We could use another horse. Our one remaining horse has become sick and weak and is barely able to till the soil. These are the things I am dreaming of before I see them coming.
The soldiers of the Red Army.
They come on horseback, and the horses are big and healthy. I know the soldiers are not from our village. Their horses are war-starved and skinny. These are soldiers from another village, another city—maybe Kiev.
This cannot be good news they bring. This might be another edict, an eviction, or an arrest—or worse—if Oizer’s secret dealings have been uncovered.
We motion to one another as they approach over the hill marking the new border of our property and gather as they come closer.
Berl steps in front of Idel, taking a protective stance on his missing-toed feet. Soldiers pass our family home. There are at least twenty of them. I see several horses turn toward our home, where Ruchel and Sura work. I start toward them, my own protective instincts already powered on.
Berl stops me. “Stay. It’s safer if we all remain together.”
“But mayn shvesters,” I begin.
“Stay now,” is all Berl can cough out.
I glance at him. He wears an expression I’ve never seen before. A thin grimace of fear.
I watch my family, afraid to watch the approach of the soldiers. Reizel stands with an arm around Idel, who still holds his potato breasts.
“They will shoot you if you interfere,” Berl says.
I am frozen, my entire body as cold as the hands I’ve been using to dig into the earth for the icy mounds in the basket at my feet. I stand, rooted.
Oizer stands next to me. His arm brushes my own. I feel his entire body trembling.
I glare at him and he flicks his eyes to mine and back at the approaching soldiers. I am thinking that if they came on his account he is responsible not only for his own terrible fate but for that of our family as well. My anger at him in this moment helps me feel less fearful.
“This is your fault, Oizer.”
“There is no fault, only sacrifice,” Berl spits.
“Time for Idel’s angel,” Reizel whispers.
She says it with a tight, dry tone and it gives the moment a strange levity. I can feel us take a breath.
Breathing. We breathe in this moment.
Idel must have taken Reizel’s words as a cue for play although I know he must also be afraid. The soldiers, with their guns and swords and horses, are all strong, powerful, and frightening. All of it, meant to be terrifying. But before he can be stopped, Idel starts dancing with his potato breasts again, in the direction of the advancing soldiers, within a few yards of us now. He skips around Berl and runs forward to entertain them with his nonsense.
“Idel,” Reizel and Berl shout.
Then the terrible confusion begins.
Startled by the small boy and the shouting, two of the horses rear back, throwing the soldiers off balance. One soldier falls to the ground, creating chaos in their formation.
Another soldier, the captain, jumps off his horse and moves to intercept Idel’s approach on foot. He catches Idel by the collar of his coat and holds him roughly there.
Behind him, the soldier who has fallen lies still on the ground.
My family moves forward to collect Idel from the captain, who snarls at him. Idel, quite frightened, cowers in his grip.
Berl reaches them first. He speaks his excellent Russian, explaining that Idel is playing, that he hasn’t meant to upset the horses or the soldiers. As he speaks, the two of them, Berl and the captain, keep craning to look at the soldier on the ground.
Berl and the captain, who is still dragging Idel by the collar, move toward the soldier. Reizel, Oizer, and I follow them to where the man, bleeding profusely from the head, lies motionless, his eyes glazed and unfocused.
I have never seen so much blood. The right side of his head is open like a black tomato, and what must be his brains spill out and cover the side of his face. Blood pools out around his head and stains the muddy earth of the potato ditch a deep purple-red.
He is dead.
He is dead.
What happens then happens quickly, before anyone has a chance to drag their eyes away from the staring corpse.
One shot drawn from the captain’s gun.
One shot.
Point-blank, I think it’s called, when the gun is as close as it is to Idel’s poor little head.
Idel shot in the head.
Then not even a head. The force of the bullet at this range, the space of about a foot, blows half of Idel’s head off.
Idel’s body falling.
Berl, who is standing behind him, falls. Berl, we realize, has taken the same bullet. It lodges somewhere in his heart, stopping it in that second. Berl and Idel fall together in a bloody, smoky mess to the mud.
Berl wears the same glazed, wide-open, horrified stare as the soldier with the spilled brains, his chest open and bloody with the wound.
Idel’s blood everywhere.
I cannot not bring myself to look at what is left of his face.
Reizel is screaming.
Screaming.
The captain is saying something.
I can see his lips moving. I stare into his face. The captain has a face like a broken brick. Although I understand Russian, I cannot understand these words.
The sound seems far away.
Something. Something about the farm being taken for the army; our family, the entire village, being resettled in a Jewish district in the south.
The words—like ice picks hacking my frozen thoughts apart.
You must gather your things at once and join your neighbors who are also going.
Reizel still screams.
I try to collect my wits. I cannot find where my wits are, but somehow, somehow my legs move.
I am pulling Reizel away from something horrible.
From the horrible spot in the mud.
Oizer, still standing there. Still staring.
I hear the voice of my father clearly, as though he speaks the words again, standing next to me there in the orchard.
“Iberkumen,” he says.
Survive.
I shout, but the voice which comes out is not my own. I order Oizer to help me pull Reizel away, to help me take her back home, where we need to gather as many of our things as we can carry. We grab her. I order Reizel to stop screaming. She tears her way out of our grip to run back to the spot where Idel and Berl lay. We try to take her again, but the soldiers pull us apart and fling her into the arms of two soldiers who threaten her to stop screaming with their guns and swords and turn her away to march toward home. Reizel, finally frightened into silence, lets herself be dragged by the soldiers.
As we approach, soldiers come out of our home. Four, five? I can’t remember now how many I saw coming out.
More screaming from inside.
Ruchel and Sura.
Inside—at least ten soldiers. A few on the main floor where our small kitchen and main room are. I can hear their boots in the bedroom upstairs, above us. They shout and laugh over my sisters’ screams.
Ruchel and Sura upstairs with the soldiers.
The first punch of rage begins to drive the shock from my body. Every cell of my body strains to grab one of the swords hanging on a soldier standing nearby.
I want to kill every soldier. I picture them like small shrubs. I will chop them down to twigs.
The captain, who followed us on his horse, enters. His brick face barks an order, bringing the soldiers who have been upstairs flying down like locusts. They are half-clothed, rapidly dressing themselves, and sheepish. The captain barks at the men to go outside and motions at me.
“Go to your sisters and tell them to gather their things. You have five minutes.”
Five minutes. This is the time they give us.
My rage carries me into the completion of this impossible task.
We heard stories later, after our month-long journey to t
he settlement camps in Southern Ukraine, of families ordered to leave with no possessions, or to give their belongings to these soldiers in exchange for their lives.
I would have given my life to erase the pain that my sisters and the rest of my family endured on this day and in the days that followed.
I don’t remember how we managed to collect our things, preparing for what we thought might be an overnight hike to a nearby village or city. We had seen many immigrant camps on our way into the Kiev market. We remarked to each other how poor, how bedraggled, the people who lived in those camps appeared. We had no idea how much worse things could become. We would learn.
Ruchel and Sura. They never recovered from their attack.
Ruchel had already been frail and thin from the typhus. Sura, her twin, had been stronger, but now they are tiny mirrors. They lost light on that day. They became the ghosts of my sisters.
None of us talked about it. None of us dared ask any questions. It seemed too terrible, maybe as terrible as what happened to Idel and Berl. Maybe more terrible. They’d been killed by the attack as surely as if they’d been shot. This is how things are in those days. For women—girls, really, they are fifteen—to be raped felt the same as death.
Their ghosts died as well. The ghosts of my sisters left the world a few weeks later. They starved to death. Both of them. Both deciding they would refuse to eat the meager rations the soldiers provided us on our journey to the resettlement area. We begged the girls to eat the grains offered. Reizel, Oizer, and I begged. Nothing worked. They’d made their decision. Each day the walking contributed to the eventual loss of all energy. Their weak bodies gave out.
We woke one morning and found them clasped, arms around one another, under their coats, which we used as blankets on the cold ground. They had gone together in the same way they had been born.
Reizel led us in the prayers. We had no Shomer, no Chevrah Kaddisha, and no Tahara.
They gave us five minutes to say the prayers. Five minutes more than I needed. More than I wanted. Five minutes longer than I could stand to acknowledge the pain of this loss without losing what remained of my mind.
The soldiers on their horses, waiting, ordered us to leave their bodies shrouded in their coats, and without a burial, by the side of the road. They told us they would assign soldiers to bury my sisters.
I did not believe them. I no longer believed anything.
Life began its bad dream. There is no color. Shapes are a deep, flat gray, shadow. Sounds are muted or clanging in distorted decibels. At first, everything hurt my skin. Then I no longer felt my body.
I could not tell you what we ate, how long we marched each day, what people we met, what the weather is like—nothing. None of these things can be remembered. It is as though I am sleepwalking.
To continue to live in a world where people behaved like these soldiers seemed impossible to me. I had great shame, guilt, and anger at myself for not being able to prevent the terrible murders of Idel and Berl. The deaths of my sisters had been as much my fault as the soldiers’. I had failed to do the one thing Foter had charged me with: protect my brothers and sisters.
After her breakdown upon Idel and Berl’s murders, Reizel grew much stronger than Oizer and me. She took us by the hands as we left our sisters there. She led us away from that place. She managed to follow Foter’s edict to survive and taught us how to do the same.
Reizel became the reason I didn’t join my ghost sisters in their starved exit from this life. In her strongest spirit, she led us through that terrible time and eventually to a place where we found peace.
Twelve
Jules, 10years | September 17th, 1971
SEAGLASS
MY BEST FRIEND Leigh and I stroll to the school bus, after school. I half-listen to her going on about her newest crush while I focus on the magnificence of the tree leaf colors.
Withensea is filled with trees, and trees, in a small New England town, are serious business. The people of Withensea passed one of the New World’s earliest environmental laws when they voted against cutting down any more small trees on the island. (The island timber was being used to build homes in Boston.) The result of all the tree hoopla is that Withensea is a green paradise. Maple, balsam, oak, and white pine grow everywhere. They stand around homes and businesses, lining every roadside that doesn’t border the sea with its ferocious winter winds.
The fall beauty is particularly spectacular. All this week the colors have been coming, and the golden yellows, burnt oranges, and scarlet reds sparkle out against the old faded lime green leaves like they’ve been colored on. When the sun begins to set, its reflections light the leaves as if they have tiny light bulbs inside them. I drink in the intensity of the colors and remind myself to memorize its reality and its essence. I’m saving it all for when I’m older—for when I leave Withensea.
Beauty. If only I possessed a sliver of the gorgeousness. Wendy says although I’m not pretty, I’m not unattractive.
I have long, straight brown hair and dark, cucumber-green eyes with pale skin and freckles. When I’m scared the color of my skin gives me away more than my eyes, because my freckles stand out like tiny brown pebbles on white sand. I don’t match the weight or height for my age in those standards charts—I’m in fifth grade and barely break four feet, plus I’m too thin. I get teased all the time as the smallest girl in my class.
My best friend, my one friend, is Leigh Westerfield.
One day after school, I had a fistfight with one of the girls in my class. It was one of those weather days where the rain comes in twenty-second pelts and then quits. I’d been having almost daily fistfights since school began, and I had learned to draw blood as quickly as possible. Best way to end it.
The girl grabbed my hair and swung her fist toward my head, but I caught a lucky break when she lost her footing. Her fingernail caught the edge of my ear as I pulled away, giving me a perfect shot at her face. She got a bloody nose, and I got a ripped earlobe. She called off the fight.
Leigh hung out as the small crowd of kids moved away after the fight ended. She’d moved into my neighborhood the week before school started that fall, but I hadn’t talked to her until then. All I knew was that she was one of the few girls in my class that was already wearing a bra. This is something I hope never becomes a necessity for me, despite the way my brothers tease me about my lack of breasts.
I knelt on the ground, searching for the tiger’s eye earring the girl ripped out of my ear. Leigh offered to help and began scrambling around with me in a muddy puddle.
She wore the coolest purple jeans I’d ever seen.
“You’re destroying those.” I jutted my chin at her jeans and spoke in an angry tone.
I expected her to take off.
“You just beat up the toughest girl in our class. I thought you were way too small to take her.”
I ignored her.
“You won’t have to fight anyone else again now you’ve shown you can beat her up.”
“You think?” I asked.
“Absolutely. I wouldn’t mess with you.”
I thought she might be making fun of me, but a goofy smile spread over my face. I couldn’t keep it in.
Leigh smiled back, offering the kerchief she’d been using to tie back her wavy, strawberry-blonde hair.
“Your ear is bleeding. Wipe it off unless you’re trying to look really tough.”
I never found the earring, but that was it. We were best friends. And she nailed it: no one ever bothered me again. Leigh’s smart about people. I’m happy around her in a way I’ve never been before. I’m still like an alien, but with Leigh beside me it’s okay, even wonderful, to be different.
After the bus drops us off, we stop at her neighborhood playground for hours, swinging on the swings and talking. We wait until the sun begins to drop behind the big oak trees that tower over the playground before starting the walk back.
“Watch out. He’s got a water gun and a big crush,” Leigh warns me
about the boy riding his bike toward us.
“On you?” I ask.
“No, not on me. On you!”
“He does not. He hates me. He punches me every time he walks by me in the hall.”
“Exactly! When he develops a vocabulary, he’ll ask you out.”
I laugh. “You’re loony. He loathes me.” I pronounce “loathe” in a way that rhymes with “cough.”
I have gotten into the habit of sprinkling words I’ve read—but have never heard spoken—into my speech. The result is something Leigh labels the Jules Finn “Say-It-Like-It-Looks Dictionary.”
Leigh peers at me oddly. “Huh?”
“I think he hates me cuz I fought him in the third grade and threw him over the cliff in front of my brother and all his friends.” Leigh laughs.
The boy, Jeff, rides by us, circles, and squirts me until I’m soaked and screaming. Leigh steps over to his bike and wrestles the water gun out of his hand while he tries to keep his balance on the bike. She grabs it, and he peddles away, cursing, after she turns it on him.
“Thou lump of foul deformity!” I shout after him.
“What did I tell you? He wants your attention,” She squirts the water gun into her mouth.
“Well, that was fun, now I’m totally in love,” I say. “How come only the weirdos like me?”
“Anyway, what I was gonna tell you … Andre asked me to the all-school dance at the high school tonight!”
“No way. Are you gonna go?” I ask.
Neither of us has been to a school dance before.
“Duh! What do you think? And you’re coming! We can go together and meet him there.”
“No, it’d be way too freaky. You go.”
A plane coming out from Boston Logan flies overhead, nearly drowning out our conversation.
“No, come on, it’ll be fun,” Leigh shouts over the noise. “I stole cigarettes from my sister, and we can bum more at the dance.”
The Belief in Angels Page 11