I say nothing to Rosa about all this, nor do I tell her that during the winter I spent in Temke’s barn, he raped me. With Rosa I speak in a silent tongue, heart to heart. We gaze upon the slender flaxen threads that drift by like thoughts, floating in the air like the nerves of mutilated bodies that refuse to die. Night falls, but we have nowhere to go. We watch the birds rising from the fields. We do not curse the fields, or the black earth rich with the blood of our murdered world. We don’t talk about today. We immerse ourselves in the past, in girlish dreams, in the crushes we’ll pursue when we’re as old as Reyzye Paltiels.
We talk about Bumke, the boy with the shock of black hair. Rosa still believes he visits our street because he’s after her, but I know that I’m the one he wants. I see him even now in the withered grove. The wind plays with his tousled hair, and I feel his eyes on me and grow hot. I feel he knows what Temke did to me. Perhaps he thinks I’ve been defiled. I can’t blame him. He was not in the forest. And after all, he’s still so young. He will never be older than fifteen.
We talk late into the night, until morning. We talk and we talk, about Israel, about the pioneers who are now there and those who are planning to go. We burn with the passion of speeches made in the Great Synagogue. Even if we can’t grasp the situation with the British, we believe the fiery words of the speakers. We’re part of the fire sweeping through our world, the lava in the mouth of the volcano. We believe in the blue-and-white flag and the Hebrew songs, the agricultural training and the survival of our people. We believe!
When I crossed the ocean, I carried with me the habit of speaking to the shadows, and it became my way of life. I look up at the stars that were extinguished long ago. For me they still shine with the first fire of creation. I don’t care that the heavens tell lies. I accept the fantasy along with the fact. I’m not looking for truth. I’m seeking the faith that I’ve lost, a way out of chaos, a place where my broken self can put down roots. I know the evil powers that live within people and make no attempt to cloak them in pretty words. I don’t separate myself from the community, but I live on the sidelines, like a stranger in my own world. I live with the snakes and scorpions, with the black leeches in my brain, in my blood.
I live with the garden in my backyard. Among the stones I carried with me, flowers grow. I refer to them by the names of those who are no more. They burn like memorial candles, each in its season. My parents, who were killed in winter, emerge from the snow, their tart red berries reaching up like blood-soaked fingers. I watch as the hungry birds peck at the berries one by one. My mother’s white fingers seem to hold out fruit for the birds. I like to think she enjoys having them eat from her hands.
The first bloom that breaks through the winter crust is named Rosa. She appears as a narcissus, white, slender, and shy. The snow may lie at her feet, but she tolerates the bitter weather, bestowing the rich perfumes of her pure soul upon the wind and holding her head high, stretching up with youthful exhilaration. Sometimes she lasts for a day, sometimes for a week, but the bulb stays planted deep in the earth. She will return, and she knows I will be waiting.
My summer flowers, on the other hand, have no fixed identities. They change their character day by day, according to my mood. When the sky is blue, the gladiolus laughs with my cousin Gitl’s sensuous mirth. The pink goblet with its red rim reminds me of Gitl’s half-parted lips. Always eager to be fruitful and multiply, at twenty she was already the mother of two sets of twins. Whenever she was nursing a child, her mind flooded with intoxicating notions. She lowered her gray eyes, ashamed to raise them lest her thoughts be revealed. Perhaps she asked God to forgive her for feeling such heated desire for her husband. It was said that at the very end she was pregnant again. A German put a bullet in her belly and left her lying in the street with her guts spilling out. The sight was so unsettling that the peasants crossed themselves in fear on their way to church that Sunday. In my mind I lift her up and carry her far away from human eyes. Surely if a wolf came upon her in the forest he would devour her. A cannibal would make a feast of her. Yet her ultra-civilized murderer left her lying in the street to show the world what he could do.
The shadows slink around me as I sit in my garden. A smile, a gesture, swims into memory. They are not numbers but living people, each one unique. In the rich soil of my garden, their severed lives are flourishing. Pansies with violet eyes, blue forget-me-nots, red poppies like congealed blood, white roses choked by murderous parasitic vines — side by side with yesterday, a today is blooming. Often I feel that a tomorrow, too, is growing.
Whenever I recall a particular face, I plant a flower. I don’t pamper my blooms with synthetic food. They must cope with the raw elements. Free from illusions, self-aware, they rely on no one but themselves. Soaking up hot sunshine and plenteous rain, hail and hurricane, they know the art of adaptation and survival.
Sometimes, when storms fail to arrive and the thorns on my roses turn limp and passive, a fear overtakes me. In my desperation I summon a storm of my own, awakening shadows with my mute wailing, my wild laughter. I laugh and I storm, and it seems to me that the wind storms with me.
Everyone who knew Pachysandra knew that she talked to herself. Yet her face never betrayed the slightest hint of what she was talking about. Her expression remained hard, closed, the brick-colored skin drawn taut over her cheeks, her eyes shaded by the brim of the straw hat she never removed.
As soon as she opened her eyes in the morning and remembered who and where she was, her lips began to move — not just with any words, but with verses from the Bible. The first verse that came to mind and fully penetrated her consciousness would stay with her all day long, to be recited over and over from morning to night.
Pachysandra did not select her own material. Biblical texts and images flooded her imagination, adapting themselves to her moods, which shifted in reaction to the weather, or to an argument with her son Tom, or to some distant pagan source whose origins she did not know and did not want to know.
Pachysandra believed in the holy patriarchs of the Old Testament. She knew they were looking after her because they came without premeditation or prayer. They arose from the depths of her spirit, filling every corner of her room, settling on the bed, giving her advice on what to cook and what to eat. When she laughed, they laughed with her; when she cried, they cried, too. They embraced her like a trellis of roses, guarding and protecting her private world.
All day, while her mind was busy with this and that, the images were in motion. Figures appeared as if under a silver cloud. She saw Abraham’s caravan on the edge of the desert and the matriarch Sarah, encircled by a retinue of maidservants and wrapped in white linen, riding side-saddle on a small donkey. Pachysandra couldn’t see her face, but sensed her royal bearing, and with the utmost respect she chose not to peel away the swaths of fabric protecting her privacy. For each image, she had a corresponding verse. The images and the verses populated Pachysandra’s world, which she tended in a special chamber of her being, minute as a pinhead and yet infinite.
Pachysandra saw parallels between Sarah’s fortunes and her own. She too had rescued her only son from the butcher knife that he himself had sharpened. She too had crossed the river into a foreign land — and not just one river, but many rivers, many seas, until the very last wandering that brought her from South Carolina to cold, alien Brooklyn.
Pachysandra yearned for South Carolina. She missed the wide open universe, as wide and open as God had created it. Every morning when she went shopping for her son Tom, she made a detour through Prospect Park so that she could luxuriate in the scent of the grass, the trees, the water. She scolded the birds in the park if they refused the bread crumbs she’d set aside for them the previous evening.
“If I had any teeth, I wouldn’t be tossing God’s bread at you like this,” she told them. “The Creator has already provided you with nuts from the trees and worms from the earth.” Pachysandra carried the leftover crumbs to the river where the less finicky ducks quickly devoured them.
“How