The River Midnight (12 page)

“What is this?” he asked in an aristocratic Polish. Between his eyebrows, there was a small white scar.

“Pardon me, sir,” she said. “Excuse me, pardon me. It was my
fault. I didn’t see where I was going.” Her Polish was good, she knew it was good, and yet she was sure that her accent and her kerchief and the darkness of her eyes said Jewess, and what business did she have on this beautiful avenue? Perhaps this man would think she was a thief and he would call a policeman who would demand her papers and she had nothing with her but a few kopecks to get some soup for Surala.

The man answered her in Yiddish. “Are you lost, madam?”

This was a Jew? This beardless man in the top hat? “Yes, sir. I was looking for Nalewki Street.”

“You have gone in quite the wrong direction. That is Marszałkowska Street. Many Jews live on that street, but only Polish is spoken there.”

“Is it very far from Nalewki?”

“I own a bookstore cafe on Nalewki and I would not walk. It will take you quite some time.”

“Then I had better start. Would you mind giving me directions, sir?”

“I have a better idea, madam. I must stop for a moment at my sister’s house on Marszałkowska and then I will take a carriage to the cafe. Please be my guest.” He held out his arm.

Faygela shook her head. “Thank you, no. I’ll walk.”

“But I cannot allow it. Are you not a fellow Jew?” She hesitated. “You see before you the director of a theater troupe. I know the villages. I may be unfamiliar to you, but your kind is quite familiar to me and it is far too easy for you to get lost again.”

“Were you ever in Blaszka?” she asked. He looked like the director of the Golem Players. She couldn’t be certain.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But there were so many small villages …”

Faygela knew that Hanna-Leah would warn her away from this stranger. Even Misha, who was afraid of nothing, would say that she should stick to her purpose. But Faygela was curious about these Polish-speaking Jews that could live on a broad boulevard so close to the theater. And besides, her feet were already sore. Could she really walk to Nalewki Street if it was so far? “Very well,” she said. The Director held out his arm and she put her hand in the crook of his elbow.

T
HE MAID
came to the door. “Your wrap, madam?” she asked Faygela, looking her up and down.

“You mean my shawl? No, I’ll keep it, thank you.” It was silly the way she was clutching the shawl around herself, Misha’s red shawl, to hide the drabness of her black dress. Faygela looked past the maid. In the room beyond, she could see men and women like those in Theater Square, silken and bright, their shadows thrown on the wall by the harsh light of an electric chandelier. Someone was playing the grand piano.

“Chopin’s
Polonnaise
,” the Director mumured. A woman separated herself from the crowd and came toward them. “Dear sister …”

“Here is your package. I don’t know why the publisher cannot remember to send the books directly to the cafe. And who is your little friend?” The Director’s sister was blonde, her hair in a crown of curls, her earrings Polish eagles with a ruby in each beak.

“She was lost, looking for Nalewki Street,” the Director said. “One of our newcomers from the shtetl.” Taking a pipe from his pocket, he flicked a match against his front teeth, the little flame causing the rubies in his sister’s earrings to sparkle.

“You must come in for a minute,” the Director’s sister said. “My friends are just discussing the situation in the shtetls. They would be most interested to meet a person from—where did you say you were from?”

“Blaszka. My name is Faygela Shnir.” The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of books. Books in German, French, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, English. Faygela moved toward them, forgetting Surala, forgetting Warsaw. What would she find here? Every thought she could think. Every question she could ask. Only to hold those books in her hands, to smell the leather.

“Come in then. This is my young friend from Krakow just returning from Paris, the painter and dramatist, Stanisław Wyspianski. And this is Isaac Goldman, a student of I. L. Peretz. Please meet Faygela Shnir from the shtetl.”

“You know Mr. Peretz?” Faygela asked.

“Yes, personally,” the young man said. He wore a fashionably cut coat, the other one, Stanisław Wyspianski, a cape. The two men nodded politely, each of them taking Faygela’s arm as they walked up and down the salon. Soon they were shaking fingers at each other above Faygela’s head while she looked from one to the other.

“But of what use is it to awaken your fellow Jews from their ignorance if they do not know their own land? Where is the spirit of Poland?” Wyspianski asked. “It is the national question that is of paramount importance. Our Israelite brothers must join us as they did during the insurrection of ’63. By making our struggle their own, the Jews will earn emancipation.”

Faygela nodded. Yes, her father used to say that very thing.

“No, dear sir,” Goldman argued. “After the assassination of the Tsar in ’81, a Jew cannot believe in brotherhood. Who can forget the pogroms?”

Indeed, Faygela remembered the mourning. Meyer, Hanna-Leah’s father, dead. Killed during the pogrom in Warsaw—and how he died, unthinkable. Hershel was wounded. The Puks lost one of their sons.

“You cannot take that seriously,” the young man in the cape said. “It was just a ploy. The people were whipped up by the authorities and the Jews made the scapegoats to break up resistance against tsarist oppression.”

There was a time when many people in Blaszka wanted to learn to read Polish so they could prove their worthiness to be true Poles with the same rights as Christians. After the pogroms, no one cared about learning to read Polish anymore. They just wanted to live. That’s all, just to live, she thought.

Goldman was shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No, I cannot agree with you. My friend Peretz says that a Jew is not a Pole whether he wears a caftan or not. A man must be who he is. He can’t escape it.”

“Let us ask her,” Wyspianski said, turning to stare at Faygela.

She flushed under his gaze. Men in Blaszka did not look at women like that. “I think,” she said quietly, then louder, “I think …”

“What can she know of world affairs, tyrannized by the authorities in a stagnant backwater?” Goldman asked.

“Untainted by the false manners of this …” Soon they were wagging fingers again, voices fast and sharp.

“Excuse me,” Faygela said. “I am not in another kingdom. I am right here, do you see?”

“Pardon me, have I offended you?” Goldman asked, taking Faygela’s hand.

She pulled it away. “Pardon me, gentlemen. I will leave you to
your great thoughts. Such a refined climate is not for me.” The Director was standing near the doorway. Faygela made her way toward him. “Please let me by. I’ve decided to walk after all.”

“But Mrs. Shnir, there are so many interesting people for you to meet here. You see my friends, Stefan and Albert?” the Director asked, pointing with his pipe to the two men sitting on a settee. One was lighting the other’s cigarette, cupping the flame. As the first man thanked him, the other’s hand brushed his cheek. “Charming people. What do you make of them?” The men were leaning toward each other, laughing quietly at a private joke.

“You think we hear about nothing in Blaszka? I read the German newspaper. In Berlin there are women who cut their hair short, put on men’s dress clothes, and dance with each other. Does that make it something new? Believe me, it’s not only in Berlin or Warsaw that such things go on. Only now all of a sudden someone decided that it has to have a name.”

“For the sake of knowledge, madam,” the Director said, stoking the tobacco in his pipe until the embers glowed.

She had the distinct, but unreasonable, impression that her own words were being thrown at her. “Let me by. I have to go.”

“Just keep walking up Marszałkowska past the Karsiński Gardens and you’ll come to Nalewki. If you want to return to the Old Town you will have to turn right and if you head left, you will eventually reach the Miła cemetery.”

“Thank you,” she murmured.

He bowed.

F
AYGELA FOUND
a room on Stawki, two blocks past Miła. The ramshackle house belonged to a Jewish family of wagoners. Poor people. Rough language. But there was a public kitchen, grass, even a cow or two, here at the northern edge of Warsaw. In another week Surala could help in the house and the baby smelled milky. On
Shabbas
, Faygela and Surala went to the wagoners’ synagogue and Faygela began to look forward to sitting with her own girls soon.

On the 23rd of May, a Wednesday, Faygela came home. Bursting into the village square, she threw open the door to the bakery, ready to call out,
Sholom aleikhem
, children, In a good hour, Shmuel. But her words dried in her mouth. She saw a house of mourning, the girls with red eyes, Shmuel opening a sack of flour with trembling hands, and Berel sitting under the table, his thumb in his mouth, his little shirt stained with pee.

“Shmuel, what is it? Girls, what happened? Ruthie, Ruthie, where is my Ruthie?” Faygela cried, dropping her bag.

“Mama, you’re home,” the girls said, crowding around her, clutching her arm, her dress, her neck.

Faygela looked at Shmuel. His head was bowed in shame. “Ruthie was arrested yesterday,” he said in a voice so low she thought she didn’t hear him right.

“Shmuel, what did you say?”

“It’s true,” he said loudly. “She was carrying pamphlets. The young people, all of them were taking pamphlets to Plotsk. I don’t understand it, Faygela. What did they want to do?”

“What are you talking about?” There was some mistake. Ruthie must be helping Misha pick herbs, that was all.

“It’s true,” he said. “I saw with my own eyes. They showed me one of the pamphlets.”

“Who let this happen? Who? Didn’t you know what she was doing? I said I shouldn’t leave. You don’t lift a finger to keep the girls in place. God in Heaven, what can you expect from a man? But Misha should have known. Ruthie looks up to her like a queen. If anything happened to Ruthie, it’s her fault.”

“Misha didn’t know anything,” Shmuel said.

“Didn’t know, didn’t know? And my Ruthie’s in jail?”

“Faygela, Misha has her own problems. She’s pregnant.”

“That’s impossible. She would have told me.”

Shmuel looked down, embarrassed. “They say she just started to show after you left.”

“So that’s it? I’m gone for three weeks and everything’s upside down. I trusted Misha to watch out for my girls. I thought she was the one woman in Blaszka who knew how to take care of herself. And now look. I’ll never say a word to her again. Never.”

“Faygela, the girls and boys did it all on their own. In the woods.”

“Emma was the ringleader. Ruthie won’t admit it, but it could only be Emma. Everyone says so,” Freydel added. “They were using
Zayda
’s printing press.”

Faygela held onto the girls tightly, sure that if she let go she would fall to the floor. “My father’s old printing press? It can’t be.”

“They found it in the woods in the old hut.”

Time seemed to collide: 1863—her father, a young man printing tracts calling the people to revolt; 1894—her daughter, her firstborn in the broken-down shed with the rusted press. “No, it’s some mistake. Ruthie is so good, she wouldn’t do anything wrong. We have to tell them.” Faygela pushed the girls aside. “Shmuel, you have to tell them. They’ll send her away from us. She’ll die. Shmuel.” She was shaking him by the shoulders and he was crying.

The justice system was a simple one. It consisted of flogging, hanging, and exile to Siberia, and the only proof of innocence was a bribe large enough to placate the Tsar’s minions.

D
URING THE
preliminary investigation at the prison in Plotsk, the interrogators pinched Ruthie’s breasts and slapped her till she cried, but they didn’t break anything. She was a pretty girl and they had ideas for later. “Who are you protecting? Just tell us everything,” the deputy warden said in Polish. To his assistant, he added in Russian, “The girl looks a little stupid, don’t you think? But she’s a nice little morsel.”

Ruthie was doing her best to look stupid, fluttering and stuttering, signing her name with an X and coughing every so often, especially when the guards came near her, as if she had something catching. “I found the basket on my way home from Plotsk,” she said. “It was so pretty with the blue ribbon woven into it. I never had one like that. And I thought the papers would be good for wrapping fish. I didn’t know it was anything bad. I can’t read. If I knew, well, you could cut my hand off before I’d touch it. I hope you catch those troublemakers
from Plotsk.” Then she coughed and hacked, spitting into her sleeve. “Blood,” she said cheerfully. “Well, everyone spits a little blood, don’t they?” she asked the deputy warden, who was wrinkling his nose. The guards, however, were not the least put off by Ruthie’s display.

“You’re from Blaszka,” one of them said thoughtfully. “Didn’t I hear of that?”

Afraid that someone would remember the insurrection of ’63, the mill blown up, the printed pamphlets, Ruthie quickly said, “Everyone knows about Blaszka. It’s famous for its cheese. Did you ever eat Alta-Fruma’s cheese? It’s like no one else’s. My father will bring you some. With some vodka to wash it down.”

This was the kind of thing that the interrogators liked to hear. “A little gift wouldn’t be out of order either,” the guard said, rubbing Ruthie’s chin between his thumb and his forefinger. “And of course, something in appreciation of His Honor, the Governor.” His hand smelled of fish and onions.

F
OR SOMEONE
in the Tsar’s service, a posting far from the centers of power in Moscow and St. Petersburg was a rebuke. The farthest outpost was Poland, or Vistulaland as it was officially called, and unofficially Purgatory. But the empire was big, and the railway lines short, so that every administrator of the provinces could make up his own version of the Tsar’s regulations. His Honour the Governor of Plotsk, in his villa on the hill, sighed extravagantly, removing his fat little legs from a velvet stool as his secretary brought him the latest communique from St. Petersburg. After reading it, the Governor ordered the public flogging of a woman who had been caught teaching Polish. This gave him a good appetite for his lunch, brought in on numerous silver serving dishes emblazoned with the crests of exiled Polish counts. His secretary threw a pile of silver rubles, a bribe from some distraught family, into a drawer, where it rattled among the other little piles of meaningless village life.