Hush (6 page)

We all screamed at once. “Guns!” “Baseballs!” “Almost-kosher candy!”

There was hushed silence. Everyone looked at me.

“There is no such thing as almost-kosher candy,” Miss Goldberg said, laughing.

“Um,” I said, embarrassed. “I meant TV.”

She stared at me a bit strangely. She then called on another girl and we all set about making the poster. Every girl received one gold or black paper with a picture to work on. Devory made the baseball, I made the gun, Chani was making the menorah in back of us. Devory cut out a crooked circle, drew some lines, then stared at it skeptically and announced that there was no such thing as a black baseball. I told her that it didn’t matter. It was
goyishe
so it was black and that was all there was to it.

Then I wondered if Leo had guns in his house. Devory said no way, but Chani said that Miss Goldberg said all goyim did and she was the teacher, so she knew better. Anyway, Leo probably hid the guns and black baseballs inside the black TV.

Miss Goldberg explained to us that the evil Greeks tried to impose on the Y
iden
all such materialistic
goyishe
things, like guns and sports, that took the soul away from holy things.
Yiden
were supposed to sit and learn Torah all day and give
tzeddakah
—charity—and not waste their whole lives on silly things like baseball and hunting.

Miss Goldberg held up a Torah that she had cut out and pointed to it. “It says in the Torah that you could find beauty by the goyim—plenty. The Greeks were obsessed with beautiful things, but Torah, spirituality, a goy doesn’t know what that is! And
that
is what really counts.”

School was out for the first two days of Chanukah and my grandmother Savtah, who lived in Queens with my aunt, came over to celebrate with us. I didn’t like Savtah. She was old and sick and cranky. She would order us all around, and nothing we did pleased her. But she was my mother’s mother, and I knew that if I uttered one word of complaint I would be promptly and severely punished. “
Kibud Av Va’Em,
honoring one’s parents, is the most important commandment,” my father explained to me when I complained that Savtah was taking over my bed. “It comes before everything.”

My mother didn’t like Savtah either. They were always arguing over something or other, and it always ended with my mother stomping out of the room and angrily slamming the door. When I asked my mother why she didn’t like Savtah, she looked horrified and said, “What? I love Savtah. Where did you get that strange idea into your head?”

“But you and Savtah are always fighting,” I said.

“We are?” My mother looked surprised, then ashamed.

“
Oy
, Hashem.” She sighed. “It’s becoming more and more difficult.”

My mother confused me. Three months before, my grandmother had had a stroke and my mother—convinced that Savtah would die—cried like I had never seen her do before. I couldn’t understand her tears. I could barely wait till Savtah died. She was so old and ill and seemed mighty eager to get off the face of the Earth, and though I pitied the angels up in heaven (how would they ever sleep with her snoring so loudly?) I would have been relieved with the new arrangement—Savtah moving up to Hashem, us staying down here. My mother, though, seemed devastated.

My grandmother, typically, refused to die. She said that if she could survive the Holocaust, she would survive this too. I was afraid she was right. Three months later she was back on her shuffling feet, unhappy with everything.

My mother explained to me that Savtah had suffered so much in her life; she had been my age when her entire family was killed. “That is what makes her so difficult,” she said. “She can’t help it. She takes out her fears and insecurities on us.”

Then my mother hugged me hard and said that I must learn to have more patience.

We had a fine time the first night of Chanukah. My mother made cheese latkes and doughnuts, and I got a purple jump rope sprinkled with shiny glitter that shimmered when I turned it. After opening the presents, we all put on a Chanukah play with my father as the head of the M
accabim
—the heroic warriors of Hashem who defeated the Greek empire’s army when they turned Jerusalem’s Holy Temple into a pagan place. Surela played Yehudis—the heroine—and I played the evil king.

Savtah laughed, watching me bellow about the Jews as my father charged toward me on his broom-horse. After the play was over and the Jews had once again triumphed over the Greeks, my grandmother asked me to make her tea. I brought her the simmering cup, placed it carefully on the table near her, and looked out the window across the street.

“Look,” I told her, “the neighbors are putting up such pretty lights for C
ratzmich
.”

Cratzmich
was the word we used for Chr—as, which was forbidden to write or say, as it had something to do with J—. Savtah looked at me and laughed. “Pretty lights? Not so pretty lights.”

“Why not?” I asked. “They
are
pretty.”

She motioned to me to come closer.

“Come here,
maideleh
. I want to tell you a story.”

I sat down near her on the couch, and Sruli and Avrum quickly joined us. We liked her stories. She pulled her sweater tightly over her thin body.

“My neighbors in Poland also had pretty lights.” She smiled sadly. “I was so small, like you, Gittel, so small, and already my mommy and totty were dead. The Germans shot them in the head.” She pointed her finger to her forehead. “Like that they shot them—after the neighbor took the Nazis to where they were hiding. And I was a little girl, hiding at the home of my father’s old gentile friend who taught him music when he was a boy. My father gave him money, lots of money, to hide me well, to feed me, but the war was so long, and the money wasn’t enough, and the old man was scared.”

I fidgeted. I wasn’t so sure I would like this story.

“It was his wife who was the real
rashanta
—that evil woman. I could hear them arguing from upstairs.

“ ‘You’re crazy!’ she would scream. ‘You will be caught and then everyone will die! Tell the girl to go! You crazy man! She’ll kill all of us!’ Again and again I would hear her shouting at him to throw me out. The Germans were searching the area for Jews and a seven-year-old girl was too dangerous a visitor.

“One morning he gave me a piece of bread in a bag and told me that I must go. ‘Little girl,’ he said, ‘I cannot help you anymore. Someone will tell the Germans and they will come. Go, little Jew. You must leave my house.’

“And that’s how I left the basement, in the freezing cold winter, with snow up to my knees, wearing a thin summer jacket. It was late at night, and I was so cold I could not even think of fear. I ran back to the block that my family had lived on. I thought maybe one of our old neighbors would help me, because we lived on the block with a lot of goyim.”

She pulled my hand into her cold ones. “I remember those pretty lights, so many pretty lights decorating the houses. And when I stumbled onto the block I could see all the decorated green trees through the windows. I went to two neighbors, two of them. I knocked on one door and rang the bell. I was so cold, I was shaking so hard, and when she opened the door, I couldn’t even talk. I just looked at her.

“And you know what she told me, Gittel? You know what she told me?”

I shook my head.

“She looked up and down the block and told me, ‘I can’t believe you’re still here! Get out of here, girl, get out! If anyone sees you they will kill you and me! Leave my house now!’ And she closed the door in my face. I remember that door slamming in my face, Gittel, because they had a metal cross and that man nailed onto it, hanging on the door. And I looked at it right there in front of my face and I cried. I couldn’t move, I was so cold.

“The other neighbor didn’t even open the door. He just yelled through it, ‘Go away from here! We have enough trouble without you!’

“So I hid in a garbage can. There was a big garbage can across the street near a boarded-up house, and I climbed into it and folded myself up into a ball so I would feel my body’s heat. There was a small hole in the garbage can, probably the cats scratched it through, and I sat there folded up like that, staring through the hole at the pretty lights across the street, so many pretty lights strung all over the houses.

“Better to trust a dog than a goy,” my grandmother warned me. “After I left the garbage can, I ran to the cemetery to hide. The guard dog from my father’s factory followed me and didn’t want to leave. I was scared it would give me away with its barking and forced it to leave. Such a fool I was. The dog was the only one that was loyal.”

She let go of my hand and stood up.

“But, Savtah,” I said, “the goyim here are different. They would never do that.”

“Different?” She snorted. “It’s in style to be nice today. Everybody likes each other; everybody respects each other. It’s in style.” She shook a finger at me. “Don’t ever, ever trust them,
maideleh
. Nobody is different. They are the same people all over. Tomorrow the Pope will tell them not to be nice, and they will turn into Nazis in one week.”

Savtah, though I didn’t like her, was a great saint. My mother always said so. Even after going through hell at such a young age, she still prayed three times a day and said Psalms too. She always told us that a miracle had saved her, nothing else. Her brother, who was blond, handsome, and looked like an Aryan, was killed. And she, a seven-year-old obviously Jewish girl, with dark hair and eyes, survived.

“Don’t ask me how,” she would say. “I ask myself that every day.”

In school we learned a lot about the Holocaust. All my classmates’ grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Once, the entire
Chassidish
world lived in Europe. The Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of the
Chassidish
movement, lived in Ukraine. But then the Holocaust came and destroyed everything. Whoever survived moved to Israel or America and built up the community again.

“The Holocaust taught us the greatest lesson we’ll ever need to know,” my teacher told us whenever she spoke about it. “Never, ever trust the goyim. Stay as far away as possible. In the end, they will only hurt you.”

At ten p.m. the Chanukah flames were a tiny spark drowning in oil, and my mother ordered everyone into bed. I was pulling the nightgown over my head in my room when I heard my mother’s surprised voice.

“Devory, what are you doing here? Why are you here so late?”

I raced downstairs.

“Go upstairs to Gittel’s room,” my mother was telling Devory. “I’m calling your mother.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked happily. “It’s so late!”

Devory didn’t answer. She ran up the stairs to my room, sat on my bed, and pulled off her shoes. Her hands moved hurriedly.

“I’m sleeping here tonight and tomorrow. Shmuli came home from
yeshiva
and there’s no room.”

“Doesn’t he sleep on the couch?”

“Sometimes, but he told my mother that the couch is too uncomfortable. Leah’lah should sleep on it, and he’ll sleep in my room instead.”

Devory pulled off her socks and rubbed her toes. She looked up at me and smiled brightly, suddenly, her eyes blank, as if she wasn’t sure how she had appeared in my room.

“There’s no room,” she repeated.

I heard my mother’s hurried footsteps coming up the stairs. She opened the door. Her snood had slipped back, showing tufts of black hair, and the skin near her eyes creased worriedly.

“Do you know that your mother is really worried?” Her voice rose, half-angry, half-confused. “You just walked out of the house without asking permission and walked under the bridge at ten o’clock at night! Your mother is furious! Get up now, put on your shoes, and Gittel’s totty will take you home in his car.”

Devory pulled at her toenails intently.

“There’s no room at home.”

My mother tensed, frustrated.

“Devory, enough of this nonsense. You can only come here if your mother gives you permission, and you know that.”

“There’s no room.”

My mother snatched up Devory’s socks and shoes and placed Devory’s foot firmly on her knee to pull on each sock and shoe. Devory stared straight ahead. Her hands lay limply on her lap and she did not resist. My mother ordered Devory to stand up, then held her firmly by the arm and led her downstairs to where my father was waiting. Devory trudged slowly after him. Once, she looked back, and I thought, by the flash in her eyes, that she would run back upstairs, but my mother had closed the door behind them. She then turned to my sister, who was staring curiously from the top of the staircase.

“What is wrong with that child?”

Miranda annoyed me. I had been sitting in the little room forever, it seemed, and every time I said something, haltingly, she would scribble it quickly in her notebook.