The River Midnight (34 page)

A
FEW DAYS
later the Old Rabbi sent for Hayim. “I think of you like a kind of son, Hayim. It’s not good for a man to be alone. The evil inclination gets the better of him. And it’s time that Misha was matched up, too. It’s been a year since her mother died. There’s no reason to hold it off. Neither of you has anyone to approach the matchmaker on your behalf, so I’ll do it. After all, what’s there to arrange? It’s
an easy matter. All right, Hayim, you can go. Leave it to me.” The Old Rabbi turned back to the volume he was studying at the front table in the studyhouse.

“But, but, what does Misha say?”

“Say?” the Old Rabbi asked, turning a puzzled face to Hayim. “A woman has to marry. Is there someone else for her in the village?” Hayim shrugged. How would he know? “I watched you and Misha dancing,” the Rabbi continued. “It’s good. You’ll see, Hayim. After marriage, the babies come, you work for them and you grow together.”

A baby. A son. That would be something. He’d always assumed that he wasn’t going to have children. Who would marry him, a watercarrier? He liked Misha. He liked the way she cared nothing for what people said. He liked the way she’d danced with him. He liked her long black hair. And if she was willing … “All right,” Hayim said.

They didn’t talk to each other before the wedding. That was the custom and Hayim had decided that from now on everything in his life would be done in the usual way, no more weddings at midnight. He was going to be a man with a family. As was traditional, Hayim went to the cemetery and prayed at the grave of his father, inviting him to the wedding.

They were married at dusk in the synagogue courtyard. As the men led Hayim to the wedding canopy, he thought of how tender he would be with Misha. How he would tell their babies everything that Asher the Hasid had told him and they would look at him with Misha’s dark eyes. His first son would be named Ari after his father. When Passover came, Hayim would throw open his door to invite the needy stranger to eat with his family. And on the Sabbath he would recite “A Woman of Virtue” to Misha. As she approached, led by the women with their lit candles, she smiled at Hayim, and if her eyes looked sad, that was only natural since her mother couldn’t be with her. When they went up to her house, Hayim took his time, sitting with Misha, stroking her hands, waiting until she was ready to undress and then attending to her until she told him that if he didn’t hurry, she would pull his ears. Afterward she seemed content and her sleep was easy. She lay on her side, her full breasts under the light touch of Hayim’s hand.

But before long, Hayim could see that something wasn’t right. He
carried water, Misha made up her remedies and sold them on market day. In the evening they ate together. In the morning he prayed. But Misha sighed. Every once in a while, she looked away from Hayim and her sigh ended with a little groan. A month passed. Two months. When they made love, she would seem happy, but then the next day she would mutter to herself, biting her lip. He asked her over and over what he could do for her, but she said there was nothing. She couldn’t sleep. She said there wasn’t enough air in the house. So Hayim opened the front door and the back door to let the summer wind blow through with the smell of the coming harvest. But still she tossed and turned. So he lay on the floor, leaving the bed to her. “Just tell me,” he pleaded. “What, what is it?” She would shake her head or she would turn her back to him and once, to his surprise, she climbed out of bed, threw her arms around him and kissed him deeply, pulling him to her. Afterward she said only that he shouldn’t think it was something he’d done wrong. But what else could he think? Misha, who’d danced with him so that he could hardly keep up with her, who laughed like a dozen, who knew what to do for every ailment, was growing thin. In the village people said she looked more dead than alive.

One day in late fall, when the fields were cleared and the trees bare, Hayim climbed the steps to Misha’s house as usual. He couldn’t think of it as his house. No, it was all hers, and he was a guest who slept on the floor more often than not. He dropped his yoke and buckets in the corner, beside the bridal trunk. The room was in its usual disarray, the table a clutter of jars and herbs in the process of being sorted. On the tile oven there was half-crushed bark in the mortar. Pots bubbled on the cooking grate. The nauseating smell of ergot rose from some indeterminate corner. His wife was sitting, not looking too well. She gripped a cup of tansy tea between her hands.

“Maybe you should lie down a little. You’re pale,” he said.

“I’m not sick,” she answered hoarsely, as if she’d been crying. “I’m pregnant.”

“Misha, Misha,” he said, seating himself opposite her at the table, surprised at the awe and tenderness that overwhelmed him. Now we’ll come to know each other, he thought, now we’ll come to love each other with this new life, this precious soul between us.

“I want a
Get
,” she said abruptly.

A rabbinical divorce? “What did I do?” he asked in astonishment, wondering how he could drive her to such a thing without even noticing. And in her condition yet. In his mind he reviewed all the grounds for a
Get:
impotence, infidelity, revulsion, cruelty. What did he do to hurt her so terribly?

“Nothing. I just want a
Get
,” she said.

“Nothing? No. It, it must be something. Tell me,” he said gently. “Let me make, make it up to you.”

“Are you an idiot?” she asked harshly. “I said you didn’t do anything. I just want a divorce. That’s all. You can say whatever you want to the Rabbi. Tell him that I’m a hag, that you can’t live with me. I don’t care. I need a
Get.
”

She shivered. It was getting cold, and he heard the geese honking as they flew toward Egypt, but he had no sympathy for her drawn, pale face. Did she think he was a stick of wood with no feelings that she could just throw onto the fire and burn into ashes? He had a wife, he had a child, and she wanted him to have nothing but his yoke. “We have a child coming into the world and you want a divorce? A child without a father? No. You, you, go to hell.” He kicked the water bucket across the room. It banged into the eastern wall underneath the embroidered landscape, which he faced every morning for prayer.

She yelled at him until she couldn’t yell anymore, then she begged him for the
Get.
He stammered angry replies, pacing from the table to the eastern wall to the tile stove to the table again, stamping his feet and twisting his hands. For the first time in his life he wanted to hit a living thing. “Dear God,” he shouted, pounding the table until the jars crashed to the floor, shattering ground glass into his heart, “Show this woman your justice!” Then he walked out, following the river bank beyond the woods to barren fields, gray with oncoming winter, thinking his terrible angry thoughts.

When he came home a few hours later, Misha was calling for her mother. Her legs were drawn up in her agony. “Misha?” he asked, his anger drained. A pulpy, bloody mass was spreading along the bed. “Misha, what should I do? Tell me.” She didn’t answer, her face twisted as she rolled onto her side, groaning. Hayim ran for the
feldsher.
While the barber-surgeon tended Misha, Hayim waited outside. His legs shook. Unable to stand, he fell to his knees in the mud beside
the river, covering his face in shame. “Master of the Universe, forget what I said. Am I a person to listen to? All right, she’s having a miscarriage. The baby is gone. Just don’t take her, too. Let her have the divorce if that’s what she wants. Only let her live.” Dead leaves floated on the river.

The
feldsher
, with his leeches, did more harm than good, but Misha managed to survive his ministrations.

A
LL THROUGH
the divorce proceedings, Misha refused Hayim an explanation. She told him once, she told him twice, she told him ten times, even with a kiss on his cheek, “It’s not your fault.” Yet her face shone with relief when he handed her the parchment that cancelled the marriage contract. As she carried it under her arm, walking around the table in the Rabbi’s study to show that she had received the document with full knowledge of its meaning, she paused for a moment. There seemed to be a look of regret on her face. The Old Rabbi saw it, too, and stopped her, saying that he could tear up the
Get
and it would be as if nothing had occurred. But she said, “No. Let’s finish this.” They left the Rabbi’s study side by side. It was hard to realize that they were now strangers. He had tried many times to draw Misha, but had never gotten her quite right. Now he never would. Misha whispered to him, “You give a woman great pleasure, Hayim. Don’t forget it. But I have to live alone. It’s just meant to be that way.”

S
O ON THE
eve of Purim in 1894, Hayim filled the water barrel in Misha’s house without any pain. He’d been with many women, all of them content to seek him out in the thatched hut that let in the stars. But as he lifted his bucket, he sniffed. The smell coming from the stove, how familiar it was. Yes, that aromatic odor of tansy tea mingling with the nauseous skin-penetrating stench of ergot. He’d never forget it. The day she miscarried, that same smell. The sense of loss was returning as if it had all just happened. Hayim stared at Misha.

She was sitting at the old table, the pine slab on the maple stump. It had been the table of Blema the midwife and Aba the carpenter. Then Blema the widow and her daughter Misha. Then Misha the orphan and Hayim the watercarrier. And now it was her table alone. She sat with her knees apart, feet flat on the floor, her red shawl billowing
over her shoulders and chest. Her eyes were glazed as if she could only see inside herself, as if she had absorbed the world, and outside was a starless, moonless night. It was the same expression she had had fifteen years earlier.

Misha blinked, slowly focusing on Hayim’s presence. Steam rose from the cup in her hands.

“A mazel tov, Misha,” he said. She dropped the cup. It rolled off the table onto the floor. Tea soaked into the braided rug.

“How did you find out?” she asked. “Does everybody in Blaszka know?”

Crouching, Hayim retrieved the cup. Replacing it on the table, he bit his lip and shook his head. God forgive me, he thought, I have no sense. An idiot like me should stick with talking to animals.

“Who’s talking?” she asked tensely. “Tell me. How did you know?”

“Why, I, why …”

“ ‘Why not?’ Is that an answer?”

“Shouldn’t I know? I was, I was …”

“My husband? Only for eight months.”

“Long enough. I see. In your eyes, I see it.”

“My eyes? What’s wrong with them?”

Hayim felt as though his tongue was swelling up. The more clearly he saw, the less he could speak. His head was emptying itself of words as it filled up with memory. There she was the night she miscarried, and there on the day they were married, and there when she first looked at him at Hanna-Leah’s wedding.

Water trickled from his jacket. His ritual fringes, slapping against his pants, dripped into his boots. “If you know, the whole world will be pointing fingers at me,” Misha said.

“It’s not. Don’t, don’t trouble yourself, Misha. I can’t put two words together when I want to.”

She wasn’t looking at him now, but at the dried herbs hanging above his head. Hayim waited, dripping. “Happy Purim,” he said at last.

Hayim was the first person in Blaszka, other than Misha, to realize that she was pregnant. It was the day that Hanna-Leah found the stranger hiding in the woods. The day that the Director poured tea for Alta-Fruma and Mr. Hoffmann.

It was the boy who brought Hayim to Alta-Fruma’s house on Passover. Izzie slid up to Hayim in the courtyard of the synagogue, saying to him, “We should have a guest for the seder. Would you come?” Taking hold of Hayim’s arm, he continued, “There aren’t any strangers in Blaszka today. Did you notice? And there aren’t enough beggars for everybody to have one. If you don’t eat with us, we won’t be able to fulfil the mitzvah.” The boy sighed as if contemplating a great sorrow, looking up at Hayim, one hand on his cap so that it shouldn’t fall away and bare his head before heaven. Hayim joined him with a deep sigh of his own. Side by side they exhaled their profound contemplation, the boy in his knickers and stockings, the man robed in his white
kittel.
Darkness was falling, the moon fought with the clouds for a place in the sky, and Hayim weighed the emptiness of his hut against a debt of gratitude. Alta-Fruma might be uncommonly attractive for her age. Hayim wasn’t as blind to this as others in Blaszka. But she was such a good woman, such an unremittingly good woman, an intimidatingly, even boringly good woman. What would she say to him? The Jew with a pig. And not any pig. But the particular pig that had eaten half the turnips in her root cellar. Of all the houses that might accommodate Hayim for the Passover seder, hers was one of the last he would choose, but he had nowhere else to go, and the boy’s trusting hand was slipping into his.

As they came into the house, leaving behind the cold wind and spring drizzle and whipping trees, Hayim saw Emma, her back to the door, putting the kerosene lamp on the sideboard. The room was warm. Chicken soup bubbled on the cooking grate. A plate of egg noodles and a bowl of glazed carrots waited on the sideboard. The fragrance of roasting brisket drifted toward the flames in the candelabra. Alta-Fruma stood in the circle of its light, blessing the table with its Passover dishes, unmatched remnants of fine china and oddly shaped, glaze-streaked clay bowls around the holiday candles.

Shimmering in the candlelight, her black lace shawl draped over her head and shoulders, she recited in Yiddish, “
Dear God, I thank and
bless Your holy Name for permitting me the sweet
mitzvah
of candlelighting. May the effort of preparing for the Passover and cleaning the house of all leavened food be for the merit of these children. Help us to sweep out the evil inclination that leavens our heart like yeast.”
Alta-Fruma cast Emma a quick glance. “Amen.”

As she saw Hayim and Izzie standing in the doorway, she said, “Come and sit,” her hands beckoning as if she were pulling light to the table.
“Gut Yom Tov”
Hayim said, entering the room hesitantly, Izzie pulling him by the hand and settling him on the chair beside him. The warmth, the richness of food smells, the gleam of the green-tiled oven, the brass samovar, and the crystal goblet full of sweet red wine unsettled him.