The Little Russian (6 page)

“Good, then it’s settled.” He took her hand and helped her up to the bench. As she climbed up she was acutely aware of a hole in her stockings just above her right ankle that she had been meaning to mend.
She didn’t want him to see it and was careful to stoop as she climbed up to keep her skirts over the spot.

When she was comfortable, he went around and climbed up beside her. “Do you believe in fairies, Mademoiselle?” It was an allusion to Yeats.

She smiled with pleasure. “Of course I do, don’t you?”

He laughed and picked up the reins and gave them a snap. The horse started up and the cart dipped and bounced over the ruts. All the way back they talked about fairies, ghosts, and gods. They quoted passages, sometimes in unison.

 

A FEW WEEKS later, Hershel pulled up to the store in a new droshky. Berta was the first one to see it.

“Is that yours?” she called out as he jumped down.

“All mine. You like her?” He turned back to admire the carriage.

“She’s beautiful. I like her very much.”

Berta had to admit that the droshky didn’t look all that new; the paint was peeling off the chassis and the mudguards were cracked and needed repair. But the brass lamps had been recently polished and the spoke wheels had been painted yellow and the seats seemed to be in good condition.

“I bought her off a cabman in Cherkast. Come out with me. I have to see a man about a load, but it won’t take long. It’s a beautiful day.”

Berta went up to change into her lavender tea dress. She wore her straw hat with the matching hat band and carried her lace parasol. After she was seated alongside Hershel, he urged the horse on and it trotted out to the clatter of hooves on the hard dirt. She watched her reflection ripple in the shop windows and caught the women at the town pump giving her hard, envious looks. She closed her eyes and it felt like Moscow again, the same heady sense of entitlement, of being special and apart, of being up high where she couldn’t be reached.

They drove out on the Cherkast road that led north to the wheat center of the same name. It was a wide ribbon of gravel bisecting the rolling fields of half-reaped wheat, the tawny shafts standing straight and tall in the sunlight, casting straight-edged shadows over the
stubble left behind by the scythe. Here and there were one-story houses built of logs and plaster, covered with thatched mansard roofs and surrounded by a variety of defeated outbuildings. The yards were typically littered with years of farm trash: broken-down carts, rusted-out tubs, bits and pieces of old scythes and sledge runners and stacks of moldy crates. There was always a dog or two in the yard that barked as they rode past.

They turned in on one of the back roads, the droshky bouncing along the dusty track, the bells jingling on the harness, the springs squeaking like startled mice. It was one of those hypnotic days, warm and drowsy. There was a hectic surge of excitement inside Berta, an urge to let it all in: the sun, the smell of the black earth, the caress of muslin against her back. Her senses were alive and for the first time in a long while she felt the thrill of freedom—from the store, from the town, from the life she had fallen into since leaving Leontievsky Street.

Hershel pulled into a rutted drive that led down to a farmstead just off the main road. “This shouldn’t take long,” he said, bringing the droshky to a stop in front of a threshing shed whose roof nearly sagged to the ground. He jumped down. “Want to come along?”

She nodded and held out her arms so that he could help her down. Together they went up to the house, skirting rusting barrel hoops, a dung heap, beehives, and barking dogs the color of parched earth. At the door he stopped and waited. “Why don’t you just call out?” she asked.

“It’s considered bad luck. We just have to wait for someone to come. But it won’t be long with this racket.”

A moment later a woman with a baby on her hip appeared at the door and looked at them with suspicion. She wore a faded skirt and a gaudy head scarf and shooed the dogs away with a wave of her hand. Hershel tipped his hat and asked in Surzhyk for the whereabouts of the
bol’shak
. The baby began to fuss so she stuck a finger in its mouth while she nodded over to one of the larger outbuildings.

They found the
bol’shak
and his sons repairing harnesses in the barn, a rambling structure with stalls on one side, battered work benches on the other, and a hayloft in the back. The boys had the same light hair, flat wide face, rounded nose, and suspicious mouth of their father.

At first Hershel and Berta stood at the barn door, aware that they hadn’t been invited in. Hershel wished them a good day and said he’d come to buy their wheat. He was speaking Surzhyk like a muzhik and this seemed to lessen the tension. They knew he was a Jew, but a Jew who had taken the time to learn their language. Berta may have been reading into it, but it seemed to her that he had gained some respect for his efforts, especially with the
bol’shak
, who motioned them in.

Berta could barely speak the language, a mishmash of Russian and Ukrainian, but she had picked up enough working in the store to get the gist of what was being discussed. Hershel was saying something about a cow and their neighbor, possibly calling into question their neighbor’s skill at husbandry, and this they found uproariously funny. They talked about beehives. Hershel complimented the
bol’shak
on the hives they had seen on the drive. The old man took it in stride. After that she lost the thread of the conversation until the
bol’shak
invited them into his home for bread and salt.

The house was well kept for that part of the country, although the walls, which had been whitewashed once, were nearly black with soot and grime. They sat at a long farm table and ate bread slathered in lard topped with stout granules of salt, which they washed down with kvass served in jam jars. The men smoked their pipes filled with the foul-smelling
makhorka
. They weren’t in a hurry to get down to business and the conversation meandered over taxes, the purchase of a new horse, and the design of a new steam-powered threshing machine from Germany.

After the bread was consumed and several more glasses of kvass were drunk along with some vodka, Hershel and the
bol’shak
finally got down to talking about money. At first they started out far apart, but over time Hershel was able to bring the price down. He didn’t do it by belittling the man’s wheat as other merchants would have done. He did it by praising all the wheat in the region and implying that if he didn’t get his price here, there would be plenty of other places he could go. Finally, when they got down to haggling over two kopecks a pood, Hershel excused himself and went out to the carriage. He came back in carrying a sack of coins, which he emptied out on the table. Hundreds of shiny new kopecks spilled out over the worn planks and rolled
through specks of salt and the sweat from the cold glasses
.
There were two- and three-kopeck coins, some five-kopeck, and a few
grivenniki
, ten-kopeck coins, all sparkling in the light that poured in through the open doorway. When the
bol’shak
saw the mound of coins he grinned and Berta saw that he was missing several teeth.

After the deal was struck, Hershel shook the man’s hand. The
bol’shak
walked them out to the droshky while his sons and daughter-in-law watched from the porch. Berta climbed up and brushed off the bench with her gloved hand. Then Hershel climbed up beside her and, after saying good-bye, signaled the horse and started up the rutted lane.

“Once I figured out they’d rather have a sack of kopecks than a piece of paper with the czar’s picture on it, the rest was easy. I never cheat them. I always give them a fair price, but it’s my price. Next spring I plan on managing six more silos. I already talked to Knoop and he’s happy to give them to me. He knows I get the best wheat and nobody gets my price. And after that I thought I’d ask for a piece. They won’t turn me down. They can’t. They know I’ll go over to the competition if they do.”

She looked at him from under her hat. It was a look of admiration, not coy, but openly admiring, and he took it in with pleasure. “You’re good at this, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Am I?” he said, barely suppressing a smile. The horse trotted past wide swaths of ripened wheat. “This is Adamovich’s,” he said with a wave of his hand. “I own it. All of it. I bought it when it was only seed.” He didn’t mean that he actually owned the fields, only that the consortium in Moscow had bought the wheat. But he was so connected to his work that these lines were often blurred. “Already it looks to be one of the highest yields in the district. He’s used a new seed from America. And he’s got the best soil. You can taste it.”

“You taste the soil?”

“Of course.”

She made a face and he laughed carelessly. He had a nice laugh. They rode back under the trees, the sunlight spilling through the leaves and tattooing the ground. It was quiet with only the clip-clop of hooves and
the occasional thrum of a steam-powered thresher far off in the fields to break the calm. When the road got rough she had to hold on to the side of the box for support, but even so, her shoulder swayed into his, creating a stir of desire.

She asked him where he grew up and he told her about the shtetl where he was born and about the gymnasium where he went to school.

“It’s called Leski. Not far from here. On the way to Cherkast.”

“And what about your parents? Do they still live there?”

His smile faded a bit and he looked away. “They’re dead.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. How did they die?”

“They just did. Sometimes people die for no good reason.”

She thought this was an odd answer. She felt awkward after that, like she had committed some breach of etiquette, and didn’t know what to say.

They rode on in silence for a while, until he said, “Her name was Sophie. She was very beautiful, my mother. She had long fingers. She used to say they were her secret when she played Rachmaninoff. She had great plans for me. She wanted me to grow up to be a famous doctor, not the kind who sees patients. She said anybody could do that. She wanted me to do research and make discoveries and get my name in the history books.”

“Is that what you wanted?”

“No. Or rather I didn’t know what I wanted. I suppose I just wanted to make her happy.”

“And what about your father?”

“He was an educated man. He read to me when I was little and taught me to play chess and told me scary stories.”

She laughed. “What kind of stories?”

“Mostly ones about dybbuks and golems and vampires.”

“Weren’t you frightened?”

“Of course, but that was the point. I wanted to be frightened. Once he told me about the blue man who lived under our house. I used to dream about him. I remember he had sharp teeth and an evil smile. I wasn’t sure what he wanted, but I was pretty sure he was up to no good. After that I wouldn’t go to sleep without a lamp. My father took me
under the house to show me there was no one there, but it didn’t do any good. I still wouldn’t go to bed without the lamp.”

“And what happened to him?”

“The blue man? I expect he’s still there.”

“Under the house?”

He looked out across a field where peasants in belted tunics were moving up the furrows in careless concert, their long-handled scythes cutting swaths of ripe wheat, their heads bent to the task.

“Under every house.”

 

THAT NIGHT, Berta stood by the window brushing out her hair and looking down into the street. There was a peddler coming home from the road. He wore a shabby overcoat and carried a bundle on his back. The torn lining of his overcoat dragged on the ground behind him. Usually the peddlers stayed out until Friday afternoon, when they came home for Shabbes, but this one was coming home early, exhausted, shoulders slumped against his luckless life. She stood there not really seeing him, but thinking of Hershel, of his parents, and wondering how they died.

She put her brush on the nightstand and climbed into bed next to Lhaye, who was already asleep. She closed her eyes and soon she too was asleep—dreaming that she was a little girl playing in the yard behind the grocery with a caterpillar on a stick. She was sitting in the dirt watching it inch up to one end of the stick and then turning the stick upside down, watching it inch back up again. Someone called her name and she looked over at the crawl space under the building. There she saw a face grinning back at her from out of the darkness. It called her over. She didn’t like the look of its teeth. They were sharp and very white against the gleam of its blue skin.

December 1904

 

WHEN BERTA arrived at the women’s bathhouse, she knew that it was silly to hope for clean water. The water was rarely changed and always an unusual shade of green. In fact, the whole place smelled of the fecundity of a healthy swamp. Even the little foyer smelled of overripe vegetation.

Berta climbed the steps of the raw-boned building, opened the door, and stepped inside. The bath keeper’s wife was sitting on a chair in the overheated foyer with her knitting on her lap. She was making a blanket for her grandchild, and although it wasn’t even finished yet, it was already dirty from the coins she handled all day long.

The old woman looked up at the door and frowned. “It’s not closed all the way,” she said, drawing her shawl up around her shoulders.

Berta turned back to the door and slammed it shut. Then she stepped forward, dug into her pocket for the ten-kopeck coin, and handed it over. “Is the bath clean today?”

“Of course it is clean. It is always clean. I clean it myself.” Her eyes were the color of the bathwater and her mouth was a line of disappointment sunk into the cavity between her cheeks. Berta didn’t argue. Instead she took the towel that was offered, so thin it was nearly transparent.