I Am Forbidden (18 page)

One child? If she sat near Enayim in Paris, if she opened her eyes might she have one child?

Policemen in riot gear stopped the taxi near the city center. Mila explained that her family lived in the Marais, off the rue de Rivoli. The police waved them on. The car inched its way between indigo vans with darkened windows. Placards
were plastered on every façade, on traffic signs, bus shelters, bold swatches of scarlet and black, and the slogans of spring 1968 would soon find their way into Mila’s notebook:

And, in every margin:

The taxi turned the corner,
RUE DE SÉVIGNÉ
. Mila ran up the three flights, into Hannah’s arms. After tea and cake, Mila asked, “May I? Now?,” but Hannah did not answer the usual, “Go child, go.” Instead, she explained: “The streets aren’t safe, the Goyim are protesting each other. You mustn’t go out.”

Mila stepped onto the balcony. A black flag rippled on a roof. Further off, two red flags. Sirens wailed, insistent. Josef joined Mila. He wanted to use this moment alone to tell her that he had resolved to consult a rabbi in Paris, one more lenient than the Rebbe, a rabbi who might consider allowing the semen sample.

Mila was staring at a poster on the opposite façade.

“
Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands
,” she read out. “We are all German Jews.”

“What do they mean?” Josef asked.

“Perhaps … they want to undo the past. Look, that poster over there, it’s the same face. It says:
Libérez Cohn-Bendit
. I don’t know what it means. Perhaps they want to repair the world?”

“Josef, have you seen this baraita?” Zalman called from the study. “The Yismach Moshe says.…”

Mila and Josef stepped back inside. Josef did not get to tell Mila his latest thoughts regarding the test. Mila lifted Hannah’s youngest, inhaled the baby scent, then in a sudden burst, she put down the toddler, opened the front door of the apartment, pulled it shut behind her, and bolted down the stairs.

The demonstration was dammed on the Left Bank. The bridges were barred, the Pont Louis-Philippe and the Pont Marie, but Mila wanted to see, feel this unrest that throbbed as her own. She ran south and across the Pont de Sully, then north toward the boulevard Saint-Michel. A policeman stopped her.

“Ma p’tite dame! Il faut rentrer chez vous!”

In her pink suit with pearl-gray piping, her pearl-gray pillbox hat, this woman did not belong in the Latin Quarter, not on this day, not with the riots.

Mila rose on her toes, to see past the policeman’s shoulder, to better hear the students’ chant.

The truncheon started to swing.

“Mila!”

She spun around.

Gasping Josef, who had sensed her departure and had run after her. She saw Josef’s lips move, but amidst a siren and waves of shouting, she could not hear him. She thought that he must be saying:
But we are holy. Separate. Our concern is God’s six hundred and thirteen commandments—

With a speed that surprised her and the police, she turned and plunged past the cordon. Josef tried to follow, but the tips of two truncheons pressed against his chest. “Mila!” Josef yelled. The truncheons pressed harder against his chest.

The pillbox hat bobbed up, down, past the tight weave of the marine police jackets.

“Mila! Mila! Mila!”

A
ROLLING
, delirious tentacle lifted her, carried her forward. Fists pummeled the air in anger and exhilaration. “C-R-S S-S!” the students chanted. Mila’s own arm went up. Her voice, not to be heard in public, not in front of men other than her husband, surged—exquisite melting of boundaries, her timbre mixed with other timbres, as she teetered from raised fist to raised fist, and louder her forbidden voice, “C-R-S S-S!”

J
OSEF
stepped back from the police cordon. He rushed to one side street, then another. All access points to the demonstration
were blocked.
Please, Mila, it isn’t safe. You’re suffering. I’ve been trying to tell you, I’m thinking of it … the forbidden test.…
Pushed by a throng, he stumbled into an open door. Out of breath, disoriented, he sat on a bench.
Not in my merit but in theirs, in the name of Abraham Isaac Jacob, dear Lord, preserve from harm Blimela, daughter of Rachel, shield her body, guard her soul.…

Had she run off because they had entered the tenth year of their barren marriage? Did she fear he might abandon her? Was she trying to risk her life?

When Josef lifted his head, he saw before him blue, shimmering folds that were at once the blue taffeta suit Mila wore the day they met again, across the dining table on the rue de Sévigné, and the folds of Mary’s robe— But he was in a church! His arms flailed as if entangled in Mary’s billowing mantle, his hand struck the stone stoup, which, through the prism of his anguish and past losses, was the stoup in which Florina wet two fingers to sprinkle his forehead with holy water … 
To live Anghel, to live
.

T
HE PROTESTORS
were now marching thirty abreast, arms linked behind a row of red flags and black flags. A song erupted, carried by thousands:
“Debout les damnés de la terre!”
Mila did not know the words of the “Internationale,” but she heard the summons to rise up. Then she heard the rumbling boots, as did the students next to her. She leaned into the line and passed cobble after cobble, toward the front, where
they flew against shields and helmets. A group broke in from a side street.
“Libérez nos camarades!”
Mila started her own rally cry: “E-na-yim!” A teenager waving a black flag took up her chant: “U-na-nimes! U-na-nimes!” Mila’s eyes teared from acrid, whistling smoke. A rush threw her to the ground. A swinging club—too close, the seam of her skirt ripped, her wig and hat swiveled, askew one instant, then gone … arms pulling her, lifting her, helping her up … a winding stair, a terrace overlooking smoke and flashes—

“A disinfectant! Bandage!”

A youth unwound the red scarf from his neck and knelt at her feet. Mila’s eyes opened wide on the scarlet thread:

After swaddling the cut on her heel, the youth ran his fingers through the stubble on her head. “Like the Brancusi muse: smooth and perfectly whole. Perfectly beautiful.”

Mila understood that her wig was gone; she flushed, deeply.

“Comrades!” the youth called, extending an arm toward her.

“Revolution est belle,” someone whispered.

Mila’s arms lifted; her hands covered her scalp as she hobbled toward the stairs.

“Don’t!” the students cried out.

The youth’s hand on her shoulder, holding her back. “The bastards club anyone they come across after a demonstration.”

“I must,” Mila said.

“I’ll go with you.”

“No!” she replied abruptly, thinking of Josef’s and Zalman’s shock if they saw her next to a sheigets. “I mean … stay with the protests. I can get home.”

The youth hesitated.

“Please!” she begged.

He stepped back. “Don’t forget, tomorrow 15:00 hours in front of the Sorbonne. Wear flat shoes, it’s easier to escape. A demain!” He kissed her left cheek, her right cheek.

She hopped down the stairs, one hand on the railing, the other hand where his lips had met her skin. She stepped into the lane and remained very still as the breeze brushed her scalp that had been covered ten years. She removed the red scarf from her foot and tied it around her head. Limping down the street, she heard the students call from the terrace: “Your name! Xavier here wants to know your name!”

J
OSEF
was pacing the half-lit entryway. He could hear the children call from the balcony, “Mila! Josef!” He wondered whether he would have to tell Hannah she had lost yet another daughter when the porte cochere opened.

There Mila stood, a rag around her head, her skirt un-seamed, shoeless. “I’m fine,” she was saying. “Please run up and get my other wig. In the black suitcase. Quick!”

Josef hurried up the stairs but the door opened before he rang the bell; the children on the balcony had seen Mila.
Hannah came running down. She clasped her hands in grief and disbelief. “HaShem yerachem
(the Lord have mercy)
, where is your wig?”

“It’s my fault,” Josef said. “We got caught in the melee.”

“Why, why did you go out?”

“We … I was curious,” Josef said. “I didn’t know it would be—like this.”

And this was the first time that Josef lied for Mila.

France went on strike. The police occupied the Sorbonne, then left; the students occupied the Sorbonne, the streets quieted down, but after her foray in the riot, the night of their arrival in Paris, Mila stayed home. Surely the feeling of connection to the world outside, that she had experienced the night of the riot, was a trick of her evil inclination. She prayed for a Torah fortress—concrete walls, not metaphor—to intercept the chants and slogans.

The days wore on. The return to Williamsburg neared and Josef grew desperate. He had placed such hope in the trip to Paris, but in Paris, too, Mila would not leave the apartment. “The streets are safe now,” he pleaded, “go to the Luxembourg, the Palais Royal.” She shook her head, no. He asked whether it would help if he accompanied her, but he did not insist; he sensed she felt slightly embarrassed next to him, when people stared—with his sidecurls and black coat, they turned into objects of curiosity in the streets of Paris. “Won’t you take the children out?” Always, Mila shook her head.
“We’re leaving in two weeks.” “One week.” “We’re leaving in five days.” She shook her head, no.

The impending return to Williamsburg brought the scrawling in Mila’s notebook to a chaotic pitch. She could barely decipher her count of blood and clean, her temperature charts, numerologies, the excerpts about Tamar and Judah, the
begats
from the Book of Ruth:
Tamar’s son Peretz begat Hezron who begat Ram who begat Amminadab who begat Nachshon who begat Salmah who begat Boaz. And Boaz begat Obed who begat Jesse who begat David—

T
HE DAY
before the departure for Williamsburg, Mila logged into her Book of Days the rise on her temperature chart: 98.6, 98.7.

She was setting the breakfast table when she heard the front door open.

“Hallo, is Josef feeling better?” Zalman called.

Mila stopped setting the table.

Zalman appeared in the doorway. “Is he feeling better?”

“Josef is not with you?”

“He wasn’t well and left synagogue before services were
over. He didn’t come home?” There was a silence. Zalman adjusted his skullcap. “Blimela, this is a … difficult time for you and Josef. Ten years.…” Mila did not meet Zalman’s eyes, she returned to setting the table. Zalman continued: “Josef is permitted, expected, to divorce. Blimela, as long as you obey God’s commandments, our home is your home.”

Mila bit her lip, hurried out of the room.

In the kitchen, she poured boiling water in the teapot, but she did not bring the tea to Zalman. In her room, she flung herself, facedown, on the bed that had once been Atara’s and now was Josef’s, then she rose, grabbed her handbag, ran out of the apartment.

*

N
EW SLOGANS
lined the walls.

The sun played on the green shutters and pale pink roughcast of the rue Sainte-Catherine.

On the riverbank, long-haired youths strummed guitars under weeping willows. Bells echoed bells.

In the Latin Quarter, the statue of the archangel Michael at the Fontaine Saint-Michel wore a red bow tie. Cobblestones lay in mounds. Here, there, a car on its roof, but now the atmosphere was sweet and euphoric. Clusters of people engaged in lively discussion, everyone talking with everyone: workers in blue overalls, girls in miniskirts, youths in bell-bottoms, and everywhere, as if the city were a book and the walls its pages:

Mila climbed the five flights to the terrace where she had taken refuge with the students the night of the riot. A frayed note was stuck to the parapet:

Mila understood the note was for her, the rebel muse with the Brancusi head.

Had it rained since the night of the riot? She could not remember.

Tomorrow 15:00 hours in front of the Sorbonne. Wear flat shoes.…

She headed toward the Sorbonne.

Crossing the rue Champollion, she felt the first raindrops.
The Lord is with me!
She turned back. Heels clattering, she climbed the winding stairs to the terrace. Empty. A burst of heavy drops through sunshine reminded her that it was spring; it must have rained several times since the note was pasted to the parapet; the youth must have come, waited, gone.

She gazed at the gargoyle’s mouth pouring into the sky, its glistening eyes. She retrieved the youth’s scarf from her handbag, straddled the parapet, tied the scarf around the gargoyle’s neck. She stood on the narrow outer ledge of the terrace five stories above the street. She stroked the gargoyle’s elongated snout, stared into its grimacing maw, kissed its wind-eaten lips. “But David was entirely handsome,” she said. She watched the circling swallows and leaned into their glide. She bent and straightened her knees.