by Rena Rossner
My hand is over my mouth. I’m doing everything I can not to shout, not to make a sound. I’m so busy watching the swan in our kitchen that I don’t see my father reach into the trunk. When I notice, he’s taking out a brown fur cloak, one I thought I’d seen him wear before, but maybe not. This one looks different—the fur more lush and lifelike. Like the bear cloaks the townsfolk wear to celebrate the new year. Then I hear a noise that doesn’t sound very manlike and my heart skips a beat in my chest.
I look over, and in the space where my father had been, there’s a bear. This time I nearly do cry out—in fear! I’ve never seen a bear so large. It’s twice his size, like a mountain of rich dark earth. Its eyes are dark and shining, like orbs of obsidian stone, and its teeth, sharp and yellowish, terrifying, poke out of a long snout. The nose at the end of the snout is double the size of a human nose. The bear takes a step forward. His fur is so brown it looks black, like the bark of a birch tree, rippling in a sheen with every move he makes to reveal powerful muscles and paws with claws that look sharp as daggers and dig into the wooden floor. It’s a dream, I keep telling myself, it must be a dream. A fairy tale coming to life in my head, nothing more. I look over at Laya and see that she’s still sleeping. Maybe I’m sleeping too?
I’m trembling so hard I feel as if I might tumble down the ladder.
The bear nudges the front door latch open with his snout and looks back at the swan. The swan leaps onto his back as he lumbers out of the house, careful to close the door behind him. I let myself breathe hard once the door closes. I clasp and flex my fingers, trying to wake myself up, but my fingernails feel sharper and when I look down at them, they’ve grown black and dark, with fine points that almost look like claws. I cry out and reach for Laya, but when my hand hovers over her sleeping form, I see that the hair on my arm has nearly doubled in volume and thickness. I bring my arm back, afraid of what my own hands might do. I hold myself instead, trembling in fear. I close my eyes and let the tears that have gathered fall onto my nightgown, afraid to rub my own eyes and do them damage, and too scared to move lest Laya wake and see what’s happening to me. It’s a dream, Liba, just a dream, I keep telling myself. When you open your eyes everything will go back to normal.
I lie down in bed and try to steady my breathing. I wait, my heart thundering in my chest, until I hear the rustling of bedcovers and the sound of my father’s snores. I open my eyes and look at my still-shaking hands—they look completely normal. I take a deep breath and creep down the ladder, determined to see my parents as I’ve always seen them—human and whole.
Mami is awake, drinking tea at the table. I sit by her feet and put my head in her lap.
“I had a bad dream,” I say in a shaky voice.
“What did you dream?”
“I heard you and Tati speaking,” I confess.
“Oh, dochka. You heard?” She takes a deep breath. “And saw?”
I nod. “Everything,” I say, and my voice shakes.
It’s in that moment that all I’ve ever known changes. Mami always says that fairy tales are real. With my head in my swan-mother’s lap, I start to believe—and I wonder which tale is ours.
Mami leans down and embraces me.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” she says. “But it’s not everything.” She shakes her silky white-blonde hair and her tears fall on my cheeks. “There are things I need to tell you.”
But Mami doesn’t say anything more, and soon I get up and silently make my way up the ladder back to bed. All night I watch the windows and the doors. I can’t sleep. Yankl’s words about the Rebbe dying scare me because I don’t know what it will mean for our future. But the truth of what I’ve seen my parents become scares me even more.
Tati always says that every heart has its secrets, and it is not our role in life to try and uncover them. I’ve uncovered my parents’ secrets, and more terrifying than anything, I think that means I have a secret too.
As I watch Laya sleep, I see her scratch in places where only wings grow, and then I know. My body is thick and large-boned while my sister’s is lithe. We both eat fish, but I hunger for meat. We both love the Dniester River, but I’m drawn to its dark places, while she loves the tall trees that line its banks and the open air above. My hair is coarse and black-brown, but hers is blonde like Mami’s … nearly white. Everything makes sense suddenly, and yet nothing makes sense at all.
There have always been rumors about the Kodari forest and the hidden things within it.
Now I know we are a part of that unseen world.
8
Laya
When I wake in the morning,
something is different
but I don’t know what.
Liba’s still sleeping;
her eyes look puffy and red.
Mami’s not in her bed.
Tati still snores.
Something is wrong.
I want to ask the air, the sky.
I go outside to the forest
and make mute offerings:
bits of string, twig and bark
collections I leave on trees
like I am claiming them—
this one: mine mine mine—
now tell me a secret.
I ask the leaves
Where’s Mami?
Why was Liba crying?
But there are no answers.
I cross and re-cross
imaginary lines
and mark lichen-green rocks
so I can find my way home.
The elegant stems that sway
with the contours
of the river
nod and drop like feathers
and I feel recognition
in the half-light.
Is this for me?
An answer?
A bare moment
like finding sanctuary
from a storm.
Where is she?
I see a swan
swimming in the river
and hear the happy syllables
of birds, the whistling
of wings, the coos and calls
that answer.
Coo coo coo.
I want to add my voice
but these are dialects
that I don’t understand.
Not Yiddish—
the mamaloshen—
or Mami’s Ukrainian;
something else,
something other.
There is light out here
and air and voices
in the trees:
wind
birds
insects
and sometimes other things,
creatures that have no names,
and music that calls to me—
bells, I hear bells.
At first I think
it’s the river—
skaters on the ice
wear bells
on their ankles—
but these are not the sounds
of bells I know.
Bells bells bells
late in the night.
Many rivers flow
into the Dniester.
I have followed
the ways they change
and lead to villages
huddled along shores.
People talk
on the banks of rivers.
They think
that no one hears them.
I do.
I watch ice skaters
and fishmongers
and I listen
to their idle talk.
I see young people
from our town,
skating down the river
as if they don’t have a care
in the world.
I watch the couples
holding hands as they skate.
They take breaks
and find copses of trees
where they think
no one can see them
and they kiss.
<
br /> The air fogs around them.
Will I ever feel as free
as they look
on those skates?
I am always looking
for someone,
or something,
hiding just beyond the forest,
past the river,
above the trees.
A place.
A story.
A person.
A different kind of life.
Someone who understands me.
Who sees
what I see,
feels what I feel,
who knows,
the way I do,
that there must be
a different way to live.
What would happen
if I found it?
9
Liba
The next day, Mami and I are at the stream behind our house doing laundry. Laya is … off, like she always is. Mami lets her go. She always does. I am the one who stays.
We dip the clothes and linen into the freezing stream and rub the cloth raw with large rocks. I lean over the bulge my stomach makes and suck it in, even though it hurts to do so. I hate the way I look, like a boulder at the edge of the river, while Mami folds herself down and up. There is always space between her and the river, always air surrounding her. Laya is just like her—thin and full of light and air. How did I not see it before? How did I not know?
Mami is distracted. She looks around us constantly, waiting for something.
I don’t know how to bring up what I saw last night. Part of me still hopes it was a dream, but I know in my heart of hearts that last night held truths I’ve always half known. The way I know which path to take in the forest because the earth and the trees just look right. The way that sometimes, a trail even smells right. And before last night, none of that made sense, and now it does somehow, and that is more confusing than anything.
“What are you doing?” I ask Mami.
“Making sure that we’re alone.”
“I don’t see anyone.”
“In the woods you are never alone, malyshka. Come closer.”
I gather my skirts and sit beside her. Her legs are doubled beneath her, but my legs cannot move the way hers do. I sigh and try to get comfortable.
She cups her hands around my ear.
“There are things you need to know before we go to Kupel. Things your sister will need to know someday. I know you saw us last night, but there are things you don’t understand. Things you haven’t seen.” She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. “Tati is not Laya’s father. Laya’s father was a swan, like me.”
“What …?” I feel as though a rock tumbles out from under me and I’m falling. My stomach is in my mouth; my mouth is full of fur. I can’t breathe. How?
“There isn’t time.” Mami takes my face in her hands and fixes her gray eyes on mine. “I’m a swan, as you saw. I come from a family of swans.”
I try to wriggle out of her grasp. Seeing them that night was one thing—but hearing her story now, I’m not sure I want to know.
“Liba, bud’laska.” She grabs my arms. “Please—there isn’t time.”
I swallow and shiver as though there is a sudden gust of wind.
“I wasn’t meant for life as a swan. As my family flew high above the trees each winter, my eyes would scan the ground and the paths between the trees. When we flew again in summer, I would watch the rivers and the hilltops. Sometimes you know when you don’t belong, but you don’t know how to leave. We spent our summers at Onyshkivtsi, but at times we would land close to here and spend time on the Dniester. I always wandered far away from my flock. One day I came across your father. I heard a noise and saw dark fur on the ground, struggling. I hid behind a tree. He was caught in a trap. He had fallen into a pit. I was fascinated—he was so large, so clearly of the earth and forest.
“Soon after, I saw a man lead him by a chain out of the pit and to a clearing. They played a song—“Hupp Kazak, dada dada dada”—“Hupp Kazak, get up if you can.” It was a party of sorts, out in the woods, held for the local landowner. They made the bear dance in a duel with a man. Whoever danced better would be set free. But when your father (in bear form) out-danced the man beside him, the villagers attacked him and threw him back into the pit. And I knew then that I had to do something. No creature should be caged like that. Nobody should treat an animal with such cruelty. I didn’t yet know he was a man.
“I waited until the middle of the night and then flew down into the pit. He bared his claws and gnashed his teeth, and at first I thought that was the end of me, that he thought I was supper. But then he felt me tug on the chain with my beak, and slowly, inch by inch, I unfurled my wings and beat at the air and pulled him up out of the pit. I used my beak to pick the lock. Swans are stronger than they look, malyshka, never forget that. He looked into my eyes and I saw a tear there, and then I knew—he was not as he seemed. It was the first time I realized that my family of swans was not the only one that could change what they were. I was enchanted. I’d found the possibility of a different kind of life.
“As soon as the lock sprang open, he transformed before my eyes. A man, with dark intense bear eyes, whose fur became dark hair and muscles. He took me—still in swan form—into his arms and thanked me. It was my turn to watch his eyes grow as the air shimmered around us in the copse of trees and he found a naked woman in his arms—not a swan.”
“Mami …” My stomach feels like it’s on fire.
She smiles as she smooths my hair. “We spoke all night. He told me about his people, Chassidei Berre, his shtetl, Kupel, and how he’d been captured—he too had wandered from his flock with a desire to see how others lived. But he fell into a trap. The landowner there trapped bears and then used them to force his tenants to pay rent. The custom was widespread—just like when people dance in bearskins to chase away bad spirits in honor of the new year. Except in this case, if you didn’t pay your rent and taxes on time, the only way to win your freedom was to best one of his bears. Most men didn’t survive the duel, as his bears were well trained.
“Your Tati’s great-grandfather, the Shpoler Zeiyde, would often offer to take the place of other Jews in this dance. He was a man who bested the bear of his local landowner so many times, earning his freedom and the freedom of other Jews, that he became a bear himself. Sometimes you become what you need to be in a time of great need, that’s what your father always says. And there is always a need to protect the Jewish people from those that seek to harm them. Everyone who descended from the Shpoler Zeiyde took on his form. Your father’s people are Chassidim, Berre Chassidim, but they are also bear-men.
“I wanted to know everything about him. I wanted to know if I too could find a way to be something other than what I was. He brought me home to his family and told them how I saved him, but they only called me names, like shikseh, tsatskeh, nafkeh, and goy. He was outraged. He’d brought home an outsider who’d saved his life, and still it meant nothing to his insular family. The more time we spent together, the more we admired the strengths we saw in one another. We were falling in love, and the way his family treated me only pushed us closer together. We decided to run away. There was no other way for us to be together. He left everything he knew, everything he was.
“But when we went to my family, they didn’t accept us either. A bear marrying a swan? It was unheard of. They wouldn’t offer him a place in the flock. And my parents told me that if I stayed with him, I would be cast out.
“We wandered the forest alone, sleeping in caves, bathing in rivers, foraging the forest for sustenance. Your father had one last idea. He said that his family would accept me if I converted. I studied and prayed; I did everything right. I took on your father’s faith and dunked into a river seven times to purify myself and become a Jew. But his family still wouldn’t accept me. I wasn’t a bear. I would never be a bear. They cursed us and told us never to return. Swans are fierce, dochka—we do not easily take on another f
orm.
“But your father loved me, and I loved him. What we felt between us was warm and alive and free in a way that neither of us had ever known that love could be. So we started over in a bigger town, a place where both Jews and non-Jews lived side by side, here in Dubossary. A place where nobody would know who and what I was, and what your father was, the dynasty he came from—a place where perhaps a bear and a swan could be free.
“Your father built us this house and you were born, Liba. The baby of our love. You were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. You come from two proud houses. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
She’s still talking, but I break out in a sheen of sweat and fear. I’ve always known that I was not like my sister, but this is too much. Everything I’ve ever known has been turned upside down. While Mami’s story should feel like coming home, like swimming in an icy-cold river for the first time in spring, all I can think is, What else is there that I don’t know? What else lives deep in the Kodari—and beyond? What other sorts of creatures?
“Liba,” Mami continues, “pay attention—there’s more. One night I was alone in the cabin and a swan came to the window. He was my intended. Swans mate for life and he had never mated with anyone else. Sometimes you become the person you want to be, you give up everything that you are … but family and faith have a way of calling you back …
“He came to me in human form: he was naked, long and lean, his skin glowed in the moonlight like mother-of-pearl, and I couldn’t help but be mesmerized at the sight of him. Something deep inside me recognized him, and then he touched me …”
“Mami …” I close my eyes.
“No, this you must hear. I startled and made to run away, but in an instant he was white, dressed in feathers and glory, with a crown of gold upon his head, his beak black, his eyes like obsidian stone, but soft and wise and kind. I stared at him and he bent his head beneath my palm. He left one feather and I knew he meant for me to take it. It was as if he wanted me just to see him, to recognize him, to know that he still lived, and that he had never forgotten me.