MUD FILLED MY THROAT, A THICK AND STICKY LAYER OF it. It gurgled and thickened with each breath I tried to take. I strained for breath, gulping air in huge and useless swallows, but the mucus only spread across my throat, blocking the passage to my lungs.
Tsila forced steam through my nose and mouth with towels so hot that they burned the skin of my face. But though the steam filled my nostrils and mouth, it couldn’t penetrate the mud. I strained harder, clawing at the air, then at my throat, which wouldn’t admit it. With each failed breath my legs kicked up from the bed, then fell back. Tsila gripped my head against her lap, pressing harder with her hot, rough towels.
I heard Lipsa’s voice again, then felt her hands upon my head, and though her touch was gentle, the very hairs on my head ached beneath her fingers.
“Master of the universe,” I heard her say.
“Save this child …” The prayer continued, but in Tsila’s voice now.
I opened my eyes. It was daytime and nighttime at once. Candles burned in the room, yet light poured through the window. Moonlight or sunlight, I didn’t know, but in that one beam of light I saw the suspended dust of the room begin to dance in a slow and swirling pattern. It circled my ankles once, twice, then again and again, gently tugging and lifting my now weightless legs from the bed. And though I did not see my mother among the particles of dust, I knew she was there, lifting and pulling me toward her. In the shadow behind me, though, Tsila clutched me against her hard and bony lap, holding me to the roughness of life.
Around the edges of my eyes a darkness began to gather. The dust still swirled, but it moved within a shrinking circle of light. Faster and wilder as the darkness pressed in around it—I watched, entranced, until the cool smoothness of Tsila’s hand shut my burning eyelids. “Lord of my fathers, I beseech you,” I heard from the shadow behind me. “Guide my hand in the act I am about to perform.” My head was pulled back, my throat bared like that of a calf prepared for slaughter. “Hear O Israel …,” Tsila whispered in my ear, preparing me to die. My mind followed the path of her words.
In peace will I both lay me down and sleep. For thou, Lord, makest me dwell alone in safety.
My father sat by my bed when he thought me asleep, softly reciting the Psalms. Time had passed. I didn’t know how long. A cold wind still blew through the chinking of the walls, but Tsila had begun her Pesach cleaning.
The fever had left me, and with it my strength. I awoke each morning and placed my feet on the floor, and each morning the air of that place pushed me backward into my bed. The wound in my throat where Tsila had cut through the mud still hurt me, but air moved freely through my throat to my lungs. Every few hours Tsila boiled a new towel in water and laid it upon the wound.
The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart … None of them that take refuge in him shall be desolate.
My father recited in darkness. His workdays were long—except on the Sabbath he was never in the house in daylight. I would hear him early in the morning, before the sun rose, and at night again, after the first calling of the nightingale: I am come into deep waters and the flood overwhelms me. I am weary with crying; my throat has dried.
I had not spoken since my illness. It was not from stubbornness, though Tsila accused me of that. Where my voice had once been, there was now only pain. I showed Tsila without words the ache that I felt there.
“Pain is no excuse for your stubbornness,” she scolded me, as she brought me cup after cup of honeyed tea. Her face was pale and strained, her eyes rimmed with red as vivid as her birthmark. “Life is painful, but you don’t see people lying down dead in the streets because of it.”
“Should we not call Lipsa?” my father suggested.
“Has that woman not caused enough damage already?” Tsila asked.
My father’s eyebrows arched with surprise, but he didn’t answer right away. He took a swallow of tea, then another as he considered the question put before him. “What damage?” he asked finally.
“What damage?” Tsila’s eyes, flat with exhaustion all the weeks of my illness and convalescence, lit now with anger. “What would you call cutting us off from a living? Doing us a good turn, perhaps?”
All the weeks of my illness no one had come to our house to be fitted for a dress or to pick up an order. No one had crossed our threshold at all, except Lipsa. My father still left for work before dawn each morning, but Tsila sat idle save for keeping house and nursing me.
“People were afraid, Tsila,” my father said.
“Afraid of what? And by whose tale bearing?”
My father closed his eyes, as he often did when faced with an argument with Tsila. He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, as if that might somehow give him the strength for the harsh words that loomed.
“It was safe for Lipsa to cross our threshold all those weeks but not my customers? What, Lipsa can’t infect other children, but my customers can?”
“Lipsa is a healer. She can’t heal the sick without going to them.”
“It wasn’t Lipsa who healed your daughter, Aaron Lev. And I didn’t see her fear mongering when Freyde’s Itche burned with fever last summer.”
“Itche didn’t have diphtheria.”
“Diphtheria.” Tsila spat the word. “Don’t give me diphtheria. She thinks I’ve stolen the child from her, so now she tries to starve us.”
“Tsila, Tsila,” my father chided. “She’s not trying to starve us. Why would Lipsa try to starve us? She’s a good woman, and besides, she knows the child is ours.”
“Yours. She has always known the child is yours, but when six years passed and still you didn’t call for her …”
“I always meant to.”
“Still, you didn’t until you married me.”
“I don’t think—”
“You never think,” Tsila spat back. “Just what business do you think Lipsa still has here? In my home?”
My father didn’t answer.
“You don’t answer because you don’t know anything. I am the one who knows. I am the one who watches her scuttling up the hill, hunched and oily as a cockroach rushing to do her evil sorceries. I am the one who knows what she wants. She wants the child back in her clutches, Aaron Lev—on my own good health I swear this to you …”
“Don’t,” my father said.
“Her potions are nothing. Do you understand me, Aaron Lev? You think she has a potion that will return your daughter’s voice, but I am the one who can return your daughter’s voice. I am the one who saved your daughter from death.”
“Only the Eternal One—”
“You know nothing,” Tsila snapped and my father fell silent.
“The child will speak again. Trust me, Arele. Have I not loosened your own tongue and freed it from its fetters?”
My father did not answer.
“Your daughter will speak, Aaron Lev. I will lead her to words.”
“WATER,” I CALLED OUT THAT NIGHT IN MY SLEEP. THE first word I had uttered since falling ill. When I opened my eyes, Tsila was standing by my bed. “Water,” I said again, and she handed me a glass of the cool water I had called for. I drank it empty and handed it back to her.
“What do you say?” she whispered.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Again?”
“Thank you,” I repeated, and she dropped to her knees beside my bed.
“Your mouth is lovely,” she whispered to me, the same words I had heard Lipsa say to her two youngest boys when they uttered their first words.
Help us guard his little mouth from obscenities, Lipsa had said. May he never curse or lie, but speak only words of Torah and wisdom, pleasing to God and men. Amen.
Tsila said none of that. She stayed half kneeling, half leaning against my bed, her face close to mine, her long, soft hair falling around my head. “Your lips are a crimson thread,” she whispered, softly tracing the outline of my mouth with her finger.
WE STARTED THEN, THE VERY NE
XT DAY, WITH BES, THE second letter of the alphabet.
“Aleph was chosen to be first, it’s true, but what came of it?” Tsila asked.
She looked at me, awaiting my response, but I had no response. I didn’t know about the letters.
“Bes came second. A disadvantage, no?” I nodded and that seemed to satisfy her.
“But look,” she said, pulling an egg from the basket beside her.
“Baytzah,” she pronounced, teaching me the Hebrew word as well as the letter. She placed the egg in my hand. It was warm and heavy with promise, but as my fingers closed around the perfect curve of its shell, pleasure and sadness filled me in equal measure. The promise that swelled against my palm was not to be fulfilled. Its fate had guided Tsila’s fingers to pluck it from the dirt of the yard so that it could be poured out of its shell and scrambled with potatoes and onion for our supper. “Baytzah,” I said as I handed it back to her.
“Bayis,” Tsila said next, using Hebrew again instead of Yiddish and sweeping her hand to indicate the house that encased us. Like the shell of an egg were the walls of our house, protecting the life within.
“Bimah,” Tsila said. “Are you listening?”
“Bimah,” I repeated. The podium at the front of a shul. But now Tsila wasn’t satisfied. “We’ve hardly even started and already you’re daydreaming.”
“I’m not daydreaming,” I protested.
“You can’t afford to daydream,” she said. “Other girls, yes, they can daydream all they want, but you—you cannot afford to daydream when I am trying to teach you the aleph-bes. Do you understand me?”
I did not understand her but nodded my head anyway.
“Do you want to end up like Simple Sorel?”
It was said that something had scared Sorel in her infancy and that was why she walked around with her hands covering her ears and eyes, humming lullabies to herself all day.
“I’m not like Sorel,” I said.
“Sorel wasn’t like Sorel either until she started daydreaming and scaring herself half to death. Now you pay attention.”
“I am paying attention.”
“So then what else starts with the letter bes?”
I thought about it, making the sound B over and over again. Tsila tapped her long fingers on the table.
“Bayla,” I said finally. Tsila’s younger sister whom my father should have married.
“Bayla,” Tsila repeated. “And what else?”
“Bagel,” I said. “Bracha, Binyamin, bubbie …”
“Good,” she said, with obvious surprise. “Bagel, bracha, Binyamin, bubbie—a lot of words, no?”
I nodded, but she wasn’t looking at me.
“But most of all,” she said, “most important of all the words bes leads into the world … Can you think what it is?” She looked at me with hope. I wanted to satisfy her, but couldn’t. She opened the Humash on the table before us, opened it to the first page of the first book. Genesis. The beginning.
“Breshis,” I said before she could.
She looked at me. Her eyes were flashing emerald light. Her color was high, obscuring the mark of anger in her cheek. “Breshis,” she repeated. “The beginning. Do you see?” she asked, excitement swelling her voice. “Second in line after the letter aleph, yes, but chosen by God to begin the Torah, to begin all creation. Do you understand?”
I was only a child, and an ignorant one at that, but I sensed a blasphemy in the charged atmosphere of our lesson.
“And where’s the aleph?” she asked. “The great first letter?” Her eyes were lit as if by fever.
“Nu?” she prodded.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Exactly.” She took my finger, the second finger of my right hand, and pointed to the third letter in the word breshis.
“Aleph,” she said. “First in line, but silent now after bes.”
She sat back in satisfaction and I waited for her to bring out the sweets she would now lay before me, the drop of honey she would now place on my tongue. Lipsa’s boys had been carried to heder their first day; Lipsa herself had baked the sweets and provided the honey. A light golden honey she had chosen. “Knowledge is sweetness,” she whispered to her boys, as the letters of the aleph-bes paraded before them for the first time.
“I’m not your mother,” Tsila said, her face still flushed, her eyes flashing sparks of light. “I mean no cruelty, but I am not your mother. You and I have an understanding on that, no?”
I nodded my head, though uncertain as to the nature of the understanding I was entering.
“I will raise you and teach you to be a human being among human beings.” She paused as if to digest the significance of such a promise. “But as for your mother … this is your mother now.” She indicated the letters before us, a long line of unnamed letters, their mysteries still unrevealed.
“Your first mother was unfaithful to you.”
I wouldn’t nod my head to that. I knew the commandments even if I could not read them.
“But you mustn’t blame her,” Tsila went on. “All mothers are unfaithful to their daughters.”
Another blasphemy. I felt it in the knotting of my stomach and the flutter in my throat.
Tsila looked at my face and laughed. “You mustn’t close your ears when I tell you the truth.” Her laugh was light, almost kind. “I’m going to tell you many truths. And what I’m going to give you will be faithful. Far more faithful than your mother could be.”
Knowledge, she meant—I understood that. But mine would not be sweet. I had expected honey, but my mouth tasted of bile. Fear and dread, but also excitement mingled on my tongue.
“Knowledge will be your mother,” she said. She took my finger then and pointed to the third letter of the alphabet. “Gimel,” she named it. “For gevurah.” Strength.
CHAPTER THREE
1897
“I CAN’T POSSIBLY MAKE YOUR HAVA A DRESS FROM this material,” I heard Tsila tell the mother of a bride who was to be married on Lag b’Omer, the thirty-third day after Pesach.
Three years had passed, and in that time Tsila hadn’t failed to take time out of her busy days to teach me as she’d promised she would. “Your daughter has a clever head,” Tsila often told my father, pride, if not love, evident in her voice. “But as for her fingers …”
My fingers were clumsy, there was no denying it, and it was hard to know who suffered more during the hours I spent, needle in hand, trying to improve my impossibly sloppy sewing. Tsila, I suspect, for on most days she cut my sewing sessions short, grabbing the fabric from me as if trying to save something precious from butchery and sending me out, in the warmer months, to tend our kitchen garden.
“This material is already spoken for,” Tsila said to Hava’s mother. “And besides, this shade of rose … with Hava’s coloring …” Tsila hesitated, but just barely. “She’ll look like a turnip.”
An unnecessary cruelty. Hava Leibowitz already looked like a turnip—bulbous and yellow, with rings of purple around her eyes. No color she wore, rose or otherwise, could ever affect that.
“What about this?” Tsila offered, unrolling a length of cobalt brocade.
“She’s not a sofa,” Hava’s mother responded. “For whom, may I ask, are you saving the rose?” Her hand, bent with arthritis, reached out to stroke the blushing fabric.
“It doesn’t matter,” Tsila said.
“For Shendel,” Hava’s mother guessed, the other Lag b’Omer bride. Shendel’s match wasn’t as well-off as Hava’s, but neither was he as old. And no one could deny Shendel’s loveliness.
“Hush,” Tsila said. “The rose is too flimsy for the wife of an established businessman.” Hava was marrying a merchant from Pinsk. It was said he smelled strongly of fish.
“So she has to swelter in brocade?” the mother asked.
“A married woman has to get used to discomfort. But look …” Tsila stroked the fabric she was offering. It was a deep blue, dark but luminescent, like a dark sky
rent by lightning.
Hava’s mother touched the fabric. “I wonder,” she said. “I suppose, in the company she’ll be keeping in Pinsk …”
“Flimsy won’t do in such company. This is much better,” Tsila assured her.
“And you’ll have enough for a little hat as well?”
“What, little? In Pinsk she can even get away with a feather or two.”
Tea was poured, a glance cast my way. “How’s the child?” Hava’s mother asked.
Tsila shrugged. She was not a superstitious woman. In fact, she made no secret of her disdain for the backward notions other women subscribed to. Still, it would have been imprudent to invite the evil eye by saying anything positive about me.
“You’re not sending her to Hodel’s with the other girls?” Mrs. Leibowitz prodded.
Hodel Gittleman was a young widow whose husband had been caught on the wrong side of a falling pine in a woodcutting operation, leaving her with four children to raise. In desperation she had started a heder for girls—a first in our town—where she taught the aleph-bes as well as the prayers and blessings and mitzvahs that were incumbent upon women to perform. Girls of all ages attended.
“It might do her some good to get out among the other girls,” Hava’s mother persisted.
“Miriam is sickly,” Tsila said. “She caught enough colds this past winter without sending her to town for more.”
“Still, it might do her good. Nobody sees her anymore, living up here as she does. Weeks go by, a few months—people start to wonder: is there something to hide?”
“I’m not hiding her, as you can plainly see.”
“Still, people love to talk. I don’t have to tell you that. It doesn’t take much.”
“Their talk doesn’t interest me.”
“I’ve heard questions about just what it is you’re teaching the child.”
“And I’ve heard talk that your daughter threatened to kill herself if you forced this match on her.”
They drank their tea in silence. Tsila didn’t offer fruit or sweets. Hava’s mother drained her cup but another wasn’t offered.
“Have Hava come for her fitting,” Tsila said, rising to show Mrs. Leibowitz the door. “The dress can be ready in two weeks.”
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