Passage

      Leida was my grandfather’s sister.

      She came to America at the turn of the century but soon died of typhoid fever at thirty.  Her life before the trip over was unknown and she had hardly any left once she arrived.  But on the ship, during the passage, there was this one thing.

      As I heard the story, she found herself crammed into one of the cargo holds of the Batavia along with a lot of other European refugees.  There was a small round window across from where she was sitting but a persistent fog had turned it into a misty mirror for days.  There was therefore nothing to see out there, and nothing to do in there, and so Leida, like the others, just sat and waited.

      A young teenage girl was lying on her side nearby.  Leida looked at her carefully and noted the brown scarf that covered her head and how the round glasses veiled her pale eyes.  Her coat was worn and covered a long thick skirt that fell like a curtain over her thin legs.  Her shoes were muddy and her only other possessions were in a bag at her side.  The girl had not moved for a long time and only stared off into space.  Leida asked the girl her name, her family name, her town but got nothing back.

      More hours passed and the nothing never changed; the mist in the window barely shifted.  It was limbo there, a kind of purgatory if you believed in such a thing.  The girl seemed to Leida to be slipping away, her will dissipating into the endless nowhere of the journey.

      And so she decided to entertain herself, at the very least, and the girl too perhaps, by telling a story about something that happened before she left Vilna.

      “You see,” Leida began, “it all came about because if this man.  Schal was his name.  Broynem Schal, yes.”

      Was the girl listening?  Did she even understand Yiddish?  It was hard to tell, but Leida continued anyway.

       “A big handsome fellow he was but his parents were poor and therefore he had nothing to offer when he fell in love with this girl from the city.  Her name was Kaylekhdik.  A fancy name for a simple girl so we can just call her Kayla.  That’s right, Kayla Brillin.  Do you know the Brillin family?”

      The girl blinked once, which was either an answer or a twitch; either way Leida took heart and pressed on.

      “The Brillins were well to do, the father sold furs in Europe after all, and they had a nice house and a garden and all that.  You can imagine what happened when young Schal came to call.  The father pretty much threw him out of the house.  ‘What you can offer my daughter’ he shouted but it was really an answer not a question.’” 

      The girl seemed to curl her brow slightly at that point, as though she had an opinion that her body was too weak to express.  Leida went on.

      “But the two of them were in love anyway, so what did they do?  They found a local magistrate who would marry them without the father’s permission.  This is the old country, of course, so I think you can guess how Kalya’s father reacted to that!”

      For the first time, the girl’s eyes met Leida’s.  She said nothing but she said it so clearly that Leida know the story was working.

      “The father howled and raged and ranted but he could do nothing to undo the marriage.  So finally he offered the boy a large sum of money to get the marriage annulled.  The father was desperate, Schal was insulted, Kayla was distraught.  So what did they do?”

      The girl made some kind of sound at that point and maybe even turned her head and Leida jumped on the gesture.

      “That’s right…they went to see Rabbi Mantel!  Groys Mantel…he’s pretty well-known, have you heard of him?”

      “No,” the girl said in a voice like a swirl of wind in October.

      “Well Mantel listens to the whole story, rubs his beard, stares at the ceiling.  He can see they are in love but he also can see that the father is looking out for his daughter.  What to do?  He takes forever to decide and then finally does.”

      “Here is the solution,” he says to the father.  “You pay the boy the money to annul the marriage, he accepts your offer, and that will end that foolishness.”

      The father liked this immensely, the boy not so much.  But the rabbi went on. 

      “But now when this young man comes to call, as I’m sure he will because he is obviously as stubborn is the sun, you must accept him because he is no longer a man of no means.  He has money now and something to offer besides his love.  In which case, there is no reason for you to stand in the way of their marriage!”

      The boy liked this immensely; the father not so much.

      “Come to think of it,” Rabbi Mantel added, “why go through all this mishegoss?  Since they are married already, why just give them the money and wish them well!”

      The girl smiled at that and Leida knew that the plan had worked.  She had brought her back, if not from the dead, then at least from a limbo that was just as bad.

      Of course it was all baloney. 

      There was no boy or girl or rabbi.  Leida concocted the whole thing.  The story was something she heard once in town, and the names were simply made up, based on what the girl was wearing head to toe.  Broynem schal…a brown scarf.  Kaylekhdik Briln…round glasses.  And Groys Mantl…Yiddish for great coat.  Had she needed to go on, a certain Volen Reckell (the wool jacket) would have made an appearance and perhaps a man named Zach (that bag she had next to her).  But none of that was needed because just then the fog lifted a bit and a skyline came into view and the girl was alert enough to see it. 

      But I wonder.

      What if the family treasure, this oytser I was so obsessed with, was not a thing at all?  Not in the thingy sense anyway.  Not a hidden diamond or a deed to some forgotten real estate.  What if it was something smaller than that.  Much much smaller.  Like a fleck of cytosine or a flick of guanine on some weensy strand of DNA.

      In other words, what if the treasure was not property at all but simply a propensity?

      And not just for the irritable bowel syndrome, thank you very much, but for this lust for tales, for this understanding that it is stories, not hope or faith, but stories pure and simple that keep us alive.