Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan

by Ruth Gilligan

  Arrived.

  America.

  The beginning.

  The right world at last, too perfect even to be said aloud.

  While behind them Cork City lay slouched in sleep, snoring off last night’s dregs, dreaming of anything other than the unexpected arrival of a Russian slaughterhouse ship.

  There is always a beginning before the beginning, and this one had started with a plague of rats.

  He had been an aspiring young playwright in a village called Akmian, which meant ‘a river full of stones’. He sometimes went swimming to check if the rumours were true. He had a younger brother and a brand new wife and a skull that was full itself – an endless stutter of ideas like a tick or a twitch until one about a plague just stuck.

  He felt the scurry of it, running through his dreams.

  He wrote for five years; five years on one wooden, time-knotted desk, high away in an attic room where pillars of notes and ideas towered on every side – one sneeze and the pages would fly. While out in the shtetl, the locals all thought him crazy – calls his wife the Princess of the Bees and writes a play about rats?

  ‘Nu, inside his head must be a zoo.’

  ‘Noah’s Ark, two by two!’

  But once finished, something about the play caught on. First in the shtetl’s tiny shed theatre, the local ramshackle treat; then in the town of Vilnius; then eventually it caught on in Moscow. And every night in the Empire’s biggest city, beneath the ceilings dripping gold, the audience would gaze at the swarms of rodents; at the valiant hero who did not slaughter them, but rather rhymed the rats to death with his poetry and wit. Though the biggest joke of all was that no one could ever know the name of the man who had created this magic. Anonymous said the theatre programme. Anobody. A genius with a pockmarked face and a pair of bottle-thick specs forbidden to catch even a glimpse of his own work.

  Since 1882 it had been illegal for Jews to move to Moscow. So said the May Laws. The no-you-May-not Laws. After the assassination of the Tsar the conspiracy theories had rippled out from St Petersburg, all eyes burning on the underdogs. Until eventually, the truth came out – that yes, there had been a Jewish man involved. Just one. And not even in the killing – not in the hurling of the bomb or the years of conspiracy, just in the hiding, to give the rest of them a place to disappear under the cracks of his floorboards because his people had had a history of being refused such a luxury, so now, who was he to do the same?

  In the end, he was a hanged man.

  From that moment onwards, it was his people who were forced to hide. Banished from the big cities; forbidden to own land or to take up certain jobs.

  To see their masterpieces on stage.

  Until one of them begged and an exception was made – a one-night exception for the Ratman.

  It took him an entire day to get there – a bus from Akmian then a local train to Moscow, the carriages filled with prostitutes heading to work. Each clutched a bottle of vodka in one hand and a bright yellow permit in the other, both needed to appease the guards. Yet, at the sight of the patchwork of fishnets the playwright didn’t so much as flinch. ‘Sorry to disturb, ladies, but is this seat taken?’ He buried himself amongst them with a smile as their cleavages ricketed along in time with the tracks. The scent of musk lightened heads. The snow chucked fistfuls of itself at the windows. And the more they gossiped the more he began to listen, enthralled, flattering them with a kind of attention they had never known in all their lonely lives, so that soon he felt the slick of their ruby lips upon his earlobes, whispering, begging for more. Either down the back of the train or in the icy Moscow alleyways where they made their dens. ‘Come on,’ they pleaded. ‘We don’t even charge you…’ Just one chance to steam up the glasses of the Akmian genius who spoke to them nicer than any boychik ever had.

  But ‘no’, he eventually managed. ‘No thank you.’ He had his Princess of the Bees waiting back home. And besides, the Commandments decreed – Mitzvah 69 to be precise – that there should be no intercourse with a woman outside of marriage.

  The ladies cackled at that; the ladies who made a living out of those who flouted Mitzvah 69.

  Eventually they waved him goodbye as he made his way towards the theatre’s back door. He smuggled up to the cheapest seats in the house and looked down at the gilded faces looking up to his rats in awe.

  By the time he returned to the shtetl it was the following afternoon, yet he knew his Princess wouldn’t have slept a breath.

  ‘So?’ she asked. ‘How was it?’ Her black eyes had turned grey in the winter light.

  ‘Exquisite.’ He pulled her to him. Still his ears rang with the douse of the applause. ‘Austėja, I have been… I think…’ The same sound as torrential rain. ‘I think it is time for us to leave.’

  She gazed out the window beyond his shoulder. The snowflakes landed soft thuds on the ledge. ‘Moshe,’ she said, suddenly. ‘You have something on your ear.’

  He grabbed the stain between his fingers, ruby red. ‘I must have cut it,’ he replied. ‘Shaving.’ Even though he had been growing his beard since the day they were married, a hive for the honeybees.

  It took them ten whole years to save; ten years and two daughters and one brother Dovid gone on ahead to work. A long wait. And then a crumpled letter arrived with some extra money for four tickets on an orange-rusted cattle ship – yet another beast to add to the zoo.

  To America.

  As well as packing his bags before he left, the playwright had learned his pillars of notes by heart, then built a giant bonfire in the middle of the Market Square. The whole shtetl gathered round to watch the flames feasting on years and years of work, their eyes streaming from the smoke almost as if they were upset; almost as if it were the man himself being burned.

  ‘In the beginning,’ he joked, perpetual patron of the upbeat, ‘God cremated the heavens and the earth!’

  But even hours after the embers died, still the stragglers stood, staring, thinking of other lands. While mothers snarled at sons to breathe in the fumes, just in case the genius was infectious.

  The following day they began their schlep, all the way to Latvia and onto the ship where the captain smashed a bottle on the prow – an ancient tradition to launch them out to sea. A bit like a groom breaking a glass on his wedding day to remember, always, the destruction of Jerusalem. A sailor married to his vessel. Though everyone knew the story of the playwright’s nuptials when the glass had refused to crack.

  The chuppah had been a beautiful thing, the roses mangled into a perfect arch above the soon-to-be-happy couple. But below it the groom had started to sweat, stamping his foot upon the lump that just wouldn’t flatten, while his almost-bride watched on, forcing a smile, trying to find some symbolism in the glitch – that their bond was unbreakable? Not a single flaw or weakness? Until, finally, another foot stepped in – Dovid’s foot – putting them out of their misery as the crowd cheered and the Princess of the Bees kissed her husband, sucking away the panic and also the flicker of doubt as to which brother she had really married that afternoon; which one she wished she had.

  But now, after ten days at sea, they had sailed away from that life. Those whispers. The Akmian playwright with his rats safely stashed in his pocket ready to be translated to a magical place called ‘Broadway’ where everyone would know his nobody name, the exhaustion worth it at last, the roses tossed on stage like a flock of birds scooped up to carry home for his wife, to keep her his and always his.

  These were the things he had prayed for; the things he saw now as he slept in the dirt of a dockside shed. While all around him the ship’s passengers lay dreaming their own versions of American dreams.

  Ruth was the first to open her eyes.

  The throb of her hand had woken her, pulsing its way through her sleep. She breathed in. Metal and sweat. An aftertaste of sea.

  It had been late last
night – long past her bedtime – when the woman down the end of the port had led them here. Lady Liberty. Not a statue at all, as it turned out , but a landlady, touting for business; offering a place where they could rest their poor, tired heads. They had followed her in silence, exhaustion winning out over a thousand questions, each of them just content for the moment to sleep on solid ground again. Though actually, Ruth had found it strange dropping off without Mame and Esther below her. She had liked being in the top bunk on the ship, feeling their words as they vibrated beneath – secrets they never let her hear but at least now she could feel.

  She checked her finger. Already the base had begun to blacken.

  Beside her, her father snored, eight hours of ideas clogging his nostrils. The white patch of baldness gleamed out from the crown of his head, the first bit of him to come into the world usually hidden away beneath the circle of his kippah.

  Next to him in the dust her mother’s curls mingled with her big sister’s – a carpet of black, oily and slick. Like the story Tateh used to tell about the trio of women who spent their lives knitting – a widow, a spinster and a divorcee – alone except for each other and their needles and wool. Until one day they had an argument and tried to pull apart, only to discover that they had knitted themselves together – their clothes, their hair, even their eyelashes, bound into one.

  Mame had warned him to stop. She said it would give the girls nightmares.

  ‘But Austėja,’ Tateh had protested, eyes vast with the confusion, ‘it is supposed to be a metaphor. For family.’

  Her family had begun to wake now, limbs stiff from awkward folds, and then the other bodies across the floor stirred too. Ruth watched as they opened their eyes one by one, each face registering a split second between waking and realising; remembering where they were.

  America.

  Arrived.

  A sleep-crusty grin. And a look around for a bucket so that the men could wash their hands to begin their brand new day; their brand new everything.

  ‘Have a look for one outside, girls, would you? There’s bound to be one by the port.’ It was Leb Epstein who made the request, drowsy up on elbows, his gut still resting firmly on the ground.

  He was a tailor who had come from the very same shtetl as Ruth and her family, accompanied by his thin little wife. She always looked at your shadow instead of at you as if her eyes were too skinny to fit too much at once. The couple planned to travel to America first and save enough money through waistcoats and pleats to send back to the rest of their clan, just like Uncle Dovid had for them – letters of advice; certificates of introduction; pale pink flushes from sisters-in-law that couldn’t always be hidden.

  Ruth put her left hand behind her back. ‘A bucket, Mr Epstein? Yessir.’ She repeated the word in her head as she beelined for the door, abucket abucket abucket.

  She had always been eager to make herself useful; to help the adults wherever she could – barely able to walk before she had sought out the orders, the chores, the tasks that made her feel more important than she really was. Sometimes the villagers laughed at her diligence; told her she had a very old soul for her eight little years. But this morning especially she just needed an excuse – anything to get outside.

  Ruth eased the shed door open, a low groan off the hinges as if they had been sleeping too. She craned her neck, preparing herself for the New York view. The skyscrapers. The cabs. The peanut ­vendors on every corner – every single one – Uncle Dovid wrote that he worried he was about to turn into a peanut! And Ruth thought now it sounded a bit like one of her father’s ideas, A Plague of ­Peanuts! The Incredible Salty Man! So she wondered if that counted as imagining; if maybe she should try and tell Tateh. Guess what, guess what, America has fixed me! Or if maybe she should just stay shtum and stop trying too hard to please?

  Outside the shed, America hadn’t tried at all.

  The dock was deserted, quiet as an inhale.

  There were no sailors.

  No peanut vendors.

  Nobody.

  Ruth craned a little further.

  Beyond the empty quay the sea was empty too. There was no sign of their ship – not even an orange-rusted bruise smudged against the port – while above, the sky stretched away uninterrupted, untouched, no buildings or scrapers at all. Like an uncracked glass on a wedding day, Ruth thought – an omen she hadn’t ever understood.

  Until now.

  Behind the shed the warehouses sat in rows, abandoned. Smashed-out windows. A barrel leaking a tongue of rust where the rainwater had spilled. The only sign of life was the maul of seagulls overhead, their wings making hard work of the breezeless air, currents that just wouldn’t run.

  ‘Right, you runt.’ Ruth’s big sister suddenly appeared next to her, eyeing the dockside wasteland. ‘Where would we find a pump?’ Not that, really, they looked like sisters at all. Even at ten, Esther was much too like their mother – the wool-thick hair; the black eyes; the stare that cut like wire – whereas Ruth, as Esther always liked to remind her, had been born deformed, one of her eyes green and the other one brown.

  Ruth never understood why the world didn’t look different colours out of each one.

  But this morning, the world just looked wrong. Felt wrong. Not even a shudder from the trains running under the ground – had Uncle Dovid just been making them up? And where was Liberty this morning, Ruth wanted to know – there had been no word from her either – so what if it had all just been a big fat trick?

  ‘Esther…’ She looked at her hand. The blackness had travelled even higher. ‘Esther, are you sure…’ She wondered if the nail would fall off soon; if the seagulls would swoop down to peck it up.

  And normally she wouldn’t have said a thing about her confusion. She didn’t like to complain. Most of all, didn’t like how cruel her sister could be with her weaknesses. All of them.

  But this was different – this was everything.

  Or at least, it was supposed to be.

  ‘Esther, are you sure this is New York?’

  Two days before they began their journey Tateh had taken the girls up to his attic, almost empty now that his papers had been carried off for the fire. He told them they could each choose one remaining item to take with them when they left – a souvenir from this life to the next.

  Of course, Esther had gone first; had marched right up to the Shakespeare that sat on the top shelf of the bookcase, swathed in pale blue leather – another cow in another life. She had struggled to even carry the ton-weight down, let alone for thousands of miles, but it seemed the impracticality was precisely what had made their father smile; the perfect after-his-own-heart choice.

  His second daughter had opted for the compass. It was hidden half-forgotten in the clutter of the desk, a mere four words in total. North, South, East, West. But even as she held it Ruth had felt better; had run her unbroken finger around the rim so that her nail made a sound along the ridges, a buzz that almost drowned all the other noises out.

  This morning, Esther’s voice was loudest of all. ‘Stupid girl!’ it cried, the disdain filling the whole span of her mouth. ‘Don’t you remember what Uncle Dovid said?’ It was a voice for the stage, her father always boasted – the finest legacy he could have hoped for. The only one, really, he would ever need. ‘Ellis Island,’ it said now. ‘He told us we had to come to Ellis Island first before we were allowed in.’ Reading from a script everyone else seemed to know – everyone except for Ruth. ‘All right?’

  And to any audience the gesture that followed would have just looked like a kindness, a sibling affection, as Esther smiled and took her little sister’s hand in hers. ‘That’s why Tateh and Mr Epstein are about to go to the Immigration Office.’ She gave it a tug, a squeeze of reassurance. ‘That’s why you are shooing off with them too.’ And then a twist. An extra snap. A whimper barely heard. ‘You didn’t think we’d travelled all
that way for this, did you?’

  Two hours later, having woken from her faint, Ruth sat on the tram with her father and his friend, stiffening her face into a smile, nice and wide like her sister had shown her. And maybe someday, years from now, they would come to look alike, maybe even be loved alike. An American family healed better again, the scars you could barely see.

  Just as long as she ignored the pull in her pocket where the compass tried to drag her down. It must be broken too, she told herself, the magnets somehow mangled when the boat slammed the shore, because as they boarded the tram she had checked it, just to be sure.

  She had stood at the edge of the dock and gazed out at the Atlantic, knowing the sea was meant to be East. The arrow had dithered, stuttering like a lip before tears. And then it had fallen down. South. The sea spreading off the bottom of Ireland and away.

  So Ruth smiled a little harder now, telling herself that once Tateh and his rats were rich and famous he would buy her a new one that worked, the four points back where they belonged again.

  In the end, the smiles turned out to be more like a plague. A transatlantic epidemic.

  They were only in the Immigration Office five minutes before the laughter caught on, the flatcapped men behind the giant oak counter in stitches at the Ratman’s wit.

  ‘New York?’ they screeched as they regarded the stranger with his scrap of a hat and his bush of a beard – a nest for the seagulls who squawked outside, taking the mick themselves. ‘America?’

  While his face turned as pale as the tiny patch of white on the crown of his head. Or as white as a spot on a map that desperate fingers have pointed at again and again and again. Until it is gone.

  In time, so many stories would be spooled out of that moment it would become impossible to count.

  Some said that when their boat found land there had been cries of ‘Cork! Cork!’, but that in their exhaustion they had heard ‘New York! New York!’ instead; didn’t notice the difference for weeks.