by Anna Solomon
THAT night he stared at her—as if daring her to imagine that she’d seen him at the creek. He complained that the bread was dry, then suggested that she try a different ratio of water to flour. “And add a little yogurt,” he said.
Minna was slow to respond; she felt naked all over again. “I’ve never heard of that,” she said.
“It’s what our mother did,” Jacob said. He looked at Minna, then at Samuel. “It’s true,” he said.
“That’s not the point,” Samuel said. “The point is it’s better that way.”
“Boys.” Max held up his slice of bread. “Let your mother be.”
Then, as if realizing the possible confusion, he said, “The girl’s bread is fine as far as I’m concerned.”
There was color in Samuel’s cheeks. It was as if he’d briefly forgotten Max, as if in his forgetting he’d experienced a great relief for which he was now embarrassed. After dinner, he appeared to pray more fervently. And after prayers, and all the next day, he was kinder to his father.
SIXTEEN
THE heat broke as quickly as it had struck. A wind in the night, the door clapping on its hinges, a pungent release as if from a dream. Minna woke to a tingling in her skin and bolted upright. The air was cool. She was alone. The kettle was warm, the bread she baked yesterday gone. She touched the cutting board, groggily feeling for crumbs. They were dry; it was late.
In the closest corner of the closest field, she found Max, up to his shins in a hole, digging with a vigor strange to him. When Minna toed her boots into his vision, he swung the shovel a few more times, then looked up. His face was red, his usual lack of humor marred by a twitch in his lips, an almost-grin she might have thought flirtatious if she thought him capable of flirtation. When she asked what he was doing, he glanced around conspiratorially, then said, “I’m building you a mikvah.”
Minna laughed. She felt light-headed, as though overnight they’d slid across the earth into a new atmosphere. The idea of a bath in this place was divine, and bizarre.
“You’ll bleed soon enough,” Max said. “You’ll have to bathe.”
His forthrightness shocked her. At first she thought he was talking about their wedding night. Then she understood. She’d forgotten, somehow, that he would know everything she knew with regard to her menstrual “events”: that they did not in fact come every month, as she’d told the doctor. I should have pretended, she thought. For a few days, I should have made him stay away, forged pain of the feminine sort. In Beltsy, a man could divorce a wife if she didn’t give him a child within ten years. There was no reason to think Max wouldn’t do the same, or worse. Out here, ten years would be an eternity. Here a man might wait only one. And then where would she be?
That’s not polite, Minna wanted to say. But she also wanted the bath. But not for the reasons he wanted her to want one. She wanted warm water, privacy. The moment called for delicacy, she thought—a protest of the sort that leads to submission. “I don’t need a mikvah,” she said.
“But in Odessa, you went each week.”
Yes, she’d answered at the municipal building. Yes to this, no to that.
Max’s face was too trusting.
“Sometimes,” she said.
“That’s not your fault, Minna. Odessa is a filthy place.”
Minna smiled. “Odd then,” she said, “that you would search for a wife there.”
Max dug the tip of his shovel into his boot. Minna wondered if Jacob had been wrong about his father’s reasons for ordering her through Rosenfeld’s, if it wasn’t because Max had been too humiliated to tell the family and friends he’d left about Lina’s running away, but for the same reason that he prayed, and made the rest of them pray—because he didn’t trust people. A service, a method, a book, a God—these he trusted. She wondered if Max sensed the weakness in people—in her—more than he let on.
“Of course you’re right,” she said, smiling more brightly. “A filthy place. But a mikvah, it just seems—a bit—indulgent. To build a mikvah in this, well . . .”—she kept smiling—“in this place. Which is filthy, some might say, in its own ways.”
“That’s what the boys said. In so many words. That’s why I’m digging it while they’re gone.”
Minna looked around, for the first time that day. She was filled with a sense of error. “Gone?”
“With Leo. There’s work on a farm about three days north.”
“You didn’t think that I should know?”
“I didn’t like the idea.”
“You thought I might not notice?”
Max stared. He looked stunned—as if he hadn’t noticed a particular feature on her face before. “It was decided weeks ago,” he said.
Minna crossed her arms. She wished there were someone to guide her. Or some thing at least: a manual for new wives, a primer—though she doubted that such a book would even apply to her situation. What would it say of the new wife whose stepson had seen her unclothed? And not only once. Twice more Samuel had wandered over to the creek while she’d been bathing. Twice more she had caught him, looking. She’d closed her eyes quickly, pretending not to have seen, shifted her position slightly so as to look less flat, then lain there, imagining his face: curious, but also troubled; handsome, yet full of guilt. She lay perfectly still, heart thudding, until she heard his boots retreat. Then he came a third time, and barely stopped to look before he jumped down onto the creek bed. Minna startled, and sat up. “I told you,” he said, through gritted teeth. He stood above her, fists clenched at his sides, his whole body taut as wire. Minna thought he might kick her. She clamped her legs together. “I told you,” he said again, “not . . .” He stopped. He was staring at her breasts. On his face was a look of pain. “Not to let me . . .” Minna lifted a hand to cover herself, but her other arm was propping her up, and in a moment of witting incapacitation, she only managed to hide one breast. She wondered if the pain on his face was displeasure. She knew, even as she wondered this, that it wasn’t. She had combed her hair, anticipating him. She watched him carefully. “You needn’t keep coming,” she said. Samuel raised his eyes from her chest. “You needn’t keep being here,” he said. “Where else am I meant to wash?” “You’re not washing, you’re . . .” He looked away. A trickle of water ran down Minna’s back; she shivered. “What is it you think I am doing?” she asked, but Samuel was shaking his head. “That’s not the point,” he said. “Isn’t it?” Minna was aware of her body as though it were new; even her knees, which she’d never thought of as anything more exciting than knees: Samuel was staring at them. Minna kept expecting herself to hide her nakedness, to reach for her dress and tell him to leave, to remind him what he was to her, and she to him. Yet she could find her shame nowhere. She picked up a pebble and threw it at his feet. “You’re the one who told me to come down here,” she said. “If you’ll recall.” Samuel chuckled strangely. His gaze traveled quickly up her legs to her hips, her stomach, breasts, armpits, throat. Then he bent, picked up a slightly larger pebble, looked her in the eye, and aimed it for her stomach. It stung; she winced; when she opened her eyes, he was scrambling up the bank. And Minna, feeling hot again, had lain back down.
What would her father say?
And Max, who was still waiting for her to respond? Who had touched, but never seen her naked?
She uncrossed her arms, crossed them again. She remembered well, when Ruth and Leo first came, the closed-door conference, the shaking of hands. That was many weeks ago now—it felt like months. She considered her choices. To berate. To nag. To beg. To forgive. None appealed. She was thinking of Samuel, how he must have known all that time that he’d be leaving, and when. And Jacob, who’d argued so stridently that she stay—hadn’t he thought to warn her that he was going? Wouldn’t he think, perhaps, to invite her along?
“How long will they be gone?” she asked Max.
“Two weeks. Maybe four. I don’t know. It was Leo’s idea.” Max’s voice cracked. He looked as surprised by his own ignorance
as if a stranger were talking. He looked mortified. “I don’t know how it works,” he said, and dropped his shovel to the ground, and suddenly Minna didn’t care what he had to say. They would be alone for weeks, perhaps longer. She couldn’t bear him hating himself, and the work it would take. Besides, if she concentrated on it, she could feel a reprieve in the boys’ departure. Samuel’s pebble had left a mark to the right of her navel the size of a penny.
She crossed her arms more tightly. “So how big will this hole be?”
“It’s not a hole, it’s a—” Max covered his eyes. “Do you really think this place so awful?”
Minna sighed. She squatted down so that she was looking up at him—so that he, when he uncovered his eyes, could look down on her. “Of course not,” she said. Better to love him. “No,” she said. “It was a silly thing to say. Forgive me. But a bath, Motke. It would be a great help.”
THE boys’ absence gave Max a new courage. At night, when he climbed on top of her, he muttered words near her ear. “Angel,” he said, touching the place above her lip where her skin made a little valley. “You have been touched by an angel.” Or, just before he entered her: “You are so good.” Which seemed backward to Minna—“good” for letting him in? “good” for appearing in his bed again?—until one night as he finished she heard him whisper, as if in prayer, “My duty,” and she understood that he meant, you will be good . . . when you give me a child. This, she realized, was what Max wanted more than anything. It was why he asked after her pleasure. It was why he was building her a mikvah. As if, once there was a mikvah, Minna would bleed, and then be fertile. As if all she’d been waiting for was a place to wash. You will be so good.
She expected to feel angry. That he’d been scrutinizing her bodily functions was enough, she thought, to make her angry. Yet she couldn’t help feeling satisfied that he’d kept track—just as she’d begun to feel a certain satisfaction in the pains he took to touch her the exact same way every night, in the exact same order. He attended her. She was attended. “Angel,” he declared in his brave not-whisper, pressing her lip a bit too hard, so that it dug into her teeth—so that in her stomach she felt a near heat, a shimmering instant of desire.
Then desire was gone. Max would make a funny sound, and stray from his purpose, and leave her oddly numb. His was not the courage, after all, of a courageous man. It was ambivalent and raw—more the courage, perhaps, of any guardian (of children, of sheep, of jewels) whose charges had suddenly disappeared and set him free. Every shovelful of earth Max removed from the mikvah hole was a rock he had not cleared, a necessary task he had not completed, an act of disobedience against his sons—in particular Samuel. This, she thought, was what made him nearly giddy as he dug; this he must have imagined to be his own minor rebellion. He would not think of his greater treachery, which was growing increasingly apparent to her: his need for a new child so that he might diminish his old ones, and—more to the point—the woman who’d borne them. For even his duty to God was not as strong as his need to forget Lina. He’d barely spoken of her. He kept no remnant, no souvenir. In Minna’s estimation, his attempt to obliterate and replace her was so precisely the opposite of her father’s hoarding that it had to come from the same affliction, a grief so shameful it could not be indulged. So the men made the women dead. If their tactics differed—worship, nullification—their end goal was the same: to be left for death, at least, was more bearable.
Minna knew—she remembered—how to be with such a man. How to soothe and please him in his mourning. The key was discerning the shapes of the holes the women (or infant boy) left behind, then occupying them. That Minna hadn’t known Lina didn’t matter. She was not required to invent new habits or personalities—only to fill the void with a new body body. Which had little to do with Minna herself: she had to stay, was all, or—even simpler—not to leave, and to convince him, with every movement, that she never would. She poured Max’s coffee as she’d poured her father’s tea, a long lingering stream, and like her father, Max never asked her to hurry up. He had a habit, while waiting, of folding his lower lip into his mouth, biting down on his beard, then releasing it, very slowly, from his teeth, as if to draw out the crackling sound of the hairs. His cadence, when he spoke to her, was as vague as his gaze, so that anything he talked about—food, planting, rocks, weather—came out sounding inconsequential. Minna didn’t mind letting him believe this, or letting him think she believed it. Standing over him, listening, she felt a familiar weight returning, the sunk, tangled comfort of needing to protect, which sometimes felt so close to wanting to protect that she did not think of being anywhere else.
She set to work on the walls, beginning—as Ruth had instructed—by making a glue from milk. Samuel’s farming magazines served as paper; the thin pages tore easily and took well to the glue. She papered from the ground up, working in tall, single rows, layering the pages three deep over the sod, exactly as Ruth had said. It worked. It looked smoother and neater than anything she’d imagined herself capable of making. And the whitewash paste, once she began smearing it over the funny pictures of plows and scales and machines whose purposes she could not imagine, was so white, that the cave—if she narrowed her eyes—appeared to glow.
When Minna tired, she went out to the hole and watched Max dig. He’d made quick progress downward, then decided it wasn’t wide enough and started outward again. The hole was, in fact, quite wide enough—so wide it could already fit four Minnas comfortably—but Minna did not mention this. She sat on the edge, swinging her feet, expressing quiet admiration as he laid bare dark and darker soil. She liked sitting like that, her heels thumping the earth, her only labor that of accompaniment. Max told her about a dream he’d been having—or rather suffering, laydn, as he put it: in this dream a rainstorm came in the night and flooded the house and Max didn’t wake up and so he drowned.
Each time he told it, Minna smiled. Whether she herself appeared in the dream, she didn’t ask. If she was there, if she died along with him, she guessed that Max felt guilty—and if she wasn’t, if she didn’t, perhaps guiltier. She smiled and said well, it didn’t sound very likely, and besides, even if a rain ever did come, the door made of crates would collapse before the cave could fill with water. And Max would look at her, the skin around his eyes flushed with his work, his eyes themselves wet—with the dream, perhaps, or maybe just the cooler air, which moved more freely now, gathering itself into little frenzies and whipping the skin. He looked, she thought, mildly disappointed—as if he hoped, each time he told her the dream, that she would explain it to him. Yet he never looked offended, as she expected, at her scornful remarks about the house. The door did not concern him, just as everything else he was neglecting in order to dig the hole did not concern him. And Minna found that she didn’t judge him for this. She felt similarly about her whitewashing, whose purpose, after all—a lovelier cave?—was even less necessary than the mikvah. Together, she and Max seemed to have broken off from the question of necessity—as if, as long as the boys were gone, the coming winter was indefinitely suspended. In the distance, they watched cows lumbering toward the railhead at Mitchell, driven by one of Otto’s sons for a ranch owner out of Texas; in the sky, they watched birds arrowing southward, shoved sideways then straight again by errant gusts of wind. Yet Minna and Max shared no compulsion to join in these preparations.
Minna and Max. Odd, to feel the names coupled in her head. Bread and butter, broom and pan. Odder still that they should come together out of mutual apathy, or defiance, or whatever one wanted to call it. Minna completed her daily chores. She swept, and gathered sad-looking squashes from the garden, and baked challah every Friday as Max asked her to do; she even threw a precious fist of dough into the fire, as he also asked her to do. “To remember the burning of the Temple,” he said, when she first hesitated. There was relief, she discovered, in following the order of his order, his ongoing, forever repentance for letting the Russians tear into the Torah with their crowbars; there was a gi
ving in that calmed her. But she didn’t think more than a few hours ahead, and she did not behave practically. On the first two Friday nights, she lit a pair of Shabbos candles they’d been given at the wedding, no matter that she should save them for an emergency, that the lantern shed adequate light, that kerosene was easier to come by than candles. On the third Shabbos, when the candles were shrunk to thumb-sized stumps, she melted their wax together in a tin, inserted a bit of a rag for a wick, and spent an indulgent amount of time holding the rag upright until the wax hardened again. Then she burned this candle, too, and Max made no comment.
Did he think, as she did, of Samuel? Did he feel an excitement, an almost petulance, at the idea of Samuel watching them as they failed to be useful in any real way? It wasn’t indolence, she would tell him. Look at the mikvah hole! Look at the neat, smooth wallpaper she’d made from his magazines! No, they weren’t indolent. They were simply unwilling to face the truly necessary task of preparing for their survival. For that would have required more than knowledge and skills and materials they didn’t possess. It would have required optimism, which required faith or else ignorance—depending on how one looked at it, depending on who one was. But Max, who was faithful and believed in God, did not seem capable of believing in the acres he stood upon. And Minna, who was talented enough at self-delusion, could not manufacture a vision of success in this vast, vastly exposed place. She couldn’t see how anything they did would counter the enormity of what there was to be done.
So Minna papered with what remained of Samuel’s magazines, and Max dug, and they witnessed the rest of the world move toward autumn. By late afternoons, the sky took on a crystalline pallor. Dark came early. The morning breeze grew teeth. They did not speak of these changes, or of the fact that they’d begun using the boys’ blankets on top of their own. Minna didn’t tell Max that two of the chickens had stopped laying, or that sometimes she thought she glimpsed Indians out the corners of her eyes, far-off shadows that disappeared before she could turn her head. She didn’t tell him that she’d stopped lying naked on her back in the creek. Who knew what Max didn’t tell Minna. The walls gained more paper, the hole gained more hole, but sometimes it seemed to Minna that if they’d woken up and found their work undone—the walls bare, the hole filled—if they had to start all over, neither would complain.