Beyond the Pale: A Novel (20 page)

P
LUMS WERE FALLING
into the river. Seven, eight, nine … a hundred and one … all the trees were bent over like old men bowing towards Jerusalem, their branches scraping the ground. Then I heard a Pesach song—
Eliyahu ha novee, Eliyahu ha tishbee, Eliyahu, Eliyahu Eliyaaaaahu ha
—there should have been a rabbi. Where was the rabbi? Mama?

The strangled sound of my voice woke me. From the other side of the river in my dream, the Angel of Death was flying towards me, a raven, his wings blocking out the sun. I sat up. Only snoring in the dark house. I counted the living snorers: Sarah beside me, Esther, Bobe Malka, Uncle Elihu, Aunt Shendl, Rebkah, Aviva, all the boys’ snores mixing with the snores of Papa’s students. The pogrom wasn’t a dream. I knew it was a sin, wishing to die, but still I wished to wake in a different place. I rubbed my forehead with my thumb knuckle. Sarah stirred.

“Sha, go back to sleep little one. It’s not morning yet,” I said like Mama would have said—Mama would have—. I wrapped my arms around my ribs and waited for daylight.

When day came I went outside to sift the dirt for feathers, trying to get enough to remake our featherbeds. At first I was afraid—so much debris and blood. Two men lying in our street were covered with stones and broken glass, and cousin Reuben told me about a woman just three houses down, her stomach cut open and stuffed with feathers. I told him about the woman with the nails but I didn’t say anything about Mama.

Sarah wanted to help and so I let her. Why not? She had already seen everything horrible there was to see. Almost everything. At least finding clean feathers was something to do. Sarah and I spent hours in the streets and no one seemed to care, although we were supposed to be inside, sitting on boxes, mourning like proper Jews. But there were no boxes left and no more proper Jews. Only Uncle Elihu, mumbling in Hebrew and Yiddish with the fever from his broken leg, was really sitting shive.

Sarah made pictures with feathers and dirt. I squatted beside her, trying to figure out what they were. Most were trees. One, she said, was Mama’s baking apron. “See, here’s the red embroidery,” she said, pointing to a line of dried blood.

The house was too crowded, too full of broken furniture. Relief people, strangers, came and talked to Aunt Shendl. I didn’t want to answer any questions. Instead I wandered, kicking every stone on the streets of Kishinev. It took me two days to find myself in front of Simeon’s printing shop. The street was filled with scraps of paper, little bits of metal and letters scattered near the entrance. The oak door swayed on a single hinge, moaning like the survivors being carried to and from the hospital. It was dark inside. I forced myself past the entrance. When my eyes adjusted to the light I saw Zalman’s magic Linotype pushed over on its side, all the parts splattered with melted lead. The printing presses were smashed, the type cases thrown around the room. Ink was smeared over the walls, black patches giving way to slogans: Kill all zhids. Smells of kerosene and ink made my nose itch. The metal case that held the Linotype letters was split like a fig, the brass keys spilling as if they were seeds. Seeds on paving, no place to root. The aleph Zalman gave me had disappeared in the wreckage of my house. I sifted the keys until I found another and put it in my pocket.

Daniel came to the funeral in disguise and slipped away before anyone besides me noticed him. He’d let his beard grow back—without one it was too easy to spot him for a socialist. I think he had been preparing to make peace with Papa. Daniel always had to hide somewhere. If a person believed in something, then he should fight for it, even if Papa said that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that fighting only makes our enemies more intent on crushing us. How much more intent could they get? Fighters should come out in the open. Maybe Daniel didn’t believe as strongly as he said. Maybe I was hard on him.

Mama fought but she—. I thought many Jews must have fought the pogrom but afterwards they said only a handful mounted any resistance. That didn’t make sense to me, yet it made it easier to bring Elihu his soup. At least he had been fighting.

Every day, after all the cousins were out scavenging, I swept and packed the dirt floor down as well as I could. I liked to walk around the house barefoot, feeling how smooth the dirt of the floor was, how Mama kept it. Esther said when Nathan came to live with us he’d put wood on the floor, planks of wood, as if that were something special. Maybe Mama would have liked it. I wanted to be fair. But I liked the dirt floor—I’d fixed it again so you wouldn’t trip on a pebble anywhere.

You were supposed to wait a year after a parent died before you even went to a party. Since both Mama and Papa got killed I thought Esther and Nathan would have to wait at least two years. But Aunt Shendl said these were exceptional times and it would be a mitsve for all of us if there were a man in the house. It wouldn’t look right for us three girls and Bobe Malka to have yeshive students here without Nathan. As soon as Elihu could walk a little, the relief committee was going to help resettle his family in the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw, where his brother had a little hat factory. I didn’t think Elihu was going to be right in his mind again, but maybe working for his brother would help.

We had one window unbroken in my parents’ room, a little gift. The rest we covered with cloth, trying to keep the cold spring wind out of our pockets. The moon was half full. The wind smelled already of young wheat growing beyond the city. We hung rags for partitions, which made shadows in the dark that reminded me of Cossacks with whips. Elihu wouldn’t go into Papa’s bedroom, so he and Shendl and the four boys slept in the big room. The twins had my old space behind the stove. Bobe Malka had what used to be the storeroom to herself. Papa’s two students stayed in the room he had built for the boys. I made a featherbed from the street feathers big enough for me and Sarah, and lashed the wood of Mama and Papa’s bed up as best I could, a few miserable planks. We took their room. Esther slept on a little cot that Nathan’s father brought over, close to the door.

“How can you sleep over there?” Esther worried at me, as if it was some kind of holy place. But I knew it was just a room. If Mama and Papa were ghosts, they weren’t there. I would have known. Mama used to sing to us. Remember, Sarah? But Sarah was already asleep beside me in the lopsided bed.

“Sarah’s old enough to sleep by herself,” Esther fussed.

“Where?” I said, annoyed. “Is it so exciting for you, sleeping alone?” We whispered though I was sure everyone listened.

“I’m a woman now and I’m waiting for Nathan.” As if Nathan were Elijah, all clean and pure, and his arrival would obliterate the horror. I didn’t like how Nathan smelled. And that red beard—he always wore his soup in it. Waiting for that?

Then there was another sound. Near the window. Esther sat straight up in bed. I slept with Mama’s knife under my pillow. If they came to get me, they’d be sorry. I pulled the knife out and drew my nightgown closed. Esther was so quiet she scared me. Would she have sat there and let anything happen? Not me. I stood up. There were pebbles against our one window. Daniel. Daniel’s sign, the one we had arranged before he left Kishinev the first time. He had usually come when Papa was at shul, and even if Mama thought it was odd that I went outside to stare at the stars, she never objected. Now Esther started to cry. She didn’t sob but I could see big tears running down her face. She was still sitting up in bed as if she were made from stone except for the tears.

I went to the window. A figure moved in the bushes. He pulled a red handkerchief from his pocket and then I knew for sure it was Daniel. I tapped the window from inside three times to let him know it was safe. The cousins thought Daniel was a hero because he was in the Bund, and they would never have betrayed him.

Esther lit a single candle. Sarah was still sleeping. I had told her stories about our brother who came in the night and she thought they were fairy tales. She remembered Daniel a little but Abraham not at all. Sometimes I wasn’t sure either. Did I only dream my brother threw stones at the window? Then I remembered the weight in my hand of the pamphlets he would bring. I had kept them hidden behind a loose stone in the wall. “Cease your slumbering, sisters and brothers,” one pamphlet said. “Awake! Unite! See to it that all are equal.” There was a world beyond Kishinev, a world that even a girl could get to. I knew that in the north, in Vilna, girls who went to the university joined the Bund.

Esther never wanted to look at the pamphlets. “Martov,” she sniffed, “you think this Martov cares about you? That you go sneaking around in the night as if you were in love, bringing love poems to strangers?”

“That’s good,” Daniel said, “very good. I’ll put it in my next tract. Don’t you see, Esther, I am in love. I am in love with the Bund, with the cause of the people. It’s for love of working people I do what I have to do.”

“Aren’t we people?” You could count on Esther for the predictable. If there were pamphlets left after the pogrom, Shendl must have used them for kindling. We couldn’t risk drawing attention now by starting a fire to boil water in the middle of the night, even if we’d had enough wood to waste like that. But there was cold tea and Esther brought Daniel a glass. We were whispering, sitting on Esther’s bed with a salvaged table between us. We didn’t want the cousins to hear, but of course everyone except Sarah was just pretending to be asleep.

“What is it, Daniel?” Esther could see he was agitated.

“Don’t you have anything to eat?” he asked, which was not what Esther meant. She brought him a plate of cold beets and black bread with a little precious butter. Most of the cows Jews kept in town had been killed too—and the rabbis said no one could eat their meat, it wasn’t kosher, so the goyim got even our cows. Papa probably would have said the same. It was hard to find butter. Butter meant Esther was really glad to see him.

Daniel ate as if he’d been hungry for weeks. I shouldn’t have believed he didn’t fight back. We just watched him. I wanted some bread and butter too. My stomach hurt. I was used to the ache but it made me remember how Mama would give me bread and honey, and I had to push her memory away.

I didn’t like to watch Daniel chewing, all the hair on his cheeks squirming around, but he was almost done and I knew he had something exciting to say. We hadn’t seen him since Mama and Papa were buried. Then police were all over. They acted like it was a big favor to us, that they let us come to bury our dead. The Vice-Governor showed up in his dress uniform. He said too many of us came and we should resign ourselves, that what happened was payment for our sins and our fathers’ sins, God’s will. He, the Vice-Governor, had compassion for us so he wouldn’t send us away. Remembering, I wanted to beat the table with my fists and cry but I didn’t like to cry anyway, not in front of Daniel.

“Do you remember our mother’s half-sister, Bina Petrovsky?” he asked. This was not exciting. I swung my foot to keep it from falling asleep. “She lives in Odessa now, with her husband, Isadore the watchmaker. They have a daughter, Rose, about your age, Chava.”

Of course I knew this. They lived here until I was nine. Sometimes Rose would come for the reading lessons Mama gave. She was nice enough, I supposed. Right after the lesson she’d run home. She had four older brothers and had to clean up after them, even when we were six and seven. To me, she seemed too meek and cheerful about all the work. Daniel said that when Isadore’s first wife died, he had four boys and Papa arranged for him to marry Mama’s half-sister Bina in Odessa. After Rose was born, Bina couldn’t have any more children. They moved back to Odessa when grandpa Yosl was sick. The old man died two years ago. Isadore did all right for himself in Odessa.

So what, I thought. I got very bored with those so-and-so begat so- and-so stories everyone liked to tell. I was afraid Daniel wanted me to marry one of Rose’s brothers. That was how it always started, “The father did all right.” I was just fourteen, I didn’t have to get married yet. Daniel couldn’t make me—even Esther got to choose.

“I heard they were going to America,” Daniel said. America. They were going to America. I felt excited again. “I went to talk to them.” He looked down at the red stain of beets on his plate and wiped his beard. I liked that about Daniel, that he remembered to wipe his beard.

“I don’t know what’s best to do,” he said. He was trying to look as serious as Papa and I didn’t like that so much.

“What’s to do?” Esther asked. She never understood anything. Obviously Daniel was going to America, leaving us all to rot in Kishinev. Very exciting. I stood up and went to the window. Maybe my real brother was still outside and this man was an impostor.

“Chava, please, come sit down, I’m not done yet.” Everyone was always telling me what to do, but I did what he said. “So, Chava, what do you think, would you like to go to America with the Petrovskys?”

Me? He was talking about me? I tried not to show my feelings. “What about Esther? And Sarah?” I asked.

“Esther has the house for her dowry. You want to stay here with Nathan, don’t you?” Esther nodded. “And Sarah,” he shook his head, “Sarah can’t go to America because of her eye.”

“You need a certain kind of eye to go to America?”

Yes, don’t be so smart. You do need a certain kind of eye to go to America. We don’t even have to send Sarah to a doctor to know they won’t let her in. Sarah must stay with Esther and Nathan and Bobe Malka.”

I could see that Esther was finally listening. She was realizing that when she married Nathan, me and Sarah would have to stay with them until they could find us husbands.

“I don’t like to break up the family,” Daniel said. “America is a long way. You don’t have to go, Chava. But I thought, there’s no place for you here.” I understood what he was saying and actually thought Daniel wanted to give me an opportunity.

“In America,” he continued, “a girl can go to work herself and can go to school too. They have free schools in America, even for girls.” Of course I knew this already. What did he think, I didn’t know about the letters all the yentes got? They used to come to Mama to read them, and I’d hear everything about America. But I didn’t know about the eyes. I wished Sarah could come with me. Would Esther and Nathan be able to take better care of her than I could in America?