The Little Russian

by Susan Sherman

  “I thought you might be lonely,” Fichmann whispered. He had squeezed into the bed beside her and was lying on his side, holding on to the headboard to keep from falling off. His other hand came back, gently brushing the inside of her thigh and moving up with purpose. “I’m good with widows, very gentle and kind, just what the doctor ordered.”

  Berta couldn’t be angry with him. He saw himself as a champion of the ladies, devoting himself to their service, doing his best to make them happy in a bitterly unhappy world. “But I’m not a widow,” she whispered. “I have a husband in America.”

  “I didn’t know,” he said, making no attempt to remove his hand.

  “That’s all right,” she said, turning away from him and leaving his hand behind, naked and lonely under the coverlet.

  “And you’re going to him?”

  “Yes.”

  He took his time thinking about this. “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Eight years ago.”

  “That’s a long time. Do you miss him?”

  She pulled the quilt up over her shoulder. “Yes,” she said, vaguely.

  She lay there facing the wall, listening to the sound of Samuil’s breathing. He was snoring softly in the corner. Then she turned back and lay on her side to give Fichmann more room. They were lying face-to-face, close, but not touching. His breath smelled of the beer he had with dinner. “I heard it from the peddlers,” she whispered anxiously.

  “What?”

  “That he is looking for us.”

  “So?”

  “So, it didn’t come in a letter. It wasn’t official. It came from them.”

  “And this worries you?”

  “I think I made a hasty decision. I should have thought about it longer. I think I made a terrible mistake.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if they got it wrong? What if he’s not looking for us and we’re in Poland and there’s no way of getting back? What will happen to my son?”

  The potato merchant thought it over and then said, “The peddlers are often right, not always, but often enough. I’ve heard plenty of stories of wives reunited with their husbands because of them.”

  “You have?’

  “Many times.”

  “And they’re true?”

  “I’ve always believed them to be.”

  They lay there together while she thought it over. Then he rolled on his back and extended his arm out as an invitation to her. She moved over to him and curled into the warm crook of his shoulder, letting the atavistic comfort of his presence seep over her, quieting her fears, softening the raw edges.

  After a while, he got up without her having to tell him, kissed her on the cheek, and returned to his blanket on the floor.

  BERTA HAD no idea what a border stealer was supposed to look like. He could’ve been a Polish count or the heir to a Polish estate. His clothes were clean and there was a ring on his little finger that glinted in the lamplight. He was a wiry man with thick ropy arms and thinning blond hair. He wasn’t big, but his chest was muscular and his neck was thick. It was as if the top half of his body had been meant for someone else.

  They met at an inn in Zhvanets, a town located on the north bank of the Dniester River. It was bordered on the west by the Zbruch River, which separated it from Galicia, now under Polish rule. There was an attempt at respectability at the inn: curtains on the windows, a little vase of roadside flowers on wooden tables that had been freshly scrubbed with salt. Fichmann handled the bargaining: so much for a river crossing, so much now, and so much when the woman and boy got across. The fact that the Pole never looked at her, not once, made her uneasy. She wanted him to think of her as a human being, not as a load of household goods to be picked clean and dumped into the river. She remembered Pavel’s stories of bodies stripped naked, battered by rocks and currents, washing up on slices of river sand. But Fichmann swore he knew this border stealer. It was said that he had the best boat in town and knew every inch of the river.

  She watched him eat his bread and salt and down his vodka. His cheeks were flushed with the heat of the stove. His hair was plastered to his forehead and he kept twisting the ring on his little finger with his thumb, while his eyes slowly traveled around the room, finally coming to rest on her. He eyed her with a speculative look, authoritative and appraising.

  When it came time to pay the first installment, Berta stepped outside and went around to the back. There was a man relieving himself in the clearing behind the inn who seemed unconcerned by her presence. When he was finished he buttoned up his pants and as he passed her he said some pleasantry that was lost in the clamor of the inn.

  When she thought she was alone, she picked up her skirt and tore the thread away with her teeth and let down the hem. She took out the money and was counting out the sum when she happened to look up and see the border stealer, standing in the shadows not too far off. His back was to her and he was relieving himself, seemingly more concerned with the arc of his stream than what she was doing. Still, after that, she found a new hiding place for her money. She hid it in the heel of her shoe despite the discomfort it caused her and the feeling that one hip was higher than the other.

  Two nights later, they met the border stealer down by the river near the place where the women bathe and wash their clothes. It was a dark night with no moon, only a scrim of stars winking overhead in the mist. He was standing by a heap of boulders in a little clearing; behind him the river was a disembodied roar through the trees. She expected him to have an electric torch or a lantern, but he had nothing to light the way.

  “How will you see?” she asked him, as he led her and Samuil down to the shore. He walked down the darkened path as if it were broad daylight, while they stumbled after him, tripping over tree roots, their clothes snagging on the bushes and low-lying branches.

  “I don’t need to see. I was born on the river. I only need to feel.”

  The border stealer led them down to where the boat was tied to an aspen standing on a small spit of land that jutted out into the river. He untied the painter and held the boat steady while they climbed in. He joined them, picked up the oars, and let the current take them out into the middle. The river was swollen with melted snow and stunningly cold. Occasionally a wave broke over the bow, soaking Berta’s clothes, numbing her legs and hands, and forming a pool in the bottom of the boat.

  She watched the border stealer using one oar then the other, sometimes rowing backward, sometimes forward, cursing the river and searching the water for signs that only he could read. At one point he got up and her heart stopped. But it was only to find a small bucket, which he handed to her so she could start bailing. Even so she watched every move he made, especially when they got farther out into the river. There he maneuvered the boat along the current, around boulders and half-submerged logs that came up so fast she didn’t see them until they were nearly past. Soon they were in a wider part and the river slowed down. It grew quiet and she could hear the water slapping against the boat and against the boulders that lined the shore. She was aware that he was watching her in the dark. Once when he shifted position, she tensed and gripped the sides of the boat.

  He laughed: “I’m not going to murder you, woman. You don’t need to be worried about me. It’s the river you should be worried about . . . and the border guards.” He nodded up ahead and she saw searchlights raking the waves, illuminating the trees along the shoreline, and lingering over a pile of boulders that sat in the middle of the river.

  “Will they see us?”

  “Probably.”

  “What should we do?”

  “You’re not going to do anything. You’re going to sit there and let me do my job.”

  The border stealer guided the boat to a place in the water where the river was squeezed into a frothy tumult between two granite cliff faces. There he let the current carry them past the searchlights, rowing furiously first with one oar and then the other, in an effort to keep off the roc
ks that threatened them on either side. Only once did the light fall on them, but it was only for a fraction of a second. Even so, she could hear the impotent crackle of rifle fire behind them, answered by similar fire from the Polish side.

  The current carried them swiftly along past beaches and coves that seemed like suitable places to pull in. When she asked the border stealer about them he only grumbled “patrols” and kept rowing. At an unlikely place he rowed into a rocky cove and guided the boat up alongside a fallen log. “All right. Here you are,” he said, tying the painter line to the log and returning to his seat.

  “Here?” she asked looking at the jagged rocks that acted like a fortified barrier around the shoreline. “How are we supposed to get in from here?”

  “That’s your problem. But whatever you do, you better be quick about it. There’ll be patrols up and down here looking for you. You’ll have a little more time because of the rocks. They won’t think to look here. They won’t think you’re stupid enough to try, so you better get going.”

  Berta had no choice but to pay the man. She took off her boot, counted out the money, and handed it over. He counted it quickly and pocketed the bills. “The best way in is through there,” he said, pointing into the gloom.

  “Where?”

  “You’ll see once you’re in. Now off with you. I have to get going.”

  She took off the other boot, tied them together, and hung them around her neck. Samuil did the same. Then she stood a little unsteadily in the rocking boat and climbed over the side, lowering herself into the frigid water. Samuil followed and she could hear him sucking in his breath as he let go of the side of the boat. They couldn’t touch bottom yet and had to feel their way along the slithery bark of the log. Soon Berta was fighting the current, grabbing on to a boulder while reaching behind with her free hand for Samuil. But he had caught his own boulder and didn’t need her help. They scrambled over the rocks, over a mossy outcropping, a crevice, the roots of a dead tree, moving from one slippery surface to the next. In some places the rock faces were serrated and spiky, in others smooth and slippery. Berta led the way, shivering in the cold, picking her way in the dark. She was careful to keep her footing, changing direction only when she had to, but always keeping an eye on the shore and adjusting their course whenever she could.

  They crossed a place where the rocks were piled on top of each other, their sharp, ragged-toothed outcroppings jutting out in all directions. Her fingers were numb and stiff and it was hard to get any strength out of them. She was about to tell Samuil to be careful when she heard him grunt, his feet scrambling to find purchase, and a splash.

  “Samuil!” She whipped around in the dark and lost her balance, falling forward and landing on the sharp edge of a rock. She broke her fall with her hands, but sliced open her leg just below the knee.

  “Mameh!”

  She turned back and dislodged her foot that was wedged in a crevice. The water was nearly up to her hip now and icy cold. It numbed her leg so she didn’t realize how deep the gash was, how it cut through muscle and tissue nearly to the bone. There was hardly any pain so she assumed that it was warm water running down her leg and not blood.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  March 1920

  BERTA DIDN’T want to lean on Samuil. She didn’t want to appear sick or injured because it might draw attention to them. She wanted to walk off the train along with the other passengers, one foot in front of the other, down the steps, and into the station. So she waited until they were nearly alone in the carriage and then stood. The pain was so intense it made her dizzy and she had to sit back down.

  “Mameh?”

  “Shush, keep your voice down. I’m all right. I’m just going to have to lean on you a little.”

  Fichmann had told them where to go once they crossed the river—to a shtetl and a house, whose occupants were part of the rabbinical underground. The rabbi’s wife cleaned the wound and bandaged it, gave them dry clothes, changed their money, bought them train tickets to Warsaw, and taught them how to say Warsaw and American Embassy in Polish without accents. All along the border and in the larger cities there were houses like this one, sanctuary for fleeing refugees on their way to America. They were funded by those already in America through a variety of organizations with names like Relief of Jewish War Sufferers and European Jewish Appeal.

  Samuil helped her off the train. It was hard getting down the steps. She had to lean heavily on the railing and put most of her weight on the other leg. Once they were out on the platform, she limped over to a post and leaned against it, waiting to catch her breath.

  “Warszawa?” she asked a porter who happened to be passing by.

  He hardly gave her a glance. He was bored by her ill-fitting secondhand clothes, her dirty bundles, and the shoes the rabbi’s wife had given her that were so big she had to shuffle along to keep them on her feet. Without a word he nodded to a nearby platform and walked on, stooping to pick up a coin dropped by some passenger hurrying to catch a train.

  Since the train wasn’t due for another hour she decided to find the pol’za, the facility, where she could clean the wound and change the bandage. She found it in a little alcove off the main thoroughfare. It was for ladies of a certain class, expensive women who traveled with maids and nannies and were married to men in industry or in respectable positions in the government. It was late and so it was nearly empty. An older woman, expensively dressed with a cigarette between her fingers, looked up when Berta came in and watched her with curiosity through a haze of smoke. A seamstress was at the woman’s feet pinning up the hem of her dress that had most likely gotten caught on her heel.

  An attendant in a starched black cap and jumper and white shirtwaist stepped over to Berta and pulled her aside. She put her lips to Berta’s ear and whispered sharply in Polish so as not to make a scene. Instead of leaving, as she knew the woman wanted her to do, Berta reached into her pocket and brought out a handful of coins and dropped them into the attendant’s hand. The attendant looked at them and then up at Berta. She was confused. Berta nodded to the porcelain sinks and to the stack of clean Turkish towels that sat on a little table by the door, motioning to them and then to herself. The attendant asked her a question in Polish and Berta nodded without knowing what she said, but guessing she was clarifying Berta’s request to use the facility. After that the attendant poked at the coins in her hand, probably thinking that she could get fired for something like this. But in the end she pocketed them, waved Berta in, and led the way through the room, grumbling the whole way in Polish.

  She stopped in front of a door marked by a sign that Berta couldn’t read. The woman reached into her pocket, took out a key, and inserted it into a lock. She motioned Berta inside. It was a little room for the employees. It had a stove with a rusty tea kettle, a table, and a few chairs, and in the corner was a stained sink, a castoff from the other room.

  By now the attendant knew Berta didn’t speak Polish and motioned with her hands, palms down, to indicate that she should wait there. Then she left and came back shortly after that with a towel and soap. She threw them down on the counter and stood there waiting for Berta to use them. Berta tried to explain that she wanted privacy and when the attendant finally understood, she left, complaining loudly in Polish but closing the door behind her.

  Berta went to work. She propped up her leg on the sink, carefully removed the bandage, and examined the wound. It was torn and inflamed. There was pus oozing from beneath a flap of skin that was beginning to smell suspicious. The surrounding tissue was red and painful, but it had stopped bleeding. She filled the basin with hot water and soaked the towel in it. Then she wrung it out and put it over the wound gasping at the first touch of heat. It was painful, but it felt good. It felt clean. She wanted to keep it there as long as she could and brought over a chair so she could sit and be moderately comfortable.

  The attendant came back after only a few minutes and walked in without knocking. When she saw Berta with her
leg propped up on the sink she ordered her to get dressed and get out. Berta ignored her and reached into her bag for a bottle of antiseptic that the rabbi’s wife had given her and poured it over the wound. She winced and her eyes watered. The attendant took a good look at the gash, sucked in her breath, and grimaced. She watched Berta wind the fresh bandages around her calf and when she was done, the woman took away the soiled bandages without a word and waited while Berta got ready to leave. This time the attendant helped Berta shuffle out past the woman who was standing in her corset, watching the seamstress sew up her hem. On the way out the attendant turned and slipped something into Berta’s hand. It was a bar of soap.

  SAMUIL HELPED her off the train at the Warsaw station. She was too weak to walk without his help. He held her arm as she limped past the darkened ticket counters, out through the brass doors to the curbside and the waiting cabs. She knew they should walk to the back of the line, where the cabs were cheaper, but her leg was throbbing and she felt hot all over, so she took the first one they came to. After she and Samuil climbed in she instructed the driver to take them to the American Embassy in almost perfect Polish with only a hint of an accent.

  Although it was hours before dawn, they climbed the steps of the embassy and lay down against the doors, gathering their bundles in around them and huddling together to keep warm. It began to rain and across Ujazdowskie Avenue she could see dark sheets of water falling on the locust trees. Fortunately the portico was deep enough to keep them dry so there was no chance they’d freeze to death. The rebbetzin had told them that once they were on the steps of the embassy they were never to leave no matter what. “You’re in America as long as you’re on those steps. You wait there for the doors to open. Nobody can hurt you there. Nobody can say a thing.”

  Berta couldn’t sleep, so she lay there listening to the sounds of the sleeping city, the rain on the pavement, the occasional automobile splashing through the puddle at the intersection and the rhythmic drip, drip, drip from the rain spouts, which seemed to underscore the rhythmic throbbing of her leg and head. She eventually fell asleep and dreamed about Fichmann and about the river, not the one they had to cross to get to Poland, but the gentle tributary by the widow’s house. In her dream he was trying to coax her out of the water, but she didn’t want to leave. The water was cool and she was hot and thirsty, and it felt good against her skin. She woke to find a soldier shaking her shoulder and speaking to her in a language she didn’t understand.