“You don’t have to run to Argentina,” Benny said. “There’s a new world dawning, even here. Not right here, of course. We’d have to go to Odessa or somewhere to find a rabbi willing to marry us. And God help us both if my mother gets wind of it first. But I’ll marry you, Miriam. You don’t have to go to Argentina to find a man willing to marry you.”
BENNY STAMPED HIS FEET AS HE ENTERED MRS. GOLD’S and pulled off his mitts to warm his face with his hands. “Good afternoon,” he said to all and no one in particular. I had not spoken to him since turning wordlessly from his proposal to me.
“Good afternoon,” said the young woman in the lambskin coat, catching Benny’s eyes with a boldness that seemed to me a bit unseemly.
“I need some kerosene,” Benny said. “Oh, and some goose fat, so I don’t get frostbite on my way home.” He positioned himself beside my ladder as I climbed for the goose fat.
“But also …,” the girl continued to Mrs. Gold, “he has these peculiar boils developing on his face.”
“Who?” Benny asked me.
I ignored him, the mere sight of him a renewed humiliation.
“Not boils, exactly, more like pustules. I’m wondering if there’s a pharmacy where I can get something for that.”
“A pharmacy? In this backwater?” Benny asked, laughing. “You’ll have to go to Mozyr for that, sister.”
I climbed down the ladder and added up his purchases.
“You don’t need a pharmacy to treat boils,” Mrs. Gold said.
“Pustules, really.”
“Pustules, boils, carbuncles—it doesn’t matter what you call them. I have something that will help. Guaranteed.”
“Powdered cobwebs,” Benny muttered.
“Have you not paid yet?” Mrs. Gold asked.
“I’ve paid.”
“So what are you still doing here? Do you want me to have you arrested for loitering?”
“Good afternoon,” Benny said, taking his leave.
“I have something that will help your brother, but I have to mix it up,” Mrs. Gold said. “You’ll have to wait.”
“Mmmm. I don’t really want to leave him sitting in the coach. He’ll catch his death.”
“God forbid.”
“Can your girl deliver it to me later?”
“It won’t be until the end of the day,” Mrs. Gold answered.
“That’s all right,” said the girl with a little smile, the first she had managed since entering the store. She was dour when she wasn’t being bold with young men she had just met. “I’ll pay extra, of course.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Gold said.
MARKOWITZ’S TAVERN WAS A DARK-WALLED ROOM WITH a clay floor and a low beamed ceiling kept aloft by thick wooden posts. Windowless and partly subterranean, it might easily have been used as a root cellar, but Markowitz had filled it instead with long tables, rough benches, a stove, and a counter from behind which he, his wife, and daughters served vodka, whiskey, brandy, and simple meals. On that evening, as on any winter evening, the tables closest to the stove at the center of the room were filled. At one, Kugelmass and his friends carried on a lively debate in Hebrew. The other tables were filled with peasants from neighboring villages stopping for a drink on the way home from the market. At the table closest to the stove Noam and some of the other coachmen warmed themselves on whiskey after their day on the road. Noam used one of the supporting posts as a backrest, leaning against it as he watched me make my way across the tavern. I went straight to the counter to ask Dina, the younger of the Markowitz daughters, to direct me to my customer’s room.
“I can direct you,” she answered, “but since when have you started visiting young men in their bedrooms?” She spoke loudly enough for all in the room to hear, obviously amused by this unexpected opportunity for entertainment.
“It’s not the young man I’m visiting, but his sister,” I responded, my voice quavering with anger and shame. “I have medicine to deliver.” I held up the bottle of medicine as proof.
“So deliver it,” Dina said, indicating a table by the far wall, where, now that my eyes had grown accustomed to the smoky dimness, I could see a lone female figure seated.
I made my way over to her table. She was eating a supper of herring, black bread, salted cucumbers, and tea.
“It isn’t really cobwebs, is it?” she asked as I handed her the bottle.
“It may have some cobweb in it,” I allowed, “but it’s very effective.”
“I’ve heard the same said about exorcisms,” she said. She put some herring on a piece of bread and handed it to me. “Doesn’t your employer give you time off to eat during the day?” she asked as she watched how quickly the herring disappeared down my throat.
“Usually,” I answered, though that particular day had been so busy that neither Mrs. Gold nor I had had a moment’s break.
“You’re entitled to a lunch hour every day, you know,” the girl said.
I glanced nervously around to see who might be listening, who might report us to the town’s Russian officials.
The girl smiled at my nervous glances and handed me another piece of bread and herring. “I have regards for you from your friend Wolf,” she said.
The herring, so delicious an instant before, was now a hard lump in my chest.
“Perhaps now you can understand why I’m less than enthusiastic about your employer’s magic cobweb potions,” she said. “I’m looking for more effective medicine for the illness that afflicts us all.”
She spoke in a normal conversational tone that blended unnoticed into the noise of the room. My voice, when I answered, matched hers. “I have what you need,” I answered, and as I did I felt an immediate quickening of my blood and a sharpening of my senses. “I can deliver it to you here tomorrow,” I said.
The girl smiled. “It’s my hope that my brother and I will leave here early tomorrow morning. Perhaps you can meet my coach on the road toward the bridge?”
I assured her I could, and we arranged a time.
“Thank you for your help,” she said. Behind my back I heard Dina’s laughter, familiar and unfriendly. “Wolf said you’d not let us down.”
The thought that Wolf had spoken about me, and spoken highly, filled me with a pride that lifted me from the discomfort I felt at the sound of Dina’s laughter.
“I would like to help you some more,” I said.
She looked at me without speaking. Dina’s laughter continued behind me, joined now by some of the men at the teamsters’ table.
In front of me, the young woman nodded. “Then perhaps you will,” she said without smiling. “My name is Dora,” she informed me, extending her hand.
“And I’m Miriam.”
Siberia, January 1912
She was a woman in love with death. That’s what you’ll likely hear about Dora. If you hear anything at all. She was a woman in love with death. No man could hope to compete.
Dora’s specialty within the Combat Battalion of the Socialist Revolutionary Party was the chemistry of explosives. It was she who loaded the bombs for many of the party’s “daring blows.” But it was not the nature of her specialty, rather the single-mindedness of it that led some of her comrades to their opinions about her.
“There is only one sort of explosion that interests Dora,” I heard your father say of her once. It was a joke, of course, and a crude one at that, but so persuasive is your father with words, and so influential now within his new party, that I fear his assessment of Dora will stand when all others have fallen silent.
She studied obstetrics before she joined the party. Does that sound like a woman in love with death? She was in Lydia’s class—our Lydia here—and dropped out only because she could no longer, in good conscience, continue to deliver babies into misery and injustice. “Does a physician’s duty not extend to healing society?” she asked Lydia, a question that, in time, led Lydia along the same path as Dora. “When this country is restored to health by revolution, it will be my g
reat joy to deliver new life into it.”
Blowpipe bombs were her forte. It was her handiwork that felled the Grand Duke Sergius Alexandrovich—Governor General of Moscow and brother-in-law of the Tsar. She was arrested soon after and went mad within months of her incarceration in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. News of her death in a lunatic asylum reached us in the winter of 1908. We still don’t know how she died.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I LEFT MY HOME LATE IN THE WINTER OF 1904. IT was just after Purim, the exact time of year that I had first gone to live with Tsila and Aaron Lev. The older Mrs. Frumkin, Shmulik the Goat’s mother, was making a trip to Kiev with her daughter Zivia. There was a free clinic there, a surgical clinic, and they were hoping something could be done about the tumor that protruded ever larger from the base of Mrs. Frumkin’s spine. Since the river was not yet navigable, the Frumkins were taking the longer, more expensive route: by coach to Kalinkovich, where they would transfer to a train. And I, on Tsila’s decision, was traveling with them.
A week earlier a proposed match for Tsila’s younger sister, Taube, had been broken by the prospective bridegroom’s family in the final stages of negotiation. It had been a good match, an excellent family—the young man in question was from a merchant family in Kiev—and the Hero and Rosa had been visibly elated that a wedding for Taube was finally imminent.
Taube, at twenty-four, should have been long married already, and certainly there had been no shortage of men suggested for her over the years. She was fussy, though, her tastes and expectations far exceeding both her beauty and the value of her dowry; and her parents were lenient—misguided, many called them. They were loathe to force their daughters into marriages.
The most recent proposal, brought by an aging but still tireless Chippa, had seemed at first too good to be true. Here was a man, finally, whose wealth and place of residence matched Taube’s inflated aspirations, and whose shortcomings—four children from a deceased first wife—were not ones of character or health. The usual inquiries into background and family revealed no unpleasant surprises, and the bride and groom soon met and declared themselves agreeable to the match. It seemed, at last, that Taube was to be settled into a normal life. Plans were made for a wedding before Pesach; fittings for her trousseau began. But then a fatal complication arose.
“I could have lived in Kiev,” Taube wailed as I opened the door to our house one evening after work. She was seated on the floor by Tsila’s chair, her head in her older sister’s lap.
“Who would want to live in such a city, anyway?” Tsila asked, stroking her sister’s long, pale hair. “A city where an honest Jew is forbidden to reside—who needs such a city? Feh!”
It was Kiev’s residency laws that Tsila was referring to, the constant round-ups and evictions, the near impossibility for a Jew from the poorer classes to obtain a permit to legally reside there.
“I wanted to live there,” Taube wailed.
“It will all work out, I’m sure,” Tsila clucked. “His family is probably just angling for an increase in your dowry.”
“It will not work out,” Taube said, raising her tear-streaked face from Tsila’s lap. “It’s over. And I’m ruined.”
“Hush now. You’re hardly ruined,” Tsila said, impatience beginning to tighten her voice.
“I’m ruined,” Taube repeated. “And all because of Bayla.”
“Bayla?” Tsila snapped. “What does Bayla have to do with this?”
It seemed the prospective bridegroom’s uncle had decided, at the last minute, to conduct further inquiries into Taube’s family. What had taken him so long, Taube didn’t know. He certainly hadn’t had to dig very deep to unearth Bayla. She was living practically under their noses, right there in Kiev.
“Kiev?” Tsila asked. “With him?”
“How should I know? With a bunch of nihilists, apparently.” A fresh burst of weeping convulsed Taube’s face. She tried to throw herself back into Tsila’s lap, but Tsila wouldn’t have her.
“Nihilists?” Tsila asked. “I really don’t think so, Taube.”
“Yes, nihilists. I’m absolutely certain of it. That’s exactly the word Herschel’s father used when he broke the engagement.”
“How did the uncle find her?”
“What do you mean, how? He dug a bit, and like a mole she emerged to the light. He said she looks ill—deathly pale, like a ghost—and is completely ill-mannered. She didn’t even invite him in, the uncle of her future brother-in-law. She just stood in the doorway of her house, looking ghastly, neglecting to offer the uncle so much as a glass of tea. Can you imagine? So that was that. I can’t very well blame the uncle for his report—or the family for their decision. Who would want to be associated through marriage with such …” Taube’s mouth twisted unbecomingly now. “Such scum,” she said, at which point Tsila slapped her once across the face.
“I’m going to Kiev,” Tsila had announced immediately upon awakening the morning after Taube’s visit. It was still dark out, but we were all up, preparing to start our day. Aaron Lev was standing by the stove, waiting for the kettle to boil. He took a lemon from the basket that hung by the dish rack, rolled it between his two hands, then cut it and divided it among three glasses.
“Bayla needs me,” Tsila said. “She came to me in my dream.”
Aaron Lev nodded. He poured hot water into the three glasses, then handed one to Tsila and one to me. “Did she say what she needs you for?” he asked.
“Not in so many words,” Tsila said.
Aaron Lev nodded again and drank his hot lemon-water. “If she needs you so much she could have sent you a letter,” he said. Ten months had now passed without a word from Bayla.
“She’s too ashamed to write me,” Tsila said. “He still hasn’t married her. She’s ashamed to admit I was right.”
“How do you know he hasn’t married her?”
“A sister knows these things. He’s abandoned her and now she’s afraid to face those who knew all along that it would end this way. It’s shame that’s keeping her in Kiev now, not her great revolutionary convictions. Bayla’s no revolutionary.”
“She was showing inclinations that way before she left,” Aaron Lev reminded Tsila.
“Only because of him,” Tsila said. “Inclinations of various sorts she’s always had, depending on whom she was trying to please or befriend. But inclinations don’t harden into convictions with Bayla. Her nature is too tender. She’s like putty that never sets, ready to be reshaped by every pair of hands that hold her.”
Aaron Lev raised one eyebrow but said nothing. Tsila cradled her hot drink in her hands and held its heat to her forehead as she thought about her sister. “She should come to Argentina with us. She can start fresh there, make a new life.” She looked up at Aaron Lev.
“You’re going to travel all the way to Kiev just to invite her to join us in Argentina?” Aaron Lev asked. “It’s such a busy time for you,” he said, glancing at the pile of fabrics in Tsila’s work area. Tsila followed his glance. It would be at least two weeks until she had worked her way through her backlog of orders. And by then there would be more, as Pesach and Easter approached.
“Mrs. Frumkin and her daughter are leaving for Kiev in a week,” Aaron Lev said. “Can’t you send a letter to Bayla with them?”
“There’s enough talk about Bayla already without sending that Zivia in to see for herself. The mouth on that woman!”
“Tsila, Tsila,” Aaron Lev entreated. “What makes you think Bayla would even want—”
“I’ll go,” I said.
“You?” Tsila turned on me. “You expect me to trust you on such a journey when I can’t even let you out of my sight for an evening without you bringing God knows what into our home?”
I had not known until then that she had told Aaron Lev about the dynamite.
“Maybe she’d be better to be away from here for a while,” Aaron Lev suggested as if I were no longer in the room. “She can travel with the Frumkins, st
ay with them in Kiev. They’re decent people—I went to heder with Shmulik. They’ll look out for her.”
“Mrs. Frumkin’s an idiot. And that Zivia’s no brighter.”
“It doesn’t take genius to get to Kiev and back. It might do her some good. And they’ll only be gone a week or so. Two weeks at most.”
Tsila didn’t answer, but neither did she argue. Aaron Lev began pulling on his overclothes, preparing to leave for the day.
“If I trust you with this, will you act with the maturity and responsibility we expect?” Tsila asked, turning to me. It was the first time she had turned her full attention to me in weeks.
So welcome was the return of her interest, the possibility of regaining her trust, that I resolved on the spot to do her bidding successfully in Kiev, to convince Bayla to join us in Argentina, to restore to Tsila not only her sister whom she had all but given up as lost forever but myself as well.
THE DAY OF MY DEPARTURE WAS AS CHEERLESS AS THE one ten years earlier when Lipsa had led me by the hand up the very road that Noam’s coach was now taking me down. My future was no more discernible to me than it had been then—I could not even see the shape of the following day—but as I settled myself on the hard bench of Noam’s coach, arranging sheepskins around myself for warmth, it was hope and excitement that filled me.
Noam’s was not the only coach heading into Kalinkovich that day. The coaches were now traveling in caravan formation due to an increase in attacks by bandits along the way. Noam’s was in the lead and the Frumkins and I were his only passengers.
No one spoke. What was there to speak about? The driving was treacherous; our eyes scanned the thick forest through which we were traveling, wary of who might emerge at any time. It was a gray, misty day. The pines crowding the road seemed black in a light that failed to illuminate the green of their boughs. Mrs. Frumkin moaned every time the runners on the coach hit a rut, a constant occurrence, since the ice was softening, rendering the road a washboard. I wondered if she might die before she made it as far, even, as Kalinkovich. And then I wondered if I would be forced to turn around if she died or if I might be allowed to continue on my own to Kiev. I settled into a huddle beneath the sheepskins and asked the Almighty’s help in subduing my selfish thoughts.
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