The Little Russian (46 page)

 

FOR A WHILE the rain stopped, but the sun didn’t come out. In fact the sky darkened again and the wind picked up and soon they were driving through a hail of white and pink blossoms from a stand of hawthorns. A heavy branch landed on the hood and careened off the windshield. It startled them so much that Hershel had to pull over and wait until his heart stopped hammering in his chest. Peering out through the windshield he saw a flash of lightning that shattered the sky and then a crack of thunder that seemed more like an explosion.

This time Hershel put her into gear and drove on, looking for a
widening in the road so he could turn around. The branches in an aspen grove were thrashing about in the wind, and the grass on the verge was nearly flattened to the ground. When he came to a bend, he slowed, turned the wheel sharply, and gave her a little gas until he made the turn and was heading back the way they came. It started to rain, not splashes on the windshield, but a deluge so dense that they had to pull over and wait. Lightning streaked across the sky and Hershel sat there watching it, afraid to admit how nervous he was. The hair on his arms was standing on end from the static electricity. He wondered if the tires would ground them or if they would end up a blackened crisp for some farmer to find. He looked over at Samuil, who sat very still, his face a white mask.

Staring out at the sky, Samuil asked, “Will the tires ground us?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” he said, without hesitation.

 

WHEN THERE was a break in the storm, Hershel pulled out the carburetor choke and pressed the starter button: She coughed and sputtered, but didn’t catch. He reset the hand spark and the throttle lever and pressed the starter again. This time she started on two cylinders, coughing pitifully.

“Please God,” he whispered, giving her a little gas. She coughed again and then, as if sighing in relief, she caught and roared into life. He let out a breath that he didn’t even know he was holding. Then he touched the dashboard with two fingers and brought them to his lips as if he were kissing the Torah.

“Let’s go home, Papa.”

He gunned the engine a few times, threw her into gear, and eased her out into the roadway, avoiding potholes full of water and mud.

When they walked into the comfortable house on North Wilson Avenue, Hershel could hear the sound of an English language record drifting down from upstairs. He heard a precise voice on the gramophone saying
I would like to go to the library.

Samuil shouted up the stairs. “Mama, we’re home.”

Berta appeared at the top of the stairs and leaned over the banister. “You’re home! Thank God!” Then as usual, whenever she was overcome by emotion, she lapsed into Yiddish. “Hershel, you took him out in this storm? Out on those roads?”

“English, Berta. Speak English.”

She sighed. It was frustrating having to put all her thoughts and emotions into a foreign tongue. “You want he should burn up? With all that . . .” Flicking her fingers in the air.

“Lightning, Mama.”

“Ya, lightning. What were you
tinking
?”

“It’s all right,
mishka
. I was watching out.”

“Watching out? Watching out for lightning? And then what? You were going to catch it in your hand?” Berta could no longer sweep down the stairs but she managed her limp by holding on to the banister.

“Can’t we have a little fun, Mama?”

“Fun, yes. But this?
Ach
, such foolishness.” She took Samuil’s face in her hand. “Do me a favor,
boitshikel
. Stay away from lightning. Now, take off your shoes. Olive just mopped the floor.”

She took their coats out to the porch to shake off the water.

“You should’ve seen it, Mama. It lit up the sky. It rained so hard I thought it was going to break the—”

Hershel waved a hand in front of his face to shush him. “We’ll just go up and get ready for supper,” Hershel said quickly, to change the subject. “What’s for dinner?”

Berta came back in with the coats and hung them in the closet. “Chicken and
knedla.”

“I like
knedlas.”

“So tell me something I don’t know.”

Their house was located in the best neighborhood in town. Their street was wide and divided by a median strip where maples and oaks grew among the serviceberries and dogwoods. It had a wide covered porch and tall windows to let in the light. There were two bathrooms, one upstairs, one down; a velvet settee in the parlor; and a Quick Meal porcelain stove with four burners and an oven in the kitchen.

 

HERSHEL STOPPED at the linen closet on his way to the bedroom to get a fresh towel. Berta was always complaining that he used so many that Olive couldn’t keep up. Usually the closet was filled with them and bedsheets too, except when Olive got behind with the laundry. Today there were only three left, so that when Hershel took one out he could see all the items stored in the back. There was his old Homburg that he knew he would never wear again. There was Berta’s yarn bag filled with needles and skeins and the beginnings of a chenille throw that had been started with enthusiasm but quickly abandoned. There was a photo album belonging to his sister, Rachel, and beneath that was the box.

The box had come shortly after they had arrived from Poland. Lhaye had sent it through Pavel, because it was difficult to get things out of the country. It was a simple pine box with green curlycues around the perimeter of the lid. It wasn’t large or heavy. When Hershel lifted it out of the closet, he could hear several items rattling around inside. He didn’t like to look at it. He wished that Berta had found some other place for it, possibly among her things in the armoire. It would have been nice if she had stored it away in a place where he never had to lay eyes on it. Of course, he never mentioned this to her. She wouldn’t have understood.

Hershel had no idea why he reached for it. Usually he went out of his way to avoid it. Maybe it was the dangerous storm that unsettled him and the fact that Samuil had been there with him. Berta was right. He shouldn’t have taken Samuil. It was no place for the boy.

He took the box to the bedroom, sat down on the bed, and opened the lid. Inside was a toy horse, beautifully rendered, tenderly cared for, with a long flowing mane that was still in good shape despite the fact that it had journeyed from the Berezina to Dulgaya Street and then all the way to America. There was a pair of gloves with violets on the cuffs. They hadn’t fared so well. They were dirty with holes in the fingers. There was a bell and a hair clip etched with violets, pink ribbons, and a silk bow. Hershel examined the contents, picking up the bell and ringing it and then quickly silencing it so that Berta wouldn’t
hear. All these items were nothing but a little girl’s treasures and yet they had such an effect on him. Shame, grief, and, above all, a hectic restlessness to get away.

 

HE HAD TWO schnapps before dinner and another one with the chicken. He could tell that Berta noticed by the way she looked at him, surprise at first, then with feigned disinterest so as to not embarrass him. Usually he was careful with his liquor. It was already a year into Prohibition and good liquor was not so easy to come by in Rice Lake. When he came up to bed, he saw that the linen closet door was ajar. He opened it and found that the towels had been rearranged to hide the box. For an instant, he felt an immense rush of tenderness for his wife. The ferocity of it caught him by surprise. She was already asleep when he crawled into bed beside her. She lay on her side, away from him. He wrapped himself around her and drew her close. She murmured something unintelligible in her half-waking state. He fell asleep with his face buried in her hair, smelling the rose petal soap she favored.

 

HE AWOKE around four in the morning, got dressed, and left the house. The night was clear and clean after the storm. Tangles of downed branches littered the street and a torrent of water still ran in the gutter. Water droplets rained down on him whenever the wind rattled the branches. The air was surprisingly warm.

He walked down North Wilson to South Main toward the outskirts of town. He passed Dick Hamilton’s brother-in-law, the one who came back from the Marne whole in body but not in mind. The two men glanced at each other as they passed on the wooden sidewalk. The young man was wearing his bedroom slippers and singing “America the Beautiful” in a loud voice as he shuffled along. When he stopped singing, Hershel glanced back to see why and caught him peeing in Mrs. Bronfstead’s camellias.

Hershel took a dirt road that led into the hayfields and cut across a pasture. He sloshed across the sodden meadow, coming within touching distance of the grazing cows. They stopped when he approached and watched him suspiciously. Once he had gone a fair distance he
turned back to them: unmoving hulks, cardboard cutouts against an inky sky.

When Hershel reached the edge of the pasture, he saw his destination: a grove of aspens crowning the hill. He welcomed the climb out of the muddy field. The mud and water had come in over his shoes and now his socks were soaked. He started up the trail just as it was getting light enough to see the buttercups growing at the base of the rocky outcroppings. When he reached the top he found a suitable boulder among the many strewn about and sat down. There were tiny pools of water caught in the depressions of the rock that soaked through his pants.

After a while he took out several pieces of paper and a pencil and sat there thinking about what he wanted to say. By then the sky had turned to a delicate blue. Red and pink ribbons banded the horizon. He didn’t want to write a prayer; he didn’t believe in God. Instead he wrote only short notes. He talked about how much he missed her, about her childhood, memories of Masha the cat, the park, riding on her pony. He wrote about coming to America, his regrets, his remorse in leaving her, stupid and unforgivable. He kept on writing, slowly draining the reservoir of shame, until he ran out of things to say. Then he hung the strips on the low-hanging branches, along with the bell.

When he was done, he sat back and watched them tremble in the morning breeze in concert with the new leaves. They reminded him of a quilt of butterflies, newly emerged from the cocoon, fanning their wings to dry them. The bell rang softly, and he listened as it mingled with the sound of the brook at the base of the hill.

Copyright © 2012 Susan Sherman All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sherman, Susan.
The little Russian / Susan Sherman.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-619-02029-0

1. Jewish women—Fiction. 2. Soviet Union—History—
1917–1936—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.H4676L58
2012 813’.6—dc23 2011037731

 

 

 

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