Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 40 of a new online serial novel, Without a Trace, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. Click here for previous chapters.
Shevi Auerbach reviewed the photos she’d just picked up from the developer, for about the hundredth time. The three-year-old Goldschmidt boy smiled back at her from the images; his mother would be very pleased, she was sure.
She took an album off the stack of new albums she’d bought and began sliding the pictures into the plastic sleeves. Mrs. Goldschmidt had said she’d come over later that evening to pick up the photos, and Shevi wanted to have time to show her work to at least one other person before she came.
Should she go downstairs to Chasida? No, it wasn’t nice to disturb her four days before her wedding. Besides, it was impossible to know how her mother would react. Shevi had no idea why, but Mrs. Dresnick did not like photos, especially not of children before their upsherin. Strange, wasn’t it? She’d said it clearly, when Shevi had begun taking photos and had scanned the Dresnick home for studio photos of grandchildren with long curly hair. She would have thought it was so like Chasida’s mother to adorn her home with photos of her grandchildren, but people don’t always turn out to be the way you think they are.
Shevi walked over to her dresser and opened a drawer. Chasida’s engagement photo lay there, and she picked it up, focusing on the faces looking into the camera. Herself, red-eyed, hugging Minda, who, with all her dislike for pictures, could not say “no” to the camera. Shoshi, Chasida’s twin, stood off to the side, and on their left stood Chasida, not looking directly at the camera, but rather trying to soothe Miri. Shevi remembered how the baby, frightened by the unfamiliar scene and not recognizing the festively dressed person who was holding her in the hubbub, was not amenable to being soothed just then. Keep Reading…
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