Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories. Blume Lempel

visit. She’d had so much to say, so much she wanted to hear. I imagined how she’d wrestled with Death, mounted her resistance, waited and hoped that at any moment the door would open and I would arrive. Until five in the evening she held off the Angel of Death. When night fell, her thoughts became muddled as usual, her wits distracted. Then, only then, was she defeated.

      If only they had called me in time, I could have been standing at her death bed, perhaps wearing the white wings of the Angel Gabriel. I would have opened the gates to the Garden of Eden for her. With all due ceremony, I would have shown her to the seat she so richly deserved, where the patriarchs and matriarchs and all righteous men and women sing the Song of Praise before the Throne of God.

      At daybreak I arose, ironed the garment she’d sewn for herself, wrapped it in tissue paper, and set off for the funeral. In the lobby, the women fell upon me: “How could you have been so cold-hearted? Her wailing could have moved a stone, but you chose not to respond. They said in the office that they’d called you — the poor woman was waiting for you until the moment her soul departed.”

      I followed a man who led me down to the basement to identify my aunt’s body. She was lying in an open coffin, wrapped in cheap linen basted together with big stitches.

      Frozen with fear, I stood and looked at her. I had to do it — I had to — the demand took hold with iron claws. I looked at my escort. “Get out!” I said in a voice that allowed no opposition. He stared at me, startled, but said nothing.

      When he had gone, I unwrapped the shroud with its ruffled collar and frilly sleeves. I pulled it over her thin frame, all the way from her feet to her blue lips. I covered her head with the special burial cap, and over the cap I placed her mother’s white silk kerchief edged with golden fringe. I pulled the kerchief over her closed eyes. Only her long, pointy nose poked out at me.

      Bracing myself against fear, against death, against my own feelings, I touched my lips to the silk kerchief, and it seemed to me that with this gesture I freed the imprisoned soul, which then rose, fluttering softly, and wafted away to the exalted place for which it was destined, leaving behind the body as a gift for Mother Earth.

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      Through the sun-drenched streets of Tel Aviv I follow the coffin carrying my girlhood friend Zosye to her eternal rest. Inside my head, black crows caw loudly around the dead body, blocking the streets and the passersby and the hearse at the head of the procession. Their din prevents me from gaining access to the ways and byways that led Zosye into prostitution.

      It is my first visit to Israel. Intending to go to Eilat, I had already checked out of my room in Tel Aviv and packed my toothbrush when the head of our immigrant society called to invite me to the funeral. I have long since learned to skip over the place where my cradle once stood and instead to seek my origins in the stony strata of history — to search for the living source under the sands of the Negev, shadowed by time, to sail through the gates of the desert and steer my ship along its fated course.

      I have placed a film of artificial frost over the small window that looks back into my past. There, white trees and dead roses are always in bloom, not as a memorial, but as a reminder that the layer of ice is an illusion, nothing but the thinnest skin stretched over black depths where snakes and scorpions feed on the remains of their unburied victims.

      Whenever I encounter someone who has escaped from the abyss, I look at him with terror, expecting to discover something that disturbs my sense of how things are.

      As I ride along in the car, my eye follows the carriage carrying Zosye’s martyred bones. I seem to hear the letters “s” and “z” dangerously sharp in her Polish name. Zosye, Zoshke, the bookkeeper’s pampered daughter, is riding her bicycle, her windblown hair as blond as the furniture in her father’s parlor. When Zosye laughs, the rows of trees lining the road respond with an emphatic “yes!”

      Many girls in our small town spoke Polish, but Zosye’s Polish had deep roots. Absorbed with the milk of her gentile wet nurse, it was a mark of her dual identity.

      I leaf through the pages fluttering in my mind. The black crows retreat into the background. The open path ahead leads to the town where I grew up. I follow the town princess to the shadowy corners of the world, and to the sea, to the blue shores of the Mediterranean into which she threw herself. I don’t see her the way she looks now. Sealed in the coffin, she is safe from curious eyes. She is no longer for sale, neither to earn money nor out of despair. Against her will she arrived in this world, and against her will she has departed.

      Three other people are sharing the car with me. They, too, are shuffling through pages — pages marked with judgments. “She was a streetwalker who lived with an Arab.” They exchange information they have observed with their own eyes. I am trying to see the invisible. I don’t trust the eye that relies on facts. Half-truths can mislead, divert the guilt from murderer to murdered. The corpse is silent, and the murderer, protected by the privileged status accorded him as a citizen, a father, and perhaps by now a grandfather, sips his beer in peace and grows fatter by the day.

      “Why didn’t she adapt to the new way of life? Why didn’t she become a productive member of society like other immigrants?”

      I don’t answer these questions. The truth is concealed beneath bloody bandages; the painful wound may not be touched. It is clear that a single standard does not fit all. I believe no suicide is an accident. Every hour, every moment, the suicide holds the blade over her throat. Zosye committed her first suicide — her initial, spiritual suicide — in Felix’s attic. The physical one came gradually, step by step.

      I meander along the victim’s own paths. I know who murdered her. In exchange for a piece of bread and a slice of ham, he sated himself on her blooming, sun-ripened white body. Perhaps she committed suicide even earlier. Perhaps her life ended on the wild autumn night when Felix arrived like a prince on a white horse, bearing a loaf of bread and a peasant skirt, blouse, and kerchief. Zosye donned the clothes and kissed her mother’s wet face, black as that autumn night. . . . She kissed the dog that lay by the door without understanding that the house he was guarding had become a prison. She kissed her father’s body, which had lain abandoned in the marketplace after he was shot. She kissed the piano and the garden that surrounded the house. Everything, everything she gathered up inside her, hiding it like a ransom in the cellars of her being.

      Behind Felix’s barn, downhill from the path, stood a pond bordered by linden trees. Beneath its slimy green surface, fish were spawning. On sunny days Zosye could see them swimming in the water. She could see the black rings on the green-mirrored surface. Through the narrow crevices in the attic, these rings became the only outlet for her famished gaze. Looking down, she would imagine the ring she’d create when she threw herself into the water. Buried deep in the hay, she had time to mourn her own death and to attend her own funeral.

      Now, on the way to her funeral, I want to tell her that I see with her eyes, feel with her senses. I picture perspiring beds. I caress bodies with her fingers. I do it in the spirit of the girl I once knew, searching for a sign of today in the buried world of yesterday. In that light, or more aptly put, in those shadows, I seek to glimpse the why and the wherefore. In my mind I lower myself into the abyss, following the overgrown footpath to long-ago.

      Sometimes in those days, after I’d brought my father his coffee in the butcher shop, I would stop at Zosye’s exquisite garden on my way home. Standing on tiptoe, I’d peer over the fence and marvel at the golden lilies that grew around her house. I would bemoan all that could have been but never was. If my grandfather hadn’t been so stubborn, if he’d yielded to the demands of Zosye’s father’s parents and provided them with the dowry they asked for, then I, not she, would have been the bookkeeper’s daughter, playing the piano and preparing to travel all the way to Lemberg for my studies. But my pious grandfather was loath to go against his deeply-held ethical beliefs by making a promise he knew he could not keep, and so the bookkeeper and my mother had parted forever. He married a rich man’s daughter,