Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea: Stories

— The Low Hum of Her —

Father built me a new grandmother when the real one died. “She’s not a replacement,” he said, as if anything could be. This one was made of clay and metal all run through with wires to conduct electricity, which Father said made her a lot like us. At her center, where we have hearts and guts, she had a brass birdcage. I don’t know how he made her face look right. He put my real Bubbe’s clothing on her, and wrapped one of my real Bubbe’s headscarves around her iron-gray hair, and put Bubbe’s identification papers into her skirt pocket, and told me to call her Bubbe.

“Does it cook?” I asked him. “Does it bake, or sing?”

“She can,” said Father. “Those are exactly the things she can do. You just have to teach her. She can look after you and keep you company when I’m working.”

“I won’t call it Bubbe.”

“Call her what you like. Maybe you can say ‘the new Bubbe’ and ‘she’ when you’re around me, though. I worked hard to make her for you.”

He had spent months at his workbench. Long evenings after days spent teaching, and then long days after he was no longer allowed to work at the university. I had heard him cry sometimes, when he thought I was asleep. “She,” I repeated, eyeing the machine.

That night, it offered help as I prepared beets for soup.

“Just stand in the corner and watch,” I said. “You don’t know how.”

It followed my instructions. I stained the kitchen red with my messy chopping while it stood in the corner. How strange to see something that looked so much like Bubbe lurking in the dark corner where Bubbe never would have been found. “Too much to do,” she would have said. “I’ll rest when I’m dead.” Now she was dead, and her absence was an ache in my chest.

The fake Bubbe was quiet for a while, then spoke again. “Teach me the songs you’re singing, Tatiana. We can sing together while you cook.”

I hushed it and sang the old songs softly to myself, imitating my grandmother’s quavering soprano. There was no “we,” I told myself. There was Father and there was me and there was the hole that Bubbe had left. No machine could replace her, even one that looked and sounded like her. It didn’t even know to call me my nickname, Tania. Or perhaps Father told it that would be too familiar.

I had started a notebook of recipes and songs back before my real Bubbe took ill. She hated that notebook. She said I should remember with my hands and heart and not leave a book to do the remembering for me. Each night after she was gone, I flipped through the pages and chose something to make, trying to re-create her recipes precisely. I made new notes to myself when the recipes went wrong, trying to recapture the little details that hadn’t made it to the page. On the page for challah, my original transcription said “knead.” “Use your back to knead,” I remembered Bubbe saying when she first showed me how. “Your hands will get tired without the help of your back.” She threw her whole body into the effort. Her whole front was coated in flour by the end. “Bosoms,” she sighed in false despair, dusting herself off.

I wrote “use back” next to “knead.” Still, the dough never worked out as well for me as it had for her. The other recipes were the same way. My father ate each meal without complaint, but I longed to make us something that tasted as good as my grandmother’s cooking. I tried and tried, with the new Bubbe looking on from her corner.

And then Father came rushing home early one afternoon. “Tania, we must leave the house now as if we are going for an afternoon stroll. We can take only what we can fit into Bubbe.” I started to correct him, to say “new Bubbe,” but something in his tone silenced me.

The new Bubbe unbuttoned its blouse and opened the birdcage for us. For the first time, I understood what it was for. Father filled it with what little gold we had: my real Bubbe’s rings and necklaces and the shabbos candlesticks, all wrapped in headscarves so they wouldn’t rattle. Father’s prayer book. I put in the picture of my parents at their wedding, and a portrait of Bubbe with the grandfather I never knew, and my book of songs and recipes.

I saw my father glance back, just once, and I looked back too. The house looked sad. The eaves drooped and the window boxes sagged empty. Father had been too busy to fix the eaves, and I had not known when to plant seeds for spring flowers. Bubbe had always done that. What if my memories of my mother and grandmother were so tied to that house that they stayed behind? I whispered one of Bubbe’s songs under my breath, to show the memories they could come with us.

We walked away. The trees still had more flowers than leaves, but rain the night before had driven some of the petals to the ground. The petals were soft underfoot and muted our footsteps on the cobblestones. The streets smelled like lilacs and rain and I listened for screams and jackboots that I never heard and the three of us strolled down to the river and along its bank as if there were no hurry in the world. We walked away from home, just like that, just kept walking with nothing but the valuables that traveled inside the cage of the new Bubbe’s chest.

One of Father’s friends met us outside the city as evening fell. He gave us black bread and cheese and drove us through the night. We stopped once to show papers. A soldier shined a light into the car and looked at our documents while another held a rifle at the ready. They opened all of the doors and the boot of the automobile.

“Where are you going, Grandmother?” the one soldier asked the new Bubbe. I held my breath.

“My son, he has all the answers,” she said. It was something Bubbe had always said. I didn’t even know this one knew how to say it. I didn’t hear Father’s explanation for our travel over the pounding of my heart. The light lingered in our faces another moment, then went out.

“No bags,” said the one soldier to the other. They raised the gate to let us through.

We drove on. I wished Father had sat in the backseat with me, to stroke my hair and reassure me. Instead, the new Bubbe reached for my hand in the darkness of the car; for the first time, I let it. I fell asleep on its lap listening to the low hum of it and pretending it was a lullaby.

Father’s friend left us in a strange city in the morning. There, Father purchased a small trunk and a suitcase and clothing for us, then tickets aboard a steamship for the following day. He only bought two tickets. I watched from our hotel room’s single sagging bed as he dismantled the new Bubbe.

“I’m sorry I have to do this,” he said to it. It shrugged and sighed a very Bubbe-like sigh, weighted with suffering and understanding. I shivered when the light went out of its eyes.

“Why didn’t you just buy it—her—a ticket?” I asked.

“There will be closer quarters on the next part of our journey, Tania, and inspections. She can fool anyone who is not expecting a person to be something other than a person, but she would not pass a medical examination.”

He separated it into several parts, tying and braiding wires back in on themselves in neat bundles. I averted my gaze when he took its face. He left the torso intact, like a dressmaker’s form, with its birdcage core and all of our valuables hidden within. Disassembled, she fit into the small trunk he had purchased that afternoon.

At the docks, we were assigned numbers and a group. We descended a steep staircase to the steerage compartment, pushed and prodded the whole way like cattle. Father needed both hands for the trunk that contained the new Bubbe, so I gripped his coat with one hand and the suitcase with the other, trying not to get separated from him in the crush of people. Two more levels down we found the family quarters, where we were permitted to claim two iron bunks and the narrow gap between them.

That night, Father placed the trunk at the foot of his straw mattress. He slept curled up like a baby in the space that remained. I tried not to think about the collection of parts in the trunk, which had once seemed so close to alive. Life was a fragile thing. I had seen my grandmother’s body after her passing, but I was not there to witness the light leaving her eyes.

Our quarters smelled like sweat and wet wool and sick. And so many noises! Other families murmured. Babies cried, and somewhere an old woman moaned. The steam engine churned and clanked. I struggled to sleep at first, but I soon learned to tune out the families and let the sounds of the ship lull me. The engine sounds from the deepest parts of the ship’s belly reminded me of the new Bubbe, and that in turn reminded me of my own Bubbe’s voice. I let the sounds blur together: real and imaginary, alive and almost alive.

I did not count the days, but gave over to the indignities of the situation. We had no dining area, but ate on the floor or on our bunks. We gnawed hard biscuits and picked insects out of our soup. My cooking was fit for royalty compared to the ship’s fare, and at least I had never lost a hairpin into my stew. After each meal I waited in line to dunk our tin plates in a basin of seawater, and in another line to wash my face and hands. I considered the new Bubbe, in pieces in the trunk, whenever I felt too cramped.

We arrived in the place Father said would be our new home. As he had warned, there were physical inspections. They checked our hair, face, neck, and hands, which the new Bubbe might have passed, then our eyes, which she might not have. The doctors had chalk in their hands, and marked the clothing of some. I tried to regulate my breathing, tried to turn myself into a machine incapable of weakness, and hoped Father was doing the same. We passed the doctors, and the interrogators, and then we were in the new place with nothing but our trunk and our suitcase.

Father had the address of a colleague from his old university, and we walked for an hour to reach his house. Mr. Levitan embraced my father despite what must have been the overwhelming stink of us. He helped us secure an apartment that very day. Perhaps the odor sped his actions. Still, he took the time to ask me questions about our journey, and he gave me a candy that tasted both sweet and citrus-sour at once.

The new apartment was much smaller than our old house. That didn’t matter, since we had fewer things. The building smelled like lemons and pickles and cigarettes, and the sunlight that filtered through the windows was more intense than the light where we had come from. Bells rang often throughout the day.

Father reassembled the new Bubbe. I did not admit it to him, but when he reconnected her circuits I was relieved to see that she had survived her travel without any damage. I listened as he explained our new situation. She shrugged and nodded.

Father said not to leave the apartment, which was easy since we had no place to go. The new Bubbe was my only company now that Father was away working even longer hours than he had at home. She had not asked her questions since we moved to the new place. Father brought home only bread and herring, so she had no reason to help with the cooking. He bought me a radio. I listened to that in place of singing, though I recognized few of the songs and didn’t know the language the announcers spoke.

The electricity in our building was inconsistent, surging and dropping at various points throughout most days. For the most part the power would resume mere moments after the interruption, but one morning it went out and didn’t come back on. My radio cut out in mid-song. I paced the floor, at first in boredom and then in fear. Hours passed, and the room grew dark.

“What if something happened and Father can’t come home?” I asked the new Bubbe. “What if we’re alone?”

“Ssha,” she said. For the first time since the car ride, I let her take me in her arms. The whir of her inner workings reassured me; she was something the outage couldn’t touch.

It took a minute to realize she was singing. Quietly at first, then louder when I didn’t make her stop. She sang one of Bubbe’s songs, the ones I had sung under my breath when I didn’t want her to hear. Her voice cracked like porcelain on the high notes.

I wanted her to sing another, and she seemed pleased when I asked her to do so. I joined her on the chorus. We sang another, and another, the old songs and the ones from the radio, and passed the day in that way. I didn’t even notice when the electricity came back on.

Late that night, Father arrived with a chicken and an onion and a sack of kasha.

“Get your recipe book, Tania,” he said. “We’ll have a feast.”

I shook my head.

The real Bubbe said to remember with my hands, so I showed the new Bubbe how the secret to kasha was to mix in the chicken fat. She got grease on her blouse, like the real Bubbe. I taught her to say “bosoms,” and sigh, as the real Bubbe always had.

My thought that day was if I taught her hands the recipes, if her lips knew Bubbe’s songs, then there would always be two of us to remember, even when Father was away. My real grandmother had been my teacher, but this one needed me to teach her.

“You can call me Tania,” I said to her. It might have been my imagination, but I thought she looked pleased.

“What will you call me?” she asked. I considered. Bubbe did not fit any longer, nor “the new Bubbe,” as I had addressed her with such derision.

“What would you like to be called?”

She shrugged. “You choose. Call me something with meaning to you.”

I gave her the name Chaya, alive. She was no longer just a reminder of the grandmother I had lost, but her own thing.

She will be with me always, I hope. Someday she and I will show my children and grandchildren how to make kreplach and kasha varnishkes. Someday they will wonder at the birdcage in her chest, which still holds my old book of recipes and the photo of my grandparents. Someday I will have hair as gray as hers, and then grayer. I will lean over the table and cover my own blouse with flour, and sigh and say “bosoms” with the right note of false despair, so the children around me will giggle. When the others go to sleep, she and I will remember together, and I will listen to the low hum of her, and we will sing each other lullabies.