by Anna Solomon
It seemed a promising plan. To think of herself as an alternative, surrogate self, made up of other women, and of her house as a surrogate house, made of other women’s houses—just thinking it made her feel less poisonous and clumsy. Her hands would be more gentle, her eyes more scrupulous, her appetite smaller. She’d learned as a girl how you could imitate someone’s walk and know something of her arrogance, or shyness, or ugliness—now it was the same, but the effect stronger: she could become these women, possess their artistry, and eventually their satisfaction.
All this promise was enough to make Minna feel that it would be acceptable, once conditions were right, for her to keep, as her one decadence, the pleasure of Fritzi’s books. Jacob would teach her the English alphabet, and how the letters went together, and at the end of the day, in the second room, when they thought she was asleep, she would read. And Samuel, if she asked nicely, Samuel, her other stepson, would build a set of drawers, one of which would be for Minna’s underclothes—for she would have more, in this new life, than she could wear at one time—and hidden beneath these underclothes she would keep, one at a time, her books.
Which were only stories, in the end. And made-up stories, at that. Made-up stories she didn’t even know how to read.
And so her only remaining vice would be hidden, and made up, and she would have to learn to enjoy it.
TWENTY-ONE
SUPPER was eaten, the pot clean, prayers finished. Max studied. Jacob shuffled a deck of cards he’d somehow acquired on their trip. Samuel sat with a pair of torn trousers across his knees, trying to thread a needle.
Since coming home, the boys didn’t bother pretending to study with Max, but neither did they interrupt him, and so there was, each night, this time of waiting. Even the room seemed to wait—as though it sensed its counterpart, on the other side of the wall, half built. Minna was testing a broom she’d made that morning, determined as she was to have two brooms, as per the instructions in Ruth’s book. She poked it into a corner and found that she’d cut the angle just right, then she aimed for a scattering of soil and was pleased with her choice of straw. Her floors were real now, wood, and the broom made a fine sound, thrub-swish, thrub-swish. She swept from the edges of the room inward, working around the men’s feet, swish, knowing that she must be irritating someone, thrub, perhaps everyone, but not caring. They could say something, but they wouldn’t, each for his own reason, and Minna liked how masterfully she knew these reasons now, and how comfortably she could ignore them. She liked how tall she felt, wielding the broom as the men sat. When all the waiting began to tire her, she asked, without stopping the broom, “What plans have we made for drawers?”
Max scratched his nose, but didn’t look up from his book. Jacob stopped shuffling and smiled, as if anticipating some entertainment. Samuel squinted into the lamp, his thread trembling. “Drawers?” he repeated calmly. “For our plentiful belongings, you mean?”
He was trying to punish her, mock her. And his doggedness with the needle was starting to enrage her. His fingers were too large. He stuck out his whole tongue to wet the thread. He’d denied her early offer of help.
But she had to stay calm. Liesl and Ruth would stay calm. They would smile. They would not be spoiled. Minna smiled. “Yes,” she said. “Drawers.”
“A lovely aspiration,” he said. “I’ll be sure it raise it with the Baron at our next rendezvous.”
“It’s not such a luxury,” she said, a bit less nicely.
“No.” Samuel paused, eyes closed. He’d begun doing this, at the start of a conversation he didn’t want to have, just resting there as if caught in the middle of a blink. He must have intended it as deflection, but the effect was the reverse. It caused you to observe the only strangeness in his face: the weight of his eyelids; how many folds they contained. She stopped sweeping. She could hear the tearing of Max’s beard in his teeth.
“It wouldn’t be difficult. One set of drawers. A little order,” she said. Then, certain that no one was listening to her, she suddenly lost Liesl and Ruth, and raised her voice so sharply it cracked: “A little dignity!”
Max looked up. His eyes were wet. He caressed his left forearm with his right hand. “You know,” he said, and pointed at the trousers in Samuel’s lap. “Minna could do this for you.” He looked back down, turned a page, bit into his beard.
Minna caught Samuel’s eye.
“I can manage,” he said.
“Sender.”
“I can do it.”
“Son.”
She waited for Samuel to falter. To throw the needle, or growl, or curse. She had the sudden idea—she liked this idea—that he feared her as much as she feared him. So that when he stood, boldly, forcing her to look up, she saw his boldness as a costume, put on, like his unruly hair and his tough walk. In his eyes she saw his knowledge of the outline of her body. When he set the needle and thread on the trousers and pushed them toward her, she was purposefully slow about putting the broom down, and slow about accepting the bundle.
“It will be my pleasure,” she said. Which was, she remembered, a thing Ruth said to her once.
Samuel’s face shifted; the skin around his eyes hardened; he leaned in so close she had to turn her cheek. He might have kissed her, she thought, in front of his father. But Max wasn’t even watching them, and Samuel, out the corner of her eye, didn’t look as if he wanted to kiss her. He looked angry enough to spit.
“Excuse me,” Minna said quietly, with every intention of backing away. Her only dilemma—the only thing that stopped her—was the fact that he smelled so good to her. She nearly closed her eyes. Then she heard Jacob clear his throat. He was peering up at them, his expression one of worry, and wonder. Samuel must have noticed this, too—he leaned closer now, as if to berate Minna privately—then closer still, so that her ear filled with heat. He whispered: “I’ll build you the drawers. Mother. In the meantime, why don’t you keep your little book under your mattress?” Then he straightened to his full height, walked to the door, and yanked the string. A rigid stream of air. The door closed. Jacob shuffled his deck, Max turned a page, then came the hollow patter of urine hitting dirt.
A cold snap. Frost. The chickens stopped laying altogether.
Minna had three dozen eggs packed in salt, a few more sitting in flour. One egg a day would last only forty days. Half an egg, eighty, but what was half an egg. And still the chickens ate and shat and made their chittering ruckus. She couldn’t look at them without wanting to snap their necks. Snap, everything snapping, the air and her mind and her voice at Jacob when he snapped his fingers too loudly. Such a word, so many uses, all tending toward violence. Her challahs were flat and white and unglazed for lack of eggs, and she refused to throw a fistful into the fire, and Max asked, Why?, but she refused to placate or change her mind and this was her first meager, awful victory. She began rationing flour, too (Samuel said nothing, not even I told you so), and then corn and potatoes and what vegetables they had left. Why, Max asked, though of course he knew, though his question was like a dog’s yelp, habitual, easily stroked.
And why, he began asking, why was Minna still without child?
She had no answer.
One afternoon, he found her at the creek with the washing and laid her down on the sand that had been the creek’s shallows before it became its dry banks. It was not particularly uncomfortable—the sand was smooth, the gray walls gave privacy, Max kept her warm and was gentle with her, as always, always gentle in his insistence, his insistently gentle way—but the cottonwoods rattled their leaves up above and Minna thought, they were mine, and the water trickled past nearby and she thought, it was mine. She thought of Samuel, looking down at her. Then she thought of her mother, a terrible, shameful thought, she thought of how many places her mother would have been laid down. And maybe because it was not dark, or because she sensed the beginning of a new descent, or because the bristling cottonwood demanded that she keep her eyes open, she could not count away these thought
s of her mother, and by the time Max breathed his finishing breath and slid off her, she half expected him to button his trousers, pay her, and walk away. Instead he brushed her hair back from her forehead and asked, “Is that better? Here? Did you feel pleasure?” When she didn’t answer, he began his tickling again, in her hair. He’d never tickled her after, only before, and Minna felt, despite herself, if not pleasure exactly, a vague excitement. She was married, she reminded herself, a married woman performing her duty. She might as well be Ruth, or Liesl, performing theirs. But Max was looking at her, the daylight mining his balding places, his lips too pink and full and the bottom one hanging, lazy and timid and greedy all at once. She closed her eyes and offered up a quiet moan, then a funny smile she’d never made before, a smile she hoped would convey both graciousness and finality.
Max said, “Do not worry. You mustn’t think you are barren.”
Minna nodded.
“It is better here. More—only us. You must relax. You must feel pleasure to bear a child.”
The sky had been rough all day, clouds fuming up from the horizon yellow gray and spinning, but now they’d started to loosen and thin. A patch of clear, calm blue appeared, and Minna knew, if she wanted a child, that she would take this as a favorable sign. But she feared the child’s dying. She feared its living and her leaving it. She pointed up at the blue sky and said, “It’ll get cold now.”
“Don’t worry,” Max said.
“I’m not worried.”
“Good.”
“But if the child, Motke—if it—shouldn’t happen.”
Neither looked at the other. Their embrace held—one of Max’s arms digging under her neck, the other resting on her stomach. Minna thought of the ten-year rule. She’d thought it unfair, that a woman should be divorced just because she was barren, but now she wondered if the system provided an opening—if it gave you a way out without having to be a woman who left. You would be barren, but not bad. Or you would be bad, but helplessly so.
“You mustn’t think it,” said Max. “All will be well. You will pray more righteously.”
Minna thought she’d been mouthing the words more convincingly. She thought Max didn’t notice anyway.
“But if it shouldn’t happen,” she said again. For she knew suddenly that it would not—she knew with stunning certainty—no matter what she did, or how she prayed, no matter what she wanted, or came to want. She was defective, or else she was sinful. Which one had no bearing, she saw; Minna herself was of little consequence. Her throat filled with tears, then emptied. Up above, one of the boys shouted something and the other called back. Minna had the urge to tell Max how sometimes, standing in the yard, looking out across the plain, she would see, or think she saw, the shadows again. Thin switches of light, dim flickers through the grass. She would feel a queer longing; she had an idea of the Indians coming for her, like in Leo’s story, and taking her back to their huts made of sticks and skin.
But Max was sitting up, and pulling Minna up beside him. “Shhhhhh,” he hushed. “Don’t think it.” Then he brushed off her back, patting, like a friend.
TWENTY-TWO
No one saw the first snow begin. When had the sky gone white? Where had the wind picked up knives? The snow drove against the house in lines straight as trees. It stood toward the sky and slammed into the earth. For a time you could see the dark slash of the little barn’s roof, then it was gone. They stood at the windows until the windows were white, then kept standing. Who knew how dark white could be? Minna lit the lamps and fed and fed the stove, ignoring, each time she knelt, Samuel’s fists fisting tighter. Her house would be warm. She cut rags to fill the biggest gaps in the floorboards, then filled the kettle. Ruth and Liesl would have cocoa, she thought—they would make drinking chocolate, and knit. Why had Minna never learned to knit? She brewed coffee for the men, thought of milk to make it special, thought out loud: “We need a path to the cellar.” The men looked stunned—they’d looked stunned since the windows went dark, like squirrels. Max nodded, but didn’t move. Jacob said the shovels were in the barn. Samuel went to push the door open, but gained only a crack. Snow tumbled in like sand.
“It shouldn’t hinge out,” he said. “Why did we build it to hinge out?”
“Otto!” cried Max. “He knew this would happen.”
Samuel kicked at the door. “I knew. I should have known.”
“Get out of the way.” Jacob held the iron poker like a pickax.
“Out of the way,” he said, prodding Samuel aside with the poker. He began slicing into the snow, wiggling the poker side to side, shoving the door with his shoulder. Soon the opening widened; snow blew freely into the house; Minna swatted it back with her new broom. Then Jacob managed to squeeze out and Samuel grabbed the old broom and followed him. Minna handed Max the ladle, pushed him after the boys, and shut the door.
For a long while, she heard nothing but wind. How long? She didn’t know. If she had Max’s pocket watch, she thought, she would keep track—if they weren’t back by a certain time, she would go after them. Jacob had told her the stories: men getting lost on their way to a barn, freezing to death twenty feet from the breakfast table, eggs still steaming on a plate. In Beltsy, the trees had broken the snow, and there were other houses and the road to see your way by; here, Jacob said, people tied themselves to ropes so they could pull themselves home.
But Max’s only rope was tied to the cow, and the cow was in the barn.
If Minna had the watch, it would insist that she wait the right way: tense over her lap, watching the minute hand creep, trembling as it reached the allotted time. But the watch was nowhere in the room. And Minna could not summon a suitable anxiety. Inside the spirals of the wind, the whistling and growling and purring and groaning, there was silence. Her father had taught her this, how if you listened, it was there, how the noise of the wind was not in fact wind but all the things that were not wind being touched by it, and saying WIND. During late-summer thunderstorms, when lightning swept off the steppes and took down trees and shook the house, he would rush into her room, mix air with his finger and say, it’s all right, say, think of the willows at the river, the house is like that, it needs to sway to stay standing, that’s how it stays standing. It was her father who was scared—she hadn’t cried out—but she’d let him hold her and pretended to feel saved and this came as easily to her as the idea that the wind itself was silent. And now alone inside the dampening of snow, she heard the hole at the center of the wind and felt calm. There was coffee going cold and cracks in the floor still weeping cold and her sweater missing its top button, yet here she was standing calmly by the windows, one after another, each view the same, the world a dark, white, growling silence. Here she was moving through her thoughts as if the men had already vanished. There was a bin of coal. A sack of flour. Snow would make water. She would make do.
She was alone, and glad of it.
She was selfish. They’d always said so.
She listened for voices, heard nothing, waited for panic to properly grip her. She drank a tin of coffee, then another, until she felt a buzz at her nape, and was able, finally, to focus. On the windowsills, for instance. They were fine sills. Fine windows the men had chosen, and paid for, and put up. Three more, meant for the second room, stood against the outside wall. So much had been provided her, planned, promised. And there were dangers—yes—focus. She had to remember the dangers. The eggs, for instance—the eggs were in the cellar. And most of the canned goods, too, and more flour, and all the potatoes. So. So they had to make it to the cellar and back, and to the barn, too, and to the chickens. And she had to keep the doorway clear so that they could return, and so that when they returned they would see that she’d hoped they would. Quick. She took up her fine new broom and opened the door. New snow pushed her back. She pushed harder, until she had to squint against the snow, the lost silence, the deafening search of her ears.
Where were they?! She began to sweep.
WINTER, then.
That early time was almost sweet. The snow would gain their shoulders, then the sky would break for a few days, the snow pour off the roof, there would be water to drink and wash with and the paths would stamp down almost to the ground. At midday they ate outside to feel the sun through their coats, ate with their eyes closed against the glare and got sleepy. Sometimes they napped then; even Samuel saw the limits of industry when the snow was high. Dark came early and a moon rose so close its bruises made shadows inside the house. The house felt like a house in those days, not just a room. The door string grew thick with the oil from their hands. Minna wove a small rug out of rags and laid it by the stove. She brought out her comb and a scrap of paper and hummed, through its teeth, a song she must once have been taught. Jacob instructed them in the intricacies of whist, and convinced Max to play, too, and Samuel offered up a square of felt and two dice. And because the way to the creek was never cleared, Max couldn’t bother her there, and neither did he bother her in their bed. He thought she was pregnant, she realized—for the pleasures she’d pretended before the snow came, for the high mood she was in now. He wouldn’t think to wonder if her mood might have something to do with his not touching her. She stopped anticipating his fingers, clenching for his approach. She forgot, almost, about Fritzi’s book. Sometimes she felt during that time like the men were her brothers, all three, forsaken along with her, and she their good sister, good as a gentile Sister, her face simple as an egg. Snow, Jacob said, and Minna found herself nodding, as though she knew the word already. The more English she learned, the more she felt this way: the more her tongue seemed to guide the language rather than the other way around.