I Am Forbidden Read Online Free PDF Page B

Heller are in Jewish ground, ready for the End of Days. For this alone, the Lord will reward you with eternal life.” Zalman glanced back at the hump of boy and eiderdown. He looked to the road ahead. “Vatome-er Zio-on,” Zalman chanted. “That’s how your haphtorah begins. Will you be ready for your bar mitzvah, Josef, son of Yekutiel and Judith? Bar mitzvah means son of the commandment; it means that soon, when you turn thirteen,you’ll be an adult in the eyes of the Law.” As if Josef had responded, Zalman intoned the cantillations boys learn when they prepare to read aloud the Torah in synagogue: “Zakef kato-on.… Let your voice rise, deep, from your belly! Zakef Gadol.… You think I’m making these up? You think man can create such blissful modulations? No, God Himself taught them to Moses on Sinai.” And to the vast silent fields, to the road ahead, to the boy between coat and eiderdown, Zalman trilled, “Paze-e-e-e-e-er!”
    *
    T HE NIGHT Zalman set out to retrieve the boy, Mila tossed in bed. Her agitation grew when Zalman did not return the following evening. The same fear kept awakening her. “What if they were caught?”
    Atara tried to reassure her, the war was over and Zalman expected the trip to last a few days, especially if, at first, the boy did not wish to leave.
    “Your father is stubborn,” Mila said. “The boy will have to come.” She did not voice her confusion about whether it was right to take the boy away from his new mother.
    The two girls were leaning over the balcony’s railing, eyes searching the road to Deseu, when the cart turned the corner.
    “They’re here!”
    They rushed down the stairs: Mila, Atara, Hannah, and the younger children.
    Hannah welcomed the boy exuberantly, “Shulem Aleichem!” She lifted the eiderdown from his arms, insisted that he wanted something to drink, to eat.
    The Stern children marveled that a farm boy could be standing in their entranceway. Zalman’s big, black skullcap looked odd on the boy’s shoulder-length, honey-colored hair. His face was tanned, not like the indoor complexion of yeshiva boys. While the other children escorted him into the kitchen where Hannah readied a meal for him, Mila slipped away. The boy had not caught sight of her; Mila knew better than to add that encounter to the strangeness that surrounded him. Sitting on the bed in the girls’ room, her face held a relief not seenduring the two years she had been with the Sterns. She rose, turned eastward, and prayed for the messiah with renewed fervor; surely this first reunion with Josef was a sign of the reunion to come when her parents would live again.
    Zalman whisked the boy to synagogue for evening service.
    Mila and Atara were in bed when they heard Zalman chant in the stairwell, and the key in the front door. Mila listened for the boy’s footsteps and her body turned as she tracked him around the house. “He recognizes it from when he was little, the smell of chicken soup and the smell of starched Sabbath clothes. He hears the plop-pof of your mother’s fists kneading the challah dough. He knows the quiet part when she removes the sticky paste from between her fingers.” Mila rose out of bed and pressed her ear against the door. “He is going to the kitchen but it isn’t his mother. It isn’t either of his mothers.”
    In the morning, Zalman called from the study: “Hannah, is Josef up? Make sure he rises properly.”
    Hannah coached the boy: “
I give thanks before Thee for returning my soul
.… You didn’t wash your hands before getting out of bed? How will your soul know that you are ready for it? When you are asleep, your soul rushes up near its Creator and, without a soul, your body becomes impure. Take hold of the cup with your right hand, good, now switch it to the left. Pour the water over the right hand. Switch the cup back; pour it over the left. Now repeat after me,
Blessed art Thou Adonaï
.…”
    Hannah set in front of the boy a glass of