Margot: A Novel (21 page)

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there either work for Robertson or know people who do.” He
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pauses and runs his hand through his curls. “I’ll draw up the
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flyers, and then I’ll just need you to take them down there,
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and speak to the rabbi, sometime before Saturday services.
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You can take an afternoon this week.”
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“Me?” I ask quietly. “You want me to go?”
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“I would do it,” he says. “But the rabbi there sometimes
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plays golf with my father, so I need you to keep this quiet. Don’t
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even tell the rabbi which law firm you work for, all right?”
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“You want me to talk to the rabbi?” I whisper. My throat is
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turning numb, and so are my fingertips. It is hard to breathe—
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sometimes this would happen to me in the dark, in the annex.
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It was so dark there at night that sometimes I imagined that’s
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what it would be like if we were dead. Just a vast space of
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nothingness: no sound, no light, no air. The darkness fright
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ened me so much that I would start choking on it, until Peter
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held on tighter and whispered in my ear, “Just breathe, Mar
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got. Breathe. In and out. It is only air. Babies can do it. The
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Green Police can do it.”
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“Rabbis are just people,” Joshua is saying, shrugging. “Just
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like the rest of us. No big deal, Margie.” He pauses. “Why
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don’t you do it tomorrow. Go down there, then take the rest
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of the afternoon off. You deserve it,” he says. “You’ve been
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working hard.”
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For a long while, after we talk, I stare at the keys on my type
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writer, not moving, not typing anything.
A rabbi is only a per-
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son,
Joshua had said.
And a synagogue, it is only a building.
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I shake my head. Joshua is wrong; it is not that simple;
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they are remarkably Jewish things, and thus that makes them
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different.
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It has been almost fifteen years since I have been to a
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synagogue, and I promised myself I would never go to one
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again. Even though I sometimes long to go now as my lonely
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Shabbat candle flickers on my table, my fear it will not let me.
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But I cannot think of a good reason to tell Joshua no, and
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even in my head, this fear of Beth Shalom, a synagogue to
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which I have never been, begins to feels silly.
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And besides, I remind myself, I am a Gentile now, a sec
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retary. It is not the same. Not the same at all.
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Judischausen was a large temple in the center of
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Frankfurt, where I remembered going to Saturday services as
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a little girl with Mother sometimes. Even after the war, after
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I came to stay with Eduard in Frankfurt, I could still picture
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in my mind the way the glass windows rose in an arch, with
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a blue Star of David stained inside, giving off a particular
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glow in the light of the morning. In my head, I knew the rest
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of Frankfurt was not the same, that even some of the houses
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on Eduard’s Street, Ulme Alle, had been annihilated, as if
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struck by a wayward tornado. But still, in my mind, Judis
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chausen, it remained untouched.
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One Saturday, not too long after Brigitta had left me off
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at his doorstep, Eduard asked me if there was anywhere
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I wanted to go, anywhere he could take me. I had already
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told him that my family, they were all dead. I’d watched
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his dapper green eyes fall against the light of his fireplace
as he’d asked about my mother. “Even Edith?” he’d whis
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pered, a faraway look on his face, so I’d wondered if he
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was picturing Mother, the way she was once, when she was a
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girl.
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Before we left Frankfurt to move to Holland in 1933,
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Mother had taken my sister and me with her to say good-bye
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to Eduard. She’d told me then that he was just an old friend,
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from her girlhood days. But even as a young girl, I could tell
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it had been—or was—something more. He’d kissed her good
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bye, once, gently on the mouth. “Oh, Edith,” he’d said then,
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his voice filled with so much sorrow, I was surprised he wasn’t
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crying. Eduard had loved my mother; this much I was sure of.
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But I also knew that Eduard was not a Jew, and my mother
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had been raised as a conservative one. Even before the Nazis,
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there were some lines that were not crossed.
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“I want to go to Judischausen,” I told Eduard that Saturday
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morning, when he asked.
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“Judischausen?” Eduard shook his head. “You do not want
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to go there.”
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“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
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“It will not be as you remember it,” Eduard said.
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“Nothing is,” I told him.
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So Eduard drove us slowly through the icy streets leading
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to the center of Frankfurt, where buildings had crumbled,
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destroyed by bombs. Frankfurt barely appeared to be a city at
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all by this point, much less a civilized one. But still, in my
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head, Judischausen would be the same.
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Eduard pulled into a parking space and pointed across the
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street. “There,” he said. I shook my head. We could not be
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there yet. I remembered the synagogue had risen high, and I
saw nothing but disasters nearby.
I got out of the car and walked, as if inspecting the area
more closely would change it. The blue Star of David glass
had been blown away, and in its place was a gaping, empty
hole, surrounded by the dust of bricks and mortar. One wall
was still in tact, but it had been painted with the ugliest of
symbols, red swastikas. They rose and fell in parallel lines.
One was not enough—the Nazis, they had felt the need to
cover the wall with dozens of them, as if they were shouting.
I touched my heart, where my yellow star had once rested,
sewn into my clothes, then my arm, where then, underneath,
my number rested, sewn into my skin.
Judischausen had not just been destroyed by the war, but
decimated by it: stripped, shaven, beaten down, tattooed.
I thought about Peter, about what he’d said as I’d lain
there in his arms.
After the war I’ll no longer be a Jew. I’m done
with being a Jew.
“I’m done with being a Jew.” I spoke to Eduard softly, but
with certainty.
“But . . . your mother?” he said, and his voice cracked on
her name. It was religion that had kept them apart, I was
certain of it. And religion that had taken her away.
“My mother is dead,” I said.
Eduard shook his head. “You are who you are. This much
you cannot change.”
“What is religion,” I asked him, “if it cannot protect you?
If it kills you?”
“You are who you are,” Eduard repeated.
* * *
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I am thinking about that moment now, Thursday afternoon, just
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before 4 p.m., as I find myself clutching tightly to Joshua’s flyers,
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standing at the doorway of Beth Shalom. This synagogue is a
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flat, square cement building and, I am relived to see, almost
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unidentifiable as a Jewish place, except for the small green Star
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of David etched into the front of the wooden door. There are no
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large stained-glass windows, and maybe that is better. Nothing
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to shatter, I think as I take a deep breath and pull open the
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heavy door to walk inside. Every muscle in my body screams at
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me to turn and run. I do not want to go inside. I do not want to
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talk to the rabbi, a Jewish man of God. I feel he might look at
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me, maybe the way Bryda has looked, and call me a snake. It is
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so much easier to hide, to slip inside a second skin, so you can
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simply avoid anything that falls around the first skin.
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But I cannot see a way around this, and I am already here.
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I will simply drop the flyers off, I tell myself, and then I will
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run. I will travel back on the bus that took me here, back to
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Market Street, back to my apartment and Katze. I will run,
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and then I will forget again. Forgetting is easy. It is almost as
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easy as hiding, or keeping secrets.
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Inside the synagogue it is dark and smells faintly of rainwater
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and mildew. I follow the signs to the rabbi’s office, which
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appears to be just off the main room, and I swallow hard to
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try to keep myself from gagging. I keep my eyes straight
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ahead, not allowing myself to look inside the main room.
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I knock quietly on the office door, hoping that the rabbi
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won’t be in, that I’ll just be able to leave the flyers by the door,
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and run.
Run.
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But quickly I hear a response to my knock. “Come in,” a
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man’s voice says.
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I take a deep breath, turn the handle, and walk inside his
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office.
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The rabbi sits behind his desk, dressed in a gray suit. He
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is an older man with a thick graying beard, not so dissimilar
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looking to Ezra Rosenstein, only a bit thinner. Though the
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immediate, obvious difference between him and Ezra is
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the black yarmulke crushing the rabbi’s silver-tinged curls.
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The nameplate on the front of his desk reads
Rabbi Epstein.
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“Can I help you?” he asks, looking up from his desk, rais
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ing his silvery eyebrows a little. I don’t say anything for a
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moment. I want to speak, but I can’t. I clutch tightly to the
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flyers, leaving sweaty fingerprints across the back of them.
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“Can I help you?” he repeats.
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I clear my throat, but still no words will come. Suddenly I
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am a mute, my voice stolen, the way everything else has been.
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I hand the flyers to him across his desk. He picks up a pair of
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reading glasses, places them on the bridge of his nose, and
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holds the flyers out a bit in front of him. “ ‘Join group litigation
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against Robertson’s Finery . . .’ ” he reads out loud, and then
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mumbles the rest to himself.
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He looks at the flyer, then back at me, then at the flyer
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again. “Do you want to have a seat?” he asks, pointing to the
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chair across from his desk. I shake my head.
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“I won’t stay long,” I finally say, the words escaping me,
almost against my will. I force myself to breathe.
Breathe.
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Breath is harder than you think, when you are trying, when
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you are thinking about the motion of your lungs, in and out
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and in and out.