to live. He urged us to leave. But I wouldn’t go, I would not leave my son. But then we saw—” He put a cupped hand to his forehead, as if he could hold captive those tragic memories. “We saw the Nazis coming, at the end of the street, they were going door to door, we heard screams. . . .”
“Granddad—”
“My wife’s blood was on the floor, my son wasn’t moving, his breath was hardly there, his sunken chest.” He sobbed. “His chest was rising, but only slightly, hardly at all, he was bloody, all over there was blood, his wounds were so bad. He was dying, we all knew it. The doctor, my old friend, implored us to leave. ‘Save yourselves, save your daughter, your son’s soul is already gone, I am sorry, but go go go. Your wife would not want all of you to die, she wouldn’t want that. Go, go!’”
That scene branded itself onto my brain. My granddad, a young man; my grandma, a young woman; my momma, a girl in blue, in the midst of two dying people, the blood everywhere, the hopelessness, the desperation, and the Nazis beating their way down the street.
“I . . .” He choked on his own tears. “I leaned down, and I kissed Madeline, and I got blood on my hands, my mouth. Your momma, she didn’t make a sound, and she hugged her mother close. Your grandma hugged her sister, pushed her hair back, caressed her face, then the three of us went to Ismael, hugged him, kissed him. I held him close, rocked him back and forth, I thought I would die of pain. His head was back, the blood . . . so much blood, he was so pale, not moving. Dying.”
I was crying freely now. Annie’s face had completely stilled. It was the mask she always wore when the pain was too much.
“I didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to, but the doctor grabbed me, pulled me away, and he and his wife, they had risked their lives for us, they pushed us out the door. I grabbed your grandma, but a teenager, and your mother, who picked up Madeline’s violin, and we left.”
“Oh, Granddad,” I said.
He moaned, from the top of his soul. “My son died without us. He died without his family.” He wailed, long and hoarse, wretched. “He died alone. I am ashamed. I left him, left my son in his last minutes. I was not there. His father was not there.”
“Granddad, please,” Annie begged. “You didn’t have a choice. He was in a coma, he was dying . . .”
“If you hadn’t left, you all would have ended up in the camps. All of you, Momma, Grandma, you . . . Annie and I wouldn’t be here.”
“Logically, I know this. It has never, it
will never
make it better. My son died without me holding him, talking to him, praying for him. As a father, I was not there.”
We patted him, we soothed him. It did nothing to help him. Nothing could heal that pain. It is foolhardy to think it ever could.
The hawk dove down to stab another mouse as the trees swayed and the leaves rustled, and Annie and I and Granddad were in France, in a ruthless, dangerous world.
“We barely made the train,” he whispered. “I showed those bastards, those Nazis, our forged papers, but we were questioned, anyhow. They liked that, liked to scare people, liked to strut. They were criminals, brutal, conscienceless, merciless. But your mother, your sweet mother, in her blue coat and blue dress, she whipped out her momma’s violin and played one of the pieces she had made up herself. Even at that age, your mother loved to compose her own music. She had an ear . . .
BOOK: The First Day of the Rest of My Life
10.22Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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