The Seder was often celebrated at my grandparents. Tables colluded
under shimmering white clothes, bleached by my grandma in plastic
vessels. Matzos and wine bottles served porcelain and crystal bowls
with scarlet sparkles. My mother and my father observed, dejected, from
the corners of the room, two strangers in an intimate occasion.
My parents, unloved, rejected by both progenitors and progeny, clinging
together, having survived their families. With eyes downcast, hands
sculpting breadcrumbs or folding and unfolding wrinkled napkins, they
silently cruised through the night, tight-lipped and stiff.
It was an awry evening. My grandpa, drowsed by medication, ensconced in
sleepy, torn pyjamas, read the Haggadah perfunctorily. We devoured the
food doled out by my grandma from steamy, leaden pots. We ate with
bated silence, a choir of cutlery and chomp. Immersed in yellow
lighting, we cast our shadows at each other. A tiny wooden bird sprang
forth, recounting time from a cuckoo clock my father gifted to my
grandparents.
Still silent, my grandma and my aunts began to clear the table, when
Janusz implored Dinah, from the windowpane, to exit and meet him in the
dusk. My grandmother didn't utter a single syllable as she fastened the
blinders in his face.
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