Beyond the Pale: A Novel (18 page)

“Isaac, I have a very bad feeling about this. Something terrible is going to happen.”

“Always a feeling, never a fact. In the Talmud—”

“Isaac, please, please listen to me. You know what happened in Shpole and in Nikoleav.”

“It’s been four or five years. It was almost twenty before that. This is Kishinev, Miriam, not some little shtetl.”

“Isaac, you know what this means.” Papa got up and started pacing. I knew he knew she was right. “The men respect you. Talk to the Chief Rabbi. Maybe you can go to the Mayor or the police and find out what they know, if they’re prepared for this.”

“Yes, the police. I’ll get together a distinguished citizens minyan, and we’ll just stroll into the police station. And the police captain will say, ‘Don’t be afraid, little brother, everything will be fine.’”

“This is not a joke. Schmidt, he’s always been friendly to the Jews, go to him.”

“Our German mayor? If there’s going to be pogrom, he won’t be able to stop it. We have go to the Governor, General Von Raaben.”

“Then go. We have to defend ourselves.”

“I’ll go. To please you. But God’s will is God’s will, who can change it?”

“This is not about God, this is about men.”

“I said I would go, didn’t I?” Papa patted Mama’s hand. “You’re a good Jew, Miriam. I appreciate how you take care of things, don’t think I don’t. But really, I wish you wouldn’t go to the Royal Gardens for concerts.”

I was hanging at the edge of the doorway, pretending to be polishing a candlestick. I could just make out Mama pulling Papa’s beard a little. He laughed and a strange brightness came into him. “I shouldn’t forget to enjoy my wonderful wife, the modern woman!” It was a mystery to me why anyone would want that scratchy beard close to them. But I didn’t have to think about that. I didn’t have to think about anything if I didn’t want to.

When I fell asleep I dreamed I was surrounded by men wearing shields, old-fashioned shields that hung around their shoulders and strapped around their waists. The shields were all made of newspapers.

On Thursday Papa went with the Chief Rabbi, the rabbi from the shul in the Bender Rugatka quarter and some very well-dressed men to see the Governor. He came back with his faraway ghost look again.

“So what did Von Raaben say?” Mama asked after he removed his overcoat. They didn’t notice me standing by the stove.

“They are taking all necessary precautions. You know how it says in the May Laws the Jews are under the Tsar’s protection. He is bound by law and by decency to protect us.”

“So what does that mean he will do?” Mama had been reading and her reading glasses were pushed down on her nose.

“He has the troops. If there should be a pogrom, he’ll stop it.”

“What he should do is make them stop printing that anti-Semitic paper
Bessarabetz
.”

“Should. Should. Rabbi Horowitz himself told me that when he went to the Greek Orthodox, the Bishop asked him if there were not, after all, a sect of Jews who used Christian blood for matzoh.”

“I thought the Bishop—”

“Don’t be so surprised, Miriam. None of this would happen without the church’s complicity. Well, Sunday is their Easter. If we can get through that, this will all blow over.”

“Do you think we should send the girls out of town?” She took her glasses off and folded them slowly.

“Railroad tickets grow on trees? And who knows where it’s better. The girls should stay by us.”

That weekend we made no plans to go to the Royal Gardens. In shul on Shabbes it was like usual. I didn’t like the smell of perfume, sweat and garlic in the women’s gallery. My stomach jumped like a slaughtered chicken and I didn’t even want to eat the tsholnt Mama took out of the warm oven when we got home. Only Sarah was really hungry. Everyone else ate slowly and quietly.

“Chava, your mother works hard to make such good meals for us. You must eat your share,” Papa said.

“You know her stomach isn’t strong. Let her be. She’ll eat when she wants.” Mama took my plate away and left it on the shelf by the washtub.

“I’m going back to the shul, I’ll be home before sundown.”

“Isaac—”

“What, Miriam?”

“Suppose it happens?”

“I will go to shul in the morning and pray.”

“All right, you pray. But what about us?”

He wet his lips as if we were a particularly difficult passage of the law. “If there is trouble, kayn ayen-hore, you take the girls by my sister Shendl. It’s not far from the shul, and she has a secret room in her chicken shed. You’ll be safe there. But I think the mood is calmer now, everything will be all right.”

My mother didn’t like to be in Shendl’s house. They were so poor their furniture gave you splinters just looking at it. My Uncle Elihu was a capmaker, but there must have been a hundred Jewish capmakers in Kishinev and work for maybe twenty. Every Friday night after dinner Shendl would say, “Next week you’ll come by us!” and my mother would answer, “Of course.” Then the next Friday, there they were again, all eight of them, kicking up the dust in the road. Shendl had four boys and two girls, Rebkah and Aviva, twins a year younger than me. Papa liked to have all those boys in the house. I could have lived without it, though my cousins were very polite. Politeness that came from hunger didn’t feel right. I didn’t know if Papa even noticed—anyway he would think it was a sin to notice hunger because it made the appetite a source of shame. Sometimes he even let my cousin Reuben say kiddush since he was bar mitsve.

Sunday morning the air crackled around my head and I didn’t want to get up.

“It’s because you didn’t eat supper last night. It’s going to be a long day, Chava, at least you’ll eat some bread and butter.” Mama’s voice sounded different, not exasperated, but calm and insistent. “There’s tea. Come, get dressed.”

I could hear the morning church bells ringing. All the Christians went to celebrate Christ rising from his grave, which made no sense to me. Of course, it didn’t make sense to me either when Papa explained how, when the messiah came, everyone would rise from their graves to join God in heaven. I knew what happened to people in a grave—why would God want a million skeletons dancing around? Wouldn’t he rather just have our minds there with him? I could hear the carriages rolling by, taking people to church. Papa was in his good Shabbes clothes. Mama was smoothing his collar.

“Everything will be fine, Miriam, don’t worry.”

“And if something happens, where will we meet again?”

“You stay with Shendl and I’ll come there after dark.”

“And if you can’t?”

“Still, you’ll wait for me. I’ll come. Don’t come to the shul. I expect if there’s trouble, the shul won’t be so safe.”

“Why are you going, then?”

“Because I’m the Rabbi, it’s where I belong.”

“Oy, Isaac. Not everything is resolved by faith.”

“But without faith, nothing is resolved. I’ll see you again by tonight.” He put on his best fur hat and kissed each of us girls on the forehead. I didn’t want him to leave us but I said nothing.

Hours went by. Our neighborhood fell unnaturally silent. In the square near Alexander Street, booths were usually set up for the Christians to have their festival after church. Was everyone in the city waiting? The Christians were waiting to get out of church and have a good meal, and the Jews were waiting to see what the Christians would do. All the waiting, pulsing in the air. Then the church bells rang again. Noon.

We began to hear shouting. Mama looked like she had eaten a rotten fish.

“Mama, were you ever in a pogrom before?” I asked.

“Before?” She pulled her shawl around her shoulders, and an odd, perplexed look came over her. “No. But I was twenty and carrying your brother Abraham when Tsar Alexander was assassinated. There were pogroms everywhere. We had family whose houses were destroyed in Kiev. Here there was only rock throwing. We thought we were lucky to live in such an enlightened city. If we all live through today, you remember I said there is no enlightened city in the whole of Russia. Now we must hurry to your Aunt Shendl’s.” She had a little package of food prepared.

We followed my mother like baby chicks through backyards and alleys. Once she became disoriented but I knew a shortcut behind Armenia Street. We could hear a mob very close, screaming about the Jews and Christian children, and then the noise of glass breaking. Sarah was crying without making any sounds and I whispered that she was very brave and smart to keep quiet. Esther turned around and gave me a dirty look that changed to fear and I forgave her.

We got to Shendls’ before the mob was in her street. Already there was no one around. Mama took us to the courtyard by the chicken coop.

“Shendl, it’s Miriam. Let us in,” she whispered into a knot hole. A door swung open that looked just like the wall of the coop. I had always admired how my Uncle Elihu could make a whistle from a scrap of wood and this was even better. The little room was already stuffed with my cousins and Shendl, who didn’t hesitate.

“Come, you’ll squeeze in.” And we did. There were many holes in the boards so at least there was air, even though there was hardly room to turn around. The air was full of chicken feathers, chicken stink. It felt like a coffin.

“You get used to it,” my cousin Aviva whispered. Sounds came from far away, then close and then far again. Horses and breaking glass and hurrahs! mixed with “Kill the Jews.” I looked at my cousins’ faces in the streaked light. For a minute I forgot my fear and anger. I felt the strangest sensation, like the top of my head was lifting off. Why were we all packed in there like beasts? What did we do? Ever since I had been old enough to think, I’d been trying to understand why everyone hated the Jews, and still it made no sense. I felt as if I had to make up for the rioters, and I wanted my cousins, my sisters, to know how much I loved them, how wonderful their lives were. My heart felt so big it hurt.

No one spoke. We stood like statues. There was enough room left for one person to rest on the floor at a time. When it was quiet we changed places. Eleven of us used one chamber pot, squatting only an inch away from someone else’s leg.

Esther whispered to Mama about Nathan.

“It’s up to God now,” Mama shrugged.

We heard footsteps, crashing, then going away. “Where is Elihu?” Mama asked.

“He went with a group of Bundists to see where they could fight back. Not that they had even guns, just sticks and homemade alcohol bombs.” Shendl sighed like her lungs would break.

“Sha,” Mama said, “he’ll be back. The Bundists know how to get in and out of bad situations. He’ll be all right.” I looked at her. This was the first good thing she’d ever said about the Bund. To comfort Shendl or because she actually believed in their cause? I didn’t ask. The light left the shed like a sputtering candle and we stood in the dark for at least an hour. Finally Shendl asked Mama if maybe we could go in the house to rest. The littlest boy had messed his pants and all of us were exhausted. Esther and Reuben were having spasms in their legs. Mama thought it would be all right—the only sound we’d heard for a long time came from the chickens. Shendl cracked the door and peeked out. It didn’t look so bad from the courtyard. Some of the houses had their doors broken in, some had broken glass. I thought, if this is the pogrom, all right, we lived through it. We took turns standing guard for each other in front of the outhouse and washed up a little at the courtyard pump.

My cousins had only two rooms in their house besides the big kitchen. Mama, Shendl, Esther went to sleep in Shendl and Elihu’s room. The boys slept around the stove. Sarah and I shared a little straw mat on the floor, the twins sleeping beside us.

I could hear Mama walking around, looking out the windows for Papa. I got up and went to her. She put her arms around me and pulled me close, stroking my hair. Even after a whole day sweating in the chicken coop, I loved the feeling of being close to her.

“Something’s happened to your papa.”

“No, he just can’t come. He will, he’ll come for us, Mama.”

She remembered she was supposed to be comforting me. “Yes, that’s right, he’ll come for us soon.”

My papa, Rabbi Isaac Meyer, lay in the new Alexander Street market. Face up, staring at God. The mob had found him in the temple, holding the Torah. They ripped the Torah into little ribbons in front of him, and he cried.

“What babies these zhids are,” a man taunted. “They’re made of straw. Push them just a little, they cave right in!”

“Let’s make an example of this Jew!” someone else yelled. They tied up his hands and forced him outside where the mob shouted for the rabbi’s blood. “We’ll show you what it means to kill Christian children!” They pushed him down the steps and kicked him until he was on the ground. Then they tied his feet. While he was lying on the steps of the synagogue tied up like a calf for the butcher, the Bishop rode down the street in his carriage, blessing the crowd. The crowd made a little wall around my father, so the Bishop didn’t exactly see him.

When the Bishop had passed, the mob tied another rope around my papa’s beard and connected the ropes around the hands and beard to a rope on the saddle of one of their horses. The army was in the street, watching. A number of other Jews were tied or being held by the mob, students and old men who thought the house of God would either protect them or be a good place to die, two women who were found hiding behind a curtain in their shop.

“What do you think of your rabbi now?” the mob asked. “Huh, Jews? And your God, where is your God this afternoon? We’ll teach you! You exploit, you crush us, you kill our children—now we’ll show how we take care of our Jews!”

The Moldavian rider spurred his horse and dragged my father through the street. The crowd threw rocks and stones at him. He was praying, wasn’t he? Reciting the shema while they dragged him through the dirt. They dragged him all the way to the market. No one knew when he died.

My father was dragged by his beard until he was dead. He was in the Alexander Street market, counting the number of stars. If he could get the number right, it would spell the secret name of God.