Beyond the Pale: A Novel (9 page)

“You see how she is,” Reb Kohn said. It seemed like he was talking to me, though he didn’t look my way. He would probably rather talk to a ghost. “She may see conspiracies everywhere, but she knows what’s good for the business.”

Pesah rolled her eyes as we went into the courtyard.

Business was good not only because of so many foreigners in town, but because of an outbreak of illness. Smaller than a plague, the disease gave people fevers, chills, terrible pains and congestion. Some were dying. People thought sweating was healthy, that it drew the sickness out of you. Milcah said this was pure superstition, that people who were sick should stay home and not risk spreading it. When she told this to Pesah, Pesah got so mad her voice trembled.

“Who made you a doctor? And tell me, did you enjoy your classes at the university in Saint Petersburg? I have been running this bathhouse for twenty years. Nothing cures a person of sickness like a good sweat and maybe a little cupping, if it’s serious.”

“Maybe the cupping helps remove bad blood, but coughing and dripping in each other’s faces spreads disease. ‘Don’t lie down with a healthy head in a sick bed,’” Milcah replied. She was one of the few women in town who wasn’t cowed by Pesah’s size and self-possession.

“Are you telling me my bathhouse spreads disease?”

“Pesah, calm yourself, please. This is not about you personally. You and I, we both have a trust for the health of Jews. You can’t take that lightly.”

“I’m up from sunrise to the middle of the night, scrubbing, cleaning, because I take my duty lightly? Maybe I’ve had enough of you this week, Mrs.-Speaks-With-Angels. Go. Go home, crush a few herbs.”

Two weeks later my mother, Feygele, started coughing. I was busy tending to births and sickbeds with Milcah, so I didn’t notice how badly off she was until her groans woke me one night. She had thrown her covers off, her face was hot, almost burning to the touch. I ran to get Milcah through the unpaved streets, my shadow jumping sideways in front of and behind the oil lamps.

“Please, I know you’re angry at Pesah but my mother—”

Milcah followed me home. Pesah was already sitting by the bed, holding my mother’s hand, rocking back and forth.

“You want to help?” Milcah said to Pesah, “here, heat these.” She handed her folded rags full of clay and nettles. They didn’t say another word to each other the entire week Feygele lay there, growing sicker and smaller.

My mother and I shared a room behind the stable, with a narrow iron bed and a straw pallet beside the stove. She insisted I take the bed after I started apprenticing because, she said, I had two jobs and she only had one. While she was sick I went back to sleeping on the pallet, as I had when I was a child. And I felt like a child again, in everyone’s way, unsure of what I should do.

“A midwife has to learn to bear trouble even when it comes close,” Milcah said as gently as she could.

“But what good is everything I learned, and your bat kol, when I didn’t even notice my mother getting sick right in front of me? Why couldn’t I see it?”

Milcah opened her mouth as if to say a proverb but thought better of it. “Sometimes we do better by strangers than our own. No one knows why. I won’t expect you this week. You stay by your mother.”

Pesah avoided Milcah when she came to change the poultices or administer a tincture. On the third night she muttered, “That woman has no idea what she’s doing.”

“Pesah, we have to do something.”

“Oh, Shayne,” she said, wrapping her big arms around me, “I’m sorry. Of course, we have to do something.”

But Feygele pushed the poultices off and spit out Milcah’s potions. A smell like wet burning leaves lingered in the room, and then a smell of sulfur. On the eighth night, my mother gestured for me to come close.

“Gutke,” she whispered. My name seemed torn out of her throat, and I waited for the important thing I knew she wanted to tell me.

She asked for a little of Pesah’s plum jam.

“Anything, Mama,” I said. The corners of her mouth turned up slightly.

I ran to get the jam and Pesah followed me back. When we got there, she was dead.

They say blood drops from the sword of the Angel of Death into water where someone dies. Pesah emptied all the water from every bucket, every tub, even the mikve, although Feygele died in her own bed. Pesah kept turning around in circles: first the water, then covering the mirrors, then hammering together boxes for us to sit on and cry. At least she could move. I felt as if every muscle in my body had turned to stone.

I never thought so many people would come. All day, morning and afternoon, the house was full of visitors. Many, I know, came because of Pesah and Reb Kohn, who knew almost every Jew in town. But I saw how my mother’s hardworking spirit had touched people—she was always kind, never gossiped. She only let Pesah and me close to her, but her gentleness and singing voice were a sweet spirit in the bathhouse. The other workers and the women she attended appreciated her, even the ones who suspected her story was not entirely the truth, the ones who called me a mamzer behind Feygele’s back. Reb Kohn finally admitted that it was a mitsve for everyone that Pesah had taken my mother in, and he paid for all the funeral expenses without a touch of bitterness.

I had never been to a funeral of someone I loved. A few times I went with grieving mothers to the burials of their dead; twice I stood behind the family when a woman had expired while giving birth, so I knew how the ritual went. Yet I never anticipated my mother’s death. She rarely complained of so much as an ache, though I would sometimes rub her back and legs with olive oil in the evenings. My little dark-eyed mother.

It was early spring. Standing among the people beside the open grave, I noticed the first leaves had just rolled open. The rabbi motioned to me. I picked up the shovel and threw a mound of dirt into my mother’s grave. As the dirt thudded against her coffin, a wail I didn’t expect shook my body. Pesah took the shovel from my hands, her own face streaked from weeping. She threw a shovelful in and we stepped back.

“Who will say kadish for this woman?” the rabbi asked.

I cleared my throat to speak and felt the full weight of Pesah’s hand on my shoulder. “In private, at home, not here,” she hissed in my ear. Milcah was on the other side of me, squeezing my hand.

Reb Kohn stepped forward and recited,
“Yis’gadal v’yiskadash sh’may rabah…”

I was so angry I had a fresh burst of tears. Everyone thought it was my gratitude to the man who had treated me like a father, or perhaps my grief over my mother. But I was furious at the way Jews clot around a wound, a death, making such a hard scab. It was always appearances that counted. I loved my mother—I was the one who should be mourning and praying for her, the one whose kadish God should have heard first. I was the one she gave up her life for, the one who walked to Kishinev with her. I had the right and the obligation. I wanted to scream at them. Pesah’s hand tightened. I kept crying and everyone thought I was a wonderful daughter.

I stood between Pesah and Milcah. They glared at each other. I could hear them, though they didn’t speak a word.

—Your fault for not listening to me.

—And what was I supposed to do? Close the baths? Your fault for putting the evil eye on me.

And both of them believed, yes, they could have prevented this. They should have known. A few herbs. A week of rest.

I left them staring at each other and walked alone to the edge of the cemetery. I was looking up at the patterns the leaves made, wondering where my mother had gone, when I felt someone standing beside me. I turned, expecting to look into my mother’s face. Golde’s dark eyes startled me.

“I’m sorry.”

“My mother—” I intended to give some easy epigram. Instead I started to weep, not in anger anymore but because my poor mother—what did she ever have? “My mother had no pleasure,” I was surprised to hear myself say. What a thing for a Jew to even think: Pleasure!

Golde quickly put her arms around me. Her sweet smell mixed with the smell of death that was still strong in my nostrils.

“Sha, of course she did. Of course she did, Gutke.” Golde, who had nothing to prove, was such a relief after Pesah and Milcah’s stubborn guilts. Although I was a little bigger than her, I felt at home when she held me. This time there was no fog, only relief.

She stroked my hair and kept talking softly. “All you ever saw was that your mother worked and sang. But I saw how she loved you, how she relied on you and Pesah. Every day that you were all together and safe was a miracle to her. She was a woman who had faith in little miracles and they sustained her. Faith is a kind of pleasure, Gutke. But it’s right to feel terrible now. I remember when my mother died—,” I moved out of her embrace but held on to her hand. “I felt something like what you just said, that my mother never had enough in life, my father and brothers stole all her time.”

“I’m sorry, Golde. I didn’t realize.”

“No need to apologize. Time makes it easier, even if we never forget. Today it’s your turn for a little comfort, Gutke. Come, walk with me. Cry as much as you want for your mother.”

When the proscribed seven days of mourning were over and Pesah uncovered the mirrors, I told her I thought I had finished my apprenticeships.

“Yes,” she agreed, hardly looking at me, “You always learned quickly. You probably know more than Milcah by now.”

“I don’t know if I ever will know as much as Milcah. She’s a very learned woman.”

“Even the wisest women can be fools.”

“Pesah, you’re not listening to me. Enough between you and Milcah—it wasn’t either of your faults that Feygele died. God gives with one hand and takes away with the other, you know that.”

“Oy, I’m sorry, Gutke, shayne, I should be the one saying that to you.”

“Pesah, this isn’t easy for me.”

“No, of course not.” She misunderstood me and pressed my hand against her breast, to soothe me. I waited a second before pulling it away.

“No, I mean leaving.”

“Leaving Milcah?”

“Yes. And leaving here.”

“Leaving here? But why? Where would you go?” She was startled and as soon as the startle left her, she was full as a steam engine ready to explode. I immediately wanted to take it back. “You can’t leave. It’s my duty to your mother, of blessed memory, to make a dowry for you and see you married.”

“Pesah, I appreciate your goodwill and generosity. But I can make my own way in the world now. I have a trade and I’m healthy and young. I have no interest in being married yet. You have been as much a mother to me as Feygele and I have no intention of deserting you—only of testing my own strength.”

“Testing your own strength! And where will you go?”

“Golde Zelkin has a little room behind her shop where I can live.”

“For this you leave me? To live behind an old maid’s pitiful store? This is your big adventure in life? What makes this more appealing than living here with me?”

“I grew up in the baths, Pesah. Now I have to be a working woman on my own.”

She drummed her fingers on the table. She got up, paced the room and looked out the window. I looked over her shoulder as a couple men ran through the courtyard but Pesah was oblivious. She sighed and turned around.

“You really mean to leave me all alone?”

“Alone? Pesah, you’re not alone. Every day people crowd around to tell you the latest gossip, to eat at your table. Your friend Sadie doesn’t miss a weekday meal here. And Reb Kohn—”

“Please.”

“But anyway, you’re hardly alone.” I heard a sound like thunder a long way off.

“What’s that? Not rain?” Pesah was momentarily distracted.

The sun streamed through the window panes. “I think your laundry is safe for at least a few more hours,” I said. I had an uneasy sensation but let it go as Pesah resumed her complaint.

“Your mother, now you. You have no pity on an old woman.”

I put my hands on her shoulders. I was only a head shorter than her, which made me among the tallest Jewish women in Kishinev, but she was still twice as wide, if not quite as big as she used to be. “Of course you will miss me. I’ll miss you. It’s sad but no reason for pity. You’re not some helpless incompetent. You’re a tower of strength, a beacon of Israel.” I quoted what the rabbi recited at my mother’s funeral: “‘Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.’”

“You! You could talk the snake into giving up its poison.”

“I had a good teacher.”

“Enough with the flattery. Go on, if you’re going to go. Get your things.”

What did I have? The talis vest Milcah made, my clothes, a few books on medicine, the storybook Pesah gave me when I was a child and a Yiddish translation of
David Copperfield
. My mother’s candlesticks, my knife and tools for birth, an assortment of herbs and potions. When I was ready, Pesah handed me a heavy bag. It was crammed with rubles.

“What’s this?” I said, amazed.

“It’s your mother’s wages. You think she was a slave here? Not in my house. She saved almost every kopeck. For your dowry. You should marry a yeshive bokher, someone from a good family. You’re eighteen, off on your own. I give it to you.”

“But the cost of the funeral—”

“Don’t insult. This was an honor to me, and to Reb Kohn even, to bury Feygele Gurvich. And this—.” From her cabinet, Pesah handed me an old Chanukah menorah, an oil one, not like the ones for candles they make now. “This was my own grandmother’s. I’m not giving it to any of Reb Kohn’s daughters-in-law, I can tell you that. You take good care of it.”

We stood there sighing, looking at each other. I’m not sure how long men were yelling in the background before we heard them. What now? Pesah turned back to the window. The courtyard had filled with Russian cavalry.

“Quick, hide all your things. Get in the root cellar.” Her reaction was instant, instinctual.

“I’m not leaving you alone up here.”

“Do what I tell you! Go on.”

I hid the money and my bag, staying on the stairs to the root cellar, listening. Pesah was talking with a man, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. No screams, no “hep! hep!” I came out again.