The Little Russian (37 page)

Sometime later in the night she heard a shot and a man scream and after that she could hear him moaning out in the alley. He called out to his comrades to help him and later, in his delirium, to his mother. He whimpered for mercy, begged for release; another shot and then nothing.

When the sky began to lighten, the shadows evolved into distinct
shapes: a garbage can, a sledge, an old bed frame lying on its side. With the coming dawn a breeze blew in from the river and the fog began to lift. Berta heard shouting through the doorway and saw men running in from all directions. They were Reds. They jumped on each other, slapped each other on the back, playfully punched each other, and laughed. She stopped a man in a black leather jacket wearing a visor cap with a red star on the front.

“What is it? What’s happening?”

“No Whites! They’re all dead or on the run. We’ve been firing at each other all night. The goddamn fog had us all turned around. Yankovsky!” he yelled to a comrade holding a coffeepot. “Save me some of that.”

Berta ran on through the city, slipped on the ice, and broke her fall with a bloody hand. People were coming out of their cellars. Some were picking through the smoldering rubble; others were searching the streets for missing loved ones. There was a sobbing woman crumpled over the mangled body of a man. A boy led a roan mare down the street, talking to her the whole time. Farther on two men were unloading mangled corpses from a cart and laying them out in a neat row in the snow.

Soon she was climbing the hill that stood between her and the Jewish section. At the top she paused to catch her breath and searched the landscape below for Dulgaya Street. She thought she could see it through the haze of the smoking chimney pots. She imagined that the light she saw burning in one of the windows was from the lamp in the kitchen. She took it as a good sign for no other reason than she needed a good sign.

Then she was on the street a few blocks away. As she came closer she saw a man hiding in the shadows of her building. It wasn’t light enough to see his face, but she had already made up her mind to kill him if he tried to stop her. She had just picked up an iron bar from the rubble of a bicycle shop, when she saw the figure step into the light. It was Pavel.

“I was just about to look for you,” he said.

“How is she?”

He hesitated and then she knew. She threw down the iron bar and ran upstairs, flinging open the door and rushing into the kitchen. Lhaye was sitting beside Sura, holding her hand. She got up when she saw Berta come in and tried to put her arms around her sister, but Berta pushed past her. She scooped up her daughter and lay down on the bed. Sura’s skin was cold and clammy. Her face was white and tinged with blue. Already the muscles in her face had begun to relax and her cheeks were beginning to sink into her skull. Berta rocked her and prayed, not to God, who had betrayed her, but to Sura,
keep breathing.
Pavel came into the room and crouched down in the corner. She barely noticed him. She only knew that her daughter was struggling to live, her breath coming in jagged gasps that had no rhythm.

Her eyelids fluttered open and for a moment Berta thought she could see a glint of recognition in the feverish black eyes. “Sura, it’s Mameh. It’s Mameh,
maideleh
. My darling girl.
Tsatskeleh der mamehs.”
Sura looked up at her and struggled to move her lips. They were dry, cracked with fever, and blue. Not a sound escaped them, but the word they formed was plain enough.

A few minutes later the mournful cry could be heard up and down the hallway. It spilled out into the street and mixed with the first stirrings of the morning. By the time the day began in earnest—the women hunting in the rubble for anything salvageable, men loitering on the curb looking for odd jobs, the children off to heder or playing cross tag in the ruins—everyone on Dulgaya Street knew that Berta Alshonsky had lost her daughter.

December 1919

 

BERTA LAY on a pallet in the bruised light of morning with her daughter in her arms. She could feel the warmth from Sura’s body ebb away as she lay there trying to find the strength to do what must be done. Pavel had been sent away and now only Lhaye remained with her. She came over and closed Sura’s eyes and then lifted her body so that Berta could get out from underneath it. Together they lowered her back down on the bed and laid her arms gently by her sides. Her features had changed so much since death had taken her that now she looked like a wax effigy. Berta kissed her one last time and pulled a clean white sheet over her head and together she and Lhaye placed candles all around the bed and lit them.

There was a knock at the door. “It’s the
shomer
,” Lhaye said, coming back to the kitchen.

“Tell him to go away. I don’t want him here.”

“Who will stand guard over her?”

“I’ll do it myself.”

“But you are the
nihum avelim
.”

“I said I will do it myself.”

That evening, Berta and Lhaye washed the body and wrapped it in a tallis. The man from the burial society came and told her that if she did not have the money for a funeral, they would provide her with one. He was a thin man, all angles, with a bushy beard that nearly covered his lips, leaving only a thin line of flesh where the words came out. Berta didn’t have the money, so she was grateful for the help.

“Don’t worry, Froy Alshonsky. Everything will be taken care of. It’s a nice plot, under a tree. A chestnut, I think.” She started to cry. He was
used to this and stood there quietly while she pulled herself together. Then he went over a few details, telling her when they would pick up the body and the time of the service.

“I don’t want any official mourners,” she said, thinking of Aviva Kaspler and her partner.

“She doesn’t need them,” said the man. “There are plenty of people who will mourn her.”

That night she brought her pallet into the front room next to Sura’s body and stretched out on it. Lhaye wanted her to come out into the hall to eat something since it was forbidden to eat or drink in the presence of the dead, but Berta shook her head. She only wanted to be left alone. So Lhaye went back to her apartment and her children. Berta could hear them through the wall: little Rivke pleading for her shoe, Vulia teasing her, Lhaye admonishing him. It was the normal clamor of life and it caused her a momentary pang of jealousy. She rolled over and stared at the flickering candlelight. Then she closed her eyes and saw its dark afterimage. She lay there for some time and waited for sleep to come. Her thoughts became half dreams of disjointed images. She felt as if she had been cut into pieces, her limbs severed, her face halved. She could no longer feel her lips. She wondered if she could move at all.

After the funeral, Lhaye and Froy Wohlgemuth, the old lady from down the hall, came over with bread and hard-boiled eggs. This was the first meal of shiva, the seven-day mourning period. Then the neighbors began filtering in with more food and condolences. Berta sat on her pallet and did not move, did not get up, neither washed nor changed clothes nor greeted visitors. These were the rules of shiva. Even if they hadn’t been, she would have still followed them. She could do little else. She could hear the comings and goings of others from far away, like a child sent to bed before the guests arrived. But she was in another room and the door was closed. She was no longer a part of the world.

 

NOW THAT there was no one to tell Samuil that he couldn’t go across the street to the bombed-out building and climb up to the second floor, he went up there whenever he wanted to. He liked it up there. He liked
sitting on the edge where the wall had once met the floor, with his feet dangling over the piles of rubble below, and watching the housewives in the alleys trade used goods for wood and food. Since he wasn’t going to school, he had plenty of time to make himself comfortable. He staked out two rooms that overlooked the street and furnished them with an armchair that was missing a cushion, two packing crates from the deserted poultry market, and a charred table. These were the rooms that he shared with Sasha Riabushinsky and Moses Sforim, who came by after school to play cards. They would stay up there until their mothers called them down. Since there was no one to call Samuil down, he stayed up there long after they left.

There was another room that he had recently claimed. It was in the back and looked out across an empty lot to the back porches of several houses. It was in the corner and out of the way and had a door that closed. He didn’t tell Moses or Sasha about it. There was no furniture in there, only three walls and a mantel that jutted out from a chimney that seemed to hang in the air.

On top of the mantel he kept his most secret things. There was a broken comb that he found under a cart. It was decorated with bits of sparkly glass and it glittered whenever he held it up to the light. There was also a scrap of lace that he found fluttering from the ragged edge of a fence post and an old silk flower from Mumeh Lhaye’s sewing basket. Yesterday he cut a hank of his little cousin’s hair. It wasn’t much. She didn’t mind. It was the wrong hair from the wrong girl, but the color was right and he put that on the mantel next to the comb. He was always on the lookout for these things. His prized possession was a ceramic cat with a broken tail that looked like Masha. That morning he made a drawing of Arabian horses grazing in a pasture. He balled it up because the horses looked like dogs and threw it off the edge, watching it bounce off the pile of rubble below.

He was supposed to be sitting shiva, but whenever he got the chance, he climbed up to this room and fingered his secret things. That morning he had cried and it scared him. It was so intense that he thought his insides were pouring out of him. At first he couldn’t breathe, poised on the edge of something impenetrable and overwhelming. Then he
tumbled down into it, his shoulders juddering, his breath ripped from his lungs in big, gulping sobs. Afterward he felt a little better and wiped his face on his sleeve. Even so he didn’t want to do that again. It could easily get out of control and no telling where he’d end up if it did.

The idea of the mantel came to him the day after Sura died. He thought if he gathered enough things that she liked, she might come back to look at them. He told himself that he wouldn’t be scared. He wanted her to come. He wanted to say that he was sorry for not reading the titles to her at the moving pictures. If he had it to do over again, he would’ve read them to her. Every word.

He waited for five days but nothing happened. Then on the sixth day, just as he was about to climb down the beam to the second floor, he heard someone walking in one of the rooms down the hall. Footsteps. He listened. “Who’s there?” he called out softly.

Silence.

“Who is it?”

Silence.

He listened again. The sound came from his room, the one in the back, as if someone had crossed the floor from the window with the jagged glass to the mantel. Her mantel.

He stood by the hole in the floor, barely breathing. He told himself that if he heard another footstep, he would investigate. Part of him wanted to hear it. The other part wanted to run out of the building. But he forced himself to wait in the gathering darkness. At first he only heard the sounds of the street below, then the sighing of the wind through the charred bones of the building, and then nothing. He waited for a few moments more and then climbed down the beam.

Once outside on the street he didn’t go home. Instead he did what he always did when he was bored or when he wanted to be taken out of himself—he used the shadows, trees, doorways, garbage cans, anything that could give him cover to spy on his friends, neighbors, and strangers. From these vantage points he heard about mysterious ailments, unwanted pregnancies, the theft of a pair of shoes, a feud between brothers, and all about loss: the loss of a sister, a husband, a business, a job, a home. It seemed that all of Dulgaya Street had lost
something. The whole neighborhood was suffering from a broken heart.

That night, Samuil became a lamppost, the wheel of a cart, and a barrel. He heard about a cheating husband, a colicky baby, and a boil that wouldn’t burst. He melded into an old oil drum and heard two peddlers complaining about the new edicts outlawing private enterprise and the black market. They were strangers to Cherkast because he had never seen them before. Both wore long gabardine coats that looked as if they had been bought and sold many times. One wore a pair of battered shoes with flapping soles and the other had a thick black beard and wore shoes that bent up at the toes.

Samuil knew about peddling, about how you had to keep your wares hidden in your pockets and under your clothes, or risk getting shot as a speculator. How you had to hide buttons, soap, suspenders, pots and pans, rope or cooking oil, anything you could trade for food in the countryside to sell in the city. He liked to listen to them because they traveled from town to town and brought news from the rest of Russia and sometimes even from Poland or America. There were stories of pogroms and battles between the Whites and Reds, starvation in Petersburg and Moscow, farmsteads looted, kulaks shot, suspected counterrevolutionaries shot, speculators shot, ordinary people shot for no other reason than they were on the wrong side of the street or wearing a warm coat or boots that looked new.
Better to execute ten innocent people than spare one who is guilty.

“They pulled him from the train,” one peddler was saying to the other. “He had sacks of bulgur in his pants. He was so scared he peed himself and one of the sacks broke and the grain ran down his leg.”

“What did they do to him?”

“You really want to know?”

The other nodded.

“What do you think? Shot him. He was a speculator.”

“Right there, in front of the whole train? Was it just him?”