“How did you come to see Freyde?” Tsila asked with a scowl so deep I wished I had kept my mouth shut.
“Lipsa took me by there on my way home.”
“Did she?”
I nodded, though Tsila’s tone had put me on guard.
“And why do you suppose Lipsa took you by Freyde’s? It wasn’t exactly along your way, was it?”
It wasn’t. Freyde lived down a little side alley, not far out of the way, but certainly not along it.
“Did Lipsa have something to drop off? To pick up?”
No, she hadn’t.
“So why do you suppose, then …?”
Now that Tsila asked me, I could see that there was a bit of oddness here. It’s not as if Freyde was fond of me. The urchin, she called me. Even today, after she had looked me over, she had droned in her deep nasal tones: “I see the urchin is still among us.”
“Clear the table and I’ll tell you something,” Tsila said.
WHEN THEY WERE FIRST MARRIED, AARON LEV FOUND Henye a house in the village. A cheerful house, with whitewashed walls and nice wood shutters and room out back for a little garden.
“You know the house,” Tsila said. “You were just there. Freyde and her family occupy it. It’s not so nice now, of course—she lives like a pig, Freyde does—but at that time there were only two other families in it and they always kept it freshly whitewashed.”
The walls were gray and weather-beaten now, the shutters half rotted, but the garden grew wild with flowers and herbs, and children and chickens filled the yard.
“You could see it was nice once, no?” Tsila asked.
I nodded.
“But Henye wouldn’t have such a house. Do you know why?”
I shook my head.
“It was too noisy for one such as Henye. Quiet, your mother suddenly wanted. She who had refused Aaron Lev at first on account of his silence.”
“She had?”
“Yes, of course. His tongue wasn’t smooth enough for a girl like Henye. She preferred her tongues clamorous and well oiled, but that’s another story. She refused Aaron Lev as if she weren’t an orphan and all alone in the world, as if she could afford to be choosy about a man who would have her. She refused him as if she were suddenly Queen Esther. I’m not saying your mother was above herself—God forbid I should speak in such a way about one who can no longer answer on her own behalf …”
She looked at me to make sure I understood that one could never be too careful in speaking about the departed. I nodded understanding.
“But she did refuse a perfectly good match—she wouldn’t deny that, I’m certain—and with no parents around to force her hand, what could your father do?”
“What did he do?”
“He followed her around. For a year he followed her around. A silent shadow of a man, that’s what Aaron Lev became until finally …” Tsila paused again.
“Do you know when silence grows on a person?” she asked me.
In the world to come, I thought, bleakness replacing any curiosity I had been feeling about my own origins. But Tsila wasn’t leading me to my mother’s death.
“When a person wants to hear her own heartbeat—that’s when she begins to seek silence,” she said.
I remembered the terrible silence that first afternoon Lipsa had brought me to my father’s and left me with Tsila, the sound of my own blood rushing through my veins. The sound of my own life. Terrible.
“ ‘Quiet you’ll have,’ your father said when he saw the house your mother had chosen. Sender the tanner lived here for years—you wouldn’t remember, of course. How could you? Not that there was much to remember. He worked winters, drank summers, and smelled all the while of the rot that would eventually kill him. He died right here in this house, did you know that? Just a year before your brother’s birth. His death was an agony—his whole body black from the rot. That’s the house your mother chose for her married life.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why, I’m not telling you right now. There are theories aplenty, I can assure you. But I’m telling you what now.
“ ‘And what about the times you’re alone?’ your father asked her. Because a shoemaker has to travel for his work, no? Winter months he could be gone the whole week, weeks at a time, even, making his rounds of the neighboring villages, and Henye, all the while, on the edge of the swamp with no one but her thoughts for company. Is such a life right for a young bride? This is what Aaron Lev wondered when he saw the fine house Henye had chosen. This is what everyone wondered. And do you know what your mother answered?” Tsila asked.
I concentrated but could not think what my mother might have answered.
“ ‘I am never alone.’ That’s what your mother answered. I am never alone. Can you imagine such an answer?”
I had no response.
Tsila shrugged. “Who knows what a person hears in her own heart when she finds the silence to listen. Some say it’s dangerous to listen—to what good can it lead? That’s why we don’t live alone like wild animals. We live together, in a community, like human beings.”
“So we won’t listen to our own hearts?”
She looked sharply to see if I was being cheeky, then continued.
“They say your father shouldn’t have let her have her way, that he should have put his foot down as a man properly does and insist she live in the house he had found for her. In a cheerful house, in town, among people. Some even go so far as to suggest that her end is on his shoulders, hence his stoop. I don’t know if Lipsa is among those, but she does blame him. Yes she does,” Tsila said emphatically, waving an impatient hand to silence my protest.
“Why else would she have shown you the house today? What else would she be doing taking you to Freyde’s?”
I didn’t know.
“This is where you should have been born. That’s what Lipsa was telling you. I know how she thinks, that one. Remember this house when you return to the dangerous silence of your father’s. That’s what she fed you today, along with your tea and bread and onions. You washed and said the proper blessings?”
I nodded. “Lipsa didn’t say anything …”
“She didn’t have to. She thinks I’m a fool, but she’s the fool, with all her tricks and sorcery that are useless in the face of fate. Changing your name …” Tsila shook her head as if what Lipsa had done was unusual in some way and worthy of scorn. “A person’s fate is inscribed in her heart,” Tsila said. She took my hand and laid it flat against my chest. “Do you feel your fate?” she asked me. I felt only the strong, steady beat of my heart. “Do you think sorcery and tricks can change what is beating beneath your hand?” she asked me.
Siberia, May 1911
It was my mother I thought of when I first glimpsed Maltzev, her words that rose to save me, filling my mind, guarding its furthest edges, barring the entry of any other thoughts.
I am never alone.
We came to Maltzev from Akatue, the receiving prison of the Siberian katorga, and though I had thought my life was ending when I arrived at Akatue after two difficult months of transport away from all I knew and held dear, Akatue, in retrospect, was like a country inn compared to what awaited us at Maltzev It was summer, first of all, when we arrived at Akatue, and the valley in which the prison sat was green. And when we passed through the outer gates of the prison itself, the courtyard was filled with young people, men and women like ourselves—and children too, I noted with a pang—all calling out their welcome to us. “Welcome, dear comrades,” they called in greeting. “Glory for the fallen and freedom for the living!”
Maltzev, in contrast, we approached in winter. The order came in January, when the frost was most bitter.
Akatue was too crowded in the summer of 1906 for proper discipline to be maintained. All that’s changed now, of course, but in that first summer after the failed revolution, the walls of Akatue and the will of its guards were no match for the spirit of the youth pouring into it in ever increasing numbers
. Within Akatue’s walls, prisoners moved freely, tongues as unshackled as their limbs, exciting themselves with ideas and plans, organizing themselves into communes devoted to the overthrow of tyranny. And then, just before my arrival, Grigor Gershuni managed to escape. Gershuni, the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s Combat Battalion, who had authored so many “daring blows” against the oppressive regime.
Gershuni escaped by hiding in a barrel of sauerkraut that was being carried out of the prison. Prisoners regularly prepared their own sauerkraut for the winter, cleaning and cutting the cabbage and packing it into large barrels for storage. At the bottom of one of those barrels, Gershuni crouched, rubber tubes in his mouth leading to two airholes cut out of the side of the barrel, a metal plate on his head to stop the thrust of the sentry’s bayonet, fermenting cabbage filling the space around him. His comrades carried him to the gate, but it was the guards and soldiers themselves who lowered him into the cellar from which his tunnel to freedom had already been dug.
Reaction was swift: joy and hope among the prisoners, retribution from the jailers. Fifty male prisoners were transferred immediately to Gorni Serentui—the harshness of which was recently made public through the suicide of Yegor Sazonov, a man many once called irrepressible. And then, in winter, the transfer of the women to Maltzev.
Seven days we had to travel to reach Maltzev. We traveled by sleigh—there was no other way—wrapped in skins that kept us alive but not warm. Seven days we traveled across a lifeless landscape where swirling ice and snow were the only movements besides our own. Nights we spent locked in the Siberian étapes—holes so disgusting with vermin and excrement that to breathe their foulness into our lungs was a form of torture as severe as the cold. On the eighth day, Maltzev came into view: a lone gray structure barely rising out of the desolation around it.
“God save us,” Lydia muttered. Lydia the atheist, who was serving ten years for her preachings against God and the Tsar.
“It looks like a lizard,” another whispered. Maria. She was so ill she had to be carried to and from the sleigh at the start and end of every day. Perhaps in her delirium the prison did look like a lizard. Perhaps she mistook the snow all around for the sun-warmed sand where a lizard might survive. Delirium it must have been, for what stood before us was no lizard. Low to the ground, yes, but gray as the face of death. It was no living thing that lay in wait for our arrival that day, but a coffin, a coffin built to entomb us until we could be properly turned into the ground.
“I will not survive this,” I heard myself utter. “With God as my witness, I will not survive this.”
The sleigh had stopped—a momentary break so we could stand up and try to move our freezing limbs. I raised my eyes to my situation. We were surrounded by barrenness, gray and white for as far as the eye could see and beyond. We were three hundred versts from the nearest railroad station, seven days by sleigh from our comrades at Akatue. When I moved out of range of the sound of my companions’ breathing, the silence was so powerful that I felt it as pain. An unendurable pressure in my ears—that’s what I felt, a band tightening around my head, a weight crushing my chest, my lungs, squeezing me from all sides. I raised my hands instinctively to protect myself, but there was no protection.
I stamped my feet, clapped my mittened hands, but as soon as I stood still, silence moved back in around me. It was twilight by then. If I stayed where I was standing I would be dead by nightfall. By morning the moving snow would cover any trace of my physical existence. Already the sweeping snow and darkness had obscured me from my companions. I was utterly alone.
And that’s when I heard her. I am never alone. In a clear, strong voice, those words rose from my core as lava might, filling my chest with heat, spilling inside my head until there was room for nothing else. I am never alone. I am never alone. I am never alone. I couldn’t ponder the meaning of the words, could only grab hold of them as a drowning person might grab blindly for anything within his reach, allowing them to carry me to their source. Down the comforting slopes of their tones I slid, deeper and deeper inside myself. There I found Tsila’s voice, my mother’s words, my own noisy heart—at that moment, sufficient.
CHAPTER FOUR
1900
IT WAS ANOTHER THREE YEARS BEFORE THE COBALT brocade found a woman willing to wear it. Tsila offered it to every bride who walked in the door, but no one wanted to start her marriage in such ill-fated cloth. Emigrants wouldn’t have it either.
“Why not? It’s perfect for New York,” Tsila told Shendel, whose husband, Yehuda, had left for America just weeks after the wedding and had now returned to collect her.
“What do you know of New York?” Shendel asked bitterly. Her sweetness had curdled in the three years since her wedding. Her cries had been so loud on her wedding night that her father had burst through the door of the marital chamber, only to find Shendel fully clothed and weeping over the ticket her husband had thought would be a happy surprise. She hadn’t accompanied him then—she had her mother’s weak nerves—but Yehuda had made good in his new life, so good that he could come back in person to collect his wife and show off his new clothes rather than just send a ticket. “And anyway, it’s not New York he’s taking me to, but Montreal. Canada.”
Tsila pursed her lips. “Then you’ll be happy for a heavier material like brocade.”
At this, Shendel began to weep. “It’s difficult enough leaving my mother, sick as she is. Do I need to wear bad luck on my back as well?”
“Your luck will go with you, whatever you wear,” Tsila said dryly.
“Yes, but I don’t need Hava Leibowitz’s as well.”
No one had seen or heard from Hava since the day she had left. Even the rumors had fallen silent. Her mother’s weeping in the synagogue was the only reminder we had that Hava had ever sojourned among us.
Tsila examined the brocade, frowning at a thread that had come loose, while Shendel held her face in her hands and wept. “The women there don’t even cover their heads,” she wailed. “And he’s happy about that. ‘You’ll grow your beautiful hair back,’ he told me, as if that would make me happy. As if I won’t die of shame first.”
Tsila looked up. “You won’t die of it.” Everyone knew that beneath Tsila’s wig her hair was as long and thick as in her maiden days.
Shendel removed her hands from her face to meet Tsila’s eyes. “Maybe I’d rather die. Maybe I’d rather die than become shameless and … and who knows what else?”
Shendel’s wig had shifted a bit during her weeping fit. Tsila reached over to straighten it and gave Shendel’s wet cheek a quick stroke with her finger. Shendel was still beautiful. The worry and sadness of the past years had eroded some of her fullness, but only to reveal the fine bones of her face. Her eyes, filled with tears, were luminous.
“I’ll make you a nice hat,” Tsila said. “No one can make you take it off. And forget the brocade. It’s not for you. I have a nice soft wool, perfect for Canada.”
I offered tea but nobody heard me. They were poring over the rich brown cloth that complemented, perfectly, the deep cherry tones of Shendel’s skin.
IT WAS BAYLA WHO WANTED THE BROCADE.
“You do?” Tsila asked, suddenly uncertain.
“It’s perfect for me,” Bayla said, holding it up to her bluish white skin.
“It’s actually a bit heavy for you,” Tsila said. Bayla had surprised everyone by taking a job as a shop assistant in Mozyr soon after turning down another match Chippa had brought her. The hours were long—she’d grown very thin—but her face had finally emerged out of what had previously resembled a bowl of milk. Glittering eyes as green as her sister’s, an aquiline nose, and spots of color above high, sharp cheekbones had replaced a featureless pallor.
“And I’m not sure about the color,” Tsila said. “I see you in something a bit brighter, this nice green, perhaps?” The emerald green silk that Tsila held up for her sister was the finest material she had, but Bayla shook her head. She had d
ecided on the brocade, just as she had settled on the bridegroom that she had chosen for herself.
It was unorthodox for a young couple to have arranged their own marriage but not unheard of. The century had turned, even here in our town, and Bayla’s family prided themselves on their enlightened views, so when Shendel’s husband, Yehuda, approached Bayla’s parents to petition on behalf of his cousin, he was not thrown out on his ear.
“He was nicely dressed,” Tsila’s mother, Rosa, reported when she came by for tea the next day. “And though I didn’t trust him—not for a minute—it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to be related through marriage to a family like the Entelmans.”
“Get my mother some cookies,” Tsila told me.
The name of the young man was Leib, Rosa reported, and he had seen Bayla at Shendel and Yehuda’s wedding three years before. He hadn’t seen much at that point—just one glimpse of her, laughing.
“ ‘And since then you’ve seen more?’ I asked Yehuda right away. I didn’t trust him, as I’ve said. Who can trust a man whose first act of married life is to wrench his new bride from her mother?”
“Enough with Yehuda. Tell me about Leib,” Tsila said.
“It seems he’s been courting our Bayla in Mozyr,” Rosa said. Bayla worked long hours in a pharmacy there and came home every Friday afternoon for Shabbes, but somehow she and Leib had found a few free hours, and in those hours they had gone for walks, talked … nothing unseemly, of course, Yehuda had assured Rosa and Avram, as if that even needed to be said with a girl like Bayla.
“And he loves her?” Tsila asked.
“As she apparently loves him,” Rosa answered. “Not an unimportant consideration, after all. And it’s not as if the family is unknown to us.”
“Meaning, if the family is good enough for the Entelmans, who are we to raise concerns?” Tsila snapped.
Rosa didn’t answer, but her face flushed a bit.
“What does he do, this Leib?” Tsila asked.
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