The River Midnight (42 page)
Read The River Midnight Online
Authors: Lilian Nattel
O
VER THE
next few days, while the Jews of Blaszka were begging one another’s forgiveness in preparation for the Day of Atonement, Yarush ate the equivalent of two cows and a mill of flour. He was drinking in Andrei’s tavern when a young traveler in a ragged coat with a rose pinned to the collar pulled up a chair, a fresh bottle and a large, round almond torte in hand. Yarush was sitting at his customary table in the back, below the sword hanging on the wall and next to the shrine of Our Lady of the Barley, red candles burning in front of her. The shrine reminded him of his mother.
“You gave me a ride, remember?” the Traveler said.
“So?” Yarush asked. The Traveler cut a good wedge of torte and slid it onto his plate.
“So I’m returning a favor. A torte like this they make only in one place. Can’t get that flavor anywhere else. Just Blaszka. They don’t stint on the almonds. Not the raisins, either. Can’t get a torte like this in Plotsk or even Warsaw.”
Biting into the torte, Yarush’s mouth filled with a thick and plummy paste.
“I heard that you saved a boy from drowning. Brought him to Blaszka.”
“I don’t do something for nothing. He paid,” Yarush said.
“Of course. But tell me, what’s a Gypsy boy doing around here?”
“Looking for his wife. Waste of time. He should have stayed home with his uncle’s horses.”
“You’re right. Horses are worth a lot of money. Russian peasants will poke out a man’s eyes and hang him for stealing a horse, even an old nag like yours, if you’ll pardon me. I suppose the boy just wants an adventure.”
“Nah,” Yarush said. “He wants the girl. Stupid. But that’s what he wants.”
“Well, never mind. He’ll forget about her. A man can always find a woman, right?”
“Yeah,” Yarush said, but he couldn’t shake off the memory of the boy’s face as he said, I go look girl, I find her.
“Anyway if he found her, what good would it be?” the Traveler asked.
Maybe she was waiting for Pyotr. In a little house, sitting at a table covered with a white cloth, a bottle of wine on the table, an empty glass. When he came in, he would take off his boots and he wouldn’t have to watch his back. Maybe she’d ask him to play a tune for her. And he would. He’d play anything she wanted.
“Well, it’s none of your business anyway,” the Traveler continued. “Have another piece of almond torte. In Blaszka they make it with enough butter so you know you’ve eaten something. Sits good in the stomach, so eat up. I have another one. Tonight is the eve of Yom Kippur. A fast day. Eat hearty.”
“A fast day? Do I care?” Yarush said.
“Right now,” the Traveler leaned forward confidentially, “the great book is open and the Holy One, Blessed Be, is writing your fortune for the next year. It could be good, it could be bad. Who knows?”
Yarush stopped in midchew. “Right now?”
“Oh, yes. But intercession is possible.”
“For me?”
“Who else? Maybe you know someone up there who could plead for you? Someone from here?” The Traveler looked around the tavern.
Yarush followed his gaze with consternation. “Not here,” he said.
“Somewhere else maybe. Someone who might hear you if you prayed nearby?”
“Yes, yes, I know someone,” Yarush said. “The Old Rabbi. From Blaszka. You think he would talk to the saints for me if I prayed to him? Not here, of course. But maybe in the synagogue in Blaszka?”
“Could be,” the Traveler said. “It’s not too late. The sun is just starting to go down. You could make it if you left now. Here, take the other torte for the road.”
Yarush stands against the back wall of the synagogue. He isn’t robed in white, like the other men. He doesn’t own a
kittel
or even a prayer shawl. He is shrouded in his fur coat, and beneath he wears his plain, peasant clothes layered with lice. Over the heads of the men rising to their feet, he sees the Rabbi in front of the reading platform. His voice is stronger than Yarush would expect from such a skinny man.
“
By the authority of the heavenly court and by the authority of this earthly court
,” the Rabbi calls.
“With divine consent and with the consent of this congregation, we hereby declare it possible to pray with those who have transgressed.”
These are the traditional words spoken at this very moment in a thousand places. Yarush doesn’t understand them. But he knows they are important. Soon the Old Rabbi will speak on his behalf. But what is this? A noise from above and the men are clearing out like thieves from a house where someone’s blown the whistle. “What’s going on?” Yarush asks, but no one hears. They’re looking out the door, not at the strangers leaning against the back wall. Yarush is weak with hunger, stiflingly hot under his fur coat.
No one notices Yarush leave the synagogue. Outside, he sits on a bench near the guest house, where wandering beggars can sleep without interference on the pallets of straw. Now the beggars stand with the crowd of men near the doorway. On this side of the synagogue there is no one except for Yarush and the Gypsy boy, Pyotr, who is also alone, sitting on the bench, looking at the moon. It is ten days old, more than a half moon, not quite full. The voices of the men and women of Blaszka are muted. There is a cool breeze. Yarush could fall asleep sitting here.
“You look better,” Yarush says. The boy’s cut has healed. His hands are restless in his lap. “Play something,” Yarush says. The boy picks up the
gudulka
and plays a mournful song. Yarush plucks at his sleeve.
“Something cheerful,” he says. And the boy obliges with a wedding dance. There are tears on the boy’s cheeks.
“Take the horse and cart,” Yarush says. The boy looks at him wonderingly. “Take it,” Yarush growls, “to Warsaw. Even to Moscow. What do I want it for? Go on.”
Quickly, before Yarush can call him back, the boy goes to the cart and leaps into the seat. As he drives out of Blaszka, he finds some bread and cheese and kielbasa in the cart. He is hungry enough to eat, even though the food might be impure.
Yarush walks alone along the path through the woods toward the river. What is another hungry day to him?
A
G
IFT OF
F
IRE
In the coming year, after Pyotr leaves Blaszka with Yarush’s cart, after Kol Nidrei, after Yom Kippur, after the fields are bare, after the snow falls and the houses of Blaszka are alight with Hanukkah candles, Berekh the Rabbi will receive a letter from Paris. His oldest friend, Moyshe-Mendel, known more widely as the journalist Maurice LaFontaine, is sick. He will ask Berekh to go to Warsaw to dispose of some important papers. “If anything should happen to me,” the letter will say, “I don’t want my wife’s future to be in any way inconvenienced. I know that I can trust you, Berekh, for the sake of our friendship, to do what is right.”
Berekh will leave for Warsaw immediately. He will retrieve the papers from the safekeeping of a lawyer on Nalewki Street whose office is stuffed with antique furniture from the time of Napoleon. On Christmas Eve 1894, sitting in a small, windowless room off the lawyer’s office, Berekh will sort the papers into three piles. One pile he will destroy. One pile he will forward through a safe courier to Paris. And the third Berekh will take with him, to read while sitting in a cafe at the back of a bookstore on Nalewki Street. He will have every right to do so, since these are letters that he himself wrote to Moyshe-Mendel.
The proprietor will ask Berekh what he is gazing at with such intense interest. Berekh will reply, “Ghosts.”
In the corner of the cafe, a large woman with moon pale hair under a cap strung with golden ribbons nods. He will read, and he will remember.
Lag b’Omer, Monday May 20, 1878
My dear Moyshe-Mendel
,
I am sorry to send you the news that my brother Pinye is dead. Drafted last year—killed in action. As they say. But I hear that more die from hunger, sickness, and “disciplinary” punishments than from fighting in the Russo-Turkish War.
I would only like to know if this was the plan of God above. That the good brother who would have followed our father as a cantor in Zhitomir is dead, while the unworthy brother who left the Rabbinical Seminary to wander aimlessly lives. As the heretic Elisha Ben Abouya used to say in days of old: God does not follow His own laws of justice and therefore is not worthy of worship. I do not say so. I merely quote. I say that God is old and therefore nods off while His creatures tear each other to pieces.
If I had had any courage at all, I would have gone to the draft in Pinye’s place. My father mourns. As for me, I have returned from Moscow where I sang with the Gypsies and drank with the
guliaka,
the young Russian gentry that frequent Gypsy cafes. They did not mind drinking with a Jew, as long as I shared my bottle freely. And afterward, when my pockets were empty and theirs, too, we went out into the streets and sang. If our arms were not around each others’ shoulders we certainly would have fallen. The girls stood in the doorways, laughing while we blew them kisses until their mothers pulled them inside.
But this is suitable activity for a boy of eighteen not an old man of twenty-four such as I. So when I heard the sad news of Pinye’s death, I left my roguish behavior behind and returned to my familial duties. Since I could not comfort my father, I determined to make my amends by attending to the family of my cousin Yekhiel, who was so good to me when I was young.
You remember Yekhiel, the baker in Blaszka whose wife died
when their daughter, Faygela, was only two years old? It was he who convinced my father to release me from the prison of the yeshiva in Zhitomir and send me to the Rabbinical Seminary with you. I can still recall the odor of our sweat in that yeshiva class full of boys arguing the fine points of archaic law, while you and I and some others hid our books behind the sacred texts. What else could anyone expect in Zhitomir, that den of Jewish enlightenment?
In the seminary, our Jewish teachers taught us to seek knowledge of every kind and I became an educated person. Hence out of loyalty to Yekhiel’s memory, I am now in the village of Blaszka, where my cousin resided until his death three years ago. His daughter Faygela still sees him everywhere. There is little I can do for her in this backwoods but let her know that she has a friend in me.
The ways of fate are mysterious, my friend. Even here, in a place where the flatness and dearth of life surpass that of the Dead Sea, there is an object of interest, a female object. Cupid’s arrow struck in a small house on stilts above the Północna, wherein resides the lady with eyes as dark as our River Midnight.
The lady in question is Misha Fliderblum, twenty years old and unmarried, I may add. Thank Heaven above, she has no
yikhus,
no family stature, her heritage being one of carpenters and mid-wives—not a pale and tired scholar amongst them. Her great-grandmother, in fact, was the last person in Poland to be officially tried for witchcraft, though I hear that in the Russian countryside the peasants still conduct trial by water. A woman accused of witchcraft is thrown into a pond, a bag of rocks tied to her waist. If she drowns, she is innocent and is given a Christian burial. If she does not drown, she is guilty and is burned at the stake. Fortunately, we are somewhat more civilized, here, and Misha, who is the village midwife, is in no such danger.
This Misha is no wifely girl with modest manners, but how she laughs. There is more life in her than in the whole of Russian Poland, and I found it here in the least distinguished plot of land imaginable. The village requires a “crown rabbi,” and I have offered myself for the position. I will record births, marriages, and deaths, and should the Tsar’s minister have any reason to communicate with the people of Blaszka or, if the villagers wish to convey a
message (as foolhardy as this would be) to the Tsar’s minister, it will be my duty to act as intermediary. The government may believe that we “crown rabbis,” graduates of a Russian school, will lead the Jews of the Empire to assimilation, but they are much mistaken. The people hereabouts trust only the Old Rabbi, who speaks Hebrew and Yiddish, but no Russian, and whose thinking is unpolluted by secular learning. I am entrusted with no religious functions whatsoever, all such matters remaining in the hands of the Old Rabbi. I am to be content with my gold-nibbed pen and the ledger book of village records.
How naive we were to think that we would become teachers of the people when we left the seminary. There is some interest among the villagers who participated in the Polish insurrection of ’63, but there is little material in Yiddish. Meyer the butcher, who was a friend to my cousin Yekhiel, can read a little Polish and I am endeavoring to instruct him. Like the other men, his Hebrew is adequate for prayers but not for the newspaper or other modern texts. Most people are preoccupied with the struggle to earn a living and have no use for new ways.
I attended my first village wedding today. Hanna-Leah, daughter of Meyer the butcher, was married to Hershel, the butcher’s apprentice and soon-to-be partner. I had the honor of amusing the bride by performing the Angel of Death dance with our watercarrier, Hayim. He in turn invited Misha to join him in the kosher dance. It was not quite the custom, as she is not the bride. But the more the old women scowled, the higher she stepped and the harder she stamped, pulling her dress above her calves. Her hair flew behind her like ravens and I wished that I had thought to ask her to dance. She teased Hayim mercilessly and the poor man blushed with embarrassment. I would not have blushed.
Tuesday, July 9, 1878
Dear friend
,
I attended another village wedding, today: Misha the midwife and Hayim the watercarrier. It was all arranged by the Old Rabbi, himself, and I am told there could be no better
shadkhen
except for the Holy One above. The village luminaries acted in place of the
bride and groom’s parents, who are deceased, and all was conducted according to custom.
You may wonder why I didn’t speak for Misha. Since it has just been a year since her mother died, and the two were very close, I thought that she would be missing her mother too much to think about a suitor. And even if it were not for that, I considered that I should first establish myself in Blaszka. What could she know of me, a stranger in the village who had visited on occasion and settled here only three months since? Well, my friend, I was too slow. Before I made a move, I heard that a match had been arranged, the plate broken, the betrothal fixed. I would not say a word to interfere with another’s happiness, so I must forget the foolishness to which I alluded in my previous letter. Clearly it was not meant to be.
I myself have been presented with several candidates by the local matchmaker, all of them good and spiritless girls, very suitable. I protested that I was not worthy, having neither money nor prestige in my situation as the “crown rabbi.” The
shadkhen
commended my honesty and returned with a list of women who are still good, he assured me, but also somewhat ugly, poor, and lacking family
yikhus.
Hence they have been left sitting, as they say here. I told him I will give proper consideration to the matter, which, being no light thing, requires serious deliberation. I will think about it at great length. Very great length.
Meanwhile there are tensions in the countryside, and there is rumor of revolt. The peasants are breaking under the double load of taxes and redemption payments. You remember how it was before the peasants were emancipated in
’63.
They were serfs—let us be honest, practically slaves—property of their masters, with no human rights at all. But things are not so much better now. It’s true that the peasants are free and own the miserable bits of land they used to work for their masters. But they are required to pay the former landowners compensation. Many cannot meet the high payments and their taxes, too. This is not chance, but strategy. The finance minister aims to force the peasants into exporting their grain, thus improving the balance of trade, with the gold from foreign buyers stabilizing the paper ruble, which drops in value daily. The peasants, having been liberated from serfdom, go hungry, and every year
more of them abandon the land and pour into the cities, where they are even hungrier. The wars cost much, the debt must be paid somehow, and the hungry peasants look for someone to blame for their misery.
Thank you for sending me the article concerning Heinrich von Treitschke and his band of crackpots. Who would think that the worthy professor would ally himself with such backward types? He cannot really think that the Jews are the misfortune of western civilization. It is laughable. A cunning race of snakes gripping the throat of the honest, hard-working, and natural German? This Heinrich should only be our guest in Blaszka, where he could meet, perhaps, the cunning watercarrier Hayim who stammers and stumbles over his yoke, or the still more cunning baker, Shmuel, who fills his baby’s mouth with plump raisins.
What would I do without you, Moyshe-Mendel, to send me all the news of the world?