Freyde didn’t argue. “The woman’s a witch and always has been.”
“They wanted her for my uncle Beryl,” said Rivka, who had just joined us. “But he wouldn’t have her because she was a witch even then. So she can run all she wants, but where will it get her? There are things your legs can’t save you from. Believe me, I know.”
Mrs. Leibowitz was still trying to hurry when my father saw her by the side of the road, but the weight of what she was trying to escape, as well as her own respectable girth, made sustained hurrying difficult.
“Do you think Hava might come back, then?” I asked Freyde. “And did the soothsayer say where she has been all this while?”
“What?” Freyde droned. “Is Tsila’s stepdaughter so enlightened and well educated now that she puts her faith in the babble of an old Gypsy soothsayer?” The other women laughed, and a familiar shame returned to me, more painful for the pleasure I’d been taking from its brief absence.
Sara was disappointed in me. I could feel her censure as we walked away from Freyde’s stall. She didn’t take my hand as she usually did when we walked in the evening, didn’t speak at all until we were well clear of the marketplace and on the path to the river.
“I never thought the day would come when Freyde and I would see eye to eye on something,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
I had a choice, Sara said. I could drown in superstition, turning for the rest of my life to soothsayers, rabbis, and the like for answers, or I could join the other young people who were emerging, finally, from the haze of ignorance that had enslaved us for so long.
She told me then about a wedding that had taken place just the night before in Kalinkovich. It was a traditional wedding, with the bride circling the groom seven times and the seven blessings recited. But at the end of the last blessing, the young couples’ friends from work had surrounded the canopy, and a young man had climbed on a chair to address the crowd. “What have we just witnessed here?” the young man asked. “Jumbled mutterings by a cleric in a greasy caftan!” A wave of shock passed through the crowd. “Is this what will unite the couple standing here before us? No!” the orator shouted. “It is love that will unite them. Love and loyalty to each other and to the proletariat, which, when it comes to power, will do away forever with all such ceremonies. Down with musty ceremonies!” The young people began to shout. “Down with clerics in their greasy caftans! Long live the Bund of Poland, Russia, and Lithuania!”
“This really happened?” I asked.
“Of course,” Sara assured me, grinning widely. The leader of her study circle, Malka, had been one of the young people in attendance. “The bride’s mother fainted, Malka told me. From shame. Would you not have loved to have been there?”
I nodded.
“So start coming to the study circle, then.”
My continuing absence from the study circle was becoming a wider and harder wedge between Sara and me, but it met in the evening, the very time of day when Tsila was most uncomfortable and disturbed by premonitions about her pregnancy. My father was out in the evenings, attending the learning at the shul or at meetings of the town’s self-defense group, and when Tsila was alone in the darkening house she sank into gloom. The only thing that seemed to soothe her, at that time of day, was the sound of my voice reading the Psalms, so I would read to her for minutes or hours, depending on the night, until I had lulled her into sleep. Only then did I feel free to leave. But by then the study circle was finished for the night, so it was to the river that I went, to cool myself in its waters.
Sara often met me at the river, and she told me what Malka had taught that evening. It was usually history or economics, and as I listened, trying to catch Sara’s excitement, I knew in my heart that I was not the serious girl she had mistaken me for. As Sara talked, her words knocked against my ears, but it was the scent of the river that entered me, the coolness of the water against my skin. I was a dreamer, and I feared Sara was beginning to suspect as much.
“If you’d come to Malka’s you’d already have known all you want about Hava. And it would be the truth you would know, not the half-baked foolishness of a soothsayer.”
My mind snapped to attention as it never did during Sara’s discourses on history and economics.
“You have news about Hava?” I asked.
“Hava lives in Gomel and works at the glassworks there,” Sara said.
“Gomel?” I asked, vaguely disappointed. Gomel was so close. I had imagined her in America or Palestine or dead in a ditch, but never in a factory in the next city over. “How do you know?” I asked.
“Malka’s from there. Her family lives in New America.”
“New America?” I asked, my mind filling with visions of broad avenues and modern houses.
“Don’t get so excited,” Sara said with a smile. “I think the name’s meant in jest. From what Malka tells us, conditions in that part of town are even worse than they are here, though I don’t see how anything could be worse than the mental backwardness we have to endure in this pit of ignorance. Anyway, a few years ago a girl moved into the cellar apartment of her family’s building. A young woman with no family, completely destitute …”
“Hava?” I asked.
Sara nodded. “Malka helped her find a job at the factory, saving her from I can’t even tell you what kind of work.” Sara looked at me meaningfully. “Now she not only has a job, but she’s opened her heart to other girls like herself running from the backwardness she escaped from, to ensure they don’t suffer as she did. A bed she can’t offer them, of course. She herself can only afford a corner large enough for her own bed—she shares the room with six other girls. But tea she never fails to offer, no matter what the hour. And a warm heart.”
“You learned this at your study circle?” I asked.
Sara nodded. “But I can’t say any more,” she said. “What happens in the group is secret. I shouldn’t even have said what I did.”
NO ONE BLAMED AARON LEV FOR THE ECONOMIC MISfortune into which we fell that summer. Have we sunk so low, people asked, that now a man is fired for taking a moment out of the workday to address his Creator? For that’s what Aaron Lev was doing the day he encountered Mrs. Leibowitz. He had turned off the main road from Kalinkovich and onto a secondary road. It was hardly a road, more of a track, one wagon’s width across, cutting through an area of thick forest and leading to nowhere but a few desolate villages. So narrow was the track that the tops of trees met overhead, forming a canopy, a thick green canopy through which the sun penetrated only in dapples and shafts. And why had he done this? Why had he taken such a detour when he was being paid for the speed with which he transported goods, as well as the care? “To recite the Minchah service,” Tsila said tersely. For it was there, apparently, under that canopy of greenery, in the shafts of late afternoon light that he felt—more strongly than in any other place or at any other time—the presence of the Creator.
No one blamed Noam either. Times are not so easy, people said, that Noam should be expected to pay a coachman who cuts long detours out of his workday. Especially this coachman, they added with knowing looks all around.
I didn’t ignore the comments and innuendos that Noam’s firing of my father had created—I have never been one who could dismiss as nothing the opinions of others—but neither did I fall into despair. I had hope that summer, hope that the comments would soon cease, that my family’s luck would soon change, that the opinions about my father and Tsila would soon be forever altered. The source of my hope was the new life that was taking form in Tsila’s womb.
Tsila’s condition, while not the best, was not deteriorating either, and as she safely passed through the sixth and then the seventh month of pregnancy I began to feel that all was turning out well. Such is the power of new life. I began to imagine the child that was forming inside her and all the changes his birth would bring. For it would be a boy, I decided. That’s what I wanted. A brother to love and take care of, a brot
her to prove that our household was like other households, and Tsila and Aaron Lev a couple like any other; a brother to forever shut the mouths of those who deemed Tsila too sour, and Aaron Lev too weak and our household too cursed to take part in the miracle of creation that is the legacy of every living being.
It was life I turned my hopes to—this is what I’m telling you now—the life forming in Tsila’s womb in which I placed all my faith and dreams for the future. Remember that, if not my name.
THE WEEKS PASSED, WARM AND RAINY AND SWEET WITH the smells of ripening. The sorrows of Tishah-b’Av were behind us and just ahead were the weddings and festivities of Shabbes Nachamu, the Sabbath of Comfort, when we turn our thoughts from the destruction of Jerusalem to our hopes of deliverance and redemption.
On the Wednesday of that week I came home later than usual. It was evening already; the lamp should have been lit, Tsila should have been getting supper in the slow dreamlike way she had begun to move that summer, as if the air around her had thickened to water. Instead, a dark silence greeted me. I remained in the doorway for a moment, thinking I was alone.
“Close the door,” I heard at length from the darkness. Tsila’s voice, though it was so dull it was barely recognizable. I saw her then, as my eyes grew used to the darkness, her slumping form on the bench, leaning against the wall. I went to her, taking her hand as I crouched beside her.
“What is it?” I asked. Her hand was cold and limp in mine.
She turned to me—there was a sickening sweetness to her breath—and looked as if she had not understood the question I had put to her.
“Are you ill?” I asked, the beginning of fear in my chest.
“No,” she said dully, turning her head away from me to stare straight ahead.
My father wasn’t home yet, but he would be soon. She wanted me to light the lamp, prepare supper. Cold borscht, she thought, sliced cucumbers. The day had been warm, had it not? I started to do as she’d told me, but she just sat there unmoving. I brought her a glass of water. She took it in her hand but didn’t drink it. “Drink,” I told her.
“For what?”
“You’ll feel better. It’s very warm in here.” It was stifling, the heat of the day trapped within the four walls of our home. Tsila didn’t answer, nor did she drink.
I dropped to the floor beside her, looking to her face for direction, but she had no direction to give me. I tried to meet her eye but her gaze was fastened on the wall ahead. I lay a hand on her arm. Her skin was warm. She didn’t move away, so I removed the glass from her hand and stayed crouched beside her, stroking her arm softly, daring at length to place my head on her abdomen, the hard domed surface beneath which I heard nothing but the quick beating of Tsila’s heart, the shallow intake and outflow of her breathing.
I don’t know how long it was before my father came home. I didn’t hear him approach but was aware at some point of the door opening, another’s breath as he stood there looking into the darkness.
“Get Dvoire,” he said as soon as he saw what was before him. It was a command so unlike my father’s usual way of speaking, so harsh in its decisiveness, that I felt as if startled from a deep slumber.
He was beside Tsila before I had even risen to my feet, taking her face in his hands, lifting her chin gently until her eyes met his. She didn’t look away. Then he was behind her on the bench, his chest supporting her back, his arms … two, four, six pairs of arms it seemed he had, so completely did he engulf her in his embrace. Only her hair escaped, spilling over the length of his arms, and her gaze, her fading, vacant gaze.
Comfort Ye, Comfort Ye, My people,
Bid Jerusalem take heart,
And proclaim unto her
That her time of service is accomplished.
Her guilt is paid off;
She hath received of the Lord’s hand
Double for her sins.
Shabbes Nachamu offered no comfort. The women’s section fell silent as I entered the shul. Word had reached the town of the scene Dvoire had come upon when I brought her back to our house: no baby or any sign of one coming, Tsila with a vacancy in her eyes, and Aaron Lev engulfing her as if to trap her fleeing soul in his embrace.
“Out!” Dvoire commanded, as she always did when a husband had not already fled the situation. She was used to obedience—I was already at the stove heating water as she had commanded—but Aaron Lev looked at Dvoire and only tightened his hold on his wife. “Out!” Dvoire said again, one hand on her hip, the other pointing to the door, but Aaron Lev refused to untangle himself. He looked at Dvoire strangely, then shielded Tsila’s eyes from Dvoire’s with his open hand.
He had been a young child when his parents were taken, Tsila had told me, no more than two or three. His father had gone in the night while he slept, but his mother was still alive as he crouched beside her the next day, applying cloths to her face. The cloths were no longer cool or wet, and his mother’s requests for such comforts had ceased, but still he applied them. His mother’s eyes were closed, her cheeks sinking as life seeped from her flesh.
That was a summer day as hot and still as this one. The light had moved from the one window in the room to the other, then faded as Aaron Lev crouched beside his mother. No one had been by the house that day—it was a time of epidemic—and he was frightened as well as hungry, thirsty, lonely. As daylight fled the room, though, a visitor finally came. He didn’t knock or announce himself in the usual manner but slipped unseen into the shadows, only his voice alerting Aaron Lev to his presence, the voice of an old man, deep and gentle. “Leave her now, Arele,” the voice entreated. “Let her rest.”
Aaron turned to the sound of that voice, and the eyes that met his calmed his fear. They were the same eyes that gazed upon him now: patient eyes full of wisdom and compassion, eyes entirely out of place in Dvoire’s face. As a child of three he had removed his hands from his mother’s face, turned from her, just for an instant, to meet those eyes, and in that instant they had shifted to his mother and she had slipped from him forever. Now he made no such mistake. He shielded Tsila’s gaze with his hand, and with his own gaze fastened hard on Dvoire, he met her command with his own.
“Out!” he said, his voice so harsh that Dvoire started and retreated a step. Still, she didn’t flee. She was a confident woman, if not skilled. She was used to fear and pain and had dealt with more than a few difficult husbands. She prided herself on knowing when to be strict and when to cajole and comfort. “Aaron Lev,” she purred now, her voice a roll of velvet. But Aaron Lev was not fooled.
“Out!” he said again, and a violence rose in his eyes, a violence unlike any Dvoire had encountered in a husband awaiting the birth of a child. Afraid both to face it and to turn her back to it, Dvoire backed out of the house, then hurried into town, her tongue laden with tales of strangeness and bewitching in the house of Aaron Lev on the hill.
Sing, O heavens and be joyful, O earth
And break forth into singing, O mountains;
For the Lord hath comforted his people,
And hath compassion upon his afflicted.
“How is Tsila?” Lipsa whispered to me. She alone of all the women in shul had shifted on the bench to make a place for me.
“Not so good,” I answered.
Tsila had been alone in the house when she’d felt the pain in her back. She had thought at first she was mistaken. It was too early, all wrong, this ever tightening band of pain. She mistook the baby for a clot of blood at first, a clot as large as one of the river rats that roamed the bank at night. Then she saw the perfect head, the tiny hand clenched against its fate. She tore off a strip of the cobalt brocade, wrapped him in it, and turned him into the ground at the edge of our yard.
It’s no surprise, I heard whispered all around the women’s section of the shul. There’s a sourness in that woman, is there not? they whispered, even as they extended their hands to me in comfort. And a weakness in the man. Yes, a weakness.
“Tell Tsila I’ll come
to see her later,” Lipsa said, patting my hand as she had always done to reassure me.
SARA WAS WAITING FOR ME OUTSIDE SHUL. AS SHE walked me home she urged me to ignore the talk about my family, chiding me for heeding every bit of gossip that assaulted my ears.
I listened to Sara’s words halfheartedly. There was such an aching pressure in my chest: grief about my baby brother, dead, my own hopes buried with him in the corner of our yard, while all the love and longing that I’d felt for him lived within me still, and shame as well that ours was not a home that could sustain new life.
“Why do you listen to all the gossiping yentas when there’s obviously not a grain of truth in anything they say?” Sara asked me.
“Even in the most wicked gossip there is usually a grain of truth,” I responded, thinking that if my father was not actually bewitched, as people were saying, he was certainly strange in his behavior. He had not left Tsila’s side since he had chased Dvoire from the house, insisting on feeding Tsila every spoonful of food she could swallow and performing other, more personal tasks that would more properly have been left to me or her mother.
“What truth?” Sara asked. “One has your mother cavorting with the teamster Noam, excuse my vulgarity, and another with the capitalist Entelman. What grain of truth can you possibly find in such—”
“My mother?” I asked. “Mr. Entelman?”
While Sara immediately regretted having opened her mouth, I would not allow her to shut it again until she had told me all she had heard.
“There’s nothing to tell,” she insisted. “Stupidities about your mother, Mr. Entelman, his music room, I don’t know.”
“What stupidities?” I persisted.
“Lies,” Sara said. “Baseness. Don’t look at me that way.”
“What way?” I asked.
“Don’t hang on to gossip as if your truth can be found in it,” Sara said.
I said nothing.
“ ‘The mouths of the foolish pour out foolishness,’ ” Sara quoted, the first and only time I ever heard words of Torah pass her lips.
Your Mouth Is Lovely Page 15