The Covenant (8 page)

Often she felt Oprah was speaking directly to her when she told women to cheer up, to write about what was happening in their lives, about their past, in order to help them—how did she say it: “Rekindle their spirit”?

Lately, she had often felt her spirit, her
neshamah
, sputtering like a daylong
yarzheit
candle at the end of its twenty-third hour. The dark ghosts of her past often swept through the room, poking her with their annoying, inconsiderate fingers, prying loose the tears she had held back all these years; tears for her murdered parents and sister and nephew and brothers and daughter and for the grandchildren that had never been born; for the Jews of Israel, people she didn’t know, black Ethiopians and blond Russians. They were all part of her blood, and they were being murdered and harassed and frightened… Most of Oprah’s solutions didn’t really work for her. She’d tried jogging, but her feet began to hurt even before she crossed the street. She had tried using Oprah’s “Favorite Things,” but all those butter cookies and rich cocoa drinks clogged her plumbing. As for keeping a journal, she wasn’t much of a writer, and her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be. But she’d kept it all in her head.

That’s why making the videotape for the Shoah Foundation, that movie director, that Spielberg, was such a good idea. That nice girl had asked the questions and a man had filmed everything, making a movie. After Leah had gotten over her disappointment that Spielberg himself wasn’t going to be directing, it had all worked out fine. Often, early in the morning, she would watch the tape. She looked old and overweight, she thought, her face
bloated and angry, not like herself at all. But sometimes she was surprised and secretly pleased at the things she heard herself say, things that brought back such memories. She slipped it in now. She had an hour to kill until she could eat or watch
Oprah.
She pressed play, staring at the screen, listening to herself describe the house in Uzhorod surrounded by woods and fields; the visit of the
tzadik
of Munkatsch who had come with his whole yeshiva and raised his hands above her head in blessing; her father baking Passover matzohs for the village, his beard dusted with flour; baby Shmilu’s blue sun hat left in her hands when Mengele sent him and her sister left, and her right… And Esther, Maria, and Ariana, who had been with her in Auschwitz, saving her life countless times. Her three
block shvesters
, closer than sisters of flesh and blood, united forever by their experiences and their Covenant vows…

Never liked to talk about it. What was the point? Like opening a sewer cover, allowing all the filth, the degradation to send up its stench to pollute her life and the lives of those she loved. But now the world had gone mad again, denying the past, claiming the facts were not facts but a deliberate lie or an exaggeration. And people were such ignoramuses that they actually listened. If we don’t open our mouths now, before we die, then we let the liars win, she’d told the others.

Esther was making her tape now, already planning the big party they’d have when all four tapes were done. She shook her head fondly. Esther and her big cosmetics company and her big parties, her Hollywood parties. Like Zsa Zsa, with all that fancy makeup and the fancy clothes. But maybe it would be fun. She hadn’t seen Ariana or Maria for years. A reunion, to see what it had all come to, all their struggles for life; where they’d all ended up, close to the end of their incredible journey.

She didn’t add: and if it had all been been worth it.

She heard the phone ringing. For no reason, a small dart of fear pierced her calm and she thought, without hesitation: Elise.

Chapter Seven

Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem
May 6, 2002
11:40
P.M.

“B
UBBEE
?”
ELISE WHISPERED
. “I need to talk to you.”

The effect of the sedatives still coursing through her veins gave her a sense of floating on water. She looked at her watch. It was almost midnight. Why did I do this? she thought, listening to her grandmother’s urgent stream of exclamations and questions. She was filled with sudden panic. So many people had offered to make this call for her: her neighbors from Maaleh Sara, Jon’s friends from the hospital, the sweet young social worker from the army, a very nice English-speaking policeman… So many people were out there wanting to help, her doctors told her. There was a news blackout, but of course everyone knew anyhow.

Israel was like one big family, she thought. There was one, maybe two degrees of separation. All it took was for the ambulance driver to mention it to his girlfriend, one soldier to tell his mother, a nurse to call her sister… News about the attack had spread like a brush fire all over the country. Hundreds surrounded the hospital, waiting for news.

Why, then, she wondered, did she feel so alone?

“Bubbee
, something terrible has happened,” she repeated tonelessly. She heard her grandmother’s sharp intake of breath. “No… not a miscarriage. The baby is fine. I’m fine…” Her throat contracted painfully. “
Bubbee
—”

Ho w am I going to tell her this? She, of all people? Ho w do you break this news to anyone, especially a survivor with a heart condition? But it couldn’t be helped. She’d hear it o n CN N soon enough.

Elise felt her breath stick in her lungs, refusing to leave her body, giving her the sensation of choking. She had never had asthma, and it frightened her. It was the beginning of something new, she realized, some bodily reaction that was now going to be part of her life, something she would learn to live with. A friend in college had once described similar symptoms. She’d called it a panic attack.

I can’t do this, she understood. I can’t finish this call.

“Wait,” she wheezed into the phone, putting her palm over the receiver. “Please, Nurse, call Ruth, Ruth Silver… outside…”

Why had she chosen Ruth, she wondered, regretting it immediately. The truth was, she didn’t really want Ruth, not really. She didn’t want someone she knew and liked to see and remember her at this moment in her life, committing it to memory. She didn’t want any witnesses. She was in the process of a metamorphosis, evolving moment by moment. Like some B-movie about an ordinary person injected with the serum of a mad scientist, she might, at any moment, turn into a homicidal maniac, or a wolf man, or simply, she thought, disappear altogether. She couldn’t bear the face of pity, confirmation that she was pitiable, from a friend, a neighbor.

“Ruth, it’s my
Bubbee.
Please… I… please, Ruth…”

Ruth took the phone, her dark eyes wet. Elise turned her face to the wall.

“Mrs. Helfgott?
Bubbee
Leah? This is Ruth Silver, I’m a friend of your granddaughter… Oh yes, that’s right. Daphna’s mother, from Maaleh Sara. I’m fine, fine…
Bubbee
Leah… First, let me tell you that Elise is fine. She’s under a doctor’s care. But Jon and liana…”

It isn’t fair, Elise thought. It isn’t right for me to ask this of her. Of anyone.

“. . . were riding home from her ballet recital, and their car…”

Elise listened as if hearing this for the first time. So it was all true then. Not a nightmare. Others could not have had the same bad dream… or could they? Unless this too was just part of a dream…

“—No,
Bubbee
Leah, please, just let me finish…”

Elise took a sudden deep breath and grabbed the phone.
“Bubbee
, they are not dead! We don’t know what happened to them. The car was hit with bullets, but they weren’t in the car. They’ve just disappeared. I don’t know any more,
Bubbee .
. .
Bubbee
, I’m going to put a policeman on the phone, someone who knows English. He’s going to explain what he can, the details—”

She stopped, listening intently to what her grandmother was saying. “A person can live through anything, Elise. Remember that,” her grandmother told her.

Elise felt a sharp stab of sudden anger. What was that supposed to mean? That no matter what happened to Jon and liana, that she, Elise, would be all right!? she thought, furious. No, that’s not it. That’s not what she meant, Elise understood with a sudden flash of insight.

Years in Auschwitz surrounded by corpses, medical experiments, starvation, torture; living when millions around her had died. A fourteen-year-old girl with no one to help her… Her
Bubbee %
own survival was living proof that a person could never predict with absolute certainty what was going to happen to them. No matter how horrible your situation seemed, there was always the chance that you would be the one to somehow, miraculously, come through it, living to see great-grandchildren and die peacefully in your bed. Like people who overcome a list of terrible medical complications, or people who walk to safety out of plane wrecks in snow-covered mountains. Or like her
Bubbee
‘s three friends who went on from Auschwitz to found a cosmetics fortune, run a famous nightclub and over-throw a Communist regime… Living proof, she thought, listening to her grandmother’s soft voice whispering comfort and prayers, that no matter what Jon and liana were faced with, there was still hope. No matter how bad it looked, they could be the ones… the ones who survive.

“Thank you,
Bubbee”
she whispered.

She didn’t feel alone anymore.

Chapter Eight

Beverly Hills, California
Monday, May 6, 2002
11:20
A.M.

“T
HE VIDEOGRAPHER IS
just changing to a new tape,” the interviewer from the Shoah Foundation explained.

“No hurry, darling. Take your time,” Esther Gold said graciously, dreading it. Tiny and imperious, she sat stiffly upright in her uncomfortable antique Louis XIV chair, queen of a vast estate whose circular driveway, manicured lawns, and beautiful, generous rooms framed her with the exqui-site simplicity and beauty of a diamond circle pin.

Nervously, she fidgeted with the stunning string of perfectly matched black pearls around her neck and straightened the skirt of her chic gray suit. As she moved her arms, the interviewer’s eyes couldn’t help being drawn to the shocking tattoo of blue numbers that flashed out through the row of fashionable gold bangles that laddered up her arm.

As the head of a huge cosmetics firm, Esther Gold was used to interviews. In fact, she loved to talk about her rags-to-riches story as a new immigrant, never tiring of the tale of how she had gotten a cousin with the run-down hair pomade lab in the Bronx to make up a batch of her mother’s face cream recipe; and how she had sold it customer to customer in beauty parlors, and then at Hadassah conventions, until finally convincing the big department stores to take it on. How she’d met her husband, Solly, a Dachau survivor, who was supposed to cater her wedding, and married him instead of the American groom… She’d told these stories a mil-lion times, and loved every minute. Even the first tape for the foundation
had been all right, all the good times, before the war. No w the real torture would begin; opening the coffins, dragging out all the decayed corpses of those obscene memories she had spent all these years trying to put behind her; telling all those things she had never shared with anyone, especially not her family.

Think about the party afterward, she told herself, the celebration, whe n all four tapes are finally done. Ho w lovely it will be to see everyone, to meet all the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, gathered together for the first time from the four corners of the earth. To see what it all came to, this will to live through the worst of times. And this was the time to do it. Before heart conditions, diabetes, or breast cancer snuffed out the possibility. They were all going in one direction, and it was irreversible.

What about making it in the Beverly Wilshire? she mused. O r why not here, in the backyard, in the tropical garden? There was plenty of room in the house to accommodate everyone for a few days… weeks… even months! Maria’s grandson, who’ d recently graduated film school and was making documentaries, would have a great time in L.A. She could introduce him around. And Leah’s granddaughter Elise with her nice doctor husband and their little sabra and the new baby due in a mont h or two, had never seen California. Ho w lovely it would be to have little kids running around again, making noise, tracking up the Aubusson, putting sticky little fingers on the polished antiques, giving this museum a little life… she thought, looking at her pristine living room.