What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander Page B

inside.
    “Tzuki,” she said. “My last boy has been killed.”
    Yehudit and Aheret, like every citizen of that country, were up-to-date on the national news of the day. There’d been nothing in Lebanon or Gaza, no terrorist attack listed on the radio at the top of the hour. It was a quiet September morning.
    But it wasn’t any outside force, not politics, or religion, that did Tzuki in. It was Israel’s own internal plague that had taken him, the one that took more children of Israel than all the bloodshed and hatred of all their long wars combined. “Hit,” Rena said. “The coastal highway. Run off the road by a boy driving one hundred and eighty kilometers an hour.”
    “ Baruch dayan emet ,” Aheret said. And then: “Mercy upon you, a terrible loss.”
    “Sit, sit,” Yehudit said, overturning the basket of clean laundry and helping Rena to sit down. “Another tragedy,” she said. “How many can fall on one home?” As she said this, she stepped over to the eaves and began tearing wildly at a little mint plant, one among many at the side of the house. She held these leaves out to Aheret, letting them fall in wet clumps into her daughter’s hands. “Go,” she said, “make Rena a hot cup of tea.”
    Before Aheret ran off, Rena had ahold of her skirt. “No need for tea,” she said to Yehudit. “We’re not staying long.”
    And here, Aheret, who did not know the story of her childhood sickness, who did not know of the deal that had been struck, reflected on this statement along with the exchange she’d heard earlier.
    Growing up, Aheret would lie with her head in her mother’s lap and beg her to run her fingers through her hair, and to tell the stories that came before remembering. The one Yehudit always told with great pride was that once upon a time, there were in this place two empty mountains that God had long ago given Israel but that Israel had long forgotten. And one day, two brave families had come to settle those mountains. The first had three young boys, and the other came up that hill alone and bore a baby girl who was, for the future of their settlement, as great a gift as Adam’s finding Eve.
    Aheret now stared at her mother, and knew from her face that there was another story she’d not been told.
    “Look this way,” Rena said, pulling at that skirt, drawing Aheret’s eyes to her. “Look to me, at this face. Here is where your questions now go.”
    Rena then pulled hard at the skirt, not to draw Aheretdown, but to pull herself up. Standing, staring at Aheret, she said, “Come along.”
    “Please,” Yehudit said. “You can’t really want it this way? Today—despite your sadness—is not really any different. Tzuki, before this accident, was already, to you, long gone.”
    “A child distant,” Rena said, “a child rebellious, a child cut off in head and heart, it is not the same as no child at all. You have always been a smart woman,” Rena said. “And what takes place here is not remotely equal. But in a moment, you’ll have the first tiny inkling of how I three times over feel.”
    “It was a joke,” Yehudit said, panicked and referring back to their deal. “The whole thing a silly superstition. You said yourself—almost thirty years ago, and I remember like yesterday—you said it was just old-country mumbo jumbo, a worried mother’s game.”
    “A deal is a deal,” Rena said to Yehudit. And to Aheret, she said, “Daughter, come along.”
     
    · · ·
     
    The woman had just buried her last son. The woman gone mad. And Yehudit, who had been through it all with her, who had built this giant city at her side, thought it would not hurt to send her daughter to walk the woman back, to help her into her mourning, to stay and offer comfort and maybe cook for her a meal. Think about it. A husband killed at the start of her new life. Two sons cut down as heroes and a third, already lost to her, run off the side of the road. And here was Yehudit, blessed with nine, all