If I Told You Once: A Novel (33 page)

All this I saw in that moment of longing to run, sandbagged by flesh, waiting to feel their fingers. But just then another bus arrived, and the gush of people that burst from the gates rushed between me and them; it broke their hold, hid me from their view. The traffic light changed; the press of people carried me across the street to the opposite shore.

The air was full of the hum of autos, moving shoulders. An elaborate baby carriage, two children riding inside like royalty, rolled over my foot. A man in heavy boots plowed past, a long loaf of bread held against his shoulder like a rifle. A boy stumbled and fell against me, his head was close shaven, the shape of the skull clear and vulnerable beneath the skin. His hands moved over me swiftly, expertly, delving into pockets and cuffs and coming up empty. I felt his fingers on my wrist, his body pressing close then shouldering on.

For a long time I watched the back of his head bobbing and weaving in the currents of the crowd, a head delicate as eggshell, shining with the secrets it held.

Did you know that if you hold an egg up to the light you will be able to see the merest faintest shadow of the creature curled up inside?

I turned and looked back at the bus stop. I thought I saw three figures still sitting on the bench, I thought it was the same three, but I could not be sure.

I have trouble seeing lately.

The trouble is not in my eyes; my vision is as sharp as ever. It is the world that has become more blurred.

It is the air here, they talk of pollution, ions, electricity, ozone, something. The air is limp, greasy, it blunts the senses. No one sees clearly anymore.

*   *   *

So I got away from the three messengers that time.

But soon I was seeing them everywhere.

On the buses, on the steps of churches and hospitals, sitting on park benches. Always three women, similar enough to be sisters, always talking, always casting conspiratorial sly glances all around. I spied them in the market, waiting on corners for the light to change, standing together flagging a taxi, sitting together all sharing the same newspaper, and once for a brief fantastic moment on the public basketball courts engaged in a game of three-on-three with some tall black youths.

When they appeared in the alley behind our building I tried to tell Sashie.

She nodded and patted my hand then placed a cup of tea in it.

I looked down at them from the window. They lingered in the alley, pretending to be occupied. They had slipped into the alley, all three of them, under the pretense of placing a single scrap of paper in the trash can. But I knew why they were there.

They rattled the lids, chattered casually. They knew I was watching.

*   *   *

I had been silent so long.

I had shut myself off in a small dark place, away from the stream of events. Safe in this apartment, impervious as a tomb. I had shut myself away just as my grandmother had a lifetime ago, walling herself in with bricks of stale bread. I had watched the city rise up around me, watched my daughter and then my grandchildren from a distance so that they seemed tiny, nothing more than ants in an anthill.

Now suddenly I felt alive again; the arrival of those three had given me a vicious jolt. Suddenly I was thrust again into the world.

Where had these enormous buildings come from? These fantastic lights? What is this music? Everything was beautifully, terrifyingly vivid, and enormous, and much too loud. Cars passed in a blur. I had never seen such colors, they dazzled my eyes. These people of all different colors, their thick muscles and beautiful skin. Where had these magnificent people come from? Where were their wings?

I felt alive again, and all was beautiful, and all was fraught with danger.

Those three women would find me sooner or later, I knew, and they would tell me the things I did not want to hear. Their ugly gossip, their dire predictions.

They would bring me back to that place I had fled so many years ago. They would take away everything I had done and been until I was only a hollow shell in the center of a vast barren plain.

If I go away from this place and leave nothing behind, then it will be as if I had never existed at all.

*   *   *

The only way to stave them off was to tell someone.

I needed to beat them at their own game, drown out their story with mine.

I thought suddenly of that girl who listens, that girl with my face, the only one who listens to me now.

I was afraid for you. I feared they would notice you, recognize my features on your face. They will drag you back with them and force you to repeat it all, go through the motions over and over, a treadmill life.

The only way to protect you is to warn you. That is what I am trying to do.

Please listen. Please do not pat my hand or offer me tea.

If I tell you what I know then perhaps you will be able to evade them. Mara and Sashie have already failed without knowing it, they have fallen into the ruts long ago; they are treading in circles in their in-looking lives, circles within circles, getting smaller and smaller until soon they will be spinning in place. But you, I want to teach you to break away.

It is a paradox, isn’t it? To make you learn about history and its patterns in the hope that you will rebel against the lesson, escape those patterns and go your own way.

Will you listen? Or will you cover your ears, run from the room, drown me out with your own voice?

You are listening, aren’t you?

Mara

I came home today and found them at it again.

My grandmother telling tales with silent Nomie curled beside her, rapt, chin on knee. Worse than a neighborhood gossip, my grandmother is.

With gossip, at least, you know to take it with a grain of salt.

My grandmother tells stories as if they are the gospel truth.

I stood quiet in the doorway a minute, listening to that voice that seems more familiar than my own, it is the voice my conscience takes on these days, she echoes my own inner chiding.

This can’t go on.

I listened, and then broke in:
That
story? Again? If you’ve told that story once, you’ve told it a thousand times.

She looked up at me. Well then, this time will make it a thousand and one, she said calmly.

Nomie said nothing, played with the fringe on my grandmother’s shawl, counting the strands, knotting, braiding.

The stories are what keep us alive, my grandmother said in her significant way that brooked no argument; she bowed her head and resumed her story in tones only Nomie could hear.

A thousand and one of her rotten tales; how could Nomie stand it?

My grandmother seems determined to talk herself to death.

It is taking quite a while.

Oh, I have long ceased to be intimidated by those knowing looks of hers, her way of divining people’s thoughts from their eyes or the nape of their necks, her air of holding a dark mysterious knowledge the rest of us are too imbecile to grasp. I have begun to see those things for what they really are: the false grandiosity of old age.

Yes, I have ceased to be afraid of her. I left the room, quickly, when she glared at me—but only because I did not want to hear any more of the story.

Those stories of hers, I do not want Nomie listening to them. They are not fit things for an impressionable young girl to hear. They are not fit for anyone, really, neither scholars nor madmen nor insomniac Arabian kings.

What bothers me most about her stories are not the naked and bloody details; it is that she calls them the truth, gives them the stamp of history. She dresses up her lies like kings in rags, or wolves in sheep’s clothing. No one in their right mind would be fooled. Seeing Nomie at her knee I had wanted to say: What great eyes you have, grandmother, what big teeth.

When I was Nomie’s age I too wanted to believe in certain things, and when I discovered they were false it felt like the worst kind of betrayal.

I want to spare Nomie that feeling.

I have never listened carefully to my grandmother’s stories, but I don’t need to; those stories from the old country are all the same.

The truth is, her stories are lies. Every one.

Oh, this can’t go on.

Ilana

These days I think about Ari.

I wonder if he is still alive.

If he is, I wonder how he has satisfied his appetite all these years.

How many hundreds of thick-necked officers?

He must be an old man now. The hair on his shoulders must be silver.

I wonder if he is angry at me for leaving him behind.

That splash in the water. I would not look at it, did not turn around.

Don’t you see, it wasn’t you I wanted to leave behind, it was everything else about that place.

And now it has turned out to be futile, I have left nothing behind, it all has followed me here. I thought I could raise my children differently here. But I look at my daughter, and her daughter, and I see in them the same fierceness and singleness of purpose that people had over there.

Do you remember our mother and father?

Perhaps one day long ago, by chance, walking in the forest, you might have met my dear ones, my sons. Perhaps one day as you glided along the ocean floor you might have seen my grandson. He loved to swim.

One of these days I know I will step outside the door and find myself again in a city of dust, crumbling and empty, clocks broken and silent in the gutters, and ships like the carcasses of great fallen birds lying on the floor of a vast dry seabed.

Sashie

Lately my mother has been babbling about three old women she has seen, women who have been following her everywhere. They have come for her, she says.

Now every time she comes home she darts into the apartment, slams the door, leans against it and locks it. Out of breath, her head scarf askew, hair wild.

What will people think of me, letting my mother wander the streets looking like this?

She’s stubborn. I can’t do a thing with her.

She keeps insisting that these old women are plaguing her.

She doesn’t seem to realize that she is an old woman herself, and that the sight of her probably frightens people.

Lately she has been taking Nomie aside and telling her things, I don’t know what exactly but I can guess. I know her mind is full of darkness, nastiness, things best forgotten or left unmentioned. She is giving Nomie strange ideas about her heritage, about us.

These days when I look for Nomie I always find her with her great-grandmother, sitting together in a corner of the dark room among the old furniture, both wrapped in my mother’s moldy shawl. Nomie, usually so sulky (that is natural: she is fourteen) now sits gazing at my mother as if she is in love (
that
is not at all natural).

It is unhealthy. It will taint her young mind.

I’ve read newspaper articles about things like this.

I don’t know where my mother gets her grotesque stories. Mara and I have wondered if she’s picked them up from something she has read, or seen on television. But we’ve never seen her open a book, and she treats the television set like an unwanted guest: when one of us switches it on in the evenings she turns her back to it and lets out affronted little sniffs.

Of course we’ve suspected senility; she must be well into her nineties, after all. She does not know exactly how old she is, she does not know the exact date and year of her birth. It’s not that she’s forgotten it—she never knew. No one kept track, in that backward place where she was born. Can you imagine? How can someone not know her own birthday?

But her mind seems as sharp as ever. She has the bus schedules memorized, for instance. Any time of day or night, when she hears the rumble beneath the window, she’ll say something like: There’s the three-thirty-seven express, or: That’s the one-seventy-six, Arthur’s driving, he’s always a little late.

I worry that she will fall down, break a hip, get knocked down and robbed in the street. She doesn’t seem to realize she is an old woman, she continues to work like a horse, wanders the city on her mysterious errands.

Maybe it is that, after a lifetime of hard labor, her body does not know how to stop.

I cannot even call her an old woman, exactly. She is at the next stage, something
beyond
an old woman. Whatever that might be.

For
I
am an old woman now. I admit this.

The idea that we are colleagues is a frightening thought.

Whenever she starts in with the stories, I tell her (gently, of course): That’s impossible, mother. It never happened like that.

And she says: Yes it did. How do you know about it, I don’t remember
you
being there.

And I tell her: Of course I wasn’t there, I wasn’t born yet.

Then how can you know, she says triumphantly. I was there, I saw it all, I remember exactly what happened.

I would like to ask her for proof, for photographs, newspaper clippings, love letters. But I know she has no such thing, only these pictures in her head. And anyway, I know better than to press her. She is an old woman at the end of her life, trying to dress up a drab past in shocking colors, in sequins and armor.

And she is my mother. So I try to let her be. It is only for the sake of Nomie that I question her at all. I think Nomie should know the truth.

When I get the chance I will take Nomie aside and tell her my version of things. I will explain to her about my mother, how she twists things. I think I will tell Nomie to continue to humor my mother, pretend to swallow her stories. For her sake.

That would be the kindest thing to do, I think.

So now when I see them, see my mother’s tongue wagging, I try to keep my mouth still. My mother clings fiercely to her stories. She is childishly stubborn. I will leave her to these castles made of dust and barnyards and enchanted forests, this ramshackle past she has built with her hands and hovers over like a sandbox king.

*   *   *

But I could not stop puzzling over where she got these stories. And why she told them, what pride or shame drove her to it.