The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel Read online

  Ma said, “Yes you will see. There is room.”

  Herschel shifted his shoulders inside his shirt that was missing half its buttons, and said the house was too small for how-many people to live in: ten? “Ten fuckin people like in a animal pen, that’s bad enough now for Chrissake. The fuckin stove ain’t any good except for this room, an the God-damn well water tastes like skunk, an me an Gus is always bumpin into each other in our damn room, how’re you gonna fit a new ‘brother’ in it? Shit.”

  Without warning, swift as a copperhead snake striking, Pa’s hand flew out to whack Herschel on the side of the head. Herschel recoiled howling his damn eardrum was burst.

  “That won’t be all that’s going to be burst, you don’t shut your mouth and keep it shut.”

  Ma said, pleading, “Oh please.”

  Gus who was still hunched over the table, unmoving, afraid to look up at his father, said another time that Joel could sleep with him, it was O.K. with him.

  Herschel said loudly, “Who in hell is gonna sleep with him, pissin the bed every night! It’s bad enough sleepin in the same damn room like hogs.”

  But Herschel was laughing now. Rubbing his left ear that Pa had hit, in a way to show it didn’t hurt much.

  Saying, “Fuck I don’t care, I ain’t gonna stay in this shit-hole. If there’s a war, see, I’m gonna en-list. Guys I know, they’re gonna en-list an so am I, I’m gonna fly a plane an drop bombs like what’s-it�the Blitz. Yeah, I’m gonna.”

  Rebecca tried not to hear the loud voices. She was peering at Freyda, her sister Freyda who (you could almost believe this!) was peering up at her. Now they knew each other. Now they would have secrets between them. Rebecca dared to lift the photograph to the light to look inside it somehow. Oh, she wanted to see Freyda’s feet, what kind of shoes Freyda was wearing! She seemed to know that Freyda was wearing nicer shoes than she, Rebecca, had. Because Freyda’s little jumper-dress was nicer than anything Rebecca had. Kaufbeuren Rebecca was thinking in Germany across the sea.

  It seemed to Rebecca, yes she could see into the photograph just a little. Her cousins were standing outside, behind a house somewhere. There were trees in the background. In the grass, what looked like a dog with white markings on his face, a pointy-nosed little dog, his tail outstretched.

  Rebecca whispered: “Frey-da.”

  It was so, Freyda’s hair had been parted in the center of her head neatly, and plaited like Rebecca’s. In two thick pigtails the way Ma plaited Rebecca’s hair that was inclined to snarl, Ma said, like tiny spider nests. Ma plaited Rebecca’s hair tight so that it made her temples ache, Ma said it was the only way to tame flyaway hair.

  The only way to tame flyaway little girls.

  “Frey-da.” They would brush and plait each other’s hair, they promised!

  It was time for the younger children to go to bed. Herschel stomped out of the house without another word but Gus and Rebecca wanted to linger, to ask more questions about their cousins from Kaufbeuren, Germany.

  Pa said no. He was returning the photographs to an envelope Rebecca had not seen before, of tissue-thin blue paper.

  Still the moths fluttered around the bare lightbulb. There were more now, tiny white animated wings. Gus was saying he never knew there was cousins in the family before. Damn he never knew there was anybody in the family!

  15

  Those summer weeks when she was never alone. Always Rebecca would remember. Playing by herself it wasn’t by herself but with her new sister Freyda. Always the girls were chattering and whispering together. Oh, Rebecca was never lonely now!�no need to hang around her mother so much, nudging Ma’s knees till Ma pushed her away complaining it was too hot for fooling around.

  Herschel was always giving his little sister presents, things he found in the dump he’d bring home for her, there were two dolls he’d brought for her called Maggie and Minnie, and now Maggie was Freyda’s doll, and Minnie was Rebecca’s doll, and the four of them played together around the side of the house in the hollyhocks. Maggie was the prettier of the dolls, so Rebecca gave Maggie to Freyda because Freyda was the prettier of the sisters, and more special because she was from Kaufbeuren in Germany across the ocean. Maggie was a girl-doll with plastic rippled brown hair and wide-open blue eyes but Minnie was just a naked rubber doll-baby with a bald head and a corroded pug face, very dirty. The way Herschel had given Minnie to Rebecca, he’d tossed the rubber doll high into the air making a wailing-baby noise with his mouth and it landed with a thud at Rebecca’s feet scaring her so she’d almost wetted herself. So when Minnie was bad you could discipline her by throwing her onto the ground and it would hardly hurt her but you would not wish to throw Maggie down, ever, for Maggie might break and so Maggie was the better-behaved of the dolls, and obviously smarter because she was older. And Maggie could read words, a little. Pa’s old newspapers and magazines Maggie could read while Minnie was just a baby and could not even speak. Of such matters Rebecca and Freyda whispered endlessly in the wild-growing hollyhocks in the very heat of midday so Ma was drawn to come outside to peer at them in wonderment, hands on her hips.

  Asking Rebecca what on earth was she doing in that hot dusty place, who was she talking to?�and her voice was throaty and cracked and alarmed, and Rebecca turned away blushing and sullen refusing to look up from the dolls as if no one had spoken at all.

  Go away! Go away Freyda and I don’t need you.

  But Monday was laundry day, and both girls were eager to help.

  For Anna Schwart did not leave the stone cottage often, and this was a special time. She would tie a scarf hurriedly around her head to partially hide her face. On even very hot days she would wear one of Herschel’s jackets over her shapeless housedress. So that if someone was spying on her (from the cemetery, from behind the crumbling stone wall) they could not see her clearly. Jacob Schwart had tried to shame his wife out of such eccentric behavior, for cemetery visitors certainly noticed her, shook their heads and laughed at the gravedigger’s crazy wife, but Anna Schwart ignored him for what did Jacob Schwart know for all his radio-listening and newspaper-reading he knew nothing about their Milburn neighbors. She knew.

  Yet the laundry had to be washed in the old washing machine in the shed, and the soaking-wet clothes pressed through the hand-wringer, and placed in the wicker basket, and the basket had to be hauled out into the backyard, into the bright sunshine and gusty air. And Rebecca helped carry the basket. And Rebecca and Freyda handed Ma things from the basket to be pinned on the old rope clothesline tied between two posts to flap and slap and clapclapclap on windy days. Rebecca made Freyda laugh by pulling an undershirt over her head when Ma’s back was turned, or letting a pair of shorts fall into the grass accidentally-on-purpose like they’d squirmed out of Rebecca’s hands, but Freyda took away the undershirt and the shorts to hand to Ma for Freyda was a good girl, Freyda was a serious girl, often Freyda put her forefinger to her lips Shhhh! when Rebecca was being loud or silly.

  In Rebecca’s bed, they snuggled and cuddled and hugged and sometimes tickled. Rebecca slid Freyda’s warm bare arm across her side, over her ribs to snuggle closer so Rebecca could sleep not hearing Pa’s radio voices in the night.

  Oh, that delicious swoon of a dream: Rebecca and her new sister Freyda walking to school together in matching jumpers and shiny patent leather shoes along the Quarry Road, and along the Milburn Post Road, a mile-and-a-half walk it was to the Milburn Grammar School, and they would be hand in hand like sisters. And they would not be afraid because there were two of them. Except Ma had been saying this year was too soon, she would not let Rebecca go yet. I want my little girl safe with me long as I can. Pa said that Rebecca would have to go to school, she would have to start first grade, why not this year since she knew her ABC’s and numerals and could almost read, but Ma insisted No. Not yet. Not for another year. If they come to ask us we will say that she is too young, she is not well, she coughs and cries all the time.

  But Rebecca thought: F
reyda will be with me now. And Elzbieta.

  The sisters would all walk to school together.

  Rebecca felt a thrill of triumph, her mother would not be able to prevent her now.

  How strange it was that in those weeks of July 1941 there was such excitement in the stone cottage like the humming of bees in the powdery snakeroot flowers you were not supposed to play near for you would be stung, and a sickish sensation beneath like running faster and faster down a hill until you are in danger of falling yet the name Morgenstern was rarely spoken and then only in whispers. By Morgenstern was meant adults as well as children yet Rebecca gave not the slightest thought to her cousins’ parents. Freyda! was the only name she cared for. It was as if the others even Elzbieta and Joel did not exist. Especially the adults did not exist.

  Or, if these Morgensterns existed, they were but strangers in photographs, a man and a woman in a setting drained of all color, beginning to fade like ghosts.

  16

  And so they waited, in the caretaker’s stone cottage just inside the front gates of the Milburn cemetery.

  And so they waited patiently at first and then with increasing restlessness and anxiety through the second half of July, and into the terrible damp heat of early August in the Chautauqua Valley.

  And the Morgensterns who were Anna Schwart’s relatives did not come. The uncle, the aunt, the cousins did not come. Though the cottage had been prepared for them, the woodshed cleared out, curtains hung at windows, they did not come. And there was a day, an hour, when at last it was clear that they would not be coming, and Jacob Schwart drove into Milburn to make telephone calls to ascertain that this was true.

  “Ask God why: why such things happen. Not me.”

  There was the voice of her father, that pierced her heart in its fury, and shame.

  It made her feel faint, dazed as if the very floorboards tilted beneath her bare feet, to hear his voice in this way. Yet there was a curious exhilaration in his voice, too. A kind of relief that the worst had happened, he’d anticipated from the start. He had been right, and Anna had been wrong, to have hoped.

  “Turned back! Nine hundred refugees turned back, to die.”

  Above the roaring in her ears and the panicked beat of her heart Rebecca heard her parents in the kitchen. Her father’s words that were sharp and distinct and her mother’s that were not words but sounds, moans of grief.

  The shock of hearing her mother crying! Choked ugly sounds like an animal in pain.

  Rebecca dared to push open the door a crack. She saw only her father’s back, a few feet away. He wore a shirt soaked through with sweat. His hair was graying and straggled past his collar, so thin at the top of his head that his scalp showed through like a pale glimmering sickle-moon. He was speaking now in an almost calm voice yet still there was the exhilaration beneath, the obscene gloating. For now he had no hope, he would have no hope. The hope of the past weeks had been lacerating to Jacob Schwart, who wished for the worst, that the worst might be over with, and his life over. Rebecca was a child of only five, and yet she knew.

  “Why not kill them on the ship, set the ship on fire? In New York harbor, for all the world to see? ‘This is the fate of the Jews.’ It would be mercy for these Christians, eh? Hypocrite bastard Roosevelt may his soul rot in hell, better to kill them here than send them back to die like cattle.”

  Desperately she wanted to run past her father to her mother yet she could not, Jacob Schwart blocked her way.

  Unconsciously Rebecca reached for Freyda’s fingers. Since the evening the photographs had been spread across the kitchen table she had not been apart from Freyda. You would not see one of the sisters without the other! Rebecca and Freyda were of a height, their hair plaited in the same way and their eyes identical dark-shadowed eyes set deep in their sockets, watchful and alert. Yet now, Rebecca reached for Freyda’s fingers, and felt only air.

  She could not now turn to see Freyda pressing a forefinger against her lips Shhhh Rebecca! because Freyda herself was air.

  Rebecca pushed the door open, and entered the kitchen. She was barefoot, and trembling. She saw how her father turned to her with a look of annoyance, his face flushed, livid eyes that held no love for her in that instant, nor even recognition. She stammered asking what was wrong? where was Freyda? wasn’t Freyda coming?

  Her father told her to go away, out of here.

  Rebecca whimpered Ma? Ma? but her mother paid no heed to her, turned away at the sink, sobbing. Her mother’s chafed hands hid her face and she wept without sound, her soft slipping-down body shaking as if with merriment. Rebecca ran to her mother to tug at her arm but Pa intervened, grabbing her hard. “I said no.”

  Rebecca stared up at him, and saw how he hated her.

  She would wonder what Jacob Schwart saw, in her: what there was in her, a child of five, he so despised.

  She would be too young for years to consider He hates himself, in me. Still less It is life he hates, in all his children.

  She ran outside. Stumbling, barefoot. The cemetery was a forbidden place, she was not to wander in the cemetery amid the rows of gravestones that signaled the resting places of the dead in the earth and were the possessions of others, those others who helped to pay Jacob Schwart’s wages; she knew, she had been told numberless times that those others did not want to see a child prowling aimless in the cemetery that belonged to them. Her brothers too were forbidden to enter the cemetery except as their father’s helpers.

  Rebecca ran, blinded by tears. Where her father had grabbed her shoulder, she felt a throbbing pain. She whispered, “Freyda�” but it was useless, she knew it was useless, she was alone now and would be alone, she had no sister.

  The cemetery was deserted, there were no visitors. The air was gusty and wet-tasting, the white-striated bark of birch trees shone with an unnatural glisten. In the taller trees, crows called raucously to one another. Where you could not hear Jacob Schwart’s voice, and could not see Anna Schwart turned away sobbing and broken in defeat, it was as if nothing had happened.

  The cries of the burning passengers of the Marea�she could hear them. In her memory it would seem, yes the Marea had been set afire, she had seen the fire herself, she had seen her sister Freyda burned alive.

  Why?�“Ask God why: why such things happen. Not me.”

  She would hide in the cemetery, frightened for hours.

  No one would call her name. No one would miss her.

  The previous day there had been a funeral, a procession of cars and pallbearers carrying a coffin to an open grave site scrupulously prepared by Jacob Schwart, Rebecca had watched from a distance the mourners, she had counted twenty-nine of those others, some had lingered at the grave as if reluctant to leave and when at last they departed there came Jacob Schwart dark-clad and silent as a scavenger bird to fill in the grave, to cover the coffin with moist crumbly dirt, until there was only earth, the curve of earth, and a smooth granite headstone engraved with letters, numerals. And flowers in pots, set with care at intervals about the rectangular grave.

  Rebecca approached this grave, that was some distance from the stone cottage. She was barefoot, limping. She had cut her left foot on a stone. In the summers she was a dark-tanned Indian-looking child furtive in appearance and often dirty, her tight-plaited hair beginning to pull loose in wisps. No wonder such a child was forbidden to wander in the cemetery where visitors might be startled and annoyed to see her.

  Only when she saw her father’s pickup truck being driven away would she emerge from hiding to return to the house, and to her mother. She would take to Ma a handful of beautiful pale-blue cluster-flowers broken off from one of the potted plants.

  17

  Not-to-be-said from that time onward in the stone cottage in the Milburn cemetery were such words as “cousins”�“Morgenstern”�“boat”�Marea. Certainly you would not say “Kaufbeuren”�“Aunt Dora”�“Freyda”�“Germany.” Not that Ma might hear, or in her nervous confusion imagine she heard.
Not that Pa might hear for he would fly into one of his spittle-rages.

  Rebecca asked her brothers what had happened? what had happened to their cousins? was it so, the Marea had been set on fire? but Herschel shrugged and grimaced saying how in fuck would he know, he never thought anybody was comin’ to Milburn anyway, not so far across the ozean with submarines now, and bombs. Also there was sure to be trouble about those damn vissas, like Pa had worried about for them.

  “See, there ain’t room for everybody over here. There’s these miz’rable people worsen us, a million maybe. Like this damn house, you can figure it ain’t big enough for anybody else! You can figure it. The Yoo Ess Immigradion can figure it.”

  Rebecca asked what that was: the Yoo Ess Immigradion.

  “The police, like. Soldiers. They got to guard the Yoo Ess so it don’t get crowded with refugees, like. People tryin to get away from Hitler, you can’t blame em. But over here, you can’t blame em either, tryin to keep people out. Why they let us in,” Herschel said, grinning, scratching at the crotch of his overalls, “I sure as hell don’t know. See I’m gonna en-list in the navy pilots, soon as I can. I’m hopin we go to war real soon.”

  In that late summer of 1941 and well into the fall, Ma was in bed. Ma was sleeping, or Ma was lying awake-not-sleeping with her eyes closed, or Ma was lying awake-not-sleeping with her eyes open but unfocused, covered in a thin film like mucus that, drying, stuck to her eyelashes. If Rebecca whispered, Ma?�there would be no response usually. Maybe a flicker of Ma’s eyelids, as if a fly had buzzed too near.

  Mostly the bedroom door was shut against the family except of course Pa could enter at any time (for there could be no room in the stone cottage from which Jacob Schwart might be barred) and at certain times Rebecca hesitantly entered bringing her mother food, and taking away dirtied plates and glasses to be washed, by Rebecca who had to stand on a chair for the task, at the kitchen sink. The bedroom was a small room only just large enough to hold a double bed and a chest of drawers. It was airless, smelly, dank as a cave. Ma refused to allow the window to be opened even a crack. As she tasted death in the well water so now she smelled death in the humid greeny-tinged air of the cemetery. A cracked and discolored blind was drawn on the window at all times of the day and night so that no one could peer inside.