by Various
What was hardest for me to learn was tact.
Once when I was eight and I was studying the holy symbols and how best to combine them with the various names of God, a local woman, a nobody to my mind, a maidservant home for a visit, for heaven’s sake, rushed into my grandma’s cottage and stood there looking around her. I did not like her at all. Her stupid stuttering interrupted my thoughts and she looked like a lost cow as she stood there blinking, unable even to articulate her need. I scorned her, knowing in my child’s way that I would never be at a loss for words like this, no matter my trouble.
“Well?” I asked her.
Nothing. She said nothing for a long minute and then she stuttered out my grandmother’s name.
“Fine,” I said. But instead of running to fetch my bubbe from the other room, I just stuck my head in and hollered, “Bubbe, another pregnant maid for you!”
Two things happened. One was that the girl burst into tears, and the other was that my grandma appeared in the kitchen and slapped my face so hard that it felt as if one of God’s angels had smitten me. I landed on my tuchus.
“Dry your eyes, my darling,” said my grandma to the girl, while I stood rubbing my jaw like an idiot. “And please forgive my granddaughter. She is sharp enough, but there is no heart in her chest, only a steel gear.”
I ran out of the house and into the garden, where I climbed into my favorite spot in an old birch tree that my bubbe used for tea leaves and tar. Not pretty and no heart, only a steel gear. There was not much future for a girl like that, I thought. No marriage, certainly, and thus no children. No wonder my mama did not delight in me as she did in my sister. Papa loved me best, in his quiet way, but he did not have my mama’s sharp eyes; most likely he just could not see my emptiness. I wept, feeling sorry for myself, but only a little. Well, I thought, if I cannot be pretty and I cannot be kind, I can be powerful. I would be powerful, and make everybody see it. More powerful than Bubbe, even.
Despite my renewed vow to study, I was not to learn anything for a week. Instead, I had to keep house as well as I could while my grandmother stood over me and harangued me.
“You think you are somebody special, a queen, maybe, to be so cruel to someone coming for help? Smart you are, and a witch you may be in time, but a zegorin, never, never so long as you keep like this! You will never command respect, and you will never be able to practice your skills, for nobody will come to you! People must come to us with trust, and if you must speak sharply to a girl you do it in private, so that she understands that you do it for her own good! Not hollering contempt like a Cossack!”
“I was not like a Cossack!” I said. “I hurt nobody!”
“So that girl was crying because she stubbed her toe? She’s not the first to be taken in by the master of the house and she won’t be the last, and anybody who comes for help should get a hearing, and not be scorned by a child too young to lace her own boots!”
I cannot say that, after this incident, I felt kinder toward those visitors of my grandmother’s whose problems were, I felt, of their own making, but I learned to school my face and my tongue and even to feel some compassion for their suffering. When I was at home, though I would pull Shayna aside to tell her the gossip of Bubbe’s village. She would have been about four or five then, the age I was when first I went to my Bubbe’s, and she always wanted to know what it was I was doing.
“What am I doing?” I would toss my head. “What am I doing indeed but cleaning up the mistakes of dullards who should know better!”
Shayna’s eyes grew wide. “What kind of mistakes?” She was at the age when she was always spilling her milk or tripping over nothing, and she had great sympathy with those who made mistakes, but I did not. After all, my grandmother rarely had to correct me more than once on the same matter.
“Foolish girls!” I told her. “Foolish girls who watch the horses and cows but don’t know enough to keep their own legs closed if they don’t want to foal or calve.”
Shayna chewed on her lip. “Well,” she said, “You can’t keep your legs together while you’re walking, or you’d fall. Do they fall a lot, like me?”
I tossed my hair again, annoyed to be talking to such a baby. “You don’t know anything,” I said. “Just like them.”
But it was only to Shayna I would whisper such scornful things. To everybody else, and especially to my bubbe, I listened patiently and even kindly.
And so almost eight years passed, with Shayna learning to sew dresses from our mother and me learning how to use my powers from our bubbe. And then one evening, in the middle of winter, my best friend Yetta banged on the front door of our house, and when I answered, she pulled me out onto the street.
“It’s Rifka,” she said. “She’s in trouble.”
Rifka was Yetta’s older sister, and I did not wonder what kind of trouble she was in. She had been almost engaged to a butcher’s son, but they had fallen out over his attentions to another girl.
“Poor thing,” I said, unthinking, and then Yetta smacked me, just lightly, but enough so that I paid attention.
“Don’t give me ‘poor thing!’” she said. “Everyone knows how you spend your summers, and I will not go to anyone who might tell Mama or Papa. If you are a friend to me, you will come help Rifka now!”
Of course, I was only too pleased to be asked. I collected my bag of tools and herbs that I had put together under my grandma’s green eyes and set out, telling Mama that Yetta and I were going for a walk. Rifka was not far along—anxiety had made her careful, and I could have mixed up the powders she needed blindfolded, but she clasped me to her and wrung her hands as though I had moved heaven and earth. When she miscarried the following day, tears of joy ran down her face as I held her hand.
She did not tell her Mama or Papa but she did tell her friends, and soon enough I was called upon for various illnesses and childbirths and other women’s matters. It got so I could no longer go to my bubbe’s for more than a month every year, for the women of Bialystok’s Jewish Quarter could not do without me. I missed the idyllic months with my bubbe, but I was proud of my learning and new status. And I do not regret this! Learning and skill are things to be proud of; they are the stars that light the sky of one’s lifetime.
By sixteen, I was bringing in as much money as my mother and sister combined. For not every family can afford dresses, but every family will have a sick child, or a distressed daughter.
When I did go to my bubbe’s, I took over more and more of her work in order to give her some rest.
“I do manage without you,” she’d say, as I’d come home late from sitting up with a child with whooping cough.
“Yes,” I’d say, “but you shouldn’t. I can hear your bones creaking from here.”
I don’t think she minded such comments as much as she pretended to. I think she was proud of me. She called me her good right hand. I was there with her when she fought the lilit at the bedside of Pearl, the butcher’s wife. It was a strong demon with wild long hair and claws that stuck out from her fingers like nails from a plank of wood. She raged and raged outside our circle of protection. I knelt at Pearl’s hips, supporting the coming baby with my hands while my grandmother chalked stronger and stronger charms of protection on the wall.
The lilit howled like a livid wind.
“Don’t look!” I shouted to Pearl. “It’s unclean! Think of your little one!”
Pearl shut her eyes tight and clutched the silver knife we had placed in her hands when labor started. She added her own voice to the whirlwind in the room while I slipped my hands inside to loosen the cord around the baby’s neck. I felt it straining tight against my fingers.
“May the foolish woman who brought clothing for the new babe into her house before the birth be left with nothing but an armful of cloth!” shouted the lilit. “May she claw at the dirt like a dog, searching for her baby’s bones! May she—”
“In the name of Eloe, Sabbaoth, Adonai, let your mouth fill with mud and your voic
e be stopped!” said my grandmother firmly, putting herself between Pearl and the demon. As she cut off the lilit’s words, the cord loosened, and my grandmother went on to bind the lilit with the names of the heavenly host. Finally all was quiet and Pearl’s baby spilled, healthy and ruddy, into my arms.
I held her up in triumph to the new mother, but Pearl’s face was a mask of terror.
“What ails you?” I asked her. “All is well.” Then I turned to follow her look, and saw that although my grandmother had bound the lilit, she was deep in conversation with the creature when she should have been doing the work necessary to banish it. I handed the baby to his mother and turned to my grandmother.
“Look to your own children, Hannah,” said the lilit, cutting her eyes at me. “You think she will thrive here? Trouble is coming to your daughter and her family in Bialystok.”
“Bubbe, what are you doing? Banish the unclean thing and be done with it!”
My grandmother pursed her lips. “Deborah, tend to Pearl and her son. This creature and I are speaking.”
“Then speak outside!” I told her. “Speak outside if you must speak to it!”
“Very rude,” said the lilit, clacking her claws at me.
My grandmother held the door open pointedly, always keeping her body between the demon and the new baby. I waited for half an hour before she came back.
On the way home, I exploded in a way I only ever did with Shayna and with Bubbe. “What were you thinking, listening to a child-killer?! What filth did she pour into your ears?”
“All creatures have some knowledge,” my bubbe said patiently, “and it’s as well to find it out.”
“Very wise,” I said sharply, “but perhaps now I should find it out, too? What were you talking about?”
“The future,” said my bubbe, and she refused to say any more.
I returned from that trip and found that my mother and Shayna had not been having an easy time of it. Business was slow. One day I found them together pinning up a dress onto a pattern. They didn’t know I was there, and they were talking in low voices, intimately, in a way I’d shared with my bubbe but never with our mother. I became green with jealousy, and lingered in the doorway to listen.
“Pass me that pin, darling—ugh,” said my mother, sitting back on her heels to look at her handiwork. “You know, when I was a girl, with a needle in your hand your life was golden. Always you would have work, always you could support your family.”
“And so I shall!” said Shayna sunnily. She had long ago grown out of her clumsy phase and now everything she did was graceful and delicate. “Already you see the embroidery I do, Mama! The stitches so tiny, only an ant could see each one.”
Mama pressed her hands to the small of her back. She was starting to show, and I was not the only one who’d noticed. “Well … no. Not anymore. Already you see us scraping and scrimping for business. The new factories open up and machines can do more work for less pay, and the factories do not hire us. I begin to think that my mother is right … perhaps we should send you and your sister over to America. They say there that Jews can work in factories as well as gentiles—indeed, that without us there would be no factories.”
Shayna’s face turned pale, and I was sure mine had too. It was rare not to know a family that had sent a daughter or husband over to America, di goldene medine. Yetta’s family owned a sweetshop, and even they had sent over Rifka. I had always thought it was because they had found out about her disgrace, but perhaps it was not. Money came every week, and letters too. In America, Rifka wrote, children went to school together, Jews and gentiles, with no fees to pay and no limits on the number of Jews. There was not gold on the streets, and she lived with a family that had her sleep on a board placed on two chairs and made her do most of the housework, but still she sent home more money in a week than her parents could make in a month.
“Bubbe would not want that!” I cried. “How could you say so? How can you talk about sending away your own daughters?”
Mama was so surprised to see me that she nearly swallowed a pin. She coughed and said, “But she wrote to me about the idea. She didn’t say anything to you?”
“Not last I saw her, and that was only a month ago.”
“Well,” Mama sighed. “My mother keeps secrets. She keeps secrets and she makes plans and catches us all in her net. Her own feet, too, sometimes, she tangles.” She looked at me tenderly. “I have wanted to warn you sometimes, darling. You need to be careful of my mother’s plans. Once when I was young she decided—”
I did not wait to hear what my bubbe had decided. “Bubbe would not send me away! She needs me!”
Mama frowned. “Well, I would never force either of my girls to go. But you should think hard about it, both of you. Bubbe has sent me a letter and she is unhappy with what she sees in store for our city. I shudder to think of any danger, and between that and the money.… Now you go away, Deborah, go chatter with Yetta or brew up some broth. Your sister and I have work to do.”
I wandered out into the street. It was true what Mama said, that business was not good for her and Shayna, but to go across the sea! It was not as if we lived in one of those places where, as Bubbe said, they killed you after every bad harvest. Bialystok was modern and the chief of police was a man of decency, who did not hold with the killing of Jews. Besides, our young activists had formed a self-defense league, and I would not have wanted to be on the wrong side of those knives and guns. I thought we were safe; at least, we did not fear every moment of every day.
I kicked sullenly at rocks until I wandered over to see Yetta, and then we played at singing games, which we could only do when Shayna was busy, because her voice sounded like a sick cat.
* * *
Later that year, Cossacks killed my grandmother.
My grandmother’s village was too small for word to reach us before we visited. Papa and I found most of the village’s houses destroyed. Just cottages, built of mud and straw. Easy to kick apart. Easier to burn.
Papa had grown up in a village like this one, and his face twisted as he surveyed the wreckage.
“Back into the cart, young one,” he said. “We leave now.” He didn’t raise his voice, just spoke as if what he said was fact.
“Without burying Bubbe?” I said, trying to match his calm.
“Where is there to bury her? The shul and graveyard are destroyed. We will take her back with us. This is not a good place to be.”
“Papa,” I said. “Let us at least say Kaddish—surely we have enough time for that?” The wind blew my hair in my face.
We went inside and I lay my bubbe on a ragged old blanket, too worthless to bother taking. I cleaned her body with water from the well and closed her eyes, arranged her arms and legs decorously alongside her body, not all splayed out at odd angles like we found her. I do not think she had died from violence; I think the terror was too much for her heart. When I was finished, she looked almost as if she had been sleeping when the Angel of Death took her, not cowering and hiding as men no better than beasts destroyed her village. But I could not wash away every sign of decay, and one look at the remains of her home showed the peaceful arrangement I had made for the lie that it was. Papa said Kaddish over my grandmother. He let me have another fifteen minutes to go through the house and take what was left to bring home to Mama. I found Bubbe’s box of needful things behind the loose stone in the hearth where she usually kept it, and a small pouch of old jewelry with it. That was all.
In the cart I cried all the way home.
Mama and Papa had grown up in small villages, and they feared the pogroms every time the wind changed. But I had not been touched by such fear before. Hadn’t our own chief of police said, “As long as I live, there will be no pogrom in Bialystok”?
* * *
Soon after Papa and I had returned with the news of my bubbe’s death, Shayna and I were sitting together in the main room when Mama came in with sadness in her eyes and the box and pouch in her hands.
“You should have these to remember and think on my mother by,” she said.
She took out a locket, an ivory cameo carved with the profile of a fancy lady, and stroked it with one finger. “Shayna, darling, you look like my mama did when she was young, when I was little—hair so gold it puts the sun to shame. You should have this locket. Mama wore it when I was a little girl, and she said it was fine protection.” My mother looked near tears. “I hope the new one coming is another girl. A girl I can name for my Mama.”
Then she turned to me and tilted her head, thinking. Our sharp-eyed mother was back.
Mama took the ivory box from her lap and shook it suspiciously. “I can’t open it, and believe me, I’ve tried. But the symbols carved into it—I suppose they mean that Mama would want you to have it.”
I took it and traced out the carvings with my fingers, the same way Mama had touched Bubbe’s cameo.
Mama stroked my coarse black hair. “Be careful, baby girl. Use your judgment.”
Deborah was a judge in the land of Israel, and Mama never let me forget it.
That box was where Bubbe kept prayers for women whose husbands traveled, special inks, blessed talismans, and one photograph of Mama, Papa, Shayna, and me that we’d paid a traveling salesman for. I’d never had any trouble opening it. I was different from Mama.
I waited until I had some time to myself and went to a place I knew, secluded by bushes, not too far from our home. There I opened the box, expecting Bubbe’s familiar collection of blessed things to tumble out onto my lap. What I found inside was a length of deerskin wrapped around a silver-plated knife, the photograph, and a piece of paper. It wasn’t a blessing. It was long and complicated and seemed to be some kind of contract.
I tried to puzzle through the contract but the words swam in front of my eyes and made me dizzy.
As I refolded the paper and put it back in the box, I heard a rustling