Chapter Eighteen
December 1919
BERTA LAY on a pallet in the bruised light of morning with her daughter in her arms. She could feel the warmth from Sura’s body ebb away as she lay there trying to find the strength to do what must be done. Pavel had been sent away and now only Lhaye remained with her. She came over and closed Sura’s eyes and then lifted her body so that Berta could get out from underneath it. Together they lowered her back down on the bed and laid her arms gently by her sides. Her features had changed so much since death had taken her that now she looked like a wax effigy. Berta kissed her one last time and pulled a clean white sheet over her head and together she and Lhaye placed candles all around the bed and lit them.
There was a knock at the door. “It’s the shomer,” Lhaye said, coming back to the kitchen.
“Tell him to go away. I don’t want him here.”
“Who will stand guard over her?”
“I’ll do it myself.”
“But you are the nihum avelim.”
“I said I will do it myself.”
That evening, Berta and Lhaye washed the body and wrapped it in a tallis. The man from the burial society came and told her that if she did not have the money for a funeral, they would provide her with one. He was a thin man, all angles, with a bushy beard that nearly covered his lips, leaving only a thin line of flesh where the words came out. Berta didn’t have the money, so she was grateful for the help.
“Don’t worry, Froy Alshonsky. Everything will be taken care of. It’s a nice plot, under a tree. A chestnut, I think.” She started to cry. He was used to this and stood there quietly while she pulled herself together. Then he went over a few details, telling her when they would pick up the body and the time of the service.
“I don’t want any official mourners,” she said, thinking of Aviva Kaspler and her partner.
“She doesn’t need them,” said the man. “There are plenty of people who will mourn her.”
That night she brought her pallet into the front room next to Sura’s body and stretched out on it. Lhaye wanted her to come out into the hall to eat something since it was forbidden to eat or drink in the presence of the dead, but Berta shook her head. She only wanted to be left alone. So Lhaye went back to her apartment and her children. Berta could hear them through the wall: little Rivke pleading for her shoe, Vulia teasing her, Lhaye admonishing him. It was the normal clamor of life and it caused her a momentary pang of jealousy. She rolled over and stared at the flickering candlelight. Then she closed her eyes and saw its dark afterimage. She lay there for some time and waited for sleep to come. Her thoughts became half dreams of disjointed images. She felt as if she had been cut into pieces, her limbs severed, her face halved. She could no longer feel her lips. She wondered if she could move at all.
After the funeral, Lhaye and Froy Wohlgemuth, the old lady from down the hall, came over with bread and hard-boiled eggs. This was the first meal of shiva, the seven-day mourning period. Then the neighbors began filtering in with more food and condolences. Berta sat on her pallet and did not move, did not get up, neither washed nor changed clothes nor greeted visitors. These were the rules of shiva. Even if they hadn’t been, she would have still followed them. She could do little else. She could hear the comings and goings of others from far away, like a child sent to bed before the guests arrived. But she was in another room and the door was closed. She was no longer a part of the world.
NOW THAT there was no one to tell Samuil that he couldn’t go across the street to the bombed-out building and climb up to the second floor, he went up there whenever he wanted to. He liked it up there. He liked sitting on the edge where the wall had once met the floor, with his feet dangling over the piles of rubble below, and watching the housewives in the alleys trade used goods for wood and food. Since he wasn’t going to school, he had plenty of time to make himself comfortable. He staked out two rooms that overlooked the street and furnished them with an armchair that was missing a cushion, two packing crates from the deserted poultry market, and a charred table. These were the rooms that he shared with Sasha Riabushinsky and Moses Sforim, who came by after school to play cards. They would stay up there until their mothers called them down. Since there was no one to call Samuil down, he stayed up there long after they left.
There was another room that he had recently claimed. It was in the back and looked out across an empty lot to the back porches of several houses. It was in the corner and out of the way and had a door that closed. He didn’t tell Moses or Sasha about it. There was no furniture in there, only three walls and a mantel that jutted out from a chimney that seemed to hang in the air.
On top of the mantel he kept his most secret things. There was a broken comb that he found under a cart. It was decorated with bits of sparkly glass and it glittered whenever he held it up to the light. There was also a scrap of lace that he found fluttering from the ragged edge of a fence post and an old silk flower from Mumeh Lhaye’s sewing basket. Yesterday he cut a hank of his little cousin’s hair. It wasn’t much. She didn’t mind. It was the wrong hair from the wrong girl, but the color was right and he put that on the mantel next to the comb. He was always on the lookout for these things. His prized possession was a ceramic cat with a broken tail that looked like Masha. That morning he made a drawing of Arabian horses grazing in a pasture. He balled it up because the horses looked like dogs and threw it off the edge, watching it bounce off the pile of rubble below.
He was supposed to be sitting shiva, but whenever he got the chance, he climbed up to this room and fingered his secret things. That morning he had cried and it scared him. It was so intense that he thought his insides were pouring out of him. At first he couldn’t breathe, poised on the edge of something impenetrable and overwhelming. Then he tumbled down into it, his shoulders juddering, his breath ripped from his lungs in big, gulping sobs. Afterward he felt a little better and wiped his face on his sleeve. Even so he didn’t want to do that again. It could easily get out of control and no telling where he’d end up if it did.
The idea of the mantel came to him the day after Sura died. He thought if he gathered enough things that she liked, she might come back to look at them. He told himself that he wouldn’t be scared. He wanted her to come. He wanted to say that he was sorry for not reading the titles to her at the moving pictures. If he had it to do over again, he would’ve read them to her. Every word.
He waited for five days but nothing happened. Then on the sixth day, just as he was about to climb down the beam to the second floor, he heard someone walking in one of the rooms down the hall. Footsteps. He listened. “Who’s there?” he called out softly.
Silence.
“Who is it?”
Silence.
He listened again. The sound came from his room, the one in the back, as if someone had crossed the floor from the window with the jagged glass to the mantel. Her mantel.
He stood by the hole in the floor, barely breathing. He told himself that if he heard another footstep, he would investigate. Part of him wanted to hear it. The other part wanted to run out of the building. But he forced himself to wait in the gathering darkness. At first he only heard the sounds of the street below, then the sighing of the wind through the charred bones of the building, and then nothing. He waited for a few moments more and then climbed down the beam.
Once outside on the street he didn’t go home. Instead he did what he always did when he was bored or when he wanted to be taken out of himself—he used the shadows, trees, doorways, garbage cans, anything that could give him cover to spy on his friends, neighbors, and strangers. From these vantage points he heard about mysterious ailments, unwanted pregnancies, the theft of a pair of shoes, a feud between brothers, and all about loss: the loss of a sister, a husband, a business, a job, a home. It seemed that all of Dulgaya Street had lost something. The whole neighborhood was suffering from a broken heart.
That night, Samuil became a lamppost, the wheel of a cart, and a ba
rrel. He heard about a cheating husband, a colicky baby, and a boil that wouldn’t burst. He melded into an old oil drum and heard two peddlers complaining about the new edicts outlawing private enterprise and the black market. They were strangers to Cherkast because he had never seen them before. Both wore long gabardine coats that looked as if they had been bought and sold many times. One wore a pair of battered shoes with flapping soles and the other had a thick black beard and wore shoes that bent up at the toes.
Samuil knew about peddling, about how you had to keep your wares hidden in your pockets and under your clothes, or risk getting shot as a speculator. How you had to hide buttons, soap, suspenders, pots and pans, rope or cooking oil, anything you could trade for food in the countryside to sell in the city. He liked to listen to them because they traveled from town to town and brought news from the rest of Russia and sometimes even from Poland or America. There were stories of pogroms and battles between the Whites and Reds, starvation in Petersburg and Moscow, farmsteads looted, kulaks shot, suspected counterrevolutionaries shot, speculators shot, ordinary people shot for no other reason than they were on the wrong side of the street or wearing a warm coat or boots that looked new. Better to execute ten innocent people than spare one who is guilty.
“They pulled him from the train,” one peddler was saying to the other. “He had sacks of bulgur in his pants. He was so scared he peed himself and one of the sacks broke and the grain ran down his leg.”
“What did they do to him?”
“You really want to know?”
The other nodded.
“What do you think? Shot him. He was a speculator.”
“Right there, in front of the whole train? Was it just him?”
“No, there were others. As a reminder, they said. There was a woman with three plucked chickens under her skirt and others, I forget.”
They stood in silence. They may have been wondering how long it would be before they suffered the same fate. Then the one with the flapping shoes asked: “Nu, you looking for someone?”
“Selensky. You heard of her? An old woman from Spasova.”
The other one shook his head.
“Her son is looking for her. Big reward. You hear of her, you tell me. We’ll split the reward.”
The peddlers were often looking for lost family members. There were families in America and Europe who offered big rewards to anybody who located their relatives. They passed the word from one to another and in that way the search extended beyond the borders and spread throughout the Pale. Samuil was never much interested in missing relatives. He was about to move on when he heard the one with the turned-up toes ask, “Nu, what about you? What do you have?”
“A woman and two children.”
“There are lots of women and children.”
“This one lives in the Berezina. She has a girl and boy. A pretty woman. Lives in a big house on a hill. You heard of her?”
This stopped Samuil and for a moment he didn’t know what to do.
“A Jew in the Berezina? This shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
Samuil jumped out from behind the drum and asked, “What’s her name?”
The peddlers gasped, startled by his sudden appearance, and the one with the turned-up toes snapped: “Hey, you little pisher, you don’t sneak around like that. You could give a person a heart attack.”
“I just want to know her name.”
“What for?”
“I just do, that’s all.”
“You know this woman? A big shot like you. You’re acquainted with a fine lady from the Berezina?”
“Maybe.”
The peddlers laughed. The one with the flapping shoes rubbed his hands together to warm them. “So how much you going to pay me for this information?” Samuil looked at him in confusion. “You expect it for free?”
He shook his head, thought for a moment, then dug into his pocket and pulled out a pearl button and a piece of hard candy that a woman in his building had given him because his sister was dead. The button belonged to Sura and he was going to put it on his mantel, but then he thought his mother might miss it so he was bringing it back. Now he had another change of heart and held out his hand. The peddler took the button and turned it over and over. Then he looked up at Samuil. “Debishonki. Her name is Debishonki.”
“Debishonki?”
“That’s right.”
Samuil thought for a moment. “It couldn’t be Alshonsky?”
“It could. But Debishonki is what I heard.”
“Who is looking for them?”
“The father. He lives in America. I forget where.”
That’s all Samuil had to hear. He ran home and found his mother as he had left her that morning, lying on the straw mattress in front of the stove in the kitchen. She had been like that since Sura’s funeral, curled up with her knees to her chest, staring at nothing. She was dressed in the same blouse she had worn that day and her hair was unwashed. The only light in the room came from the gaslight flickering outside in the street. The room was cold and the fire had gone out. He heard scratching in the walls and tried to remember if he covered the bread that morning. He was hungry and was counting on it for supper. He didn’t want to have to go next door and lie to Mumeh Lhaye about where he had been all day.
“Mameh, wake up.” He squatted down beside her and shook her gently. She stirred and opened her eyes.
“Not now, please, Samuil.”
“I heard two peddlers talking.”
“I’m tired, let me sleep.”
“They’re looking for a woman and two children. She lives in the Berezina.”
“I don’t care.”
“But it’s us, Mameh. They’re looking for us.”
She closed her eyes again and rolled over. The straw rustled beneath her and a few feathers that had escaped the quilt floated effortlessly on the currents in the room. “Go next door. Mumeh Lhaye will feed you.”
“It’s Tateh, Mameh. He’s looking for us.”
“Tateh is dead,” she said dully, pulling the quilt up over her ears. “Now, go away.”
“No, he isn’t. He’s looking for us. They say we have to go to Warsaw.”
She laughed softly without opening her eyes. “Warsaw, is it? What name did they give?”
“Debishonki.”
She rolled back and put her arm under her head for a pillow. Her eyes were open now and dull in the half-light. “Debishonki is not Alshonsky, my son.”
“But they always get it wrong. You know how it works. One person hears something different and the next a little more and so on. By the time it comes all the way across Little Russia, it’s been changed. Debishonki, Mameh, it’s just like Alshonsky.”
“I don’t think so.”
“They’re looking for a rich woman with two children who live in the Berezina. That’s us, Mameh. That’s where we used to live. And he doesn’t know about Sura, that’s why he’s looking for two children. Can’t you see I’m right? Mameh?”
But it was too late. She was gone and there was no reaching her. He stood and looked around for the bread. It wasn’t until he was eating it at the table that he realized how much he wanted company. So he wrapped it up and put it into a heavy pot with a lid to protect it from the mice and went next door. There he was fed and fussed over. After dinner he lay down between his cousins and, comforted by the warmth of the litter, drifted off into a dreamless sleep.
THE NEXT morning Berta lay on her side staring at the floor. It was dark beneath the stove and there were wispy clouds of dust laced with mouse droppings and the dried husks of roaches. She thought that if she ever got up again, she would clean under there, and took this as a good sign. There was an implication of life after Sura’s death in that thought and, although she still didn’t believe it, at least she had begun to consider it.
Outside she could hear Froy Wohlgemuth’s shuffling step in the hall. She would be bringing Berta two pieces of bread on a chipped china plate and a glass of tea. S
he had been bringing this every morning since shiva had begun and today, the last day, was no different. Berta heard her at the door trying to turn the knob. Her hands were bent with arthritis and it took her a while to open it. She considered getting up to help and thought this too was a good sign.
“Wake up, mein teier. Wake up, mein faigeleh.” She always called Berta mein faigeleh, my little bird. She walked into the front room and put the glass and plate on the table.
“What is it?”
“You must get up. The peddler is downstairs. He is looking for you.”
“He’s not looking for me.”
“Oh, yes he is. He is looking for a woman and two children from the Berezina. How many Jewish women are from the Berezina? Come now, it’s time to get up.” Froy Wohlgemuth tried to help Berta up, but the old woman wasn’t very strong. She had thin arms, a prominent hump on her back, and one hip was noticeably higher than the other.
“You have it all wrong. He is not looking for me. He is looking for another woman by a different name.”
“Ah feh! It’s always the wrong name. He is looking for you. Why is that so hard to believe? Your husband is alive. He has sent for you. This is happy news. Now come and eat. Essen, my brave girl . . . you need your strength.” She grabbed Berta’s forearm with her twisted fingers and attempted to pull her up.
Berta resisted at first, but she knew Froy Wohlgemuth was right. It was time to get up. There was no food in the house and no money to buy it. She had to find something to sell, something she could trade out in the countryside for food. She couldn’t keep relying on Lhaye and Pavel and neighbors for food. She had to start living again. Gathering her strength, she crawled out of bed and stood on the cold, damp floor.
The Little Russian Page 29