Red Shoes for Rachel: Three Novellas

Halfway Down the Road Back to You

— 1 —

Precisely cut slices of white bread were lying lined up on sheets of newspaper spread out everywhere; there was an empty space on the little cabinets around the sink and on almost the entire kitchen table; even the only chair was covered with a page on which six or seven crusts of bread were huddled together. The kitchen was open; it was not separated from the front room by a fourth wall but looked like an alcove for preparing food. Eating, however, took place in the salon, as they called the living room. It sounded high class, one could even say aristocratic—salon, but even in the living room, the white slices, like mushrooms after a rain, had captured every surface on the sparse furniture, including the narrow little sofa and the few empty bookshelves attached to the wall; not even the top of the television set had been spared, and the slices had spread out freely on the windowsill.

It was a pleasure to look at such a salon and kitchen, flooded with such fresh-smelling mushrooms, and old Sarah, more happy than tired, leaning her elbows on the table and still holding the knife in her hand, looked slowly around at the lines of bread, not omitting a single slice, as if each of them bore a distinctive mark so that only she could arrange them in a certain order and uncover the secret of a hidden inscription.

Sarah had firmly decided: she was going to go visit them, and how can one set out on a visit without well-dried slices of bread. No sweet crackers whatsoever can compare to them; they break up into crumbs and creep into everything, and afterward they stick in your throat. A well-dried slice of bread is something quite different, especially white bread! It’s always ready to be eaten, with a little boiled water or thin potato soup, or even simple ice-cold water right from the well, to say nothing of a glass of milk. It doesn’t scrape your throat, it doesn’t stick to your gums, and as you’re eating it your tongue doesn’t get tired so fast from mixing around the chewed-up bread in your mouth. A delicacy! As she remembered that word, Sarah smiled and she again swelled with pride at the work that her hands had so skillfully accomplished.

They would surely be satisfied by her gift, Sarah figured, but a thought kept nagging at her: would they recognize her? So many years had passed—a whole lifetime, one could say. On the other hand, all those years hadn’t gone anywhere—they had melted into her blood, poured over her body. Her memory had absorbed everything, down to the last detail. True, she felt that it was getting weaker with each passing day; she was starting to forget things—faces, even words. Recently she had forgotten her daughter’s last name—her landlord had telephoned her two days ago and had asked her for the name, because the telephone was listed under that name. For a moment she had forgotten it—the first name of her son-in-law, Misha, was right at the tip of her tongue, but his last name, which was, of course, also the last name of his wife, her daughter, seemed to have fallen into a black hole, no matter what she did. She did remember it later—Weissman—a simple last name, but the incident left her with a feeling of helplessness, as if she had suddenly lost her way on a strange street, or in a foreign city, or country.

It wouldn’t take long, a few hours, till the slices of white bread got to the texture they should have. Everything dries quickly here. When the word here crossed her mind, a barrier immediately appeared by itself, and it responded with an echo: there. The here referred to almost seven years, but, as Sarah now thought about it, that was almost completely eclipsed by the there, a full seventy-three years. Here meant Israel, the city of Nazareth Illit, the apartment her children had rented for her. The lostness was something she had felt earlier, even there in her hometown, Beltsy, when they were just beginning to talk about going to Israel.

In the beginning she took the talk about Israel to be vague rumors that had been circulating in the air for quite a long time, like a sort of infectious childhood disease such as measles: you get sick once in a lifetime and then you forget about it. She thought that in this case, too, people would get over the measles and forget about the plague, the talk of going.

But that’s not the way it turned out—it became something more: the words started to become reality. They sold a lot of things from the house, and if the things they were selling were being torn out by the roots, as it were, together with a piece of history of the house and the family, the brand new things they were buying, often still packed in hard boxes stamped on all sides with warnings: Do not throw!, Do not strike!, Glass!, Open here!, Caution!, Handle with care!, frightened her. She was afraid to touch them and just wanted to get out as quickly as possible from her bedroom, which was filled from floor to ceiling with packages and cartons of various widths and lengths. It was Fira, her daughter, who took care of all that. The mother just sighed and felt that each new day left her less of the mission that she had so faithfully and devotedly carried out during her family life: to be a housewife, to run her own home. At night, she used to practically sigh to David: But they’re turning our whole life into dust! Her husband didn’t answer, though Sarah knew that he wasn’t asleep; she could tell that from the way he was breathing, the way a good doctor could tell everything that was going on inside a patient simply by putting his ear to the patient’s heart or chest. She knew that David felt the same way she did, but for now he couldn’t find any words to explain it all and justify it. One time he did indeed answer her, but that didn’t lift the stone from her heart. They’re right, Sarah, David said quietly. She held her breath and waited for her husband to continue, which God knows was appropriate from his word right. But he just repeated it and added: because they have a choice.

Sarah was now sitting on the edge of the little sofa reading a newspaper. A few minutes earlier she had carefully squeezed herself into the last bit of free space amid the spread-out newspapers with the slices of bread on them. It was like the way she used to go over to her child who had fallen asleep on her bed and take a nap next to him. At first it was her son, Ilik, and afterwards, six years later, it was little Fira. A thick packet of newspapers lay right next to the sofa. She had collected them after reading them; every Friday morning she bought the newspaper at the kiosk across the street, from the Moroccan Jew Yossi, and she read it unhurriedly during the course of the week, a page at a time. Yossi knew Sarah very well, and as soon as he saw her, he would yell in Russian: "Babushka, gazyeta! (Grandma, newspaper!")

She was dressed warmly: over her long flannel robe she wore a sleeveless fur coat; on her feet she wore heavy socks and winter boots; on her head, a green kerchief tied with a loose knot under her chin, which, as if deliberately, kept moving up to her lower lip, trying to hide the old lady’s mouth. When they were packing their things, David had once reproached her: Why are you dragging along those old rags of yours?! You would do better to take the opportunity to buy a new wardrobe. Perhaps he was actually right; there always comes a time when everything you’ve saved turns to ashes and dust, as had happened to their home. However, the old rags had definitely been of use to her. The new country was indeed a hot one, and in the summertime, it was impossible to sit inside without a masgan, as they call an air conditioner here, but in the winter it got very cold in the apartment, and there was no heating here as there was there. It was possible that winter was warm somewhere in the country, but in their house in Nazareth Illit the cold was piercing. It crept into your bones, especially from the stone floor. She had begun to hate those stone floors immediately, from the very first day. No matter what she wore on her feet, she felt the poisonous cold pour over her body.

So now she was sitting, swathed in heavy clothing, with a thin blanket on her lap and her feet on a small pillow, also brought from there. When Fira was still a child she had loved to play with her little pillow, which was embroidered with colorful flowers and decorated with a green silk ribbon around it. She used to fall asleep more quickly if she laid it on her head and hugged it with her pudgy hands. Even later, when she was already old enough to be a bride, Sarah occasionally found her sitting on the sofa, deep in thought, pressing the embroidered pillow to her belly. Her mother knew that it was a sign that something had happened to her. Later, of course, she forgot about the pillow; got married, had a son, moved into her own house, and became a skilled housewife herself. The green silk ribbon had long since been torn off and the colorful cotton thread had faded and gotten rubbed off, but the pillow still protected her old, careworn feet from the cold that constantly rose from the floor.

No, she had no interest in reading today. Of the few Russian newspapers that could be purchased at Yossi’s kiosk, she bought Novosti Nedeli (News of the Week). She got onto that one while living together with her children. Actually the news is the same in all newspapers. Here they don’t make it easier to stomach or censor it. On the contrary: they keep repeating the truth till one’s heart grows heavy. They have no pity whatsoever on themselves. But the main thing in it was the supplement: Yevreyski Kamerton (Jewish Sounding Fork). That section put one’s heart at rest. She loved to read the beautiful, moving stories of Jews of her generation. On the pages of Sounding Fork, one could find a piece of what every one of them had survived there, but of which they had only been able to talk here.

She took off her glasses and put them in a pocket of her robe, and folded the newspaper precisely. Her gaze once again rested upon the white slices. She touched a piece of bread lightly, with her fingertip, then moved the knot of her shawl down. With her mouth free, she softly said out loud: Another hour or hour-and-a-half and I can hit the road.

— 2 —

Two weeks earlier, right after Sukkot, a woman had called her on the telephone and asked whether she, Sarah, had heard about the video interviews with Holocaust survivors that were being conducted by the Spielberg Foundation. You were in the ghetto, weren’t you? the woman asked, as if she were unsure of it.

That had annoyed Sarah. The whole business of receiving compensation from the Germans was still fresh in her memory. She herself had no use for their money—it was covered in Jewish blood. Her daughter Fira, however, had insisted; a half-year after they came here, she, through an acquaintance of hers, had sought out the address of some sort of women’s organization that helped new immigrants from the Soviet Union prepare the paperwork to get the German pension. They could, of course, have hired a lawyer, but Fira declared that lawyers tear your guts out, and anyway she could do what they do herself. She had had plenty of experience with Soviet bureaucrats, so she would be able to cope with the Israeli and German ones too. They’re all cut from the same cloth!

She went to Jerusalem with her mother and took her to the office of that women’s organization, where she had to sign a stack of papers, and only then did her troubles begin. Letters would arrive, asking Sarah to indicate exactly where she had been and who could confirm in writing that she had indeed been there. And there were other such questions that caused her pain and made her feel that they didn’t trust her, as if she were slyly fooling them or trying to get money that was not due her. That didn’t bother Fira; she was a practical woman and didn’t let her emotions lead her astray. She wrote to various authorities, sent an inquiry to an archive in Vinnytsia, and got what she needed. Sarah saw the document herself and a cold shiver of horror ran through her body: her only witness, who was crying out to her from that murdered world, was also a bureaucrat, as Fira would call him, who once wrote her name in the camp commandant’s office ledger, saying that she, Sarah (here he entered her maiden name), together with her sister Chaya Hershkovitsh, had received a bundle of wood on November 15, 1941.

It didn’t make sense to her that after so many years the document that confirmed the bitter truth of her fate was lying around somewhere amid the thousands of files arranged on shelves, squeezed between other faded, yellowed papers and notes.

And here she calls, the woman, and asks whether she can come to see Sarah so she can tell about those years. Sarah certainly had something to tell, but where could she find the words and the strength to tell it? Her hair stands on end whenever she reads what people survived during the war in the Sounding Board. The woman from the Spielberg Foundation should talk to them! But the woman on the telephone was insistent—each person had to tell his or her own story so that the coming generations would remember it. The stranger spoke inspiring words—Sarah had thought very little about it previously. There had never been an occasion to tell her story, and there had been no one to tell it to. Should she have gone and told her own children about the hell she had survived? It was bad enough that she had experienced it herself and had carried around the pain, locked inside her, all her life.

Nevertheless they came at the agreed-upon time—the woman who had talked to Sarah previously on the telephone—Edith was her name—and two young Israeli men from the local area. When their equipment was set up, the men immediately began giving orders, acting as if they were in their own homes; they spoke loudly, in Hebrew, and when they needed something from Sarah, Edith translated it for her. The first thing they did was move the sofa and place it facing the window, and then they unpacked their equipment and plugged it in.

While the film crew was preparing, Sarah sat on the sofa where they had placed her, and looked at everything that was happening around her with mixed feelings: she felt both curious and lost. She couldn’t believe that the entire hustle and bustle was really for her, the old, unknown woman who had come here from the distant provincial town of Beltsy, where she had lived for some seventy years. She had prepared for this visit: she had put on the cream-colored rayon gown with three golden buttons in front—David had bought it for her half a year before they emigrated; on her feet were her dark brown shoes, which were still quite new—she had worn them perhaps three or four times. She had left her green kerchief in the bedroom; she had tied her hair back on her neck and had inserted her gold-ornamented semicircular bone comb, which had been a gift from her son for her seventieth birthday.

Edith, a dark, charming woman with plump lips, about forty like her Fira, sat down next to Sarah, stroked her hand, and said:

You don’t have to relive it, she said softly. I’ll ask you questions and you answer me. You don’t even have to look at the camera—look at me and tell me the story.

Will they show it on television later on? Sarah asked.

Edith smiled. This apparently wasn’t the first time she had heard those words.

For now, we just have to complete the work, but in time somebody will certainly be interested in the material. In any case you’ll get a copy of what we do today.

They turned on the lights on both sides and aimed them at Sarah, as if the bright lights could peel away the distant corners of her memory, all the hidden days and nights that she herself had tucked away there and locked up with seven locks. Then she heard the first questions:

What is your full name and when were you born?

Edith was sitting on a chair, facing her. On her knees lay a notebook open to a fresh blank page; she had apparently chosen to write down Sarah’s answers herself. Sarah answered in Russian, as she had for the dozens of surveys that she had filled out for various authorities that she had had occasion to deal with there, and now here too.

Wechsler, Sarah. Born in 1924, in the city of Beltsy, Bessarabia.

Who were your parents?

My father was a worker, Sarah continued in the same formal tone, but suddenly she stopped, and after a moment she started over: My father, Zelig Nusnboim, was a merchant, a well-known and distinguished person in the city. I remember my mother telling us proudly that when our father went into the municipal bank, the bank manager would meet him at the door. My mother, Dobe Nusnboim, didn’t work; she ran the house and brought up the children, me and my elder sister Chaya. We spoke Yiddish and Romanian at home. In addition to those, my mother knew Russian pretty well because she had lived in Bessarabia when it belonged to Czarist Russia—only after the civil war did the territory become part of Greater Romania. We lived very well, quietly. A maid helped my mother with the housework, but my mother always did the cooking herself.

And did you observe the Jewish traditions? Edith asked.

Yes, we kept kosher. For Passover, we had separate dishes, which we kept in the attic in a wicker basket covered with a thick piece of cloth. I don’t remember my father going to the synagogue; on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, yes—arm in arm with my mother, both of them beautifully dressed—but in general, no. Jabotinsky’s portrait hung in the front room of our house; for a time, my older sister hung around with Zionist youths, and when they used to get together at their meetings, she would take the portrait with her. My mother, as I recall, was active in community affairs; she was a member of a committee to help poor children who were attending the ORT schools. Do you know what kind of schools those were? The children in the upper grades both had conventional studies and were taught a trade. The girls were taught to be seamstresses; the boys could become carpenters, for example. Once a week my mother had a tour of duty: she checked on how the children were dressed and whether it was clean in the classrooms; she tasted the food, because the children used to eat lunch there. We kept chickens in our yard, and one day my mother ordered that ten hens be butchered and taken to the ORT school.

Sarah sighed.

I’m remembering trifles, she said. You probably want to hear other things from me?

Did you experience any anti-Semitism at that time?

Sarah thought about that for a while. She understood the question, of course, but her memories relating to the years of her quiet childhood under the warm wings of her parents and the short time of her blossoming womanhood just didn’t contain a trace of human hatred and wildness.

"Anti-Semitism? Certainly there was anti-Semitism then too. It’s simply that in those years I still understood very little about such things. We lived on Church Street in Beltsy. Wealthy people, mostly Jews, lived there. We had a big house with four rooms. Across the street lived a certain Russian immigrant and his wife. He had fled from Russia after the revolution, and he had a soap factory. People said that he was an anti-Semite. They had no children, and since they were childless the wife used to ask my mother at times to let me go for a walk with them. Apparently she liked me. She treated me very well, bought me candy … Of course, later, in the thirties, when the Romanian fascists came to power, there were bitter rumors that the anti-Semites were girding themselves to attack the Jews. At that time I was already a student at the Romanian Gymnasium, and the Jewish students at my school knew that the Romanian literature teacher, Mr. Constantine, was a member of a right-wing extremist