The Woman with the Blue Star, Pam Jenoff [highly recommended books txt] 📗

the grate. The chamber was oddly quiet, Pan Rosenberg hunched over his prayer book in the corner. I did not see Saul. He must have gone for water, I realized. I wished that I had run into him in the tunnel, so that we could have shared a few quiet moments alone together.

Bubbe lay in the bed on the Rosenbergs’ side of the chamber. She had not gotten up that morning and I had tiptoed around to prepare breakfast so as not to wake her. Her confusion had worsened to delirium the past few days and she had remained on her pallet in the far corner of the chamber, moaning and mumbling to herself nonstop. Sometimes when her suffering noises became too loud, I could not help but think that they brought just as much danger as my baby sister’s cries once had.

I had tried to speak with Saul about her a few days earlier, when her deteriorating condition was impossible to ignore any longer. “Bubbe,” I’d said, stating the obvious. “She isn’t well.” He had nodded in acknowledgment. “Do you have any idea what it might be?”

“It’s a kind of dementia,” he said. “Her father had it as well. There’s nothing to be done.”

I had moved closer, wanting to comfort him. “I’m so sorry.”

“She was always such a smart, funny lady,” he said, and I tried to picture the grandmother that he described, who had been largely gone by the time we had come to the sewer. “This illness, it’s crueler in some ways than a physical disease.” I nodded. Dementia had robbed Bubbe of herself.

Now Bubbe lay silent and still. The bowl of gruel I had tried to coax upon her that morning sat beside her, untouched. It seemed odd that at noon she was still asleep. I moved closer to check on her, hoping she had not caught another one of the fevers that seemed to bedevil only her, worsening her condition. I put my hand on her forehead to check if she was hot. To my surprise, her skin was cool. I noticed then that she lay in an odd position, her face fixed in an almost smile.

I pulled back quickly, putting my hand over my mouth. Bubbe was dead. She must have passed in her sleep. Was her death somehow related to the dementia, or had it been another illness, or simply old age? I looked over at Pan Rosenberg, who sat just feet away, unaware of what had happened to his mother. I wanted to tell him. But it was not my place. I hurried from the chamber to find Saul.

As I stepped into the tunnel, Saul rounded the corner, walking slowly with the weight of the full water jug. “Sadie...” He smiled warmly, his eyes seeming to dance as they did whenever we met. Then, seeing my devastated expression, he dropped the jug, spilling the water, and raced toward me. “What is it? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. It’s Bubbe.” Without speaking, he sprinted into the chamber. I followed, but hung close to the door, keeping a respectful distance as he checked her and confirmed what I already knew. He bowed his head for a second, then stood and walked to his father, knelt before him. I could not hear the words he whispered. I thought Pan Rosenberg might wail, as he did the day he learned his oldest son had died. Instead, he pressed his forehead into Saul’s shoulder and wept silently, a man too broken to give voice to his grief.

When they finally separated, I walked over. “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to figure out what to say. I would have imagined that after all the losses I had seen and suffered since the start of the war that condolences would come more naturally. “I know how much you both loved her and what a terrible loss this is.”

Pan Rosenberg nodded, then looked to the bed where Bubbe lay. “What are we to do with her?”

Neither Saul nor I answered. Jewish law dictated that Bubbe be buried as soon as possible in a proper grave. But we couldn’t take her to the street and the floor of the sewer was impenetrable for digging. With no other choice, the three of us carried her from the chamber and into the tunnel to the juncture where our sewer pipe met up with the wider body of rushing river. We lowered her to the surface. I looked at her sadly, touched her now-cold hand. Bubbe and I had not had an easy start. But I saw now that everything she had done was to protect her family—and in some ways me. And despite it all, we had grown fond of one another. As the current carried her away, I thanked her for her help, forgave her wrongdoings toward me and my family. She slipped around the corner before sinking unseen beneath the surface. I imagined that my father was waiting for her.

“Should we say kaddish?” I asked. Though I did not know much about our shared faith, I was familiar with the prayer for the dead, which I had heard at funerals and shiva visits growing up in Kazimierz.

Saul shook his head. “You can only say kaddish if you have a minyan, ten men.” So here, with just the three of us, he and his father would be denied this mourning ritual. Saul put his hand on his father’s shoulder. “Someday, Papa, we will stand in shul and say kaddish for Bubbe.” He sounded certain, but I wondered if he believed it. The synagogue in their village had been burned to the ground. The ones in Kraków were gone, too, I thought, recalling the stilled, hollowed-out shells I had seen on my walk through Kazimierz with Ella. The few that still stood had been desecrated by the Germans and converted into stables or warehouses. It was hard to imagine a world where a prayer and the house to say it in still existed.

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