Slowly, the other living children gathered in a circle around their parents. They were a wall keeping the world out of this moment. No birdsong, no blown wind, no water dropped from the sky, no evidence of life. They said the prayers they knew and the prayers they did not. Igor closed his eyes and told his parents, “I am so tired,” and he lay down on the floor.
And outside in the world, people kept trading money for fruit and fruit for hammers, knowing nothing of the death of the first new life or what would occur because of it. In everyone’s root cellars were congratulatory canned apples and sympathetic canned potatoes, and we would need every jar.
Kayla sent Hersh, uncertain, uneasy, but obedient Hersh, door-to-door, measuring, inspecting, trying to win over any marriageable young man inside. He brought hard candies in foil wrappers, cookies in wax paper. Small sculptures of horses for the boys, nice wooden spoons for the mothers and strong tea for the fathers. He remarked on the beauty his girl was turning into.
The fathers of sons said, “She’s a lovely girl.”
Hersh said, “Lovelier every day.”
The mothers of sons said, “It wouldn’t be so bad to let her grow up a little.”
Hersh said, “She grows so much we can hardly keep up. Growing is not the problem.” The mothers and fathers of sons accepted the chocolates and the teas and the wooden spoons.
They chatted about the progress of our existence, the state of this and that. The beets were on the soft side, but the potatoes were delicious; money was not as plentiful as anyone had hoped; the weather, the weather, the weather. When could we look forward to some sun? “We will become aquatic soon,” Hersh joked.
When he left, the fathers of sons said, “Thank you for the gifts. Your daughter will no doubt find a good husband, in time.”
“I am trying to do the right thing. I’m trying to do as my wife asks,” Hersh said, wanting to explain, to apologize, to find a way of loving simultaneously everything he loved: me in my growing, Kayla in her mothering, the new world asking questions no one knew how to answer yet.
“In this, the beginning of the world, I think we’re all trying to do as our wives ask,” the fathers of sons assured.
Hersh kicked a rock down the cobbles, enjoying the tink it made against each set stone. Free rock on caught rock, showing off. At the banker’s house, the windows were draped in black fabric, which caused Hersh’s heart to fall in his chest. He knew what black fabric over the windows meant. Death, the idea of death, struck him across the head like a punch. No one had died yet in the new world. We had lost nothing we ourselves had not pushed out. He stood on the stoop’s reed mat, cleaned his boots but did not knock. A loss so final seemed nearly impossible to him, almost absurd. The End, he said to himself, and it did not make sense. He examined the hair on the backs of his hands, considered how air felt in his nose. Hersh was alive, every bit of him was so alive. Losing one part made sense—his arms could die, his skin could fall off—but not everything. Not at once.
The door was cold and solid when Hersh leaned his forehead against it. What was lost was locked inside—everything beyond was blind and dumb to the fact of it. All it took was a door, and the day cooed along without sadness. Hersh imagined the banker’s family in the dark, inside—which person he should erase from the picture he did not know—standing around a nest of eggs, incubating the hot yellow yolks of sorrow within. Soon, the eggs would hatch, and whatever creature sadness had made would fly out through the opened door.
Am I the one to let them out? Hersh asked. He knocked, curiosity enough to propel his knuckles. The stranger opened a seam in the door, her white face framed like a portrait. “I saw the curtains,” Hersh said.
“Thank you for your concern. It’s the baby. He died in his sleep.” The eggs cracked. Our beautiful world waited to meet grief for the very first time. The wind changed, moved through Hersh’s clothes like a ghost. His skin cooled.
I was supposed to be ready at any moment to become a screeching infant or a dying old woman, a wife. Except I was not ready for any of that, not ready or prepared. Aware of the possibility. Alert at best.
When Hersh’s husband-finding mission had commenced, I escaped through the drizzling world to the river. I took my wash and my books and I went to a bend where the willows grew up high and the mud was red. On the opposite bank, I could almost make out the shapes of two deer drinking. I soaked and wrung my dresses and my uncle’s underwear. I soaked and wrung Kayla’s stockings. I let the sweat of their bodies wash downstream. I took my clothes off and got into the river, which was cold and smooth with silt. As I washed, I felt the new shapes my body made. Little hills on my chest, my waist deeper than before. How did it know what to do? My skin tightened in the cold.
I held on to an underwater branch to keep from drifting downstream, and I floated. The river did not ask my age or my purpose but kissed me blindly, the same as if I were an old man, a fish or a discarded chair. I thanked it for this.
On the bank the mud was mounded, curled around rocks, matted in the roots of the trees. The mud was full of small, hard-shelled beetles. The mud was full of the sucking roots. The trunks of the trees rose out of the river as arms for the mud, ways for the mud to catch birds. Wind flashed over the mud’s skin.
I hung the bodiless sacks of clothing over the branches and lay down, covered myself in muck, stained my skin the color of earth. I let the sky come down and the earth come up and press me between them.
“Can you tell who I am?” I asked. “What do you think, mud?”
The mud pulled at my fine hairs as it dried. The splitting felt deeper, like I might break down, pieces departing from pieces, until I was a shattered thing and the bugs could carry me away. But I was as whole as ever. The only thing I started to lose were tears, unreasonable, unspecific tears. I did not know if I was crying for the loss of something or for the weight of what I had gained. The mud did not care one way or another, it drank my sorrow up. I was a baby, then I was a teenager, and no one had ever asked me what it felt like. I could not have answered, but I would not have minded the question. Here I was, in the sloppy, thick muck, and it seemed to know how to make a place for me, to mold itself around my body. It was meeting me at all my edges. It was cold, but I did not want to move.
My hair lost its hope of being strands and instead became a mash of fibers. I sank down a little. The hands of the mud held my own hands, the arms of the mud held mine. My ears filled with the dark meat of the earth. It said, “We haven’t forgotten you.” Whispered, “You’re home.” Whispered, “We do, we do, we do remember who you are.”
Hersh found Kayla working her knife over the skin of a potato until she had a tiny, naked globe in her hand. “The new baby,” he started to say.
“Yes, I know. He’s very cute,” Kayla snapped, as surprised as Hersh was by her own jealousy.
“No,” he told her, “not that. The baby is dead.” Hersh looked away from his wife because he thought he might see a flush of relief in her cheeks.
“Dead?” she asked.
“Suffocated.” Kayla put the potato down on the counter and stabbed the knife into it for safekeeping.
“Why?” she asked, and looked at her husband with the clear eyes of a child who has come upon a piece of nonsense everyone else takes as fact. Hersh had neither a sufficient answer nor an insufficient one. Wisdom ran away from him, comfort with it. “Lena!” Kayla burst out, desperate. My ears were far from there and I did not come running. “Lena!” she yelled louder.
“Maybe she’s not here,” he said.
“Oh, oh, oh!” Kayla picked up and put down the stabbed potato. She picked up and put down the chair she had been sitting in. Hersh recognized these as the movements of someone who has lost something, but their girl was too big to be discovered in the vague condensation under a skinned vegetable, or the footprint of a chair’s skinny leg.
“What are you doing?” husband asked wife. He had not moved yet—he was waiting for the scene to make sense
or come to a quiet stop.
“She’s gone!” Kayla yelled. “She’s gone!” She took from the shelf an iron soup pot and a wooden spoon, and ran outside, slamming wood against metal, shouting, “Help! Lena is missing! Lena is lost!”
When Kayla came to the banker’s door, ringing her alarm pot, the stranger opened it and begged her to be quiet.
“What are you doing?” the stranger asked.
“Lena is missing!” Kayla shrieked.
“Please,” the stranger said. “Please be quiet. The banker and his wife lost a baby today.”
“And what of my grief?” Kayla wailed. She swung the spoon once, hard, on the pot. Sense, reason, were clearly going to melt like snow on the hot surface of Kayla’s panic. “All right,” the stranger whispered. “You stay here for a minute. We’re going to find your daughter, but please. Please be quiet.”
The stranger left the others with the banker’s family, where the low ceiling pressed their grief back down each time it drifted for a moment. Igor had fallen asleep on the floor by the fire. Peace was a distant thing, but the truth of what happened had also fallen far away. His dreams were dim and chaotic. Ravens, wind, closed doors.
Kayla and Hersh were worried about whatever it was they were going to see—nothing, probably. The absence of their daughter. The places, hundreds of them, thousands, where I was not. The crooks of the trees, the trunks of the trees, the tall grass, the tall grass, the tall grass, the shelves where the chickens nested, their warm round forms atop a bed of possible kin, willing and warming them into existence, all empty of me.
“Maybe the Golem has her,” Hersh said. “What’s that story again?”
“I don’t think we’ve written it yet,” our stranger told him. “How should it go?”
“Well,” he began, “the monster is made of mud and bugs and sticks. The monster is born out of the earth itself.” He paused. “Is that a good start?”
“That’s a very good start,” our stranger assured him.
“Okay. So the monster is born out of the mud and he lives peacefully on worms and fish and small rodents.”
“I don’t think he lives peacefully at all,” said Kayla. “I think he terrorizes the villagers and chews on their toes and steals their potatoes right out from under their knives. I think he falls in love with all the daughters and takes them away to live in the mud with him.” She looked up at her husband, terror renewed. “Oh, dear! He’s stolen Lena!”
My parents sped up, shined their lights on any dark thing. The row of lanterns along the riverbank bobbed. They dipped close to the water, scanned the bushes. Webs of branches came into relief in the light, then faded back into the darkness.
I unearthed myself, sat cobbled with mud, my complete arms around my complete knees, watching someone come to me. I had traced their approach, the giveaway of their lights making a line through the fields. I knew I would be found, would be washed, would be taken to bed. I knew I would be scolded and loved.
When the chain of lights came close, when the voices with Lena in them were in my ears, I stood up. I was myself, but crusted over and thicker. Rougher. My hair was one solid brown mass, my eyebrows and my eyelashes.
“Another stranger,” the stranger whispered to herself. It was as if she were discovering herself on the shore, rescuing her own cold body from the water.
Hersh and Kayla came to the mudded person, ready to demand their daughter back. They saw my eyes and reached out together, scraped my arm and watched the brown crust fall off. Their lamps lit up their faces from below, making them look like masks, their cheekbones sunken, their chins jutting out.
The stranger recognized me, which meant she was still alone. She was still the only stranger. She turned her back to us so we would not see her face twist up.
“It’s you,” Hersh said.
“It’s me,” I answered.
“What were you doing?” Kayla wanted to know. Her voice was smoke, dissipating. The thing she was sure of—tragedy—disappeared.
“I was here. I am here.”
“Why did you leave me?” Kayla whimpered.
“I didn’t,” I said. “I just came to do the laundry and stayed on awhile.”
Kayla draped a still-wet bedsheet over me, saying, “It’s indecent. You’re not a child anymore.” They began to lead me home, but paused when the stranger did not follow. “Hey,” Kayla said, “we found her. Time to go home. Everything is fine.” The stranger, her back still turned to us, waved us away. “I’ll come back soon,” she said quietly. “I’m going to . . . stand here for a while.”
“Thank you for finding me,” I told her, not wanting to leave her alone.
“Thank you for finding me, too,” she answered. There was a little rain, which was so light we could not feel it falling. Hersh and Kayla had our clean laundry slung over their arms, and I, coated in mud, followed behind. I felt like a flower bulb they had just dug up, hopeful that they might plant me in the garden, where, after the long, frozen stillness of winter, a spray of irises might emerge as if from nowhere.
THE BOOK OF HOPE, LOST AND GAINED
We gathered under the swinging branches of a cottonwood at the northern edge of the village in the middle of the cemetery, where the road, grown over with hungry vines, once led out and away. Igor stood with his brothers and sisters while his parents were shoulder to shoulder. His mother had not spoken to him since the baby’s death. She would not meet his eye. That morning, his father had said, “She will forgive you someday,” and Igor had said, “Forgive me for what?” His father had shrugged his shoulders, as if his were not the weight that had ended the fragile life. “Forgive me for what?” Igor had asked again.
“For seeing her like that. For being disgusted by her.”
“Disgusted?”
The rain was heavier that day but we were dry under the tree, all the water falling in a ring around us. We remembered in great detail the four days when the baby had been alive. Igor asked our stranger to explain what had happened and she said, “He was conceived in a different world—he was not meant for this one.” She blessed his cold body and washed him off with river water carried here in a flowerpot. We each took a turn putting our fingers on his forehead, wishing him a safe journey and thanking him for visiting us here. But more than anything else, we stood in silence, because death lived with us too now and always would. The sweet months were over when no one had ever left us.
And was it true that he came from another world? Was it true that his death was right? Or was this the first curse, the first shining ring in a chain? We offered our sadness to the banker and his wife and the eleven siblings—who stood together in a group just failing to add up to a complete dozen—but we did so from a few feet away. We did so with our hands hidden in our pockets. We did so without once kissing any of them on the cheek or offering our own clean handkerchiefs for their miserable eyes. We each threw handfuls of dirt into the baby’s hole, and placed small pebbles on his gravestone, which read simply, The First Birth, The First Death.
Later, Kayla polished her wooden spoons. She kept looking into them, waiting for the moment when her rag had worked enough circles for a mirror to appear in the birch. I was transfixed by her hopeless determination. Kayla always felt the electricity of her own belief crackle and spark so ferociously that she was sure she could light the world. At the door, three questioning knocks. Kayla lined her wooden spoons, ungleaming, on the table. It was the banker, dressed in black. Kayla stood in the doorway, blocking the entrance while she offered him tea, a sweet and her condolences for his tragic loss.
“Can I?” he said, motioning inside.
“Oh, certainly, yes of course, certainly, yes,” Kayla said while she stood in his way. The banker took a step and forced her to move. “I cannot imagine,” she told him. “None of us can imagine.” He shook his wet hat out on the floor. She eyed the water like something contaminated.
“That’s not what I’m here about,” he said. “I know there is talk of a cur
se and maybe it’s true. I’m here about your daughter.”
“My daughter?”
I looked at both of them. “Me?” I asked.
“I have settled on the story,” he said. “Are you ready? May I sit?”
“Okay,” Kayla told him. “Certainly. I’m sorry, yes. We like stories.” The banker arranged himself in the chair slowly, crossing and uncrossing his feet, folding his hands on his lap.
“Once upon a time, there was a quiet village at the edge of a river,” the banker started. His voice was measured and low. “For a long time, the village was innocent and nothing very bad had happened there. But then, a baby was crushed by the weight of his father’s love. Crushed. And the people in the village understood that sadness waited for them ahead.”
The banker picked one of Kayla’s wooden spoons, stirred an invisible pot. “But there was a beautiful young girl. The Girl Who Retold the Story. No matter how afraid the others were, she could tell the next chapter of the story, and they were always safe in it.”
He had been watching; I had been seen.
“Now, once upon the same time there was a young man who needed to find a new home, and a new family. He was a little bit greedy with his parents and asked to have a hand in everything, but he would grow out of that. He wanted to change and he wanted to marry. He had waited patiently for the perfect, magical wife who could cancel out any family curse. Who could turn the story into something happy. When the boy’s father came to the girl and asked for her help, she gave it.”
He paused, watched me, a silent girl sitting across the table from him. I looked at my hands, which were utterly ordinary, as was everything else. Somehow, other people kept seeing something they thought could save them, when all I saw was dry skin, chipped nails. I felt like a vessel, the container itself meaningless, yet into it people kept pouring ashes, tears, blood, and calling me holy. As much as I wanted to explain the mistake, I knew they would brush me aside. A person who wants to believe lives in a world full of proof.
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