Read Online Upon the Head of the Goat by Aranka Siegal - Free Book Online

greetings on the street. Ica and I could sense the new limits to our relationship.
    Just before Passover, Mother and Lilli received the first cards from the men in almost two months. Father’s card seemed to jolt Mother out of a depression, and she cried as she read it over and over.
    â€œWhen was that card sent?” Lilli asked.
    â€œAlmost three weeks ago.”
    â€œLajos’ card is almost four,” Lilli exclaimed. She and Mother beamed at each other in spite of their tears and exchanged postcards.
    The first week in June we received a surprise visit from a woman about Mother’s age accompanied by a girl my age and a boy of seven. She introduced herself as Mrs. Gerber. “My husband wrote to me that he is in your husband’s battalion,” she said as Mother walked with her toward the salon.
    â€œHe asked that I come and meet you so that if one of us gets mail and the other doesn’t, we can check with each other and be in touch,” she said after she had seated herself on the chair in the salon. Mother introduced us to Mrs. Gerber, and she, in turn, introduced us to Judi and Pali. The women talked for a while, giving each other all the information they had received in the past months from their husbands. Then Mother went into the kitchen and brought back holiday cakes and tea. She was playing hostess again, a role that she loved, and she talked about Father without stopping. Mrs. Gerber invited us to visit her the next Saturday. “I have a cherry tree full of cherries, and they should be ripe by then.”
    We all decided to call on the Gerbers the following Saturday. Judi Gerber and I climbed up into the tree with a basket and picked the ripe fruit for everybody.
    â€œYou realize that we are picking cherries on the Sabbath and nobody seems to notice,” I said.
    â€œWe are not religious,” Judi answered. “We don’t bother with tradition and holidays, we are only Jewish by birth.”
    Beginning with that Sabbath, Judi and I became friends. We waved and talked to each other on the playground. She didn’t have many friends because the other girls said she was odd and standoffish, but she really wasn’t once you got to know her.
    â€œFunny we never talked before,” I said to her one day.
    â€œYou were always with your friends.”
    â€œI’m not so friendly with them any more. I feel closer to you now.”
    Judi had come from Budapest when her father’s company transferred him to Beregszász before the army drafted him. She lent me some of her books from the school in Budapest and told me that the school had been a progressive one where the students discussed all kinds of ideas and where there were no rigid routines.
    I told Iboya some of the things Judi had said. “Don’t pick up too many of her ideas,” Iboya answered, “or you will become as unpopular as she.”
    Mother and Mrs. Gerber continued to see each other, and they often talked about Budapest. “My daughter Etu is there in the Gymnasium,” Mother said to Mrs. Gerber one afternoon when we were all sitting in our back yard. “I have asked her to come home, but she wants to finish the year.”
    â€œDon’t ask her to come back here,” Mrs. Gerber replied. “She would be much better off there in an emergency. There is less conflict in the big cities because people are not that easily influenced by propaganda. What can she do here? I wish I were back there. We went to the opera and the theater and had marvelous friends.”
    â€œYes,” said Mother. “I lived there for a while when I was a young woman; I stayed with one of my sisters who is now in America. How I loved the theater! That was what I missed most of all when I came here. What a long time ago all of that was!”
    â€œBut she still remembers all of the plays she saw,” said Lilli. “My mother would have made a good actress. You should see her