The River Midnight (38 page)

“Well, I’ll tell you,” the Traveler said. “You keep this rock in your pocket for a hundred and twenty years, guaranteed you’ll have a long life.”

“Where you going?” Yarush asked, as if he hadn’t noticed the Traveler’s scornful tone. He’d just let that stranger get into the cart so he could give the bag a kick and see how heavy it was. Then he’d show the young man the point of his knife.

“Oh, just that ways a while.” The Traveler waved in the direction of Blaszka.

“All right.” Yarush moved over to make room. As the Traveler climbed into the cart, his nostrils fluttered. Yarush smiled. The smell of his fur coat was a powerful thing, lunging at strangers like a
Rusalka
, the fish women who lurked in swamps and tormented unwary travelers at night. Yarush gave the bag a kick. It shifted easily. Worthless. Still, the stranger might have a rich relative somewhere.

“Where you from?” Yarush asked as the cart rollicked along the ice hard dirt between last year’s nettles and the hunched willows with their golden branches praying over the frozen river.

“Around,” the Traveler answered.

“No place special? Just around.”

“Right.”

Not so proper then. A man from nowhere is on the run. Has to sneak out of places. Wanting nobody to know he’s gone. “Everyone says there’s nothing like a corpse’s hand for keeping a house asleep,” Yarush said. “You want one? I can get you one for a good price. Works like magic.”

“Like magic?” the Traveler asked.

“Magic,” Yarush said.

“Well, what do you think I’ve got in my hands? It’s a magic rock. Take it.”

In the Traveler’s hands, the rock had a reddish tinge. Maybe it was lucky. The young man should hope so. Yarush was getting itchy.

“Who knows what could happen if you have this?” the Traveler insisted. “What do you want? A nice house, maybe a wife?”

“I had a wife,” Yarush said. “She left me.” He was hungry again. Where did he have that salami?

“Ran off?”

“Yeah and for nothing. Didn’t even use a belt on her. I just gave her a slap with the back of my hand and she fell down the stairs. Took my little girls away. I couldn’t find them anywhere.” Andrei’s wife
never complained. Not a word. Never a word about anything. And sometimes he knocked her around anyway, just to remind her. “A man has to let the woman know he’s the boss, doesn’t he? It wasn’t half of anything my mother got,” Yarush said.

“You miss your girls?” the Traveler asked, his voice suddenly warm with pity like Yarush was some soft old man that anyone could knife when his back was turned.

Yarush spit over the side of the cart. “It’s not like they were sons,” he said. “If they were sons, my wife wouldn’t dare take them. I’ll tell you something about women. You go with a woman and you think you’re having a good time. But afterward you’re still hungry, know what I mean? Like you’ve had nothing. And she’s just whining and crying over every little thing. Driving you crazy so you can’t get any sleep. You’ve got to sleep after a job. Drink up and sleep it off. But there she is crying and pulling on you and complaining. She’s cold, the baby’s cold, where’d the money go? Women? There’s not a good one among them.”

“The rock works. Good women will come to you. Even a flock of them. Believe me, I wouldn’t cheat you,” the Traveler said, the scorn back in his voice.

Yarush shrugged. He was always too generous after Andrei threw him out. Missing the boys. Maybe he could use a lucky rock. “I won’t break your neck this time,” he said to the Traveler.

I
T WAS
late afternoon by the time Yarush reached Blaszka. Hungry, he searched through his cart, amazed at the absence of all the cheese and bread and meat he’d loaded behind the stolen goods for sale. Inside the pots, between the coils of wire, within the barrels of nails, unraveling the bolts of cloth. Nothing. The village square was empty, the stalls dismantled for
Shabbas.
The low wooden buildings were gray against the gray sky, shops closed, blinds drawn. Even the Director’s carriage was heading out of Blaszka, minus one piglet now asleep in Hayim’s arms.

So it was nearly
Shabbas.
What did Yarush care about that? He was angry at the shuttered stores. At his slow horse and at the setting winter sun for cheating him out of a chance to buy a piece of bread before the Sabbath. Yarush was monstrously hungry. Red and black spots
confused his eyes, obscuring the village square as he heard the sound of wood breaking, a thump as the nag hit the ground, the broken shaft of the wagon like the mast of a drowned ship on top of her.

Yarush jumped down from the cart. “Stand up!” he shouted in a frenzy. “You good for nothing horse, get up!” he shouted again, punching her for good measure.

“Take your hand off the horse,” a woman called out. Yarush looked up to see a big woman with wild black hair coming to him, storming across the village square. A crowd had appeared, from nowhere it seemed. One minute the square was empty, the next it was filled with a flock of women, a milling mob making way for the big woman.

“You talking to me?” Yarush asked. Now the men were joining the crowd, nudging one another, eyeing Yarush suspiciously.

“Who do you think I’m talking to? God in Heaven?” the big woman asked.

People were laughing.
Shabbas
is coming, they said, who’s going to take the peddler home for dinner? Not me. I’m not ashamed to say that I’m afraid of him. Let him get going and eat with the peasants. He’s more one of them than one of us.

Yarush scowled. All of them with their shops closed and locked against him, with their Sabbath breads and soups hidden from him. Smoke was rising from their chimneys, from the tiled ovens cooking good meat and potatoes. Yarush smelled it, yes, with his nose in the air, thick nostrils inhaling the wafting odor of Sabbath food for everyone except him. “Go back inside, woman,” he said as she approached. “Mind your own business.”

“If it happens in Blaszka, it’s my business.”

“You think you’re something, don’t you?”

“Leave the poor nag alone.”

Yarush kicked the horse. “What do you mean, ordering me around? Can you say what I should do with my own animal?”

“I told you once, and I’m telling you again. Leave the poor nag alone.” The woman moved closer.

“I’ll show you who’s the master here,” he said, grabbing her shoulder. A heavy round shoulder that fit his hand nicely.

“Master? Of me? The Pope will marry our blind Hindela first.” The woman laughed, her head back, her gold tooth gleaming.

“I’ll give you something to laugh for.” She was trying to get out from under his grasp. He could feel her pulling back, straining. A big woman. It wasn’t easy to hold onto her, but he would. He’d show her.

“You’ll show me some respect,” she said. She kicked him. Right in his calf. There’s a woman for you. Blink and she’s at you. Keeping you from your business. Making a scene. But he didn’t move. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. Instead he pulled her closer, squeezing her shoulder, pressing into her collarbone with his thumb. She winced. So, she didn’t like this? Wait. He had more for her.

And then she turned her head and spit into his beard. She spat at him!

“Go to hell,” she said.

Now she was going to get it.

From within the crowd, a bass voice was calling, Let me through, let me through. Like water swirling around a tossed stone, the crowd’s attention shifted toward the new voice. What is it, they asked. Who’s getting mixed up in this business? Hershel, they cried, this is a good joke. Does he think he’s King David sent to fight Goliath?

Yarush’s fist was midway to Misha’s mouth when he was distracted by the sight of the bottle in the raised hand of a short, balding man, his hat slipping over one ear.

“Friend, friend, join me in a drink,” the gnomish man said. Yarush slowly turned. Where there was drink, there was food, and if not food, at least the hot fire of a schnapps. What was a woman compared to that?

“Schnapps?” Yarush asked.

“Ah. A man of few words. The best.” Hershel took Yarush by the arm and gently drew him across the square, the crowd parting like the Red Sea.

In the tavern Yarush gulped down three quick tumblers of vodka. His hunger burnt up in the fire, the outlines of the men wobbly in its smoke.

“She likes you,” his benefactor, Hershel the butcher, was saying.

“She spit at me.” For nothing. Just like a woman, Yarush thought.

“A good match for you, no? Misha, the woman in the square. She just needs a little, what should I say? Encouragement.”

A match, a match, it went around in Yarush’s head like a drinking song.

“A big woman like Misha, she’s a whole wedding feast, my friend, and you have the teeth to enjoy it,” said Hershel, pouring another glass.

Yarush drank. A big woman for a big man. Her shoulder in his hand. Meaty. Nice. He leaned back, digging his hands into his pockets, imagining Andrei patting him on the shoulder, winking and flicking his thumb under his chin in the go-ahead sign.

In his pocket he felt the rock rolling into his right hand and his thoughts turned to a hazy dream of his ride with the Traveler. “Like magic,” Yarush said aloud.

“Yes, yes,” Hershel replied. “You’re absolutely right. It’s meant to be. Of course the community council will provide a dowry for our esteemed midwife. With silver, all right maybe brass, candlesticks. And you’ll have a house, too. A small house but right on the village square. You can see it through the window. The one on the stilts above the river.” The door to the inn flew open. “And look who’s here, may Heaven bless her. My wife, Hanna-Leah.”

A dowry. A house. A big woman like a feast. Through a haze Yarush saw Hershel arguing with the woman who had come in to haul him out of the tavern. Let her go, Yarush wanted to say, women just tease you and keep what you need for themselves. But the words fell into the glass of vodka as he drank it down. Hershel’s friend, the baker, left and soon after Hershel followed his wife. The innkeeper put another bottle on the table, and he went, too.

Yarush sat alone. The inside of the tavern turned red with the setting sun, and then black with a darkness lit fitfully by the fire. With his second bottle in hand, he found his way into Perlmutter’s cupboard. Pushing bread and shmaltz herring into his mouth, he remembered Misha’s abundance. Not like the other women he’d lain with. Stringy bits of meat such as poor men boil to nothing in their Sabbath soup just to give it a little flavor. This Misha would be firm. She would be warm. She would wrap herself around him like a feather bed. He would plunge into her over and over until he was finished, and then he would know what he’d had. She wasn’t a ghost, that one. She had substance. A proper woman.

As Yarush toyed with the empty bottle, he imagined sitting at her table. The cloth was white. Candles were lit. There were two braided
hallahs. A whole roasted hen with gravy crackling through the skin. She would speak to him, call him “my Bear,” stroking his head, and, and … his imagination failed him. And? She would turn against him. No, he could hear her say. No. You can’t have that. What? Not any? No. Nothing. The cupboards were closed. The door was locked against him. Even though she was his. Yes, his. She was promised to him. And what did she do? Shout at him. Kick him. Spit on him in front of the whole village.

Pulling himself to his feet and nearly falling out the door, he lurched across the square to Misha’s house. There he climbed the steps that rose up from the river bank, glinting as the moon skidded across the frozen river. He held the rock in his hand. He raised it high, seeing already the crack in the feeble wood of the door. When dawn came, Yarush was gone, the rock left on Misha’s step. It had split in two and between the two halves a red drop glinted in the morning light. The broken door swung weakly on its hinges.

In the yard behind the tavern, Andrei’s sons were throwing knives at Yarush. The storm had passed and the muddy yard was pocked by melting ice pellets. In the fenced-off corner, the sow was suckling her piglets. The rooster was trying to ruffle his bedraggled feathers. “Come on, you dogs,” Yarush called. “We’ve hardly started.” His coat lay on the ground. His pants were tucked into his boots. His shirt, the sleeves cut off, hung to his knees. He used first his right then his left hand to catch the knives, the tattoos on his arms shivering, the Angel of Death on one and a mermaid on the other. He’d gotten the tattoos when he was drunk, and he was sure they meant he’d die by water. He was afraid of water. And darkness. And hunger.

“Is that your best? You’d better go back to ploughing fields,” he said, “and sucking the landlord’s asshole.”

“Forget it,” Matthias said. “Take your twenty rubles.”

He threw the money down on the woodpile beside Yarush, who pulled on his coat, hiding the slight shaking of his arms, his back to Matthias and his brothers. They’d bet that if Yarush could last for ten throws, either Matthias would try it or forfeit twice the number of
rubles. As Yarush pocketed the money, he thought it was a good thing Matthias decided to pay up. Andrei wouldn’t take kindly to Yarush throwing knives at the hands of his favorite son, the lock picker, even though Matthias himself had put Yarush up to it. But you have to let people know you can give as good as you get, especially when you’re not so young anymore. Otherwise they’ll tear you to pieces. Yarush put half the money in each pocket. One side was for drinking and cards. The other side was put-up money for Andrei, who got half of everything. It’s not cheap to pay for bribes, supplies, and church candles.

Inside the tavern, Yarush bought drinks for everyone. To Yarush, they said. To Yarush. To Yarush. The pimps at the front of the tavern, the old sailors at the back, the thieves sprawled in the center, the hunched porters and the beggars with their crutches leaning against the side wall lifted their cups calling, Luck and health to Yarush. Yes, yes, to Yarush, a young sailor said, though Yarush had never seen him before. He was paying over his wages to one of the pimps, taking hold of the freckle-faced, orange-haired cousins, fifteen years old, who, the sailor was solemnly promised, were twins. One under each arm, his hands crawling down their dresses, the sailor began to sing,
“Poland is still ours forever as long as Poles are free.”