The familiar voice shocked Sashenka. Her mother had not spoken for days. She had just slept, her breathing labored, the infection flourishing in her chest so that it seemed she would never wake again. Sashenka had been reading Pravda, the Party newspaper, when Ariadna stirred. She spoke so clearly that Sashenka dropped the paper, scattering its pages onto the carpet.
“Mama, you gave me a shock!”
“I’m not dead yet, darling…or am I? It stinks in here. I can hardly breathe. What does that newspaper say?”
Sashenka picked up the pages. “Uncle Mendel’s on the Party’s Central Committee. Lenin’s returning any day.” Sashenka looked up to find her mother’s velvety eyes resting on her with an astonishing warmth. It surprised and then embarrassed her.
“When I finally went to your room…,” Ariadna began, and Sashenka strained to understand.
“Mama, you look better.” It was a lie but who tells the truth to the dying? Sashenka wanted to soothe her mother. “You’re getting better. Mama, how do you feel?”
“I feel…” She squeezed her daughter’s hand. Sashenka squeezed back. The eyes dimmed again.
“I long to ask you one question, Mama. Why did you…? Mama?”
At that moment Dr. Gemp, a plump, worldly man with a shiny pink pate and the theatrical air often associated with society doctors, entered the room.
“Did your mother wake up then? What did she say?” he asked. “Ariadna, are you in pain?”
Sashenka watched him lean over her mother, bathing her forehead and neck with a cold compress. He unraveled the dressing on her chest and inspected, cleaned and dabbed the wound, which looked like a congealed fist of blood.
Her father appeared beside her, also leaning over the sickbed. He looked terrible, his collar filthy and the beginnings of a prickly grey beard on his cheeks. He reminded Sashenka of an old Jew from the Pale.
“Is she coming round? Ariadna? Speak to me! I love you, Ariadna!” said Zeitlin. Ariadna opened her eyes. “Ariadna! Why did you harm yourself? Why?”
Behind him stood Ariadna’s parents, Miriam, her small, dry face pointed like that of a field mouse, and the Rabbi of Turbin, with gabardine coat and skullcap, his face framed by his prophetic beard and whimsical ringlets.
“Darling Silberkind,” said Miriam in her strong Polish-Yiddish accent, taking Sashenka’s hands and kissing her shoulder tenderly. But Sashenka sensed how out of place the old couple felt in Ariadna’s room. They had been in there before, yet they peered, like paupers, at the pearls, gowns, tarot cards and potions. For them this was the Temple of the Golden Calf and the very ruin of their dreams as parents.
Dr. Gemp, who specialized in the secret tragedies—abortions, suicides and addictions—of Grand Dukes and counts, stared at the old Jews as if they were lepers, but managed to finish dressing Ariadna’s wound.
Ariadna pointed at her parents. “Are you from Turbin?” she asked them. “I was born in Turbin. Samuil, you must shave…”
Hours, nights, days passed. Sashenka lost track of time as she sat by the bed. Ariadna’s breathing was hoarse and labored, like an old pair of bellows. Her face was grey and sallow and sunken. She had become old, tiny and collapsed. Her jaw hung open, and her chest creaked up and down, catching on clots of phlegm in her lungs so that her breath rattled and crackled. There was no beauty or vivacity left, just this shivering, quivering animal that had once been a vibrant woman, a mother, Sashenka’s mother.
Sometimes Ariadna struggled to breathe and began to panic. Sweat poured off her, soaking the sheets, and she clawed the bed. Then Sashenka would stand up and take her hand. All of a sudden, there was so much she wanted to say to her mother: she wanted to love her, wanted to be loved by her. Was it too late?
“Mama, I’m here with you, it’s me, Sashenka! I love you, Mama!” Did she love her? She was not sure, but her voice was saying these things.
Dr. Gemp came again. He pulled Zeitlin and Sashenka aside.
“Don’t raise your hopes, Samuil,” said the doctor.
“But she wakes up sometimes! She talks…,” said Zeitlin.
“The wound’s infected and the infection has spread.”
“She could recover, she could…,” insisted Sashenka.
“Perhaps, mademoiselle,” replied Dr. Gemp smoothly, as a maid handed him his black cape and fedora. “Perhaps in the land of miracles.”
37
“Would you like me to read something to you?” Ariadna heard her daughter ask the next morning.
“No need,” she replied, “because I can come and read it myself.” Another Ariadna rose up from the Ariadna on the bed and hovered over Sashenka’s shoulder. She looked down and barely recognized the waxy creature with a dressing on her chest, breathing fast like a sick dog. Her hair was lank and greasy but she did not demand that Luda bring the curling tongs—so she must be dying. Ariadna wondered if she had always been cursed by the Evil Eye or infested by a dybbuk, or whether she had brought all her troubles upon herself.
She spun away from reality into wondrous dreams. She flew gracefully around the room. What visions she had! She and Samuil were together in a garden with tinkling fountains and luscious peaches. Were they in the Garden of Eden? No, the forests were slim silver birches: these were Zeitlin’s forests, soon to be the butts of rifles in the dead hands of Russian solders. The trees became ballerinas in tutus, then stark naked.
She opened her eyes. She was in her room again. Sashenka was sleeping on the divan. It was night. The room was softly lit by a lamp, not electric light. Samuil and two old Jews, a man and a woman, were talking quietly.
“I’ve lost myself, Rabbi,” said Samuil in Yiddish. “I no longer know who I am. I’m not a Jew, not a Russian. I have long ago ceased to be a good husband or a good father. What should I do? Should I wear phylacteries and pray as a religious Jew, or should I become a socialist? I thought I had my life in order and now…”
“You’re just a man, Samuil,” answered the bearded sage.
Ariadna knew that voice: it was her father. What a fine voice, so deep and kind. Would he curse Samuil and call him a heathen? she wondered.
“You’ve done bad things and good things. Like all of us,” her father said.
“So what should I do?”
“Do good. Do nothing bad.”
“It sounds simple.”
“It’s very hard but it is a great thing. Don’t harm yourself or others. Love your family. Ask for God’s mercy.”
“But I’m not even sure I believe in him.”
“You do. Or you would not be asking these questions. All of us sin. The body is for sinning in this world. Without the choice, goodness would be meaningless. The soul is the bridge between this world and the next. But everything is God’s world. Even for you, even for poor, darling Finkel, God’s mercy is there, waiting. That is all you need to understand.”
Who on earth was Finkel? Ariadna asked herself. Of course, it was her real name. Her father and her bewigged mother seemed to her at one moment like laughable cartoons; at another, they were as sacred as priests in the Temple of Solomon.
“And Ariadna?” Samuil asked.
“A suicide.” Her father shook his head. Her mother started to weep.
“I blame myself,” said Samuil.
“You did more for her than us, more than anyone,” said her father. “We failed her; she failed us. But we love her. God loves her.”
Ariadna was moved; she felt fondness for her parents, but not love. She no longer loved anyone. These were characters from her life, familiar faces and voices, but she loved none of them.
She was light as a goose feather, a draft from a window blew her this way and that. Her body lay there, croaking and wheezing. She was interested in this, but not involved in its mechanical functions. Dr. Gemp came into the room and threw off his cape like a Spanish bullfighter. She felt her forehead being dabbed; her dressing changed; morphine injected; her lips wetted with warm, sugary tea. Her belly ached; bowels groaned; the congested fist in her chest throbbed around a single bullet that she herself had placed there. This thing on the bed—the body she recognized as hers—was no more important than a laddered pair of stockings, a good pair, but an object that could be thrown away without a thought.