Broken Song

by Kathryn Lasky

  “Oh, thank you. You are too kind.”

  Again, the small little smile. This time the painted eyebrows seemed to slide toward her hairline. Bozieka wore her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun. Everything about Bozieka was very tight—her hair, her smile, even her skin. Her fingers swelled like sausages in casings, and she had no wrists, just a deep crease where her plump hands met the ends of her arms. As she had led them up the stairs, Reuven had noticed that her ankles puffed up and seemed about to burst over her tightly laced shoes. Stick her with a pin and she just might pop, Reuven had thought. It was as if she were too large for her own skin. After she left, he changed Rachel’s nappy, poured fresh water in the bowl, and wiped her face and then his own face. Finally they both crawled into bed.

  But Rachel did not want to settle down. She squirmed and wriggled. Reuven marveled how with her few little words, she managed to be so demanding. She wanted a drink of water. She wanted a cake.

  “No, Rachel, you’ve had too much already, you’ll get a tummy ache,” Reuven said.

  She scrambled toward the window, which was right by their bed, and began drawing pictures in the frosted glass with her finger.

  “It’s time for sleep, Rachel, not play.”

  She began humming, which was her sign that Reuven was supposed to play her a song on his violin.

  “No, Rachel, I don’t have my violin right now.”

  “Night night,” Rachel said and flopped on the mattress. Two seconds later she popped up again.

  “Good morning,” her voice rang out cheerfully

  Reuven groaned. It was the Night Night game. Saying “Night night!” a dozen times, she would close her eyes tight and even make a snoring noise for a few seconds, then pop up again and say, “Good morning!” But now when she sat up instead of singing out “Good morning!” she said, “Mama?” The word dropped into the dimness of the attic room. Reuven was silent. “Dada?” Panic welled in the back of his throat. What was he to do? Oh God, he prayed, what was he to do?

  “Time for sleep, Rachel,” he said. But Rachel was scrambling out of bed.

  Reuven was dead tired. I might have to spank her, he thought. Why couldn’t this child just get sleepy? Why did she have to be playing games with him after he had schlepped her on his back over thirty miles? How did you deal with a thing like this? How had his mother stood it?

  Somehow he managed to lure Rachel back to bed with the promise of a story, her favorite, the froggy story. He tucked her in beside him.

  “Once upon a time there was this frog, but he was no ordinary frog.” Reuven paused and looked straight into Rachel’s eyes and opened his own wide. “And do you know why?”

  Rachel made a little sound that sounded a little bit like why.

  “Because it was a magic frog,” Reuven continued.

  By the time he spoke a few more sentences, Rachel was fast asleep.

  “Stick your fingers through the bars, children. Let me see how fat you are.”

  “No, Rachel! No! Don’t. It’s a trick.”

  “I want to pet froggy.”

  “That’s not a frog, it’s a witch. She wants to roast us in the oven and eat us.”

  “Not a witch, Reuvie. Pig. See two fat piggies.”

  Their skin was so tight over their fat you knew they would pop if you pricked them. One with funny black eyebrows.

  “Have another tart, children” said the other pig.

  “We like them plump,” said the pig with the eyebrows.

  The pigs were drooling, their eyes gleaming. “Ummm … so good with cabbage and a cherry liquor.”

  “Oh piggies!” squealed Rachel with delight and stuck her finger through the bars.

  “No!” shouted Reuven.

  Reuven sat bolt upright in bed. He was cold with his own sweat. His heart thumped wildly in his chest. It was a dream, but not just a dream. It was more. He and Rachel had to get out of here now. He knew this as he had never known anything in his life. They must leave quickly. This priest, this house was bad. He was no friend of Jews. There was no time to waste, but how would they get down the creaky stairs without being heard? Reuven glanced out the window. The minute hand on the clock was within a sliver of twelve. The clock would chime for a full minute. They must make their way down the stairs while it was chiming. Their basket was in the kitchen. They had their clothes here, except for their coats and the skirt and the heavy shawl that he had wrapped Rachel in.

  Reuven moved quickly. He put on his shoes, pants, and thick boiled wool shirt.

  “We must go,” he whispered to a sleepy Rachel. He pulled on her dress, stockings, and shoes. He picked her up and grabbed the diapers set out on the bureau. Luckily Rachel was still half asleep. He paused at the top of the stairs. He waited one two three four seconds, and then the clock began to chime. The entire house seemed to reverberate with the din of the clock’s ringing.

  He was down the steps and across the parlor within the first thirty seconds. He went down the hall into the kitchen. There was his basket by the kitchen stove. His skirt and their heavy outer garments lay in a heap beside it. The pockets on his coat had been turned inside out. The basket was completely empty. None of the promised food packages. It was clear that the basket and his clothes had been searched. For what? Identification papers, money? He slipped the diapers into the basket and then Rachel, who was actually snoring softly. A blessing. He stuffed in the skirt. He had taken it off when they had approached the outskirts of Posva, so when they had appeared at the door, he had looked like an ordinary boy. They probably thought he was using the skirt to wrap up Rachel for warmth. Fine.

  A hunk of cold veal sat on a plate with a knife and beside it, a loaf of bread. Too bad he had forgotten the cakes upstairs. But there was a bowl of the sugared nuts by the plate. He emptied them into his pockets. He stuffed the bread in the basket with Rachel, along with the veal, and swung the basket onto his back. Rachel still slept. He spotted some apples in a bowl and was just reaching for them when a scalding voice lashed out at him.

  “Whatcha doing?” It was Bozieka. She stood there, voluminous in her white nightgown, her meaty face glowering. Reuven was transfixed. The eyebrows were gone and her features seemed marooned like tiny islands in her huge red face. He saw the small mouth move like the hole in a drawstring purse. There was something both horrifying and fascinating about the face and its features. She was moving toward him. The mouth was opening and shutting. The words were arranging themselves into phrases.

  “You can’t leave here, boy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Father’s got the constable coming.”

  Father? What father? It took Reuven a minute to realize that she meant the priest. She opened her eyes wider and nodded her head, a slight smile creased her face.

  “And the patrol too. No, no, you’re not going anywhere. Father Groff’s got plans for you, Jew boy. And for all of the Jews. We’ll be rewarded in heaven for delivering you Christ killers.” And rewarded here, Reuven thought, remembering the silver platters, the Turkish rugs, the two fat pigs stuffing themselves with food. From the corner of his eye something glinted. He remembered the knife next to the veal. In one swift movement, his hand swiped it off the tabletop. Bozieka didn’t seem to even notice. Her small, colorless eyes bore into them.

  “You try to stop us and I’ll kill you,” Reuven said in a low even voice. The knife was at his side. Perhaps she didn’t see it.

  “Phutt.” She spat at him and continued to advance. “You’re a Jew boy. We can kill you. God protects us.”

  She must not be seeing the knife, he thought. Should he threaten her? She was less than an arm’s length away.

  He never knew exactly how it happened, although he remembered thinking was that threats were a waste of time. Had he made a move toward her? Had he raised the knife? But the next thing he knew, she was standing in front of him bleeding. A red blossom had begun to spread on her nightgown as blood poured from the thin slit in her hand. They bo
th stood there in a stunned silence, each disbelieving what had just occurred. A voice battered somewhere in the back of Reuven’s brain. MOVE!

  He flew out the door. When he passed the clock, he looked up. It was three minutes after midnight. Three minutes. It felt like a lifetime. He ran out of the west end of the town. There was a post with signs to Grodno, Vilna, Bielsk, Slonim, and Bransk. He turned right, to the north, and followed the sign that pointed to Vilna.

  ELEVEN

  REUVEN HAD gone several kilometers down the road toward Vilna before he realized that he still had the knife in his hand. It was smeared with the horrid woman’s blood. He stopped as an appalling thought struck him. Suppose this knife had dripped her blood. A trail of blood! What if they sent bloodhounds after him? He looked down. There didn’t seem to be any drops of blood on his pants or coat or on the road. Still, he decided he should get rid of it. He had just raised his hand to heave it into a ditch when he thought better of it. This was the only weapon he had. Perhaps he should not be so quick to throw it away. And it was more than just a weapon, it could also be a useful tool. Reuven walked to a bank of snow by the side of the road. He wiped the knife in the snow until the smear of blood was completely gone.

  Rachel had begun to stir on his back. He hoped she would sleep some more, but she had slept when it really counted so he shouldn’t complain now.

  He planned to walk as far as he could on this road until the first light of the new day broke. Then he would take to the woods. It was a good road with lots of trees and shrubs to hide them, and he wanted to stay with it as long as he could.

  He figured with the long nights and the short days of this month of December, he had at least six or seven more hours of walking time in the shadows of the night and into the gray light of the dawn. Then he would need to rest. He would be dead tired. Barns were very tempting to sleep in, but there was the danger of the farmer coming out and discovering you. There was someplace, or the memory of a place, that seemed to nag at the back of his mind. A taste swam up in his mouth—the taste of those sour apples. Then it burst upon him—that place near Berischeva! When he had stuck his hands down into the snowy hollows formed by the drifts around the apple trees’ roots and found those apples that even the worms had deserted. But he remembered being surprised how comparatively warm the air felt within those hollows. Even the apples themselves were somewhat warm when by all rights they should have been frozen solid.

  Of course not! He remembered a book of Uncle Chizor’s with the engravings of the Eskimo people in their snow huts. Uncle Chizor had explained to him that snow can act as insulation. The packed snow blocks out the wind. The spaces between the snowflake crystals trap air.

  When dawn came, he found a deep drift. He tunneled out a little snow cave for himself and Rachel. The knife was helpful, although his little snow cave hardly looked like the neat igloos he had seen in the pictures in his uncle’s book. But it kept Rachel and him fairly warm. A wind had come up during the night that would have been bitter if they had been exposed. Reuven liked the snow cave. It was cozy and bright and most important, he felt safe. He and Rachel were hidden away as completely as animals in their winter hibernation. Unfortunately, they were not hibernating, so they could not stay in the snow cave forever. As soon as the darkness fell, they had to be off. Vilna, he figured, could not be more than thirty kilometers away. They should be able to make it easily within two or three days at the most.

  The next day an extraordinary thing happened. Rachel had been whimpering. The whimpering always started in a vague, sporadic way. She would not immediately call for her mama, but with dread Reuven could almost see her lips begin to press together to make a wretched little humming noise, like a prelude to the sound “mmmm” and finally the word “mama” would tear from her. But this time the “mmm” sound was cut short and then he heard her squeal, “Chickie! Chickie!”

  Straight ahead in the road was a chicken that had seemingly appeared out of thin air. There were no farms nearby, and Reuven guessed that a cart must have passed this way and a chicken had escaped from its coop without the driver noticing. Chickens were not to be passed up. And this one seemed a bit weary from his time on the road. Indeed it seemed so pleased to see another living thing that when Reuven bent down to grab it, the bird practically flew into his arms. He ran to the side of the road. Pressing it down on a rock, he chopped off its head with the knife.

  “Uh-oh!” said Rachel as the head fell into the snow.

  That night the sky was clear, and with the moon nearly full, there would not be much camouflage on the road. Reuven felt that it might be best to stay in the woods while traveling. They were so tired they stopped early and Reuven built a small fire. He had plucked the chicken and chopped it into roasting-size pieces. Rachel had played with the feathers while he had prepared their dinner. He should have brought those cakes from the priest’s house. A sweet would have tasted good. They had a bit of bread with the chicken.

  “We are eating well, Miss Rachel, considering,” he said as he handed her a piece of chicken.

  “Considering.” Rachel said the word clearly.

  Reuven looked at her in amazement. How quickly she was learning.

  Reuven wondered how much he could teach her. “Drumstick,” he said, pointing at the piece of chicken she was eating.

  “No, chicken,” she replied fiercely.

  “Well, yes it is a chicken, but that part of the chicken leg is called a drumstick.”

  “No, chicken,” she said.

  “Okay, chicken.”

  “Okay, chicken,” she repeated

  This baby was a wonder. He would try and teach her the latke rhyme.

  “I have a little potato.

  It’s nice and round.

  I’m going to chop it up

  and fry it golden brown.

  It’s a little latke

  ready to go

  right into my potke

  and I want more!”

  “Again!” Rachel demanded. He said it once more, then twice more. After five times, Reuven was bored silly. “Come on, Rachel, you have to say it too.”

  “Mama,” Rachel said. The game suddenly stopped.

  “Mama? No, Rachel.” His face turned stern. “We’re singing the latke song.”

  “Mama,” Rachel repeated. “Mama, Papa, Prinka.”

  The trees around them swirled. The flames of their small fire suddenly became tongues, all crying “Mama.” Rachel’s face had turned red, her cheeks slick with tears. Reuven felt a panic seize him. What should he do? He reached for Rachel and grabbed her to him, pressing her to his chest. He buried his face in the thick nubbly knit of her little wool hat. He could smell her hair through it. He could smell her diaper. What in God’s name was he to do with this smelly howling baby in the middle of Russia?

  “This isn’t fair!” he cried. “This is not fair! I can’t be doing this. I know nothing about babies. I am not a father. I am not a mother. I am a brother. They are gone, Rachel! They are gone! They are all gone!”

  “Gone,” Rachel said. The single word rang like a chime in the dense forest. She looked up and touched his wet cheeks. He saw a look of confusion in her eyes. She scrambled out of his lap and stood up.

  “Gone.” She said the word again and paused, as if she were listening to its sound. “Gone, gone, gone.” She stomped her feet on the cleared ground near their fire. It was a sound to her, a meaningless sound. In that instant, Reuven realized that fairness had nothing to do with anything. They had each other, and that was all they had in this world. It was all that counted.

  As Rachel stomped on the ground and repeated the word, he watched her antic shadow lace between the light of the flames cast from the fire, her little arms jerking, her head bobbing. Her shadow grew longer until it became tangled with his own shadow’s hunched still form. The little shadow stomped away and stretched. With the little peaked cap, it could have been that of a fierce devil of the woods—the arms slashing the night frantical
ly in some kind of manic dance.

  “Gone! Gone! Gone!” Rachel’s voice roared into the blackness of the night.

  TWELVE

  60 KILOMETERS TO VILNA.

  “No! It can’t be.” Reuven stared at the sign at the crossroads dumbfounded. They had been on the road for three days already. He had been sure they would be in Vilna tonight. He thought he had already crossed the Russian-Polish border. But he had been mistaken. This sign meant three more days, three more days at least! He was exhausted. They had eaten the last of the veal. His left foot had a blister the size of a latke. They were out of clean nappies, and Rachel stunk to high heaven.

  Suddenly he heard rowdy voices. From the other road that led at a right angle into the main road where they now stood, Reuven saw a group of men. Not just any men. They were Cossacks, and not just any Cossacks. By the light of the now full moon Reuven could see the flash of the gold braid, the white plumes on their helmets, and the silver glint of their crossed bandoliers. They were the most elite contingent, part of the tsar’s personal regiment.

  “Oy yoy yoy!” Reuven gasped.

  “Oy yoy yoy.” Rachel mimicked him perfectly.

  Reuven immediately dropped to his knees with Rachel still in her basket strapped to his back. They had to get as low to the ground as possible. The side of the road dipped into a deep culvert. He scrambled for it. The snow had melted, and he felt the wet marshy ground beneath his knees. Luckily there was a screen of thick weeds and stalks, now sere and dry, from the previous summer. He slipped the basket from his shoulders and pulled Rachel out. He felt better holding her in his arms. If she began to talk too loudly, he could put his hand over her mouth.

  “Hungry,” she demanded. He reached for their last hunk of bread and gave it to her.

  He put his finger to his mouth. “Ssshh. You must be very quiet, Rachel.”

  She put her finger up to her mouth and very loudly said, “Ssssh.”

  “No, Rachel. I mean it—very quiet.”