“You do not have to worry, Froy Alshonsky. You are safe with me.” He patted his gun. “Not to brag or anything, but Pincus came to me first because I’m the best shot in the neighborhood.” They were walking under clotheslines of drying laundry that stretched out from the second-story windows. “That is how I got there first. Wissotzky was already dead and Zev would have been too. Once they saw me they ran away. It didn’t take much. Your husband always told us it wouldn’t take much and he was right.”
Berta looked up at the mention of Hershel. “My husband?”
“Reb Alshonsky, a fine man, a righteous man, a real tsaddik. You can tell him I said so. Tell him Shammai Eggel said he is a real tsaddik. He’ll remember me, I’m the sharpshooter. That’s what he used to call me, the sharpshooter.”
THAT NIGHT Berta got word from Lhaye that she would be staying all night at the hospital, so Berta brought the children over to her apartment, fed them, and put them to bed with Samuil. She put the kettle on for tea and brought the chair over to a little table by the window so she could sit and look out on the street. The shops were closing. The shopkeepers were bringing in what little merchandise they had to sell and lowering the shutters. She was watching the hardware store owner roll in a barrel when her attention drifted to a young man. He was lanky, with stooped shoulders, and greasy blond hair hung in clumps from under his lambskin cap. He was holding an overcoat and carrying a bag and didn’t seem to be in a hurry. He didn’t look before he crossed the street, sidestepping a passing sledge and walking in the direction of her building.
A few moments later she heard someone on the stairs and knew it had to be the stranger. She could hear him coming up slowly, taking care to be quiet, and stopping on the landing to listen. She went over and put her ear to the door. Taking the knob in her hand, she turned and held it. When she heard him right outside, she yanked it opened and startled him. He jumped back. In one sweep she took in the bag on the doorstep and the coat on top of it. It was Zev’s coat. It had been cleaned and pressed. The bag contained potatoes.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
He didn’t answer her. Instead he turned and started back down the steps.
“Wait. Why are you doing this?” She hurried after him and grabbed his sleeve. “Who are you?” There had been a steady stream of little presents left on her doorstep since that first tin of kerosene.
“Nobody,” he said tonelessly, yanking his arm free.
“No, wait, please. I want to thank you.”
“No need,” he said over his shoulder.
She leaned over the railing. “Did you know my husband?” This time he turned back reluctantly and looked up at her. “Met him once.”
“Did you work with him?”
“Once.”
“Won’t you come in?”
“No.”
“Please. I want to thank you properly.”
“I told you. There’s no need.”
She noticed that the index finger of his left hand was missing. “Then at least come in and have a cup of tea. I would like that very much.”
He considered it for a moment and then halfheartedly turned and followed her back up the stairs. Once inside, she showed him to the little table by the window. “Sit here. I’ll get the tea. We have to be quiet, because the children are sleeping.” He sat down heavily and surveyed the street outside. She kept an eye on him while she made the tea to make sure he didn’t leave.
When she came back in with the cups and a plate of buns, she set them down in the center of the table. She took the other chair and handed him a bun on a plate and a cup of tea. He began to eat in silence, his jaw working as he chewed. She could see that he took no pleasure in the food. He was only there because she had insisted.
“How did you lose your finger?”
He shrugged. “Frostbite.”
“Do you know where my husband is?”
He shook his head.
“He didn’t send you?”
“Of course not.”
“I thought he might’ve sent you to take care of us.”
“No, I’ve been away. When I got back, they said he went to America and told me where you lived.”
At first, she thought he looked like he had spent his childhood in the factories and had gotten prematurely old through hard work. But when he spoke, she knew she’d been wrong. Even though he only said a few words, she could hear that his speech was cultured. He had been educated. He wasn’t a worker, although judging by his creased and calloused hands and weathered face he had been doing hard work.
“Would you like another bun?”
He stood up. “No.”
“Will you come back to see us?”
He nodded as he put on his coat.
“What’s your name?”
He buttoned it up and pulled up the collar. “Pavel,” he said, barely above a whisper.
Once he was gone, she went to the window to catch a glimpse of him as he left the building. He looked exhausted as he walked down the street, his hands in his pockets, his head thrust slightly forward on his neck. A dead man walking among the living through a colossal effort of will.
Chapter Sixteen
February 1919
THERE WAS a restaurant in Kamenka, a large town not far from Cherkast, where Berta usually stopped for a bowl of soup and bit of bread whenever she was in the area making her rounds. The restaurant was situated on an island in the middle of the square in the Jewish neighborhood. It was a squat building of peeling plaster with a rusty tin roof and tall windows flanked by broken shutters. When Berta climbed the steps that day she was tired and hungry. She wore a tangled bunch of cheap beads around her neck. This was what remained of her inventory after spending the morning traveling around to the farmsteads and trading them for potatoes and beets, and bundles of feathers, flax, and pig bristles to sell to the merchants back in Cherkast.
Berta knew the proprietress of the restaurant. She was thin with a loose flap of skin under her chin and practically no breasts on a sunken chest. She liked to brag about her two sons who were getting rich working for the Polish estate owner down the road. She was an indifferent cook but kept the inside of her restaurant in spotless order by scrubbing the tables with salt and mopping the floors with carbolic soap. The odor from the soap often overpowered the food and made everything taste bitter and clean.
It came as a surprise when Berta pushed open the door and found the place in shambles. There were dirty dishes all over the tables, broken plates on the floor, chairs overturned, and the contents of a soup bowl splattered on the wall. At first Berta didn’t see the little woman slumped in a chair in the back, her clothes stiff with dirt, blending into the chaos. The old woman’s eyes were dull and staring out of the hollows in her skull, her stringy hair framing a vacant face. She sat motionless, her gaze fixed on the crusty bits of dried soup on the wall, her flat chest barely rising and falling.
“What happened here?” whispered Berta.
The old woman didn’t move. She didn’t seem to know that Berta was there.
A younger woman came in through the kitchen door and stopped when she saw Berta crouching beside the proprietress. “We’re closed,” the woman said, looking Berta over with large suspicious eyes half hidden under a fringe of brown hair.
Berta asked, “Is she all right?”
“Of course she’s not all right. Look at her. She’s half dead.”
“What happened?”
The woman shrugged and turned away. She walked over to a table and started to gather up the plates.
“It’s all right. I’m a friend.”
The woman hesitated, then said, “There were eight of them. Soldiers, but they weren’t in uniform.”
“Hryhoriiv’s men?”
“No. They were Reds.”
Berta was surprised. Of all the factions fighting in the countryside, the Red Army of the Bolsheviks seemed the least likely to kill Jews. The White Army, composed of a loose affiliation of an
ti-Bolsheviks including the Cossacks; the Volunteer Army of General Denikin; the anarchist Black Army; the Ukrainian army called the Directory; and a long list of bandits headed by atamans or chieftains all waged brutal pogroms against the Jews, slaughtering them by the thousands and destroying their shtetlekh. But the Reds nearly always showed restraint.
“Reds? You sure?”
A bitter laugh. “Of course, I’m sure. I was here, wasn’t I?”
“What did they want?”
“They wanted to be fed, what else? And naturally there was no question of payment.”
“Did she feed them?”
“What else is she going to do? But her sons were out in the back putting away some wood and they came running in. She begged them to go away, but they wouldn’t listen to her. Stupid boys. What could they do against those men? They didn’t even have guns. The soldiers took what they wanted and shot them in the head.” She held a finger up to her forehead. “And the whole time this poor woman was standing there watching.”
The woman sighed, shook her head, and took the stack of plates into the kitchen. Berta picked up the saucers and cups and followed her in. “After they shot her sons they told her they’d be back for lunch the next day. That was yesterday, only God help me it seems like a lifetime ago.” They put the dishes in the dry sink and went back for more. “She buried her sons this morning. And then they came back just as they said they would and she fed them soup. One of them didn’t like it.” She nodded to the splatter on the wall while clearing the second table. “They took everything, all the food and the bread, everything from the kitchen, and left. After that she sat down in that chair and hasn’t moved since.”
Berta helped the woman clear the tables. When they had washed and put away the dishes they got the old woman up and walked her back to the bedroom. It was a neat little room off the kitchen with a clean coverlet over a straw mattress, a coat and a good dress hanging on a hook on the wall, and a pair of shoes in the corner. They undressed her and pulled a nightdress over her head and shoulders. Her arms remained limp at her sides, her face blank, her eyes flat and black like dirty coins. Her will was gone. She had retreated into her own world where the dishes were always clean, the floors smelled of carbolic soap, and her sons were out in the yard stacking firewood for her oven.
The woman found some bread that the soldiers had missed and gave it to Berta. “Be careful on the road,” she said at the door, as she watched Berta shoulder her bundles. “Three men disappeared yesterday. So stay off the main road and look out for yourself.”
Berta nodded. But on the way out of town she wondered how she was going to get to where she wanted to go if she didn’t take the main road. So she stayed on it, passing the outlying houses and taverns, the deserted yards and the brittle sticks still standing in the frozen kitchen gardens, until she came to a cart track that led off through the snowy fields.
The going was slow because she was carrying her bundles and wearing a pair of men’s boots stuffed with newspaper to make them fit. The sun was past its zenith, a raw globe behind the clouds and not much brighter than the moon. The wind was picking up and she clutched the bundles to her chest to block it. She had one last delivery to make and wanted to hurry so she could get back for the early train. The farmstead wasn’t far, but it would be hard to find because of the mist that clung to the hollows and spiraled up through the trees. She had never come this way before. She kept thinking that out here it would be easy to freeze to death. Be only steps away from the house and never know it.
Ihor Kochubey’s son was getting married and this meant that gold chains had to be bought since it was the custom among the kulaks to cover their brides in gold. Because Ihor Kochubey had already married off two sons the previous year, this bride would have to be satisfied with a necklace and perhaps a bracelet or two. For this reason she would not be the youngest or the prettiest of the eligible girls, but then Ihor Kochubey’s son was not exactly a catch either. He was slow-witted and often seen talking to himself.
Berta had borrowed several chains from a jeweler and had sewn them into the hem of her skirt. As she walked through the deep snow across the fields she could feel the soft thud of their weight hitting against her leg. It wasn’t easy walking. She had to curl her toes to keep her feet from sliding around in the boots while shifting her bundles from arm to arm, trying to find a comfortable way of carrying them.
Finally she came to a drive that she thought might lead down to the house. It was smoother than the surrounding fields and lacked the undulating corn row pattern beneath the snow. There was a frozen stream beside it that looked familiar, though she couldn’t be sure, since she had always seen it in the summer, when it came crashing down from the hillside or in the fall, when the water was nearly gone and barely covered the gravelly bottom. Now it was covered with a thick layer of ice imbedded with bits of leaves and twigs. She crouched down and peered through the milky ice and saw the water flowing beneath it like long, blue fingers. Wedged between two rocks was a clump of human hair trailing in the gentle current. The shock of it knocked her back off her heels. When she came back to take a closer look she told herself that it had to be some strange river reed. Fear was playing tricks with her mind.
On her way down the drive she thought about a warm fire in the stove, sipping a mug of hot tea, and sharing a loaf of bread and salt. They would want the news before they got down to business. They wouldn’t want the usual gossip. The goings-on of their neighbors held little interest for them now that the war was over and the Germans had left.
A year ago, in March of 1918, the Congress of Soviets ratified the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which gave Lenin peace with Germany, something he had to have if he wanted to stay in power. In return he signed away half of Russia’s western domain. Under the treaty the Germans were given the Baltic provinces and the nominally sovereign provinces of Poland, Georgia, and the Ukraine, which, in fact, were not sovereign states at all, but German-controlled protectorates. Under German rule the fledgling Ukrainian state enjoyed a period of peace and a certain measure of autonomy. This continued until the end of the war, when the Germans were driven out, taking any semblance of law and order with them. Now, no one wanted to hear about gossip anymore. All they wanted to talk about were the troubles on the farmsteads, in the cities, about the fighting between the Reds and Whites, about the warlords and the Directory troops who took what they wanted from farms like theirs and moved on. Of less interest were the widespread pogroms that were raging in the shtetlekh and in the cities like Kiev and Poltava and the frequent attacks on Jewish travelers on the trains and roads.
She would give them all the news she knew and in exchange they would buy her gold. They would haggle with her and she would pretend to lower the price, but it would be the one that she had been after all along. They needed the gold as much as she needed to sell it, so she was confident it would end well and all this anxiety, the uncertainty, the agonizing slog through the snow would be worth it.
She didn’t have far to go before she caught a glimpse of the house through the bare branches of the trees. It was the Kochubey house; the fancy blue shutters and wide porch were unmistakable. She pushed on with the expectation that soon she would be hearing the dogs bark and see smoke curling out of the chimney. So she was surprised when she reached the bottom of the drive and found the yard empty and the chimney cold, the barn door open and the house deserted and dark. Ihor Kochubey was a careful man and wouldn’t leave his barn door open on a day like this. There should have been children out in the yard, bundled up in felt boots and sheepskin jackets. There should have been women in the kitchen and chickens clucking in the coop. Nothing was right about Ihor Kochobey’s farmstead and for a moment she wanted to drop her bundles and run. Instead she stood in the snow and waited until the panic subsided. Then she told herself that there were no signs of violence. There were no bodies, no blood in the snow. The house was intact. It was only the quiet that was frightening her. She crossed the yard to
the barn, sidestepping a mound of frozen horse manure, and stepped into the darkness of the gaping doorway.
“Kto-nibyd yest?” she called out.
The stalls were empty and the hooks were bare where the harnesses usually hung. Her heart sped up. She turned and walked back across the yard. The windows of the house were blank. She walked up the steps and peered in through one of them, but could see nothing but the edge of a curtain and the cold fireplace across the room. She called out again, even though it was considered rude to call out over the threshold.
She waited for a few moments and then tried the doorknob. It turned easily in her hand. She called out once again before stepping inside. It was freezing in the kitchen. It smelled of a dead fire and spilled kerosene. The chairs were pushed back from the table as if the occupants had shoved them out in a hurry. There were wooden bowls of kasha on the worn planks with spoons frozen in place. Next to the bowls sat mugs of frozen tea. A cupboard stood across the room, open and empty. Beneath the table was a glass jar of canned peaches that must have rolled under and then been forgotten. She hesitated before picking it up and then shoved it into one of her bundles.
She checked the other rooms: a bedroom with several unmade beds and another one with a wardrobe and a straw mattress covered in a blanket. She was about to turn and leave the house when she heard a rustling from the back room. This time she didn’t call out. She was sick with fear as she crept down the hall to the half-closed door. Behind it was a small room that smelled of mold. There were benches against one wall, a pair of felt boots in the corner, and a few goat hides tacked to the plaster walls, a feeble baton of light straying in through a tiny window. A chicken stood in the middle of the room plucking at something in the dirt. It was a clump of blond hair. This time it was unmistakable. Some of the strands ended in tiny points of blood as if it had been pulled out by the roots.
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