The Way Back

by Gavriel Savit

And best of all: the invitation was entirely open. Everyone was welcome, without exception.

  Needless to say, this was a tempting prospect, no less to those interested in the holy Rebbe than to those interested in the promise of a good party, and it was in the midst of describing the torrent of arriving visitors that Yankl stopped short.

  “Oh!” he said. “And you’ll never guess who I saw at the tavern: Avimelekh. Avimelekh! Can you believe it? I wouldn’t have thought—”

  But what Yankl wouldn’t have thought went unsaid; at precisely this moment, the rabbi spoke up.

  “Yankl,” he said, his soft voice cutting through the chatter like a knife.

  All heads turned to where the rabbi stood in the door.

  “What?” said Yankl.

  The rabbi gave his head a sharp little shake as if to say, Don’t, and then gestured to the place where Yehuda Leib was sitting.

  Now the eyes of the crowd turned toward him.

  Yehuda Leib’s cheeks began to burn.

  They were all looking at him.

  Why were they looking at him?

  “What?” said Yehuda Leib, and when no answer came, he repeated himself: “What?”

  It was in this moment that Moshe Dovid Frumkin, the stern and pious town butcher, came forward and, mercifully, broke the silence.

  “Yankl,” he said. “Yankl, did you get my new hat?”

  “Ah!” said Yankl. “Yes!” Yankl stepped back inside, produced his hefty pack, and set to untying the large, round box secured to its bulk. This turned out to contain the hat in question: a rich fur crown of a shtreimel, glossy and fine, for special occasions.

  Now the knot of schmoozers split, some gathering in close to admire the shtreimel, some splintering into their own conversations or drifting off into the day.

  But Yehuda Leib was frozen where he sat. His heart was pounding. He did not care to be stared at—he who was so often blamed for broken or missing things, who was no sooner seen than suspected.

  Why had they all stared at him?

  What did they all know that he didn’t?

  The morning was not shaping up well.

  And this is why—even more than was normally the case—Yehuda Leib found himself growing angrier and angrier at Issur Frumkin.

  Issur was the son of Moshe Dovid the butcher and he was the only other boy in Tupik of Yehuda Leib’s age. This inevitably invited comparison, and not to Yehuda Leib’s advantage: Yehuda Leib was scrappy and small; Issur was tall and broad. Yehuda Leib was dirty, poor, always in trouble; Issur was none of these things. Because his father was prosperous, Issur’s hours were rarely occupied with work, and he was free to sit in the study hall reading holy texts; Yehuda Leib had to occupy his hours finding food to eat.

  But what made Yehuda Leib jealous was neither the comfort nor the esteem belonging to Issur Frumkin. It was something altogether simpler:

  Issur had a father and he didn’t.

  And, to make matters worse, Issur had two very different faces. The first, which he always wore in his father’s presence, was deferential, humble—the picture of Reb Frumkin’s expectation. The second, which he had a habit of turning on Yehuda Leib when others—particularly parents—were not around, was bratty, sneering, and superior.

  And there he was now, standing in the synagogue door, doting cloyingly on his father, trying on his new hat. It was far too big on him, of course, and it slipped around and made him look even more foolish than he did in the first place.

  But still, Issur’s father smiled and laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder as if there were nothing his son could do wrong.

  No one ever touched Yehuda Leib like that.

  Now Issur was asking to keep the hat with him at the study hall, and his father answered with the fond admonition that it was new and expensive, and he must be very careful.

  The little fire in Yehuda Leib’s chest was picking up heat.

  By the time Yehuda Leib looked back up, nearly everyone was gone—Moshe Dovid off to his butchery, the rabbi off to his breakfast. But Issur was crossing the road toward Yehuda Leib now, his feet kneading through the well-turned mud.

  It was not kind—and it was probably not wise, either—but Yehuda Leib was in no mood to give Issur Frumkin a free pass. Rooting in his pocket for something to eat, he shifted his body into the doorframe to block Issur’s way.

  “Hey,” said Issur, mounting the front stairs. “Move.”

  Yehuda Leib did not react, keeping his eyes low beneath the brim of his cap, chewing assiduously on a hard rind of cheese.

  “Hey! Yehuda Leib!” said Issur. “I know you can hear me. Move, you idiot.”

  At this, Yehuda Leib sighed and scooted himself over, but rather than clearing the doorframe, he moved farther in, taking up as much space as he possibly could.

  “Oh,” said Issur. “Think you’re funny?”

  Now Yehuda Leib looked up and smiled through a mouthful of cheese.

  “You’re disgusting,” said Issur. “Get out of my way.”

  Again, Yehuda Leib did not budge.

  “Some of us have important things to do,” said Issur. “Why don’t you stand up and move, you little bastard?”

  It is entirely possible that Issur was not aware that, coming from him of all people—on this morning of all mornings—that word would scorch Yehuda Leib’s guts with its injustice. It is, in fact, likely that Issur Frumkin had no idea what he was getting himself into.

  But none of this made the slightest bit of difference to Yehuda Leib.

  Calmly, he stood. Tossing aside the stripped rind of cheese, he stepped out of the doorframe, and as he passed Issur by, he swatted at the brim of Moshe Dovid’s fine new hat, sending it flying up and out into the street, where he trod on it hard, crushing it deep into the mud.

  Issur stood quivering on the study-hall stairs above.

  Yehuda Leib turned and smiled.

  “There,” he said. “How’s that?”

  And this is how the fight began.

  * * *

  —

  The house of Reb Zalman the baker was on the forest side of Tupik. Coming in from Zubinsk, you had to pass through the little cemetery on the hillside to reach it, and if you didn’t take care to lose sight of the clutch of leaning headstones before turning to the baker’s door, you might have had the uncanny feeling that you carried some residue of the graveyard inside with you.

  For this reason as well as others, the baker made sure to leave a cup and basin for hand washing by the door.

  The ground floor of Zalman’s house was occupied primarily with the necessities of his business: large sacks of flour, wide wooden workbenches, a vast clay oven stoked to blistering temperatures each morning before the sun even had a chance to rise and compete. Baskets of rolls, rugelach, and, on Fridays, shining brown loaves of thick, braided challah crowded close in around the door. If you wished to speak with Zalman, you would invariably find him here, attempting, it seemed, to cover each of his sober black garments thoroughly with flour before his day was done.

  It was mainly on the narrower second level that the women of Zalman’s house led their lives. His wife, Feygush, insisted on maintaining a second kitchen there, away from public view, which required quite a bit of schlepping—water and other necessities—up the rough wooden stairs.

  This schlepping almost always fell to Zalman’s daughter, Bluma.

  Bluma was widely considered a good girl—pretty, kind, generally receptive to the needs of others. Her only fault was a slight overfondness for the fleeting territory between sleep and waking, where the eyelids are heavy, the blankets are warm, and the entirety of the world seems to be confined behind a thick sheet of glass. Rarely did she rise until midmorning, when she might creep downstairs to steal a wink and a smile from her father—and often a sweet bun beside
s.

  It was because of this abundance of time spent in bed that Bluma was the member of the family far most familiar with the activities of her grandmother, who lived on the third floor.

  Third floor, though, was charitable. In truth, it was a cramped attic, almost perfectly triangular, in which Bluma’s grandmother lived with her crabby, toothless gray cat. Attic even was a bit too kind: there was barely enough space among the rafters to accommodate the bed, the table, the chair, the old woman, and the cat all at once. And what little floor space there was hung directly above Bluma’s bed.

  Bluma knew the sound that the ceiling made when the old woman first shifted in bed in the morning. She knew the sound of the cat jumping from the pillow to the windowsill. She knew the sound of tiny old feet shifting onto the floorboards, of the chair being pulled from beneath the table.

  And on this particular morning, the floorboards above her were dead silent.

  * * *

  —

  “Papa?” said Bluma.

  Zalman looked up from his kneading and smiled. “Good morning, darling,” he said.

  “Has Bubbe come down?”

  Zalman shook his head and began to knead again. “I think she’s still upstairs.”

  Bluma shook her head. “I haven’t heard her all morning.”

  Bluma’s bubbe was nothing if not reliable. Reliably, she stumped down from her attic in the morning to retrieve a bit of bread and water, and reliably, she creaked back up without having spoken a word to anyone.

  This had been the way for nearly as long as Bluma could remember.

  “Hope she’s feeling all right,” said Zalman, his voice jumping with the exertion of his work. “Here,” he said. “Take her a bit of milk and some rugelach. She’ll like that.”

  Bluma’s bubbe, as a rule, did not care for people. She took what little food she ate on her own schedule and often in her own room. Once a week, on Fridays, she would come down to make a pot of chicken soup, and when they all sat down to eat it, she would quietly wish her son and her granddaughter a good Sabbath.

  She never spoke to Bluma’s mother.

  Bluma arrived outside her grandmother’s bedroom door and tapped lightly with her knuckle, twice.

  “Bubbe?”

  For a period of time, Bluma had spent her days reading on the little landing just outside her bubbe’s bedroom door. She’d hardly meant to make a habit of it, but while she’d lain there one morning, her grandmother had pulled open the door. Bluma had expected to be shooed away, but her bubbe had simply stared down at her. After a moment, she’d left the door hanging open and gone about her business.

  They had lived quietly in parallel, then—Bluma reading on the landing with her pillow, and her bubbe within, occupying herself with needlework or tidying. Often she would sit in front of the oblong mirror on her wall and make a silent accounting of the dissatisfactions she found in her face.

  And then one day the door had swung open in the morning and almost immediately slammed shut again. When Bluma had gone to use the bathroom, her pillow had been moved back down onto her bed, and that had been that.

  All the same, Bluma held the quiet certainty that she had shared something with her grandmother that no one else in the house had ever seen.

  And this was correct.

  Again: one knuckle, two taps.

  “Bubbe?”

  There was no answer.

  The bedroom door was hung to swing inward, and with every creaking moment that Bluma spent pushing it, she still thought she might find her grandmother there, just behind the opening door.

  But she didn’t.

  Her bubbe was gone.

  * * *

  —

  The sky was heavy, and Yehuda Leib longed for the rain to come and relieve the pressure.

  His mouth ached.

  Issur had only gotten one good hit in—despite his superior size, he was really worth almost nothing in a fight—but as luck would have it, his fist had caught Yehuda Leib square on the lip, and it was beginning to swell.

  Yehuda Leib was too wise to stick around once they’d been hauled apart—it didn’t matter who was at fault when one of the combatants was Issur “God’s Gift to Tupik” Frumkin and the other was a grubby, fatherless thief, and so he’d made himself scarce among the rooftops.

  Up here, there was no one to glare—no one to wish he simply wasn’t.

  The time passed slowly. Feet and hooves trod the mud below. Fires were kindled, burned, went out. The dim gray sky began to darken.

  The hour came and went for afternoon prayers.

  It really was a shame. He had promised his mother that he would stay out of trouble.

  But he’d had very little choice in the matter. There were a lot of things you could say about Yehuda Leib, but he wasn’t a bastard. That much he knew.

  He remembered his father, though his mother thought this was impossible.

  The memory was warm, almost hot, and it smelled of wax and wood and sweat and wool.

  It was a very good memory.

  He had been a small boy, and his father had held him with one arm. It had been Yom Kippur, he thought, the holiest day of the year, because all around him he remembered clean white garments. His father’s garment had been white, and over it he had worn his striped prayer shawl. Yehuda Leib remembered looking up at the raucous, colorful ceiling of the synagogue, painted with vines and figs, eagles, lions, and unicorns, red and blue and tawny and white, and then his father had pulled his attention down to the front of the room, and someone had blown the ram’s horn, and there had been a great riot of supplication from the congregation, and he’d looked up, and there had been tears in his father’s eyes, and he’d reached out and taken the edges of his father’s beard softly in his fat little fists, and his father had smiled, and the tears had fallen onto his cheeks.

  That was all he remembered.

  Sometimes he thought the memory felt holy because of the synagogue, and sometimes he thought maybe it was the other way around.

  He would have given anything to see his father’s face again. He would’ve given the right eye out of his own head.

  But it was impossible. Whenever he asked about him, his mother told Yehuda Leib that his father had died, and then she became very sad for a day or two.

  After a while, Yehuda Leib learned to stop asking.

  But he never learned to stop wondering.

  “Rabbi!”

  Instinctively, Yehuda Leib lay flat against the slope of the roof below.

  He knew that voice. That was Moshe Dovid Frumkin. The last person Yehuda Leib wanted to see was Issur’s father, the butcher, a man who wore blood as comfortably as others wore clothes.

  “Rabbi,” called Reb Frumkin again, and now Yehuda Leib heard the soft, round voice of the rabbi reaching out in response.

  “Moshe Dovid,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  Moshe Dovid Frumkin let out an aggrieved sigh, and Yehuda Leib wriggled around to see the two men talking in the street below.

  “I trust you heard?” said Frumkin.

  “About the fight?”

  Moshe Dovid scoffed. “The attack, more like. Issur tells me that wild beast of a boy jumped on him out of nowhere. My fine new hat is ruined, my son’s nose broken….”

  Yehuda Leib’s guts squirmed at the injustice of Issur’s story, but at the same time, he was pleased he’d managed to break Issur’s nose.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Moshe Dovid,” said the rabbi.

  “You’re always sorry,” Frumkin said.

  “Yes,” said the rabbi. “I suppose I am.”

  The butcher stepped closer. “But the situation isn’t getting any better, Rabbi. Something needs to be done.”

  The rabbi nodded. “And what do you suggest?”

&
nbsp; “Well,” said Moshe Dovid. “I caught up with that schlepper Yankl, and I asked him about Avimelekh.”

  Avimelekh. There was that name again. Yehuda Leib had almost forgotten it in all the excitement.

  “He says,” continued Frumkin, “that Avimelekh has racked up some heavy gambling debts. He’s set on coming to Tupik today or tomorrow—before the Rebbe’s wedding. Says he can get a good amount of money finding conscripts for the Tsar’s army. Now, would it be such a terrible thing if we just let him have the boy?”

  The rabbi tugged at his beard and nodded again slowly. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think it would be.”

  Moshe Dovid sighed again, so loudly it was almost a word. “You can’t keep protecting him like this.”

  “I don’t see why not,” said the rabbi.

  “Because,” said Frumkin, “it’s just a matter of time. It’s in his blood.”

  “What is?”

  “You know what, Rabbi. And it’s going to come out. Let Avimelekh take him off our hands.”

  “I think,” said the rabbi, with a sigh of his own, “that it would be best for you to look to your own house, Moshe Dovid. The way I heard it told, it was your little wild beast who did the attacking. Good evening.”

  Yehuda Leib grinned.

  At least someone was on his side.

  But something was still bothering him.

  Let Avimelekh take him off our hands.

  It was growing dark. He should be getting home.

  Shulamis was bent over the fire when Yehuda Leib pushed through the front door, and she turned at the sound of his voice.

  “Mama?”

  Shulamis stood, consternation gathered around her shoulders like a heavy shawl.

  “I heard what happened this morning.”

  She opened her mouth to scold, but there was a question burning in Yehuda Leib, and he blurted it out before she could begin.

  “Mama,” he said. “Who’s Avimelekh?”

  Shulamis stiffened.

  Yehuda Leib did not know what he’d expected, but this was not it. Despite the popping of the fire and the rolling boil of the potato water, it felt as if all the sounds in their little house had fled in fear of the word he’d just pronounced.