I Am Forbidden Read Online Free PDF

bucket dangling from her stiff arm. Zalman followed her to the farmhouse. The door closed on her.
    Zalman knocked and stepped into the kitchen. “Tell him, Doamna Florina, tell him what awaits him once your neighbors find out their suspicions are grounded.”
    When Florina did not answer, Zalman turned to the boy.“They will kill you if you are a Jew and usurp a farmer’s inheritance.”
    Zalman’s eyes adjusted to the half-light. He saw the crucifix above the four-poster bed, he stepped back into the yard, where he paced determinedly, back and forth.
    Florina looked to where she and the boy prayed every night.
    In the kitchen with the four-poster bed, Anghel saw Florina’s love and her helplessness, and it washed over him, too. They shared this moment of losing all, of having already lost.
    Anghel strode out. “What about Florina?” he asked.
    Zalman stopped pacing. “Doamna Florina is a righteous Gentile. God will reward her a thousandfold.”
    “Florina is my mother.”
    “
The Lord have mercy
, you have forgotten your own mother, Josef, son of Yekutiel and Judith?”
    “What will you do with me?”
    “Do with you? You’ll live as you were meant to live. You’ll study in the Rebbe’s new yeshiva in America.”
    “And Florina?”
    “Doamna Florina will have her share in the next world. In this world, she will not lack a thing.”
    “She will not come to America?”
    “Doamna Florina will not be happy where you are going.”
    The boy hesitated. “If I go with you, will I see Mama, Tatta, Pearela?”
    “Child … surely you know that your mother and father.…”
    The boy tried again. “If I go with you, I will not fly to Heaven, but if I don’t fly to Heaven, will I see Mama, Tatta, Pearela?”
    Zalman strode past the boy. He banged on the kitchen door. “What have you told this child?”
    Florina, in the semi-dark, did not look up. “To live, I told my Anghel to live.”
    “Doamna Florina, for a Jew, there is no other life than to live as a Jew.”
    But there had been another life for Florina and Anghel. Seven years, Florina and the boy had dwelled in the kingdom where widows are faithful to their departed spouses—dead to this world but alive in Christ. Florina had been constant to the memory of her fictitious husband, she had rejected Calin’s advances and Petru’s, she had worn the widow’s scarf, for her son, Anghel, seven years.
    O NE LAST NIGHT , Florina watched over the boy’s sleep, then she opened the door onto the dark and went to milk the cows.
    The boy lay furled in fetal position under the eiderdown, his nose burrowing the soft peaks and crevices, hunting for his mothers’ scents.
    Zalman was waiting in the yard when Florina returned. He did not enter the kitchen with the crucifix but pointed from the threshold to the open suitcase. “He won’t need these where he’s going.”
    Florina removed the boy’s new wooden clogs. She snappedshut the cardboard suitcase and tied a string around it. She flattened the eiderdown, rolled it in a tight bolt, tied a string around it. She placed his first mother’s brooch in the boy’s hand.
    The boy clasped the brooch and wrapped his arms around the eiderdown, disappearing behind it.
    Then Florina let go of the boy with the wood-nettle eyes, green topside, gray and downy underside—in the right light. She watched her Anghel and the Jew walk to the gate. Standing under the short, tin awning, she waited for her son to look back over his shoulder one last time.
    They had reached the gate when Zalman told the boy that it would be better for Doamna Florina if he kept his eyes straight ahead.
    Zalman spread his coat on the cart bed.
    The boy huddled between Zalman’s coat and the eiderdown, between black wool and white cotton as the wheels crushed the gravel, turning, turning from Florina.…
    The cart was clattering past the Jewish cemetery when Zalman said, “Already, without any learning, you have done a good deed—the remains of Gershon