Between Gods: A Memoir (33 page)

The sack of cells has heard our fighting. It thinks it isn’t welcome.

Come back, little plus. Please come back.

I bleed all day in a numb kind of stupor. Degan sits beside me in bed, an arm around my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he keeps repeating. “I’ll be better.”

He, too, thinks our fighting has scared the baby away.

Shabbat is waning, but we don’t make Havdalah. We don’t say the
Shehechiyanu
, the prayer for firsts; we don’t get the textbook back out to read the prayer for conception, or the one for losing a child. I’m in between, in an awful place of limbo. Part
of me wishes to wake up soaked through with blood. If this is what is happening, I’d rather get it over with.

Instead, the pale dawn brings more of the same. The blood in my underwear is still fresh and red—which the Internet unilaterally declares to be a bad sign—but still only splattered delicately across the cotton. The crimson drops are oddly beautiful, like a fresh kill on crisp white snow. Out on the street there’s the sound of a car door slamming, then a man’s muffled yelling. I make decaf coffee, take a few notes at my desk. Eat a breakfast of oat bran and organic yogourt. Bargaining for what I’ve already lost. Degan will be gone at work all day; I’ll be here alone, losing our second child.

I sit down to answer emails but find myself unable to concentrate. The spotting continues. Mid-morning I get up from my desk and speed-walk over to the drop-in clinic on Dufferin as though possessed. In the waiting room, I flip through greying fashion magazines and read the doctor’s framed degrees on the wall. One is in Hebrew; Sokol is a Jewish name.

When I finally see the doctor, a balding man with wiry eyebrows that peak above his horn-rimmed glasses, he is preoccupied and brief. He says that an ultrasound won’t show anything at this point, but he will check my beta levels. Then we can see if they rise over the next several days.

Back in the apartment, I change my pad, which looks like the second day of my period. More blood, still bright red. Degan comes home from work and runs me a bath, makes me a cup of hazelnut tea. Later, we drive up to the synagogue for our last class with the JIC.

When we get there, another student stands at the front of the room. “Harriet has been a wonderful teacher,” she says.

The rest of us sneak sideways looks at each other. Beside me, Debra snickers.

“I’d like to present her with a gift.”

Harriet flushes, and undoes the paper. The gift is a framed copy of Eshet Chayil—“a woman of valour”—the hymn sung in the home on Shabbat in which a man thanks his wife for all she has done over the week. A woman of valour is energetic, righteous, capable.

“You guys are so sweet!” Harriet says sheepishly. But she looks like she cannot believe anyone would think her worthy of being called valorous.

As promised, the exam questions are exactly as they appeared in the study guide. We whip through the multiple choice, short answer and fill-in-the-blanks. People start handing in their tests fifteen minutes after they’ve been distributed. A half-hour later, everyone is outside in the hall, saying goodbye, keep in touch, Chag Sameach.

“Merry Christmas!” Debra shouts.

Gales of laughter. The laughter of pent-up release.

And then we leave, in groups of twos and threes. The class is over, just like that. We float out into the snowy darkness, into our different stories, our various versions of what-happens-next.

eleven

O
N
T
UESDAY MORNING
the clinic waiting room is full, but Dr. Sokol calls me up to the front of the line. There’s a big pile of files on his desk, and one of those happy-face squeeze balls to help relieve stress. “Can I ask why you’ve come here, instead of going to your family doctor?”

“We just live a few streets over. It’s easier to get here.”

I don’t have the heart to tell him that Dr. Singh reminds me of the last baby we lost.

Dr. Sokol flips through his papers and pulls out my results. “Good news or bad news?” he asks.

My stomach falls. “Good?”

“Your beta levels are stable.”

I exhale, but not too far. “What’s the bad news?”

“They’re not rising the way I’d like them to. They’re just sort of sitting there.” He wrinkles his forehead and pushes his
thumbs into his temples. “It’d be nice to know where this is going,” he says. “Are you pregnant or not. We’ll take some more blood today.”

“Okay,” I say, my voice flat.

“There’s nothing else. Unless you have any questions.”

“No.”

I turn to leave, then turn back toward him. “Chag Sameach,” I say.

He looks at me properly for the first time, his eyebrows protruding above his glasses.

“To you, too,” he says. “I’ll call you when I know.”

We spend the evening curled up with Thai takeout watching Woody Allen’s film
Annie Hall
. Annie, the Gentile, brings her Jewish boyfriend home for dinner. There is a parody of her family in the dining room: polite restraint, long silences interspersed with comments about other people’s illnesses. It might as well be my parents’ table.

There is a shot of Annie’s mother looking slantwise at Woody Allen and seeing, in his place, an Orthodox man with a black hat and sideburns.

After, we lie in bed; Degan puts his head under the covers and presses his mouth to my belly. “Hi, you,” he says to the baby. “How’s it going? I’ve got some things to tell you.”

He lowers his voice; I can’t hear what he’s saying. The whispering goes on for a long time. When he’s satisfied, he raises his voice again so I can hear. “Okay,” he says. He wraps up the conversation with, “Sweet dreams.
Laila tov
.”

He relaxes his head against my stomach; I stroke his hair. The pregnancy is so precarious. And with such a good father waiting in the wings.

Degan leaves for work the next morning and I prop myself up in bed with the laptop on my legs. I still haven’t watched the second half of Vera’s Shoah Project interview. I haven’t been able to bring myself to, but suddenly—who knows why—I have the courage.

I begin at the place in the interview where Vera describes the living conditions in Auschwitz. She tells the camera about the daily food ration: “coffee” (black water), a tiny crust, very rarely margarine. The so-called soup had all manner of debris in it.

They were slowly starving. Once, she says, they were allowed to write and mail two cards each, saying, “I am healthy and fine,” in exchange for bread.

The dreaded “selections” were made by several Nazis, including Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. Mengele, of the mice inserted into mouths and vaginas. Mengele, who would make a mother hold her newborn while the child starved. “They were the
meanest
men,” Vera says to the camera. But here her voice trails off, unable to find more words. Because, indeed,
mean
is not even close to adequate.

Eventually, in March of 1944, Vera’s mother, Ella Kafka, was selected for “work.”

“I asked the Nazis to take me, instead,” Vera says. “My mother was old.” Here she smiles ruefully, telling the camera, “She was fifty-six. Her body wouldn’t withstand it.”

Of course, it was not “work” that Ella was being chosen for.

Vera doesn’t say explicitly what happened to her mother but returns, instead, to that chasm in the psyche between knowing and not knowing, consciousness and willed ignorance. She says, “An engineer we knew said it was impossible. They couldn’t
destroy five thousand people at a time.” She gazes at the viewer. “So naive we were.”

In June of 1944, the Germans needed manpower. They were losing the war. There would be a selection of men for bona fide work. Knowing it could save him, Vera tried to sneak her son, Jan, onto the work transport. She managed to get Jan behind the main gate, but a quarter of an hour later he was back. The chance lost.

I pull my laptop in closer to my chest, as though I could somehow hold Vera, give her comfort.

Vera soldiers on in the face of the questions. Her face betrays a heartbreaking eagerness to please, a gratitude that finally someone is listening, and a young, foolish hope that maybe now something can be done. She tells the camera that on July 3 there was another selection. The Germans were getting desperate; now even
women
would be used in the war effort; even
Jewish
women. Those who were chosen had to stand five to a line. Vera heard the commander shout, “I am missing one!”

A beat.

He pointed to her. “You go!”

A second beat. A skip in time.

“I can’t,” she said. “I have children.”

“I said go!”

Vera looks intently, piercingly, into the camera. “He slapped me. He beat me,” she says, her eyes wide. “I wanted to run, but there were SS, dogs. What could I do?”

She asks this of the viewer not rhetorically but genuinely,
desperately
, as though she could go back and act differently if she could finally figure out the answer. “Tell me, what could I do?”

A long silence.

“It was the worst time of my life,” Vera says. “You are half-crazy in a situation like that.”

“Where were your children?” the interviewer asks.

Vera looks into the lens as if to say,
Have you not understood what I have been telling you
?

“In the barracks without me,” she answers.

“Her thought process dwindled, ceased,” writes William Styron in
Sophie’s Choice
.

She could not believe any of this. She could not believe she was now kneeling on the hurtful, abraiding concrete, drawing her children toward her so smotheringly tight that she felt their flesh might be engrafted to hers even through layers of clothes. Her disbelief was total, deranged
.

There was nothing Vera could do. She was taken from her children.

She doesn’t bother to tell the camera what happened to a child in Auschwitz who had no protection from a parent.

The rest of Vera’s story feels somehow irrelevant. The worst thing has already happened.

Her children are killed, but Vera survives against all odds. She is moved to a labour camp near Danzig and is brutally beaten. In January she is evacuated because the Russians are approaching. She walks in the snow for two months, wearing clogs. One night it’s snowing so hard that she and some other women are able to hide in a ditch. The march continues on without them. They stumble through the storm to a barn. The heat in the pig stalls is heaven. They are so hungry they eat straw.

The Russians, their eventual liberators, cannot distinguish the victims from the perpetrators and treat everyone the same. “They were like animals,” Vera says, several times, and her emphasis somehow implies sexual degradation, rape, but she leaves the particulars to the listener’s imagination.

There are more months of struggle. Vera finds her way back to Czechoslovakia. At the end of the war a man in a truck is driving around looking for a Vera Lowenbach.

“It’s me,” she tells him.

The man doesn’t believe her: she looks too old.

The same thing happens when she meets the mother of an old school friend. “I’m Vera Bondy,” she says, using her maiden name.

“You must be
Ruzenka
Bondy,” the woman replies, referring to Vera’s aunt, to Gumper’s mother. A woman fifty years older than Vera.

At the end of the tape, the disembodied voice of the interviewer wants to know if Vera has anything else to say.

“Pardon?”

“Do you think about the Holocaust often?”

“Yes. You can never forget it. Mostly I just socialize with people who were there.”

“Is there anything else you want to say?”

Her pause is imbued with futility, both desperate and resigned.

What is left to say? What could she possibly say?

“I just really hope that nobody should experience something like this again,” she answers finally. Her words scrubbed completely clean of meaning.

twelve

D
EGAN AND
I
SPEND AN UNEVENTFUL
New Year’s at the cabin. The smell of the wood stove makes my stomach lurch, as does Degan’s aftershave and the mere sight of a single dirty dish in the sink. Nausea. A good sign.

I read trashy magazines on the sofa, popping Diclectin, the drug prescribed for morning sickness, like candy. Degan sits on the armchair opposite me with Martin Gilbert’s biography of Winston Churchill on his lap. He reads to me about Churchill’s friendship with the Jews, and how he sought to support them during the war. Vera’s brother Friedl was one of them. He fled mainland Europe and worked with the Royal Air Force. The Nazis found out, and as payback, his father, Hermann—Vera’s father, too—was beaten and tortured.

The diabetic father whose insulin was taken away.

Daddy
.

Meanwhile, in today’s news, Israel has begun an attack on Gaza. Bombs, a ground invasion. The Palestinians can’t get across the border. Their diesel supply is cut off, their drinking water compromised. The Israeli defence minister says it won’t be a short operation.