The Little Bride (20 page)

 

 

 

T
HAT night he stared at her—as if daring her to imagine that she’d seen him at the creek. He complained that the bread was dry, then suggested that she try a different ratio of water to flour. “And add a little yogurt,” he said.

Minna was slow to respond; she felt naked all over again. “I’ve never heard of that,” she said.

“It’s what our mother did,” Jacob said. He looked at Minna, then at Samuel. “It’s true,” he said.

“That’s not the point,” Samuel said. “The point is it’s better that way.”

“Boys.” Max held up his slice of bread. “Let your mother be.”

Then, as if realizing the possible confusion, he said, “The girl’s bread is fine as far as I’m concerned.”

There was color in Samuel’s cheeks. It was as if he’d briefly forgotten Max, as if in his forgetting he’d experienced a great relief for which he was now embarrassed. After dinner, he appeared to pray more fervently. And after prayers, and all the next day, he was kinder to his father.

T
HE heat broke as quickly as it had struck. A wind in the night, the door clapping on its hinges, a pungent release as if from a dream. Minna woke to a tingling in her skin and bolted upright. The air was cool. She was alone. The kettle was warm, the bread she baked yesterday gone. She touched the cutting board, groggily feeling for crumbs. They were dry; it was late.

In the closest corner of the closest field, she found Max, up to his shins in a hole, digging with a vigor strange to him. When Minna toed her boots into his vision, he swung the shovel a few more times, then looked up. His face was red, his usual lack of humor marred by a twitch in his lips, an almost-grin she might have thought flirtatious if she thought him capable of flirtation. When she asked what he was doing, he glanced around conspiratorially, then said, “I’m building you a
mikvah
.”

Minna laughed. She felt light-headed, as though overnight they’d slid across the earth into a new atmosphere. The idea of a bath in this place was divine, and bizarre.

“You’ll bleed soon enough,” Max said. “You’ll have to bathe.”

His forthrightness shocked her. At first she thought he was talking about their wedding night. Then she understood. She’d forgotten, somehow, that he would know everything she knew with regard to her menstrual “events”: that they did not in fact come every month, as she’d told the doctor. I should have pretended, she thought. For a few days, I should have made him stay away, forged pain of the feminine sort. In Beltsy, a man could divorce a wife if she didn’t give him a child within ten years. There was no reason to think Max wouldn’t do the same, or worse. Out here, ten years would be an eternity. Here a man might wait only one. And then where would she be?

That’s not polite,
Minna wanted to say. But she also wanted the bath. But not for the reasons he wanted her to want one. She wanted warm water, privacy. The moment called for delicacy, she thought—a protest of the sort that leads to submission. “I don’t
need
a
mikvah
,” she said.

“But in Odessa, you went each week.”

Yes, she’d answered at the municipal building. Yes to this, no to that.

Max’s face was too trusting.

“Sometimes,” she said.

“That’s not your fault, Minna. Odessa is a filthy place.”

Minna smiled. “Odd then,” she said, “that you would search for a wife there.”

Max dug the tip of his shovel into his boot. Minna wondered if Jacob had been wrong about his father’s reasons for ordering her through Rosenfeld’s, if it wasn’t because Max had been too humiliated to tell the family and friends he’d left about Lina’s running away, but for the same reason that he prayed, and made the rest of them pray—because he didn’t trust people. A service, a method, a book, a God—these he trusted. She wondered if Max sensed the weakness in people—in her—more than he let on.

“Of course you’re right,” she said, smiling more brightly. “A filthy place. But a
mikvah
, it just seems—a bit—indulgent. To build a
mikvah
in this, well . . .”—she kept smiling—“in
this
place. Which is filthy, some might say, in its own ways.”

“That’s what the boys said. In so many words. That’s why I’m digging it while they’re gone.”

Minna looked around, for the first time that day. She was filled with a sense of error. “Gone?”

“With Leo. There’s work on a farm about three days north.”

“You didn’t think that I should know?”

“I didn’t like the idea.”

“You thought I might not notice?”

Max stared. He looked stunned—as if he hadn’t noticed a particular feature on her face before. “It was decided weeks ago,” he said.

Minna crossed her arms. She wished there were someone to guide her. Or some
thing
at least: a manual for new wives, a primer—though she doubted that such a book would even apply to her situation. What would it say of the new wife whose stepson had seen her unclothed? And not only once. Twice more Samuel had wandered over to the creek while she’d been bathing. Twice more she had caught him, looking. She’d closed her eyes quickly, pretending not to have seen, shifted her position slightly so as to look less flat, then lain there, imagining his face: curious, but also troubled; handsome, yet full of guilt. She lay perfectly still, heart thudding, until she heard his boots retreat. Then he came a third time, and barely stopped to look before he jumped down onto the creek bed. Minna startled, and sat up. “I told you,” he said, through gritted teeth. He stood above her, fists clenched at his sides, his whole body taut as wire. Minna thought he might kick her. She clamped her legs together. “I told you,” he said again, “not . . .” He stopped. He was staring at her breasts. On his face was a look of pain. “Not to let me . . .” Minna lifted a hand to cover herself, but her other arm was propping her up, and in a moment of witting incapacitation, she only managed to hide one breast. She wondered if the pain on his face was displeasure. She knew, even as she wondered this, that it wasn’t. She had combed her hair, anticipating him. She watched him carefully. “You needn’t keep coming,” she said. Samuel raised his eyes from her chest. “You needn’t keep being here,” he said. “Where else am I meant to wash?” “You’re not washing, you’re . . .” He looked away. A trickle of water ran down Minna’s back; she shivered. “What is it you think I am doing?” she asked, but Samuel was shaking his head. “That’s not the point,” he said. “Isn’t it?” Minna was aware of her body as though it were new; even her knees, which she’d never thought of as anything more exciting than knees: Samuel was staring at them. Minna kept expecting herself to hide her nakedness, to reach for her dress and tell him to leave, to remind him what he was to her, and she to him. Yet she could find her shame nowhere. She picked up a pebble and threw it at his feet. “You’re the one who told me to come down here,” she said. “If you’ll recall.” Samuel chuckled strangely. His gaze traveled quickly up her legs to her hips, her stomach, breasts, armpits, throat. Then he bent, picked up a slightly larger pebble, looked her in the eye, and aimed it for her stomach. It stung; she winced; when she opened her eyes, he was scrambling up the bank. And Minna, feeling hot again, had lain back down.

What would her father say?

And Max, who was still waiting for her to respond? Who had touched, but never seen her naked?

She uncrossed her arms, crossed them again. She remembered well, when Ruth and Leo first came, the closed-door conference, the shaking of hands. That was many weeks ago now—it felt like months. She considered her choices. To berate. To nag. To beg. To forgive. None appealed. She was thinking of Samuel, how he must have known all that time that he’d be leaving, and when. And Jacob, who’d argued so stridently that she stay—hadn’t he thought to warn her that he was going? Wouldn’t he think, perhaps, to invite her along?

“How long will they be gone?” she asked Max.

“Two weeks. Maybe four. I don’t know. It was Leo’s idea.” Max’s voice cracked. He looked as surprised by his own ignorance as if a stranger were talking. He looked mortified. “I don’t know how it works,” he said, and dropped his shovel to the ground, and suddenly Minna didn’t care what he had to say. They would be alone for weeks, perhaps longer. She couldn’t bear him hating himself, and the work it would take. Besides, if she concentrated on it, she could feel a reprieve in the boys’ departure. Samuel’s pebble had left a mark to the right of her navel the size of a penny.

She crossed her arms more tightly. “So how big will this hole be?”

“It’s not a hole, it’s a—” Max covered his eyes. “Do you really think this place so awful?”

Minna sighed. She squatted down so that she was looking up at him—so that he, when he uncovered his eyes, could look down on her. “Of course not,” she said.
Better to love him.
“No,” she said. “It was a silly thing to say. Forgive me. But a bath, Motke. It would be a great help.”

 

 

T
HE boys’ absence gave Max a new courage. At night, when he climbed on top of her, he muttered words near her ear. “Angel,” he said, touching the place above her lip where her skin made a little valley. “You have been touched by an angel.” Or, just before he entered her: “You are so good.” Which seemed backward to Minna—“good” for letting him in? “good” for appearing in his bed again?—until one night as he finished she heard him whisper, as if in prayer, “My duty,” and she understood that he meant, you
will
be good . . . when you give me a child. This, she realized, was what Max wanted more than anything. It was why he asked after her pleasure. It was why he was building her a
mikvah
. As if, once there was a
mikvah
, Minna would bleed, and then be fertile. As if all she’d been waiting for was a place to wash.
You will be so good.

She expected to feel angry. That he’d been scrutinizing her bodily functions was enough, she thought, to make her angry. Yet she couldn’t help feeling satisfied that he’d kept track—just as she’d begun to feel a certain satisfaction in the pains he took to touch her the exact same way every night, in the exact same order. He attended her. She was attended. “Angel,” he declared in his brave not-whisper, pressing her lip a bit too hard, so that it dug into her teeth—so that in her stomach she felt a near heat, a shimmering instant of desire.

Then desire was gone. Max would make a funny sound, and stray from his purpose, and leave her oddly numb. His was not the courage, after all, of a courageous man. It was ambivalent and raw—more the courage, perhaps, of any guardian (of children, of sheep, of jewels) whose charges had suddenly disappeared and set him free. Every shovelful of earth Max removed from the
mikvah
hole was a rock he had not cleared, a necessary task he had not completed, an act of disobedience against his sons—in particular Samuel. This, she thought, was what made him nearly giddy as he dug; this he must have imagined to be his own minor rebellion. He would not think of his greater treachery, which was growing increasingly apparent to her: his need for a new child so that he might diminish his old ones, and—more to the point—the woman who’d borne them. For even his duty to God was not as strong as his need to forget Lina. He’d barely spoken of her. He kept no remnant, no souvenir. In Minna’s estimation, his attempt to obliterate and replace her was so precisely the opposite of her father’s hoarding that it had to come from the same affliction, a grief so shameful it could not be indulged. So the men made the women dead. If their tactics differed—worship, nullification—their end goal was the same: to be left for death, at least, was more bearable.

Minna knew—she remembered—how to be with such a man. How to soothe and please him in his mourning. The key was discerning the shapes of the holes the women (or infant boy) left behind, then occupying them. That Minna hadn’t known Lina didn’t matter. She was not required to invent new habits or personalities—only to fill the void with a new body body. Which had little to do with Minna herself: she had to stay, was all, or—even simpler—not to leave, and to convince him, with every movement, that she never would. She poured Max’s coffee as she’d poured her father’s tea, a long lingering stream, and like her father, Max never asked her to hurry up. He had a habit, while waiting, of folding his lower lip into his mouth, biting down on his beard, then releasing it, very slowly, from his teeth, as if to draw out the crackling sound of the hairs. His cadence, when he spoke to her, was as vague as his gaze, so that anything he talked about—food, planting, rocks, weather—came out sounding inconsequential. Minna didn’t mind letting him believe this, or letting him think she believed it. Standing over him, listening, she felt a familiar weight returning, the sunk, tangled comfort of needing to protect, which sometimes felt so close to wanting to protect that she did not think of being anywhere else.

She set to work on the walls, beginning—as Ruth had instructed—by making a glue from milk. Samuel’s farming magazines served as paper; the thin pages tore easily and took well to the glue. She papered from the ground up, working in tall, single rows, layering the pages three deep over the sod, exactly as Ruth had said. It worked. It looked smoother and neater than anything she’d imagined herself capable of making. And the whitewash paste, once she began smearing it over the funny pictures of plows and scales and machines whose purposes she could not imagine, was so white, that the cave—if she narrowed her eyes—appeared to glow.