I Am Forbidden (23 page)

Mila raised her pen. She wrote:

Mila drew a garland around
David
. She picked up a second ballpoint pen and colored each petal of the garland red. The garland sent out shoots that intertwined the names
David, Rachel, Judith.…

When the doorbell rang and Judith’s voice called from the stoop, Mila was so startled her hands gripped the tablecloth as she rose. The carton of milk exploded onto the tiles, the uneaten bowl of oats shattered.

A
MESSENGER
delivered the notebook that Mila’s adolescent hand had labeled so many years ago:
Mila’s Book of Days—Private
. Clipped to the cover, a note scrawled on the back of a pharmacy receipt:

• • •

Atara had often imagined Mila’s knock on the door and a great childhood love returning to her life, but now,
too late to travel back in time
, it was for the knock of Mila’s grandchild that Atara waited.

The opening pages of Mila’s notebook flooded Atara with memories of the days when Mila commenced a count of blood and clean, and drifted farther from Atara, memories of the Paris dawn in which Atara stood in front of the double porte cochere, a string bag in her hand—a toothbrush, spare underwear—and turned the corner onto the avenue, Paris, the wide world.…

Atara reached to switch on the lamp by the couch and a postcard fell out of the notebook. On the left of the card:
Mila Lichtenstein
and an address in Williamsburg. On the right,
Atara Stern
but no address. The card was dated 1958, the year Atara left.

It had taken ten years until, in the euphoria of spring 1968, Atara sent Mila her address and phone number. From then on, with each subsequent move, Atara had sent a postcard: New York, Cambridge, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, New York.… With each unanswered card, Atara reminded herself that she knew before leaving that she would lose her family, she knew that Mila could not open her door to a renegade sister without jeopardizing her children’s marriage
prospects. Mila would get in touch once her children were raised and married.

The time for marrying children passed.

Atara tucked Mila’s unsent postcard in the back of the notebook and discovered an airmail envelope, from Paris. One typed paragraph informed Monsieur Lichtenstein that he could not conceive.

Evening fell in the loft as Atara read and reread Mila’s notebook, trying to make sense of the numerology, the biblical fragments, the laboratory letter. As the story came together, her eyes blurred with tears.

She rose and stared out the window.

Why would the girl come to her? It seemed to Atara that long ago a deal was struck: Atara won her freedom but lost existence in her family. Was the deal being renegotiated after forty-seven years? Her heart began to race.

I
N THE
women’s balcony overlooking the prayer hall, Judith pressed her forehead against the lattice.
I am—I am and my children are
—she could not bring herself to finish the thought.

In the hall below, her brothers danced with the Bridegroom of the Law, they danced unaware that they were misbegotten. In step with her brothers, shoulders already stooped from so much study, her Yoel. The invitations had been mailed,
Judith and Yoel, ceremony at half past six—

Before the women could see her tears, Judith wound her way to the back of the balcony, down the crowded stairs, through the maze of prams filling the street and sidewalks.

Just two Sabbaths ago, she had strolled down these blocks almost singing aloud:
How goodly are your tents, Jacob!
How goodly in the soft gleam of a lit prayer hall, how goodly the hushed land of Williamsburg when traffic halted to celebrate a Holy Day. Two Sabbaths ago, Judith knew that she, too, would wear a white kerchief and lean over a stroller while her
husband danced the seven rounds; she, too, would bring into this world souls waiting to be born, and when all the souls had come down and the messiah arrived—

But did souls like hers hasten the coming of the messiah, or delay it? Every night since reading her grandmother’s notebook, she had researched seed issuing as unpious books said it would, as her father’s books said it must not.

She headed north, toward the Williamsburg Bridge. She would keep the promise she made to her grandmother: Before bringing the secret to the rabbis, she would see the one who left, May Her Name Be Erased.

She climbed the pedestrian ramp. She had crossed the bridge before, but never in the dark, alone. Four youths leaned against the orange fence, watching her approach—she should have tucked the string of pearls under her collar, she must not run, they would outrun her.
HaShem, do not abandon me
.

Once she had passed the youths, her fingers hooked the necklace. Would she be asked to return the pearls, her betrothal gift from Yoel, when the secret was known? Shame burned her cheeks and spread to her neck.

A rumble approached from behind; a slap of rectangular light; the train rattled and teetered off, pulling its shadow after it.

A fenced footbridge crossed over the tracks. She pressed her face against the fence. Amidst the roar of a honking truck, of another passing train, her lips sounded out the verdict of her father’s books:
“I am forbidden.”
Her throat tightened. She swayed behind the fence as if the footbridge were the women’s
gallery and the track below were the Rebbe’s dais; in her prim suit, heeled pumps, she swayed as if the entire world were a prayer hall and the night above were the Lord’s veiled eye; and her body bowed with the fear that the Lord no longer looked upon her with compassion, that the Lord had abandoned her even before she was born.

The clang of a train interrupted her swaying. A luminous J inside a circle trembled on the rear of the last car, and shrank. A tall lamppost lit the track. She wanted to curl around the post and rest. She set out again.

On the edge of Manhattan was a brightly lit field where youths her age aimed balls at rings. Some tossed the ball inside the ring even as they ran, even as others jumped in front of them. She stared at the light-footed humans playing in the night, then walked on.

Office towers were lit but nothing moved inside. An eerie glow hovered over the city. There lived Atara Stern.

A
TARA
prepared for Judith’s arrival. She covered the human representations, the oil paintings in which Judith would see only transgression: a grandfather gazing inquisitively from his carved armchair, found in a Prague street market; a Roman grandmother in luxuriant pink, lavender, and violet; an unfinished sister with a gauzy ribbon in her hair, from a collector she knew in Strasbourg. She left uncovered the medieval maps and walled gardens.

She paused in front of ink-jet printouts tacked to a white foam-core board. A few years earlier, when smoke and ash had covered lower Manhattan, her producer had e-mailed a link to a video of a stoning. She had printed a few stills: an oblong blue ball stuck in the ground; a blue veiled form struggling out of the ground—human, hands bound, female; a circle of bearded men around the writhing red pulp. What could she
do
?

In the retreating light, the blood seemed to spread from the stills to the mounting board, to the philosophy books, the
novels, poems, to the labeled canisters of her films.… She turned the board so the printouts would face the wall.

She put on a long-sleeved dress, set two paper cups on a paper napkin—but there was no concealing that she was Atara Stern, the one who left, the daughter Zalman mourned. The stories about her surely frightened the girl. Who was Atara Stern in those stories? A traitor? Dead? Worse: a questioning Spinoza? Ah, of course, no story at all:
May Her Name Be Erased
.

But she would help the girl even if the girl did not want to be helped; Mila knew to whom she was sending her granddaughter and could not expect otherwise. She would help even if old Hannah and Zalman had to hear about their lost daughter enticing a young girl to leave. The ancient laws had done enough damage.

Atara checked the landing. No one.

The phone rang. A number in Brooklyn. Silence on the line, then a sharp breath that Atara still recognized. “Mila?”

There was no reply, but it was Mila—Mila not wanting to compound, by talking, the sin of dialing on a Holy Day.

“She isn’t here yet,” Atara said.

Another sharp breath. Atara heard Mila pray that Judith, daughter of Rachel, cross the bridge safely, then Mila’s breath became a whisper: “She won’t ring a bell on Simchath Torah.”

“I’m sitting where I will hear every step in the stairwell.”

“She swore that she would go to you.”

“She swore? Then it wasn’t
her
decision?”

“No.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Of course I want her here, with us, in Williamsburg.”

Remembering how Mila would attach her most intense hopes to the least likely outcome, Atara said, “But if she won’t keep the secret? If she believes her fate and the fate of her siblings, her mother, is to live disgraced on the fringe of the community?”

“I … I can’t let her destroy the family.”

“So in that case you would want me to help her, to help her leave?”

“She’s a good girl. Perhaps you can help her understand I was faithful … always faithful.”

Atara realized Mila was not seeking to provide Judith with a way out but rather with a trapdoor back in.