The First Day of the Rest of My Life

  One photo was of Grandma Madeline and Grandma Emmanuelle as girls with their parents, the parents who shot the Nazis and died in their own homes, their father in a wheelchair. Another was of Grandma Madeline and Granddad, our momma, and Ismael, as a family, in front of a pond, all grinning and holding instruments, and a third photo was of Grandma Madeline and Grandma Emmanuelle together, holding Ismael and Momma on their laps. We found a ring box at the bottom of the suitcase. Inside was a diamond ring, the diamond small but pretty. It was Grandma Madeline’s, from Granddad, the ring that Grandma wore to escape out of France, the blood from her sister soaking her dress.

  Granddad held the ring to his heart, then kissed it, putting it carefully back in its box, tucking it in the suitcase.

  Beside the suitcase Grandma placed my violin and told me, “No more dents and scratches now, Madeline. We have to show Ismael. He’ll want to see your violin. His blood is in it. You call it the blood butterfly. There’s a story there. A story in the violin.”

  Later, after I packed, I played my violin by the piano, Bach’s Partita no. 3 in E Major.

  Annie sat on the bench. She did not play.

  Lavender is a gift.

  It offers beauty, and it offers practical uses.

  That night, I did not sleep. We were leaving early for the airport, so I walked up and down the rows of lavender. I bent to touch a leaf, inhale the scent, pull a weed.

  I didn’t know when we would be returning to The Lavender Farm. I didn’t know when I’d hear the owl hoot again, see a flash of a coyote, pet Mr. Legs or Door and Window, or when I’d bark at Cat. I didn’t know when I’d see the sun set right over those purple blue mountains or watch the clouds change the colors of the land quilt as they floated over. I didn’t know when I’d come back and drive through the blooming tulip trees that Granddad planted for Grandma because he loved her more than life itself and wanted to make her happy.

  I put my arms out, like a plane, and spun around, slowly.

  I didn’t know when I was coming back, but I knew this: I would make a change in my life when I returned. I would spend more time with the rows of lavender that marched over our land like purple flames.

  I heard three violins, together, fast music, dancing music, clapping music, boot-tapping music, fiddler’s music . . .

  Dancing music.

  Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv airport is light, bright, modern, and swarming with security.

  Granddad, Grandma, Nola, Annie, Dr. Rubenstein, and I went through customs and picked up our bags, then Annie and I held on to each of Granddad’s elbows as he hobbled through. “I will not use a wheelchair, so don’t even suggest it,” he’d growled. “I will meet my son . . .” His voice caught again, and the tears streamed down, sticking in the lines of his face, the lines brought on by despair and despondency, by sunshine and smiles and a farm and family. “I will meet my son standing, that I will do, dammit.”

  When we had our bags, we saw a huge group of people not twenty feet in front of us. Old people, middle aged, teenagers, children, toddlers, babies. I noticed that many of them were crying, tissues flying, shoulders shaking, arms around each other, gasps audible when we turned to face them.

  Granddad stopped and stared, stunned, overwhelmed.

  They stared back, stunned, overwhelmed.

  A man with thick white hair, like Granddad’s, and soft brown eyes, like Granddad’s, with a thin frame, like Granddad’s, and only a little taller, stepped forward shakily. “Mon père,” he rasped out, his face crumpling. “Mon père, mon Dieu, mon père.” He put his arms out. “Father.”

  As if propelled by a force greater than his own, our granddad took three long, wobbly strides and met his son, his son Ismael Bacherach, whom he thought died in Paris as the Nazis surrounded them, whom he had missed and mourned for his entire life, whom he had prayed for and loved. Granddad stepped into his son’s arms with a raspy cry, low and scratchy.

  The two started to crumple together, and other men rushed forward to hold them up, but they were upset, too, and the tears flowed, from all of us, from Nola and me, from Dr. Rubenstein, and from the family we never knew we had, whom we embraced as if we’d known them forever.

  Our tears streamed out, not the tears of life’s inconvenient difficulties, but the tears of unspeakable grief and astounding relief.

  Even Annie cried.

  My granddad had found his son.

  His name was Ismael.

  Grandma had insisted on wearing a silky red jacket and a skirt with a ruffle and a jaunty red hat with a red feather on the plane rides over. “Ismael loves the color red!” she declared, smiling broadly, her face, which had aged with such graciousness, alight with happiness. “It’s his favorite! He’ll know me, Aunt Dynah, when he sees the red.”

  She told everyone she was going to see her nephew and the blood was gone. Gone! She snapped her fingers when she said “gone.” The blood was gone! Snap, snap!

  As Ismael and Granddad hugged, Grandma watched from the side, the tears falling down her cheeks. When Granddad and Ismael finally parted and Ismael wiped his eyes, he focused on my grandma.

  “Aunt Dynah,” he croaked out, in French, then hobbled over, his emotions overwhelming him. “Aunt Dynah!”

  Grandma threw her arms out. “Ismael! My Ismael! How I’ve missed you! I have felt you right here.” She pointed to her heart. “I have brought you swans, and I have worn your favorite color! Red!”

  Ismael had a wife and seven children.

  They were all there with their spouses and children—a total of twenty-eight grandchildren. The spouses of Ismael’s children had brought their parents and siblings and those siblings’ children. His neighbors and friends were there, too.

  Ismael’s children’s names? Abe for his father, Madeline for his mother. Dynah for his aunt, Frieda and Eli for his maternal grandparents. Anna, for my momma. Ismael after himself.

  After a great deal of chaos, Ismael motioned for silence. “My family,” he said, broken. “My friends. I am so glad you are with us today to celebrate this most momentous, this most miraculous event.” He broke down, more tears. We were all in puddles. “I want to say something special, something novel to mark this event, something profound, but I can think of nothing but two words. Two words only!” He paused again, gathered himself together. “To my father, my aunt, my nieces . . .” He shook his head, and his voice came out through the rolling tears, the decades of anguish, the incomparable joy, “Welcome home.”

  Welcome home.

  Can you imagine the party we attended at Ismael’s house?

  Enormous. People everywhere. Tables and tables of endless food. It lasted all night, all night long.

  There was a rockin’ band, too, and at the first song, the entire mob, as one heaving, laughing group, tumbled to the middle of the great room and danced.

  We were pushed along—Grandma, who immediately threw her arms in the air and started shimmying; Granddad, who hobbled in and managed to bust a move, which got him huge applause; and then Annie and I.

  We resisted, we laughed, we tried to leave the mob, but hands grabbed us, pulled us back in, pooh-poohed our refusals.

  Finally Annie and I took a gander at each other. What to do, what to do? We didn’t dance anymore. We hadn’t danced since we lived in the house by the sea with a momma who wore pink and a dad who told us we could be whomever we wanted to be.

  “Shake it, Annie! Get down, Madeline!” Our cousins (our cousins!) yelled at us, shakin’ it hard, twirling around, boogeying away.

  Ah, what to do.

  Annie started it. She did one of those slinky moves, tip of finger to tip of finger, as if music was rolling through her body. I was next, and I put my fists above my head and wiggled my fanny.

  Annie made a groovy roll with her whole body.

  I spun around, to the beat. We grabbed each other’s hands, and that was it.

  We danced.

  For the first time since we had lived in the
pink, we danced. Granddad, Grandma, Annie and I, Nola and Dr. Rubenstein. We danced with each other, with our cousins, with Ismael and his wife, Devora.

  We danced with our family.

  We danced.

  Annie and I finally put Grandma to bed at three in the morning. “Tell Abe to come right on up, dear.” She winked at me. She had been determined to wear her cheetah print nightgown. She attached the fluffy pink handcuff to one wrist. “Tell him I’m ready to chain myself to him.”

  “I’ll tell him, Grandma,” Annie said. “I think he’s gonna like that handcuff. It’ll make him feel dominated.”

  “He is such a good man,” Grandma said. “The swans had to help us walk over the mountains, but then we lived with hardly anything to eat or drink. Anna in her blue coat was hungry. We took a big swan to the place with all the lavender after the place on the corner with all the food. I was but a girl, an innocent girl, and Abe, he was my sister’s husband. We were lost, together lost, wanting Madeline, wanting Ismael whose wings had been smashed. Abe had me go to college. I studied swans when I was there. Swans and painting and marbles.”

  She drew a shape of a swan with her hand, as if a paintbrush was in it. “And Abe was so proud, he put my swans in his stores and we worked in those stores, always working, and one day, after a long, long time, on a day filled with centaurs and giants and talking beavers, we fell in love. It was on the deck near the lavender and the marbles. I kissed him because I had fallen in love with him. I loved him!” Her face brightened. “Love!”

  Love, sweet love, the brightest beacon, the warmest hug, the desire above all else.

  “Abe said to me, after the kiss, he said, ‘No, no, Dynah . . . we can’t,’ and I said, ‘Why not, Abe?’ and he . . . the lavender magic was there that day, and he knew. He knew what was between us, the passion. We never had that passion when Madeline was alive. He was my sister’s swan then, but he knew that our new love was pure, that Madeline would flap her wings and understand. He kissed me back, held me in his wings, and I held him in my wings forever.” She laughed, sighed. “Forever and ever I have held him, and when I am in heaven I will share Abe with my sister, Madeline. I love my sister! She is right here, in my heart, and I will share him, and we will all be together in a nest filled with sticks and cotton with Anna and Luke, who are in the nest already.”

  The mention of my momma, of Marie Elise, née Anna Bacherach, and the mention of my dad, had me all choked up again.

  “We will fly together and land on the pond and play our instruments in an orchestra!” Grandma announced. “All of us—you, too!” She kissed us both, on both cheeks, like the French do. My tears ran into her kisses.

  “Abe found our Ismael, didn’t he, Madeline? Didn’t he, Anna? He found him! And he was right here, in the Land of the Swans, the whole time.”

  She clapped her hands.

  “We have our love, don’t we? Our family love!”

  “I thought I had lost my entire family,” Ismael told Annie and me the next afternoon on his rooftop. His face was so like my granddad’s, younger, but even the lines grooved into the angles and planes were the same. “My mother was dead, the doctor told me, and my father, my aunt, and my sister were on the run.” He closed his eyes. “I was alone in a world that had gone mad, lost itself, its morals and value for life obliterated. It was as if all the goodness had left, disappeared, and in its place was only hatred and killings and tanks and guns.”

  Ismael had woken up in the crawl space under the doctor’s home, where they’d hid him when the doctor and his wife saw the Nazis moving toward their home. He was in and out of consciousness for days, too critically injured to move. For weeks the doctor and his wife cared for him until his strength ebbed back.

  Ismael, when healthier, made plans. The doctor knew everyone, he had connections, and after being hidden here and there, Ismael eventually joined the French Resistance. The doctor and his wife were sent to the camps as “traitors” and died within weeks of their arrival of typhoid. “They saved my life. Knowing the risks of hiding Jews, they literally gave their lives for others. What more can be said? Their actions were heroic.”

  Ismael, even though he was barely a teen, became an expert in explosives.

  “With unimpressive caches of explosives we had to be creative,” he said, winking. “My specialties were trains and train tracks, with some side work done in intelligence. I was young, quick, much taller than most children my age, but older by grief. I took my anger, my aloneness, my pain, and focused on my explosives and what I could do to bring down the Nazis.”

  “I like explosives,” Annie said.

  “Tell me about that,” Ismael said, leaning forward, grinning. “I understand you were with the government.”

  “I was. For years. Now I take care of animals, but tell us more, Uncle Ismael, please.”

  “I will, but only if you promise me that we can talk explosives later.”

  Annie actually laughed. “Deal. It’s one of my favorite topics.”

  “Me too!” Ismael’s face lit up. He settled back into the past, a turbulent, horrid past. “Europe was in chaos and we were part of it. I determined that I would do whatever it took to bring down the Nazis or die trying, but I could not stop worrying about my family. Had they made it out of France? Were they lost in the camps, dying, sick? Had they been shot trying to escape, their bodies buried somewhere in Europe, covered by snow, rained upon, walked over? Sometimes I drove myself crazy, wondering if I had walked over their graves in the years I spent crisscrossing France in the Resistance.

  “Toward the end of the war we were caught by the Nazis. We were betrayed. I was with six other members of the Resistance. The Nazis shot two of the men on the spot, point-blank. They took the two women, I don’t know what happened to them. Poor Bridgette, poor Mara.” He bit down on his lip and we waited until he composed himself. “We were sent to Dachau. We were stamped, like cattle, permanently branded.” He tapped the numbers on his arm. “I gave them a fake name. I was defiant. I fought wherever I could, in any way I could. We were starved, beaten, and worked almost to death. Disease was rampant. There was no sanitation. It was inhumane, vicious, the result of the sickest, most violent of men.

  “Finally, the Americans came to liberate us. They came right through the gates and we stared, we could not believe it. We cheered, we cried.... Then shots, machine guns . . . The Americans killed SS and guards, they were livid, these hardened U.S. soldiers crying when they saw us, the walking dead and the dead piled up in train cars, like one might pile up beef. The inmates killed some of the guards, too, most often with their hands, a shovel.... I killed a guard myself, a man who had tortured all of us. He deserved it. Some people do not deserve a place here on our planet. I am not proud of it, but there it is.”

  There it was.

  “I received medical care. I was starving, I had trouble swallowing, I had tuberculosis, I was infested by lice and bugs, and I had unhealed wounds. When I could stand up, walk, move, I stayed and helped the other victims. Some, even after care, died. They were too far gone. I will not tell you now the other horrors I saw in Dachau, it is too much. Too much depravity.” He caught back his cries. This took about five minutes. We waited for him once again, holding his hands in ours, our own hands trembling with the visions he cast.

  “When I was better, I tried to find my father, my aunt, my sister before leaving France. I hoped, I lived in the hope that someone, one of them even, would be found alive, but no. I could not find them. There were no Bacherachs. They had disappeared. I later hired an investigator to look for my family, but he turned up nothing, because Bacherach was not the name being used anymore. I had to assume that they had died, too, in the blasts of the war, in the rubble that Europe became after madness overran it.” Ismael ran his hands over his face. “To me, all was lost.”

  And lost to us, too. The family, our family, in Germany, in France, gone. We never had a chance to know them at all.

  “But I knew I could
not stay in Europe any longer. France had turned against my family. The Germans and the Nazis had turned against my great-grandparents. The Russians had turned against my great-great-grandparents. Everywhere, forever, Jews have been persecuted, assaulted, scattered. I came to Israel to help create a place where Jews would be safe, safe forever. That is why I am here, that is why I will never leave.”

  He took a deep breath, and I knew he had taught himself to not travel too far into the memories lest the memories kill him. “So I had many children. I love all of them, I love my wife. I love family. I had to have a family again and now you, my sister’s daughters, my father, my aunt, all here.” His face scrunched up and he breathed in and out. “You are the daughters of my beloved sister. I have missed her since the day we parted. Always a loss I can never run from.”

  Our granddad, along with Annie and I, had told Ismael about Momma, about her beauty parlor, the pink, the house by the sea, our dad’s death. We had told him briefly about the trials, and how she had dropped herself into the sea. He listened carefully, but never once had the tears stopped streaming from his eyes.

  “You must call me Uncle Ismael. I am your uncle, the brother of your mother.” He hugged me, reached for Annie. “You are my family,” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “You are my family. Forever and ever we will be together. We are family, my red-haired nieces.”

  I knew my mouth had dropped open, a gaping hole of surprise.

  “You can see the red?” Annie asked.

  “Absolutely!” Ismael gushed. “It’s glowing all around you. It’s the luck of the Irish in you! From your father. I hear he was a great man.”

  “Yes, he was,” I said.

  “Great man, a most pure and gentle mother, grand and lovely daughters,” Ismael said, so emotional again. “He would be proud of you.”