A Tale of Love and Darkness (29 page)

Poor Dora, when she was nine months pregnant, they came and took her away to a village, to some cousin of Xenia's. I think that Papa gave them some money. Xenia went with Dora to the village, and a few days later she came back sick and pale. Xenia, not Dora. Dora came back after a month, neither sick nor pale but red-faced and plump, like a juicy apple, she came back without a baby and she did not seem in the least sad, only, as it were, even more childish than she had been before. And she had been very childish before. After she came back from the village, Dora spoke to us only in baby talk, and she played with dolls, and when she cried, it sounded just like the crying of a three-year-old. She started sleeping the hours a baby sleeps too: that girl slept for twenty hours a day.

And what happened to the baby? Who knows. We were told not to ask and we were very obedient daughters: we did not ask questions and nobody told us anything. Only once, in the night, Haya woke me and
Fania saying that she could hear very clearly from the garden, in the dark—it was a rainy, windy night—the sound of a baby crying. We wanted to dress and go out but we were frightened. By the time Haya went and woke Papa, there was no baby to be heard, but still Papa took a big lantern and went out in the garden and checked every corner, and he came back and said sadly, Hayunia, you must have been dreaming. We did not argue with our father, what good would it do to argue? But each of us knew very well that she had not been dreaming, but that there really had been a baby crying in the garden: such a thin high-pitched cry so piercing, so frightening, not like a baby that is hungry and wants to suck, or a baby that's cold, but like a baby in terrible pain.

After that pretty Dora fell ill with a rare blood disease, and Papa paid again for her to go and be examined by a great professor in Warsaw, a professor as famous as Louis Pasteur, and she never came back. Xenia Dimitrovna went on telling stories in the evening, but her stories ended up wild, that is to say not very proper, and occasionally words crept into her stories that were not so nice and that we didn't want to hear. Or if we did want to, we denied ourselves, because we were well-brought-up young ladies.

And little Dora? We never spoke about her again. Even Xenia Dim-itrovna never pronounced her name, as though she forgave her for taking her lover but not for disappearing to Warsaw. Instead Xenia raised two dear little birds in a cage on the porch and they thrived until the winter, and in the winter they froze to death. Both of them.

MENAHEM GELEHRTER
, who wrote the book about the Tarbuth gymnasium (secondary school) in Rovno, was a teacher there himself. He taught Bible, literature, and Jewish history. Among other things in his book I found something of what my mother and her sisters and friends studied as part of their Hebrew curriculum in the 1920s. It included stories from the rabbis, selected poems from the Jewish Golden Age in Spain, medieval Jewish philosophy, collected works of Bialik and Tchernikhowsky and selections from other modern Hebrew writers, and also translations from world literature, including such authors as Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev, Chekhov, Mickiewicz, Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Shakespeare, Byron, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Jack London, Tagore, Hamsun, the Epic of Gilgamesh in Tchernikhowsky's translation, and so on. The books on Jewish history included Joseph Klausner's
History of the Second Temple.

Every day (Aunt Sonia continues), before the day begins, at six or even earlier, I go slowly down the stairs to empty the liner in the garbage can outside. Before I climb up again, I have to rest there for a moment, I have to sit on the low wall by the garbage cans because the stairs leave me breathless. Sometimes I bump into a new immigrant from Russia, Varia, who sweeps the pavement in Wessely Street each morning. Over there, in Russia, she was a big boss. Here—she sweeps the pavements. She has hardly learned any Hebrew. Sometimes the two of us stay for a few minutes by the garbage cans and talk a little in Russian.

Why is she a street sweeper? To keep two talented daughters at the university, one in chemistry, one in dentistry. Husband—she has none. Family in Israel—she has none either. Food—they save on that too. Clothes—they save on. Accommodation—they share a single room. All so that for tuition and textbooks they won't be short. It was always like that with Jewish families: they believed that education was an investment in the future, the only thing that no one can ever take away from your children, even if, heaven forbid, there's another war, another revolution, another migration, more discriminatory laws—your diploma you can always fold up quickly, hide it in the seams of your clothes, and run away to wherever Jews are allowed to live.

The Gentiles used to say about us: the diploma—that's the Jews' religion. Not money, not gold. The diploma. But behind this faith in the diploma there was something else, something more complicated, more secret, and that is that girls in those days, even modern girls, like us, girls who went to school and then to university, were always taught that women are entitled to an education and a place outside the home—but only until the children are born. Your life is your own only for a short time: from when you leave your parents' home to your first pregnancy. From that moment, from the first pregnancy, we had to begin to live our lives only around the children. Just like our mothers. Even to sweep
pavements for our children, because your child is the chick and you are—what? When it comes down to it, you are just the yolk of the egg, you are what the chick eats so as to grow big and strong. And when your child grows up—even then you can't go back to being yourself, you simply change from being a mother to being a grandmother, whose task is simply to help her children bring up their children.

True, even then there were quite a few women who made careers for themselves and went out into the world. But everybody talked about them behind their backs: look at that selfish woman, she sits in meetings while her poor children grow up in the street and pay the price.

Now it's a new world. Now at last women are given more opportunity to live lives of their own. Or is it just an illusion? Maybe in the younger generations too women still cry into their pillows at night, while their husbands are asleep, because they feel they have to make impossible choices? I don't want to be judgmental: it's not my world anymore. To make a comparison I'd have to go from door to door checking how many mothers' tears are wept every night into the pillow when husbands are asleep, and to compare the tears then with the tears now.

Sometimes I see on television, sometimes I see even here, from my balcony, how young couples after a day's work do everything together—wash the clothes, hang them out, change diapers, cook, once I even heard in the grocer's a young man saying that the next day he and his wife were going—that's what he said, tomorrow
we're
going—for an amniocentesis. When I heard him say that, I felt a lump in my throat: maybe the world is changing a little after all?

It's certain that malice,
rishes
, hasn't lost ground in politics, between religions, nations, or classes, but maybe it's receding a little in couples? In young families? Or maybe I'm just deceiving myself. Maybe it's all just play-acting, and in fact the world carries on as before—the mother cat suckles her kittens, while Mr. Puss-in-Boots licks himself all over, twitches his whiskers, and goes off in search of pleasures in the yard?

Do you still remember what is written in the book of Proverbs? A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother! If the son turns out wise, then the father rejoices, boasts of his son, and scores full marks. But if, heaven forbid, the son turns out unsuccessful, or stupid, or problematic, or deformed, or a criminal
—nu
,
then it's bound to be the mother's fault, and all the care and suffering falls on her. Once your mother said to me: Sonia, there are just two things—no, I've got a lump in my throat again. We'll talk about this another time. Let's talk about something else.

Sometimes I'm not quite sure that I remember correctly whether that princess, Lyubov Nikitichna, who lived behind the curtain in our house with her two girls, Tasia and Nina, and slept with them in the same antique bed, I'm not quite sure: was she really their mother? Or was she just the
gouvernantka
, the governess, of the two girls? Who apparently had two different fathers? Because Tasia was Anastasia Ser-geyevna, while Nina was Antonina Boleslavovna. There was something a bit foggy. Something we didn't talk about much, and when we did, it was an awkward subject. I remember that the two girls both called the Princess "Mama" or "Maman," but it might have been because they couldn't remember their real mother. I can't tell you for certain, either way, because the cover-up already existed. There were many cover-ups in life two or three generations ago. Today perhaps there are fewer. Or have they just changed? Have new ones been invented?

Whether the cover-up is a good thing or a bad thing I really don't know. I am not qualified to judge today's habits because I may well have been brainwashed, like all the girls of my generation. Still, I sometimes think that "between him and her," as they say, perhaps in these times it has all become simpler. When I was a girl, when I was what they called a young lady from a good home, it was full of knives, poison, terrifying darkness. Like walking in the dark in a cellar full of scorpions with no shoes on. We were completely in the dark. It simply wasn't talked about.

But they did talk all the time—chatter, jealousy, and
rishes
, malicious gossip—they talked about money, about diseases, they talked about success, about a good family versus who knows what sort of family, this was an endless topic, and about character they talked endlessly too, this one has such and such a character and that one has such and such a character. And how much they talked about ideas! It's unimaginable today! They talked about Judaism, Zionism, the Bund, Communism, they talked about anarchism and nihilism, they talked about America, they talked about Lenin, they even talked about the "woman question," women's emancipation. Your aunt Haya was the most daring of the three of us about women's emancipation—but only when it came to talking and arguing, naturally—Fania was a bit of a suffragette too, but she had some doubts. And I was the silly little girl who is always being told, Sonia don't talk, Sonia don't interrupt, you wait till you grow up, then you'll understand. So I closed my mouth and listened.

All young people in those days bandied notions of freedom about: this kind of freedom, that kind of freedom, another kind of freedom. But when it came to "between him and her" there was no freedom: there was just walking in the dark in a cellar full of scorpions with no shoes on. Not a week went by without our hearing horrifying rumors about a young girl who experienced what happens to girls who aren't careful; or a respectable woman who fell in love and went out of her mind; or a maid who was seduced; or a cook who ran off with her employer's son and came back alone with a baby; or a respectable woman who fell in love and threw herself at her beloved's feet only to be cast out and scoffed at. Do you say scoffed? No? When we were girls, chastity was both a cage and the only railing between you and the abyss. It lay on a girl's chest like a thirty-kilo stone. Even in the dreams she dreamed at night, chastity stayed awake and stood beside the bed and watched over her, so she could be very ashamed when she woke up in the morning, even if nobody knew.

All that business "between him and her" may be a bit less in the dark nowadays. A bit simpler. In the darkness that covered things then, it was much easier for men to abuse women. On the other hand, the fact that it's so much simpler and less mysterioius now—is that a good thing? Doesn't it turn out too ugly?

I'm surprised at myself that I'm talking to you about this at all. When I was still a girl, we would sometimes whisper to one another. But with a boy? Never in my life have I talked about such things with a boy. Not even with Buma, and we've been married now for nearly sixty years. How did we end up here? We were talking about Lyubov Nikitichna and her Tasia and Nina. If you go to Rovno someday, you can have a detective adventure. Maybe you could try to check if they still have in the town hall any documents that can shed light on that cover-up. Discover whether that countess, or princess, was or wasn't the mother of her two daughters. And whether she really was a princess or a countess. Or maybe whether Lebedevski, the mayor, was also the father of Tasia and Nina, just as he was said to be the father of poor Dora.

But on second thought, any documents there must have been burned by now ten times over, when we were conquered by the Poles, by the Red Army, and then by the Nazis, when they simply took us all and shot us in ditches and covered us with earth. Then there was Stalin again, with the NKVD, Rovno was thrown from hand to hand like a puppy being teased by Russia-Poland-Russia-Germany-Russia. And now it doesn't belong to Poland or to Russia but to Ukraine, or is it Belarus? Or some local gangs? I don't know myself who it belongs to now. And I don't even really care: what there was doesn't exist anymore, and what there is now will in a few more years also turn to nothing.

The whole world, if you just look at it from a distance, will not go on forever. They say one day the sun will go out and everything will return to darkness. So why do men slaughter one another throughout history? What does it matter so much, who rules Kashmir or the Tombs of the Patriarchs in Hebron? Instead of eating the apple from the tree of life or the tree of knowledge, it seems we ate the apple from the tree of
rishes
, and we ate it with pleasure. That's how paradise came to an end and this hell began.

There's so much either-or: you know so little even about people who live under the same roof as you do. You think you know a lot—and it turns out you know nothing at all. Your mother, for example—no, I'm sorry, I simply can't talk about her directly. Only in a roundabout way. Otherwise the wound starts to hurt. I won't talk about Fania. Only about what there was around her. What there was around Fania is also maybe a little bit Fania. We used to have a kind of proverb, that when you really love someone, then you love even their handkerchief. It loses something in translation. But you can see what I'm getting at.