(Author: Eugenie Freed, Vol. 70, No. 3, Chanukah 2015)
Abie, Abie, Abie my boy,
Vot are you vaiting for now?
You promised to marry me, sometime in June,
It’s never too late, and it’s never too soon!
All the family
Keep on h’asking me,
Vitch day? Vot day?
I don’t know vot to say …
Abie, Abie, Abie my boy,
Vot are you vaiting for now?
Zaideh Zalman sings along with me as we sit next to each other, me perched high on a big cushion, the swing-seat on the stoep rocking and scraping as he booms out the words and my little—girl voice dances on top of his. And when we finish the song, we laugh and laugh because we sound so funny singing together.
*********
My mother and I live at Zaideh Zalman’s house. I have never lived anywhere else. The Deeb family are our next-door neighbors. Every day I hear Mrs. Deeb and her mother-in-law shrieking at one another in Lebanese, as they hang up the washing on the clothes-lines criss—crossing their back yard. Zaideh Zalman says that’s why Mr Deeb leaves home so early in the morning — before it’s light – and comes back from his business so late.
Dina lives here too. She arrived about a year ago, and now she is like a part of the house. My Ma says she’s “family”, but she seems to me like the upright piano in the living-room, covered with a faded fringed shawl. No one ever lifts that shawl. No-one lifts the lid of its keyboard. The living-room is locked and its dark-red velvet curtains stay closed. Once a month Jim, our servant, unlocks the door and lets in daylight while he swishes around with a feather-duster. I try to get in there when he cleans, because I have so many questions to ask about what’s there. I wish I could play on that piano. When Jim’s finished dusting he closes the curtains, and as he locks the door I can feel the darkness settling back, thick and dark-red like the curtains.
Zaideh never goes into that room. If he has visitors, they sit on the stoep in front of the house in summer, or in the dining—room if the weather is cold. My mother pours tea and offers the sponge—cake she bakes every Friday, with icing-sugar on the top — always the same cake. I asked her why she doesn’t bake a different kind of cake sometimes, like the chocolate cake I had at my friend Lulu’s house, but she didn’t answer me. I know by now that when my mother
doesn’t answer, it’s because she can’t understand what I mean — so if it’s important, I must ask Zaideh Zalman.
Dina has never had a visitor that I can recall, and when people come to visit Zaideh, she stays in her room. She comes out to have tea after they have left. Once I heard her whisper to my mother, in Yiddish, that she should try using bigger eggs for her sponge-cake. Dina hasn’t learned much English, so far. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t want to meet our visitors. But I know she wants to learn, because she tries to talk to me in English. On my birthday she baked biscuits, with raisin eyes and noses and orange-peel smiles, and she gave them to me in a little box tied with a pink ribbon. I like Dina.
Last night, as I passed Dina’s room, I noticed that her door was standing open. Mostly she keeps it closed. I could see her narrow bed, all smooth under a white counterpane. She was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, still dressed in her black blouse and long black skirt. I wondered why she wasn’t getting ready for bed. She was staring at something in the middle of the room, though there was nothing there that I could see.
* * * * * * * * *
This is my bedroom. I never had a room to myself at home, in Libau. A bed, a chair, a table, all for my own use. In the cupboard clothes are hanging, clothes that Reb Zalman paid for. When I came to this house, I had only what I was wearing, and my black woolen shawl, plain linen underclothes and a night-dress.
Rivkah showed me this room and pointed to this clean white bed. She said: “Papa says you’ll sleep here.” I asked “But where does your Papa sleep?” Her forehead wrinkled; she didn’t understand what I was asking.
Rivkah told me “You can hang your clothes here” – and she opened the empty cupboard. But I didn’t have other clothes. When Rivkah told Reb Zalman this, right away he gave her money, and told her to go with me to the shop. I bought two long black skirts, one for every day and another for Shabbos, and three blouses, two black and one white for Shabbos.
He’s a good man, Reb Zalman. He has given me a place to live in this new country. It’s safe here, it’s clean, there’s always food in the house. The black man cooks and does all the house-work.
But I like cooking and baking, I love the smell of bread baking. Sometimes I patzkeh in the kitchen here. Chayaleh tells me the English names for ingredients, and I write the words down, in Yiddish. I like to breathe in the aroma of seasoned minced beef when I spoon it on to pancakes. Then I fold them into little square parcels before I fry them again in oil to make the meat blintzes, crisp and crunchy, to pass around the table with fragrant golden chicken-soup.
When I fold up the blintzes, I dream about having my own family to feed on a Shabbos evening – on any evening. My aunt Malkah in Libau always used to say I would be a Beria. Aunt Malkah brought me up, and she taught me to cook. She thought she knew everything about Africa, because her son sells second-hand furniture in Port Elizabeth. Drom Afrika, it’s a good country to live in, her son wrote to her – there are no laws forbidding Jews to set themselves up in business or send their children to good schools. The weather is mostly warm, there are servants to help in the house. People who came here from Lithuania did well. “Just look how well my son did!” Malkah would say – anyway, that’s what he told her in his letters.
And she said to me: “Reb Zalman Schnaier is a good man. I knew the mishpochah from alte yoren – I knew him and his brother Ben, before they went to Africa. Decent men, honest, hard-working. And Zalman’s wife, Shaina ava-sholem, such a lovely woman. Five years she waited – and then when Zalman sent for her, she took the ship from Libau to London with their three children, and then another ship to Africa. I heard they had more children after she got there. Sad that she died so young. She was clever, and she loved music.”
Well, what my aunt told me was true. Reb Zalman, he’s a good man. But I thought my new life in Africa would be different. Not like this, no, not at all. There was one thing Malkah didn’t tell me – but how could she have known?On the stone at the grave in Brixton Cemetery that Reb Zalman visits every month, it says “Shaina, daughter of Reb Yitzchak the Levite”. What Malkah didn’t know … is that Shaina’s not lying under that stone. Shaina never left this house.
* * * * * * * * *
This morning, I was sitting in the kitchen, spooning up the sweet nutty mabela porridge that Jim cooks for breakfast, and thinking about Dina in her room the night before.
“Ma, what kind of ‘family’ is Dina?”
My mother was rolling black wool into a ball, her hands flying. Knitting is what she does most of the time, though nothing she knits ever seems to get finished. She glanced at me under her heavy black eyebrows, then turned back to the wool draped over a kitchen chair.
“Dina? She’s – uh, she’s from the family of – uh – your Bobba Shaina ava-sholem.” Mentioning the name of Bobba Shaina was almost like uttering the name of Hashem. It was something you didn’t speak out loud when Zaideh Zalman was around.
“Why did she come to live with us?”
“Well …”
The wool slipped off the chair and tangled on the floor. Drops of sweat rolled down my mother’s forehead as she bent to pick up the skein, clucking with her tongue. It’s hard for her to bend down because she’s so big and heavy.
“I was just wondering ….”
“No time for that now, Chaya, you’ll be late for school!”
* * * * * * * * *
They’ll think I’m meshugah. But does it really matter? No one in Reb Zalman’s family cares what I do. The only one I can talk to is Rivkah, and half the time she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Her situation is almost the same as mine, except she’s got a child. I wish I had a child. Even without a husband, like poor stupid Rivkah. So here I am – a married woman, but without a husband or a child.
ust think, Shaina had eight children with Reb Zalman. Three born in Lithuania, and five more after she joined him here in Africa. Five sons she gave him – two in the old country, another three here, and three daughters. He’s so proud of those sons. Three of them doctors, two working in his business. When they visit, I don’t think they see me even when they look straight at me. Zalman loved Shaina so much, there’s no love left in him for any other woman. When he married me everyone said he was doing a double mitzvah, because he saved my life –the Litvaks never liked the Jews anyway; already, they’re pushing them into camps. (May God take my poor Aunt Malkah away before they take her!) And it’s a mitzvah for a widower to marry a woman from his late wife’s family.
Oh yes, Reb Zalman is a good man. He’s a gabbeh in the shul – he looks so dignified in his black satin top-hat on the High Holy Days, tall and upright, so handsome, with his grey hair and those sharp green eyes. Everyone respects him. I see the women in shul looking at me sideways, and I know what they’re thinking … “Zalman Schnaier – a good-looking man, with a good business, he could have anyone, but he takes this plain woman with no money – a ‘grüner’ from Lithuania … why?”
But this man whom everyone respects – do they know the way we live in his house? I came here to be his wife, he had agreed to that. I was just a little girl when he left Libau to come to Africa, he hadn’t even noticed me.
And he still hasn’t. Two hours after Reb Zalman and Pinchas, his eldest son, met me by the docks, I was standing under the chupah next to him in an empty shul before a strange rabbi with a tattered beard – just so that the immigration police couldn’t send me back on the next ship. I looked up at Reb Zalman when the rabbi recited the wedding brochas, and there were tears in his eyes. The rabbi and my new stepson wished us both “mazal-tov” afterwards, but Zalman said nothing. We got on the train and travelled for two nights and two days. Such a big, hot, empty country! Two nights I slept in a train compartment with five other women, and Zalman and his son slept in a compartment with other men in another carriage. When we got out at the Johannesburg station, he brought me to this house. And I thought, surely I’m a lucky woman, coming to a new country to be the wife of such a fine man, to live in this nice house!
But now I know why he wept under the chupah.
Tonight I must speak to him. Before he goes to his bed, I’ll tell him where I’m going tomorrow and what I’m going to do.
* * * * * * * * *
I was giggling to myself as I walked into the kitchen after school. Our teacher’s name is Miss Gertrude, but one of the cheeky boys had called her “Miss Beetroot”. I wanted to tell Zaideh Zalman – he likes to hear school jokes. And then there’s this important question I have to ask him.
But something felt different today. My mother was sitting where she always sits at the kitchen table, her bottom spilling over the kitchen chair, knitting fiercely and frowning down at the knitting-needles dancing in her hands. Dina wasn’t there. Zaideh was at his place, at the head of the table. Every morning he walks up the street to the family business; my uncles Pinchas and Jake run it now. Zaideh comes home for lunch, and after that he sits in the kitchen and reads the morning newspaper before he takes his nap.
When I open the kitchen door he lifts his shaggy grey head – “Ja, Chayaleh, you doing good?” he says, with a twinkle in his green eyes. He never waits for a reply, but goes back to his newspaper. Today when I come home from school the newspaper is lying on the window-sill, still rolled up. He doesn’t speak to me. He sits looking down at the linoleum covering the table. When I try to talk to him, he shakes his head. Maybe I should wait with my big question…
* * * * * * * * *
On Monday morning I leave the house before anyone but the manservant is up. It’s a cold, windy day, and I wrap myself in my shawl. I walk down the street and across the railway bridge. I am going to Mr. Deeb’s shop, the “Terminus Café”, by the tram-terminus in Central Street.
As I walk, I’m thinking of what happened last night with Reb Zalman. We had hardly exchanged a word since he brought me to his house, but last night I had to speak to him. He was reading the Sunday paper after supper when I told him what I was going to do. I didn’t ask “What do you think?” I just told him, in plain Yiddish. The newspaper dropped to the floor, and for a few minutes Zalman was silent. Finally he said, “Why do you want to go out and work? Deeb won’t pay. You don’t have to earn money. I support you.” And I replied, “Reb Zalman, in this house there’s no place for me. I have to do this for myself.” And he shrugged as though to say “What does this woman want of me?” Then he bent to collect his newspaper from the floor, piece by piece. But I believe he understood what I wanted to tell him.
There’s a wooden bench outside the “Terminus Café” where people sit while they wait for the tram. A man in an overall is mopping away mud outside the entrance to the shop. They haven’t opened yet. A woman is sweeping a soapy cloth over the letters “TC” painted on the inside of the glass door. Chairs and tables are stacked against one wall of the shop. A glass counter runs along the wall to the left as you come in; behind it, shelves with the goods people buy while they wait for trams – newspapers, cigarettes, sweets, packets of potato chips, dried peaches, pieces of the dried meat they call “biltong”. Another woman is scrubbing the floor, splashing water everywhere. Near the door, a bosomy lady fills the space behind the till. The shop looks over-crowded even with no customers in it.
“Good morning, lady. I can speak with Mr. Deeb?”
She looks me up and down, at my pinned-up braids and my long black skirt and my black blouse buttoned up high, and she pulls her mouth as though she wants to laugh out loud. But she calls to the man with the mop “Ask the boss to come to the front, will you, Sam?”
Mr. Deeb appears, small, dark and edgy. Is he shocked to see his stay-at-home Jewish neighbour in his non-kosher eating-house?
tell Mr. Deeb, in any English words I can find, that I can cook, and I want to work for him. At first he doesn’t understand what I’m saying – then he acts like I’m making a joke. But I won’t stop talking, in English or Yiddish, until at last he listens. He says, “Mrs. Schnaier, I’m sure you’re a fine cook, but we don’t serve fancy food here. Only a simple menu”
But I won’t go away, and he can’t get rid of me. He may think I’m crazy, but he doesn’t want trouble with Reb Zalman. Everybody in the neighborhood knows Mr. Zalman Schnaier, and his family has business connections in the community. So Mr. Deeb says “Alright, come to the kitchen.”
He takes me through a swing-door in the back of the shop, and there is the kitchen. Dirty, cramped, dishes piled in the sink. The woman I saw washing the front door, a fat black woman with a striped scarf over her head and a soiled apron across her hips, is now unpacking the sink, giving each dish a quick wipe with a grubby cloth before stacking it on the granite draining-board. Cockroaches scuttle past. A black mess surrounds the coal stove in the corner. I hope the cleaning-woman will come to splash some water in the kitchen.
Mr. Deeb says, “You want to cook here?”
He wants to put me off. But I won’t let go.
“Let me see what spices you have.”
“Spices? Umm – don’t use them.”
“And honey – do you have any?”
He shakes his head
I look around the kitchen. One rickety cupboard stands against the wall dividing it from the main shop.
“Can I look in there?”
I don’t wait for his response, I start rummaging. They do have spices, at the back, in jam-jars without labels. I have to smell each one to find out what it is. Cinnamon, ginger, allspice … there’s honey too, it’s been hidden away so long it’s crystallized solid, but I can get it liquid again by heating it. It’s a miracle the ants scurrying around the kitchen haven’t found it yet. A few oranges in a splintering basket on the window-sill; I’ll need those too. I’m going to bake a ginger lekach, the honey-cake we make for Rosh Hashanah, for a year of sweetness. I need some sweetness in my life. First I have to find everything – eggs, flour, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, bowls, spoons, forks, in that kitchen where nothing has a place. Tryphena, the woman who was washing dishes, won’t help me. I say to her “Please, Tryphena, where you keep flour?” – and she mutters in her own language, and turns her back on me. She thinks I’m trying to take her job.
But I find what I need at last. I feel triumphant as I mix flour with sugar, leavening and spices.
I squeeze the oranges by hand – if there is an orange-squeezer in this kitchen, Tryphena’s not going to show me where it is. I mix the juice with warm liquid honey, make a well in the flour mixture, pour them in, and swirl them together. Now if only they have some whisky …. I go to ask Mr. Deeb, who is now behind the counter, leaning against the bosomy lady. He chuckles, winks at her, and produces a bottle from a locked cupboard. “Arak,” he says, and unstoppers the bottle for me to smell. Oh no, that peppery licorice-tang will kill the other spices. I’ll have to leave the liquor out this time.
I’ve found a bread-pan to bake in. I can’t even walk out of the kitchen for a moment while the lekach is baking, for fear of burning it. The scent of the fresh spicy loaf as it comes out of the sooty oven (when last did Tryphena clean it?) is like a breath from the garden of Paradise. I take it to Mr. Deeb; he sniffs its spicy fragrance. “Mmm-mm,” he says. He cuts himself a slice, and offers another to the bosomy lady.
“Too good for my customers!” he says, and laughs. I tell him, “Tomorrow it will taste even better.” And I can see I have given him an idea.
“Why you don’t give your customers something they can’t get other places?”
“Like what?” he says.
“Like blintzes – meat blintzes, with chicken soup, cheese blintzes, with cinnamon sugar.”
“What’s ‘blintzes’?”
“I’ll make, if you get me things I need. We have to make chicken soup. But first Tryphena must scrub kitchen.” He raises his eyebrows and shrugs his shoulders.
So I tell him: beef chuck for the meat blintzes, and soft cottage cheese, eggs, and sour cream for the cheese blintzes. I remember the names of the vegetables for the soup – onions, carrots, leeks – and I want a big chicken.“A whole chicken?” He wrinkles his nose, but he writes it all down on the back of a till-slip.
“See you tomorrow, Mrs. Schnaier,” he says.
I am exhausted when I start walking up the hill back to Reb Zalman’s house. But I feel stronger than I ever have since I came to that house.
Tuesday morning early I’m at the “Terminus Café” again. Mr. Deeb did get everything on my list – I almost expected him to change his mind, but he didn’t. First I must get the soup going. Talitha, who was washing the floor, doesn’t mind helping me. She washes the vegetables and the chicken, and cuts up everything for the soup. I put the beef in a pot to braise, with onions and carrots. I put eggs and flour in a bowl with a little oil, and make a double recipe of pancake mixture, half with milk for the cheese blintzes, and the rest with water for the meat blintzes. The pancakes I have to fry in a little pan I brought with me, only on one side to start with. That pan is milchik, so I have to set it aside carefully; it must go back to the kosher kitchen at Reb Zalman’s house. First the cheese blintzes: I make the cheese mixture, put a spoonful on the side of the pancake that’s been fried, and fold it up into a little parcel. Then I fry the parcels gently in butter. By that time the beef pot-roast is ready. Talitha helps me to mince chunks of cooked meat with fried onion in the mincing-machine she found for me in the kitchen cupboard. I season the mince with salt and pepper, and moisten it with chicken soup. I show Talitha how to fold the blintzes into parcels and fry them in the big pan. When I give her a meat blintz to taste she’s delighted. Tryphena won’t even try one.
The smell of the blintzes – milchik and vleischik – wafts out of the shop; passers-by in the cold and wet outside sniff the delicious scents, and flock inside.
Mr. Deeb has a blackboard to put up on the pavement outside. He reads aloud to me what he has written on it:
SPESHAL: TODAY ONLY!
DELISHUS BLINTZES!
MEAT BLINTZES WITH CHIKEN SOUP
CHEESE BLINTZES WITH SOUR CREEM FOR DESERT.
My blintzes fly out as fast as we can fry them. I have to make another double recipe of pancakes, and we run out of soup.
* * * * * * * * *
Today’s Friday, and when I come back from school I must speak to Zaideh Zalman. I should ask my mother as well, but she never knows the answers to important questions. This is the question I have to ask: where is my father? Lulu asked me that on Monday at break. We were sitting together on the dry grass, eating peanut-butter sandwiches. She said, “You tell me about your Mama, and your Zaideh, but you never talk about your father. Where does he live?” I know where my mother is, and I know my Zaideh is her father – but I never thought of asking anybody, where is my father? This is something I should know. So I must ask Zaideh, because he knows everything.
But when I ask Zaideh this question, his face goes dark and he covers his eyes with his hand. And he doesn’t give me an answer. He says “Erev Shabbos we don’t talk about these things.”
“What things? Why not?”
“Because it’s not fit.”
“So Zaideh, will you tell me after Shabbos?”
He lifts up both his hands and looks at the ceiling. I don’t know whether that means “Yes” or “No”.
And I don’t understand what’s happening in our home. Dina looks different. She’s been going out every morning early, and when she comes back she’s tired, but more alive, somehow. This Shabbos Zaideh Zalman doesn’t say a word after Kiddush and Ha-Motzi. He never has anything to say to Dina, and not much to my mother, but usually he talks to me, he tells me a joke, or he asks about my day at school, and he listens to my funny stories from school and laughs at them. This Shabbos night – no jokes, no stories. I’m wondering, is that because I asked him about my father? Everybody else has a father – why shouldn’t I know about mine?
Dina talks to me at the Shabbos table, she’s trying out new words in English. She asks me a question:
“If two blintzes cost a shilling, and you give me a half-crown, how much change must I give you?”
“You’re not my teacher,” I say, and she laughs, and says “That’s right, Chayaleh, you’re my teacher!”
Zaideh Zalman says nothing at all, and he doesn’t eat much either. He doesn’t even bentch after supper, he just gets up and goes straight to his room. What’s the matter with these grown-ups?
* * * * * * * * *
Mr. Deeb’s employing me, and I’m earning money! Only a little, and I can tell he won’t pay much more, but I’ll keep at it and I’ll make out, somehow. Next week I’ll cook a good thick vegetable soup, with potatoes for thickening, and maybe make bread to serve with it. But first Tryphena has to clean up that kitchen – I’ll have to win her over. I have to make this work.
Now I must speak with Zalman again.
What I have to tell him will be much harder to say than speaking to Mr. Deeb with my little English. But I’ve been burying my pain and anger deep inside me, and by now it’s breaking out and burning up my soul.
* * * * * * * * *
Zaideh Zalman has hardly said a word to anyone for this whole Shabbos. Most of the time he was behind the newspaper. Uncle Pinchas and Auntie Ida came over for tea. Uncle Pinchas is short and fat, and Auntie Ida is tall and thin; they look so funny together. They sat with Zaideh on the front porch and tried to talk to him, but he only grunted. Later I heard Uncle Pinchas asking my mother whether Zaideh was well, but I didn’t hear her reply. Maybe it was one of those questions she couldn’t answer.
Dina slept late this morning – usually she’s up and dressed before anyone else, even on Shabbos. We had lunch together, and talked and laughed. Now Dina is trying to learn how to write in English, and she asked me questions about the alphabet. Zaideh didn’t open his mouth at lunch-time except to put food in it. After lunch Dina went to her room, but when she heard the voices of my uncle and aunt she came out to say “hello”. She even went out to the stoep with them and Zaideh for tea, with my mother’s Shabbos sponge-cake. I don’t think she likes that cake much, and I know I’m tired of it. I’ll ask Dina to bake us a chocolate cake. I’m sure she knows how. But this is the first time I’ve seen her joining in when we’ve had visitors.
When Shabbos was out, after my uncle and aunt left, I thought that would be a good time to ask Zaideh Zalman about my father. But when I found him in the kitchen behind his newspaper, Dina was there too. I’ve never seen them alone together before. And I didn’t want to talk to anyone except Zaideh about my big question, so I went away.
* * * * * * * * *
After all this time, we started talking, Zalman and I. Not right away, but later that Saturday night, when at last he put down that newspaper. He’s not a stupid man, Reb Zalman, he did understand what I meant when I told him there was no place for me in his house. And it’s not easy for a man like him – he’s a leader of the community, the patriarch of the family – it’s hard for him to admit that he did wrong. And he had to confess that what he thought of me was wrong too. He thought I was brainless and a nothing; he brought me to this country, saved my life by marrying me, only to honor the memory of his Shaina. In his mind he kept faith with her in the spirit when he stood under the chupah with her younger cousin.
He said to me at last, “I’m sorry, Dina. I’m sorry you were unhappy. But …” – he turned as though he was about to speak to someone invisible beside him – “but I have to go to the cemetery tomorrow.”
Yet that was the first time he spoke my name.
* * * * * * * * *
I had to wait most of the week-end to ask Zaideh Zalman my big question. Before I was awake on Sunday morning, he went off to the cemetery, and he stayed there a long time. Lulu had asked me to come for lunch, so I left before Zaideh had come back, and when I got home my mother said Zaideh was taking his afternoon nap. When he came out of his bedroom at five o’clock, I followed him to the kitchen.
“Zaideh, I can’t wait any longer! You have to tell me about my father, I want to know now!”He looked at me in a strange way.
“Come, Chayaleh, let’s sit in the swing on the stoep.”
It was cold outside, but I fetched my big cushion and we sat on the creaking swing-seat, side by side, moving slowly backwards and forwards.
Zaideh spoke as though he was having trouble getting the words out.
“Your father’s name was Lazar Plotkin. He and your mother were married only for a very short time. Rivkah was always … slow, but this Plotkin promised to look after her. But just one week after the wedding, he brought her back to this house. They had an argument, but Rivkah couldn’t tell us exactly what happened. Then he disappeared. Nine months later, when Rivkah gave birth to you, I didn’t know where he was. I still don’t know. As far as I’m concerned, that father of yours was dead before you were born. That’s all I can tell you about him.”
I felt cold for a moment. But when Zaideh spoke again he sounded more like himself.
“Something else I can tell you, Chayaleh: we all love you, your mother, your Bobba, and me. From the day you were born. Bobba Shaina ava-sholem used to play on the piano and sing for you. You were just a baby, but you loved music as much as she did: you would sit on the floor and sing and clap.”
I had to think about all of this for a long time. But I couldn’t help noticing that this was the first time I had ever heard Zaideh say Bobba Shaina’s name.
* * * * * * * * *
Even now there are things I need to settle with Reb Zalman. He’s still not my husband, and I’m not his wife. There’s more to a marriage than a wedding. In his heart, Shaina is still beside him. I can’t spend the rest of my life waiting for Zalman to let her sleep in peace in her grave. But I think something is moving: he’s unlocked the living room and pulled back the curtains there.
As for me – with those five working days in Mr. Deeb’s little kitchen, even with Tryphena and the cockroaches, I moved out into the world. And something in my head tells me never to move back. To come home after a day’s work, yes; but never again to live as I did.
It was Zalman who found a way forward.
“You can’t go on working for Deeb,” he said. “That mamzer will use you up and pay you nothing. You must work for yourself. If you want, I can rent a shop for you with a kitchen, and you can open a decent business to sell good food. Maybe I can be your business partner. There’s a place up the street, near our business premises – a small shop, it was an eating-house – I can ask Pinchas to find out.”
“Yes, yes, please do that!”
“Dina – I’m happy that you are friends with Chayaleh. She needs someone …” he didn’t say that Chayaleh needed more than poor Rivkah could give her, but I knew that’s what he meant.
“I love her very much.”
“It’s funny, I never knew you could cook!”
“I never got the chance before. The Yomtayvim are coming – I’ll make you a ginger lekach. A honey-cake for a sweet year.”
* * * * * * * * *
Well, I found out who my father is, even if Zaideh couldn’t tell me where he is. Lazar Plotkin. I’ve been thinking about him ever since Zaideh told me his name – for months now. Does he even know that I was born? Maybe one day I’ll go find him, and tell him who I am. Maybe.
Anyway, I feel better now that I know.
These days the living-room door is open, and the curtains are drawn back to let the light in. And now I’m allowed to play the piano – and I’m taking music lessons! My teacher Mrs Burstein comes to the house twice a week, and I practice every day.
And Dina has opened a little shop, just up the street, called “The Honey-cake”. A lady called Talitha helps her, and they sell delicious things that they make, like cheese blintzes, and cakes, and home-made bread. On the afternoons when I don’t have a music lesson, I love helping them at the shop. Dina always has chocolate cake for me – or honey-cake.
Dr Eugenie Freed (Isserow) is a Research Fellow in the Dept. of English at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she taught for many years. She has published a book on William Blake and continues to publish scholarly articles on a variety of literary topics. In recent years, she has also been trying to learn how to write publishable fiction.
