Golde looked at her girls. From one to the other: her string bean and her little bird, growing into women. When she spoke again, it was plain but genuine. “‘Like the birds that fly, even so will the Lord of Hosts shield Jerusalem.’”
“Isaiah,” said Hodel.
Mama nodded. “Good. And because of this very passage, challah loaves originally were baked with the shape of a bird on them. Some people even call the challah a feigel, which of course means—”
“Little bird,” Chava whispered, her eyes lighting up with sheer, unbridled joy.
“Yes,” replied Golde, smiling to herself. “I thought you’d like that.”
Chava smiled in return, overwhelmed by how special this made her feel.
“Now we wait—and clean in the meanwhile.”
The final speck of flour had long been swept away when Golde at last reached into the oven, carefully removed the golden loaf, tapped the bottom to make certain it sounded hollow, and placed it onto the table.
“So you see, bread is not just nourishment for our bodies but also for our spirits.”
They beheld their creation. Golden, warm, and inviting. The aroma of it beyond description but evocative of home and comfort. The smell of this moment would remain with them throughout their lives.
“Now, just as God told Adam in Genesis, ‘By the sweat of your brow will you eat your bread.’ Delicious, yes?”
Never, not ever in the history of the entire world, could bread have tasted so good.
Hodel would have given anything for the smallest piece of that fresh bread now, as she sat on the floor of her cold cell. She was motionless, facial muscles twitching slightly. Flies buzzed, landed lightly on her face. She found them oddly comforting—specks of affection. Besides, she could no longer afford the energy required to deflect them, nor did she see the point. So much of her daily existence was spent with her eyes closed, envisioning herself somewhere—anywhere—else. At last she opened them. The crust around her eyes cracked, clouding her vision.
She lived to sleep. Despised being awake. But until the moment we do not, she thought, we must always wake. So she lay there, her milky eyes fixed on the floor, seeing only the dust, the mud, the flicking of shadows, and the unmissable lesion-colored night.
She was in exile. From herself. She was more roiled with hunger than she had ever been.
She moved in hysteria to her secret hoard behind the stove. She plunged an arm in to retrieve a scrap from her stash. It did not matter that they were rotten—moldy and half-devoured by shadowy critters. Even a rotten roll is food when you’re starving. That is true of souls, too, she thought.
She swept her hand back and forth in the small space, unable to reach her prize. Then suddenly, the horror of nothingness settled: her storage of bread was completely cleared away.
The jailer, she thought, defeated and raging. This must be his doing! What humanity I thought remained within him, the goddamn scoundrel! In her rage, she tried again. The last search. Which one does when they cannot bring themselves to quite believe what they already know to be true.
Then her frantic hand came across something at the far back.
Hodel stopped dead. What is this?
Her hand grazed what indeed felt like another roll—what joy! She wrestled it out, hid it beneath her skirts, and returned to the corner of her cell, buoyed instantly by her guile.
All suspicion, Hodel inspected her loot. It was smaller, harder, lighter too. My God, she realized. This is one of Tzeitel’s rolls, the very same from my dream! So new and fresh it seemed, dishonest even. But starvation got the better of Hodel, and she revealed its guts as she ripped it open, mouth attacking like an animal. But before she could devour the bread, her eye came upon something more miraculous: a roll of paper, small and tight. She looked around. Who would leave so covert a note? Who so artfully? But no one was there. She reached inside and pulled it out in careful stillness. Hodel held her breath as she unrolled the scroll in total silence. She gazed at the words: Further in. That was all it offered her.
Hodel returned to the pipe and at once laid her body upon the ground. Her arm throbbed with urgency as she reached and reached to the very back—this was the kind of search distinct to deprivation, the reach of yearning; a search for light beyond the darkness when all you saw was snow and shadow. Or perhaps snow was shadow now, black now white—no reason sound, no sanity pure. Ever deeper in, her arm all torment, Hodel no longer cared to disguise her movements. Lord, she thought as her fingers came upon it. Fist tight, she wriggled out the paper and dashed back to the corner of her cell; her eyes found light just as she unfolded the crumpled page. Steady, steady, take it in. Could her heart believe it? It could not be. It was an official transfer form:
Perchik Tselenovich, Prisoner No. 937
Crime: Political
Sentence: Labor, 24 to 48 months
Location: Nerchinsk Katorga Prison Camp
Town: Nerchinsk, Transbaikalia, Eastern Siberia
Note: High security
Signed: Sergei Konstantinovich Dubov,
Governor General of Omsk
At long last.
She knew.
In the city of Nerchinsk.
She knew where Perchik was.
twelve
SHE KNEW WHERE HE WAS. NERCHINSK KATORGA PRISON CAMP IN Transbaikalia, Eastern Siberia. That was something.
She lay on the damp, bare floor, grateful for the clarity, the sobering effect it provided. Earlier in the night, the jailer had appeared beyond the bars. She could not help but notice that he held her gaze a little longer than ever before. She understood. He merely bowed his head and, in his retreat, left a lamp. . . . She knew. Somehow. She was going to be free of this place.
Her fate was being determined in the nearby room where the Chief Commander’s council was sitting. Her hopes were pinned upon it. The Chief Commander might indeed send her to Nerchinsk alongside Perchik. He might assign her to serve out Perchik’s penal sentence in any of the government work camps. He might send her to a remote settlement to expand the female populace. Or worse than all of these, he might simply send her home again.
But she knew where he was. That was something. Wasn’t it? Slumber hovered over her like an incessant song—a constant melody that would not flee her brain. Squinting against the feeble light, she saw, for the first time in months, her face reflected in the many surfaces of the lamp: a horrific face it was—pale, hollowed, with crust along all the moist places, all health and hope within it melted away like wax beneath a flame. She gazed beyond the image, deep into the unknown emptiness that called her away from beyond the prison gates, into an endless, ineffable night that also held Nerchinsk within it.
Despite her horror, she could not help but look. In some corner of that darkness, Perchik lay. Perchik—growing nearer and more tangible. Perchik, in some unnameable shadow, his arms empty and awaiting her. . . .
There was a great deal of work to be done before the Sabbath—the laundry, cleaning, and all food preparation had to be completed before sunset on Friday afternoon, when the Sabbath officially began. The Sabbath may have been a day of rest, but the hours leading up to it were fraught. No matter how much preparation went into the task, the Sabbath always threw them into a frenzy.
“It’s important all of us pitch in,” Tzeitel announced far too near the sunset on this particularly stressful autumn day (impending sunset loomed more severely than in summer). The girls internally groaned. “The incredibly important work of a woman is as the spirit of the home.” Here she was: Tzeitel the boss. “Mama dashes madly from Friday morning till sunset to get this or fetch that for all of us, or for the guests who sometimes are invited—”
“—or unexpected,” smirked Hodel, referencing Tzeitel’s wide-eyed, oft-visiting childhood playmate Motel.
“We must aim to appreciate this struggle,” continued Tzeitel, ignoring her. “Someday soon we shall all be on our own. We cannot thrive in a pigsty.”
Hodel r
etorted coyly, “I thought the main purpose of Shabbat was to rest.”
Tzeitel sighed and her face tightened as she laid out cooking pots, trays, and knives.
“Shabbat is supposed to be entered peacefully,” she said as she shot Hodel the black look. “Not in total exhaustion.” Tzeitel clanged the pots with an audible sense of purpose, punctuating her sentence.
“This is throwing me into total exhaustion,” Hodel muttered under her breath to the others as she threw Chava a look of her own. Chava couldn’t smile. She was too tense.
“Shprintze, Bielke,” instructed Tzeitel. “Please recite to me the thirty-nine categories of endeavor that the sages specified are not allowed on the Sabbath while you scrub these potatoes,” she said, placing them down.
The little ones took up their brushes and obediently began.
“Cooking and sewing of course,” said Bielke, the youngest, hesitantly. “Then carrying.” She paused, stumped.
“Burning and extinguishing—must these all be in a special order?” asked Shprintze apprehensively.
“Oh, burn first, extinguish second, no question, particularly if Chava is doing the cooking,” retorted Hodel.
“Hodel, please!” barked Tzeitel, and Hodel sulked away, iron pot on hip. “You are doing very well, girls. Continue.”
“Finishing, writing . . . Those are all that I can remember. . . .” Disappointing Tzeitel caused Shprintze such anxiety.
“My head is sore,” muttered Bielke.
Everyone’s head is sore, thought Hodel.
Chava resided at the far end of the kitchen, hopelessly peeling at carrots for stew. She was stewing in her own right—painfully aware that her eldest sister harbored her most humiliating secret. Though Chava herself might characterize her attitude toward table-setting, laundry-folding, and corner-dusting as free-sprited, others might descrbe it more plainly as disasterous. For all her good intentions, Chava truly was a hopeless homemaker. She could not, at any acceptable level, sew, fold, or dust, but she was was particularly calamitous in the kitchen, having once started a stove fire when attempting to dry a dishcloth and another time mistaking salt for yeast. And, above all, she was utterly unable to properly peel a vegetable. Tzeitel had spent a lifetime nurturing Chava, keeping this devastating fact from everyone else.
Whenever Tzeitel was placed in charge of Sabbath delegations by Golde, she would see to it that Chava was often given tasks she could handle without too much of a fuss. Scrub. Perhaps peel. Stirring had consequences. Even folding had the potential to be sloppy. Instruction was of no use—it never seemed to make a dent in her proclivity toward disaster.
So, while Shprintze could genuinely cook, and Bielke was a fastidious cleaner, and even Hodel possessed real potential if she simply applied herself, things were different with Chava, and Tzeitel knew it.
“How old is the Sabbath?” Tzeitel continued, one eye on the disquieted Chava in the corner.
“As old as the creation of the world!” Shprintze exclaimed.
“And why do we refrain from work on the Sabbath?”
“I—I am not certain,” said Bielke, “but I do like taking so long to eat. That is my favorite bit.”
“I like the eating bit too,” whispered Hodel, sneaking in a wink across the table toward the little one.
“Shprintze?” prodded Tzeitel.
“Because, on the seventh day, God rested from all the creation that He had done. So God commanded that on the seventh day, we were to rest as He did when He created the earth. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because . . . because that was the day He rested?”
“Exactly,” said Tzeitel. “But also to refrain from work, giving us time to enjoy our families, rest from the honesty of a week’s labor, as well as take time to reflect on our relationship with God.”
Tzeitel glanced over at Chava. Although she was tough on the others, Tzeitel never outwardly scolded Chava. In private she would take her aside and force her to cut what felt like thousands of vegetables (each with a thousand rules), to sew and resew seams, to scrub and re-scrub the floors. Tzeitel felt sorry for Chava and encouraged her to dig in.
“It will become easier once you accept the work. It can be joyful. But the more you continue to despise it, the less you will want to perfect it, and your spiral begins. Some things take practice. Not everything can come easily.”
Tzeitel was genuinely concerned for Chava’s future, for her welfare—not merely as a homemaker, wife, and mother, but as a functioning person. She pictured fingers sliced and bloody from rogue knives, stabbed with needles. In her mind, she could see Chava engulfed in flames due to yet another accidental kitchen fire. In discussing the Sabbath traditions, she was hoping to encourage a rise in Chava’s bookish passion for full understanding.
Tzeitel asked, “Do you know the Hebrew word used to describe work?”
“Melakha?”
“Very good, Shprintze! But the word means more than just labor. In fact, we must refrain from any creative activity because this is the day we honor when God rested from His creation.” She handed Hodel a pot of potatoes to peel. “And how does God feel about the Sabbath?”
“He . . . He likes it?” asked Bielke.
“Oh, He sure does,” answered Hodel, smirking.
From the corner, Chava sighed deeply. She had missed bathing before the busy Friday afternoon preparations because a batch of rugelach had gone all wrong. Forbidden to do any form of work after sunset on the Sabbath was God’s law, thus heating water to bathe in so close to dusk was asking for trouble. Cold water it was.
“A rude reminder you were not thinking of God,” Golde said as she hurried back into the kitchen. Shivering but clean, Chava began preparing herself for dinner.
She attempted to smooth out her fluffy mess of hair with her hands to no avail. There was something poignant about her hair in its natural state of misfortune—something that symbolized every other shortcoming thrust upon her by God in comparison to her sisters. The insufficiency of her hair in this moment hurt so greatly, for it carried within in it every other disappointment she had ever felt about herself. She returned to the kitchen frozen and brittle, only to find Tzeitel talking like a rabbi. Wonderful.
“The Sabbath is probably the most important of the moedim, or God-ordained appointed times,” Tzeitel continued, making her way over to Chava, who had picked up a peeler and begun to do a dismal job. She had to step in, patiently demonstrating a technique that would prevent the minuscule chunks of vegetable from flying everywhere but into the pot.
Chava kept her eyes downward, as though her head were splitting in half. She shook it abruptly and stabbed at the vegetables as though they were Tzeitel’s eyeballs. Tzeitel lifted her finger and tapped it sweetly upon Chava’s perfectly button-shaped nose, identical to Tzeitel’s own. This was a gesture that was theirs and no one else’s, and in its wake Hodel felt a pang of jealousy, for she knew Tzeitel adored and expressed her love for Chava in a way Hodel had never felt. But beyond that, Tzeitel and Chava possessed a closeness that required no language, no proof or articulation. Hodel drowned in the tidewaters of her covetousness—for Tzeitel’s regard, and for her challenged rank as Chava’s closest sister.
Tzeitel instructed Chava under her breath. “If you peel in long strips and not in little bits, it preserves more of the vegetable.” Chava attempted this, but her hands were unpracticed and her mood foul. Tzeitel watched—and watched again—in disbelief.
“Well, I suppose it is easier with carrots,” she said. Chava tried again. “That’s better,” Tzeitel said, though—quite clearly—it was not.
“You baby her,” Hodel said under her breath.
Tzeitel shot her a dark look in response.
“Well, you do!” Hodel insisted, and sulkily pounded her fists into a mound of dough.
“So creativity is why we cannot cook on Shabbat?” asked Bielke, always in the mood to discuss food more.
“Yes, nor can we light fires or prepare for the
upcoming week, which means that we cannot plan for tomorrow or the week ahead,” said Tzeitel.
“So what can we do?”
Chava’s voice cut, sharp and vexed, through the air from across the kitchen. “Nothing,” she said.
They all turned.
“Not nothing—we read; we pray; we walk,” said Shprintze. “And everything is so still and quiet. It is my favorite day of the week.”
“And eat! In such a nice, slow way!” piped up Bielke. “Plus meals on Shabbat are so much fancier than normal. And, oh, the sweets . . .” Her eyes glistened. “The sweets are the very best part. The mandel bread, the rugelach—”
“Unless of course it is Chava’s rugelach!” Smiling, Hodel danced over to her sister; she wrapped her arms around her waist and kissed her troubled little face. “Then there shall be no rugelach at all! A lazy person must do a task twice!”
That was it. Chava broke free of Hodel’s arms, flung her knife down onto the table, turned the bowl containing the potatoes on its side, and stormed into the bedroom. She’d had enough.
The room went very still. The only sounds came from the bubbling of broths and the wind rapping on the windows. The little ones squirmed. Tzeitel turned her head toward Hodel and gazed at her in a manner far sterner, far more saddened, far more heartbreaking than any look she had ever thrown at her before or since; she closed her eyes, exhaled deeply, and left the room shaking her head. Hodel was horrified—what had she done?
“Chavaleh?” Tzeitel said in a hush as she entered the bedroom. Setting herself down gently beside her sister, she put a hand on Chava’s trembling back.
“Tzeitel, please. Go away.”
“Chavaleh . . .” She began gently untangling the ends of Chava’s knotted hair.
“Go away. I am so weary of your bossiness and your pity!”
“I do not pity you, Chava,” she said. “Not in the least.”
“Fine. Then please just leave me alone—and tell wretched Hodel to stay away. I want to be by myself.”
After Anatevka Page 6