Shadows of Berlin полностью

“Never mind. I don’t want to hear it,” Miriam commands. “I’m only glad your father didn’t live to see the day. It would have killed him.” The doorbell rings and punctures the argument. “Go. Answer the door like a person, will you?” Miriam commands her daughter. “It’s probably Bubbe and Zaydi.”

“Oh God,” Naomi groans dully, but she trudges off in the direction of the door. “If Bubbe pinches my cheek, I’m gonna lose it, Ma. I swear it.”

“Mind your manners!” her mother instructs her in a loud, routine scold, then turns to Rachel, eyebrows arched over her cat’s eyes. “Rachel, honey,” Miriam says. “How about you come into the kitchen to help me finish up?”

“Of course,” Rachel agrees.

In the kitchen, a table knife in Rachel’s hand, she scrapes butter across the brittle unleavened surface of the matzah crackers. The bread of slavery, the bread of freedom. Miriam likes them buttered and stacked on the plate catty-corner so that they form the angles of the Magen David. Meanwhile, the woman is peeling her hard-­boiled eggs. “So you’d tell me, right?” she asks.

A half glance. “Tell you?”

“Yeah. You’d tell me. If there was any news.”

Rachel scrapes the knife. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean. News of what?”

“News,” Miriam repeats with a bit of added force. Maybe it’s that her daughter-­in-­law is simpleminded. “I mean you and Aaron have been married for how long now?”

“Seven months.”

“Okay. Well, I was just asking, ya know?” She rolls the egg against the cutting board, fracturing it, then peels the shell away from the glossy egg meat. “I thought you might have some news.”

Finally, Rachel gets it. She breathes in and then out as she butters. “Oh. No. No news.”

“Well,” Miriam says with a smidge of a frown. “I suppose things are different today,” she says. “Nobody’s in a hurry.”

The table is set with her mother-­in-­law’s finest. The Paragon china with floral sprays. The Royal Danish sterling and Lenox crystal. The delicate lace table linen that was a wedding gift from Miriam’s mother, may her memory be a blessing. And beside every neatly arranged place setting is a thin yellow-­and-­burgundy paper booklet from the grocery store with pages numbered back to front.

Her husband and sister-­in-­law refer to them with wry affection as the Maxwell House Haggadahs. A publication available to every Jewish housewife for free at the Foster Avenue grocery and every other grocery across the land that stocks matzah and gefilte fish. Rachel’s is pristine. Picked up new for the occasion of her introduction to the family Seder table. A hammered steel emblem is printed on the cover. Deluxe Edition Passover Haggadah in English and Hebrew, Compliments of the Coffees of Maxwell House, Kosher for Passover. But the other copies have obviously been exhausted by the years. Dog-­eared and stained, both Naomi’s and Aaron’s are mottled with childhood wine spills and have been thumbed halfway to rags. “Ma, do ya think you might pick up a couple of new ones for us at some point?” Aaron says. “The pages are falling out.” But Rachel can tell that he’s not really complaining.

“New? These are the ones with history,” his mother insists. “Your whole childhood is in them practically. You want new? Go to the Ornsteins. They got everything new there. Okay! Calling all cars,” she broadcasts from the kitchen. “Everybody who hasn’t should go wash up so we can sit down.”

The table could stand to be a little longer. What with Bubbe and Zaydi Perlman, Great Uncle Meyer with his enormous belly, Aunt Deenah and her husband, Walt, who owns the bakery on Ditmas Avenue, neither of whom anyone could mistake for thin, Uncle Hyram grown fat in the scrap iron business, plus the cousins from Parsippany, whose names Rachel has forgotten, their twin boys, whom Naomi calls Leopold and Loeb, their sullen teenaged girl who must be the tallest girl in her class, and the chair reserved for the Prophet Elijah, remembered for good. With the entire balibt mishpocha seated, they’re a little crowded, so it’s just as well that Naomi’s goy stayed on the Upper East Side with his kids. Otherwise, they would have had to suspend him from the glass bowl chandelier. This is the joke Aaron must make, because he’s the funny one.