Broken Song (10 page)

“Mama? No, Rachel.” His face turned stern. “We’re singing the latke song.”

“Mama,” Rachel repeated. “Mama, Papa, Prinka.”

The trees around them swirled. The flames of their small fire suddenly became tongues, all crying “Mama.” Rachel’s face had turned red, her cheeks slick with tears. Reuven felt a panic seize him. What should he do? He reached for Rachel and grabbed her to him, pressing her to his chest. He buried his face in the thick nubbly knit
of her little wool hat. He could smell her hair through it. He could smell her diaper. What in God’s name was he to do with this smelly howling baby in the middle of Russia?

“This isn’t fair!” he cried. “This is not fair! I can’t be doing this. I know nothing about babies. I am not a father. I am not a mother. I am a brother. They are gone, Rachel! They are gone! They are all gone!”

“Gone,” Rachel said. The single word rang like a chime in the dense forest. She looked up and touched his wet cheeks. He saw a look of confusion in her eyes. She scrambled out of his lap and stood up.

“Gone.” She said the word again and paused, as if she were listening to its sound. “Gone, gone, gone.” She stomped her feet on the cleared ground near their fire. It was a sound to her, a meaningless sound. In that instant, Reuven realized that fairness had nothing to do with anything. They had each other, and that was all they had in this world. It was all that counted.

As Rachel stomped on the ground and repeated the word, he watched her antic shadow lace between the light of the flames cast from the fire, her little arms jerking, her head bobbing. Her shadow grew longer until it became tangled with his own shadow’s hunched still form. The little shadow stomped away and stretched. With the little peaked cap, it could have been that of a fierce devil of the woods—the arms slashing the night frantically in some kind of manic dance.

“Gone! Gone! Gone!” Rachel’s voice roared into the blackness of the night.

TWELVE

60 KILOMETERS TO VILNA.

“No! It can’t be.” Reuven stared at the sign at the crossroads dumbfounded. They had been on the road for three days already. He had been sure they would be in Vilna tonight. He thought he had already crossed the Russian-Polish border. But he had been mistaken. This sign meant three more days, three more days at least! He was exhausted. They had eaten the last of the veal. His left foot had a blister the size of a latke. They were out of clean nappies, and Rachel stunk to high heaven.

Suddenly he heard rowdy voices. From the other road that led at a right angle into the main road where they now stood, Reuven saw a group of men. Not just any men. They were Cossacks, and not just any Cossacks. By the light of the now full moon Reuven could see the flash of the gold braid, the white plumes on their helmets, and the silver glint of their crossed bandoliers. They were the most elite contingent, part of the tsar’s personal regiment.

“Oy yoy yoy!” Reuven gasped.

“Oy yoy yoy.” Rachel mimicked him perfectly.

Reuven immediately dropped to his knees with Rachel still in her basket strapped to his back. They had
to get as low to the ground as possible. The side of the road dipped into a deep culvert. He scrambled for it. The snow had melted, and he felt the wet marshy ground beneath his knees. Luckily there was a screen of thick weeds and stalks, now sere and dry, from the previous summer. He slipped the basket from his shoulders and pulled Rachel out. He felt better holding her in his arms. If she began to talk too loudly, he could put his hand over her mouth.

“Hungry,” she demanded. He reached for their last hunk of bread and gave it to her.

He put his finger to his mouth. “Ssshh. You must be very quiet, Rachel.”

She put her finger up to her mouth and very loudly said, “Ssssh.”

“No, Rachel. I mean it—very quiet.”

They could now hear the thud of the horses’ hooves. There was drunken singing. Maybe the soldiers were too drunk to notice them. But if they were discovered, drunk Cossacks were the worst of all. The alcohol made them terrible. The clouds scudded off the moon and the entire landscape turned silvery bright. It was a warm night for this time of year, and there was a dampness in the air. Reuven watched as a fringe of tiny beads of moisture collected on Rachel’s dark eyelashes, turning them silver. Then a long shadow cut across the drainage ditch and against the bleached ground—a horse’s head snorting and tossing that appeared like a moving silhouette. Then there was a crisscross of shadows as dozens of horses’ legs latticed the night. It was as if he and Rachel were being trampled by shadows. The Cossacks were so
close. Reuven could have almost reached up and touched one of the clopping hooves. The tall black boots in silver stirrups glimmered with the light of the moon.

A tiny voice began to sing. “I have a little potato—”

Reuven clapped his hand over Rachel’s mouth. She squirmed violently in his arms. He felt her hot little breath trying to scream. Why in God’s name did she have to choose this time to sing the latke song? Her feet were thrashing now. His other arm wrapped around her legs. He looked in her face. Never had he seen such fury in her eyes.
She is hating me, but by God this is the way it has to be
! he vowed.

Reuven did not know how long it took the Cossacks to pass. It seemed like forever, but it might not have been more than three minutes, as there were only twenty or twenty-five of them. When they finally did pass and he took his hand away from Rachel’s face, he did not hear the yowl he had expected. She merely whimpered and rubbed her nose. This made him feel worse.

“I’m sorry, Rachel. I really am.” She didn’t even look up at him.

Although the Cossacks had headed off in the opposite direction from Vilna, Reuven made a quick decision that the moonlight was too bright for them to be out on this road. It was a good road too, and with still sixty kilometers to go he was reluctant to leave it for the shelter of the thick forest. Perhaps tomorrow the night would be cloudy and they could travel on it again. But for now the safer choice was to go into the woods. So with Rachel on his back, he climbed out of the ditch and
headed across a barren field to the wooded land at its far edge.

There was much less snow in these woods than the others they had been in, and he heard the howl of what could only be a wolf. But what was a wild wolf next to a Cossack? The thought caught him up short. Children were supposed to be afraid of wolves. There were dozens of stories about wolves slipping into pastures and killing sheep or worse, sliding through the shadows of the night right into homes where they would snatch babies from their cradles. But he could not imagine that wolves could be any more savage than the Cossacks who had broken into their home in Berischeva and murdered his parents and sister. Wolves might even be reasonable in comparison. So the occasional howl that laced the night air did not disturb Reuven as it would have two weeks before.

Suddenly the trees in the forest seemed to thin and he found himself in a clearing.

“What’s this?” he asked. But there was no “uh-oh” popping up from the basket, only the soft snoring sounds of Rachel, who was sound asleep. Reuven squinted. There was this clearing and then a short way beyond it, no more than one hundred meters away, he could swear he spied another road. He began walking quickly.

Indeed it was a road, and not a bad one at that. He had no idea which way to turn on it, left or right. But he saw a sign post to the left so he began walking toward it. There was only one marker pointing west. The words were B
RYZNCK
2
KILOMETERS
. He read the name and then said it again out loud. Where had he heard that
name before? Like a bell with a muffled clapper, the name rang dimly somewhere in his memory.

“Bryznck!” he burst out.

“Uh-oh.” Rachel raised her head, fully alert now.

“Bryznck! Rachel, Bryznck!” Of course, Bryznck was the village of the Baron Radzinsky, Uncle Chizor’s baron! And it was only two kilometers away Reuven must have crossed the border into Poland without even knowing it. He knew that the baron’s house was very near the border. Vilna was still sixty kilometers north, according to the sign on the road where he had encountered the Cossacks. The only thing he could figure was that somehow he had gained distance west toward Poland but was much farther south than he had anticipated. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. His only thought was to get to the baron’s estate. It would not be hard. He remembered from his uncle’s descriptions that there was barely a town. Whatever townspeople did exist worked primarily on the estates of the baron, who owned virtually all the surrounding land. The road took a sharp swing to the right. A sign appeared, announcing in both Russian and Polish that at this point the lands of the baron Drago Radzinsky began and all hunting was expressly forbidden.

“Come on, Rachel. Let’s go.”

The big iron gates leading into the baron’s estate were shut. But it did not take Reuven more than five minutes to find a way in by scrambling over the stone pilings that anchored each end of the gates. And now he was on the drive. It was just like Uncle Chizor had described. Huge
white oaks on either side of the drive. When he looked to the east, he could see a faint rose tint in the sky as the skin of the night peeled away and the first light of the new day broke. He supposed that he and Rachel should not knock on the door as soon as they got there. It would be awfully early. He imagined that barons slept late. In the distance he could just make out the portico. In another five minutes, they would be there.

He saw the lions, and then suddenly their stone mouths seemed to drop open and out rushed the most bloodcurdling barks. Reuven felt Rachel lurch in her basket and scream. Five hounds with their fangs bared raced around the corner of the portico and lunged at them. He did not run. Instead, some instinct made him drop to his knees. Keeping his eyes down, he extended his open palms to the dogs. He crooned softly the melody of one of the first Chopin etudes he had ever learned on the violin. The dogs’ barks became a blend of whelpings and mewlings and they began to back away. A shadow in the pink light of morning moved over him.

“A baby?” a man said first in Polish and then quickly in Russian. Reuven felt a hand cup his chin.

“Up, my boy,” the man said.

Reuven raised himself up, still shaking from the dogs. He did not have to ask. He knew that the man standing before him with the neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, the patch over one eye, and the scar that sliced diagonally down the left cheek was Baron Drago Radzinsky.

“Sir, my name is Reuven Bloom and this is my sister, Rachel. Our uncle is Chizor Bloom. Chizor has gone to
America already, but our village was burned. Our mother and father and sister were killed by the Cossacks. Rachel and I are all that is left.”

Reuven dared now to look directly into the baron’s face. He saw that the man had become very pale. His eyes were filled with a dim sad light and his mouth quivered.

“So these dogs were nothing next to the Cossacks. I understand.” He spoke in such a low voice that Reuven almost had to strain to hear him.

THIRTEEN