by Nomi Eve
In the morning, on the way over to the draft board, Nachum had practiced his limp again—stumbling clumsily down the dirt roads, stumbling as he walked by the Moscow schoolteacher’s house, stumbling, clenching the invisible pin in place. It really worked, limping, limping as he made his way down to the other village where the draft board sat. He had limped by the old egg woman. She had waved and said, “Nachum, son, what is wrong?” But he hadn’t answered her. He was concentrating on not letting the invisible pin fall out from in between his toes, and when she saw in which direction he was going she had thought, “Oh, dear God in Heaven, please put a universe of clumsiness in that boy’s foot. For just one morning.”
Nachum limped all the way to the draft board. And he limped into the hall where the tall Russian men were sitting at a table with their legs stretched out on the floor in front of them, their feet crossed at the ankles. The one in the middle who was calling out names had a zigzagging scar on the side of his neck and a crisp, cold voice that made Nachum think of old snow. Nachum wondered if the czar also had a voice like old snow, but then he thought, No, the czar’s voice probably sounds like a glacier.
He took his place at the back of the room with all of the other draftees, some of whom he recognized, but most of whom were strangers. He waited all morning and half of the afternoon, his limp keeping him company, sitting next to him like a good friend. Then finally, the officer in the middle with the zigzag scar and snow voice called Nachum’s name and Nachum got up from his seat. His limp got up with him and walked with him past all of the other young men, the invisible pin perfectly clenched in between Nachum’s biggest toe and the one next to it. But just as he was about to cross the room and take his place in front of all of those uniformed Russian men the pin fell out, and he was abandoned. His heels hit the ground with equal force. And even though he tried to conjure the pin back, even though he tried to will himself to stumble, he could not fall, he felt his feet lifted, lifted up, walking the walk of a healthy man. And as the Russian officers inspected his body with their eyes, his right leg spoke to him. It said, “I can run one million paces. And yes, I can even climb Mount Sinai if you want me to.” Nachum stood in front of the uniformed men, his hands behind his back. His wool hat in his hands. A prayer cap on his head. His long hair flapping into his eyes like a decorative fringe. And as the officer with the snow voice and zigzag scar called his name a second time and asked him his parents’ names and asked him if he was in good health, and he answered their questions, Nachum wondered if God lived in Russia, and if he did, he wondered if God ever had supper with the czar.
MY FATHER WRITES:
Nachum was drafted. He was killed on the Russian-Japanese front later that year. When Nachum was killed, my grandfather Shimon decided that he would travel to Palestine in Nachum’s place. That is how our family (on the Sepher side) ended up in Israel. Had Nachum not been killed, my grandfather would probably have stayed in Russia.
I WRITE:
When Shimon heard of his brother’s death he had been out chopping wood. He sat down on the woodpile and remained there for a very long time; even when it got cold he did not leave the woodpile. After it got dark he built a fire. Some of the wood was dry, but most of it was wet, and so the fire did not take immediately. Shimon added small twigs to the two logs, and then he put more twigs under the tent of wood and kept feeding it until the logs caught and the fire began to travel from the edge of one piece to the edge of another, until finally all of the wood was bathed in flames. Shimon stared and stared at the fire, the way you can only stare at fire or at running water. He watched the fire spark in yellow and orange and red flame. He had never had his own Grief before. He felt as if he did not exist. And that this Grief, this dead Nachum Grief, had dreamed him up. He rubbed his hands over the fire, and breathed in and out quickly, blowing air through his lips in short staccato. No, he did not exist, he was only a dream and he would fade and in his place the Nachum Grief would walk the world, a more permanent creature.
They did not bury Nachum. His body was lost somewhere on the southern Russian border. But the family sat shiva for the traditional period of seven days, sitting on low stools with their clothes and their hearts rent. Several days after they finished sitting shiva, Shimon walked to the next village and to the House of Study of Nachum’s rabbi. He knocked gently on the door, and asked to be let in. It was a smoky room. A stove in the back left corner puffed and leaked gray scarves of smoke into the air. But no one seemed to notice. Shimon surveyed the crowded room, the dirt floor, the wheezing stove, the students and their books. He noticed a crumpled-up dark-green handkerchief on the floor under one of the tables and wondered where it had come from. Whose pocket? He walked further in. Nachum’s study partner had big hands and huge feet and a mouth that was little more than a line. Shimon let the study partner put his arm around his back and walked into the crowded room with him, but he would not sit in Nachum’s empty seat and instead just leaned against the wall. The old rabbi nodded at Shimon from across the room.
On the second day, Shimon stood against the wall again.
On the third day he took a seat under the window, and on the fourth he sat there too. Shimon continued to come for two weeks. He would chop his wood way into the night, and work at the dye factory from midnight to dawn so that he could go to the House of Study during the day and just sit. He wasn’t sure if he slept during this period. “Maybe my eyes are closed on the inside,” he thought, “and all of this waking is really a queer way of rest.” He didn’t really feel the need to sleep. He did not know what he wanted to do there, in the House of Study, but he knew that he needed to go in. And in return, the pious young men read Shimon’s presence with kind glances and cantillations of silent acceptance. Their rabbi had taught them that although the Holy Ark is home to God’s greatest revelation, there are other Torahs, one written on human pages, the kind you can’t roll up and return to the ark. Nobody asked him to join in their Talmudic conversations, nobody pressured him to learn. They just let him sit.
On the eighth day of his vigil, Shimon found himself sweating even though it was not very hot. The ends of his fingertips felt numb. And there was an uncomfortable throbbing from out of the crook of his right elbow. Shimon felt his body was mixed up and that maybe his face would soon migrate down to his feet and vice versa and he would have to walk home upside down.
On the ninth day of the vigil, Shimon got up from his seat, walked across the room, and approached the rabbi. For several seconds he stood and just watched the rabbi read. The rabbi looked up from his book with a two-mouthed gaze that said simultaneously, “I am glad to see you my son,” and “I have already seen you, my son,” but Shimon was not put off by this contradiction. He crossed his arms across his chest and asked the rabbi the following two questions:
“Rabbi, how far is it from here to Palestine? And, please sir, tell me what is the nature of its terrain?”
The rabbi got up from his table and walked over to a bookshelf leaning against the left wall of the room. He walked with a forward-leaning shuffle. Reaching the bookcase, he bent nimbly down and pulled a slim green volume with frayed cloth and a battered spine from the second shelf up from the floor. He gave the book to Shimon and said, “You go west and then south, my son. The entire journey should take you no more than several months if you are lucky. In the middle of the ocean trip you will reach a depth equaling the height of the Tower of Babel, and I would highly recommend that at this point you watch day and night for schools of elegant intrinsic puffer fish. They are rare, you know, most rare, and live only at that latitude, and swim on the surface of the water only several days a year. Watch for them, my son— each year they choose a different time to rise up and show their fins, which are yellow with magnificent red spots.”
Shimon laughed out loud, he couldn’t help it. The rabbi, who had a very big red nose and a beard that split into two pieces— each reaching all the way down to his belly button—smiled widely and twirled the left piec
e of his beard. Shimon kept laughing. He had the strangest feeling. He thought that he could feel his Nachum Grief laughing too. The rabbi handed him the book and their fingers touched together across the spine. Shimon thought, How strange that a Grief can have a sense of humor. But it does. Several of the students looked up from their books.
Shimon thanked the rabbi for his gifts, and he walked home with a book full of the names of Palestine’s birds, minerals, and flowers, its absolute elevations, distances, and depths. Shimon read the book voraciously. And he began to recite litanies. The trees are this, he would say, the soil is that, the birds are such, the clouds are those. There seemed to be something very important about knowing all of this. Shimon stopped going to the House of Study, returning only once, two years later, the day before he left Tokmach. He had gone to return the rabbi’s book, but the rabbi had refused it, and had pressed it back into Shimon’s hands.
Shimon left Russia with his pockets almost empty but for a few precious rubles stuffed there by his older brother, Yonatan, and a fancy carton of Russian soap. Yonatan earned more than anyone else in the family by selling fancy soaps to wealthy vacationing Russians in the Ural Mountains. The soap was made out of minerals that came from a secret cave underneath the river Volga. It was packed in blond wooden cartons of various sizes, and the cartons were stamped with an intricately rendered image of the czar’s face.
On the day that Shimon was set to leave the village on his long journey to Palestine, Yonatan had taken pity on his penniless sibling. “Take these rubles and run,” he had said to Shimon, and then he had reached a hand over and tussled his baby brother’s hair in the way that only older brothers are allowed to do.
THE RIVER JORDAN
Shimon smiled. He put the rubles in his pocket and then crouched down on the dirt floor of their parents’ house in a sprinter’s classic starting pose.
They had grown up racing each other.
The trick was you had to come up with a silly sentence to launch you off. “Take some sticks and sprint to the stream!” “Take a ticket and I’ll beat you to Babel!” And then you could run, race, fly around the village like crazy Cossacks, your brothers at your shoulder, the three of you reaching the end of the race simultaneously and then each of you swearing that you got there first. Gifted with gazelle speed, always flying around the shtetl with the swiftness of sweaty angels. Yonatan ran with his palms open, his fingers held straight together like soldiers. Shimon ran with his chin first and his fingers clenched into fists. Nachum had run with his tongue between his teeth and he kicked up high and funny with his feet so that from the side it looked like he was dancing.
Shimon looked at Yonatan. “You say when, brother, I’ll run you all the way to the Jordan River and then loop back around the world to your beloved Volga. You just say when.”
Yonatan had laughed and then, with a sneaky sideways motion, he kicked Shimon on his backside in a strategic place with a strategic amount of pressure so that the physics of the playful kick made Shimon fall flat on his face. Shimon landed with a growling thump. Shimon, who was really the swifter one but was also the less steady on his feet. They were so fast, the fastest boys in southern Russia they would boast, even though they had never raced a Christian. Because Jews ran against Jews. And Jews ran away from Christians. This was the way it worked.
Shimon stood up. He leaned into his brother with his left shoulder—a hard, I-will-push-you-down sort of lean. But Yonatan stood his ground, and the lean led to a rare hug. Shimon suddenly, awkwardly, wrapped his arms around his surviving brother’s muscular middle. And then with equal awkwardness, Yonatan wrapped his arms around Shimon’s broad, barrel-shouldered frame. Yonatan was the taller of the two. Resting his head on Yonatan’s shoulder, Shimon breathed in the sweaty musk of his brother’s neck. And they stood there like this for several seconds, caught in the horrible crush of what each knew would probably be a lifelong goodbye.
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
“Oh, and take that carton of soap,” Yonatan softly offered. They were still hugging and so his words were spoken into the side of Shimon’s head. “Take it, I left it outside the door. Fancy Russian soap. Take it with you, brother, trade it for some domestic goods. It’s worth a good amount of money.”
“Take these rubles and run.” Shimon respoke his brother’s last challenge. And though they were both standing still, as they continued to hug, each brother felt possessed by the power and spiritual flow of a good hard sprint.
“Thank you, my brother,” Shimon said. “Thank you.” And they parted.
Shimon thought often of his brothers during the trip. Many nights, before he went down into the hold, he looked up into the starry sky and thought of the prayer that his brother Nachum had liked best: “Blessed be God who arranges the stars in the Heavens.” Nachum had told Shimon that he liked this prayer because it helped him think of God in the process of actually setting the world up.
“Physically fitting things together. You know, like a sculptor or a painter or even an engineer.” Nachum had had a very physical way of speaking. When he spoke he waved his hands wildly as if he had extra vowels in his fingers and verbs in his fists. He was also always nodding his head down at the end of sentences, so that his hair, worn long and rather messy, flapped into his eyes. Shimon, standing on deck, stared at the stars and wondered if God would be so kind as to arrange his dead brother up there alongside the other twinkles, bursts, and heavenly glows.
But Shimon’s thoughts were not only about the heavens. After walking under the stars he would go down into the hold and try to sleep. He suffered from strange dreams in which Yonatan was diving into the Volga and frolicking naked with the czar. He tried not to dream this dream but it kept coming back. Shimon tried to force the dream away, or to keep himself awake so that he wouldn’t dream anything, but nothing worked. He kept falling asleep and the czar and Yonatan continued to flip and somersault and dive backward into the water.
Halfway through the trip Shimon looked for the rabbi’s yellow fish but could not find them. He leaned over the rail of the deck and said softly, under his breath, “The intrinsic puffer fish have yellow fins. They come to the surface of the water only once a year.” But no fish came to the surface of the dark and grinning waters. Shimon leaned farther into the wooden side of the ship. For the past few days he had been seeing faces in the waves, and waves in the faces of his fellow passengers. He felt lonely and all mixed up.
By the time he docked in Jaffa he was a shadow of the Shimon who had left Russia. A skinny shadow with only those few rubles in his pocket and that fancy carton of soap with the czar’s face stamped on it. He had only one other piece of baggage—a battered gray suitcase packed with two sets of clothes and one pair of winter shoes and Nachum’s small black Bible with his uncle’s letter pressed in between the pages.
They met in the Turkish police station inside the Old City walls, just to the right of the Jaffa Gate. Shimon was behind bars. Avra was not. She was in the hallway, waiting for him to be released. For although it is true that she had filched a miniature olive-wood carving of the Last Supper from a Christian knickknack stall that very morning, Avra wasn’t in jail because she had been caught stealing (she hadn’t been) but because she had witnessed the crime that had put an innocent and angry Shimon behind bars.
It happened in the early afternoon. Avra had been wandering through the bazaar looking for something to steal. Her eyes rested on a miniature oval olive-wood carving of the Last Supper, no bigger than the middle of her palm. And she decided to take it. She reached out and put it in her dress pocket. (That was how she usually did it, authoritatively nonchalant—as if she were supposed to be taking whatever it was she was taking.) Then she walked next door to the shop that sold spice, soap, and fancy perfume. What she wanted to do was to leave the Last Supper in the middle of the cloves and cardamom and cinnamon and pepper and salt. She liked the idea of Jesus eating his last meal on top of the warm-smelling packets o
f spice. But just as she was about to take the Supper out of her pocket, she saw the pickpocket with no front teeth reach his right hand into the jacket pocket of the handsome young man who turned out to be Shimon. Both the thief and Shimon were in the middle of the shop. The pickpocket reached in and tried to take the small satchel of money out. Shimon felt the invader’s hand reach in and smashed his own hand down on it, breaking the man’s fingers. The pickpocket immediately withdrew his wounded limb and started screaming. His hurt hand was flopping around like a dead fish in the air. A crowd gathered. The shopkeeper backed up against the wall of his wares, not knowing what to do. Soon a Turkish gendarme came running to see what the fuss was all about.
Now Shimon was a stranger in Jerusalem. He had never before traveled to the Old City. He was living on his uncle’s property in Petach Tikvah, two days away from the Holy City if you took the fast donkey, three if you took the slow. The fast donkey was busy carrying Shimon’s new friend, Alexander Tsarfati, to Jaffa where Alexander was meeting some relatives at the port, so Shimon had taken the slow donkey and had stopped many times along the way in order to sightsee and rest. He had come to see Jerusalem and while he was here he wanted to try to sell his brother’s fancy soap so that he could buy some lumber to build his own small house and barn.
