The Belief in Angels (16 page)

We enjoy a more fortunate life than anyone we know here in our tucked-away village hidden by forests. We have been spared many of the tragedies that have torn apart our neighbors’ families. We are simple farmers and until the last few years the politics and wars around us hadn’t influenced us in ways that caused much change to our daily lives. Now, with our village’s new Russian military presence, everything has changed.

Yes, Gershon died, and Ruchel still suffers from frailty caused by the same typhus epidemic, but the rest of us have been spared this and other illnesses plaguing the Ukraine. Besides Gershon, my only other true sadness has been the loss of our beloved
bubbe,
who died an old woman and who lived a good life with our family and our love.

But now we live on a tightrope.

Wars and the pogroms have taken many Jewish lives in these years. It is ironic that Jews feel safer under our current Soviet rule than we did with the Ukranian nationalists, who rarely protected us. The Polish army massacres Jews as they retreat from the Soviet forces in Kiev. As though the Jews are responsible for their defeat.

Idel has his ideas, however. He remains certain that we will be left alone if we befriend the Russian soldiers. He often goes to visit with them. They live close by and occupy the largest estate in the countryside, the former home of the great Russian entomologist the Baron de Chaudoir, who died long ago.

Idel, an ingratiating spirit, entertains the soldiers, who are weary with war. They enjoy the presence of the dark-haired, blue-eyed young boy with the engaging smile and silly antics. He must remind them of their own young brothers. Or maybe he reminds them of themselves before the war, before this terror.

Oizer digs in the row next to me. He looks like an old man with his spectacles, although he is a year younger than me. He is the resourceful one and has the
financial brains in the family. Oizer has arranged a way to channel almost half of what we produce on the farm to a marketer from Zhytomyr, who sells the produce for half the price to yet another distributor. We never declare this income when we pay our taxes. We save at least twice what we lose on these half-price sales. Oizer’s plan has brilliance, but the interchange holds risk. If the Russians find out, we might all be sent to prison, or worse. Oizer set the plan in motion without consulting anyone. He came home with the rubles in his pocket and told us we could start to plan our departure to America with the money we would be saving.

We will not have to wait for
Foter
to send for us. We will send ourselves after we save enough.

The money makes us jubilant and careless.

Idel prances in the potato field. Reizel tries to usher him back to her row, to rein him in and focus the rest of us back to the task of pulling up the crop.

Harvesting potatoes is dirty, backbreaking work. We use wooden, spiked forks and our fingers to turn the potatoes up. We start at dawn, fortified with the latkes Reizel makes from the same potatoes we pull each day.

Latkes. I’ve grown sick of latkes. Even the slices of dried apple Reizel adds are not enough to sweeten the taste of the starchy wafers.

We will have them for dinner as well. This has been our meal for weeks. We wait until the next market day to bring us the more varietal foods our taste buds and our bodies crave. I dream maybe we will have a chicken. The ones we’ve bred have been requisitioned by the army. Requisitioned. I envision the chickens wearing uniforms and caps, marching in formation, before meeting their eventual doom on the chopping block.

We could use another horse. Our one remaining horse has become sick and weak and is barely able to till the soil. These are the things I am dreaming of before I see them coming.

The soldiers of the Red Army.

They come on horseback, and the horses are big and healthy. I know the soldiers are not from our village. Their horses are war-starved and skinny. These are soldiers from another village, another city—maybe Kiev.

This cannot be good news they bring. This might be another edict, an eviction, or an arrest—or worse—if Oizer’s secret dealings have been uncovered.

We motion to one another as they approach over the hill marking the new border of our property and gather as they come closer.

Berl steps in front of Idel, taking a protective stance on his missing-toed feet. Soldiers pass our family home. There are at least twenty of them. I see several
horses turn toward our home, where Ruchel and Sura work. I start toward them, my own protective instincts already powered on.

Berl stops me. “Stay. It’s safer if we all remain together.”

“But
mayn shvesters,”
I begin.

“Stay now,” is all Berl can cough out.

I glance at him. He wears an expression I’ve never seen before. A thin grimace of fear.

I watch my family, afraid to watch the approach of the soldiers. Reizel stands with an arm around Idel, who still holds his potato breasts.

“They will shoot you if you interfere,” Berl says.

I am frozen, my entire body as cold as the hands I’ve been using to dig into the earth for the icy mounds in the basket at my feet. I stand, rooted.

Oizer stands next to me. His arm brushes my own. I feel his entire body trembling.

I glare at him and he flicks his eyes to mine and back at the approaching soldiers. I am thinking that if they came on his account he is responsible not only for his own terrible fate but for that of our family as well. My anger at him in this moment helps me feel less fearful.

“This is your fault, Oizer.”

“There is no fault, only sacrifice,” Berl spits.

“Time for Idel’s angel,” Reizel whispers.

She says it with a tight, dry tone and it gives the moment a strange levity. I can feel us take a breath.

Breathing. We breathe in this moment.

Idel must have taken Reizel’s words as a cue for play although I know he must also be afraid. The soldiers, with their guns and swords and horses, are all strong, powerful, and frightening. All of it,
meant
to be terrifying. But before he can be stopped, Idel starts dancing with his potato breasts again, in the direction of the advancing soldiers, within a few yards of us now. He skips around Berl and runs forward to entertain them with his nonsense.

“Idel,” Reizel and Berl shout.

Then the terrible confusion begins.

Startled by the small boy and the shouting, two of the horses rear back, throwing the soldiers off balance. One soldier falls to the ground, creating chaos in their formation.

Another soldier, the captain, jumps off his horse and moves to intercept Idel’s approach on foot. He catches Idel by the collar of his coat and holds him roughly there.

Behind him, the soldier who has fallen lies still on the ground.

My family moves forward to collect Idel from the captain, who snarls at him. Idel, quite frightened, cowers in his grip.

Berl reaches them first. He speaks his excellent Russian, explaining that Idel is playing, that he hasn’t meant to upset the horses or the soldiers. As he speaks, the two of them, Berl and the captain, keep craning to look at the soldier on the ground.

Berl and the captain, who is still dragging Idel by the collar, move toward the soldier. Reizel, Oizer, and I follow them to where the man, bleeding profusely from the head, lies motionless, his eyes glazed and unfocused.

I have never seen so much blood. The right side of his head is open like a black tomato, and what must be his brains spill out and cover the side of his face. Blood pools out around his head and stains the muddy earth of the potato ditch a deep purple-red.

He is dead.

He is dead.

What happens then happens quickly, before anyone has a chance to drag their eyes away from the staring corpse.

One shot drawn from the captain’s gun.

One shot.

Point-blank, I think it’s called, when the gun is as close as it is to Idel’s poor little head.

Idel shot in the head.

Then not even a head. The force of the bullet at this range, the space of about a foot, blows half of Idel’s head off.

Idel’s body falling.

Berl, who is standing behind him, falls. Berl, we realize, has taken the same bullet. It lodges somewhere in his heart, stopping it in that second. Berl and Idel fall together in a bloody, smoky mess to the mud.

Berl wears the same glazed, wide-open, horrified stare as the soldier with the spilled brains, his chest open and bloody with the wound.

Idel’s blood everywhere.

I cannot not bring myself to look at what is left of his face.

Reizel is screaming.

Screaming.

The captain is saying something.

I can see his lips moving. I stare into his face. The captain has a face like a broken brick. Although I understand Russian, I cannot understand these words.

The sound seems far away.

Something. Something about the farm being taken for the army; our family, the entire village, being resettled in a Jewish district in the south.

The words—like ice picks hacking my frozen thoughts apart.

You must gather your things at once and join your neighbors who are also going.

Reizel still screams.

I try to collect my wits. I cannot find where my wits are, but somehow, somehow my legs move.

I am pulling Reizel away from something horrible.

From the horrible spot in the mud.

Oizer, still standing there. Still staring.

I hear the voice of my father clearly, as though he speaks the words again, standing next to me there in the orchard.

“Iberkumen,” he says.

Survive.

I shout, but the voice which comes out is not my own. I order Oizer to help me pull Reizel away, to help me take her back home, where we need to gather as many of our things as we can carry. We grab her. I order Reizel to stop screaming. She tears her way out of our grip to run back to the spot where Idel and Berl lay. We try to take her again, but the soldiers pull us apart and fling her into the arms of two soldiers who threaten her to stop screaming with their guns and swords and turn her away to march toward home. Reizel, finally frightened into silence, lets herself be dragged by the soldiers.

As we approach, soldiers come out of our home. Four, five? I can’t remember now how many I saw coming out.

More screaming from inside.

Ruchel and Sura.

Inside—at least ten soldiers. A few on the main floor where our small kitchen and main room are. I can hear their boots in the bedroom upstairs, above us. They shout and laugh over my sisters’ screams.

Ruchel and Sura upstairs with the soldiers.

The first punch of rage begins to drive the shock from my body. Every cell of my body strains to grab one of the swords hanging on a soldier standing nearby.

I want to kill every soldier. I picture them like small shrubs. I will chop them down to twigs.

The captain, who followed us on his horse, enters. His brick face barks an order, bringing the soldiers who have been upstairs flying down like locusts. They are half-clothed, rapidly dressing themselves, and sheepish. The captain barks at the men to go outside and motions at me.

“Go to your sisters and tell them to gather their things. You have five minutes.”

Five minutes. This is the time they give us.

My rage carries me into the completion of this impossible task.

We heard stories later, after our month-long journey to the settlement camps in Southern Ukraine, of families ordered to leave with no possessions, or to give their belongings to these soldiers in exchange for their lives.

I would have given my life to erase the pain that my sisters and the rest of my family endured on this day and in the days that followed.

I don’t remember how we managed to collect our things, preparing for what we thought might be an overnight hike to a nearby village or city. We had seen many immigrant camps on our way into the Kiev market. We remarked to each other how poor, how bedraggled, the people who lived in those camps appeared. We had no idea how much worse things could become. We would learn.

Ruchel and Sura. They never recovered from their attack.