wasn’t the only such example. In fact, my aunt peopled the home with characters from the Old Country. The rope-maker from her town had turned up here and was overseeing the kosher kitchen. The tenant farmer’s son had become the house doctor. The cantor was the same one who used to lead the prayers in the big synagogue. The doctor assured me her confusion was caused by hardening of the arteries, but I had my own interpretation. My aunt was running away from the old age home, escaping back to the shtetl. She was going home, back to her youth, back to her roots. Step by step, as if descending a ladder, she was returning to her beginnings, her own Genesis.
One Sunday evening, she called me by the name of her sister, my mother.
“Pesenyu,” she said, “I have something to tell you, but remember, don’t tell a soul.” She moved her chair closer to mine. Her eyes sparkled, and her white hair peeked out from under her kerchief like the unruly curls of a young girl.
“Listen to this,” she said. “Motele Shoyber has turned up again. How he figured out where I live, I have no idea. Please, Pesenyu, don’t breathe a word to Papa.”
She looked me in the eye, then smiled as if to someone behind me. I turned aside, not wanting her to see that I knew she was rambling.
“He’s walking back and forth in front of the window,” she said, “just like in the good old days. I plead with him — ‘How can this be, Motele, you have a wife and children, what do you want with me?’
“‘You’re my one true love,’ he answers — ‘it was ordained in heaven.’
“Last night I had just finished saying the prayer for the end of the Sabbath. The lights hadn’t yet been turned on. All of a sudden I hear someone tapping at the window — not banging, God forbid, but gently, pleadingly. I look out — it’s Motl.
“‘What are you doing here in all this rain?’ I ask.
“‘Open up, Rokhele,’ he begs me. He flashes a look with his Gypsy eyes. I go hot and cold. I’m scared to death — Papa could walk in at any moment. But Motl won’t give up.
“‘Rokhele, darling, open the window, I’m dying for you!’ His red-hot eyes burn holes in the windowpane. I cover my face. I don’t want to look at him. I don’t want to see the net he’s spreading for me. I grab the holy book lying on the table. All the virtues of my mother and father come to my aid. And even though I don’t turn around again, I can tell he’s still there — so sad, so forlorn.”
My aunt cried, and I cried along with her.
All summer she fantasized about Motele. By the beginning of autumn, she was slipping rapidly. Around Hanukkah, she had become a little girl . . . running around barefoot, washing her mother’s noodle-board in the river . . . setting down the noodle-board in the water and swimming away with the current.
Her mind didn’t always wander. These excursions into the past took place mostly in the evening, when she would lay aside her prayer book and sit in her room with only the walls for company. She seldom complained about her fate and even stopped envying the women who had children of their own.
“God works in mysterious ways,” she would say. “We human beings with our limited understanding cannot comprehend God’s ways.”
I lay in bed thinking about our limited understanding. The March wind had blustered away somewhere, taking with it the keening women who spoke to me in my aunt’s voice. I also thought about the philosopher who said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Indeed, I knew a little. Lately, when she’d begun calling me Mama, I knew that her end was near. I’d even asked the secretary to call me promptly at the slightest change in her condition.
Well, they had let me know after it was too late, and now God’s mysterious ways were enough to make me lose my mind.
Again and again I imagined her despair. She’d been counting on my last visit. She’d had so much to say, so much she wanted to hear. I imagined how she’d wrestled with Death, mounted her resistance, waited and hoped that at any moment the door would open and I would arrive. Until five in the evening she held off the Angel of Death. When night fell, her thoughts became muddled as usual, her wits distracted. Then, only then, was she defeated.
If only they had called me in time, I could have been standing at her death bed, perhaps wearing the white wings of the Angel Gabriel. I would have opened the gates to the Garden of Eden for her. With all due ceremony, I would have shown her to the seat she so richly deserved, where the patriarchs and matriarchs and all righteous men and women sing the Song of Praise before the Throne of God.
At daybreak I arose, ironed the garment she’d sewn for herself, wrapped it in tissue paper, and set off for the funeral. In the lobby, the women fell upon me: “How could you have been so cold-hearted? Her wailing could have moved a stone, but you chose not to respond. They said in the office that they’d called you — the poor woman was waiting for you until the moment her soul departed.”
I followed a man who led me down to the basement to identify my aunt’s body. She was lying in an open coffin, wrapped in cheap linen basted together with big stitches.
Frozen with fear, I stood and looked at her. I had to do it — I had to — the demand took hold with iron claws. I looked at my escort. “Get out!” I said in a voice that allowed no opposition. He stared at me, startled, but said nothing.
When he had gone, I unwrapped the shroud with its ruffled collar and frilly sleeves. I pulled it over her thin frame, all the way from her feet to her blue lips. I covered her head with the special burial cap, and over the cap I placed her mother’s white silk kerchief edged with golden fringe. I pulled the kerchief over her closed eyes. Only her long, pointy nose poked out at me.
Bracing myself against fear, against death, against my own feelings, I touched my lips to the silk kerchief, and it seemed to me that with this gesture I freed the imprisoned soul, which then rose, fluttering softly, and wafted away to the exalted place for which it was destined, leaving behind the body as a gift for Mother Earth.
Through the sun-drenched streets of Tel Aviv I follow the coffin carrying my girlhood friend Zosye to her eternal rest. Inside my head, black crows caw loudly around the dead body, blocking the streets and the passersby and the hearse at the head of the procession. Their din prevents me from gaining access to the ways and byways that led Zosye into prostitution.
It is my first visit to Israel. Intending to go to Eilat, I had already checked out of my room in Tel Aviv and packed my toothbrush when the head of our immigrant society called to invite me to the funeral. I have long since learned to skip over the place where my cradle once stood and instead to seek my origins in the stony strata of history — to search for the living source under the sands of the Negev, shadowed by time, to sail through the gates of the desert and steer my ship along its fated course.
I have placed a film of artificial frost over the small window that looks back into my past. There, white trees and dead roses are always in bloom, not as a memorial, but as a reminder that the layer of ice is an illusion, nothing but the thinnest skin stretched over black depths where snakes and scorpions feed on the remains of their unburied victims.
