Burning Girls and Other Stories

by Veronica Schanoes

  My brothers were out when I saw Uncle Leyb coming home through the window. His face was distorted, and I could not tell if it was an effect of the glass rippling or of some deep distress.

  He seemed calm by the time Mama and I met him at the front door, having dropped the forks from our hands and abandoned our meal. My mother brought him into the kitchen and settled him with a measure of kirschwasser. Then she told me to go play outside. I was moving toward the door with my brothers’ old hoop and stick as slowly as possible—they were too big for hoop rolling by this time, but I still liked it—when my uncle raised his hand and I stopped.

  “No,” he said firmly. “She should stay and listen. And her brothers, where are they? They should come and hear this as well.”

  My mother met his eyes and then nodded. She sent me out to collect my brothers. When all four of us returned, my mother’s face was drawn and taut. For many years I thought that my uncle had told my mother the tale of my father’s last day privately after all, but when I was older, she said not; she said that when she had seen that Uncle Leyb was alone, she had known already that she would never again lay eyes on my father.

  The four of us sat between them, my eldest brother holding our mother’s hand. My uncle held his arms out to me and I climbed onto his lap. I was tall, even as a child, and I no longer quite fit, but I think it was his comfort and consolation even more than mine, so I am glad I stayed. At the time, I was still obstinately hoping for good news, that Papa had struck a marvelous bargain that had taken a lot of work, and now we were all wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, that even now Papa was traveling home as quickly as possible, his pockets loaded with treats.

  My uncle wrapped his arms around me and began to speak quietly and deliberately. “Esti, Kinder. Yakov is dead. He will not be coming home. I buried him just a few days ago. With my own hands, I buried him.”

  My mother sighed, and somehow her face relaxed, as though the blow she had been expecting had finally landed, and it was a relief to have it done.

  My brothers’ faces looked blank and slightly confused; I suspect mine did as well. I did not quite believe what my uncle said. Perhaps, I thought, he was mistaken. But I could tell that my uncle was genuinely sad, so I reached up and patted his face.

  “I fell in with Hoffmann after a few days, and told him of our worries”—Hoffmann was a peddler my father and uncle crossed paths with every so often and saw at shul on the high holy days. He lived several towns away, but he took much longer journeys than did my father. It was strange, though, that he should have been peddling among my father’s towns.

  “He said that word had spread that my brother’s territory was going unattended; otherwise, he never would have presumed to visit it. He offered to join me in my search, so we pressed on together until we came to Dornburg. ‘Burg’ they call themselves, but they’re not even as big as Hoechst. As we approached, the town lived up to its name, thornbushes on every patch of scrub by the road.

  “Yakov’s body was hanging from a gibbet mounted by the side of the road just outside the town.

  “We waited until nightfall, cut him down, and buried him under cover of darkness. I left a few stones at the graveside, Esti, but otherwise, I left it unmarked. I didn’t want to risk them digging him up. Let him rest.”

  My mother’s face was stone, and my uncle’s voice was calm, but the top of my head was damp with my uncle’s tears. I was still confused, so I turned around on my uncle’s lap so I could face him.

  “So when will Papa come home?” I asked him. I can make no excuses. I understood the nature of death by then. Perhaps I just did not want to believe it.

  My uncle put his palms on either side of my face and held my gaze. “He will not come home again. The people of Dornburg killed him. He is dead, like your baby brother two years ago.”

  “How?” I could not imagine such a thing. My papa was big as a bear and twice as strong in my eyes. He could swing me around and around and never get tired. He could wrestle my two eldest brothers at once. He could even pick up my mama.

  “They made him dance, liebchen. They made him dance in thorns, and then they hanged him.”

  “For what?” The cry burst from my mother. “For what did they hang him?”

  “Theft,” said my uncle, not taking his eyes from my face. “They said he had stolen all his money; rumor has it that they gave all he had to some vagabond fiddler, and he set himself up nicely. What’s little enough for a family of seven is plenty for one vagrant.”

  “My papa never stole anything,” I said. It was then that I realized what had happened. These people could say terrible things about my father only because he was dead.

  “Not since we were boys,” Uncle Leyb agreed.

  I put my hands over his and stared into his eyes intently. If my father could not bring justice to those who slandered him, I would. “I will kill them,” I told my uncle. My voice was steady and I was quite sincere. “I will surround that town with death. I will wrap death around their hearts, and I will rip them apart.

  “I will kill them all. Every one.”

  My uncle did not laugh at me, or ruffle my hair, or tell me to run along. Instead, he met my gaze and nodded. Then he took my hands in his and said, “So be it.”

  He said it almost reverently.

  * * *

  The residents of Dornburg were proud of their story, how they had destroyed the nasty Jewish peddler. How a passing fiddler had tricked the Jew into a thornbush and then played a magic fiddle that made him dance among the thorns, until his skin was ripped and bloody, and how the fiddler would not leave off until the Jew had given over all his money.

  How the Jew had caught up with the fiddler at the town and had him arrested for theft; and how the fiddler had played again, forcing everybody to dance (the residents of Dornburg often omitted this part, it was said, in order not to look foolish, but the other gentiles of Hesse gladly filled it in) until the Jew confessed to theft. And how the Jew, bloody and exhausted and knowing he would never see home nor wife nor children again, did confess, and how he was hanged instead of the fiddler, and his body left to hang and rot outside the town gates as a warning.

  How one morning, the town of Dornburg awoke to find that the Devil had taken the corpse down to Hell.

  * * *

  Uncle Leyb said that Papa would come home to me nevermore, but I did not quite believe it. I waited every night for years to hear his footsteps and pat his black beard; I waited every night for his pockets full of treats and his embrace.

  I still do not understand why I waited, full of hope. I knew what my uncle had said.

  My baby brother had died of a fever two years before; my parents had been heartbroken, and I still missed his delighted laugh when I tickled his face with my hair. But he had come and gone so quickly, a matter of months. Papa had always been with me; I think that I could not conceive that he would not be with me again.

  I knew better than to tell anybody that I was waiting, but I waited nonetheless.

  I think that I am waiting still.

  * * *

  My mother never quite recovered from Uncle Leyb’s news, and when the story of the Jew at Dornburg became commonplace, her soul suffered further. She had been so careful, so alive to the delicate balance that would placate the Christians so that we could live a good life; finding that her best efforts were so easily overcome, that the mayor and the judge of a town where my father had traded for years would hang him at the behest of a vagrant fiddler, and that the townspeople from whom he had bought, to whom he had sold and loaned, with whom he had drunk and diced and sung, would gather and cheer, it was too much for her to bear, I think.

  She became a wan, quiet shadow of the mother I remember from early childhood. She stayed indoors as much as possible, and avoided contact with nonfamily. She ate little and slept for long hours. I missed her strictness. She had always been the stern and reliable pillar of my life. And of course, business suffered as the families of Hoechs
t enjoyed visiting less and less often, and my mother declined to seek out their company. Too, she suffered strange aches and illnesses with neither source nor surcease.

  We would have starved, I think, if not for Uncle Leyb and our next-door neighbors, whose eldest daughter came over to help my mother through her days. Tante Gittl, I learned to call her. There was some talk for a while, talk that I was supposed to be too young to notice or to understand, that she was angling to catch the eye of Uncle Leyb. If this was anything more than talk, she was doomed to disappointment, for no woman ever caught the eye of my uncle, who much preferred the company of other young men, though he was not to meet his business partner Elias until some years later.

  Uncle Leyb took over my father’s peddling, joined by my eldest brother, Hirsch, who, at sixteen, had hoped to make his way to Vienna, but willingly turned to peddling to keep food on the table. Tante Gittl helped my mother recover herself, and to slowly revive what remained of our business, and Heymann was able to continue at cheder. At thirteen, Josef was already demonstrating that he had the temperament of a sociable man, one who preferred the company of fellows to the rigors of scholarship. He now keeps a tavern in Mainz, having gone to live with our mother’s cousin and learn the trade.

  Heymann devoted himself to study, seeking in the teachings and commentaries of rabbis both living and dead the father we had lost. But I knew he would never be found there, for my father was never a bookish man, proud though he had been of Heymann’s intelligence and aptitude for study.

  I was still young, old enough to help around the house, but not much else. I spent much of my time alone with my dolly, running my fingers over the scar where my father had repaired her, sometimes not even aware that my thumb had found its way into my mouth until Tante Gittl, barely two years older than my eldest brother, would remind me gently that I was too big a girl for such behavior, and set me some petty task as distraction.

  Eventually I began reading Josef’s cast-off books. Heymann, who had always had the soul of a scholar, stole time from his study breaks to play tutor, practicing on me for his future career.

  Time passed, and perhaps that is the worst betrayal of all, for life without my father to have become normal. It felt sometimes as if only I remembered him, though I knew that was not so, as if only I missed him, though surely Uncle Leyb felt keenly the absence of the elder brother who had taken care of him in boyhood and brought him from Frankfurt am Main to Hoechst in manhood, the two of them staying together even as so many of our families are blown apart like dandelion puffs, never to see one another again.

  Uncle Leyb must have been as lonely as I.

  And Mama never remarried.

  So perhaps it was foolish to feel that nobody was as bereft as I, but I am sure that my father and I treasured each other in a way peculiar to only the most fortunate of fathers and daughters.

  * * *

  I wonder, sometimes, if the fiddler, Herr Geiger, as he was called in Dornburg, felt that way about his daughter. He always seemed uncertain around her, as if he wished to love her but did not know how to begin. Once he told me he would love her better when she was older and had a true personality. But she has always seemed to have quite a strong character to me, right from the very beginning, even in her suckling.

  I could have told him how to love her. I could have told him that to love a baby is to wake up every time she cries, even if you have not had a full night’s sleep in days, to clean and change her cloths even when she has made herself quite disgusting, to sit up fretting and watching her sleep when she has a cold, to dance with her around and around the room without stopping, because her delight is well worth your aching legs and feet, to tell her stories and trust that she understands more than she can say. I could have told him this, but I did not.

  He was not a bad father. But he was not a good one. And I did not help him.

  * * *

  My mother died when I was seventeen. She seemed to have just been worn out by the treachery of our gentile neighbors. I do believe that the people of Dornburg killed her as surely as they did my father. She kissed me on her deathbed, and prayed to God to guide me to a safe home. And she died, with God having given her no answer, no peace of mind, the worry still apparent on her lifeless face.

  * * *

  I became Tante Gittl’s main help after my mother’s death, as Josef had left for Mainz two years earlier and Heymann had no interest in the family business. Too, Heymann was—is—studious and intelligent, but not canny. His is the kind of intelligence that can quote Torah word-perfect at length and analyze the finest points of disputation, but he never could add up a column of figures and get the same answer twice. Not if his life depended on it.

  And I hope it never does.

  I became Tante Gittl’s help, but she did not need me. She and my eldest brother, Hirsch, had married the year before, and it made good sense for her to take over the business. She was very good with people, very charming, and she and Hirsch lived in harmony, companions and business partners. Nor did she need me when she became pregnant, for she had her own sisters, even her own mother next door.

  I think it was her wish for me to wed her brother Nathaniel, and he was not unkind. The match would have been well made, but I knew that motherhood would destroy any plan of mine to see my father’s grave and take vengeance on the man who had ended his life, because of what we owe to our children. To put myself at great risk—that was my choice, my prerogative. But if I’d had children—it is not right for parents to abandon their children, never. I knew too well what it meant to lose one’s greatest protector and caretaker, the one in whose face the sun rises and sets, while still young. And I could never have done that to my child. We owe our children our lives.

  * * *

  With my mother in the ground and the youngest of her children grown, my uncle Leyb grew restless. He had met Elias while visiting Worms, and with Hirsch and Tante Gittl well set and Josef in Mainz, he deeply desired to make his life in Worms as well. Heymann and I were left to choose our paths.

  There was never really any question about Heymann’s future: he lived and breathed the dream of continuing his studies at the yeshiva in Cracow. I told Hirsch and Gittl, and Heymann as well, that I was going to Worms with Uncle Leyb, and there, perhaps among so many of our people, I would find a husband. They believed me, I think, though Heymann, who of all my brothers knew me best, wrinkled his brow in perplexity. Uncle Leyb accepted my decision without comment, and we made plans to depart.

  The last night we all spent together was much as our nights had been for some time, with a pregnant Gittl and Hirsch conferring about the future while Heymann talked to me of his plans for study and Uncle Leyb sat by himself writing a letter, this time to Josef, detailing our plans.

  Worms, my uncle said, is perhaps four days’ travel from Hoechst, provided the weather was good and nothing hindered our progress. But we would be carrying our lives with us on horse and cart, he noted, and would, of necessity, go more slowly than he did while peddling. The three of us—Uncle Leyb, Heymann, and I—traveled together to the regional shul, where the men prayed for good fortune on our journeys, and then we parted ways, the brother closest to me in both age and affection kissing my cheek, swinging his pack off the cart and onto his shoulder, and turning to the northeast and his scholarly future. His face was flushed with excitement, but the journey was six hundred miles, and he would be alone for the first time. For months after, I would picture him alone on the road, set upon by ruffians, or ill among strangers, without any one of us to hold his hand or bring him water.

  My uncle and I walked in silence for a while. After perhaps half an hour had passed, he kept his gaze on the road ahead but spoke carefully.

  “Ittele, you know, of course, that Elias and I will always welcome you. But you have always been my favorite, and I flatter myself that I know you as well as anybody could. Surely my brave, bright-eyed niece is brewing plans more complex than husband-catching?”

 
; “Yes,” I replied. “I am.” But I did not elaborate.

  When we stopped for dinner, he broached the topic again. As he finished up the bread and sausage we had packed, he poured himself a measure of kirschwasser. He leaned back against the cart and looked me in the eye.

  “So, liebe, what are these plans of yours? Indulge your old uncle by taking him into your confidence.”

  I smiled at him. “I do mean to see you settled, Uncle. And when you are happily ensconced in Worms and have joined your business to Elias’s, and are well occupied, I believe it will be time for me to set out once more.”

  Uncle Leyb raised his eyebrows and gestured for me to continue.

  “To Dornburg, Uncle. I will go to Dornburg, and I will watch the fiddler’s last breaths.”

  My uncle poured himself another measure of kirsch and sipped it slowly. “How do you intend to do this, child?”

  My voice seemed to come from far away as I spoke, though I had long thought on this very question. “I do not yet know, Uncle. It depends on how I find him. But I must do this. I have known ever since I was a child. The knowledge has lodged like … like…” I fumbled for words.

  “Like a thorn in your heart, my child?” said my uncle.

  I nodded.

  My uncle finished his kirsch. “Yes,” he said.

  “You are bravest of us all, I think,” he said, and then he stopped. “I should go—I should have been with him—I will go—”

  I put my hand on his arm to stop him. “No. You should go to Elias. I am my father’s daughter, and I will go to Dornburg.”