The River Midnight (44 page)

I
N THE
Golem Cafe, Berekh puts down the pile of letters. It has been over three years since his wife died. He is forty years old. Neither of the children remembers their mother, though they both look like her. Rayzel can read already and Adam is beginning to learn his letters. Berekh refuses to separate them and will not send Adam to the heder where a crowd of boys mechanically chant their lessons in an airless room.

“More tea?” The proprietor of the Golem Cafe hovers at Berekh’s elbow. Berekh nods without looking up, lost in memory. “And lemon?” the Director asks.

“Yes,” Berekh answers, thinking of the simple headstone, “Hava Eisenbaum, 1867–1891.”

“And sugar?”

Berekh nods, waving his hand to dismiss the Director.

“One or two lumps?”

“One,” he answers abruptly, irritated at the distraction.

“Ah,” the Director says, “you’re sure, one, not two.”

Now Berekh looks up. The Director’s eyes gleam, a red flicker in each pupil like a pair of lit matches. “I told you one,” Berekh says. “If it’s so important, then give me two.”

“Certainly not. If monsieur desires one, then he should have only one. With the sugar tax as high as it is, I would not like to abuse monsieur’s taste for sweetness. But perhaps monsieur would like a cigarette?” The Director proffers a silver case.

“No, thank you,” Berekh says wryly, “the tax on matches is rather high, as well.”

“Very good, monsieur,” the Director laughs half-heartedly. “Perhaps you require more light for your reading? I can bring over the lamp. We are not short of kerosene.” At Berekh’s definitive no, the
Director gracefully deposits a slice of lemon and a lump of rock sugar beside his glass, and slides away.

Berekh puts the sugar in his mouth, sipping the tea as he gazes at the letter, but his concentration is broken, his mind drifting aimlessly while his tongue gouges a tiny hole in the sugar, the crystals melting into the sides of his mouth. Instead of the cemetery in Blaszka, his mind fixes on the sugar, the contrast between the hard intensity of its sweetness and the pulpy slice of sour lemon in the hot tea. It reminds him of his first cup of tea in Misha’s house.

A
FTER THE
shloshim
, the first month of mourning, he came to thank Misha for taking such good care of his wife, not only during her last pregnancy, but in all the others as well. Both doors were open, front and back, so that the wind blew through with its spicy autumn smell, a leaf scurling and skittering along the well-worn pine floor. Misha offered him tea, motioning to the kettle bubbling on the
pripichek.
“The water just boiled,” she said.

“Not today,” he answered, “but later, if you don’t mind, I would like to visit you.”

When summer came, he did. His first cup of tea with Misha, July ’92. So bitter it drew the two sides of his mouth together and a lump of sugar so big he could only suck on it for what seemed like hours, rivulets of the bitter tea slowly eroding channels in it. The doors were open, again, and the sweet smell of hay mixed with the wine and rose scent of Misha’s decoctions.

She moved with her large grace from the stove to the table, her presence like the fragrance of locust flowers, so thick and musky it is more of a taste than a scent. While Berekh drank his tea, Misha strung garlic, nimbly braiding the silvery leaves, looping the garlic onto a nail in the beam beside the fall of bronze onions. A chest, sanded and half carved with intricate spiral ferns, stood against the wall under the garlic. She turned to the stove, where a bowl of rose petals was soaking in raisin wine. On the blue tiles beside the bowl were rows of leaves, roots, and bark, their function denoted by small pieces of brown wrapping paper marked with cryptic signs. Misha bundled each row, except for one, into paper and string. Berekh noticed that this was the only one marked with recognizable Hebrew letters: a “nun” and a
“gimmel.” With his mouth still full of sugar, he could only lift his eyebrows questioningly.
“Nisht gut,”
Misha said, no good. “Someone showed me how to write it.” She swept the row of leaves into her large hands and threw it under the grate of the
pripichek
, where the quick fire had set the kettle to boil again. “The rose petals in wine are better for cramps,” Misha said, motioning to the bowl. Now she knelt in front of the chest, her broad back concealing it from Berekh.

“Who did the carving?” he asked.

“My father, before he died. The trunk belonged to my mother’s grandmother. He was refinishing it.”

“What do you keep in it?”

“Things.”

“What kind of things.”

“Oh, my father wanted it to be my bridal chest.”

“Is it?”

Misha laughed, her whole body shaking at the joke.

“It could be,” Berekh insisted. “It still could be. You might consider a person, one whose children are small and good-tempered, not much of a burden, at all.”

“No. I was married. Once is enough.”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Berekh said. “I mean only in the proper way, with a
shadkhen
, when the time is right.”

“Sometimes my bed gets cold,” Misha said, looking at Berekh, her dark eyes, with their hint of gold around the iris, narrowing mischievously. “And what good is a matchmaker then? No, I have no interest in a wedding canopy, none at all. But I might consider a person on a cold night. If the person came himself.”

“This person, in theory, such a person would be finished with his year of reciting the mourner’s kaddish, wouldn’t he?”

“Maybe a year, but it could be ten months or three years, too. He would know when enough time had passed.” Misha sat on the stool beside Berekh, her shoulder touching his. Not looking at him, she said, “I miss Hava.”

“I didn’t know that you and Hava were friends.”

“She was a good friend to me. If Faygela wasn’t able to read me the news, Hava would always come with the Jewish paper, not that Polish
Israelite
that Faygela reads, but the real one,
Dos Yidishes Folksblat.
A shame it went out of business last year. Hava missed it.”

“My Hava?”

“Of course, yours.”

“You don’t mean my Hava. She never read anything.”

“I mean your Hava and no one else’s. Whenever Faygela was lying in with her babies, Hava took her place and read to me, so I shouldn’t miss anything interesting. Once I mentioned that it would be nice to read it myself. She said that Faygela could teach me how, I only had to ask, and she would help, too. I didn’t want to. I was too busy. It would take too long. But your Hava said there was no rush, we had plenty of time.” Misha shook her head. “I didn’t do right by her. The bleeding came too fast. I wasn’t ready.”

“And me?” Berekh asked. “I didn’t even know her.”

“After my mother died I thought of everything I didn’t ask her. I thought there was still so much time. Then it was too late.”

“It’s good to sit here,” Berekh said. “Just for a cup of tea. Even if there isn’t so much time, who has to be in a rush?”

A
FTER THE
year of mourning, Berekh still found himself waking up sweating and nauseated. He only had occasional dreams of Hava, then, but he had begun to dream of poor Meyer again, the pogrom, the fire. He would wake up in the middle of the night and, hobbling to the samovar, he would pour himself a cup of tea, wincing at the cold, bitter taste, as bitter as Misha’s tea. Really, he should put the kettle on to boil for a fresh pot, but he couldn’t bear to kindle a fire. His hand shook even putting a match to a candle. So instead he waited for dawn, sitting at the table with his stale tea.

The front room was dense with reminders of Hava, the dark cabinet filled with her trinkets, the sideboard with her dowry, a silver tea set and a dozen silver spoons, on every surface her knitted green doilies, and on the eastern wall the wobbly landscape of the Holy Land, which she had embroidered before they were married, with its doglike camel and its faltering tents. Berekh preferred a plain, functional room, but he wouldn’t think to remove these things any more than the charcoal portrait of the Old Rabbi in the studyhouse, drawn by Hayim. A person has the right to be remembered, Berekh said, and one should not begrudge their memory for the sake of his own comfort.

Some nights Rayzel would awaken, stumbling into the room with
half-sobs and murmurs of bad dreams, of the darkness, of ghosts and monsters. The child would clamber onto his knees, Berekh stroking the silky head until she fell asleep, held close in his arms. Sometimes Adam would cry, and Berekh would take him from his cradle and rock the baby in his arms while he drank his cold tea.

His friendship with Misha continued to grow slowly, though she would not allow him to approach her in the ways demanded by custom and propriety. “But why can’t I even come for a cup of tea without creeping through the woods?” he would ask.

“People will talk.”

“So let them. I’m ready to make things right with you. Any time.”

“When will you understand? I was married once already. That was enough.”

“All right. So it didn’t work out. It happens. A man divorces a woman. It doesn’t mean her life has to end.”

“Dear God, save me from wise men,” Misha finally said one day, shaking her hands at heaven in exasperation. “If people know, then they’ll badger me day and night. ‘It isn’t right, you’re a woman alone. He’s a good man.’ And you’ll agree with them. ‘Am I so terrible?’ you’ll say. Yes, and you’ll look at me with a sad face, and your voice will weep, and one day, even though I know better, one day when I’m not feeling so well, maybe I have a chill, or it’s my time of month, I’ll agree. And then, oy vey, it’s not to be thought of.”

Berekh laughed. “All right,” he said. “I won’t complain. I’ll be as quiet as a thief from Plotsk. But you know someone will suspect. In a small place like this, people will talk anyway.”

“Ah, but they won’t know for sure!” Misha said triumphantly. “In the women’s gallery they’ve matched me up with almost every man in the village, even with old Pinkus the
shokhet.
So how can they tell when the truth catches up with their imagination?”

“What truth?” Berekh asked. “That we talk together, drinking your bitter tea? Or that I sit while you make up your mysterious infusions and powders? Or,” his voice softened, “that I never tire of watching you? Every day, something different. The light, the smell of the river, the table covered with herbs, your hands moving. It’s like a holy text, like a deep commentary; I find something new in it all the time, I never know it all.”

He brought books to her house, but she made him take them away. “Do you think I need to be a yeshiva boy?” she asked. “Are there no children for you to teach?”

“Hava read to you. Now I want to,” he said. “There’s so much I can tell you.”

“If I want to know something, I’ll ask a woman. You men don’t know anything. Except maybe Hayim. And not just because I was married to him. Let me tell you, he would have plenty to say, if someone has the patience to listen. He watches everything, but as soon as a person looks at him, he hides.”

“What is there to see, shlepping water?”

“You would be surprised. Hayim has a deep head. Not like me. Not like you, either.”

Berekh was not flattered by the comparison. “Hayim? I don’t believe it. What did Hayim tell you? One thing. Anything at all.”

She only laughed, saying, “If you want to know something, then sit in the women’s gallery on
Shabbas
, you’ll hear everything.”

Berekh would retort, “You think the men don’t talk in the bathhouse?”

“Oh, yes, they talk, but do they know anything?”

Berekh was insatiably curious about the secrets that Misha knew about the villagers. He poked here and there with questions, like a Talmudic master testing a student, but Misha refused to be either student or teacher. She would say nothing more than what Berekh himself could observe if, she said, he cared to notice. “There is always something more to find out about a person. Just look, under each layer is another,” she told him.

“Then what about me? What do you see?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” she asked.

“What, what?” He smiled broadly, as she ran her fingers through his beard.

“The Rabbi …”

“Yes, tell me, what?”

“The Rabbi,” she said, “is playing at love with the midwife! Can you imagine such a thing?”

“But I’m not. I haven’t,” he said. And then,
“Ah,”
as Misha began to undress.

It was June ’93, more than a year and a half since his wife had died, and he lay with Misha for the first time. As he undressed, excited by the secrecy, shamed by it, he wondered if he would please her. When he used to make love to Hava, his body covered hers and he worried that he would be too heavy. And here was Misha half sitting on the bed, her breasts large and round and darkly nippled, her dimpled thighs large enough for both his hands to caress and not find any end to the soft heat. His touch was tentative, he was clumsy, and yet she smiled, her gold tooth gleaming as she opened her solid arms to take him in.

The first time became many times. As the days dipped down toward the short Friday in December, Misha’s body became familiar to Berekh, his gratitude became joy. And now another year has passed. He is in a cafe in Warsaw, it is Monday—in a few days the short Friday will have come around again.

B
EREKH AWAKES
from his reverie as the door to the cafe swings open, bringing with it a blast of cold wind. A young man in a ragged jacket shakes the snow from his sleeves and collar, where a silk rose rests incongruously in a snowy lump. He is carrying a worn traveling bag with rope handles, which he deposits beneath the table beside Berekh’s. Removing his hat, he runs his hands through his hair until it stands on end like rooster feathers.

The noise in the cafe is as familiar as the village square on market day. The tables are occupied with men and women arguing loudly and earnestly, as if their living depends on it. Instead of the price of a hen or a corset, it’s an idea they bargain over, but the sing-song of voices, the slap of the table, the jab of a pointing finger could be Hanna-Leah’s or Alta-Fruma’s or Getzel the picklemaker’s: “Are you mad? Don’t you see what’s in front of your eyes? What are you talking, Adam
Harishon
wouldn’t buy what you’re selling.” Some are well-dressed, some in rags from the community barrel. They read, they argue, they write, they stand and look over one another’s shoulder. They speak quickly, as if to keep up with their short lives while the world rushes into the next century transfigured, mutated, altered beyond recognition, and everyone is trying to guess how. The light is dim, filtered by the damask curtains, reddened by the colored shade of
kerosene lamps casting a blush on the cherubs that seem, already, old-fashioned and awkward.