A Tale of Love and Darkness (23 page)

Many years ago, in a peaceful little town in the Land of Enularia, in the region of the innermost valleys, there lived three brothers who were blacksmiths, Misha, Alyosha, and Antosha. They were all thickset, hairy, bearlike men. All the winter long they slept, and only when summer came did they forge plows, shoe horses, whet knives, sharpen blades, and hammer out metal tools. One day Misha, the eldest brother, arose and went to the region of Troshiban. He was gone for many a day, and when he returned he was not alone, but with him he brought a laughing girlish woman named Tatiana, Tanya, or Tanichka. She was a beautiful woman, no one more beautiful than she was to be found in all the width and breadth of Enularia. Misha's two younger brothers ground their teeth and kept silent all day long. If ever one of them looked at her, this Tanichka would laugh her rippling laugh until the man was forced to lower his gaze. Or if she looked at one of them, then the brother she had chosen to look at trembled and lowered his eyes. There was only a single big room in the brothers' hut, and in this room dwelt Misha and Tanichka and the furnace and the bellows and the anvil and the wild brother Alyosha and the silent brother Antosha surrounded by heavy iron hammers and axes and chisels and poles and chains and coils of metal. So it befell that one day Misha was pushed into the furnace and Alyosha took Tanichka to himself. For seven weeks the beautiful Tanichka was the bride of the wild brother Alyosha until the heavy hammer fell on him and flattened his skull, and Antosha the silent brother buried his brother and took his place. When seven weeks had passed as the two ofthem were eating a mushroom pie, Antosha suddenly turned pale and went blue in the face, and he choked and died. And from that day on, young wandering
blacksmiths from all the length and breadth ofEnularia come and stay in that hut, but not one of them has dared to stay there for seven whole weeks. One might stay for a week, another for a couple of nights. And what of Tanya? Well, every blacksmith throughout the length and breadth of Enularia knew that Tanichka loved smiths who came for a week, smiths who came for a few days, smiths who stayed for a night and a day, half-naked they labored for her, farrowing, hammering, and forging, but she could never abide a smith who forgot to get up and leave. A week or two would do, but seven weeks? How could they?

Herz and Sarah Mussman, who lived in the early nineteenth century in the small village of Trope or Tripe near the town of Rovno in Ukraine, had a fine son named Ephraim. From his childhood on, so the family story ran,* this Ephraim loved playing with wheels and running water. When Ephraim Mussman was thirteen years old, twenty days after his bar mitzvah, some more guests were invited and entertained, and this time Ephraim was betrothed to a twelve-year-old girl named Haya-Duba: in those days boys were married to girls on paper to prevent their being carried off to serve in the Tsar's army and never being seen again.

My aunt Haya Shapiro (who was named after her grandmother, the child bride) told me many years ago about what happened at this wedding. After the ceremony and the festive meal, which took place in the late afternoon opposite the rabbi's house in the village of Trope, the little bride's parents stood up to take her home to bed. It was getting late, and the child, who was tired after the excitement of the wedding and a little tipsy from the sips of wine she had been given, had fallen asleep with her head in her mother's lap. The bridegroom was running around, hot and sweaty, among the guests, playing catch and hide-and-seek with his
little school friends. So the guests started to take their leave, the two families began to say their farewells, and the groom's parents told their son to hurry up and get on the cart to go home.

*I heard this and other tales, which I tell on the following pages, from my mother when I was young and partly also from my grandparents and my mother's cousins Shimshon and Michael Mussman. In 1979 I wrote down some of my Aunt Haya's childhood memories, and between 1997 and 20011 occasionally noted down some of the many things that Aunt Sonia told me. I have also been helped by my mother's cousin Shimshon Mussman's book
Escape from Horror
, published in Hebrew in Tel Aviv, 1996.

But the young bridegroom had other ideas: the child Ephraim stood in the middle of the courtyard, all puffed up suddenly like a young cockerel, stamped his foot, and obstinately demanded his wife. Not in three years' time, not even in three months' time, but right here and now. This very evening.

When the remaining guests burst out laughing, he turned his back on them angrily and strode across the road, thumped on the rabbi's door, stood in the doorway face to face with the grinning rabbi, and started quoting texts from the Bible, the Mishnah, the law codes, and the commentators. The boy had clearly prepared his ammunition and done his homework well. He demanded that the rabbi judge immediately between him and the whole world, and give a ruling one way or the other. What was written in the Torah? What did the Talmud and the jurists say? Was it or was it not his right? Was she or was she not his wife? Had he or had he not married her according to the law? And so, which was it to be: either let him take his bride or he must have his
ketubba
, his marriage contract, back, and let the marriage be null and void.

The rabbi, so the story goes, hemmed and hawed and cleared his throat, fingered his mustache and scratched his head a few times, tugged his sidelocks and pulled at his beard, and eventually he heaved a sigh and ruled that there was nothing for it, the boy was not only skillful at marshaling his texts and his arguments, he was also perfectly right: the youthful bride had no alternative but to follow him and no other course but to obey him.

And so the little bride was woken and, at midnight, when all the deliberations were concluded, they had to accompany the bridal pair to his parents' home. The bride wept for fear all the way. Her mother held her tight and wept with her. The bridegroom, too, wept all the way, because of the guests' jeers and sneers. As for his mother and the rest of his family, they too wept all the way, from shame.

The nocturnal procession lasted an hour and a half. It was a cross between a tearful funeral procession and a raucous party, because some of the participants, delighted by the scandal, insisted on recounting at the tops of their voices the well-known joke about the male chick and
the female chick, or the one about how to thread a needle, treating themselves to schnapps to the accompaniment of obscene snorts and neighs and shouts.

Meanwhile the youthful bridegroom's courage abandoned him, and he began to regret his victory. And so the young couple were led, bewildered, tearful, and deprived of sleep, like sheep to the slaughter, to the improvised bridal chamber, into which, in the early hours of the morning, they had to be pushed almost by force. The door, it is said, was locked from the outside. Then the wedding party retreated on tiptoe and spent the rest of the night sitting up in another room, drinking tea and finishing up the remains of the feast, while endeavoring to console one another.

In the morning, who knows, the mothers may have burst into the room, armed with towels and washbasins, anxious to discover whether or how their children had survived their wrestling bout, and what damage they had inflicted on each other.

But a few days later the husband and wife were to be seen happily running around the yard and playing together barefoot and noisily. The husband even built a little treehouse for his wife's dolls, while he himself went back to playing with wheels and watercourses that he channeled across the yard into streams, lakes, and waterfalls.

His parents, Herz and Sarah Mussman, supported the young couple until they reached the age of sixteen.
Kest-Kinder
was the Yiddish name given in those days to young couples who relied on their parents' support. When he came of age, Ephraim Mussman combined his love of wheels with his love of running water and set up a flour mill in the village of Trope. The mill wheel was turned by running water power. His business never prospered: he was dreamy and childishly naive, an idler and a spendthrift, argumentative and yet never stuck to his guns. He was inclined to engage in idle conversations that lasted from morning till evening. Haya-Duba and Ephraim lived a life of poverty. His little bride bore Ephraim three sons and two daughters. She trained to be a midwife and domestic nurse. She was in the habit of treating poor patients for nothing, secretly. She died in the prime of her life, of consumption. My great-grandmother was twenty-six at her death.

The handsome Ephraim swiftly married another child bride, a sixteen-year-old who was named Haya like her predecessor. The new
Haya Mussman lost no time in banishing her stepchildren from her home. Her weak husband made no attempt to stop her: he seemed to have expended his entire modest share of boldness and resolution all at one go, the evening when he knocked heroically on the rabbi's door and demanded in the name of the Torah and all the jurists the right to consummate his marriage. From that night of bloodshed until the end of his days he always behaved unassertively: he was meek and mild, always yielding to his wives, happy to defer to anyone who resisted his will, yet with strangers he acquired over the years the enigmatic manner of a man of hidden depths of mystery and sanctity. His bearing suggested a certain self-importance wrapped in humility, like a rustic wonder worker or a Russian Orthodox holy man.

And so his firstborn, my grandfather, Naphtali Hertz, at the age of twelve, became an apprentice on the Vilkhov estate, near Rovno, which belonged to an eccentric unmarried noblewoman named Princess Rav-zova. Within three or four years the princess had discovered that the young Jew whom she had acquired virtually for nothing was agile, sharp-witted, charming, and amusing, and in addition to all these qualities he had also learned a thing or two about flour milling as a result of growing up in his father's mill. There was possibly something else about him, too, that aroused maternal feelings in the shriveled, childless princess.

And so she decided to buy a plot of land on the outskirts of Rovno, opposite the cemetery at the end of Dubinska Street, and build a flour mill. She placed in charge of this mill one of her nephews and heirs, Konstantin Semyonovich Steletsky, an engineer, and appointed the sixteen-year-old Hertz Mussman as his assistant. My grandfather very soon revealed the organizing abilities, tact, and empathy that endeared him to all who met him, and that sensitivity to others that enabled him to divine what people were thinking or what they wanted.

By the age of seventeen my grandfather was the real manager of the mill. ("So very quick he rose in the favor of that princess! Just like in that story about the righteous Joseph in Egypt and that what's her name? Lady Potiphar, wasn't it? That Engineer Steletsky, everything he fixed he smashed up again himself when he was drunk. He was a terrible alcoholic! I can still remember him beating his horse furiously and crying
at the same time out of pity for dumb animals, he was weeping tears big like grapes, but still he went on beating his horse. All day long he was inventing new machines, systems, gear wheels, just like Stephenson. He had a sort of spark of genius. But as soon as he invented anything, he would get angry, that Steletsky, and destroy it all!")

And so the young Jew got in the habit of maintaining and repairing the machinery, haggling with the peasants who brought in their wheat and barley, paying the workers their wages, bargaining with dealers and customers. Thus he became a miller like his father, Ephraim. Unlike his idle, childlike father, however, he was clever, hardworking, and ambitious. And he was successful.

Meanwhile, Princess Ravzova in the evening of her life became increasingly pious: she wore nothing but black, multiplied vows and fasts, was in perpetual mourning, conversed in whispers with Jesus, traveled from monastery to monastery in search of illumination, squandered her wealth on gifts to churches and shrines. ("And one day she picked up a great hammer and hammered a nail into her own hand, because she wanted to feel exactly what Jesus had felt. And then they came and tied her up, took care of her hand, shaved her hair off, and shut her up for the rest of her days in a convent near Tula.")

The wretched engineer, Konstantin Steletsky, the Princess's nephew, subsided into drunkenness after his aunt's demise. His wife, Irina Matveyevna, ran off with Anton, the son of Philip the coachman. ("She was a great
pianitsa
—drunkard—too. But it was he, Steletsky, who made her a
pianitsa.
He used to lose her at cards sometimes. That is, he would lose her for one night, get her back in the morning, and the next night he would lose her again.")

And so Steletsky drowned his sorrows in vodka and cards. ("But he also wrote beautiful poetry, such wonderful poetry full of feeling, full of repentance and compassion! He even wrote a philosophical treatise, in Latin. He knew all the works of the great philosophers by heart, Aristotle, Kant, Soloviev, and he used to go off on his own in the forest. To abase himself he used to dress up as a beggar sometimes, and wander the streets in the early hours of the morning rooting around in the rubbish heaps like a starving beggar.")

Gradually Steletsky made Hertz Mussman his right-hand man at the mill, and then his deputy, and eventually his partner. When my
grandfather was twenty-three, some ten years after he was "sold into slavery" to Princess Ravzova, he bought up Steletsky's share of the mill.

His business soon expanded, and among other acquisitions he swallowed up his father's little mill.

The young mill owner did not bear a grudge on account of his eviction from his parents' house. On the contrary: he forgave his father, who in the meantime had managed to become a widower for the second time, and installed him in the office, the so-called
kontora
, and even paid him a decent monthly salary to the end of his days. The handsome Ephraim sat there for many years, sporting an impressive long white beard, doing nothing: he passed his days slowly, drinking tea, and conversing pleasantly and at great length with the dealers and agents who came to the mill. He loved to lecture them, calmly and expansively, on the secret of longevity, the nature of the Russian soul as compared to the Polish or Ukrainian soul, the secret mysteries of Judaism, the creation of the world, or his own original ideas for improving the forests, for sleeping better, for preserving folk tales, or for strengthening the eyesight by natural means.