In my dream, a voice urges: Go back. Go back for the
pachim ketanim. All day I puzzle over the message. I
even look up the passage in Vayishlach describing the
detour Yaakov Ovinu takes to retrieve the small jars.
Then I remember Fabian and I realize the jars are brimming
with memory. Stories wait trapped in the dark, stone
interior. Confined, they wait for release. They wait for us
to shake them open into the light.
*
Fabian's story waits in the folds of parchment for fifty
years.
In the cellar in Holland where they hide from Nazis, his
father finishes morning prayers with the Psalm of the Day. He
is putting his tefillin back into their velvet bag.
Suddenly, he stops. His lips move as if he is counting.
He tells his son: Today is your Bar Mitzva. He
arranges his tefillin on his son's head, tilts the
angle of the black batim that look like a miniature
house. Now the weight of that house rests upon the boy's
head.
His mother thinks: Today the sacred vessel rests on my
son's head like a tired bird. But even a tired bird is a
miracle these days.
Just then -- a knock on the cellar door. They have rehearsed
the signal so many times that when it comes, Fabian thinks he
is dreaming. His father has to push him out the door and into
the forest.
Here images race together. A small boy running through the
forest alone, his mother dead, his father dead. A small boy,
his house on his head.
*
I think the tefillin saved me, he says.
He looks at me with sudden urgency: I lost them, he
says. I cannot account for the tefillin.
I watch you lower yourself down the rungs of memory. You go
back into that forest. Trees shroud the sun. A branch reaches
down with human hands and snatches your shel rosh.
Still you are searching. Without the tefillin you
cannot complete the circle, make a reckoning of how your life
was saved. Or, for What.
The circle has no end. You spin it once more:
My mother. My father, he says in Double Kaddish. Then,
again, the tefillin. And when he says: The house is
lost, he always says it twice:
The house is lost.
The house is lost.
All the losses are folded into the missing batim.
*
Fabian, what are you thinking about when your car hits a
hidden layer of ice on top of an oil spill? Do you recognize
this feeling? Are you already an expert in the art of
spinning, holding yourself together as you suspend yourself
into the vortex of motion?
When you lie in a coma, your brain shuts all its doors but
one. The doctors say you would be dead, but activity persists
in one chamber of the brain.
I know where you are these last days. You come and go out of
a small black house.
You take your time.
And when it's time to leave, you slip out through the
door.
It's easy. When you know where to leave from.
In memory of Fabian Goldstein
