Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories. Blume Lempel

used to stand at the fence and imagine how it would have been, if only. . . .

      Today, as a tourist from Paris, I accompany the bookkeeper’s daughter to her eternal rest and remember how gladly I would have relinquished all my worldly ambitions to study in Lemberg.

      Through the skylight of my Parisian garret I used to look up at the tiny rectangle of heaven that fortune had allotted me and conjure up Zosye’s lush, slumbering garden. How I cursed the fate that had stranded me in Paris on my way to Israel!

      Zosye did not want to go to Israel, nor did she need to. For her, the vine was abloom with all the brilliant hues of the bejeweled peacock that resides in the dreams of every young woman.

      How could she have known, as she played the piano, that the civilization of those magical notes was even then writing her people’s death sentence? How could she have known that form and harmony were but the seductive song of the Lorelei, the façade behind which the cannibal sharpened his crooked teeth? Protected and sheltered like the golden lilies in her father’s garden, Zosye could not see those teeth. With the natural power that is the birthright of every living thing, she glowed in the light of the sun. Endowed with all the attributes she needed to thrive and grow, Zosye was primed to scatter her own seeds across God’s willing earth.

      The pages I turn are blank, as unreadable as the image in a shattered mirror. It occurs to me that the earth to which Zosye is now returning holds the remains of another prostitute, the biblical Tamar, who sat down at the crossroads where fortunes were decided and seduced men with her charms. I search for a spark of Tamar’s desire in the image of Zosye that is anchored deep in my memory. I search for the lust of a whore in her dimples and her rosy, Polish-speaking lips that surely didn’t even know the meaning of the word “prostitute.” I look into her eyes, the reflection of her soul. Her character, unripe, uprooted, is borne by the wind to the four corners of the world. I search for the legacy of modesty passed down through the generations. I search for the set path of her father, and before me another form rises up: her Uncle Shloyme, the Russian. I don’t force this figure to take shape — I let it grow on its own. I relive the terror that his death caused me, which penetrated my dreams long after I’d left my town behind. His imposing figure rises out of the mist: gray eyes, bushy black eyebrows, broad shoulders, erect and proud. From his mouth I heard for the first time that “all is vanity.” When Shloyme spoke, every word burned, a reflection of the grief and rage that gradually devoured him. At the time I imagined he looked the way Job did when he sat down in dust and ashes, despising himself. “What is the difference between man and beast,” Shloyme asked, “if even a rabbi will paw at his wife’s tits?”

      These particular words, expressed at our home one Sabbath afternoon, provoked a radical shift in my thinking. I too began to ask questions that led me off the beaten path. When Shloyme the Russian lay on his death bed, he wanted only one thing: that God should grant him sufficient strength to get out of bed, set the house on fire, and be burned with all his worldly possessions on God’s eternal sacrificial altar. And, in fact, this is what he did. People said that years earlier he had been banished from the Jewish community for reading the heretic Spinoza and for walking too far outside the town limits on the Sabbath, in violation of Jewish law.

      Did Zosye, too, search for a path to God through alien gardens? Did the tragic worm that consumed Shloyme the Russian make itself at home in her soul and force her to leave the main road and set off on another? Did it force her to walk beyond the Pale and excommunicate herself?

      Shloyme the Russian had a legitimate claim against his Creator. His barren wife turned away from the Almighty before he did. She became devoted to black magic, ghosts and spirits, and witches who fed her wild herbs and swindled away a fortune with promises that help would come her way if she followed their directions. And so Shorke the Russian, Shloyme’s wife, did as instructed. She strung around her neck the claws of a crow and placed the hairs of a she-panther in her bosom. At midnight she bathed in the milk of a pregnant cow and outlined her navel with the blood of a bull. Her hair unkempt, eyes painted with soot, cheeks rouged with chicory paper, Shorke approached her husband to be fertilized.

      In the car all is quiet. I look out onto the winding streets of Jaffa. The sky is a pure, light blue, without a cloud to anchor the mind. The hearse carrying the corpse continues ahead. Parallels multiply; characters who have no obvious connection to one another become entangled like roots under the earth. They worm their way into the core of Zosye’s being. They help me to construct a woman from the child of long ago.

      I see the woman in Felix’s attic. She is speaking to God, pleading with Him to spare her mother and her little sister. She pleads until there is nothing left to plead for. The city has been destroyed. The past is no more. Perhaps it never was? The abyss she is looking into has lost all familiar markers. No signs of yesterday, no indications of tomorrow. The forest in its innocence is in full flower. Fish multiply in the pond. Cicadas call to one another; male and female come together in the deep grasses of the meadow. Zosye knows she is pregnant. The cow in its stall is pregnant, too. Both are silent. The cow chews its cud and ruminates. Zosye picks up a stalk of straw and does the same. She thinks mostly about eating. Not about the wild strawberries with sweet cream that her mother used to serve, but about bread with salt, perhaps with a clove of garlic.

      The chickens in the courtyard peck at their grain and carry on with their squabbles. They have no idea that man has confined them in a ghetto for his own gain, that cold, cynical human calculation has lodged them in a comfortable death camp. Whenever he feels like it, he’ll grab a cleaver and chop off the white head of a hen, whistling all the while. Zosye is not afraid of death. She accepts Felix’s favors like the cicadas in the grass. She doesn’t tell him about the pregnancy.

      Felix has a wife and children. He keeps Zosye in his mother’s attic, holding his mother responsible for her safety. Felix’s mother is well aware of her son’s desires and knows that he means what he says. She makes sure not to let the Jewess out of the attic. She hides Zosye’s food in the bucket of oats for the cow. Felix’s mother is talkative. She prattles on at length about how the Germans have shot all the Jews, stacked the corpses like timber, doused them with kerosene and set them ablaze. She doesn’t conceal her satisfaction. She hates the Germans, but their savage treatment of the Jews is pleasing to her. “It’s high time we were rid of them,” she says.

      Zosye doesn’t tell Felix about his mother’s chatter. She has long since stopped complaining, either to God or to people. She lies in the attic and listens as the front draws closer every day. The stable trembles with the heavy shelling that rolls like spring thunder. Zosye does not wait for tomorrow or hold onto today. Now that liberation is near, she wants only to sleep. In her dreams she has a past. She has a father, a mother, a clearly demarcated path, a straight line between two mountains of snow. She glides on ice skates; diamonds sparkle in the sun. Overwhelmed with bliss, she closes her eyes just for a moment — then loses her way in a fierce blizzard.

      Zosye sleeps. She wants to gorge on the dream until she chokes. But when the liberator bangs on the door, she can’t find the strength to get up and open it. Instead, she lies there, listening to the cells dividing in her bloodstream. She takes her pulse and counts her heartbeats. She descends deeper and deeper into the black shafts of consciousness. Inch by inch Zosye draws back into herself. The footsteps of the liberator echo rhythmically on the road. She has no road. Her paths are overgrown with grass. She digs into the earth, under the weeds, touches the root with its suicidal poison — then gets up and climbs out of the attic. She pauses next to the cow. For a long time they stare at each other in mute understanding.

      Slowly and carefully, Zosye walks down the hill between newly planted garden beds. She goes to the pond covered with green slime, closes her eyes, and throws herself in.

      Zosye opens her eyes in the hospital. A bit of congealed blood trembles in a glass by the side of her bed. “A four-month-old soul,” says the nurse. “Everything inside you was rotten. It all had to be removed.”

      Zosye smiles and says nothing. She asks no questions; she has no wish to know. Perhaps she thinks about her aunt, the barren Shorke? The truth is she is utterly