This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (2 page)

I hadn’t seen my brother Nachum in more than a year, ever since he had been given away. I was seven years old and he six when it happened, at the end of the summer after first grade. My mother had taken us to Israel for summer vacation, all six of us kids, but when we came back to New York, there were only five. She had left Nachum behind.

Ever since then, things had been good at home, and I saw no reason for this to change. But only a few weeks after starting third grade, I came home from school and Nachum was there, playing Lego on the floor by the door, my mother smiling joyfully behind him.

I gasped and dropped my schoolbag.

My mother’s eyes were wide with happiness. “Menuchah!” she said. “Come give your brother a hug!”

So I gave Nachum a hug.

“Tell him that you missed him,” she said.

I told Nachum I had missed him.

Nachum giggled to himself. He never said hello. He started playing with the pieces of his Lego set.

“Nu?”
my mother said. “
Nu?
What do you say? Nachum is home!” She said it as if she had brought home a surprise Chanukah gift, one that I had been waiting for all this time.

I could not believe my eyes. My crazy brother had finally gone away, and now, voluntarily, she had brought him back? Didn’t she remember the trouble he had made before, the messes, the noises, the nights she had tied his leg to the bed so he wouldn’t wander out of the house? Why was she so happy?

My older sister, Rivky, explained it to me after supper. “Nachum is smarter now,” she said. “Ima said he got better.”

Rivky was extremely good. She was nine, a year older than I was, and did her homework every day. Then she’d help clean up and take care of my baby brother, Avrumi. I did not trust Rivky, with her clean and trimmed nails and stick-straight dark hair, but my oldest brother, Yitzy, eleven years old and not nearly as clean or saintly, said the same thing. He told me that Nachum was cured now. He could say full sentences and even answer questions. My mother had prayed, the rebbe had blessed, and our brother, crazy as a bat before, was healed.

My father said nothing.

But my father did not speak much anyway. He was a practical man, tall and strong, with a short black beard. Everyone said that my father was as straight as a ruler, always to the point, like the time Aunt Chedvah was sick and everyone prayed and hoped, saying, God will help, surely God will help, except my father, who said, “She’ll die this week.” He’d been correct. And like the time he said I was prettier than all my friends. And like the time he said, “Something’s wrong with the boy. He’ll never change.”

My father and I liked to play. When he came home from work in the evenings, I’d run to open the door. Then we’d play catch around the glass dining room table.

“I come home,” my father would say, laughing, “end you dun’ even give me vuhn kees?”

That’s how my father spoke English, in a thick, funny accent, saying “k
ee
s” instead of “kiss,” and “eh” for “ah.” At home we spoke mainly Hebrew, the language of Israel, the country both of my parents had grown up in. Sometimes I spoke English with my father, but no matter how many times I practiced with him, saying, “Kiss. K-
iiih-s.
Kiss!,
” he said, “K
ee
s.”

“No!” I would shout. “I am not giving you any k
ee
ses!”

I kissed my father every day. I’d jump on him, he’d lift me up high, and I would put my arms around his neck. But my father’s beard was itchy, it scratched my cheek, so the day Nachum came home, I said no. There were no more free kisses. I wanted payment.

My father chuckled. He laid a chair on the floor sideways between the door and the glass table, blocking my escape.

“Uh-kay,” he said. “How much you vant? How much?”

I jumped excitedly. “A hundred! I want a hundred!”

“Nuh problem,” he declared. “I give you vuhn hundred.”

I knew that trick.

“Not one hundred kisses! One hundred dollars!”

My father sprinted around the table. “Nuh vay! I give you vuhn hundred keeses!”

Shrieking happily, I fled the dining room, running down the narrow hallway. I rushed toward the bathroom at the end of the hall to hide, but Nachum’s bedroom was right in between, and he came out just as I passed by. I swerved wildly around him, my elbow brushing him roughly.

Nachum froze.

Then he screamed. “Eeeeeeeeee!”

He threw his hands up, as if pushing bees away. He blinked frantically, squinting as though he was staring into the noon sun. Then he froze again.

My father walked up the hall, straight and fast like a soldier, and leaned over my brother. He lifted up Nachum’s chin. “What happened?” he asked in Hebrew. “What happened, Nachum? What happened?”

Nachum did not look up. He pushed his head down and to the side, his eyes reaching for the emptiness behind my father, at the dark end of the hallway.

“Nachum?”

My brother moved quickly, walking hurriedly to the empty space. My father looked after him. His eyes darkened. I bounced up and down, waving my hands.

“Abba, Abba, you can’t catch me! Catch me, catch me!”

But my father was watching Nachum. The twinkle in his eyes was gone. He did not play catch with me again that evening.

My mother was tall and strong too. Her wig, a bright copper red, was the color of her real hair, and when she spoke, her voice was commanding. During the week, in the early mornings, my mother taught in the ultraorthodox girls’ high school, and once, during a school holiday party, three of her students gathered around me, leaning over, and asked furtively, “Are you very scared of your mother?”

Everyone said I looked like my mother, but I did not. My eyes were hazel like hers, it’s true, but they never blazed the way hers did when she meant business, no matter how much I practiced in the mirror. And though I’d colored my hair with a bright red marker, the color had washed right off in the bath, leaving me with plain brown. Maybe I looked like my mother, but in a short and bland version, with buck teeth, and cheeks that were chubby and round while my mother’s cheekbones were high and firm.

Nachum looked like neither of my parents. He just looked like himself. One afternoon, a neighbor watching him run like the wind down the block called him a beautiful child. She said he had a perfect heart-shaped face, and pretty, curving eyes. She thought the freckles scattered over his face were adorable, and those two dimples that appeared when he smiled—just so cute.

I didn’t see the pretty in Nachum no matter which way I looked at him, and I looked closely at my brother all that first week after his return to check if he was cured.

But Nachum wasn’t cured. He still blinked his eyes as though there were pebbles in them. I knew because I’d thrown a pebble at him in our backyard to see what he would do, and he jumped up and down, making crazy faces and flailing his arms just as he used to.

True, Nachum could say words now. The day before, he’d said an entire sentence.

“The chain. The chain. The chain broked on my bike.”

But then the chain was fixed, and he jumped on his bike and was gone, the light in his eyes turned inward, like before.

I asked my mother why Nachum was still crazy. She said I should stop calling him crazy. I asked my mother if he was still retarded. She said I should stop calling him retarded. I asked my mother if the year in Israel had made Nachum cured. “A little bit,” she said. “He is better.”

My mother said Nachum would go to a special school called Chush. There they would finish curing him. I asked her how long it would take. She smiled at my question.

“Only God knows,” she said quietly. “We’ll see.”

My mother gave Nachum away the summer after first grade. It was then that she told us we were going to Israel to visit family. I had never been to Israel before, had never met my relatives, and my mother said we would have a good time.

In Israel, we had aunts, cousins, and my mother’s mother, poised and beautiful as she’d always been. Everyone lived in the holy city of Jerusalem alongside hundreds and thousands of ultraorthodox religious Jews who were just like us. My grandmother lived in the center of the city, in the third-floor apartment of an old stone building, the place where my mother and her two sisters had grown up.

When I told my teacher we were going to Israel, she smiled. She said that I was lucky to be visiting the Holy Land, a place where only Jews lived. Because it was there that the Messiah would take us when he redeemed the Jewish nation from our long exile. And then we’d fly to Jerusalem on the wings of an eagle.

On the plane taking us to the Holy Land, I had pretended that Nachum was not my brother. Instead, I closed my eyes and imagined that I was flying on an eagle. It was hard with my baby brother screeching and Nachum climbing into the overhead compartment. Then he sat down in his seat and began to rock—back, forth, back, forth, as though there was a lullaby deep inside his head, one that only he could hear. The lady across from me stared at him wide-eyed. I nodded sympathetically. He was not my brother. Nachum only stopped rocking once the plane took off.

Ten sticky hours later, we arrived in the Holy Land. We stood around my mother, six children waiting for a dozen suitcases. I wanted to run ahead to the suitcases, tumbling like bowling balls out of the gaping mouth of the baggage tunnel, but my mother did not let me. Instead, she sternly told me and my four-year-old sister, Miri, to stand this close, to each hold one of Nachum’s hands, and to never let go. Then she turned, pushing the baggage cart ahead.

I glumly held Nachum’s pinky finger as we marched toward the conveyor belt. That’s when I saw that there were goyim in Israel. They were all over, in every corner and space. In fact, I barely saw any Jews.

I let go of Nachum’s pinky finger. Miri looked at me. Then she let go too.

“Where are the Jews?” I asked. My sister shrugged, her thumb wedged securely in her mouth.

“Where are the Jews?” I repeated.

“Jews?” my mother said, placing my whimpering baby brother in his carriage. “Here. There. Everywhere.”

I looked everywhere. I saw men without
kippas,
in jeans, women without head coverings wearing pants. Just plain regular goyim like the ones we already had in New York.

I also saw soldiers. They were walking casually among the goyim, in green uniforms and dark berets. The soldiers wore black boots and armbands with symbols on them. Over their shoulders they slung long black guns.

I could not understand. I was looking for the real Jews, men like my father, with beards,
payos,
and large black
kippas.
Women like my mother, with long skirts and wigs covering their hair.

Yitzy said that the people around us were the secular Jews.

“Secular,” I repeated. “What are secular Jews?”

“Jews who live like the goyim. They don’t live the right way like us. They do sins.”

“It can’t be,” I said. “Israel is filled with Jews, and Jews wear black
kippas.
”

Yitzy said I was stupid. He was already ten, three years older, and knew better.

“Watch the baby,” my mother commanded. “Where’s Nachum?”

She looked frantically around.

“Nachum? Nachum? Where is he? Where is he?”

Nachum had been right here. Then he was somewhere else. My mother shook her finger angrily in my face, but I told her that it was not my fault. I had held on to Nachum’s pinky finger as tight as I could. It was he who had let go.

My mother found Nachum on the other side of the conveyor belt and pulled him back to where we sat impatiently on the shiny floor. She sat him up on top of the suitcase pile, where Yitzy watched him carefully as we waited for the rest of our baggage to come tumbling out.

I asked my mother if it was true what Yitzy said about secular Jews. Heaving a suitcase onto the cart, she said, “The black suitcases are here. Only the blue ones are missing. Rivky, look out for the luggage with the duct tape!”

So I asked her again. And she said yes, yes, it was true. But it was all right. I didn’t have to worry. Because one day Mashiach would come, and the
kippa-
less Jews of Israel would repent.

We stayed in Israel for six weeks. Aunt Zahava, my mother’s older sister, had found an apartment for us just a few buildings down from where she lived on the corner of Gershon Street.

My mother and Nachum went away a lot. My siblings and I played with our cousins in Aunt Zahava’s house. I also played with Chayala, the neighbor, whose birthday was the same as mine.

Chayala showed me how to play
kugelach,
a children’s game of toss and catch using five cubic stones. She also taught me fast Hebrew songs. One day she took me to the tiny corner grocery to buy a bag of milk for her mother. We sang songs all the way there about the beautiful day, about God the Almightiest, and about the Messiah, who’d come tomorrow.

Just then a soldier turned a corner. He passed us with his long black gun. The soldier did not look at us but strode ahead in his big boots, the gun swinging on his back.

I stared. I asked Chayala if the soldier was a real Jew. Chayala said that he was, but not the right kind. “Good Jews don’t fight,” she explained. “He is one of the Jews who don’t keep the Torah or daven. They believe in strength and killing, not in
Emunah Ba’Hashem,
faith in God. Jews like us do not join the army. We don’t wear green uniforms or hold guns. Good Jews pray to Heaven and study the Torah. That is why Israel is always saved.”

I wondered if the soldier knew this. I wondered if he knew that he was going to hell. Chayala said a girl in her class had a brother who went mad one day and joined the army. Everyone in the community prayed for his soul but it was too late. In the army, he fell in love. He fell in love with another soldier—a lady kind. The worst kind of all.

The boy’s father, Chayala said, did not leave the house for weeks, so great was his humiliation. As for the soldier and the lady, they moved away and nobody ever saw them again.

I sighed sympathetically. Chayala nodded. “This is what happens if you go into the army,” she said.

On the last day of our trip in Israel, my mother took me and Rivky to the hills outside Jerusalem where my ancestors were buried.

The hills outside Jerusalem are a holy place. Thousands of Jews lie beneath their sacred ground, and it is here that descendants and followers come to pray, putting pebbles on fading gravestones, asking the departed for help from the heavens.

My mother handed me a laminated sheet and told me to recite the psalms printed on it, but I didn’t want to. It was hot in the hills, and outside the small mausoleum where my ancestors lay buried there was no shade from the vengeful sun. Bored and irritated, I wandered between the uneven lines of graves, gathering pebbles left on headstones into neat little mounds. Then I sat in the mausoleum, watching my mother and sister pray as two bearded men stood outside, patiently waiting for them to finish.

Other men waited behind those two because my ancestors had been holy men, and many came to pray at their graves.

After we left, Rivky said that it was disrespectful to be bored in a graveyard, and forbidden to play with pebbles left for the sacred dead. But I stuck my tongue out at my goody-goody sister and her righteous babble.

“I made the messy pebbles into neat piles,” I told her. “The sacred dead like it much better that way.”

“No, they don’t,” Rivky said. “The dead don’t care about such things.”

“Yes, they do,” I said loudly. “They don’t want pebbles all messed up on their graves.”

Rivky turned to my mother, waiting for her agreement, but my mother said that it really didn’t matter.

“We’re going to Aunt Itta now. Enough with the fighting.”

Aunt Itta and Uncle Zev and their daughters, Ayalah and Batya, also lived in Jerusalem, in a fourth-floor apartment on a road near the bottom of a hill. The street they lived on was called Rabbi Yehuda or Rabbi Shimon Street. Or maybe it was Rabbi Levy Street. In Jerusalem many streets are named after rabbis. I just called it Rabbi Holy Man Street.

Aunt Itta and Uncle Zev did not have air-conditioning. They said they did not need any on Rabbi Holy Man Street. Jerusalem’s air was pure and fresh, and when you breathed it in, you no longer felt hot.

This was not true. I had breathed Jerusalem’s air all day long, both in and out, and I was still hot.

In the fourth-floor apartment, my sixteen-year-old cousin Ayalah told me to stop whining.

“Come here, and stand by the windows,” she said. “See the beautiful hills? Here you feel the breeze.” Then she gave me sugar puffs and brushed my hair, twisting it into two short braids.

Fourteen-year-old Batya, the gentler one, smiled and gave me four colorful erasers. “I have more,” she said very quietly. “I’ll give them to you when your sisters aren’t looking.”

I liked my cousin Batya, with her bouncing black curls and pleasant, round face. I also liked her because she said that I was very sweet. I liked Ayalah too, just not as much. She was more serious, less cheerful, her dark eyes more reserved. Ayalah was taller and thinner than her sister and did not have the same easy laugh, but Aunt Itta said that Ayalah was very smart. When she finished high school, she would study for a degree in special education. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I knew that to pursue it you had to be very smart.

My uncle Zev, my father’s brother and a renowned scholar, sat at the table studying a holy book. He looked up every once in a while and smiled. With his almost white beard and gentle eyes, he looked very nearly like a saint. My aunt, with her plain, chin-length wig and old-fashioned glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, looked just like the matronly wife of a near saint. I had three more cousins, all boys, but one was already married, and the other two were in yeshiva somewhere, where they studied the Torah all day.

Everyone hovered over Nachum. My mother and aunt conversed in low, urgent tones, watching my brother, who sat by himself in the corner, setting colored wooden blocks in perfect patterns and rocking softly back and forth. I chased Miri around the dining room table until we broke a glass cup.

Then we said our good-byes. Back at the apartment we had rented, Aunt Zahava and her husband, Tzvi, helped carry down our suitcases. Then we drove in a white taxi to the airport in Tel Aviv. Nachum did not come with us. He stayed with Aunt Itta and Uncle Zev on Rabbi Holy Man Street in Jerusalem, near the bottom of the hill.

On the plane going back to New York, I watched a Disney movie. As my siblings and mother slept, I ate the bag of meringues that she had hidden in the carry-on, the ones Aunt Itta had made for us for the way home. When my mother woke up and saw what I’d done, she was really angry. I said I was sorry but I was not.

I did not ask my mother why Nachum had stayed, or if he’d ever come back. It was good enough that he was gone.

Back home in Flatbush, my cousin Shaindel asked why Nachum had not come back with us.

I shrugged. “Don’t know,” I said, slurping my dripping cherry Popsicle.

“Is it ’cause he’s cuckoo?” she wanted to know.

I licked my fingers, then stuck out my tongue as far as I could.

“Is my tongue red like blood?” I asked.

Shaindel said it wasn’t.

I ignored her question about my brother and went to the bathroom to look in the mirror and see for myself whether my tongue was red like blood.

Things were quiet in our home without Nachum. He was only a year younger than I was, but we had never played together. Nachum played only by himself. When I tried to share with him, he blinked, flailed his hands, and sometimes gave a piercing shriek, and I didn’t want to play with him anymore. It was better when he was away. And after our trip to Israel, I thought things would stay like that forever.