Broken Song (17 page)

He had passed a small bridge that spanned a creek. The sun was just rising, and a fierce almost blinding light spread over the horizon. He cupped his hands over his brow and squinted to see the far edge of the field. They would have spent the night at this edge near the forest, probably in the forest. Aaah! Reuven thought he saw something over there, a trace of smoke from a dying campfire. He pulled up the horse and tied it to a stump near the road. Then he took out the soup pot and some bowls and he began walking out across the field.

A middle-aged, stiff-jointed man came out from a stand of birch trees.

“Hello!” Reuven cried cheerfully to the man.

A young girl of no more than nine or ten clutched his arm and looked out from under tangles of long dark hair with enormous gray eyes.

“You are Reuven?” The man stepped forward. The little girl moved with him as if she were locked onto him.

“Reuven Bloom. Yes I am. Quick, start the fire again, I brought you soup.”

Then a small distinct voice emanated from behind the tangled hair. “Do you have a firebrand?”

“What? Say that again, child?” he asked.

“Do you have a firebrand? Wolf said you were a firebrand.”

For some reason Reuven thought this remarkably funny, especially coming out of a child’s mouth. He hated when people laughed at children. It was so easy to hurt their feelings. But he began to chuckle, and then he could not help it. He flung back his head and laughed. When he finally recovered, he noticed that the child did not seem offended at all but was looking at him with great curiosity.

“Why don’t you help me get this soup on the fire? I forgot a spoon to stir it with, however. Do you have one?”

“No.” She shook her head solemnly. “But I’ll find you a stick.” Others began to come out of the woods. There was a woman who was introduced as Ida. She
held a baby in her arms and a toddler clung to her skirts. Then there was another woman in her midtwenties who wore spectacles and a very serious expression. She reminded Reuven of the women in the cafès in Vilna. She helped an ancient-looking man who was bent over and leaning on a cane. He was introduced as Zayde Sol. He mumbled something when he was introduced, growled deeply in his throat as if to clear it of a river, and then spat on the ground.

“Charming,” muttered the bespectacled woman.

“Where’s Sashie?” someone asked.

“Oh Sashie, the little one—the girl, she went to fetch something to stir the soup with,” Reuven replied. At that moment she came back.

“A birch stick. I peeled it myself. So it’s very clean now.”

“Perfect,” Reuven said, and began stirring the soup with it.

The little girl called Sashie was watching him carefully. He heard her asking the woman in a low voice what a firebrand was.

“Oh, it’s a revolutionary. You know what that is,” the woman answered. Reuven pretended to be focused on the soup, but he was listening to the conversation.

“What do you mean, a revolutionary, Aunt Ghisa?” the little girl asked. “Is it something musical?”

Reuven nearly dropped the stick in the soup pot.

“Musical?” Ghisa said in a perplexed voice. “No. You know, it’s someone who stirs things up, inflames people with ideas, tries to turn things upside down to make thing better politically.”

“Huh,” said the girl.

Reuven began serving up the soup first to Ida, then to Ghisa, and then to Sashie. “I did remember bowls,” he said. He bent down and handed her the bowl. “Even firebrands like me still believe in serving ladies first. Here you go!” The huge gray eyes looked up and right through him. Reuven nearly flinched at the intensity of her gaze.

“You’re no firebrand, Mr. Bloom. You are filled with music!”

Reuven had never felt anything like this. “Who … how do you know that?”

“I just know it,” she said, setting down her soup bowl and folding her arms across her narrow chest.

He looked at her. There was no figuring these things out. “Just … just stay right there. No. I mean, get up and serve the rest of the soup while I fetch something from the wagon.”

He returned a minute later with his violin. Tucking it under his chin, he put his foot on the edge of a rock. He began slowly. A procession of notes stirred the air. The sound was hushed, delicate but never frail. The girl sat on a log near his feet. He could look straight down the fingerboard and see her small fragile face. The music went right into her. He could tell. It found a resonance within her. She did not merely sense the vibrations, she became part of them. She was a completely musical creature.

Later that morning Reuven stood in the middle of the road and played his violin as the family drove off. Of all
the difficult things Reuven Bloom ever had to do, this oddly enough was one of the most difficult. It was another good-bye. His entire life seemed to be made of good-byes, Reuven suddenly thought. He was very tired of it, tired of good-bye, tired indeed of revolution. The idea of leaving the Bund no longer shocked him as it once might have. Not since his meeting with Muttle. He had no more anger. He was an impatient man now and he was simply sick of standing in the wreckage of broken things.

Sashie stood up in the back of the wagon as they drove away. She stood straight and steady and never took her eyes off Reuven Bloom as he continued to play the beautiful music. The notes wrapped around her, streamed through her, and, she would later say, “filled me with stars.”

Sashie stayed standing as she and Reuven grew smaller and smaller in each other’s vision, until they were little specks on each other’s horizons. And even when they were mere specks, the filaments of the music growing dimmer and dimmer seemed to connect them and they knew that the other was there until the wagon disappeared around a bend in the road.

NINETEEN

AMERICA, ELLIS ISLAND, NEW YORK

1904

“Bloom—B-L-O-O-M. First name, Reuven.” He looked down. The man had written “Rubin” not “Reuven.” Oh well. So he would be Rubin Bloom here in America. At least he had passed through all the inspection stations. Poked, prodded, and questioned by interpreters, he had been declared lice free and fit for America. The
Goldeneh Medina
. And now he was to go through the wide door and somehow among the hundreds of people on the other side, find his baby sister. But she wouldn’t be a baby anymore. Rachel would be almost eight years old. The moment he stepped through the door he felt swamped, as a sea of indistinct faces, their mouths moving around the words of a dozen unintelligible languages, rushed toward him. How would he ever find Rachel? At eight she would still be too short to show up in this crowd. He scanned the faces. Would he recognize Basia? It had been six years. An adult would not change in six years as much as a child. Perhaps he should concentrate on looking for Basia.

“No smoking here! No smoking! Sir.”

A voice barked, “It’s not lit, you fool.” Reuven turned to see what was going on. There was an odd sight, a slightly illogical assemblage in which the parts didn’t quite come together. It was like sorting out the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Reuven saw a burly man wearing a fashionable homburg hat with an odd contraption atop his shoulders. It loomed above his head like another hat. There was something sticking out of his mouth, and then over the wide fur lapels of his coat two skinny legs in thick wool stockings hung down. A child’s arm reached over the top of the man’s hat and plucked the cigar from his mouth.

“Take it out, Uncle Chizzie,” she said.

“Aaach! Women!” The white tufted eyebrows flew up in exasperation.

Reuven froze. His mouth dropped open but no words came out. The other hat was no hat. The hat was a girl, no longer a baby.

“Rachel!” Reuven bellowed, and tore through the crowd, dragging his bundles. On top of her uncle’s shoulders, Rachel seemed to dance. The cigar flew up and down. The homburg tumbled through the air. A cloud of white hair swirled up like a cumulous cloud.

“Chizzie!”

Then they were in each other’s arms: Rachel, still on her uncle’s shoulders, embracing Reuven’s head; Chizzie pressing him to his chest in a bear hug. They created an amazing tangle of arms and legs.

“My God, this is your leg. Such a long leg,” Reuven said, as his sister kept hugging his head. Then Rachel had
scrambled down and was standing in front of him. “Such a tall girl!”

They were caught in each other’s gaze. “You are so different. So big,” Reuven said.

“You …” she paused. A slow, almost shy smile spread over her face. “You look just like Aunt Basia said you would.” She gasped and flung her arms around his waist.

“So this is your old friend, the very same violin,” Chizor said, and touched the wood of the Ceruti lightly. They were in Basia’s apartment on Delancey Street on the Lower East Side of New York.

“How did you come to find it again?” Basia asked.

“Oh, it is too long a story for now,” Reuven replied.

Perhaps too long, but also perhaps too desperate or violent. Basia and Chizor exchanged glances. There was not a refugee from Russia or Poland these days who did not harbor a terrible story.

“Besides,” Reuven continued, “I want to hear your stories. How have you learned English so well, Rachel?”

“I go to school. Real school. Girls do that here in America. I sit at a desk. I write on pieces of paper. I have my own pencil box. But I know how to use a dip pen and I am learning to write cursive. We have spelling tests and geography lessons.”

“Can you tell me where the Great Lakes are?”

“That’s easy. That is where Uncle Chizor lives. He came all the way from Minneapolis to be here when he heard you were coming.”

“But tell Reuven how you really learned to write so well in English,” Basia said.

“You mean my book, Auntie?”

“Yes, of course.”

Reuven watched her as she went into the other room for her book. He had not taken his eyes off her all evening. She was indeed the very same Rachel, bigger of course and speaking English as well as Yiddish now. But her spirit was the same. He could tell. Willful, positive. It was right that he had let her come here. She now returned with a large scrapbook.

She sat down on the floor by Reuven’s feet and opened it to the first page. On this page there was a lumpy-looking figure with stick legs and on his back there was a basket with a small round face peeking out. Underneath in Yiddish, written in the hand of an adult, were the words: “This is me. Rachel Bloom. On my brother’s back. We leave Russia.” And underneath the words was the English translation.

Miri spoke now. “We remembered when you first came to our apartment in the alley off Szeroka Street and how you told the story of carrying Rachel on your back out of Russia. It was Yossel’s and my favorite story. We made Mama tell it all the time. And when Rachel learned how to talk, she remembered things and added to the story. Show him the pictures of the snow cave, Rachel.” Rachel turned a few pages in the book to another drawing.

“You see,” Rachel said, “I didn’t know how to make snow on white paper, so I painted most of the paper blue and left the white for the cave. There are you and me, and there is the basket. There is not one picture in the book without the basket.”