The Little Bride (28 page)

But that was the thing about the backs of the forths: on the days when the cold stood behind the door like the open bones of a jaw and her eyelashes stood like nails and she did not believe it would ever end, rationing was impossible: an act of optimism; on these worst days it seemed as frivolous as putting on jewelry, or brushing one’s hair. So the butter would run out. So. So she’d use their precious milk to make more. She could smell her frugal ambitions fleeing, the other-women gone, her domestic artistry lapsing into greed. She could already taste the butter on the corn, the burned fatty crisp at the edges of the cakes. And carrots—they would eat carrots. She would open the last jar in the cellar.

And then Jacob was there, with the chickens, and she tasted leg, skin, breast. She didn’t wait for Max to act or speak. She cut off the heads, hung the birds outside to bleed, packed a pot with snow and brought it to a boil, then dipped them until their feathers came loose. Liesl had lent her enough dishes so that they would have two full sets, and now Minna dusted off the
fleischig
plates. Max said nothing—not when she returned with the naked, gutted chickens, not as she made a show of cutting out the deepest, most treacherous, least kosher veins, not while she boiled them. She set his plate before him and watched his eyes take it in, his lips move through his prayers, his hand pick up his fork. The boys huddled over their food, wincing. She’d run the stove hot all afternoon, to cook the chicken, and soften Max; the room was bone-dry at the table, moist with breath up the walls.

Max began to eat his corn cakes. He finished one, started in on the other, finished that. He ate his carrots, slowly. Minna prepared to speak in defense of the chicken. Would God waste the animal’s death? Would He prefer to see them suffer? And she’d bled it the best she could. There were exemptions—weren’t there? For women and children, at least, there were exemptions. And for the hungry, too? That means you, she would say. Motke, God couldn’t have meant for you to use your will in such a way.

Then Max finished the last of his carrots and stared at his plate and in his eyes was a look she’d known her whole life: a moroseness meant for her to see, a flagging that said, don’t make me a vagrant in my own home, please, sit with me, stay. That face—she couldn’t look at it anymore. She had nothing to say for herself. She began to eat. The boys ate. And when they finished, they ate what was left on Max’s plate.

T
HEY ate the second chicken quickly, unapologetically, offering none to Max. The flour was low. The last potatoes smelled of rot and snow; she cooked them, sliced thin and fried in chicken fat the way Galina had liked them, and though Max wouldn’t eat these either, they were quickly gone. Minna rationed out of necessity now; she could see the bottoms of bags. She and the boys fought over who would milk the cow, with the understanding that the milker drank from the bucket before bringing it in. They fought over who had to feed the chickens. No one wanted to face the chickens: they felt guilty for having eaten them, and for wanting to eat more—and maybe, too, they each feared being the one to kill a third.

Just die, they thought—and yet they went on feeding them scraps they could not spare.

And for a time, too long a time, no more chickens died. They had enough coal to keep the house warm in the days and warmer than frozen through the nights, and yet they felt cold all the time, their stomachs barely lined with a watery paste of flour or cornmeal, or flour and cornmeal. There was always enough water to make it watery; water stood in your eyes, and fell again from the sky, deceptively light before it piled: when you drank, you could feel it slide through you: it found your emptiness, touched it everywhere, left it shivering.

They were rich only in dishes, which seemed to mock them now from their stacks.

Where was Otto? Max wanted to know. He was leaning against the east wall, head in his hands. He stood all day sometimes, saying it made him warmer, then he wound up tilted and slouching like this, until he was as good as lying down. “What?” he asked. “Has the big German with his big ideas decided we aren’t worth it after all?”

“Why should he help you?” Jacob asked.

“He left us. He built the door the wrong way.”

“He built us a door.”

“He did it on purpose.”

“And what’s to say it wasn’t my fault?” interrupted Samuel. “Who’s to say I don’t know how to build a door?”

“He can’t teach you everything,” Max scowled. “He hasn’t. He won’t.”

“If you wanted a benefactor,” Samuel said, “you might have asked the Baron.”

“O Barohhhn.” Jacob clasped his knuckles beneath his chin, which was sharp now, undone of its child fat. “O Barohhhn de Vintovich, please, save us.”

“He’s saved others,” said Samuel.

“You’d like to believe it,” Jacob said.

“You might believe something.”

“But I do.”

“Oh?”

“I believe in Americaaaah!” Jacob laughed.

Samuel closed his eyes. “The Baron is a man, at least.”

Max slapped a hand against the wall. “Enough,” he said. “I’m not a fool.”

 

 

W
HEN the third chicken died, Jacob mmmed and ohhhed and belched. Samuel ate steadily, refusing to look at Max, who sat like a post before his plate of corn mush. Max closed his eyes and said his prayers, then he was reaching his fork for Jacob’s plate, stabbing a leg, delivering it in a long, wavering arc onto his own. He cut. He brought the meat to his mouth. He chewed, not looking up, holding his fork, which trembled. He swallowed. He cut again. If he would only look up, Minna thought, for she was suddenly sorry. The boys stiffened; they must have felt it, too—Max had been their holdout, their representative in faith. For the first time since winter began, Minna thought of Moses, from the boat. She thought how disappointed he would be. She thought, though this was foolish, though it rendered the world back there as dreamlike as the world here had become, the towns merged, strangers wed, she thought that perhaps Moses and Max had known each other. They might have been friends—brothers. Moses would be so angry at Max for giving in. Now they were all four of them eating
treyf
. And it had been so easy. Beyond the walls, the snow gave off a long yelp, shrinking back slightly from the heat.

 

 

 

T
HEY had wanted Max to eat the animal. Of course. They must have—it was only right: his eyes had gone dull like theirs; his skin was yellow. Still, his giving in was a disenchantment, the sort that occurs when you didn’t know you were enchanted. It was a revelation, and over the next few days, it led to others. Jacob brought out a pistol, which he said Fritzi had loaned him for the winter, to warn off Indians. Samuel dug five bottles of vodka out of the snow, saying they might as well, he’d bought them stupidly, impulsively—
so stupid!—
he should have bought more food. Minna brought out Fritzi’s book, and handed it to Jacob, who began to read.

The book was called
Old Man Jones; or, The Maiden Daughter and the Stranger.
It was a good story, the first time through. There was a wealthy ranch owner trying to save his bad son and marry off his good daughter, a poor-but-hardworking stranger who tried to help him do both, and a gang of cowboys who tried to stop him. There was town and there was country; there was a drunk and a shopkeeper and a schoolmarm and a maiden; there was drought and plague and violence and drowning and, of course, Indians. There were great adventures they were missing, apparently. Towns and countries far more story-worthy than the ones they knew. The only element missing from the book was a prairie fire, which they didn’t notice until the second reading.

The third time through, they drank vodka to stay interested. Jacob performed voices for them, and sound effects. He pointed his gun at the ceiling when the characters pointed theirs. Max, in anticipation, would raise his hand and say, “Bang!” His sin with the chicken left him ashamed, but it was a broken shame that led to more. He ate more chicken, drank more vodka. Then he would pray, but silently, as far from the warmth of the stove as he could get, and Samuel would go stand next to him, and shut his eyes tight so that all the folds in his lids darkened into one, and sway. His swaying made him look pious, as his mother had meant him to be, but in fact it was simply the most visible aspect of his drunkenness. In general, the more Samuel drank, the more sober he appeared, the more troubled by his father’s defections and Jacob’s laughter and Minna’s quiet, steady mode of filling her tin cup. She had not been drunk before. She pretended to pray, too, more earnestly than she’d pretended before, bowing her head, murmuring softly, copying as best she could, and in the simple, unthinking motions of her mouth she discovered a simple sort of comfort. Once or twice she caught Samuel staring at her with murderous disbelief, but before she could shake her vision clear, he’d walked off into a corner. Even his anger was comforting when Minna was drunk. She felt free, for a time, of want.

The corners were like other rooms some nights, set off by their distance from the lamp. They were drawn there, like cats seeking privacy. Then there were nights when the corners seemed made of solid matter, a darkness encroaching, pushing them toward the center, making them feel they might never get out. This was false—you could pull the string and the door would open, you could brace your skin against fresh air, savor the moments before the cold began to burn. Yet somehow you didn’t. You sat at the table, the bones in your legs taking on the shape of the bench, and finished your share of the drink. Jacob might read again, or not. They might argue. Argument was its own intoxication; argument saved the vodka. Why do you keep that rock? Samuel might say, pointing at Jacob’s iridescent crescent, which sat, curled into itself, in the center of the table. And Jacob might answer, It’s from the ocean. And Samuel, Don’t make things up. And Jacob, I’m not making it up. This whole country, all the grass, we’re at the bottom of an old ocean. And Minna, Really? And Samuel, Don’t believe his tales. Or another night, Samuel would begin, So you’ve got a gun. And you’ve got arrowheads. So whose side are you on. And Jacob would say, Both. And Samuel, That’s impossible. And Jacob, Whatever you say. Samuel, You have to choose. Jacob, Why do you care so much? Samuel, Why don’t you care more? And Max, head in his hands, We’re not on anyone’s side. Laughter from Jacob. But our own, is that right? Isn’t that what you were going to say next? And Samuel, Let him be. And Jacob, Sorry. Of course. You’re so good at just letting him be.

Then it would be the end of the night: and then again: so many times, they went through this end, when the beds seemed too far to reach. They’d stopped undressing weeks go. The stove hissed, the last embers fell to ash. Then at last they found themselves under blankets, the day’s fire or the gun’s glint or the white snow flashing behind their eyelids. Max held Minna tenderly then, his hands cradling her belly, his toes in their thicker socks kneading the soles of her thinner stockings, working to warm her.

 

 

M
INNA had thought she’d known hunger. She thought she knew it in Odessa, and on the boat, and even here, not so long ago, when the potatoes ran out. But she understood now that those hungers had been an idea—like her child idea of the forest when the town was just behind the house, or her city idea of loneliness when there were people everywhere. Real hunger required denial, a trick—you could not believe in it or it would flood you. She tried concentrating on her bones. She counted her fingers and toes. She focused on the warmth between her legs. But all this vigilance delivered her nowhere, it only led to other parts of the body, the throbbing at the back of her skull, the swelling of her tongue in her mouth. She learned to concentrate on not concentrating, to let her mind spread out, puddlelike, far enough from the body that the body was forgotten. Or at least silenced. A calm fell over her limbs. She wondered if this was prayer. If prayer was nothing more than a giving in, like sickness—if you weren’t required to believe, only to stop struggling. The exercise grew familiar. The boys grew hair on their faces. And though Samuel’s was a full black beard, and Jacob’s a layer of fuzz like a playactor might draw on, the hair made them look alike, and like Max, and Minna gave in to their merging, their repetition, as she gave in to the repetition of hunger. She knew that she loved them, the beards, the bodies, the men themselves. She saw them out the corners of her eyes, she brushed them as she passed. They were her furniture. You could love anyone, she thought, if you needed to. And in a curious way, not in spite of her need but because of it, because she was hungry and trapped, she felt safe.

 

 

O
NE night she was peeing. She was listening to the snow melt under her and smelling how her pee smelled of nothing and feeling, in her squat, the bones in her upper legs press against the bones in her lower legs. She might not have looked up at all. But she did, and to the north, above the wall of snow, she saw lights filling the sky. Her first thought was lanterns—Otto—he’d come at last. But she heard nothing. The lights grew no closer. They shot toward the ceiling of the sky, white and pink and almost red in places. She was hallucinating. She had to be. That or God had come for them. He’d warmed the earth everywhere but here, and now remembered them.