Evergreen (2 page)

Whenever Anna told or thought about the story of Pretty Leah she fell into the cadence and language of the twelve-year-old child she had been when it happened.

“Mama sent me to the farm to buy some eggs. Pretty Leah and I stood in the courtyard counting the eggs. Then I wanted to go into the barn to look at a newborn calf, and I was there when the men came, three of them on plow horses, cantering into the yard.

“I think Pretty Leah thought they wanted to buy some eggs because I saw her smile and look up at them. They jumped off the horses and one of them took her shoulders. They were laughing, but they were angry, too, I think; I didn’t know what they were, really, but Pretty Leah screamed and I ran up the ladder into the loft and hid.

“They dragged her inside and shut the barn door. Her screams, oh, her screams! They were drunk and saying dirty words in Polish; their eyes were all puckered in their flat cheeks. They pulled her skirt up over her face. Oh, they will smother her, I thought;
I mustn’t look
, and still I could not look away from the things they did.

“Like the bull and the cow, that time when Mama and I were out walking and Mama said,
Don’t look
and I asked,
Why mustn’t I?
And she answered,
Because you are too young to understand. It will frighten you
.

“But the bull and the cow had not frightened me at all. It seemed a simple thing, what they had done. Not like this
awful thing. Pretty Leah twisted and kicked; her screams under the skirt had turned to weeping and pleading, soft, soft, like a baby animal. Two of the men pinned her arms and the third lay on top of her. Then they changed places until all three had lain on her. After a while she stopped moving and crying. I thought,
My God, they have killed her!

“When the men left they flung the barn door wide. I could hear the hens clucking in the yard. The light came in and fell on Pretty Leah with the skirt over her face, her naked legs spread wide, blood sticky on her thighs. After a long time I came down the ladder. I was afraid to touch her but I made myself draw her skirt down. She was breathing; she had only fainted. There was a cut on her chin; her black hair had come unbraided. When she wakes up she will wish she were dead, I thought.

“Then I went outside and vomited in the grass. I picked up the basket of eggs and went home.”

That was the way she remembered it, all the years of her life, the way she would often think of a man with a woman, although she would not want to think of them like that.

In the evening after the dishes had been put away Mama said, “Come, Anna, well sit outside on the steps and talk awhile.”

But it was dark blue dusk. There were shadows and movement of Things behind the trees, and someone was walking in the distance, rapping on the road, the fast steps coming closer.

“I don’t want to go outside,” Anna said.

“Very well, then, I will ask Papa and the children to sit in the yard and we can talk by ourselves.”

The mother lay down on the bed beside the daughter and took her hand; the mother’s hand was hot and rough.

“Listen to me,” she said softly. “I would give anything if you hadn’t seen what you saw today. Such an ugly, ugly, evil thing!” She was trembling. The long quivering shook her body, shook her voice. “The world can be so frightful and human beings worse than beasts. Still, you must remember,
Anna, that most people are good. You must try to put this out of your mind as soon as you can.”

“Will nobody punish those men?”

“In the first place, nobody could prove who did it. Nobody saw it.”

“I saw it. And I remember the faces. Especially the short thick one. He wears a red shirt and sometimes he goes into Krohn’s Inn to get drunk.”

The mother sat up. “Listen to me, Anna, do you hear? You are never, never to mention that to anybody, to anybody at all, do you understand? Terrible things would happen to you! To Papa, to me, to all of us! You must never, never—!”

The child was frightened. “I understand. But then, there is nothing that can be done about people like that?”

“Nothing.”

“Then how can we know it won’t happen again? Even to you, Mama?”

The mother was silent. And Anna pressed, “How can we know?”

“I suppose we can’t.”

“Then they can always do what they want to do. Kill us, even.”

“That, too. You’re old enough now to know.”

The child began to cry. The mother held her. After a while the father came in. He stood at the door. His face was crumpled and creased.

“I’ve made up my mind. Year after year we put it off. But this year, by spring, well manage it somehow! Well sell the furniture, your earrings, your mother’s silver candlesticks. We have got to get to America!”

“There are seven of us.”

“And if there were seventeen we would still have to manage it. This is no place to live! I want to lay my head down once without fear before I die.”

So all the time, in this home of theirs, they had been afraid. Mama so calmly and skillfully arranging things, Papa humming and smiling while his strong arms hammered
and cut. The child thought wonderingly: I didn’t know, I never knew.

The winter of 1906 was strangely warm. Snow fell briefly and lay puddled in soggy gray slush. A damp wind blew; people perspired in their heavy coats, sneezed, shivered, ran fevers. Late in February the rain began, racing in long, even lines down the dark sky. The village street turned to sucking mud; the little river that curved at the bottom of the rise rushed over its banks and flooded all the yards along its length.

The sickness started down there at the river. In the middle of March a baby and a grandfather died in one house. On the other side of the river, where the peasants lived, a whole family died. Each day brought more sickness and some deaths. Sickness traveled north and south; people on farms five miles away brought their dead to be buried in the churchyard. It was like the black rot that spreads some years in the potato fields, creeping down the rows. And there was no place to go, nothing that anyone knew how to do but wait.

Some said it was because the floods had brought filth into the drinking water. The village priest said it was because people had sinned. Hour after hour the church bells rang for funerals and masses of intercession, making a grave, bronze clamor in the rain. Whenever the rain stopped the processions formed: the priest, the altar boys holding candles, carrying banners and a bone relic in a glass box. Men lifted a statue of the Virgin on a swaying platform; women cried.

In Anna’s house the shutters were closed. “If this sickness doesn’t stop soon,” the father said, “they will start blaming us.”

The mother spoke sadly. “I don’t know which is worse, fear of the cholera or of them.”

“In America,” Anna said, “there is no cholera and nobody is afraid of anybody else.”

“And by summer well be there,” Papa said.

Perhaps at last they really would have gone that year. Who knows?

The father and the mother died at the end of March after an illness of just two days. Celia and Rachel died with them. Anna and the twins never fell sick at all.

They lived, the spindly red-haired girl and the ten-year-old boys, followed the four pine coffins to the cemetery, shook in the whipping wind while the prayers were chanted, saw the first clod of earth strike the wood. Hurry, hurry, it is so cold, Anna thought. And then she thought, I shall forget them. Close your eyes: Think of their faces, remember the sound of their voices calling your name.

They stood in the kitchen of what had been their home. Someone had aired and disinfected the house. Someone else had brought soup. The little room was crowded with neighbors in dark wraps and shawls.

“So, what’s to be done with these children?”

“No family! People without relatives shouldn’t marry each other!”

“That’s true.”

“Well then, the community will have to provide!”

And who is the “community”? Why, the richest man, naturally, from whom all charity is expected and to whom all respect is given. He steps forward now, Meyer Krohn, innkeeper, dry goods merchant, money-lender. He is a tall, pock-marked man in peasant boots and cap. His gray beard is rough, his voice is rough, but it speaks with authority.

“So who’ll take them? What about you, Avrom? You, Yossel? You have room enough!”

“Meyer, you know I give what I can. I’ll gladly take one of them, but not three.”

Meyer Krohn frowns; the furrows in his forehead are deep enough to bury the tip of a fingernail. He roars.

“We don’t separate families! Now, who here will take in these three orphans? I ask you, who?”

Nobody speaks. Anna’s legs are weak; the bones melt.

“Ah,” Meyer says, “I know what you’re thinking! You’re thinking:
Meyer’s rich, let him do it!”
He thrusts his enormous
arms out. “What am I, Rothschild, that I have to support half the community? ‘Meyer, the school needs a new stove; So-and-so broke his leg and his family is starving’—is there no end to what is expected of me?”

Coughing and shuffling. Eli has been told that he must be a man now. He is trying not to cry.

“All right,” says Meyer Krohn. “All right.” He sighs. “My children are grown and gone. The house is big enough, God knows. There’s a room for the boys and Anna can share a bed with the servant-girl.” His voice lowers quietly. “What do you say, Anna? And you, Eli? Which one of you is Eli and what’s the other one’s name? I always forget.” He puts his arms around the little shoulders of the boys. “Come along home,” he says.

Oh, he is decent, he is kind! But Anna walks naked; everyone is looking at her growing breasts, the secrets of her body. Her clothes have been stripped off. She has been shamed, she has been outraged. Like Pretty Leah.

The Krohns live prosperously. Their house has two stories and wooden floors. There is carpet in the front room. Aunt Rosa owns a fur cape. A servant does the cleaning while Aunt Rosa measures cloth and waits on customers in the store. Sometimes she helps in the tavern; sometimes Uncle Meyer helps in the store.

Anna works wherever she is needed, and she is always needed everywhere. She is often tired out. But she has grown tall like her mother, with bright, healthy hair. The Krohns have fed her well.

“How old are you?” Uncle Meyer asks one day. They are rewinding cloth on the heavy bolts and lifting them back onto the shelves.

“Sixteen.”

“How the years fly! You’ve turned out well in my house. A nice girl, a worker. It’s time we found a husband for you.”

Anna does not answer, but this does not brother Uncle
Meyer. He has a way of talking without noticing whether anyone answers or not.

“I really ought to have done something about you before this. But I never seem to have time. People think: he’s a rich man, Meyer Krohn, what has he got to worry about? My God, when I lie down at night I can’t sleep, my head spins, a hundred things at once—”

He is always complaining, there is always an undertone of resentment even in the best humors. But Anna knows that is because he’s afraid. Growing up in a stranger’s house you learn to watch for moods, to anticipate and analyze, to look at the outside and see what is inside. Yes, Uncle Meyer is afraid, even more than Papa was, because he is important and conspicuous in the village. When a new commissioner of police is sent to the district it is Meyer who goes to him for favors that may possibly buy the safety of the community. Also, he has his personal bribes, gifts to the peasants so the store will not be looted and wrecked during the holiday rampage. The same friendly fellow who comes with his cajoling smile to ask for credit—and who, of course, receives it—can just as easily return to boot you down the stairs or set his wicked dogs upon you.

“Yes, and there are your brothers to think about. What’s to become of them? Let’s see, how old are they now?”

“Fourteen.”

“Hm. Fourteen, already. What’s to be done with them? How are they to support themselves?” He thinks aloud. “Rosa has an uncle in Vienna. He went there years ago, perhaps we’ve mentioned him? He sells furs. As a matter of fact, his son will be coming through here this spring to buy fox skins. It’s an idea.”

He looks like a fox himself, Anna thought. The young man from Vienna was thin and lively; his reddish eyes snapped; his city suit fitted like skin and he talked so much and so fast that even Uncle Meyer was subdued. Eli and Dan were fascinated.

“… and the Opera House has marble stairs and
gilded carving on the walls. It’s so enormous that you could fit thirty houses, one whole side of your village, into it.”

“Bah,” Uncle Meyer could not resist. “Who hasn’t seen big buildings? I’ve been in Warsaw; I’ve seen buildings in my time.”

“Warsaw? You compare that with Vienna? I’m talking about a cultured country! Where Jews write plays and teach in the university, where they don’t have pogroms whenever the drunken peasants feel like having a little fun!”

“You mean,” Dan asks, “that Jews in Vienna are exactly like everybody else?”

“Well, naturally they don’t attend balls at Franz Josef’s palace, but neither do other people. They have grand houses, though, and carriages, and they own big shops with porcelains and Oriental rugs and fashions—you should see where I work, we’ve just doubled the place. Why, if you work hard and use your brains, you can see your family rising for generations to come and no limit!”