The River Midnight (35 page)

“Please begin,” Alta-Fruma said, seating herself beside Emma.

Almost inaudibly, Hayim chanted the kiddush, but as the ritual of the Passover seder took hold of him, he began to relax in its familiar rites. Lifting the plate of matzah, Hayim recited from his father’s Hagaddah, “
This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of
Mitzrayim.
All who are hungry, let them come and eat. All who are needy, let them come and celebrate the Passover with us. Now we are here, next year may we be in the land of Israel. Now we are slaves, next year may we be free.
”

When Hayim put down the plate, he leaned back against the feather pillows on his chair like a man of leisure. Izzie also stretched out his legs and inclined, as one should on this night when everyone remembers what it is to be free. Leaning over to look at Hayim’s Hagaddah, illustrated by Ari the Eggs, the boy rested his head on Hayim’s shoulder, as his own son might have done had he lived to be born.

Alta-Fruma looked at Hayim over the head of the boy, a direct unswerving gaze that startled Hayim. “
Nu
, Hayim, isn’t the boy the picture of his father? An angel, not a human being,” she said.

Hayim nodded. The boy did remind him of Mikhal. There was the same innocence about him.

“Not like Emma,” Alta-Fruma added, pinching the girl who was fidgeting and making faces. “But what can we do? We come from the earth and we go to the earth. Like Adam
Harishon
, we have to make a living. Then we turn to go back to the Garden of Eden, but what happened
in the meantime? God locked the gates. Can anyone get in? No. But they can’t help themselves. They try anyway.” She shook her fists in the air like someone rattling the gates to paradise. For a moment her whole body tensed as if she were standing at the fence, peering between the bars with an intensity of desire that fell from her like sparks. And then it was gone. She relaxed so quickly that Hayim blinked. Only someone who by habit watched as closely as he did would have caught that expression, and had he been looking the other way, as he often was when it came to Alta-Fruma, the good and thrifty dairywoman, he would have missed it.

“So Izzie, are you going to sing or do you intend for us to go hungry all night?” she asked. As the youngest child, it was Izzie’s job to recite the four questions that introduce the Passover story recited before the meal.

“Why is this night different from all other nights?”
Izzie chanted.
“Why on other nights do we eat bread but on this night we eat only matzah? Why on all other nights do we eat herbs of any kind, but on this night only bitter herbs?”
Izzie asked, repeating the question in Yiddish for the women, and pausing as if waiting for an answer.

“Well, if you ask me,” his aunt said, “it’s because on other nights a
pig
came into my cellar and tore up my herbs, but pigs, you know, have no interest in what is bitter. That they leave to human beings who drink a bitter cup every day. Isn’t it true, Hayim?” He noticed the flicker of mischief in her green eyes. “Go on, Izzie,” she said, “hurry up and finish the
Ma Nishtanah
or we won’t eat until the Messiah comes.”

Reciting the long answer to Izzie’s questions, Hayim didn’t stammer. The words weren’t his but his ancestors’. The melody wasn’t his but his father’s. His thoughts remained his alone, while he chanted flawlessly.

They ate slices of horseradish on matzah until the tears ran from their eyes in memory of the slaves’ bitterness, then comforted their mouths with sweet
haroses
and the second cup of wine. Alta-Fruma rose to bring in the soup, pulling Emma with her.

“My favorite part,” Izzie said excitedly, “is where it says,
‘For more than once have they risen against us to destroy us; in every generation they rise against us and seek our destruction. But the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.’ ”

“It’s not any God but our own hands that save us,” Emma said.

“Ha-ra,”
Alta-Fruma observed to Hayim, shaking her head. “Our fathers, who wrote the Hagaddah, were thinking of Emma when they described the wicked child who thinks she knows everything but doesn’t want to hear anything. Don’t interrupt, Emma. We have a guest.” As she spoke, Alta-Fruma was preparing plates of food for the children, meticulously cutting away the fat on Emma’s brisket because the girl didn’t like it, all the while scolding her for leaving the best part.

A good woman, Hayim thought when she rushed to him with a clean rag, mopping up his spilled soup, clucking over his wet
kittel.
But why was it that she allowed her hands to linger on him as she pulled away the damp edge of his sleeve, a mix of something in her eyes that didn’t quite belong to a virtuous and predictable woman? And as Hayim watched her, he realized to his surprise that she was eyeing him with equal interest and equal stealth.

Casting around for something to bring her into conversation, Hayim said, “Your, your cow, it’s well?”

“Yes,” she said. “And your pig is healthy?”

“Y-y-yes,” he answered, ducking his head in embarrassment. But one of the merits of a worthy and virtuous woman is her patience. Alta-Fruma waited without speaking until Hayim looked at her again, unable to contain his curiosity. She was holding out the bowl of glazed carrots in both hands, at arms length, like a food offering in the Holy Temple. She smiled, and as she smiled, her tongue slipped out and quickly touched her upper lip.

After the meal, by the third cup of wine, Hayim was singing and drumming on the table with Izzie joining him enthusiastically, translating into Yiddish for the edification of his yawning sister.

“At midnight,” Hayim echoed Izzie, “at midnight.” Darkness and light played over Alta-Fruma’s face, her eyes gazing out of the shadows in a gleam of mystery. Darkness wrapped around the house as Hayim poured the mandatory fourth cup of wine. Darkness held the children in their tender half-sleep, as Alta-Fruma drank it down.

“At midnight,” she proclaimed, “if a person should walk in the graveyard he’ll see the spirits of the dead and they’ll try to enter his living body because they miss being in the world.”

“Is it so wonderful, then, to deal with all the
tzuris
and turmoils of life?” Hayim asked, the wine and the quiet and the leaping shadows loosening his voice.

“A person’s spirit hungers for life always,” Alta-Fruma replied.

Sleepily, Izzie said, “The sages wrote that without the evil inclination the human race would die out. What does that mean, Auntie? Why wouldn’t there be any more people?”

“Just like Hayim’s pig,” she said. “An instinct to get into everything. You know what they say about a pig? She lies down and sticks out her hooves that are split like a cow’s and wiggles them at you as if to say, ‘You see, I’m kosher.’ And if a person looks too hard, then he’s seduced and before you know it, the pig is deep in your cellar eating everything you have.”

Her eyes glittered. Was she talking about pigs, Hayim wondered, or something else? And all the while, he was noticing the graceful lines of her body and the spicy smell of her skin as she leaned toward him. Before he finished the fourth cup of wine, he had agreed to plant her garden to atone for his pig. Later, when he lay on his straw bed, looking up through the holes in his thatched roof at the black night, he thought that of all the women who had come to him, there wasn’t one that he had chosen for himself. Yet.

C
ARRYING A
rake and a hoe, Hayim walked along the path through the woods, undisturbed by the darkness and fog. As he walked, he thought of Asher the Hasid, whose hut near the well was Hayim’s home now, whose yoke was Hayim’s yoke, and his buckets Hayim’s, too. When he first went to live with Asher, Hayim would come back at night, exhausted from a day of carrying wood on his shoulders to the farmers along the river. Asher would say, “Hayim, don’t think
because you’re a woodcutter and not sitting in a yeshiva studying the Torah that you’ve fallen in the world. I’m telling you plain, everything is God. Are you looking, Hayim? Are you using your eyes? The
Ba’al Shem Tov
, of blessed memory, spent days in the fields and the woods, and there he saw the Holy One arising from every living thing and also the stones.”

Later Asher would say to Hayim, “Come back and tell me what you see.” This was when Asher had become blind, before the cholera epidemic, and Hayim carried his buckets and was his eyes. Hayim was seventeen. He would sit on a stool, Asher reclining on his cot as if it were Passover, lifting a cigarette to his mouth with shaking hand, inhaling and coughing, nodding at every point as if he, too, saw it. The little boys were in the apple tree, the one that always blooms first even though it was cracked in half by lightning, Hayim would say. They were throwing apples at the girls. Hershel it was, the cobbler’s boy, and his cousin Shmuel. The girls screamed and gathered up the apples. Faygela pulled Hanna-Leah by the hand and told her to ignore them, but Hanna-Leah looked up into the tree. She said if you throw an apple at a girl you have to marry her. The barley is ripe. It looked like a field of light under the blue sky. That’s what I saw, Hayim would say, and Asher would say, “That’s good, that’s good. And what else did you see?” I saw wasps making their paper nest, I saw them flying from the dead log to the eaves over Yekhiel’s old printing press in the woods. I climbed onto the roof and I saw the wasps spitting paper into the nest. The wasps were humming, like this, Hayim said. Gray clouds were running across the sky. I saw Yekhiel standing in the doorway of the hut. He was wearing his apron, and holding a book. And then Yekhiel walked away like he was a giant, not a thin little baker. I’m drawing a picture of him, Hayim said. “I see it,” Asher said, staring into the darkness as if he did. “But tell me, Hayim, did you see anything else?” I saw a tree frog sitting on a leaf. I nearly missed it, but I saw it when it moved its head, as small as my finger, like a green star on the leaf. The clouds broke and the tree was so bright like it was on fire but nothing burned, and I looked at just this branch and just this leaf with the tiny green frog shining in the sun. Do you think, Hayim asked hesitantly, I saw the Holy Presence? “Don’t stop looking, Hayim,” Asher said, putting his hands on the boy’s head in blessing as if it were
Shabbas.

But although Hayim continued to look deeply, it never occurred to him that someone else might look at him and see anything except the stammering hauler of water who couldn’t keep a wife.

“D
O YOU
see her?” Hayim asked the bird perched on a branch of the willow tree. He was scattering seeds in Alta-Fruma’s garden, the smell of rich spring earth intoxicating him with delight in God’s beauty. Alta-Fruma was leaning on her broom, barefoot and bareheaded with enticing carelessness, watching him. “Do you think she’s watching to see if I’m doing it right?” He paused. “Why else would she be looking?” And as he gazed at her, he wished that she was looking because she wanted to see him. But that was a ridiculous thought for a man whose life-long ambition was to be invisible.

“Put your eyes back in your head,” she shouted at him, throwing down her broom. “Are you here to look or to work?”

Hayim didn’t answer, but he thought stubbornly, I’m here to look. He plunged his hands deep into the earth, snorting like Hazzer the pig.

S
INCE THE
early spring when Hayim’s pig had grown big enough to break into a cellar, Hayim had tried to keep it penned up. Still, it managed to escape too often, and had been gradually working its way from house to house in the village. That pig is a menace, people said in the village square, Hayim should sell the pig and the community council should make him do it. But then Ruthie was arrested, Tuesday May 22, two weeks and four days after Hayim dug Alta-Fruma’s garden, and the community council had no time to worry about a pig.

On Wednesday, in the house under the willows, Alta-Fruma slapped Emma and said, “Congratulations, you’re a woman now,” while a clap of thunder sent Hayim’s pig squealing and scurrying into the dairyhouse, a carrot hanging from its mouth. At the other end of Blaszka, Hayim was looking up at the sky, hoping he’d get the wood under cover before the rain began.

He was cutting wood for Misha. Wasn’t she his wife before the
Get?
Should she have to bend down and carry in her condition? No. Someone should get it for her. He owed her that at least. He wouldn’t say anything to her about it. He would just leave it behind her house.

When the rain stopped, Hayim stood in the doorway of his hut. He stretched, inhaling the electric grassy scent of May storms. The wind riffled the tablet of paper on his stool, page after page of eyes. Almond-shaped eyes surrounded by a flagrant thickness of lashes. “You see?” Hayim turned to the goat, who had clambered onto the low thatched roof to munch on the sod. “I still don’t have her eyes right. What’s the use? I have wood to chop.”

Hayim had just lifted his ax when the pig came charging at him, its snout white with dried curd, and close behind it, Alta-Fruma with a stick in her hand. She gave the pig a loud whack on the behind, and then another as the pig ran into the goat shed.

“Your pig is a Cossack,” she said. “A whole vat of curd spilled.
Vilda haya
,” she called to the pig, shaking the stick. It quivered in the straw. “The farmer could make good sausages out of you, pig, and then this
shlemiel
of yours could pay for the damage you made.” She turned back to Hayim, leaning toward him as if to leap from the ground and fly over the treetops. “What good is it that you planted my garden? It’s ruined. There’s not a stem the size of my little finger left.”