Beyond the Pale: A Novel (8 page)

“Talent?” A talent was to know how to save a baby’s life or manage a business like the bathhouse. What happened to me seemed more like a curse than a talent, like being born with six fingers.

“Sometimes, Gutke, you’re as thick as cold kasha. No one chooses her talents. We’re lucky if we find out early what they are.” She must have heard herself scolding, because her voice softened. “Think of this as a form of spiritual talent. If you were a man, you’d become one of those wonder rabbis who strive with spirits.”

If I hadn’t just seen the ghosts, I would have thought Milcah was teasing me. A wonder rabbi—she might as well have said I could have been the Tsar. “I thought they were just in stories.”

“Stories come from life. We don’t rely on them the way we did when I was a girl but that doesn’t mean they don’t hold truths. So, what should we do with you?” She rubbed her hands together, thinking.

I had a knot in the bottom of my stomach. I was used to being different from other girls, that’s not what bothered me. It was the spirits themselves. I never thought the wall that separated us from angels and demons was so thin that ghosts could actually use me as a place to enter the world. I felt transparent, as if I were a branch of leaves and a cold night wind was blowing through me, tearing off bits. I was silent, but Milcah must have heard my fear.

“Come, sit down beside me. It’s not so bad, child. You will gain control of yourself, learn how to keep the window shut and open it when you want. You will have to learn how to say kadish like a boy, for the stillbirths and miscarriages—otherwise you’ll start carrying around the dybuks of infants, what a mess that would be! It’s a good thing Pesah sent you to me, she has her moments of insight. I myself will make you a talis—”

“A talis?” Only boys wore talesim. It’s one thing to be different inside, another to wear your difference so anyone can see. The knot in my stomach grew by inches.

“For under your clothes, not exactly like a man’s, but a fringed vest. You’ll wear it when you deliver women. You’re almost thirteen now, right? For boys it’s thirteen, for girls twelve, when they make the passage. That’s what this is, your passage. Do you bleed yet?”

“Just last month, a few drops. My mother showed me how to make the cloths. She slapped me and said I would start to know what pain means.”

“Your mother, may her life be long and sweet, is not the most enlightened of women. You know this?”

Of course I knew this. Even the yardboy knew this.

“Tell me when you bleed. It may influence the bat kol or whatever makes you prophesy at birth. We will experiment.” She rose as though she had been stuck with a pin. “I have just the thing to help you. Here—,” Milcah rummaged through some old embroidered bags in a bottom drawer, “this stone. You will carry it in your pocket whenever we go to attend a birth. If the birth is going well, you just need to think about it. If death comes into the room, hold onto it.”

It seemed like an ordinary stone, with shiny flecks, but when she put it in my hand, I saw a little farm and could feel the black dirt of the Ukraine in my palm. My stomach relaxed. I put the stone in my pocket. Today, even, I have it still.

Much was revealed in those years with Milcah. I have come to believe that life is a long corridor hung with veils. Every time we get past one veil, we feel that now we understand, we have the true, clear picture. Then we move a little bit, see the next veil and are frightened—both because we were boastful in our ignorance, and because we must go on to find out what’s behind it. When you’re young, you run through this corridor, shivering with fear and excitement. Every day you’re reborn a wise woman, every night you’re a humble wretch, begging God’s forgiveness. Then you come to the wonderful nights when you forget about God altogether. Now I find such a long distance between the veils that I sometimes think I’m at the end of the corridor. But it was not so long ago that I became the age Milcah was when I first came to her, and the veil separating us lifted. Then I could see what she meant and thought in everything she taught me. When I remember this, I know there are many veils still separating me from my end. Who knows what will be behind the last one?

When I think of the last veil, I believe behind it will be the splendor of the palace of God. And then I realize God’s palace looks, in my mind, like the bathhouse. It could be worse.

Every day, every year, I was learning new things. At night I would tell Feygele and Pesah all about the women—who screamed loudest, who had the biggest babies. Pesah knew everyone, and she would cluck and hum: “Yes, I knew it!” or “Who would’ve thought?” I didn’t tell them about the spirits.

I wanted to tell. Sometimes I thought of Golde, how dark her eyes were, how she would understand. But she was a grown woman and besides, Yetta was always with her. I made sure to be working the nights they came. Now they gave me ten kopecks. Yetta would frown and Golde would wink. That’s all. I would make sure the girls who took the private tubs would get what they paid for, which was privacy.

A couple, maybe three years passed this way. Sometimes I myself guided the baby into this life, and Milcah helped me. I earned fifty kopecks from every birth and made a few more selling concoctions from the herbs I gathered on my own. I felt I was truly blessed; this I never forgot for a minute.

One night Golde arrived at the baths alone. Her eyes were puffy from crying.

“Good evening, how are you? It’s just me tonight,” she said as if everything was fine. So I gave her towels. I waited a few minutes, considering. It didn’t take a spirit to tell me I should go in to see her.

I knocked. “It’s only me, Gutke. I thought maybe you would like a drink of cold water.” When I went in, she was sitting on the bench with her hands folded neatly in her lap, a towel across her shoulders, draping her breasts. She was staring at the floor. I looked at her hair, which got so curly in the steam I didn’t think you could run a brush over it.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking up at me, her eyes spilling tears.

“For what should you be sorry to me? Tell me what’s wrong.”

She laughed a little. “You’re always so nice to me, Gutke. But this you wouldn’t understand.”

“I understand something bad has happened between you and Yetta—is she all right?”

“Oh, she’s fine, just perfect!” Golde ground her teeth in rage. “The shadkhn’s been pestering her for years. But she was her mother’s youngest, the baby. For her, they could wait for just the right match. Yetta said, she said—”

“Yes?” I asked. I sat on the bench next to her. Of course, I had my clothes on, so I was very hot. Just a light skirt and a blouse with the sleeves rolled up, but even so.

“She said I was the right match for her.”

Golde hung her head, and I could tell she was ashamed to reveal this to me. I wasn’t sure exactly how to reassure her. “Yes, it seems to me she loves you very much.”

“You could see it? Did other people see it?”

What an opportunity! “I don’t think so. I can see things other people don’t.”

“What?”

“I see spirits, or visions, when women are giving birth. Sometimes I can see a little bit of what will happen to their children. Milcah says sometimes I hear a bat kol. She told me not to tell anyone about this, but I—” Golde looked at me so sharply it made the sweat burn and prickle where my skin was exposed.

“You can see the future?”

“Only a little bit, when babies are born. Other times I just get a feeling.” I shrugged. I didn’t want her to think I was too strange to confide in.

“Yes?”

“Just a feeling. Here—,” I pressed my chest, “or sometimes in my arms or legs. Not like something is taking over me but like something is giving me a direction. It’s not such a big thing. I think if people paid more attention, more would admit to having ordinary visions.” I decided not to tell her about my little talis or about the time the dead came to Milcah’s.

“You mean you think there are spirits around us all the time but only a few people admit they feel them?”

“Not exactly.” It was so hot, I was shvitsing up all my clothes. “It’s more that everyone is so busy getting food on the table. Most people don’t have time for spirits. So they feel a tug at their elbow—they think it’s the wind.”

Golde gave me a small sad smile. “Yes. I think you’re right. So smart for a girl.”

“I’m not a girl,” I protested. “I bleed, I’ve seen 172 births and three women die.”

“Really?” She patted my hand, almost forgetting I was there. “I apologize then.”

“So. Yetta’s getting married?” I didn’t want her to drift away from me, even if I had to make her cry again.

And she did. The tears balled up, fell down her face and nose quietly. “Yes. She’s marrying Leybl, who works for the railroad. The shadkhn says he’s very handsome and has a good steady job. I can’t bear it.”

“But Golde, what could she do? If it’s a good match and the parents want it, how could she refuse?”

“She could have just refused. She doesn’t care about him.”

“So, she gets married. You can still see her.”

“She doesn’t want to make a scandal.”

“What scandal? You still have your shop, nu? So she comes in to have you make clothes or to help you with something. Pesah’s friend Sadie is here every day to help with the midday meal.”

“Yes, but they’re old. And both married. And besides, they don’t feel about each other like I feel about Yetta.”

“How do you know?”

Again Golde stared at me. “Pesah Kohn touches Sadie Rabinovitch?”

I blushed. “I don’t know for a fact. Only after I saw you and Yetta, I thought, maybe—”

“Maybe. No, it can’t be.” She held my hand tightly, staring at something a long way off. “And you?”

“Me?” The breath tangled in my lungs like an umbilical cord coming out before a baby. I took my hands away and folded them in my lap. Sweat was staining my blouse and back, dripping down the curve of my ears.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ask such things. Even if I am doomed to gehene for my sin. This room—it was a world apart for me. Please forgive me.”

“Where is it written that love is a sin?” My breath came back to me.

She sighed. “Among women, sins don’t have to be written. You should know that. Not marrying is a scandal, not having twelve children a sin. Reading Mendele is a sin. Not lighting the Shabbes candles is a sin, not baking bread for the poor is a sin—”

“You don’t light the Shabbes candles?”

“Of course I light the Shabbes candles. I’m just saying.”

I was relieved somehow. I realized I had a picture in my mind of Golde bentshing likht, waving her hands over the flames, her dark eyes closed, her eyelids a delicate purple. My blush came back. “I don’t know the answer to your question,” I said, pushing the words out of me before I choked on them.

“My question? Oh.” She looked all the way through me. Even in the steam, I could feel a coolness. “I don’t mean to insult you, but you are young still to know this. And maybe you have seen too many things. Too many intimate parts of a woman.” She considered me a little differently. “I myself only saw Yetta, and the women in the bathhouse, but just passing by.”

“So how did you know?”

“I don’t know, really. I grew up with all boys. So I was curious about girls. And, well, some of my brothers were nice, but my brother Moyshe, the second oldest, a rotten fish. Always making a disturbance in the kheder, always with his hands on me. I had to take care of all of them while Mama was sick and then after she died. I knew I didn’t want to let myself be married to a villain like Moyshe, and then, when I thought about it, I didn’t want to keep taking care of boys at all. I looked around. I’m not a fool.”

You couldn’t be less of a fool than Golde, I thought.

“Most of the women are out in the marketplace or sewing a little this or that or keeping the store and the books. So I decided to be an old maid. Isn’t that a funny thing for a Jewish girl!”

“There are worse things.”

“Not according to the bathhouse women.”

“Still.”

“Yes, still. But how did I know? Swimming in the river, taking measurements for a skirt, when Yetta made a joke about a psalm. In little bits, I suppose. And—”

“Yes?”

“When I kissed Yetta, then I knew.”

“Oh.” This would have been a good time to excuse myself. I had a lot of work to see about. But instead I pulled together my courage. “Maybe, maybe you should kiss me, so I will know.”

Golde laughed. I felt like I was burning up. I struggled to my feet, but she grabbed hold of my hand.

“Little Gutke, I’m sorry. Please. I’m not laughing at you. It’s just, I can’t. It wouldn’t be right. I am mourning for my Yetta, and I don’t have a feeling like that for you. Don’t misunderstand me. I think you are a very comely young woman, very interesting. But I’m already twenty-three and you’re only what, fifteen?”

“Sixteen in a month. Women get married younger.”

“Yes, but we’re not talking about marriage, are we?” So sad, she looked. “We will be friends, yes? We’ll talk. I’ll help you if I can.”

I stood up as tall as I could. “Please forgive me for being so forward.”

“You forgive me, I forgive you. All right? Friends?”

“Friends.”

A year went by, maybe two. Business kept getting better at the bathhouse. Reb Kohn said Kishinev was the crown jewel of the southwest, with more traveling businessmen every day, Rumanians and Turks. The increase in trade brought foreign Jews to the baths, even Arabic Jews from Turkey.

“The Turks are spies,” Pesah said without looking up from her mending.

“Nonsense. What makes you think that?” Reb Kohn asked.

“There are too many Russian soldiers in town.”

“This is the capital of Bessarabia and more important than ever. That’s why the soldiers are here.”

“And that’s why I think the Turks are spies,” she said, cutting the thread to repair Feygele’s old apron.

“Everyone knows that our Kishinev wool is finer than Odessa’s, and cheaper too. The Turks are just here for wool for their rugs.”

“All right, Reb Kohn,” Pesah said, “whether they’re spies or traders makes no difference to me. We still need to hire another boy for the men’s side. Our guests expect the kind of service they get in Kiev and Constantinople, and we have to keep them content. We don’t want any trouble from the authorities—on either side. Now you’ll excuse us. Gutke and I have towels to wash.”