THE NEXT MORNING there’s a call from our real estate agent. The market is so crazy that we’ve given up looking, but there’s a small three-bedroom in the Annex he thinks we should take a peek at. It has exposed brick in the kitchen, and lovely hardwood floors, and a park with a playground directly across the street. We don’t need long to decide. In three short weeks we pack up the apartment; I work for five minutes, rest for ten, work for five, rest for fifteen. I’m so fogged up with hormones I can barely remember my name. It’s a beautiful feeling, though, hazy around the edges. Despite being more bound by my body than ever, I feel an accompanying sense of absolution, as if the tethers of the material world have momentarily slipped me free.
My mikvah is set for a clear spring day in June. I wake early and lie quietly for a few minutes, breathing in the fresh air from the open window, luxuriating in the sense of unhurried imminence. The future is coming for me; I don’t have to chase after it. I think of the long months of darkness behind me, and how they have transformed into the light pushing in through the screen. I feel lightness inside me, too, spreading through my limbs, my face, the tips of my eyelids. I know my depression isn’t over for good, isn’t somehow solved like a puzzle, but I am grateful for the respite.
Degan rolls over on the other side of the bed. I heave myself over to hug him.
“Take that, Phil,” he says.
Phil is the name we’ve given to the long maternity pillow I sleep with my belly propped up against.
Degan leaves for work, but I linger in bed, listening to the robins outside our window and the sputtering cough of a motorcycle someone is trying to start. I eventually get up and send a few emails as the baby throws her punches and jabs inside me. I go out for groceries, fill the car with gas, review the blessings I will have to recite later this afternoon. I struggle to remove my toenail polish, my stomach almost too big for me to reach my feet. But the rules are clear: for immersion in the mikvah, the body must be unadorned.
Degan and I drive forty minutes north to the mikvah. We have to sign in at the front desk; there is a hundred-dollar fee. Downstairs, Degan kisses me goodbye and goes to wait in the small room adjacent to the mikvah. Rabbi Klein greets me, shows me into the change room. With effort, I reach behind me for my zipper and slowly step out of my dress. The enormity of my naked body, a world unto itself. My big breasts and my belly. The child huge inside me.
I look in the mirror and think of Granny: If I start crying, I will never stop. Of Gumper: Not if I was the last Jew on earth. Of his mother, Ruzenka, fasting quietly, secretly on Yom Kippur.
I think of what Judaism has come to mean to me. Of Shabbat, of tzedakah, of the shivers down my spine when I hear the prayer for the dead. There’s a knock on the change-room door. “Ready when you are,” Rabbi Klein says.
I look around for a robe and realize I’ve forgotten to bring one. I improvise and wrap my blue flowered maternity dress around me like a toga. Rachel laughs when she sees me. “Full points for creativity.” Then she says, in a serious voice, “I’ll turn my back. You can enter the pool.”
I have been picturing a beautiful green stone pool, but the mikvah looks more like something from a health club or a physiotherapist’s clinic. Cream plastic with an armrail on the stairs. I let my dress fall and take my first steps in. The water is lovely and warm. It rises up over me: ankles, knees, hips. The huge bulb of my daughter, ready to burst. Once I am standing up to my shoulders, Rachel turns to face me. She shows me a pipe I haven’t yet noticed, shunting rainwater gathered according to Jewish law into this holiest of baths. “Flowing water is fitting for this particular day. For you,” she begins.
I swallow.
“A river symbolizes continuity,” she says. “Today we are thinking of your family. Your father, his parents and grandparents behind you. The life within your belly, flowing forward to the future.
“In the Torah we learn that the mikvah waters are called living waters. Living waters come from one source and are propelled to another, stopping along the way at many junctures. You are standing in the mikvah, at the juncture to official conversion. This is not a beginning or an end in itself, but rather, a beginning out of something that has existed, and that will continue to exist in the future.”
She reads a beautiful passage from the Torah, and then it is time for the dunks. She tells me to spread my fingers and toes so the water will touch every part of me. I have read so many things about immersion having to be kosher, not a strand of hair allowed to graze the surface, about dunks being annulled because a toe bumped the floor of the pool, but Rachel is very casual. “Make sure you’re immersed, but don’t stay under too long. Ha ha!”
But once I am under I never want to come up. I churn my arms to stay beneath the surface. The water holds me; my water holds my child. Finally I need to breathe. When I break the surface, Rabbi Klein says the blessing concerning immersion. I repeat it.
Then it is time for the third and final dunk.
When I come out of the water, I will be a Jew.
As a writer, I believe in the power of words, but there are things words cannot speak to, worlds that language cannot name. The mikvah, for me, is one of them. In the long year of classes, of learning Hebrew and making Shabbat, it has not occurred to me that the bath would be more than a rite, that I might truly be transformed. But when I emerge, I am different. My skin shines, as though every inch of me—inside and out—has been purified. I think of Shayna’s wisdom at my wedding, how she preserved the ritual so I could appreciate it fully at the proper moment. She was right. I turn to Degan now with the face of his wife, and with another woman’s face altogether.
Outside, the June day is blustery and bright. I blink in the sunshine. There is a playground beside the school, and beyond it a small grove of trees. We linger on our backs, looking up at the sky. The clouds make a canoe, a mother duck followed by a trail of ducklings. I twirl a thick blade of grass between my thumb and forefinger and lazily brush an ant off my calf. Basking in the warmth, the sense of completion. Degan rolls onto his side, props his head up with his elbow. He pushes a gift-wrapped bag toward me. Inside are two small packages. I unwrap them carefully: a Magen David, or Star of David, to wear on a chain around my neck, and a beautiful mezuzah for our new home. I touch each object, my fingers taking them in, learning what they mean about who I now am.
Eventually we get in the car to drive home. On our way, we stop at the downtown synagogue where we will be picking up our organic vegetable share every Tuesday throughout the summer. I look around at the families choosing peppers and pears, children up on their fathers’ shoulders, a small boy in an even smaller kippah. After my long exile, these are my people. There is no uncertainty, nothing halfway about it. All at once, I belong.
At home, I fall into bed in utter exhaustion. I sleep on my side, my belly out in front of me like a huge crystal ball. An oracle. I feel our daughter’s foot, the curved world of her head, and dream the colour orange and the smell of baking cardamom. I wake to a phone message from Shayna. She tells me mazel tov, and to check outside my front door. I find blueberries, kosher cookies, a huge bouquet of lilies.
I turn on the computer. An email from Rabbi Klein is waiting: “You’ve worked hard for this, Alie. Fighting history isn’t easy.”
And one from Jordan, who twenty years earlier on the playground saw me for what I really was. “So it’s come to this, has it?” he writes. “You are officially Jewish. Well, welcome. Is it strange?”
Eli and I have been in touch a bit over the past weeks, and his response to my news is a single word: “Hooray!”
The last email comes from Dad. He is in Europe—in Prague, as fate would have it. He writes to tell me he went to synagogue on Shabbos morning. When he arrived, the rabbi asked about his background. Ten Jewish males make up a minyan, the minimum required for the public aspects of prayer. At the synagogue in Prague there were rarely enough. Today, there were nine. Until Dad arrived. The rabbi questioned him at length about his background and finally declared him a full Jew. My father’s presence made for great celebration. Because he was there, they could bring out the Torah.