“This is a concern,” Rosa admitted. “His parents run a dry-goods store in Bialystok, but he’s not working there, is he? He’s come to live in Mozyr. ‘And to do what, exactly?’ I asked the cousin.
“ ‘He works at the match factory,’ the cousin answered, and this didn’t sit well with me. A boy who travels some distance from his home to a town smaller and more provincial than where he started out … and all to work at a factory renowned mostly for the foulness of its air?”
“Nu?” Tsila prodded.
“Apparently he’s a teacher,” Rosa said.
“A teacher who has to work in a factory?” Tsila asked.
“Exactly my concern. Your father’s too. ‘A teacher?’ your father asked. ‘What, does Bialystok no longer have a Talmud Torah or gymnasia?’
“ ‘Of course it does, a large center like that,’ the cousin answered, but then he went on about how teachers they also have a lot of, how everywhere you look in Bialystok there are teachers, a glut of teachers, if you will. And on he went about how times like these require a certain flexibility, about how a man has to be willing to move to where the work is, not sit around waiting for it to come to him. ‘Look at me,’ he told us. ‘I had to cross an entire ocean to follow my course—’
“ ‘The ocean, yes,’ I interrupted him. ‘That particular current leads to opportunity, it’s well known. But the Pripet River? Our Pripet River?”
“So what, Mamma?” Tsila interrupted. “Did you and Papa give your permission?”
“Are you going to offer me more tea today, or not?”
I rose, embarrassed, to refill her glass.
“I asked this Yehuda what it is that this cousin of his likes so much about my daughter,” Rosa said. “A good question, I think, and unexpected. He had been prepared, it was obvious, to assure us of Leib’s capacity to support Bayla, to impress us with his learning. But now, to have to explain what it was about Bayla that had captured his cousin? And do you know what he said?”
“How would I know?”
“He said, ‘There was a moment at the wedding when she laughed, an instant just before her hand flew up to cover her mouth …’ As if the unguarded laughter of a young woman is suddenly the proper basis for a marriage.” Rosa paused at this to meet her daughter’s eyes. “And it was at that moment that your father took out the shot glasses.”
“What?! What was he thinking? Is he so desperate to marry her off that …” But here Tsila stopped. Something in her mother’s expression, perhaps. “It wasn’t just Papa, was it?”
“I wasn’t smiling like your father was, but neither did I restrain his arm from pouring the brandy.”
“But why, Mamma? Are you also so desperate …?”
“It has nothing to do with desperation,” Rosa said.
“What, then?”
“She is not without spirit, my Bayla,” Rosa said quietly. “I’m glad she found someone who can see it.”
TWICE A WEEK THAT SPRING, TSILA SENT ME DOWN TO the swamp. On Mondays and Thursdays, the very days of the workweek when the Torah was read as part of the morning service, she filled my apron pocket with samples of the roots and barks that she needed for her dyes, filled my head with warnings, and sent me on my way.
“And you won’t forget the reeds?” she would call after me, as if an afterthought, though that was the real reason for the excursions: the white-centered reed that put babies in married women’s wombs. Six years had now passed since Tsila’s wedding day and still she had no baby to show for it. She didn’t complain about her plight or utter special prayers, nor did she consult with Breina, who specialized in removing curses and dispensing advice about the evil eye; but the spring of Bayla’s engagement, Tsila began eating those white-centered reeds with a devotion she had previously reserved only for her dressmaking. All day long, while she cleaned, while she cooked, while she taught me my lessons, while she sewed her dresses—no matter how busy her hands were, she was always able to steal an instant from her work to pop a bit of the breadlike substance into her mouth. Only when she heard my father’s returning footsteps at the end of the day did her mouth stop working and the reeds return to the darkness of the pantry.
I was not afraid of the swamp. In this I was different from the others of the town. It was not that I was not aware of the swamp’s snakes and bandits and prowling gray mists, but those perils paled, somehow, next to the shame I had begun to feel on my trips into town. It was the whispers of other girls that I feared, the murmurs and turned heads that my appearance prompted.
Just look at her, I heard them whisper. Me, they meant, as if the separateness of my life was engraved on my face for all to see. I held my head high as Tsila had instructed me, looking neither right nor left, but that seemed only to sharpen the tongues. Proud, like her stepmother—and of what? It isn’t pride, I wanted to cry out. Didn’t I know more deeply than they my shameful beginnings, the unloveliness of my face? The marriage is barren, no surprise there, a young housewife would contribute. Barren as a rock, but still she finds cause to act proud. And the emptier her womb, the higher she holds herself, another would comment. That poor Aaron Lev—the luck that man has had with wives. The higher she rises in her own mind, the lower he stoops under the weight of her. Just yesterday my David saw him crawling home and mistook him for a worm.
Such were the greetings I received in town. They shouldn’t have bothered me, perhaps. They didn’t bother Tsila—ignorant boors, she called the town gossips—but I had been shaped from different forces than had Tsila. The cold indifference that had greeted my birth, the averted eye of my mother as I hung naked in the midwife’s grasp had chilled me so deeply that I craved warmth, sought it from every gaze that came my way, warmth and reassurance that were rarely forthcoming.
Have you seen her neck? one of the girls would whisper. It’s marked by death, she would add, referring to the scar on my neck, the point at which—according to the town’s yentas—death had been forced to retreat from me and would, at some point, reenter to claim me. More whispers would follow, a gauntlet of whispers through which I had to pass to reach the center of town.
For this reason, the swamp seemed kinder to me at that time than the town. If it was true that it harbored the spirits of the dead in its mists, then those spirits did not seem to mean me any harm. If anything, I felt they were welcoming me, rising to greet me, wrapping themselves around me to escort me safely into the swamp.
I quickly learned the paths of the place, the sandy tracks that wound past thickets of nettles and hemlock, and the spongier trails that led to the bog. I found the firm footholds, the dry hillocks carpeted in moss, the groves of aspen that fed the match factories of the towns. I knew the pools of black water from which skeletal hands might rise to pull an onlooker in, and the clear channels where fresh water flowed. In the channels were snakes, and giant water bugs floated on the top, but the water, when I scooped a handful into my mouth, was clearer and sweeter than any in the village.
The swamp was not a quiet place, but the sounds that filled the air were the buzzings of insects, the croakings of frogs, the calls of wild ducks in flight overhead. Only rarely did I hear human voices. Sometimes it was the voices of boys from neighboring villages laughing and calling to each other as they fished and played in the channels. Other times it was the deeper voices of men on their way to lumbering operations or the makeshift camps of vagrants and beggars that were sprinkled throughout the region. I didn’t want to meet the embodiments of these voices, but neither was I afraid. When they seemed too loud, too close, or too drunken in tone it was easy enough to duck into a shrub off the path and avoid being seen.
Only once that spring did someone actually surprise me on the trail. It was a boy, not much older than I. He was alone and so light in his step that I didn’t hear him until he was almost upon me.
“Aaiee,” I exhaled, surprise and fear filling me until I realized he was just a lone boy, and a sickly one at that.
“I’m sorry,” he m
urmured. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
His voice was gentler than any I had ever heard, beautiful to my ears, but his face was unpleasant to behold: clammy skin, gray in tone, eyes yellow where the whites should be, teeth already blackening in his mouth. “Are you ill?” I asked him, just to hear his voice again, but forcing myself to look at his face as well, knowing the pain an averted gaze could cause.
“Not very,” he said. He looked me in the face for a long time, as if trying to find something there. I smiled, and color rose to his cheeks. He glanced then at the small bundle of reeds I had gathered and took one. Before I could stop him he had split it open, the precious white center discarded on the path. He brought the reed to his mouth and blew into the hole he had made, and through that absence came a single note, a tone of pure sorrow. Then he lowered the reed and slipped past me.
“Wait,” I called out to him, but he was already quickly moving away from me and soon dropped out of sight.
“IT WAS PROBABLY YOUR IMAGINATION,” TSILA SAID when I told her about it later, but her face darkened and the next time I went to gather her reeds, she came with me.
“Do you think it was my brother?” I asked her. He was the age Yaakov would have been by now and he had the look of someone who had died years before.
“Don’t be silly,” Tsila said sharply.
“I’m not silly,” I said. “His face was gray, his eyes were yellow—”
“Were his teeth not black?” she interrupted.
“Exactly,” I said.
“Exactly,” she mimicked me. “Don’t you know the teeth of the dead don’t rot? It’s only the travails of this life that rot the teeth out of our heads. The teeth of the dead are always strong,” she said. The boy was nothing to be afraid of.
“I wasn’t afraid,” I answered. My meeting with the boy had consoled me. Though I’d felt a shock when I first looked at his face, that first shock had soon given way to recognition. Here, finally, was another being like myself, it seemed, someone more at home in the swamp than among his people. And there was that gentleness in his voice when he apologized for scaring me—when had I ever felt the caress of such gentleness before?—as if he immediately recognized a fineness in me that no one else had ever noticed. And the sorrow I had heard when he raised the reed to his lips, my own life, it seemed, distilled to a single thread of sound.
“Where was it you met this unfortunate?” Tsila asked.
I led her to the place where he had overtaken me.
“You shouldn’t be here anyway,” she said, though the place I had taken her to was not different from other areas of the swamp. “Look how stunted the reeds are,” she pointed out, and I could see that they were, though all around them other vegetation grew lush and thick. “The soil must be sour here.”
I pointed out the willows flourishing nearby.
“What nourishes one species sometimes chokes another,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to put into my mouth anything choked by such soil.” Then she hurried to remove us from that place.
I asked her what it was about the reed that would help her have a baby, and she revealed to me, as we walked home, the mystery of conception as related in the Talmud. The mother provided the red parts of the body, she explained. Blood, muscle, hair, the dark of the eye—all that came from the woman’s monthly blood, the same blood that would soon start flowing out from my own body and would one day flow into a new being forming within me. The father provided the white parts: bones, teeth, the white of the eye, the tissue of the brain. This came from a liquid that only men could produce.
“But all that is simply matter,” Tsila hastened to add. “Lifeless sinew and flesh. It’s the Creator Himself who breathes life and spirit into every new being, He who puts sight in our eyes, intelligence in our brains, expression in our faces, and motion into our muscles and limbs. The soul,” Tsila said. “Without which there is no life. The soul is the salt of the body, the preserver of flesh. The moment it departs, the flesh rots away.”
My mind filled now with red and white: flesh and bones and teeth and blood, all woven together, in my case, by one thin thread of sorrow. Was that all my soul was, one thin thread? How would such a flimsy soul be strong enough to sustain my body? We walked farther and farther from where I had met the boy, and I felt the lengthening and shortening of my muscles, the beat of my heart, the flow of my blood, red and warm, coursing to the farthest reaches of my limbs. Was not the strength of my body and warmth of my blood also part of my soul? The movement in the muscles and limbs, Tsila had said. And the intelligence of the brain. Which meant my thoughts and ideas, the questions that formed so continually in my mind as we walked that it was only when we reached the bridge back to town that I remembered my original question: the reed that I gathered for Tsila, the white-centered reed. I asked how that would help her have a baby. Tsila stopped walking and leaned on the railing of the bridge. I leaned with her, staring into the placid waters of the Pripet. A fish jumped, flashing silver and light.
“An injury to the soul affects the flesh, just as injury to the flesh can crush the soul,” she explained. “In the matter of conception …” Here she hesitated. “Sometimes when a man has sustained an injury of a certain sort, there’s a shortage of white matter he can contribute.”
I didn’t ask what sort of injury my father had sustained. It was the reeds I turned my mind to. Would the reeds I provided be sufficient to remedy my father’s problem? I had been careless about where I had gathered them, not understanding the role they had to play. How many had I gathered that were withered or stunted or otherwise lacking in white matter? I knew I would have to make another trip to the swamp as soon as possible to replace any of Tsila’s store that seemed inferior.
TWO DAYS LATER, ON SHABBES AFTERNOON, I WAS WALKing along a path in the swamp that connected Mozyr to Kalinkovich. It wasn’t an easy route—you had to know how to follow its bends and when to emerge onto the main road to avoid an expanse of bog. It was used mostly by vagrants or others who had some reason to stay off the main road, and I had chosen it precisely because it was so little used. I did not want to be seen on Shabbes carrying an armful of reeds; what I was doing was a violation of the day.
I expected total solitude, or at most a vagrant as anxious to remain invisible and anonymous as I was, so it surprised me to see a young couple taking their Shabbes afternoon stroll there. The girl was small and nicely groomed, except for her hair, which she had cut short like the young radicals who had been coming more frequently through town. It was she who was talking as they walked toward me, her hands gesticulating as if she couldn’t trust her mouth alone to make her point. The man was tall and well built, with strong limbs and wide shoulders and masses of thick black hair. He was bent toward his companion as if to better hear what she was saying, but he wasn’t as attentive as he was making out to be. His dark eyes were flitting nervously at the wilderness around him, which is how they lit on me, crouching behind a shrub, pulling at a reed.
“Excuse me, little sister,” he addressed me. “Is this the right way to Mozyr?”
“Have I not told you this is the way?” his companion scolded him. “Don’t you trust me anymore?”
He didn’t answer her, did not even acknowledge that she had spoken. He kept his dark eyes locked on mine, so I could not look away had I tried. “This is the way,” I told him, and pointed in the direction that his companion had been taking him. Released by his gaze now, I glanced at the young woman. Her complexion had the sallowness of a match-factory worker, but her eyes had a brightness that animated her face. “Thank you,” she said to me as they continued on their way.
“So, my little Golda, am I to trust you now?” I heard him ask in a teasing tone as they walked on. The rest of their words were muffled by the growing distance between us.
Siberia, July 1911
In the evenings we are silent, a self-imposed silence so as not to disturb the sleep of our companions who have retired early to their cots. We sit a
round the table at the center of which burns our petrol lamp. In the winter we are wrapped in blankets—a dozen well-wrapped figures huddled over their books and papers. On a summer evening like tonight, though, we sit uncovered, our bodies a little straighter for the reprieve from the gnawing cold.
We begin our silence after the evening inspection, when the door to our cell is locked for the night. This is a difficult time: the moment when the key turns, completing our isolation from the living world, the plusnge into silence that follows. In that moment I see the panic that rises in the eyes around me. We are young, were once hopeful. We expected fire, revolution, perhaps a martyr’s death. Never this monotony, this slow rot, this silence in which they have entombed us. I feel the tightening of my own skull as I struggle to regain the composure necessary to survive. This is the moment that madness seeks its entry.
Madness, hunger, and cold. Each is our mortal foe, but it is madness we fear most. It hovers in the room, always, like the deadliest of vapors. By day we keep it at bay. Our tightly honed discipline, the intensity of our focus—with these we push it into the corners of the room. But in the transitional moments—the descent into quiet at night, the waking from dreams in the morning—it surges full-strength from the margins to which we’ve banished it, brushing up against each of us in turn to find a weakness it can penetrate.
I feel its touch on the back of my neck, its weight on my chest. My heart beats rapidly, my thoughts begin to race. Fragments of memory fly through my head: Tsila’s face, my father’s eyes, your tiny hand closing around my finger. Faster and faster these images assault me until I know my head will burst from them. I will not survive this, I tell myself. With God as my witness, I will not survive this. But my head does not burst despite what it knows, and my heart, despite what it feels, does not break apart in my chest. I force myself to the table. There, eleven sets of eyes meet my own. Natasha’s eyes are wide and dark with fear. Lydia pulls a chair up close beside her and tries to draw her attention to a book of mathematics, a subject that never used to fail to harness her thoughts. I pull out this notebook, dip my pen in the ink. Out the window behind Natasha’s bent head the half-moon of Tammuz rises over the prison wall.
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