I Am Forbidden Read Free

Florina said.
    A peasant raised a lantern above the cart bed crammed with furniture. He chuckled.
    “They robbed us long enough,” Florina said.
    The man leaned his stubbly jaw to Florina’s face. “Did you see, on your way in?”
    Florina crossed herself. “The earth was swelling … scabbing … we heard groans and—”
    “Prostie! They should make sure they’re dead, they should let the bodies cool.” Again, the farmhand raised his lantern above the cart bed. “You weren’t afraid?”
    “Petrified. The trees were chasing us—”
    “I mean, to work for them. Don’t you know Jews sell Christian women?”
    Florina laughed. “Not the ones I worked for.”
    His vexed grumble. “I didn’t think you’d be back.”
    A silence.
    “Help me with my boy,” Florina said. “He’s asleep.”
    “Your
what
?”
    “Hush!”
    “You married!”
    “I had to.”
    “His father—”
    “Is dead,” Josef said.
    Carrying the boy into the kitchen, Florina looked over her shoulder, then she whispered in his ear, “Never take off your pants in front of anyone. Ever.”
    The boy stared at his mother’s brooch, fastened on Florina’s pinafore.
    “Mama is dead,” he said.
    “Hush!”
    Florina took off a skirt. Florina never undressed entirely, she did not have a white nightgown, a pale blue quilted bed jacket. She did not read in bed, did not know how to read. She took off her kerchief, black since she called him Anghel, my son, husband killed, Odessa front. The bed tilted when she sat on it. He rolled toward her on the soft incline, came to a stop against her wide backside. His feet nested between her calves.
    In the kitchen’s four-poster bed, Florina and the boy curled up for the night. Under the eiderdown in which he still smelled his mother’s sleep, Florina lulled him:
“To live, Mama wants Anghel to live.…”
    Florina and the boy cut through the cattails as bells called across the fields. She looked over her shoulder, stopped.
    “You’ll sit when I sit, you’ll stand when I stand, and when the priest places the wafer on your tongue, you’ll ask Christ to forgive you. Soon we’ll go to the river and you won’t have to be a Jew anymore.” She smiled. “After you are baptized, you too will fly to Heaven.”
    “In Heaven, I will see Mama—”
    “Hush!”
    They walked, silent, through the tall grass.
    E VERY S UNDAY , the bearded priest paced in front of the pews swinging a censer that released, with each oscillation, a tangy cloud of myrrh. Behind the cloud, the cassock’s black sleeves puffed up like wings straining to unfold, the walls swelled with light, the icons’ eyes were furry bees,
In this joyous Eucharistic liturgy, in resurrectional felicity, in this bread, in this wine … burn me with longing, O Christ!
    Anghel took Jesus’s body on his tongue, and His Blood, and God cried tears of gold and Anghel learned that Jewswere responsible for what befell them, because Jews refused to see the light.
    Winter. Spring.
    After Florina left to milk the cows, Anghel set out with the eiderdown. He picked daisies, anemones, bluebells, buttercups. As he had seen Florina do, he placed the bouquet at the base of the field shrine behind the vegetable patch.
    “Pearela,” he whispered, staring at the red-brown rivulets on Jesus’s bony toes. The gnarled knees and scrawny thighs were entirely different from his baby sister’s cuddly limbs, but those nailed palms surely knew of Pearela with the prong in her cheek. He swaddled the thin ankles and rusty nails with one end of the eiderdown and wrapped himself in the other end.
    “Hie lee lu lee la,” he hummed softly.
    The first warm rays grazed the ridge when Florina lifted eiderdown and sleeping boy. She carried them into the kitchen. She smiled as her broad hand rubbed hot tuica on Anghel’s chest, but the boy was careful not to smile back, fully smile. If his dimple showed, Florina might think he was trying to bewitch her, she might tap his