Perla, with her bright eyes and miniature features. Her hand rests loosely on Hannah’s and in it she sees the tiny fingers, the slight glare of her fingernails.

“How tall was she?”

Bubbe shrugs and puts her hand down, stooping slightly. She was halfway between Bubbe’s knees and her hips, and Bubbe is not very tall.

Zeide shakes his head. “You’re forgetting. She was taller than your waist.”

“No. She needed a stool to get onto the chair.”

“That was only when she was a child. By then, she used to hold onto both armrests and give a little jump back and up. She didn’t need a stool from when she was13.”

The argument is painful. Hannah’s mother opens her mouth to argue, when Emmy interrupts. “She was so small but she was so beautiful.”

And suddenly, her mother, so stiff with Emmy, melts. She reaches out and touches Emmy’s arm and Emmy catches her hands and holds them, so the two of them, standing there, are like one being, joined together.

Emmy turns around to her mother and her forehead creases into a question. “But why did we not visit her kever today?”

Hannah feels her cheeks flush. She tries to keep her voice steady. “She is not buried here in the village.”

The question on her forehead deepens. “But why not?”

Hannah shrugs. “It is a long story.”

Emmy stares. “And you are not inclined to tell it.”

“Correct.”

Emmy goes and sits down next to Zeide. “Zeide?” she says softly. “Where is Perla’s kever? I wanted to daven there today.”

Zeide gives a slow, sad smile. “Oh, Emmy, you are a good girl, you know. A good girl.”

Hannah bites her tongue. Emmy will not be put off so easily.

“But where—”

“We do not know.” He hangs his head.

“But what happened?”

“That, too, we do not know.”

Oh, why can she not stop? Does she not know better than this? Her old parents, how much they have been through. Just a few minutes ago, everything was so companionable. The menorah. The warm latkes. The laughter. And now Emmy has brought the shadows into the room. Her eyes prick with sudden tears.

“It is an old story, and a sad one,” her father says. His voice is almost a whisper.

Emmy stands up and walks into the kitchen. A few minutes later, she returns with a steaming glass of tea, complete with a stick of cinnamon, just the way Zeide likes it. She sets it down in front of him. “Zeide, I am ready to listen.”

In the darkness of the night, she hears Emmy crying.

“Emmy?” She gets out of bed, sits next to her daughter, and begins to stroke her hair. At home, her hair is carefully twisted and pinned between small pieces of wax paper, to make the curls hang just so. There is something childlike about her as she lays there, with her hair loose on her shoulders. “This reminds me of when you were a little girl,” she says.

“The hair?”

Strange how Emmy understands her.

“Yes. I used to sit by your bed, when you were falling asleep, and stroke your hair.”

“I don’t remember.”

“There are many things we don’t remember, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t inside us.” A pause. Then, “What is it?”

“Perla. She was so beautiful.”

“Yes, she was.”

There’s a thickness in her throat, and she tries to swallow but it’s there, a pain, a blockage, taking away her air.

“And just like that, one day she disappeared?”

They had been walking by the riverbank. Perla loved to run, though she was slow. And they thought she had run into the woods, and had summoned everyone to search for her. All day they searched, calling her name until they were hoarse, looking for some sign. When the setting sun finally forced them home, they did not sleep, but wept over their Tehillim, all night long, until the rising sun let them out again.

“Yes, Emmy. It was a hard time for all of us.”

Emmy sits up. “For you? For you? What about Perla? What did she suffer? What happened to her?”

Hannah sighs. It is an old, old pain, but it hurts. “I don’t know.”

They are silent for a few moments. Hannah watches as the tears continue to fall down her daughter’s cheeks. It is not only about Perla. That was just the key to the tears which were waiting inside.

“It’s not just Perla, is it? It’s Joachim, too.”

A nod.

Her heart breaks for her daughter. She would not have wanted them to marry, but it hurts her to see Emmy in so much pain.

“Tell me.”

“What happens when you love someone, Mama? What happens when your hearts are bound as one?”

You’ve been reading too much poetry, she wants to say, but doesn’t.

“Hearts can be mended, Emmy.”

“Can they? I don’t know. It does not feel like it now.”

It does not feel like that for her, either. This talk of Perla is like a stone pressing on her body.

“How long has it been? A month? Two?”

“Seven weeks.”

“I know that this seems like a long time. But already I see that you are taking an interest in other things, in things outside your world.”

“All I have before me is blankness. Like those fields we passed on the journey, just endless flatness, dark brown earth, covered with white frost, nothing to break it up, no bushes or trees or crops That’s what it feels like. I had a future, Mama. I had a man whom I admired, and who made me feel like the whole world was created for me. When in fact, it is not created for me at all.”

She strokes Emmy’s hair, trying to find words, but finding nothing at all.

Eventually, she speaks. “Emmy, do you believe in miracles?”

“Miracles?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. Felix doesn’t.”

“I’m not so sure about that. But I think if we leave a space for miracles, they might come upon us and bless us.”

Emmy shifts in her bed to face her. In the moonlight, her face is almost white, and her eyes look huge. “Have you ever had a miracle?”

Hannah laughs a little. “Of course. You and Felix are my miracles.”

“Come on, Mama.”

She thinks. Coming back home makes her feel dislocated inside. This could have, should have been her future. She had always longed for it, and felt cheated that it was taken away from her. And then, when Ernst turned out to be a lesser Jew than she imagined, all she could think of was raising the children and then returning here, slipping back into her old life. But life here is so harsh, and her horizons have become so broadened, that she cannot imagine returning.

And then there is Ernst. She, with no dowry, who would have married her? Some widower, twice her age, with a house full of children. Or she could have been like Becca, sent away, never expecting to find a husband for there is no money for one. She thinks of the composition that Ernst had played her before she left.

“I have a miracle,” she tells Emmy. “And that is your father.”

Emmy smiles. She slips down onto her pillow. “Mama?”

“Yes.”

“I was thinking.”

“Hmm?”

“We are not shtetl Yidden. If we went to the magistrates, they would listen to us.”

Hannah starts. “You are talking of Perla.”

“We have friends in good places. Joachim’s family, they would help us. And Felix is a newspaper man. Journalists have contacts everywhere. This is the 19th century. The modern world. Girls can’t just disappear from the streets. There is a law of the land.”

“Emmy, this all happened years ago.”

Emmy jerks up. “But not in your heart, Mama. For Bubbe and Zeide, this is happening right now.”

Hannah closes her eyes, as if this could shield her from the pain. It is true. As Tatte spoke to Emmy tonight, he seemed to shrivel into old skin and sorrow. But still. Why dig up the past? Why? “Felix has few contacts apart from the students he still drinks wine with. And he writes stories about two little children doing good deeds.”

“But still. He is astute. Sharp.”

“That he is.” Oh, to worship an older brother.

Emmy meets her eyes. “So we can find out what happened to Perla. And if need be, we can bring her to proper burial, a Yiddishe kevurah, here in the beis olam, where we can all come to daven by her kever. She’s your sister, Mama. Doesn’t she at least deserve that?”

“Papa?”

The postmark is from Istanbul. The writing on the envelope is large and clumsy, with each b crushing the letter next to it and the s snaking across the page.

Papa sits by the piano, working on a difficult passage in Beethoven.

“What do you think this means?”

He reads it out loud and translates from the Yiddish into German. His father understands Yiddish of course but prefers it not to be spoken in the home.

“What do I think? I do not know why your mother agreed that we should be a postal distribution service.”

“Listen to this: I have no reason to fear that we will not be provided for when Pesach arrives, for we already have marror aplenty.”

Ernst plays six bars, frowns and leans over the manuscript paper, and erases a chord. “It sounds like one of those heroines from an opera. You know, cryptic messages written in code.” He spreads his fingers over the keyboards and plays a few bars of a dark, brooding melody. In the left hand, he plays a B-flat minor chord.

“What do you think it means?” Felix asks.

His father shrugs. “Who knows?”

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 701)