Beyond the Pale: A Novel (16 page)

I opened the basket. Mama had sent cheese and bread she made herself, as well as herring and plums. The little round cake had the letter daled shaped in dough on top, daled for Daniel. This would have made Papa turn purple. As I unwrapped the food I could see Daniel remembering home. In the daylight, ink spots showed all over his shirt and pants, even on his suspenders.

“Everyone’s well?” he asked as he broke off some bread and cheese. “Mama, Esther, Sarah?”

I nodded. He didn’t ask about Papa, but I wasn’t interested in talking about home. “What did you mean before, when you said you organized a strike?”

“Oh.” Daniel puffed up again and talked with his mouth full. He was nineteen and clean shaven now like all the socialists. Even without a beard he looked like a grown, serious man. “You must not tell this, you promise?” He looked around. “I’m the representative from our shop to the workers’ council in the city. I let them know what the other printers think, and they suggest tactics for agitation and authorize strikes. We had a strike last year—all eight of us just stood by our machines and did nothing until Simeon had to give in to our demands. That was something to see, I’ll tell you!”

“And what did you demand?” I felt bad, almost ashamed, that I didn’t know about this. Since Daniel left, Mama and Papa didn’t talk about socialism or the unions. Papa brought home his students, the same as always, and they rehashed the ancient arguments about Torah and Talmud at dinner.

“We demanded a twelve-hour day—it was ours anyway by law—and now we have it.”

“By law?”

“Can you believe it? Catherine, the same Tsar who herded all us Jews into the Pale like oxen, wrote a law that the workday should be twelve hours, with a half hour for breakfast, an hour and a half for dinner. Of course the capitalists buried this law, but the Bund found out about it. There’ve been hundreds of strikes—maybe a thousand—all over the Pale. And I led the one here.”

I wished Daniel wasn’t so pleased with himself. He was interesting enough, but such bragging. “And does everyone win their strikes?”

“Well, not always, of course.”

“What happens to the workers then?”

“Most of the time they just go back to work sixteen, seventeen hours a day. I myself worked eighteen hours when we had a special contract.” He stopped and sighed. I had a little more sympathy for him. After all, as a student he never had to do anything much besides read. Work must have felt like falling into an icy river. He looked at his hands and I looked too. They were scraped and scabbed, ink running into red creases.

“Sometimes the capitalists bring in strikebreakers from another town,” Daniel said, “or Russians, who don’t understand the meaning of unity. Then the workers get fired.” “And they still strike?” Having a trade seemed a wonderful thing to me—I couldn’t understand why you would strike if it meant losing your work. There were so many who could find nothing, scraping from kopeck to kopeck.

“Of course. We’re all poor workers, what have we to lose? The tailors can always sew from their houses if they have to, and printers—well, we can go to another town.”

“Another town?” I never thought about Daniel moving away.

He took my hand. I couldn’t remember him ever doing that before. “I may have to go soon anyway, strike or no. The central committee may send me north to organize and distribute propaganda.”

I pulled my hand away. “Here—Mama made this special for you.”

I handed him the cake with the daled.

He smiled in a sorrowing way that reminded me a little of Abe.

“Mama is a bourgeois sentimentalist. But tell her thank you for me.”

“You won’t go away without seeing her?”

“I honestly don’t know, Chava. I can’t come to the house and she can’t come here. We could meet in the birzhe, the organizing street, near the New Bazaar. She could wander through on her way to market.” He blinked, looking into the trees, picturing it. “Ask her if she’ll come say goodbye to me a week from Wednesday. I’ll be there at four o’clock if I’m being sent away. I’ll try to wait an hour. You tell her and Esther and Sarah I do this for them as well as for the workers. A day will come when we won’t have to depend on Russian masters for every crust of bread!”

“Meyer!” Simeon stood shouting from the doorway with his hands on his hips. “This isn’t a resort on the Black Sea. Say goodbye to your sister already and get back to work!”

“I’m glad you came,” Daniel said. “If I don’t see you for awhile, remember that I’m working for your future too, comrade Chava.” He brushed the dirt off his knees and held out his hand to pull me up.

Comrade, he called me. I was sorry I hadn’t gone to see him before. I must have frowned.

“What’s wrong?” Daniel asked “You’re too good to be a comrade? I thought you had more spirit than Esther.”

“I do. No one ever called me comrade before, that’s all. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Meyer!” Simeon yelled.

Daniel held out his hand and I felt proud to shake it, to be his sister and comrade. I got a little smudge of ink inside my thumb and was careful not to rub it off for a long as I could.

But Daniel forgot, or never knew, that people don’t fall into neat rows like letters. I told Mama his plan to meet. First she wanted to know how he looked, if he was taking care of himself. Then she wanted to know what he’d said about the cake.

“He said you were a bourgeois sentimentalist, and thank you.”

“Sentimentalist?” She looked up from her sewing. Esther, who had been looking at me, stared back down at her stitches, pretending she didn’t understand. I was preparing the wax for the candles. Mama pursed her lips and raised her eyes to the ceiling. Then she said it again. “A sentimentalist, am I?”

When the appointed Wednesday came, she didn’t go.

At first I thought I had swallowed a nail and it was piercing me from inside. My stomach hurt often enough, but this was lower. Something terrible was wrong. Mama was over on Ismailovsk Street distributing clothes with Sarah. I had no choice but to go to Esther. Esther took a minute to really look at me. The freckles spilled across her nose and I watched them instead of her watery green eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic,” she finally said. She was doing hand embroidery on a pile of yarmulkes that were special for boys’ bar mitsves.

“Dramatic? What do you know?”

“This I know. Check and see.”

“Check what?”

“In your underwear. For blood.”

“Why would I bleed in my underwear?”

Esther sighed and put her needle down. “Just do what I say.”

I went behind the curtain and checked. There was a little stain. How did Esther know? What was going to happen to me now?

“Well?” she called from the kitchen. Her voice had that “I told you so” sound. Now that Nathan, the tavern owner’s son, has been courting her, she was more self-important than ever.

I came back. How could I be bleeding below when I could feel all the blood in me rushing up to my cheeks and upper arms? Maybe the blood was making circles like a whirlpool in my body and at the bottom of the whirlpool it was draining out. “What is it? How did you know?”

“It happens to every woman. It happens to me and Mama.”

“To Mama? Why didn’t she tell me?”

Esther shrugged her soft shoulders. I still didn’t want to look in her eyes so I watched her mouth instead. I noticed how thin Esther’s lips were for someone plump. “She didn’t tell me until I started. Why worry about something before you have to? I’ll show you what to do. Come with me.”

We went into Mama and Papa’s room. She opened the bottom drawer of Mama’s chest, which had lions carved at the base of the legs. When it was cold and I couldn’t sleep, sometimes I’d pretend I could hear the lions growling, and Mama would let me come sleep beside her. Of course I was beyond that for a long time already.

“Here, see these rags?” There was a stack of neatly folded cloth squares, leftover pieces of this and that, all with old stains. “When you start to bleed, you put these between your legs. Change them when they’re uncomfortable and wash them out behind the pump. Mama dries them on a shelf behind the oven. Maybe she’ll make you some new ones for your own. Don’t let Papa or any boys see. And don’t go running around while you bleed! It will just make it worse—you might get the blood all over you.” This she said with some satisfaction. She was always trying to get me to hold still. “Take one now. Your undergarments will hold it in place enough if you don’t squirm so.”

“For how long?” How was I supposed to go around with rags stuffed between my legs?

“Oh, it lasts for three or four days and it comes almost once a month. Mama says every woman is a little different, how often, how long.”

“Every month, all my life?” I was shocked, not just that this was happening to me, but if it happens to women everywhere, how do they all keep it secret?

Esther looked perplexed, as though she’d come to the end of her knowledge, which happened often enough. “I think so. Yes, I think all our lives. It’s what it means to be women. When you’re finished bleeding, you go to the mikve with Mama. She’ll show you what to do.” She paused. “Chava—I’m sorry it hurts you. If it gets bad, when Mama comes home, ask her for a hot-water bottle.”

I went back to my bed behind the curtain and put the cloth in as Esther instructed. Was it the bleeding that made Esther so proper? No, she had always been that way, as long as I could remember. Maybe the blood made it worse. I wouldn’t change, she’d see. She didn’t want me to run only because she didn’t, that was all. My legs were already as long as Daniel’s. A little blood wouldn’t stop me. But what if blood did shake out of me when I ran? Esther said it would only be for a few days. I could run when it stopped.

I supposed this was a good opportunity to read for awhile. I had some of Daniel’s old pamphlets underneath my mattress, even though he hadn’t sneaked into town for over six months. I liked this one with the picture of Rosa Luxemburg,
Sozialreform oder Revolution
. Well, what I liked was her profile on the front—serious, she had a serious face. Sometimes I looked in the mirror to see if my face could be serious enough to be a revolutionary’s. You can’t be too pretty, otherwise no one pays any attention unless they want to marry you. Or so ugly no one would want to look at you. I was glad I had a long, dark face with a little mole on the left, towards the back of my jaw. You had to have a serious face, like Rosa Luxemburg. Mama had a serious face, not quite so stern, but then she wasn’t writing pamphlets. Papa said Mama was a handsome woman and if I was lucky I’d look like her when I grew up. I could be handsome and serious too. Maybe being a revolutionary made you look more serious. I couldn’t understand all the words the revolutionaries wrote, though I got most of the ideas. I liked to run my hand over the page and feel how the type cut into the paper, all the indentations it made on a page. I closed my eyes and pressed my fingertips against the pamphlet. Could words enter through your skin and change your mind without your knowing?

If I had gone to school I would have been able to understand Rosa Luxemburg perfectly, but Papa wouldn’t send me after Daniel disappeared. He was afraid I’d get involved with the intellectuals or socialists. What if I did? “Esther, at least, is a jewel—see how she behaves,” he liked to say. “A good match we’ll make for her. But you—you need a firm hand and the only way you’re going to get it is if you stay home. Besides, your mother is as educated as half the teachers in Kishinev. She’ll teach you all you need to know.”

Everything started to seem sour to me. I was never going to be bar mitsved like my brothers—no celebration, no one clapping me on the back and inviting me to read to the congregation. I sat beside my mother on Saturday mornings in the balcony while she led the women’s praying. Some of the women liked to just sit up there and gossip, but Mama kept everything as orderly as she could. She made me keep Sarah from fidgeting, and that was the whole of my religious duties—besides lighting the candles and separating the dough.

I would never have gotten into the gymnasium anyway unless Papa had been rich and willing to spend his riches on me. It was miracle enough that Abe went so far in Russian schools with the quotas—and Abe had gone to pick grapes in Zion. The longer he was away, the sillier his dream seemed. It wasn’t like going to Vienna or Berlin, where there was opportunity. Palestine was like going backwards, from the city to a shack in the country, from the start of the twentieth century to the start of the sixteenth—or even back to the Second Temple. I could see Abe wearing a loincloth and carrying a staff, followed by a flock of sheep. If I could have gone to the university, I wouldn’t have thrown it away by becoming a farmer in a desert. I would have been a doctor. Or someone who designed machinery, though I didn’t think they let girls do that. That was the other thing: every time I turned around there were walls. What was I going to do, cooped up in the house with Mama, Esther and Sarah, bleeding and dripping candlewax? I suppose it was better than working at the candle factory, but at least there I could have joined the Bund and organized the other girls. Wouldn’t that have been something? Daniel wasn’t the only one in this family who was important. I would have made speeches. At home no one listened to me. Except Sarah and what could I say to her—Rise up, little sister, we must organize against Mama and Papa, who exploit our labor?

Now that I was twelve years old and bleeding, my parents were probably going to marry me off the first chance they got. They were already making arrangements for Esther with Nathan’s parents. Who would they find for me? One of those sickly students who came to dinner? Then I’d have to work to support him, and what did I know how to do besides make candles and run a shop?

Maybe I could support a household selling books instead of candles. Would people buy books from a girl? Women would—and women read. I would order all the Yiddish novels and translations from Poland, Germany and Saint Petersburg from the peddlers who came around. I would always know what was new, what the important people were reading in Europe. Women would come from all over Kishinev to buy or borrow books—I’d keep a few to lend out, for a few kopecks. Maybe Mama would tell the matchmaker I needed a husband who would let me run a business as I saw fit. If I asked her, she might agree. She’d have to have pity on me because I was bleeding now and it hurt. So I would marry some shlemil, have ten children and run a little bookstore.