Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 53 of a new online serial novel, Nine A.M., by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. Click here for previous chapters.
Copyright © Israel Bookshop Publications.
A note Katy handed to Naomi:
Dear Naomi,
I hope you won’t tell anyone what you saw and heard in my house.
Elky
Naomi folded the note and stuck it into her pocket, wondering about her dream last night. “Who gave you this note to give to me, Katy?” she asked. “Elky?”
“Yes.”
“And then she went on to the infirmary?”
“No, of course not, she went to her job. I saw her going up the path.” Katy loved providing information.
Naomi hoped Elky’s going to work meant that Mottel’s condition had improved. Where was Babbe this morning? In the infirmary? The kitchen? There was no way to know. Normally, she cooked here in the mornings, and only went to the infirmary in the afternoon. But when there were more seriously ill patients, she was there most of the day.
Naomi decided to kill two birds with one stone: to silence Dror, who was telling everyone all about his visit to the teacher’s house yesterday, and to send him to see if Babbe was around. “Dror,” she called to the boy. “Go look in the kitchen, please, and tell me who came to cook today, okay?”
Elky expected her not to say anything. Was being quiet the responsible thing to do, or did she have to tell something to someone who could help?
But what if her motivation was not the desire to help Elky, but simply her latent anger toward her? Elky was the one who had gotten the prominent, profitable job, work that provided a real parnassah. Not that she envied that packed shelf—she understood that something abnormal was going on—but the sight of all those vouchers had triggered something inside her.
As if she lacked for another secret to harbor. The issue of the strange paprika in the Wangels’ kitchen was enough for her. At least Aryeh and Binyamin had promised to look into that matter, but the thoughts gave her no respite.
Dror was back in a flash. “Babbe Sarah Liba is there!” he crowed. “With all her friends. You know what she told me? That this morning, they were giving that patient, the husband of the lady where we went yesterday, a new medicine. Right she said that it’s so expensive? I heard that that’s what they said, and I told Babbe Sarah Liba that the man’s wife, your friend, has tons of money in her closet and that she can even buy a hundred bottles of medicine, right?”
Oh, no. Elky could send her a warning note, but it would be much harder for her to silence Dror’s prattling.
“Listen, Dror,” Naomi said quickly. “Do you remember when we left my friend Elky’s house, I told you not to tell anyone what happened there, because big children don’t tell secrets?”
“I didn’t tell!” He looked offended. “I didn’t tell anyone that she was crying away, and that you needed to open the door yourself. I didn’t say that she said they hadn’t eaten healthy food. I just told Babbe Sarah Liba that we don’t have to worry, because Elky has tons of money, and she can pay for the medicine.”
“And what did my grandmother say?” Naomi felt guilty.
“That everything is fine, because Elky already gave the money for the medicine.”
“Oh,” Naomi said, feeling somewhat frustrated. She had no strength to feel guilty, and even less, to deal with accusations from Elky. Not that Elky had the right to blame anyone, because she herself was the one who had spoken yesterday, without taking into account the fact that Dror was there.
The internal arguments with the imaginary Elky were draining for Naomi, and she tried to make sure the children didn’t notice how distracted she was. But when the children in her group went out of the “classroom” area to the tables to eat, and Rivku’s group replaced them, one of the girls asked out loud, “Are you tired, Naomi?”
“A little bit,” she conceded.
“You didn’t sleep at night?”
“Actually, I did.” She smiled, with effort. Yes, she’d slept. And dreamed about Elky sitting on the floor and stuffing rolled-up money into spice canisters. The labels were actually blank, but when she suddenly noticed that Elky was going to stuff a thick envelope into the container, she grabbed it from her hand and disappeared.
Elky didn’t speak in the dream, and she, Naomi, wasn’t able to utter a word either, but if she would have been able to, she would have shouted, “That’s my wedding gift from the Wangels! And you took it all for yourself, as payment for the antibiotics for my student, Zuska!”
Naomi shook herself. No, she did not regret the good deed that she’d done, even though she assumed that the money was stuffed somewhere among the other bills in Elky’s closet, and hadn’t been used as payment to anyone else in the office.
“Zuska,” she said, and the ten-year-old raised her head from her sandwich. “Do you know where I can get a hawkbit flower, the kind that you put in your flower album?”
“Sure. My father and I picked it in the forest.”
“When?”
“Around two years ago.”
“Do you remember which season it was in?”
“I think the spring.” Zuska’s forehead creased. “It was after the heavy snow melted—remember the snow from two years ago? I had a terrible cold, and my parents didn’t let me out of the house to play in the snow; I couldn’t even come to school.”
“I remember,” Naomi said. “You have very caring parents.”
“So when I cried about it, my father promised that as soon as the snow melted, he’d take me for a walk in the forest to see the melting water flowing down on the path, like a stream. And in the area behind the factory, there were tons of little flowers like that.” She smiled. “There were lots of other kinds of flowers, too. So I picked one of every kind, and that’s how I started the album. My father was able to tell me all kinds of things about flowers. My grandfather taught him.”
“So interesting! I saw that you also wrote in your album how you can prepare all kinds of remedies from the leaves of each flower.” Naomi took a seat near her student. Maybe instead of letting her yetzer hara frustrate her about the money Elky had amassed on her account, without any sentiment for their friendship, she’d subdue him and show how to have compassion for Elky. Perhaps by asking Zuska, of all people, for the information that might help Mottel Kush.
Even if he’d taken the expensive medication, surely a natural remedy would help boost his system even more.
“Right,” Zuska replied. “It sounds like you really like my album.”
“I do! It’s a great thing. I am just trying to think if this is a remedy that can work for my friend Elky Kush’s husband. Did you hear that he’s sick?”
“Sure.”
“So what do you think about using your flower as a remedy for him?”
“That one flower isn’t enough.” She glanced around and then whispered, “Don’t tell anyone about all this, because Mr. Sherer doesn’t let my father prepare remedies from plants to give to people. They say he’s not a doctor and not allowed to do these things, because who said the plants are good and not harmful.”
Another secret! This was all she needed now, on her already pounding head. Maybe she should go to the Neiman home and ask Zuska’s father for a remedy for her headaches!
“I assume your father knows what he’s doing,” Naomi said carefully.
“Definitely!” the younger girl confirmed vehemently. “People come to him and he prepares remedies for all kinds of problems: people who can’t fall asleep, people who have headaches, or stomachaches… But he uses lots of plants for each person, not just one small flower.” She smiled apologetically and added, “And anyway, the one in my album is already dried up.”
***
“You look worried,” Binyamin told her that evening, when they met in the yard of their mother’s house.
Naomi glanced quickly to the window; their mother was standing inside the house, frying eggs. “I am,” she whispered. “I have too many secrets on my mind these days.”
“Secrets,” he repeated, exchanging a glance with Aryeh, who was with Naomi.
“Yes, and I’m feeling very confused about everything.”
“Then it’s better that I shouldn’t tell you the information I heard today. I’m pretty sure it’s worse than anything else you’ve heard, and it won’t give you any peace of mind, that’s for sure.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Aryeh, her husband, answered for him. “It’s really better if you don’t hear it, Naomi. It’s not something we can do anything about. Besides for feeling heartache.”
“Then don’t tell me,” she replied in resignation, surprised to discover that she didn’t even feel that curious about what it was that they shouldn’t tell her.
“In any case, I have to apologize to you, Naomi. I shared with someone this morning the secret that you told me about Herr Wangel’s paprika.”
“What, that sentence it said there?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He’s a guy who has his head on straight, and I think that, out of everyone in this camp, his wife spends the most time at Wangel’s estate. Well, aside for Aunt Chani, who is only in the kitchen and dining hall on the ground floor, and besides the cleaning staff, who is under constant supervision. So if we manage to get his wife involved in our investigation…”
“The Elkovitzes,” Naomi said. “Dror’s parents.”
“Exactly.”
“Ah, you spoke to him about Tatte’s matzeivah? Was it really his son who wrote on it that—”
“Leave it, Naomi. That’s already connected to the secret I don’t want to tell.”
“Just tell me if they really murdered Tatte.”
“It’s not clear,” Binyamin said, though he didn’t sound very sure of his answer. “But he apparently heard something that he shouldn’t have heard, and that only shows us how careful we have to be about any step we take going forward.”
***
Dena sat in the office, reading out to Suri, the other secretary, the recipe for her mother’s Zserbo cake. In the background, an upbeat Purim song was playing.
“I love Hungarian food,” Suri murmured. “I also love to bake. What about you?”
“I don’t particularly care for baking,” Dina replied. “But you know what they say: I do it because I have to.”
“Do it because it’s worth it!” Suri laughed. “The smell of cake baking at home is amazing. Don’t they teach that in Israel, before a kallah gets married?”
Teach it? She didn’t remember too well what she’d been taught when she’d planned, with dreamy eyes, how her future home would look, b’ezras Hashem. What she hadn’t planned, back then, was to spend half a day in her father-in-law’s office, in a position that she knew very well they’d crafted just to fill her time.
Oh, yes, she’d had lots of dreams back then. But none of them featured the house on the seventh floor of an upscale apartment building in Vienna.
thenextpage-israelbookshop.com 