I Am Forbidden (16 page)

“Blessed be he who cometh!” Zalman bellowed from the dining room.

She tried to make out Elijah’s silhouette in the dark, empty stairwell.

Passover mornings, she went to synagogue; afternoons, she accompanied the children to the Luxembourg Gardens. In a daze of spring, bright skies, and flowering urns, she pushed the baby carriage and watched over the toddlers. An infant’s cry or babble would call up her empty apartment in Williamsburg, its windows and tabletop clear of baby fingerprints. She slapped her flat belly:
Why?

The children followed her home, silent.

*

E
ACH RETURN
to Williamsburg grew more difficult. The fourth year of her marriage, climbing out of the taxi, Mila no longer marveled at the bold Yiddish and Hebrew signs but wondered how she had not noticed, upon her first arrival, the trash cans punctuating the stoops, the garbage spilling onto the sidewalks. She almost wished she had forgone the trip to France, it was followed by such longing. Cars honked in the sunken roadway and Mila ached for bells pealing time in melancholy or joy, for deserted August in Paris, and September with its rustle of fresh beginnings in fallen leaves.…

And every month, the count of blood and despair.

Her reflection in the mirror riled her; her beauty exasperated her. Breasts empty of milk! Arms empty of child! Pleas tumbled from her lips, to barren women in Israel,
Mother Sarah, Mother Rivka, how I thirst for the breath of my baby!

T
HE FIFTH YEAR
of their marriage, Mila told Josef that her physician insisted on a semen sample before prescribing fertility drugs.

“But it is a grievous sin,” Josef replied. “The Torah forbids it.”

“Even for medical purposes? The doctor says some of his orthodox patients did do the test.”

“Our Rebbe would never permit it.”

“Even for couples who cannot have children?”

“Mila, how would the doctor help if the problem lies with me?”

“But if the problem
doesn’t
lie with you, then the doctor will prescribe fertility drugs.”

“The Torah itself forbids it, not just rabbinic law. No God-fearing rabbi would permit it.” He hesitated. “Many women have been helped by the Rebbe’s blessing.”

“You ask him. I won’t go to the Rebbe.”

*

L
EAFING
through magazines in the doctor’s waiting room, the name
Kasztner
leapt off a page. Mila’s heart beat faster. A book had been published about Kasztner’s train for
prominenten
. The magazine slipped from her lap—Josef was right, it was better not to think about those times. She rose and asked the receptionist how much longer it would be, but as the wait continued, her hand reached for the magazine. She read the review, and buried the magazine at the bottom of a stack of
Expectant Mothers
.

Her heart felt heavy when she left the doctor’s office. She walked past the subway entrance, and kept walking. She stopped in front of the Forty-Second Street public library.

Face flushed, she climbed the grand stairway. The serenity of the long reading room unsettled her. How could a place
where men and women mingled, how could a den of heresy, present such a tranquil front?

The reference librarian directed her to a historical atlas of Central Europe. Mila’s finger traced the border that had divided Transylvania during World War II; her finger traced the parallel blue line of the Nadăş River, which she had crossed on her father’s shoulders; traced the thin, black rail line that, near Kolozvár, almost touched the war border. To the north: Hungary; to the south: Romania. And there, in tiny print on the river’s bend,
Deseu
, where Anghel had lived with Florina. Indeed, a train from Kolozvár to Budapest could have gone—would have gone—past the shed where she and her parents had been hiding.

From then on, Mila returned to the Forty-Second Street library every time she had an appointment with her physician. Mila had been taught that Atara’s insistence on finding out what happened was a
pleasure-seeking
quest, a toying with superficial matters instead of the weightier teachings of the Law, but now Mila recognized that whatever was driving her own need to return to the library, Atara must have felt from a young age.

Watching a clerk retrieve books from a rolling cart, watching the clerk shelve the books, Mila imagined Atara working in such a place, that one day Atara would appear behind the reference desk. Finally Mila summoned the nerve to ask the woman behind the checkout counter if she knew someone named Atara Stern, who particularly liked libraries. The
woman politely explained that the New York Public Library had many thousands of patrons.

In the reading room, as the light traveled across the tall windows, Mila came across an article by a professor at City University, Fifth Avenue. She realized the address was near the library. She walked down the few blocks and found him in a small office behind a glass door. Yes, the Kasztner train was a subject of deep interest to him, both as a historian and because he owed his life to Kasztner: the professor’s mother was pregnant with him when she escaped on Kasztner’s train. Yes, he knew about the Satmarer Rebbe’s escape. He had documents, testimonies.…

O
NE
T
HURSDAY
evening, Josef was peeling carrots for the Sabbath soup when Mila said, “About the dream, about Kasztner’s dead mother, or his aide’s dead mother urging Kasztner, or his aide, to rescue the Rebbe of Szatmár—is that how the Rebbe explains his escape?”

“I believe it was the Rebbe himself who told the story of the dream but I never heard him talk of it.”

“Some people are angry with the Rebbe. They say he, and other community leaders who fled on that train, behaved shamefully. They say these leaders knew about the camps, knew that Kasztner’s train would be let out only if other Jews did not resist deportation. That’s why Kasztner’s convoy left Kolozvár after the other Jews were deported: to make sure the
prominenten
remained silent. ‘It was a good bargain,’ Eichmann said during his trial.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Kolozvár was only four kilometers from the border and Jews were no longer killed in Romania in the spring of ’44. Had the Jews of Kolozvár known about the extermination camps, they would have fled. There were twenty thousand Jews and a handful of armed guards. Some would have been shot while fleeing, but most would have survived.”

“What do you mean, ‘Had they known about the camps’? No one knew.”

“The leaders had been warned. Certainly our Rebbe knew enough to escape with the help of a Zionist even though he had expelled from the congregation anyone who interacted with Zionists.”

“The Rebbe never asked a Zionist for help. He never asked to be on that train.”

“He
begged
. ‘Nem mir, Ich bin der Rebbe of Szatmár.’ ”
(Take me, I am the Rebbe of Szatmár.)

“Nem mir?” Josef laughed. “Our Rebbe asked to be part of a venture negotiated by a Zionist?”

“
Begged
. And Josef, our Rebbe would never have transgressed the Sabbath if he had not known it was a question of life and death. He knew, Josef, he knew about the extermination camps—”

“Our Rebbe transgressed the Sabbath?”

“Atara told me years ago. She read it in newspapers. There
was a trial … I didn’t want to think of it … I went to the library.”

“You went inside a library?”

“I had to know, Josef. What if the Rebbe knew what would happen to everyone left behind? What if he did what he accuses Zionists of doing, what if he failed to warn his community—”

“Mila! Where are you hearing such things?”

“I’m not angry with the Rebbe for surviving; I’m angry because when it came to his life, he allowed himself to compromise, but when it comes to our lives, we cannot do the one test that would permit me to start a fertility treatment.”

“It’s the test you’re talking about? I told you, this isn’t about the Rebbe. No God-fearing rabbi would permit what is expressly forbidden in the Torah.”

M
ILA’S NEIGHBOR
recommended a physician who would prescribe fertility drugs without a semen sample: drugs to regulate Mila’s time of ovulation—which had not been irregular—drugs to stimulate her ovaries though everything indicated she ovulated regularly. The drugs, the temperature charts, the count of blood days and clean days, the intimate inspections melded into one wrenching failure to conceive. Mila barely noticed Josef reaching for her, his longing, his tenderness, his embrace.

Clean: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
.

Blood
.

Again, she curled up on the bed.

Josef ached to take her in his arms. Nothing wrong with her, the doctors said. Shame swept over him, for her bloated ankles, her nausea, her despair. If he were the infertile one, then she was taking the drugs for naught—the drugs that so altered her moods. He never did deserve her, her tenderness, her beauty that now, too, begged for salvation. He hungered for her laugh, how long it had been since she had pulled him into her dance—
Yadidadidam!

*

M
ILA
knew that after ten years of barren marriage, an orthodox Jew may not abstain any longer from keeping the command to
be fruitful and multiply
. One evening, she asked, “Almost ten years since we are married. Has anyone suggested … that you divorce?”

“Divorce!”

“It is a commandment for a man to bear children.”

He stroked her face, kissed her eyelids. “You’ve been taking these drugs too long. Would you consider—”

“I won’t stop the fertility treatment.”

Josef reached for a Talmud treatise, searched for a clause that might permit a semen analysis, and once more failed to find it:

*

O
N THEIR
tenth anniversary, Mila copied out for the first time the verses that weighed so heavily on their marriage, the passage from Genesis about Onan’s death sentence for spilling his seed upon the ground. Her handwriting started off steady, intent on making a faithful transcription, but later, as she copied out the verses again and again, the script trembled as she grasped that the story was not Onan’s—Onan dies as soon as he is mentioned; the story was Tamar’s. Law and custom demanded that Onan’s widow, Tamar, be married to Onan’s brother, but her father-in-law, Judah, reneged on his promise to do so. Facing childlessness, Tamar took matters into her own hands.

Once more, Mila copied the verses into her Book of Days:

On another evening of separation—Josef was hunched over a Talmud tome at the cleared dining table, Mila was reading her Expanded Rabbinic Bible in the armchair by the window—Mila asked, “What does it mean, that Tamar sat at Enayim? Was there really a place called
Eyes
?”

“Ah, you too are reading about Onan.”

“About Tamar. The verse says: Tamar sat
bepetach Enayim
.”

“One reading is: Tamar sat near the
gate of Two Fountains
. Of course, since
enayim
also means
eyes
, and
petach
also means
opening
, it is not incorrect to read: Tamar sat at, near, the
Eyes’ Opening
. The Targum Jonathan says: She sat near a division of paths, near a crossroad that requires all eyes to open and consider which way to proceed.”

“And King David stems from Tamar?”

“So will the messiah. Before Judah knew Tamar, he pledged a signet ring to her. The Midrash says the signet bore a lion to signify that from this union would come the royal line of Israel, the lion of Judah.”

Mila circled back to a commentary and entered it into her notebook:

Below this, Mila wrote and circled two words:

Nem mir
(take me)

Two words with which Mila drew the unholy train into the story, and from that moment on, it was all connected in Mila’s mind, all the same story: Tamar, Judah, the Rebbe, each shrouding a holy act in the satanic cloak.

The numerologies that had so enchanted Mila at the seminary now spilled from the margins of Scripture into her Book of Days as she attempted her own sums and interpretations.

, vetahar
(and she conceived)
, summed to 611, which summed to
6 + 1 + 1 = 8.