Art by Kaysha Siemens
There Will Be One Vacant Chair
by Sarah Pinsker
* * *
1862
Ohio
If we are indeed living in the eternal now that Julius once wrote of – writes of – then the soldiers on the battlefields of Pennsylvania and Kentucky and Virginia are away at war still, and they are being welcomed home, and they are kissing their loved ones goodbye. Their families are waiting for them, but they have not yet left. Levi and Julius are still fighting at the dinner table over obscure theological points. My brothers always argued, though they were grown men already when I was still a girl, grown men already when we fled Hungary for Ohio.
The Sabbath is meant to be ushered in as a peaceful bride, but our Friday night meals were often contentious. Papa and my brothers always returned from synagogue arguing some Talmudic point or another. Julius was by far the most devoted scholar of the three, but Levi was too stubborn ever to acknowledge he was in the wrong. Their walk home took some time, due to Julius’s shortened leg, and we could hear their arguments from some blocks down the otherwise quiet street. They would grow silent when Mama lit the candles, and through the other blessings, then erupt into discord again as the meal was served. Even after Levi married and moved three blocks away, this was ever the pattern, only his children would wail when his voice rose, and his wife, Hava, cowered at the far end of our expanded table.
Their greatest fight occurred in such a manner, though on an evening when Julius did not attend synagogue with the others. Levi and another of the local doctors had been charged with conducting military examinations all that day, to determine whose petitions for exemption from the Union army might be granted. Julius had insisted on walking there without aid of his stick. He arrived back sweaty and spent, and closed himself into his room until we begged him to come out for the lighting of candles.
Julius fumed through dinner. He sat beside me, as always, and I could see the fist he clenched in his lap. Levi, oblivious or simply uncaring, picked the very subject he should have left alone. “I still don’t understand why you came in today, Julius. I didn’t need to examine you to mark you for a disability certificate.”
Julius kept his eyes down and pushed the shlishkes around his plate. His mouth was a tight line beneath his beard. Levi continued, “I would have thought you would be grateful to me for getting you out of fighting. Now you can stay home with the women and your books.”
Julius slammed his fist onto the table. A dumpling jumped from his plate, scattering breading across the tablecloth. “Do you really think I prefer not to fight? I came to you because I thought you would approve me. You’re my brother. Approve me for something else, if not for fighting. I’ll chaplain, or nurse. I don’t want to stay home. Not again. Just me and the scrofulous and the rheumatic.”
“You are rheumatic. And that leg of yours can’t carry you across the house without a rest, let alone a battlefield,” Levi said. “You are meant to stay home, brother, whether you want to or not.”
I knew that Papa and Levi had fought in the war back in Hungary, but I had never considered that Julius might have wanted to do so. I didn’t understand why he wanted to go. Unlike the family stories I had heard about revolution in Hungary, this new war of Southern rebellion didn’t seem relevant to our situation. I wanted to ask why they were joining the fight, to understand, but it was not my place. I could inquire of Julius alone, later. He always answered my questions as if I had a right to ask them.
Julius made a strangled sound and pushed himself away from the table. In his head he must have strode from our small dining room, but in reality his progress was painfully slow.
Levi shook his head and spoke as if Julius were out of earshot. “I wish he could see that I’ve done him a kindness. He’d be just as useless in the army camps as he is here.”
Julius halted, then turned. He took two dragging steps, then launched himself at Levi. He managed one punch at Levi’s jaw, and then Levi was out of his chair too, twisting Julius’s arm and kicking his good leg out from under him, forcing him to the ground. Our parents watched slack-jawed. Levi’s son Izsak, now six, stood up in his chair and swung his own fists. Hava tugged the boy’s sleeve until he sat down. His eyes followed his father, who now spoke in mocking tones.
“You had the element of surprise and you still couldn’t best me. How would you fare against someone with a bayonet? You can’t stand, you can’t fight, and you can’t run.”
“Julius,” our father finally interjected, as if Julius were still sitting at the table, and not pinned to the floor. “Levi is not saying you lack courage or conviction. Merely that someone in your condition does not meet the minimum medical standards. Come, you shouldn’t be fighting on the Sabbath.”
The only tool I had for bringing peace to the table was Julius’s devotion to me. “Mama and I will feel better knowing you are here when the others are gone.”
His voice did not relax, but it deflated. “As you wish, Frieda.”
* * *
Levi and Papa both left in April of 1862. Levi, like most of our neighbors, mustered with the 199th Ohio Infantry. All of our community’s young men went together, except for Julius. At least they could converse in a familiar language.
Papa would not have the comfort of known faces or language, though he spoke English better than the rest of us. He had been asked to doctor on one of the new steamboat hospitals traveling up and down the river with aid and supplies. Mama and Hava and Izsak and I waved from the yard until we could no longer see them. Julius stood with us for only a moment before returning to his books.
Papa wrote often, though his letters sometimes arrived out of order or in groups of two or three. He was on a ship with three other surgeons, a few medical students, and several volunteer nurses of varying experience. He said that he had petitioned the President on behalf of the Jewish soldiers to ask for Saturday as an alternate day of rest.
“Our boat is not intended to venture into battle. Most of our patients suffer with typhoid or measles, as those with wounds are tended by the field doctors. I have not heard from Levi, though I imagine that is his role. Have you had news from him?”
We had not. We knew he was alive only because Reuven Goldstein, now Sergeant Goldstein, wrote often to his wife. She shared parts of the letters with Hava, who shared the news with my parents and me.
If Hava was upset with her husband’s failure to write, she didn’t show it. “He must be very busy,” she said. We sat in her small parlor, knitting socks for the soldiers of the 199th. Izsak battled imaginary forces under the legs of our chairs while the younger children napped.
“But the infantrymen write, and they must be even busier.”
She smiled at me. She had a scar that twisted across her lips like a winding river. “Frieda, you really must learn to think before you ask. Are you trying to make me worry more? I’d rather worry less, given the choice.”
I blushed. I kept hoping age would bring discretion, but that never yet seemed to be the case. “I just mean I think he should be writing to you.”
“I agree, but that doesn’t make it so.” She pursed her lips and resumed her knitting. She had dropped a stitch somewhere along the way, but I pretended not to notice.
Hava and I knit and sewed for the soldiers until our knuckles swelled, but Mama built herself a different role. She canvassed our community – by which I mean the other Hungarian Jews, for she had no means of communicating with any others – to find out which women were struggling while they waited for their husbands to return. There were so many. We were lucky my father and brother were doctors. We had more than most.
“I have been in their place before, as a mother and a wife,” Mama said, as we carried between us a full pot of sholet for a family from synagogue. The smells of the stew, bean and onion and smoked beef and paprika and garlic, all swirled around us. My mouth watered. Then a stronger wind blew up the street, so that we were forced to hold our head
scarves on with our free hands. I wondered what it must be like for Mama to endure her husband’s departure yet again.
For Hava and Mama, the cooking and canning and knitting served as a distraction. For me, it assuaged my guilt. Several girls my age had left with the soldiers, to serve as volunteer nurses or cooks or laundresses. I was too frightened. I told myself Mama and Hava needed my help with the four children and Julius to care for, and that my English was poor. As long as I kept busy, these reasons were excuse enough.
They weren’t mere excuses, either. I had served as Julius’s nurse for as long as I could remember, bringing him his meals and caring for him on his worst days, which outnumbered the good ones. My brother continued his self-designed studies as though there were no war. He usually confined himself to the traditional biblical texts and commentaries, but occasionally he ventured into more esoteric topics. He tested these on me before discussing them with the rabbi or Papa – not Papa now, of course.
“What are you reading today?” I asked when I entered, and he always told me, rather than telling me it was not for my mind, as Levi would do. I loved that he conversed with me as if my education were equal to his own.
“Have I told you about Rabbi Luria, Frieda?”
“No?” I attempted to sweep the cluttered floor of his room. We had long since converted the first floor parlor into a bedroom and study for Julius. It robbed us of any sort of sitting area beyond the dining room, but the stairs gave him too much difficulty even on his best days. Though I fussed about his mess, I loved the smells of leather and paper and ink that I associated with him.
He held up a thin volume. “Ha’ARI, they called him. The Lion. He was a mystic. His teachings lie outside of my ordinary scope of study, but I found a book by a descendent of one of his students. Fascinating ideas. He believed that when Adam’s soul was created, so were all the other souls of the human race. Until the arrival of the Messiah, these same souls will continue to wander from one body to the next, even to animals, to objects.”
“What an odd notion,” I said. I looked around the room, imagining souls clinging to the narrow bed, the desk, the bookshelves.
“I’ve always thought myself to be a poor excuse for a man. A good scholar, but useless to you, useless to everyone. How can I be a righteous person?”
“You are a righteous person, Julius. I don’t know anyone who is more pious. Not even the rabbi.”
He tugged at his beard. “I’m incomplete. How much does it matter that I study if I can’t do anything with my knowledge? But there’s one more extension of this concept that has piqued my interest. Ibbur, impregnation of a body by a righteous soul. Perhaps if I strive to be better, body and soul, I can invite a righteous soul to possess me. Perhaps another soul can use me to complete its work.”
“I’m trying to understand, Julius.”
“As am I, Frieda. I’m afraid I have no further appetite for study today, though. I think I shall go for a swim in the creek.”
“A what?” I heard him, but it made as little sense as his talk of possessed souls. “Do you even know how to swim?”
He pushed himself back from the table and put a ribbon into the volume he had been reading to mark the page. “I do, though I haven’t done it in many years. I don’t expect it will be difficult to pick up again.”
I considered everything that might go wrong. Though the creek was a short walk from our home, even a short walk was an ordeal for Julius. He would be exhausted by the time he got there.
“Shall I accompany you?” I asked, assuming his answer to be yes.
He surprised me. “I prefer to go on my own.”
“What if you’re pulled too far downstream? You condemn me to worry.”
“I understand your concern,” he said, in a tone that said that he both understood it and chose to reject it. So unlike Julius. He usually went to great pains not to burden me.
I blocked the doorway with my body, my arms crossed over my chest, so that Julius knew he could not move me. I did not enjoy shaming him. Any other man could have displaced me with ease. We stood opposed for several long moments, and then his shoulders sagged.
“Very well,” he said.
The woods that bordered our community were not deep. I had taken Izsak to gather berries along the edges, but had never ventured in before. Julius and I followed a narrow deer path between the trees and down to the creek. I had only ever seen the more civilized portions, closer to the town center. It was wider here, rougher. I found a stone to sit on, just off the path but in view of the water.
“Are you sure this is safe?” I asked.
Julius didn’t answer. He was not self-conscious in front of me, for I was the one to bathe him whenever he took ill. He stripped naked and climbed down the bank. The creek lapped at his ankles as he waded in, then his knees, then his waist. His movement seemed less awkward in the water, and when he dove in, it was with surprising grace.
I spent an anxious afternoon watching as he expended himself. When we finally staggered back to the house he was too weak to even climb the front steps without my help. He was smiling, though. “I think I’m going to swim every day.”
Julius put aside his books for the first time in his life, if only for a few hours. He started swimming in the creek every afternoon. I grew to trust that he was not going to drown himself, and no longer insisted on following him.
One day he took Papa’s Hungarian saber off the wall. Nobody had ever taught him to wield it, and he looked terribly awkward even to my untrained eye.
“What are you doing?” I watched him shuffle back and forth on his uneven legs, struggling to hold the sword in a usable position.
“We need to be prepared if the rebels should appear in our town. Who would protect you?”
“Give me the sword and teach me to use it. Then I can protect myself.”
He lowered the sword, then handed it to me. “I suppose you’d do just as good a job as I would.”
I hated myself for having told the truth. I didn’t see him pick up the sword again, though he continued swimming in the river daily. His arms and chest grew visibly stronger from the effort of dragging his weak legs through the current. In the mornings, when I brought his breakfast to him, I often caught him gritting his teeth at the pains he was trying to ignore. He stopped as soon as he noticed me watching.
“Have you encountered any other souls in your excursions?” I asked him.
He shook his head, refusing to be baited. “I can say only that I have found a sense of calm and strength in the water that is equaled only by a perfect thought. Both happen rarely, but I strive to achieve them with more regularity.”
His answer was so earnest I could say nothing in response. I watched him as he continued to exhaust himself, body and mind, day after day, and week after week. If Papa had been home, I’m sure he would have talked to Julius about the dangers of his new hobby. If Levi had been home, he would have mocked Julius so comprehensively that Julius would have redoubled his efforts and dropped dead of the exertion. But all I could do was watch.
Summer turned into autumn. Letters from Papa said that he was forced to work on the New Year and the Day of Atonement, on the latter treating bloodied limbs with no food in his stomach, until he nearly collapsed. I tried to imagine being in a place with no Jews at all, where the rituals of the holy days were transformed into improvisations and compromises. I ached for him.
A heavy rain brought down all of the leaves on one October night, and then the temperature dropped, so that everywhere we walked we felt the crackle of frozen leaves beneath our feet. Julius gave up his swims only when a thin layer of ice formed over the creek.
Snow came. Hava and I redoubled our efforts for the soldiers and the poorer families, switching from socks to blankets. Every letter from Papa gave mention of the bone-chilling cold. He had moved from the steamboat to a field hospital.
“I am relieved to be among Jews again, though none are Hungarian, so I still do not feel entirely am
ong my own. For the Jewish soldiers, I serve as both surgeon and chaplain, so that they are not confused in what may be their final hours,” he wrote. “I am not sure which duty wears on me more, or where one ends and the other begins. Julius, I wish you were here to administer the chaplain duties, for your counsel on such matters is far more valuable than mine.” Julius read that letter out loud to me, the despair in his voice uncontained.
We had still not received correspondence from Levi, though the Goldstein letters assured us he was fine. “He regales the troops with jokes and songs,” wrote the sergeant, leaving me to wonder if, in fact, he was referring to my brother after all. Or perhaps war really did change a person. Hava continued to write to him, despite his failure to reciprocate. She told him that he would have to teach her some of his jokes, and that the children were growing by leaps and bounds, Izsak in particular.
Izsak was indeed growing quickly. He was his father’s child, mercurial and stubborn. As far as he was concerned, he could not age fast enough. He fashioned himself a blue cap and took to sneaking around with a knife he had stolen from his mother’s kitchen. He watched me when I practiced with Papa’s sword. I made him swear not to tell anyone.
“I’ll teach you how to use it as soon as you have the strength to hold it,” I told him.
He frowned. “But I want to be a soldier now. My father will be back by then, and I will have missed the war.”
I hoped so. In the meantime, I hoped my promise would steady him and hold his desire to fight at bay.
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Page 35