The Gravedigger's Daughter Part 10

Elzbieta was the oldest, Ma said. Twelve or thirteen. Freyda, she was the youngest, Rebecca's age. And Joel was somewhere between.

Rebecca had seen pictures of people in newspapers and magazines but she had never seen photographs, that you could hold in your hand. The Schwarts did not own a camera, for such was a luxury and they could not afford luxuries as Pa said. Strange it seemed to Rebecca, and wonderful, that a picture could be of someone you knew, whose name was known to you. And of children! A little girl Rebecca's age!

Ma said these were her little nieces and nephew. Her sister Dora's children.

So strange to hear Anna Schwart speak of nieces, nephews. Sister!

These attractive strangers were not Schwarts but Morgensterns. The name "Morgenstern" was utterly new, and melodic.

In the photographs the Morgenstern children were smiling uncertainly. Almost you might think they were looking at you, because you could look so closely at them. Elzbieta was frowning as she smiled. Or maybe she was not smiling at all. Nor Joel, who squinted as if a light was s.h.i.+ning in his eyes. The smallest, Freyda, was the most beautiful child, though you could not see her face clearly for she stood with her head bowed. Shyly she smiled as if to beg Don't look at me please!

In that instant Rebecca saw that Freyda was her sister.

In that instant Rebecca saw that Freyda had the same dark, shadowed eyes that she had. And except that Freyda had fluffy bangs brushed down on her forehead, and Rebecca's forehead was bare, their braided hair was the same. In one picture, Rebecca's favorite for you could see Freyda the clearest, the little girl appeared to be tugging at her braid over her left shoulder in the way that Rebecca sometimes did with hers when she was nervous.

"'Frey-da.' She can sleep in my bed."

"That's right, Rebecca," Ma said, squeezing her arm in approval, "she can sleep in your bed."

Pa was saying that the Morgensterns would be "making the crossing" along with nine hundred other pa.s.sengers on a s.h.i.+p called the Marea, in mid-July, sailing from Lisbon, Portugal, to New York City. They would be journeying then upstate to Milburn, to stay with the Schwarts until they were "settled" in this country.

Rebecca was excited to hear this: her cousins would be crossing the ocean, that Rebecca's family had crossed before she was born? A strange little story came to her the way such stories often did, like dreams, swift as an eyeblink and vanished before she knew it: that another baby girl would be born, then. The way Rebecca had been born. And so when the Morgensterns came to live with themwould there be a new baby?

It would seem to Rebecca that, yes there would be a new baby in the house. But she knew not to mention this to anyone, not even Ma, for she was beginning to understand that some things she believed to be true were only dreams inside her head.

Herschel said sullenly there wouldn't be enough room for them all if these new people came, Chrissake would there? "Bad enough livin like hogs."

Quickly Gus said his cousin Joel could sleep with him in his bed.

And quickly Ma said yes there would be room!

Pa seemed not so certain as Ma, more worried, stoop-shouldered and rubbing his knuckles against his eyes in that way he had, that made him look so tired, and old-seeming, saying yes the house was small, but he and his brother-in-law could enlarge it, maybe. Convert the woodshed into an extra room. Leon was a carpenter, they could work together. Before the Morgensterns arrived, he and the boys could start. Clear out the trash and level the dirt floor and lay down planks for floorboards. Get some tar paper sheets, for insulation.

"Tar paper!" Herschel snorted. "Like from the dump, huh?"

A mile away on the Quarry Road was the Milburn towns.h.i.+p dump. Herschel and Gus often explored there, as did other neighborhood children. Sometimes they dragged things home, useful items like castoff rugs, chairs, lamp shades. It was believed that Jacob Schwart, too, explored the dump, though never at any hour when he might be observed.

The dump was one of the places Rebecca was forbidden to go, ever. Not with her brothers and especially not alone.

Ma was saying in her quick warm voice she could fix all the rooms nicer. She had never gotten around to doing all she'd meant to do, she'd been so tired when they first moved in. Now she could put up curtains. She would sew curtains herself. Ma was speaking in a way that made her children uneasy for they had not heard her speak like this before. Ma was smiling a bright nervous smile showing the crack between her teeth, and Ma was brus.h.i.+ng at her hair with both hands as if the moths had gotten into it.

Ma said, "Yes you will see. There is room."

Herschel s.h.i.+fted his shoulders inside his s.h.i.+rt that was missing half its b.u.t.tons, and said the house was too small for how-many people to live in: ten? "Ten f.u.c.kin people like in a animal pen, that's bad enough now for Chrissake. The f.u.c.kin stove ain't any good except for this room, an the G.o.d-d.a.m.n well water tastes like skunk, an me an Gus is always b.u.mpin into each other in our d.a.m.n room, how're you gonna fit a new 'brother' in it? s.h.i.+t."

Without warning, swift as a copperhead snake striking, Pa's hand flew out to whack Herschel on the side of the head. Herschel recoiled howling his d.a.m.n eardrum was burst.

"That won't be all that's going to be burst, you don't shut your mouth and keep it shut."

Ma said, pleading, "Oh please."

Gus who was still hunched over the table, unmoving, afraid to look up at his father, said another time that Joel could sleep with him, it was O.K. with him.

Herschel said loudly, "Who in h.e.l.l is gonna sleep with him, p.i.s.sin the bed every night! It's bad enough sleepin in the same d.a.m.n room like hogs."

But Herschel was laughing now. Rubbing his left ear that Pa had hit, in a way to show it didn't hurt much.

Saying, "f.u.c.k I don't care, I ain't gonna stay in this s.h.i.+t-hole. If there's a war, see, I'm gonna en-list. Guys I know, they're gonna en-list an so am I, I'm gonna fly a plane an drop bombs like what's-itthe Blitz. Yeah, I'm gonna."

Rebecca tried not to hear the loud voices. She was peering at Freyda, her sister Freyda who (you could almost believe this!) was peering up at her. Now they knew each other. Now they would have secrets between them. Rebecca dared to lift the photograph to the light to look inside it somehow. Oh, she wanted to see Freyda's feet, what kind of shoes Freyda was wearing! She seemed to know that Freyda was wearing nicer shoes than she, Rebecca, had. Because Freyda's little jumper-dress was nicer than anything Rebecca had. Kaufbeuren Rebecca was thinking in Germany across the sea.

It seemed to Rebecca, yes she could see into the photograph just a little. Her cousins were standing outside, behind a house somewhere. There were trees in the background. In the gra.s.s, what looked like a dog with white markings on his face, a pointy-nosed little dog, his tail outstretched.

Rebecca whispered: "Frey-da."

It was so, Freyda's hair had been parted in the center of her head neatly, and plaited like Rebecca's. In two thick pigtails the way Ma plaited Rebecca's hair that was inclined to snarl, Ma said, like tiny spider nests. Ma plaited Rebecca's hair tight so that it made her temples ache, Ma said it was the only way to tame flyaway hair.

The only way to tame flyaway little girls.

"Frey-da." They would brush and plait each other's hair, they promised!

It was time for the younger children to go to bed. Herschel stomped out of the house without another word but Gus and Rebecca wanted to linger, to ask more questions about their cousins from Kaufbeuren, Germany.

Pa said no. He was returning the photographs to an envelope Rebecca had not seen before, of tissue-thin blue paper.

Still the moths fluttered around the bare lightbulb. There were more now, tiny white animated wings. Gus was saying he never knew there was cousins in the family before. d.a.m.n he never knew there was anybody in the family!

15.

Those summer weeks when she was never alone. Always Rebecca would remember. Playing by herself it wasn't by herself but with her new sister Freyda. Always the girls were chattering and whispering together. Oh, Rebecca was never lonely now!no need to hang around her mother so much, nudging Ma's knees till Ma pushed her away complaining it was too hot for fooling around.

Herschel was always giving his little sister presents, things he found in the dump he'd bring home for her, there were two dolls he'd brought for her called Maggie and Minnie, and now Maggie was Freyda's doll, and Minnie was Rebecca's doll, and the four of them played together around the side of the house in the hollyhocks. Maggie was the prettier of the dolls, so Rebecca gave Maggie to Freyda because Freyda was the prettier of the sisters, and more special because she was from Kaufbeuren in Germany across the ocean. Maggie was a girl-doll with plastic rippled brown hair and wide-open blue eyes but Minnie was just a naked rubber doll-baby with a bald head and a corroded pug face, very dirty. The way Herschel had given Minnie to Rebecca, he'd tossed the rubber doll high into the air making a wailing-baby noise with his mouth and it landed with a thud at Rebecca's feet scaring her so she'd almost wetted herself. So when Minnie was bad you could discipline her by throwing her onto the ground and it would hardly hurt her but you would not wish to throw Maggie down, ever, for Maggie might break and so Maggie was the better-behaved of the dolls, and obviously smarter because she was older. And Maggie could read words, a little. Pa's old newspapers and magazines Maggie could read while Minnie was just a baby and could not even speak. Of such matters Rebecca and Freyda whispered endlessly in the wild-growing hollyhocks in the very heat of midday so Ma was drawn to come outside to peer at them in wonderment, hands on her hips.

Asking Rebecca what on earth was she doing in that hot dusty place, who was she talking to?and her voice was throaty and cracked and alarmed, and Rebecca turned away blus.h.i.+ng and sullen refusing to look up from the dolls as if no one had spoken at all.

Go away! Go away Freyda and I don't need you.

But Monday was laundry day, and both girls were eager to help.

For Anna Schwart did not leave the stone cottage often, and this was a special time. She would tie a scarf hurriedly around her head to partially hide her face. On even very hot days she would wear one of Herschel's jackets over her shapeless housedress. So that if someone was spying on her (from the cemetery, from behind the crumbling stone wall) they could not see her clearly. Jacob Schwart had tried to shame his wife out of such eccentric behavior, for cemetery visitors certainly noticed her, shook their heads and laughed at the gravedigger's crazy wife, but Anna Schwart ignored him for what did Jacob Schwart know for all his radio-listening and newspaper-reading he knew nothing about their Milburn neighbors. She knew.

Yet the laundry had to be washed in the old was.h.i.+ng machine in the shed, and the soaking-wet clothes pressed through the hand-wringer, and placed in the wicker basket, and the basket had to be hauled out into the backyard, into the bright suns.h.i.+ne and gusty air. And Rebecca helped carry the basket. And Rebecca and Freyda handed Ma things from the basket to be pinned on the old rope clothesline tied between two posts to flap and slap and clapclapclap on windy days. Rebecca made Freyda laugh by pulling an unders.h.i.+rt over her head when Ma's back was turned, or letting a pair of shorts fall into the gra.s.s accidentally-on-purpose like they'd squirmed out of Rebecca's hands, but Freyda took away the unders.h.i.+rt and the shorts to hand to Ma for Freyda was a good girl, Freyda was a serious girl, often Freyda put her forefinger to her lips Shhhh! when Rebecca was being loud or silly.

In Rebecca's bed, they snuggled and cuddled and hugged and sometimes tickled. Rebecca slid Freyda's warm bare arm across her side, over her ribs to snuggle closer so Rebecca could sleep not hearing Pa's radio voices in the night.

Oh, that delicious swoon of a dream: Rebecca and her new sister Freyda walking to school together in matching jumpers and s.h.i.+ny patent leather shoes along the Quarry Road, and along the Milburn Post Road, a mile-and-a-half walk it was to the Milburn Grammar School, and they would be hand in hand like sisters. And they would not be afraid because there were two of them. Except Ma had been saying this year was too soon, she would not let Rebecca go yet. I want my little girl safe with me long as I can. Pa said that Rebecca would have to go to school, she would have to start first grade, why not this year since she knew her ABC's and numerals and could almost read, but Ma insisted No. Not yet. Not for another year. If they come to ask us we will say that she is too young, she is not well, she coughs and cries all the time.

But Rebecca thought: Freyda will be with me now. And Elzbieta.

The sisters would all walk to school together.

Rebecca felt a thrill of triumph, her mother would not be able to prevent her now.

How strange it was that in those weeks of July 1941 there was such excitement in the stone cottage like the humming of bees in the powdery snakeroot flowers you were not supposed to play near for you would be stung, and a sickish sensation beneath like running faster and faster down a hill until you are in danger of falling yet the name Morgenstern was rarely spoken and then only in whispers. By Morgenstern was meant adults as well as children yet Rebecca gave not the slightest thought to her cousins' parents. Freyda! was the only name she cared for. It was as if the others even Elzbieta and Joel did not exist. Especially the adults did not exist.

Or, if these Morgensterns existed, they were but strangers in photographs, a man and a woman in a setting drained of all color, beginning to fade like ghosts.

16.

And so they waited, in the caretaker's stone cottage just inside the front gates of the Milburn cemetery.

And so they waited patiently at first and then with increasing restlessness and anxiety through the second half of July, and into the terrible damp heat of early August in the Chautauqua Valley.

And the Morgensterns who were Anna Schwart's relatives did not come. The uncle, the aunt, the cousins did not come. Though the cottage had been prepared for them, the woodshed cleared out, curtains hung at windows, they did not come. And there was a day, an hour, when at last it was clear that they would not be coming, and Jacob Schwart drove into Milburn to make telephone calls to ascertain that this was true.

"Ask G.o.d why: why such things happen. Not me."

There was the voice of her father, that pierced her heart in its fury, and shame.

It made her feel faint, dazed as if the very floorboards tilted beneath her bare feet, to hear his voice in this way. Yet there was a curious exhilaration in his voice, too. A kind of relief that the worst had happened, he'd antic.i.p.ated from the start. He had been right, and Anna had been wrong, to have hoped.

"Turned back! Nine hundred refugees turned back, to die."

Above the roaring in her ears and the panicked beat of her heart Rebecca heard her parents in the kitchen. Her father's words that were sharp and distinct and her mother's that were not words but sounds, moans of grief.

The shock of hearing her mother crying! Choked ugly sounds like an animal in pain.

Rebecca dared to push open the door a crack. She saw only her father's back, a few feet away. He wore a s.h.i.+rt soaked through with sweat. His hair was graying and straggled past his collar, so thin at the top of his head that his scalp showed through like a pale glimmering sickle-moon. He was speaking now in an almost calm voice yet still there was the exhilaration beneath, the obscene gloating. For now he had no hope, he would have no hope. The hope of the past weeks had been lacerating to Jacob Schwart, who wished for the worst, that the worst might be over with, and his life over. Rebecca was a child of only five, and yet she knew.

"Why not kill them on the s.h.i.+p, set the s.h.i.+p on fire? In New York harbor, for all the world to see? 'This is the fate of the Jews.' It would be mercy for these Christians, eh? Hypocrite b.a.s.t.a.r.d Roosevelt may his soul rot in h.e.l.l, better to kill them here than send them back to die like cattle."

Desperately she wanted to run past her father to her mother yet she could not, Jacob Schwart blocked her way.

Unconsciously Rebecca reached for Freyda's fingers. Since the evening the photographs had been spread across the kitchen table she had not been apart from Freyda. You would not see one of the sisters without the other! Rebecca and Freyda were of a height, their hair plaited in the same way and their eyes identical dark-shadowed eyes set deep in their sockets, watchful and alert. Yet now, Rebecca reached for Freyda's fingers, and felt only air.

She could not now turn to see Freyda pressing a forefinger against her lips Shhhh Rebecca! because Freyda herself was air.

Rebecca pushed the door open, and entered the kitchen. She was barefoot, and trembling. She saw how her father turned to her with a look of annoyance, his face flushed, livid eyes that held no love for her in that instant, nor even recognition. She stammered asking what was wrong? where was Freyda? wasn't Freyda coming?

Her father told her to go away, out of here.

Rebecca whimpered Ma? Ma? but her mother paid no heed to her, turned away at the sink, sobbing. Her mother's chafed hands hid her face and she wept without sound, her soft slipping-down body shaking as if with merriment. Rebecca ran to her mother to tug at her arm but Pa intervened, grabbing her hard. "I said no."

Rebecca stared up at him, and saw how he hated her.

She would wonder what Jacob Schwart saw, in her: what there was in her, a child of five, he so despised.

She would be too young for years to consider He hates himself, in me. Still less It is life he hates, in all his children.

She ran outside. Stumbling, barefoot. The cemetery was a forbidden place, she was not to wander in the cemetery amid the rows of gravestones that signaled the resting places of the dead in the earth and were the possessions of others, those others who helped to pay Jacob Schwart's wages; she knew, she had been told numberless times that those others did not want to see a child prowling aimless in the cemetery that belonged to them. Her brothers too were forbidden to enter the cemetery except as their father's helpers.

Rebecca ran, blinded by tears. Where her father had grabbed her shoulder, she felt a throbbing pain. She whispered, "Freyda" but it was useless, she knew it was useless, she was alone now and would be alone, she had no sister.

The cemetery was deserted, there were no visitors. The air was gusty and wet-tasting, the white-striated bark of birch trees shone with an unnatural glisten. In the taller trees, crows called raucously to one another. Where you could not hear Jacob Schwart's voice, and could not see Anna Schwart turned away sobbing and broken in defeat, it was as if nothing had happened.

The cries of the burning pa.s.sengers of the Mareashe could hear them. In her memory it would seem, yes the Marea had been set afire, she had seen the fire herself, she had seen her sister Freyda burned alive.

Why?"Ask G.o.d why: why such things happen. Not me."

She would hide in the cemetery, frightened for hours.

No one would call her name. No one would miss her.

The previous day there had been a funeral, a procession of cars and pallbearers carrying a coffin to an open grave site scrupulously prepared by Jacob Schwart, Rebecca had watched from a distance the mourners, she had counted twenty-nine of those others, some had lingered at the grave as if reluctant to leave and when at last they departed there came Jacob Schwart dark-clad and silent as a scavenger bird to fill in the grave, to cover the coffin with moist crumbly dirt, until there was only earth, the curve of earth, and a smooth granite headstone engraved with letters, numerals. And flowers in pots, set with care at intervals about the rectangular grave.

Rebecca approached this grave, that was some distance from the stone cottage. She was barefoot, limping. She had cut her left foot on a stone. In the summers she was a dark-tanned Indian-looking child furtive in appearance and often dirty, her tight-plaited hair beginning to pull loose in wisps. No wonder such a child was forbidden to wander in the cemetery where visitors might be startled and annoyed to see her.

Only when she saw her father's pickup truck being driven away would she emerge from hiding to return to the house, and to her mother. She would take to Ma a handful of beautiful pale-blue cl.u.s.ter-flowers broken off from one of the potted plants.

17.

Not-to-be-said from that time onward in the stone cottage in the Milburn cemetery were such words as "cousins""Morgenstern""boat"Marea. Certainly you would not say "Kaufbeuren""Aunt Dora""Freyda""Germany." Not that Ma might hear, or in her nervous confusion imagine she heard. Not that Pa might hear for he would fly into one of his spittle-rages.

Rebecca asked her brothers what had happened? what had happened to their cousins? was it so, the Marea had been set on fire? but Herschel shrugged and grimaced saying how in f.u.c.k would he know, he never thought anybody was comin' to Milburn anyway, not so far across the ozean with submarines now, and bombs. Also there was sure to be trouble about those d.a.m.n vissas, like Pa had worried about for them.