The room was unusually crowded by the time I arrived and my seat near the dividing curtain with the small tear in the ninon had been taken by an elderly woman. One of the few empty seats left was in the first row. I sat down and found myself facing the bare front wall of the room and with a hazy, distorted view of the other side.
The service sounded subdued, the singing restrained. A boy read the Torah, hurriedly and with no errors. When the Torah was returned to the ark, all sat down. Silence filled the room.
The synagogue did not have a rabbi. From time to time one of the men would deliver a brief talk before the Silent Devotion of the additional service.
Now a man began to speak and I recognized immediately the deep, slightly nasal voice of Mr. Dinn. I saw him vaguely through the curtain. He stood at the lectern in his dark suit and long prayer shawl and dark felt hat. I looked through the curtain for David but he sat among tall adults and I could not see him.
“We are confronted by a new Haman,” Mr. Dinn began, “one far deadlier than the Haman of old. This new Haman does not require the approval of a higher authority for his acts of brutality. This Haman is himself the highest authority in his land. Germany has returned to the age of Teutonic barbarism.
“Today’s Torah reading tells us about the destruction of Sedom and Amorrah. What terrible sins were committed by those cities? Our sages gave us a long list of their sins. But one sin appears to stand out above the others. The people of Sedom and Amorrah hated strangers who entered their cities. These were wealthy cities that refused to share their good fortunes with anyone unknown to them. The stranger would be defiled, dishonored. He would be given no recourse to the law. He would be killed. How would all this be done? Our sages tell us that when a stranger entered those cities he would be set upon and beaten. Bleeding, he would go to a court of law and ask for damages. Whereupon the judge would tell the poor victim to pay his attacker for the medical treatment of bloodletting! Indeed, a story is told by the rabbis about Eliezer, the servant of Abraham, who one day visited Sedom and was injured, and sued for damages in the court and was told by the judge to pay his attacker a bloodletting fee. Whereupon Eliezer picked up a stone and struck the judge and said, ‘The money you now owe me for this bloodletting you can pay to the one whom I owe.’”
Soft laughter rippled across the room. Mr. Dinn waited a moment, then continued.
“Law that is used to victimize the stranger, the one who is helpless—that is the law of Sedom and Amorrah. Jews have lived in Germany for a thousand years. Still the Germans look upon us as strangers because we worship a different God, came to the land from the warm south rather than the frozen north, had our beginnings in a desert rather than on a tundra. We now know the true nature of Nazi Germany. It is Sedom and Amorrah. And it will be destroyed as were Sedom and Amorrah.”
He paused a moment. The room was very still. He went on.
“I’m not a politician. I’m a lawyer. But this much I do know. There are times when people must choose sides and tell themselves, ‘That’s my enemy, and the enemy of my enemy is, at least for now, my ally and my friend.’ Let us now find who our true friends are and join ourselves to them. Together with them, and with the help of God, we will destroy this brutal twentieth-century Sedom and Amorrah.”
A murmur of approval swept through the large room. Mr. Dinn sat down. I saw David lean forward out of the adults around him and hug his father. People were shaking Mr. Dinn’s hand. An elderly man rose and walked over to the lectern and resumed the service.
Later I told my mother about Mr. Dinn’s talk, and she said soberly, “The Fascists won’t destroy only Jews, Ilana. They will destroy decency everywhere. That’s why I work so hard for the party now. That’s why your father went to Spain. Who else is trying to stop the Nazis today? England? France? America? Who else?”
“I’m very scared of the Nazis, Mama.”
“Yes,” she said. “There’s good reason to be scared of the Nazis.”
• • •
A letter arrived from Jakob Daw.
The recently published French edition of his stories had been well received by all who were not involved in politics. And since nearly all the French were involved in politics, the voices of approval had been few, indeed. The right had called him a Marxist obscurantist and his writings a threat to moral decency, and the left had labeled him a voice of the decadent bourgeois class. Still, there were some who read his stories and understood. Here and there small islands of sanity were still visible in the fog of madness descending upon Europe. “How is our Ilana? Well, I hope. How old is she now? Ten, I believe. Tell her our bird still nests peacefully in our harp. Is it still your intention to move to Chicago? If so, I wish you well. The cough is bad and seems not to be helped now by the Mediterranean air. What a strange darkness I feel about me everywhere in this sunlit city! It is as if a curtain is being drawn across the entire vault of heaven while a drum beats a distant barbarous rhythm. I grow weary and must lie down now. Please remember me to Ezra Dinn. Jakob Daw.”
The winter months wore on. At the social work agency, my mother had begun to work mostly with Jewish immigrants, recent arrivals who were trying to bring the rest of their families out of Germany. Her days were filled with the desperation of frightened people. She came home, made supper, worked at her desk, went to bed. The party meetings continued. On weekends she went out with Charles Carter. Mr. Dinn no longer visited us. Ruthie told me that he and David planned to move into our apartment after we moved out.
That spring my mother was asked by her agency not to leave until the end of the year. She had a special ability with refugees, and the agency sorely needed her. They were short of people with her talents. They asked her to use the additional months to train the woman who would replace her. My mother agreed. Charles Carter would be leaving for Chicago in August, and we would follow a few months later—not in August, as had originally been planned. My mother explained it all to me again and again. I said yes, I understood, I understood. But I did not really understand. I did not want to leave for Chicago, especially in the middle of a school year. There were fights between us. Our kitchen became a battleground.
The days were longer now and the winds warmer. I walked alone often in Prospect Park along the rim of the lake, gazing at my reflection in the water. Trees were returning to life, tiny shoots of grass were springing from the earth. Did the trees and grass grow green in Germany too? Somehow it seemed to me that Germany should be covered with darkness: black sky, black grass, black leaves, black trees, black sun. I didn’t want to share the loveliness of a green spring with Germany, my last spring in this neighborhood. Everything I saw now I was seeing for the final time. I thought of the Lag Ba’omer day of games that had taken place here last year. Had a year gone by already? Was it two years since my father had died? I had been told by the head of the Hebrew Department of my school that if I continued my good work I would be moved into my regular Hebrew class in September. I did not want to go to Chicago and live in an apartment somewhere with my mother and Charles Carter. Would they sleep in the same bed? Would I have to share a bathroom with him? Papa, why did you have to try to save that nun? For once, only once, couldn’t you not have done the decent thing, and stayed alive?
I walked slowly back through the park to the botanical garden. I had gone with my class to the garden during the past week and a man had talked to us about the different kinds of flowers that grew there. It was lovely in that garden in the spring: beds of flowers, a banked hill glowing with yellow daffodils, winding paths, scented air—an enchanted magical kingdom. My mother had not come to the park or the garden in a long time. Too much work to do. Too much to think about. Too much. A haunted brooding had settled upon her like a garment of mourning.
We rarely talked now. She was reading the galley proofs of the book of my father’s special writing and translating into English the stories Jakob Daw had written while he had lived with us. She worked at the desk in her bedroom, in a nightgown
, and often her door was shut. Sometimes she would wander out of the room with papers in her hands and sit near the living room window where she could look out upon the trees, and I would be able to see the tips of her breasts through the thin cloth of the nightgown and the vague hint of the triangular darkness at the juncture of her legs. I wondered when I would begin to look like that, breasts and nipples and hair between my legs—and a faint stirring would begin somewhere deep within me. My mother seemed no longer to care how she looked as she walked about the apartment or that, in her nightgown, as she stood by the window or before the living-room floor lamp, she was almost naked to my eyes. She would sit looking out at the trees or reading and playing with her hair, twisting long strands of it in her fingers. She would turn on the radio to listen to the news or to music. She listened often to the news. And the news was always bad.
Late that spring on a warm and sunny day I climbed into a bus along with my classmates and rode to an art gallery in Manhattan. I think it was named the Valentine Gallery; I am not certain. We did that sort of thing from time to time: went on trips to museums, the theater, the ballet. But this was our first visit to an art gallery. We had been told by our English teacher that the gallery was showing a very special painting; she knew someone who worked there and had obtained permission for this class visit.
I remember the ride through the tunnel and along the river and up narrow streets thick with people and traffic. There were only about twenty of us on that trip and we walked in a huddled mass about half a block through the heart of Manhattan and into the entrance of a tall building. I think it was a tall building; I am not certain. I remember my English teacher being greeted by a handsome, dapper-looking man in a dark suit, and how we all quietly tittered at that. I remember carpeted rooms with paintings on the walls. Then the man led us into a room that was dominated by a huge painting on one of its walls. I do not remember if there were other paintings in the room; there may have been drawings and sketches on the other walls. Ruthie, standing next to me, eyed the painting and giggled. “Look at it,” she whispered. “Isn’t it crazy?” The teacher began to talk to us about the painting.
I had to crane my neck in order to see it. We stood near the wall across the room from it and still it was enormous and I could not see all of it at one time. I had never seen such a painting anywhere. It seemed inhabited by monsters and was not even in color but in black and white and gray. Most of my classmates seemed bewildered and bored. The teacher kept on talking and I stood there trying to see all of the painting at the same time and could not. She had mentioned the name Pablo Picasso a number of times and I was trying to remember where I had heard that name before. And then she said something and I grew very still and I stood looking at the painting and took a step toward it and stood very still, staring at the painting.
The teacher had said the painting was called Guernica.
A slight shiver ran through me. I could not stop staring at the painting. It was odd how silent the room had become, the teacher’s voice slowly fading as if absorbed by the walls. Guernica. Black and white and gray. Grotesque bodies of women and a horse and a bull. A woman with a dead child, screaming. A woman with naked breasts, running. A woman with arms raised, burning. A black and white bull, staring. A lamp clutched in a disembodied hand. And a light overhead. And bits and pieces of a dead soldier. And what was that in the darkness between the screaming head of the horse and the staring head of the bull? A bird! A small gray bird, head upturned, beak wide open, crying. And all in black and white and gray. How easy it was to do now what I had done once before—a bending of the knees and an upward thrust and lightly through the air and landing effortlessly beside the bird and gently scooping it up and running with it away from the bull and the horse and through the rubble of blasted streets and fallen houses and fires and pieces of bodies to the river and the bridge at the edge of the town where my father was and helping him carry the wounded nun so his hip wouldn’t crumple beneath her weight. People were shouting at me and I responded but I did not know what I was saying. I ran back and forth through the town, holding the bird to me, and I could not find my father. Fires and bombs and airplanes and screams and a bridge somewhere and a river. He was here and I could not find him. I turned a corner—and there was the bull, staring, and the horse, screaming. I held the bird, felt its warm and terrified pulsing.
Ruthie was talking to me. My teacher was talking to me. I stared at them. I was fine, I said. Sure. I was okay.
My mother was talking to me. “What is the matter with you? You haven’t eaten a thing. How can you waste food this way?”
How did I get back to my house? And my room? It should have been easy to find him. Guernica was a small town. Only a few thousand people. Where was the river and the bridge?
I lay in my bed with the gray bird in my hand and when I woke in the early morning the bird had grown tiny during the night, tinier than a thumbnail; but I could still feel its beating heart and its warmth. Outside it was raining. I saw the rain in the leaves of the trees and on the street, a gray rain that ran in rivulets along the gutters, and I wondered if all the rains in all the world could ever put out the fires of Guernica. I got out of bed and went silently through the hallway, the tiny gray bird still in my hand. And I placed the bird in the circular hollow of the door harp next to the black bird nesting there. Then I dressed and ate breakfast and left early for school.
We lived in the city that summer and Mr. Carter came often to the apartment. Sometimes he stayed very late. Once he and my mother were in her room together for a long time. I played in the park and sometimes I imagined myself in Guernica, saving my father. David and Ruthie were away and Mr. Dinn no longer visited us. I went to the synagogue on Shabbos mornings but no one I knew well was there. My father’s book would be published in September. My mother was sad when Mr. Carter left in early August for Chicago.
It was a sweltering summer. I slept naked and sweating in my bed. Often I dreamed of all the ways I would save my father and the nun. Sometimes I prayed that my mother and I would never go to Chicago. Let something happen, I prayed. Not anything terrible. But enough to keep us from going. I did not know whom I was praying to. But it was good to think and whisper the words in the darkness of my room. I did not pray on my knees.
Letters arrived from Jakob Daw, all in German, and my mother would not read them to me. They were personal, she said. Yes, he sent me his good wishes. No, he was not well. Would I please stop pestering her; she was definitely not going to read me Jakob Daw’s letters. And she would grow angry and sometimes shout at me. We had become strangers to one another. At times I thought I hated her, and that frightened me terribly. After each of our quarrels I would journey into the painting, searching for my father.
Always somewhere in our lives that summer there seemed to be a radio. On weekdays I played in the park with others in the day-camp program and went rowing on the lake. There was a radio in the small house that was the camp office and the news would come from it like some dark utterance from a region of fire and pain. It would move across the grassy meadows and through the trees and over the lake. And in the nights the news would enter my room from the radio in the kitchen and become caught in the corner shadows and I would hear it there, vibrating softly with words I was listening to for the first time: mobilization, war of nerves, brink, hostilities—words of impending war. It was over that radio that the news first came to us of the treaty between Hitler and Stalin.
We heard it during supper one night in the last week of August, the announcer’s voice calm and smooth: Germany and Russia had signed a nonaggression pact. He talked about it at some length, then went on to other news. My mother turned off the radio.
“Capitalist lies,” she said. “What they go through to slander us!”
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“Never mind.”
“What does nonaggression pact mean?”
“Finish your supper, Ilana. Filthy lies. Even the radio news is c
orrupt.”
The phone rang. She went out of the kitchen to the hallway. I heard her talking in a low, tight voice, but could not make out her words. Some minutes later she returned to the kitchen and poured herself another cup of coffee. She spilled coffee on the table as she set down the cup and washed it off with a towel. Her hands were trembling.
“Mama?”
“Leave me alone, Ilana.”
“Mama?”
“Ilana!”
I went out of the kitchen. The phone rang again. From my room I heard my mother’s voice, low, urgent. Later that night I went back into the kitchen for a glass of water and saw the radio was gone. I stood at the closed door to my mother’s room and heard the voice of a news announcer softly through the darkness. In the morning the radio was back on its shelf in the kitchen. We listened to the news. My mother stared at the radio, her face a clear mirror of her emotions: anger, pain, disbelief, bewilderment. She would not respond to any of my questions and left quickly to go to work.
On my way to the day camp I stopped at a subway newsstand and looked at the headlines. I read, GERMANY AND RUSSIA SIGN TEN-YEAR NONAGGRESSION PACT. I asked the news vendor what it meant and he told me to get out of the way, I was keeping him from taking care of his customers. In the park I listened to the radio and, later, in the rowboat on the lake I asked the counselor at the oars what nonaggression pact meant, and he explained it to me. He was the same counselor from whose boat I had jumped two summers before.