The River Midnight (31 page)

H
ERSHEL PEERED
into the darkness, listening for footsteps, for a broken twig or a startled bird. A cool wind brought the smell of fall into the summer air. A goose flew across the moon, honking. At night it all looked strange. Charcoal, blue-black hazy shapes. Everything large merging with its shadow. Familiar landmarks missing. Where was the tree that he climbed with Shmuel to spy on the girls? He had pointed to Hanna-Leah and said, “That’s the one I want. The big one. The one with the golden hair.”

“What if her father doesn’t want you? He’s a butcher, and your father’s not so much.”

“He will. That’s all. I’ll make myself his apprentice.”

“An apprentice doesn’t count for anything.”

“I will,” he had said, pulling himself up to the next branch.

Hershel pushed his way deeper into the woods, tripping over logs, falling through nettles, tearing his caftan, cursing his clumsiness. When he heard singing, he stopped. A man’s voice, a Polish drinking song. The man was stumbling through the undergrowth of the woods, singing and laughing as he fell to his knees and pulled himself up again, alone. Hershel continued on his way, the song growing fainter as he weaved through the trees like the drunk, without direction, without knowledge. When he broke through the underbrush, he blinked at the sudden light of the moon hovering above the river.

A figure stood in the water, her silken shift bright in the moonlight. Hanna-Leah. Alone. Thank God, alone. But in the water? What was she doing here, where the water ran so fast around the rocks? If she lost her footing for a minute she could trip. She could hit her head. She could drown. As Hershel opened his mouth to call her, she dipped under the water. Dear God, she was drowning. He began to tear off his boots, then stopped. She was rising from the water, standing. Not drowned. Maybe she was hot. All right, Hanna-Leah wasn’t exactly herself these days. It didn’t matter. She was his. Whatever she was. She dipped again and a third time, Hershel watching carefully, not wanting to disturb her, afraid that she might yet fall and hurt herself. The third time, when she didn’t rise, he ran toward the water, calling “Hankela, Hankela, I’m coming,” but then she was standing again, now walking toward the shore. Of course she didn’t see him. Not in his caftan, as dark as the shore. When he saw that she was climbing up the river bank, he retreated to the bush, moving quickly into the woods. He would hurry home. She would never have to know that he followed her. Or why. Overhead a goose circled the moon seven times.

W
HEN SHE
came home, Hershel was sitting in his chair. “You’re wet,” he said.

“Am I?”

“Where have you been?”

“The river. Near the silver rocks.”

“There? The current is fast. The water’s deep. You could have drowned.”

“I didn’t,” she said, yawning and smiling.

“You didn’t,” he said somberly, “Thank God, you didn’t. You’re soaking, Hankela. You’ll catch your death. Come into our room and let me help you take off the wet clothes.”

Standing next to the bed, he gently pulled first the sodden dress over her head and then her shift, wrapping her in a towel, his arms around her, arms like Moses. Not like Moses when he broke the clay tablets, but the Moses who met Tzipporah at the well and drove off her persecutors, helping her to fill her troughs and water her flock. Slowly, tenderly, Hershel dried Hanna-Leah, her shoulders, her breasts, her hips, her thighs, between her legs, with his hands warming every inch of cold skin until she glowed, her nipples hard under his hand, his body filled with the smell and the touch of her. As Hershel took off his clothes, he thought to himself, a butcher doesn’t make a hacked-up mess of the animal. He cuts it carefully, knowing that people work hard for a little meat on the Sabbath. You need a good eye for that, and a strong arm. That was his last thought as he leaned toward Hanna-Leah, her lips soft against his, her legs open, her thighs gripping.

I
N THE
Hebrew month of Elul, while the harvest was gathered, the shofar was blown every morning in the synagogue, waking the people to the coming Days of Awe. The blackberries ripened as the Passages of Consolation were read from the prophets:
“Violence shall no more be heard in your land, neither desolation nor destruction within your borders. But you will call your walls Salvation, and your gates Praise. The sun will not go down, nor will the moon withdraw itself; for the Holy One will be an everlasting light, and the days of your mourning will be ended.”

On the first day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei, the crescent moon was a sliver beside the setting sun, sitting like a red crown on a bank of clouds. The New Year was announced, and the children of Blaszka dipped apples in honey so that the coming year would be sweet.

In the morning Hershel asked his mother and his wife for their forgiveness, and they gave it before they left for the synagogue.

*  *  *

“T
HERE WAS
a man of the hill country whose name was Elkanah,” the reader chanted from the Prophets. Some of the men had fallen asleep, arms folded, heads nodding. Shmuel, who fired up the ovens in the darkness every morning, was half-smiling in a dream, but Hershel was awake and listening.
“He had two wives,”
the reader said,
“one named Hannah and the other Peninnah. Peninnah had children, but Hannah was childless. Whenever Elkanah offered sacrifices, he would give portions to his wife Peninnah and to all her sons and daughters; but he would give a double portion to Hannah, for he loved her, though God had made her childless. Her rival would taunt her severely because she was childless. This went on year after year. Whenever she went up to the house of God, Peninnah would so distress her that she wept and would not eat. Elkanah her husband would ask her: ‘Hannah, why do you weep, and why do you not eat, and why is your heart so sad? Am I not better to you than ten sons?’ ”
Better than ten sons, Hershel repeated to himself. Hanna-Leah is more to me than ten sons.

Near the Holy Ark, the Rabbi stands in a pool of light. In the front row are the scribe, the ritual slaughterer, the
shammus.
In the second row, Hershel, the head of the community council, stands with his cousin, Shmuel the baker. The poorest of Blaszka are in the back row. Hayim the watercarrier. Getzel the picklemaker. Their heads covered by prayer shawls.

A moan drifts across the village square. And another.

Hershel looks up to the gallery where the women are rustling like geese disturbed by a change of wind. Now there is the clatter of footsteps, the slam of a door. The men look at one another, confused, bereft as if while looking up for the heavens to open, the earth has opened instead. What’s going on? they ask.

Hershel climbs the stairs to look out at the courtyard. “The women are leaving. They’re going, they’re just going, that’s all. Come and look.” He waves to the men, who follow him through the doorway of the synagogue where they look from the women to the darkening sky. On Rosh Hashanah their fate was written, on Yom Kippur the
book will be closed. The sun itself is the red seal, coming lower, lower while the men crowd together in their white burial robes.

I
N THE
coming year, Hanna-Leah will say to Gittel the raisin-wine maker, “So what is a Friday night? Is it so special? What’s wrong with Monday and Thursday, too. Tell me, did you hear that they say the
zogerin
Tzipporah has lost all her hair? It’s true, I heard it straight from Liba, the bath attendant. That’s what comes when you have an old husband. Some men have eggs of gold and others eggs of lead. You just have to have luck with the matchmaker.”

Along the River Północna people will say, The governor of Plotsk might have eggs of steel, but the head of the community council in Blaszka has eggs of gold.

In five years, Hershel will arrange for the village square to be paved with cobblestones. When there is a resurgence of pogroms in Russia ten years from now, Hershel will institute self-defense groups. In fifteen years, he will organize the building of a school in Blaszka. During the First World War it will be used as a hospital where the Rabbi’s son Adam and daughter Rayzel will nurse the injured and comfort the grieved.

Just before sunset, the Director crossed the bridge, his top hat black against the fading sky, the tails of his coat flying behind him. The latch to Hayim’s door lifted, the door banged open, and the Director, seeming to fill the entrance with a tall, gaunt shadow, held out a wriggling, crying little pig at arm’s length. “Look what I found on the bridge. Do you know who this belongs to?”

“N-no,” Hayim said. He was cooking his Sabbath dinner of potatoes on a tripod over the fire. His hips were bruised where the heavy buckets banged him, and there were grooves in his shoulders from the yoke. The well was beside the
mikva
, convenient to the fine homes of the wealthy, now in ruins. No one gave a thought to the convenience of the watercarrier who had to run back and forth across the bridge.

“I have no time to look for the owner of a pig,” the Director said. “The troupe has to stay ahead of the authorities. You want him, or should I leave him with Ambrose the beekeeper for sausages? Tell me yes or no.”

The piglet looked at Hayim appealingly, its coat dark brown with
lighter stripes along its length. Probably not a farmer’s pig with that coloring, but a wild one. Could he condemn a living thing, a child of God, to sausages, to
trayf?
“Give, give him to me,” Hayim said.

“Take him, then.” The Director handed the crying pig to Hayim and strode back into the dusk.

While the potatoes boiled, Hayim fed the piglet some goat’s milk, dipping his finger into the bowl of milk and then giving it to the creature to suckle. “What will I do with you?” Hayim asked. “A Jew with a pig? Everyone will look at me.” He didn’t stammer. He never stammered when he spoke to his goat, or the birds, or his ax, or the night. Only with people.

He had begun to stammer when he was sent to school. In the stale, dim front room of the teacher’s house, forty boys pushed and poked and shouted while the teacher cracked his ruler on their shoulders, the teacher’s wife in the other room cooking potatoes with onions and garlic, her babies screaming over the sing-song chant of the boys. Hayim would sit in the far corner, praying, “Master of the Universe, make me invisible.” Nine hours a day except for
Shabbas.
At night, Hayim would see the teacher’s face, as huge and pale as a bearded moon with its mouth open to swallow him. Only when he jumped up from the bed and with a stub of a pencil drew a picture of the teacher in the margin of his scribbler did the trembling leave him. In the morning, he would carefully black out the sketch and the teacher would beat him on the knuckles for marking up his notebook.

Hayim’s father, Ari the miller, was determined to lift up his son among the fine people, the
shayner.
First he’d built the bathhouse with its marble columns. Then he dressed Hayim in satin and velvet, like the sons of the
shayner.
And finally he hired tutors for Hayim so that after his nine hours of heder, he was shut into a snug windowless room, where Hayim could hardly breathe, never mind speak when the tutors ordered him to recite Torah. All of this so that Hayim would someday be matched up with a girl from a good family. The best, his father would say. Full of rabbis.

On
Shabbas
in the synagogue they sat in the second row, behind the scribe, the cantor, and the two grain merchants, Eber and his partner, Zelig. “You’ll see, Hayim. You’ll be a fine scholar,” his father would say. “Thin, pale, your head full of the Holy Word. Not grain,
flour, taxes, and bribes. Hey, what do you say, my friends?” The miller would lean forward and slap the shoulders of the grain merchants. “My son the scholar. Maybe he’ll learn to chant and the cantor will be out of a job. He’ll be in the back row and Hayim here will sit among the
shayner
beside the Holy Ark. Good seed from old apples.” The miller would pat the inside of his thigh and wink while the cantor coughed and turned away. But as Hayim, red-faced, turned his eyes to the ceiling, he would hear one of the grain merchants say, “A rich apple full of worms.”

Hayim would look up at the umbrella-shaped ceiling of the synagogue, with its ribs of oak, painted in 1622 by a man known as Ari the Eggs, the many times-great-grandfather of Hayim’s own Papa, who was named Ari after him. Mama said their ancestor was called Eggs because he was bald, but when the miller took Hayim to immerse in the ritual bath before the Sabbath, he winked and nudged, pointing to the other men’s nakedness, and said, “Him, no one would call Eggs, with those shriveled peanuts, but that one, there, you see? He has a couple big ones. He could father a dozen, let me tell you. That’s why they call a man “Eggs.” Ari the Eggs—you understand, Hayim?”

On
Shabbas
, Hayim looked at Ari’s ceiling, drinking in the vividness of color, the elephants and monkeys, the huge bright flowers, the hot blue sky. How did Ari the Eggs see so far? All the way across the Sambyaton, the river beyond which the ten lost tribes of Israel waited for the Messiah. Hayim thought about it for a long time. When he was finished thinking, he had decided that Ari the Eggs so revered the Master of the Universe that he practiced looking at the Holy One’s creations, gazing deeper and farther until his vision was unmatched. A man like that would look at everything. If it was foreign or forbidden, he would have to look harder until he knew it by heart; there was not a thing that didn’t contain the spark of the Holy One.

After the Russians blew up the mill, the family lost everything. They lived on the charity of the community council. Instead of becoming
shayner
, they had fallen to the lowest of the
proster
and Ari’s heart gave out. What could Hayim’s mother do? She was a rich man’s wife. She had no skills, no livelihood. What choice did she have? She remarried. Her new husband took her away, leaving Hayim behind, ignoring her tears and pleas, even though she went down on her knees
and kissed his hands. And Hayim, who was fourteen years old, went to live with the watercarrier, Asher the Hasid, an old man who had no children of his own. People said that if Ari wasn’t dead already, he would have died to see his son sleeping in a shack on a bed of straw. But Hayim was happy cutting wood for a few kopecks. There were no more tutors yelling at him. No teacher cracking a ruler over his head. No airless classroom. Only Asher, who put a bowl in front of Hayim and told him that everything is a child of the Holy One, even a blade of grass, even a pig. Hayim didn’t have much to eat, but when he was done cutting wood for the Old Rabbi or the scribe’s house, he could wander among the trees and look as long as he wanted at anything he liked, breathing the cool, sweet air while he sketched the world into being.