A Blessing on the Moon by Joseph Skibell Read Free Book Online

them, and continues in her stocking feet. I brace her, one hand on her arm, the other steadying her back, and slowly, a step at a time, we take the stairs. Although she must periodically stop, she refuses to sit. Instead, she presses hermeager weight into me and lays her head against my chest, until she is able to summon the strength to resume.
    I feel as if I am cradling a dear coatrack in my arms, so light is she and her bones so stiff, were it not for her shaking and her trembling and the fevered heat she’s giving off. This I can feel in my own cheek where it meets the top of her head. My children used to hide in this staircase. We’d search for them for hours. A silly game, and soon enough we learned where we could almost always find them. Ester worried they might fall, God forbid, playing on the roof, but the roof held no interest. It was the staircase that fascinated. They called it “the tunnel,” so dark it was and tantalizing with its biting cedar smells. Ester, too, liked the tunnel, but only when she was in labor and needed to walk. So many times we climbed these narrow stairs, much like Ola and myself now, me bracing Ester, gripping her arm, pressing my hand into her back. Of course, she wasn’t light and stick-like like Ola, but heavy and round, like a herring barrel. I could practically have rolled her up the staircase! The walk in the night air on the roof helped to calm her, as we waited for her midwives to arrive. And on the roof is where they would find us, Ester in a heavy heap of skirts, her dark triangular eyes staring over the railings and across the town into the sky, as though searching the Heavens for the soul of her incubating child, waiting for it to arrive in its whiteness and its purity. It took all three midwives to lift her to her feet. This they did by surrounding her, these three little sisters, a small army whose job it is to bring more life into the world. With their arrival, I am suddenly cutadrift and rendered superfluous. Rooted to the spot, I stand watching their red and yellow and green babushkas disappearing through the rooftop doorway, my Ester borne among them, as though weightless, forgetting me entirely. I might light a cigar and smoke a little before returning to my office to pretend to work until the baby is born. On the staircase now, I have a vision of myself striding across the roof of my house, a cigar clenched happily in my teeth. I am young and whole and my family is growing beneath my feet.
    “Why are you crying, Panie Chaim?” Ola asks.
    I’m surprised to see her face looking intently into mine, her eyes trapped and enlarged behind her thick spectacles. Moving back and forth, searching my eyes, they look not a little like butterflies attempting to awaken.
    “There are tears rolling into your beard,” she says, brushing them away with the back of her hand.
    “We should hurry,” I say, “before the night is over.”
    “Panie Chaim,” she says.
    “Yes, Ola?”
    “Nothing,” she changes her mind. “I’m a silly girl. It’s a stupid question.” She looks so frail, this coatrack with her braids and her enormous glasses thick as whiskey tumblers, standing against the inside of the roof’s doorway, hidden in its shadow, trembling, coughing. I wipe the bloody phlegm she spits up with an old handkerchief, as red as a carnation.
    “There was a boy, in my school, that I liked, but …” She doesn’tknow how to finish her sentence. “I never knew what to say to get him to like me. I’m not beautiful, like your daughters.”
    “My daughters?” I say.
    “I’ve seen their pictures. My father and mother hid them away, but I know where. In the garage. How beautiful they were.”
    I find I can barely remember their faces.
    “It’s just as well,” she says, blushing. “Never mind. Forget it, forget it. Open the door. Please. Let’s go up, let’s look at the stars and see if your Hasids have returned the moon yet to the sky.”
    I find that my voice has