Shekecheyanu - Haley M. Stevens

The day her parents burned was the day Taliah turned pretty. When Taliah Horowitz came to live with the Munteanus, she had just turned fifteen, and her eyes were dark, her skin a dirty ivory, her hair a bundle of black curls; and her parents were dead, killed in a massacre after a plague outbreak left seven dead and eleven dying. Her parents, fearing the worst in first few days of plague and pamphlets, covered Taliah’s thick dark curls with a black shawl and bade her hide in the neighbor’s barn, under straw piled high to the low rafters, while outside, her community burned.
 
See, the village Priest sent pamphlets door by door in the days before, enlivened by the burnings in the other villages, blaming the only people he could: the Jews. These were drawings of demon Jews feasting on Christian flesh, kidnapping children, drinking blood, fornicating with pigs, poisoning wells, their food, and infecting every nearby village with the plague.
 
The scent of smoke on the wind—like the pyre of Isaac—from other nearby infected villages—was the scent of burnt flesh, the lingering vibrations of non-consensual sacrificial screams. With the smoke came the lack of plague. This mysterious cure, a blessing that left those other villagers healed: fire. Soon, most believed our priest’s plea: it was the Jews who had brought the black disease. They too needed fire. Once the village was purified of evil, the dying would heal by the grace of God! God will save them. God will save them all.
 
In the barn, the straw scratched and bit at Thaila’s arms. The barn belonged to Fabiana, a Spanish Jew and widow who’d converted over thirty years ago, so no one remembered she was a Jew. But every Friday, Fabiana braided Taliah’s hair and told her stories of Spain, of the great expulsion, the diaspora, the smell of meat roasting over the fire, challah rising on the stove. “I never forgot my roots,” she’d whisper into the girl’s ear, pulling her hair in a painful twist. “No matter what happens, girl. Never forget who you are. Never forget.”
 
Now, webs hung from the rafters. Rickety wooden beams, barely holding the barn together, were infested with termites, and Taliah was all alone. One candle…one lick of the flames, and it could all disappear…
 
The militia came.
 
Door by door, they grabbed and yanked Jewish villagers by their hair. Stripped them bare to expose marks of the devil—circumcisions—birthmarks—Taliah, through tears that blurred her vision, peaked out through the straw and watched through a crack in the wall, and she saw: her naked parents herded like sheep onto wooden pyres erected in the center of the village. Where once was a vast market, now children, men, women, and ailing grandparents, were ushered, hit. Spat on. Pale flesh and wool coats, torches and cheers, scratching, hissing, screaming. Chaos.
 
An old woman fell, and a man kicked her so hard she rolled onto her back. A young woman, then another, were yanked away by the elbow, lifted from the waist, thrown over the backs of brutes, as men took them into houses or alleys. She saw them unbuckle their belts, bite the women’s breasts, put their hands where no man’s hands should go. One took a child a few years younger than Taliah, screaming and flailing his little legs in the air, lifted up like he was no more than a bag of grain, a pail of milk. She looked away, bile scorching her throat. Her parents, bound fatally in that foul embrace against apathetic poles, were reaching toward the other with broken fingers, waiting for their last words to be cut off by the screeching flames, when panicked eyes flickered toward the barn where Taliah hid.
 
Militia. Coming her way.
 
The air filled with smoke as villagers passed torches left and right, casting an awful, unnatural orange into the evening’s twilight. As more naked bodies were bound to wood that splintered and puckered like loose teeth, the clouds above thickened, and Taliah held her breath.
 
The screams were the voice of God, a scorched smoke, a booming, guttural thunder.
 
As Death declared its presence in the dying embers, bones and ash, the Priest announced that God’s will had taken the demons back to Hell, these demons who, in the disguise of human flesh, infiltrated the weak links of the community, the unfaithful, the unchristian! As he spoke, his features dimmed and stretched, his flesh grew pale and sickly. Beads of sweat dripped like poison from his brow, and his wicked smile drew past pointed teeth. His eyes shrunk and glinted into slivers, and his voice, carrying over cheers, cries, and screams for mercy, reached Taliah in the barn with a fear that struck, a knife twisting in her gut. She couldn’t tear her eyes away.
 
There was something unnerving, Taliah thought, and unnaturally beautiful in the way the flames licked her mother’s cheek. Then the smell of ash and burnt flesh churned her empty stomach, and she vomited, dry heaving away from the straw and into the dirt. Afterwards, Taliah flattened herself to muffle her sobs in the straw, as fear choked her, a hissing snake curled and tightening around her throat.
 
When the flames died, the militia made their second round, to herd the detoured to the next round of flames. When Fabiana opened her door, she told them she thought she saw a Jewish girl make a run for the woods when they lit the pyres. “She must’ve hidden in the fields before that,” she said. “With everyone too busy with the flames to take notice of a little Jew. Besides,” the old woman clicked her teeth, “she won’t make it in the woods. Not with the mountain lions and the wolves. Even if she did, winter will soon be upon us and what then? She has no jacket, no furs.” The woman ended with a flourish, and a nonchalant wave of her hand: “and of course,” she said, “if she’s out of the village, that’s all that matters, hmm? No Jew, no plague, yes?”
 
The militia left.
 
Later, maybe hours, perhaps days, when the flames officially died and the world hissed in a silent sigh through its aging nostrils, the old woman brought Taliah bread and cheese and hugged her while she cried. She whispered who was lost, each name a trinket on her tongue. Thirty-six names. Thirty-six and no men left to say minyan for their souls. Or to sit Shiva.
 
The plague took five more that night. Ten the next. Followed by three. But as days passed, less took ill, and those who did survived. And the village took this as success. No Jew. No plague. Except there were two Jews. And there was plague. It had merely run its course.
 
Taliah stayed in the barn for weeks until Fabiana told her it was safe to come out. By then every blast of wind against the barn door, every creek in the wooden beams, belonged to the ghosts of her parents mourning their life, their daughter; every footstep came the militia coming to take her to the flames.
 
Fabiana had arranged for her to visit a distant family member in the alps. Though he had never settled, Fabiana said, he had money, a bed for her, and resources to protect her should there be an outbreak. Taliah thought of this and more, wondering, as she sat up in the itchy straw, and saw her parents lingering in the door frame, if this was a person her parents knew and trusted, or if this was merely Fabiana wanting to get rid of her, so she didn’t have to worry about the girl anymore. But her parents held each other, and her mother’s hair, dark and shriveled without her shawl, ripped from her head when she was stripped and branded, nodded her head, and smiled.
 
Wasn’t Fabiana worried the Militia would come for her? Converted or not, she was a Jew, and she’d always be one— The old women lighted candles on Shabbat, sweeping the flames toward her eyes in that swooping motion while she muttered the shehecheyanu and prayed for her family, for life.  Taliah wondered if she should follow Fabiana’s footsteps. Just tell the village she’s a Christian now. There were no other converts in the village but Fabiana. Fabiana, a practitioner of the herbal medicinal arts. Healers were rare in the rural villages, and this, Taliah thought, besides the children’s cries of “witch! witch!” as they passed and throwed stones at her door, saved Fabiana from the flames. Who else, after all, would tend the sick, should the plague—heavens forbid—return?
 
Then she could stay with Fabiana and learn how to heal like she did, and her neighbors would love her and forgive her for the plague.
 
But the flickering frames of her parents frowned and shook their heads, covering their eyes. An eternal bitter smoke lingered in the air, and Taliah coughed. Her mother’s burnt hair fell from her head in a pile of ash. Her father’s blackened burnt chest pealed, revealing bloody masses and strips of white bone.
 
“You can pretend to be them,” her mother explained to her once, after Taliah had caught Fabiana with Shabbos candles and pointed at them through the window. “But you will never be one of them. Not really. Fabiana is a great pretender, a survivor, but she will never be them.”
 
“How come?” Taliah asked.
 
Her mother wrapped her arms around Taliah, and she smelled like honey and fresh baked bread. “You cannot erase thousands of years of history. They’re in your bones. In every step. Practice or do not practice, it stays with you. It’s in the way you hold yourself. In your blood. No one knows resilience better, knows how to survive. If you forget the old ways, you’ll lose your soul. And if there is no soul. There’s no life. No life, and you’re good as dead.”
 
When the moon was new and the world filled with darkness, Fabiana huddled Taliah into a carriage, handing her bundles of dried meats and fruit for the journey. Then Fabiana gave her something else: a small red bag filled with garlic, cloves, a rare stick of cinnamon—sewn together with a drawstring braided and fashioned into a necklace. Fabiana draped the cord and pouch around Taliah’s pale neck and told her it was for protection.
 
“Never take it off.” Patting the bundle beneath Taliah’s coat, an old, ratted thing she’d taken from a young farm boy she used to employ in the summers, Fabiana smiled and kissed the girl’s forehead, muttering shema under her breath, so softly no one but the two could’ve heard it. “Senor Munteanu will take care of you Bubbeleh,” Fabiana whispered. “Like a daughter. You do what he says. Be good.”
 
“Is he Jewish?” Taliah murmured and shook as a gust of wind knocked her black curls out of its kerchief and in front of her face. In the lack of light, Fabiana’s eyes looked black and sad, and it was in those eyes that Taliah saw a thousand souls, her ancestors, living on through Fabiana, her words, her actions, her bones. She finally understood her mother’s words.
 
“He’ll teach you to look white.”
 
“I don’t want to look white,” Taliah said.
 
“Would you rather be burned?”
 
Taliah stuck out her chin. “Never forget.” One hand went up to clutch the bundle of protective herbs against her chest. “You told me that.”
 
Fabiana sighed. “There is forgetting. And there is surviving.” She glanced to the other side of the carriage, where Taliah’s ghostly parents sat. Her mother shifted forward to push a strand of hair behind her daughter’s ear. “You must survive, if not for you, then for your ancestors. Your parents. Your congregation. You live for them all now.”
 
“What if I stop breathing?” Tears blurred Fabiana’s face as Taliah held her breath, puffed out her cheeks, and leaned into the cool touch of her burnt mother beside her.
 
“As Hashem keeps you alive, you’ll never forget to breathe.” Fabiana smiled and closed the carriage door, locking it shut as Taliah released her held breath. The horses kicked back dirt as they dragged the carriage away, Taliah’s hair blowing back in the wind.
 
At home, surrounded by the spirits of her congregates, Fabiana lit a candle and sang Shehecheyanu, cupping the flame toward her face. For Taliah. For her family. For the survivors who never forget:
 
Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, shehecheyanu, v’kiy’manu, v’higiyanu laz’man hazeh. Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of all, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this moment.