People wonder why I never cry. The doctors think that if I did, the walls of my resistance might crumble and I might be able to speak again. They’ve even tried hurting me physically, but the pain only made me laugh.
And yet I remember that I used to cry, to speak, to tell and retell the stories I used to hear on winter nights around the stove. I’d brush the mildew from the old pages and arrange them lovingly on memory’s shelf. In my mind, fantastic Edens bloomed and white birds spread their wings to guard the boundary between good and evil.
Growing up, I had no reason to doubt the established order. Enclosed within my father’s words and my mother’s tears, the world came to me as a finished product, and I accepted its colors and nuances as part of the natural arrangement of things. Just as the sun rose every morning behind our barn and set every evening behind the tree that my father pointed to, so I stayed within the picture frame, walking in the light, avoiding the shadows, never straying beyond the borders. The house where I was born and grew up was my personal fortress. Over the walls a roof and over the roof a sky — a frame atop a frame, double insurance against malevolent forces that lay in wait beyond. When my father shut the gate every evening, I was certain that nothing harmful would befall me. The peasants on the other side of the river might be wounding one another with knives, the wind might be howling and the forest black as hell, but I didn’t worry. I had no doubt that what lay within the frame could resist all the dark powers.
Maybe it was the strength of my belief in that order, in the bookkeeper’s columns of good and bad, in words, in the talk that sustained those concepts — perhaps this was why I ceased to speak.
When I lived with the squirrel in the forest, speech was unnecessary. From her, I learned the art of survival. With eyes open and mouth shut, I followed in her tracks, learning to beware of the slightest rustle, the tiniest vibration from miles away. Life there sharpened my senses until I could distinguish between prey and predator and identify animals and people by scent alone.
She led me to trees laden with nuts. In that region the squirrels were plump and well-fed. Once, lightning set fire to a tree and incinerated a whole family of them. I remember the taste of those singed creatures. The grease trickled down as I gnawed the marrow of their charred bones. I felt the power of their extinguished lives filling my veins with strength. New energy welled up inside me. I felt as strong as Samson and left my forest bunker ready to take on the murderers and finish them off with a single blow.
In such limpid moments, the scent of my mother’s body would come to me, her skin smelling of noodles fried in oil and honey. How good it felt to cry on her breast! “Children’s tears never go to waste,” she used to say. “Innocent tears find their way to the Throne of God.”
I did not cry my last tears before God. I cried before Temke, our peasant neighbor. I wanted him to bury my parents, and so I cried before him. I never cried again.
I don’t know how I managed to bury my parents in the Jewish cemetery. Today this holy ground is covered with cement. A cultural center has been erected, with a red roof and playgrounds and peaceful gardens where Temke and his fellow lowlifes can enjoy themselves. There was a time when I believed that only from this cemetery could the souls of my parents ascend to the loftiest heights imaginable.
After the last roundup, when my parents were killed, I left Temke’s barn and went into the woods. The darkness that had once frightened me became my protector, sheltering and concealing me. The wind mingled my scent with the smells of the forest. The rain washed away my footprints. I followed the animals and kept away from people. The wind brought me the smell of berries, a dead bird, the rotten carcass of a half-devoured creature. Under cover of night, propelled by hunger, I pursued these scents. The forest took me in without tears, without words, receiving me with indifference, a naked, frank, and savage truth — one single truth for the worm in the grass, the rabbit in the thicket, tree, star, nuts, and me.
In such profound connection, I would close my eyes without fear or sorrow. As I merged with the impersonal ways of nature, my body would forsake me — until the wind stirred and I descended once again to my hiding place.
When I was discovered and returned to life among people, I was unable to utter a word. I thought I’d become deaf to human speech. But that was wishful thinking. In fact, I didn’t want to hear about the enormity of the disaster. Instead, I looked for answers with my eyes. I scrabbled in the garbage with my fingernails. I tasted the dust, pawed at the stones. I sought a path to the house where I was born, the room where my cradle once stood. I looked for the barn behind which the sun would set. I sniffed for my mother’s honeyed scent in the mountains of ash. Even the sky was gone. The horizon had burned away, leaving no center, no foothold, no answer, no purpose.
I searched and searched until the pain exploded, and then I began to laugh. I was taken to a doctor who peered into my eyes, my heart, and my soul, and declared that I needed to rest. Total rest and good care, he said, would calm my nerves and make me normal once more.
I’m sure he meant no harm, this Jewish doctor in his Russian uniform. But the word “normal” provoked me, touching a nerve at the root of my illness. Long-sealed sluices of buried pain burst open. Waves of molten wrath, shame, and murdered hope flooded over the banks, accompanied by spasmodic laughter. I laughed until the flames smothered my breath and I lost consciousness. It was then that the doctor administered the first injection.
I found it difficult to leave the cemetery — not only the one now covered with cement, but also the burial ground of my orderly childhood world. After the efficient destruction, all that remained were chimneys and orphaned walls. I could not bear to leave these, to part with the mound of rubbish and the earthen bench where my friend Rosa’s home once stood. No doubt that bench remembered the Yiddish songs we sang there — and even if the bench did not remember, I could not forget. Nor could I forget Reyzye Paltiels with her gold tooth, through which she filtered her rippling octaves. Reyzye was the only girl in town who could sing “Aida” with all the trills, like a diva. Her exquisite love songs ascended like prayers to the house high on the mountain where Yosele lived. She and I both knew Yosele was standing by the back gate, looking out through a crack. He climbed the towering heights of her song and fluttered on fantasy wings, soaring on the tones of her Song of Songs without regard for the abyss that yawned below. Yosele knew that his father, a wealthy dry goods merchant, would never consent to a match with the daughter of a wagon driver. But Reyzye had her own ideas. She heeded the urgency of her feelings and the power of the kiss she had shared with Yosele in the grove under cover of night.
The apple trees are still standing in Reyzye’s orchard. Perhaps they remember the loving couple’s last kiss, or the tear from Reyzye’s brown eyes, or the sigh that trembled with leaves in the wind.
I sit on the bench as the shadows gather around me. They sprawl at my feet and coil around my throat, my heart, my thoughts — and because I have nothing to say to them, I begin to laugh. I laugh against my will, against my better judgment. I laugh until I stick in the needle and try to convince myself that I’m normal.
The shadows come and go, but my friend Rosa is always beside me. We speak without words, like the river at the foot of the mountain that flows on as though nothing has changed. We do not speak of the torn garments of bereavement that separate us, nor of the sea of blood nor the mountain of ash.
At the foot of the mountain on the other side of the river, the fields extend as far as the eye can see, and the ripe wheat waves in the wind as if yesterday had never happened. Geese and ducks swim in the river, filling the air with their brash cries. In the evening, they shake the water off their wings and return to their nests. The peasant women who have spent all day with the flax lay their sheaves in the shallow water and cover them with mud. They wash their feet and make their way toward home. On that side of the river lies the village with no past. Smoke winds from the peasant chimneys as supper is prepared. Mothers rock their children to sleep. Under one of those thatched roofs lives Temke. In his barn he keeps our cows and the horse I used to ride. For the privilege of spending the winter in that barn, I turned over all our belongings.