The River Midnight (9 page)

Thanking her father quietly, Ruthie slipped the book into her apron pocket, ignoring her sisters who were laughing and wrinkling their noses. “English, who wants a book in English?” they said.

“Don’t tease your sister,” Faygela said. “At least she can read a little German and Russian, which is more than either of you. If only my father was still alive, I might have educated daughters who respected their older sister. And who knows, maybe a little English might be useful someday. Ruthie could write a letter to your uncle in America. Well, once he learns to speak English. Yes, it could be quite useful. There are plenty of Jews in America. Plenty. Nearly as many as in Warsaw. It so happens that it was just lucky that your father found this book.”

Shmuel gave her arm a quick squeeze as he handed her a package tied with string. “I found everything you wanted,” he said. In the package was the latest issue of
The Israelite
, a book, two notebooks, and several pencils. Shmuel always made sure that Faygela had a few pencils and something to write in. Whenever she could spare a minute, she would sit on a low stool, using her bridal trunk as a desk. The notebooks were locked inside, and she wore the key around her
neck. If she ran out of time or paper, she got cranky, and when Faygela was cranky her Friday nights with Shmuel lacked a certain enthusiasm.

As she cut the string, the book, sandwiched between the notebooks, fell into her hand. “Oh Shmuel, you brought it. And it wasn’t too much?” She stroked the cloth cover of
Bakenta Bilder—Familiar Pictures
—by I. L. Peretz.

“Not too much,” Shmuel said, rocking back and forth on his heels, hands clasped behind his back, his face alight as Faygela threw her arms around him.

“I don’t know how an intelligent, cultured man like Peretz knows so much about life in a small village, but his last book could have been Blaszka itself. Every word was written on my heart. Look, girls,” she said, opening the new book. “These are the words of a man who knows the truth about life. This is what I want you to read, not those cheap fantasies of Shomer’s.” She sighed. “If only I had time to teach you then you could read the books that belonged to my father. But a family of girls can’t do what it wants.
Shabbas
is coming. We have work to do, and I want to visit Misha before it’s time to light candles.”

M
ADE OF
half-planks with lichen still clinging to the bark, Misha’s house perched on stilts above the floodline. The front door opened onto steps that climbed down to the village square, the back door opening directly onto the slope of the river bank. Faygela came toward Misha’s house, not from the bakery, but from the woods, icy mud on her boots, a dried oak leaf caught in her shawl. Clattering up the stairs, she called out, “Misha, Misha,” her face pale, her lips blue with a coldness that started in her bones.

Misha was standing at the stove, pouring melted beeswax into a pan, her broad back toward Faygela. “Sit,” she said, “I’m making ointment.”

“I can’t sit. It’s impossible. Not now,” Faygela said.

Misha turned around. She took all of Faygela in, as if she were a book that Misha read from cover to cover in an instant. “If you have a behind, you can sit,” Misha said. “And you can have a cup of tea.”

Dropping onto the stool beside the pine table, Faygela took a deep breath as if the air of Misha’s house were a shot of brandy distilled
from the herbs hanging in baskets, the roots dangling in bunches from the beams, the loops of onions and garlic, the pots bubbling on the cooking grate, the honey smell of the melting beeswax. “I saw him again,” she said. “My father.”

Pouring the tea into two cups, Misha said, “So why shouldn’t you? Aren’t you his daughter?”

“But he’s been dead for eighteen years.”

“And?”

“He wouldn’t talk to me. He ran away from me.”

“Well, I would be upset, too. A father not talking to his daughter.”

“Misha, my father is dead. Ghosts don’t exist. That’s just ignorance. My father would be the first one to say so.”

“Well, then, he should tell you instead of running off.”

“Misha, be serious. Let me tell you what happened.”

“All right, all right. Tell me before you burst,” Misha said.

“I could see him just as clear as you. His back was to me, but it was my father.”

“Where was he?”

“Outside the bakery. I thought at first it was somebody who just looked like him, maybe one of the actors. But I had to follow and see. Just at the path between the synagogue and your house, where it goes into the woods, he half-turned. I’m telling you, it was my father and no one else. He was wearing his old apron with the torn strings and books in every pocket, just like when he was alive. I called out, ‘Papa, Papa,’ and I ran into the woods after him. I looked here and I looked there, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. He disappeared. That’s the way it always happens.” Faygela’s shoulders slumped. “I see him like that every few months. Each time I tell myself that it’s just my imagination playing tricks because I miss him, and then I promise myself that the next time I won’t pay any attention. But I can’t help myself. I run after him, and then he disappears.” She lifted the cup of tea, not drinking it, just warming her face in the steam.

A
S FAR BACK
as Faygela could remember there was just her father in the bakery, rolling dough, a book open on the table beside him, and her maternal grandmother praying in the cemetery. Faygela was two when her mother died. So how could she miss her? It was her father who taught her everything about the world.

“My life is cursed,” Faygela’s grandmother used to say. “I married Eber the grain merchant and our daughter could have had anyone. So who do I get for a son-in-law? Oh yes, the matchmaker told us that your father was a student in Zhitomir. All I heard from the matchmaker was Yekhiel this and Yekhiel that. A scholar. A prodigy. But did anyone tell us that he spent every waking hour poring over the books and letters of heathens and heretics? Your grandfather of blessed memory tried to turn him back to the right path. He said, ‘Yekhiel, for the sake of my daughter I’ll forget everything if you’ll throw away those books of yours. You want to read philosophy? What for? It’s lies. And that science of yours? It means nothing. The Holy One above gave us the Torah to study. If you devote yourself to it, then you and your wife will want for nothing while you’re in my house. Otherwise, you’re on your own, I won’t have an apostate under my roof.’ But did your father think of his wife’s welfare? No. Stubborn as an ox. He chose to work as a plain baker instead of obeying your grandfather’s wishes. And my husband, my dear Eber, was so upset he didn’t even notice that his partner was stealing everything from under his nose. My daughter was a dutiful wife. She worked beside your father in the bakery and whenever you cried she ran to feed you. So small and a mouth like a sucker fish. You weakened her and your brother came too early. That was the end of the two of them. A boy,
nebekh
, to say the mourner’s prayer when I’m gone. He would have been a scholar. But it wasn’t to be. How she bled, how she suffered. My only daughter. You put her in the ground, you and your educated father.”

Faygela learned Hebrew and German sitting beside her father at her grandmother’s mahogany table. “At the yeshiva where I studied, we learned only Talmud. The teachers said it was a sin to read anything except Torah,” he would tell her. “But plenty of the yeshiva students hid the books of Darwin and Goethe inside religious commentaries. Near the yeshiva, there was a Rabbinical Seminary. It was a Russian school where they learned philosophy and science, not just Talmud. I used to sneak into the classes and now your cousin Berekh is studying there. When he comes to visit you’ll have something to talk to him about.” Her father’s hands, so much like Shmuel’s with their cinnamon stains, would turn the pages of Goethe’s essays, brushing the hair from her eyes while she strained over a new word. “Knowledge is freedom,” he would say. “There’s nothing I want more
than for my daughter to be free. That, and to take a fresh raisin bun for each of her friends when she’s done studying. Now read this paragraph for me,
mamala.
”

In the corner, her grandmother rocked her chair with a loud rap-rap, rap-rap as she slammed forward and backward, tsking and snapping her jaws, her long knitting needles spiking the meek wool. More often than not, when Papa went out, her grandmother pulled the book from Faygela’s grasp. She was a long, thin woman in black, hard-boned and knobby. “Reading just fills a girl with the evil inclination,” she would say, locking the book behind the glass doors of the cabinet. “You have no business with such things. Look what a mess your father made of his life. He could have been a Talmud genius. Instead he’s just Yekhiel the baker, wasting his time on the books of unbelievers. And worse, he leads his daughter down the same path, God protect us.”

“It’s just a book,” Faygela would protest.

“If you bring a piglet into your house, the next thing you know a wild boar is tearing out your throat with his tusks. A good Jewish girl marries when she’s young and has plenty of children. Then she supports them. That’s her learning.”

As Faygela ran out of the house, her grandmother would shout after her, “And don’t you go off into the woods with those
vilda hayas
of yours.”

“W
ELL
, I’
LL
tell you, Faygela,” Misha said, taking a slurp of tea. “If you saw your father it probably means something good.”

“Why something good?”

“Well, if it was bad news, he wouldn’t be able to keep your grandmother’s ghost from running to tell you.”

“All right, who can argue with you?”

Misha poured another cup of tea. “I heard that Zisa-Sara’s children came on the afternoon train. Did you see them?”

Faygela nodded. “The children look hungry. I thought at least in America Zisa-Sara would have plenty for her children.”

“I wish I had gone with her to the train station when she left,” Misha said.

“I went but I didn’t give her anything to remember me by. And she
was the one that held us together, the four of us. Whenever we had an argument, she could quiet us with just a few words.”

“I remember that she had more patience than I did. You always wanted to recite poetry when we met in the woods. It put me to sleep.”

“I remember.”

F
AYGELA WAS
fourteen and it was late summer in the woods. “Listen to me, girls,” she said, “ ‘Whatever you can dream, begin it. There is magic, power and genius in it.’ ” Hanna-Leah listened, because she was Faygela’s best friend and that’s what best friends must do, but Misha, sitting up in the tree, laughed and threw green apples at her. Misha refused to wear shoes, running barefoot like a peasant, as thin as the wind in those days. Sitting against the tree trunk, Zisa-Sara, her knees tucked under her dress, was braiding her hair, weaving a ribbon between the gold-brown strands. “You won’t be so interested in poetry when it’s time to get married. You’ll have something better to think about,” she said, her green eyes dark in the shadow of the apple tree.

“Oh, so you have your eye on someone,” Hanna-Leah said, forgetting the mushrooms. “Tell us, who is it?”

But before Zisa-Sara could answer, Misha jumped down from the apple tree. “What do you want to get married for?” she said. “A woman doesn’t own her own soul once she’s in her husband’s house. Let me tell you, no one’s going to catch me.”

“What makes you think anyone wants to?” asked Hanna-Leah.

Swinging her hips from side to side, Misha winked. “I know what I know,” she said. “Don’t you wish you did?”

“What do you know?” Hanna-Leah challenged. “Tell me one thing.” But Misha only smiled as if she had made friends with the demons and had no price to pay for it.

“I have no intention of wasting my life in Blaszka, peddling rags to feed a bunch of children. My father is sending me to school in Warsaw,” Faygela said. “And when I’m famous, you can come to visit me in my box at the opera.”

“Well, in the meantime, Miss Famous, you won’t be able to dance at anyone’s wedding if you don’t learn how,” Zisa-Sara said. “And what about the rest of you?” She began to hum a wedding tune, and soon the girls’ arms were linked as they danced while the sun glimmered
through the leaves of the woods. Faygela was the youngest, Hanna-Leah two years older, Misha and Zisa-Sara a year older than Hanna-Leah. Faygela was the first to marry, Zisa-Sara the second. Then it was Hanna-Leah’s turn and finally even Misha’s.

After the pogroms in ’81 and the May Laws in ’82, which forced many Jews to move from their villages into already crowded towns, there were people who said that there was no future in Blaszka. No one thought that Zisa-Sara would leave them. Someone else, maybe, someone who was scared that what little she had would be taken away, not Zisa-Sara. She only asked that if she smiled a person smiled back, if she held out her hand it was taken.

But when her first child was close to four years old and she was pregnant with her second, she came to say good-bye to her friends.

They were sitting at the table in Misha’s house, three of them in shawls and kerchiefs, Misha, who was divorced, with her hair falling around her shoulders.

“I want you to listen to me.” Zisa-Sara’s voice was low, as it always was, but her friends were surprised at the fierceness in her tone. “In America, my children can go to school and learn with everyone. Can you imagine it? My children, educated people. But here …”

Faygela nodded reluctantly. In Blaszka, Zisa-Sara’s daughter would learn to read Yiddish in the kitchen of an old woman who could read and write and had no other way to earn a few kopecks but to teach the little she knew. Enough for prayers. Enough for a girl to write a letter. If Zisa-Sara had a son, he would learn Hebrew from a broken-down
melamud
, who slapped and pinched and made sure that by the time a boy was apprenticed at the age of ten, he knew his prayers and could follow in the Torah with a little understanding. Once in a while a boy went away to yeshiva. In the old days when people were better off, someone might hire a tutor for his daughter. But a good school where there was a chance to learn something about the world?