Trail of Miracles

by Smadar Herzfeld

  When I got near him, I ceased breathing altogether and turned my face to the wooden floor. And then I felt his hand take hold of my dress. I looked at the thin white fingers, with the blue lines intertwined all along them, and I was filled with dread. I was caught. Like the golden fish in my dream, I wanted to slip away and escape, but my holy father-in-law had caught me in his net. I raised my eyes and I saw him leaning forward in his chair, almost falling off it in the effort to grab my dress. His mouth was open and his eyes sparkled with laughter. I straightened up and, with all the politeness I could muster, said, “Good morning, sir.”

  He winked and sat up, letting go of the dress. The soft checkered fabric fell back around my black-stockinged legs, and, though it was really hard for me, I spoke. I felt like the penitential goat being sent astray into the desert on the Day of Atonement and humbly sent forth my words into the room.

  “Life is bitter for me, sir . . . I wander around the gloomy corners and recesses, which are the only quiet places in the house. All I want to do is to get away, but I don’t know where I would go. Everyone is always busy, even my master’s wife has no leisure. In my father’s home, I became used to doing things . . . but here, they don’t seem to need me even in the kitchen. And your son, well . . . my worthy husband, Rabbi Avraham . . . where is he?”

  Since the week of the wedding, I had hardly seen my husband. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of his tall figure standing next to a window with a book in his hands. Then he would be standing with his back to me and facing toward the window, so immersed in what he was seeing that he didn’t hear my footsteps. Once or twice, I retraced my steps; I trod on the floor harder with the heels of my shoes, but I could not draw his attention. He seemed downcast, as if about to fall straight into the window, and his narrow, lonely back stirred in me the desire to touch him.

  His everyday kapote was sewn from a coarse fabric that was frayed at the shoulders. My solitary husband, I thought. He’s like that funny bird who pecks a hole in a tree and then sits inside that hole and peeks out.

  After he left, I’d go over to the place where he had been standing and look out through the glass. There were the black wooden houses of our Jewish neighbors, mud-covered geese and chickens in the backyards. And far from the town, dipped in the bluish light of the horizon, a mountain reared up like the frozen wave suspended in the air as described in the story of the Exodus from Egypt.

  To my mind, my husband must have been blind. Otherwise, why would he be avoiding me? Why did he not look at me and never smile even once? I did not yet know him, but I was already angry at him.

  The truth was hidden beneath the anger, like demons in a closet, and there was the embarrassment and the silence of the first days of our marriage. But I was still a child, I still had daydreams of Queen Esther, and my husband’s dark figure, frayed and stooped, fleeing down the corridors like a ghostly spirit, pierced my heart like a chisel.

  I was frightened of him and I was frightened by the hatred that he aroused in me. At night, I buried myself under the feather quilts in the large bed where a trace of my mother’s scent still lingered, and I consoled myself with visions of fury and revenge. Rabbi Avraham was a prince who came from the places of darkness; from his sunken cheeks and his eyes rose dark leaden vapors like those that hang over the marshes in the winter. A shiny black cloak fluttered behind him, and a black hood enveloped his head, casting a shadow over his face and his protruding ears. He was a prince of cold and mists from the region of death and he came to me from a room filled with evil spirits.

  In my imagination, I waved my arms and with great effort, clapped my hands. My husband was affrighted and his knees buckled. I pushed him back into the room from which he had come; for an instant, the door opened and what I saw was utter darkness. The scent of mold filled my nostrils.

  Afterward, it seemed to me that he really was gone, which made me very happy.

  Another time, I saw him with the eyes of my soul as if he were made of dust. Even the sockets of his eyes had filled with dust. I took a broomstick and touched his navel with it, and my husband disintegrated into a cloud. And then, very slowly, the cloud dissipated.

  And I saw other images like these, in all of them a kind of struggle, and in all of them, I vanquished my husband and I was happy about it.

  Over the years that followed, I locked away my desire to vanquish him and take revenge. Only when I reached Jerusalem could I at last forget the wound to my heart, at last forget my humiliation and my anger, at last forget my body.

  Yet on that long-ago day in a dim room of creaking floorboards, facing the question in my father-in-law’s merry eyes, I was blazing with fury, sorrow, and humiliation.

  “Patience, my daughter,” I heard him say. “With patience everything will come, all in its proper time. Our existence in this world is only suffering and more suffering, and anyone who has much suffering must have patience . . .”

  He looked upward, smiling, and I saw that two of his bottom teeth were missing. Here I was longing for my parents’ home, and he was speaking to me, as if from a great distance, in praise of patience.

  “It’s like armor against the assaults of the world,” he said. “It watches over our distress and does not allow us to fall into the darkness of exile.”

  I knew that by “us” he meant the Jewish people, I knew that for the time being we were here and could not see that we were the sons of kings, but the day would come when we would step out in azure and gold, floating lightly, on the path to redemption. But at that moment all I could think of was myself. I needed redemption, I was going into the darkness like a shadow, and it was not armor that I wanted but something else, soft as the duvet and the pillows piled high and filled with goose feathers. Like the scent my mother had left on the bed.

  “This isn’t my home!” I declared as my hands tightened to fists.

  He was amused by me. I knew it by his smile. His eyes examined my face, interrogated me, looked inside my heart. And then he spoke to me in a low, melodious voice, describing my old home and my old life to me. As if he were there, in Kremnitz, as if actually in front of my house.

  “It’s made of dark wood,” he said. “There are two floors, and the lower story is surrounded by a veranda with a railing. The windows looking out onto it are small with opaque glass. The yard is quite neglected, but at this time of year, it is full, brimming with all kinds of greenery, tall and short, all tangled up together. Flowers burst out of the wild growth, sending out tendrils to the railing, catching onto the wooden beams and turning the veranda into a flowering garden.

  “Your young brother, almost a baby, who has been put down alone at the front door, thrusts his face in the petals of a blue flower. A bee emerges from the flower, buzzing around his nose, and he points at it and bursts out crying. The door opens and someone scolds him and wipes his face and goes back inside.

  “Now the door stays open. A hen wanders up, squawking excitedly in front of the doorway, and a young peasant girl in a floral kerchief comes out of the house. She gathers up the hen in her arms and disappears to the far-off part of the veranda, the part that I cannot see.

  “And your illustrious father sits on the second floor, under the gabled roof, from which a chimney rises. At the very top of the roof is a wrought iron rooster standing on one leg. Now I see him bending over one of the volumes of his sacred texts—the Talmud. He holds the tractate about the laws of damages and compensation. Standing before him is the leader of the Jewish community, his hat in his hands. The man who draws and carries water has fallen from a bridge that the leader of the community built over a channel. He broke a limb and now his wife is berating the leader.

  “And the leader waves his hat and claims that the carpenter did shoddy work and so he should pay the injured water carrier from his own pocket. And what now, now I hear the sound of wailing . . .

  “It’s the water carrier’s wife shouting brazenly, storming through the flowers, climbing onto the veranda, and stopping at the
open door. She stands there and weeps.

  “And the young peasant girl comes running back. She calls to the woman, ‘Mistress Baiyla!’ and ushers her inside.”

  I sighed loudly with yearning. With the confidence that this man could move and speak in dreams, I imagined going inside, into my father’s house.

  I closed my eyes and I told the holy Maggid about what went on in the women’s part of the house.

  “Leibush, my baby brother, is lying on a feather bed in a corner, sucking his thumb. My sister, Yocheved, is standing over a pile of clothes, folding them and putting aside the ones to be ironed. Dasha, our servant girl, crosses the room with a flushed face, dragging her feet in their heavy peasants’ shoes, her body tilted backward to balance the large rounded stomach of her first pregnancy. She’s carrying a container full of apples to the storeroom outside. Soon, they will be made into jam or compote to eat after the cholent stew at the Sabbath meal.

  “And my mother stands in the small kitchen, which is filled with the aromas of spices, a tin spoon in her hand and a stained towel tossed over her shoulder. She is stirring the buckwheat porridge as she prepares kasha. All the utensils are completely blackened by soot, as are the stones arranged around the opening for the fire. And the paraffin stove in the corner, the ceiling, the walls are all covered in soot.

  “There is no window in the kitchen, and as my mother wipes the sweat from her face with a towel, she draws streaks of dirt and grease over it. With a long-handled poker, she stirs the hissing embers in the pail under the stove, puts pans on the fire, slathers them with goose fat, and when the grease is hot, pours the porridge over it. She pats it down with the underside of the spoon so that it’ll be nice and flat and then covers it with a lid. Over that, she lays a heavy towel that will keep in the heat. And then she goes straight on to the dough, which has already risen, kneading it out and cutting it into quarters. At the center of each quarter, my mother places a mixture of potatoes and fried onions, and she takes hold of the corners of the square and folds them inward. Now the knishes are ready and she places them, one by one, onto the large frying pan.

  “If this were a Thursday, then Dasha would be scraping the scales from a plump carp and pulling out its red entrails, the green gallbladder, and the white bladder sacs that we liked to hold and toss from hand to hand. She would be cutting the fish into slices and then giving them to my mother, who would stuff them and make them into gefilte fish for the Sabbath.

  “On Thursdays, we would also prepare sweets for the coming Sabbath: the tagelach covered with a brown dusting of sugar, and the cookies made from carrots, sweet and pungent.

  “And of course, that was the day we made dough for the challah—the Sabbath loaves—covering it with a flimsy cloth and leaving it till Friday morning.

  “And at dawn the next day, in the pale light before sunrise, my mother would be braiding the dough, sinking nuts and raisins into it, and then coating it with a shiny layer of egg.

  “And then, working quickly, she starts on the largest pot of all, the pot of cholent. She adds thick pieces of meat, peeled potatoes, chicken feet and thighs, rounded white bones dripping with grease, and beans the color of blood. She takes a length of beef intestine and stuffs it with a mixture of flour, meat, and potato, and then, with a needle and thread, she sews it up, tears the thread with her teeth, and places it deep inside the pot, which she then covers with a linen cloth.

  “And now it’s time for the generous chunks of fat, which will give the dish its taste. Then Dasha pours in water up to the top and puts in a bag with fresh eggs, and then my mother says, as she does every Friday, ‘Let’s hope that this comes out for Sabbath as nicely as it went in.’

  “And she puts a lid on top, sealing it with a towel, and turns aside to wipe away the sweat dripping from her face and neck and staining her armpits.

  “And now you run to the market, for the day before the Sabbath day is a good day for earning. And Dasha will clean and scrub the house and iron, and at noon, she will go out to the backyard and sit there, among the hens and the geese, with baby Leibush on her knees.

  “And if Dasha’s in the mood, she’ll tell us stories about the gentiles in the village—beautiful and terrifying stories about them and their demons.

  “When she speaks, her Yiddish is garbled with the language of the peasant women. And her kerchief is woven from black and red yarn. And her golden hair is in a long braid, slipping out of her kerchief. And when she laughs, her cheeks are round and flushed, and her blue eyes sparkle . . .”

  And, as suddenly as I had begun to speak, I fell silent.

  I could have told him about my father, and how he had taught me to read and write. The two of us would be leaning over a large sacred book, the black hair of his beard caressing the pages with their holy letters and sometimes touching my cheeks.

  First, we studied Genesis, and then we studied the holy families: Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, their hearts like a garden of love for the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He. He sends them words, dreams, angels, and they leave their homes for His sake, sleeping on stones for Him, ready to sacrifice their sons and even to grip the blade of a knife for Him.

  By their sides are Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel—faithful only to their sons, to their most beloved sons and no one else. And so the stories are spun of strands of loving-kindness and strife and contention. And my father touches the words with the hard end of a goose quill, and when I have a question, he lowers the feather to the bottom part of the page, reading the commentaries by scholars such as Rashi or Ibn Ezra. And he chants and his eyes are half-closed. And when we make progress in learning, he holds the feather and I read out loud. Not chanting as he does, but word for word so as to understand what is written. Sentence after sentence, with a pause after a few sentences, when he says, “Here a Jew sits and reflects upon what he has read.”

  But I drink in the words with a great thirst, and as for stopping to reflect—well, I can do that later. Our hours of study together are more precious than gold and I do not want to pause, I do not want to stop. And the candlelight dances like water on the pages, and my father and I stream across them like two ancient sailors. Above us, the firmament sparkles with stars. And around us the Children of Israel are multiplied, as countless as the sand upon the shores of the sea, and we are borne aloft toward the Holy Land.

  Before us spread fields of wheat, vines that curl and twist, fig and olive trees. And the blazing sun picks out the ripe fruits. And a sweet, heavy juice flows from the pomegranates that have split like open mouths, from the soft figs, from the carobs hanging like black fingers on the trees. And the air that I breathe is no longer the fusty air of my father’s study, but soft and clean, as if it came from the very mouth of the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He.

  In my imagination, I could see myself walking beside Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, our holy forefathers, and their wives and children. All of them going over the hills and traversing the deserts of the Holy Land, and me with them. We wander, searching for water, for food. At night, we gaze at the stars just as Jacob did when he fled from Esau, and I feel part of this ancient family drama.

  All the sweet hours I had spent in my father’s company rushed through my mind as I stood there, facing my father-in-law, and like Lot’s wife, I was seized by an immense desire to look back, to immerse myself forever in what had been and was no longer. What awoke me from that dream, what brought me back to my body? A cold wind swept around me, and for a moment, my eyes searched for an open window.

  Fine, trilling sounds reached my ears, and I was surprised to see they issued from the Maggid’s throat. He chirped like a bird and clucked his tongue, his arms fluttering in the air, and loudly clapped his hands a few times.

  Then he fell silent, calm again. His arms returned to the chair’s armrests, and his eyes looked at me searchingly but smilingly from beneath his heavy eyelids. A short while later, he said in his normal voice, “Sometimes God and Satan fight over the soul of a person, my daughter, and th
en it’s good to play the fool, to behave like an idiot, and in this way, Satan is confounded.”

  After that day, things changed for me in my husband’s home.

  At dawn, I would take up my place in the kitchen, where Froumeh and her daughter Rivke walked around bleary eyed. They lived in a small windowless room next to the kitchen, sleeping together in a hard, narrow bed, and I got used to hearing them chattering and rapidly became close with Rivke. Both of us helped Froumeh with the cooking, and when there was no work, we would escape to their little room and lie on the bed, side by side. Opening our eyes wide in the thick dusk, we would speak about anything and everything that crossed our minds. She told me that, when she was a baby, her mother had become a widow and that the Maggid, out of the goodness of his heart, had brought them into his home, which was now her home, for she had no other.

  Another thing she told me was that, when she was a very young girl, she thought the Maggid was her father. And she laughed about it and said that the thought had done her much good. “He used to sit me on his knees, and would give me a cube of sugar when I was sad, and when I stroked his beard and pulled his sidelocks, he would make the sounds of a horse neighing. And on his lap, I would gallop far away, away from the reach of Mother or the scolding of Mistress Sarah, of whom I was always afraid, and whom I fled whenever she came into the kitchen . . .”

  Mistress Sarah was the Maggid’s wife, a woman silent like no other, dressed all in black. I was also terrified of her. I stroked Rivke’s arm that was always sweating under my fingers, and said that, if I weren’t married, the two of us could go somewhere that was much, much better than here.