Mama was always telling me, “Look after the little ones,” as though I was not already wearing my tongue thin speaking spells of protection over Shayna and Yeshua. It did not come without cost, the work I did, and I grew tired of Mama’s constant worries, especially because in my heart I did not believe that anything could happen to us. Not in Bialystok.
Every so often I would take out the contract and pore over it. But trying to read it hurt. The ink seemed to be made of blood and vomit. A stench like cow shit rose off the page. My stomach churned every time I unfolded the paper. The writing itself snaked obscenely in my brain, displacing any meaning the words themselves might have. I would spend hours and come away with a headache strong enough to make gravel of boulders and only enough words to know that my bubbe had signed a contract of some kind.
What this meant, I had no idea.
* * *
“Take care of the baby,” Mama said.
Yeshua was always wandering off. He would get bored watching Mama work, and of course it was always I who had to fetch him back. He crawled through and smudged the circles of protection I drew around him and it was almost impossible to get to the end of an invocation without Yeshua trying to eat the herbs I placed around him. I cannot count the times I had to break off in the middle, redraw the circles, and start over. I cannot count the number of amulets I drew up for him, as he chewed each paper with its magic symbols and prayers to bits. It got so I could not tell if any of my work was worthwhile—he seemed so set on undoing it all.
It became simpler just to take him everywhere I went. That way I could protect him in the moment and keep him out from under Mama’s and Shayna’s feet. The only places I did not take him were to women’s childbeds. Otherwise he was a constant presence on my hip.
One day, coming home from Yetta’s sweetshop, an old woman with long, straggly gray hair, who looked like a heap of clothing with a cord tied around the middle, stopped us.
“Lovely baby,” she said. “Lovely baby boy.”
I waited for her to make a sign warding off the evil spirits she’d attracted with her compliments, and when she did not, I knew she meant us no good and tried to push past her. As I did, she grabbed Yeshua out of my arms. He began to wail and reach for me.
“Get your pigkeeping hands off my brother!” I yelled, grabbing for him, but she swung him away from me.
The old woman looked me full in the face and I fell back—her eye sockets were empty holes, and fires burned in them. The creature was a lilit, the lilit my grandmother had spoken with.
“Pigkeeper, is it, granddaughter of Hannah? Your brother, is it? The boy is mine, and none of thine.”
I pulled out the silver-plated knife that had been in my grandma’s box. I’d kept it in my apron pocket ever since that day I’d found it. “He’s mine and I’ll send you to the fires of Gehenna if you don’t give him back.”
Instead of answering, the old woman sprang away from me. I stabbed at her with my small knife, but my aim was no good and all I managed to do was slice into her arm.
The creature fell to her knees, screaming in pain. Some kind of mucus poured from her cut arm. I grabbed Yeshua back while she pressed on the wound, vainly trying to stanch the flow while she raged at me, spitting and cursing. The mucus ate away at the blade of my knife. I clutched Yeshkele to my breast as though he were made of gold and bolted for home.
By the time I got there, frightened and out of my breath and my wits, Shayna was the only one at home. I flung myself into her arms and cried while Yeshkele squirmed impatiently to be put down. But I couldn’t force myself to relax my grip.
“Deborah!” Shayna exclaimed. “What’s happening?”
“He’s our baby, ours!” I rocked back and forth on my heels. Shayna unbent my fingers, took the baby from me, and set him down gently.
“Our baby, ours,” I kept saying while Shayna patted my hair and wiped my face. Yeshua crawled off to play with some toy horses our papa had carved for him.
Finally I ran out of sobs and told her what had happened, that a demon had tried to take our baby brother, who was chewing thoughtfully on one of the horses.
“How could it?” Shayna asked me. “After your work?”
I wiped my face. “I must have forgotten something,” I said. “Something that makes him vulnerable. Or I’m just not strong enough yet. Or—” Suddenly I thought of the mysterious contract in Bubbe’s box and of her long talk with the lilit that had been trying to take Pearl’s baby.
I ran and got the paper from the box. “Shayna,” I told her, “these words are sick—can you smell them?”
“I can’t smell anything,” she said. “It’s just a blank piece of paper.”
“It’s not,” I said. “If I keep these words in my head my eyes burn and my thoughts curdle. So I’m going to read out each word I can to you, not keeping it in my head at all. And you write them down.”
Shayna looked a little frightened, but she did what I said.
“Baby,” I finished, and Shayna gasped.
“Oh, Bubbe,” I whispered. “Oh, Bubbe, how could you?” For our bubbe had killed our brother with ink as surely as if she’d taken that silver knife to his throat.
The long and the short of it was that our bubbe had struck a bargain with the lilit, whose name resisted my reading, for the power to get us safely to America. In return, she gave the demon the right to take the next baby of the family.
I’d never realized how much Bubbe wanted to get us out, and I wondered what the lilit had told her about Bialystok.
Well, she’d been cheated—the mob had taken her and we were still in Bialystok. But our baby brother wasn’t safe yet, and the demon was trying to collect. I tried to put a brave face on for Shayna’s sake.
“The contract can’t be good still,” I told her. “Bubbe can’t see us safely to America now.”
But in my heart, I knew the demon didn’t see it that way, and so did Shayna.
“Don’t be an ass, Deborah! If that were true, you wouldn’t have had to fight it off this morning.”
I didn’t know how to keep Yeshua safe. But I did know that it was no use telling Mama and Papa, and Shayna agreed. After all, they were working as hard as they knew how to get us across the sea, away from the old demons, and what more could they do if they did know? It was down to me to take care of this kind of business.
For two weeks, Shayna and I hovered over Yeshkele like two cats over a mousehole. When one of us slept, the other one watched. We took him everywhere with us, and Mama appreciated the help, even if she didn’t know its reason.
After two weeks of my eyes falling out of my head with exhaustion from useless charms and wardings and my brain boiling with effort, I reasoned like this: Everyone knows the power of a contract. The contract was what put Yeshkele in danger. So, if we destroyed the contract, we would release the power and dispel the danger.
I tried throwing the thing on the fire, but it wouldn’t burn. I stuck it right in the heart of the blaze, but when the embers had burned themselves out, I stirred the ashes, and there the contract would be, with not even a smudge.
Sometimes you need more than herbs and spells of protection. Sometimes it is not enough merely to defend. So Bubbe had taught me the evil eye. The evil eye, everybody knows, works by concentrating the element of fire, infusing it with the power of God’s curse, and directing that cursed fire with one’s vision. Under Bubbe’s supervision, I had practiced by glaring my heart out at dust, at flowers, at old rags. Lines formed in my face ahead of their time and eventually I got good enough to set regular bits of paper alight with my gaze. Now I needed to direct my anger at something more powerful than rags. I could feel the anger at my grandmother for making this cursed bargain massing behind my eyes like lightning in a black cloud. And I could hear the crackling in the air around me. Shooting pains ran through my head and I could feel my hair start to snake out from its braid. When the pressure was like a blacksmith’s vise, I’d open my eyes and send my
pain at the rag or the paper and it would burst into flames.
When I felt that I was ready, Shayna and I took Papa’s cart outside of the city and made a pile of oil-soaked rags and dry leaves. We put the contract in the center. Then she held Yeshua and drove the cart well clear of me and the kindling. I had told her to go half a mile; she went barely a quarter mile, which was just as well for me, in the end. When she and the baby were safely away, I focused on my rage at Bubbe, at the demon trying to take Yeshua, on the mob that had killed my grandma. I heard the crackling and felt my head pulse with pain, and when I turned my gaze on the mound we had built, there was a sound like a hundred gasps, and a tower of flame shot from the small pyre up into the cloudy sky.
My joints felt like they were made of moss and I fell down hard, hitting my head on a rock. My muscles like cobwebs, too weak to move or even to call for help from Shayna, I watched the fire burn itself out in clouds of oily, acrid smoke so thick you could have cut it into slices and spread butter on it. It took close to an hour to clear, and I could hear Shayna stumbling around with Yeshua in her arms, calling for me. Even when she found me, I wouldn’t let her start for home until she’d sifted through the ashes and found nothing left of the contract.
I had succeeded.
* * *
Shayna had to almost drag me back to the cart. I was sick, she said, so sick that it looked like I might not wake up. Mama and Shayna told me that my fever burned so hot that when they dunked me in ice water to bring it down, the water turned warm as blood. Mama longed for her mother to come and put together one of her brews, but Bubbe was gone and all Mama knew how to do was boil up a chicken and try to make me eat. They said that I fought her, that I said she was trying to drown me. And then, as suddenly as I got sick, I got better. I woke up one morning and asked Mama for something to eat. By the next day, I’d had enough of lying in bed. But Mama didn’t want to let us out. Something had happened while I was sick. The skin around her eyes was taut and she had chewed her lips so hard that they bled.
“The chief of police is dead,” she told me. “Dead and gone. And there’s bad feeling in the air.”
“I don’t feel anything,” I said. I suppose I was still sick, to have said something so stupid.
She clipped me around the ear. “Not your kind of feeling, child! The chief didn’t up and die of a chill, idiot! Someone killed him. And the army says it was the Jews.”
Shayna broke in. “Everybody knows that the chief was a friend to us! Didn’t he say—”
“Yes. Yes, he did,” said our mama. “And now he’s dead and the chief prosecutor is no friend of ours. The self-defense league has been patrolling every hour of the day and weapons are appearing on the streets outside of the quarter, and for all it’s a bright June day, there’s a dark fog lying over the city. I don’t want you two going out.”
“Mama,” I said. “You can’t keep us in forever. How long must we wait until this fog lifts? I haven’t been outside for so long. This is the gentile Holy Week and things will only get worse. Better now than Easter Sunday.”
Mama looked like she might slap me again. “Headstrong girl! I should have sent you both to America already, for here you have the survival skills of an infant!”
To hear such a thing after what I had done! That she wished me far from her side, that she did not trust me to take care of myself even after she had depended on me for charms and amulets. An infant, she called me! Me, who had fought off a demon and destroyed its hold over our family! Still, I kept my temper in check, as I had learned.
“Mama, if times are so bad, it’s all the more reason for me to go out. With the protections I put on the family, my supplies are low. Let me get what I need to protect us, and when I come back, you’ll have no more worries.”
And Mama relented, I think as much out of a desire to see roses in my cheeks again as anything else. I took Shayna with me to help carry my supplies, and as we stepped over the threshold, I looked back at Yeshua. But I shook myself. He was safe now; if Mama was to be believed, taking him with me would only be putting him in more danger. So Shayna and I left together, and Yeshkele stayed with Mama while Papa worked in his shop next door.
After I got the herbs I needed, Shayna and I walked over to Yetta’s sweetshop, so I could make sure she was all right. It was a long walk for me; I was weak, and the colors didn’t look quite real—everything was thin and watery. The sun hurt my eyes.
At the sweetshop I fell into conversation with Yetta, who was minding the shop while her parents were out. Shayna eyed the candies. We could hear the sounds of some kind of parade from far off, but Yetta was catching me up on the gossip I had missed during my weeks of illness, and I was enthralled in the story of her other sister’s betrothed’s time at gymnasium. I didn’t even notice the sound of a gunshot, which I later learned had been the signal for the processions to turn on the Jewish Quarter. We didn’t hear the shouts; it wasn’t until Yetta smelled smoke and looked out the door to see a mob yelling and throwing stones that she grabbed me and Shayna and pulled us into the stone cellar. I helped pull the rug over the trapdoor in the back room as we went down and wrestled the bar into place.
We heard glass shattering, and then sounds of violence were right overhead. We could hear barrels being smashed, the counter splitting. My mind was still weak from the fever, or I think I would remember more clearly. But I do remember knowing as strongly as I had ever known anything that Yeshkele needed me, only me, and he needed me to come quickly, to run to him. I remember the sound of flames crackling, my hands on the barred trapdoor, Yetta grabbing my arms from behind and yanking me back down the stairs. We stayed there a long time. We ate the sweets and dried fruits that were being stored and used an old barrel to relieve ourselves. We slept and woke and still the sounds of the mob carried down to the cellar.
Finally there was quiet.
Shayna crept upstairs and put her head out the trapdoor while Yetta made sure I stayed still.
“Everything’s burnt,” Shayna said. Her whisper cracked.
Yetta and I followed her upstairs.
The shop looked like—nothing. Everything burnt or smashed or both. We picked our way across the floor, silent and reverent as Adam and Eve on the first day of the world, but it felt like the last.
The streets were empty, but fires were still burning down the block.
We didn’t speak. Other people were just as silent. I remember one man watching a building burn. Tears dripped steadily from his eyes but he didn’t make a sound. Some wandered aimlessly; nowhere left to go, I guess. I saw two women meet each other in the middle of a block, saw their eyes widen in shock and relief, and then they threw their arms around each other. Without a word. I never heard a silence like that before.
I don’t remember saying good-bye to Yetta. She went to look for her family, I think, and Shayna and I needed to find ours. I didn’t see Yetta again. I don’t know what happened to her. My best friend, and I never saw her again.
I don’t remember walking home, either, but I must have. Not all the streets were destroyed. We found out later that in some places the self-defense league had managed to fight off the attackers: civilians, police, an army with bombs and guns. And some streets that held places like butchers’ shops, places where men and women brought out the long knives, they made it through all right, too. I do remember that Shayna insisted that we would find Mama and Papa safe at home, Mama with her dressmaker’s shears and Papa with his awl, but I knew different.
* * *
Our street was always quiet, mostly private homes.
Shayna said she had to lead me home every step, because if she let go of my arm I’d just stand in the middle of the street like a lamppost. I allowed her to pull me along, but I paid no attention to my path, stumbling once into a pile of broken glass. I did not feel the fall, though the cuts hurt sharp enough as they healed. Shayna spent almost an hour picking glass out of my flesh that night. When we reached home, my arms were coated red with my ow
n blood.
Mama and Papa and Yeshua, they were dead. Shayna closed Mama’s eyes before I went to see her. I couldn’t bear to stand before those eyes. I remember holding Yeshua’s little body against my breast and crying, trying to wake him up. But I could not wake him, and all my embraces did was stain him with my blood.
The day after we buried Mama, Papa, and our brother, I went into the back garden and dug up our savings. It was enough for two of us.
* * *
That is how Shayna and I came to America. In America, Mama had said, they don’t let you burn, and I repeated it to Shayna every night on the boat.
We had enough when we got here to rent a room and buy some new clothing so we didn’t give ourselves away as a couple of greenhorns before we even opened our mouths, but not enough to last for long. A business like mine needs word of mouth, needs local knowledge, so it’s not like I could just set up shop. Our landsleit group got us work at one of the tiny sweatshops in the neighborhood, no more than six people crowded into the boss’s front room, his wife cooking dinner on the same stove he used to heat the irons. But it was such a little shop—you couldn’t live on what they paid. The boss sweated every penny out of you and the shop was no good for rebuilding my own trade, because there were so few of us working there. I had no intention of living out my life like that, and I would not allow Shayna to do so either. I saw what had happened to women who had been sewing their whole lives—hacking coughs from the cotton dust, eyes bleary and half-blind from peering at seams and threads all day, fingertips like leather from stabbing themselves with needles.
Burning Girls and Other Stories Page 23
