In our kitchen, Uncle Hersh’s hands trembled.
“Will you be helping out in the new temple?” my mother asked.
“Kayla really believes,” Hersh told her. “I think I can save her. I think she’ll be herself again.” Hersh had found some courage, some trust in his reason for coming. His voice was full of determination.
“Have you made a saddle yet in the new world?”
“All those years felt like drowning. It felt like watching my wife sink to the bottom of the sea.”
“You want some more tea?” my mother asked, polishing the handle of the teapot with her thumb.
“I’m sorry. I wish I could do this myself. You have no idea.”
My siblings and I did not speak or move. Our eyes met for tiny seconds before we looked away again, not wanting to see our own scared faces reflected back.
Hersh paused. “I don’t want you to think about it, I just want you to say yes.”
“You want to buy one of my children?” My mother’s face was flat and still.
“We can become parents, which you will still be. She will be happy.”
“It’s a she you want?”
“I wouldn’t ask for your son. She can learn to cook everything. She can be taught to read and to write.”
My mother explained that her children were not babies and already knew those things, even little Lena knew those things. “She’s small for her age, but she’s smart for her age, too.” From across the room, hearing her say my name made me itch. Moishe, Regina and I had stopped turning the pages of the book we had been reading—an encyclopedia of dog breeds. We had been on the Australian shepherd page. The animal was frozen, staring at us with one blue eye, one brown.
“I’m going to beg you every single day for the rest of time. The entire world is yet to come and we’ll never be part of it. Kayla will die and I’ll die and that will be all. Do you understand?” He began to cry. “It will never matter that we existed.”
“Help,” my mother said.
“We all have the right to love something more than ourselves,” Hersh said quietly. “We all have the right to die of sorrow when something happens to our babies.”
“You want my daughter so you can lose her?” my mother asked.
“I want your daughter so I can keep from losing her. So I can break my fingers if it helps her. So I can bury my face in her hair when I sing to her. So my wife does not turn to dust. Give us hope. Perl, my sister, give us something to pray for.”
My mother looked at the heads rolling everywhere in the house. Two cabbages were resting against the big blue door, like dogs waiting to go out. I could tell that our mother’s own head was thick, filled up with mud. The mud wrapped its big, suffocating arms around every logical thought.
“Come back tomorrow,” my mother said.
I ran out the door and down the street. My feet smacked the puddles hard. I thought about running away forever, except that the whole point was to be home. I spotted my father in the square near the statue of the long-dead war hero with a bunch of other rain-wet men. I wrapped my arms around my father’s leg. He looked at me in confusion, but then patted my head and said hello. He did not know that a deal was under way to sell one of his children. The men, having finished their lunches but unready to return to work, were arguing over the fate of a typewriter. Around us, people walked from shop to shop, carrying baskets and bags of supplies. There were weak fingers of light coming through the spaces between buildings. The baker held the old black typewriter, tapping the S key with his ring finger. Should this be part of the new world? Should it be thrown to the bottom of the river, as the butcher suggested? Should it be stomped to bits and sprinkled over the tomato gardens? Should it be encased in glass and viewed as a museum object—evidence of an unknown time? Or should it be what the barber said it was—a clacking record keeper, inherited and benign?
People snarled, angry about the disagreement. “A lot of fuss over a few buttons,” the barber said.
“How are we supposed to know what to do?” the jeweler cried.
“Starting over is starting over,” the butcher spat as he stamped a boot-shaped puddle into the mud.
“Is it better to give the next generations the opportunity to invent new things, or is it better to provide them with the tools that were here when we arrived?” my father asked.
Igor said, “We’ll take whatever we can get.”
The typewriter was only one of the items in question. People disagreed about cash registers and hammers. If we threw out our hair ribbons, should we keep our shoelaces? What about our buttons and watches? “We have not gone back in time,” the baker said, “we have gone somewhere in time that no one has ever been. A brand-new place. Those watches cannot keep track of this place any better than a hairbrush could. We need to get rid of the watches.” He put the typewriter down on the ground, took his black felted-wool hat off and shook the rain out of it.
The barber agreed. “He’s right. This hat is a new world hat now, just as my eyes are new world eyes. But time roots us to the old world—time must never have existed before. Everything depends on that.”
All the glass faces stared back from a wheelbarrow in the middle of the square, ticking down hours that we denied even existed. The watch killers followed the cart past the butcher shop, the bakery, the bank, the candy store, six houses, four wet dogs, a row of white rosebushes, to the path through the cabbage field toward the river. The river garbled, and the rain tickled our foreheads and the backs of our hands as the men tossed our watches one at a time into the rocky blue. The past and the impending future were buried together like a pair of stillborn twins. The typewriter went in too, but not before the barber could kneel on the bank of the river and type the word goodbye. The watch chains made snaky chimes as they hit the water. We did not see a single watch or clock stop ticking; we did not see those faces crack and fill with liquid.
On shore, all we saw was a time-empty cart with a big wooden wheel. No markers of what approached or what had been. No counting up or counting down. Igor looked worried, aware of the vast emptiness ahead of him, the land of the uninvented. The jeweler’s eyes were panes of glass, easy to see through. In his mind was a man with a row of glinting needle-tipped tools and a pocket watch, its chest open and its metal heart revealed. The man, who had once been the jeweler’s father, was a lost ghost now and all of time silent at the bottom of the river. “Well, that’s one thing done,” said the jeweler, chewing his knuckles and hoping that he could support himself with wedding rings and child-size lockets alone. And what was to ensure that those would not be cast out? “Let there be wedding rings and child-size lockets,” the jeweler muttered. He remembered the small radio, which had kept him company for thousands of evenings since his parents died and his brother had gone off to seek his fortune. Now those people had been banished from existence, the past no longer a place. He was sure that radio too would be eliminated, but not if no one knew of it. The jeweler planned to hide it under the rotting floorboards of the old barn, where it would be safe.
I gazed out at the unchanged river and hoped we remembered to save more than we gave away. Already, cash registers and horse plows were named as traitors. Bicycles would be blacklisted, non-blank books. Anything with a wheel or a switch would soon sink to the bottom of the river, where the mud would hold it prisoner, shut it up.
The group looked up at the cloud-hidden sun, which had sunk to the side a little, making short shadows at our feet—small gray versions of ourselves who accompanied us back to town and shivered every time we crossed the mottled light of elm trees.
Living in the new world would not turn out to be that different from living in the old one. We had to survive with only the food we could grow and make ourselves, and the clothes we could knit or sew from fabric we already had. If a dish broke, there was no replacing it. But we found that it was not difficult. We had plenty of stuff. There were many bags of flour in everyone’s cellars, the cows and goats gave enoug
h milk for us all to drink and make cheese with. As long as they kept reproducing, we could slaughter an animal every few weeks without diminishing the herd. Instead of trading with other villages, we traded with one another. Someone always had more forks than he needed, but not enough butter. One woman was always willing to offer a big bowl of soup and a loaf of bread if another woman would watch the children for a few hours. There was not enough chocolate, but we had a lot of sugar to make cakes. Beyond any accounting, we had the feeling of abundance—our world brimmed over.
What disappeared completely, no leftovers, no crumbs, was news. For us, there was no outside world.
My mother served bowls of cabbage soup that evening. She put out the spoons. We children sucked and slurped, the whole room full of the sounds of our mouths, trying to create too much noise to talk over.
Our mother said, “Regina is going to go and live with her uncle and aunt.” I hated myself for the relief I felt when my name was not the one spoken.
“What uncle and aunt?” our father asked, his eyes full of sharp surprise.
My mother explained with as much confidence as she could lie with that Regina would get music lessons and be a star. But mostly that she would be Hersh and Kayla’s child.
“How did you choose me?” Regina asked. The words were as thin and sharp as ice breaking.
“Your brother was here?”
“She will come to love them.”
“Regina is mine,” our father said.
Regina looked around her. She was sitting at her own kitchen table, her own brother and little sister, her own mother and her own father and her own feet and her own hands. This was her table—the legs, the surface, the dents and edges. This was her wide, foot-polished floor. She now felt an overwhelming allegiance to the white enamel washbowl she had never thought much about before. And above all else, the cabbage soup—the smell of her life, the taste of it. “I will be their child?” she asked.
“We’re all of us starting over,” our mother said. “The world is new. Everyone deserves to love something more than themselves.” The reasons, so passionate when Hersh had said them, were no better than soggy bread in Perl’s mouth. Her face flushed with blood. “Hope,” she tried, not knowing the meaning just then.
Our father gripped the table. “You gave away our daughter?”
His wife shook her head no and said, “Yes.” She said, “They have a piano. And the horses she’ll ride, and the bed of her own?”
Silently, Regina, as if in answer to her mother’s questions, put her hands into the bowl of cabbage soup, both hands, and began washing them in the warm mush, wringing them together. “What are you doing?” my father asked. I understood—this was the last supper of my sister’s known life. The soup, the same soup we had eaten every day, was a bath drawn of our mother, our home. Regina washed her hands in that broth as if it could bless her, make her permanent, mark her as part of this and no other family. We watched the dripping juice go up her arms.
We sat there for a moment, dumb. Then I put my own hands in my soup and washed. My mother dipped her fingers. My father and Moishe joined. Our dozens of fingers grabbed and wrung and squirmed. We rubbed the hot liquid up to our elbows. The skin came back pink from the heat, pulsing from the heat. Whether or not the soup had been holy before, we made it so. We were baptized together, a family born of cabbage.
“We’re just learning how to live here,” our mother said. “Everything is a guess.”
I felt faint, like paper dissolving in water. “We are sorry for everything we will do wrong,” I said, not knowing on whose behalf I was speaking.
“Sorry is only the beginning,” our father told us.
THE FOURTH DAY
Since architecture was completely new to us, everyone felt proud of our early ideas for the temple—it seemed this came naturally. We would build up on the northern edge of the village, near the little spit of land that would have connected us to the rest of the planet had such a place existed. The main room would have a fifty-foot ceiling, vaulted. It would be a place for all the volumes we would write about the world, starting now and going on into the centuries. Leather bound, gilded edges, wrapped in a piece of red silk. The shelves, we figured: ebony. How do we know ebony? we wondered. We were born that way, and since we knew, we thought we should make use of that knowledge. Black wood bookshelves filled with the History of the World, and above, the vaulted ceiling painted with the constellations of the summer sky. Each of us would be his own planet in the middle of the universe.
We had many pages of drawings, measurements, lists of supplies needed. We would all have to contribute and we all would.
“The stranger is amazing,” the jeweler said to the butcher and the baker.
“She’s kind of odd. I find her a little scary,” the baker said. This was nonsense, absurd to the jeweler. What further loveliness could have been included in a woman?
“She is the best listener.” He sighed. “She listens and listens. Which gave me an idea . . .”
We voted yes on the jeweler’s proposal to station the stranger in the square as the interim recorder. She was neutral and she was the one who had thought of the idea to keep track of prayers in the first place. When the baker had knocked on the jeweler’s door to request the stranger’s approval, the jeweler retrieved her from the rocking chair with pride. She was to be the one. She would have the honor. “I found you a really good job,” he told her. “I think you are going to be great at it.”
We gave her a thick stack of paper, a nice fountain pen and a well of ink. “Do we know about ink?” the healer had asked. We have to, the butcher thought. There are things that do not need inventing—that just are. Blood and skin, ink and paper.
We strung a gray-and-white striped blanket up to keep the rain away. We had the stranger sit with her back to the square and anyone who came to pray so that he or she would not feel self-conscious. The stranger sat down and waited, hearing the voiceless quiet of this particular day for the first time in her life. It was good to have something to fill the time, for the days ahead not to be gusting, empty wind. For hours, no one brought her a prayer, so she brought herself some. “I pray that I do not disappoint you.” Her back began to ache against the chair, her feet were cold and damp. Doubt was a worm wriggling on the ground beside her, but the stranger stepped on it, leaving nothing but a pink smear on the stones.
I was the first to pray. “I pray for good and peace and enough of everything.”
“Hello, my fellow storyteller,” the stranger said to me.
I wanted to ask her something about herself. I wanted to make that small human trade—one truth from my life for one truth from hers. The reservoir was shallow, just a few days behind us. My question was too big and too small at the same time. “Are you all right?”
I heard her fill her lungs. I heard someone’s heels mark the distance between one destination and the next. She said, “Something was rustling around outside in the night, and at daybreak there were three small mounds of newly turned dirt. A fat gray bird used them to bathe, ducking and shivering as if the earth were water.”
“If I help stir the batter, I am allowed to lick the spoon,” I said, not knowing whether I wanted this to mean something.
The stranger’s laugh was a short gust of warm air. “That’s a good trade.”
My uncle’s proposal flashed in my head like a struck match. I did not want anyone to get traded, but I could not bring myself to utter that prayer, since giving voice to the idea only made it feel more real. Instead I prayed for unexceptional, everyday mercy, and the stranger’s pen scratched it down.
The jeweler, like a nervous parent, spied on us from behind the statue of the long-dead war hero. He sauntered past with a cup of tea, as if he just happened to be passing by with exactly what she needed. As I left, a line of others wandered up to take my place.
“I pray that we do a respectable job on this world. I pray that my Jonah is the tallest boy in town. I pray that I am
more tomorrow than I am today. I pray that we discover riches hidden under our bed.”
“I pray that my house never sinks into the ground. I pray that my knee begins to hurt less and that I can once again help my mother into her bed at night. I pray that my wife is more beautiful tomorrow than she is today. I pray that the earth spills over with food.”
“I pray for the sick to get well. I pray that what we build remains forever. I pray for money, which I’ll take very good care of.”
“I pray that my mother appreciates how hard I try to take care of everyone.”
“I pray for money, for money, for money. And for baby boys.”
“Do you remember me?” a small voice asked the stranger.
“What?”
“Do you?”
The stranger knew her daughter’s high rasp, the softness in her r’s. This was not a voice that could be mistaken. Without turning, she reached her arm around to touch her girl. Her trembling fingers opened. What her hand found was wood—the chair’s cold leg, the empty seat.
“No,” the stranger said to all the nothing around her. “I do not remember you.”
My uncle the saddlemaker and his wife knocked on the door with the whole soggy afternoon around them, the whites of their teeth shining in it.
“You came,” my mother said, her words a drooped flag on a windless day.
“We brought some cakes,” Aunt Kayla offered, beaming, her big teeth a sloppy white smear. “For everyone. To share.” Her eyes were too bright. Fiery.
My father wanted the visitors to know that he had given his approval. That of course his wife had not been able to make a decision without him. Words, nothing more than dressed-up nerves, rolled out of his mouth. Hersh’s coat had a fur collar, which he petted in slow, meaningful strokes. Regina was standing with my brother and me, hoping not to be recognized. But she had the nicest dress and the flattest hair and the cleanest cheeks. There was no question which child was for sale.
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