River

by Shira Nayman

  “Kishinev …” I said.

  “It made no difference, did it,” Sarah said, “that they found the murderer in the end. The government had already declared that the death of the Christian baby was a ritual murder, plotted by Jews. The peasants formed a mob—how efficient they were, burning, killing. With the full support of the government. As far as everyone was concerned, if they said that Jews did it, then they did it—even after a Christian relative of the baby confessed to the crime.

  “I think that’s what scares me most. That there’s no reason to it. It’s just pure hatred that has nothing to do with reality.”

  It was colder here, by the river. Despite the blanket, I began to shiver; the shaking seemed to reach all the way to my bones.

  “Perhaps we ought to go back,” I said.

  Sarah wiped away a tear.

  “Yes, I suppose we should,” she said.

  “It’s a new year. Maybe everything will settle down. Blow over.” The moment my words were out, I realized how hollow they sounded.

  Sarah gave me a probing look. “I’ve always found hope in the bright spots of our history,” she said. “The times our people have flourished.”

  Hearing her say that—our history—jarred; the history she was talking about, of the Jewish people, felt like it had nothing really to do with me. Yes, my mother was Jewish, and I had known that all my life, but since I’d not been raised Jewish, it seemed like a fact that did not really impact me.

  “Such as …?”

  “My favorite period is when the Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem, almost fifty years after Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Temple. You know, when King Cyrus of Persia decreed that not only could they return, but he would provide funding to help them rebuild the temple. Did you know that Jews talked Aramaic in those days? Papa has taught me some in our studies together, since some of the Torah is written in Aramaic. I am so lucky, since most girls don’t get to learn like the boys … I’ve always loved that passage about the edict; it comes right at the end of the Tanakh. I memorized it when I was a little girl:

  So said Cyrus the king of Persia: All the kingdoms of the earth has the Lord God of the heavens delivered to me, and He commanded me to build Him a House in Jerusalem, which is in Judea. Whoever among you, of all His people, may the Lord his God be with him, let him ascend!

  “Those last words fill me with hope—let him ascend! It means that one day, we will go up to the place we call home, where we belong, where no one will set fire to our houses or murder us just for being who we are.

  “That period of the Second Temple lasted for six hundred years. Six hundred years! I know, there were still wars and all kinds of terrible things happening—that seems to be how history works. But it was a period mostly of peace and flourishing for Jews. I long for that—for our people to be left alone.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Together, in silence, we turned our backs on the river. The return journey seemed longer; the chill had sharpened, and though I held the blanket tightly around me, the frigid air crept in through the unavoidable crevices. By the time we rounded the corner onto Sarah’s street, I was shivering uncontrollably. A bank of cloud dampened the starlight, sinking the house in shadow.

  Inside, the house was dark—the single candle from earlier had sputtered out. I unfolded the blanket I’d been using as a wrap and spread it over the bed; we undressed in the near darkness and climbed in together.

  “Shanah tovah,” Sarah said, reaching for my hand. Her voice seemed far away, as if coming to me through the wrong end of a telescope. I returned her grip, aware of a vaguely desperate feeling that I was clutching her hand to keep Sarah from slipping away.

  “Shanah tovah.” My accent was as thick and natural as hers, as if I’d been uttering this Hebraic expression, “A Good Year,” the whole of my life.

  Within minutes I could hear, from the sound of her breathing, that Sarah was asleep. I felt exhausted, but at the same time alert and wide awake, as if I’d never sleep again. I lay there, listening to Sarah’s deep, even breaths, my mind a whirl of images, impressions, tastes, and sounds from this very long day. I drew in some careful, steady breaths and tried to still the tumbling carnival of images. I found myself fixing on the disturbing conversation I’d had with Sarah in the midst of our marathon cooking session.

  What was the name of that yeshivah student she’d mentioned—the one who, along with a group of friends, had fought back against the czar’s men with stones, and was later savagely murdered? I had an urgent feeling—that I must recall his name. How could I let him lie there on the street in my mind’s eye, brutalized, without remembering his name? I desperately wanted to say a prayer for him here, in his hometown, on this Rosh Hashanah evening.

  It came to me. Yitzhak Baron. If Sarah was eight at the time, then that particular pogrom took place five or six years ago. And now, according to Sarah, the violence was again in full swing, though it had not yet reached Dusiat.

  I pictured Cossacks on horseback holding firebrands, kicking children down in the street, drawing pistols and swords: knifing, shooting, attacking the men and women with whom we’d celebrated this evening. Wasn’t the world meant to become less baffling as one grew older—not more? I longed for the feelings I’d had as a young child, lying in bed as my mother or father read to me, snuggly warm and safe, with thoughts only of Winnie the Pooh and the Magic Faraway Tree, filled with the certainty that aside from the villains in fairy tales, people were kind and good and righteous.

  I curled up under the woolen blanket, suddenly woozy and aware of a crushing need for sleep.

  The next thing I knew, I was sitting up in bed, coughing wildly. A thickness of black smoke burned my eyes and choked my throat. I shed the heavy blanket and stumbled to my feet.

  “Sarah!”

  She was lying in the bed, still asleep. I shook her body—she remained unmoving.

  “Sarah!” I shouted again, and this time she stirred.

  She leapt from the bed and ran coughing to the sideboard where the large jug of water stood. In a moment, she was back; she threw a soaked cloth to me and I caught it, then pressed it to my nose and mouth as I could see, in the wavering orange light, she was doing with a similar piece of rag. Sarah crawled on the floor to her parents’ door and began pounding on it with her fist. A loud thud: Yossele, jumping down from the alcove and landing clumsily on his side. He, too, was coughing. I ran over to help him up. He winced as he righted himself but did not seem seriously hurt. Blinding smoke billowed through the space. The fire roared, attacking everything with burning claws.

  The bolt, I thought, recalling how Sarah’s father had bolted his door. At that moment, the door fell forward—whether her parents had axed it open or it had succumbed to the flames, I did not know—and Sarah’s parents stumbled out. Sarah thrust wet rags into their hands and together we crawled along the floor to the back door.

  Then, we were outside in the alleyway; the cool air rushed into my lungs with such intense relief, it felt almost like pain. Beside me, Sarah was gulping in air. She leaned close to my ear.

  “Mama said it was going to happen,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “She’s been saying it all along.” Her eyes were glassy and oddly calm.

  We ran along the street. I looked back, keeping the damp cloth over my mouth and nose as the smoke billowed all around us. Row upon row of simple wooden houses I’d passed by earlier in the night were in flames. Beyond the houses, against the hills’ silhouette, I made out a series of swiftly moving shadows: men on horseback, twenty or more, brandishing fiery torches. The powerful young men we’d glimpsed earlier in the evening, riding low on their horses, their jackets flying behind them. On their faces, I imagined a grim satisfaction as they turned back to look at the burning village, their eyes glinting perversely with pride.

  I thought back to last night, when I lay in the wooden bed that by now was surely aflame, picturing a scene that was eerily close to what was happening now.

&nb
sp; We ran on, joined by ever more people—men, women, children, pouring from the houses, running together, a burgeoning, frightened herd. I kept closely behind Sarah’s father; I realized he was clutching something; a large piece of fabric was flapping in his hand. I squinted to make out what it was and recognized the crumpled piece of white silk, with its yellow-and-blue embroidery and shaggy white fringe. In all the commotion, surrounded by deadly, thick smoke and greedy flames closing in on their house, Sarah’s father had thought to bring his tallis—the simple prayer shawl given to him on his wedding day by the parents of his wife.

  What, I wondered, would I seize in such a situation from my own home—so very far away in time and place?

  The street widened, and I felt a flare of intense heat; instinctively, I veered away from it toward the middle of the packed-dirt road. I turned my head to see the old barn-like synagogue furiously burning; only a few hours earlier, it had called to me in a sweet and welcoming way … There was something brighter about this fire. A horrible stench pressed through the rag I held to my nose: fumes, kerosene or some other kind of combustible fluid. The enormous wooden doors were aglow, eerily without flames. The illusion held for but a moment; an angry cracking, like the sound of logs being split, tore the doors apart, huge timbers chewed at by the devouring flames.

  A loud creaking split my ears and I turned my face from the vile burst of heat that brutally punched the air. Time compressed, and though I continued to hurl myself down the street, along with the growing crowd, something inside me gripped onto the molten moment: the heat of the dying synagogue was inside me, like the energy in a giant coiled spring. Only a few hours ago I had longed for the morning, when I’d expected to pass through those enormous polished doors and into the sanctuary. Where I would join Sarah’s family—my family—in prayer, the sinuous Hebraic words gliding from my own tongue, their meaning rich and plain as I rehearsed the service that my grandparents and their parents and all my ancestors down through two thousand years of history had uttered before me.

  Now, it would never be; it would never come to pass.

  Escape? But to where—and by what means?

  Something in the heat that pummeled us, that flooded my being from within and tugged at my heart and soul, felt like a taste of what might have been, what would have been, if not for the Cossacks and their firebrands.

  And then, it was snatched away—the sight of the burning synagogue, the houses all around. The street ended and we veered off onto open farmland, our collective feet muffled by the brown grass underfoot. We were off across the field, and then rounding a large copse of trees, moving farther and farther away from the village. Everything was suddenly dark, increasingly dense vegetation hiding the sight of the flames. No sounds but the thudding of our feet on the earth and the deep heavy breathing of hundreds of people—much of the population of an entire village, in the thick of the night, moving along carrying nothing, no possessions, only life—fleeing into the darkness with nowhere to go.

  I looked up to the skies, which were darkening, swallowing the stars whose generous light had earlier allowed us to pick our way across the nighttime landscape toward the Sventoji River. We were now in dense forest; a small clearing opened up ahead and we all slowed, spreading through the space, quiet voices rising in ghostly chorus. Sarah slipped her hand in mine; we both waited for our breath to steady before speaking. I wondered how far we were from the river—wondered how long it would take us to reach, and whether there would be boats to sail us away from all this.

  Sarah was studying my face and once again, for what felt like the hundredth time in the course of this very long twenty-four hours, I had the unsettling feeling that she was reading my mind.

  “Father says there are going to be boats,” Sarah said. “We don’t know when they’re coming—but soon. Small boats. They’ll take us to the Baltic Sea.”

  “And then where?” I asked, scrambling to remember my geography. The Baltic Sea, how foreign that sounded, conjuring images of people and places I’d never imagined would actually involve me.

  “They talked about the big boats, the ships. That sail to Southern Africa. We have people there. Distant relatives, from Dusiat. They saw the writing on the wall, that’s what Papa says.”

  Sarah’s eyes were shining strangely, the way eyes look with fever. Her voice, though still a whisper, vibrated with excitement. But my own heart sank; I knew that I wouldn’t be going with them. I was developing an instinct about my journey—and standing there, in the darkness, whispering to Sarah, I knew that I was about to leave her and find myself once again flung into some other reality.

  Oh please, let it be home.

  The wish was so intense, it felt like a crushing weight on my chest. But even as these words formed in my mind, I had a foreboding that my wanderings were not yet over. I felt an awful plunging within, as if my heart and stomach were sinking within me like giant stones.

  “For now, we’re going to hide in the forest,” Sarah said. “Look—” She pointed into the darkness, some distance away, where a group of men were busy with shovels. Some were crouched on the ground, their bodies hunched, intent, busy. “They’re digging pits,” she said, her voice lowering to the faintest whisper, so soft I could only just make out her words.

  “Pits?”

  She nodded. “You’ll stay with us.” Her voice was tentative, the fevered shine gone from her eyes, which were now hollows of seriousness.

  I said nothing. What remained unsaid, hung between us: Where else would I go?

  Sarah gestured toward another group of men, huddled together within a dense grouping of trees.

  “Yossele is going back with my eldest brother, Chaim. To Kovno. Things are calmer there. Chaim says the government will keep the trouble in check. He can join Chaim at the yeshivah.”

  No! I wanted to shriek. Yossele mustn’t go with Chaim! The terrible image of Yossele’s future reared up in my mind, bloody and awful; my hands trembled as I reached for Sarah’s arm.

  “Hadassah, what’s wrong?” She searched my face.

  My throat seized; I could not utter a single word.

  I felt I was choking on time itself; I knew the future, which meant I had the power to change the future, to speak out—no, to shriek—Come with us, Yossele! So you might live in South Africa, not here, not in Kovno, where several decades from now a new band of evildoers will make the Cossacks’ attacks seem pranks by comparison. So that you and your children might be spared the horror of succumbing to the Nazis’ bullets. In South Africa, you will have a different wife, different children—and you will all survive!

  But how could I interfere with the past? The past had already happened!

  A voice threaded its way into my confusion. Wait, this inner voice said, Yossele has nothing to do with your own past. I struggled to make sense of this thought. Since Yossele was Sarah’s brother, he was not in the direct line of my own family—only now did I make the actual connection that Yossele was in fact my great-great-uncle. His fate, therefore, had no impact on the fact of my own birth. Maybe I could say something now, to Sarah? Maybe I could change history after all—maybe I could save Yossele! That sweet boy, so clever, the intelligence shining brightly in his eyes.

  How could I not say anything? I closed my hands into fists—could feel the immense power in my own hands and tried to squelch it. It all felt too much! But—but—how could I turn away from the chance to save Yossele from his fate? Yossele, his wife, his children! I was too panicked to run the logic—and who could believe in any case in logic when it came to this crazy topsy-turvy time and space journey I was on? Logic would say this: that if Yossele went to South Africa with his sister, Sarah, he of course would end up with a different wife, different children. The point was, I’d be saving him. And yes, even saving the children that would not in fact end up being born. My mind was scrambling. The crowd was pressing in, we were being pulled apart by this river of humanity.

  “Sarah,” I said, aware that the pr
essurized-steam panic rising within me was evident in my voice. “Yossele must go with you! You cannot let him stay here!”

  She shook her head. “We’ve talked with him,” Sarah said, pressing my hand. “Mama, too, and Papa. It’s agreed. He’ll be safe here.”

  “He won’t be safe! I’m telling you—you cannot let him stay!”

  Sarah let go of my hand. “Hadassah, what are you talking about? How can you possibly know—?” There, the furrowed brow, her eyes wavering with confusion and fear.

  “If you don’t—he’ll be shot!”

  Sarah’s eyes went blank. “Hadassah, what’s happening to you?”

  She looked at me sideways, this time with a wariness that made me want to weep. It was as if the feeling between us was suddenly sucked away. All the closeness and togetherness of the past day evaporated.

  I sank to my knees, limp with helplessness. History itself was bearing down on me, a dark river governed by the moon, thrusting forward, but tugged by a raging sea—the future, Destiny, bearing down on the moment, on me, with brute, unyielding force. I saw myself for the first time as the tiniest thing on earth, powerless as a mote of dust.

  “Sarah,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I reached for her hand and she tentatively took it, and then the dark look in her eyes melted away.

  And then, he was there beside me, Yossele; I had not heard him approach.

  “I want to say goodbye,” he said. Was I imagining it? An unbearably knowing look in his eye? “And wish you safe journey.”

  I’d never felt so hopeless. I looked at Yossele, tried to return his farewell but was struck mute, as if by some mighty, external force.

  “It’s all right, really,” he said, raising his arm toward mine, as if he were going to take my hand, but then dropping it again.

  He turned, then, and walked away. It all seemed so surreal—hundreds of us milling around under cover of the forest, the night heavy around us. Ordinary people, standing about in an ordinary way, and yet everything extraordinary, not normal at all: the world turned on its axis, lives uprooted, ripped from their foundations, everything changed, forever. And yet—after all, just people whispering and talking and planning, under the stars.