“Five rubles,” I said.
“Five?” the two of them repeated in unison.
“For what, a bed in her kitchen?” Hinda asked.
“It’s right beside the oven,” I pointed out.
“That’s a sin,” Masha said.
“I’m lucky she rented it to me at all.”
When I had first knocked at Mrs. Plotkin’s door, she had only opened it a crack, demanding to know what I wanted before allowing me entry.
“I heard you have a bed to rent,” I told her.
“Who said?” she asked.
“Mrs. Kaminsky at number eleven.”
“Well, Mrs. Kaminsky at number eleven should mind her own business,” Mrs. Plotkin responded, but she opened the door a crack wider so I could see her face, deeply wrinkled and sunken around a toothless mouth. “You have your permit?” she asked.
I told her I didn’t.
“And Mrs. Kaminsky sent you here?” Not a wisp of hair escaped her kerchief, and her eyebrows were hairless ridges.
“I have enough money to cover a month’s rent.”
“How do you know what I charge for a month’s rent? Wait, let me guess … Mrs. Kaminsky at number eleven told you.”
I nodded, and Mrs. Plotkin smiled then, a tired smile, as if we had just shared a joke about the state of the world. “So?” she asked. “What’s the rent?”
“Four rubles,” I said.
“That’s for girls who have residence permits. For those who don’t … to tell you the truth, eight rubles wouldn’t be enough.”
“Four and a half,” I offered.
“It’s not worth my trouble.”
“All right, then,” I said, beginning to walk away.
“Seven,” she called after me.
“I can find an entire room for that.”
“Six, and that’s final.”
“Five, and I’ll pay you up front today.”
“Of course you’ll pay me up front. Do I look like a lending bank to you? But for such a reduced rent, you’ll do some chores for me as well.”
She had shown me to my bed then. It was a cot, behind the stove in the kitchen. This I didn’t mind, for I had been dreading the dark damp of a basement. No sooner had I put down my bag, though, when Mrs. Plotkin began listing all the chores I would perform to make up for the reduction in rent, beginning with lighting the stove and drawing the day’s water first thing in the morning.
“Is there something wrong with this water?” I asked Hinda and Masha. The water in the courtyard’s cistern had a peculiar brownish red tinge to it.
They both stared at me for a moment. “How long did you say you’ve been in Kiev?” Hinda asked.
“I didn’t.”
Hinda smirked while Masha explained that the water was drawn directly from the Dnieper and unfiltered. It was that way in all the poorer neighborhoods, and some of the richer ones as well. It was at its worst this time of year, when the spring flooding drew the sewage of an entire winter into the river all at once. “There’s already cholera breaking out and it’s not even Pesach yet. But tell me,” she said, “have you found employment?”
I admitted I hadn’t.
“Do you have residence papers?”
“No,” I said, and she told me, as Mrs. Kaminsky had, that Shamsky’s was looking for girls.
“What’s Shamsky’s?” I asked.
“What’s Shamsky’s?!” Hinda’s smirk had progressed to a sneer.
Masha informed me that the Shamsky family ran a large sugar plant and they were known to turn a blind eye to the missing paperwork of new migrants. “It makes for more loyal employees, if you know what I mean.”
“They can pay lower without worrying about a strike,” Hinda explained. “It’s a far walk from here, though. We’re lucky where we work. It’s just fifteen minutes.”
They worked in a confectionary factory in the Podol, she explained, work that was not unlike what I would be doing if I found employment at Shamsky’s. “We wrap candy, you’ll wrap sugar,” she said.
“All day?” I asked, swallowing hard.
“From seven until seven, with an hour off for lunch. It’s not hard, but the pay’s low until you get the hang of it. It was only thirteen kopecks a pood last year, but I hear they’re up to fourteen kopecks now.”
“I made eleven rubles last month,” Hinda bragged.
“But you can’t expect to make near that at the beginning,” Masha said. “No one does.”
“Especially not at Shamsky’s,” Hinda snickered.
“You’ll catch on quickly enough, though,” Masha assured me.
I smiled at them both, trying to keep my discouragement to myself as I realized what it would take to support myself in Kiev while I looked for Bayla.
“You’ll move in with us at the end of the month,” Masha was saying. “Three and a half rubles for a bed, and the group of us share a pot of soup at night, which saves even more.”
I kept smiling, stiffly I’m sure, as I imagined waking up in a seeping basement every morning to Masha’s advice and Hinda’s smirk. I could only hope that my wages would stretch enough to cover the rent at Mrs. Plotkin’s, the merits of those accommodations were all the clearer for having encountered the alternative. Mrs. Plotkin was brusque but not unfriendly now that we had agreed upon the rent. She didn’t ask where I had come from or why I was here. And when I had sat down with her four boys the night before to teach them the aleph-bes, she had smiled to herself as she stood by the stove, later placing a bowl of soup before me, though that was not included in the rent.
THE SPRING PROCEEDED SLOWLY AT FIRST, THE FLOODWATERS ebbing gradually as the poplars and chestnuts put out their first tiny leaves. Then a week of heat, and the greenery thickened into a canopy overhead through which the sunlight dappled the sidewalks and boulevards. Maybugs flew through open windows, nightingales sang in the night, and the warm breeze carried the fragrance of lilacs that blossomed purple and white against the red cliffs of the city.
I woke up very early each morning and drew the day’s water before heading out across the city for Shamsky’s. Yes, I was working at the Shamsky’s refinery, walking an hour across the city to wrap sugar twelve hours a day, then walking back an hour in the evening. The work was tiring but not complicated. The only part of the workday I truly dreaded was right at the end when the security guards would pat us down to check that we had not stolen sugar from the owners. Every afternoon as my arms and shoulders tired and my legs began to cramp, the dread would build inside me. And every evening the anger, as the guards’ hands groped me in places no one else had ever touched. The shame.
Still, I was not unhappy with the work. It wasn’t long before I was earning close to two and a half rubles a week, and this brought me both pleasure and pride. The thought that I carried my own earnings in my pocket pleased me, as did the freedom of deciding how to spend them—buying a bag of sunflower seeds on my way home, or stopping at a confectionary for a candied plum, or saving for a new hat or dress if I chose to—and not having to report any of my decisions to anyone.
I had no friends at work but could have had I wished. One girl in particular sought to draw me in. Tonya was her name, a girl with upswept auburn hair whose fierce profile and piercing eyes resembled a hawk’s. She often invited me to join the group that gathered in the canteen during lunchtime and met for various activities after work hours as well. I was not cold to Tonya’s overtures—I appreciated such friendliness—and sometimes I joined her group during lunch. My evenings, however, I chose to spend alone, searching for Bayla.
I walked through the city most evenings after work, from the neighborhood near the sugar plant where workers’ plywood hovels spilled over hillsides and the ravine bottoms were rotten with garbage, to the wide boulevards of Lypky, with its lime trees and grand mansions, where the Shamsky family had its residence. And at every pharmacy I saw along the way, I stopped in to inquire after Bayla. Wherever I walked there were dangers, I knew, danger
s that Mrs. Plotkin warned me about whenever I returned from my solitary wanderings. In the Lypky I would be arrested for loitering, she was sure. Near the ravines I would be raped and left to die. This had happened just the year before to another girl, also new from the shtetl. That girl had been older than I was but just as foolish, Mrs. Plotkin said, walking about alone all the time. Did I want to end up dead in a ditch, Mrs. Plotkin wondered.
THE SPRING PROGRESSED. MORNINGS WERE FRESH AND mild, the evenings filled with light. People poured out onto the streets in the lengthening evenings: strutting sailors on leave from their ships, gazing young couples escaping airless apartments, gentlemen with their ladies on their arms. Smartly dressed factory girls sashayed by with smug smiles. They had quick retorts for the young men who begged for their kisses as they passed, but they barely wasted a glance at their duller cousins from the countryside who stood kerchiefed and barefoot on every street corner with their flowers for sale in pails of water, their slices of gingerbread, their jugs of cold milk that they promised was fresh. I watched but was careful not to be watched, alert always for police or other officials who might stop me and ask for my papers.
I bought my refreshments from the vendors on the streets. The woman selling buns who had jostled me the day I met Leib worked a long stretch of sidewalk on the Krestchatik. Her buns were so stale that they had to be soaked in milk to be eaten, but they were five kopecks cheaper a dozen than anyone else’s. On Fundkleyev Street, near the François Café, was a vendor whose hot cheesecakes were loaded with raisins. To get to her, though, I had to endure the beggar stationed beside her who muttered so loudly about the filth of the Jews that his venom entered me every time I had to pass him, poisoning me with momentary shame and doubts about my own cleanliness. “Don’t mind him,” the vendor would tell me as she handed me my cheesecake, but one day she dropped the coins I had given her into his wooden bowl.
Every week I received a letter from Tsila ordering me home at once, and every week I sent a letter back assuring her and Aaron Lev that I was safe at Mrs. Plotkin’s, that my search for Bayla was progressing well, that the wages I was earning would help with my passage to Argentina. Did I recognize my own deceit in those letters I sent so faithfully? How could I not? How could I continue to pretend it was my search for Bayla that was keeping me in Kiev? But how could I turn away from the longing that filled me those first few weeks in Kiev, a longing for a new life—my own life—that seemed to be reaching for me at last?
One evening I stopped in at the café where I had waited for Leib. I had received a letter from Tsila earlier that day. I was to return home immediately, she told me once again. I ordered a cup of rich and bitter coffee—so much more enticing than the tea I drank at home—and wrote back to Tsila that I would return home very soon. Then I read the newspaper—full of news, as always, of disease in the city and disaster in the war with Japan. And trouble in the Polyseh, I read that evening in the Kievskaya Mysl’, a paper less liberal than others in the city. The scoundrel Andrey Gon and his company of bandits were still at large in the swamp, the article reported. An entire detachment of dragoons and forest guards had failed to capture him. He emerged with regularity to conduct his shameful raids on isolated estates, only to disappear into the bog and quicksand where no arm of the law could reach. And this was just one example of the disreputable denizens of that lawless region, the article continued. Bandits and beggars had long made their home there—this was nothing new—but now it was known to foster encampments of revolutionary terrorists as well. The entire swamp should be drained, the writer declared. Worse than merely useless land, it had now become a festering boil whose poisonous elements threatened the very life of the regime.
A festering boil? Poisonous elements? An exaggeration; still, I remembered the vapors that wafted from the swamp, the stunted landscape shrouded in mist, and as I put down the paper I had a sensation of cold damp brushing up against my skin. It was fleeting but real, the first I had felt it since my arrival in Kiev: a familiar clamminess—my past? my destiny?—close at hand. I gulped down the last of my coffee, left a pile of coins on the table, and hurried out into the warmth of the evening.
The street was thronged with people, the air warm and thick, though darkness had fallen by now. I threaded my way through the crowd, ignoring the glares I received as I wedged my way between people, the admonishments to watch where I was going. My skin was warm and moist with sweat as it pressed against the warm, moist skin of strangers. The clamminess I had felt earlier was nothing now. A memory. A fear.
At the other end of the Krestchatik a crowd gathered around an organ-grinder. It was the one with the red-and-green parrot whose specialty was “The Waves of the Danube.” He played other songs too, of course—“Oh the Box Is Full to Bursting,” “Yearning for the Fatherland”—but it was “The Waves of the Danube” that always drew his largest crowds. I drew closer, expecting to hear the familiar waltz and to join the rhythmic swaying of the crowd. The crowd was strangely still, though, as I approached, and what I heard was not a waltz but a piercing sadness, a longing so deep it had the radiance of joy. “Bitter Parting,” the organ-grinder was playing, and I closed my eyes to listen, while all around me the crowd grew larger and larger—passersby stopping, caught, perhaps, as I had been by the sound of their own longing, suddenly easier to bear for the beauty that the organ-grinder had found in it.
When he finished “Bitter Parting” there was a momentary hush, then he asked, as he always did, if anyone cared to try a lucky dip. “Only five kopecks,” he offered, and I felt my head nodding yes. I had tried the lucky dip before, allowing his parrot to pick out a colored slip of paper with a prediction printed on it. Each time before, the prediction had been obscure—Beware the orange cat at dusk, for example—as if the parrot had mistakenly pulled out a truth meant for someone else, but that evening he chose one that was meant for me alone. Dark eyes will bring you good luck, the prediction promised, and relief flooded me. “What does it say?” I heard people asking around me. A man beside me looked over my shoulder and read the prediction out loud. An approving murmur passed through the crowd, and as the organ played the first notes of “The Waves of the Danube,” I was filled with hope about my future.
THE OUTBREAK OF CHOLERA DID NOT SUBSIDE WITH THE ebbing of the floodwaters but persisted, spreading as the weather warmed. As more cases were reported in our neighborhood, Mrs. Plotkin took it into her head that all the water that I drew in the morning should be boiled before I left for work. This was onerous to me, not only for the extra time it took out of my morning, and the heat it generated in the already overheated kitchen, but also for the earnings it took out of my pocket. The additional wood needed to boil our water was a cost Mrs. Plotkin insisted I share.
“What?!” Masha shrieked when she heard this latest outrage. She and Hinda were also being careful with their water, of course, drinking only tea or hot water, but to have to boil the water that was used for washing, and to then be required to share the cost of this eccentricity … “You’ll move in with us,” Masha insisted. “What do you need with that hag?”
I heard Masha’s indignation but my mind was elsewhere. A letter had arrived from Tsila, informing me that if I did not return home immediately she would come to Kiev herself to retrieve me. I could no longer pretend to Tsila or myself that I was going to find Bayla in my haphazard wanderings through the city, and in the absence of that purpose I knew I did not have the will to defy Tsila outright, face to face, in Kiev. I bought a train ticket for the following week and wrote Tsila of my plans.
As the cholera worsened, agitation about it increased. In the newspapers, on the streets, during breaks at work, that was what everyone discussed. The corruption of the city council was to blame, many said. How else to explain the continuing filthiness of the city’s water when the problem could so easily be corrected by the simple installation of filters?
A girl at work fell ill—Olga was her name—and a collection was taken up on her
behalf.
“How’s this going to help?” asked Tonya, fastening her piercing gaze on each of us in turn. We were in the canteen having lunch, the group of us who lived too far to go home for the midday meal.
“What do you mean how?” asked Anna, who was taking up the collection. “It will buy food, medication, help with the rent …”
“That’s not what I mean,” Tonya said. “I’m asking what good are isolated acts of charity? It’s like running around hell trying to put out brushfires.”
Anna turned a dull face to Tonya. “Are you suggesting we shouldn’t help Olga?”
“You know that’s not what I’m suggesting.” Tonya dropped a few kopecks into the box. “I’m simply posing a question. What are we doing about the larger problem?”
Now, Tonya was a popular girl, admired for her quick laugh and for her quick hands that never failed to wrap close to four poods of sugar a day. At that moment, however, all of the girls shifted uncomfortably around her. A few cast glances at the guards, the security guards who patted us down each evening, watched over us throughout the day, and eavesdropped on our every conversation.
“What larger problem?” Anna asked.
“Oh, forget it. Just forget it,” Tonya said. She had a quick temper to match her quick laugh and quick hands.
“The water supply,” I said quietly. “That’s the larger problem that no one seems able to address.”
“Willing to address,” Tonya corrected. “They’re able to but not willing. But that’s just a symptom. Just one small symptom of the corrupting greed of capitalism.”
“The installation of filters shouldn’t be such a complicated matter,” I said. I had read all about it in the Kievskaya Gazeta just the evening before.
“But it might cost some money,” Tonya said, excitement or anger flushing her face. “It might cause a few kopecks to slip through the greasy fingers of certain city councilmen.”
“I, for one, have no interest in this discussion,” Anna said loudly. Too loudly. It was obvious she was speaking for the benefit of the security guard.
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