Beyond the Pale: A Novel (7 page)

Pesah discussed all the changes in her clientele with Sadie, and I watched my mother listening, trying to understand. It seemed to me my mother cleaved stubbornly to the innocence she had the day before she was raped. Nothing she saw in the bathhouse left a mark on her. She could listen to women and men arguing all day about socialism and nihilism and have no opinion. Well, she did have an opinion: “Someone will always be rich, someone will always be poor. Do you think the Narodniki will give the government to washerwomen?”

She was happy to see me growing and delighted to get good reports from Milcah. While Pesah thought of her as a little sister, Feygele never for a moment thought of Pesah as anything more than our kind benefactor. From a benefactor, goodwill must always be bought. I was much freer. In fact, my mother bought my freedom, day after day, chore after chore. Something I only now see. Not all understanding comes in visions!

So I was twelve, and Pesah let me help in the evenings. I would be tired but the steam in the bathhouse was invigorating, and the women who came at night were more interesting than the married women who shleped along their babies during the day. There was a group of unmarried women, “old maids” in their twenties, who would come on Wednesdays and take the four private rooms, with their own little bathtubs, twenty kopecks for each room extra. Yetta, Rayzl, Naomi, Golde—I remember their names still.

After a few months I was particularly aware of Golde. She was maybe twenty-two, one of the first women in Kishinev to have her own Singer sewing machine. She had opened a little tailoring business—beautiful work, everyone said. Golde was very much in demand as a seamstress, and three girls worked for her in the front room of her house. (The women in the bath always gossiped about each other, especially the old maids, so it was easy to learn whatever I cared to know.) Her mama died when Golde was still young. She was the only daughter, her father a traveling merchant. She kept the house for her papa when he was home, and ran her shop. She had seven brothers, if you can imagine, and they had all married and gone.

Golde had eyes so dark they made the new moon seem like an oil lamp. Milcah was teaching me to pay attention to smell and I realized Golde smelled like an infant, the way healthy babies smell, like cherry trees fruiting during a summer rain. Already she had a small bump on her back, from bending all day at the sewing, but seeing how hard she must work made her spirit seem sweet to me.

It was my job to make sure everything in the private rooms was clean and the stove hot. Each room had its own long bench, tub, stove and a faucet. The old maids would arrange it so that one room wouldn’t be steamy, and they would sit there after they were done bathing, playing cards. I could hear them laughing and singing. They liked to be left alone and they gave me five kopecks if I made sure no one bothered them.

One night the women came in, laughing. Their cheeks were red so it must have been winter, before Pesach. I don’t know why, but I thought I had forgotten to bring enough towels for them. Some feeling pushed me. I got fresh towels, extra ones even, and headed towards their rooms. My hands were full so I pushed the door a little with my elbow, to knock. The door swung open without making a noise. Golde was lying on the hot bench and Yetta was sitting between her legs, like a midwife, yet not like a midwife—her hands were pushing, rubbing Golde’s breasts. Golde turned and saw me. She grabbed Yetta’s hand, and then both of them were looking at me. I stared at them. Tears were in Golde’s eyes, and I didn’t know what to do.

Yetta was mad. “You don’t knock? Why do you sneak around, spying on us? For this we pay you?” She stood up, folding her arms across her chest.

“The door just came open—”

Golde leaned up on one elbow. “Gutke didn’t mean to spy on us, did you?”

“No, I would never spy on you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”

“Yes, I forgive you. But you must keep this a secret. Do you know how?”

When Golde looked at me, I felt a fog come over my body. Not from the steam in the room, but from a feeling that started in my belly. I knew, because they were frightened, that they were doing something forbidden, but I didn’t know more than that. If there were words for it—women putting their hands on each other—I had never heard them. So I swore I knew how to keep a secret and they latched the door carefully behind me.

For weeks, when I went to sleep at night, I would see Golde’s black eyes watching me. My own breasts were just beginning to fill out. I held them the way Yetta had held Golde’s and rocked myself to sleep, imagining resting my cheek along Golde’s breasts or pressing my lips to hers.

I became a very attentive student at the births. I wanted to know everything about anatomy, the way nipples pucker and how the different colors of a woman’s underlips all have meanings that change in every phase of labor. “But isn’t every woman different?” I asked.

“Yes,” Milcah agreed, “but you can already see for yourself there are only so many types—small and phlegmatic, large and stoic, for instance.”

I understood what she meant but it seemed to me that when you thought about type deeply, each woman became her own type. Golde, the dark-eyed seamstress who liked to lie on the rough planks in a steamy bathhouse while another woman swayed on top of her—is that a type or a particular?

“But even if we can’t decide what type a woman is,” I said, focusing on a shape I couldn’t quite make out somewhere beyond Milcah’s left ear, “we can still know the woman, can’t we? If we pay attention to her body and her countenance while she’s carrying the child, the changes she goes through in labor will be clearer, won’t they?”

Milcah put her hand on my shoulder, nodding vigorously, pleased with me.

One day after Pesach I went to Milcah’s, as usual. A stranger, a man, was sitting at her table, his head and arm bandaged, his clothes filthy and torn.

“This is my son, Gershon. From Odessa, I spit on its name,
feh!
Gershon, this is my apprentice, Gutke, who lives with Pesah, the bathhouse manager. After you get a little strength, maybe she’ll take you back there. You can clean yourself up a bit, maybe talk to some businesspeople here in Kishinev.”

He started to cry, and she gave him a cup of hot tea, chamomile with valerian, to calm him.

“Stop crying already, tell us everything, how it happened,” Milcah said. He must have told her the story already, but repeating helps people get over sorrow. Otherwise the words build up in you, a lamentation, and you can’t stop grieving.

“I used to think Odessa was the whole of civilization,” Gershon mumbled into his tea cup. “Where else do Greeks and Rumanians argue in French about German theater? The whole world should know such civilization!” Bitterness was like a shawl around his shoulders. He pulled it tight to give himself a little comfort. “Of course there was anti- Semitism, where not? Every Easter the Greek sailors shoot guns by the synagogue and gangs of hoodlums, boys, eighteen, nineteen years old, you know what kind—it happens, everyone looks the other way. Well, this is what their looking away gets them!” He waved his arm about. Then he winced and the tears started up again, pure pain tears. “Only a fool or some child longing for a fight goes into the street on Easter Sunday. We don’t start this. I have friends, even, who put an Easter loaf in their windows just in case. This year, they were the lucky ones. Now there are thousands homeless—”

“Thousands homeless?” I had heard of pogroms, who hadn’t? They happened years ago, in shtetls without defenses. But a pogrom in Odessa? In 1871? How could that be?

“Thousands. I don’t exaggerate. Three days they sacked and looted our houses, and when they could find nothing more, they burned them. Burned up whole streets if there were only Jewish houses on them.”

“How can they tell the Jewish houses?”

Gershon laughed as if the evil in the world were stuck in his throat like a fishbone. “‘And you shall put it on your doorposts for a sign’—look!” He ran wildly to the door, pointing at Milcah’s mezuze. “This, our holy protection!” With his good hand he tried to pull it off the wood but Milcah stopped him.

“This is my house. Gershon, stop—sit down!” She was at least a head shorter yet she got her palms on his shoulders and pushed him back as if he were a boy. “The Christians put their saints and crosses on the outside, so it happens. We have a duty to honor our faith. It is bitter and bad when the public is wrong, but it doesn’t mean we stop being Jews.”

I was trying to see what had happened. Heavy clouds drew over my eyes and a buzzing started in my ears. After a moment the sound of flies cleared, becoming human voices, low, rumbling voices like carts rolling over cobblestones. Gershon’s high-pitched complaint seemed miles away.

“Mama, it wasn’t just the burning. You shouldn’t know from what I saw. I broke my arm fighting to keep a woman from being violated. One of the boys, he, he cut off her ear—he was holding it up like a trophy.”

“That’s enough. Gutke’s just a child.”

It didn’t matter. I could see the streets, the broken glass, the drifts of ransacked papers, legs of people poking up through the debris along with legs of furniture. I sat on my hands and started rocking, breathing the way women do when they’re ready for birth. Gershon and Milcah were talking to me from the other side of clouds. I knew they were there, and I had to get myself back to them so Milcah wouldn’t think blood scared me, or death. A midwife has to know death. Already I understood that. But this kind of death—where does it come from?

“Drink. Just cold tea. You can hear me now? So.”

Her voice was faint, but I forced myself to nod and let the liquid run down my throat. The fog began to take form, wrapping itself around those deep voices. One by one the dead filled up the room, a few beardless merchants, like Gershon; women with their hands on their heads searching for the wigs their attackers tore off them; an old Chasid stroking his long coat, ripped up and down the sides. The old ones started to move around, lifting the lids on Milcah’s herb jars, inhaling the smell. I inhaled the scents of lemon verbena and dust with them.

More and more phantoms were walking around, rubbing the mirrors. When Milcah pulled a pair of candlesticks out of the hands of a bobe, who was saying, “These look just like mine,” I realized the ghosts were real, not just some private dream I was having.

Milcah pressed her fist against her upper lip, concentrating. As if it were a puppy, she brushed aside a crawling child whose entrails dragged along the floor. “Come, Gershon, you’ll say kadish.”

“Mama, I don’t go to shul anymore.” A woman floating overhead, her bloody apron flapping beside Gershon’s face, looked down at the floor, rubbing her hands, disapproving.

“Did I say go to shul? You don’t remember the mourners’ kadish? How do you think we’re going to get these dead out of here?” Milcah went to a drawer and retrieved a little yarmulke. Like a boy, Gershon put it on. When Milcah lit the candles, a group of women gathered around her.

“So, go ahead. The kadish,” Milcah whispered.

Gershon started to choke again. One of the dead, a young yeshive scholar whose beard was still growing in awkward tufts, clapped him on the back. Startled, Gershon coughed once and stood up. The first words of the kadish came out in a strangled squeak, and the yeshive boy shook his head, mocking. A girl in the corner hid a giggle behind the stump of her arm. Gershon turned red, his voice cracked once and then settled seriously in his chest. A real voice emerged, not the whine of someone beaten who has come home to cry in his mama’s lap. The ghosts stopped prying into Milcah’s things and closed their eyes.

“Go now, rest, we will remember you,” I heard my own voice singing, as soft as Milcah’s prayer. The ghosts were starting to float up to the ceiling, some with their heads upside down so they could hear the very last words of the kadish
—Aleynu va’al kol Yisrael, vi’imru amen
. By the time Gershon was done, all had disappeared.

I walked with Gershon to the baths and asked our yardworker to find Reb Kohn. Reb Kohn was delighted to see Gershon, who was, after all, news. He pumped his arm without thinking or noticing how it hurt and led him off. Milcah said I had to come right back to her, not stop to see my mother or Pesah, no matter how much I wanted. To tell the truth, I was frightened and wanted to go to them, but I liked how seriously Milcah treated me.

“Oy, Gutke,” she said when I got back. The house was full of burning herbs and Milcah was on her knees, scrubbing the floor. All the mirrors were covered. She got up, smoothing her skirts. “You must learn how to control yourself.”

“Me?”

“You. You have in yourself a very powerful window between the worlds.”

“What worlds?”

She laughed for the first time that day. “What worlds? How should I know? You think I can move back and forth like you do? You don’t know how you move?”

“No.” I didn’t think I had moved at all. I just became still and the ghosts arrived. It was one thing to hear murmurs, an occasional word in the well-water, to feel, sometimes, that it was more than the wind brushing my arm. But to be the cause of ghosts? I looked at my shoes. “I’m sorry.”

“Apologies have nothing to do with this. First you will have to accept that this happens to you. But inside you, you move—now I’ve seen it at least three or four times. It doesn’t only happen around me, does it?”

Maybe we were a bad combination, she was thinking, like mixing the wrong herbs together. But I remembered how I felt seeing the bathhouse sign when I was just a baby, and how I had been drawn to Golde’s room that night.

“No, I see and hear things other times, usually it just lasts for a minute,” I said. “But it’s when I’m with you that big things happen—the babies, the pogrom.” Maybe it wasn’t all my fault. I couldn’t look at Milcah, so I concentrated on a bunch of lavender hanging on the wall.

“Yes, that’s very wise, very true. The gates open in birth and death—and sex, but you’re too young for that. Yes, and you’re young. This may get weaker as you grow up. God forbid it should get stronger. So, now we know you have this talent, you can direct it.”