You will never know.
Perel stops. “Have I offended you? If I have, I beg forgiveness. I didn’t mean to mock you.”
She shakes her head: no offense taken.
“Thank you, Yankele. You’re a mensch...” The Rebbetzin glances at her hesitantly, then says: “Your mind is sound. It’s your tongue that’s the problem, you know.”
She tilts her head. She did not know she had a tongue; she assumed she didn’t. No point in giving a tongue to a mute.
Perel drags the bucket of water between them. “Here. Open your mouth.”
Open her mouth? She cannot open her mouth.
It then occurs to her that she has never tried.
“Open your mouth,” Perel says, “and stick out your tongue.”
Clumsy lips part, and in the black glossy surface of the water, she beholds stumpy teeth forming the bars of a cage. She pries them open and gazes down her nose at a runty piece of flesh, lolling in the cavity of her mouth like a deep-sea creature mistakenly hauled to the surface.
A tongue, sure enough, though it hardly deserves the name. It fascinates and repels her. It’s been inside her this whole time and she never knew.
She squeezes her cheeks together, forcing it out farther, and receives another shock.
Her tongue has a waist.
A string, tied so tightly that it causes the gray flesh on either side to bulge out. There’s a knot, too, with a big floppy bow, ends sticking out, begging to be tugged free.
Or — she squeezes her cheeks harder — not a string, but a thin strip of—
Paper?
No wonder she can’t talk.
How exhilarating to finally grasp that the problem is so simple. Simple problem; simple solution.
She reaches up to untie the strip.
Perel shrieks. “No.”
She pauses.
“You must never, ever do that,” Perel says. “Do you understand? Never.”
She nods.
“Tell me: you will never touch that.”
What kind of absurd, cruel demand is that? She can’t tell her anything, not with her tongue tied up like a dog.
“It’s the Divine Name. Written on parchment. If you take it out...” Perel pauses. “Don’t touch it, please.”
She stares sadly at her reflection for a few moments more. The stupid little organ, the pathetic little scrap. They — not her misshapen body, not her glutinous mask of a face — are what make her a monster.
“I’m sorry, Yankele. I shouldn’t have shown it to you. I just didn’t want you to think there was anything wrong with you.”
But there is. And there always will be.
She knows that, now.
And now that she knows the knot is there, she can’t stop feeling it. She scrapes it against the roof of her mouth as the Rebbetzin completes the final two roses in silence.
After cleaning her tools and rinsing her arms in the bucket, Perel dries her forearms and rolls down her sleeves.
“Pour this out for me, please, Yankele?”
Obedient, as always, she carries the bucket to the small arched door set into the garret wall, lifts the iron bar, and dumps the water out onto the cobblestones below.
Perel dries her tools, bundles them in leather, and stores them in the drying cabinet, along with the new spice jar.
“I’m sorry for showing you that. I truly am.”
She nods. She’s already forgiven her.
“I’m going to show you something else. Hopefully it will lighten your heart.” Perel stands on her stool, reaching to the back of a shelf. She removes an object wrapped in wool and tied in twine, begins undoing the knots.
“Yudl must never know,” she says. “He’d be furious.”
Unfurling the wool, she holds up an astonishingly lifelike model of Rebbe’s head.
“It was an experiment, to see how realistic I could make it. You can’t use a wheel for something like this, you have to trust your fingers. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s very good. Is that vain? I meant to destroy it after I was done, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. More vanity. I want my creations to live on. I also think — maybe I’m being self-serving — but I think it would be a shame if no one were ever to know what he looked like.” The Rebbetzin grins nervously. “Nu? What do you think?”
I think it’s perfect.
Perel contemplates the sculpture. “I don’t know. Perhaps I’ve done a sinful thing. But it can’t be good, to keep everything buried.” A hand flutters toward the ceiling. “Yudl says God is best reached in a state of joy. I try, Yankele, but then I think about Leah, the sadness of the world overtakes me. I feel sometimes that I am standing in a river of tears. What does one do with that? Me, I have to keep my hands busy.”
Perel rewraps the sculpture, replacing it at the back of the shelf, pinning the cabinet doors shut with a wooden peg.
“I’m glad I showed you, Yankele. I think that you understand what I’m feeling, whether I tell you or not.” The Rebbetzin pauses. She looks abashed. “And I know you’re unhappy with the way you are, and that makes my heart ache. You don’t have to speak for me to know.”
She nods again.
“I wish I could hear what you’re thinking. Being with you is wonderful but it’s sometimes like listening to someone chewing in another room and guessing what they’re eating.”
Perel shakes her head, looks at her, green glowing eyes. “I’d give much to know what is in your mind — the exact words.”
I love you.
Chapter forty-seven
Sam’s voice over the phone was subdued and remote. “It would be better to have this conversation in person.”
Jacob said, “Did you hear me, Abba?”
“You need to come home, Jacob.”
“I’m flying out tomorrow.”
“There’s no sooner flight?”
Jacob paced the sidewalk outside Radcliffe Science Library. Exiting students gave him a wide berth. “I’m in the middle of an investigation.”
“You had enough time to call me.”
“Yeah, well, sorry, but I’m kind of pretty freaked out.”
“Getting upset is not good for you.”
“I wouldn’t be upset if you’d just give me a straight answer.”
“What’s the question?”
“Did you know?”
“Every family has stories. Who can say?”
A Talmudic dodge; Jacob wanted to scream. “Why didn’t you want me to come to Prague?”
“I explained to you. I’m an old man, I didn’t want to be left alone—”
“You told me to visit the cemetery. You didn’t tell me to visit the shul. Why?”
Sam, softer, sadder, tinged by fear: “Please come home.”
“I’ll tell you why: because you knew I would see it.”
“How in the world would I know that? Jacob. Listen to yourself. You sound—”
“What. What do I sound. You can say it. Say it.”
“I’m concerned about you,” Sam said.
Jacob laughed, flailing his arm up, nearly whacking a girl wearing a bicycle helmet. “You know what, Abba? I’m concerned about me, too.”
“Then come home.”
“Don’t, don’t, don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Condescend to me.”
“I’m not—”
“You are, when my brain is, like, throwing up, and you’re sitting there telling me that the remedy is to come home and have a cup of tea with you. I’m busy. Okay? I work. I have a job, all right, and as far as jobs go, it’s kind of fucking important, so will you please, please stop talking to me like I’m six.”