The River Midnight (21 page)

Emma shook her head. Only when the trunk caught against a stone, she paused, then slowly let her end drop. “Let Izzie go in. I’ll wait over here,” she said, “with the trunk.”

“Come inside and dress for
Shabbas.
We have a guest coming,” Alta-Fruma said. “Misha was your mother’s best friend when they were girls. You want to know something about your mother? Just ask Misha.”

The girl looked as if she might say something, but then she sat on the trunk, crossing her arms. Stubborn? Like a mule. Like a mule and a goat put together. Another Rakhel.

On the eve of spring, Alta-Fruma was in Warsaw, sitting decorously on the edge of a brocade wing chair in a lawyer’s office. She had a ticket for the afternoon train so she could be home in time for Purim, but when a person came to Warsaw, who could tell what might delay her?

Mr. Hoffmann, the lawyer, hadn’t moved from the building on Nalewki Street where Alta-Fruma first met him, but instead of an attic chamber, he now occupied half a floor, his office crammed with furniture from the time of Napoleon. His sleeves were rolled up and tied around with black binding, his round face beaming, his glasses slipping on his nose.

As always when she came to Warsaw, Alta-Fruma wore a green silk dress that brought out the radiance of her eyes. Even a sensible woman, when she goes away, is allowed some vanity, even a woman of sixty who, in Blaszka, wears a black shawl over her holiday dress.

People who live to be old have their characters written into their skin, smiles and frowns etched in wrinkles even when the face is at rest. And yet it isn’t enough for age just to show what people are. No, age is a trickster. A willowy beauty hardens into spikes, an athlete falls
into fat and an ugly young man, like Hoffmann’s manservant, gawky and freckled with a potato of a nose, could, in old age, stand tall and straight, drawing people to him with his wry smile.

At rest, Alta-Fruma’s face was smooth, revealing nothing, the lines only faint marks, the freckles of her girlhood faded into a scattering of gold dust across the bridge of her nose. This is what the villagers would have seen had anyone really looked. But they knew who she was without looking, didn’t they? In Warsaw, where no one knew her, a person might see that Alta-Fruma moved with a lithe and agile grace, her breasts were still firm handfuls, her teeth were good, and when she smiled, which wasn’t often, her tongue darted out to lick her lips as if she were about to taste something very, very good. Leaning back in Adam Hoffmann’s plushy brocade chair, Alta-Fruma was smiling. Her eyes, fringed with dark lashes and green as the souls of leaves, were as arresting as when the lawyer had first seen them.

“It’s so good to see you again. Please have a glass of tea, and some cherry preserves. Do you know,” he said shyly, the morning sun forming a square of light across his shoulders and face and the painting of the gondolier behind him, “it’s thirty-one years today that you came to my office. Purim, 1863. I remember it like yesterday. You were running down the stairs, do you recall? I think old Mr. Plutzer frightened you. I could hear him shouting two floors below. Everyone had the windows open to hear the speeches and the singing outside. It was a cold day, more winter than spring, even though it was March.”

“Cold?” Alta-Fruma said, tapping the side of her glass. “My lips were blue.”

“And in my office? I didn’t have a fire to keep it warm. Wood was too expensive. I was up in the attic, remember?”

“Yes, with the dressmaker’s dummy in the corner.”

“Do you remember the marching in the streets?” Mr. Hoffmann rapped his right fist on the table, humming “da, da, da,” his left fist swinging as if he marched with the Polish nationalists, waving the flag of independence.
“Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła
,” he sang.

“Poland is still ours forever as long as Poles are free,”
Alta-Fruma said. “It made me nervous. You know what happens when people get excited? Like the old story of the Polish counts arguing about who is the truer patriot. ‘We’ll settle it like men,’ they say. ‘I’ll beat up your Jew and you beat up mine.’ ”

“There were Jews marching in the street, too.”

“Not you, thank God. You always saw both sides of every question, so you sat quietly at your desk.”

“Yes, with my scarf wrapped around my neck while I shivered from the cold. Then I heard a yelling so loud it blocked out the singing in the streets.”

“He had a voice like a bullfrog, Mr. Plutzer.”

“You wouldn’t think he was a man of seventy-five years. I’ll never forget it. ‘Witch,’ he yelled. ‘Whore. How dare you come to my office alone, with your hair hanging out of your kerchief, talking like a man. A Jewish wife, shame on you. Your husband missing for ten years? May God deliver him to teach his wife modesty. Get out before I teach you myself.’ I ran down the stairs to look. I was a shy man, but I wasn’t dead. It was a year since my wife died, and after all, I was only twenty-five years old. ‘Witch, whore,’ it sounded very interesting.” He reached across the desk to take Alta-Fruma’s hand. “You were running down the stairs, but you turned once to look up and I saw your eyes. Green lightning. I was struck.” He put his hand over his heart.

“It was a cold Purim,” Alta-Fruma said, pulling her hand away gently. “A late frost.” Even thirty years ago his hair had been receding, his broad forehead and spectacles giving him a mild look. It was only this mildness that had caused her to pause on the stairs when he called after her. That and his lips. Red as beets. She had wanted to touch them to see if his lips were as smooth as they looked in the wiry nest of his beard. She wouldn’t easily forget. Not that Purim or many others she spent in Warsaw.

They would walk together to the old synagogue to listen to the reading of the Scroll of Esther. Afterward he would take her to a Purim play. It wasn’t like the children’s plays in Blaszka, or the men’s performances with the same jokes year after year in Perlmutter’s tavern. These were professional actors that made her laugh until her sides ached. They cavorted, they sang, they fell on their behinds with innocent surprise, they spouted nonsense in imitation of scholars, and, gazing with astonishment at their uncooperative arms, they attempted to fly to heaven as the Hasidim claimed their rebbes did. “Unrepentant, stubborn as a wilful child, do you see these arms?” they would appeal to the audience. “Absolutely refusing to turn into wings.”

After the play, she would walk with him. Some years there was a warm current of spring in the air. Other years there were still lumps of snow in the shadows of stone buildings. Matching his stride to hers, he would ask, “Did you enjoy yourself? Did you, Frumala?” He would look at her with so much anxiety and hope about this little thing, her enjoyment, which no one else in the world had ever been concerned with. She couldn’t help herself but to slip her hand into the crook of his elbow with a reassuring squeeze. Then they would have wine in a cafe, and why not? On Purim it was a virtue to drink so much that you couldn’t tell the difference between Haman the murderer and Mordecai the savior. And afterward, when they lay together in the darkness, Alta-Fruma remembered the smell of water and the pulsing of the wind and snails slowly merging on the surface of a tiny pool.

Yet they had to be careful. Always careful. Holding back so neither of them would forget what to do. When she got home, she bit her nails and was sleepless until her period came. Eventually her luck ran out and, as for all the women in Blaszka, in a crisis there was no one better to turn to than Blema Fliderblum, Misha’s mother.

It was just after Passover, she remembered, and her period hadn’t arrived in the punctual manner to which she was accustomed. Faygela, eight years old, was standing on the steps of Blema’s little house built on stilts above the riverbank. “Why don’t they wait for me?” she was crying. From the river below, laughter came, and a glimpse of Misha. She was thin as a reed then. She looked like a spirit from the river with weeds in her long dark hair and her borrowed dress trailing over bare feet. “They’re playing ‘wedding’ without me,” Faygela complained. Misha was singing:

The
badkhan
had sung this song at Alta-Fruma’s wedding and at Rakhel’s, too. Rakhel’s daughter, Zisa-Sara, was sitting on the bank, protesting, “No, Misha. Give me the doll. The baby has to be mine. You don’t have a husband.”

“I do so. I have two. A fat one and a rich one.”

“Two,” Zisa-Sara laughed.

“They’re being silly, I’m going home,” Faygela said just as Hanna-Leah emerged from the forest, calling to her, “The woods are full of greens. Get your basket, lazy.” Alta-Fruma watched the child run off happily. How careless they were, how ignorant.

Inside the house, Blema was pouring vodka into a tincture of some herb. The room was neat, sunlight finding its way easily through the clean windows to the jars and bottles arranged on shelves in order of size, a braided rug centered on the floor, the eastern wall marked with an embroidered landscape, the
Tzena-U-Rena
between the candlesticks on the bridal trunk below. Misha’s mother was a woman of average height, neither fat nor thin, calm-voiced and reserved, with nimble hands and serious eyes. She was as ordinary as a woman of her family could be, but she had refused to remarry after her husband died two years earlier, during the cholera epidemic. This was enough for people to talk. A widow alone with her unruly daughter in a house that shakes with the spring rains, what could be in her mind? Don’t forget who she is. Manya’s granddaughter.

Everyone knew that Manya had been tried as a witch by the Polish court. Only thirty-five and her hair had turned white. She’d left two little girls, no one even knew who their father was. Did an apple ever fall far from the tree?

“I need something to make my period regular again,” Alta-Fruma said to Blema.

“How many times did you miss it?” she asked, looking at Alta-Fruma easily, without judgment and with no hunger for the shameful details, even though she was Rakhel’s best friend, and so entitled to some curiosity about her friend’s sister, the good sister, the modest sister, the always disapproving sister, coming to her with this.

“Once,” Alta-Fruma said, her voice cracking. She felt old. Too old for this kind of problem.

“Once, that’s good.” Blema looked along the row of jars until she found what she wanted. “This will make you regular,” she said, measuring out a dose. Alta-Fruma drank it. “And this will keep you from bleeding too heavily.” She handed her a glass of something else. “If your belly hurts more than usual, that’s to be expected after missing a
period. But if the blood flows freely, like from a wound that can’t be staunched, then you should send someone for me right away.” Alta-Fruma nodded nervously.

Her period came with a terrible cramping, but the nausea vanished and so did the bloating. Alta-Fruma was grateful that her life was not ruined, though afterward she’d avoided Blema, who knew too much about her.

When she went to Warsaw after that, Adam still took her to Purim plays. Sometimes they drank wine. As the years passed, sometimes she found herself with him in the darkness again. But she was tense. When he began to think about marrying, she encouraged him.

She’d missed her period just before her thirty-sixth birthday. And now Blema’s daughter Misha would be turning thirty-six. So young. So very young.

A
DAM PUT
his hand over hers, again. “Frumala, Frumala, how I’ve missed you,” he said.

“It’s not to be spoken of,” she answered. “I’m here.”

“Thank the Holy One above,” he said.

“And I need you to take care of things. What if, God forbid, something happens to me? The children have to be provided for.”

“But do you remember the cafe where we used to have tea?” he asked. “The bookstore in front, then the archway and the cafe in back.”

She didn’t resist him, allowing herself for a moment to enjoy, again, the sensation of his fingers stroking her skin. “You mean the one right here on Nalewki Street,” she said. “With the damask curtains and the cherubs on pedestals?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Everyone called the owner Ginger Dybbuk because of his mustache. As red as fire.”

“He let the place run down,” Adam said. “But I heard that his son came back and took it over.”

“Ginger Dybbuk had a son?”

“Who knew? But they say he did. And now the cafe is always crowded. Maybe you heard of the son? He was the Director of the Golem Players. It took their last kopeck to bribe the station master.
The troupe went to America, and the Director came to Warsaw to take over his father’s business. What do you say, Frumala? Let’s go to the Golem Cafe for a cup of tea like in the old days.” He brought her hand to his still smooth lips, kissing the palm. “Your business can wait an hour.”

Inside the doorway of the bookstore on Nalewki Street, six copper bells, the color of the Director’s mustache, shimmied in the draft as the door opened and closed behind each new customer. Beyond the archway, Adam and Alta-Fruma sat in a corner of striped shadows, the red glow from a shaded kerosene lamp lighting the naked cherubs.

Adam looked at her and then away. “Don’t go. Stay with me, tonight. I miss you.”

“It can’t be the way it was,” she protested, but she didn’t move his hand from its warm place on her knee. So many years, she thought, so many memories. A person needs a scribe to keep them in order. “Your wife?”

“She’s not well.” There was a change in him, she noticed, a plump quiveriness in his cheeks that had never been there before.

“Years ago the city was so exciting,” she said, wondering when the mildness that had attracted her had turned into this jellyish something she couldn’t quite name.

“It’s still exciting. Stay with me,” he pleaded.

“In Warsaw nobody but you knows me,” Alta-Fruma said. “I used to think it was a dream. One can do anything in a dream.” He had been so unlike the learned men of her childhood who tolerated no grays, only black and white, kosher and
trayf
, pure and impure, condemning her to the no-man’s land of the
aguna
, the abandoned woman. Even a heretic can repent on Yom Kippur, but where is there redemption for an
aguna?