The Cantor's Daughter

Her name was Noa Nechemia. She was sixteen now, a junior in high school. Her narrow face was too somber to be called pretty, with deep-set eyes and a hairline that started low on her forehead, not much more than an inch above her heavy eyebrows. Her lips were full and well-shaped, but she had a habit of sucking them between her teeth and chewing them during school, and they chapped easily. At night, with the bathroom door closed, she practiced putting on lip gloss, so in the morning she could get it straight even as the bus jolted over potholes. She kept extra tissues in her purse to wipe it off before coming home. It wasn’t that her father disapproved of make-up—but seeing it on her would have brought out that oppressive, mournful expression that meant he couldn’t believe how fast she was growing up, couldn’t believe how much she was beginning to look like her mother.

Her father sang Ashkenazi services for Temple Emek Shalom in Chatwin, New Jersey, though he’d grown up on Sephardi tunes, first in Tangier, then in Netanya, where Noa had been born and where a car accident had killed her mother when Noa was eight. But Cantor Nechemia could sing anything—he had a rich, powerful voice and enormous range, and his ear was flawless. At home he listened only to opera, Mozart, Verdi, Janacek, anybody but Wagner, and when a record ended he often sang several measures from memory. “Yes, maybe I could have made a tenor, a passable one,” he sometimes said, massaging his windpipe through the stubbled skin of his neck. But then he shook his head and shrugged, adding as he did whenever an uncomfortable thought entered his mind, “But for me, God wanted something else.”

“This is the worst music ever,” Noa said, lifting the needle from a record in the middle of an aria. “If God existed, he’d set fire to all the opera houses in the world.”

God was a sore subject for them. For years her father had explained her mother’s death by talking about God’s will—divine reasoning, he said, was beyond the grasp of human understanding. As a little girl she’d accepted what he told her without question. She hadn’t known any better. But now she understood that talking about God was an excuse for her father not to face the guilt he still felt, an excuse not to get over his grief and move on with his life, and the mere mention filled her with rage. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “He’s God, right? He could make things understandable if he wanted. What’s the point of believing in something you can’t understand?”

“Question all you want,” her father said. “But in the end, all we can do is trust.”

“Trust what?” she said. “Why should I trust something I can’t see? Where is he? In here?” She opened the hall closet and pushed aside coats and rain jackets. She was being dramatic, she knew, making a big act of peering under shoeboxes and behind an umbrella stand. “Come on out,” she said. “Show yourself.”

Her father didn’t get angry. He never did. He just watched her sadly, as if he’d lost not only his wife in the accident but his daughter as well. All three of them had been in the car, her father fiddling with the radio while he drove, Noa in the back seat. All she remembered of the impact now was a strange sound that had stuck with her all these years, that still sometimes surprised her in the middle of a waking dream—a slow splashing, like water poured from a pitcher, or small waves hitting shore, though they’d been a mile from the sea, heading home from an excursion to Tel Aviv. She guessed later that it had been gas spilling out of the tank beneath her, or water from the radiator, though an irrational part of her still believed it was the sound of her mother’s life draining away. Noa had walked away with nothing more than a bruise on her cheek—God’s will, her father said. He hadn’t been so lucky. He’d broken an arm and two ribs, and lost his left eye to a flying glass shard. He wore a patch now, and on several occasions she’d overheard one of his congregants say he looked like a young Moshe Dayan. Those that didn’t know about the accident probably imagined he’d been wounded in Sinai or the Golan. It was true, he had fought in Sinai in 1973, a few months before Noa was born, pulled out of Yom Kippur services, hustled onto a convoy, thrown into combat within minutes, it seemed—but at that time, he said, God had chosen to keep him from harm.

Noa knew the statistic: more Israelis were killed in cars every year than in all wars and terrorist acts since 1948. But she sometimes told friends at school other versions of her mother’s death—a bomb in a crowded market, an ambushed bus in the desert, a rocket lobbed from southern Lebanon. She confused her stories, never remembering whom she’d told what, but no one ever called her on her lies. Why did she do it? To seem exotic, she supposed, to make the sorrow she felt only vaguely now, if at all, more present. As much as her father’s sadness infuriated her, she envied the respect it brought him, the careful way people treated him. If she ever wanted to believe in God, these were the times, hoping he pitied her for the shame she felt as she told each lie, for the disgust that overshadowed any satisfaction she might have gotten in the telling.