The River Midnight (20 page)

Emma shook her head. “No, Mama. Papa says that God makes miracles.”

“Do you know what a miracle is?”

“Uh-huh. It’s a flood. When it rained for forty days and forty nights and everybody drowned except Noah.”

Curling Emma’s hair around her fingers, Mama sighed and kissed her forehead. “Just remember what I’m telling you, Emma. Words do more than miracles.”

“More than magic?”

“Yes.”

“Can you say magic words?”

Her mother laughed. “Put your head on my shoulder and I’ll tell you a story about when I was a little girl in Blaszka. My mother and my Auntie Fruma went to the river to bathe. I followed them even though it was night and I was supposed to be asleep. And do you know what I saw there in the moonlight?”

Emma looked closely but she didn’t see any magic words coming out of her mother’s mouth and before the story ended, she fell asleep.

I
N THE
grayness below Emma clutched the fedora. “Will I see her when I go?”

The Traveler sighed. “You’ll be assigned, but even up here you don’t get what you want. It’s the Boss’s decision.” He put the finished whistle in one pocket, his small carving knife in the other.

“You mean there’s a boss up here?”

The Traveler patted Emma’s hands. “It won’t be so different, Emma. The Boss gives the orders and you carry them out. Just remember that there’s no argument. All right, Emma. Take your
kittel.
We’re ready, now.”

Putting her arms into the sleeves of the white robe, Emma paused. “What do you mean,
no argument?
”

“When you come up here, you just carry out your orders.”

“What about your opinion?”

“It won’t be much use to you in your new assignment. You’re just the messenger. There’s no strikes or demands. No agitation.”

“I’ve changed my mind.” She began to take off the
kittel.

“Now? It’s too late, Emma. The deal’s made.”

“What do you mean, too late? I never said for sure. A person’s entitled to change her mind.”

“A person, yes. A dead person, no.”

“Aren’t I still alive?”

“Hmm.” He looked down. “What’ll you give me if I let you go back?”

“I’ve got nothing.”

“That could be a problem. I might need a bribe for upstairs. Wait. I know. Let your brother have the miracles. The Boss would like that.”

“There’s got to be something else. It’s too embarrassing. I can’t do it. Can you just see the headline? ‘Famous Rabbi Makes Rain’: ‘Due to his extraordinary piety, Rabbi Isidore Blau is reputed to bring rain to the parched fields of Poland. Daily his circle of disciples grows.’ And his followers—praying when they could be joining the revolution.”

“Well, you get the revolution. The Boss gets the miracles. That seems fair.”

“Let me give you something else. Please. How about I start going to synagogue?”

“No. Miracles or nothing. And you can keep the hat. Deal?”

Emma nodded. The Traveler pulled the whistle out of his pocket and blew on it.

I
N THE
coming year, Josef Mill will be sent by the Vilna group of Jewish socialists to establish The Jewish Worker’s Union of Warsaw. Izzie will go to study at the yeshiva in Kovno. In time they will call him The Rainmaker.

In a hundred years, in Los Angeles, there will be a strike of the Needleworkers’ Union, protesting sweatshop conditions of new immigrants and illegal aliens. Among the picketers will be a man in a ragged jacket, his copper hair like rooster feathers. He will have a red rose pinned to his jacket, and he will be bareheaded.

In the village square the old women stood in a clump as the black carriage stopped in front of Perlmutter’s tavern. Who is it, what is it? they asked, the frost of their breath mingling. The Director came down from his perch in the driver’s seat, whip still in hand, tipping his top hat to the gathering crowd. The carriage door opened, the actors emerged. Such colors, such feathers, such a rollicking tumble of pushing and falling and singing about bodily functions. The old women, who had lived through everything there was to live through, laughed until the tears fell from their eyes. The juggler frolicked with his bottles and plates and the silver samovar flying up to heaven like a Hasidic rebbe. The crowd, swollen with amazement, clamored for more, stamping their feet, shouting, whistling, children shyly pressed against their fathers’ coats or boldly climbing over the carriage with its fancy yellow lettering,
THE GOLEM PLAYERS
.

The Director held up his black-gloved hands for silence. The door to the inn opened and closed. There was the smell of schnapps. A girl and boy came out, plainly dressed, standing together without touching.
And then, as the violin began to sob, the smell of yearning opened into song. Leaning against each other, remembering, the old women asked, Where is Alta-Fruma? She should only see this. Warm breath melted the ice on the edge of their shawls, they clasped hands and wept. The women were old and knotty and strong, and they counted on Alta-Fruma to remember them as they were when they were young.

She wasn’t a big talker, Alta-Fruma, but she could tell you exactly how you looked on your wedding day. Too bad she missed the excitement, they said, throwing a few kopecks into the basket the actors were passing around. That’s Alta-Fruma, she has no luck. She’s the kind of person who always gets the smallest piece. What can you do? It’s a nature. She was never one to push herself forward, not like her sister Rakhel, may she rest in peace. Do you remember how Rakhel always had an opinion about everything? She would look at you as if she were Devorah, the Judge of Ancient Israel. Rakhel’s daughter was something else altogether—Zisa-Sara ran around with the
vilda hayas
, but she was goodness itself.

Did you hear that Zisa-Sara’s children are coming back to Blaszka today? Of course, a brother and sister. Poor Alta-Fruma. She’s used to living alone and having things her own way. What will she do with two strange children? Well, the boy will go to heder and the girl can work in the dairy. Maybe she’ll learn something from her great-aunt. No one makes cheese like Alta-Fruma, not from here to Plotsk. And her floor—the Tsarina could eat from it.

It’s a shame that Alta-Fruma had no children of her own. A shame? I don’t know. You get no thanks from your children, they just break your heart. Maybe it’s better for her. What are you talking? Alta-Fruma was only nineteen when her husband disappeared, and no one knew what became of him. An abandoned woman is a pitiable creature. By Jewish law she’s not marriageable, an
aguna.
They say her husband could show up at any moment. She’s not meat and not dairy. Nobody knows—is she
parev
like fish or potatoes that can go with anything? Or is she, God forbid,
trayf?
I’m telling you, there’s nothing worse than to be alone.

A
LTA
-F
RUMA
was on the other side of the bridge, walking and talking to herself. She needed to be alone, to think things out, and so she
walked in the ruins, blending with the shadows and meandering through the deserted lanes, her gray shawl frothing in the wind. What did she know about raising children?
The boy will listen to reason. But the girl, to be frank, is a handful
, it said in the letter.

This side of the village was a place of weeds and reeds, the river seeping into every crevice, broken houses falling over, saplings sprouted in the deserted houses of the
shayner
, poplar and birch cracking the cobblestones, nettles clustered thick around the bathhouse and the well, apple trees twisted as Warsaw beggars creaking in the wind near Hayim the watercarrier’s hut.

As Alta-Fruma came around Hayim’s hut, she saw someone emerging from between the alders. Who was this? Yes, the
zogerin
, her hand to her head, straightening her wig. Hayim stood outside his hut, watching expressionlessly. He wore a long unbleached shirt like a peasant, his shoulders broad and steady as if he stopped the wind. His hair was long and his beard was long, thick, black, smooth, blowing over his shoulder like a scarf. When he was a boy, women used to pinch his round red cheeks, but in his forties Hayim was not a smiling man. He had eyes like a cat, narrow, gold, and unreflecting. His eyebrows slanted upward toward his nose, meeting in the center quizzically as if the world were a sad and puzzling place. Other men in Blaszka avoided the glance of women, but not Hayim. He looked intensely at all he saw. Alta-Fruma, narrow and gray as a shadow camouflaged by a cluster of leafless trees, gazed at him equally intensely, remarking the proportions of Hayim’s body while the
zogerin
hurried across the bridge.

So should I be surprised? Alta-Fruma asked herself. The
zogerin
might be the women’s prayer leader, but she’s still a young woman, given away by her family to a fat old man for a husband. And why? For honor, for family lineage, because her husband, the ritual slaughterer, has some rabbis among his ancestors. The
zogerin
doesn’t owe anyone a thing and I won’t tell anyone about her, either, but she’s a fool. Someone else will see and then everyone will know. Who in this village can keep a secret? Just Misha and I. A midwife has to know how to keep things to herself. Otherwise no woman could trust her. And I learned from my sister. Whatever she did, I did the opposite.

As she walked back through the overgrown lanes, Alta-Fruma took
the letter from her pocket, reading it yet again and muttering to herself. “If the girl were like her mother, Zisa-Sara, I would know what to do with her. Zisa-Sara was a sweet child. But it seems that this Emma takes after her Grandmother Rakhel.”

Alta-Fruma could see her sister Rakhel as if she stood right in front of her, those blue eyes that darkened when she was excited, studying with the tutor until Papa found out what she was learning. The beautiful sister. Rebellious. Stubborn. A will of iron. She did whatever she wanted while Alta-Fruma milked the cows and made cheese and supported the whole family. The most sensible woman in Blaszka, people said.

Of course she was sensible. She kept her business to herself. Did anyone know how she made her cheese? Or how much money she had? Or what she did in Warsaw? No. And so there was no reason for anyone to make any trouble for her. But however sensible Alta-Fruma was, there was the matter of her little gift. A talent of no consequence. Something she had inherited from some unknown ancestress, maybe through a vague connection her family had with Misha’s. People said that Misha’s great-grandmother, Manya, had been a witch. And this little talent Alta-Fruma had—well, she could turn herself into a frog. A tiny treefrog whose skin shone green as her eyes when it was on a leaf and gray as her shawl when it clung to the trunk of a tree. When she was a girl, after she milked the cows and cleaned out their stall and sold her cheese in the village square and washed the floor in the front room of the house and prepared the soup and mended her sister’s stockings, she might find herself in the woods, riding a leaf flung by the wind onto a shiny pool where snails roused each other to a wet frenzy of merging and mosquitos were born with the wings of seraphim. The smell of water, the sharp edge of a leaf, the sweeping wind. Could she forget?

Rakhel, whenever she wanted to unnerve Alta-Fruma, would whisper in her ear: Witch! Even later, when it had been so long since Alta-Fruma had exercised her gift that she wondered if she ever had or if it had been a dream, Rakhel could still prickle the skin on her neck by whispering, “Witch.”

So now Rakhel’s grandchildren were coming home. Two children in the house putting their noses into everything. Children from America? Who knew what they were like?

She’d had plenty of advice from all the mothers in Blaszka. Use
your hand. Use a stick. Don’t listen to nonsense. Wash out a bad mouth with soap. They only have you now. If the boy’s to learn Torah and the girl to make a good match, you have to be strict.

The women probably knew what they were talking about, but Alta-Fruma remembered that all the beatings her father gave her sister Rakhel didn’t stop her from reading the books of heathens and heretics.

Walking back across the icy bridge, Alta-Fruma still didn’t know what she would do with the children, and she was sure that in the short time before they arrived, she wouldn’t become any wiser.

T
HE BOY
stood beside his sister, hanging onto the sleeve of her coat, one of his socks fallen in a sad crumple over his cracked boot. The girl twisted and turned, looking up at the flat gray sky and down at the flat white earth as if to find a place high enough to stand on and shout. Shayna-Perl, the cart driver, had brought the children from the train station, lifting the heavy trunk herself while her stout gray horse snorted and frosted the air with swirls of his breath. Leaving the trunk under the weeping willows beside the house, her sheepskin jacket opened to the cold and her pipe clenched between her teeth, the carter left without a thought for how the trunk would get into the house.

“So this is Emma and Izzie. Come in, children, get warm,” Alta-Fruma said. The girl took after Zisa-Sara with her high slanted cheekbones, the mole like a tiny fingerprint above her mouth and the brown braids threaded with gold, but she carried herself like Rakhel, at the brink of a leap, and her blue eyes were Rakhel’s eyes.

Emma picked up one end of the trunk, leaning back, her heels dug into the snowy earth as she tried to drag the trunk toward the door. “You’ll hurt yourself,” Alta-Fruma said. “Wait. Faygela said she would send one of her girls to help.”

“I don’t need any help. Me and Izzie, we can take care of ourselves.” She turned toward her brother. “Right?” she added in English. The boy nodded, putting out a small hand toward Emma’s tough, brown fist.

“Emma took care of me. She always takes care of me,” he said in English, then repeated in Yiddish as his great-aunt shook her head uncomprehendingly.

“At least come inside for a minute. Get warm. You think I need
sick children in my house?” Alta-Fruma spoke harshly, hiding the pity she felt at the sight of the motherless children in coats that were short in the sleeves and tight in the shoulders and not too warm, either. The boy was shivering. A person has to be firm with children, she reminded herself, noting the jut of Emma’s chin. “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. Get inside.”