Over the following pages were various family photographs. The middle-aged man grew old and then, as she turned the page, died. In his coffin he lay stiff, his face sunken, nose turned beak-like in death. Around him his family gazed into the photographer’s lens, seemingly obliviously to his corpse. Only one woman ignored the photographer, a young woman who gazed down, her face a mask of sorrow, her lips pressed tight, one against the other, her hand reaching out slightly, seemingly instinctively to touch the folded hand of the dead man. By her side stood a small child, barely visible. His head was pressed close against the woman’s thigh. His eyes were wide, and his lower lip drooped, as if he was struck by awe.
Yael eased the corners of the photograph carefully from their holders and lifted it away from the page. Turning it over she found on its reverse ornate Russian script. Father’s funeral, it read, December 23rd 1912. She turned it over again and examined the young woman. The grief-stricken daughter had long dark hair, coiled beneath a loose black lace headscarf. Her features were fine, her large, almond-shaped eyes beautiful and exotic. She was vaguely familiar. The little boy, no more than two or three years old, was undoubtedly her son. He shared her dark hair and eyes. The same exotic beauty. It was Aleksei. The mute.
Yael examined the photograph carefully. She carried the album across to the bed, which stood closer to the window where it was lighter. This photograph had also been taken in Russia, as had the next, which was of the same woman and child. With the two of them, though stood slightly apart, was a man in his early twenties. The style of his clothing seemed slightly old-fashioned and he held a cane. It was not that he distanced himself from his wife and his child, Yael thought, scrutinising the family group, her eyes flicking from one of the figures to another, it was more that the man seemed self-sufficient, while the woman seemed to withdraw. The young boy clung to her, his small hand clutching her skirt, his head inclining towards her, while still he gazed at the photographer with the same awe-struck expression, loose-lipped, eyes wide.
The following pages were peopled by blunt faces of the provincial middle class, one group of distinguished men, in formal dress, at the back of which, with barely his head showing, was Aleksei’s father. Yael turned over quickly, three more stiff pages, the tissue paper crackling before she found them again.
1917. Augustow. Poland. Aleksei would have been about five. Dark shadows beneath his mother’s eyes. His father still stood apart, his suit a little looser, his collar worn. He leaned against the stick, one hand clasped on top of the other and stared into the camera, seemingly unaware of his wife and son.
The next photograph did not have a date. The photographer’s studio address was written neatly in gold lettering across the bottom though. It was on Warsaw Street in Selo. The same one she had herself visited on a number of occasions with her parents and Josef. Aleksei was a couple of years older. His pretty, open face gazed steadily, seriously into the camera, while he leaned in against the side of his mother. The young woman’s face was thinner, the skin still darker beneath her beautiful eyes. She was stunning, Yael thought, touching the surface of the photograph softly. There was something tragic about her. Her husband was not in the photograph.
Yael turned over the page, but there were no more photographs. She flicked through the rest of the album but it was empty.
The light had almost gone. Yael stood up. There was a lamp on the small bedside table; she lit it and pulled down the glass. As she lifted the album to put it back on the shelf, a photograph fell and landed at her feet. She bent down and picked it up, taking it over to the bed. She sat down beside the lamp.
She recognised the graveyard, it was in Selo. The coffin was sealed. He stood by the grave, his body rigid, staring bleakly ahead at the lens of the camera. Around him were a few people. His father, leaning heavily on a walking stick, gazing away across the low headstone as though this funeral had nothing to do with him. An Orthodox priest who looked uncomfortable and haughty. Two young men, gravediggers, stood at a distance. Yael’s gaze returned to Aleksei. The petrified grimace tore her heart. His arms hung stiff and straight by his sides as if he was stood to attention. No one reached out to touch him. No hand rested upon his shoulder. No body was there for him to lean against. He stood alone, his eyes wide with fear.
In the kitchen she heard the sound of the door handle. Her heart turned. She stood up, the photograph clasped tightly in her hand. The door opened and then closed. She found her legs were trembling and she sat back down on the edge of the bed. There was a moment’s silence, before she heard the rustle of a coat falling to the floor and footsteps crossing the kitchen.
12
Aleksei stood in the doorway and wordlessly she looked up at him, the photograph clasped still in her hand.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He stepped over and took the photograph. He did not look angry. He stood for a moment before her and then he turned and placed it in the album on the shelf.
Yael was careful over the next few days. She kept out of his way, busying herself quietly. If she looked up and found he had been watching her once again, she averted her eyes and did not make it obvious she had noticed. The tension of the first few days began to ease and the mute did not disappear again. Silently they shared their meals at the old wooden kitchen table, as if they ate alone. When Aleksei boiled water on the tiled stove, he made strong sweet tea for Yael too, leaving it on the table, rather than giving it to her; and she would make no fuss about drinking it.
The week before Christmas the temperature continued to fall. On Christmas Day it was so cold branches began to break from trees and it was difficult to keep the water in the well from freezing. Instead they began to rely on the snow which they would collect in buckets and leave to melt by the side of the stove.
The more Yael struggled to make herself unobtrusive in the house, to avoid confronting his glance, the more she became sensitive to his presence. There was not a moment when she did not know where he was or what he was doing. As his nervousness of her lessened she felt him observe her more closely, more openly. Despite the longing for contact, she affected ignorance of his gaze. She became so sensitive to it, she knew without looking up if his eyes had slid from the book before him and crept over to her. She felt it like fingers on her back, stroking her, caressing her.
She became more careful of her appearance and noticed, glancing in the small mirror one morning, the colour had risen in her cheeks. She would not call attention to herself, but would long for that quiet, still moment in the day, as she sat sewing, her head bent over the cloth, and he was lounged with his feet on the stove, Lermontov on his lap, when she would notice the difference in the pattern of his breathing, the minute, barely perceptible lowering of its pitch. All at once her skin prickled, as though suddenly coming to life. Her heart quickened and she became for that moment more alive to the texture of the cloth, to the sharpness of the needle, to the exact quality of the light, to the blood that pumped through the veins in her fingers, in her slim wrists.
One evening while bathing in the tin tub in front of the tiled stove, she noticed she had forgotten to pull closed the curtain between the two rooms. Aleksei was reading in the other room and could not see her, but in the silence she became acutely aware of him. She was kneeling in the water which barely covered her thighs. Lifting a jug from the floorboards she filled it, conscious that through the doorway he could hear the burble of water, the slop and creak of the bath as she moved, each drip that fell from her body. Closing her eyes she tilted back her head and poured the water over her face, luxuriating in the way it flowed down across her body, separating around her breasts, circling her naval. When she had finished, she pulled a cotton sheet around her loosely and stood by the open door, allowing the water to drip from her, her flesh more vividly alive, more sensitive to the run of a droplet of water, to the breath of wind, to the softness of the air than ever she had felt it before. Goosebumps dimpled her pale flesh. A deep ache awoke inside her, so
suddenly painful she almost groaned.
When, in the mornings, Aleksei shaved, Yael would settle herself at the kitchen table with a book and pretend to be engrossed. Covertly she would watch over the top of the page the quiet slow ritual. He would arrange along the top of the stove, in a neat line, the knife with which he shaved, an old brush, the hairs of which had become soft with age, the bar of soap in its ornamental wooden box, the lid of which he would remove and place alongside, and a metal bowl. Once the water had begun to bubble in the pan on the stove, he poured half carefully into the bowl, lathered his brush and applied the soap to his face. She enjoyed the smooth dexterity of his movements, the ripple of tendons on his bare back, the way he would flick the dark curls of his hair from his face.
On the wall close to the door, beside the hooks on which he hung his coats, a calendar was pinned. It was a cheap wall calendar, illustrated with no pictures. One morning Yael stood by it, gazing up at the dates. She heard his footstep on the floorboards behind her and, thinking he had come to take his coat, moved quietly aside. He did not brush past her, however, nor reach out for his fleece-lined jacket. Instead he stopped a step behind her, so close she could feel his breath on the bare skin of the back of her neck. Yael stiffened. A flush of blood coloured her cheeks. For a few moments he stood silently behind her, then raised his arm, over her shoulder and placed his fingertip on the calendar. So confused was Yael by his proximity, by the intimacy of this movement, she did not at first notice the date on which his nail rested. It was only when he lifted it slightly and tapped the card that she saw it was the thirty-first of December. That it was New Year’s Eve. The last day of 1941.
Yael turned, slowly. He did not move. His eyes flicked away from her, settling anxiously on the calendar. The air seemed sharp suddenly, as if charged with electricity.
“It’s New Year’s Eve,” she whispered, her voice, so unused to speaking, no more than a breath. Aleksei’s hand fell back to his side. His head bent away from her but he did not move. She repeated the phrase softly, this time in Russian, enunciating each word with clear schoolgirl care. Slowly he nodded. They stood so close she could reach out and touch him. She could lift up her hand and stroke the line of his jaw, the pink lobe of his ear which showed beneath his hair, the vein that ran down his neck.
The floorboards sighed. A crow called from close to the door. The day was silent. He breathed, she breathed. The blood pulsed in her veins. The muscle in the lid of his eye flickered. It hurt when she swallowed and she wondered if he had heard the dry gulp. He turned then and crossed the kitchen and sat on his stool by the stove. He did not touch the book. She moved to the table and gripped its surface to support her. Her cheeks burned. She could not look at him. Stiffly she set about clearing the cup and plates from the table. She knelt by the wooden bucket in which they washed their dishes and rinsed them carefully. She heard him get up and walk through to the other room. For ten minutes she knelt on the wooden floor, the plates shimmering beneath the water and struggled to regain control of her breathing.
For the rest of the day they moved about the house silently, occupied with the tasks that needed doing: the boiling of porridge for the pigs, feeding the fowl, bringing in fresh wood and keeping the stove alive. When they entered the same room, they avoided looking at each other. Yael found her hands shook slightly. She wondered if he had planned on celebrating the New Year, as often her neighbours had done in Selo, but as the light faded and the kitchen dissolved into darkness, he opened the door, as was often his custom, and smoked a cigarette. When he had stubbed it out, he came back inside and ate the normal thin broth and drank a cup of tea and wandered through into his room.
Yael heard the springs of his bed creak. The house was so silent she could hear the pulse of blood in her ears, her unsteady breathing. Though it had grown dark Yael felt no desire to sleep. It was hard to make out the contours of the kitchen furniture, the only thing visible was the bright outline of the door of the stove. She felt oddly unsettled, her limbs prickled with desire for something.
To occupy herself, she tried to recreate in her mind her family home; each corner, each surface, each picture on the wall. The face of her mother, of her father, of Josef. But despite her efforts, the walls shimmered indistinctly, the faces disintegrated, crumbling away as quickly as she built them. Perversely she found the face of her grandfather rose clearly and unbidden, his features so distinct, she felt she could reach and touch them.
As a small child Yael had never felt comfortable with her grandfather, had been even a little frightened of him. She had never relished the family’s visits to Lomza. Partly this was because of the old man’s obvious and bluntly spoken disapproval of his son-in-law. Her father had been a student as a young man in one of her grandfather’s Talmud classes and it had been before these classes he had met Reb Silverstein’s daughter. Her father had wanted to move to Warsaw and study. Already as a young man, he had begun to talk romantically about Palestine, a source of conflict with his future father-in-law. Selo had been the poor compromise.
In the darkness of Aleksei’s kitchen her grandfather’s face hovered before Yael. The leather strap of the phylactery, bound so tight the veins protruded on his arms. The box on his forehead. The shawl, thinning with age. The way his body bobbed from the waist, backward and forward, in short pecking motions as he prayed. The way his eyes shone as he told them stories in the light of the kurnik.
Each story was laced with bitterness: ‘Like the Passover meal,’ he whispered passionately. ‘Our lives are seasoned with bitter herbs. As it says in the book of Ruth, Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter!’
As she lay down upon her bed in the corner of the room, the story of Ruth drifted through her mind. For some time she lay on her back, covered by Aleksei’s coat, the tale spinning in the darkness. Her heart lurched. She sat up. She paused and listened. Heart thumping, she stepped noiselessly across the floorboards.
A pale moon illuminated his room. He had not drawn the curtains and the light lay slick and ghostly across the sheets of his bed. She paused a moment inside the door, her heart thumping so hard she thought she would turn back. He did not stir. She could not hear his breathing. He did not move when she lifted the corner of his blanket at the foot of the bed and lay down. At first she hardly dare move. The air was cold. She drew herself up into a tight ball, easing herself backwards, until the blanket covered her and she was able to wrap it beneath her. She felt his foot pressed against the small of her back. Her body stiffened, but he did not shift. He did not rise. Slowly she relaxed. The warmth of his bed crept into her muscles. She slept.
The next morning when Aleksei turned from the doorway, tossing out the stub of his cigarette, his head ducked nervously seeing that she was watching him. Quickly Yael bent over the stove setting the water to boil for tea. At the table they avoided looking into each other’s eyes.
13
The brutal cold lasted into the New Year. The temperature continued to drop until, as Yael read on an old thermometer attached to the wall, it hit minus thirty. In the week that followed it was difficult to go out, and Aleksei only left the house to feed the pigs. The chickens he moved into the pigsty, to benefit from the warmth of the close proximity of the pigs.
The world seemed to retreat. Venturing out one evening, as the sun was setting, Yael stood for some minutes at the edge of the wood. The snow reached up to her thigh. The trees were black against the intense purity of the untrodden expanse of whiteness. Not one sound was audible; no bird, no animal, no voice, no engine, no breath or stir of wind. Yael had never experienced a silence more crushing.
Aleksei had an old radio, more primitive even than the one her father had listened to each Saturday afternoon. Occasionally Yael would turn it on and wait while it hummed and whistled and warmed up. Carefully she would twist the large dial, searching through the static haze for the whisper of a voice, which proved they were not the only ones alive.
The German inva
sion had been slowed to almost a halt by the fierceness of the winter. Their tanks, unsuited to the poor roads and the bitter cold, made slow progress. Soldiers were dying of hypothermia and disease. Hitler had ordered that they stand firm. The Soviet army, meanwhile, more accustomed to the conditions, had launched a counter attack, advancing in some places as much as a hundred miles. Yael thought of Josef.
Aleksei did not listen to the radio. It did not seem to concern him when Yael turned it on, but he would invariably walk through into the kitchen and tend to the stove, or lose himself in one of his books. Occasionally, when Yael picked up a station that was playing music, he would shuffle in. His dark eyes fixed upon the radio apparatus and he would be lost in the flow of strings, the rise and fall of the melody, the drama.
One evening, as he pushed logs into the stove and gazed distractedly at the fierce dance of the flames, Yael picked up the book he had been reading. It was a collection of poems by Akhmatova, her profile etched on the front. Yael read out the first line of the poem from the page the book was open on. Song of the Last Meeting. Her voice sounded odd at first and she coughed and cleared her throat and began again. Aleksei glanced up from the flames. For a moment their eyes met, before she focused once more upon the lines. She noticed he continued to watch her.
The Song of the Stork Page 5
