The River Midnight (36 page)

“I can replant it,” Hayim said.

“And the cheese?”

“I can work in the dairy.”

“And the carrots?”

“I’ll work for that, too.”

“How long?”

“Whatever you want.”

She chewed the inside of her lip, nodding. “A person couldn’t ask for more than that. It’s a bargain. Do you hear, pig? I won’t hand you over to the draft.” The pig’s snout lifted above the straw while Alta-Fruma held out her hand to Hayim. He took it, a warm firm hand pressing into his decisively, not caring that men and women shouldn’t touch in public. “You’re an honest man, Hayim,” she said looking him in the eye. “Your father was an honest man, too. He would be happy to know that he raised a mensch.” If he had his pencil, Hayim
thought, he could get her eyes down just so, the yellow glints in the iris swirling, the lines curving under her eye like a waterfall drawn in soft pencil over her cheekbone. He wanted to touch the lines, to feel the texture of the skin, to study it with his charcoal. “Don’t move,” he said. “I, I.” His tongue swelled. “I …”

She waited while he stammered and stumbled toward the door, returning with a wildly waving tablet of paper and a pencil tucked behind each ear. He seated himself on the tree stump, the tablet on his lap, his pencil moving quickly. That was better. Yes. Her eyes exactly. But how could he draw the way his heart beat faster as she looked at him?

T
HE NEXT
morning, while he was walking in the woods, Hayim saw Emma. She was running away. So much was evident. She wore traditional running-away garb, several layers of clothing, a precious trinket on a string around her neck, a bundle tied onto her back, a knife hanging from her waist and a startled, guilty expression at the sight of Hayim. Wordlessly, Hayim matched her pace until finally, discomforted with the silence, Emma said, “I’m going to Warsaw.”

Hayim nodded, walking alongside her without further comment.

“I can’t do anything here,” she exploded. “My great-aunt is breathing down my neck every minute. The revolution will be over by the time I’ve satisfied her.”

Hayim raised an eyebrow.

“Well, she hates me anyway. She won’t miss me.”

“And, and Izzie?” Hayim asked.

“Oh, he has his nose in his religious books all the time. He won’t even know I’m gone.”

As they walked the woods thinned, the path widened, and below the rising sun, the road appeared. On either side fields of rye and barley tossed in the wind like a green sea. The peasants were busy with their hoes weeding around the rosettes of cabbages and the endless rows of potatoes. Pushing his hat back under the warming sky, Hayim hummed, “
On Monday we eat potatoes, on Tuesday potatoes, on Wednesday potatoes again, and on
Shabbas
potato pudding.
”

Emma’s pace slowed. Head bent, in a low voice she said, “Ruthie’s mother came home yesterday. She’s going to kill me and no one’s ever going to speak to me again.”

“No,” Hayim said. “No, no, no, no.”

“No?” she asked.

He cupped her chin in his hand. “Just a, a, a little yelling, it could be. You, you’re afraid of, of a little yelling? I don’t believe it. No. Not a, a child of Blaszka. You heard of the rebellion of ’63.”

“Ruthie told me,” she said.

“Many, many people in Blaszka were involved. Even my father. He, he, supplied coats and boots to the young people hiding in the woods. That’s why the Russians blew up the mill.”

Emma shifted her weight from foot to foot. “I wouldn’t be able to visit Ruthie in prison if I went so far away,” she said. “But it’s too late.” She took her bundle from her shoulder, swinging it back and forth. “My aunt will know I’m gone by now. I can’t go back.” She squinted at Hayim, the sun now directly behind him. “Unless,” she said, “oh, Hayim, would you talk to her for me?”

“Me, me?” he asked in surprise.

“She would listen to you. She likes you.”

He shook his head. “She, she wouldn’t listen to …”

“She would. I know she would. She’s always saying to Izzie that he should grow up to be a mensch like you. Please, Hayim,” she pleaded.

“I don’t know. Maybe. What, what do you want me, me to tell her?” he asked.

“Oh, you know what to say. Something about how it’s her religious duty, you know, as a good Jewish woman. Something like it’s just proper for her to leave me alone.”

“And you’ll go home?” he asked.

She nodded. “If you come with me,” she said.

A
SHER ALWAYS
used to tell the young Hayim that he shouldn’t be self-conscious about his stammering. “Every word is a prayer if you say it with all of your heart,” he used to say, rolling a cigarette from the coarse strong tobacco he kept in a wooden box. It smelled like the end of days, Hayim thought, but Asher insisted the sharp taste reminded his tongue that it was still alive. “Let me tell you the story of the village that was suffering from a drought,” Asher would say after taking a long drag. “It was terrible. The fields withered to nothing. No one had a
groschen
to buy a needle. The synagogue was full of scholars and worthy men who prayed and fasted and recited psalms day and night. But
still it didn’t rain. They tore their clothes and smeared their faces with ash. Still God had no mercy. Everything was closed. Even the tavern. One day Shloimeh, the village drunk, raised his hands to heaven and cried out with more sincerity than all the righteous in the synagogue.
‘Gotteniu,’
he cried, ‘I need a drink. Let it rain so the tavern can reopen.’ And so it rained.”

A drunk, yes, Hayim would tell Asher. But no one has the patience to listen to someone that stammers. Better not to say too much than to watch people turn away. In the village square they said that Hayim hoarded words like a miser hoards gold.

A
LTA
-F
RUMA
was in the dairyhouse churning butter, her shoulders hunched like an old woman’s when Hayim and Emma arrived. Hayim was carrying Emma’s bundle, and Emma dragged her feet like a calf coming to the
shokhet.
As they entered the dairyhouse, Alta-Fruma straightened up with a start, her arms stretched out to greet them, her face caught between relief and anger. “In a good hour,” she said. “You didn’t cause enough aggravation already? You had to run off and scare your brother half to death?”

“Didn’t he get my note?” Emma asked sullenly.

“Yes, sure, but he didn’t believe it. He thought the Gypsies kidnapped you and made you write the note. I assured him that the Gypsies have plenty of their own children and have no use for anyone else’s, never mind a troublesome Jewish girl who doesn’t know what’s good for her and doesn’t give a thought to anyone else. He ran off to find someone with a cart to go and look for you, but I see you decided to come back. Or did you lose your way?”

Emma began to turn around, quite prepared to march back down the road, but Hayim held her by the shoulder. “No, no,” he said. “She, she wasn’t running away.”

“No, she was maybe baking matzos in the woods?” Alta-Fruma asked.

Murmuring a quick apology to the Holy One above, Hayim took a deep breath. “Emma was going to Plotsk to get work,” he said. “Piecework. You said she should help out with the bribe for Ruthie’s warden, didn’t you?” Emma’s protest turned into a squeak as Hayim jabbed her in the ribs with his elbow.

“Is that what you were up to?” Alta-Fruma asked.

“Hayim met me and …” she looked at him. He nodded encouragingly. “I realized I forgot to say in the note where I was going, so I …”

“You didn’t eat, Emma. Go inside and have some tea and bread. You can help me in the dairyhouse today. There’s enough time for you to go to Plotsk next week.”

After Emma went inside, Alta-Fruma said to Hayim, “I’ll have to stop her brother from raising the whole village to look for her.”

She knew, Hayim thought. How could she not? No one needs to wear three dresses to walk to Plotsk. She wouldn’t think he was such a mensch anymore, not a man who tells lies. No she would think he was an idiot who imagined that she would be fooled by such an obvious fabrication. May God put it to his merit that he sacrificed his character so that Emma could come home. Well, is the character of a watercarrier worth so much anyway?

Hayim turned to go. He had water to haul. “Wait a minute,” Alta-Fruma said. “You know, Hayim, the sages write that even God lies to protect peace in the home. Avraham heard Sarah laughing in the tent when the angels told him he would have a child. She laughed at the idea—imagine, at his age. ‘Do you hear how my wife laughs at me?’ he asked the Holy One. But God said, ‘No, you have it all wrong. She’s laughing because she thinks that she herself is too old.’ It’s true, Hayim. I’m not making it up. The
zogerin
told the women in synagogue.” She left the butter churn standing as it was. But as she passed Hayim, she said, “Thank you for bringing Emma home. You’ll see, I won’t forget it.” Her hand was on his arm, and he could feel her heat through the sleeve burning into him.

The next day she asked him to stay for
Shabbas
dinner.

The following week she asked him to stay for
Shabbas
dinner.

The next week, again.

The week after that, on the day that Ruthie came home from prison, Alta-Fruma told him that he didn’t need an invitation anymore. “Are you a stranger?” she asked.

They were standing under the willow trees outside the dairyhouse, looking at the red sun fall into the river. “I hope not,” he said.

“Of course not.” She turned toward him, looking as if in the half-dark she could see everything about him.

When the raspberries were ripe, Hayim left a stack of wood behind Misha’s house, and, with his yoke, walked along the path to a sunny spot near the birches in the woods. There the biggest, sweetest raspberries grew and he whistled as he picked them. The day was warm and muggy, the bucket big. By the time he got to the dairyhouse a thin line of sweat was trickling along his neck.

Alta-Fruma stood with her back to him, a straight and narrow back, the shoulders working as she stirred the curd in the big vat. Hayim could see a single gray curl under her ear, freed from the confines of her kerchief, the ends of the kerchief trailing along her neck. Picking up one of the ends, Hayim pulled gently, as if to untie the kerchief. Alta-Fruma spun around. “You,” she said. “Stop it.” But her voice was soft and she was smiling.

“Raspberries,” Hayim said, presenting Alta-Fruma with the bucket.

“And I have fresh cream to go with it. Let me get bowls from the house. You sit right here.” She pointed to the bench.

While she was gone, Hayim took a tablet of paper from the corner and a piece of charcoal from his pocket. A number of his sketches were pinned to the walls of the dairyhouse. Emma and Izzie and Alta-Fruma and even Hazzer the pig in every characteristic pose, Emma arguing, Izzie studying, Alta-Fruma working and Hazzer trying to get into whatever was forbidden to him. There was not a single sketch of Hayim, though Alta-Fruma had asked him for one many times. “How can I draw it for you?” he’d asked. “Can I see myself?”

When Alta-Fruma came back with the bowls, she sat beside him on the bench while they ate and when they were done, still they sat. Could he say what they talked about? He moved toward her and pulled away a dozen times, muttering madly about jewels and secrets. How could he keep himself from her? The sages were right to put a
mekhitzah
between men and women. A man wasn’t to be trusted. Even her bare feet on the floor attracted him. She was so close. Just a hair’s breadth away from the touch of his hands. No, he just imagined she
was so near. If she was across the room she would seem close, so conscious was he of her presence. If he reached for her she would back away, and he would have to leave. Maybe he should leave. How could he insult her with these thoughts? And yet, see how she leaned toward him, picking a hair from his apron, twisting it around her finger.

“Maybe you’re right,” she was saying, “I won’t say no.” She spoke quietly, leaning so close he could feel the small puffs of her quick breath. “The floor is cold,” she said as she lifted her feet onto the bench, rubbing them. Narrow feet. Calloused around the heel. Plump toes. Sweet round pink toes.

Without a thought, like Hazzer the pig facing the door to a cellar, Hayim pushed her hands away. “Let me,” he said, taking her foot. She didn’t pull away. She only looked at him, her head tilted, eyes narrow, little sighs escaping from between her lips as he warmed her feet between his hands. Delicate bones under his fingers. Plump toes that could fill his mouth. He couldn’t meet her gaze. Hayim who saw everything, Hayim who looked at women, bent his head. It was then that he felt her cool fingers on his neck, reaching upward, tickling the edge of his ear, touching his lips. Her leg began to tremble, his hands slid along her calf. Lifting his head, he saw her looking at him with a half-smile.

“Come with me,” Alta-Fruma said, pulling him toward the door that opened into the cow shed.

In the cow shed he wrapped his arms around her. She was so light in his arms. A bird with her head bent, the trailing ends of her kerchief feathers on each side of her neck. He kissed her neck, his lips gentle on the fragile skin, his heart beating against her breasts until she pushed herself away with a strong arm, saying, “I want to see.” She was looking at him, nodding. “Everything.”

“Why not everything,” he said, taking off his apron. His caftan. His shirt. The undershirt with his ritual fringes. His buttoned trousers. Unbuttoned. And he opened his arms to her as she looked at him.

W
HEN
E
MMA
fell sick with typhus, the whole village was afraid there would be an epidemic. They wore garlic in pouches around their necks as they recounted the deaths of the cholera epidemic. Mothers
cut off their daughters’ braids and scoured their children’s heads for lice. The
zogerin
prayed at the grave of the Old Rabbi. People asked Berekh, still the “Young Rabbi” though he was forty, to bless their homes. Disease is caused by germs, not the evil eye, he explained. But the villagers said, Tishah-b’Av is coming, you know how many terrible things have happened on that day. And still Emma shook with fever.