A few months passed. Esther tried to fight day and night against her weariness and bitterness about her poor hopeless baby.
It was a morning of an early spring’s, Esther was wearing her blue long dress and her white head wrapper, and to her feet were her oversized boots. While tears began to wet her eyes, she dressed her two years old child, and took him outside, to warm in the sun. She set him in his wagon, and well connected him to it by a leather rope, that Aaron had recently fixed there.
She soon returned to the hut, and rushed to the bookcase, where she found the book of Psalms. She opened it and was murmuring a prayer from chapter 39-12: “ O’ God. . . Turn your rage away from me, that I may smile again - before I depart and I am no more.”
‘At ten oclock,’ thought Esther, ‘I will hand the laundry parcel to Blooma, our neighbor.’ Blooma was thirty years old, obese and fat faced, ugly but kind hearted. She was used to help Esther from time to time, and the day before she had promised to take her own dirty clothes- together with Esther’s laundry- for hand washing. The place where the Jewish women were used to do that - was the small water lake (some called it ‘the pool’) at the edge of the town.
Blooma soon arrived, standing at The Rabbi hut’s front door and grabbing her parcel of laundry. She was dressed in a wide long grey cotton skirt and green woolen light sweater.
“I am fed up sitting at home,” said Esther, “So- I’ll walk with you, pushing the child’s wagon.” Both peeped at the boy, who was seated at his wagon outside, looking at a nightingale’s cage. His father had bought it for him from a gypsy. Raf’l was fascinated from the bird’s colored feathers and mumbled to it.
“We should make a hurry,” Blooma urged Esther, “My friends are waiting there for me. Please take your laundry.”
“Rabbi Aaron promised to arrive at this point of time. But as usual- he’d forgotten,” complained Esther in melancholy. Blooma agreed to wait a few minutes.
“Maybe I’ll leave this laundry for tomorrow,” reckoned Esther, “I want to stroll a little bit, and look at the bright green summer in the fields. I am closed here like this nightingale- in his cage. And I am without his nice colors,” she laughed strangely.
“I’m sorry I have to leave you, but let me have your parcel.” insisted Blooma.
“I know what I’ll do!” said Esther in a burst of rage. “Aaron has forgotten, that he had to be with the child. So I’ll leave Raf’l here, and walk with you. When my dear husband arrives - he’ll find the kid outside and bring him home. ”
She went out, and both she and Blooma stayed a while at the boy’s wagon. Esther bent to him and said:
“Be a good kid and stay here, don’t cry. Papa will soon arrive.”
The boy hardly looked at her. He was listening to the nightingale’s whistles.
“I don’t worry about Raphael,” said Esther decisively, “No eagle monsters fly above.”
“Well, if you want…” said Blooma and opened the gate to go out,
“Nobody will take away my deformed child…I wish it sometimes.”
“Don’t talk like that!” Blooma scorned at Esther, as they began walking toward the suburbian pool, “Don’t smearch God’s name.”
Aaron was late, being delayed by a geeze trader in his Butchery hut. At that hour he stopped working, as two Municipality ‘hygiene Inspectors’ and two local policemen arrived there. They searched inside the two wide butchery rooms, one used for butchering winged creatures, the other for cattle and sheep. The men searched around, ‘to ensure that no remnant of a a hen’s limb or slaughtered animal had remained here’ they said. Then they showed shocked Aaron – an Order from the police Head: “the Jewish butchery hut is confiscated for the public. From now on - it should not be used for clerical reactionary Jewish purposes, but for the good of the whole free and loyal society of Minsk.”
Rabbi Aaron was irritated, knowing what it had meant. He began to struggle with the men, who have just arrived to uproot him from his Kosher butchery place: The regime would try to cancel one of the last signs left - for even just a formal Jewish community in town. Aaron began to shout, and refused to leave the place. The policemen boxed his nose, which became bleeding; they threw him on the floor and then dragged him out of the place. Aaron’s coat became dirty from the hens excreta, and his trousers were stained with fresh blood of the chicken butchered earlier in the morning. Two citizens heard his shouts – but no one said a word.
Outside the hut - the beaurocrates handed Aaron Hittin the document of his dismissal from the job of an Official Buthcher. Till now he had been salaried by The Municipality, but no more. However, the letter included some sentences, that would sound less severe: “If Jewish religious people would prefer to provide Kosher meat on their tables, they will be allowed to visit Comrade Aaron Hittin, in his house. But there- he may perform only a buthchery of hens, chicken, and other winged animals. . . From now on any butchery of cattle, sheep or goats - is prohibited, due to the limits on food supply in the State... Rabbi Aaron will be responsible for keeping a neat and disinfected place in his private butchery(in an area of nine quadrat meters3x3). He will charge clients and they will pay for the butchery. His income will be taxed accordingly.”
When Esther and Blooma came to the small lake, they saw tens of women washing there their laundry. Three Jewish women, who were Blooma’s friends, said hello also to Esther. They put down their laundries, and Blooma took out from her backbag a small squared waved tin for ‘hand laundry’. She started to wash Esther’s clothes first. Esther found a woman she had known for long, and began to chat with her a few words. Both put off their boots, and were seated by the water, sinking their legs into it.. Then the two found a new friend, who also entertained herself with the water. The three young women siezed the edges of their skirts and folded them high up, exposing their thighs, in order to enter more deeply into the water, while laughing and splittering one on the other. Suddenly Esther waved to them, mumbling in bewilderment and began walking away in the shallow water. She was running in the shallow water more than a hundred steps, then got deeper into the water, still with her clothes on. This time she was waving her hands forward and to the sides, like trying to swim. She was aware of her sinking deeply and deeply - till the water had reached her throat. She murmured: “Hear oh Israel. God.. . is the one!” -and completely immersed into the water, closing her eyes...
There was a small peddling boat not far, and one of the two men on it discerned Esther’s drawning. He shouted to his friend, and they were paddling hastily toward the place where she had disappeared. Having arrived there they were looking around – and one of them jupmed to the water. He dived quite deeply, and found the body. He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her out - but she was lifeless. The chaps had loaded the body onto their boat, and rapidly brought it to the pool’s-shore. Soon they were dragging it to the launders’ place. Blooma and other women discerned the approaching corpse of Esther, and began weeping and screaming.
Meanwhile the policemen invited wagoner Bearl, to take the injured and sored Rabbi home- ‘on the Municipality’s account’. Bearl heard Rabbi Aaron’s saying, that he would like him to drive to the police station, to submit a protest. But the wagoner persuaded him, that there was no use in doing that.
“You know, that is not the worst thing that we will face,” told him Bearl, who was two years older than Aaron, and was respected by him.
On their way, the wagoner tried to cheer up Rabbi Aaron’s spirit, and told him that he remembered the congregation in the good times of the Tsar. Those days would not return, “but Lenin is a practical man –maybe he would relent, and renew some freedom of religion.”
“Even if you are right in that, “ said Aaron, “ I’ve heard that Lenin is very sick. A woman had shot him in his head. He deserves it, but who knows who will inherit his leadership.”
Bearl’s wagon and brown horse soon crossed the Market street, and arrived cl
ose to Aaron’s hut. Rabbi Aaron knew that he was late, and thought that his wife would rebuke him. He saw his kid’s wagon in the front courtyard, thanked the wagoner for his job and went down, rushing to the deformed infant.
“Is your mother… at home?” he mumbled, still not discerning that the boy had wept, and got tired. Aaron opened the door’s lock, entered the corrridor and called loudly:
“Esther, are you here?” But no one answered. He began to search in the kitchen and in the rooms. Then he looked at the backyard. There too -he did not find a sign of her.
His heart began to pound. He went to Blooma’s fence and shouted his wife’s name. But from there – also came no answer.
He ran back home and rushed to the boy at the front coutyard. But looking toward the gate and the street behind it, he suddenly became terrified.
A crowd of about fifteen people was approaching silently, and gathering at the gate: in the middle of the group Rabbi Aaron discerned four policemen bearing a stretcher. Beside and behind them- were clearly seen his wife’s women friends, headed by her neighbor, Blooma. She was weeping, while chatting excitedly with an old woman, who had just joined the small group.
“I had been… washing laundry with her,” she murmured, “and suddenly she was lost from my eyes.”
Aaron’s face had become crooked; he felt dizzy and bewildered. His sight became vague, and he shouted toward the crowd: “Esther, Esther!”- while rushing toward the gate, he came near the stretcher’s carriers, who soon entered his courtyard. The women pointed on Rabbi Aaron to a police officer, who followed the corpse carriers.
The officer was gazing straight at Aaron, and told him:
“Sorry, Rabbi. Your wife has been found in the lake…”
A Blackout hit Rabbi Aaron Hittin. He collapsed with a quiver, and the policeman bent over him, calling one of his colleagues to help him. Both policemen carried shocked Rabbi inside his hut, and poured a cup of water on his face.
CHAPTER 5
The Rabbi Who Tricked Stalin Page 4