Beyond the Pale: A Novel (4 page)

“Are mules like horses?”

“Yes, darling,” she laughed.

“You’re much more fun than a horse,” I said.

“Flatterer. What a child. I only hope you will be spared being sold to fools. That fool they tethered me to was Benjamin, my first husband. The farm wasn’t good enough for him, and I was restless enough to agree to anything. These potatoes are coming along nicely. Salt, rosemary—maybe I’ll add some of last year’s olives. Where was I?” She rubbed her big hands on a corner of her apron.

“Benjamin.”

“Oh, Benjamin. We packed up and came to a big shtetl. He carried bricks. I learned to trade in the market. From two eggs, I got a fish. From a fish, five kopecks.” She took deep breaths, turning and cooking, humming between the sentences. “For five kopecks, some plain cloth. I knew plants from my childhood. A certain herb makes wonderful red. Would you like me to show you sometime?”

I nodded, my mouth full of the fried potatoes she’d just given me.

“If you and your mother work out, I’ll show you everything. Red shawls I wrung from the cloth, three of them. The women admired my work. At the end of a week I had six rubles, my husband, only two. This you may not believe, but it’s God’s truth. So angry he got, he fell down dead. Would you cry for a shlemil like that?”

I shook my head no. She pinched my cheek. “Well, then I had eight rubles and it took four to bury him. I saved up every kopeck and finally traveled to the big city. To me, the sidewalks in Kishinev were an event—oh, and the balloons. Have you ever seen a balloon?”

“A balloon?”

“You and your mother really did come from the shtetl, didn’t you? Well, I remember how that feels. I got work in a tavern. People think a fat woman will know how to cook and give good portions. You’re lucky it’s true of me, though there are plenty of days I never want to see a chopping board again. And all that time, working, I still wanted—oh, who knows what? Want, what is it? The moon would fit in my hand if I could reach it. I always believed there was no great thing I could not do if I had a chance.”

She sighed and added logs to the fire, then filled up a kettle bigger than me with water. “How did I end up here, you want to know? There was a widower. He liked how I cooked and organized. He had boys who needed a mother. I told him, I am not a mother. I had enough of children on my parents’ farm. ‘But it’s commanded,’ he said, as if that would convince me. They have their books, they can tell you anything is written. They think they’re very important because they know the secret language of God. If you ask me, God speaks in onions. But who asks? Now don’t tell Reb Kohn I said that. Turned out he owned the baths. A prosperous, respectable man, even if too pious for my taste.”

Pesah lifted a basket of peaches onto the work table as if it were empty and started cutting up the fruit. Every once in a while she’d pop a sweet sliver in my mouth. I swung my legs back and forth and smiled at her.

“We made a deal,” she said, adding some peaches to the boiling water. “I agreed to farm his sons. It was, after all, easier than plowing a field. And I managed the business. Plainly I’m a woman who can get things done. We arranged to live as man and wife—oh, what should a child know about these things? You know marriage allows the man to come into your bed, don’t you? But I made Reb Kohn agree that we could have separate rooms. I get satisfaction enough by working, cooking, taking care of the baths and the garden. He was always a little, fussy man; even you can see that, can’t you? My conditions suited him fine. It was really a business deal. The matchmaker says all the best marriages are. After we had the ceremony, I had my photograph taken on the steps of the baths. Wouldn’t my mother have been surprised! Of course she’s gone and there are no more Jewish farms. We all scattered. If hunger didn’t send us off, the decrees did. The less you ever know about that, the better.” She stopped for a moment, staring at the back of the stove.

“I like the baths, though. I’ve learned how to read people and how to keep what I know to myself. For instance, I can see you think I’m just going to spoil you, that I have a weak spot for little girls. But I’m not all that good-natured. You’ll have work of your own, Shayne, any minute now, you’ll see. I just want you to get strong again, after your long walk. Everyone thinks I’m a soft touch and you can’t stop what they think about big women any more than you can stop the Jew-haters, but when you know me, you’ll learn how tough I can be. Oh, don’t be scared. I’d never hurt a child like you!”

I gulped down the fruit in my mouth. When I looked at Pesah, an orange-red light seemed to fringe her body, as if she were an autumn leaf. “I’m not scared,” I said. “I’d like to work.”

“You would, would you? Plenty of time for that. Do you like peach jam? This is going to be a very good batch. You’re lucky to be living now. When I was a girl there wasn’t so much as a train. I comfort myself with the wonders of steam and engines. And my work. I have garlic, I have onions. This year both the potatoes and the peaches are good. I feed whoever comes.”

I had never been in a bathhouse before. We always washed in the river, and in winter wiped ourselves clean from well-water heated on the stove. The bathhouse was a fairy tale, full of steam and pipes, faucets and pumps, with a hallway of rooms with doors and, of course, the mikve pool at one side of the main room, where women immersed for purification after they bled or gave birth.

In the courtyard between the Kohns’ house and the baths, a horse moved ceaselessly around a treadmill, pumping water from the river into the bathhouse. There was a little stable on one side of the courtyard and two plum trees shading a garden on the other, with grape vines all around and olive trees beside the rear entrance. Behind the Kohns’ house were another eight fruit trees—peaches and a different kind of plum. This was a whole world to me, and quite enough of a world after the ordeal of walking.

Pesah had convinced Reb Kohn they should have two horses that could each work a half day, so they might last longer and give more value. When my mother and I arrived, one of the horses was very old and one fairly young. The young one was spotted gray and white and was harnessed for seven hours a day, the old one for six. I could pet the unharnessed one, feed him oats and a little dried fruit, but the one going round and round had to be left alone.

My mother worked like those horses, though at least she had a bigger circle. She was up before dawn lighting the kitchen fire and pumping water for the house. Then she was cleaning the bathhouse, scrubbing the floors, stoking the fires for steam. Then she was helping the mothers with children undress and washing their towels.

Pesah was a magician in her own way. She never spoke harshly to anyone, never let anyone whip her horses. She just told my mother how to scrape the benches in the steam room or let her know that the windows needed washing, and my mother understood it was her job. She would work and sweat without stop until Pesah would notice her and say, “Enough for a little bit. Come have some cold soup and bread, a plum maybe you’d like?” And then it would seem as if Pesah was the fountain of relief instead of work.

And often enough I think she was. I was kept busy from the week after we arrived, cleaning the dirt off potatoes, and later filling buckets in the bathhouse. My mother worked harder than Pesah ever asked, to show her gratitude and ensure our safety. Pesah was usually up before my mother, checking to see if there were enough towels and wood in the baths, checking the cleanliness of the men’s side before the men appeared. She was the last to turn down the lamps at night, after she finished her evening’s sewing.

She also had a little wine-making concern, plum and grape wines, which both she and Reb Kohn sold to their bathhouse customers. They were always very careful and secretive—God forbid the authorities should know, though I am sure the rabbi blessed it for kosher. Making wine was only supposed to be for rich Russians, but many Jews still kept taverns and had licenses to deal in liquor. Pesah was always giving a bribe to someone, even though she told the police it was part of the business of the bath, something about Jewish ritual she made up to confuse them.

“You see how they are,” she was instructing me how to be in the world. “They are always suspicious, always wanting an excuse to take what we have away. But they know nothing about us, except what their priests tell them. So you can tell them anything, twist their ignorance in your hand like the braids of a challah loaf, make something from it for yourself. But don’t make a mistake or ever show you’re laughing at them. They don’t want to ever see you smile. Their stupidity has no innocence in it. Ignorance is not like a child—you are a child, my sweet sugar lump, my shayne, and you are curious about everything. Ignorance is the opposite, closed, frightened, spiteful. Russians!”

Pesah hired Russians sometimes. Usually only the stablehand, who would be the Shabbes goy as well, and sometimes others for outside repairs or heavy digging, but never for inside the baths. I never saw a woman—or a man, even—stronger than her. Proverbs says, “She girds her loins with strength, she strengthens her arms,” and that’s how Pesah was. She ordered flour by the sack and would lift the sacks off the cart as if they were featherbeds, while the men strained with their burdens.

Pesah fed all the workers a midday meal: the yardhand, four boys from the men’s bath, the barber who did cupping with leeches for the men, three women who came every day for the women’s side and to help with the children, her friend Sadie who did the cupping for women and helped her with cooking, my mother and me. For everyone it was a feast compared to what they had at home. Always black bread and onions and cucumbers, radishes, cold or fried potatoes with salt and oil, olives, fresh fruit, watermelons in season or plum preserves in winter. If it was very cold, maybe a barley soup, and on Tuesdays Pesah usually added herring, sometimes a stew with a little chicken or beef tongue when times were very good. Because on Tuesday, she would say, it was easiest to forget the promise of the sabbath and think that we were nothing more than horses turning around endlessly in our tracks. And besides, it’s written that on a Tuesday, God looked at creation and was pleased. So Tuesday is a lucky day.

Everyone worked hard and ate as much as they could hold. Reb Kohn hardly ever ate this meal with us. He thought it was both extravagant and demeaning how Pesah fed the workers and ate with them herself. “And isn’t it said that after the destruction of the Temple, the table became the altar of the Jewish people?” was her reasoning. She listened to everything people said at the baths, the women’s arguments, the men’s disputations on the steps, the students Reb Kohn brought home for dinner—and she never forgot anything. He couldn’t make any arguments against anything she did. She was a giant and he was just an ordinary, little man.

The workers got paid two rubles on Thursdays so they could get what they needed for Shabbes, but I don’t remember Pesah ever paying my mother. To her, we became like her own family. We needed something, she would get it. She would give me a few kopecks every week so I could buy myself sweets or little toys, and she would sew all our clothes herself. This made my mother particularly love her. Pesah would ask her opinion about the cloth and the patterns, and when everything was agreed, we would get measured.

“Come, undress now, I’ll see how big we have to make the waist and bust,” Pesah would say. Every time my mother would blush. “All day long we see women naked in the baths. You should blush here in front of me, Feygele? You could fit inside me three times already and still there would be room. Come, we’ll see.”

And Feygele would undress in front of Pesah, a pink running under her skin, which was almost as dark as plums. Pesah had a long cord that she marked with ink for the measurements. Two lines for the breast, one for the waist, a circle for the hips, a triangle for the upper arms. She would wrap the cord around my mother’s upper arm, then wrap another cord around her own, and compare them, laughing. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing to make a little dress for you, hardly anything to it!”

My mother would frown and Pesah would lean over and kiss her on the forehead. After all, the bee knows its strength and touches the flower just enough to get what it needs. “It’s the heart that counts in us, isn’t it, Feygele? Our hearts are the same size and that’s what matters.”

Once my mother told me that this was the biggest reproach she ever felt. No one had a heart bigger than Pesah Kohn, she thought. Pesah’s heart was as big as her belly, while my mother thought her own heart was no bigger than my one gold eye. I wanted to tell her she was wrong but I couldn’t lie. Instead I held her hand and told her she was the best mother I could ever want, which was truth enough for both of us. Feygele was like a horse with blinders on. You think the horse doesn’t know? Yet the horse has no way to shake them off. That’s how it was with my mother. She was set in her course and she was loyal to everyone who ever spoke a kind word to her. She knew there was a world full of miracles outside her, as if flies carried the news to her ears. But see it for herself? She couldn’t; there was no way to shake off her restraints.

My mother never asked Pesah for a ruble for herself, but she made her promise that I would get some education. To do this was a mitsve to Pesah, a way to work a blessing. Of course Pesah made as if it were her own idea, which pleased my mother just as well. I don’t remember Reb Kohn protesting, probably he never knew. Pesah could read Yiddish and knew how to keep the books with a counting frame. She knew a few prayers in Hebrew and I think she could actually speak Russian quite well. She had the idea that I should be able to read Russian as well as Yiddish, and maybe German too.

“The world is big outside the bathhouse, but it all comes here to be laid out,” Pesah said one day in the kitchen. “The men draw maps in steam explaining things to each other; sometimes I find their outlines on the walls. They argue about Mendelssohn, Chernyshevksy, religion all day long. I want you to be able to read the Haskole newspapers from Germany that explain about this ‘enlightenment.’ It won’t be enough for you just to make a nice seam. When you get married, I want you to have a choice. I want you to have someone you can talk to, who will be interested in what you have to say.”