Dreamcloth fragments
from my book The Dreamcloth (Jacana Media, 2005)
I spent ten years working on my first novel, The Dreamcloth which was published by Jacana Media in 2005. When I wrote it, I was deeply influenced by Toni Morrison’s Beloved and knew I wanted to write an intergenerational story of someone haunted by an ancestral ghost. I drew on my own Jewish South African upbringing, and used my grandfather Solomon’s lifestory to write about a love-affair between a seamstress and a poet in a Lithuanian shtetl, which is the source of suffering through the generations.
Here is a passage I loved writing:
zikh tsu frayen:
to rejoice:
enjoy by possessing;
feel joy on account of (an event);
to be glad or greatly delighted;
to exult
Maya’s eyes—the colours of labradorite, greys infused with splinters of fern-greens and tawny stone—first came to rest on the figure of the seamstress in the communal bathhouse and, to Maya, she felt as unexpected as a shaft of sunlight in those unkind winters of Kovno. It took courage to look neighbours in the eyes, for each wretched body was doubled over with the weight of weather and worry, stinking of sweat and urine.
It was her smell that first drew Maya to look her in the face. It was almost impossible to distinguish where smells began and ended, for everyone encumbered by her body, was part of that great stench that was the air of the shtetl.[1] But the seamstress, she had a smell of something held to the earth, like a potato or a beetroot still wet with brown clods of soil. It was a smell that caused Maya to salivate, quite beyond her control and much to her shame. She wanted to bury her nose in its softness.
In the communal bathhouse, poor and smelling of a week of cold and hard work, the women would bathe together, first in shyness, covering their heavy breasts and tangled groins, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden when the taste of apple was still sweet on their lips. The widow must have felt Maya’s eyes sniffing her, but she did not scuttle from her gaze. Knowledge brings shame, as was written in the Torah, and they were full of it.
Never before had Maya so desired to lay eyes completely on another. And when the seamstress untied the grey cloths across her head that held a bulk in a neat cradle of hair, the glory of those tresses that came tumbling down, called Maya to touch, smell, mesh her fingers into it. The seamstress raised her eyes to Maya, a sideways glance exposing her neck—a place to lay lips, fingers, (if Maya could be forgiven for such immodesty), tongue.
Maya spoke first. Words were her companions. The seamstress was shy. Lonely. At twenty-three she had already buried a husband. The small boy she bore was skinny, weak. She sewed for a living—jackets, dresses, trousers. Anything people asked for. And such hands she had—hands familiar with the inside of garments, the underbelly of the cloth that touches skin, hands that had pressed into seams that hold bodies from the frost, hands that were patient with the simplicity of stitch by stitch.
They parted. Wished one another well until the next bath day. As Maya walked back home, the crunch of gravel underfoot, a stirring began in her loins— perhaps it was her umbilicus. She reached to her belly, but the sensation, almost bubbles under water, rose to her chest, the heat ascending the shaft of her throat, and before she could cover her mouth a sound escaped for which she had no word to describe. Laughter? Almost. A gasp? Not quite. She fumbled for language—any part of it—to attach to this sound, a stranger to her body. She felt as if she was hovering at the edge of something wide and deep and endless, and she wanted to throw herself into it.
She clasped her hands to her face, and looked up to see who was watching. The town was unchanged, but everything had altered. A beginning. She was at the beginning of something, a place that marked a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in a life wound up in endless circles of mundane sameness and it felt, god forgive her, like joy. It was a vicious secret, more prized than a handful of matbeyes[2] sufficient to purchase a freshly slaughtered chicken, maybe even already plucked. Maya guarded it like treasure.
***
The days could not wind down into darkness with speed kind enough for a week to pass. On that next washday, Maya dared to call her ‘friend’. Two weeks passed before they told each other small things—the boy’s name, whose hem needed fixing, the shape of the moon the Shabbos passed. Sometimes they even laughed. Maya tucked strands of loose hair under her headcloth. She blushed, lowered her eyes and rubbed her hands together. They kept place in line for one another at the bathhouse, standing close so Maya could breathe the fullness of fresh potatoes.
Once she whispered to Maya, while she scraped the black calluses off her feet, that when she had time, of which she had but moments to spare, she would sew the dreams she had into small cloths with the scraps of cotton and cloth she saved from orders. These she kept to unfold when the days were dark for months on end and she could not meet the emptiness of her child's eyes with a handful of porridge. Sometimes a person with a celebration might buy a length of material that had sea-green or sky-blue woven into it, not that she had ever seen a green sea or a blue sky. For a wedding, one could always be sure that a neckline of lace would be requested. Even the cover of the Torah had to be replaced, and if she were so lucky as to be called upon by the Shamesh[3]—or even the Rabbi—to make it, that would give her two weeks in which she could caress an arm's length of maroon velvet, the colour of her monthly bleeding. And in such moments she would blush with rare pleasure, for she would match the order, but by some miraculous stretch of fit, a corner, or a finger length, or a diagonal, or the angles left from a square from which circles or curves were cut, remained. And from those tatters she braided a deeper world, her own secret Garden of Eden.
And Maya was so bold as to ask if she might see them. Not all, she said, just one, maybe.
Maya waited the week, counting down the days for the time to wash. And there she waited for Maya, greeted her, and said nothing of the cloths of her dreams. Maya was afraid to frighten her away with eagerness, so she bathed with her, told of the chair her husband carved that week, it’s handsome legs, its back with angel wings. And she smiled low into her neck and spoke only words needed for the sharing of the bathing. And it was time almost to greet her farewell and may she prosper for another week, when she took Maya by the hand, and led her behind the bathhouse, where their shoes got soaked in mud and it smelled of human waste but Maya’s heart was swollen and trembling.
From the dark seam between her bosoms, she drew out a piece of cloth, no bigger than a small handkerchief, and held it flat in the palm of her hand. Maya did not know where to look first or longest—into her palm or her eyes, for in both she saw tricks of light and sleights of wonder, a glimmer of blue silk, a copper sequin, a moon of filigree lace, a rosebud of buttons, woven cobblestones of amber and jade. Maya was made to think of meadows in starlight and rainbows after thunder, things unseen by her eyes, but suggested by her heart. That cloth whispered stories, its promises made her weak with longing.
“Why, it’s a poem!” Maya whispered.
And then as quick as she had shown it, she folded it back into her breast, and put a finger to her mouth, and Maya nodded. Perhaps it was the secret threaded from her palm to Maya’s eyes and back to hers that changed the world that day. The day she saw such beauty wrought from nothing. For the first time, she wanted to share her poems.
***
They would meet earlier than the bath times, wash quickly, sometimes not at all, but would find a spot where people would not venture. There they would find a rock, a low wall, a discarded barrel, and Maya would speak her poems. Through them, the seamstress never spoke, nor would she wipe the tears that fell from her eyes. Sometimes they would part without farewells, just an unspoken something bigger than both of them that swept the world clean like the floods in the time of Noah.
“Where have you been, Maya, my love?” he would ask, lifting his chin from his chisel.
“At the bathhouse, Yankel, my husband.”
“Such a long bath?”
“The lines get longer and longer, for many of the newly weds have had children, and they must go first.”
And he would nod and say, “Welcome home.” And after a while he would lift his head again and say, “Perhaps it would be better if you made the dinner before you left for the bathhouse on a Thursday. That way, none of us will go hungry.”
Maya would stand over the pripetshok[4] peeling potatoes. Only the pink marks on the white potatoes alerted her that she had cut her flesh in her haste. It was as if her body only came alive with feeling at the bathhouse.
If you’d like to read more, you can purchase The Dreamcloth here.
[1] ‘village,’ in Yiddish.
[2] ‘coins’ in Yiddish.
[3] beadle in the synagogue.
[4] Stove.