This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (13 page)

I followed right behind. We walked down the aisle, through the crowd of gapers and starers as they cleared a wide path, careful not to touch my brother and catch whatever it was he had. The kind-looking man with the beard opened the door, following us with his eyes until we crossed the avenue and he could not see us anymore.

I sobbed all the way home. I hadn’t gotten pizza or ice cream. But Devorah rushed ahead, telling me only to hurry up. My mother would give me whatever I wanted when I got back home.

Nachum was quiet now. He stayed calm even as the babysitter dragged him by his sleeve, pulling him along until we reached Avenue I. He held the ice cream cup high up, tipping it over his mouth, gulping globs of ice-cold chunks as if they were juice, until there was nothing left.

When we reached our block, I ran from the babysitter and into our house, into my blanket box. I could hear her coming up the stairs now, nudging Nachum and Vrumi inside. Faintly, I could hear her speaking to my mother, trying to explain what had happened.

I don’t know how much she explained or how much my mother understood because I stayed crying in the box, planning vengeance on my brother and God. A few minutes passed, and the babysitter left. I could hear her heels clattering down the steps and carrying her out the red gate, never to be seen again.

Later that evening, I told Rivky that Nachum should be sent back to Israel immediately. Everyone would be happier that way.

Rivky said I was mean. “He’s my brother,” she said. “I want him to stay with us.”

I grimaced. “No, you don’t,” I said.

My sister looked at me, trying to sound disgusted. “Yes, I do.”

Now I was mad. “You’re lying,” I shot back. “You’re just saying that, but you don’t mean it even a little.” And I reminded Rivky of last year, when Nachum had been in Israel from June to September and she hadn’t missed him at all. She hadn’t said his name even once. Nobody did.

But Rivky said she had missed our brother, secretly, deep inside her heart. “I just didn’t say it out loud.” Then she walked righteously away.

I stomped my foot. Goody-two-shoes liar! She had not! Nobody missed Nachum, inside or outside their heart.

There was the Holy Rebbe and, to his right, his brother, the one who’d be rebbe after him. There was my other great-uncle, the youngest of the rabbinical brothers, and at his side my grandfather, shaking a well-wisher’s hand. In between them sat my father, with his trimmed beard and round, fur
shtreimel,
a soldier in a Chassid’s land.

In front of the head table on the wooden dais where they sat, crowds of Chassidim thronged. They pushed forward, struggling to touch the rebbe, black hats bobbing up and down like a dark, churning sea.

I pored over the pictures in my mother’s wedding album for hours. My mother had agreed to take it out to keep me busy, and I sat on the couch all evening, studying it, wondering at the questions I’d never ask.

There, under the plastic sheath, was my grandmother Miriam in a long, rippling silver and mint-green gown. Next to her, Zahava and Chana smiled prettily for the cameraman. In another photo, under a velvet canopy stood a sage uncle reciting a blessing over a cup of wine. Near him swayed my grandfather and my father, their eyes closed in prayer, thin, braided sashes tied loosely over their long, dark coats. Toward the front sat the women, far from the men, wiping away tears and murmuring prayers.

I had looked at the wedding pictures in daylight, in lamplight, and in the moonlight to find my grandfather’s curse. Curses were wrathful things, wounded and enraged, usually hidden beneath stiff, angry faces. But it was hard to know a story from a picture, to know what really happened just by looking at eternally frozen smiles. The problem was, I knew that angry fights and dark secrets never revealed themselves for the camera, never showed up in the darkroom. But somewhere behind the expressions in the photos was the broken spirit of my mother’s father, watching and waiting, unforgiving of his youngest daughter’s betrayal.

Yitzy had told me that night in his room, along with the other bits of the story, what my great-aunt Frieda had told him one day when she forgot that he was only ten at the time. She had said that the morning after Zahava’s engagement, to a perfect young scholar from a city nearby, the matchmakers had come for Esther. Why waste even one more day? they said. There weren’t many possible husbands left for a girl way past marriageable age. Did it really matter if they suggested a list of distinguished names a week before or after her sister’s wedding?

They approached my grandfather in the synagogue and my grandmother in the bakery or in the street. Esther might be old, but no matter: she was still beautiful, and the family heritage would make up for her being twenty-three.

But Esther refused to hear the matchmakers. Not until after Zahava’s wedding, she said.

Zahava’s wedding came just a few months later, and then it was done. On the other side of the city, where my mother and the soldier walked, they knew they could not wait for even one more Sabbath to pass. Esther had to tell her father, her mother, and her beloved Bubba Miril now, that very day, that a matchmaker would not be necessary. She already had her groom.

Exactly how and when my mother told them about the man she was to marry, Yitzy could not say. Not even my great-aunt Frieda knew exactly what had gone on in the apartment on Ben Kadosh Street. Only that when the conversation ended, the heavens above the ancient city seemed to darken, and all hell broke loose.

Within hours, the rebbe was told and the uncles found out. Within a day, Savtah Miriam was standing on the roof, her screams echoing over the neighbors’ yards. She screamed about their honor, their long, dynastic pride, and about her suffering in the Holocaust:
“Is this why I survived?”

By Friday evening, the scandal had rippled and spread through the neighborhoods on both sides of the city. It made its rounds among the synagogues and the men walking down Geulah Street. It made its way through crooked lanes and opened shutters overlooking courtyards, through groups of young mothers watching their children play and passing around half-baked truths about Esther and her soldier groom.

The scandal circled the
shtieblich
where young men met to gossip and pray. It reached the porches where elderly women sat above the chatter of passing girls. It made its rounds, and then made them again, until everyone had offered their thing or two to say about a girl who prances about until way past marriageable age.

And such a fine girl. Who would have thought?

It was good, some said, that Esther’s Knesset minister grandfather had died some years before. His bones must be turning over in his grave beneath the ground of the sacred Mount of Olives. Because a Chassidic girl does not find her own husband. A descendant of great rebbes does not marry a man she actually knows. And if it wasn’t bad enough that the man had been a soldier, to make things worse, he was also a fatherless boy.

A pious girl does not sign her own agreements. A descendant does not, ever, marry a fatherless waif. Pity him, maybe give charity—but marriage? No matchmaker would suggest such an insult. Even the simple girl with no more wealth than an intact family did not marry a man bereft of a proper parent.

Why? Because. Some questions don’t need answers.

Why? Because. And that’s what mattered: tradition, hierarchy, and the way of doing things, the way it always was and had always been.

In a room closed off to all, Esther sobbed to Bubba Miril for days, begging her to understand, to meet the boy—to speak with him, at least. She could not bear to break her father’s heart, but she simply would not marry another man.

This went on for weeks. Well, not weeks, but certainly many days. Or months. Yitzy wasn’t sure.

“And then,” he said. “And then…”

He was quiet.

“Yes? What happened then?” I asked. But he didn’t know.

“Did they run away?” I helpfully suggested, but he could not say. Because it was just about there in the story that my great-aunt Frieda remembered that Yitzy was only ten years old, gave him some chocolate, and sent him off to play. So he never heard the rest of the story: who convinced Bubba Miril and my grandfather and who, if anyone, got my screaming grandmother off the tiled roof porch.

“They didn’t run away,” Yitzy said. “They got married. Even the rebbe was there.” But he wasn’t sure how. A year or so later, there was definitely a wedding—we had the pictures to prove it. But Yitzy said that it must have been a terrible time, full of blame and whispering. He knew. He’d even seen a rebbe point at Nachum roaming the halls in cheder, and heard him tell another, “See? Good things don’t come from such a marriage.”

I asked Yitzy whether our parents realized that they were cursed, but Yitzy shook his head fearfully and said that he had no idea. This was not the kind of question one asked a mother or a father.

It was nearly ten when my mother found me sitting on the living room couch with the wedding album. I had shifted my legs and was stomping and kicking at the air, trying to wake up my tingling feet.

“Your bedtime was at nine,” she exclaimed. “Who are you kicking? Well, what do you expect? Sitting for hours…”

She took the album out of my hands and put it away. I listened to her walk down the hall, heard her in her even tone repeatedly tell Nachum to go back to bed. Slowly, I shuffled, half hopping, to my room. Miri was already asleep.

I sat on the desk by the window.

In the fragments I had gathered from Yitzy, it was hard to know the scandal from the truth. Had my great-great-uncle the rebbe blessed the marriage as an emissary of God, or simply as an uncle, only on his own behalf? Maybe my grandfather could not bear his daughter’s tears and had appealed to his uncle for help. Perhaps it was Bubba Miril who could not watch my mother’s pining and sorrow and who pleaded with her brother, the Holy Rebbe, to have a word with the heavens, to bless the girl already, despite the Grand Master Plan.

But one cannot force God’s hand. One cannot change the divine will with emotions or sheer desire. You could say you spoke for God, but you could not change what it was He wanted to say. Such things could only end badly, even for saints.

I sighed and watched Miri sleeping, an open book over her snoring face.

It was hard to know the scandal from the truth, but one thing was certain. The blessing given by my great-great-uncle could not have been genuine, or there would never have come such a curse.

Mrs. Friedman told me that she knew things were hard at home. She said she knew it was frustrating living with a brother like that, but that one day things would get better.

“God gives us only what we have strength to receive,” she said kindly, as I sat at my desk alone. “Your mother is a strong and powerful woman, like her father and grandfathers.” Then she told me about a renowned scholar who stood up in respect every time a crazy person walked into the room. “He said they were higher souls.”

I stared glumly at Mrs. Friedman. It was recess, and my friends were running wildly outside. But Mrs. Friedman wasn’t finished with my brother.

“The saintly scholar explained that all such souls had once belonged to tzaddikim who had been returned to earth by God to rectify a sin from their past lives. Children like your brother have a holy mission, to serve as penance, however tiny the flaw, so the holy soul can achieve divine perfection. That way, when they go back to Heaven, their perfect, glowing soul is sent straight to the highest level of paradise.”

Mrs. Friedman also explained that God did not drop such a spirit just anyplace when He sent it back down to earth. He searched long and hard for the right mother and the perfect family who could take care of this very high soul.

Mrs. Friedman said that everything was for the best and that one day, when I grew up, I’d understand. Until then, if I’d only try to look differently at my brother, I’d find the good in what seemed only bad.

But Mrs. Friedman did not know what she was saying. She did not know that my brother wasn’t a higher soul, only a broken one. She did not know of the tap, tapping angel, striking my brother’s lip just a tad too hard until his mind was completely gone.

Then again, Mrs. Friedman did not have a crazy brother. She didn’t have friends whispering behind her back. So all day I stayed just as glum as when she’d spoken to me, until something happened that made me rethink all that I believed.

It was that very evening when, by accident, I found a very good thing.

I hadn’t been trying at all. I didn’t care about finding the good side of my brother’s special mission to atone for some past saint’s life. Instead, I fought with Rivky over her new markers and then marched angrily to the living room to mope.

It was there that I saw it, the gift box I’d been eyeing for two days, the one my mother had received from her close friend. My mother had warned me to keep my little hands off—“Don’t even think about it!”—but I desperately needed to know what was inside. And the package just
lay
there, alone on the shiny glass dining room table, white wrapping sticking out of the half-opened lid.

Looking around to make sure no one was there, I reached for it. If I did it fast, my mother would never know. The problem, though, was the gift itself, wedged tightly into the Styrofoam. I had to pull really hard until it finally came right out, too hard, too fast, and straight onto the floor.

I winced and stared down at the porcelain fragments of my mother’s dear friend’s gift. I listened for quick footsteps, for a shout, but there was silence. I had only seconds to run.

I rushed to my room. Once there, I grabbed a book and lay on my stomach on the bed, as if I’d been doing nothing but reading all along. Ten minutes later, my mother came in. I was up to chapter four.

She was furious.

“Did you break the porcelain plate I just received?” she fumed. “Were you the one who took it out of the box when I specifically said not to?”

I shook my head vigorously.

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t! It was Nachum, I think. I’m almost sure! I saw him standing in the dining room before, right by the table.”

The anger etched into my mother’s face instantly disappeared. Her eyes, which had flashed with fury, now just looked tired. She shook her head slowly. Then she walked back down the hall without another word. This was a very good thing.

Somewhere inside my heart, I felt a little bad, but in the rest of my body, I knew it was all right. Because it struck me with clarity that this was the good I was to find if I only looked differently at my brother. It was like that when you had a crazy sibling. You could blame him for stuff he’d never done, because Nachum never got punished, no matter what. At most he’d get a gentle scolding from my mother.

So there it was. I’d been blind to the good that God had placed right in front of my eyes, but now that it was clear, I felt a renewed wonder for the mysteries of the divine plan. And I started to blame Nachum for everything.

I blamed him for the Super Snacks I’d eaten, and for Rivky’s missing markers hidden in my drawer. I blamed him for the mess in the bathroom, and for the strawberries and sugar splattered on the floor. I blamed him for other things too, and these were also all part of the divinely placed good that I had found. It could have gone forever this way, if only my heart hadn’t betrayed my happy thoughts.

But that feeling somewhere in my heart unexpectedly grew on the second or third day. It began when I blamed Nachum for the third time, and he blinked, bewildered, at my accusing finger. The feeling grew heavier by the fifth time; by the sixth, it was weighing me down as I walked around. But it was at night after prayer when it was the worst, pressing down on me so I couldn’t breathe, and could barely sleep.

It was as if a boulder had settled itself right in the center of my chest. In my entire life, I had never felt as uncomfortable inside my own self. It made me irritable, and angrier than ever at Nachum. You’d think with the trouble he’d made, and the damage he’d done, he could take the blame for a Super Snacks or two, but no, of course not. Not with that dead saint inside. Not with that nearly perfect inner glow. Nachum and his stupid, high soul.

So the next morning, I repented. I asked Nachum to forgive me, please, so the terrible feeling should go away. This wasn’t simple, because I first had to convince my brother that I was there at all.

I sat right near Nachum on his bed as my mother made sandwiches in the kitchen. Though I sat inches from him, he seemed very far, somewhere on the other side of his mind wall. I spoke quietly, my voice just above a whisper, because my brother was playing with his socks, and it felt silly apologizing to someone who couldn’t hear.

But I said that I was sorry anyway. I told Nachum that he needed to forgive me, he had to, that if he didn’t I’d make him miserable for the next three weeks. I confessed about the porcelain plate, the Super Snacks I had eaten, and promised never to do those things again. I spoke clearly, leaning toward him as he fidgeted and watched my lips move as if trying to decode the strange babble of a foreign language.

But then Nachum lost interest and stood up to wander off, and I was forced to pull him back down by his wrist. Because, really, if he was to rectify any of the past errors of an imperfect soul, he simply had to learn to stay in one place long enough to forgive.

I asked him again to accept my apology, but still, he didn’t hear, and as soon as I let go, he got up, trying to leave again. I followed him, blocking his way to the door. I repeated myself urgently, because, again, I had no choice—I needed to be done with the apology before the yellow van arrived to take me to school.

“Do you forgive me?” I asked Nachum. “Do you? Yes? Nachum, yes? Say yes, Nachum. Say yes. Like this: ‘Yes, yes…’” And finally, Nachum nodded. He said, “Yes, yes,” as if mimicking a song. Then the van honked outside, and I ran out.

I sat next to Leah as she chattered on and on. In my chest, my heart danced, light as a feather. I had left my schoolbag behind the door, and my lunch on Nachum’s bed, but the boulder was gone; I could breathe again. I was purified, cleansed of all sin.