Beyond the Pale: A Novel (10 page)

“Didn’t I tell you to go to the root cellar?”

“What are the soldiers doing here?”

“Nu, it never ends. There’s a new war. They didn’t think to inform us until now. The Tsar is fighting the Sultan for Bessarabia again. I told Reb Kohn all those Turks couldn’t be wool traders. Now the soldiers are taking over the bathhouse.”

“What’s wrong with their barracks?”

“Too small. Another plague, I tell you. What will we do?”

“Take back the money—”

“No, this is yours, and besides, you think I don’t save my own? It’s best you have somewhere to go. God forbid, we might have to go live with one of Reb Kohn’s sons. The soldiers will need someone to cook for them, I expect. Maybe I’ll get to stay put. Pray this war is over soon and that those Cossacks don’t destroy my garden.”

I retrieved my things, hid the money in my skirts as best I could and walked out through a street full of soldiers on horses. They made every kind of insult. I just looked forward and prayed, holding my skirt up. I remembered how I thought less of my mother for looking straight ahead in life, never turning to the left or right. I wondered if she could see me, swallowing my arrogance.

The whole town was in a state of excitement. The gunfire that we’d mistaken for a storm was still far off, so people were out on the streets, in the marketplace, buying up whatever they could. As I made my way to Golde’s, I overheard the fruit peddler ask Yosl the cobbler if the Turks would really attack Kishinev.

Yosl had three sons over twelve at home and I could see memories of forced conscription cross his face. “Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Myself, I don’t think they’ll get that far. But the real question is, will this be an excuse to drag more Jewish boys into the army?”

Hannah, who sold eggs, stopped me to ask if I thought the Governor would maintain order among the troops, or would they just take what they wanted? Would the government pay cash for its extra provisions, demand credit or have everything brought by convoy from Saint Petersburg?

I started to laugh before I realized how serious she was. “Hannah, sell every egg you can today and hide the rest until we can tell better which way the wind is blowing. Here, give me a half dozen now.”

Holding my eggs carefully in a kerchief, I slipped in and out of the confusion and made it to Golde’s shop unharmed.

The Russian-Turkish war was over in less than two years but not before the troops left their mark on local women. Jewish women were particular favorites of the Cossacks. Milcah sent many who did not want to bear Russian babies to me. There is knowledge people hope never to need, and they entrust the knowing to a handful who become strong enough to bear it. We don’t advertise, but midwives know what to do when a child is unwanted, and women know that we know. I gave those who came, usually in the dark, cloaked and stammering, strong doses of pennyroyal oil and tea. Every night I remember those souls in my prayers. Many women chose to have the babies, the married ones pretending it was their husband’s, the unmarried leaving Kishinev, even as my own mother had done.

The year before I stopped working with Milcah, she gave me a tattered piece of paper. “Something else to consider,” was all she said. I never found out if she composed it herself or had gotten it from the midwife who taught her. After the war I memorized it.

The Midwife’s Prayer

Lord of the universe, blessed be thy name,

I am among thy faithful, hear my prayer!

I have watched the bowels

torn out of women and girls

babies come sideways and stick

killing mother and child.

I have seen too many women without bread

birth their sixth, seventh, ninth.

We increase the carriers of your covenant

in blood and pain.

Creator of all things

who makes the summer days long and

the vineyards bear grapes, hear my prayer!

Give the women relief

from your commandment of fruitfulness.

Send us seven barren years

that each may simply breathe and make peace

with her fate and her faith or

give your humble servants some consolation,

some sign beyond the starving new mouth.

We are the daughters of Sarah, we have

served you well all these generations, hardly

do you hear a mother complain.

For them I beseech you.

The lot of women

is too hard and they are too worthy

to endure so much with so little reward.

Lord of the universe, bestower of light and life,

I pray that you may find in your vast treasure

a time to love your creature woman

even as I do, and give her rest.

Amen

Even through those terrible times, I often blessed Pesah Kohn in my prayers for deciding I should be a midwife, and my mother for agreeing. Women always need potions for something. And even in the worst of circumstances, a midwife was given something, at least a meal, maybe a chicken.

I paid Golde five rubles a month and we took most of our dinners together, unless I was attending a birth. Her father had died not more than six months before my mother, from old age. I don’t think she missed him and she had the extra room. As much as I hated to leave Pesah, Golde had the knowledge I needed next: how to be an unmarried Jewish woman, a rare thing. I was happy living with Golde, as happy as I could be in that time. Golde never changed her mind about me. Often I thought of kissing her but I was ashamed to ask again. Besides, she had become more like an older sister to me, familiar and dear. We were loyal to each other the way women can be when they share a secret they never talk about. I replaced Golde’s image in my daydreams with the figure of a stranger, covered in a black cloak, who would come to our door looking for an elixir for some minor ailment.

Golde made up with Yetta but it wasn’t between them like before. Her business expanded and she hired four more girls. She was busy with the shop and I was busy with my patients. A few years after I moved in, Golde started to see a teacher from the gardening school, Vera, a German. Vera had heard there were beautiful lace-trimmed skirts in Golde’s shop and she came to see.

Vera was a modern woman, handsome and tall. I never really took to her but Golde was smitten the minute the shop bell tinkled and she looked up. Who can afford such feelings in this world? Of course, Vera couldn’t live with us. What would people think, a wealthy shikse moving into a Jew’s pitiful house? So they would take a walk in the evenings by the river or maybe go to a concert. Sometimes Golde would suffer a fit of longing during the workday. If Vera wasn’t teaching, Golde would make up a bundle from the shop, like a delivery, and go by Vera’s apartment. Saturday nights Golde spent there, after Shabbes. Sunday, Golde’s workers didn’t come to work until eight. She was always home in plenty of time to prepare their work.

There were new clothing factories that could make a dress much cheaper than Golde’s little shop, but many people, Jews and others, continued to buy from her. Her work was good and made to order. Some bought from pity, I think, because it was a house of old maids and poor working girls, yet there was no need to pity us. Golde was good to the girls. They worked usually only twelve hours a day. She paid a few kopecks a week better than the factory and did her best to make the light good for sewing. She encouraged them to know about the Russky Zyuse workers’ union and the seamstresses’ self-help society, and they in turn told the girls who were going to work in the factories.

Her goodwill kept the girls from gossiping too much. To them Golde was more like a patron or a teacher than a boss. And Golde kept the sabbath, contributed to all the Jewish funds for orphans and burials, always went out with a babushka wrapped around her hair even though, as an unmarried woman, she didn’t have to. She was a good businesswoman, an honest Jew and, to most of her customers, an unfortunate. The marriage brokers pestered both of us yet we always managed to put them off.

If Golde liked to touch the bodies of women, and I liked to think of her touching them, what difference could it possibly make? I knew there were a few other women like us. Some of the married women even—I could tell, after a while, how it was between them and their best friend who assisted at a birth. Bits of daydream came to me while I gathered herbs or before I fell asleep. I was young and hungry for touch, but I couldn’t see how it was going to come to me.

Besides, so much else was happening. Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, and suffering was the air in our lungs. The uprooted filled the streets of Kishinev for more than ten years. Many families even had to borrow coal in winter in order to boil water for the newborn. Pogroms raged throughout the Pale—one year of misery, then maybe a little break; families moving from one town to another; then a famine in the north and more homeless. Tsar Alexander III enforced the May Laws; more Jews got thrown off their land, out of their shtetls. We got used to so many poor in the streets, living on less and less. There was a little calm, then a depression, and the Tsar took it into his mind to expel all the Jews from Saint Petersburg and Moscow. They arrived here chained together like criminals, doctors and businessmen.

When we consider our youth, we see only ourselves and the way the world unfolds in front of us. We are full figures walking among cutouts of buildings and people, never knowing exactly what’s behind them—and we don’t care. But gradually we grow smaller and smaller, until we are part of the landscape in which we move, and then we find others all around us, moving, becoming part of time. For seven years the whole catalog of human misery paraded before me and my own life began to seem like a blade of grass that escaped the scythe—fortunate and insignificant. I tended closely to women and I saw most of their lives only getting harder. Gradually the misery around me supplanted my daydreams and I became serious, almost bitter. There were no potions that could cure Jewish poverty or my own loneliness. Golde worried about me. One spring day when I was pounding herbs so hard that the old brass pestle clanged, she took my hand, turned my gaze away.

“You must find a little joy where you can, Gutkele.” She was the only one who called me that.

“And where does this joy live?”

“Saturday night you’ll come by Vera’s. She has guests from Odessa and Kiev. It’s a party.”

“I don’t want to go to a party with goyim.”

“Not just goyim, Jews too. Only women will be there.”

I stared at her. Of course. If men have secret societies, then there must be some for women too. Only so secret no one knows until they’re invited.

“You’ll come then?”

Saturday afternoon a Mrs. Simkhovitch on Asia Street decided to deliver at least a week early, a protracted, difficult birth. Thank God the mother and daughter were fine. Only midwives work on Shabbes! Golde had gone to Vera’s ahead of me. She left a note, so sweet, that I shouldn’t forget to come.

To tell the truth, I was worn out. I needed some Shabbes rest. Then I thought again about Golde and Vera, how their hands found each other whenever Vera came to the shop. I liked to watch their hands, how they try to keep them still, behind their backs, in their pockets. Suddenly a finger is pushing a curl back from the temple, a palm is against a cheek that blushes, turning to see if anyone’s looking.

I put on a clean skirt and the multicolored shawl that Pesah herself had knit for me. It reminded me of Joseph’s coat of many colors, though I had no one to be jealous when I wore it. There were four shades of red, one pale gold, a light blue and purple. I stood by the doorway playing with the fringe, for a minute unable to move beyond the threshold of my home—but I did.

It was a long walk to Vera’s and dark already. I knew the spirits looked out for me, yet even so, I didn’t like to walk alone at night. I reached Vera’s apartment without anyone noticing me. Suddenly my skin felt dry and hot, my palms wet. Nervous—this was what nervous was. Me! Brave enough to talk to demons and too afraid to go to a party. But from Odessa and Kiev, goyim and the daughters of wealthy Jews—I was only a midwife, Feygele of Kamenka’s mamzer daughter. What would I talk about with such women? Pacing up and down in front of the building, I didn’t notice that a man in a carriage was watching me.

“Is something wrong?” I heard a voice as he stepped to the sidewalk. There were only street lamps and shadows, but for a second I had the image of a flame. Just for a moment, the crackle of fire in branches.