by Talia Carner
As she hurried back to the kitchen in the dark, she prayed, “Thank you, God, for watching after my family—” She stopped. God wasn’t here, where His Jews were being tortured and exiled, if not murdered. Maybe He was in the Holy Land—but more likely He was in America, where everyone prospered and ate chicken every day.
Only after the midday meal did the innkeeper’s wife let Batya rest. She gave her a bowl of potatoes and sauerkraut with tiny pieces of sausage peeking out to take to her family, and then draped a dress set over Batya’s arm.
“Here. Tidy up so you can help serve dinner in the tavern.”
Batya’s heart sang as she rushed back to the barn. Serving dinner would be cleaner and less exhausting than hauling coal. She was being elevated! She halted outside the barn and fished out with her fingers the pieces of sausage, surely made of pork and horsemeat, and hurled them toward the dogs tied near the shed. In her head, she asked God for forgiveness. The unkosher meat, tref, had contaminated the entire dish, but even He would have agreed that it was more important that her parents ate.
With a moan, her mother rose on one elbow from the hay. She reported that Koppel was out, trying to sell whatever milk and dairy products he could carry on his back. Earlier he had split wood for the innkeeper and tended to the guests’ horses.
“I’m sorry to be a burden when we need all our strength,” her mother added, then whispered, her voice breaking, “If only Hedi had married the postman instead of her goy, she’d be alive and we would all be riding to America in his fancy coach with bells.”
“Just rest, Mama.”
“Why did Keyla have to run off to Siberia? When will I ever see her again?”
You have me. I’ll make up for all the disappointments.
Batya fell into a deep sleep, but a dream of Komarinoe and Miriam’s murder woke her up with a start, horror contracting her heart. She missed her dark-eyed, laughing, inventive friend. Just last month, the two families had shared the festive Rosh Hashanah dinner, after which their fathers sang joyous wordless nigunim, “bim-bim-bam,” and “ai-ai-ai.”
She must forget Miriam and Komarinoe. She mustn’t think of her two willful sisters. It fell upon her to be the rock for her parents, work hard, and hope that the innkeeper would allow them to stay until she somehow found a way to help her father get them to America.
Batya filled the pail of water at the well and then hid behind a heap of hay at the back of the barn while she washed herself with a rag as best as she could. Feeling clean made up for the freezing water that prickled her skin. Right after the full moon, she would have to take care of her monthly flow. It had started five months before, and she’d learned to wash and hang the rags to dry. How could she do that when her family was out on the open road again, pushing their cart? She shoved away the apprehension. Tonight she had work to do, honest work that would guarantee her family’s safety here from road bandits and from the snow flurries that now swirled in the air before early sunset.
Surale combed the hay out of Batya’s hair and plaited it into twin braids, then wrapped them around Batya’s head like a crown, using a dab of butter to flatten the stubborn tendrils into submission. There was nothing they could do to stop the itching of lice or remove the white eggs visible down the strands of Batya’s blond hair. The lice would continue to multiply along with the fleas in their bedding.
Batya hadn’t worn a good dress since she’d outgrown her Shabbat sarafan, the long, printed pinafore worn over a blouse, an outfit that had first served her two older sisters. When passed to Surale, the shirt had been patched too often, and the dress’s printed flowers had faded and looked no better than the tattered ensemble passed down to Batya from her mother. It felt so good now to put on the fresh white blouse and slip on the new brown pinafore.
Tying the strings of the high-waisted, striped apron behind Batya’s back, Surale gushed over its hem and collar trimmed in red and green. Batya whirled to feel the ample fabric of the skirt rise and fall against her ankles. She laughed, grabbed both of Surale’s hands, and pulled her into a spin, round and round. It seemed so long ago when they had last romped in joy, when only poverty was their steady companion, not fear and loss and the uncertainty of the coming days.
“How will we find a good shidach if there’s no matchmaker around?” Surale asked.
“You’re crazy to think of such a thing at your age!” Laughing, Batya hid her embarrassment that this past year some new longing had awoken in her, too.
“I hope my groom will be handsome and interesting and well-off,” Surale said. “Like Hedi’s—”
“Hedi?” Batya stopped dancing. “She betrayed us—and all our people. She permitted the Jew-hating priest to marry her!” Batya squeezed Surale’s hands until her sister winced. “The most important mitzvah you and I can ever do is honoring our parents. Be loyal and obedient. Two daughters have already disobeyed them. We’re never to do that, too. Do you understand?”
“Sorry,” Surale mumbled.
Batya softened. “We’re too poor and have no remarkable lineage to appeal to a good match. But even without yichus, when the time comes, Papa will find each of us a good man.”
“Mama says that Papa is a dreamer.”
“He’s survived many pogroms. He speaks directly to God and can read the Bible. Didn’t the neighbors come to him to read their letters for them? Papa knows what’s good for us.” Batya looked at her feet. “For now, all I want is a new pair of socks.” Buried in the cart was a stained child’s sweater her mother had bought from a peddler with the intention of unraveling the wool to reuse. Batya had no time now to dig under the heap of the family’s possessions for the yarn and the knitting needles.
Ten minutes later, she stopped at the tavern door and examined her reflection in the window. The uneven pane of glass distorted it, but not enough to hide the green of her large eyes and the pink of her too-full lips.
“I’ll be worthy of Your name,” she whispered. Her name, Batya, meant God’s daughter, and as such she was destined for great things. Her first mission was to help her family survive.
Her hand on the door handle, a new understanding washed over her of an internal shift: since their escape, her parents could no longer protect and provide for her. She had grown up.
Chapter Two
Work in the tavern’s dining hall proved more grueling than the labor in the hot kitchen. Batya had to rush among tables squeezed together, forced to brush against male guests no matter how much she tried to minimize herself. At their urgent calls for food and drink, she struggled to carry heavy trays, refill tin cups without spilling, haul pitchers of beer and vodka, collect dirty dishes and run them to the kitchen, only to bring more plates, bowls, and cups, all without dropping anything. Her muscles burned, and the blisters on her feet from the rough wooden clogs reopened. But her family was safe. Tonight they had a roof over their heads. They had been fed. If she focused on the tasks, performed them to perfection, then tomorrow her mother would be able to rest again.
Once Batya caught the crinkle of a smile on the face of the innkeeper when he handed her a tray of filled vodka glasses. She lowered her eyes in shyness, encouraged that he was pleased with her work.
At a small table against the wall, one man sat alone, apart from most of the guests seated on the benches that flanked the two long tables. His brown hair was combed and parted neatly on the left side, then slicked down; in the light of the hanging lantern, its top shone golden. Unlike the peasants and peddlers around him, he was dressed in the most elegant clothes Batya had ever seen—a dark blue suit of good wool, a sparkling white shirt with a clean collar, and a wide, short tie with a gold pin that matched the buttons on his shirt. A large diamond glittered on his middle finger. He drew from his pocket a gold watch that was secured to his jacket button by a gold chain, glanced at it, tucked it back in, and then motioned with his finger for Batya to refill his mug. He tilted his chair back, chewed a cigar under his thin, waxed moustache, and examined the gai
ety in the room without joining the laughter that seemed contagious among the others.
When Batya served this man of great importance his plate of fatty meat and boiled cabbage, he thanked her softly in Yiddish, which surprised her. In all her father’s stories about his customers, the rich Jews of Bobruevo, whose dachas had a separate back door for peddlers like him, he’d never described a man who dressed this well. Even the landowners and officials Batya had seen, all Russians, wore worn and mended clothes.
The man’s presence in the inn created a great excitement in the kitchen. The cook and the innkeeper’s wife gossiped that he had traveled all the way from America to find himself a virtuous Jewish wife. He was on his way to his home village, where several potential brides had been lined up for him to choose from.
The evening stretched on, and the raucous merriment in the room grew louder. When Batya came through with a pitcher of beer to refill glasses, one man grabbed her waist, and his big arm closed around her narrow frame. She tried to pull away, her heart pounding, recalling the thugs who had violated Miriam. The man’s arm tightened.
“Let go of her,” the elegant stranger called out in Russian. “Don’t you see she’s just a girl?”
The man hesitated, then released his hold and, still leering, returned to his beer.
For the rest of the evening, Batya was careful to serve that table from its other side. This kind stranger’s future bride would be a lucky woman to have a husband who was both rich and good-hearted. That bride, Batya imagined later, when she finally lay down beside her parents, would be beautiful and come with a sizable dowry, her trousseau packed in two, maybe three, huge trunks: bed linens made of soft cotton and embroidered in silk with her initials; furs, each with its own hand muff and hat—a short white fox cape and a chestnut-colored sable coat reaching down to her ankles; at least four dresses. And then there would be leather boots and gloves, silk shoes, lace-trimmed handkerchiefs, and silk underthings. That lucky bride would most likely be the daughter of the village’s rabbi or the butcher.
Batya’s hopes to stay in the barn one more day were dashed when the innkeeper showed up the next morning. His grim, knotted brows showed none of his earlier kindness.
“Koppel, my priest says that it is unchristian to shelter you,” he told Batya’s father.
“It’s Friday.” Her father held both hands in supplication. “May God be with you, but could we at least stay till the end of the day tomorrow?”
The innkeeper shook his head. “Speaking of God, the priest says you people deserve His just punishment. Who am I to defy His will?”
Batya’s father lowered his head. “We thank you for the kindness you have shown us until now. May blessings fall on your head like stardust.”
As they gathered their belongings, Batya’s mother cried into Batya’s shoulder. “How can we prepare for Shabbat, let alone welcome it with dignity?”
Batya wished they could have stayed in the home they’d been forced to flee. A thatched-roof hut of only one small room with a ceiling so low she could reach up to grab a dangling spider, it had a stove with a wide loft built over it where the family slept together to keep warm during the long winter nights. Next to the stove had sat their table, two chairs, and the backless bench—now abandoned broken on the roadside. On the opposite wall, her father had fixed shelves to hold her mother’s few cooking pots and utensils, and the pair of candlesticks—brass, not silver—that waited all week to be taken down on Friday, polished with sand until they shone, then placed on a white tablecloth. Theirs had been the most humble of houses, yet when her father returned from the prayers at the makeshift synagogue—a shtiebel lacking a rabbi or a cantor, and where the floor was porous clay—their home became richer with his warmth and cheer.
With a heavy heart, Batya returned the pretty brown dress with its white blouse and striped apron to the innkeeper’s wife and put on her frayed, dirty sarafan and stained canvas apron.
She had failed her family. Had she been a couple of years older, not a small-framed, thin adolescent, perhaps she would have been more valuable to the tavern owner. Perhaps he would have kept her working at least until after Shabbat.
As they trudged again on the furrowed road, Batya pushed the cart doubly hard, while her mother leaned on it as she struggled to walk. But her father sang.
My father buys a little horse that neighs
Whose name is Mutzik,
Buys a puppy that barks
Whose name is Tsutsik.
Batya tried to draw strength from her father’s spirits, but rather than buoying her mother’s mood, the singing only distressed her further. “Do you hear him, Batya? A poet I married. The only train to America is the train of his singing.”
“What’s the first thing you’ll do when you reach America?” Batya asked her mother in an attempt to distract her.
Raising her head heavenward, her mother said, “Get myself a gold front tooth from all the gold that’s paving the streets.”
“I’ll be so rich that I will have a candy every day,” called Surale from behind, where she was leading Aggie. “Or maybe a slice of orange?”
“In America everyone gets a whole orange every day. It showers down like manna from heaven,” Batya’s mother said. “And there’s so much sunshine that people must wear special dark glasses or their eyes can’t sleep at night.”
“I’ll have a hot bath in a real tub.” Batya’s tone was dreamy. “I’ll wash my hair in rosewater until it shines.” When combed with fragrant oil, the blond streaks would emerge. Her curls would fall on the back of a lovely new sky-blue dress she’d wear, its full satin skirt like Queen Esther’s.
“First get rid of the lice,” her mother said. “In America they have a special concoction for it.”
“I’ll go dancing at a ball.” Twirling Aggie’s rope, Surale swiveled in a jig.
“How can you dance on an empty stomach?” Their mother smiled. “First we’ll eat the feast Americans will prepare for us upon our arrival: kneidlach soup brimming with fat, a whole goose cooked on a spit, and kreplach filled with mushrooms.”
The long sentences seemed to dissipate her energy. She breathed hard as she and Batya resumed pushing the cart. Batya gave it a heroic shove to also help her father in front. It was still early morning. How could they go on the whole day—and where to?
From behind, the pounding of hooves signaled an approaching carriage. Batya’s father pulled the cart to the side, and Batya navigated its wheels to make room on the narrow road.
As the carriage passed, the coachman, perched outside the enclosed cabin, called his horses to a halt. A head leaned out the cabin’s window, and Batya recognized the rich patron from the tavern.
“Where are you heading?” he asked Batya’s father.
“Wherever my horse will take me.”
The man looked around, puzzled, then laughed as he caught the joke. “A Jew can’t get very far like this,” he said. “May I invite the ladies to ride with me?”
Batya couldn’t believe their good fortune. She helped her father hitch the cart to the back of the carriage and tied Aggie behind, and after her father conferred with the coachman about the pace Aggie could keep, Batya climbed with her mother and Surale into the cabin. While her mother fingered the red tassels framing the windows, Batya turned to check on her father as he settled on top of their belongings.
“I’m the king presiding over my kingdom,” he called out, grinning.
Batya could hear in her head her mother’s reaction, unuttered in front of the thoughtful stranger: When God decides to punish a man, He starts by removing his brains.
Inside the carriage, Batya leaned back into the smooth leather of the seat. Beneath her, sturdy springs absorbed bumps on the uneven road, and the rubber-covered wheels did not squeak.
“I am Yitzik Moskowitz from Buenos Aires,” the stranger said, smiling.
“God should shower blessings on your head for your generosity, Reb Moskowitz.” Batya’s mother bow
ed her head in respect as she addressed him with “reb,” the title of veneration for a man of distinction.
“Aren’t we Jews commanded to stand for one another? Who else would help us, the goyim?” He chuckled. “God, blessed be He, has been generous with me. Some would say too generous with Yitzik the Pitzik, who came from humble beginnings just like yours. I was beaten and punched. I starved until my stomach became glued to my spine. Now I am ordered by Him to do mitzvahs wherever I go, wherever I can, with whatever means He’s made available to me.”
“Reb Moskowitz, I’ve never heard of your shtetl. Is it beyond the Mountains of Darkness?”
“It’s far away in America.” He shook his head with vehemence. “There, I drink fruit nectar every day. But I return to visit my birth country here, and what do I discover? The czar is still at it: heavy taxes on anything Jewish—from the ritual slaughtering of cows to burial. Now he wants us out. Out!”
“Or dead,” Batya’s mother said.
He leaned forward without removing the cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth. “You tell me how I can help.”
Batya’s mother shrugged. “Speak to the czar?”
“I may do that.” He laughed.
Batya sucked in a quick breath. It was common knowledge that some men of substance—Jewish or not—helped the czar fill his coffers. How amazing that she should meet one such man in the flesh just when her family needed help the most. Her father had been right to throw in their lot with God.
“Where, may I ask, are you all heading?” Reb Moskowitz asked.
“The Pale of Settlement,” Batya’s mother said, mentioning the only area of Russia where Jews were permitted to live. “Unless the czar, may he be afflicted with a blister on top of a boil, has moved the borders again. Some shtetls that were within the Pale’s boundaries last year are now suddenly outside it.”
“I’ll drive you there. That’s the least I can do for my fellow Jews.”
“May God bless you with good health and long life.”