The River Midnight (43 page)

Tuesday, August 5, 1879

Greetings Moyshe-Mendel
,

I write to you from my room above the bakery. It was kind of my cousin Faygela and her husband Shmuel to allow me to use this room, but I am quite ready to move out. It may be difficult for you to imagine, though I assure you it is true, that the smell of fresh bread can become a noxious scent as it ascends day after day into the stifling heat of an attic room. There are blotches in the ledger book where the sweat poured from my hands as I entered births and deaths and even a divorce with my gold-nibbed pen.

You know how seldom divorce occurs among these people, though it’s easy enough to obtain a
Get.
But after less than a year of marriage, Misha Fliderblum and Hayim Bernstein are divorced according to the Law of Moses. No one knows why, though many have tried to guess. I did not wait long, this time, but sent the matchmaker to Misha to plead my case. I eagerly await her answer, but I must tell you, my friend, this Misha is no ordinary woman, and I am quite sure that my little house and my meager income as “crown rabbi” will neither interest nor deter her. It will only be I myself that she will judge as worthy. Or not. And so my friend, I am quite
nervous. You would not think that this is the same man who rode by sleigh from Moscow to St. Petersburg, the sole male escorting a choir composed of healthy, young women.

Through my little window I see the matchmaker coming toward the bakery. He is frowning. It does not look good.

The matchmaker has left. It seems that Misha did not receive him kindly. Moyshe-Mendel, I could ask no one else but you. Tell me. Be forthright. Am I so terrible that a woman should throw a jar at the head of the matchmaker representing me?

Wednesday, April 13, 1881

Dear friend
,

Only a brief note this time. I hope that you will have a better Passover than we. The good Tsar Alexander II was assassinated exactly one month ago, and now the Jews are blamed. It seems that among the terrorist group responsible, there was a desperate young woman, Jessie Helfmann, a Jewish seamstress. From this small fact, anti-Jewish circles have woven the extravagant claim that the assassination was a Jewish plot. We have heard that there are to be organized riots against the Jews, authorized by the new Tsar Alexander III. Pogroms. And lives are not to be spared.

Friday, December 23, 1881

To my mentor Moyshe-Mendel, greetings

The pogroms continue, the peasants, who require a scapegoat for their misery, eagerly following the lead of the Cossacks.

We have been safe, so far, in Poland, but there are rumors that there will be trouble in Warsaw. I intend to follow your advice and will not stand idly by while fellow Jews are attacked. A group of us will be spending the Sabbath in Warsaw, where we go to defend the Jews: myself, Meyer the butcher, his son-in-law Hershel, and the Puks, a family of carters, father and three sons. We do not go unarmed, but have amongst us an ax, several cleavers, and an ancient sword. Since God in Heaven does not come down to defend His people, we must march to the call of our ancestors, and not cower like sheep in a storm.

Addendum: December 28

It is over. What do the Gypsies say? “One madman makes many madmen, and many madmen makes madness.” The pogrom began three days ago, on the last day of Hanukkah, and we imagined ourselves to be as the Maccabees fighting the Romans. It was Sunday, Christmas Day, the narrow streets of the Jewish quarter crowded with good Christians—pogromchiks smashing shop windows. Goods scattered. Doors of homes broken. Women’s cries as they were dragged out and set upon while the church bells rang. Houses set on fire. Snow falling among the feathers of torn pillows stained pink with blood.

Tell me, Moyshe-Mendel, why do they tear up the pillows, a poor girl’s only dowry?

I was pushed against the wall of a butcher shop by the crowd of peasants trying to gain entrance, the rusty point of my sword sticking in the wooden sign that said “Kosher Meats.” I am ashamed to tell you how frightened I was by this mob armed only with fists and kitchen weapons. They were not human anymore, but something else. Something without a mind. Something that grew large on the smell of blood. And I was a coward before it, slammed against the wall, my arm over my eyes—to protect myself from the broken bottle coming toward my face or because I could not bear to see? I do not know, my friend.

Hershel and Meyer wielded their cleavers fearlessly and, with the Puks holding iron bars, they kept the peasants from overrunning the store, inside which five Jewish families had barricaded themselves. This was before the Cossack leaped off his horse and pointed his rifle at Meyer, who sensibly dropped his cleaver. Then Hershel grabbed the ax from the elder Puk. With one hand he gripped his knife, with the other he flung the ax. The Cossack was most amused. We disarmed Hershel, despite his protests, when the Cossack aimed his rifle at Hershel’s lower parts. Then, after forcing Hershel to hand him the ax, he swung it to each side of my head, grazing my ears. Impressed by the Cossack’s skill, one of the peasants wanted to see if he could also mark my ears without cutting them off, but Meyer rushed at him, sticking him with a knife he had hidden in his boots. The peasant screamed, though the wound was more surprising
than damaging, the knife partly deflected by his sheepskin. We turned to run, but a shot from the Cossack’s rifle stopped all of us when Puk’s middle son fell.

Then two peasants in big fur coats took Meyer, the snow falling on them while they tied him up. “Sugar tax,” said one, pouring a bag of sugar, looted from the broken window behind us, over Meyer’s head, laughing as he sneezed and choked. “Kerosene tax,” said the other man, pouring kerosene over the sugar. “Match tax,” they shouted together and, while I started forward, the Cossack’s bayonet stopping me in half a step, they set fire to him. I blinked, and still my vision seemed to waver as the flames exploded.

Avram Puk is sitting shivah for his son, but the younger brother will not leave Perlmutter’s tavern. He drinks and eats, and when I pleaded with him to sit with his father, he said, “You are too thin, Berekh Eisenbaum, you will flicker and out you will go like a match. But I won’t stop eating until I can make a huge fire that will burn for hours, a fire big enough for the Tsar to see in Moscow.”

I have discovered a second truth. While God in Heaven sleeps, Berekh Eisenbaum on earth is useless. I could do nothing for my brother Pinye nor for my fellow Jews in Warsaw nor for brave Meyer who, in defending me, lost his own life. Better to have offered myself as a sacrifice.

I am on my way to my grandfather’s hut in the Tatras. Even on the mountain among his goats, I will not forget the smell of the fur coats as they warmed in the fire from Meyer’s body, or the smell of sugar on his skin burning as it blackened and curled away from his bones.

I could not bear to speak with anyone in Blaszka before I left. Misha, meeting me on the path through the woods, asked me to take a cup of hot tea to warm myself in her house. But she must not have heard what had happened. If she did not see fit to accept my suit earlier, surely she would not want me in her house now. I declined her invitation and made ready to leave the village.

Thursday, July 27, 1882

Dear friend
,

Tishah-b’Av has come and gone, Moyshe-Mendel. And after my
grandfather prayed for the destruction of the Holy Temple, he said to me only, “Go down. You belong among people.” Perhaps he is right. I am a burden to him here. An extra mouth to feed with no skill to offer him. The goats hide from me and I cannot even light his fire. The sight of a match causes me to shake. And from time to time I have the delusion that I am in Warsaw once again. I hear the screams. I smell the fire.

You would not know me, now, my friend. I scarcely know myself. I am not the reckless young man I once was, nor can I pretend to be the romantic who went to Warsaw, dreaming that I could make the least difference in the world. But at twenty-eight years of age I can at least support myself in Blaszka and fulfill the mitzvah of giving charity, even if I can do nothing else. You may wonder that I speak of mitzvah, I who quote the heretic Elisha Ben Abouya, I who hear God snoring. But while I walked in the clear mountain air, I determined that a man needs to follow something if he is not to go mad in this unjust and chaotic world. I am a Jew. I will follow Torah.

Friday, March 30, 1883

Dear Moyshe-Mendel
,

Congratulate me, old friend. At the ripe old age of twenty-nine I am betrothed. The girl is of impeccable, if not great, lineage. All the knowledgeable denizens of our village assured me that the match was not only suitable, but perfect. Everyone in the village will attend our wedding, from Hershel the butcher to Misha the midwife.

When I came down from the mountains, I found that the Old Rabbi had died: the
real
rabbi, that is, the one who determined points of religious law as well as settling local disputes for Jews and peasants alike, as is often the custom in these backwoods places. He judged everything: a boundary dispute between peasants; an argument between husband and wife; whether the stain on the woman’s rag means she is still unclean. Everyone went to him with their
shaalehs,
their questions. If one is lost in the woods and cannot see the sun, when is it time to pray? Is so-and-so obliged to divorce his wife if she cannot give him children? Does the money pouch belong to Haykel who found it or Getzel who owns the land where it was found? You remember the type, a beard like Moses, making no concessions to the modern world.

The village is too small and poor to offer much of a livelihood, not that they pay the rabbi, of course. Oh no, that would be to make an ax out of the Torah, as they say. But the Old Rabbi’s wife had a monopoly on yeast, and that’s how they lived. Therefore my stipend in the post of “crown rabbi” made me a prime candidate, despite the disadvantage of my secular education. Since the pogroms, interest in the outside world has been eclipsed by fear and suspicion, but the fact that I first went to yeshiva has lessened the sin of reading German, Polish, and Russian. In the end, there was no one else. So they made me the Rabbi of Blaszka, branded me, so to speak, like a stray sheep, and, having magically transformed me into the local religious authority, they informed me that I could do nothing else than marry. After a year of resistance, I surrendered. The deed will be done on Lag b’Omer and you must attend the wedding, my friend.

My betrothed is a pale-lipped, scurrying inoffensive little mouse of sixteen, whose ears turn red at the tips when she is nervous. I will do my best not to make her nervous.

Sunday, June 10, 1883

Greetings, Moyshe-Mendel
,

I cannot tell you how glad I was that you were able to attend the wedding. My young wife Hava is still rather shy. Except for the cup of watery tea that suddenly appears and disappears at my elbow, I hardly know she’s in the house. She speaks only to ask me if everything is to my taste, and even then looks quickly away before I catch her eye. In turn I ask her if all is to her liking, and she replies, her ears turning red, that all that is lacking is a child, and she hopes that the Holy One, in His wisdom, will see fit to grant us that joy soon.

We are fortunate to retain the assistance of my predecessor’s servant, Maria, who attends my young bride with kindness and myself with a touch of scorn. She went to work for the Old Rabbi when she was fourteen and still reveres him as a saint, as do many in these parts. For myself, I do not have such fond memories of him. After my cousin Yekhiel’s death, I appealed to the Old Rabbi on Faygela’s behalf. She wanted to go to school, as her father had promised. The Old Rabbi replied that while secular studies were no danger to a
female child, if the pious grandmother objected to my sending Faygela to school in Warsaw, then she should find her contentment in obedience.

Thank you for sending me Émile Zola’s new work. I will share it with my cousin Faygela, who cherishes every word of print, burdened as she is with three (presently to be four) children, though she is only twenty-two years old.

Wednesday, October 7, 1891

My dear Moyshe-Mendel
,

Please forward my most heartfelt congratulations to your new bride. Since we are only a few days from Yom Kippur I would like to ask you if I have done anything to offend you in the past year. I hope that you will forgive me.

It is good of you to make your house in Warsaw available to the refugees. Since the Jews were expelled from Moscow, there is hardly the corner of a room available anywhere. Even in Blaszka, the guest house regularly has one or two families on their way to Warsaw. I, myself, have had a peasant family staying with me over the last few days. They, too, left their home in Russia and are on their way to Warsaw, having lost everything in the famine, poor souls, and are nothing but skin and bone. The little one’s face is gray and she sits completely still, holding onto the silver crucifix that hangs on a leather string around her neck.

I hesitate to tell you my sad news and cast any shadow on your joy. But Hava, my wife, passed away recently. She died happy in the knowledge that she had finally been blessed with the son she so badly wanted. Misha, the midwife, wrapped the baby and held him to Hava as her eyes closed.

Tell me, Moyshe-Mendel, did I need to have a son? I told her a hundred times that we have a beautiful daughter. With each miscarriage I begged her to stop. But she wanted a boy, a son to say kaddish for us when we die. Why did I give in? I am the one reciting the mourner’s prayer, and who knows if the baby will even live?

Until Hava was gone, I didn’t know how much life came from the corner where she sat all day knitting and consulting with Maria. I know nothing, now, of what is going on in the village
,
and the house is so quiet that I am startled by the mice. Yesterday Maria brought some peasants to me for arbitration in a boundary dispute. Three brothers, three small farms. I could have kissed them for disturbing the royal silence of my long days.

Please excuse the brevity of my communication. I find myself overly tired these days. May you and your bride be inscribed in the Book of Life. Do not forget your old friend, Berekh.