The Little Bride (16 page)

“I don’t—”

“You need no company, yet you want to be seen.”

Flaps of veil stung white in the corners of Minna’s eyes. She wanted to pull it down again and sink back into the fog.

“Try again,” Ruth said. “What is it you mean?”

Minna wiped sweat from her forehead. How old was Ruth? Forty? Twenty-five? Behind her, the children were running across the dead field, kicking up dust, cocoa powder. “I only meant, it’s a flour sack. I meant, why not call it what it is.”

Ruth nodded. Her smile was gone; she looked kinder. “Is that why you’ve done nothing about your house?”

It took Minna a minute to understand. Even then, she didn’t know the answer; she’d given the house little thought except that it was despicable. Was Ruth right? Maybe. Maybe Minna wanted to leave her poverty uncovered, unmistakable. Maybe this was how she meant to punish the men. Then again, maybe not. Either way, she couldn’t see how it was any business of Ruth’s.

She tucked her chin. “I’ve done nothing about the house because I don’t know
how
,” she said, thinking this her best defense, forgetting that it was in fact true. She didn’t expect the tears that began spilling from her eyes. They were fat tears, heavy on her cheeks; they felt almost false—like she was falsely crying. Then she realized that she couldn’t stop. The swarm of children halted in the yard, and stared at Minna with a grave, brutal fascination, and she remembered the children in Beltsy, and thought these are the same as those, they can recognize an orphan. And perhaps Ruth sensed Minna’s desire to snarl and stamp her feet at them, for she shooed the children away and told Minna to “Cry it out,” and when Minna was done, she handed her a leftover scrap from the flour sack, told her to wipe her nose, and congratulated her. She was a real bride now. Did she know that song?
Kallehle, Little Bride, cry, cry, cry. Your bridegroom will send you a plate of horseradish. And your tears will pour all the way down to your toes.
Hadn’t Minna learned that one? (She hadn’t.) Didn’t every child adore that song?

 

 

 

R
UTH’S basket contained one jar of jam, one of pickled beets, another of pickled cucumbers, and another of herring. In the back of the wagon were bags of potatoes, which Leo carried into the house over Max’s protests. No, they wouldn’t stay for dinner, no, it was all for Minna and Max, no, they had to leave now, to get home before dark. They would see them in less than a week, for the wedding, which Leo and Ruth would host.

“It will be my pleasure,” Ruth told Minna. But Minna was watching Leo and Max, who’d stopped in the doorway of the house and lowered their voices. Samuel and Jacob stood nearby, obviously listening but pretending otherwise. Leo spoke with his arms folded, his pipe nodding, one hand occasionally reaching to scratch an ear. Max’s hands leaped and fell. Then Leo held out an arm, offering Max the privilege of entering his own house. The boys followed. The door shut, leaving the women and children outside.

Minna tried to catch up with Ruth, who was explaining, stepby-step, the process for papering and whitewashing earthen walls. They’d had a dugout, too, Ruth said, before Leo built the two-story frame house they lived in now. Minna pictured the Friedman homestead: snow white and dustless and twice as tall as their wagon. Which still wouldn’t be as tall as the house she’d imagined for herself, once upon a time. But she was adapting. Her ideas were adapting. She would be happy, she told herself, with anything taller than a cave.

“See?” Ruth said. “It’s easy. You just have to make sure the paste doesn’t get too thick or too thin. Moderation. As in everything.” Ruth smiled, expectant. But before Minna could think to thank her, she’d turned her attention to her youngest son, who was trying to climb into the wagon by himself, using the wheel’s spokes as his ladder. He kept bumping his head and falling, then starting the whole thing over again, until finally he pinched a finger and started to cry.

“Abraham!” shouted Ruth, and Minna held her breath, waiting for a tirade or slap—yet when the boy ran over, Ruth kissed his finger and let him fall into her skirts and stroked his head. “
Nakhes’l
,” she purred, “
nakhes’l
,” like an entirely different woman from the one Minna thought she’d met. Ruth pressed two fingers to the boy’s eyes, then to his mouth, then to his nose, and he laughed now, as if it were a game between them. Then she covered his ears, and said to Minna, “When you have your own, you’ll belong here.” She nodded at the small bulge at her stomach. “You’ll see. This life.”

“It’s wonderful. A blessing. Soon enough, you’ll never think to want anything else.”

The men emerged from the house. They might have been arguing, it was hard to tell: Leo appeared certain of something and Max just the opposite, but perhaps these were simply their standard expressions, each one amplified by the other. Samuel and Jacob followed, eyes on their feet.

“Ruth!” called Leo. “Ready? Giddyup!”

“Ach,” Ruth said quietly, so that only Minna could hear. “Giddyup. This is his new favorite word.”

Minna nodded. She guessed it must be its own kind of difficulty, one she’d never contemplated, to go to a new place with someone old. But she didn’t look at Ruth any more than Ruth looked at her. They watched as Leo held his hand out to Max, then as Max—who was taller—stooped a little, and shook.

“It used to be Leo worked on his father’s farm,” Ruth said, “and Max spent all day at the the
beis medrash
, bound for greatness.” She chuckled. “Now look. Here he is, trying to be a farmer.”

Minna stared straight ahead. This was Ruth’s victory speech, she supposed. There was a cruelty to this woman.

But Ruth put an arm around Minna’s shoulders, and pulled her in close. “You know,” she said. “It’s better that you love him.”

Minna didn’t answer at first. Ruth’s voice was quiet, almost placating, as though she knew the impossibility of Minna following her advice. Marry Max, yes. Love him—was that really necessary?

“I barely know him,” Minna said.

Ruth took a loud, sharp breath. Then her arm was gone and she was up, pushing her son toward the wagon and walking after him, not stopping or even looking back as she called, “And you think you are original in this?”

M
INNA knew about hiding. Her own as a child, under steps, begging to be found. Her father’s, in his voice. There was hiding in cellars, beneath bridges, underwater with reeds for air. Hiding by cutting off a toe, or a finger, disappearing the parts they’d want when they came to take you to fight the czar’s battle.

But it was one thing to hide yourself. It was another to be hidden, under a glorified sack, while near strangers and total strangers witnessed your bridegroom witnessing that it was in fact you underneath, that you had not run.

(And where would you run?)

This was her wedding, then. In Ruth and Leo’s clean wooden house, with two other Jewish families, and Otto and his wife—whom Ruth invited at the last minute, to Max’s annoyance—and Jacob clanging out a beat with two spoons against his knee—he wouldn’t say where he’d learned to do such a thing—and a woman whose name she would never remember humming above the spoons, and Minna under the bright obliteration of her veil.

She determined, at the start, to use the veil to her advantage, to wander through the ceremony unseen—privacy, at last. But as events progressed, as Minna was led to the
chuppah
and made to sit (the poles were too short to stand under) and as an unfamiliar man’s voice began to pray behind her and the dim form of Max came to occupy the stool to her side and as Minna found herself unable to weep, as she was meant to do, she discovered that her strategy was flawed, for it assumed that the face was honest, that to hide the face was to hide one’s true feelings, or lack of feeling. It forgot that the face could be its own means of hiding, that without her face Minna was nothing but stubborn, unsubtle parts. Right now, for instance, she might have twisted her face into something that looked like weeping, but she could not make her body shake. It was as the magician had said: the body knew nothing but what it was: sensation: the smell of flour, the cool slime of sweat at the small of her back, the pull of Galina’s mother’s too-large dress across her shoulders because she’d sat without sight and couldn’t adjust it and no one had helped her to adjust it and she was being pulled backward on the stool as if attached to the wall by a rope between her shoulders, as if they were reeling her in and laughing because they didn’t want to focus on the fact that she wasn’t weeping and that they therefore weren’t weeping.

If the bride couldn’t weep, who would?

A cool weight was placed in her hands. Her veil was lifted. Max nodded at the wine cup, nodded at her. His lower lip hung open, his brow showed its wrinkles; at least, Minna thought, she had her own hair. She drank—chokecherry wine, she learned later, though now she only registered it as the strangest sort of grape, a tacky grip in her tongue that caused tears to well in her eyes at last and she was momentarily grateful, but now the veil dropped again. The cool weight was taken away. A hand—Ruth’s?—grabbed her wrist and pulled her to standing, or rather to crouching, to clear the
chuppah
, and began leading her in circles around Max. Seven, Minna knew, though she could not count, she grew quickly dizzy and let Ruth do the counting, Ruth do the pulling. Hunched, she felt like an ape; veiled, like the shadow of an ape, following its own wrist round and round. In her gauziness she thought of Galina laughing—oh, how she would laugh!—and from Minna’s throat a panicked giggle rose up which she didn’t bother to squelch. The men were beating their hands against their laps, trying and failing to keep time with Jacob’s spoons, as unskilled at unison as men singing in
shul
.

Minna grew dizzier when Ruth sat her down. She closed her eyes, though it made little difference, simply black traded for white. She thought she might be able to cry now, out of sheer misery, but couldn’t manage even the slightest shiver of her shoulders. Her head felt like it was still being dragged in circles. She concentrated on the one beat that kept time with Jacob, which must be Otto’s, she decided, and pictured the gentile chapels down in the mine, salt-dug rooms with salt-carved icons and salt lanterns,
lickable chandeliers
her father used to call them in his good moods, he knew because he prayed in those rooms, or pretended to pray in those rooms, to those long-melting icons, so that he could rest. And Minna knew, from walking across Beltsy’s Out Bridge on a Sunday morning, past where the white sides of lard hung on hooks, and from walking through Mikhailovskaya Plaza in Odessa on any morning, she knew the gentile melodies were simple ones, led by one voice and followed as one voice, like a soft, grave agreement. She felt a longing to go home with Otto and his wife. She wanted to be taken in as a child, to be sung to as if an infant.

The beating stopped. Max had her hand again. A ring, which Minna guessed Max had sold something far more necessary to buy, though she didn’t yet know what. She thought of the seats on the train, the endless rolls and cups of coffee of his absent courtship, his desire to promise what he couldn’t give her. The ring slid over her finger and seemed to disappear, and she itched to feel it with her thumb, this new ornament with its weightless weight, its covenants of an entire civilized race, but Max held her thumb against her hand and her fingers against her other fingers and said, Minna, you are consecrated unto me.

 

 

 

T
HE table, shining. Globes of fat in the chicken soup. Gravy slick as rain. A silver fish, caught and gifted by one of Otto’s sons. Fish! And the carrots: the shocking, flamboyant carrots rolling in butter—had carrots ever been that color? When had Minna last eaten a carrot? She had to stop herself from reaching into the bowl, grabbing, squeezing the sun into her throat—

Then she was blind again. At the back of her head was a clenching—Ruth’s hands, knotting, replacing the veil with a blindfold. Minna had never heard of this custom—if that’s what it was. She moved her hands to her waist, knowing what she would find: the loose dress even looser, billowing around her stomach like curtains. She twisted away. “What are you doing?”

Ruth caught her shoulders. “Hold still.”

“You’ve taken my belt.” Minna knew the point was the blinding, not the taking, but she couldn’t help thinking about the white satin mashed into a knot.

“Give me back my belt.”

“Don’t make a scene, dear.”

“I won’t make a scene if you give me—”

“You’re making one already.”

“Give me—”

“You’ll embarrass yourself. Minna. Max wants it this way.”

Ruth’s voice was calm—even tender. Minna had been so focused on the food, she’d forgotten about the people: now they surrounded her, unmoving as trees; now they could see her face, though she still couldn’t see theirs. She felt a sudden ugliness in her mouth, spread open, all its disgust making it disgusting. She grew aware of the bones in her nose snarling.