Beyond the Pale: A Novel (23 page)

“Charity?” Rose considered it. “Half the Jews in Odessa beg the other half for food for Pesach. We’re lucky, I know. But—.” She was confused, sleepy. “You’re supposed to take what’s given to you without shaming the giver, isn’t that what they say?”

“Have I shamed you? I’m so sorry I haven’t learned big city manners yet.”

“Fine. Have it your way. I thought—”

“What? What did you think? That I would be content for you to take me for those walks around your lovely neighborhood? That I would be like a toy your father brought home from the market for you? Something clever from Bessarabia to show off to your friends?”

“Friends! What do you know about my life? You remember how I lived in Kishinev cleaning up for all those boys? It never stopped. When we first got here we lived in two rooms over by Meldavanka, in a neighborhood of gangsters. Now I have two friends and I have to leave them. I thought maybe—”

“I would be their replacement?”

“You have to make everything sound the worst.”

“Everything is the worst. You still think you’re a little girl and you don’t have to know what happens in the world.”

“Chava.” Rose came up to me and looked in my eyes. “I didn’t do anything to make you so mad at me. If you don’t want to be friends, fine. But you could be—,” she took a deep gulp of air, “kind to me. You could think of it as giving charity back. Because I don’t want to have to live every day in the same room with someone who hates me.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“That’s a beginning.” Rose smiled a little. “We might as well be up now. Are you hungry?”

“I forget to be hungry most of the time. I suppose I am.”

“I’m the opposite—I always remember to be hungry.”

I sighed, looked at my feet, my little toes all alone on the wood floor, and then I looked at Rose. “I’m sorry to be so rude. Sometimes I think there’s a dybuk inside me.” I balled up my fist and thumped my chest.

Rose laughed. “Come, then, and let’s feed your dybuk some of the rolls Mama baked for breakfast.” We rinsed at the washbasin stand and dressed.

At the top of the stairs we stopped. Isadore and Bina were arguing in the kitchen.

“Steerage from Marseilles!” We could hear Isadore shouting. “Don’t I make a good living, isn’t there enough for everything? What possessed you to get steerage tickets? Why did I leave this to a woman?”

“Is he often like this?” I whispered to Rose.

“Not often. Only sometimes about money,” she paused, “and my brothers.” She looked embarrassed. I shouldn’t have been glad to find out her life wasn’t perfect but I was.

Bina patiently explained how much more expensive it was to travel from Odessa than from Germany, even calculating what they saved in railroad tickets. There was something about bribing for legal passports.

“I thought passports were free,” Rose whispered.

“Nothing’s free if some Russian can make you bribe him to give it to you,” I whispered back. “At least it was that way in Bessarabia—I assume it’s the same in the Ukraine.”

Bina told Isadore that Saul was still making up his mind whether to join the family, but she had purchased a ticket for him and he could sell it if he wanted to.

“You gave that Narodnik bum his ticket already?” Isadore was shouting. “Where was your head? He’ll trade it for a bomb and get us all arrested.”

“You like to think of yourself as enlightened,” Bina said calmly. “So, your son hangs out with Narodniki and anarchists. This does not a bum make. He’s like you when you were nineteen.”

“Don’t talk to me about Saul,” Isadore said, disgusted. “Chava has her own ticket?”

I rarely blushed but I could feel how hot my cheeks were. I slid my hand back and forth on the banister. Rose looked at the stairs.

“That’s another thing—you think they’d give her anything better than steerage?” Bina asked. “And there will be more bribes so they won’t turn us back at Constantinople—I have it on good authority. Altogether with the passports it was over two thousand rubles, Isadore.”

“Two thousand!” He whistled.

“Your family has that much?” I asked.

Rose’s eyes were wide and her shoulders went up to her ears. “I guess,” she said but she seemed surprised too.

My aunt and uncle had moved on to arguing about bringing kosher food. It had never occurred to me how hard it would be for Jews to travel a long way. Isadore said it was as good a time as any to give kosher up.

“Give kosher up?” I whispered. In all those letters from America that Mama used to read for the neighbors, no one talked about giving up keeping kosher.

“Shh,” Rose said, straining to hear.

“I heard in America only greenhorns keep kosher,” Isadore said. “I don’t intend for my family to be viewed as greenhorns—at least, not longer than a month.”

“If being a greenhorn means we keep being Jews, then we’ll be greenhorns. I happen to know there are many women who keep kosher houses. Mrs. Finklestein already gave me the name of a kosher butcher in New York.”

“They’ve argued about this before,” Rose whispered. “Papa thinks we should move into the twentieth century. Mama says she’s all for the new inventions but it’s important to remember our traditions.”

“And you?” I was thinking about Daniel. Did he eat treyf when he was moving around, organizing? Maybe if you were going to starve otherwise, it would be all right.

“I can’t imagine it,” Rose said.

“Me either.” Isadore was telling Bina they could keep kosher in New York, but he didn’t sound sincere. He went back to complaining about the money.

“You’re the one who insisted we go. ‘If we stayed at home, we wouldn’t wear out our shoes,’” Bina said.

“And you wanted to stay in Odessa after what happened? It’s only a matter of time before we get the same here. They’ve done it before, they’ll do it again. I suppose we’re lucky we can afford to go. We should give thanks even if they are bleeding us dry.”

In Rose’s blue eyes there was some kind of sorrow I couldn’t interpret. We were so quiet we could hear almost every word.

“So we have to go in steerage,” Bina said. “At least we’ll be in the company of more Jews that way.”

“But what kind of Jews?”

“Jews like you, Isadore, working men and their wives.”

“From Marseilles, they’ll all be Italians and French.” He sounded tired now, as if arguing were work and he’d finished his job.

“You know a little Italian. Ephraim reads Dumas in French, and he must be able to make conversation. Jews are Jews. They’ll all know a little Yiddish. In America, you will make back the cost of the trip ten times, you’ll see. I have faith in you. In all of us.”

Rose smiled. I could tell she loved her mama, that she was proud of how Bina managed. I started to say something spiteful and then held my tongue. Wasn’t she supposed to honor her mother? That didn’t mean she was dishonoring mine. Their banister was so smooth. I wondered how they got it that way.

“Bina, I don’t know what I would do without you.” Now Isadore was trying to be charming.

“Is that an apology?”

“Apologize? To a rich woman who can spend two thousand rubles—not me!”

We could hear him in the hallway getting his coat. We waited to go down to the kitchen until we heard the front door close.

Aunt Bina had papers spread over the table. She pushed them into a single pile when she saw me and Rose. We had hot rolls with a little white cheese and glasses of milk with just a thin skin of cream floating on top, pure luxury.

“So what are you going to show Chava today, Rose? Mrs. Wishnefsky told me there’s a new klezmer band in the park.” She gave Rose a handful of coins for our outing. Every day I was still surprised that Aunt Bina was ready to send us off without a chaperone. Papa would never have allowed me to go where wandering minstrels played. Rose said everything was different in Odessa, even girls went to the university. It was safe enough in the day if you knew where to go.

We walked for several blocks and then jumped onto a streetcar drawn by four matched gray horses. Rose pointed out the elevated railroad that brought grain from the steppes to the granaries. Would it be as modern in America as Odessa? We got off close to where the city formed a ledge high above the port. The sunlight was a bright track on the water and I imagined the wheat train whistling past the port, into the sun.

“That’s the Black Sea—you’ve never seen it before?” Rose asked.

I shook my head. The water was endless. The streets were so wide, paved with blocks of granite. In Kishinev I knew miles of roads and alleys, not that knowing them helped, but the scale of everything here, streets and sea, made me dizzy. Rose watched me. She pretended not to but she did.

“Tired?”

“No. It’s just very big, isn’t it?”

“When we first came from Kishinev, I wouldn’t go anywhere without Mama. I was little then. But I know how you feel. Maybe we’ll wait to go down to the port, unless you want to see it now.”

“No, I expect we’ll have enough water soon.”

Rose frowned and kicked a scrap of paper off the sidewalk. “You’re glad to be going to America.”

“Why not? I’m afraid I won’t be able to see Sarah again. But I could never imagine what kind of life I was going to have in Kishinev. Maybe that’s because my life wasn’t supposed to be there. I’ve heard in America we can go to school for free.”

“I heard that too.”

“You don’t want to go?”

She shrugged. “I don’t believe that you just pick gold up off the streets there. I’ve seen people come back from America who say there’s as much misery as here. Why trade one misery for another? We’ll have to learn a new language, new ways of doing things, probably we’ll have to get jobs—.”

“I want a job. I don’t want to be stuck at home making candles. I want to learn a real trade. And besides, in America there are no pogroms.”

Rose’s mouth opened a little and closed. She shook her head. “No, I never heard about pogroms in America. Or catacombs either.”

“Catacombs?”

“This you wouldn’t believe. Under the streets of Odessa there are other streets—not streets—tunnels, a whole other city.”

“They built the city on top of another city?”

“Mama told me people dug the limestone from underneath for the buildings. They left a maze below our feet. Now the poor live there.”

“Live in them?” I tried to imagine. Were the tunnels smooth and white like the sides of shops, or pitted and full of rats and water? Could people make fires to keep themselves warm? Were they scared of the dark or did they get used to it? “Can we see?”

“It’s too dangerous. Papa says times are hard in the grain business. Men come from the country to get work in the port, and there’s no work. But I heard that even women and children live down there.”

“How? How can they live?”

Rose shrugged again. “By begging or stealing, I suppose. I don’t know. It must be awful.”

Below the city there were women and children living in caves off of charity. The Petrovskys could have changed their minds, never met me at the station. The relief workers could have refused me a ticket. I could have been down there too. Who decided how charity was parceled out? Maybe everything was written in the Book of Life every new year, like Papa said. I shivered.

We walked along a street with fine stores, well-dressed people wearing hats, not just caps or babushkas. “Papa’s shop is three blocks from here.” Rose was boastful for a minute, then she looked at me again. “But maybe we won’t go there. The park’s in the other direction.”

When we got to Aleksandrovskii Park we saw a small crowd, with music coming from the middle. Rose took my hand and we threaded our way to the front. There were the klezmorim: Jews with clarinet, violin, accordion, tuba, drum and something I hadn’t seen before.

“What’s that?” I pointed.

“It’s a tsambal mik, a Rumanian kind of dulcimer. Not exactly opera,” Rose said. I liked the music. They were playing waltzes, marches, wedding tunes that I remembered from Kishinev, a little different of course. I didn’t miss Kishinev, how could I? But when I thought about Sarah and Bobe Malka staying there, my own breast felt like a fiddle roughly bowed. Rose moved easily through the crowd. She bought us hot bagels from a woman with a cloth-covered stick near the park entrance. She ate hers quickly and looked at my almost untouched one. “You’re not going to finish it?”

“You take it.” Something about this made me soften towards her. She had been plump when we were little and in Odessa she was just the same. I used to think plump girls were all stuck up. Rose looked more like a Russian than a Jew in her roundness and blue eyes, except for the darkness of her skin and hair. Rose was like a havdale candle, the dark and light wax braided together.

We went by the Café Richelieu where her brothers Ephraim and Saul liked to argue politics. Saul was a Social Revolutionary. Rose said the Social Revolutionaries believed in assassination, though none of them had ever assassinated anyone.

“Brothers! My brother Daniel doesn’t trust the Social Revolutionaries or even the Social Democrats now, since the pogrom. He says they all want Jews to cast their lot with the Russian masses, but the Russians will never tolerate the Jews.”

“He’s right, isn’t he?”

I had to agree. He was right.

Hats were the last thing on Aunt Bina’s list. All the women in the family had to have new hats so we wouldn’t look like we just got off the boat when we landed in America. Rose and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

“You think I’m not making sense but believe me, I know what I’m talking about,” Bina said. We almost believed her—she was the organizing force of our migration. She’d sold all the household furnishings except the menorah, candlesticks and featherbeds. She sold her and Isadore’s seats in the Brody Synagogue—it was late August and people were already looking ahead to the High Holidays; she waited to sell them as long as she could and got her price, a hundred rubles. Then she took us to the milliner’s.

I’d never owned a hat, only a shawl I used on Shabbes to cover my head in shul. Ribbon, silk flowers, bright felts and strong perfume were everywhere. Aunt Bina and Rose tried on every hat in the shop. I chose a plain dark blue with the narrowest brim I could find, trimmed with ribbon, no flowers. I didn’t think it was right for someone in mourning to even consider new hats.