S chool assembly. Rows of hot, cheese-smelling socks lined up on the polished floor. No black-soled shoes were allowed to scuff up the ancient wood in the auditorium, according to our principal, Mr. Coldry. Outside, hundreds of pairs waited in neat rows to be claimed after we had been dismissed. Just thinking about the task of finding my shoes, the ones with one lace shorter than the other, made my hands clammy.
Inside, mouths moved, voices were raised in song. Backs were straight and eyes lifted to the teachers on the podium. Lips were parted in perfect O’s. Everyone’s but mine — they were clamped shut. My tongue trapped behind rigid teeth as the others sang, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” Voices blending one into the other, louder now, eyes bright with joy. Jesus, yes, Jesus was their savior. Everyone’s but mine. I was small and dark haired, a replica of my grandmother, Leah, so I had been told, although I had never met her. She had died giving birth to my mother, Ruth.
Leah was my Hebrew name, my heritage. I was a descendant of our tribe from a shtetl in eastern Europe, whose offspring had fled the pogroms and found their way as immigrants to Johannesburg, South Africa. I was a Jew. I could not sing the praises of Jesus, so I kept my mouth shut tight and hoped that no one would notice, while Abraham, Isaac, and Moses watched me from above. “Yes, Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so!” Hundreds of voices sang the final chorus. And I was alone in my silence.
As we filed out of the pristine auditorium, I was relieved that I had managed to keep my singing secret safe for one more school assembly. I was eight years old, and there were hundreds more weekly school assemblies to come, but I tried not to think about them. As I put on my shoes and tied the one with the shorter lace into a less-than-perfect bow, I wondered why my parents hadn’t sent me and my sisters to King David, where all my cousins went. But my mother and father were not the sort to send their kids to such a school. My parents were Jews of the delicatessen kind, heavy on noodle kugel and gefilte fish, but light on the Talmud and Torah. My father’s beliefs centered on things that were grounded in the earth. He was pious about politics and religious about smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, Rothman’s filtered, which he couldn’t be without. My mother mentioned God only when she was in front of her vanity table. “Oh God, I’ve glued these false eyelashes on backward!” She mentioned Jesus, too, mostly on the tennis court. “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I missed that shot!”
There was only one sign in our home that we were of the Hebrew tribe — those who had wandered in the desert for forty years — and it was a mezuzah placed on the door post to the entrance of our home. A little rectangular box, it contained the first verses of the Torah on parchment in Hebrew, I was told by my cousin Merlyn, who went to King David. They learned that kind of stuff at her school, she had told me proudly. I was always eager to hurry my best friend, Mary Waite, with the wispy blonde hair and blue eyes, through the front door when she came over to play, for fear she would notice the ancient scroll on the doorpost.
God was not ever discussed in our home, and I knew Jesus probably didn’t want anything to do with the dark haired little girl who refused to sing his praises in school assembly at Parkview Junior School in the suburbs of Johannesburg below. I was spiritually rudderless. So, while my father ranted on about the state of the world, blowing smoke and leaving its stale trail through the house, and my mother floated from tennis games to lunches, leaving lipstick stains on glasses and the scent of her spicy perfume mingling with the odor of his tobacco, I held on to fluff and fur.
My savior was four legged, black and marmalade in color, with big green eyes. His name was Yoyo. He purred the loudest and licked the softest of any cat I had ever known. When doors were slammed and voices loud and shrill from my parents’ bedroom down the hall, I did not pray to something above to make the fighting stop. Instead I held on tightly to Yoyo’s soft, long-haired coat. That was all the comfort that I needed. Yoyo never squirmed under my grasp; he seemed to know to relax and let me draw whatever it was that I needed from him. I had gotten him as a kitten two years earlier from a woman who made dresses for my mother. The dressmaker’s cat had given birth to five, and I chose him without hesitation: big green eyes that filled me up with liquid warmth immediately. I had the joy of Yoyo in my life for two and a half years. I experienced all that was good and pure in his small warm body and was given holy love, unwavering and unconditional.
ON THE MORNING THAT STARTED LIKE ANY OTHER and ended like no other, I remember Yoyo playing with the laces of my shoes that were never allowed in assembly. “We’ll play in the garden, when I come home. I promise,” I said, as I kissed him quickly on his pink nose. And we did, for most of that afternoon until the sun was almost gone, in the mauve light tinged with the last rays of gold. I had climbed the big plum tree and Yoyo had followed me up, meowing and rubbing against my arm. Then helter-skelter, down he went. I stayed sitting in the tree’s cool branches, sucking on a plum, the juice sweet and smooth on my tongue. Then a bark and a snarl followed by a hideous strangled meow reached my ears through the foliage. I leaned forward quickly, so I could see all the way to the edge of our property line, the place where the awful sound had come from. I almost toppled down by the vision of the shocking, horrible scene on the far side of the garden. Yoyo had his head pulled through the chain-linked fence. On the other side was Morgan, the dog that lived next door. He was viciously pulling and pulling on my beloved cat. “no! no! no!” I screamed. I flew down the tree and raced across the lawn, a mother bird on a mission to save its young. I kicked and kicked at Morgan through the spaces in the linked fence until he let go, his mouth dripping red.
I picked up a limp-bodied Yoyo and carried him in my arms across the lawn. The air was cooler now. The light gone. Time moved very slowly and the journey across the lawn felt endless. I was numb and cold but with a single thought in my head. My cat was going to be fine.
I laid Yoyo down on the linoleum kitchen floor and opened a can of cat food. My hands shook. My mouth was dry and my pulse raced with hope.
“Eat, you’ll be better. Please stand up, Yoyo, and eat.” But Yoyo didn’t move.
I pleaded. I prayed for the first time in my life. “Dear God, please let my cat live. I promise I’ll have a bat mitzvah when I’m thirteen. I’ll call myself Leah from now on.”
But Yoyo didn’t move.
“Jesus,” I pleaded, “I’ll sing. I promise, I’ll be the loudest in assembly with the sweetest voice of all.”
But still, Yoyo didn’t move.
“Please, Yoyo. Please. Just take one small taste.” I put the cat food into the palm of my hand and held it to his bloody mouth.
My nanny, Nellie, came in and saw me kneeling over the cat I loved so much, the can of salmon cat food smeared all over my hands. “He is dead, Miss Lin,” she said. “Come,” she held her rounded arms out to me, and I ran into them and wept.
Out back, where the corn grew high and the chickens ran free and wild, I buried Yoyo. Thomas, the gardener, dug the grave, and I found the box that my school shoes had come in at the back of my closet. Inside was a brand new pair of laces, so I buried them with Yoyo. I knew he would like that. My parents offered to get me a new kitten, but I said no. There was only one cat for me, and he never was to be replaced.
SIX MONTHS PASSED, and I had become even smaller than I already was. My clothes, baggy and ill fitting, looked like they belonged to a rosier, more robust child. Nothing felt right, nothing tasted good, and going to sleep at night was the hardest of all. I did not have Yoyo’s soft fur to wrap around my wounds. The thing I believed in most was gone.
While my father still chain-smoked and my mother still drifted in and out of the house, I became fixated with thoughts of Yoyo and what he looked like now. One swelteringly hot summer afternoon, when I could stand it no more, I took a shovel from the cool dark coal shed and went to find out. Deeper and deeper I dug, my hair matted and wet from the solo exertion of exhuming my beloved cat. When metal finally hit the cardboard box I had buried him in, I whispered his name. “Yoyo, I’m here.” But when I opened the box, it released a stench so strong that it made my stomach lurch, and bile filled my parched throat. Inside were bits of bone and tufts of fur. Maggots crawled everywhere, but something inside me willed me to keep looking. The earth around the remains was thick and tarlike, transformed, it seemed, by his lifeless form. Small white worms crawled through the black and orange fur that I had clung to so often. But somehow I got past the shock of the stench. I willed myself to not be sick. I needed to be here, with my cat. Then suddenly, I did not feel repulsed or revolted anymore. A calmness came over me. I stood in the garden for a long, long time, just staring at his remains. I did not care that the unforgiving sun was burning my shoulders, or that my head throbbed and my arms ached from my exertions with a heavy shovel. I felt something opening and closing inside me all at once. I bent down and clutched the putrid earth in my bare hands, knowing it was just that. Earth.
I was now ready to begin the task of closing the grave. As I shoveled dirt, I knew that all I was covering was bones and fur, not my beloved cat. Yoyo was long gone. Joined with the savior, as he had once been a savior for me. Now they were one.
Something inside me shifted that day. I no longer hurried my friend Mary Waite through the front door past the mezuzah. In fact, I showed it to her when she next came over. “There’s a Hebrew scroll inside,” I told her, pointing toward the symbol of our faith. “My family is Jewish, you know.” She punched me in the arm. “Silly, of course I knew. That’s why my mom never serves ham or bacon when you come over.”
IN SCHOOL ASSEMBLY THE NEXT WEEK, I opened my mouth and sang, “Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.” My voice was strong and clear, my mouth a perfect O. I knew that up in the heavens they wouldn’t be angry at me. I figured anything that powerful would not get hung up on what they were called.
When assembly was over, I sat and tied my shoes, the ones with the one shorter lace. I knew it didn’t matter anymore if my name was Linzi or Leah, or whether I was Jewish or Christian. I felt a rush of Yoyo inside me, that same liquid warmth I had felt the first time I laid eyes on him. And, as I followed the throng of kids out into the bright morning sun, God, Abraham, Isaac, Moses, Jesus, and Yoyo smiled down on me from above.