Erica Jong - Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters

Prologue

Sarah's Story

P EOPLE W HO C AN'T S LEEP 1905

Death does not knock at the door.

YIDDISH PROVERB

S ometimes, in dreams, my firstborn son comes back to me. I think he is my guardian angel. "Mama, Mamichka, Mamanyu, Mamele," he says, "let me warn you" And then he tells me something about some man in my life, or some business dealand always it turns out that he is right, though I never quite remember his words when I awake. He speaks in that dream language of the dead. His presence itself is a warning. I can't remember his voice either, but I do know what he looks like: he wears a tall black silk hat, a fur-lined silk pelisse. His cloak is trimmed with sable. He has a long beardhe who never learned to walk, let alone to grow a beard. He is a manwho was always only a babybut that baby smell clings to his sweet neck, and in the dream I know he is both baby and man for all eternity. I have lost him and yet I have not lost him. He lives in a country to which only death provides the key.

I had come home to Sukovoly from Odessa, where I was apprenticed to a photographer, retouching sepia portraits of the gentry. Only seventeen and as foolish about boys as I was smart about pictures, how could I know I was pregnant? How could I know how I got that way? Another long story for another rainy night.

When my mama realized what was happening to me, she raved and screamed and tore her hair. Then she calmed down. "With babies come blessings," she said, murdering some proverb. And she got excited about her first grandchild.

He was such a sweet baby, my David, my Dovie, my little man. He latched onto my breast and sucked as if all the world were in my nipple and he meant to devour it. But that night the Cossacks came and we hid in Malka's barn, I knew that my life and Mama's and my sister Tanya's and my cousin Bella's and my little brother Leonid's all depended on silence. So when my darling Dovie started to whimper, I took out my breast and crammed it in his mouth, hearing him suck, suck, suck, and be silent.

My heart was beating like a drum, my breath was almost held with fear, the metallic taste of terror was in my mouth as if I were drinking from a rusty cup put down into a cold clear well. I was praying with my whole soul for all those lives (including mine and his), and for a while God must have heard, for the baby sucked and sucked and all I could hear was the pounding of my own heart. But then the little wiggling one squirmed and began to whimper. He needed to be held upright. He needed to be burped. I was not sure I could do this without betraying us all. Biting my tongue, I carefully raised him to my shoulder, patted his little back, and held him until he gurgled up from his depths a noisy air bubble and then he spit sour milk over my breast and my shoulder.

The Cossacks had been stomping around below us, sticking their bayonets or swords or whatever they had into bales of hay, but when the baby started to whimper, they stopped and listened. Then there was no sound but their boots dragging the hay with a sort of swishing. I clapped the baby on my breast so fast I might have been a gunfighter drawing for a shootout in one of those silent movies they had when I first came to America. The baby sucked and sucked again, and I very quietly let the air return to my lungs and felt them expand beneath the baby's moving mouth. When he became quiet and seemed to sleep, I did not notice, because of the ruckus and screaming down below. The Cossacks had caught a calf and were running him through with their horrible instruments and he was making wild animal noises, almost the noises of a childa child who would never nurse again. It was only when the Cossacks had gone galloping off to the next slaughter, the next shtetl , that I realized my boy did not draw breath.