Work Text:
The apartment is empty when Erik walks inside; the furniture has been removed, and the wallpaper peeling in the corners.
It is not the warm home that smelled of chicken soup and shoe polish, it is not the home filled with sefarim and yellowing photos.
A cross hangs limply over a mattress in the corner.
Erik looks around the room one more time and imagines Ruth trying to embroider a challah cover on the sofa as their mother does her own embroidery. He tries very hard to remember Ruth’s face, but it evades him.
He softens the edges he knows are sharp, and sharpens her curves that were once soft. She is her, but she is wrong.
His mother remains intact, but only as she was remade by the camps.
He can almost hear Ruth complain about pricking her thumb with the needle, and their mother responding the same way she always did.
“Such things take patience, Ruth,” she would say with her own such patience.
Patience that exists now only in other mothers, Erik thinks.
He wonders what kind of mother Ruth would’ve become had she been given the time, and to whom.
Erik leaves the room and cautiously opens the door to a smaller one. It is dark, no overhead light. This had been his parents’ room.
In most Jewish homes, like the one he had been raised in, the parents’ room was off-limits. It was a holy place for lovemaking and learning another’s neshamah; no children allowed unless they were young.
The room is dull and cleared out, smelling faintly of dust and mildew.
Almost, almost, he can hear his mother and father whispering to each other, careful that Erik and Ruth couldn’t hear.
They never closed the door, only on Shabbos, when they devoted their love to each other. But before, it was never closed; it was an open space, a threshold they could not cross.
He imagines his father leaning half out of the room, his hands on his hips as he calls for Erik to get ready for shul.
“Nu, Mordi, are you ready?” His father would call, his words jumbled and raspy.
His father had never truly recovered from the Great War; he would scream for hours in pain after mustard gas burned his eyes, until his voice never recovered.
Almost, almost, he thinks again.
He closes the door; even now, these years later, he can’t make himself cross the threshold.