Free The Covenant by Naomi Ragen Page B

interrogation room,” she repeated hoarsely.
    The fat gendarme with the filthy fingers and the leering mouth. Her skirt lifted , hisfingersinside, searching for jewels. A young girl . . . But you don’t die of shame. Only one thing kills you, only one: death. Everything else, you can survive.
    “And then, they took my mother.”
    Mother, whose white hands painted watercolors, who sat at the head of a gracious table speaking of French cinema and Russian literature . . .
    She balled her fingers into a fist. “They molested me. And I knew what my mother was in for. I wanted to grab the guards. To stick my fingers in their eyes, to scratch their faces bloody! But I knew if I did, they would torture and kill us both. I was helpless.”
    Can she, can any American, conceive of that? Even begin to understand?
    Totally helpless.
    “I just sat there and waited. When she came out of that room— how can I explain it? —it was as if she was already in another world. I knew then that the horrors I was about to face would be unimaginable. But at least, I thought, I wouldn’t be alone. I still had my mother.
    “We were shoved into boxcars. Each moment, she seemed to grow smaller and paler, almost translucent. She was fading in front of my eyes. I begged her to hold on, but I could see she didn’t hear me. And then, suddenly, on the third day without food or water, she turned to me with this otherworldly light in her eyes: ‘Live,’ she said. ‘Teach my grandchildren that… that… human beings are capable of infinite glory.’ ”
    She sat silently, her head bowed, staring at her lap. Her chin trembled as she took deep breaths of the sweet, clean air of her own perfumed home.
    Mother.
    “I’m sorry, but I have to interrupt. Gran…”
    “Not now, Morrie!”
    “Gran. It’s your friend Leah from Brooklyn.”
    “Leah? Rabinowitz?” She looked at her watch. “Listen, tell her I’m finally doing the tape. Tell her I’ll call her right back. She’ll understand.”
    “Will you excuse us a moment?” he said to the interviewer and cameraman.
    “Morrie, this is the reason that people complain about you. You don’t listen…”
    “Gran!”
    She stared at him, her annoyance giving way to alarm.
    He took her arm and tucked it through his, helping her out of the chairand over to the phone. “It’s Leah’s granddaughter, Elise. There’s been a terrorist attack. Elise’s husband, her child…”
    Esther felt a sudden vulnerable space open inside her body, a place that she had kept closed so tight, made so hard over the years. A soft, fleshy spot began to throb, naked and exposed.
    This couldn’t happen. This was a new world. A world all her work had made safe and comfortable for those she loved. She wouldn’t permit it to happen.
    “Give me that phone… Leah? My God, my God!” Esther put her hand over the phone and hissed to Morrie: “Get me Dr. Shavaunpaul at Sloan-Kettering in Manhattan on your cell phone. Use his private pager number and tell him it’s me and it’s an emergency—
    “Leah. This is not like you… “ I thought you had no tears left, Leah, my Leah.
    Morrie motioned to her urgently. “The doctor’s on the phone.”
    She reached out for it. “Leah, go lay down. My doctor’s coming over. Go lay down. Go! What use will you be to Elise otherwise? Take your medicine and lay down. Of course you’ll go to Israel, to be with her. Of course, we all will. But now go lay down, so you’ll have the strength. Good-bye. I’m hanging up, Leah. Good-bye. Yes. Go, go.”
    She grabbed the cell phone out of Morrie’s hand: “Doctor? Esther Gold, of Estay Cosmetics. Yes, of course… I’ve been giving that cardiac intensive care unit you wrote me about a lot of thought… But I’m actually calling for another reason. I have a friend in New York, not far from you, with a heart condition…”
    Her grandson listened, amazed and appalled as his grandmother wheedled and bullied the world-famous heart