Bridal Chair (23 page)

“Soon they will begin to complain about Mexico,” he said knowingly.

She agreed. She and Michel often spoke of Marc and Bella as though they themselves were the parents, amused by their childish vagaries, Marc’s restlessness, Bella’s yearnings.

Michel had not yet had any news of his own mother and father, although he inserted hints to them in his broadcasts. Daringly he had invented an interview with a son whose mother fashioned paper flowers that she sold on the streets of Nice. “If that mother hears this broadcast, she might try to send a message to her son through yours truly, Michel Gordey,” he had said, but no message had been received.

“They may not have heard the broadcast. They may not know how to communicate with you. No news is good news,” Ida assured him.

He shook his head wearily. Worry lines creased his avian face. She worried that he was not eating well. He had lost weight; his clothing hung loosely on his angular frame. He, in turn, worried that she was not getting enough rest.

“Not that you don’t look beautiful, Ida,” he assured her. Always and forever, he knew, she would look beautiful to him.

He arrived one evening and stood in the doorway and watched as she danced with a sailor whose friend stood beside him. Ida’s bright hair was braided into pigtails. She wore tan slacks and the loose khaki shirt a GI friend had given her. She laughed as she danced, laughed as her partner led her through intricate steps and swept her into a dip, color rushing to her face.

“She’s a great girl, that Ida,” the young naval officer said. “How do you know her?”

“She’s my wife,” Michel replied shortly, and he wondered if she still wore her wedding ring.

He fell asleep in her bed that night, beneath the painting of
The
Bridal
Chair
, and awakened at dawn to find her beside him, her eyes closed, her voice a whisper.

“Please, please. Don’t let them catch me. Please, please, put out the fire.”

The whispered words floated through the half darkness. He recognized them. Her recurring dream had been part of the life they had shared. Her sleep-bound body trembled and he held her close until she lay still and slept quietly in his arms.

He took her hand in his, saddened but unsurprised to see that she no longer wore the ring he had placed on her finger beneath their wedding canopy in an autumnal garden where the fragrance of late-blooming roses had filled the air.

Marc and Bella returned from Mexico elated by the reception his work had received. Their spirits soared when
Aleko
was next performed at the Metropolitan Opera House and Marc’s sets were acclaimed by the elite art critics of New York. But once the ballet closed and their stay in the limelight ended, they again imprisoned themselves in a dark and suffocating pessimism.

Bella burst into tears suddenly and inexplicably. Marc shut himself in his studio, but his canvases and sketchbooks no longer interested him. He felt that the scope of his paintings and drawings was limited after working on the splendid amplitude of the stage sets.

“How can I work on such a small scale?” he asked Ida, kicking aside a canvas.

He longed to create murals, to decorate ceilings and places of worship. His crucifixion paintings no longer satisfied him. He needed space to re-create his tortured martyrs, space to re-create biblical scenes. He dreamed of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. He yearned to paint his own vanished village on the ceiling of the long-destroyed great temple of his people, envisioned only in his dreams.

“The war will end and you will explore new horizons,” Ida assured him.
As
will
I
, she thought and wondered what those horizons might be.

Spring arrived. Marc and Bella ventured outside and felt the soft wind upon their faces.

“It will soon be Passover,” Bella said. “Should we have a seder?”

“Who would we invite?” he asked bitterly. “My dead sisters? Your dead brothers? Will their ghosts sit around our table?”

And then he held her close because his words had caused her to weep.

It was the Opatoshus who hosted the Passover seder, but there was little joy at their festively set table. The assembled guests were haunted by the grim news of the war. The Japanese had captured Bataan, and Germany was sending huge units of planes and tanks to the Russian front, testing the strength of the Red Army. The émigré Jews dutifully turned the pages of their Haggadoth as Joseph Opatoshu read the story of the cruelties endured in Egypt and the miracle of liberation.

“Isn’t Michel coming?” Bella whispered to Ida as she turned a page.

“Of course he’s coming,” Ida replied. “He called and said he’d be late. Some important news was breaking and he had to deliver a broadcast.”

“Important news is always breaking,” Marc said bitterly. “Bad news and worse news. Your Michel cannot come to the seder because he must tell the people of France that their world is on fire, that German bombs are falling on London, that Jews are being killed in gas chambers. The Voice of America might do better to remain silent.”

“Please, Marc.” Bella placed a restraining hand on his arm. “You are ruining the seder for everyone.”

“God is ruining the seder,” Marc retorted as Ida stood and helped Adele Opatoshu clear the soup plates.

“Michel is doing his job,
Papochka
,” she said calmly. “He will be here soon, I’m sure.”

Minutes later, Michel flung the door open and burst into the room. His face was pale, his dark hair unkempt, his eyes flashing. Although the spring night was cool, his sweat-stained shirt clung to his body and his jacket was slung over his shoulder. He panted, struggling for breath.

“Michel, what’s happened? What’s wrong?” Ida asked, running toward him.

He stared at her and sank into a chair.

“Everything is wrong. Everything has happened. The worst, the very worst.”

They listened in shock and sorrow as he told them that the Warsaw ghetto was surrounded by the Waffen-SS. German tanks were moving through the streets and troops were going from house to house. Houses and factories were on fire.

“But the Jews are fighting back,” he said. “Oh yes. They are dying, but they are fighting back. That is what I’ve been saying again and again in every broadcast. The world must know that the Jews are fighting back.” He closed his eyes. His arms fell loosely to his sides. “I’m tired, Ida. So tired. I’ve been reading communiqués for hours. Hours and hours. And still we don’t know all that happened and all that will yet happen. Our Washington office says it may take days before the ghetto is totally destroyed.”

She brought him a glass of wine and held it to his lips. He sipped slowly, as Joseph Opatoshu lifted his Haggadah and in his strong voice invited Elijah the prophet into the room. Bella, her face white, her hands trembling, ran from the room. Marc followed her into the bathroom where she stood over the toilet bowl, vomiting out her terror and her grief.

“
Gotenu
,” she murmured between spasms. “My God.”

“God?” he asked and wiped her pale face with a damp white cloth. “God is busy. He’s playing his fiddle on the roof of a burning house in the Warsaw ghetto. Ah, but perhaps the ghetto is no longer. Where then has God taken his fiddle? When will we know? How will we know?”

They walked slowly back into the dining room where the guests, pale and sad-eyed, were nevertheless singing the concluding song of the Haggadah. Marc added his voice to theirs. “One kid,” he sang. “One only kid, that my father bought for two farthings. Poor little kid. Poor little kid.”

* * *

The knowledge of events in the Warsaw ghetto paralyzed them. The ghetto was destroyed. The Jews had mounted a courageous but futile defense.

The stories filed by international news services were unsatisfying. “The Associated Press says ‘victims.’ Did these ‘victims’ have names, faces? Reuters talks about the destruction of the ghetto. Tell me, Mr. Reporter, how did that destruction take place?” Marc asked bitterly. He tossed aside the Yiddish newspapers that he read obsessively and angrily each day. “I want to know. I want to hear from witnesses, from Jewish witnesses.”

“Ghosts do not speak. I do not think we will soon hear from any of the Jewish survivors,” Ida said wearily.

She was wrong. On a still June evening, the quiet of the apartment was disturbed by three sharp knocks at the door. Marc and Bella looked anxiously at each other, frightened as always by any unanticipated invasion of their increasingly solitary life. Ida, her hair still damp from a swift shower and braided into a single plait, stared at her immobile parents, shook her head wearily, and opened the door. She stared dubiously at the cherubic, pink-faced man who stood at the entry, smiling with the confident awareness of a man always certain of his welcome no matter the time, no matter the place. He strode into the apartment and embraced her without hesitation.

“Idotchka, you must be my little Idotchka. So grown up, so beautiful.”

He spoke in a booming Yiddish, and his smile grew broader as he planted a kiss on each of her cheeks. His eyes glinted brightly behind his rimless glasses. She felt the strength of his embrace, inhaled the tantalizingly familiar scent of his skin, and eased herself free as her parents rushed toward them.

“Itzik, Itzik Feffer. My God, I don’t believe it. Itzik Feffer, here in the United States.” Marc’s voice trembled and the two men hugged each other, both of them openly weeping.

“Ah Bella, my Bella.” Itzik Feffer turned to Bella, took her hand, and lifted it tenderly to his lips. “As beautiful as ever. The beautiful mother of a beautiful daughter.”

Bella laughed. “And you haven’t changed. You are still the Lothario of the steppes. Come in, come in. You must be hungry.”

“Don’t you remember that I was always hungry? I could finish one meal and begin another one at once. I used to eat the food your Idotchka left on her plate, and now your Idotchka does not even recognize her Uncle Itzik.”

He laughed and took Ida’s hands in his own. She wondered at the softness of his skin, the gentleness of his touch.

“I’m sorry, but that was so many years ago,” she said apologetically. “I must have been a very little girl.”

“So many years ago. So many lives ago,” he amended. “So many wars ago,” he added. “I was so young then. ‘Uncle Itzik’ you called me then although I was only twenty.”

He laughed again and took a seat at the table, eating swiftly as Ida watched him with growing curiosity. All his movements were vested with urgency; she sensed that he was a man with no time to waste, a man whose energy never flagged. He spoke rapidly as he ate, anticipating the questions they had not yet asked. He told them that in the years since Marc and Bella had fled Russia, he had worked as a reporter and risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Red Army. He was also vice chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and in that capacity, he had been sent on an unprecedented mission to the United States. There were still Jews in the Soviet Union, and his government had asked him to help raise money in the United States for his threatened community.

“But isn’t it the Soviet Union itself that threatens the Jews?” Ida asked caustically.

“Ah, little girl, why did you grow up? When you sat on my knee in Moscow with your hair in pigtails, you never asked such cynical questions.” He smiled benignly at her, lifted her long braid playfully. “You must not believe such propaganda, my Ida. Mother Russia loves her Jews. And I think her Jews continue to love Mother Russia. Isn’t that true, Moshe?”

Marc cringed. He disliked being called by his Yiddish name. Still he nodded his assent.

“This poor Jew, at least, loves his homeland,” he said. “I splash my canvases with red, the red of revolution, the red of hope.”

“The red of blood,” Bella muttered.

“Surely, Papa, you remember that when you were in Vilna, the Soviet government refused to allow you to cross the border into Vitebsk,” Ida said irritably.

“That was in 1935. The war has changed all that. In these terrible times, Russia is the only nation that protects Jews. Isn’t that so, Itzik?”

“I am here, am I not?” he replied. “The Soviet government has sent a Jew as an emissary to plead for other Jews.”

Bella brought Itzik a slice of babka, which he ate with relish.

“Your favorite, I remember. But what of your poetry, Itzik?” she asked. “Do you still write?”

“A poet never stops writing. And a Yiddish poet, in these times, has an obligation to write. Do you know what Simon Dubnow said as he lay dying in the streets of Riga? His last words were ‘Jews, remember, Jews, write!’ I will not forget. I have written and will yet write more.” He reached into his pocket and removed a dog-eared Yiddish pamphlet. “This is how I remember. This is what I have written.”

He flipped it open and read a few lines in mellifluous Yiddish. The murmured verses fluttered through the room, winged words beating against the sadness of their silence.

Itzik sighed and handed the pamphlet to Bella. She read the title aloud in Yiddish and in English.

“‘
Di
Shotns
fun
Varshever
Geto
.’ ‘The Shadows of the Warsaw Ghetto.’ May we borrow this, Itzik?” she asked.

“You may keep it,” he said. “I have other copies. Too many. Who wants to buy and read the work of a Yiddish poet? And will you read it, Idotchka? Do you know some Yiddish?”

“It is still the language of my heart,” she replied softly and studied his reaction. She wondered why it was so important to her that this rotund, energetic man approve of her.

“I hope that your heart will not break when you read my words. My own heart broke as I wrote them,” he said and he did not smile.

He told them then how he had written it after encountering survivors of the ghetto who had somehow made their way out of Warsaw. The ghetto, they told him, became a sea of flames. “Can one drown in a sea of flames?” he asked sadly, and Ida closed her eyes and envisioned small children swimming through tides of fire as sparks rained down from heavens set ablaze.

Their mood lifted as Itzik Feffer tossed out crumbs of gossip, speaking of the love affairs and divorces of distant friends, peppering his stories with amusing dollops of malice.

“And you, Itzik, you are still married?” Marc asked.

“In my own fashion,” he replied enigmatically. “I have a favor to ask of you,” he said to Marc as he rose to leave. “Will you lend me your little Ida so that she may introduce me to New York? I need her to explain the different neighborhoods to me, to tell me where the subway goes and where I can find a decent knish and a bowl of kasha.”

Ida blushed and spoke before her father could reply. “I am no longer ‘little Ida.’ You do not need to ask my father’s permission, nor my husband’s for that matter. I decide how I spend my days. And it will be my pleasure to be your guide through New York, Itzik Feffer.”

“Of course. Of course. You are an independent woman. I like that. I respect that,” he replied. “Your husband is to be congratulated. He is a very lucky man. I look forward to meeting him.”

“Michel’s work with the Voice of America keeps him very busy,” Bella interjected hastily.

It worried her that Michel, so immersed in his work, was hardly ever at the apartment, hardly ever with Ida. No longer the shy student who had sat so uneasily at their table in Paris, Michel was now a highly respected journalist, recording the dramatic and tragic times.

Itzik Feffer nodded.

“The Voice of America is indeed very important,” he murmured.

He shook hands with Marc, kissed Bella on both cheeks, and lifted Ida’s braid, brushing it across his mouth.

“It is the color of firelight,” he said. “I had to see if it would burn my lips.”

He laughed, and they all laughed with him. His charm was magnetic, his laughter contagious.

“I will see you tomorrow then,” he said.

“Yes. Tomorrow,” Ida agreed.

* * *

They met each day that week in the early afternoon and wandered through the streets of the city. Ida introduced him to the Automat and smiled at his childlike delight as he plunged nickels and dimes into the slots and watched the windows slide open. He removed the soups and salads that he favored hurriedly, as though fearful that the panels would slam shut.

“In Russia,” he told her, “everything is rationed. Bread, milk, potatoes.”

“Here too we have rationing,” she said.

“Ah, but there is rationing and then there is
rationing
,” he retorted.