Read Online This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir by Judy Brown - Free Book Online Page B

already stuck.
    So Mendel called my father, Shloimy, then seven years old, who grabbed a broom from outside the Itamars’ door and thumped it down the drain. Mendel locked the bathroom so the neighbors could not see as his older brother pulled and pushed, pushed and pulled at the socks that would not budge from deep inside the toilet. Mendel said two psalms for unplugging the toilet, the way he’d done to heal his stray cat, and it was then, as my father gave a final push, that the socks came spurting up—along with everything else.
    Shloimy told Mendel to stop praying. Now was the time to flee.
    They dropped the broom on the overflowing bathroom floor and ran to the courtyard, where they started playing kugelach and tag as if they’d been there all afternoon, never once looking back. They chased cats down the alley and dared each other to touch the entrance door of the dark building where the Christian missionaries lived, those who kidnapped Jewish orphans.
    When Mr. Itamar returned home to the screams of his wife, hovering over her filth-caked broom, he grabbed his sons, each by one ear, demanding to know which of the little fools had stuffed the only toilet with his socks. They yelped and screamed and said they didn’t know, but Mr. Itamar made them clean up the mess anyway while my father and Mendel sat several courtyards away eating Aunt Dina’s cakes and snacks.
      
    Life could have gone on like this forever, but it didn’t. Perhaps because God saw that things were better for Savtah Liba and He got worried. She had already been happy for several years.
    So it was a rather simple thing for an angel to trip Sabah Mechel in the dark, to send him stumbling down the stone steps with his wagon, and to see to it that his head hit the sharp edge of a brick or stone. The milk, rushing from the overturned canister, streamed down the street, all wasted, but Sabah Mechel never noticed. Blood covered his eyes, soaking the fallen kippa near his head, red mixing with white, as the wheels of the wagon spun in the dark, silent air of Jerusalem.
    It was Yanofsky who saw him first as he walked down the street on his way to early morning prayers. Yanofsky dragged Sabah Mechel to the hospital, where they stopped the bleeding, wrapping his head in gauze and plaster. But Sabah Mechel did not open his eyes for days. In the operating room, a surgeon with a sharp knife cut open the back of Sabah Mechel’s head and poked around worriedly inside. Then, finding nothing but smashed skull, he sewed Sabah Mechel back together again with a needle, a thread, and a prayer.
    Sabah Mechel was discharged several weeks later. There was nothing more the doctors could do. The ambulance brought him home, and he lay in the apartment’s one bedroom in crippling pain. He was a generous soul still, but now there was a raging violence that burst randomly from the cracks of his broken skull, and it was impossible to know what would set it off.
    Sabah Mechel could no longer wake up at dawn, so Savtah Liba went to work instead. She rose each morning before the sun, pushing the milk wagon down the twisting lanes.
    Sabah Mechel’s seventy-five-year-old mother, Bubba Tzirah, moved in to care for her crippled son. In the morning, she filled the house with the smell of cheese strudel and fresh bread. In the evening, she cooked warm soup and scrubbed the little ones clean. Sometimes she sent Hadassah, the oldest, to help her mother with the milk at dawn. Sometimes she sent my father, already eight years old and strong enough, to help too. They filled glass bottles as the sun rose over the city, and children rushed past them to school. Some mornings, Hadassah would see her teacher walking hurriedly down the street. Crouching behind a gate or a wall, she hid until the teacher was gone and could not see her poverty and shame.
    Things got better when Savtah Liba found a job koshering chickens in the butcher’s store. There she did not need to wake up before the sun.