brick books
In Rumenye iz dokh gut
Fun keyn dayges veyst men nit
In Rumania, life is good!
No one worries, no one should
Aaron Lebedeff,
“Rumenye, Rumenye”
The ancestors of everyone I’ve let into my body
are gathered in a small room with one window,
no lights. Yes, the room is crowded. Yes, there
are no chairs. Yes, they are talking. Why are we
here, says the Nazi resister. Where are the chairs,
says the Viking (no horns). Where is the light, say
the people with their new French name hung
around their necks heavy like a long black cross.
Here, says the grand wizard, and a long white
light descends from a point on the ceiling.
The people of the oldest empire are here, too,
they have brought their own fire (hidden), they
too can speak French, they know in an instant not
to trust that light. They are opening the window.
How do we get away from these people, they
murmur. True Aryans! say the Nazis with their
new French name. No one is speaking
to the Catholics. There is a knock on the door —
there is a door. More Nazis. How did this happen?
Outside the open window there is a small huddle
of shawls and feet and candlesticks, a suitcase
and a cane. Someone has forgotten their things,
says the Nazi resister. The candlesticks turn into
my great-grandmother, their tarnish to coal smears,
the cane grows tall into my great-zayde, the shawl
his mother, suitcase an uncle with an aunt inside.
The feet are just empty shoes — my cousins have
already died. The small huddle of my family outside
the open window begins to sink to a great distance,
first one storey, then a long drop. Someone spits
through the open window. My great-zayde
shields his face. Great-Grandmother looks up.
What are those people, she says, doing
in that room?
Everyone in these pictures looks like you!
— childhood friend, upon reading her first book about the Holocaust, circa 1996
You learn to use a word like a lock — how it
barely secures a mouth. A word
just far enough east that the elementary map
unrolls a little faded. Water spilled
across the collective atlas, childhood
reflex: Romanian — a word you throw
at people to make them go away.
A lock to shut many doors
at once. You tried turning it into a game —
guess — but everyone who was supposed
to win guessed wrong, again
and again, in the field, youth group,
security lineup. You cancelled
the tournament, but men
who miss home, drunk women — insistent
competitors, on sidewalks,
at the cash register, under neon — persisted
from across the street. The real
answer: shut your adult
mouth. It conceals one
song, two great-grandparents, one village,
one train, the valley of the shadow
of the Atlantic —
The deader the language the more alive is the ghost.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer
In another time I braid
and unbraid my hair
until the house falls down or
I get pregnant,
whichever happens
first. I worry
about teeth. In a circle
around the shul we stand —
the more important we are,
the farther away. Empire ticks
on slowly around us,
stealing our shoes and tailors and —
well —
everything. I spit out words
like seeds —
hener, czar,
khasene. Later, tifus.
I stand in the mirror, mutter —
I watch my face learn how to read
and then forget, then
never learn. It is hard
to imagine how dark it must have been
at night. A wool blanket, the pelt
of a beast. Great-Zayde
lights a lamp. Cuts a fake collar
from white cardboard, steps out onto
the broad back of the sky.
Basarabia E România
— Graffiti slogan found across Romania. Reading “Bessarabia is Romania,” it refers to territory annexed by Russia which now forms the Republic of Moldova.
No matter your love for the trees, the colour blue,
twilight comes to the forest. False border
between day and night and safety. Bessarabia calcifies
around me, shatters and dissolves. Heralds electric light.
The only reason we know where we are is a bird call
that screams from the future That’s not a real place anymore,
over and over. The edge of Europe is a river
that recedes from Ukraine saying Get out now. Somewhere,
a foundry begins to glow a faint fire. The air turns to smoke. Iron
pulls itself back into the earth, dreading
a national purpose. I pull the forest around me and sprout needles,
I pull the forest around me and grow knots, acacia bole,
soak up groundwater. Fade into a steppe
and wait for death. Night is that bird call.
Night, your friend, the thief, is ruined. Night is
a uniform, the earth who never turned you
away. Bessarabia collapses
out of English — becomes spray paint
on an overpass, primary colours on cement,
block letters crushed into a church.
Does the earth turn towards you or away? What do you call
something you see everywhere, that tried to kill you,
but doesn’t exist anymore?