Tsila and I heard the approaching footsteps. We had not exchanged a word since she had returned the dynamite to its hiding place. She had lit the candles at the appointed time and opened the siddur to chant the Song of Songs, as we did every Friday night. I had opened my siddur and joined her.
This was usually my favorite time of the week, this hour of dusk after the lighting of the candles when Tsila and I read the Song of Songs together. The reading was an expression of our love for the Sabbath Bride, Tsila had explained to me once, and as we read it in the darkening Friday evenings, I could always feel the presence of the Sabbath entering the room. As we read it that evening, though, the awaited feeling of peace eluded me.
Tsila was furious, I thought, and how could she not be? With this you have thanked me, she would say to me soon. With this you have expressed your gratitude for my years of devotion and care. I had accepted seven pounds of dynamite from a terrorist and hidden it in the heart of her home. I couldn’t explain why; there was no excuse. I braced myself for what would soon be unleashed.
Like a lily among thorns, Tsila read aloud. So is my beloved among the maidens.
She was calm as she read, her anger not yet in her voice. I glanced at her face, but it too appeared calm. My beloved is a cluster of myrrh, she continued reading, as she had every Friday night since she had first taken me into her home. My beloved called to me and said: Rise my love, my friend, and come away.
I joined her in the reading, willing a calmness into my voice to match her own. We finished just as we heard my father’s approach.
“Your father is here,” she said, meeting my gaze. Her eyes at that moment were steady and clear. Gone now was the dullness that had clouded them in the first weeks following the baby’s death, the furtive glancing away that had followed as restlessness took her over. As we heard my father’s footsteps, she held my gaze as she hadn’t done in many months.
Aaron Lev paused at the door to stomp his feet and clear them of snow. “Good Shabbes,” he said as he opened the door.
“Good Shabbes,” Tsila answered.
“I’ve brought a guest.”
“So I see. Good Shabbes,” Tsila greeted the guest, and we assembled around the table to sing “Shalom Aleichem.”
The guest’s name escapes me now but he was a peddler of string.
“String?” Tsila repeated. “And what else?”
“Nothing else,” our guest answered. He hunched over the soup I had placed before him, slurping it noisily into his mouth.
“And from that you support a family?” Tsila asked.
“We manage,” he answered. He lifted his face from his bowl long enough for Tsila to pour another ladleful in, then continued his slurping.
“You’re from around here?” Tsila asked.
“Not far,” the guest answered.
In that way the dinner continued, attempts at conversation gradually dropping off as our guest hungrily consumed everything we put before him.
“A little more chicken?” Tsila asked him, returning her own portion to the serving dish so that he could eat it.
When Aaron Lev was finished eating, he pushed his plate away and began humming a Shabbes niggun. Our guest continued eating, but eventually he too was finished and joined Aaron Lev’s singing. They continued like this until Tsila brought tea and a plate of dried fruit. The guest drank three glasses of tea and finished all the fruit on the plate. When he and Aaron Lev had finished the grace after meals, he thanked us and left.
“The poor man,” Aaron Lev said as soon as the door closed. It was clear from his tone that he was already thanking the Almighty for the blessings of his own life, which, compared to those of our departed guest, seemed many and generous.
“Poor man,” Tsila agreed. “But do you think you’re somehow above such a wretch?”
“Not above,” Aaron Lev said quietly. “Just more fortunate.”
“Today you’re more fortunate, but tomorrow? The day after?”
“No one knows what the future will bring.”
“Nothing good,” Tsila said.
“We don’t know …”
“We do know,” Tsila said. “We may not know if you’ll turn into a starving peddler, like our honored guest, wandering from village to village with nothing to offer but a ball of string. We may not know if we’ll die this year from starvation or next year from a pogrom. But we do know that prosperity, comfort, a decent life—that none of these things will come to us. Never. Not if we stay here. There is no life for us here.” She looked at me.
It was this she had come to, then.
“We’re leaving,” she said to Aaron Lev.
Aaron Lev didn’t answer right away. He closed his eyes as he often did when difficult words loomed between him and Tsila, but then he smiled. It was a peaceful smile, as if a pleasantness had just filled him, a remembered fragrance, perhaps: apricots in a bowl on a table where he once sat, warm in summer sunlight, between his mother on one side and his father on the other. His eyes still closed, he inhaled deeply through nostrils thickened by years of leather and death, smiling still, as if he smelled only the sweetness of those apricots, felt only the warmth of that memory spreading inside him as easily as any spilled substance will spread when newly released from a vessel that has contained it. “We’re leaving,” he agreed when he opened his eyes.
Just one week earlier, after evening prayers, as he and the other men in the shul had huddled around the stove, reluctant to venture back out into the winter night, Hayyim Frumkin had pulled out of his pocket the most recent letter from his brother Shmulik who had departed for the Holy Land three years earlier. “This winter went easier than the last,” Shmulik had written. “The rains, thank God, were plentiful, and now, as I raise my eyes to the window, I can see the buds of the almond trees swollen with new life, ready to burst into blossom.” As Hayyim read those words, all eyes of the group had shifted to the window of the room in which they were gathered, a window so thickly frosted that they could not see through it to the cold darkness beyond. “We have a proper four-sided house now,” the letter went on, “more reliable water. And relations with our Arab neighbors have improved since the incident I related in my last letter.”
“We’ll go there,” Aaron Lev told us now. “To the Holy Land.”
We could leave within the year, he reasoned, after the hardest frost had passed but before the spring melt, when the entrapping mud might slow us. We would go by rail to Odessa, and from there by boat, arriving in the Holy Land in the first heat of summer.
“And exchange one desert for another?” Tsila asked.
“We’ll make the desert bloom,” Aaron Lev answered, as some of the younger men in town had been saying—albeit more persuasively.
“Stop with the preaching.”
“If Shmulik Frumkin has managed there, anyone can,” Aaron Lev countered. Shmulik the Goat is what everyone called the younger Frumkin after he clambered onto the roof of his heder one afternoon to escape his melamed’s rod and then refused to come down. Neither bright nor diligent in his studies, he had seemed destined for a life of unredeemed ignorance. Yet now he tended vineyards in the Holy Land, pulled green onions out of the earth all winter long, and had new potatoes by Pesach. “We’ll go to Petakh Tikva,” Aaron Lev announced. “Doesn’t your mother have a cousin there?”
“He died,” Tsila answered.
“We’ll go anyway,” Aaron Lev said. “We’ll grow grapes like Shmulik Frumkin does. Never mind grapes. We’ll grow apricots, a whole orchard of them.”
Tsila looked at Aaron Lev for a few moments, as if she were giving his idea serious consideration, then she spoke. “We’re going to Argentina.”
“Argentina?”
“A man stopped by the house this week,” Tsila explained. “Was it just yesterday? Yes, it must have been. He was on his way out of town, heading toward Mozyr by way of the swamp. He stopped to ask if he was following the right road. It was cold, the snow was coming. I offered him a gla
ss of tea, which he accepted.”
“A Jew?” Aaron Lev asked.
“A Jew,” Tsila answered, “but the Yiddish that he spoke was unusual. There was a strange rhythm to it. A lilt. Speak to me in your own language, I told him, then I closed my eyes to listen.”
“You closed your eyes while a strange man was drinking tea in your house?” Aaron Lev asked.
“ ‘What is this language that flies out of your mouth like music?’ I asked him. ‘Spanish,’ he told me.
“Spanish,” Tsila repeated, allowing the sound of it to linger on her tongue.
“Spanish?” Aaron Lev asked.
“He’s from Argentina. He works for the Baron de Hirsch.”
“And from this you deduced that we too should go live …”
“There was a beauty to the language,” Tsila told him. It was the dynamite, I knew.
“Español,” Tsila said, the smooth slide of it warming her mouth in a way—may God forgive her—that the Holy Tongue obviously did not.
“Argentina?” Aaron Lev asked again.
“It’s as warm as the Holy Land, but the soil is deep and fertile.”
It was the dynamite, without a doubt. This is what I thought at the time. She should have been angry. She should have been fearful, for she well understood the danger of the situation. But she was neither of these. There was a composure to her, a clarity, as if when she had discovered what it was she held in her lap, wrapped in the very same fabric in which she had enwrapped her own dead child—a fabric she had once thought would dress a bride, her own sister—a calm had descended on her. A sudden calm, unexpected and unforeseen after what seemed, in contrast, a lifetime of agitation. And in that calm a truth revealed itself in the way that an object submerged in murky waters is suddenly visible once the storm passes. “There is nothing for us here but death,” she said to Aaron Lev. “We still have time to make a life.”
“A life, yes,” Aaron Lev agreed. “But Argentina?”
“People say the Baron’s colonies there are holding their own.” She meant the agricultural colonies in Argentina that had been founded for landless Russian Jews by the Baron de Hirsch. “And I’ve heard the Christians there don’t hate the Jews.”
“There were problems with drought,” Aaron Lev responded. “Or was it locusts? Locusts, I think. But that was a few years back,” he allowed. “Conditions may have improved.”
“You can grow your apricots there,” Tsila said. “We could leave in the summer.”
Late in the summer, Tsila decided, to allow her enough time to earn the money for our passage. That she would be able to earn our passage by then was not in question. Already she brought a focus to her discussion with Aaron Lev, a concentration that when applied to her work would win back double the customers she had lost during her long months of pregnancy and illness.
And the dynamite? It remained where I had hidden it, unseen but not unfelt, its destructive potential manifesting itself as a silence between me and Tsila, a dense, compact silence that blocked the flow of life that had always passed between us. We said less and less to each other—how could I explain having brought such danger to our home, our lives? And in the constant presence of such an act, what else was there to talk about? I began to see the dynamite—my act of accepting it—as an island that had risen out of the river that had once been my life with Tsila, an obstacle forcing a divergence of two currents that had once flowed as one.
Only once did she ask me about it. “Who gave it to you?” she asked, looking up from her work late one evening.
“A boy,” I answered. “I don’t know his name.” The first lie now lay between us.
“A boy,” she repeated. “Whose name you don’t know.”
I waited for her anger, her cutting sarcasm, her outraged disbelief, but nothing came. Nothing. That is what I had placed between us, an absence of substance as deadly as any explosive.
“A boy whose name she doesn’t know,” Tsila repeated. To herself, not to me. She returned her focus to her work.
A FEW WEEKS LATER, ON A PARTICULARLY COLD AFTERNOON, a young woman, well dressed in a lambswool coat and hat, entered Mrs. Gold’s store.
“Can I help you?” Mrs. Gold demanded, before the girl had even fully entered.
“Yes. Good afternoon,” the girl said softly, pulling aside her scarf to reveal more of her long, bony face.
“Good afternoon,” Mrs. Gold answered.
“I’m wondering … my brother and I are just passing through on our way …”
I waited with curiosity to hear why she and her brother would have pulled off the main road to stop in such an out-of-the way place.
“My brother has fallen ill,” the girl said. “He’s running a high fever, so we’re stopping the night here. I’m wondering if you have ice compresses.”
Ice there was plenty of outside, and all she needed to do was wrap some in a piece of cloth, which is what I would have suggested had Mrs. Gold not already pulled out the more expensive of her two compresses and begun her instructions on the most efficacious way of applying it.
“I know it’s not too much further to Mozyr,” the girl was saying. “But with his fever so high and the temperature outside already so cold, and dropping, it seems—”
“Never mind Mozyr,” Mrs. Gold interrupted. “Markowitz has rooms above the tavern, very warm, my own father-in-law stayed in them once. This was a few years ago now, of course, but what’s a few years to a room? It’s mortals like us who bear the ravages of time. Is your brother taking quinine?”
“I don’t think—”
“Miriam! Bring me some tablets of quinine.”
I moved the ladder to the pharmaceutical supplies.
“I think just some soap, maybe. If you have it.”
“Of course we have it.”
I moved the ladder to the hygiene supplies.
“And also …” The whole time the girl spoke, her voice was so low that one had to strain to hear it. And her skin had an unhealthy pallor, as if her blood had long ceased to rush beneath its surface. “Some writing paper. It doesn’t have to be the highest quality.”
“Poor quality you can get at Zirl’s on the other side of the market. Here we carry only the best,” Mrs. Gold informed her. “Over there,” Mrs. Gold directed me. “The top shelf. How many times do you have to be told something before you remember?” She smiled apologetically at her customer.
“I’d like to write a letter to my parents to inform them …”
“You’ll need ink, then. Miriam!”
“Yes, ink,” the girl said.
“Postage I can’t help you with, though,” Mrs. Gold said.
The door to the store opened again and Benny entered.
“You again!” Mrs. Gold greeted him.
Benny had been coming to Mrs. Gold’s store ever more frequently—almost daily—since discovering my family’s plan to move to Argentina. “Argentina!” he had repeated when I first told him. He was walking me home after work one night. We were just passing the widow Ida’s. It was a clear night, and cold. Our lanterns cast a shifting light onto the snow. Benny fell silent as we began to climb the hill to my house.
“It’s warm there,” I told him. “They speak Spanish.”
He remained silent—unusual for Benny, who liked to fill any silence with joking and banter.
“Tsila says the Christians there don’t hate the Jews,” I elaborated.
Still no answer from Benny.
“We’ll grow apricots,” I said.
“And do you want to go?” Benny asked finally. “Do you want to go to this Argentina and grow apricots?”
“I don’t know,” I had to admit. My life had certainly become lonelier and more difficult since the night I’d met Wolf in the forest. A few days after Malka’s arrest Breina and another girl had also been arrested. The study circle had temporarily suspended its meetings, but even if it hadn’t, I couldn’t have attended. Tsila insisted now that I come home immediately after wor
k, to sit night after night with no company but her silence. And on Shabbes, the one day I didn’t have to work, I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere except shul. There were many days when I thought anything at all would be better than the life I was living, yet when I tried to imagine what awaited me in Argentina, nothing rose to mind.
Benny stopped walking and turned to face me. “You don’t have to go, you know.”
“Of course I do,” I said lightly. There was something in his tone that made me want to skip to the end of this conversation. “What am I supposed to do when Tsila and Aaron Lev leave? Move in with the witch?”
“You don’t have to go,” Benny repeated, ignoring my feeble attempt at humor. There was something ghastly about his face—his square chin, his broad nostrils—lit from below by his lantern. I raised my own lantern to make his face more recognizably Benny’s.
“I know why you’re going, why they’re taking you away from here,” he said.
Now my body tightened to an animal’s caution. Was it the dynamite Benny was referring to? It had to be. But how could Benny know of it? Was it possible that Benny had been sent to retrieve it from me?
“I know what they say about you,” he told me.
I waited.
“That you’ll never find a bridegroom,” he said.
“I won’t?”
Benny took a deep breath. “I don’t believe in any of that nonsense. That’s all it is. Nonsense.”
“What’s nonsense?” I asked, scarcely breathing.
“You know,” he said, unwilling to say it. But then he did. Say it. “Declaring someone a bastard. And unto the tenth generation, no less. It’s utter nonsense, nothing more.” Benny was declaring himself modern, as well as decent. “To me, you’re who you are. I don’t care about your parentage.”
I said nothing, of course. One needs air to speak, and Benny’s words had emptied me like a punch to my deepest gut. Here was something that had never reached my ears before, despite the whispers that had assaulted me all my life. Here was my secret, my great discovery about myself, revealed to be as widely shared as the filthy copper kopecks that passed through every hand in town. And here I had been imagining how I might refuse Benny if he were proposed as a possible match for me, flattering myself that he might be too dull for my liking, imagining that I could pick and choose from among prospective bridegrooms.
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