“Why?” Magdalena said.
“I’m going to convert,” Lina said. “Dov will change his mind if I’m Jewish.” And because Magdalena realized she might be right about that, she didn’t tell Lina that she didn’t need the rabbi. There had been a whispered conversation years ago, when Ruta was drunk and she came to Magdalena’s mother’s apartment late one night when Magdalena was supposed to be asleep, about names being changed during the war. But Ruta said a lot of things.
Magdalena made a lather with the dish soap and pressed the razor close. And now she saw that Lina wore her ancestors like a kerchief wrapped tight and hidden under her hair. Her mother was Ruta, born Kazlauskait?, whose mother was Ona, born Chana Gitelson, whose mother was Rivka, born Fein. When Lina made Magdalena fill the bathtub and said that Magdalena would have to help her because her entire body was supposed to be submerged at the same moment, Magdalena didn’t tell her the stories of great-and great-great-grandparents that darkened her scalp or that over one fresh-shaved temple she carried instructions for prayers Magdalena knew Lina had never learned. Instead Magdalena said, “It’s not going to work. Your butt will float.”
“Please,” Lina said. “The rabbi won’t do it if I haven’t had the bath.”
So Lina held her breath and Magdalena pushed her under, trying to make sure that Lina’s heels and calves, her bottom and shoulder blades and the back of her naked head all got wet at once. The bathtub was too small and she couldn’t quite do it. Just as well, Magdalena said. The whole idea was crazy, and anyway, no rabbi was going to accept an at-home immersion. But Lina wouldn’t listen. She gathered her things, wrapped a scarf around her strange pink head, and shouted good-bye from the stairs. For a moment Magdalena thought about calling after her, but Lina was already gone. Magdalena cleared the hair out of the sink by the handful and put it in the bin.
Inside the yellow church it was quiet. Back in Lithuania old women might sit in the last few pews straight through a Sunday afternoon, but in Swindon not so many people went to church and this one was empty except for the smell of flowers left too long in their vases. Magdalena put her glasses on and watched the light filter through the colored glass.
When she was eight or nine years old, after Lina had gone back to live with Ruta in Kaunas, Magdalena’s mother got a job cleaning in a church. In the afternoons after school Magdalena would sit in the basement and watch the sisters while they made communion wafers. Sometimes they’d let Magdalena do the mixing, so long as she didn’t touch the dough. If she’d been confirmed she could have helped them roll it out and cut it into little squares, but as it was she just watched as the nuns made two cuts for a cross into each square, murmuring body of Christ, sprinkled them with holy water, body of Christ, and covered them with a white cloth until they could be baked for Sunday morning.
The nuns were old, but they were happy. Magdalena’s mother said that this was because the Russians were gone and they didn’t have to be nuns in secret anymore. But Magdalena believed she knew the real reason. Now the nuns could wear their old clothes again, with low hoods that covered the words on their foreheads and pinned down over their necks and ears. That was back when Magdalena thought that everybody saw the writing, and she was sure that the nuns were glad not to have to read each other’s secrets anymore.
One night a few months after Lina made Magdalena cut her hair, she came to the bar where Magdalena worked on weekends. She was soaking wet—she must have walked all the way from Dov’s flat in Stamford Hill to get that wet because it was barely raining. Her hair seemed to have grown back, darker now and unnaturally smooth. Her face was flushed and the things she was saying weren’t making a lot of sense. If Magdalena had thought about it she would have known something was wrong. But right then she was worried about her cash drawer, which was coming up short again and again. So she poured Lina a drink and told her to sit at the bar until she was done counting. The register was under by twelve pounds fifty. She counted the drawer again while one of the regulars bought Lina another drink. Twelve pounds fifty short. It was funny how she remembered that. If she’d just paid the difference herself and taken Lina home. If James the day bartender hadn’t dropped the petty cash receipt into the ice bin—where Magdalena found it, finally, blotted it dry with a napkin, circled the amount (he’d taken out ￡12.50 exactly to buy lemons for the bar), and stuck it in the cashbox, then shooed the closing time regulars out and took Lina home. If she hadn’t made Lina wait for her, if Lina had had one or two fewer drinks—well, it might not have made any difference, and that was the truth. But what was also the truth was that Magdalena had been glad to make her wait. It had been a long time since she’d heard from Lina, weeks had gone by without even a text, so let her take her turn waiting, and never mind that her head kept dipping up and down.
Lina seemed all right on the bus ride home, except that she was talking too loudly. She and Dov had been living together, there were problems with the family, Dov was spending more and more time away, leaving Lina alone in the big empty flat they had moved to because Dov’s mother wouldn’t let Lina stay with them. Without his family Dov was losing touch with things, he was going out too much, not caring if Lina was there or not, and so Lina tried to do the things Dov’s mother had done, keeping certain fasts and doing things with candles, although Dov hardly noticed. That particular day had been a special one. The women were supposed to go without food or water till sundown when the men would mix honey into wine and tip it to the women’s lips to drink. Lina had waited at home all day and into the night for Dov to come. When he did, his eyes were tiny pinpoints, and when Lina asked him if he knew what day it was he said it was probably already Saturday, and he was going out again. When she said that she was hungry he said there was some fruit in the fridge, to help herself, and he was leaving. He had some things he had to do.
So Lina put handful after handful of little orange fruits into the blender until the motor jammed—“Yeah, of course,” Magdalena said. “You didn’t take out the pits”—and drank them down. And when she’d finished she came to find Magdalena, a little unsteady on her feet and with something bitter on her breath. Magdalena helped her off the bus and down the street and up the stairs to their flat. She cooked some Minute Rice and fed it to Lina with a spoon. Lina fell asleep on the couch and Magdalena got out the camera, wondering what Lina would look like without the writing on her face, and if the blush around her lips would come off too. She wound the camera. Lina was sleeping with Magdalena’s jacket balled up underneath her head, and she didn’t wake up when the flash went off.