Beyond the Pale: A Novel (21 page)

Esther turned to look at me for the first time in months. She was crying again. “Oh, Chava, it’s so far!” As if she wouldn’t mind if I went to Odessa and she only saw me at Pesach, then she could still think she was a good sister. “She can stay for my wedding?”

Daniel nodded, weary. Even Bobe Malka said it was important to pick life up again, to follow bad with good. Their wedding was in a few weeks, only two months after the pogrom. I was glad it would be soon now. Esther came over and hugged me. “If you want to go, little sister, I won’t stop you.”

I thought I didn’t really like Esther. I thought she didn’t really like me. I thought this while she was hugging me and it hurt so much that I couldn’t help myself from crying a little too.

Daniel became alarmed. “Do you want to go? We could also try to find Abraham in Palestine, if you think you want to cast your lot with the Zionists.”

I let go of Esther. I hadn’t thought about Palestine in a long time. The life Abraham wrote about, when he wrote, sounded so dry and difficult. Farming! Not exactly my idea of paradise. Besides, Abraham was a grown man and at least if I went with the Petrovskys there would be another girl my own age.

“No,” I said, wiping my face, “I want to go to America.” Everyone sighed, even some of the sleepers in the shadows. Esther sat down again.

“I already talked to Nathan,” Daniel said. I got mad again. To be so arranged about. “Nathan agreed he would help provide for Sarah’s dowry when the time comes. And I managed to get a ticket for you from the relief agency. They don’t want to pay for very many tickets to America, especially from Odessa—the Americans who are there now don’t want to see more of us Russians come in. We’re too dangerous!” He laughed, thinking of himself. “But because you are an orphan and the Petrovskys are as good as adopting you if you go, they made an exception. It’s luck for you—don’t frown at me like that. I know it’s not lucky to be an orphan. ‘When an orphan suffers, no one notices’—but we’re all orphans now. I am doing what I can with what I have. It’s lucky for you that you’re able to leave Russia.”

They all wanted to send me away. I was no use to them here. What shall we do about Chava, they said, and then they said, “Oh, send her to another part of the world so she won’t bother us anymore.” But I wasn’t going to break down in front of them.

“Chava,” Daniel said, pulling my chin up to look in my eyes in the candlelight. “You don’t have to go. I don’t really want for you to go but I can’t be any kind of brother for you here. Esther is going to start a new life with Nathan soon. I know you, you wouldn’t be happy. I’ll write to you in America. I’ll send you my pamphlets and you can see if they like them in the golden land.”

Then I cried again.

The train station in Kishinev used to be one of my holy places. Sometimes, after Shabbes services, I would walk down there, sit on the benches and watch the people come and go. Hardly any Jews traveled on Shabbes but I always felt safe in the station, before the pogrom. I liked to study the train schedules and pick up newspapers the travelers left behind.
Bessarabetz
, the Kishinev paper, was just full of lies about Jews. I could make out Russian pretty well and I liked the newspapers from Moscow best, though they were rare in Kishinev. Once I found a copy of
Iskra
, Lenin’s paper that Daniel was always talking about, but it gave me a headache to try and understand the arguments. Rumanian, I couldn’t read a word, so the papers from Bucharest were useless.

Where should I go? Every Saturday afternoon this was the game in my mind. It would take more than three days to get to Moscow, five to Saint Petersburg. Jews couldn’t go to Moscow or Saint Petersburg but I was so young, I thought they wouldn’t pay any attention to me. I’d have enough money for a first-class ticket, and I would look out the window, answering everyone very politely in perfect Russian. I would have a fur hat to hide my hair and people would think I was the daughter of a great baron.

At last I was going on the train even if it wasn’t how I had imagined. Sarah was crying, her nose running. Shendl gave me a piece of cheese wrapped up in clean paper. My cousins were waving and telling me to write to them in Warsaw. I had the address where they were going next week. The station was full of Jews leaving Kishinev and all the goyim knew who we were. I thought they must be laughing at us—see how we’ve got them on the run again, scared as rabbits! For the first time I felt proud of Esther and Nathan for staying. Esther had sewn ten rubles up in my jacket. I complained it made me feel like a fugitive but she insisted. I let her take care of me. She sewed my steamer ticket under another patch. I had three rubles of my own in my pocket, one Daniel gave me and two I had I earned myself making candles.

Thirteen rubles did not make a baron’s daughter. Anyway, I spat on the barons of Russia and all the princes. When you grow up, you have to be proud of who you are. Finally I understood what that meant. I tried to stay proud, for Mama and Papa, but everyone was so sentimental at the station I pushed out a few sobs to comfort them.

“I’m just going to Odessa,” I said.

“Oh, you’re such a brave one!” Aunt Shendl pinched my cheeks and blew in her handkerchief. All the bravery she had shown in the chicken coop had melted in the fire. She did everything required of her but she had been soft and weepy the last couple of months. As I was going up the train stairs, Sarah pulled on my skirt. I bent down.

“I saved this for you.” I didn’t know how she did it, what made her think to, or where she’d been hiding it, but there it was: the photograph of Mama and Papa taken after they were married fifteen years. I put it in my bag quickly, kissed the top of her head and wiped her nose with my sleeve.

“Good luck, Sarah, if I get rich in the goldene medine, I’ll make it so you can come, no matter about the eyes.”

“Write me, Chava. Tell me everything—.” The conductors were shouting and I grabbed the handrail to keep from falling back on the platform. Inside I could only find a seat on the aisle. I leaned over an old woman in a fancy peasant shawl to wave goodbye through the open window.

“Did I hear them call you Chava?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Chava Meyer.” I felt startled by my openness, even though I was used to kindly strangers fussing over me.

The woman got up. “Gutke Gurvich. Come, we’ll trade places—quick, so you can see them better before we pull out.”

I put my little bag down on the inside and stood while the train jerked as it gathered speed. My family got smaller, until the whole crowd was one hand waving, waving goodbye to all the travelers. When I couldn’t make out that one hand anymore, I sat down and leaned out the window.

“You’ve been on the train before?”

“No,” I said curtly. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts.

“You might want to pull the window down. Things fly in.”

I did what she asked and resettled myself on the wooden bench.

“You go to Odessa?”

“Yes, I have cousins there. We’re going to America.” It felt like a boast and I was embarrassed. I realized I scarcely knew my Odessa cousins, which made me feel small and exposed.

“To America. You’re going too.” She repeated the words as if they were exactly what she’d expected me to say.

“Yes, I got a ticket from the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris,” I said before I could stop myself.

She smiled at me the way grown-ups do, which I don’t like. “So you speak French?”

“No, just Russian and Yiddish, and I can read a little German. Now I have to learn English, I suppose.”

“I’m sure you’ll learn quickly.” She fell quiet, studying me. I wanted to turn away but before I could she spoke again. “I’m sorry about your mother and father. You have my sympathy. I thought very highly of them.”

She didn’t pat my hand or shoulder, like so many of my parents’ other acquaintances. I didn’t want sympathy. Her head bobbed for a second and I knew she was looking back at the pogrom. I sucked my breath in.

“I knew almost all the dead,” she sighed, straightening her shoulders.

“Almost all?” that puzzled me. My stomach lurched, perhaps from the motion of the train.

“I’m a midwife. I stayed and helped with the sick, but now I have to leave, at least for awhile. It’s too painful to be in Kishinev. Everything ends in weeping. Yes?”

“Yes.” I looked out the window. That, at least, was how I imagined it—sparks hitting the glass, something to see every second, the moving world pulling me to its breast. I knew Gutke was still looking at me but I couldn’t look at her right away.

“You go to America from Odessa by boat?” she asked after a few minutes.

I nodded without turning away from the window. She made little tchish-tchish noises.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Oh, nothing, excuse me if I sounded rude. I was just remembering something.”

“Remembering?” I asked, more out of politeness than interest.

“I was your mother’s midwife.”

I turned back to her. She shrugged. I looked at her more closely and realized she was familiar. “Were you there when my sister Sarah was born?”

She nodded yes, and I had a faint memory of Papa arguing with Mama about the midwife, Mama insisting on this Gutke. I remembered he called her a Gypsy mamzer, and no one would tell me what mamzer meant. I got a shiver.

“Were you there when I was born?”

“Yes.” I noticed then that her eyes were different colors, one black and one a kind of mottled amber, something I didn’t remember ever seeing before. I looked down at my lap.

“Your mother loved you very much,” she said, this time laying her hand lightly over mine. And I didn’t mind.

The train wheels turned another hundred times before Gutke drew a deep breath. “Sometimes, not always, when a baby is born, I can see a little bit of their future come out with them.”

“Really? Did you see mine?”

“I saw that you would suffer very much, cross the ocean and have courage.”

“That sounds like half of Kishinev. I’m surprised women let you deliver their babies if you told them that.”

She pulled her hand back. “In my business, you learn to tell what a woman wants to hear.”

“And me, are you telling me what I want to hear?”

“A little.”

“Tell me the truth then.”

She considered me for a minute. “All I know more is that you will not rest on the other side. Your sorrow will keep you moving, but you will have good years and you will have the great good fortune to feel another love you.”

“How do you know this?”

“I see things. As if there were a room I could look at through a tiny hole, not up, not down, not to the side, just what is arranged in front of my looking. So you should take what I say with a grain of salt. It’s just an old woman’s imagination.”

“That’s what they say about me—just a child’s imagination.” For a minute it seemed as if Gutke was someone I knew closely, an aunt or a teacher.

“We make good traveling companions to Odessa, then,” she said.

“What are you going to do there?”

“I’m staying with an old friend, a woman who sells things to the rich. She thinks I help her business. And I might. Now I want to read for awhile. I don’t think you’ll mind the chance to look at the scenery.” She had a kind of portfolio filled with loose handwritten pages.

“What book is that?”

“A book of days. I’ve been writing it for three years, not all the time, of course.”

“Really? Like Sholom Aleichem, you wrote a book?”

“Not a real book, just my memories, for myself and my friends. It has nothing artistic about it, don’t worry.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Go, go on, look at your own business,” she brushed me off.

G
UTKE WATCHED
C
HAVA
for a few minutes and then turned to an empty page:

From the beginning, when I was just learning my trade, I would often see a great basin of water, stretching on forever. Sometimes that’s all I would see. At first I thought it was the water of the womb—how it flows over everything, how it shapes our destinies. I would tell the mother the child would have a long, strong life.

When I was about fifteen or sixteen, Pesah took me on a trip to Odessa. She was going to look at new fixtures for the bathhouse. I was excited, of course, and only a little bit frightened. Odessa made Kishinev look like a little sister at a wedding, what a place! I begged Pesah to come with me to the port. I wanted to see the ships, the docks, the sea. Finally she indulged me.

We came to the great steps of Odessa. This you wouldn’t believe without a picture. Wide marble steps, maybe a verst long, and two or three hundred of them, going down to the harbor. Pesah wiped her brow and raised her eyebrows at me.

“So, now you’ve seen it.”

“I want to touch the water.”

“‘Touch the water,’ she says! God in heaven! I’m staying up here, on this bench. If you faint walking up those steps, don’t expect me to rescue you.”

I laughed, kissed her and flew down to the docks. I looked out over the expanse, the mountains of Rumania rising and then fading on one side, the water shivering at the horizon and nothing beyond except the promise of more water. The sight made me breathe deeply in my chest, until the air filled my belly and even my legs.

Suddenly I realized that what I had been seeing when I delivered babies was a sea, not the waters of the womb, but a sea. Oy, what a dolt I was. But all those children? Where were they going? The water I saw didn’t look like the Odessa harbor and it made no sense that the children of Kishinev, so many, would be headed for Constantinople. I tucked this into my mind as a question. Maybe I was right to start with, the water was a symbol for life’s journey, a difficult and strange passage. That would be no surprise.

It took me almost ten years to realize that the babies were going to America. Not just the babies, the mothers too, naturally. It takes at least sixteen years in my profession to see the prophecies visited on the next generation. I had been looking in the wrong directions—south and inward. That’s my own nature, to move south. But the children were following their natures and the times. For almost a third of all babies, I would see this great body of water; sometimes, later, crowds and buildings.