I Am Forbidden by Anouk Markovits Read Free Book Online

whispered back, “Do
you
believe I saw the Rebbe on the train?” Her tone was urgent, as if she feared her memories, too, might be left behind.
    Atara hesitated. “But if the Rebbe was there, how come there was no miracle?”
    Mila pulled away and leaned her head against the window. “I
saw
him. He was wearing a white coat. He never looked up from his book but I saw him.”
    Mila fell back asleep. Her head bounced against the rattling pane. Atara tilted Mila, gently, until Mila’s head came to rest on Atara’s shoulder. Atara listened to the compartment’s door clicking in and out of its socket: her first sliding door, her first blue bulb casting shadows on Zalman’s beard, and everything she would encounter now would be a first, the conductor’s strange accent—she looked to Zalman to make sure he had not noticed her excitement, she looked into the speeding night.
    They changed trains in Oradea and Budapest; they crossed the Austro-Hungarian border, which, a few months later, would shut for forty years. They changed trains in Vienna. As the stations went by—Linz, Munich, Stuttgart—cities, towns, villages emptied of Jews, Zalman and Hannah recited psalms that streaked their cheeks.

Paris
    T HE S TERNS moved into a fourth-floor apartment on the rue de Sévigné, in the Marais, the Jewish quarter. Mila and Atara still shared a room but now had separate beds. Their first night apart, they placed a chair between the two brass frames for their joined hands to rest on, so they would not uncouple in sleep.
    “Françoise!”
a voice called across the courtyard and the girls’ fingers gripped as they sounded the new vowels,
“Françoise,”
and once again they practiced their new address in the
qua-tri-ème ar-ron-dis-sement
.…
    Sound by sound, the neighborhood fell asleep. The girls, too, were drifting off when they heard Zalman leave the master bedroom. Rather than settle into his study, as he would many nights in Sibiu, Zalman walked down the long hallway stacked with moving crates. The kitchen door scraped open and closed.
    Swish, the blade skimmed the whetstone, swish swish … a high-pitched blade for circumcision, and lower-pitched ones for animal slaughter … swish … swish.…
    The girls squeezed each other’s hands, to see if the other was hearing. Zalman was sharpening his ritual knives by the kitchen sink. Surely this was not something the Law asked of him, not right away, not in the middle of the night. It must have been Zalman himself who needed to do this. Swish … swish … the knives accelerated and he breathed intently … or was it their own breaths the girls were hearing?
    The sounds stopped. Zalman retraced his steps along the crates. A drawer in his secretary slid open, then the key of the secretary turned in its lock, and the girls’ hands, heavy with sleep, let go of each other.
    Swallows singing new French songs woke them. Atara opened the window. Mila leaned into the light as it poured down silver roofs and cast ringlets of shade on peeling shutters. The younger children’s laughter in the next room almost drowned out the bolt of the front door clicking open and shut; Zalman leaving for morning services. The girls tiptoed past the dining room where the flowered oilcloth still released its travel folds, they tiptoed into the master bedroom and climbed into Hannah’s bed. Soon the younger children scurried in and they all snuggled against Hannah: Mila, Atara, Schlomo, the two toddlers, and Hannah’s bed was a wide, white barge, her eiderdown a sail that steered them through the foreign morning.
    A bead of light filtered between the shutter’s slats andcame to rest on Hannah’s nightcap. Little Etti tried to lift the pearl of light between thumb and index. Hannah laughed. When the baby whimpered in his crib, Hannah said, “Milenka, my eldest, will you know how to carry, carefully, little Mendel Wolf?” Mila leapt out of bed, leaned over the crib, lifted the baby. Hannah