My Grandmother and the Ghost of Brody

1

“We were very poor,” she says to me in the small living room set close to the street, a redwood fence and gate separating the lawn from the sporadic traffic of Sunland, California, her brown eyes fixed on my face through their rimless spectacles which have just now become fashionable again. “Honey,” she adds this final word to the sentence. Her love for me and her poverty are eternally linked now, one braided with the other in some mysterious realm, her voice tender and almost hushed as she recalls her life as a girl to the girl that I was.

We were speaking, then, of a house without running water.

And Little Grandma would trudge to school past the house of her wealthy relatives, often stopping at the back porch to receive a bit of pastry or a cookie from the cook. It was there, having been invited in for some reason, that she first saw water running from a tap, such an inexpressible luxury that it still brings an ecstatic look to her eyes in the telling.

All progresses in an orderly fashion. One pair of shoes. One dress. To school, back and forth. Poor house, no water. No more details ever spoken of. As if her entire childhood of want is painted in pale gray: flora, fauna, streets, other dwellings, where she slept, ate, awoke each day, nothing remarked on, embroidered, or touched with light.

“One day,” she continues, “I saw a ghost, honey.” And her love for me and the ghost are again mysteriously braided.

Little Grandma on her gray road with her one pair of shoes trotting her dutifully from school to home. It all stops. The ghost appears. “It was white,” is all she can say about it to this very writing, “and I was so scared I ran all the way home. I hid for days. I never forgot it. I never saw it again.”

Her silence here is palpable.

And never in her life does she question its reality, so that when I look deep into my grandmother’s brown eyes, the ghost is there. Marking her undeniably. Staking out its territory.

From this point on she leads a sane and orderly, though transitional, life. Her featherbed folded over her pillow, she emigrates from Brody to Canada. The ghost does not follow. It is happy enough, perhaps, in the old Jewish cemetery of Brody, which I finally catch a glimpse of it, item 133, on the back cover of a catalogue of rare books from London. In the sketch, a small boy in long ear locks and coat walks with his Hassidic grandfather, between the towering grave pillars, twice his height in the sketch, each designed with medallions and script, leaning precariously toward one another. Tall trees behind them, their leaves of black ink sandwiched between the gravestones and sky. The little boy and his grandfather even have shadows of black ink; it’s wonderful what you can do with a bit of ink.

I imagine the ghost alternating between the trees and the graves. But how it came to be on my grandmother’s road home from school is another matter. Perhaps it was hungry, and living in a place without running water or much food, it wanted the cookie she was eating or the pastry the cook had just given her, warm from the oven.

Slightly misty weather, perhaps, allowed it to travel out of the graveyard.

The ghost wanted what was in her hand, why else would it have risked exposure? And I picture her running, much as Goldilocks ran after Baby Bear woke her up, and she screamed, “Bears!” and high-tailed it out of the cottage.

How she flies, kicking up stones on the road, feeling the ghost zooming behind her. She trips, skins her knees, doesn’t even stop to cry so terrified she is, her heart pounding. Don’t get me, ghost. Help! Mama, Papa, Herman, where are you? Help! She makes it to the yard, past the gray cement dishes of flowers and the water pump, and bursts through the door, without looking back. Her pregnant mother is seated at the table in a dark blouse with an apron over it, making a noodle pudding for supper.

“Mama!”

“Gittel, what? Look at you, you’ve fallen!”

“A ghost was chasing me, Mama.” She looks fearfully behind her.

Her mother frowns, wiping her hands on her apron and reaching out for her daughter to calm her, still mindful not to spoil the food she is preparing.

Gittel is lifted toward her mother. Big brother Herman snickers in the corner of the room. “Ghost!”

“Ghost!” she yells at him, sobbing and hiccupping uncontrollably. “I saw it, Herman. It was all white and flying on the road. It chased me!”

Herman strides toward the door manfully and opens it wide. The quiet empty air of their front yard throbs back at them, the pump stands dripping like a big black bird on one leg. Dark pink petunias quiver in their cement dishes, flat stones running between them out to the empty road, as it stretches in either direction: to the right, toward school and the town of Brody, sitting close to the Russian border, and to the left, toward the forest.

The sun is lowering into the meadow across the road, grass waving around a kitchen garden with its few rows of autumn vegetables, small pumpkins and squash, and the last of the corn, presided over by a scarecrow.

“She must have seen the scarecrow,” Herman says to his mother.

“No!” Little Grandma hiccups adamantly. “Not the scarecrow. Not a shadow, Herman. A ghooost.” She emphasizes the o sound in the word and shivers in Mama’s arms.

Her mother seats her on the chair and begins to attend to the skinned knees with hot water from the stovetop and a bar of soap.

Little Grandma looks at the noodle pudding on the table, the four chairs, the windows with their curtains quietly in place, the stove warming up for supper with its belly of coals, and the beds for sleeping.

“Ouch!” Her mother pours something on her knees and bandages them.

“Here, Gittel,” she says, finished now with the child and trying to get back to the pudding so the eggs won’t go flat before she bakes it. “Take a sip,” offering some of her sugared tea.

Little Grandma sips. Her eyes continue to roam the room fearfully. Did the pink and white checked curtains stir? If the oven is opened, will the ghost come out? The bedding bunches up alarmingly. Could the ghost live in a featherbed?

She stays close to her mother’s skirt all afternoon and when her father’s cart rolls into the yard, she tenses.

“Oh! It’s the phantom!” teases her brother.

Papa comes in with a leftover fish for supper, stooping to enter through the low doorway.

He places the fish on the table. “The one I couldn’t sell,” he says. “It’s cleaned,” he adds before her mother can frown. Mama nods at him and seasons it with salt and pepper, dredges it in coarsely milled flour, and sparingly measures out oil for the pan. They all watch her.

Papa’s hat comes off and his jacket is hung on the peg. Then, as his hands run over the wet bar of soap and soak for a moment in the basin, Gittel offers him the towel to dry himself with.

“Papa?”

“What?”

“I saw a ghost today.”

“A ghost, Gittel?” he sighs, taking her up onto his lap. “Tell me, did he have any money?”

At this Herman and Mama laugh.

But Gittel does not laugh. She stares at the face of her father intently. She looks at his forehead with the fluff of dark hair over it, at his eyes dark with weariness, at his brown beard growing down from his cheeks and traveling under his nose and around his mouth. She remains silent, staring just so at the face of her father as the fish whispers and crackles in the pan and the pudding is set on the table, slightly black around the edges. Mama calls heavily, “Come. Sit. Eat,” to her family.

2

A restless night. The ghost could be in the room. Papa snores, Mama sighs, Herman sleeps the sleep of stone. There are bright things in the room. The fish they ate for dinner gathers some 0f its radiance in small dots and flies toward the window. Only Gittel sees it escape through the glass, the pink checked curtains now gray with the hours of night soaking them. Something moves in the stove. The floor creaks. She has to pee and steps warily off of her small bed, a box really, with blankets to soften it under the sheet and a small feather pillow. She pulls the covered potty from its space near the door and carefully pees into it, staring nervously at every corner of the room, then covers it and hops back into bed, shivering.

She falls asleep at last and dreams that she is flying over Brody in her nightgown, like swimming through the air. She can see the whole town below while taking big gulps of night. The stars are so close they could burn her. She sees the ghost again in her dream: small, white, sailing along the road, then disappearing into the forest. She lands in her bed with a thump and opens her eyes. What she sees terrifies her. She begins to scream. There in the morning light two eyes stare out at her from a plate.

Mama sits up in bed. “Gittel! What is it?”

Too scared to move, she points. “Eyes!” she screams, as the big rock that was Herman all night long begins to giggle.

“The ghost put them there, Gittel! Ghost eyes!” he laughs.

“Herman!” Mama bellows at him. “Put those outside, immediately!”

Herman, proud of his art, lifts the little plate which he had staked out at the head of Gittel’s bed with the fish eyes neatly displayed staring out of it, and, like a waiter in a fancy cafe, bows in his nightshirt before spiriting them away, giggling and chortling.

Gittel crawls into bed with her mother for just a moment of warmth before the stove is started up and the day begins. Papa is already gone, having slipped out before dawn to fill his scoured cart with fruit this morning from the central market.

“Papa goes when it is so dark,” says Gittel slowly, a little mournfully, to her mother.

“For you,” her mother answers, smiling one of her infrequent smiles before she pulls herself out of bed, swirls the big woolen shawl around herself and sees to the fire.

And, after her experience, it will be a long time before Gittel can bring herself to walk into the forest again.

The curtains lose the night, the pink and white checks coming into them again. It is faintly shiny where the soul of the fish flew out and Gittel stares at that spot on the windowpane for a long time.

3

Ida has come home from her work in Brody for the Sabbath. Gittel runs toward her as she spots her on the road and takes a parcel from her arms, adoringly peering up into her older sister’s face.

“Nu?” asks Ida fondly gazing down into the perfect little oval that is her younger sister’s face. She catches something in the upturned brown eyes. “What?” she asks.

Gittel’s expression is tormented and surfaces up into her child’s smooth face alarmingly. Suddenly she looks like a little old woman. “A ghost, Ida. I saw a ghost.”

“Where?” ask Ida seriously.

It is the first time she has been asked to locate the ghost in space. She travels back in her mind along the road.

“After school I walk past those last three streets,” she begins.

“Yes,” answers Ida, seeing the streets.

“And I cross the train tracks?”

“Yes.”

“He sailed out from behind a tree. He was all white. He saw me and I started to run. I ran all the way home, Ida.”

“Where was Herman?”

“Herman goes too fast for me.”

The next question stumps Little Grandma. “How did you know it was a he?”

As they turn into their small yard Gittel says, “I just knew.”

Ida stops at the pump to wash the eggs and tomatoes in her basket.

“What’s in here?” Gittel asks, fingering the string on the parcel.

“For Mama from Cousin Esther,” says Ida importantly. “Come.”

And she enters her house joyfully, falling into the arms of her pregnant mother who is careful to hold her hands up away from the embrace, covered as they are with flour.

“Careful, Ida!” she laughs. And searching her oldest daughter’s face she locks eyes with her for the briefest moment, feels satisfied with what she sees there, and moves on to the basket’s contents.

“Boo!” cries Herman coming up from under the table with his face powdered white with flour.

Three things happen at once.

Gittle screams. Ida drops the basket, spilling eggs and tomatoes all over the floor. A little wind slams the door shut hard and goes swirling around the outside of the small house, forcing the curtains to tremble at the windows, sparks to fly up out of the stove, and the flowers to rustle in their bowls of gray cement just as Papa, bent over his cart slowly moves toward his home for Shabbos.

“Herman!” he bellows from the yard. “Come. Help me!” Already he guesses that his son, who shoots out of the front door looking very strange, was at the core of the confusion.

“What’s wrong with you?” he shouts. “Wash up your face. Clean this all up. Nah!”

Nah! Even years later my grandmother still used this word when playing cards with my grandfather. It had a sting to it. Take this!

My great-grandfather shoves the slippery cart full of fish scales at his son and goes off to relieve himself thinking, “All I need now is for the baby to come.”

Which, of course, the baby, who was to become my Great-aunt Sadie, must hear, and, all rolled up tight under her Mama’s apron, begins planning her exit accordingly…

4

“What was that on your face?”

“Flour.”

“Why did you have flour on your face?”

“I was pretending to be a ghost.”

“Why?”

“To scare Gittel.”

“Isn’t Gittel scared already?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you want her to suffer more?”

“It was funny.”

“It wasn’t funny. Wash your face more.”

The handle of the pump makes its long cry and out comes the water to wash Herman’s face. His father douses his head as well, and pushes the wet hair out of his son’s eyes, looking at him closely.

“Try to do good, not evil, Herman.”

“I will try.”

More of the water is gathered in a bucket as the two of them begin to wash down the wooden cart. There is again one large fish left, staring up at Herman. His father swiftly guts it and scales it. “Take this to your mother for Shabbos.”

Herman slips his index finger into the gill of the fish and walks toward the door with the offering, his face and hair still dripping water.

From under his jawbone he feels a piercing pain traveling up into his head, as if he is the fish being born through the doorway, toward the knife of his mother and the pan over the fire. He lowers his eyes as he enters the room where the three women sit.

5

The ghost is exhausted. It is crumpled up at the base of an elder tree near the entrance to the forest and hasn’t the energy to rise, like it needs a good, stiff drink.

It does not remember my grandmother at all, so it can have no remorse about having scared the wits out of her. If only she could see it this way, she would not carry such a powerful memory with her all her life. Upright and glowing, the ghost is tied firmly to her childhood, this road, this forest. Filled with wind and spawned by the forces that drove her family to seek passage to Canada, it was indeed something to be afraid of. Her older brother Herman was to remain without a clue to its existence his entire life.

My grandmother, however, never doubted it. Years later, the day after her oldest daughter died pregnant in a car crash, she looked into the mirror and saw that her hair had turned completely white. I am sure she trembled then, remembering the ghost, its whiteness, and her fear.

I do not know that she ever pitied it or saw it clearly in its existence… except in her dreams, perhaps.

They are all together now at the Shabbos table. The candles have been lit, the Kiddush has been said over the cup of wine, the bread from my great-grandmother’s oven, a little burnt around the edges, has been blessed.

Papa says to Gittel, “Eat, child.”

Gittel picks up a piece of bread.

“Eat up. You will get big and strong.”

Gittel feels like crying at the sound of his voice, she does not know why. She begins to nibble half-heartedly on the bread.

Papa leans over and puts a morsel of the fish into her mouth with his own fork, his eyes sweeping the little upturned face of his youngest child.

“Ghosts cannot have Shabbos, Gittel. They don’t have Mamas or Papas or tablecloths or candles or wine. They don’t know any of our blessings. Now, eat up!”

And my grandmother eats the small piece of fish from the fork of her father.

6

“There will be no more ghost for her now, it’s summer.”

“She will have to go on the road if I need something once the baby comes.”

“Send Herman.”

“Herman will be with you, remember? You said you will sell more with him to help out…”

“Frieda, do you believe in ghosts?”

My great-grandmother turns under the summer blanket to face the side away from her husband so her words are muffled, and Gittel’s sharp little ears cannot pick up her reply. She waits for her father’s voice in the dark to give some response, but he is already lightly snoring. The Sabbath candles on the table are almost out. Gittel watches them from her place in the bigger bed, for now she is sleeping with Ida. She can see Herman on the floor with her blanket. He is too big for the box.

Her older sister turns to look at her in the night. “Do you want to come help me in the big house, Gittel?”

“If Mama says so.”

“We’ll ask her in the morning. Now go to sleep.”

Ida hugs her.

Gittel feels like crying again. Quietly, quietly, so that no one should hear, she does. What is happening to her? Ever since the ghost, not only is she afraid of every little shadow, but she feels weepy all the time. Papa looks at her kindly—she gets weepy. Ida hugs her—she gets weepy. Even the fish eyes and Herman’s teasing, which normally would make her angry, made her cry. The two Sabbath candles tremble with the last burst of their radiance, then begin to dance crazily in their candlestick holes, throwing shadows up to swirl around, then disappear, only to rise again. Through eyes blurry with tears, Gittel watches them, taking in an involuntary deep breath and letting it all out, the whole scary week, as with a little hiccup and a sigh she enters the peace of the Sabbath, the last member of her family to do so, except the new little sister-to-be, who can never quite get comfortable once Mama lays down in bed.

The candle flames dance. Had anyone been passing on the road, they would have seen the light moving in the small house, pale and mysterious, flinging itself against the windowpanes as if trying to send a message into the night.

7

The endless crying of the newborn, my Great-aunt Sadie, has forced Little Grandma out into the yard to play. It is a hot July morning, and she moves to the shade of two bushes that arch toward each other where she often constructs a little house for herself.

“Now,” she says. “Would you like some cookies?”

I can picture her, ever the concrete realist, taking three pebbles from the ground to offer.

She is answered by the slightest rustle of the bushes.

“No,” says a voice sharply. “I don’t want cookies.”

Little Grandma looks around fearfully, half expecting a flash of white behind her. There is no one.

A sparrow hops to the ground, then flits away. Insects fly to and fro in the sunlight. She sits there with the three pebbles. Herman is with Papa, Sadie is with Mama, Ida is with Cousin Esther in the big house. Breezes of loneliness whisper over her. The bushes had white blossoms on them in spring, but now the blossoms have withered, leaving this pure green shade, and no berries. She would have to go into the forest for berries and she’s not doing that alone! It took all of her courage just to run toward town for Mama when the birth began, straight to the big house, knock, and say to Ida, “Mama says it’s started.” Ida and Cousin Esther scurried forth for the doctor and then went back with her to help Mama.

She drops the three little stone cookies on the ground, sighs just like Mama does, and takes an empty can to the coffee plant, a weed that grows in the yard with tiny brown leaf-berries. She listlessly makes some coffee, adding water drippings from the pump.

Who will drink this with her?

Who was Little Grandma’s friend? I wonder…

If she had her own grandma in Brody, her name has been lost forever. But maybe her grandma lived far, far away.

She takes the coffee can back to her house of bushes.

“Would you rather have coffee then?” she asks.

“Yes,” says the voice agreeably. “I would.”

8

The days came when her papa sickened, and he lay in bed suffering from his final illness. “He would not die, honey,” my grandmother said sorrowfully, returning herself to the scene. “We kept trying to feed him little sips of soup. His toe was all black.”

The image of this black toe is so vivid that it haunts my own mother to this very day.

“So, we called the rabbi. The rabbi was different then, honey, we went to him with our problems.” She is commenting on American synagogue life as she has experienced it. But, now I can see Herman running to the rabbi of Brody, who must have looked like the man in that drawing of the Jewish cemetery. He has a long black coat, a beard, and a large black hat, with a mysterious white patch on the front brim looking, for all the world, like a small animal skin shot with light. I know this must not be, for looking at the brim of a rabbi’s hat is like looking at the sky. Perhaps, it was a little cloud.

“And he came with ten men. And they said a blessing. And he died.”

My grandmother has a way of uttering the word died, that makes the entire world as I know it come trembling to a halt, tenderness surrounding me. And she does this not even in her native tongue, but in the one which she learned after coming to Canada.

Now I stare even harder at Item number 133, the ink drawing of the Jewish cemetery in Brody. Is one of these towering edifices my great-grandfather’s final home? Or do poor fish peddlers rest in a different drawing?

Ten men and the rabbi in that little house. It must have been crowded.

And all of them peering solemnly toward Papa’s bed. Gittel pressing up against Ida as the prayer for the dying is uttered, giving Papa strength to desert them all, saying in multiple male voices, “Go with God you are forgiven, you are free of earthly bonds. Great is God, go with him under His wings.” And Papa leaving with a groan, filling everyone with sorrow, the soup chilling in the bowl, Herman staring with wide eyes, Mama’s arms so tight around Sadie they could have broken her. The rabbi whispering, “Open a window, covering the mirror, shah,” presiding over the packed room calmly, as he had to, to make this man’s life end right.

9

My great-grandfather’s death left sorrow and emptiness, hardship and struggle, but no ghost.

His soul slipped through the open window into the darkness, glowing there like a phosphorescent fish underwater. His face never appeared in the mirrors of the little house again. Ida and Herman worked hard to support their family, aided by relatives and the community.

Gittel and Sadie grew to share the big bed and walk to school together.

One day Ida appeared with a letter from Canada. Mama’s cousin was urging them to come.

“Where is Canada?”

“Across the sea.”

“How will we get there?”

“By God’s will.”

“How by God’s will?”

“In a big ship.”

“And Papa will stay here in the ground?”

“Papa will go with us in our hearts.”

“Can Papa swim?”

“Gittel, you ask too many questions. Go to bed, sleep, child, sleep.”

Gittel curls up in the only dark she had ever known. She listens to Sadie breathe. At last she falls into a light, flowing sleep and dreams of the passage she will make. It is dark in the dream and great wars rock her bed. She clings tightly to her pillow and burrows into the featherbed. The feathers stir around her like a cocoon. She passes over the great sea in a cloud of feathers, part of a solemn migration.

I do not know where they got the money for this passage.

I do not know how they made the overland journey.

But Little Grandma comes to Canada a young woman, leaving the ghost to wander in Austria, searching for someone else to terrorize. This is my very best fortune, and it all happens before my own mother was even thought of.

10

My grandfather, Abraham Diamond, becomes the foreman of the cigar factory in Winnipeg before my grandmother, Gertrude, impeccably groomed as always, and trembling because she is legally underage for employment, steps over the threshold in high black boots.

Sitting very straight in her chair, she diligently rolls the Canadian cigars. Perhaps she has a bit of trouble at first and young Grandpa leans over her shoulder to instruct her…

She possesses an elegant air and is wrapped head to toe in a perfect complexion. She never in her life wore makeup.

He keeps checking on her, bringing a blush to her cheeks. Will he discover her age? Will she get fired? Herman and Ida are both married now, and my grandmother’s small salary is essential to the household where she lives with Sadie and Mama.

I’m sure we are all cheering for them, their five children, we ten grandchildren. We are clouds in the Winnipeg sky or trees in the park where Abe Diamond begins to court Gertrude Nadel. We are in the rays of sunlight that manage to creep through the high old windows of the factory, melding them together in a bond that would pluck us all from the stars and root us firmly in the new world.

In the wedding photograph, she wears a gigantic hat and sits in the chair like a queen. Grandpa stands shyly behind her, a slight man with a cleft in his chin and light-filled eyes, appropriately suited up for the occasion and bending toward her, but staring toward us, who are the camera, after all. There they are, two childhoods bursting into adulthood and clinging one to the other with enough love to draw us all out of the elements as they stirred together in her bed of feathers and learned to fly.