Broken Song (4 page)

That night when Reuven went to bed, he asked into the darkness, “Why?” But there was only the sound of the cricket.

FIVE

IN THE sleepy moments of the first morning that Reuven awakened after Muttle’s kidnapping, he felt a terrible heaviness within him, and also a darkness. It was as if the shadows of the night had somehow crept into his body. It did not matter that it was daylight, that the sun shone with the bright ferocity of early spring. He was confused in those first minutes. He vaguely knew that something was terribly wrong—wrong with him? Wrong with the world? And yet he could not quite remember why he was feeling this deep sadness. Then it slid over him, just like the spots of sun on his blanket. His mind fully wakened to the reality. His best friend was gone.

That was the first morning. Now he had not grown accustomed to it, but he was no longer confused. It was the first thing he thought about every morning and the last thing at night, and then a thousand times during the day.

Seven weeks it had now been; almost fifty days had passed. Nothing had been normal, and yet everyone had to pretend it was. That was perhaps the worst of it. His mother went on cooking and cleaning. His father went on hauling grain to various millers as part of his contract with some local farmers. His sister studied and took care
of Rachel. Rachel went on playing, and he, Reuven, practiced his violin. His playing had not suffered. Was this bad? He felt almost guilty for playing so well.

No one had held a second seder on the night of Muttle’s capture. People were too scared. But now it was time for another holiday, Shavuot, the celebration of the Torah and the giving of the Ten Commandments. It was on Shavuot that children, when they were three years old, began their formal studies of Hebrew. That was when Reuven and Muttle had first met, almost twelve years before.

It was rumored that the village council made up lists of boys who could be drafted. They traded the lists for favors from the tsar’s government—favors such as allowing their villages not to be burned, their families not to be murdered, their study houses and synagogues not to be destroyed. And everyone knew that there were Jew catchers, many of them Jewish, who snatched boys from the religious schools. There was a famous one from the Polish town of Orla who traveled far. His name was Lejb Tate, and he was said to be a strange and sadistic man, but a Jew nonetheless, who worked on a quota system for the tsar—so many Jewish boys delivered each year, for which he was paid handsomely. It was said that some village councils actually hired Lejb Tate secretly. On the councils there were scholarly rebbes. “Can you believe it, and they call themselves holy men?” Reuven’s mother’s strange mechanical voice came back to him. No, Reuven could not believe it for one minute.

Tonight those holy men, if they dared, would be praying in the synagogue all night long. Such was the
custom. They would read from the Book of Prophets. They would read the Song at the Red Sea.

Reuven’s mother and his sister were in the kitchen. Suddenly his father spoke. “Come, Reuven, we’ll go to synagogue.”

“Really, Papa?” Reuven looked up with surprise from the sheets of music he was studying before supper. Reuven saw his father looking at his mother’s and Shriprinka’s doughy fingers. The two women stopped what they were doing, but baby Rachel kept banging on a pot. For this, Reuven was thankful. He saw the resolve in his father’s eyes. His father was no great scholar, but he was a Jew and he would not be bullied out of his beliefs, he would not be prevented from reading Torah on this evening.

There were more people in the synagogue than Reuven had expected, including his Uncle Chizor. Reuven and his father would not stay all night like many, but he was glad that they had arrived in time for the reading from Exodus of the miracle of the Red Sea.

He squeezed his eyes shut and pictured the scene. Reuven never imagined the sea as completely dry. There was just enough water to wade in, to splash, and kick up. There might be a ball the children could play with, and the sun would shine brightly. It would be very hot, but the splashing of the water would cool the people down. And Moses was not the big towering stern figure. He was kind, and he would speak to the children in a very soft voice, not the one that gave the commandments, but like a very gentle teacher, the likes of which Reuven had
certainly never known. “Don’t tarry, little ones,” he would say. “There is still a far piece to travel. We must get on with it. I know you’re all having fun, but splashing and frolicking in Red Sea puddles won’t do just now. We’ll never make it to the Promised Land at this rate. Hurry along, Zipporah. And you too, Jacob and Yitzak and Rachel and Reuven.”

Miracles
, Reuven thought.
Did anyone ever get tired of thinking about miracles
? When he grew up, he would like to compose an entire concerto. He would call it the Miracle Concerto for the Violin in D major.

Reuven and his family were in the back of the room. Up toward the front, he saw Reb Mendel and several of the village’s most scholarly and holy men. Had any of these holy men been the ones to put the name of Isaac, the orphan, on the list? For the first time in a while, Reuven thought about poor Isaac. All these days he had grieved over the loss of Muttle, his best friend, and God knew the village had grieved over Muttle, their prize student. But had anyone given a thought to poor Isaac? Maybe they didn’t deserve miracles.

Reuven’s father nudged him in the ribs, the sign that they would be leaving. They followed Uncle Chizor out into the street. The evening was damp. A mist hung in the air outside the synagogue. Chizor took a small enamel box from his pocket, snapped it open, and got a pinch of snuff. Uncle Chizor was very fashionable, at least for Berischeva. He liked his snuff, and he ordered expensive brandy from Warsaw, and he had a large collection of books. Chizor often talked of moving to Vilna in Poland, and he always promised to take Reuven with
him. Vilna was a center of music and culture and literature. There Reuven could study with the great violin teachers. As a tailor, Chizor made a good living. But he dreamed a rich man’s dreams of drinking tea from magnificent silver samovars, served not in glasses but in porcelain teacups. He dreamed of leather-bound books and rich fabrics that he rarely touched in his everyday trade except, of course, when he tailored for the Baron Radzinsky.

“Well, boys!” Uncle Chizor always called them boys when it was just the three of them together. Reuven liked it. It made him feel as if he was part of a daring rugged little society. Not like these holy men, who could not see beyond their prayer books. “So we got away with it again!”

“Got away with what?” Reuven asked, but as soon as the question was out he felt stupid, for he had known the answer.

“Worshipping our God!” Chizor exclaimed. “What kind of a crazy place is this where you have to fear for your life to pray? My last time.”

“What do you mean your last time? You giving up being a Jew?” Aaron Bloom asked.

“Don’t be an idiot. Here, have a cigar.” Chizor drew two out from his inside pocket. They stopped walking, and in the dim light of a street lamp that hung in the mist like a blurred pearl, he struck a match and lit the end of his brother’s cigar and then his own. A rich dark smell swirled up in the dampness of the night. “Good, isn’t it?” Aaron Bloom grunted his assent. “Havana.”

“What?” Reuven and his father both said at once.

“Havana—cigars from Cuba. They’re the best.”

“Havana? Cuba? What’s that?” Reuven was glad his father had asked and not him.

“An island! Cuba’s an island. Havana is the capital.”

“Where? The Black Sea?” Reuven blurted out.

Chizor smacked his forehead in disbelief. “No! The Caribbean.”

“The Caribbean!” Both Reuven and his father said the word slowly. It had a music, a rhythm that Reuven had never before heard in any word. That it was the name of a sea was even better. “The Caribbean.” He repeated the word slowly and perfectly.

“Yes, it is a sea just west of the Atlantic and south when you get to America. Yes, you turn left and then go down.” Chizor was inscribing the air with the glowing tip of his cigar.

“Uncle Chizor, how did you get a cigar all the way from there?”

“The baron,” both Aaron and Chizor said in unison. Of course it was the baron, who could provide everything from sheet music of Dvo?ák to cigars from a place called Cuba that floated in a sea that sang its name.

Aaron Bloom coughed, cleared his throat, and took a puff on his cigar. “So Chizzie, what is this about tonight being your last Shavuot service?”

Uncle Chizor stopped walking and held his glowing cigar aloft, as if to punctuate whatever came next. “Last in this
farshtinkener
country.”

“
Farshtinkener
country? Chizzie. It is our home.”

“Tell the tsar that, Aaron. And it’s going to get worse.”

“How so?” Reuven’s father asked.

“New laws against Jews. We can’t do this. We can’t do that. We’re no longer permitted to do business on Sunday or any of the Christian holidays. No more mortgages. And every day we hear about another pogrom. A supplier of damask I have dealt with for years now is forbidden to sell to me because I am a Jew. And that’s the least of it. It’s crazy. In what other country are Jews forced to serve in the army, and then that same army is given license to tear through their own villages and burn them? You know, I heard a story that in Bukova a mother cut off her boy’s fingers so he would not be conscripted into the tsar’s army.” Reuven curled his hands in his pockets. He felt the calluses on his string hand against the softness of his palm.

Chizor looked up to the black sky swirling with stars, as if appealing to God. “So what’s to be done? People either leave or get mad.”

“What do you mean, Uncle? What do people do when they get mad?”

His uncle slid his eyes first toward Reuven’s father, as if he was asking for permission.

“The Bund,” Aaron said in a barely audible whisper.

“There are people,” Chizor said quietly, “who stay but try to change things. These are very angry people; some call them revolutionaries.”

“What do they do?” Reuven asked.

“They organize strikes, worker strikes, for better pay, better conditions. Some do sabotage.”

“Sabotage? Sabotage what?”

“Weapons in the tsar’s armories, maybe train tracks.” Chizor flicked the ashes from his cigar. “But you see,
Reuven, I am not a revolutionary. I am a tailor. I have nobody to save except myself. I have anger. But I guess not enough to stay and turn the whole place upside down. And I have no patience. Yes, I am an impatient man. Very impatient, and that is why I choose to leave.”

There was a fierceness in his uncle’s voice, and the glow of the cigar now clamped between his teeth as he spoke cast a red shadow on his face. He looked quite angry to Reuven. His eyes were like two furious dashes. His black brows with their tufts of white slid together at steep angles. His mouth drew back in a weird grin, with the cigar still clamped between his square stained teeth. He looked like the devil, a
dybbuk
come to life on this little alley off Krupinsky. There was silence, an uncomfortable one. The smoke, the mist hung between them. Reuven bit his lip lightly.

“Uncle Chizor where are you going? Poland? Warsaw? Vilna?”

“Naw,” he said roughly, then spat into the gutter. “They’re still too close. No good for a Jew.”

“Chizzie, are you going to America?” Aaron Bloom asked.

“Probably, but who knows? Maybe the Caribbean.” He winked at Reuven. The old Uncle Chizor was back, not a trace of the
dybbuk
.

The three continued to walk up the hill of the narrow street that twisted like a corkscrew.

“New York, they say New York is good, Chizor,” said Aaron.

“Ah New York—every tailor goes to New York. They got too many tailors there already. I’ll go some-place
where I can stand out. I don’t know, maybe Canada, Montreal, Chicago, or someplace out west—the prairie—Minnesota.”

“Minna—what?” Reuven asked

“Minnesota.”

Reuven walked quietly as his father and his uncle continued to talk. Reuven wished his father would consider such a thing, but he never would. He knew his father. His father believed that Russia was their country. Their home. That they had a right to be here. Besides, his father had a wife and three children. Uncle Chizor had nothing but fine books and bottles of good brandy. He could leave tomorrow and take nothing, or perhaps a few books and a couple of bottles of brandy.