Pale of Settlement

Expatriate

What Leah remembered many years later was that it was May and it was snowing and throughout the city the branches on the budding trees were snapping under the weight of leaves and blossoms and the unexpected snow. She didn’t really remember the pain of the contractions or the shaking or the numbness of her legs, other than the fact that these sensations had occurred. She remembered themilkylight,theclumpsoffallingsnow.You’renearlythere,the nurse had said. She held up a mirror and said, Look! But Leah didn’t look. She turned her face toward the wall. It was only afterward, after they’d placed the baby in her arms, washed and checked, that she drew her breath and looked and saw: skin the color of eggshells, eyes a murky, indeterminate blue. The baby gazed up at Leah, the faintest shadow of perplexity traced between her brows, as if she might have been thinking, Who the hell are you? Expatriate Maternity is proved by the senses whereas paternity is a surmise based on a deduction and a premise. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism 148 e x p a t r i a t e ~ 149 Leah felt a loosening in her hips and elbows, wrists and knees, as if she were afloat, a rushing in her ears. She took a breath and looked again: eyes and hair and nose. You’re two peas in a pod, everybody later said. There’s nothing in her of Ezi at all! Back in the early sixties when they were newly married, Leah and Ezi lived in a third-floor walk-up at Columbus and Eighty-first, a cheap rental Ezi had found when he first came to New York. They had bookshelves made from packing crates and planks, a folding bridge table, a phonograph, a couch handed down from a friend who’dgonebacktoRamatGan,apairofcanvasslingchairs(asteal at $7.95 apiece from Klein’s), a borrowed mattress on an aluminum frame. None of the dishes matched. But it didn’t matter, becausesoontheywouldbegoingback .OnceEzifinishedhisdegree. Once the Frigidaire was paid for. Once they could afford a flat back home. They were not the only ones; the hevrei came together from all over New York. They gathered in dim West Side cafés where you couldreadtheHebrewpapers(onlyafewweeksold)orplaysheshbeshwhilesomenewlyarrivedkidstrummedtheoldfamiliarsongs on a guitar. They gathered in walk-up apartments and basement flats, the air blurring with the smoke of their cigarettes as they argued over coffee and a slice of honey cake about the latest idiocy of the Knesset, or about the spoiled brats Ruthi had to put up with at Hebrew school, or how Cha’im was going to marry his American departmentstoreheiress,orhowafterallthistimeYoavhadfinally made up his mind to go back home. And they were happy in that way that you are happy when you 150 ~ e x p a t r i a t e are young and everything is temporary and who you are is still a thing that you can try on and take off again as you please, like a new shirt or pair of shoes. They weren’t their parents or their grandparents—displaced persons, refugees. They didn’t have to choose. The story Leah always told was that Ezi chased her to Jerusalem the summer that her father died and swept her off her feet. The doorbellrang,shesaid,andtherehewas,tallandhairy-leggedand resolute, the outline of her future life, backlit by the sun. He saved mylife,shesaid,asifithadnotbeenadecisionbutasimplematter of her desperation and his desire, her gratitude, his will. He held out his hand, and she grabbed hold. But in fact it wasn’t until weeks later, back in New York, that she slipped beneath the surface and began to sink, bubbles streaming from her nose. She looked up to the surface and saw the light split and refract. She sank as if there were stones in her coat pockets insteadofthatsmallwhitecardprintedwiththetelephonenumber of a doctor she couldn’t bring herself to call. Inside her, a living thing swam in the dark. There was a rush and roaring in her ears. Over and over, she counted back. When could it have happened? When? When she broke the news to Ezi, nine weeks on, the pressure on her heart and lungs so great she scarcely had the breath to speak, he simply sat down at the table in his sleeveless undershirt and took out a piece of paper and a photograph of her. This is the girl...