“Geboren ist ein Mädchen!” A girl is born! The German announces it.
Ezra is presenting the baby girl to her mother, whose arms are outstretched, sobbing with shock and joy, her hair a sweaty nest, her face gleaming, as her husband delivers her new daughter into her arms. “Such a beautiful gem,” she cries, “such a perfect, beautiful gem.” Ezra is laughing now. The German is laughing, a sharp, shared cackle of glee, face-to-face, as they shake each other’s blood-pinked hands.
Rachel stares. Aaron has finally managed to look up and spots his wife above them. “Rach,” he shouts out. The wild smile on his face makes him look like he’s having a seizure. “Can you believe it?” he wants to know. “Huh? The damnedest thing! Just like that—a baby!”
Daniela turns her head, smiling beatifically up at Rachel. Her eyes shimmer as the baby squalls, and Rachel hears her mother’s voice from behind. Life, tsigele, she’s saying. It’s life.
And then Rachel looks at the super. Standing up. Standing back. His hands stained. He digs a handkerchief from his pocket and begins to wipe them. That is when he catches Rachel’s eye, but he quickly looks away, donning a grin as the happy father slaps him on the back in a chummy manner. Ezra is grinning too as if he’s deranged, his expression exploding with joy. “Thank you, Mr. Bauer! Thank you!” he’s barking. The German continues to grin. But it makes no difference. Rachel can only believe that this is not the first time this Hun has wiped Jewish blood from his hands.
Beth Israel Hospital, First Avenue and 16th Street. Hallways of linoleum and fluorescent lights. Rachel stands in the viewing section of the maternity ward, separated by a large plate-glass window from the cluster of infants in hospital bassinets. People come and go around her, grinning as they wave through the glass. Cooing, delighted, it seems, at their own reflections. Tapping on the glass pane for attention. But Rachel stands there, staring. She is alone when Aaron returns with two paper cups of coffee. He is wearing his coat, no hat, his collar open and his tie undone. It must have started to rain outside, because his shoulders are dotted with raindrops, and he smells of it. “Where did you go?” she asks as she accepts the paper cup. “Timbuktu?”
“The coffee machine was out of order, so I had to go to a deli down the street. Probably tastes like drek, but at least it’s hot.”
Rachel sips. It does taste like drek, but it’s not hot. Aaron drinks too but makes no comment. His interest is elsewhere, peering through the glass. He almost laughs. “Who knew the super is actually Dr. Kildare?”
Rachel says nothing.
“So. Look at this,” Aaron says in amazement, gazing through the glass at the sea of babies tucked into their numbered basinets. Their blankets a wavy ocean of pink and blue. “Do we know which one is which?”
“Number seven, I think,” Rachel replies.
Aaron nods. “Lucky number seven.” The manic glee of the birth on the stairs has given way to a certain heaviness in him. “She’s cute,” he admits. “Has her father’s receding hairline.”
“They’re all cute,” Rachel says. “They’re all beautiful.” She falls silent for a moment but then remembers something she once heard. “Did you know?” she asks. “It is said that the Messiah is born into every generation.”
His eyebrows lift wearily. “Is it? Said by who?”
“I don’t know. The Sanhedrin? Whomever it is who says things. But it is said.”
“Okay. But I gotta tell you, I don’t think I see the Messiah in this particular batch. I mean, wouldn’t there be a glow or something? The Star of Beth Israel twinkling over the kid’s head?”
Rachel doesn’t respond. She sips the bitter coffee.
You were a precious treasure, she hears her Eema say. Standing beside her as she recalls her in the flush of her success. The day you were born, I thought you were a gift from God Himself. “Behold, I give before you this day the life and the good.”
“So what’s gonna happen to us?” she hears Aaron ask her. It’s a simple question. At least he makes it sound like it’s a simple question. And maybe it is. Maybe it’s just a simple matter of logistics. But Rachel has no answer for him.
27.
The Accuracy of Silence
Daniela returns with the baby, a crinkly eyed little elflette. They plan to name her Joanna Sara after Ezra’s great-aunt of blessed memory. Rachel swallows but smiles. According to the Reich’s Law on the Alteration of Family and Personal Names, every Jewish male had to adopt “Israel” as a middle name, and every Jewish female, “Sara.” But Nazi policy has no place in the temple, where the rabbi calls out her name for it to be heard in Israel.
And let us say Aymen.
Rachel suffers through the prayer service, as she suffers through an excruciating twenty minutes in the infant’s department of B. Altman’s picking out a white knit layette—hat, sweater, and booties with pink trim. They visit the Weinstocks with fillet of sole and fish sticks for the kids carried from the restaurant. With a Lindy’s cheesecake in a box. But neither she nor Aaron is much interested in staying long.
She sees the German super in the hallway once but hurries up the steps, pretending to be lost in the mail she has just collected from the box.
At the Museum of Modern Art, she stands in front of a Rothko. Before the war, the artist had become an American citizen because he feared that the U.S. government would deport Jews back to Europe. He changed his name from Markus to Mark, from Rothkowitz to Rothko, which still sounded Jewish maybe but wasn’t the name over a delicatessen. And of his canvases? They grew huge and deep. He was quoted as saying that he had “imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.” He also said, “Silence is so accurate.” A statement with which Rachel can only agree.
She would like to trap utter violence within the confines of a canvas. She would like to imprison it there, where it would live out its miserable existence in solitary confinement on the painted surface. But she also craves the accuracy of silence. Its perfect beauty, like the blank silence of an untouched canvas. The silence of a painting before it exists. So at home, she stares at the white canvas stretched across the wooden rectangular frame and tries to imagine how she could possibly capture an image of herself more silent than silence.
But then her mother is there, seated beside her on the sofa, dressed in her studio smock, her hands stained with colors, perfumed with linseed oil. You think it’s a barrier, I know. This white expanse. You think it’s a wall, and you ask yourself: Do I have the strength to break through it? But the wall, Ruchel, is an illusion. It’s not a barrier; it’s simply a screen. A screen that’s hiding the painting, which is already there, hidden behind it. You’ve already finished the painting in your head and in your heart, she says. Every stroke is already in place. All you need do is peel the whiteness away, and the truth of the work will be revealed.
“And that is what I’m afraid of, Eema. It won’t be a beautiful revelation. I’m terrified by that idea. I’m terrified of the ugliness that will come out of me. What kind of monstrosity I will release for all to see.”
Tsigele. Listen to me. For once, please listen. Art is not always beautiful. There is horror and ugliness in the world that must be painted too. It is not beauty; it is truth that’s at the heart of every true artist’s work. So I say—paint your monstrosity. Better it live on the canvas than inside you.