A Day of Small Beginnings (2 page)

My Itzik, terrified boy, lay stiffly on the ground until silence returned. He crawled to Ruchelle Cohen’s tall stone, and
without so much as a glance at the carved floral candelabras engraved there, he swiped a pebble that had been placed on top
by one of her children. With the loving care of a son, he laid it on top of my fallen stone, respecting my memory. Regret
at my childlessness passed through me again. When Itzik rose, unsteady as a toddler, I could not help being moved by him.
He held out his arms and unrolled his clenched fists. Grass fell from his fingers.

I shook with pain and thanks to God for this boy, delivered late, but maybe not too late. A child, at last. Oh, the joy I
felt! My heart! He had gathered grass for me. I swept close around him, ready to receive his prayer for the redemption of
my soul. I waited for the words:
May her soul sprout from this place as grass sprouts from the earth.
I waited, pregnant with expectation.

What came instead was a sharp, thin cry, quickly stifled, and the insult of his foot kicking apart the little mound of blades
he’d dropped on my grave.

2

S
WEEP THE HOUSE, PEOPLE SAY, AND YOU FIND EVERYTHING
. When the Angel of Death came for me I was a widow already. My husband, Berel, was four years under his stone on the men’s
side of our cemetery. The attendant from the Burial Society took the feather from my nostrils and said I breathed no more.
“God has taken our Freidl, smoothly as a hair removed from milk,” he said. My neighbors opened my windows and covered the
mirrors so that no ghosts would be captured. They came to ask my pardon for shunning me, a barren woman. They recited the
psalm,
He shall cover you with His feathers and you shall find shelter under His wings.
But they did not find the secret I had kept inside my house all those years.

I was not barren. All my life it was plain to me that my womb could have held a score of babies. My breasts could have suckled
children and delighted an attentive husband. But from the day we stood under the wedding canopy, my husband, Berel, could
not perform his marital duty.

Her conjugal rights a husband shall not diminish,
God commands married couples. Sabbath evenings, those first weeks, we went to our bed with pure thoughts, knowing it was
a holy thing to make a child. But Berel’s seed came too fast, or not at all. In the beginning I thought it was my books that
drove away his desire. A woman should not be more learned than her husband, my mother always said. I put my books out of sight
and discussed with him only household matters. This changed nothing between us. I watched for signs that he wanted someone
else. But my husband did not look at women, plain or beautiful. After not even a year, he stopped with me entirely.

I admit the sin was mine, lying for a husband who had defied God’s commandment to be fruitful and multiply. The Talmud teaches
that our abstinence was like shedding blood, taking life. I should have brought my case before the elders of our community
and pleaded to end the marriage. I could have argued it was
his
share to love his wife at least as much as himself, to honor her more than himself. But if I had brought about the end of
the marriage, what a scandal for us both.

Instead, I hid his shame. At first I hid it out of pity, though, God forgive me, in time my pity turned to disgust. Later,
I hid it because I realized I didn’t mind so much, being childless. I could study in peace, like my father. I prayed to follow
in the tradition of Edel, the Baal Shem Tov’s daughter, a woman of such valor and intellect that all who met her said the
Divine Presence shone on her face. To me, it was an impossible combination that Edel was also a mother, who raised the brilliant
Feyge, mother of the Storyteller, Nachman of Bratslav. I thought I was a woman who would only lose herself in mothering and
come to resent her children. Not for me, to let my books gather dust in the corner while I slave to feed twelve children,
like Ruchelle Cohen, all worn out at fifty.

Twenty years into the marriage, when it was too late to make a change, I realized I had not only disobeyed His commandment
to be fruitful and multiply, but also turned my back on my own nature by not becoming a mother. There was part of me that
would never grow because of this. What was the purpose of all my study if it did not reach a new life I had tended? Whose
mind would I shape, like my father had done for me? Whose hands would take up the penknife and the board, my secret pleasure,
and glorify our God with intricate
oissherenishen
—my paper cutouts?

A woman has no right to be so bitter about her husband. She is his helper in life, his footstool in heaven. That is God’s
will. But for the rest of my life hot, painful anger at my childlessness stirred me up inside. Not a day went by that I did
not taste the sin in this and serve it to my husband like a poisoned meal. Eventually, it killed the marriage.

At his funeral, I was a dutiful wife. I hired the mourners to tear their hair and wail for him. But I stood silently at his
grave, the anger reawakened by the finality of my loss.

At the moment of my death, regret rose again like a demon, and I refused to be still. When the mourners placed my body in
the ground, seven blades of grass beneath it, and proclaimed over me,
Blessed art Thou, the True Judge,
I argued with God for more time to redeem myself.
Let me teach someone what it is to love You. Let me pass just that much on,
I begged Him.

God’s answer, I believe, came to me on that cold spring night, one year later.
Itzik.

Of him, I knew certain things. I knew they said Itzik’s mother was a pious woman, a woman who gave money to Rebbe Fliderbaum
for the
yeshiva.
This she did even after her husband, Mordechai the Ragman, left her for who knows where. Five young children Sarah Leiber
had to feed, poor soul. People said the Leibers would have starved if Itzik hadn’t left school and gone to work at Avrum Kollek’s
mill.

Everyone agreed it was all for the best that Mordechai the Ragman had abandoned his family. The man had dressed like a Hassid,
but he’d been no blessing for a husband. What kind of Hassid, what kind of person, boasts in
shul
that he’d stamped his muddy boots on his wife’s wedding dress just to show her what’s what?
Their neighbor Rivka Fromin said Mordechai called the poor woman a crazy cow in front of her children. Such a father must
have made Itzik feel like an orphan even before the man left home.

After, when his father was gone and Rebbe Fliderbaum came by to offer the family help, Itzik threw the rabbi out of his mother’s
house. Called him a thief. “Prayers don’t feed my family,” he’d said.

So people called him Itzik the Faithless One. Faithless? Anyone could see the boy was just angry at his father. Anger like
this is passed down, generation to generation. Mordechai the Ragman had been angry like that at
his
father, Yankl the Porter, maybe even became a Hassid to spite him.

But even from so bad a match as Sarah and Mordechai Leiber, good children are born. I followed Itzik when he left my grave.

3

W
HEN THE
P
OLES WERE GONE,
I
TZIK WENT LIKE A THIEF TO
the center of our cemetery, where all the paths connected like spokes in a wheel. Every few steps he stopped and listened.

For myself, what a blessing, what a joy, to float in the air with no effort at all. I settled like a scarf around the inside
of his shirt collar—such a filthy thing. I flew over him, around him, wherever I wanted to go. True, my vision was double
or triple, and the colors were not right. There were too many shadows, and things didn’t look so clear. But at least bad eyesight
wasn’t going to kill me.

As for Itzik, he had no idea I was swooping like a crazy woman
around him. Maybe if he had seen me he would not have looked so grim when he pulled the cap over those eyes of his and headed
down the main stone path, past the monuments and mausoleums of the generations. We reached the stones of the Kohanes and the
small marker of our oldest resident, Israel, buried in 1568. I stopped, out of habit, to pay my respects.

We passed the burial house at the entrance. Exalted, I flew outside the iron gates. I turned for a last look at our town’s
House of the Living and got a shock such as I never had in life.

The walls around our sacred grounds had risen into a dome of crisscrossed gray hewn blocks. He, God of My Destiny, Creator
of All Boundaries, had locked me out of my resting place, my Eden. The words of the Book of Lamentations, alive in my memory
as they had been in my father’s study, came to me:
He has blocked my ways with cut stones. He has made my paths a maze.

Almighty God,
I prayed.
What have I done? The boy came to me. Did You want me to refuse him? Show me an opening. Show me how I am to regain my place
among the dead. I beg you, do not condemn me to roam the earth forever.
But He gave me no sign, just Itzik.

The boy crept into the shadows of the birch trees that lined the road back to town. Several times he stumbled in the rutted
dirt. He made little grunting noises like a frightened pup, and looked over his shoulder constantly. I watched him, not knowing
what to do, until I realized God had tied our fate.

I quieted myself as best I could. What did I have to fear? I was already dead. I told myself it was God’s will that I listen,
that I understand what He expected of me, what He wanted me to do for Itzik. The boy had reached the outskirts of town. I
flew to him. Pay attention, Freidl, I told myself. He is in danger.

From the stables, Itzik wound his way in the direction of the main square. He kept away from the open sewer on the one side
of that muddy street and stayed close to the houses. Houses? Rats shouldn’t have to live in such places. Decayed wooden hovels,
halfway to falling down, shutters broken with Jewish poverty and gashed by Yudel the Teacher’s hammer. Six days a week Yudel
would bang at those shutters until the mothers gave up their reluctant boys for a day of study at his miserable
cheder
.