“ ‘Henye, forgive me,’ Zelda said to the girl before her. ‘I know you’re a fine girl, and I mean you no insult.’
“She did nothing underhanded, employed no forceful measures. She simply explained her dilemma, describing the scene with Perla and Noam that had just replayed in her mind, the hopes that Perla had harbored for her only son, Noam. Would Henye have Zelda betray her vow to her dying friend, she wondered aloud. Would Henye deny a dead woman’s wishes for her son’s future?
“Of course she wouldn’t. Not Henye. She was unswervingly faithful to the dead.”
“Morbid?” I interrupted.
“It could be said,” Tsila answered.
“Orphaned at three, her ensuing years had been dismal, her life a torment of loneliness until, at the age of seven, her parents had come to her to reveal that her purpose on this earth was to remember them. She had not been asleep when her parents came but fully awake, breaking the spines of feathers at Elke’s—Elke the Feather Plucker, who took her in and put her to work when no other living relative came forth to claim her. She felt her parents before she saw them: a flush of warmth despite the damp of Elke’s basement apartment, a feeling of peace that quieted even the rumbling of her empty stomach. Their faces, when they did reveal themselves, were peaceful, unperturbed despite the misery of their daughter’s conditions. They saw the cramped, cold house in which she lived and worked, her hunger, the monotony of her days, but they did not weep for her or stretch out their arms to reclaim her at last. “Remember us,” they pleaded, and she understood why she had been left behind to suffer this life.
“And suffer she did until one evening when she was fifteen years old her eyes met Noam’s across the rows of gravestones. She felt a jolt then unlike anything she had experienced before. A current, not unpleasant, filled her body. It was life, of course, and despite her allegiance to the dead, she welcomed it. She did not forget her parents, but alongside their memory something new flared within her: hope that there might be a place for her in this life after all. Had she betrayed her parents with this hope, she wondered now as Zelda stood before her. How else could she understand this strange intrusion of Zelda’s into her life?”
“ ‘An alternative bridegroom will be found for you,’ Zelda assured her. ‘A dowry arranged.’ ”
Tsila took another sip of water, then continued.
“Aaron Lev and Henye were not strangers to each other. They had not spoken but their eyes had met, more than once. Aaron Lev had to pass Elke’s house twice a day, don’t forget, on his way to and from his work. Still, Henye seemed hesitant. Zelda found herself inquiring about conditions at Elke’s. She was a difficult employer, was she not? Then Zelda wondered aloud whether a position in her sister’s house—Mrs. Entelman’s house—might not interest Henye. Just that day her sister, Yitta, had been talking to her about needing a new maid.
“Henye was afraid now. From Elke’s to Mrs. Entelman’s? From a feather plucker to a maid in the finest house in town, all for giving up Noam and marrying another? Surely such a turn of events could only come from beyond the grave. She had obviously offended her parents, betrayed them with her love for Noam. They had interceded, sent this woman …
“ ‘For light work,’ Zelda was saying. ‘Nothing too heavy …’
“ ‘I’m used to hard work,’ Henye murmured. She was sixteen years old and had spent her life amidst the carcasses of chickens. She had heard Mrs. Entelman’s rooms were filled with lilacs even in winter.”
“She gave Noam up for a job as a maid?”
“You ask that with the disdain of one who has never known a moment of material hardship,” Tsila said. I flushed deeply as she continued.
“That Henye saw her life on this earth as punishment did not disturb Aaron Lev. Was his own life such a reward? Had he not lost his own parents to the same epidemic that had taken Henye’s? He felt a kinship with the girl. He thought he could protect her, ease her sojourn on this earth.”
“He loved her?”
“He felt a kinship. And Henye too felt a kinship when she met Aaron Lev, but it was, unfortunately, one she instinctively shrank from. She recognized the yearning in his eyes, the sadness, and she quickly looked away. Eyes like quicksand, she told her friends. Were she to stare too long she would drown in the mire of his melancholy.”
“She didn’t love him.”
“But she would have him for her husband; he was her parents’ choice. He was sent to her through their chosen messenger, Zelda Chayvitz—that Henye entirely believed.”
“She never loved him?”
“She tried. She talked softly to him at their first meeting. She talked, but Aaron Lev didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He saw something in her eyes. Something hard glittering deep within her eyes. She looked away, but he had already seen it. He tried to speak, to answer her questions—he knew she was waiting—but as he met the eyes of his prospective bride, words fled from his mind.
“ ‘He doesn’t speak,’ Henye said to Mrs. Entelman when asked how she had found Aaron Lev.
“ ‘He who curbs his tongue shows sense,’ Mrs. Entelman said, quoting from the Book of Proverbs, but your mother didn’t know from Proverbs. She asked for a release from the betrothal. It was granted and she ran away, to Mozyr, only to come crawling back a few months later. They were married before Chanukah. Your poor brother was born the following summer.”
I imagined the wedding, Henye looking into the muddy eyes of her bridegroom and Noam’s eyes rising up in her mind, hard as diamonds and full of light. Aaron Lev meeting her gaze and seeing it again: that glitter in her that strangled his tongue with doubt. And Henye looking away, losing the path through this life that Noam might have cut for her with his hard, glittering eyes.
Siberia, September 1911
At first the letters from Bayla were frequent and full of complaints. “Not that Shendel is an unkind employer,” she would say. “She’s actually more generous than I expected her to be. Perhaps because she’s happy. They say happiness brings out the best in a person, though my own life hasn’t provided the occasion to test that particular hypothesis.”
Yes, Bayla reported, Shendel Entelman Zalman was happy in her new life in Montreal. While her home was not quite the mansion Yehuda had promised—not yet, Yehuda would admonish—there were other compensations. Yehuda, for one. Shendel had known before her marriage that her husband-to-be was a handsome man. That anyone could see. And she had assumed he would provide well—her father, Lazer, could sniff out business acumen in another man with the accuracy of a village dog sniffing out a breeding female. But it was his softness toward her, she had told Bayla, that had been her happiest surprise when she finally joined him in Montreal, the gentleness of his voice when he wished her good morning, the tenderness in his face when he opened his arms to her at the end of the day.
That and her own newly discovered strength. She had set up house in her new country quickly, and with an ease she would never have suspected of herself. She had learned a new language, new ways, had borne two children, then a third—and all the while showing no hint of the nervous weakness that she had assumed would plague her all her life.
“She would never admit it, of course,” Bayla wrote. “She would claim until she’s blue in the face, in fact, that the pain she suffers about missing her mother is like a knife through her heart every day of her life, but the truth is, with each added day she puts between herself and her mother she seems stronger and more assured than before. Or could it be the distance from her father? I wonder. In any event, she’s a different Shendel from the one we once knew. Do you know she sings out loud now? Men or no men. Her voice rings out so clear and loud when she’s puttering in the kitchen that you’d think she’s forgotten that the voice of woman is a temptation to sin. And she’s stopped covering her hair. Can you believe it? Our Shendel, the most pious of the pious. The minute she realized that that’s what the smart women do here and that no one was going to talk too badly about her, she pulled off h
er wig and grew her own hair out. And guess what? The sky didn’t fall. This she told me. Which I could have told her years ago. Which, in fact, we tried to tell women like her years ago, and what were we rewarded with? Fear, scorn, and insults.”
As for Bayla, though, the picture wasn’t so rosy. She didn’t mean to complain, of course, but the tasks she was expected to perform, the maid’s uniform that she had to wear, she, Bayla Rubin Zalman, an educated woman. “The only comfort I take is that I’m keeping your Hayya safe for you. I have to keep up the pretense that she’s mine, of course. Even to her. It pains me to do it—and especially when I see hints of you in her features and manner—but what choice do I have? Shendel is kind, but I’m in no position to test the limits of her kindness. What if in a moment of forgetfulness little Hayya were to give herself away? Maids are not so scarce here that Shendel needs to keep one who comes equipped with someone else’s illegitimate daughter. Not that I believe Hayya is illegitimate, of course. All children, no matter what their origins, are legitimate. This I believe. But does Shendel? Even in her newly expansive state of mind? Our material security—mine and Hayya’s—is still too precarious to risk finding out that she doesn’t.”
Then Bayla would apologize for using the word precarious in reference to her material situation when my own was so much worse. “Yet as unpleasant as your situation is in a material sense, spiritually you are so much more elevated than I am,” she went on. “Not that I for one minute romanticize your situation—I think the events of the last years have stripped me of the last of my romantic notions—but when I dress in the morning, when I put on the black dress and white apron of the serving classes, I am more demeaned than I would be in any prison uniform. This I believe.”
We don’t wear uniforms here at Maltzev except when we are expecting outside officials for a prison inspection. But I haven’t told Bayla this.
“To think that after all we dreamed and put ourselves through, I should end up a maid in a wealthy household, no better off than an impoverished orphan like your mother—not that I am in any way a better or more worthy person than one such as your mother. But still, when I look at my situation, the larger situation …” (This she leaves for me to fill in to avoid censor by the prison officials.) “I have to ask myself what it was all about. I know I shouldn’t think that way. It does me no good. It’s important to look forward in life, never back—you know how strongly I believe that—but I can’t seem to help it. I lie awake in the stifling heat—it’s a hot summer, and our attic bedroom has not so much as a hint of cool air. I toss and I turn and I think of all we went through and for what? This is what I ask.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1903
I WAS HAPPY WORKING FOR MRS. ENTELMAN, HAPPY TO rise with the sun each day and walk alone down the hill into town in the fresh morning air, to have a glass of tea in the light-filled kitchen with Ghitel, then spend the day dusting and cleaning and attending to Mrs. Entelman. I was happy, also, to feel the weight of the coins Mrs. Entelman paid me heavy in my pocket as I lingered in town waiting for my evening walk with Sara before returning home.
On one such evening Freyde called out to me from her stall, offering me a special price for her last dozen bagels of the day.
“A special price for the high-class wage earner,” she called, and a flush of embarrassment swept over me. It was a source of amusement to Freyde and other women in town that Tsila’s educated stepdaughter was working as a maid for Yitta Entelman.
“A special price for staleness, you mean,” I responded.
“Impudent girl,” Freyde said, but when I bought one of her bagels she told me to sit and keep her company while I ate it.
I hesitated—since when did Freyde seek the pleasure of my company?—but my legs were tired, and I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast.
“So?” Freyde asked the moment I sat down. “How do you find her?”
Mrs. Entelman, she meant, whose unhappiness despite her husband’s great wealth was always a popular topic for discussion. Who would squander such good luck by drowning herself in unhappiness, people wondered. If ever such good fortune should land in one of their lives, even a fraction of such good fortune, you wouldn’t find them lying in bed moaning. But then, who could say? Wasn’t wealth known to weaken the character? I should be so cursed, someone would comment. Never mind the wealth, it’s that husband, Freyde would drone, her words producing a round of knowing nods, because Mr. Entelman, while not unkind to his wife, was not unkind to other women either. There were few in the town who had not felt the heat of Lazer Entelman’s appraising gaze, and though no one would admit it, there was something in his gaze that compelled one to return it, a concentrated energy in his face that drew one’s own. Freyde’s sigh was always the deepest as she compared the gray blur of features that comprised her own husband, Sender, a seller of pots, with the darting black eyes of Mr. Entelman, the white teeth that glittered beneath his curled mustache. “That poor woman,” she would sigh. “Poor woman,” the others would agree, their spines tingling all the while at the memory of their most recent glimpse of Mr. Entelman.
“Are her bedclothes made of satin?” Freyde wanted to know. And did I find her as soft in the head as they said? And her attitude … it was said she was haughty to those she considered beneath her. Freyde’s hands were already on her hips in indignation at my possible mistreatment.
I chewed my bagel slowly, offering whatever bit of gossip might prolong Freyde’s newfound interest in my well-being. No, Mrs. Entelman didn’t treat me badly, I answered, and yes, her head was perhaps a bit soft, I said, describing the odd way Mrs. Entelman had of staring at me as I arranged flowers or dusted, as if she had forgotten for a moment who I was or why I was there. But her head didn’t seem nearly as soft as her hands, which looked like they had never done anything more strenuous than wring each other in anguish.
“Soft hands, hard heart,” Freyde commented, as if callouses had suddenly created an epidemic of kindheartedness among our town’s working people. I said I’d not found Mrs. Entelman’s heart to be particularly hard.
“Just wait,” Freyde warned me, but enough of Mrs. Entelman. Had I heard that Mrs. Leibowitz, Hava’s mother, had been seen returning from one of the neighboring peasant villages late that afternoon?
“From whom would I have heard?” I asked.
“It was your own father who found her. On the most deserted of roads. He picked her up immediately, of course, and brought her safely home, but I’m sure he could scarcely believe his eyes when he first saw her. Imagine a Jewish woman alone on such a road. Did you ever?”
I had never, I agreed, and happily accepted the second bagel Freyde offered me.
“She’d been to the Gypsies,” Freyde informed me, lowering her voice to an appropriately confiding tone. Gypsies often came through the region in the summer months, camping outside town or the neighboring villages, bringing news from far away. Often it was through them that we heard of mishaps or happier occurrences: a pogrom in another town, a wedding, a sighting of someone long thought dead. “She didn’t want to admit it, of course. At first she told your father she’d been to the village on business. Business. Did you ever? What possible business might she have in such a village? It’s barely a village, just a line of huts, each more squalid than the next. Even my Sender has never found business there, though God knows they can’t own one decent pot among them.”
Pressed by my father’s silence, or maybe simply needing to share her burden with another human being, Mrs. Leibowitz had admitted finally that she’d been to consult a Gypsy woman about her Hava. “A soothsayer, of all things. Did you ever?” Freyde asked again.
“Never,” I assured Freyde, and asked if the soothsayer had anything to tell the poor woman.
“Useless babble,” Freyde said, but excitement animated her usual drone. “Worse than useless,” she continued, and then, lowering her voice again, she revealed that the soothsayer had in fact had a vision, which she related to Mrs.
Leibowitz, a vision of Hava returning to her home.
“Then she’s alive still?” Mrs. Leibowitz asked. “I knew it! All this time I knew it. Does a mother not feel the beating of her daughter’s heart even if time and distance separate them? But tell me, where is she and when will I see her?”
But the soothsayer’s face was somber. “She’s alive, Mrs., but all is not well.”
“Oooyyy,” Mrs. Leibowitz’s wail went up at once. “I knew it. All this time I knew it, but still I dared to hope. Oy, my poor Hava.”
“Her poor, sweet little Havele, whom she was happy to force into a marriage with that fish merchant,” commented Sara, who had joined us and was already rolling her eyes at Freyde’s story. Freyde ignored the interruption.
“Not well?” Mrs. Leibowitz asked the soothsayer. “What, not well? She’s not coming home to die, is she? Oh, no, don’t tell me.”
But of course she wanted to know and she had paid her kopecks.
“She’s coming home for a death, but not her own,” the woman said in such an ominous tone that Mrs. Leibowitz ran from her presence as if she had just recognized the Angel of Death in disguise.
“It wasn’t the Angel of Death she was running from, but something far worse,” Sara said.
“What?” Freyde and I asked in unison.
“The truth,” Sara pronounced. “The plain truth. Which is that Hava Leibowitz ran away from her mother and all her mother’s plans for her. And that she won’t be back except to put the woman in the ground. That’s the truth of the matter.”
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