Beyond the Pale: A Novel (24 page)

“That’s really what you want? It’s too severe for you, darling. If it’s the money, I’ll pay the difference.”

“This is what I like. It doesn’t matter about the money.” I never told her how little I had. Even if it meant this foolishness, I was determined to pay my way. In New York I’d get a job and make my own money. Rose chose dark and light purple velvets held stiff by wires, with a small bouquet of white silk roses on the side. When she put it on I was startled. She changed from a thirteen-year-old girl to a young woman, just with a handful of ribbon! Aunt Bina bought a wide-brimmed affair that tied under the chin and fit easily over her wig. Carrying the hatbox she seemed completely satisfied until we passed the Café Richelieu.

She stopped, frowned and decided to have a glass of tea. Since Rose and I were with her, it would look all right, no one would mistake her purpose. We sat at an outdoor table, everyone unusually quiet.

“He was six years old when I married your father,” Aunt Bina finally said.

“What’s Saul going to do with the ticket money?” Rose asked since the subject was open.

“Go to Kiev. Imagine! He doesn’t have a special passport—he’ll have to sneak in. What can he do there?”

“He’ll be all right, Mama.” Rose laid her hand on her mother’s sleeve.

“As long as he doesn’t throw a bomb.”

“He’s not throwing any bombs, Mama. You know he talks about change, but I think really what he’s interested in is becoming a party official himself.”

“A party official?” I asked.

Aunt Bina made an exasperated gesture. “You know how men are—they make a committee, then they need a chairman, a secretary, a who-knows-what, then they want someone for their chairman to report to. Everything is a complication with them, nothing straightforward.”

“Saul’s the treasurer of his circle. He says it’s more important who controls the money than who calls meetings to order,” Rose added.

“Well, at least he has a little ambition, nu?” Aunt Bina pushed crumbs of powdered sugar around on her plate. “Not simply content to just be another talker.”

Listening to them I realized how foolish it was to think all revolutionaries wanted the same thing or were driven by the same ideal of “the workers.” Maybe some of them fought the authorities so they could have the authorities’ jobs, only with different titles. Maybe many of them. I tried to imagine Daniel as a bureaucrat, moving papers around on a desk. That couldn’t have been what he was fighting for, even if it seemed to be what attracted Rose’s brother.

Aunt Bina stirred her tea vigorously, tapping the sides of the glass as if announcing the end of discussion. Saul was a grown man. How could a stepmother hope to influence him? “Well? What are you thinking about so intently, Chavele?”

“That after tomorrow, I’ll never see Russia again.”

We nodded our heads, taking deep sips of tea.

At the top of the great Odessa steps the world shifted. I dropped the hatbox. Rose and Ephraim stopped to look at me.

“You’re all right?” Ephraim asked. He had bags under each arm and over his back.

“Fine,” I said. Rose gave me an I-know-you’re-lying look. Ephraim went on down the steps towards the rest of the family. “Fine,” I said again to Rose, picking up the hatbox. I had little of my own so I was carrying the bag of zwieback and hard cheese and the hatbox, as well as my small satchel. “Just maybe nervous.”

“You?”

“We have to catch up to your family.”

I followed her down the two hundred long, flat steps, counting them. Every detail seemed important. Merchants, sailors, porters, travelers, immigrants, thieves, soldiers, peddlers, customs agents all kept their eyes on each other while appearing to be rushing about on their own business. During the last two months I had grown used to big city crowds but this was new. My fear swallowed my senses. Then I regained control and my fear seemed as small as everyone else’s—pushing, shoving, trying to get in the right line, find the right people, avoid the wrong ones.

Finally Uncle Isadore located our freighter, which was also carrying wheat to Marseilles. He mumbled about setting off in a little tub, even though it looked huge to me. The porters took most of our luggage away while Aunt Bina fussed at them to make sure everything was handled properly and “don’t crush the hats!” We walked up a long plank onto the deck. A man in a suit, with the sideburns of a Jew, smoked a pipe and studied us. Aunt Bina whispered, but so loud everyone could hear, that he was the captain. I never thought Jews could be ship captains. Isadore began to walk towards him but the captain turned and walked away. A crewman showed us to our bunk rooms. He said eight other families and some single men were passengers, thirty-six women and forty-seven men in all. Rose, Aunt Bina and I had to share one room and one bathroom with thirty-three other women. Aunt Bina said this was nothing, nothing at all, wait until we got to Marseilles. She must have known from the letters and the “returners,” the ones who missed their homeland and came back. Her warning didn’t make this freighter seem any less dirty.

Aunt Bina took a bottom bunk while Rose and I headed for the top. The beds were so close together it was almost like sleeping in her old room, except there were no sheets, only a wool blanket and a thin mattress that smelled of strong disinfectant. The room became crowded with women, some of them little girls, younger than Sarah. I looked at their eyes as I sat on my bunk swinging my legs.

Rose walked around, talking to the other girls. She made it look so easy. Just—”How do you do? Are you from Odessa? What street? Oh, do you know so-and-so?” Maybe it would have been easier if I came from Odessa. If the women found out about me they’d drown me in sympathy. I hoped Rose wouldn’t tell them. I jumped down just as the ship lurched and blew its horn, and I fell on my knee. I got up quickly, hoping no one noticed but Rose was right away by my side.

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” I lied to her again. I pulled up my skirt to make sure I hadn’t cut myself. “Listen,” I whispered as the boat started to move, “don’t tell anyone I’m from Kishinev.”

“What should I say then?”

“Just that I’m your cousin from—from Berdichev, whose American uncle sent for me, so it’s convenient to travel with you. Promise?”

She narrowed her eyes. “What about Mama?”

“Where is she?”

“Up on the deck I think.”

“Let’s go find her, quick, before she can tell anyone.” We raced up the narrow metal stairs. My knee hurt, yet I was still faster than Rose.

Aunt Bina was watching the Ukraine diminish. It was a warm day on shore but moving across the water was a sharp cool wind. How small Odessa looked already, even those great steps seemed a miniature of themselves. Bina looked over at us.

“The wheel turns as it must, isn’t that the truth?” she said. “What is it, children?” I wished she wouldn’t call us children.

“Chava wants us to make up a story about her and not tell she’s from Kishinev.”

“Not from Kishinev? Is that right, Chava? You want to disown your origins?”

“I’m not ashamed,” I said, realizing how bad it sounded, as if I was sneaking out of being myself. “It’s only that I don’t want anyone to pity me.”

“Pity you!” She laughed. “Who would pity you? You’re a strong, handsome young lady on her way to America.”

This embarrassed and pleased me. “You know what I mean.”

She nodded. “So, where did you say you were from again?”

I heard a murmur in the pattern of sound the sea made. The murmur turned into words that surrounded and separated me from everyone else, words that floated in and out of my ears like foam:

Trains now steamers

the brilliant new engines underneath the century

take me away from the Ukraine

away from Moldavia our family graves.

The wave has a name it whispers as it slaps the ship:

diaspora.

Carried on the curve of faith

with millennia of Jews

I give myself up

to the water

to the route.

“I’m going back downstairs,” Rose said, shaking the words out of my head. “Want to come?”

“No. I feel sick to my stomach.”

“Well, I don’t like the smell of the ship’s engine up here.” She wrinkled her nose.

“It’s better than the bunk room.”

“I need another trip for an accurate comparison,” Rose said. “I’ll probably be back before you miss me.”

Left alone, I squinted so I could keep looking into the wind. I thought being at sea would be boring, but I could make out the shores of Russia, Rumania, Bulgaria as we traveled south, sometimes just an outline at the horizon. Tracing the world gripped me, all the hills and rivers I would never pass again, and I worried something beautiful or important would go by. I would have fallen asleep on the railing, watching and listening to the wave’s melodies, if Rose hadn’t pulled me down to dinner.

“It’s a Jewish ship so the food is kosher,” she said. “Let’s go see what they have.” The idea of food reminded me of my queasiness but I followed her out of curiosity.

The dining room had five long tables. Since there were nine families, some of them had to split up, yet we managed to all sit together. A bucket of plain kasha, some cold potatoes, some kind of fish I had never seen before and stale black bread were on each table. Nothing I wanted to attempt eating. Rose took some kasha but she found bug shells in it and made a face. Uncle Isadore tried to tell us that as long as they were cooked, bugs wouldn’t hurt us—a special dispensation allowed Jews to eat bugs in grain if there was no dairy. How else could we have survived all these years? Not bad, not bad at all, he said, eating the kasha to prove his point. Aunt Bina shook her head.

“What can you do with a man like that, I ask you? There is no such thing as a kosher bug!”

Aaron raised his eyebrows and pushed his plate away. He was not going to risk breaking any of the laws of kosher, no matter how his father blasphemed, although if the Torah had said it was all right, he’d be just the type to religiously eat bugs. Aaron seemed out of place with the rest of us. Rose told me he was supposed to have gotten married last year but his fiancée had died of cholera two months before the wedding. At eighteen he had the beard and look of a Talmud scholar, even though Isadore made him buy modern clothes for the trip. He hardly spoke to me. Rose said he was afraid of being tempted by impure thoughts. This seemed ridiculous though it suited me fine.

Ephraim was only sixteen. The way he talked you’d have thought that he was hoping temptation would kidnap him. When Aunt Bina and Uncle Isadore weren’t listening, he told us he wasn’t going to settle for any arranged marriage, not him. Ephraim was going to find himself an American girl. What a pair! Ephraim avoided the kasha but ate the fish and potatoes greedily.

Rose said the potatoes weren’t so bad and put some on my plate. I took a bite and spit it out in my hand. It didn’t taste so bad, I just couldn’t eat.

“It will be a few days before you get your sea legs,” Isadore said. How would he know? The boat pitched from side to side, just enough to remind us that we’d put our lives in the hands of the water. “But you’ll see, you’ll get used to it,” he continued. “It’s good to start out on the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. They’re smooth as glass next to the Atlantic, so we can adjust gradually. The little adjustments are always the best.”

“Provided you don’t have to make too many,” Aunt Bina said. “Do you know the Darwinists say that man came out of the sea?” She put a little bit of fish on her bread.

“Mama!” Aaron said, as if Bina had struck him.

“I didn’t say I thought so, did I? It’s not sacrilegious to know what the scientists think. A person can hold the scientific and the religious, each in one hand, isn’t that so Isadore?”

“Yes, quite so,” he said, “but I didn’t think you knew from Darwin.”

“It’s easy to find out a little this, a little that in a big city. I was only telling the girls what I heard. There’s no harm in it.”

Aaron started to quote scripture and I excused myself, saying I didn’t feel so well, I needed the air on deck.

When we arrived in Constantinople there was a big commotion. A party of officials got on board and announced that Sultan Abdul Hamid II demanded 25 rubles from every passenger going on through the Sea of Marmara. For our group, that added up to 150 rubles. I remembered what Aunt Bina had said in her kitchen. I went to her but before I could speak she shushed me.

“It’s done already. They gave me a receipt for my niece from Berdichev,” she said.

“I’ll pay you back.”

“I’m sure you will. In America.”

“In America.” Some of the other women were crying. One whole family had to get off. What would happen to them? Aunt Bina said they’d probably beg at the Jewish relief agency. In Constantinople? Everywhere there was a Jewish relief agency, she said.

I wished we could get off the boat and look around. The word Constantinople sounded like a fable, a story that Mama forgot to tell me. Would she have liked this journey? We passed a beautiful clock tower and so many palaces! The buildings didn’t look terribly different from Russia, though there were many more mosques than in Odessa—in Kishinev only one. When Uncle Isadore pointed out the “seat of the patriarch” to me I had to keep from asking him where the head was. I told this to Rose and she giggled every time she looked at me all the way through the Dardanelles. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to take the place of one of Rose’s lost friends, I thought for the first time.

Traveling through Turkey was almost like being on a river. We could watch the shore on both sides and sometimes the buildings were so close I believed I could make out the patterns on the arches. When we steamed into the Aegean, the air and the color of light changed. Everything was a little bluer. Our path passed a hundred little islands. I wondered what kind of life you would have, living out here? Aunt Bina told us there were legends about these islands—of singing sirens who drove the Greeks mad and made them crash their ships.