[100 Challenge] Ocean_10

[100 Challenge] Ocean_10

The Black Dress, Part 4
Years pass, Max sells his tailor shop and buys a bar. The mob splashes Max’s face with acid when he won’t pay them off; Max and Anna move west. There are children, there are years. Anna strolls arm-in-arm with Max through the parks of the Jewish district in this city half a world away from the fields of her childhood, where the old men play chess and the women feed the pigeons. She fixes coffee for her grandchildren that is mostly milk. At a very late age she learns to write English, about which she beams. 
Now it is late in Anna’s life, and she knows not if she’s a spirit, an animal, or a little girl in a Polish village. And who now is this coming towards her: a spirit? A boy? An animal? He comes in close to her, he comes with arms reaching and a face faintly like hers, and he says,
“Great-grandmother! Throw a rope across the tides! You have grown so young. We have come to that place where the dead still touch the living. I barely know you, but I have known you, for you gave us bones to move through this world of dust and dawn. Your great-great-granddaughter shines down here like an apple in the sun. I know your blessing had something to do with this, something big. Ride the tides back and feel our memory keeping you alive, breathe in our memory of you like oxygen.” 
And she knows then that it is she who is the spirit. He whispers into her ear, something in Yiddish, in its tongues of bright celebratory tears, something familiar, so familiar. And she begins to hum and keen, and then to rock side to side. The two of them, holding on, singing softly the tune into each other’s ears…

 

Back to blog