The Little Russian (43 page)

As it turned out, Mottel Fichmann was able to sell a lot of potatoes that day. He gave a pood to the rabbi for the destitute and sold several more by midmorning. By the afternoon, his cart was considerably lighter and this caused him to reconsider. He asked around for the whereabouts of the pretty widow and her boy and was told they could be found at the actress’s house.

It only took a few minutes for Berta and Samuil to pack up their things and say good-bye to Pessel. She hugged them and gave them each an autographed picture of herself as Fanitshke in
Mentshn
. The photographs were dull with dirt and creased by the many boots that had ground them into the floor. Still, they were a good likeness of her.

They went to the stables and found Mottel Fichmann already loaded up and ready to go. He moved over so there would be room on the bench. Once they were settled in, he gave Esther a flick of the reins and a string of endearments designed to get her moving. After that, they moved along so slowly that soon Pessel grew tired of waving her handkerchief and went home even though they were still well in sight.

Mottel Fichmann was a Jew who looked like a peasant in a scruffy sheepskin coat and felt boots. He seemed bigger than he was because of his broad shoulders and the way he planted his feet firmly on the ground. Because he had a deep appreciation for his own voice, it wasn’t long before he was telling them about his life in Zhvanets, about his lovely wife and their five children, about his travels and his get-rich schemes and anything else that happened to pop into his head as they plodded along over the muddy roads. When he wasn’t talking, he was singing to Esther, or stopping for the night with an obliging widow, of which there seemed to be an endless supply from Kiev Province to Podolia.

One afternoon they wound down a steep embankment and came to a small tributary of the Buh River where several women were washing their clothes on the rocks. The women stood in the shallows with their skirts hoisted up and tucked into their waistbands, their brown arms glistening in the sunlight, their hair tied up under white kerchiefs. They beat the clothes against the rocks while they laughed and gossiped, oblivious to the approaching potato cart.

When Fichmann saw the women he pulled Esther up and announced, “It’s Shabbes. We’re stopping here.”

“Can’t we go a little farther?” Berta asked. “It’s early. The weather is fine. The roads are drying out. We can make some real progress today.”

“Travel on Shabbes? But it’s against God’s will.”

“It’s only noon. Sunset is hours away.”

“Still, no sense in pushing it. We might as well call it a day. We’ll stop with Froy Katzenberg, lovely woman, and such a cook as you never saw.”

Berta and Samuil exchanged a look. It had become apparent that Reb Fichmann was not fond of pushing it. It didn’t matter to him if their journey took an extra day or an extra week as long as there were plenty of widows along the way to make him a hot meal and give him a place in their bed.

Before long they came to a little townlet on the river. The town had only one road running through it, so it wasn’t too difficult to find Froy Katzenberg’s house, a cobbled-together structure that was only standing because there were two other ramshackle houses on either side holding it up. Even before he had a chance to get down from the cart, the front door flew open and a shapely woman came running out to greet him. She had a thick dark braid twisted into a bun at the base of her neck and two bright spots of color on her cheeks where she had just pinched them. Her chin had a deep cleft like a fist and her round head stood straight and firm on a long stalk of neck.

“
Gut
Shabbes!” he cried, opening his arms and encircling her in his sheepskin coat, tenderly kissing her cheek, her neck, and her lips.

“I didn’t think you were coming.”

“Not coming? Of course I’m coming. Why wouldn’t I come to see my little swallow?” He called all his widows this, indulging them,
flattering them, and, most of all, giving them the affection and attention they sorely needed.

When the widow noticed Berta and Samuil, she cooled visibly until Fichmann introduced them as his paying fares. After that she relaxed and invited them all in for tea. They sat in her front room, on rickety chairs, eating stale poppy seed cake with their fingers and drinking glasses of hot tea. The widow was talking about her late husband, whose hand-tinted photograph hung over the chimneypiece and showed him in the uniform of the infantry.

“Killed at Brest,” she said with a sigh. “Or at least he was shot there. They wouldn’t treat him at the front, because he was a Jew. He had to be transported to another hospital and they said he died on the way. Such a genius with a violin. Such a gentle man.” Her eyes misted over as she stared up at his photograph.

Seeing how his widow had suddenly turned glum, the potato merchant jumped in and in a hearty voice that was more peasant than Jew, he asked, “So, my little sunshine, what have you got for me today? I’m in the mood for work.”

“Oh, Mottel,” she said, looking at him with tender affection. Then, like a general in the field addressing her troops, she rose and announced to the assembled that first they’ll clean and then they’ll cook.

Berta could see that a timely departure was impossible. The widow was determined to make this a special Shabbes and soon she had Fichmann carrying the front door, the armoire, and the kitchen table down to the river so she could clean them properly. When she wasn’t scrubbing furniture, she was cooking soup or baking a pie. She put everybody to work. Samuil gutted and scaled the fish. Berta plucked the chicken until her fingers bled.

During dinner, the potato merchant was especially attentive to his widow. He touched her lightly on the arm to make a point. He kissed the back of her neck when he thought no one was looking and held her hand under the table. The widow soaked it up and her cheeks flamed with pleasure. After dinner, the Shabbes goy came to set the kitchen right and the four of them sat by the stove and listened to Fichmann’s stories about his travels and how he outsmarted the Cossacks by pretending
to be a deaf mute peasant so he wouldn’t give himself away with his thick Yiddish accent.

When it got late, the widow gave Berta a few mats and some blankets and said she and Samuil could sleep by the stove. Then she and the potato merchant climbed the stairs and closed their door. Samuil was asleep before the sounds of their lovemaking drifted down from above. Despite Berta’s attempt to drown them out by pulling a blanket over her head, she could still hear, quite plainly, that Fichmann was making his widow very happy. This was unfortunate. She thought if the widow didn’t sound so enthusiastic maybe they wouldn’t have to spend all of Shabbes with her. Fichmann wasn’t particularly religious. Berta could persuade him to travel on Shabbes provided there was a monetary incentive or better yet a fresh widow at journey’s end. But this current one sounded so passionate, so ecstatic and grateful, that Berta thought it was very possible they could be stuck there for weeks.

To drown out the widow’s pleasure, Berta pulled her coat over her head on top of the blanket. Still she could hear the moans, which were worse than annoying—they were arousing. They reminded her of her own drought, of the steady metronome of loneliness, a sparse existence, where her needs went unmet year after year. It had been so long since she had been with Hershel that she had nearly forgotten what it was like. She put her hands over her ears and closed her eyes. She didn’t want to remember, not now, not in this way.

By Sunday morning, Froy Katzenberg was hinting at a more permanent situation for her and Reb Fichmann. She was serving him breakfast at the little table in the kitchen, kasha and eggs, his favorite. Berta was out on the porch with Samuil, sitting on the steps, soaking up the sun, and pretending not to listen to the conversation going on inside.

The widow was saying that she thought it might be a good idea if he started keeping some things with her, a change of clothes perhaps or an extra harness for Esther. Just in case. Maybe they should make plans, have a few set visits when she could expect him. That way she could have his supper waiting for him when he arrived home. She tossed off the word
home
as if it had already been decided that he lived there.

The potato merchant paused for a moment to appear that he was
giving it some thought. “Let me sleep on that, my love,” he said, pouring milk over his kasha. “I love the way you cook the little kernels. The way the little hard bits are mixed in with the softer ones.”

As soon as the widow mentioned set plans, Berta knew they would be off soon. Right after breakfast, the potato merchant announced that there were hungry people waiting for his potatoes and he couldn’t, in good conscience, keep them waiting another minute. As much as he wanted to spend his days with his beautiful peach blossom, he had to say good-bye and get back on the road, even though he knew it would break his heart.

After a tearful good-bye, he turned Esther around and soon they were heading out of town under a pale sky. They made good time that day because the roads were dry and Fichmann was tired and not in the mood for widows. They stopped several times for Esther’s benefit, but mostly they plodded on in the fine spring weather, keeping an eye out for Hryhoriiv’s army and Directory troops. Fortunately Fichmann knew all the roads and kept to the less traveled ones, the ones that were little more than cart tracks and wouldn’t have been passable even a week ago.

That night they shared a room at a little inn in a townlet that the potato merchant jokingly referred to as Ganaiden, Garden of Eden, because of the open sewer running down a trench in the back. There was a wedding in town and every room at the inn was booked. Even so the innkeeper didn’t want to pass up an opportunity to make a little more coin, so she offered them her room, saying she could sleep at her sister’s over the bakery.

The innkeeper’s bed was a lumpy straw mattress that was only big enough for one. Fichmann insisted that Berta take it, saying that he and Samuil could spread blankets on the floor. At first it was hard to sleep because of the wedding party downstairs, but they were so tired that not even the music and drunken laughter could keep them up.

Later Berta woke up in the middle of the night to find a hand moving up her thigh. “What are you doing?” she asked, pushing his hand away.

“I thought you might be lonely,” Fichmann whispered. He had
squeezed into the bed beside her and was lying on his side, holding on to the headboard to keep from falling off. His other hand came back, gently brushing the inside of her thigh and moving up with purpose. “I’m good with widows, very gentle and kind, just what the doctor ordered.”

Berta couldn’t be angry with him. He saw himself as a champion of the ladies, devoting himself to their service, doing his best to make them happy in a bitterly unhappy world. “But I’m not a widow,” she whispered. “I have a husband in America.”

“I didn’t know,” he said, making no attempt to remove his hand.

“That’s all right,” she said, turning away from him and leaving his hand behind, naked and lonely under the coverlet.

“And you’re going to him?”

“Yes.”

He took his time thinking about this. “When was the last time you saw him?”

“Eight years ago.”

“That’s a long time. Do you miss him?”

She pulled the quilt up over her shoulder. “Yes,” she said, vaguely.

She lay there facing the wall, listening to the sound of Samuil’s breathing. He was snoring softly in the corner. Then she turned back and lay on her side to give Fichmann more room. They were lying face-to-face, close, but not touching. His breath smelled of the beer he had with dinner. “I heard it from the peddlers,” she whispered anxiously.

“What?”

“That he is looking for us.”

“So?”

“So, it didn’t come in a letter. It wasn’t official. It came from them.”

“And this worries you?”

“I think I made a hasty decision. I should have thought about it longer. I think I made a terrible mistake.”

“What do you mean?”

“What if they got it wrong? What if he’s not looking for us and we’re in Poland and there’s no way of getting back? What will happen to my son?”

The potato merchant thought it over and then said, “The peddlers are often right, not always, but often enough. I’ve heard plenty of stories of wives reunited with their husbands because of them.”

“You have?’

“Many times.”

“And they’re true?”

“I’ve always believed them to be.”

They lay there together while she thought it over. Then he rolled on his back and extended his arm out as an invitation to her. She moved over to him and curled into the warm crook of his shoulder, letting the atavistic comfort of his presence seep over her, quieting her fears, softening the raw edges.

After a while, he got up without her having to tell him, kissed her on the cheek, and returned to his blanket on the floor.

 

BERTA HAD no idea what a border stealer was supposed to look like. He could’ve been a Polish count or the heir to a Polish estate. His clothes were clean and there was a ring on his little finger that glinted in the lamplight. He was a wiry man with thick ropy arms and thinning blond hair. He wasn’t big, but his chest was muscular and his neck was thick. It was as if the top half of his body had been meant for someone else.

They met at an inn in Zhvanets, a town located on the north bank of the Dniester River. It was bordered on the west by the Zbruch River, which separated it from Galicia, now under Polish rule. There was an attempt at respectability at the inn: curtains on the windows, a little vase of roadside flowers on wooden tables that had been freshly scrubbed with salt. Fichmann handled the bargaining: so much for a river crossing, so much now, and so much when the woman and boy got across. The fact that the Pole never looked at her, not once, made her uneasy. She wanted him to think of her as a human being, not as a load of household goods to be picked clean and dumped into the river. She remembered Pavel’s stories of bodies stripped naked, battered by rocks and currents, washing up on slices of river sand. But Fichmann swore he knew this border stealer. It was said that he had the best boat in town and knew every inch of the river.