The woman, who appears to be in her fifties, puts down her tagging tool.
“I saw your article,” she says. Her wig is cut in a shorter style than Raisa’s. It is more matronly, with blond feathering around her face. She shakes her head and purses her lips. “I did not wish to gossip, but if her husband is asking questions… Pessie was being stalked.”
“Stalked?”
“He came to the store a week before she died. She did not wish to see him. She had Chaim with her-sometimes she would bring him to work, he was such a good little baby. Men are not allowed in the store, but he would not go away. He was yelling and yelling. He pushed right past me! Pessie gave Chaim to me and went out to talk to him. I told her not to! I called shomrim but he ran off before they got here. And she would not say who he was.”
“Do you remember anything else about him? What he looked like?”
“He was Chassidish but dressed like a goy. Clean-shaven. He was very upset. I think maybe he was on drugs. He kept saying he was sorry and that she didn’t understand.”
“Didn’t understand what?”
“How should I know?”
“Could his name have been Sam?”
“She wouldn’t tell me. Pessie was very private. Not friendly like the other girls here.”
“What did you think when you heard she had died?”
“It was terrible!”
“But did you, like, think something might have happened to her? That maybe it wasn’t an accident?”
She shrugs. “What do I know?”
“Have you told anyone else about what happened?”
“Yes,” she says. “Maybe. Why shouldn’t I?”
“I’m just wondering if you’ve… would you be willing to talk to police?”
“Police? Puh!” She makes a spitting sound. “My son got hit by a car while he was walking to shul and the Roseville policeman said it was his fault. His leg was broken! They said he shouldn’t have been walking along the road. But where else will he walk? Where else will he walk! Police are bad here. They do not like Jews.”
The woman refuses to give me her name, but says that I can call her one of Pessie’s coworkers. Aside from Levi, I still don’t have a single named source on the record.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sammy’s letters were always short.
Dear Aviva,
Tante Penina says you are my sister. She says you live in Israel and that is why we do not see you. I hope we will meet someday.
Sincerely,
Samuel Kagan (your brother)
His handwriting slanted backward and the piece of paper was fraying at the side where he must have torn it out of a notebook. I wrote him back immediately, telling him that I now lived in Brooklyn and that I would like to meet him, too. I made no more attempts to contact Eli or my father or my sisters. I had become used to loneliness in Israel, and I knew how to bear it. They did not wish to understand me, and I did not wish to force them to. I had made some friends in Coney Island. Isaac and I became very close. He reminded me how young I had been when I had you. He reminded me how lost I was, and how, frankly, stupid. I thought because I had seen movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Splash that I understood life outside the shtetl. I found work cleaning houses again. It suited me perfectly. I could work when I wanted. And every day I learned more about the goyim but I did not have to face the embarrassment of interacting with them for more than the few minutes it took for them to let me in their homes. I cleaned apartments in any neighborhood I could get to on the subway: Brighton Beach and Park Slope and Greenwich Village. Once I had a job at an apartment on the same block as the Strand bookstore where I met your father. After I finished work, I went in and walked the aisles of books slowly, hoping as I turned each corner that your father would be there. That you would be there. You were not, of course. What would I have said if you were?
Sammy’s next letter came two weeks later.
Dear Aviva,
Feter Eli told me I should not write to you anymore. Will you ever come visit us in Roseville?
Sincerely,
Your brother Sammy
I wrote Sammy back saying that I would like to visit him, but that I did not think Eli would like that. I asked him to tell me about himself. What do you like to do? Who are your friends? What do you want to do when you grow up? In his return letter, he answered my questions in a list.
Dear Aviva,
I like to go fishing with my cousins. I like to eat ice cream. I like to catch frogs. I like to ride my bicycle.
My best friend is Pessie Rosen. She isn’t like most girls. She catches more frogs than me. She has a very pretty singing voice. My cousin Dovid is also my friend. Last summer we built a fort in the woods. But it fell down in the snow.
When I grow up I want to move to Israel and study Torah.
Sincerely,
Your brother Sammy
Sammy was an eleven-year-old boy living in frum family. It made no sense that his best friend was a girl. There were only two explanations: either my family had become less observant since I left them, or he was not being properly looked after. I doubted very much that my family was less observant; like most of the people Isaac and I grew up with they had probably gotten even stricter. I discussed it with Isaac, and he agreed that something seemed strange. We asked around and found someone who had grown up in Roseville. The man’s name was Schlomo and he was in the process of divorcing his wife. He had to go to court in Rockland County almost every week because he was trying to get visitation with his children. Schlomo reported back that Sammy was living with Eli and Penina and their four children, and that one of the children was severely disabled. He was almost nine years old but could not speak or feed himself or use the toilet and had to be moved in a wheelchair. My father was also living with them, but had become a recluse. He no longer even went to shul. While I was in Israel, Diny had written me a letter once a year telling me of my family’s marriages and births and movements. She and her husband had also settled in Roseville, as had one of my younger brothers and his wife. My two little sisters, it seemed, had been passed between Diny’s and Eli’s households. Diny had mentioned nothing in the letters about a disabled child, or about my father.
“And there’s something else,” said Schlomo. “Sammy has accused a man of sexual abuse.”
“What do you mean, accused?” I asked.
“My brother attends shul with Eli,” he said. “He told me that Eli was very upset about it.”
I waited for more. “And?”
Schlomo shrugged. “And?”
“What’s being done? Who is this person?”
“Eli told my brother that it was someone at Sammy’s yeshiva. He went to the rebbe and the rebbe told him that the man denied it, and that one little boy’s story was not enough to take the matter further.”
Isaac and I looked at each other. We both knew that sexual abuse was not discussed in the community. Men were accused quietly. Occasionally, someone left a job at a yeshiva. The secular authorities-the police-were never involved, at least not for long. A moser was the lowest of the low.
“When did this happen?”
“My brother was not specific,” said Schlomo.
“Is Sammy still attending the yeshiva?”