Dora's Secret

Ruth Almog was born in Petah Tikva in 1936 to an Orthodox family of German descent. After studying literature and philosophy she taught for a number of years. Since 1967 she has been working for the literary section of the daily newspaper Ha'aretz. She has been awarded many literary prize, some for her children's literature. She has published novels, short-story collections, and children's books and stories. Ruth Almog's stories are often reconstructions of the inner worlds of children, conveying the manner in which children suffer intense feeling without understanding it.

When Dora said to me on the phone, `Come and have lunch with me and we'll talk', I couldn't believe my ears. On my previous visit to Paris she had avoided meeting me. Or so, at any rate, it seemed to me. Now she told me how to get to St Cloud-which was where she lived-said, Au revoir', and hung up. When I replaced the receiver on its cradle, for some reason there were tears in my eyes.

On my way to the St Lazare railway station I went into a confectioners and bought her a fancy box of marrons glaces It was a big bog and looked impressive without costing too much.

In the Gate St Lazare I inserted a coin in the automat and a train ticket popped out. I had no idea that I was supposed to punch the ticket when I went through the gate to the platform, where my train was already waiting. Afterwards Dora explained to me that this was against the law. `You could have been arrested for it,' she said, `You're lucky a conductor didn't come into your coach.'

During the whole train trip I was very tense. I was afraid of missing St Cloud, and kept checking the names of the stations where the train stopped against the names on the map above my seat. This was the reason that I hardly paid any attention to the landscape.

The St Cloud station was situated deep in a narrow creek and seemed isolated and remote. Nevertheless there was a huge slogan painted on the wall in black tar, saying 'Down with Khomeini'. At that time there were violent clashes between Iranian students in Paris almost every day.

I climbed the steep wooden steps out of the station and set off in the direction of the flourishing garden suburb. After a while I turned into a street of pleasant new houses. The people who lived here were obviously well-to-do. I found the house without any difficulty. When I rang the bell the door opened immediately and opposite me stood a little old woman. For a moment I thought it was my grandmother come back to life. The resemblance was astonishing, and I almost cried out loud: `Regina!' But I soon saw the differences. My grandmother's nose was prominent and hooked, obviously Jewish, whereas Dora's was small and dainty, almost retrousse. We kissed, and when I drew back the gold cross on her neck glittered in my eyes. I said: `You look like Regina, my grandmother.' Dora said: 'I don't remember her. She only visited us in Vienna once or twice. Come inside.'

From the dark entrance hall we entered a salon full of light. Next to the door, on the right, stood a grand piano, and opposite it, on the far side of the room, stood a loom with an unfinished tapestry on it. The walls were crowded with large, pale, faded wall hangings. The transitions between the pale colours were so subtle that at first the tapestries seemed quite empty of content. It was only when I came closer that I saw how complex the pictures were: they all depicted scenes from the life of Jesus and his family and were imbued with an intense religious feeling which could not be disguised by the rich, detailed intricacy of the tapestries. The colours looked to me like the colours of snow or ice. Their compass was extremely limited: from white to dark grey, various faint yellows, pinks, and pale blues. A very little black and a little very dark burgundy There was nothing bright about the colours. On the contrary, they were dim and muted, flowing in rounded lines without defined borders between them.

These tapestries filled me with wonder. Are they yours?' I asked carefully. She nodded. 'I thought you were a sculptor,' I said.

`Oh, not for a long time,' she said with a smile.

From close up it was possible to distinguish the astonishing wealth of the colours, which merged into a muted pinkish grey They were like a secret which only revealed itself to a thorough examination. But from close up it was only possible to take in the details without getting a comprehensive view of the picture as a whole. Consequently, the viewer was obliged to miss something: If he saw the scene depicted, he missed the details, and when he concentrated on the details he failed to see the scene.

Dora said: `I've been making these tapestries for years. Each one takes a year of work. I've shown them all over. Two years ago I had an exhibition in Rome, and there was a plan to show them in Jerusalem too. My husband and I wanted to visit Jerusalem very much. But because of our catastrophe nothing came of it. Come and sit down.'

We sat down in comfortable armchairs next to a coffee table and I asked her: `What catastrophe?'

`My husband is very ill,' she said, `I'll tell you about it in a minute. But first, won't you have something to drink?'

She went into the kitchen and came back with a tray holding two glasses of lemonade. I gave her my gift. 'You shouldn't have... ' she said and tore the wrapping paper. From the fancy cardboard box she removed a plain tin can. An ordinary, round, tin can, without even a label on it. I had no idea that macrons glaces came in plain tin cans. She went back to the kitchen and returned with a very small, inefficient can‑opener, and began to open the can. The tin was thick and the opener was no good and it made a jagged border round the edge of the can. Dora was careless and cut her finger, which began to bleed. `Oy!' I cried. 1 felt guilty and I didn't know how to apologize. Dora put the tin on the table and said, 'Please help yourself' But I couldn't, because her finger, which she wrapped in a handkerchief that she took out of her pocket, was still bleeding. `You must bandage it', I almost screamed, and she smiled faintly and left the room and returned with a bandage round her wounded finger.

Dora sat down in the armchair, looked at me, and said: 'We were extremely happily married. All our lives we loved one another to distraction. We never parted even for a single day and we never did anything without consulting each other. There was complete harmony between us. And now I can't finish that tapestry. Soon it will be a year that it's been stretched there unfinished on the loom. How can I know if what I do is good and right when he isn't here to tell me. You know, he never wrote a book without consulting me. In the morning he would write, and in the afternoon I would read what he had written. Our lives were perfect. No, we were never apart, not even for a day. And then, about two years ago, they found a tumour in my body. Not malignant, but it bothered me. They said I had to have it removed. But my husband was afraid. He actually cried. He didn't want me to have the surgery. I put it off from month to month. I suffered, but I put it off. Until my children--they're all doctors, you know--said it had gone on long enough, I had to have the surgery. I saw how hard it was for him and we arranged a bed for him next to me. We went into the hospital together and we weren't parted. The night before the operation he slept next to me. In the morning our oldest son came. He never left his father for a moment, but when they took me into the operating theatre, my husband collapsed. He thought he would never see me again. He went berserk, he tried to follow me into the operating theatre, and of course they wouldn't let him. My son was with him all the time, but he broke down completely. They had to tie him down and sedate him. When they brought me back to the ward a few hours later, he was sleeping. When he woke up he was no longer himself. He didn't know me. He talked nonsense and he didn't recognize me, or our children either. His mind seemed to have been wrung out of his body, it was gone, it just wasn't there any more . . . We had to commit him to an institution. I only go there to visit him once a month, the place is very far away, but it's quite pointless. He doesn't talk to me. He doesn't know who I am. He's like a vegetable. The whole thing is incredible, incomprehensible. Up to the moment they took me to the operating theatre he was in full command of his faculties, at the top of his intellectual form . . . Do you know how many books he wrote? Come, I'll show you,' and she led me into another room whose walls were lined with books, and there was one case there with a whole shelf full of his books. I looked at the titles and saw that they were about philosophy and religion and music. He wrote about Nietzsche and Fichte and Beethoven and about German Romanticism in music and literature, all kinds of books. `He was a very learned man,' she said.

'How did you meet him?' I asked.

Ali!' she said, and her face lit up, `In Vienna. He was attending a musicians' congress and my brother Henri met him there' (Why Henri? I thought indignantly. His name was Henrik) `and brought him home. I was eighteen and he was twenty‑eight. I fell in love with him. He returned to Paris and I began to take instruction in the Christian religion. He didn't insist on it, I wanted it. And later on I converted to Christianity, out of true faith, and we were married. My husband was a devout Catholic, a true believer, and so am I.' 'I thought', I said carefully, `that you were already Christians in Vienna. Leon said that your father converted to Catholicism in order to receive a government post and the title of Hofrat.'

`Nonsense!' she cried. `Leon was always making up all kinds of stories. My father converted after the war, when he returned from Mexico and came to live with me, just before he died. He had a revelation and he understood that Christianity was the true religion. He said that he wanted to die and be buried as a Christian.'

I knew that they, in other words, my mother's uncle and his son Henrik, had fled to Mexico. I well remembered the letters addressed to my grandmother with the beautiful big stamps which we would carefully remove. My father would soak the envelop in water until the stamp came off almost of its own accord, and then he would dry it and smooth it out and stick it in the stamp album. After the war, Henrik returned to Vienna. My friend, the painter Osias Hoffstetter, used to meet him there in a Bohemian cafe frequented by emigre artists. `He was a fanatical communist,' he told me. I never knew that the father had gone to live with his daughter in Paris.

`He died like a saint,' said Dora. `In his sleep. He fell asleep sitting in his armchair and reading the New Testament. The children grieved terribly. They loved him to distraction.' I said: t1 friend told me that he once heard one of Henrik's works, very modern, for twelve cellos.'

`Yes,' she said. `His music is hard to understand. It's very modern.'

`I heard someone wrote a book about him. Perhaps you have it?'

And again her face lit up. She was still a beautiful woman. Very fine, bluefish-white skin, and fine, almost golden hair. She went into the next room, her husband's book-lined study, and came back with a German book. I leafed through the book and looked at the pictures of Henrik at different stages of his life, but none of the pictures caught my imagination, I felt no closeness to him and he eluded me. I wanted very much to keep the book, but I didn't dare ask her to give it to me.

'Next week,' she said, `I'm going to Vienna to pay him a short visit.' I thought to myself that perhaps one day I would go too. In the only letter he had ever written me he said: `I'm glad to hear that you're a writer. I'm glad that there's still one exception to the rule, one artist left in our family of capitalists.'

I identified with him intensely, even though I didn't really know what he was talking about. So few members of our family had survived, and the truth was that he, too, had only known them by hearsay.

Suddenly Dora said in an animated tone of voice: `Did you know that there's a Cardinal in the Vatican from our family?'

I looked at her in astonishment and incomprehension. `Yes, yes,' she said emphatically, `We have a Cardinal in the Vatican from our family, Cardinal Rubin.'

I had never heard this before and I didn't believe her. In fact, I had stopped believing her long ago. From the moment I set foot in this elegant, well-appointed house I hadn't believed her, from the moment I set eyes on those pale tapestries of hers, with the scenes from the life of Jesus so well disguised in them that it was almost impossible to make them out. But not long after my visit to Paris, back home in Israel, a friend told me that the entourage of the Polish Pope did, indeed, include a Cardinal called Rubin. If he was really connected to our own Rubin family--my mother's, Dora's, Henrik's, I couldn't find out.

For some reason I stared at the piano, and she caught my gaze. I had no doubt that the piano was a very expensive one. `My husband's piano,' she said, nodding her head sadly, `we had a perfect marriage, perfect.' After a moment she added: `Did you know that we have four children, two girls and two boys, all doctors. But when they were small they each learned to play a different instrument and we had a quintet at home. We used to give concerts. On Sunday afternoons we used to invite people and play for them. My husband played the piano, the girls played string instruments and the boys the flute and the clarinet. It was perfect. Simply perfect. It's so hard for me to realize that he isn't here, with me. I miss him so much.' She fell silent and after a while I asked her about Kaethe, Jacob Rubin of Leipzig's daughter. I knew that she lived in France, in a provincial town called Beauvais. I knew that she too had converted to Catholicism and that her husband was a professor. Or maybe just a teacher.

Dora pulled a disgusted face: `I don't have anything to do with her,' she said. I gave her an inquiring look and waited for her to go on, and she must have sensed my anticipation for she immediately said: `She worked for the Gestapo during the war. An informer. After the war they caught her and shaved off her hair. She's lucky they didn't execute her. After the war they all got what they deserved, all those informers and collaborators.'

I said: `I don't believe it. It's just loose talk. People say things like that about you and your husband too.'

It came out on an impulse before I could stop it. I realized that I felt some anger against her. `What?' cried Dora in horror.

`Leon says you betrayed our cousins from Bonn to the Gestapo,' I said.

`What are you talking about?' she screamed. `Do you know what they did? We hid them in our old house in Neuilly at great danger to ourselves. And behind our backs they were busy dealing on the black market. My husband was in the Resistance. They were putting our lives in danger. We had to tell them to go. If we'd been caught they'd have sent us all away'

`Did the people around you know that you were of Jewish descent?' I asked.

`Nobody ever knew. Nobody knows to this day. Don't forget that I came here from Vienna. And I was already a Catholic when I came. And nevertheless, when they came and asked for help, we hid them in our cellar. But they dealt on the black market behind our backs. My husband's comrades in the Resistance warned him about them. They were ungrateful. I had small children, don't forget.'

I said nothing. I knew by then that there is always more than one way of telling the same story.

`My husband consulted me and we discussed what to do. I've already told you that we always did everything together. There were never any disagreements between us, never any arguments. Do you know that in over fifty years of married life we never had a single quarrel?'

Afterwards we had lunch. I apologized for troubling her, but she explained that the maid had already prepared everything. `She comes in for two hours every day. It's hard for me nowadays. I'm not so healthy either any more. That's why I only go to visit my husband once a month. It's so far away. But they look after him very well there.' And then she added dully: 'In any case he doesn't know me. The only one he sometimes recognizes is our eldest son...'

We finished off the meal with an assortment of cheeses. I couldn't take my eyes off the bandage round her finger. The tin of macrons glaces I had brought her was standing on the low table where she had placed it. I had not taken a single one of them and neither had she.

Dora ate very little and it was obvious that she was upset. I helped her to dear away the dishes. Her kitchen was enviably big and modern.

We sat down again and she said: 'Leon's crazy. Why did he have to go and tell you such a pack of lies? And he didn't say anything about Kaethe?'

`No,' I replied. `He never said a word about Kaethe.'

I didn't believe her story. I thought she had some unclear, hidden need to invent it. A shocking story to excuse her estrangement from her only relative in France.

Suddenly I sensed her anxiety. Hidden, unclear, but obviously present. I looked at her and I thought to myself that she was a very frightened woman.

`It was a terrible time,' she said suddenly. `Terrible! Terrible! .... You understand that that is the reason you will never be able to meet my children.'

`No, I don't understand,' I said.

`They don't know. They don't know anything. And they never will know'

`Don't know what?' I asked insistently.

`They don't know that I'm a Jewess.'

`What?' I asked, completely nonplussed. `But you're not a Jewess. You're a Catholic.'

`You don't understand,' she explained, `they don't know that I was born Jewish. We never told them. It was our secret, my and my husband's big secret. All my life I've been afraid of something like Hitler happening again. I don't want them ever to be in danger, to have something like that hanging over their heads, you understand. We decided to keep it a secret the minute the trouble started. In those days secrecy was vital. And afterwards we decided that we would never tell them.'

There were too many holes in her story. If her father had converted only after his return from Mexico, that meant that Henrik had remained Jewish, and if this was the case, how had she kept it a secret from her children? And what of the book about Henrik--didn't it say there that he was a Jew? And the name Rubin? How did she explain that? It was such an obviously Jewish name.

I felt increasingly uncomfortable, as if I were being stifled. The lies were choking me. What was true and what was a lie, I asked myself, and I knew that I would never know the answer to this question. In his one and only letter to me, Henrik had written resentfully that he had never denied his Jewishness, offering as proof the fact that he was a member of the Friends of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra. I thought about this and wondered if it, too, was a lie. I had never tried to find out and had no intention of checking up on him. Dora was now in deep distress. Her face was pale and drawn. `You have to understand me,' she said, almost imploringly.

'I understand,' I said. `It's not important. It doesn't matter at all . . .'

`I'm sorry you won't be able to meet them,' she said. 'I'm truly sorry. They're wonderful children. To this day they still play together when they find the time to meet, and they take care of me and their father devotedly. It's a shame you won't be able to get to know them. It's a privilege to know people like them. They really are wonderful.'

Now I saw how little she really resembled my grandmother, Regina. There was something slack in her face, and in spite of the similarity in their complexions, their hair, the colour and shape of their eyes, there was an enormous difference between them. My grandmother's face expressed stubbornness and determination. And she really was a hard, uncompromising woman--something which had always bothered me. But now, faced with Dora, I found myself longing for her and making peace with her in my heart.

Dora seized the tin of macrons glares and offered it to me. `Please take one,' she said.

Her bandaged finger, the wound she had received because of me, because of my coming, because of my gift, suddenly took on a symbolic significance in my eyes. And so I didn't refuse, and carefully, so as not to hurt myself, I took one from the tin, and put it in my mouth. The macron glare melted in my mouth and it tasted like Paradise.

`I think I had better go now, it's getting late,' I said and stood up.

She stood up after me, and when I picked up my bag she said: `I hope you kept your ticket. You'll be able to use it on the way back. You saved yourself some money, but next time don't forget to punch your ticket. It's an offence against the law and they treat it very gravely here.'

Next to the door we kissed each other and when I embraced her I felt how small and fragile she was.

At the top of the steps leading down to the creek and the station stood a wooden but painted white. I bought a ticket to Paris there, having thrown the previous one into the first trash can I came across after leaving Dora's house.

Opposite me, the gigantic slogan `Down with Khomeini' glared with a kind of violence, as the train slowly entered the station.

All the way back I struggled with myself, restraining a fierce desire to look up her children in the telephone directory, call them up and introduce myself, resisting the urge to betray her--not in the name of truth and for its sake, but just so, out of a kind of childish need, out of the nagging compulsion to touch, over and over again, what appeared to me as my own living flesh, as if such a confrontation had it in its power to reveal an additional, hidden and unknown part of myself.

Would I be able to resist this temptation, the sweet temptation of betrayal, in the future too, if I ever found myself in Paris again? There was no guarantee.

Ruth Almog

Translated by Dalya Bilu.

The Oxford Book of HEBREW SHORT STORIES, Edited by Glenda Abramson

Oxford New York OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1996