“My mother and Noam?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Entelman said, wiping her brow where the hot tea had raised beads of sweat. “Most assuredly yes. After the visits to their parents’ graves he and Henye would walk for hours along the river, Noam talking and Henye laughing, a laugh so light and silvery that those who heard it never forgot it.” There was another pause now as Mrs. Entelman lay back on her pillow and seemed to listen for that faraway silvery laugh.
I heard it then. Unbidden, it came to me—a laugh sweeter and lighter than any I had ever heard. And with it, a girl took form in my mind. I had not, until then, ever had a clear image of my mother. She had appeared to me always as a shadow, a glimpse of downcast eyes and sunken cheeks, a dark blur that passed through my mind as a cloud scuttles across a summer sky. But as I sat in the afternoon sun of Mrs. Entelman’s room, a light breeze ruffling the curtains by the window, Mrs. Entelman’s spoon tinkling against the fine china of her teacup, I heard my mother’s laughter and with it a girl took form, a slender girl, not much older than myself, with long hair, black as my own, and a narrow face lit by sunlight as she raised it in laughter toward her companion. I closed my eyes and saw him too, a young man, well built and tall, without a hint of a stoop. He was in the high boots of a teamster, riding crop attached but idle at his waist. I watched them walk along the banks of the river, the last rays of the day’s sun filtering through the flickering leaves of the poplars.
Mrs. Entelman sighed heavily. “Your mother understood the commandment to honor one’s parents, a commandment that doesn’t end with their death.”
The river scene faded, but I saw her still, crouched now by the side of a gravestone, her hand lightly brushing its surface to clear it of dirt, her hair falling like a dark veil around her.
“A person’s roots lie where her parents are buried,” Mrs. Entelman said. “We draw our nourishment from the earth they have returned to.
Your mother knew that, even if others seem to have forgotten.” Mrs.
Entelman paused and her eyes misted over as her thoughts turned, perhaps, toward her own daughter, so far away, or toward her own future grave, unvisited and unkept, the earth she would return to nourishing the children of strangers. She shook her head clear and continued. “No, a girl like your mother was not one to walk away from her parents.”
But what about her infant child, still living, I wondered. And the unloved husband? And the man she did love, if a word of what Mrs.
Entelman spoke was true. But Mrs. Entelman made no mention of the living left behind, just the dead, and the laughing girl in my mind was pushed aside by another with lank hair, dull eyes, and a narrow face pale with longing for the dead.
“Was she morbid, then?” I asked Mrs. Entelman.
“Morbid?” The question seemed to make Mrs. Entelman cross. “Is it morbidity now to tend to the graves of your parents?” she asked. “Is this what the enlightened members of our community teach their children?”
I pretended not to have noticed the dig at Tsila, lowering my eyes as I busied myself with Mrs. Entelman’s compress.
WHEN I LEFT MRS. ENTELMAN’S MY HEAD ECHOED WITH her voice and all she had told me, and my body churned with a restlessness that her words had ignited in me, a restless energy bereft of any focus or purpose. I went over to Mrs. Gold’s shop, though I knew it would be hours before Sara was free. The air in the tiny space was close and still, and I had to blink several times to accustom my eyes to the dimness after the brilliant sunlight of the afternoon. Sara was on a stepladder, arranging coils of rope on the highest shelf.
“Can I help you?” Mrs. Gold asked me, her sharp gaze more subduing than a lashing tongue.
“I was hoping to talk to Sara for just a minute,” I explained.
“Sara’s working, as you can see.”
I nodded and began backing out of the store.
“Your stepmother is well?” Mrs. Gold asked.
“Yes,” I lied.
“We never see her anymore. Send her my best.”
I ambled then toward the river, trying to conjure up the image of my mother that had flown so easily into my mind earlier that day, but the memory of her was not my own, and without Mrs. Entelman’s voice to paint it for me I was left only with the unfocused churning of my body. The air remained warm as afternoon gave way to evening. The light that filtered through the trees lining the river was soft and thick, the heat heavy against my skin. I stood and watched the sluggish Pripet, so lazy in its summer flow, the berlinkes with their loads of lumber drifting south to Kiev, then I turned away from the river toward town.
The last vendors in the market were closing up shop for the day. Young men stood in clusters around the edges of the market, spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds as they talked amongst themselves. Pairs of girls paraded hand in hand, their heads inclined toward each other, their free hands shielding their mouths as they whispered secrets to each other. I watched them, feeling my separateness in a way I hadn’t since Sara and I had become friends.
I was just about to turn toward home when Sara came rushing through the lane that led from the street behind the market. “I thought she’d never let me go,” she said. “We had no customers after you left, so she decided we should do inventory.”
“I thought you did inventory last week.”
“We did. And two weeks before that. The less she sells, the more she counts. And it was so hot in there today I thought I’d faint.” Sara projected her lower lip and exhaled sharply to blow away a lock of hair from her eyes, but the hair was plastered by sweat to her forehead. “So how did it go for you? Is she as crazy as they say? I see she let you out early, at least.”
I had wanted to tell Sara everything Mrs. Entelman had said to me, but as I stood before her it was impossible to put any of it into words. “She talks a lot,” I said of Mrs. Entelman.
“That’s what I’ve heard. Too much time on her hands.” Sara took my hand and we began walking away from the market. “I could stand a swim, could you?” she asked as we headed toward the river. There was a spot just outside town where some of the women cooled themselves on especially hot days.
“I have to get home. It’s late already.”
Sara looked at me. “There’s something happening tonight,” she said. “It’s a secret, though.”
“What?” I asked, and Sara explained that a girl she had known in Mozyr was starting a study circle, a new cell of the Bund.
“Right here. In this mudhole,” Sara said, grinning. “I can’t tell you where, but if you meet me at—”
“I can’t,” I said.
“You can’t?” she repeated, more astounded than angry.
“I’m sorry, but Tsila’s been alone all day. It’s hard for her to get things done in her condition, with her swelling. And today was so hot …”
“You don’t even want to attend,” Sara said, angry now. “And here I thought you’d be as excited as I am, honored to even be invited.”
“Of course I want to,” I protested, more out of concern about disappointing Sara than from an honest desire to spend the evening studying after my day at Mrs. Entelman’s. “What are you going to study?” I asked.
“Matters of relevance,” Sara said curtly.
“If I can get away I will,” I promised.
“You won’t get away,” Sara said.
NOAM’S PATH CROSSED MINE AS I WALKED UP THE HILL toward my home. Usually at his approach I would lower my eyes and stand to the side of the road until he had passed, but Mrs. Entelman’s tales that afternoon had infected me with curiosity about the man. I dared to raise my eyes as he passed, hoping to catch a glimpse of the young man by the river who had raised my mother’s silvery laugh.
He was leaning forward on his horse, flicking the animal with his whip but not spurring it to any great speed. He looked at me as he passed, and though I met his gaze with my own, it was not Noam who was revealed to me. I looked him in the face but was aware only of the weight of
my own dark hair on my shoulders and back, the slenderness of my limbs, the darkness of my eyes, the narrowness of my face. I was not the beauty my mother had been, that I had always known, but I wondered now if there was not one part of me at least—a feature of my face, a particular gesture—that might remind him of her.
I nodded my head once, the slightest of movements, a greeting, barely perceptible, the first I had ever accorded to him. Though not one muscle in his face flickered in response, he returned my gesture with a slight nod of his own, briefly bringing his two fingers to touch the peak of his cap.
I walked quickly the rest of the way up the hill. It was almost dark; I should have been home hours ago. Only a band of light remained at the edge of the sky. It seemed particularly luminous, smoldering under the encroaching cover of the night sky. Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the universe who has such as this in thy world, I uttered, pausing to admire it.
With the night had come a cooling of the air, a slight breeze from the marshes that now played against my damp skin and ruffled through my thin cotton dress. I closed my eyes to better enjoy its coolness on my forehead, my arms. I knew I would receive a scolding when I got home on account of my lateness, a scolding sure to worsen with each moment I delayed, but for one moment longer I stood alone on the crest of the hill, my arms outstretched, allowing the evening breeze to gently lift my hair from my neck and brush the surfaces of my skin.
A tale from the Hasidim relates the dilemma of a man trying to enter heaven. Standing before the Heavenly Judge, he recounts all his good deeds but concedes that there was one time when he did, in fact, commit a sin. “I succumbed to the temptation of a woman,” he explains, to which one angel laughs scornfully, asking, “Are you so weak that a woman is enough to make you sin?”
The man is denied entrance to heaven, but the angel too is punished: sentenced to a lifetime on earth as a woman.
“I am that angel,” Henye told Aaron Lev the day they were introduced. “My life on this earth is a punishment.”
“This is how your mother began her life with your father,” Tsila told me as we sat in the heavy darkness of our home. It was late at night and neither of us could sleep. The heat. Our own thoughts. My father was out at a meeting of the self-defense group that the town’s artisans had formed in the wake of the Kishenev massacre, and Tsila and I had lain separately in our hot beds, listening to each other toss and turn until Tsila finally rose to get herself some water.
“Shall I read to you?” I had asked, joining her at the table. She liked me to read the Psalms to her when she couldn’t sleep, but on this night she just fanned herself listlessly and asked what Mrs. Entelman had had to say for herself. I told her and she nodded, as if neither disturbed nor surprised to hear talk of my mother and Noam.
“Did she tell you what happened then?” Tsila asked. “The great charity she and her sister Zelda performed for the orphan Henye?”
I shook my head no and leaned against the warm wall of the house as Tsila began to speak.
“The introduction between Henye and Aaron Lev was arranged by Zelda Chayvitz,” Tsila told me.
I knew Zelda, of course. She was the wife of Feivel the butcher and younger sister to Yitta Entelman, my new employer. Less high-strung than her older sister, and not as lucky in marriage, Zelda’s reputation in the town rested on the work she did for those less fortunate than herself. It was said that as a young girl she had felt an ache in her shoulders, a heaviness that she had come to recognize early on as the pain of others, and that her own good fortune held no pleasure for her if she could not share it with others. “A saint,” some said about her, and certainly the matchmaker did when Zelda reached marriageable age. And had there been a supply of saints looking for brides at the time, who knows what kind of match she might have made? As it happens, only ordinary young men were available, and so she married Feivel from down the street.
“Zelda was a great friend of Perla Zuptnik’s. Did you know that?” Tsila asked me.
I shook my head no, uncertain who Perla Zuptnik even was.
“Oh, yes,” Tsila said. “A great friend. It was a childhood friendship—they were the same age and lived across the lane from each other. My father lived in the same laneway and says you never saw one without the other.
“Zelda was the stronger. She was taller than Perla—a full head taller—but it wasn’t just her height. She had an urge to arrange people’s lives, Zelda did. Even then. And Perla, I suppose, had an urge to be arranged. Some people do. Zelda could be heard all day long giving Perla directions about all manner of things—how to sit so as to be more modest, how to stand. Once—they couldn’t have been more than nine or ten at the time—my father even overheard Zelda choosing names for all of Perla’s future children.”
Tsila met my eye and shrugged at the thought.
“The bonds forged between them endured into adulthood, and although they no longer lived across the lane from each other as they had as girls, they didn’t live far and one could usually be found in the kitchen of the other, their laughter rising up as it always had. The difference being that now the babies they dangled on their knees were their own firstborn rather than their little brothers and sisters.
“When Perla fell ill, just three years into her married life, Zelda was in constant attendance, and on Perla’s deathbed Zelda made a vow to watch over Perla’s only child, Noam, as if he were her own, and to do whatever she could to ease his way through this life.”
“Noam the teamster?” I asked.
“That’s right. But listen now. The vow took just a moment to pass Zelda’s lips, but the honoring of it was to tax her for many years to come, since Noam, who was just a little toddler at the time of his mother’s death, grew into exactly the sort of ruffian Zelda preferred her own children to avoid. A lesson to always be careful what you promise.”
I nodded.
“Poor Zelda,” Tsila sighed. “She tried to be understanding. ‘A boy without a mother is bound to be a little wild,’ she would say in the first years after Perla’s death. Especially with a father like that. Zelda had never liked Chaim, you see. She had never understood how her sweet Perla could lie with such roughness. She shuddered every time she saw Chaim’s coach go flying by with Noam on the bench beside his father, a whip in his innocent hand instead of a tractate of Talmud, and she made sure to buy holy books for Noam whenever the bookseller came through town. Also, never did she allow a Friday to pass when she didn’t stop by the child’s home with a couple of challahs and some of her own gefilte fish so that Noam and his father could at least have a proper Shabbes.
“In such a way did Zelda try to honor her vow to Perla, and at first, Chaim didn’t stand in her way. He accepted Zelda’s offerings, even asking her in for a glass of tea on occasion. After his accident, however, Chaim didn’t want to be seen by anyone who had known him in his strength—he could hardly be blamed—and Noam stood in the doorway when Zelda called, blocking her entrance. He had become a large young man. There was none of Perla in his build. And Zelda’s heart sank to see the beginning of a hardening in his eyes.”
Tsila paused here to drink a little before continuing.
“In the summer of 1884, fifteen years after Perla’s death, the sound of laughter reached Zelda’s ears as she walked by the river. It was light laughter, pleasant; it lifted one’s spirits just to hear it. Zelda found herself lingering by the riverside to enjoy the warm fragrance of the summer evening that just moments before she hadn’t even noticed. As darkness fell, she saw a young couple emerge from the wooded path that followed the river.
“ ‘Good evening, Mrs. Chayvitz,’ they greeted her.
“ ‘Good evening,’ Zelda answered. She noted the glow that lit Noam’s face, the answering shine of Henye’s eyes.
“Now, Zelda is not a hard woman, but neither is she impractical. Henye was a poor orphan with nothing to bring to a marriage but her shining eyes, and Noam was the son of her great friend to whom she had made a bindi
ng vow. It was not cruelty that impelled Zelda. So she would claim. It was loyalty. Loyalty to her dead friend and to her own vow.
“ ‘Maybe you should just let things be,’ her husband, Feivel, suggested. ‘She’s supposed to be a good girl, this Henye, a nice girl. And so pretty. And Noam’s had such heartache, why shouldn’t he have a pretty wife?’
“ ‘Would you have her for our own sons?’ Zelda asked.
“ ‘Our circumstances are different,’ Feivel pointed out.
“ ‘I promised Perla I’d look out for him as for one of my own.’
“ ‘But he’s not your own,’ Feivel said. ‘Do you think parents are lining up to marry off their precious daughters to him? Do you think he’s such a great catch, with no education, a crippled father, and a mother with such weak lungs that she died of a cold?’
“ ‘It wasn’t a cold,’ Zelda argued. ‘It was pneumonia.’
“ ‘Who’s to say that this Henye isn’t the best he’ll find? Who are you to judge such things?’ This is what her husband asked.
“Zelda didn’t answer, but Feivel’s arguments had swayed her a little. She decided she would speak to the girl, just speak to her. If Henye clung to Noam after that, then that would be God’s will. Of course, if she desisted, then that too was God’s will.
“Zelda approached her in the early evening, at the hour when she knew Henye would be making her way to the graveyard for her nightly visit with her parents. Zelda placed herself on the same path at the same time. ‘Good evening,’ she said.
“ ‘Good evening, Mrs. Chayvitz,’ Henye responded. She was a pretty girl, your mother was, there’s no denying that, and her manners were good.
“ ‘A lovely evening,’ Zelda said.
“Henye smiled pleasantly, and Zelda felt her resolve waver. Who knew what was best, she asked herself. It’s well known that a person’s husband or wife is determined forty days before their birth. Could she really be certain that Henye wasn’t the one who had been chosen for Noam? Who was she, Zelda Chayvitz, to tamper with fate? This is what she asked herself. Or so she later claimed. She was about to bid the girl good evening again and be on her way when a vision of Perla filled her mind: Perla as a young mother, her round face glowing with pleasure as she bent over her baby boy and tickled his belly, ‘You’ll be my little scholar,’ Perla cooed as she tickled him. ‘You’ll marry a rabbi’s daughter.’ She kissed his belly. ‘You’ll have ten healthy sons, each of them a scholar.’ The baby shrieked with delight.
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