The River Midnight (15 page)

On the eve of Yom Kippur, before it was time to go to the synagogue, Faygela picked mint from Misha’s garden and brewed a pot of tea for her. Leaving
The Israelite
on the table, she said she would come back with something to brighten the room before she dressed for services. In the woods while she was gathering wildflowers, Faygela saw, as she had so many times before, her father’s ghost walking along the riverbank. She ran after him, stumbling, calling. He stopped and turned. “Faygela, Faygela, there you are.”

“Here I am, Papa. Here.”

“Of course you are. And so am I,” he said smiling at her tenderly as he faded away.

In the balcony the women sit on the hard benches, waiting to rise for Kol Nidrei. There is no whispering, no gossip, no pointing of chins, no leaning together over delicious secrets. Mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law hold hands, sisters sit arm in arm, and even the babies are quiet. There is hardly room to breathe, the women sit so close together up here, near the roof of the synagogue. But who can breathe? Time is cracking open. The candles flare, sparks faintly snapping in the stillness.

*  *  *

I
N THE
coming year, the last Tsar of Russia will ascend the throne and wed the granddaughter of the Queen of England. Marie Skłodowska will marry Pierre Curie. A Jewish-French officer named Dreyfus will be court-martialed and sent to Devil’s Island, witnessed by a reporter named Theodor Herzl who will write
Das Ghetto.
Freud will publish
Studies On Hysteria
and H. G. Wells will publish
The Time Machine.
The Lumière brothers will show the first movie to thirty-three people in the basement of a cafe in Paris, a two-minute clip of an oncoming train and the workers leaving the Lumière factory.

In six years, Stanisław Wyspianski will write an acclaimed drama called
The Wedding
, in which a Jewish woman will call forth the poetic spirit of Poland. She will wear a black dress and a red shawl.

Influenced by Wyspianski’s work, I. L. Peretz will write a Yiddish play,
At Night In the Old Market
, published in 1907. Like
The Wedding
, it will be a symbolic drama in verse, blurring the line between the real and the unreal, the living and the dead. In the same year, Sholem Asch will publish a Yiddish play
The God of Vengeance
, in which a brothel-keeper comes to a bad end. A minor element of the play involves young Jewish lovers, both women, who tenderly kiss onstage.

In ninety years, the Polish director Andrzej Wajda will film
The Wedding
, its liberation themes resonating with the struggle between Poland and the Soviet Union. In it a Jewish woman with eyes like coals, a red shawl around her shoulders, will fling wide the shutters of a closed window.

But today, as the ram’s horn brings in the New Year of 5655 along the banks of the Vistula River and its small tributaries, Warsaw is still Warsaw and Blaszka is Blaszka, less than a dot on the map. Yet in the new year, Faygela will show Hanna-Leah and Misha a story in
The Jewish Annual
, titled “The Village of Mud and Pearls” by Faygela Bas-Yekhiel. Faygela, the daughter of Yekhiel.

Emma floated in delirium. Above her was the Lower East Side of New York, and below her was Blaszka. An angel of the revolution with huge, shining red wings and a halo of burnished steel floated beside her. Wearing a silver medallion of Karl Marx on a black ribbon around his neck, he carried a placard that read
CLOSED SHOP
. 8
HOURS
.
IN UNITY IS STRENGTH
.

In the nothingness where she floated, it wasn’t day or night, not dawn or dusk. She could hear and see clearly, though it all seemed far away and yet amusing, like a drama about strangers. It wasn’t wet, but she swam. It wasn’t cold, but she wore a patchwork of woolen garments. A piece of cloak, a bit of fur, a blue shirtwaist, a jacket sleeve.

From below her in Blaszka she heard a voice crying. It sounded like her great-aunt but that couldn’t be. Alta-Fruma didn’t cry. “For this the girl was sent back from America? They should be struck with typhus themselves, the fine people from the United Hebrew Charities. These are Jews? Murderers.”

“I know what it is to nearly lose a child,” Faygela said. “But there was no choice. A pair of orphans, where were they to go? Emma and Izzie are lucky you sent for them. How long would the boy last in a workhouse?”

“He was the delicate one. I never gave a thought to her and now look. She’s burning up.”

“Has Emma been able to drink anything?” Ruthie asked.

“Not a thing. Every hour another girl or boy comes to the door. Little Henya the seamstress or Nahum the baker’s apprentice, asking, How is Emma, is she any better? Did she eat the oranges? The young people collected every spare kopeck they had to buy Emma oranges. They know she has a passion for them. Who ever has a single orange in Blaszka? Now she has three and she can’t even taste a slice of one.”

“Then let her smell them. We’ll put the oranges beside her bed. Squeeze a few drops onto the cloth and wet her lips.”

E
MMA FLOATED
contentedly in her delirium, looking down beyond Alta-Fruma’s house under the willow trees at the edge of Blaszka. Though it was night everything she saw shone as if it were burning with light. There was the dairyhouse near the river, and there the churn she’d knocked down when she fainted. The black cow was licking her calf under the chin. Emma looked across the green woods, past the clearing where the printing press had been dismantled, to the low roofs of Blaszka with their chimneys leaning toward each other like old men smoking in the warm August night. The men were just leaving the synagogue, draped in black for Tishah-b’Av. Beside the synagogue a beggar entered the guest house, settled himself on one of the straw pallets, scratched his neck, pinched a louse between thumb and forefinger, yawned, tore off a piece of bread begged from Hanna-Leah. Even the river flowed quietly. So different from up there, the Lower East Side, with everything and everyone Emma knew and loved.

She looked up to the Lower East Side. First Hester Street, with the school and the tenements six stories high, with its awnings and fire escapes, horse-drawn wagons, three-tiered pushcarts, fruit-laden stalls, the knife sharpener’s bell, the whistling men with hands in their pockets, the bathhouse three steps down, two cents for two minutes, the boys with baskets—matches, fans, hairpins, baby rattles, dishpans, pails—the girls ladling milk into a pitcher for two cents, butter a bit sour you could get for five cents a pound, bread a cent a pound, potatoes, a fifty-pound sack for the winter, oranges by the crate. Down Hester Street to Essex, past the hokey-pokey man selling squares of ice
cream from his cart. There on the second floor of the tenement, where she should be, was Emma’s mother, a pile of finished piecework on the table. Her mother’s eyes were red. Sure they were red, always red from sewing, but she was singing,
“A boy stands and thinks all night, who is the girl to catch his sight.”

“M
AMA
, I’m coming,” Emma called down, but her mother didn’t seem to hear. She turned to the revolutionary angel. “Go and tell her. She’ll be worried about where I am, and then she’ll pretend that she has something in her eye and she’ll cry.” But the angel vanished and in its place appeared a hat, a brown fedora with silk daisies on the brim. Putting on the hat, Emma saw in front of her a square table and on the table a swath of white cloth and a pair of scissors. “Mama won’t be upset when I tell her that I’m helping with the piecework.” Humming, Emma cut the cloth. From time to time she looked down to Blaszka. There the seasons were running backward, from apples to pink buds, to green haze to bare branches lined with snow, like an ermine collar over charcoal wool. “An expensive cloak,” Emma remarked.

O
N THE
short Friday in December, the river was frozen solid, around the silver rocks its eddies motionless as a painting. With a roar and puff of smoke, the train approached the river like a line of maverick tenements broken free of their foundations. In the third-class car, swinging his skinny feet, a greenish-faced boy sat with his sister, her face pressed to the window. First there had been the endless sea and now there was the endless land. Were there never going to be any more streets?

“I’m scared, Emma,” the boy was saying. “What’s it going to be like?”

“You remember what Mama used to tell us. There’s a town and then there’s woods.”

He closed his eyes the way he used to when Papa asked him a question about the Talmud. “She said the woods smelled good in the spring.” He opened his eyes and looked out the window again. “Oh, Em, it’s so empty.”

“Now you listen to me. You see out there? It’s snow. Don’t we get snow in New York? It’s just a place, that’s all. You’ll go to school and
I’ll make sure that nobody bothers you. Nothing’s changed. They just have more cows here.”

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Here’s the pail, Izzie. I’ll hold your head. That’s it. Okay. Let me wipe your forehead. You’re a good kid. Curl up there and put your head in my lap. Don’t worry about that lady’s chickens. Let them squawk. Close your eyes and I’ll sing. You go to sleep.”

Stroking Izzie’s hair, Emma sang,
“We swear our stalwart hate persists, Of those who rob and kill the poor; the Tsar, the masters, capitalists. Our vengeance will be swift and sure.”

“Not that one,” Izzie said. “Please, Emma. I feel so weak. Sing something else.”

“Are you getting feverish?” Emma touched Izzie’s forehead. It seemed forever since the ground had been steady under their feet.

“Maybe. I could be.”

“I won’t let you get sick again,” she said, poking his shoulder.

“Ow, not so hard. Sing something, Em. One of the ones I like.”

“Okay, stop squirming. You have to lie quietly.”

Emma looked left and right as if checking for informers. Then in a tone so low she had to bend toward Izzie’s ear, she sang,
“Welcome among us, messengers of peace, angels of the Highest One, from deep within us, Majesty of majesties, the blessed Holy One.”

“W
HERE
’
S THE
town?” Emma asked as the driver took them through the village square. It looked a little familiar, but she’d always thought her vague memory of Blaszka must have been of some rural suburb like Coney Island, where her father had once taken her and Izzie for a day’s holiday. They had rented bathing costumes, even Papa, his beard flapping, his knobby knees bare as he ran into the water, holding Emma’s hand on one side and Izzie’s on the other. Papa could swim. He told them he’d learned in the Północna River, though he looked like a frog when he swam. Laughing, Emma had told him so. Now she wished she hadn’t.

“This is it,” the driver said to Emma. In the village square she saw a crowd of strangers. Men in beards. Black coats. Women in shawls. They all looked alike.

*  *  *

I
NSIDE
their great-aunt’s house, Emma looked around at the front room with its green-tiled oven, the cooking grate over the fire beside it, the hen sleeping in the corner, the water barrel, the cooking benches, one for meat and one for dairy, the embroidered landscape of strange hills that marked the eastern wall for prayer. Emma had already argued with Great-aunt Alta-Fruma about waiting for Ruthie to help with the trunk and was now glaring while Ruthie sucked loudly on a lump of sugar, sipping her tea. Who ever saw sugar like that? Dark chunks of gravel.

“You must be tired,” Ruthie said, “and it gets dark early on the short Friday. I should be going.” Izzie was falling asleep at the table.

“No, no,” Alta-Fruma said quickly. “I want to get something from the bakery for
Shabbas.
You stay and keep the children company.”

After the door shut behind her, the two girls watched each other curiously over the head of the sleeping boy.

“My mother and your mother were good friends. Did you know that?” Ruthie asked.

“Sure,” Emma said. “My mother told me stories about when they were girls. Boring stuff.”

Ruthie tried again. “I remember when you left. You wouldn’t get on the train. You ran along the track and your father ran after you. My mother and your mother were crying.”

“Mothers always cry.” Emma rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Got some dust in my eyes,” she muttered, her voice trembling.

“Yes, it’s quite dusty in here.” Alta-Fruma’s house was spotless. Emma looked at Ruthie to see if she were laughing at her, but Ruthie’s face was serious. “I’ll tell you a secret,” Ruthie said. “I would love to see America. Are there many cowboys?”

“None on the Lower East Side.” Emma smiled a little.

“I like to read about other places, but it’s not the same as talking to someone who’s been there. I’ve never been anywhere. Tell me about it. Please,” Ruthie said.

The fire crackled, the tin roof banging in the wind. Emma leaned forward. “I’ll tell you about my friend Dov,” she said. “I met him in the Pig Market. That’s on Hester Street and Essex. On one side you have the women buying fruits and fish for
Shabbas.
On the other are
the men looking for work. Contractors come to the Pig Market and call out, ‘I need a hand. Who’s an operator?’ Or maybe it’s a puller or a turner he needs. Not a finisher, she works at home.

“Anyway, there wasn’t much work that season. I was ten, so that would have been four years ago. In the Pig Market the crowd was big and ugly. My father was there and I was afraid that with all the cops he’d get clobbered.”

“Your father in a place like that? A scholar? I don’t understand, Emma.”

“He only wanted to study Talmud. And to teach Izzie.” Emma bit her lip, falling silent, Ruthie reaching out to take her hand. During the day her father had worked on the mezzanine, an extra floor built under the ceiling of the factory with scarcely enough room to stand. That didn’t matter, though, because he was bent over his sewing machine from six in the morning until eight at night. There was no clock so he never knew how long he was working or how long he had left. No window. Just gas jets for light. Rush, rush, rush so fast that the needle sometimes went right through his finger.