by Talia Carner
The potato piroshki were fluffy as clouds, accompanied by a rich blend of onions, mushrooms, and carrots boiled with tiny green leaves. A second glass of red wine made it taste even better. Drinking wine was like eating chocolate, Batya decided, but more acute: it made her sight clearer, the gilded room brighter. The disgrace of her recent wrongdoing melted away.
After the main course, Grabovsky seemed in no rush to leave. His stomach looked even larger than before. He motioned to the waiter to refill Batya’s glass, leaned back, and ordered cognac and coffee for himself. He lit a cigar. Its bluish smoke made Batya cough but didn’t distract her from the whipped chocolate over white meringue that materialized in front of her. A distant voice in her head warned her that the airy chocolate must have been whisked with cream and shouldn’t be consumed in the same meal as meat, but she no longer cared. She savored the dessert’s fluffy and crunchy sweetness, and joy flooded the whole of her. This was the life awaiting her when she married Moskowitz, dressing in finery and eating in a plush dining hall attended by servants. She drank the rest of the wine, and more happiness filled the spaces that had been occupied by dread.
At last, she stretched in contentment and yawned, her arms raised. The room pitched and swerved, and the lights of the crystal chandeliers doubled. The walls swayed. People’s voices rose to a din, when something heaved inside her.
Then her dinner exploded all over the table.
“Polaca.” Grabovsky shook his head in disgust, then belched, and Batya wondered why he called her a “Pole” when he knew that she was a Jewess from Russia. Two waiters appeared, mumbling in that strange loud, high, clucking language the maid had spoken. They folded away the tablecloth, and one of them placed a glass of water in front of Batya. She sipped, and the water seemed to settle her stomach but did not cool her burning forehead. Grabovsky pushed the table away and rose, yanking her arm. When she tried to stand, her legs folded under her as if made of cheese.
He lifted her in his arms and carried her out a side door.
She felt her head loll as he moved swiftly along the many corridors and down the stairs, and finally dropped her like a log on the bed in her cabin.
The maid entered and released Batya from the confines of her dress and underthings. She helped her to the commode, where Batya retched again. The maid washed her face and had Batya rinse her mouth in the bowl with mint water, then slipped over her head a shift that was too thin for the chill in the room. Batya tried to tell her that there was a nightshirt in the drawer, but the mush in her head jumbled her tongue. Words turned into pebbles impossible to spit out even if the maid had understood Yiddish.
No sooner had Batya sunk into deep sleep when something rattled her foot. She opened her eyes a slit. Grabovsky stood by her bed, naked. In the light of the lamp on the dressing table, his belly was huge.
“No!” She tried to sit up, but the room swerved around her.
He slapped her face hard. She collapsed onto the pillow, shocked by the sting of his slap. He fell on top of her, knocking her breath out. “No!” she tried to scream into his vast chest. His hands pinched her bare buttocks as he lifted them and shoved himself into her.
Panting and grunting, he puffed his foul breath straight into Batya’s nose and mouth. She screamed, and he silenced her mouth with his paw while he pounded, the pain tearing her with each thrust.
He left her coughing for air, sobbing. She curled into a ball, filled with hatred and self-loathing. Her head felt unanchored when she turned it, as if her brain had to be nudged to move along with her skull.
She was still wailing when a sailor entered her room. Batya’s wine-laden limbs barely obeyed her as she scrambled to the corner of the cot. The sailor lifted her legs and spread them apart. His hand was like a steel vise as he held her down and unbuttoned the trousers of his cotton uniform with the other.
She screamed, then sank her teeth into his shoulder. He punched her jaw. She gathered what little force remained in her and bit again, and he laughed. She wrenched an arm free to scratch at his face, but he was already inside her, enjoying her struggles. Like a cat playing with a mouse, sometimes he let go of her arms, laughing as she flailed and hit him, then seizing them back in one swoop.
When he finally rose, she slumped over the side of the bed and retched. Only bile came up, burning her throat.
The door hadn’t closed behind the sailor when Grabovsky reentered. He slapped her again. “Stop the racket,” he demanded, and slapped her other cheek.
She was in a drunken stupor when two more men, well-dressed gentlemen she recognized from the dining hall, joined her, one watching the other as each had his way with her body.
Batya woke up feeling her head bursting like an overripe gourd. The light streaming through the porthole pierced her eyes. She lay still, counting the different pains that racked her body. Head, eyes, arms, stomach, her private parts, her legs. Her heart was lead. She was a debased, sullied human being. Not even that. A filthy animal. A creature undeserving to walk on God’s earth.
The maid who entered wasn’t the one from the previous night. This woman shook her head in pity, crossed herself, and clucked words in her language. Her hands were tender as she cleaned Batya and gently massaged her sore body. She put ointment on Batya’s opening, but it did little to soothe the pulsating pain inside her or the splitting headache. When Batya wept, the woman cradled her head in her lap and sang her a song in her strange language.
After a while she left, returning with a breakfast of salted herring, a soft-boiled egg, a slice of bread toasted and buttered on both sides, and a glass of milk. She tiptoed out, as if not to disturb Batya’s regained calm, but Batya could hear the key turning on the other side of the door. If only the key had protected her last night.
Nausea filled Batya at the smell of the food. She raised herself with difficulty and looked out the porthole. A vast lead-colored sea under an overcast sky stretched to the horizon. Low waves broke, their foaming tops receding, rolling the ship along with the rising and falling of her head and stomach.
How could this happen to her? Batya felt sick with no fever, her head as empty and brainless as a butter churn. Her future with Moskowitz was destroyed. It was one thing for him to give in to his desire for her and entirely another to have a wife who’d been despoiled by other men. She had failed her parents. She would never be able to bring them and Surale to America as a respectable wife of a man of importance and means.
For the rest of the day she stayed in bed, hovering between wakefulness and sleep. She tried eating the noontime meal to fortify herself, but fear and self-loathing clogged her throat. She was undeserving of God’s abundant good food.
And worse, facing three more weeks at sea, she was Grabovsky’s captive.
When dusk came, Batya rose and put on her gray pinafore, hoping to get out of the cabin. If she could escape, she would find some good soul to beg for help.
Outside the porthole, the sky darkened and blended with the sea into one impenetrable inky blotch. Instead of Grabovsky bringing her to the dining hall, a male servant carried in a tray. As he took out the previous barely touched meal, he smirked and winked at her.
Batya forced small bites around her growing lump of fear. Then, after drinking her hot tea, she smashed the china cup against the wall. She took off her diamond ring and placed it in the closet drawer, then clutched the curved handle of the broken teacup between her fingers, its jagged edges sticking out. Her heart pounding in her ears, she curled up in the corner of the room, trapped. Waiting.
It was late when a man came in, waddled unsteadily toward her, and reached for her.
Gripping the broken cup handle, she slashed his cheek.
Chapter Thirteen
The vibrations of the ship shook Batya awake into complete darkness. Her entire body hurt, and when she breathed, something pierced her rib cage. Her stomach ached inside and out.
She retched bile.
The floor beneath her was coarse wooden slats.
Her legs touched rough planks. Raising an arm with difficulty, she met more slats. Frantically, she felt about her: she was lying inside a crate.
In the noisy thrum of the ship’s engines, rhythmic, metallic, and juddering, events of the night before rushed in—the men, the beating, being struck on the head.
She started to cry, but every breath sent that ice pick into her rib cage. Passing her hand over her neck, chest, and legs, she touched the tender bruises. Only then did she notice the lump of cloth next to her head. Her rag doll. She must have been clutching it when she was knocked unconscious and thrown in here. Batya hugged it, her sobs turning to a wail. “God help me. Please! Hear me here, Your daughter Batyale. I was a good, obedient daughter to my parents and a devoted believer in You—”
“Crying will only make you weaker.” The Yiddish words in a girl’s voice were unmistakable. Batya turned her head, but could see nothing in the darkness. “Your name is Batyale?” the girl asked. “I’m Shayna.”
“My family calls me that. I’m really Batya. Where are we?”
“You have a family?”
“Don’t you?”
There was a long pause. When Shayna spoke, Batya had to strain to hear her voice over the din. “My parents were killed in a pogrom when I was four. My brothers and I grew up in a Jewish orphanage until soldiers came and conscripted all the boys into the czar’s army.” After another pause, Shayna went on, her voice stronger. “They did bad things to the girls. Took some away with them. Of the girls that remained, four of us were chosen for jobs. We’re sailing to work as maids in good Jewish homes in Argentina.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s where this ship is heading.”
“It’s going to Buenos Aires.”
“Buenos Aires is a city in Argentina, which is the country.”
“The country is America,” Batya said, certain in her one piece of knowledge.
“Argentina is a country in South America.”
Something ran across Batya’s leg. She yelped. The creature circled and came back. She screamed and batted at her leg.
“Those are just rats,” Shayna said. “Are you wearing something to cover yourself? They bite.”
Batya tucked up her legs under the bottom of her slip and undid the rag-doll pillowcase. She slid it over her head and shoulders and breathed through the fabric. Merciful Father, have mercy on me. Don’t make me live in this filth and degradation.
The rat came again, sniffing her. She felt a sharp nip through her thin slip and screamed.
“Shhhhhhh. Let’s pray,” Shayna said. “God, we are here, Shayna and Batya, and we need You to rescue us. Save us from evil. Heal our wounds.”
What were Shayna’s wounds? Batya dared not ask. “Yes, let us out. Take us back home,” she cried. In her mind’s eye she saw her beautiful cabin upstairs and recalled how good it had felt for just a few hours to have been a rich woman. Silently, she asked God, Please bring Reb Moskowitz back to me. Even if he won’t take me for his wife, make his kind heart show benevolence toward me.
“How old are you?” Shayna asked.
“Fourteen. And you?”
“Almost sixteen.”
For a while, neither spoke. The ship’s engines droned. The swaying of the ship was unrelenting, unsettling Batya’s empty stomach. A cockroach climbed up her thigh, and she yelped, batting it away. She mulled over what Shayna had told her. Batya had advantages over this girl: she had caring parents; she was under the protection of a man who’d mistakenly trusted his business associate; she also had an uncle living near their destination. When she arrived in Buenos Aires in that country, Argentina, that was in America, in the southern part of it, Moskowitz’s sister would take her under her wing. Even if Batya could no longer be Moskowitz’s wife, she could still become a hardworking maid.
Her thumb felt the inside of her middle finger for the ring Moskowitz had given her, and she remembered: it had been abandoned in her cabin. Moskowitz would be cross that she couldn’t give it back.
Her bladder intruded on her thoughts. “I need to pee badly,” she told Shayna.
“Might as well just do it. If you need to poop, scoot to the corner of your cage.”
A new wave of incredulity contracted the hair on Batya’s scalp. “How long have you been down here?”
“Since right after we sailed. How long has it been?”
The ship began to rock widely, and the rumbling noise rose to a new pitch. The ocean roared close by, and Batya felt herself rising and falling. She was hurled upward, then dropped down, as though the ship were a giant swing. She propped herself against the sides of her cage as her empty stomach heaved and retched.
Hours later, when the storm subsided, a door opened in the distance, and in the wan light filtering through the slats of Batya’s crate she saw a slim figure holding a lantern.
“I was sent to bring you water,” she heard a boy say in Yiddish. “How many of you are here?”
“Two,” Shayna replied.
He approached and kneeled by Batya’s cage. He rested the lantern on the floor and ladled water from a pail, then handed her the filled tin cup.
Batya took it with shaking hands and gulped quickly, then licked her lips to collect the droplets. “More, please.” Her voice sounded like a croak to her own ears.
He refilled the cup, and she drank thirstily, then handed it back to him. He lifted his lantern, and she heard him move toward Shayna.
“What about food?” Shayna asked him.
“We are very hungry,” Batya added. As poor as her family was, she had never gone a day without at least a potato or some root stew, and they always had milk and cheese.
The boy hesitated. “I’ll try.”
After he left there was nothing but dread of the dark, of the confinement, of the rats. Batya drifted in and out of consciousness. Hunger mixed with the pain in her rib cage with the ache in her limbs. When she peed, a needle of pain pierced her. The stench of her excrement stung her nostrils—but it also seemed to keep the rats at a distance. She breathed through her mouth and the pillowcase that covered her upper body.
The boy reappeared what seemed like a day later, this time with two apples and a hardtack, a dry flour cracker. “I’ve saved you my rations,” he whispered, “and stolen the apples from the storage.”
“Thank you.” Batya gobbled down the cracker. “May God shower you with blessings for helping us.”
“Why do you take the risk?” Shayna asked him.
“My sister sailed last year with her new husband but disappeared. So I got a job as a deck hand and have traveled to Buenos Aires twice to look for her. I can only stay as long as the ship docks. This is my third voyage. Maybe I’ll have more luck this time. The rumors are growing.”
“What rumors?” Batya asked.
“Men bring girls to Argentina by the dozens, then sell them.” He picked up his lantern, and as it threw light near Batya’s cage, she saw cockroaches scattering away. “I must return to my shift.”
“What did he mean by ‘sell them’?” Batya asked Shayna after he’d left.
“That I’ll be sent to a brothel.” Shayna broke into a sob.
“What’s that?”
But Shayna went on crying.
The days and nights passed with nothing to demarcate them other than the occasional break when a sailor brought water along with bread or a potato, supplemented by the boy’s visits. The air became stifling and suffused with oil smoke, sending Batya and Shayna into coughing fits. Perspiration formed on Batya’s skin and dripped down her body. She separated her limbs as far as she could to minimize the hot touch of her own skin. Images came and went: her family’s hut burning; trees merging into a hot river that drowned her; diamonds growing into giant cockroaches. In moments of lucidity her mind figured that the heat meant that they were nearing America, where Reb Moskowitz’s sister would be waiting for her.
God Almighty, she prayed. Hear me down here. But don’t tell my parents what happe
ned. It would kill them. Just save me Yourself.
Batya had no idea how many days or weeks had passed when her crate was pried open. A sailor pulled her out of the crate and, when she stumbled, pushed her against a wall with Shayna. Shielding her eyes against the sudden light, Batya saw her new friend for the first time, a girl taller and wider than she, with black curls caked with filth and brown eyes swollen from crying.
Against the swaying of the ship, Batya remained standing by pressing her back to the wall when a sudden spray of cold seawater hit her with a startling force. She slid down and covered her head, but there was no place to hide as the sailor directed the hose onto her hair and between her legs, stinging the old cuts and the newer rat bites, then sprayed Batya’s head and face, where the salt water burned her eyes and lips.
When he stopped, Batya wrapped her arms around herself to hide her nakedness in the torn wet slip. The sailor sniggered, but the break from the crate and its rats was a relief, and the cold water a reprieve from the grime and heat. Despite the burning, the fast-drying salt was preferable to the filth.
The sailor handed each of them a sheet, and Batya draped hers around herself. Trembling, her eyes stinging from salt and blinking at the light, she followed his hand signal to climb up a metal ladder. Shayna lumbered a few rungs behind her, the sailor bringing up the rear. At the top, Batya forced her rubbery limbs to pull her through the hole, and she found herself on a small balcony from which rose a flight of stairs. The ship was moving on a calm sea, and no land was in sight.
The sun was too bright. Batya shielded her eyes, then shuffled around a neatly coiled rope. Just as she reached the first stair, she heard a yelp from the sailor. She turned to see his head and torso emerge from the top of the ladder at the same time as Shayna hurled herself from the balcony. Flailing arms and legs, she hit the water with a splash, then disappeared.
“No!” Batya screamed, and rushed to the railing.
