The River Midnight (11 page)

Faygela and Berekh leaned toward each other, elbows on the table, chins resting on fists in their usual preargument stance. Shmuel shifted uneasily, though there was nothing improper, here. Nothing exactly improper.

“The Torah teaches us what is right,” Shmuel said, his soft voice breaking the concentration of the two cousins.

“Ah. Yes,” Berekh said. “And tonight we celebrate our freedom. Such as it is.”

“And nobody leads a seder like my Shmuel,” Faygela quickly added. “When he speaks you can see the fire of the Holy One leading the Jews out of Egypt. Now children, listen carefully and you might hear the footsteps of Elijah the Prophet coming to have a drink of wine at our table.”

A
FTER
P
ASSOVER
, Shmuel asked Faygela to read the letter to him again. “You have to go,” he said. “My brother’s wife Surala and her baby, alone in Warsaw, sick with no one to look after them? When my brother went to America, I promised that we would watch out for them. Should I break a promise?”

“If I go, I could be away for a month and the girls will run circles around you, Shmuel. You can never say no to them.”

“I don’t want you to go, Faygela, but we don’t have a choice. Don’t worry about the girls. Misha will look out for them. Just think
of Surala. She has no one. We have everyone we know here in Blaszka.”

Shmuel put his arm around Faygela, even though they were in the bakery and there were plenty of people to see. He kissed her quickly on the top of her head, and she squeezed his hand. “Why should I be so foolish?” she asked. “A chance to go to Warsaw and I should say no?” But it seemed to her that without her girls and her small son she would be left as shorn as the day after her wedding, hair cut off and falling to the floor in dark abandonment.

T
HE GIRLS
dragged her into Shmuel’s cart, extracting promises of gifts and stories to be brought back from Warsaw. Shmuel reassured her. Misha gave Faygela her favorite shawl for the journey, the red one that Misha wore to difficult births. Even Hanna-Leah came out and warned her not to get lost. So Hanna-Leah still remembered how Faygela used to wander off in the woods and lose herself. If only she had another minute she would have liked to say something, but there was no time. Shmuel was clicking at the horse and she was looking back at Misha, the younger children hanging onto her, Ruthie and Freydel waving.

Faygela sat on a bench in the third-class car. It was crowded with Russian soldiers and Polish peasants and Jewish men in caftans and women with hens and children who already made Faygela miss her own. With the elbow digging into her on one side and the chicken crate squeezing into her on the other, she could hardly breathe, which was a mercy because the smell of the hens’ dreck and the unwashed hair and the sweaty greatcoats and the vodka breath would have smothered her if she breathed any deeper. Faygela pulled Misha’s red shawl over her head and looked out the window past the grime to the Vistula, the queen of rivers, its water bluer, the trees along its banks greener, the ships like swans on its expanse. What was their own little Północna next to this river? The train rushed beside the river at thirty kilometers an hour, shaking Faygela as the fields flowed backward, giving way to peasant villages and shtetls with stops and starts, a soldier getting off, a woman with a crying baby on her back getting on.

When Faygela had gone to Warsaw with her father, they had ridden in his baker’s cart and it took them several days, stopping
overnight at shtetls that seemed just like Blaszka, larger perhaps, with separate synagogues for the rich and the poor and the followers of different rebbes, but still not so different from home that she felt uncomfortable. But in Warsaw there were so many goyim. As they sat in the streetcar that drove along the wide avenues, Faygela had stared at the gentlemen in their top hats and the ladies with their bustles. Afterward, Hanna-Leah had said that a woman who wears a bustle might just as well have a pig on her behind, but Faygela had been embarrassed by her plain dress. “We should at least have a corset-maker in Blaszka. It’s indecent to have my chest hanging and my waist sticking out.”

“You?” Hanna-Leah had laughed. “You have nothing to stick out—not that little waist of yours and not your chest, either, so don’t worry.”

The school was in the south of Warsaw on one of the grand streets lined by lindens, but Faygela would live with her Aunt Esther, her father had told her. She would take the horse-drawn streetcar to school past the statue of Copernicus and the theater that could hold Blaszka’s entire village square behind its columns, and then she would return to Aunt Esther and Auntie’s cousin who lived together above a store in one of the new buildings on Nalewki Street, where all the signs on the stores were in Yiddish. But even Nalewki Street had seemed strange to Faygela with its cobblestones and four-story buildings, the constant noise, nothing but brick and stone as far as she could see, not a blade of grass or a glimpse of the river anywhere. Aunt Esther had poured tea for Faygela and her father, Aunt Esther’s cousin standing with her hands on Esther’s shoulder, bending down to whisper in her ear. Aunt Esther had smiled and shaken her head and said, “Faygela will be welcome to share our home as long as she wishes.”

When they had returned to Blaszka, Faygela’s grandmother had said that if God was just, no granddaughter of hers would go live with someone like that sister of Papa’s. “People say she didn’t want to get married,” Grandmother had said. “If a woman is left sitting because she has no dowry or she’s crippled, she deserves pity. But a woman who goes to a city of goyim with no one but her female cousin to walk with her? I could tell you …” But Papa had interrupted Grandmother and Faygela heard no more.

After Papa died, when it turned out there was going to be no Warsaw, Hanna-Leah had walked with Faygela along the riverbank and had said, “I’m sorry you can’t go to school, Faygela. I mean it. But now we can be friends always and I won’t say I’m sorry for that.”

“And when I have a baby, you’ll be with me?” Faygela asked. “Every time?”

Hanna-Leah nodded, knowing that it was no light promise. She was old enough to realize that a woman in labor can easily die and Faygela had no mother or sister to help her. Hanna-Leah held out her hand. Faygela took it. Then they ran across the bridge, giggling, because only married women crossed the bridge to use the bathhouse on the other side of the river.

I
N THE
train, Faygela drank a little water from the bottle in her basket, ate some bread, and watched as they passed the terraced hills descending to the river on the left bank, a covered bridge, a road blocked by sheep, a marsh, another bridge. It is ridiculous to think of that phrase of Grandmother’s, the city of goyim, Faygela thought. In Warsaw one in three people are Jews, the same as Plotsk. In fact the anti-Semitic newspapers are complaining that if steps aren’t taken, Warsaw will become a Jewish city. Imagine, the crown of Poland. There’s nothing to be nervous about. Am I as provincial as Hanna-Leah?

The train was passing through woods and the window was dark. When it grew light again, she saw factories in a row, masses of brick and smoke and the train was curving, wheels screeching as they turned and they were on the railway bridge crossing to the left bank, her palms suddenly wet. There was Warsaw. The spires and the domes and the columns and the marble and the avenues as wide as a river and inside the third-class car the old woman snored and the woman with the crying baby took out a breast and pushed the nipple into the baby’s mouth while she wiped her nose on her sleeve.

F
AYGELA
’
S
sister-in-law didn’t live in the new tenements on Nalewki Street. She didn’t even have a room in one of the windowless houses inhabited by the poorest Jewish tailors and carters near the Miła cemetery west of Nalewki. No, Surala was on the east side of the city, on the
edge of the Old Town not far from Dung Gate, in a room above the Rooster Cafe. No coffee was served in the cafe.

Faygela sat on a wooden stool near the one window in Surala’s room. If she put her head out the window and craned her neck she could see a little sky between the old walls of the buildings. Below, the street was so narrow that the prostitutes could lean their backs against one wall and brace their feet against the other while they conducted their business. From time to time, Faygela bathed her sister-in-law’s face with a wet cloth, touched the back of her hand to the baby’s red cheek, and returned to her seat.

There were two other rooms above the cafe, in each a family with a few children, a grandmother, an aunt and uncle, and a boarder or two shouting, crying, moaning.

“Do you hear that?” Surala asked. She was thin, her skin yellow, and the baby’s head seemed too big for his neck. He was crying in a low voice. Surala had no milk. “It goes on day and night.”

“I can’t blame them. They live in each other’s armpits and the smell is enough to hang you,” Faygela said. “Too many people and not enough work. Every day more Litvaks come from the East, running from the Tsar and his program for the Jews. But you have to sleep, Surala. Don’t listen to what’s going on. Let me take the baby.” Faygela lifted the baby from Surala’s arms. Outside, the prostitutes were calling from beneath the window, Quick and cheap, special for soldiers. There wasn’t an oven in the room or even a fireplace where Faygela could cook a little soup on a trivet or boil water for tea. She had to fetch water from the public pump several blocks away.

“It was good of Shmuel to let you come,” Surala said as she closed her eyes. “I won’t forget.”

Faygela paced the tiny room, in one arm the baby, in her hand a newspaper from which she read aloud in the sing-song voice she had used with her own babies. “Another strike in the sugar works,” she crooned. “The workers will be fined, including the man who lost his leg in the accident that precipitated,” she swayed gently from side to side, “the strike.” The baby rested his head in the crook of her neck. He smelled sour, not like a healthy baby, but he was asleep. She kissed his fist, the hot fingers tight around her thumb.

*  *  *

M
OST DAYS
before she shopped for Surala, Faygela walked down to the riverbank. There she would lean against a tree and watch the light play on the water and wonder if Shmuel was singing the lullaby that Berel liked and if Freydel was keeping her promise not to tease Ruthie. When she went home she would tell them about the city walls and the royal castle. The girls would like that, Faygela would think as she went to the market in the Old Town Square for bread and herring and a little sugar to mix with water for Surala’s baby. At first she often lost her direction, peering this way and that, heart beating quickly, looking for something familiar while beggars accosted her. In Blaszka she wouldn’t think of walking past a beggar, not when her father knew his father, not even if the beggar was a stranger. A Jew refuse charity? But here they frightened her, wrapping stumps of hands in her skirt, pleading and scolding. “You miser, have you no consideration for the future of your own soul? Look at my child,” thrusting at her a baby tied around like a piece of fish in newspaper and string. Faygela would walk quickly, averting her eyes from the Russian soldiers, murmuring, Excuse me, until she recognized where she was.

A
FTER A WEEK
, Surala looked worse and the baby was too quiet. “I think I’m better,” Surala said, trying to sit up. “I shouldn’t keep you so long. You have to go home to Shmuel and the children. What would my husband think of my selfishness?”

“I can’t leave you here. This room is impossible, Surala. Even poor Jews near the Miła cemetery have water and a fire.”

“Yes, you’re right. And as soon as I get a letter from my husband with some money, I’ll go to a better place. An apartment on Nalewki Street.” She put her hand on the baby’s head. “And then we’ll go to America, won’t we, sweetie.”

“When did you hear from him last?”

“I don’t remember. He’s working hard, Faygela. We’ll hear soon.”

Faygela could just imagine what Hanna-Leah would say about this. If the man’s hands weren’t broken, he could have written, and if he didn’t, then the Messiah might come before the letter. And in the meantime? “I’ll go home when it’s time,” Faygela said. “Now I have to go out. Herring is cheap but it’s no good for someone who needs to get back her strength. Maybe I can get a little soup for you. And who
knows? Maybe I’ll find a better room, too. So don’t expect me for some time, Surala. It could be a long walk.”

Faygela threw Misha’s red shawl over her shoulders and tied her kerchief firmly around her head. Surely, she could find her way to Nalewki Street. She only had to walk away from the river and keep going for an hour or two. Among the Jewish shops there would have to be someone who would know of a decent room for Surala.

As Faygela left the Old Town behind, the streets widened and she didn’t have to squeeze herself against a wall when a cart drove by with its hard-breathing nag. Soon carts gave way to streetcars pulled by thickset horses, and after a while there were carriages pulled by thinner, taller horses with leather bags hanging from their backsides to catch their droppings. The men wore top hats, the women were in silk and Faygela realized that she’d turned the wrong way again. Leaning against a wall, she started to laugh, ignoring the passers-by staring at her. There, just across the square, was the Grand Theater that she’d seen with her father so long ago, more immense than she’d remembered, and yet she who was so small could take it in with her own two eyes.

As she continued through the square, she heard fragments of conversation in an elegant Polish, strange to her ear, used to the rough Polish of peasants. Did you see
The Queen of Sheba?
That voice. A genius. I wore a new chapeau. But that dress, my dear, the color. Emeralds and rubies together, how gauche.

Men and women walked together, promenading slowly in pairs, the women’s gloved fingers resting on the arms of men who matched their stride to the women’s. Faygela lifted her head to look up at the sky pierced by the roofs of palaces and churches and the statue of the saint with the sword. She didn’t care that she was dizzy as long as she could go on walking, surrounded by this beauty. Here was Saxon Gardens, here the watertower like a temple, here the great willows. For a moment, despite her heavy boots and the coarse wool of her dress, the city was hers. And so she was unprepared for the fear that startled her when she bumped into the man with the copper mustache and the velvet vest.