The Safekeep(64)

June 22, 1961


Have I ever been a body before? I don’t know. I think I’m a body now. Last night she woke me up from a terror and held me like a straitjacket. I could feel I had skin where she touched and where I had bone and where I was human. God what sense does this make, none none, no sense, no sense at all. She wakes up before I do and gets breakfast ready so I can have it when I am awake and it makes me want to cry. People have done this before, it is not special, and still I want to cry. I should run God I should run why am I here

- mother’s teaspoons (12)

- bread knife (wood handle)

- yellow eggcups (2)

- rings (? If there)

- paperweight

- tiles (decorative, hares)

- letter opener

- picture frames (the small ones from mother’s bedroom)

- napkin rings

- engraved cake knife

- small bread knife

- yellow illustrated book (? Title?)

- candle holders (Sjabbat)

- small blue oven dish

- big blue oven dish

- vase (marble, mantel)

- hares plates (5)

- hares soup bowls (6)

- hares big bowl

- hares sugar pot

- hares milk jug

- menorah (if there)

- blue thimble

- pencil box

- bookends (4)

- Haasje





13


IT WAS SUMMER’S END. GRAY-BOTTOMED clouds and a three-day drizzle. Isabel lay on her back under the secretary desk and put her fingers to the etched initials: EDH.

Eva had been born in this room. Her small hand was the hand that held a knife that carved this wood.

Isabel tried to tend to the garden because autumn was on its way. The dirt clung to her hands. She didn’t dare dig into the earth, kept thinking she felt pinpricks from below—but there were none. No shards, no remains, no new secrets to rise from the ground.

Knowledge came at her in flashes only, truth glimpsed from between a lattice, there and then gone: a hare let loose at a party, a box of toys in the attic, a child’s crayon drawing of a horse on a wall behind a wardrobe. The rhubarb. The trees. Every day she woke up and every day the house unfolded around her like a dark hand. She leaned into rooms and the rooms leaned away. Eva had looked at her face and had written of it: Not even honey could sweeten that vinegar. Isabel would not look at herself now, could not bear to see what Eva had seen. She tried to stand tall and found it too heavy a thing; her posture worsened. She took the piece of broken china from the mantelpiece and hid it: in the drawer, the cupboard, in a box, in with the vegetables in the pantry. And every time she regretted it quickly, went back for it with a fast-beating heart that did not slow until the thing was back where she had first placed it: elevated, watching.

She could not look at it. She woke up from her nightmares—pricking needles and bombs and the thumping on the door and—She was shivering and tangled in her sheets, wrestling, crying out—

“Are you,” she started, stopped. It was midday, and Neelke was putting on the kettle. Isabel was at the kitchen table in her nightgown. In her house robe. She was addressing the window, not the girl. She said, “Are you much like your mother?”

Neelke said, “Sorry?” And Isabel did not repeat herself. Neelke had heard. She answered eventually, while pouring out the tea. “No,” she said. They had their tea. There was no conversation after that.

Isabel wanted to know what Eva had looked like as a child. Short, she imagined. Cheeks like balls of dough.

There had once been a Jewish tailor in town. He had a shop with big windows and he’d sit by those big windows with his sewing machine and people could look in, see him at work, bent over. Isabel and her brothers liked looking in when they passed the tailor, and their mother would not allow it—would rush them past and say, Don’t, don’t look inside, children, come now. Isabel wondered now at how she could’ve known that the man was Jewish, and in the moment of wondering she immediately knew, recalled it all at once: a time when Mother took one of her skirts to the tailor for adjustments, and then had returned with the skirt and had found a spot of dirt on the hem; the story of her returning to the tailor, driving all the way back, demanding he cover the costs of cleaning. The story of how he refused to, how he insisted she must’ve dirtied the thing herself when getting into the car. The end of that story, the way it was delivered: “That Jew.”

On the morning of the anniversary of her mother’s passing, Isabel did as she’s always done: she took one plate of good china from the vitrine, off which to eat her breakfast. It was early, and dark outside. Under the dim overhead light, Isabel touched the blues, the whites. The outline of a hare’s leg, a tail, an ear.

Eva had watched her hold these things, her own mother’s things, had watched Isabel handle them, clean them, call them hers and Eva had said—she had said: You do that with such care.

Isabel could not eat her breakfast. The plate was on the table, empty. Isabel laid her head in the cradle of her arms. The feeling, when it came, was not new—had been worn familiar in the weeks since Eva had left: the sudden wanting to do away with herself. The thought—too heavy, it’s too heavy—a desire for someone to take it away from her. The plates, the walls, the weight of her hair, her own damned hands—to let someone else have them. Be done with it.