Broken Song

by Kathryn Lasky

  From his bed, Reuven could see the river. The sunlight glinted off its still surface. Then something odd happened. There were radiating glints of light on the water, as if a stone had been skipped across. It seemed as if an invisible hand had tossed an invisible stone. And then Muttle’s words came back to Reuven: “You carry the music. I carry the words.”

  Reuven thought Herschel and Reb Itchel had gone, but suddenly he saw a little wisp of white drifting into his side vision. Reb Itchel had leaned back into the room and fixed Reuven in the pale light of his nearly translucent eyes. Had the rebbe made that stone skip across the river? Was this a miracle or a prayer? Then Reb Itchel seemed to whirl out in the wake of his very angry son.

  Reuven got out of bed and stood barefoot in his pajamas. He looked at his fingers and wondered how long it would take for the calluses to come back. He picked up the violin. The first sheet of the Kreutzer Sonata was out on a low chest. He began. It sounded as if mice were gnawing on the strings. Rachel peeked around the corner now. She had a perplexed look on her face. In another second she will be sticking her fingers in her ears, Reuven thought. It’s going to take more than a miracle.

  The next day Reuven stood in Herschel’s cottage in the middle of the floor. He was trying his best with the Dvo?ák. It was a worse mess than the Kreutzer Sonata, but Herschel was patient. More patient than usual. Reuven knew it was simply because he was back.

  “You’re trying too hard,” Herschel said. “Relax. Try not to think so hard about each note. Think in phrases. The notes will gather, just like those snowflakes out there.”

  It had begun snowing midway through his lesson, and Reuven could see that the corners of the window-panes were collecting the snow in little sweeps. He imagined the hills outside of town where he and Muttle used to take their sleds. The first snows often came during Hanukkah, and by the end of the holiday week, he and Muttle could usually count on at least one or two days of good sledding. That is what he thought about now. Sledding. The sting of the cold air on his cheeks. There was that sound of the snow on the runners. Snowflakes now smeared the sky. The line of trees marking the edge of the forest became a solid dark band.

  The lesson ended better than it had begun. As Reuven left Herschel’s house, he wondered how he ever could have thought about giving up the violin. In the months that he had stopped playing, had anything improved? No, nothing at all. He had felt strange, almost disoriented. Although life in Russia for a Jew was mean and hard, for Reuven life without music was death. Now he felt alive again, as the snowflakes swirled about him.

  The ferocity of the storm had increased. Reb Mendel’s house was like a dim shadow against the sky. Light was leaking out of this day faster than Reuven could walk against the biting wind. He must hurry so he could be home in time to light the first candle in the menorah. The darkness gathered around him as he ran toward the village. There was no moon. The first night of Hanukkah was always moonless. There was never supposed to be a moon, for this was a holiday about the destruction of light when the Syrians entered the temple in Jerusalem and defiled the oil for the lamps. And then there was the miracle of light when the oil, only enough for one night, burned for eight days. Hanukkah was about light and miracles.

  Tonight they would light the first candle, tomorrow another, and then another, and another, until the menorah glowed with nine candles, including the shammes, the candle by which all the others were lit. Reuven’s family always set the menorah in the window. Each night as the number of candles increased, the reflections in the window multiplied even more because of the optical tricks of the glass, especially on a cold snowy night when the glass was etched with frost trees, which provided even more surfaces for reflections. Uncle Chizor had explained this to him—the mathematics of optics and light and reflection. But Reuven found that it was better to think about the miracle rather than about the numbers, in the same way that Herschel had told him to think about the phrase rather than the individual notes.

  He stomped his feet before going through the door.

  “Good lesson?” His father looked up from his account books.

  “Good lesson, Papa, but I need to practice.”

  “You play me something just a little. The Dvo?ák, maybe?”

  “All right, Papa, but I am still rusty. Just a few measures.” Reuven took out his violin, tucked it under his chin, closed his eyes, and remembered the snowflakes gathering in little sweeps in Herschel’s window.

  “Aah.” His father sighed with pleasure at the end of the first five measures. His face broke into a wide grin.

  The smell of latkes swirled through the air. Reuven walked over to the stove, where his mother was frying the grated-up potatoes into patties.

  “No snitching,” she said as she saw Reuven’s hand reach for one of the crisp golden pancakes on the warming platter at the edge of the stove top. “Make yourself useful. Sprinkle some sugar on those. This is my last batch, then we’ll light the candles, and then we’ll eat.”

  “How come she gets one?” Reuven said, pointing at Rachel, who was sitting on the floor happily munching away on a latke.

  “Because she is a nineteen-month-old baby and she has been whining all day. I think she is coming down with an earache. And it was either give her a latke or spank her. Latkes work better,” Bathshepa said matter-of-factly. Her face was red from the heat of the stove.

  Ten minutes later Reuven, Shriprinka, Rachel, and their parents stood in front of the window where the menorah had been placed. They were ready to recite the blessing of the first of the Hanukkah lights. After lighting the first candle, they would receive their Hanukkah gelt—a few kopeks, which Reuven might use to rent a book from the storybook man. Perhaps he could persuade Shirprinka to use her gelt for a book as well. Rachel, instead of money, would receive a little wool mouse her mother had knitted. Then they would play the chance game dreidel with the wooden tops their father had carved for them years before. Then they would eat more latkes, and their mother would say as she always did, “I think I used too much oil in that last batch.”

  Reuven was thinking of all this as his mother lit the candle and they began to recite the blessing. “Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav, v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Chanukah.” Praised are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who has sanctified our lives through His commandments, commanding us to kindle the Hanukkah lights.

  The reflection of the candle flared in the window, and then suddenly there was a blur outside, a white terrified face. A wild knocking at the door. Who could it be at this hour? Reuven went to the door. It was Yitzak, the boy from down the street. He was no more than ten, but small for his age.

  “Hide!” he screamed. “Hide!”

  “What’s this?” Reuven’s father came to the door.

  “The tsar, his troops, they just torched Pecorchova,” Yitzak said.

  “Pecorchova!” they all gasped. Pecorchova was the nearest village, less than five miles away.

  “Reuven, you must hide. I must go,” Yitzak gasped the words.

  Bathshepa’s hands raked through her hair. Rachel began to cry. The last thing that Reuven clearly remembered was the reflection of the flickering candle lights in the pane of the window. Then his parents were stuffing him down the potato hole. He heard the thunk of the plank of wood being set in the floor. Then all was darkness.

  He had not been in the hole for more than a few minutes when he heard the pounding of horses’ hooves and rough loud voices. He knew those voices spoke Russian, and although Reuven’s first language was Yiddish, he understood Russian. But he could not quite make out what they were saying. Then there was a crash, and the words came very clearly.

  “Search the house for any young males. You, old man, take a seat. You, woman, get me your chickens, every single one. No hiding.” Reuven heard the backyard door shut as his mother went out to fetch the chickens they kept in the pen.

  Next there was a terrible cacophony of squa
wking chickens mixed with the wails of Rachel and the shrieks of his mother. A gruff “no! no!” he knew was his father’s voice. Then a terrible cry split the air. It was all Reuven could do to remain in the hole. How could he be here, crouched like a rat in the darkness when his mother, father, two sisters … God only knew what was happening to them. And then sudden quiet. He did not even remember hearing the stomp of the soldiers’ boots as they left. There was only a deathly stillness, and finally a voice. It was Rachel. “Papa! Papa!” she screamed.

  Someone was shifting the plank above his head. A crack of light began to dance over his knees. Shriprinka’s face was white and her eyes, as wide and dark as river stones, looked down.

  “You can come out now, for a little while we think. We think they have gone for a while.”

  He lifted himself from the hole. The heel of his hand skidded on something warm and wet. He knew instantly it was blood, and then he looked at his father, who sat collapsed on a chair, holding a blanket to one side of his head.

  “They cut off his ear,” Bathshepa said in a trembling voice. “I got part of it here. Maybe we send for the doctor. Maybe he can sew it back on.”

  “No! No!” Aaron Bloom waved her off. “Let them have my ear.”

  Reuven wanted to cry, Let them have your ear, Papa? Your ear? Your ear into which I poured those measures of music less than an hour ago. With no ear, how do you hear music? They tear your ear, they break our song. But Reuven was too stunned to say anything. He merely stood with his hand covering his mouth. He did not even notice the wreck the Cossack soldiers had left. Tables upturned. Latkes on the floor. Chicken feathers still drifting through the air. The oddest thing of all was that the menorah still stood in the window with its candles burning. Reuven turned around slowly, looking for the silver Shabbat candlesticks.

  “They stole the candlesticks,” said his mother, reading his mind. The candlesticks were real silver. The menorah was only plated silver.

  “How did they know the difference between the candlesticks and the menorah?” Reuven wondered aloud.

  “Oh, some of these Cossacks come from very fine homes. You know, raised properly. They know the difference between real silver and plate,” his mother said as she looked straight down at the floor where a bloody pulp that had once been an ear lay. It was the same mechanical voice that Reuven had heard on the night they had snatched Muttle—colorless, without anger, as if his mother were a machine.

  EIGHT

  “BARUCH ATAH Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav, v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Chanukah.”

  From the thick darkness of the potato hole, Reuven heard his family recite the blessing of the Hanukkah lights now for the fifth time. It was the fifth night of Hanukkah. He had spent most of every night and every day in the potato hole. The entire village had lived in abject terror now for five days. There was no choice except to hide Reuven, for an order had gone out to scour the village of Berischeva for males twelve years and older. Many had tried to flee into the woods, but they were caught, because the countryside crawled with Cossacks.

  The commandant of the eighth division of the tsar’s army had decided to make his headquarters in Berischeva. The women had been ordered to bake bread for the troops. Every lamb, every chicken had been slaughtered. Violence and disorder reigned. From the darkness of his own private hell, Reuven could not see the hell above. But he could hear and he could smell, and it was a pungent odor of scorched wood, smoldering cottages, and baking bread that hung over the village. Any family that would not comply or that was suspected of holding out in any way was burned out of their home. From his hole, he heard it all. He listened to his mother’s soothing voice as she tended to his father’s injury, replacing the bandages that covered the place where his ear had been. Although it must have hurt, his father never once cried out in pain. He heard the neighbor women and the old men come by with the latest gossip and rumor—the tsar’s army plans to march into Austria and take over the throne of the Austrian king, the Hapsburg throne. The tsar’s army will march all the way to Germany and kill the kaiser. The tsar’s army will invade Turkey, and the tsar and the tsarina will have themselves crowned emperor and empress of the Ottoman Empire.

  The only blessing, if one could call it that, was that Rachel’s earache had worsened, and to ease the pain, Reuven’s parents had been giving her sleeping draughts. She was kept sufficiently quiet and groggy so that she did not go looking for her brother. Perhaps she had completely forgotten that he was in the potato hole. Once she whimpered for him and was told he was at his violin lesson. Reuven practically laughed out loud when he heard this.

  Although it could not be said that he had grown used to the darkness, he had done something to make the hole became somewhat more bearable. He had learned to fill it with his own imagination. Reuven furnished it with pictures of his family in their daily life. And though their daily life was gripped with terror, Aaron and Bathshepa Bloom had insisted that they light the Hanukkah candles every night.

  “It takes courage to receive a miracle. And besides, Hanukkah is not just about light and miracles. It is about freedom. It is about being a Jew despite all—despite the Syrians one thousand years ago, despite the tsar now. It is the weak against the mighty. We are not simply Jewish shtetl people, we are resisters in the tradition of Judas Maccabee, Judas the Hammer with his renegade soldiers in the hills outside of Jerusalem. They were weak. They were poor farmers, and yet after three years, they regained the temple from the very Syrians who had defiled it, and they won. That was not a miracle, not like the oil that lasted for eight days. It was the victory of faith and dedication and courage. No courage, no miracles. You think the Red Sea would have parted if the people hadn’t had the chutzpah to thumb their noses at the pharaoh and get up off their tokheses and leave?”

  This is what Aaron Bloom would say every night just before they lit the candles.

  On the sixth night of Hanukkah as his family chanted the blessing of the lights, Reuven could picture them standing there—Shriprinka, Mama, Papa, baby Rachel, thankfully, asleep in her crib. He could even imagine the lights reflected in the blackness of the windows. Were there frost trees on the glass tonight? Perhaps not, for it had begun to rain earlier. So that would mean the reflections of the lights would slide into shimmering liquid shapes. They would dance across the wet windowpanes like flames, like the light of a dybbuk’s face, like … like, oh where was Uncle Chizor on this night? Reuven could see the thick eyebrows with their tufts of white dancing up and down through the smoke of his Cuban cigar. Maybe he had gone to Cuba, to the city of Havana. Or was he in that frozen north place, the place of the lakes like claws that he had once shown Reuven on the map in his library? What funny thoughts he had here in the darkness. And the thoughts were laced with music, all the beautiful music he had learned to play since he was six years old—the Brahms, the Beethoven, the Bach. The music streamed through him, through the darkness. It filled his being until his soul sang and he felt in his own way as powerful as Judas the Hammer hiding out in the Judean Hills of Jerusalem. These were his Judean Hills—this darkness, this hole.

  * * *

  The next day, Reuven was dozing when he heard excited voices above him. It was Shriprinka.

  “Mama! Papa!” She had just returned from the marketplace. “They are saying that the women and the children shall be taken out to the forest and shot if all the boys in Berischeva are not given up in the next twenty-four hours.”

  “What?” Reuven’s father asked.

  “Yes, it is true,” said another voice. Reuven recognized it as Beryl, Shriprinka’s good friend. “They know many families are still hiding sons.”

  “Oh my God!” moaned his mother. “What are we to do?”

  “We must leave,” said his father. “We must leave separately from Reuven. We shall go to Zarichka and then to Vilna. It will be safe. And then from there … Yes, yes, I guess America.”

  America! Reuven could hard
ly believe his ears. The map he had studied at Uncle Chizor’s library now danced in his imagination. The claw lakes, called the Great Lakes, sparkled fiercely. He could picture it all: the thin blue thread called the St. Lawrence River, the sausage named Florida, Minnesota, the shining sea on the far edge of the map.

  Reuven heard the door close as Beryl left. He heard his father walking toward the potato hole, hopefully to tell him what to do. Where to meet in Vilna, for they would not be able to meet up in Zarichka. It would be unsafe, but Vilna would be good. Vilna even had a music academy. Perhaps they would meet there. First his father spoke to his mother. Reuven heard him talking about a distant cousin in Vilna. This was news to Reuven. A cousin named Lovotz Sperling, a book dealer. Then his mother and father and Shriprinka began speaking in terse sentences.

  “Wrap up some diapers for the baby … We take nothing but the clothes on our backs … A loaf of bread … Coins, sew the coins into the hems of your skirts … Rachel’s medicine … Sturdy shoes … your sturdiest shoes.”

  And then his father was standing very near the potato hole. He dared not uncover it. He spoke rapidly. The words were directed to Reuven, who crouched with his chin to his knees and listened.

  “Lovotz Sperling, off Szeroka Street. It’s an alley, really. I forget the name. Not far from the great synagogue.”

  Suddenly a great clattering. Things were crashing. Reuven heard a horse’s excited snorting and hooves pounding. Hooves right in the house! On the planks of their own floor! Above the potato hole, a deafening clatter and thunder. Dirt was shaking down. He heard screaming.

  “Don’t take him! Don’t take him!”

  A shot tore through the screams, then another and another. A large splinter of wood was blasted from the plank covering the potato hole, and suddenly a wedge of light dropped into the darkness. Reuven froze. He dared not breathe. Above he heard a soft moan near the potato hole. He rose slightly so he could peer through the slot that had been shot away Reuven opened his eyes in horror. Shriprinka lay inches from him. There was a gaping wound in her neck, from which blood poured. The shiny boots of a Cossack stepped neatly over her. Reuven saw a hand reach down. Was the soldier going to help her? The hand took out a pistol from a leg holster. Reuven watched, transfixed. It was one seamless movement. The hand drew the trigger and shot his sister in the chest. The other hand reached for Reuven’s violin. A slice of lamplight cut across Reuven’s face, then darkness filled his brain and everything was quiet. Very quiet.