If I Told You Once: A Novel (15 page)

I wished there was a way to give him the pleasure of the good news without actually giving birth.

But there was not, so I had to proceed with a pregnancy I did not want.

I did it for him. It seemed a small thing to do, in exchange for his happiness.

I would have done much greater things.

My belly swelled.

My boys. I knew I would be distracted, I would neglect them, they would despise me.

But all through the pregnancy they went blithely about their business, did not seem to care that I had less time for them. In fact they seemed happier with their increased freedom, they roamed farther afield, came home smiling with slingshots and black eyes and enormous appetites.

This pregnancy was so easy compared to the last. The unborn baby so docile I wondered if it was dead.

My feet swelled again, and I craved foods I could not name.

I went to the marketplace in the Chinese neighborhood and passed among the stalls staring in wonder at fantastic fish, bright orange ducks, skeins of noodles, seaweed and mushrooms in nightmare shapes, incense and sandals, searching for something to satisfy the craving.

The streets were loud with voices and I could not understand a word. I was used to that, I had felt it before.

I was studying the painted kites shaped like fish and dragons, wondering how much they would cost and how my sons would love them, when I heard my name spoken, felt a hand on my arm.

The voice was soft but in that place full of foreign tongues my name pierced like a scream. The hand on my arm was a pure ungodly white. Like snow.

I turned and saw a woman with a face as pale as the hand, her head bound tightly in a scarf though I saw strands of red-gold hair escaping and blowing across her face.

She pressed close, peered at my mouth. I smelled her breath. She would have pressed closer but my belly stopped her.

Anya, I said.

Snow and trees and men baying like hounds in the night. Here it was again.

I stood there surrounded by Chinese matrons and vegetable stalls and the heat and stink and traffic of a summer afternoon, but I was not there at all.

Anya. Her face had sagged, her flesh grown heavy. She looked human now, no longer the ethereal creature trapped in a room of lace like a butterfly in a spider’s web.

The last time I had seen her was when the soldiers had carried her away. To press her into service, they said. She had not looked back; her stumpy legs had bounced against the horse’s shoulder.

I looked down.

She followed my gaze.

Yes, I bought these, she said, lifting her skirt to show me.

They’re not perfect, I’m no dancer, she said and showed me her cane.

But I wanted to be able to buy pretty shoes, you see.

I could not meet her eyes. I looked at her hair and remembered how I had hacked at it with the ax.

I’m glad to see you still alive, I said.

Yes, she said, I’m alive and I’m here. Double happiness, as the Chinese say.

Her voice was harsh, the color of her clothes a bit too bright. I could not look at her without squinting. She wore rings on every finger.

You are doing all right, I see, she said and touched my belly.

A chill ran through me. I thought I had left my home behind me forever, traveled over land and over sea, beyond the barrier of papers and visas that was higher than any gate. I thought I had escaped that place. And now a piece of the past had caught up with me, was breathing my air, was touching my future child.

You’ve found yourself a man, she said. Good for you. I never would have thought …

I looked at her fully then and saw that she had a shrewdness she had not had before. She had learned something, and it had hardened her. I looked again at her clothes, at the sweat running down between her breasts, and I saw that she was a woman who used men for business. I saw she had nothing but contempt for them, sought only to profit from them and break them. Beneath her sagging beauty she still had the power I had once envied, the power to manipulate men.

It was something I no longer wanted.

I remembered how she screamed, how she brought violence and despair down upon us when she screamed.

I was suddenly afraid she would do it again.

Just behind Anya I saw a Chinese man gutting a huge fish with one quick stroke. The intestines burst forth inevitably, uncontrollably, there was no way to hold them in.

I must be getting home, I said.

She read my face and stepped back, turned to hobble away.

I tried to help you, back there, I said.

She said: I know you did. And now I can offer you my help. If you want it. There are things I can do for you, you only need ask.

She smiled and touched my arm, said: You know, inside we are not so different, you and I.

How could she say that?

She had disappeared in the crowd.

I had lost my appetite. My belly felt cold at the spot where she had touched it. The child inside shifted restlessly.

This time when the labor began I was certain Shmuel would respect my wishes to stay away. But instead he removed all furniture and knickknacks from my reach, summoned a doctor, and knelt beside me through the whole process.

I wanted to die from the shame of it.

Not one but
two
men bearing witness.

A bad omen. I kept telling them what evil luck would befall us now.

They laughed at me. Come out of the dark, the doctor said.

The birth was swift and easy.

A healthy baby girl, the doctor said. Do you call this a bad omen?

He held her up by her heels and she bawled.

Get him out of the apartment, I said.

Shmuel saw the doctor out, and when he came back I said: You have killed us all.

I wanted to weep.

He thumped his chest and smiled.

I held the baby and she spat at me. Her thin hair, her beaky nose, her hands curled like claws. She seemed tainted to me, the past had touched her and dirtied her somehow. She was not pure and new like my sons.

She was wrinkled and bitter, born old.

Later I put her to my breast and she bit down hard with sharp gums.

Shmuel put his arms around me. Me and her both.

A daughter, just like we wanted, he said and his face shone with happiness.

I tried to smile with him but I felt uneasy.

I told myself I would love our daughter for his sake. This was what he wanted, and he was what I wanted. It was an exchange. I would balance it out this way.

Then I felt nauseous, because I was thinking the way Anya would, I was thinking of people as pawns, to be moved about and toyed with. The last time I had reasoned this way was the night I offered an officer my company in exchange for my brother.

My body clenched then, I gagged and vomited up bile and blood, and Shmuel swept the baby out of my arms just in time, and I felt stinging pain on my cheeks from the tears, tears that burned they were so salty.

We named the child Sashie, after my mother.

She never liked to ride on my hip. She did not fit there properly, somehow. She preferred her cradle, or her father’s shoulder.

*   *   *

My boys were men now.

In body at least, and their minds were catching up fast.

We still lived crammed in the same apartment; Eli and Wolf filled one room, Shmuel and I slept with the stove and the kitchen table, and for Sashie there was the hidden closet we had made into a bedroom for her. We had heaved in a mattress that was too big on all sides and climbed the walls. She plastered every surface with photographs of film actors and actresses, and spent hours in her room stargazing.

She kept the door shut. A sulky girl.

In the mornings and evenings the apartment was loud with my sons’ clumsy bulk, their boots the size of wheelbarrows, the banged elbows and slammed doors. Their deep voices, berating each other and teasing their sister.

Shmuel had bought them razors that they cherished, and all three shaved together in the mornings, clustered around the bit of mirror, the black-flecked blobs of lather raining down.

Wolf had found work on scaffoldings and cranes, building the skyscrapers of the city. Eli worked down on the docks, loading and unloading and repairing the ships.

One loved the sea, one loved the sky.

One wanted hot tea in the evenings, the other craved cold milk.

I could not understand why people called them identical twins. They did not look at all identical to me. Even from a great distance I could tell them apart; the very shapes of their bodies as they moved were different. They curved distinctly like two different letters of the alphabet.

I was finally learning to read, you see. But slowly.

They were so close, those two, they had a rough bawdy friendship but it ran deep.

They began to notice women now, and women began to notice them.

In the evenings they combed their hair carefully and went out. There was an urgency about them then, a heady impatience and a lightness in their feet as they clattered down the stairs to the street.

Wolf and Eli no longer did stunts to impress me. Their minds were on other things.

I was glad. It was the natural way of things.

At first I worried. About the women. Because of the power men and women have over each other, the way desire can drive people to ruin their lives, break down the bonds of family. A woman, I thought, might be the one thing that could turn this inseparable pair against each other.

My sons had always been so competitive, you see.

I feared what they might do to each other if they desired the same thing.

But I soon discovered I had no reason to worry, because their tastes were so different. Wolf adored older women, the motherly ones who were sedate and sturdy and radiated wisdom and smelled like yeast and butter, the ones who would hold him against their large bosoms and kiss him on the forehead rather than the mouth. Eli chased the younger girls, the shrill flighty ones whose eyes were never still, whose hands clutched everywhere at once, who sheltered beneath his great arm like birds from a storm.

I kept forgetting about Sashie. She lived in the shadow of her brothers.

She was a strange girl, tall for her age and angular with limp hair that she brushed for hours. From an early age she liked to play at make-believe, at creating worlds of her own to live in. She sat in her room calling herself a princess in a tower, a queen on a throne.

And even when she was not playing, she tended to invent her own version of events around her, twisting the truth to her liking.

For example there was a long period when she was convinced that her hair was naturally blond, and that it was merely dirt, or some trickery of her mother’s, that made it look black. She would wash and wash her hair, then rub it violently dry, checking the towel to see if the blackness was rubbing off as she tried to return her hair to its original state, the blond curls of her cinema idols.

Her brothers watched her quizzically night after night, scrubbing and rubbing her head, whisking the towel fast as a shoe-shine boy. When I told them what Sashie thought she was doing, they laughed uproariously and she fled to her room red-faced and ashamed for she worshipped her brothers.

They
had laughed, but afterward she was angry only at me.

She did not give up the hair notion for a long time; she stopped her obsessive washing but told herself the blackness would eventually grow out, and she inspected the roots of her hair carefully using two mirrors, searching for a hint of gold.

It was something I could not understand, the way she refused to see the truth that was right in front of her eyes, how she lied to herself without knowing she did.

*   *   *

All this time, all these years Shmuel had continued to write to his parents. Sometimes he lingered over the letters late into the night, head propped in his hand. He still sent them money. They never answered.

He received the odd letter, now and then, from his friends in the theater company; they passed along news. From them he heard that his parents were still living in the same house, the house where Shmuel had been born and his father too. He heard that his sister now had seven children who labored in their father’s bakery.

The thought of his nieces and nephews plagued Shmuel; he wrote to his sister begging her to send some of her children to us to raise here. He wrote: Your children have no future over there. Surely you can see that.

Later he wrote: I will pay their passages. We could adopt them. They can have a life here that you cannot even imagine. At least ask the older ones. Let them decide for themselves.

His sister never responded.

I thought of these phantom children, dusted with flour and white as ghosts. They stood around our bed at night.

He continued to write to his family, more and more often as we heard the rumors of what was happening over there, the whispered rumblings of the dark tide rising up and threatening to wash over everything.

The newspapers droned of war with their tiny print and blurred photos of a man in a mustache with his arm outstretched. Newspapers were a reliable source of the truth, apparently. Shmuel and Eli and Wolf read them and argued far into the night.

Me, I did not trust printed words.

Along with the papers there were the rumors we heard, the letters, and the words of frightened travelers who had managed to slip away and sail across the ocean. They came here in their shabby coats, moved in with relatives and disliked to go outside. They shunned daylight.

These people with their haunted eyes, casting suspicious glances everywhere, they tried to tell us things but could not find the words. There was no language excessive enough to describe what they had seen. No words wide or deep enough to hold it. Stories so fantastic, so sweeping in their atrocities that no one could believe them.

No one wanted to believe them. Our neighbors, and even Eli and Wolf, said: They must be mad, these people, seasick and frightened, spewing nightmares and visions. These stories cannot be true, they are fairy tales told to frighten children.