by Anna Solomon
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Look
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
Marriage
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
Winter
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
Spring
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any contol over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2011 Anna Solomon
All rights reserved.
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First Riverhead trade paperback edition: September 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Solomon, Anna.
The little bride / Anna Solomon.
p. cm.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54423-5
1. Jewish girls–Fiction. 2. Mail order brides–Fiction. 3. Jews—South Dakota–Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.O4329L57 2011
813’.6–dc22
2010054194
http://us.penguingroup.com
For my parents
V’ka’asher ovadeti ovadeti.
And if I perish, I perish.
or . . .
Since we are lost already,
we might just as well defend ourselves.
Look
ONE
ODESSA, 188-
THE physical inspection was first. Eyes. Nose. On her chin, a thumb opened her jaw. The woman’s hands weren’t soft but they were dry, at least, like salted fish. Minna closed her eyes, then worried she looked afraid and opened them. The fingers tugged at her earlobes. They prowled at her nape.
All this, she decided, was normal enough. She had been to doctors, twice, men who accepted milk for their services. The first time, she was six, and still living with her father—the milk came from his goat—and she was still a boy then, in her mind, and did not mind undressing, or standing in the cold, and was not ashamed of her unwitting body: the foot kicking out, the throat gagging. Then she was thirteen, and already in Odessa, and she had seen her breasts in Galina’s dressing-room mirror, sideways and from the front, and she carried the milk—stolen from the dairy boy’s cart—with disgrace, made worse by the reason she went: a smell of beer, a heat, a terrible itching. She was sure something in her own touching had damaged her inside, and as she walked she took a long looping detour: out Suvorovskaya, past the hospitals, through the cemeteries. She decided to say a man had done it to her, whatever “it” was—to have hurt herself seemed worse than to have been hurt by someone else. But as it turned out, the doctor asked nothing. He didn’t even make her lie on his table. He looked at her tongue, that was all. Then he gave her back the milk, telling her to let it sour into yogurt and smear it on herself at night.
But now the woman ordered Minna to take everything off, and when Minna had stripped down to her underclothes, she ordered her to take these off, too. Minna felt dizzy. The room was unheated, in a basement, in a municipal building, after hours. The only color came from orange patches of rust on the walls.
The door opened. A man entered the room, followed by another woman, followed by a tall metal contraption she rolled behind her. She held a flame to it; gas flared; white light flooded the room. Minna’s skin went taut. The lamp was the sort they brought to the mines after an accident, the sort they’d used when they pulled her father out. Its cold glare missed nothing. The stone floor was crumbling.
“Off,” the woman said again.
The man waited, a pipe in his mouth. His beard was red and tattered, as if it housed moths. Maybe he was a real doctor. Maybe he wasn’t. Minna chose to concentrate on his thin shoulders under his thin shirt, on how he kept his eyes on his fingernails, which he appeared to be cleaning with his thumbnails. He could almost look—if she looked right—apologetic.
She unknotted her bodice and folded it in half. She folded it again, then again, then set it on top of her other clothing, on the floor. Order, she thought, willing her arms not to shake. Show them order. A wife is meant to create order.
“Get on with it,” said the woman. “Drawers.”
Minna concentrated on her feet. Her toes were purple; her soles stung. She would have to sneak out to Galina’s vodka late tonight and siphon off spoonfuls for the cuts. She wouldn’t dare pump any water. The pump made a noise like a cat in heat.
“Might as well know. Hard of hearing’s a mark against you.”
The woman’s breath was close, and sharp, like seawater crossed with wine. Minna fended off her desire to pull away. She would never, she told herself, have to smell this smell again. She would live across oceans, she would have a husband, she would have her own house. Her own sink and bath, made of zinc or copper—even stone would do—in which she could wash whatever and whenever she pleased.
She slipped her drawers off her hips. She planned to catch them but her body stayed stiff: the idea of bending over now was unbearable. The man’s pipe nodded as the white cloth fell to her ankles and now her eyes closed, she couldn’t stop them; between her legs, the hairs stood. The lamp gave no heat. She concentrated on the worms of light across her eyelids, on seeing sunlight, sky. In the house, above the zinc or copper sink, would be a window, which she would dress with a lace curtain. The days would sift through the lace as a silent, dustless light.
Her eyes startled open when the fish hands
cupped her breasts and lifted. At her stomach she felt a tickle: the man’s beard. He drew so close he might have been sniffing her.
“You’re sixteen?” he asked her navel.
Minna nodded.
“Your event comes every month, yes?”
She nodded again. Though sometimes she bled for a whole month straight, and sometimes not once in a year.
The tickle withdrew. “Arms,” said the man as he sucked on his pipe, and as the smoke from his exhalation swam up Minna’s front, smelling of her father, she couldn’t help but breathe it in. The woman told her, “Lift,” and started slipping her fingers around in Minna’s underarms, pressing, kneading, turning sweat to ice. At last they stopped. Slipped away. The woman nodded.
“Unremarkable,” said the man.
The woman who’d brought in the lamp scratched something in a large book.
“Fat,” declared the doctor, and the fish woman’s hands began to squeeze at Minna’s waist. The doctor circled her, observing. He was thin in the way of cellar insects, as if made to slip through cracks. Minna tried to blur her eyes. She focused instead on the pattern emerging: he questioned her, yes, but he did not command her, and he did not touch. There was a woman to perform these functions, and another to take notes. It was all part of a procedure, Minna reminded herself, a system. Rosenfeld’s Bridal Service. An underground operation, yes—but the doctor, the women, they were all Jewish. Her jaw clenched as the hands grabbed her hips, but she did not squirm. It was a service, a system, run by Jews for Jews. There was nothing personal here. Nothing to squirm from. Every bride was given her Look. Usually by the groom’s family, admittedly—but so many families had already left. Perhaps it was better this way. She’d never have to see these people again. There was a method; there were rules; there was a prize.
“Recommend more nutrition en route,” said the man, and disappeared behind her. “Legs.”
The hands tugged her drawers from around her feet. Minna started to shiver. She tried to control it, tried to breathe through her teeth so they did not rattle, to calm her limbs into stillness—but when the fingers poked the soft spot at the back of her knee, her foot swung back. Her heel struck something soft. The doctor swore.
“I’m sorry!” she cried. “I didn’t mean . . .” But her voice had come out sounding like a child’s, and she did not turn to face him. She feared seeming too aggressive, or skittish, or ingratiating.
“Do you work on your knees?”
Minna didn’t reply. Did they want her to have worked on her knees? Did they want humility? Or did too much kneeling cause injury? She had knelt too much, she knew this with certainty.
“Must he repeat the question?” asked the woman.
But perhaps the doctor had already seen some sign of it. Perhaps she was marked, and he was only testing her.
“Sometimes,” Minna said.
“Bring the lamp closer.”
The lamp was brought closer.
“Have her bend over.”
The hands nudged Minna’s shoulders forward. And now the tears that had been waiting ran into her mouth. She pushed back with her shoulder blades, but the hands were firm—then she was folded, upside down, her nostrils stinging. The hands pulled apart her buttocks. Except for the man’s teeth on his pipe, there was silence.
Minna had not been able to wash herself for days. She’d eaten almost nothing but the beets Galina had asked her to buy for a borscht before deciding she didn’t want it; this morning she’d shat water bright as Oriental silk. Her tears poured up and out her nose, then down into her hair.
“Unremarkable,” said the man. “Lay her down.”
ON the floor, at least, she no longer had to hold herself up. Through her tears she saw water stains on the ceiling, so old their centers were clean again. She bit her tongue as the hands spread her knees, as her own hands slid under her back—an automatic, pitiful bid for shelter.
“Speculum,” said the man.
Cold inside. Minna kept her mouth closed, her nose closed. Cold metal, cold air. Everything that could be closed, closed, her chest pounding like soldiers’ drums, as if—her mind pounding: what they must think.
When the metal withdrew, Minna moved to sit up, but the hands pressed on her feet, stay, then there was a prodding—Minna brought her head back down, hard, and tried to focus on the pain. Yet she couldn’t block out—was that a stick? another piece of metal? It was searching for the place that always eluded Minna, the place she tried never to think of because when she did it was gone, and when she found it again, it didn’t seem to recognize her. She approached on tiptoe—or she circumvented, pretending not to care. She’d spent years playing those games, trying mostly not even to try, and now this object was going straight for the place, as if it was—but it was—it was found. The object tapped, twice. Minna clenched her teeth. The object stroked, three times. In her right leg, a muscle twitched.
“Unremarkable,” said the doctor, and the hands closed Minna’s legs.
THE room was dim again. Minna was dressed, and alone. She heard the lamp clatter as it was wheeled into another room, then heard boots on the stairs. Another girl’s, she could tell, and felt a mean relief. Someone else would be humiliated now. Someone else was stupid or desperate or brave enough—and which was it?—to have come here.
The steps vanished, a door closed. When Minna’s door opened again, a different man walked in, short and dark, in a tattered coat that looked like it had once been expensive. It was too heavy a coat for late July, which it was. Or which it had been when Minna walked here; it seemed possible now, down in the basement, that summer was already gone. The man didn’t take off his coat, or look at Minna, but motioned for her to sit on the room’s one furnishing, a desk so chewed with knife marks it was nearly blank again. When Minna sat, she felt the ridges of old letters through her skirt: names of the bureaucrats, she guessed, who spent their days here, whistling and sighing, wading through files labeled with other people’s names. They wouldn’t try to understand the people, Minna thought, and she didn’t particularly blame them. There was rarely any advantage, as far as she could see, to understanding another person. She’d been sent to serve Galina when she was eleven, after her father died, but in the five years she’d spent scrubbing Galina’s underclothes, holding her head while she vomited, bringing her soup when she was heartbroken, she’d been careful never to ask questions, or listen too well.
“Psychology,” said the man, and opened a large black bag.
THERE were three tests.
One: a tangle of yarn, to be unknotted. Minna had heard of this at least, a puzzle of patience for the bride-to-be, and taking the yarn into her hands, she was comforted by the notion that anything in this room corresponded with the world outside it. Maybe, she thought, her mother had to do it at her own Look, in front of her father’s sisters, all five of them with their black hair and long, black nostrils. When Minna’s aunts spoke, you might have believed God Himself was upon you. If you believed in God. Yet her mother must have made herself undaunted. She was a rug maker; she knew knots. And unlike Minna, she knew who she was marrying. She knew how the wedding would be, knew the wet wood scent of the old shul, the sweet breads she would eat, the face of the fiddler who would play at her dance. The night she married, she must have believed that she would stay married. Or perhaps she tricked herself into believing this, as she must have tricked the aunts at her Look. She must have fooled them into thinking she was patient, and would stay. She must have unknotted the knot.
The yarn was coarse and thin, all the same dark gray—dyed, Minna suspected, to make it harder to see its edges. She wanted the mining lamp back. Her fingers were stiff, and stumbled. It took five minutes just to find one end and take it between her teeth, then she thought better of it—teeth were bone, mannish, the man was watching—and used her lips instead. She fumbled the yarn apart from itself. When her eyes began to pulse, she closed them and felt, and when they stopped pulsing, she opened them and looked.<
br />
After an hour, the yarn had become a dream of yarn, a gray trail passing through her fingers, which had started to blister. It was enough yarn, she thought, to knit a muff. Or maybe—more practically—a shawl. The yarn drifted across her skin like a long, supple knife. She decided upon the muff. She could see herself walking with it, or rather behind it, her bearing stately and slow, the muff drawing her along in an effortless glide. For every foot of yarn she rescued, another inch of muff became itself, and the fantasy grew closer: a winter afternoon in America, floating along a city street, her ever-expanding muff parting the crowd like an enormous jewel, leaving the people’s mouths agape. They’d never seen anything like it. And so she reached the other end.
Two: two glasses of water, loud with chunks of ice. Minna put her fingers in, like the man told her. At first they were soothed, after the yarn. Then they ached. The numbness, when it came, was preferable. One glass, she thought, was enough to wet her throat for a week. The other was enough to wash her body. She saw dirt lifting from skin. Ash from stone. Galina’s tea leaves from wherever she’d thrown them.
Was this a test of endurance?
Her fingers, when he told her to lift them out, were limp as fish fat, and as white blue and dripping.
THREE: a bird, small, on a plate. Stunned by something, woozy on its feet, its wings flitting then forgetting.
A rock. A knife. A fork. A nail.