The Little Bride (10 page)

“What. You’d rather die?”

“Ha,” Minna said to the window. She didn’t want to be a stepmother any more than she’d wanted to have one. When the rabbis came knocking, encouraging her father to find another wife—
Bavegn!
Move on!—Minna would stand in the corner and glare. The only stepmothers she’d known—or not known, no, stepmothers one only saw—were odd, quickly aging women with an acute jumpiness about them. They’d been divorced for not bearing children, or driven from their own villages for unknown but easily imagined reasons, or they were simply too dumb or poor or ugly to have married on the first round. Stepmothers communed with other women, but as inferiors. From what Minna could gather, the stepmother was expected to love another woman’s children as if they were her own, but not so intimately that she was—like a real mother—also allowed to hate or punish them.

“Where are you even from?” she asked Jacob. “Or will you make that up, too.”

“Kotelnia. South of Kiev. It was a town, like the others. Our mother sold wood.” He paused. “That’s the truth.”

“Have you heard of Beltsy? Near Kishinev?”

“No.”

Minna frowned.

“Have you heard of Kotelnia?” he asked.

“No.”

Jacob shrugged. “Well then.”

 

 

T
HE train drove through another night. When Minna woke, the forest had fallen away to clumps and lines of trees. The land was pale and dry. There were fields, and houses, and every so often a dirt street lined with wooden buildings that could almost count as a town. Minna felt blank, almost fine, watching all this. There were yards to go with the houses, and in some cases fences. Everything looked dusty but new, as if the whole country was a woodshop.

“For you.”

Jacob’s voice cracked. She woke more fully. Her circumstances returned to her. She tried to ignore them by making her eyelids heavy, narrowing her frame of sight. Even the people, she thought, looked dusty. Later, she would learn to distinguish them—Swedes or Danes or Germans or Finns—but for now she noted their pale, strangely simple clothes, and the mild way they held their faces, as if without great expectation. She could get off at the next station, she thought, and drop herself down among them.

“Minna.”

Jacob handed her coffee in one of the tins he carried looped around his belt. A couple days ago, she had thought this habit charming, but now it struck her as a cumbersome, impractical thing to do, an American affectation though she suspected he got it wrong, just like the grass between his teeth which he often wound up chewing, absentmindedly, until he’d swallowed it. The tin was too thin for hot coffee, the kind she associated with street people. Minna set it down on the bench untasted, forcing Jacob, when he sat, not to spread his legs as wide as usual. She wondered if his father and brother took up as much unnecessary space; if, at the next station, she could in fact work up the courage to step off the train and be gone. She imagined herself standing on the platform. She imagined herself walking down one of the pale, dusty streets. But she couldn’t fill in any of the details—where she would go, what she would eat, who she would meet and how she would understand them, or they her. It was fantasy, all over again—Minna Losk, lost in fantasy. Which had got her, thus far, where? On a train hurtling past towns that were not hers, heading for a not-farm with not-sons and a lame mule.

“Aren’t you going to eat?”

She had avoided, so far, looking at the rolls Jacob brought for breakfast. She had principles. She had anger to attend to. But now she was defeated, and hungry, and she peeked: the rolls were frosted in white, like little cakes. Saliva sat on her tongue. She turned toward the window as she took the first bite, which left an addictive sting on her tongue—the frosting stiff and perfect, the inner roll flaky, a luxurious waft of vanilla bean filling the roof of her mouth—and when she’d eaten the whole thing, her fingers and lips were sticky. There was nothing to do but wash it down with the coffee, then take the handkerchief that Jacob held out and wipe her hands.

“You could be my sister,” he said.

Minna threw the handkerchief back at him. But he wasn’t joking, she realized. His face was humble, like Ilya’s, a round boy face wanting nothing but to be liked. He didn’t mean it as she’d taken it, as a comment on her age. He meant
can.
You can be my sister.

“Why don’t you shush for once,” she told him. The roll had gone to her head, all sugar and a longing to give in. “Shush.”
Sister
. It was an indulgent thing for him to say. Not like a fine piece of jewelry might be indulgent, solidly, tolerably, but in the lazy, shapeless way people talked about places they’d never been to.

 

 

A
T some point when Minna wasn’t looking, the houses had grown less frequent. The trees were lonesome now, scattered in ones and twos. The fields had the parched look of late summer, the rows overgrown but crisp, as if you could reach a hand in and effortlessly lift the plants out by the roots. Even more of them looked like they’d never been planted at all. They weren’t fields, she realized; just rolling, empty land.

They were getting close, Jacob said—close, at least, to where the rail ended.

Late in the day, the sky began to look bruised. The falling sun followed them, crimson bleeding into plum. Far off, Minna saw smoke, but there was nothing between her and it except the desolate, purpling hills, and she couldn’t tell how far off it really was. It could be a warm house, or a factory, or a whole village burning.

But if there was fire, she thought, there had to be a woods somewhere. There had to be something apart from grass and grass.

“How old is he?” she asked.

“Max?”

“Who else?”

“He won’t tell you. He’s—suspicious.”

“I’m not asking him to tell me.” But already Minna wasn’t sure she wanted to know. “How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“And Samuel?”

“Eighteen.”

She thought of skin as old as her father’s and felt an illness in her throat.

“Your mother,” she said. “How old was she when she died?”

“Oh, she didn’t die.”

Minna was silent.

“She came to see the land, then said she was going back to Cincinnati. I have my suspicions. I think she would have gone somewhere bigger, like Chicago. She likes crowds.
‘Soh-ciety.’
There’s a word for you. But Samuel says she wouldn’t have gone that far from us. In any case, she only stayed two days.”

“It must be quite a place,” Minna said bitterly. “This ‘farm.’”

“She isn’t a rough sort of woman.”

“Unlike me, you mean?”

Jacob pulled a fresh piece of grass from his boot.

“He didn’t have to send away for a complete stranger,” Minna said. “He could have picked a wife the way most people do. Don’t you have any family left in Kotelnia? Friends, at least? Someone who knows someone?”

“A few.”

“Why not ask them to find him a nice wife who looked just like your mother?”

Jacob hesitated. “I don’t know, I guess. Maybe he didn’t want them to know she’d left.”

“So on top of being proud, he’s a coward?”

But Jacob’s eyes had taken on a forlorn glaze she didn’t want to look at, and Minna dropped the conversation. She understood. Max had hired Rosenfeld’s for the same reason that her father had gone to the mines. She turned her face back to the window. Night fell quick and dark between the hills, like rain filling puddles. She wished they weren’t almost at the end. She wanted to ride through to morning and wake in another land again. Farther on, according to Jacob, farther than they would go, there were real hills, even mountains, called Black like Odessa’s sea. Here, though, it was barren. Here was a place like the Russian steppes, where she’d heard wolves sniffed in packs and turned children into meat. She shivered at the idea of walking off the train into the dark. Jacob meant well, but he was not a man you’d trust to protect you. He wasn’t even a man.

He’d fallen asleep.

Or perhaps he hadn’t. It was hard to tell, when he started to talk suddenly, whether he was really asleep or just pretending to be. Minna guessed the latter when she saw his thumbs searching each other in his lap. “Forty to one hundred and twenty,” he said.

It took Minna a moment to understand what this meant. Then she recalled: in the Torah, Moses had lived to be one hundred and twenty. The men in Beltsy had used this number the same way, saying it after their own age so as to obscure their years and throw off the Angel of Death.

Which was another way to say: Max was forty. Which meant nothing, of course. Which should not cause this burn in Minna’s stomach. It was only years, piled up.

 

 

M
INNA’S dismay subsided a little as the train drew into the platform. There was a firebox raging, and lanterns swinging, and a reassuring commotion in the air. It was as if they had arrived backstage in the night’s theater—as if all the blackness had only been an illusion, manufactured here. She felt a surge of hope.

“Welcome to Mitchell,” Jacob said.

“Mishel.”

“MiTCHell.”

She tried, quietly; the word made her lips flop out. The air was warm but lacked any dampness. Her face felt taut in the way that made one remember it as a skin, a way she hoped would make her look older when Max first glimpsed her.

But Jacob, standing on tiptoe, was looking for a man called Otto. A neighbor, he explained, who’d offered to drive them back.

“Don’t you have a wagon? At least?” What sort of man missed—twice!—his new wife’s arrival? Minna wanted him to see her now, with her face taut. She had combed her hair—again. She was travel-worn, depleted, yet even this felt somehow womanly—her cheekbones, she imagined, looked high and indifferent. Minna’s cheekbones, Galina always said, were her one stroke of elegance.

“Of a sort,” Jacob said. “But only the one horse. The mule’s not much good for distance. We’re still most of the night from home. Besides, Otto’s picking up supplies off this run.”

Minna huffed. “Otto.”

“A German fellow! This tall.” He lifted an arm as high as it would go. “This broad.” He cupped his hands around vast shoulders of air. “A real American kind of German.”

They found Otto’s wagon, then Otto himself. He greeted Jacob with a handshake—briefer, Minna saw, than Jacob would have liked—then turned to Minna. He took her hand in his and spoke to Jacob in English.

“‘The little bride,’ he calls you,” Jacob said.

Otto’s face was warm and frank, so bare of artifice or beard Minna felt slightly embarrassed, and sorry for having thought of the German boys at the border waving urine-soaked sticks in women’s faces. Otto didn’t linger with her hand, and his ears stuck out, an awkwardness which tempered his height and struck her as further proof of his virtue. He took her bundle and lifted it into the back of his wagon, then Jacob helped him load two barrels of kerosene and a tall coil of rope. Otto nodded toward Minna and again said something to Jacob in English.

“You can speak to me in German,” Minna said to him slowly, in Yiddish. “I’ll understand you.”

Otto smiled and looked to Jacob.

“I’ve asked him to talk to me in English,” Jacob said. “For practice. He says you can use that rope, for a pillow.”

It was almost like a nest, once Minna settled in. She found a skin of some kind, and covered herself with it. Buffalo, she learned later. The wagon dipped and jounced, but the rope buffered her from the hardest blows. Her head fell back. She drifted through a haze of tobacco smoke and English, listening to the kerosene shift in the barrels.

Only much later, when she woke, did Minna remember her fear. How long they’d been driving, she was uncertain; she knew only that an utter, saturated darkness surrounded her. The men did not speak. There were stars, and a quarter moon, but these seemed more distant than Minna had ever known them to be. Her eyelids were heavy. She longed to sink into the rope again. But what of wolves? And what else might be watching from the unseeable stillness surrounding the wagon? She pushed herself upright. She rubbed her eyes, pulled on her eyelids, stared alertly into the red-black air.

Later, she would look back and think fear was like that for her, when she was young, and truly had things to fear: a thing to be remembered, like an item on a list. And so often she’d focused on the wrong ones: she’d feared the dark night, for instance, instead of her future. She would feel sorry for herself, that she’d missed certain wonders, and bit her fingers so often. She bit them now, guarding against sleep, but her fingertips were still callused from the yarn and the tactic wasn’t effective. She scuffed her boots against the wood floor, only half aware that she was also trying to rouse the men from their silence.

“We’re almost there,” Jacob said. “See?”

Minna climbed out of the rope and leaned out the wagon’s side. Up ahead was a light—a single, dim orb the color of sap. She couldn’t see the outlines of a house, just the light, which looked so odd, so out of place in the rest of the night, she felt a pity for it—as if it were the traveler and not she.

“Don’t worry.” Jacob spoke in Russian now, as if to keep something from Otto. “Think of it as an adventure,” he said. “That’s what I do. Every day. I just pretend I’m on one big adventure.”

Beside, the light, a figure rose. Otto called, “Hunh!”