The Loss of Bubbe

Benjamin Gold was sitting on the bed in a damp shirt staring at nothing when Susannah, his wife, put her head around the door of their old bedroom.

“I told Aaron to go to bed. He looks pale. I said you’d say goodnight.” She waited politely for him to leave so she could undress.

“You all right, son?”

“Fucking wonderful.”

“I mean do you feel ill?” Ben placed his hand on Aaron’s forehead.

Aaron, who was perched rigidly on the edge of his unmade bed, shook him off. “Leave me alone. Fuck’s sake.”

Ben hadn’t been in here for a while. There were mouldy cups, a torn maths book and a half-eaten bowl of Shreddies on the floor.

“If I turn my phone off, will you leave, Dad?” Aaron proffered the hated object at his father.

Aaron’s pupils were too large.

“What were you doing down on the beach?” Ben inspected his socked feet, which looked so much like his own father’s. “Aaron, do you remember your Grandfather Moses?”

“Mostly from photos. He gave me that abacus, didn’t he?” Aaron was pulling threads from the edge of a blue quilt with yellow ducklings on it, which Susannah’s sister had made for him when he was a baby.

“The abacus!” A beautiful image of red-faced Aaron, age two, repeatedly throwing the cumbersome object at a wall and yelling his delight with the clatter it made, rose in Ben’s mind. “I’m coming to check on you in ten minutes, understand?”

“Dad, I’m nearly sixteen.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Okay, but fuck off.”

Ben leaned down for a hug. Aaron blocked him. “Mum told me Grandpa Moses was some kind of genius and that’s where I get my mathematical intelligence from. Did he like me?”

“Like you? He thought you were the best thing since the infinitesimal approach to calculus. I wish he’d lived long enough to see you now.”

“I don’t like forgetting.”

Ben recognised that Aaron’s pupils were actually cavernous: the irises thin slivers of flecked brown. 

“Have you taken something?”

“No.” Which sounded like a yes.

Ben rubbed his temples, hung his head, and covered both eyes with his free hand. “What?”

“Maybe?”

His son turned away.

“How much and what? We’ll have to get you to a hospital to be checked out; we can do it once your mother’s in bed. You can have tomorrow off but there’s no need to worry her. Are you breathing okay?” Ben felt his own throat closing.

“Fuck’s sake, Dad. Only a tiny bit of coke. I’m fine, and if I don’t go in tomorrow everyone will ask why. I thought you were meant to be the wellbeing officer at school. Everyone does it, or didn’t you know?”

Choking on phlegm, Ben managed to stop himself from screaming. “Never do this to me again.”

“Don’t have a fit, Ben. It’s wearing off now. You won’t lose your job. Not as if I get pissed in my study every single night while I’m ‘marking books.’” Aaron used his chubby, ink-stained index fingers to create scare quotes around the last two words.

That hit Ben in the solar plexus. His limbs were not part of him. Hot rage flowed through them, scattering his mind, terrifying him. It was unclear what, if pushed at this moment, he might be capable of; what final pathetic act of violence he might perpetrate on his only beloved child, leaving a well of hatred so deep it would take decades to evaporate. And, if she took him too far away when they moved out, he might never stop hating him.

“What the hell were you doing with Lewis Wright anyway?” Ben asked. “He’s a racist—possibly a psychopath. He set some girl’s hair on fire in chemistry for being queer. Did you really think he wanted you for a friend?” Aaron flinched. Ben ploughed on. “Do you have any idea what that stuff does to your brain anyway?” Now he was yelling.

Aaron pulled the seam of his baby blanket open along the top and threw the shredded thing on the floor. His exposed hairy legs jiggled under Ben’s blank stare. Ben snatched up the blanket and cradled it in his arms.

“I should probably sleep in here tonight to keep an eye on you.”

“Least my floor’s more comfortable than the sofa in your office.”

In the kitchen, Ben downed one small glass of whiskey to help him sleep, then another large one. He filled two mugs of water, found a sleeping bag under the stairs, and climbed back to Aaron’s room, lights spinning wildly before his eyes. 

Crawling inside the bag on the floor, listening to his son’s breath, Ben inhaled an aroma of old school socks and sour booze coming from his own body.

Aaron was lying on top of the covers twitching his knees. Ben sat up.

“Try and sleep, Aaron. Your brain needs to recover from the stimulant.” The word caused tears to start behind his eyes.

Aaron tapped his feet in a rhythm. “Did Moses drink, Dad?”

“No, Moses never needed more than mathematics to make him happy. Certainly not anything that involved talking to other humans.”

“I wish he was still alive.”

Ben closed his eyes against the exploding pain in his temples. “Mm.”

“Dad, talk to me.”

“All right, if you stop fidgeting for God’s sake. What do you want to hear about?” Ben’s voice went on automatically without waiting for a reply, like it used to when Aaron was five and wet the bed at three a.m. on a school night. “I know almost nothing about my father’s parents. But my other grandmother, Bubbe. You’ve heard of her. She lived with us. She survived the war, was rescued by an American GI from a concentration camp.”

Aaron kicked his legs under the duvet, ready for the old story. Ben carefully restored the torn baby’s quilt to its place at the foot of Aaron’s bed.

“What was Bubbe like?”

Ben lowered his voice and shuffled back into his sleeping bag. His pulse slowed as he spoke. The heat left him. The words of her story were burnt into his brain. “This American soldier, he saw her moving at the back of some godforsaken charnel house and shouted, ‘Hey, some little guy’s still alive!’ She was twenty-one. There aren’t any more stories about Bubbe and the war, she didn’t like to talk about it—you know. But when she was dying, in the Royal Free in London, she thought she was back in the camp. She sat up screaming all night in Yiddish and my mother told me she ate like a dog. She was such a tiny woman. She must have looked frightening with a chunk of meat dangling from the five teeth she had left. They put her in a private room so she wouldn’t upset the Spanish lady in the bed opposite.

“I didn’t go home to visit. I’d just met your mother and my mother wanted me to concentrate on getting a first from Cambridge. The next time I saw Bubbe, she was in her coffin. A tiny lady in a box, like the skeleton of a sparrow. All I could think of was her as a young woman crawling through Hitler’s corpses. I wish I had been there to say goodbye, but what good is that now? Bubbe wouldn’t have been so sentimental. It was the only time I ever saw my father at temple without the pen and notebook he carried in case the answer to an important problem came to him suddenly.”

Ben’s mind begged for booze but he had to keep talking, in order to not disturb their brief closeness. “Once when I was small, Bubbe caught me teasing the cat—trying to see if I could catch his tongue when he yawned and hold on to it. I wanted to set a world record for holding a cat’s tongue. The cat was old, I knew he wouldn’t ever scratch me. It was an experiment, I was curious. Maybe I did other things to him that weren’t so nice, which the adults never found out, I can’t remember. But that one time, Bubbe walked in with her glass of boiling sweet lemon tea just when I had his little tongue pinched between two fingernails and she yelled at me. I thought she’d throw the tea. She told me I was a dybbuk and asked if I knew where that kind of behaviour would get me, and if I needed her to explain to me how the smell of burning hair sank into your clothes and under your eyelids. I didn’t know what she was talking about because I didn’t understand about the camps. But I was sure she was right about me. I was a dybbuk. She was the only one who noticed. I can still see her nodding and narrowing her eyes afterwards from that leather chair your mother still uses.

“I know you already know this, Aaron, but I named you after Bubbe’s youngest brother, whom she might have looked after in the Polish ghetto before they were taken to the camp. Bubbe never told us about him. She didn’t tell us anything that happened before the American soldier found her. But you know the name means exalted. That was how I felt when you were born.”

Whiskey soothed the throbbing in his temples. Ben closed his eyes, inhaled a whiff of sour milk coming from the Shreddies and tried to imagine his son as a baby. But the picture wouldn’t materialize. He lay down. This darkness suddenly felt so sorrowful, Ben had to fight himself not to run to the kitchen for a drink. He crossed one leg over the other inside the sleeping bag and gripped the smooth pine leg of Aaron’s bed with one hand.

Rubbing his temples with the tips of four fingers, he remembered Moses using the same gesture to calm himself whenever his wife, or her mother, were troubling him: nagging about sending the cousins Chanukah presents, or laughing at the indelible patterns of ink left by leaking ballpoint pens in every pocket of every shirt Moses ever owned. When Ben raised himself on one elbow, pain radiated from his head through his entire body.

Aaron was stretched out, breathing softly. Ben’s mind filled with vague information he needed to communicate before he lost his son forever. As for when they might be moving out, he didn’t know and couldn’t bear to ask. “It’s a shame, Aaron, that you never had a bar mitzvah and now it’s too late. I wasn’t taken to synagogue every week, but at least they made sure I had my bar mitzvah. They gave up Sabbath meals because Bubbe used to like to watch Friends on a Friday night and Moses always had work he had to be doing. I could hear Bubbe from the top of our house, shouting in Yiddish at the TV: lacerating Rachel and her tiny tuchus, then turning on Chandler, the smart aleck chicken. But I’ve been thinking maybe we should do a correspondence course. Duolingo or something, beginner’s Hebrew. What do you reckon? I can’t teach you much, or anything really. We could learn together. These so-called smartphones must be good for something. If your mother decides to stay in the area, we could even go to a synagogue one time together—just for the experience. I’m not trying to convert you. I know you and your mother are busy with all the extra maths and I wouldn’t want to get in the way of that. We could stick to remote learning. . .”

The thought of his son’s absence caused his arm to quiver and give way. Ben lay flat, chattering and sobbing like the lonely drunk he was. Thankfully, he was fairly sure, Aaron was already asleep.

The Loss of Bubbe was upon him, pressing his body to the floor. Bubbe’s death was the start of all this and the absence of Bubbe now made him shiver all over, though he was sweating. Half-dreaming, he was himself again as a small child, jeered at in the playground for his thick glasses and skinniness, crawling for comfort close to Bubbe’s bony body on a damp wooden bench. Always a tall boy, at eight years old he was nearly as big as her. But she seemed to him the most solid thing anywhere in the entire universe. He needed Bubbe now, because he would be losing his wife and his son—the chubby boy with fire in his mind, whom he’d never once taken to a synagogue. His Aaron, who couldn’t say a word of a prayer in Hebrew, who was now resorting to the same stimulants for comfort, Nazi soldiers had been issued to fuel the superhuman strength with which they crushed weaker beings under their boots.

But if she were here, Bubbe would sniff. She would take Susannah’s side. He could hear her voice scolding and imagine the half-threatening, half-affectionate, small smile she used when she was serious. There was no excuse for burying yourself in mathematical theorems, nor drink; no reason why Benjamin should be guilty of nauseating weakness with the complete freedom and opportunity he had enjoyed as a child growing up in Hampstead, where they were free to be Jews. Because that’s what they were. Even if Bubbe spent the Sabbath watching sitcoms. Even if his mother claimed some shellfish were kosher while Bubbe sniffed and rolled her eyes. If he couldn’t get Aaron to understand that, then what kind of father was he?