The Slaughterman's Daughter

by Yaniv Iczkovits

  “I have never known such camaraderie in this town before,” he says, exultant, before calling Yankele and Mirl to come and visit the neighbours with him so that their mother can rest.

  Mirl resists leaving her mother’s bedside but finally acquiesces, and once the children have gone, a loud argument ensues in the next room. Rochaleh and Eliyahu are complaining to Fanny, who is imploring them to leave her sister be.

  “Leave her be?” Eliyahu shouts, this time not because of his deafness. “How can we leave her be when she is acting so foolishly? I’ve been saying for a long time that she is becoming unhinged.”

  “Where did she vanish off to?” asks Rochaleh. “Can’t you explain? You are her sister!” with an accusatory emphasis on the word “sister”.

  “Do you know we found a fortune in the pockets of her dress?” Eliyahu says. “What can she be doing with more than three roubles?”

  “You owe us an answer,” Rochaleh continues, furiously. “Our lives have become a living hell, and for what?”

  And Eliyahu says, “We did not take her into our home for her to ruin our reputation.”

  Then quiet takes over, and many shushes disperse in the air. On hearing someone walk into her room, Mende pretends to be asleep.

  “Sister,” says Fanny, “it’s me.”

  But Mende retreats deeper into herself. Fanny’s words cannot assuage her, neither “sister” nor “it’s me”. Mende is alone in the world, and this world is not for her.

  * * *

  The days go by, a few nights sneak in between, a week elapses and there is no change. While Mende’s body is fully recovered, and her lungs are emptied of river water, her words remain trapped inside her and her soul remains despondent. She is barely able to get up from her bed, and as she can only nod in assent or shake her head in refusal, her carers switch to yes-or-no conversations with her: “Hungry? Thirsty? Tired? Do you want to get up? Are you comfortable? Want to go back to bed? Want us to cover you up?” Mende is actually beginning to like this form of communication. Firstly, it does not demand any effort or thinking on her part. Secondly, it focuses on corporeal matters and not so much on the soul. And thirdly, it deflects any further discussion about what happened on the river with Zizek.

  But there is a downside. Mende’s thoughts have also shrunk to consist merely of “yea” or “nay”. Her gaze has become glazed, her lips are dry, and her company is becoming burdensome. But if she is possessed by a dybbuk, it is a strange dybbuk indeed. Her body does not convulse, her mouth does not spit curses, her faith is as strong as it has ever been, and the sages of Motal are unsure whether an exorcising ceremony to expel the dybbuk would improve her condition. The neighbours continue to bring talismans but keep their visits short: one minute in Mende’s company is all it takes for boredom to set in. Her in-laws cannot scold an inanimate object, and her children are too afraid to come near her.

  Only her younger sister travels over from the village every day to visit, bringing with her a bit of bread and cheese, and sometimes a slice of coffee cake or some marmalade. Fanny opens the window, airs the room, straightens the sheets and then sits by her sister’s bed. She talks about the children for a while, telling Mende of Yankele’s mischief and the progress that Mirl and her own daughters are making in their Hebrew and arithmetic lessons, and then relates a little of the news she hears in Motal. But Fanny has never been much of a talker either.

  At the weekends, Fanny brings Natan-Berl and their five children with her, and sometimes Natan-Berl’s mother, Rivkah Keismann, will tag along despite the torturous journey, and only because “they begged her to come”.

  Mende Speismann does not know how much money Natan-Berl secretly gives her in-laws for her keep – twenty roubles, maybe thirty, each month. From Eliyahu’s obsequious tones, she knows that her in-laws’ household would not be able to make ends meet without her sister’s help. And yet Mende is incapable of showing her any warmth. One day, however, Fanny surprises Mende with the news that she is forced to go away for a while. Natan-Berl’s uncle is on his deathbed, and the entire family is to gather in Kiev. She does not know how long they’ll be away, a month, maybe two, but Mende is not to worry, because Fanny has already made all the necessary arrangements with Rochaleh and Eliyahu. Mende is robbed of her breath and choked by her tears. She half-rises from her bed and clings to her younger sister’s neck.

  “Do not worry, sister,” Fanny whispers. “I will be back soon, definitely before the High Holidays.”

  “I— I—” stutters Mende and closes her eyes to hold in the tears.

  “I know, sister,” Fanny murmurs, relieved that Mende still remembers words other than “yes” and “no”.

  * * *

  Fanny’s absence is very much felt. The days meander, dates become meaningless and the High Holidays drift further and further away. The only significant effect the changing seasons have is that they dictate how wide they open the window for Mende, and the sounds of the vibrant world outside seem to mock the woman who is still shut away in her room. Rochaleh’s and Eliyahu’s resolute footsteps pound accusingly around the house. How much longer, Mende, how much longer? And her fledglings, who used to be the source of her joy and are now a source of torment, stand at her room’s threshold, yearning for affection.

  One day, a package is delivered to her by Yisrael Tate, the tavern owner. A brand new issue of Hamagid, a rarity in god-forsaken Motal, which doesn’t even have a post office. As soon as he has gone, Mende opens the paper with a mixture of excitement and shame: maybe it is her turn this time? What has become of her advertisement?

  Yet she is in for a double disappointment today. Not only is there no trace of the announcement she wrote on her birthday, but she also comes across a new and oddly titled notice, “Wife Lost”, in which help is sought in finding a lady – a wife? – who has disappeared. This is strange, thinks Mende, reading the first few lines, which contravene common sense and morality alike, and her heart is filled with animosity towards the spoiled women who turn their backs on their calling.

  A woman went out in the second hour after midnight and has not returned since. All of our efforts to look for her in villages and towns, forests and rivers have failed. Her whereabouts are un-known and there’s not a trace of her to be found. Therefore, anyone with the slightest bit of information regarding this woman should hasten to send it our way. She has left her husband, five children and miserable mother-in-law in despair in their village home.

  Yishuvnikim, thinks Mende. Villagers. No wonder, the mis-erable wretches. Living among the goyim and imitating their manners. Black is white, bad is good, earth is sky, and woman is man. Hamagid is a despicable paper for consenting to run such abominable advertisements. What interest could the public have in this anomalous case, which tells them nothing about the way things ought to be? Besides, there’s no way of knowing whether this story is just a fabrication; perhaps all the writer wants is attention, to shock the public with their arrogance.

  She drops the newspaper on the floor by her bed. Has the world turned upside down? Is the sea on fire? Is there nothing else to write about? Has the Messiah arrived? Is she in the rebuilt Jerusalem? Have Jews reached the point where wretched women can allow themselves to abandon their poor children and husbands, Heaven forfend? She begins to cry. Master of the World, I beseech you to place an obstacle in the path of this woman leaving her home in the second hour after midnight. Bring her back to her village, to her husband and five miserable children, and do not let her lead other women astray. Some catastrophe is about to happen, Blessed Holy One, I can feel it in my bones.

  Mende picks up the newspaper again, this time searching for a sign between the lines that her prayer has been answered. She is drawn back to the “Wife Lost” notice, and reads on to the end.

  These are her details: young, twenty-five years of age, her face is round, her hair fair (blonde), ash-grey eyes, simple,
unfriendly, has a long scar marking the bite of a beast on her left arm, she was seen leaving dressed in black with a short, reddish jacket over the top. Her name is Fanny Keismann, and I, her mother-in-law, Rivkah Keismann, ask that you help my son, Natan-Berl Keismann, and I am prepared to pay generously anyone who knows of her whereabouts.

  Grodno

  I

  * * *

  For many nights, Fanny Keismann had been unable to sleep. Mende’s sad eyes reminded her of their mother, during their Grodno childhood. Deep black eyes with bags underneath. When she was a girl, there was nothing that Fanny would not try to raise their mother’s spirits. She helped with the chores, made kreplach and krupnik, learned to read the Tzena U’Renah and the Teutsch Pentateuch, and even drew water from the Neman. She would spill half of it on the way back, but she carried as much as a young girl could. But whenever she approached her mother, hoping for a hug and a kiss in return, she was always met with the same answer: “Not now, Fannychka, not now. Mamme is tired.” A sigh.

  Her father, Meir-Anschil Schechter, who was usually a stern man, had one joke that he liked to tell. He dismissed any theory that a dybbuk might have possessed his wife, and would never hear of exorcism and talismans. “Your mother,” he explained to Fanny and her sister, “is actually quite a happy woman, and there’s nothing in this world that she loves more than you two. But she can’t help being the righteous woman that she is. And if it is said ‘In pain shall you bear children’, then she must act accordingly.”

  “There is no such commandment!” Fanny said with indig-nation.

  “You are a bright child,” her father replied, his countenance softening. “Very clever.”

  Throughout her childhood, Fanny used to tug down on her cheeks to avoid getting those same bags under her eyes that were so characteristic of her mother. And recently, having spent all those hours with Mende, she has noticed that her hands are once more pulling at her cheeks and her thoughts have been drawn, against her better judgment, back to those faraway days.

  Even in the dead of night, at the second hour past midnight, as she left her home and climbed into Mikhail Andreyevich’s cart, which was waiting for her as arranged on the outskirts of the village with his horse, she felt as if she was racing to her mother’s final place of rest, somewhere between the fields of potatoes and the fields of wheat.

  Fanny was ten when her mother’s light went out, and the child had watched as her mother’s dead body was laid out in the kitchen on a thin mattress covered with a white sheet. Her father explained to her that they were waiting for the lady morticians of the chevra kadisha, who had been delayed by a snowstorm. Her mother lay on the floor in this way all through the night, between the kitchen table and the oven, and Fanny could not sleep even for a moment. When she thought she could hear breathing and gurgling from the kitchen, she dared to leave her bed and go to her mother. She felt her mother’s cold hands and crept underneath the sheet that covered her. For the first time in her life, she encountered neither her mother’s broken voice saying “Not now, Fannychka, not now. Mamme is tired”, nor that damned sigh. The child clung to the body and held its hand, until her father found them there at the break of dawn. These hours were among the happiest she had ever known, and her father smiled down at her without any sign of alarm.

  II

  * * *

  Meir-Anschil Schechter was a decent man: “in ehrlicher Yid”, as everyone used to say. Not a scholar, not a sage and not among the tzaddikim, but he was certainly God-fearing. Descended from a well-known family of shochetim, he had continued the family tradition of strictly observing the laws of animal slaughter, scrupulously following the rules of kashrut and naming a fair price for both buyer and seller. He refused to accept coins or notes from his customers. “They are for speculators,” he used to say. In return for his slaughtering services, clients would bring choice cuts of meat, bags of wheat, jugs of milk, fruit and vegetables, and even furniture and clothes. Monetary scepticism had been the hallmark of the Schechter family for many generations, and it had shielded them from worries about the depreciating impact various political situations had on the currency.

  Meir-Anschil followed a strict daily routine. In the morning he would rise, wash his hands, say his benedictions, pray, eat his bread and go to sharpen his halaf on a stone. He took care of his daughters with punctilious devotion from the moment they awoke until they left the house, and then went his separate way to the abattoir for his day’s work.

  The cattle and poultry would arrive at Meir-Anschil’s business tethered and crammed together, with the fear of death in their eyes. Cows and sheep and goats and calves and lambs and roosters came in, one after the other, on teetering legs, with dry tongues and broken spirits. As they were brought into the slaughtering pen, the animals smelled the blood and tried to resist with all the strength they had left in them. They kicked and bellowed until they tore their throats, letting out exactly the same cries they would have heard a few days earlier, coming from the direction of this very pen. Their owners cracked their whips, trying to crush any lingering resistance, but Meir-Anschil would take the animals from them and ask his customers to wait outside for a moment. Once he was all alone with an animal, Meir-Anschil never felt any real pity. True, he gave the cows water to drink and patted the calves, and looked into the subdued eyes of the lambs; but he did this out of a sense of necessity and respect, not sympathy. The animals registered the stern expression on his face, sniffed the blood on his apron, and knew that this final charity had been granted to them by none other than their executioner. It was his kindness, which exceeded that of their owners, that made them suspicious. Therefore, when he threw them on the ground, their feet bound and their bodies deep in the dirt, they gazed vacantly up at him, as if they already knew that their fate was sealed.

  Once he had begun the job Meir-Anschil never tarried, guiding his knife in a single, smooth motion. He cut the trachea and the oesophagus, the carotid artery and the jugular in a single movement, without crushing the neck, or cutting from top to bottom. He did not insert the knife between the trachea and the oesophagus, did not point the halaf anywhere beyond the incision, did not tear at the flesh – either with the blade or with his hand – he did not press or crush the animal, and he never worked when he was tired. Only once he had checked and confirmed that the incisions were kosher and that the pipes of the trachea and oesophagus had been correctly severed, would he wipe his forehead and hands, give thanks to God for the commandment to “cover blood with dust” and throw some earth over the pool of blood to absorb it.

  In the evening he returned home to his wife, Malka Schechter, and their two daughters, and because Malka usually confined herself to her room it was he who prepared a feast of a dinner for the four of them. Meir-Anschil and his daughters would eat heartily, dark bread and fresh vegetables and grains and noodles and meat, while his wife watched them with a preoccupied air. Meir-Anschil had built his home on the left bank of the Neman, a fair distance from the market square, and placed the slaughterhouse as far away as possible from the ears of the townsfolk. He never took any interest in gossip and usually resented the pilpul of sages, and therefore few guests ever frequented their home. In the evenings, his only wish was to be left in peace so that he could smoke his pipe and go to bed early.

  He loved his wife with a mad passion. His parents had agreed to the terms of his marriage when he had been a boy of ten, and for years they told him about Malka’s beauty and wisdom. He fell in love with her before he had seen her even once.

  They married two years after his bar mitzvah. All his life, his parents had taught him that marital relations evolve gradually, out of a sense of duty, but in Malka’s presence he felt like a man caught in a downpour: his face burned, his heart danced, and his mouth uttered nonsense and lies. He found himself unworthy of her beauty, of her round face, pink cheeks, scarlet lips, unworthy even of the little dimple on her chin, and he was riddled with a
nxiety whenever he was with her. He knew that the only reason for their shidduch was his profession, which guaranteed a good income, but it was precisely because of his job that he could not allow himself to touch his wife. How could he approach her, with hands that had so much blood on them? In his clothes, impregnated with the stench of death? How could he eclipse her splendour with his dark world? On their wedding night, he did not dare enter her bed, and it took months of sleeping next to each another in two separate beds for her to move over to his and lie down next to him, which obliged him to defile her slen-der body with his clumsy flesh and animal-like grunts. In the morning, when she smiled at him with blushing cheeks, he felt that she was only pretending, out of respect for him. He did not love her the way righteous men love their wives, from a sense of duty and a wish to observe the commandments; he desired her like a hungry beast and he was in thrall to her like a slave. Every evening, he returned home, certain that he would find her gone, and was eternally grateful that she was prepared to endure, if even for just one more day, his awkward appearance, his acrid smell, his slow mind and his despicable profession.

  He received his warning sign from Heaven in a dream that began to haunt him. He would be at the slaughterhouse waiting for a client, who arrived pulling along a strange animal by a rope: a beast with the body of a cow and the head of an angel – an angel with Malka’s delicate face. They would be left alone, the shochet and this creature, her tongue parched and her eyes wide open. He would call out to the heavens with bitter tears, then raise the halaf above her neck, but in his anguish he would rip at her organs and defile the act. She would die in his arms, slowly, and he would wake from the nightmare drenched in sweat and petrified.