Beyond the Pale: A Novel (31 page)

“It’s all right, all right—” Rose never complained about how often I interrupted her sleep. I couldn’t get mad at her anymore for being kind. But I wished sometimes I slept alone so I wouldn’t have been indebted to her for that gentleness, or that I could have done something for her, besides protecting her from bedbugs. Something she would have liked. Since Uncle Isadore was working again I thought about saving up to buy her a new jacket. I saw how she was looking at the ones with lace collars in the fancy stores on Grand Street. She would be able to get a good job if she wore a jacket like that. If I ate dry cake and tea for lunch, I could save five cents every day, borrow a little from the ticket money, have enough to get it for her birthday. Yet if I had extra money, I shouldn’t spend it on a fancy coat but on Sarah’s ticket.

Lena told me we were mistaken about Sarah’s eye, that the inspectors look for a disease, not a deformity. Although, she said, sometimes they’ll turn someone back for a deformity as well, because they think they won’t be able to earn a living. I didn’t think of Sarah as deformed—what did that mean? We all had the forms we were born with. She had a wandering eye. In that case, Lena said, if she came second class and wore stylish clothes, especially with me to meet her, she would probably have no problem getting in. I felt for the small rip on my side of the mattress where I secreted my nickels and dimes, and poked my finger into the hole. I could feel the texture of the stocking they were in, the edges of my deposit book. Whenever I accumulated as much as a dollar, I put it in the Jarmulowsky Bank on Canal Street, not far from where I used to slap boxes together. I understood that interest came from the accumulated sweat of workers, but I was also a worker—why shouldn’t I be getting 2 per cent on the $7 I had managed to save so far?

I never told the Petrovskys I was saving for Sarah. Maybe Aunt Bina and Uncle Isadore wouldn’t have wanted her to come, maybe even Rose wouldn’t. After all, Sarah would have had to share the bed with us, and that was too much to ask Rose, wasn’t it? In a couple of years I’d be old enough. Then I could get a bindery job and be able to afford my own place. My own room, at least. Rose could come too, if she didn’t get married. Aunt Bina said now that we were in America we didn’t have to worry about getting married until after we were eighteen. We should take our time. It was a relief not to think about anyone arranging marriages for us here. If we were really free to choose, maybe I’d choose no one.

Rose fell back asleep but thinking about the future always made me restless. The
Jewish Daily Forward
was full of news about Russia—they said the Japanese had beaten the Russian armies in the east. The tsars had turned back Napoleon and they’d done a good job crushing Jews, so it was hard to understand how the Japanese could beat them. Maybe it was different in eastern Russia; Vladivostok was almost as far from Kishinev as New York. At Pesach there were pogroms again, thank God none near home. Home, I still called it, even though I knew I’d probably never see Russia again.

It was often frightening to read the newspaper, yet I forced myself. I had a map of Russia, which I had bought for three cents from a pushcart book peddler, beneath my underwear in the bureau. When Rose didn’t look, I circled the towns where pogroms happened. Since April I had made twenty-two new circles, and not every atrocity was reported over the telegraph. Now there was a big railroad strike, the
Forward
said. All over Russia strikes were breaking out in every industry, every city—was there going to be a revolution? For a moment I regretted leaving. Wouldn’t that have been something, to be in Russia for the overthrow of the Tsar! But then what would happen? There’d be the Bund, the Social Democrats, Saul’s Social Revolutionaries … Sometimes I pictured a way to understand the whole world, stretching my mind across history and everyday events, like a puzzle in the shape of a snake. But every time I thought I’d worked out the puzzle, the snake shifted and I had to give up.

I went to sit on the fire escape in the last bit of dark. It was chilly with that warm October undercurrent, the last-minute dowry summer gives the fall. I should have been getting dressed since I had to go by Fine’s for Rose and be at Polstein’s by seven o’clock. On the fire escape I could fill my lungs for a minute, at least the landlord was right about that. Down in the street the first pushcarts were moving into place. I listened to their squeaky wheels, the cough of sick horses, the cotton softness of Rose’s breath.

Sometimes I’d find myself scribbling down a few lines. I thought of them as pictures. From my entire childhood in Kishinev, what did I have? One photograph. But if I could make an outline of someone with words, I’d be able to hold them in my memory. I wouldn’t always live with the Petrovskys, I knew. From time to time I would be struck with the desire not to forget: a gesture, the way the circles of gas light reflected a small bit of red in Aunt Bina’s hair.

In Russia, revolution.

In New York, sewing machines

on layaway.

Late, even my aunt

would sometimes stop stitching

when she thought we were asleep

looking around guilty, frowning,

would sigh, pick up

the
Jewish Daily Forward

and read.

“Aunt Bina, did you see this headline?” I asked, pulling the newspaper from under a pile of her ribbons.

“No, Aaron or Ephraim left it here. I’ve been too busy with this trimming to look.”

“That must be what had the streets in such a commotion,” Rose said, looking over my shoulder.

“What is it?” Bina turned towards us for the first time since we’d come in, troubled.

I pointed to a column halfway down the page. “There was a pogrom in Odessa. The revolution is crushed.”

“No! In Odessa? What else does it say?”

“‘The Tsar was only pretending to give in to the cry for reform … He unleashed the forces of the nether world … There were attacks everywhere as if by prearranged signal … Jews and the intelligentsia are the chief targets … In Odessa estimated losses in the millions of rubles, over two hundred dead, three thousand homeless’—two hundred dead!”

Aunt Bina put the trousers down. She looked around the tenement room, at the air shaft window where moldy dust clung like carpeting, the piles of sewing and rags, a rabble shouting for attention. She put a hand over her face.

Rose and I had come home for a quick dinner before night school. Now Rose put her arms around her mother, her head on Bina’s shoulder. I could see them looking together at their friends, their relatives, their old streets, their synagogue, di alte heym. They got out. When Mama and Papa were killed, Aunt Bina decided it was time. How can you know when to leave? Sometimes you know, but how? My sister Esther stayed, as if it were still possible to make an ordinary life in Russia. Everyone acts as if death happens to someone else. Even if it happened to your half-sister, was that enough to make you give up everything, flee the country where you were born? What made Aunt Bina know that bribes would be useless when the mobs came? Bina had said to Isadore, “I don’t care about the shop, the garden, the house—we have to go.” Out of Russia, away from Odessa with its great opportunities for Jews. Rose never saw a pogrom, she said, God willing she’ll never have to.

Rose looked at her mother, then at me. I looked away. She never saw a pogrom, but I—suddenly I felt as if my heart was a pile of broken rock dropping through my stomach into my shoes. I could see my yellow-stained hands gripping the back of a chair, my knuckles turning white. Bina gestured Rose over to me. Rose took my hand. I could feel the calluses on her fingertips from sewing, the softness of her palm, but I couldn’t respond. Rose pulled up a chair and sat down beside me, stroking the back of my hand, humming, very quietly, the folksong “What a Beautiful Night.”

An old love song seemed an odd choice. Then I heard the melody for the lyrics,
I swear I’ll never forget you until death
. Did my mother still remember me? Was she humming like Rose, somewhere above us, while she stitched the evening onto clouds with her mother, and her mother before her? My mother was so sweet. When my stomach hurt she’d bring me a plate of hot soup. I sucked in my cheeks and closed my eyes. Tears came anyway but I held my breath so as to make no sound. Rose got another chair, pushed me into it gently, her hands on my shoulders. I put my head against Rose’s belly and shook. Rose gathered me in her arms, humming still. Bina lit the gas stove to heat water. Rose smoothed my hair.

“Maybe tonight we should skip class? We could rest—it wouldn’t be a sin,” she said after awhile.

I looked up at Rose and then sat straight. Although she had poured herself around me like honey, her forehead was creased and I could see fear flickering behind her face. I noticed she’d torn one of her fingernails to the quick and it was bleeding a little.

“No, tonight of all nights we should go. There’ll be news from Odessa and we can see if there are words in English for these things.” “English, Yiddish, Russian—how many languages do you need to say anti-Semite?” Bina said through clenched teeth, pouring tea into glasses for us, with lumps of sugar to suck on the side.

R
OSE DIDN’T WANT
to sit across the room from Chava, but Chava motioned for her to take the empty seat by the radiator. “Students, please!” Mrs. Kaufman hit the ruler on her desk. She’ll need more than a ruler to keep order tonight, Rose thought as she pushed her way past the Italian girls who stood at the back of the room, uneasy, talking to each other. One of them, a girl who was taller than Chava, was chewing on a lock of her long hair. Rose wanted to tell them what had happened, but how? What did the Italians know about Russia, anyway? Probably more than she knew about Italy, she realized.

At first the teacher was reluctant to give up her lesson plan, but she gave in to the majority, as she called the Jews, to what they wanted translated from the Yiddish dailies. She wrote the words “majority rule” on the blackboard first. One of the shop owners from Houston Street was impatient.

“How do you say in English ‘coward,’ ‘murderer’?”

“What about ‘reactionary’?” Chava called out. Rose swiveled to look at Chava over her shoulder. Reactionary, she thought, that’s too polite a word for what they did. But maybe Chava wanted to avoid words that would make others pry into her life. Rose blew a stream of air through her lips.

“Students, students, one at a time,” the teacher begged. “Rose Petrovsky, what did you read that you want to translate?”

“Rape,” Rose said, her face set hard.

Someone giggled. Chava stared at the girl so intently she started to cough and had to leave the room. Rose smiled at Chava, and they turned back to see that the teacher’s ears were bright red. But she wrote the English word “violation” on the board for them.

Rose admired Chava’s anger, the way she held herself, how she always had an answer or a question when someone was trying to push her around. She was glad she’d picked such a terrible word for the teacher to start with. Chava would know she could be serious too.

With her pencil Rose scratched Chava’s name across the grain of wood on her desk, “Chava” standing out strong against the pattern of a hundred names scratched in before. She looked over the mass of heads to the coats on their hooks, the lace-collared jacket Chava had given her as a present when she turned sixteen last week.

“Just because I’m sixteen?” Rose had asked.

Chava shrugged. “Yes, and for your new career setting in sleeves. Besides, you have been very kind to me,” she said formally.

Chava’s stiffness made Rose want to hold her the way she did at night after the bad dreams.

“I don’t look for a reward from being nice to you—it’s easy.”

“You don’t like the jacket?” Chava asked.

I love the jacket, Rose thought, looking at it in the classroom. But here I am, loving a jacket while people, Jews, are being killed in Russia. She felt bad for being so easily distracted, not as dedicated as Chava. Chava, she’s seen real suffering.

R
OSE AND
I
WERE ALLOWED
to close the door to our room because of Leon’s presence—a boarder, a grown man, not just family—in the house. I sat fiddling with the laces of my boots.

“Tell me what you’re thinking about, Chava,” Rose asked.

Usually I said, “Nothing” or “Just how work was today.” But Rose kept asking anyway. I guess she was lonely for a better conversationalist and every once in awhile I tried to do my part. That night it wasn’t too hard.

“I was thinking about someone I met in Odessa.”

“Someone I knew?” Rose stretched to unbutton her skirt at the side.

“I don’t think you would know her. On the train ride from Kishinev, I was sitting next to my mother’s midwife, Gutke. Do you remember when you met me at the station—they were there?”

“Who?”

“Gutke and—and Dovid.” I noticed I was lacing my shoes back up.

“No, I don’t remember. Did you know them well?”

“Hardly at all, though probably she came to our shul. I only remembered Gutke a little from Sarah’s being born, but my mother said if it wasn’t for Gutke, I would have killed her for not wanting to come out. I was born feet first and stubborn, she said.”

“She was right, absolutely right.” Rose was folding her shirtwaist against her body. She came and sat beside me in her slip and corset.

I turned and knocked my knuckles against Rose’s freckled shoulder. She hit me with the pillow.