“Another drag?” says Naomi.
Rachel breathes in but takes the offered toke, drawing in deeply, tasting the sour smoke as she accepts it into her body. Holding, then exhaling. Her head lightens. Her body lightens. Different from the Miltown. Miltown is pedestrian. A mood dampener. This feels as if part of her brain is unmoored and on its own course.
Naomi drops back her head, eyes closed, to soak up the chilly sunlight. “God, I love sunshine,” she declares with a sweet tranquility. And then? Still with her eyes closed to the sunlight, “Can I ask you a question? I mean, it’s kind of a personal thing.”
This should have warned Rachel off, but maybe with the juju, her guard is down. “Sure,” she replies. Honestly, she thinks it’s going to be a question about Aaron or maybe about some sisterly element of feminine biology. Menstrual cycles or tampons. A personal question.
But what Naomi asks her is “Why did you stop painting?”
“Why did I stop?” Perhaps, if she repeats the question aloud, she can stall for time. Because she’s afraid that if she’s not careful, she might actually give a truthful answer. Naomi is unaware of details of the Episode. Aaron passed it off to his family as an anemic attack. Iron-poor blood. Maybe Naomi believes this and maybe she doesn’t, but either way, it was a lie that Rachel has maintained, even though it has created a gap between Naomi and her. A small unspoken thing as painfully annoying as a pebble in a shoe.
“You were so good,” her sister-in-law assures her. “Those ghosts or spirits or whatever. They were scary in a way,” she says, “but really moving too. And then you just stopped.”
“I was sick,” Rachel answers.
“Yeah. I know. The anemia thing. But you didn’t go back. So I’ve always kinda wondered why.”
Rachel has to suddenly concentrate on keeping herself in check. No tears. No tears.
“I’m sorry,” Naomi offers. “I’m upsetting you.” She can see that. “Never mind. Forget I asked.”
“I stopped,” Rachel declares. “Because I was afraid to continue,” she confesses. “I was afraid that if I continued? Something terrible would come out of me. Something,” she says, “unforgivable.”
Night. Alone in the bed. The racket of the elevated West Side freight passes, rattling the bedroom’s window glass. Rachel absorbs the blunt thunder of the tracks completely. Then speaks quietly to the air. “Tell me the story again, Eema.”
The mattress creaks softly.
Which story?
“The story of the drowned kittens.”
Eema is a silhouette, shrouded by the room’s darkness, but she has brought the perfume of the Krematorium to her daughter’s bedroom. Ah. Well. My mother. Your grandmother of blessed memory. You never knew her, I know. But she taught me a lesson when I was very small, which I would never forget.
Rachel smokes in silence, her eyes gleaming with the ruby ember of her cigarette.
A terrible thing had happened, her eema tells her. A frightening thing. I had seen a man drown a bag full of kittens by dropping them over the side of the Weidendammer Brücke. I could hear them, their panicky little meows from inside his burlap sack. And when he tossed them over into the river, he listened for a moment for the sound of the splash. When he heard it, he simply walked off as if he had done nothing. As if he was an innocent man.
I was so—so shocked. So overwhelmed that I lost my voice. It’s true, she says. Your eema didn’t speak for days. I was so utterly racked by guilt. Guilt that I should have stopped him, this criminal. That somehow, I should have rescued those little kittens from their fate. And I felt the remorse of the world on my heart like a heavy stone, she says. Until my mother came into my bedroom one night, just like this, while I was lying in the dark. And she said to me, “Vina. You cannot rescue what cannot be rescued. You cannot save what cannot be saved.”
A beat.
Laughter floats up from the street. Rachel’s eyes are chilled by tears. “And me,” she asks quietly. “What about your little goat, Eema? Can I be rescued still?”
A police siren whines sharply past, and a sudden red light invades the room from the window, exposing her eema as she must have looked on the day of her final Selektion before the ovens took her. A corpse stripped naked, skeletal, her hair nothing but a wiry scrub. Eyes bottomless. Arm imprinted with her number. Rescued? Only by your own hands, she says.
The siren and flashing red fade, but as the room passes back into darkness, Rachel is alone. Until she hears the front door opening, then closing. A beat of silence is followed by the noise of Aaron clearing his throat. A gleam of light as a floor lamp in the living room is switched on. “Aaron?” she calls out to him.
The lamplight invades as he opens the bedroom door and enters in his shirtsleeves, sitting on the edge of their bed with a chirrup of springs. He loosens his necktie with a hook of two fingers. When he speaks, he sounds utterly spent. “You know, I think you’re right. I don’t understand. I really don’t.” He pauses. The glow from the living room lamp paints his eyes. “I don’t understand what those people did. To you,” he says. “To your family. I try, I honestly do. I watched the newsreels when I was still in the army. Battalion ran screenings. A.P.S. footage from, ya’ know, from liberated camps. There were grown men who couldn’t stand it. Some were vomiting. Sick with sobbing. Soldiers doing this, you understand,” he stresses. “Trained men. Some of these guys had seen combat, yet they just couldn’t stomach what they were seeing on the screen. But me? I stayed. I watched them all. I had no choice. As a Jew, I felt I couldn’t just look away. But then whattaya do? What’s a person supposed to do after seeing all that?” he asks.
“To me, I guess, there was only one answer. It seemed so simple really. Hitler murdered six million Jews? So we make more. Shouldn’t that be what we’re doing? I mean, shouldn’t that be our job?” he asks his wife but does not appear to expect a reply. “I keep thinking: It’s just her fear. Just her fear, and all I gotta do is be patient. But down deep, I have to admit that—to me—Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz? They’re all just words. Just the names of places that might as well be on the moon. Maybe I saw the newsreels, but I have no idea, not the slightest actual idea, what they really mean to you.”
His words drift away.
Rachel wipes tears from her face. “It’s not your fault,” she tells him.
Aaron expels a sigh. Rachel sits up to guide them both back down to the bed, where they spoon together, Aaron still dressed and in his shoes.
But when she closes her eyes, feeling him nuzzling into the back of her neck, all she sees is a gust of blinding snow, obscuring the outline of the white mountain that is rising to meet her.
17.
A Jew from Flatbush
He inspects the nose-hair situation by examining the reflection of his inner nostrils. Funny how he can remember his pop doing the same thing. He sees the old man there in the mirror, staring back at him from his own reflection.
“Com’ere,” he hears Pop command, in that flat summoning tone that always signals trouble, motioning him over to the cash register. He can tell what’s coming next, the whack on the side of the head, but he obeys anyway and absorbs the whack when it comes. The whack that’s not supposed to punish him but just knock some sense into his kop. “Look at this,” his father instructs. “How many times I gotta tell you, huh? You don’t mix the ten-dollar bills in with the twenties, okay? How many times?” he wants to know. “It makes you look like you’re stealing.”