Small Worlds

by Allen Hoffman

  “You are Matti Sternweiss, the butcher’s son, aren’t you?” Faigie asked.

  “Yes, I am. They’re fine, thank you. How is Mr. Soffer?” Matti responded.

  “Oh, he’s all right,” she said perfunctorily.

  Hearing her speak of her husband in such a disinterested tone, Matti’s heart began to beat quickly again. He looked at her quizzically. She must be the naked lady, he thought in triumph. What else would she be doing here in the middle of the night lounging by the water?

  “What are you doing here?” Matti attempted to ask this in pleasant inquiry, and although the question wasn’t unpleasant, it betrayed Matti’s single-mindedness of pursuit.

  “I was waiting for someone to take me across the stepping stones to Grannie Zara’s.”

  Her voice, until now so calm and soothing, quavered on “the stepping stones” and positively shook with fear as she said the witch’s name.

  Not paying any attention to her tone, Matti blithely answered, “Oh, good, that’s just where I was going.”

  “You were?” Faigie asked in distrusting astonishment.

  “Yes,” Matti said more somberly. He realized that he had repeated his old mistake of sounding unconcerned when someone was very troubled. And Mrs. Dribble was more than a little troubled. She could barely utter “Grannie Zara” without fainting. He had already offended her, and since he wanted to determine definitely whether she was the naked lady—in the back of his mind he had not given up hope of a performance this very night—and since he was, in fact, on his way to Grannie Zara’s, he thought he had better make amends.

  “Well, I wasn’t really on my way to Grannie Zara’s,” Matti backtracked. “I’m really looking for the talking frog.”

  Faigie interrupted him, “The talking frog?”

  “Oh, yes, you weren’t in town tonight, were you? Well, you must know about Itzik and the rebbe, don’t you?” Matti was fearful that she did not and that he would have to narrate the entire bizarre performance.

  “Yes, but why do you think the magic frog is at Grannie Zara’s?” Faigie asked.

  “Well, some of Reb Gedaliah’s students went to the pond this evening, and they were assaulted by Casimir and the Krimichak gang. They were trying to drown Alexander Bornstein, the cooper’s son, when he called to Rabbi Chanina’s frog to save him and the magic frog attacked Casimir’s eyes, blinding him and routing the Krimichakers. Our boys told everyone in town about it, and I wanted to talk to the magic frog. After all, he knows all of Torah, the Talmud, and absolutely everything.”

  Matti stopped. He had tried to sound possessed, inspired, and convincing, but he knew that he’d not done such a fine job pretending to believe such nonsense. He was hoping that she had enough faith in nonsense for both of them.

  “Yes, but what makes you think the magic frog is at Grannie Zara’s?” Faigie asked skeptically.

  In his attempt to generate enthusiasm, he had forgotten to answer her question. No wonder all the enthusiastic people made so little sense; one can’t babble and think at the same time.

  “Oh, yes,” Matti said. “Well, I called his name along the shore of the pond where he had saved Alexander, and I didn’t get any answer, so I thought maybe he had chased the hooligans back to Krimichak. I assumed that once he crossed the stream, he would look in at the witch’s, since they do have something in common.”

  “Oh,” Faigie responded, unconvinced. “Aren’t you afraid to go to Grannie Zara’s?”

  “Of course,” Matti answered quietly, “but if the miraculous frog is there, I thought everything would be all right. He’s on our side.”

  Faigie did not believe the part about his fearing Grannie Zara. Earlier, he had answered quickly and naturally. Faigie had seen Casimir holding his eye, and she had heard the shouting, and she didn’t think Matti would make up the frog story that he claimed to have heard in town. That could be easily checked. The rebbe had told the Rabbi Chanina story to her Itzik. That part was true, but Matti’s search was an invented afterthought. And how—on a night like this—could a young boy not be afraid of Grannie Zara? Unless, Faigie wondered—she had heard the Polish boys talking about a Jewish witch. Who wouldn’t be afraid of a witch, she reasoned, except for another witch?

  Now it was Faigie’s turn to examine Matti. Could this strange little child be the Jewish witch? Faigie had not seen or heard any frog hopping after the Polish boys. She wouldn’t be at all surprised if Matti had that very frog in his pocket right now. But it was too dark, and he was sitting down. Faigie was indignant that this child thought she could be so easily fooled. If, however, he was the witch, then he most certainly could get her safely across the deathchurning waters. And he might be of help at Grannie Zara’s. She had better not offend him.

  “I guess he’s at Grannie Zara’s. Where else would he be?” she asked rhetorically.

  Matti thought she lacked enthusiasm, but who could get excited over such nonsense anyway? Maybe she did have some sense. Then he realized that this should not surprise him; the naked lady with a mikveh here and a mikveh there, a lover here and a husband there, was a very creative person.

  “I suppose we might as well get started,” Faigie said.

  “Yes.”

  They both stood up.

  “Aren’t you going to get your towel?” Matti asked.

  She seemed not to know what he was talking about. Her husband must not suspect a thing. Matti was impressed.

  “Don’t you have a towel in the bushes?”

  “No, why should I have a towel in the bushes?” He didn’t sound so much like a witch as a fool.

  “In case you want to take a little dip in the water,” Matti said. She was not admitting a thing.

  “I wouldn’t put a finger in that water. There’s death in that water tonight,” she said fearfully.

  Matti assumed that she was coyly hiding her true interests. The ethical onus of adultery as well as the biblical punishment was death. Through a literary reference, she was saying that anything connected with adultery is death. Very clever. Well, two could play the same game.

  “Death? How silly. Why, this is a natural mikveh filled with life. How else could it purify you?”

  Oh, thought Faigie, that’s what the little devil was getting at. A sly one, isn’t he? Bragging that he need not fear the water.

  “You aren’t afraid of the water?” she asked.

  “No, of course not. Nothing could be more attractive or convenient,” he answered, hoping that his praise might encourage her to avail herself of its purifying properties.

  Faigie was never one to play games, and this arrogant little devil was getting under her skin.

  “If you’re so concerned about convenience, then you might have said something,” Faigie said rather waspishly.

  “What are you talking about?” Matti asked. Now that he was on the defensive, he was not so assertive.

  “The women don’t have enough to do? You couldn’t save them a trip to Krimichak in the middle of the night?” Faigie accused him fiercely.

  “What trip?” Matti asked in amazement.

  “To Grannie Zara, where else?” she said.

  Matti thought that Beryl Soffer might be the luckier of Faigie’s two men. What lover would welcome a madwoman? Had Matti believed in witches, he would have thought Faigie bewitched. She wasn’t making any sense at all. Maybe the rabbis did know what they were talking about when they taught that no one sins unless the spirit of foolishness possesses him. Faigie’s foolishness rivaled the magnitude of her sin. Matti wondered if she had been so disturbed before she became an adulteress. He considered fleeing back to Krimsk, and he well might have done so had she not commanded him to cross the stream.

  “Go first and hold my hand.”

  Matti squinted down into the dark water where he knew the stones must be. After a moment, he could see a massive amorphous shape sitting darker than the water. Since the water was no more than three feet deep and he had no great fear of falling in,
he was not overly anxious. He was more concerned about falling onto the stones themselves; that would be dangerous. The five stones were large, flat, and close to one another. Matti stepped onto the first one and edged toward the center until he was sure that he had left enough space behind him for Faigie. He pulled on her hand and drew her onto the rock.

  She tightened her grip until his hand ached, and when she stood next to him, she put her arm around his waist. He felt the tension coursing through her thin arm until it was taut like a wire.

  “Fine, now let me find the edge.” Using his foot as a cane, he tapped forward. She followed so silently that Matti could not hear her. He wondered if she were holding her breath.

  “I’m stepping onto the next one.”

  Holding her hand, he stepped across.

  On the fourth stone, he paused. Her anxiety must be contagious, he thought, for he felt his legs tightening. He forced himself to concentrate and held his breath as he stepped onto the next stone. When he reached the Krimichak bank, he did not say a word.

  When she felt the earth underfoot, she breathed a sigh of relief and hugged Matti in a quick, steely embrace that left him gasping. Still holding his hand, but more relaxed, she stepped past him and led the way along the path. They creeped along slowly for several minutes until they saw the break in the foliage that permitted them to view the stars. After the suffocating blackness of the leaves, the sparkling heavens seemed light and airy. Straight ahead lay Krimichak, off to the right was Grannie Zara’s cottage. Faigie hesitated, and Matti led the way.

  In a few moments they could see the dark shape of the cabin sitting like a large shadow. It was totally dark and so quiet that Matti realized that Grannie Zara must have already been buried. He was curious to see what Faigie wanted in Grannie Zara’s empty home. He suspected that she wanted to retrieve something. A magical incantation? Sometimes such amulets contained personal names. Matti suspected that one might have the name of her lover.

  “Are you going around the back?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.

  “No.”

  To Faigie’s amazed horror, Matti opened the door without hesitating. Acting as if he were a member of the household, he walked right in. Perhaps he was a blood relative. Either that, or—Faigie tightened her grip on his sweaty hand to feel his smooth human skin and to make sure that he had not transformed himself into a furry cat as he entered the witch’s den. The last time someone had taken her hand at Grannie Zara’s, she had paid dearly for it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  EVEN WITH THE DOOR OPEN, MATTI COULD NOT SEE a thing as he entered Grannie Zara’s cottage. He stepped forward and felt sharp flashes of pain bite into his shin. “Ugh,” he moaned as what sounded like a small stool crashed across the floor. In reflex, Faigie squeezed his hand even harder. He knew that if he could not light a candle quickly, he would scream from the pain. She was crushing him in an iron vise; he sensed that it would be futile to ask her to release him. In the midst of his agony, his ironic mind was active; the only thing superhuman about all this was Faigie Soffer’s strength. Her last name gave him an idea.

  “Do you have any matches?” he whispered.

  There was no reply. If she weren’t breaking his hand, he would never have believed that she was with him.

  “Faigie, do you have any matches?” he hissed.

  What if she were paralyzed with fear? He doubted that he had enough strength to break her grip.

  “Faigie Soffer, put your hand in your pocket and give me the matches right now,” he commanded in a desperate but insistent tone. “The matches, Faigie, right now!”

  She was tugging and manipulating something awkwardly with his hand. He assumed these were the phantom parallel movements of her free hand in her pocket. Then he felt her pressing something against his arm.

  “I can’t light them; let go of my hand and hold my arm,” he said as he took the box of matches.

  He felt her loosen her crushing hold and slide her hand up his arm. She held him above the elbow. Matti seized the opportunity and dragged a match over the roughened edge of the box. It screeched into a blinding explosion of light and then descended into a small yellow flame. Faigie, fearful of what she would see, gripped his arm as tightly as she had held his hand. Ignoring this as best he could, he stepped over to light the candle on the table and then sat down. He tried to remove Faigie’s grip, but she seemed oblivious to his attempts to peel back her fingers.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  She removed her hand.

  “Have a seat,” he suggested, but Faigie continued to stand. She turned around in a complete circle to make sure nothing was behind her.

  Seeing how naturally Matti made himself at home—sitting right down like that at Grannie Zara’s table—left no doubt that Faigie was with the Jewish witch.

  She looked down at Matti, who was massaging the area where she had held his arm. The imprint of her fingers stood out clearly. Well, she thought, just like they say, even a witch gets burned by the pot. She wondered when Grannie Zara would return.

  As Matti methodically rubbed his arm, he flexed his allbut-numb fingers and looked around at what had been Grannie Zara’s home. It looked like any well-to-do widow’s, except that it was so remarkably neat. Not so much clean as orderly. Everything seemed to have a preordained position, and all the insignificant objects together exuded a harmony like a symphony but played much too loud. Matti had never experienced anything like it. He kept looking around —at the andirons, at the broom, at the few books, at the crucifix on the wall—to discover what caused the strange effect. Matti would not realize until years later that the secret lay in their relationship to one another.

  “Why did you come here?” he asked.

  “Why aren’t you looking for the frog?” she retorted.

  Matti wondered how she could be so hostile. She certainly never could have made it here without him, but she was right about the frog. Matti had forgotten; Faigie had not.

  “Oh, he might show up. I can wait.”

  As Matti spoke, they heard the low, grinding whine of the door hinges; they turned to see the partially open door slowly opening itself even farther. They could see no one pushing it, and there was not the slightest hint of wind. Faigie’s eyes popped open wide, her mouth tensed, and she emitted a low, trembling note. Even Matti, who did not admit the existence of witches, sat up in fright. Undeniably, the door was moving. He felt Faigie’s torturous grip on his other arm and then he saw the large calico cat padding around the corner of the cabinet. With supreme feline certainty and self-assurance, it leaped onto Matti’s lap, nuzzling against him. Faigie removed her hand from Matti and stepped back. Matti felt a similar rubbing sensation on his legs and looked down to find four or five normal-sized calicos at his feet. Two left him and mewed in the direction of a large double cupboard.

  “They must be hungry,” Matti said. “See if there is anything in the cupboard,” he suggested, but Faigie did not move.

  He turned to look at Faigie, who stood in the shadows behind him. The large calico with the outsize paw looked in the same direction.

  “Stay away from me, Zloty,” she warned.

  The cat returned to rubbing Matti’s chest with its head.

  “You know her?” Matti asked, turning back to scratch the cat behind the ears. She purred with delight.

  “Yes,” Faigie answered.

  “They must have seen the light and thought that Grannie Zara had returned,” he speculated.

  “I wish she would,” Faigie said.

  “Why did you come here?” Matti asked her. She was so frightened and yet so insistent on staying.

  “You’re waiting for Rabbi Chanina’s frog?”

  Matti nodded.

  “Well, I’m waiting for Grannie Zara!”

  Matti burst into laughter.

  “What’s so funny? I think there’s more chance of her arriving than a talking frog!” she said petulantly.

  “Grannie Zara is dead,” he said,
but before he could tell her that the witch had already been buried, he heard a piercing, ghastly scream the likes of which he had never heard and was never to hear again during his entire life. His hair stood on end, and he felt the frightened cat’s claws dig into his thighs as Zloty sprang off his lap. The great cat flew out the door, followed by the others. At that second Matti felt no pain, just the sensation that claws were digging into him. His only awareness was of that awful wrenching scream, as if Faigie’s chest had been torn wide open. The deafening cry did not last long, but it echoed in his ears for five times as long as it rent the night.

  When he was certain that it had ended and that he was still in one piece, Matti stood up and turned around to Faigie. He thought that she had disappeared until he saw her feet. She lay face down. He ran over and began to roll her onto her back as he called, “Faigie, Faigie, are you all right?” Blood trickled from a bruise above her eye where her head had hit the sandy floor. He wiped it away with his finger and began to pat her cheeks the way he had seen the women reviving one another on Yom Kippur when the fasting had overcome them. He was not succeeding.

  Matti wanted to leave Grannie Zara’s as quickly as possible. That scream frightened him as he had never been frightened before, and he was sure all of Krimichak had heard it, too. He looked around the cabin for something that might help. A white earthenware jug stood on a shelf next to the bed. He ran and shook it, but heard no water inside. To be sure, he turned it over on his hand, but to his disappointment, no liquid came forth. His leg, however, felt damp. He looked down to see that his pants were wet. It must have happened when she screamed. He knew that this must be Bornstein’s revenge, but he dismissed the thought; he had to get out of that cottage before all of Krimichak arrived, and he couldn’t leave Faigie there. He had to revive her immediately.

  Kneeling, Matti made one last frantic effort to pat her back to consciousness. When that failed, he graduated to sharp slaps, and when that did not succeed, he leaned over her and brought his soaking wet pants front down onto her forehead. He gently rubbed against her, then moved away and massaged the urine into her temples. Faigie groaned, and Matti patted his wet fingers onto her cheeks and chin. Finally, Faigie’s eyes opened. They were alarmingly wild with fright. She moved nothing but her eyes.