“It’s considered bad luck. We just have to wait for someone to come. But it won’t be long with this racket.”
A moment later a woman with a baby on her hip appeared at the door and looked at them with suspicion. She wore a faded skirt and a gaudy head scarf and shooed the dogs away with a wave of her hand. Hershel tipped his hat and asked in Surzhyk for the whereabouts of the bol’shak. The baby began to fuss so she stuck a finger in its mouth while she nodded over to one of the larger outbuildings.
They found the bol’shak and his sons repairing harnesses in the barn, a rambling structure with stalls on one side, battered work benches on the other, and a hayloft in the back. The boys had the same light hair, flat wide face, rounded nose, and suspicious mouth of their father.
At first Hershel and Berta stood at the barn door, aware that they hadn’t been invited in. Hershel wished them a good day and said he’d come to buy their wheat. He was speaking Surzhyk like a muzhik and this seemed to lessen the tension. They knew he was a Jew, but a Jew who had taken the time to learn their language. Berta may have been reading into it, but it seemed to her that he had gained some respect for his efforts, especially with the bol’shak, who motioned them in.
Berta could barely speak the language, a mishmash of Russian and Ukrainian, but she had picked up enough working in the store to get the gist of what was being discussed. Hershel was saying something about a cow and their neighbor, possibly calling into question their neighbor’s skill at husbandry, and this they found uproariously funny. They talked about beehives. Hershel complimented the bol’shak on the hives they had seen on the drive. The old man took it in stride. After that she lost the thread of the conversation until the bol’shak invited them into his home for bread and salt.
The house was well kept for that part of the country, although the walls, which had been whitewashed once, were nearly black with soot and grime. They sat at a long farm table and ate bread slathered in lard topped with stout granules of salt, which they washed down with kvass served in jam jars. The men smoked their pipes filled with the foul-smelling makhorka. They weren’t in a hurry to get down to business and the conversation meandered over taxes, the purchase of a new horse, and the design of a new steam-powered threshing machine from Germany.
After the bread was consumed and several more glasses of kvass were drunk along with some vodka, Hershel and the bol’shak finally got down to talking about money. At first they started out far apart, but over time Hershel was able to bring the price down. He didn’t do it by belittling the man’s wheat as other merchants would have done. He did it by praising all the wheat in the region and implying that if he didn’t get his price here, there would be plenty of other places he could go. Finally, when they got down to haggling over two kopecks a pood, Hershel excused himself and went out to the carriage. He came back in carrying a sack of coins, which he emptied out on the table. Hundreds of shiny new kopecks spilled out over the worn planks and rolled through specks of salt and the sweat from the cold glasses. There were two- and three-kopeck coins, some five-kopeck, and a few grivenniki, ten-kopeck coins, all sparkling in the light that poured in through the open doorway. When the bol’shak saw the mound of coins he grinned and Berta saw that he was missing several teeth.
After the deal was struck, Hershel shook the man’s hand. The bol’shak walked them out to the droshky while his sons and daughter-in-law watched from the porch. Berta climbed up and brushed off the bench with her gloved hand. Then Hershel climbed up beside her and, after saying good-bye, signaled the horse and started up the rutted lane.
“Once I figured out they’d rather have a sack of kopecks than a piece of paper with the czar’s picture on it, the rest was easy. I never cheat them. I always give them a fair price, but it’s my price. Next spring I plan on managing six more silos. I already talked to Knoop and he’s happy to give them to me. He knows I get the best wheat and nobody gets my price. And after that I thought I’d ask for a piece. They won’t turn me down. They can’t. They know I’ll go over to the competition if they do.”
She looked at him from under her hat. It was a look of admiration, not coy, but openly admiring, and he took it in with pleasure. “You’re good at this, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Am I?” he said, barely suppressing a smile. The horse trotted past wide swaths of ripened wheat. “This is Adamovich’s,” he said with a wave of his hand. “I own it. All of it. I bought it when it was only seed.” He didn’t mean that he actually owned the fields, only that the consortium in Moscow had bought the wheat. But he was so connected to his work that these lines were often blurred. “Already it looks to be one of the highest yields in the district. He’s used a new seed from America. And he’s got the best soil. You can taste it.”
“You taste the soil?”
“Of course.”
She made a face and he laughed carelessly. He had a nice laugh. They rode back under the trees, the sunlight spilling through the leaves and tattooing the ground. It was quiet with only the clip-clop of hooves and the occasional thrum of a steam-powered thresher far off in the fields to break the calm. When the road got rough she had to hold on to the side of the box for support, but even so, her shoulder swayed into his, creating a stir of desire.
She asked him where he grew up and he told her about the shtetl where he was born and about the gymnasium where he went to school.
“It’s called Leski. Not far from here. On the way to Cherkast.”
“And what about your parents? Do they still live there?”
His smile faded a bit and he looked away. “They’re dead.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. How did they die?”
“They just did. Sometimes people die for no good reason.”
She thought this was an odd answer. She felt awkward after that, like she had committed some breach of etiquette, and didn’t know what to say.
They rode on in silence for a while, until he said, “Her name was Sophie. She was very beautiful, my mother. She had long fingers. She used to say they were her secret when she played Rachmaninoff. She had great plans for me. She wanted me to grow up to be a famous doctor, not the kind who sees patients. She said anybody could do that. She wanted me to do research and make discoveries and get my name in the history books.”
“Is that what you wanted?”
“No. Or rather I didn’t know what I wanted. I suppose I just wanted to make her happy.”
“And what about your father?”
“He was an educated man. He read to me when I was little and taught me to play chess and told me scary stories.”
She laughed. “What kind of stories?”
“Mostly ones about dybbuks and golems and vampires.”
“Weren’t you frightened?”
“Of course, but that was the point. I wanted to be frightened. Once he told me about the blue man who lived under our house. I used to dream about him. I remember he had sharp teeth and an evil smile. I wasn’t sure what he wanted, but I was pretty sure he was up to no good. After that I wouldn’t go to sleep without a lamp. My father took me under the house to show me there was no one there, but it didn’t do any good. I still wouldn’t go to bed without the lamp.”
“And what happened to him?”
“The blue man? I expect he’s still there.”
“Under the house?”
He looked out across a field where peasants in belted tunics were moving up the furrows in careless concert, their long-handled scythes cutting swaths of ripe wheat, their heads bent to the task.
“Under every house.”
THAT NIGHT, Berta stood by the window brushing out her hair and looking down into the street. There was a peddler coming home from the road. He wore a shabby overcoat and carried a bundle on his back. The torn lining of his overcoat dragged on the ground behind him. Usually the peddlers stayed out until Friday afternoon, when they came home for Shabbes, but this one was coming home early, exhausted, shoulders slumped against his luckless life. She stood
there not really seeing him, but thinking of Hershel, of his parents, and wondering how they died.
She put her brush on the nightstand and climbed into bed next to Lhaye, who was already asleep. She closed her eyes and soon she too was asleep—dreaming that she was a little girl playing in the yard behind the grocery with a caterpillar on a stick. She was sitting in the dirt watching it inch up to one end of the stick and then turning the stick upside down, watching it inch back up again. Someone called her name and she looked over at the crawl space under the building. There she saw a face grinning back at her from out of the darkness. It called her over. She didn’t like the look of its teeth. They were sharp and very white against the gleam of its blue skin.
Chapter Three
December 1904
WHEN BERTA arrived at the women’s bathhouse, she knew that it was silly to hope for clean water. The water was rarely changed and always an unusual shade of green. In fact, the whole place smelled of the fecundity of a healthy swamp. Even the little foyer smelled of overripe vegetation.
Berta climbed the steps of the raw-boned building, opened the door, and stepped inside. The bath keeper’s wife was sitting on a chair in the overheated foyer with her knitting on her lap. She was making a blanket for her grandchild, and although it wasn’t even finished yet, it was already dirty from the coins she handled all day long.
The old woman looked up at the door and frowned. “It’s not closed all the way,” she said, drawing her shawl up around her shoulders.
Berta turned back to the door and slammed it shut. Then she stepped forward, dug into her pocket for the ten-kopeck coin, and handed it over. “Is the bath clean today?”
“Of course it is clean. It is always clean. I clean it myself.” Her eyes were the color of the bathwater and her mouth was a line of disappointment sunk into the cavity between her cheeks. Berta didn’t argue. Instead she took the towel that was offered, so thin it was nearly transparent.
In the summer Berta bathed in the river at a spot reserved for women where a spit of land curled around a tiny backwater and trees and bushes grew up into a privacy screen. Here the water was cold and clean, and afterward there was a little beach where she could lie out in the sun and dry off. But now it was winter and the snowy drifts made cushions and mounds out of the bushes and fence posts. The Dnieper flowed under a thick layer of blue-green ice and the beach was covered in snow. In the winter there was only the bathhouse.
Berta walked into the bathing area, undressed, and laid her clothes out on a bench. She took off her stockings and shoes last so she wouldn’t have to stand barefoot on the moldy tile and stepped gingerly into the bath. It was a tile pool filled with murky water, big enough to accommodate eight or ten bathers with steps at either end. She tried not to think about the marble bathroom she left behind on Leontievsky Street. It did no good to think of these things. They were gone and were not coming back. Instead she waded down the steps, plunged into the fetid water, stood, soaped, and plunged down again to rinse off. Then she climbed up the steps, the water cascading off her body, and went over to a barrel of water that stood in the corner. She dipped a small bucket into it and poured the river water over her head and shoulders, gasping from the shock of the melted snow.
“That will kill you dead, Berta Lorkis.”
Berta felt blindly for the towel and dried her eyes. It was Meshia Partnoy, Hershel’s landlady, spreading out her things on a nearby bench.
“You’re going to catch your death with that freezing water.” She had begun to undress, seemingly quite comfortable with her surroundings. Her flesh was pale and moist and seemed native to this steamy swamp. “I don’t see why you just don’t sit in the bath like everyone else. It’s very refreshing.”
“It’s green and it stinks.”
“Nu? A little green never hurt anyone. It’s a mineral bath from the springs under the ground. That is why it smells so bad. But it’s good for the joints. Ask anyone around here, these baths are very healthy.”
Meshia Partnoy climbed into the pool and lowered herself into the water with a sigh and crouched down, displacing a gentle current that circled her dimpled thighs and rose up over her breasts and shoulders to her chin. She closed her eyes. Without opening them again she said, “I’m coming to see you tomorrow. I want some yard goods. I am going to make myself a new dress.”
Berta looked over at her. “What’s the occasion? It must be something special.” A new dress was an event in Mosny. Why make a new one when a used one was just as good and could be bought from the rag dealer for a fraction of the cost?
Froy Partnoy opened her eyes. They were glittering buttons in the half-light of the bath. “You haven’t heard? We are going to America. My brother has sent us the money and we are off in a week.”
“To America? Mazel tov. I hear it’s a wonderful place. You should be very happy.”
“Of course I should be happy. What is not to be happy about? My brother owns a pickle factory there in the big city. He has fifty men working for him and an ice box and a toilet right in his house.”
Berta liked Meshia Partnoy and her son, but frankly she could not have cared less if they went to America or to the moon. It was the woman’s lodger she was thinking about.
“And what about Hershel Alshonsky?” she asked casually.
During the last of the summer she and Hershel had gone out for rides together, played chess in the tearoom, and picnicked on the spongy moss that grew alongside the streams. They had become friends, or so she had thought, but then the leaves began to fall and he started to come less frequently. Now it was winter and she hadn’t seen him in two months and eighteen days.
“Who?” asked Meshia Partnoy.
“Your lodger.”
“Oh him. . . I guess he will just have to find another place to stay, although it can’t be very easy this time of year. Still, he could look in Bogitslav. He might have some luck there. I know a place or two.” Then she stopped and looked at Berta, a slow smile of recognition spreading across her face. “Oh, I see how it is.”
“How what is?”
“Well, he’s not exactly handsome, but they say he’s a real macher. Real smart, if you know what I mean. And he knows how to make a kopeck or two.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was just making conversation.”
“He is educated. And they say he has a real nice house in Cherkast. You could do worse.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with me. I was just curious, that’s all.”
“Of course you were,” Meshia Partnoy said, with an exaggerated look of solemnity.
Berta buttoned up her blouse, tucked it in, and gathered up her things. “Good-bye, Froy Partnoy,” she said coolly.
“Good-bye, Berta, and good luck.”
Berta left the women’s bath without bothering to say good-bye to the bath keeper’s wife or even stopping to put on her hat. After a short walk home she arrived at the grocery door with a helmet of frozen hair.
The next day was the yarid, market day, and Berta was working the counter. The grocery was crowded with muzhiki, women mostly, who came in with a rush of cold air, the snow melting from their hair and sheepskin jackets, stamping their felt boots on the wooden floor that was soggy and bowed at the door from years of traffic. Berta should have been tending to the customers, but her mind wasn’t on the task. Instead her eyes kept straying out the window to the shoppers in the square and to the rows of sledges where the horses dozed under their dugas.
“Where are you going?” asked Mameh when she saw Berta taking her coat off the hook.
“I have to go out. I’ll be right back.” She pulled a scarf out of her pocket, fit it over her head, and tied it under her chin.
“But it’s the yarid. You can’t just leave.”
“I’ll only be a few minutes, Mameh. Lhaye is here. She’ll help and there’s always Tateh.”
“We have customers. I need you here.”
“I said I’ll be right
back.”
Berta opened the door, stepped outside, and closed it even though she could still hear her mother talking to her. She stood on the step, putting on her gloves and surveying the square. Her eyes moved from the stalls, to the stack of folding chairs leaning up against the tearoom, to the horses marking the frigid air with their breath. She walked up a row, moving in and out of the crowds, looking at the men leaning up against the tavern wall, at the porters huddled around a fire in an old drum, at the muzhiki playing cards around a bench that had been cleared of snow. Then she moved back down another row, searching out the faces, the dark corners, and the storefronts.
“Looking for somebody?” It was the shul klopfer, the old man who called the men to prayers. He held a bloody handkerchief in his hand. His face was white, drained of all color, and he kept moistening his cracked lips with his tongue.
“No, no one.”
“Maybe I can help?”
“No . . . but thank you.”
She liked the little shul klopfer. He had always been kind to her. She wanted to say more, maybe ask about his health or his family, but before she could say anything, he doubled over, coughing up blood into his handkerchief.
By closing time she knew Hershel wasn’t coming. She thought he had probably found a place in Bogitslav and she would never see him again. Even though it was dark and the square was empty, she took one last look around as she brought in the rakes and hoes and rolled in the barrels. She turned the sign, closed the door, and locked it with the brass key that was smooth with wear. Then she pulled down the shades and, after blowing out the lamps, climbed the stairs, only half listening to her parents, who were arguing about money in the kitchen.
They often argued about money, so it was a surprise to find Lhaye on the steps listening to them. When Lhaye heard Berta coming up the stairs, she turned and held a finger to her lips and motioned her to sit down beside her.
The Little Russian Page 5
