ALSO BY ROSELLEN BROWN
Some Deaths in the Delta (poems)
Street Games (stories)
The Autobiography of My Mother (novel)
Cora Fry (poems)
Tender Mercies (novel)
A Rosellen Brown Reader (poetry and prose)
Civil Wars (novel)
Before and After (novel)
Cora Fry’s Pillow Book (poems)
Half a Heart (novel)
Copyright © 2018 by Rosellen Brown
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brown, Rosellen, author.
Title: The lake on fire: a novel / by Rosellen Brown.
Description: First edition. | Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2018
Identifiers: LCCN 2017058702 (print) | LCCN 2018000390 (ebook) ISBN 9781946448248 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3552.R7 (ebook) | LCC PS3552.R7 L35 2018 (print) DDC 813/.6—DC23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058702
Cover and interior design by Alban Fischer.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
FOR MY GIRLS-NOW-WOMEN,
ADINA AND ELANA,
AND FOR DALIA, SPARK OF OUR FUTURE
I carry a brick on my shoulder in order that the world may know what my house was like.
—BERTOLT BRECHT
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
—JACK GILBERT
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Acknowledgments
1
FOR ALL the years of her life, this was the story Chaya-Libbe told.
The missing parts stayed missing.
THERE WERE many brothers and sisters Shaderowsky but Chaya-Libbe loved Asher best, a thousand times best. He was her only vanity. She was the oldest sister; between them there were six—Yakov, Beryle, Binyomin, Yitzhak, Dvorele, and Masha—and, in two different graveyards, the large one there, in Zhitomir, and the fresh one here, in Christa, Wisconsin, a few more, souls shaken out of them like seeds from a burst pod, early or late.
The only one lost in the new land was Sorele who, as a baby just learning to walk, caught a fever that almost killed the rest of them: She was one of the helpless pioneers of the stone-hard graveyard, out in the fenced place as far from the barn and the house as they could take her. (The first act a community of Jews must perform, even before they build a place to pray, is to make a burial ground, and fence it away from unhallowed soil. They understand the priorities of the universe too well to be frivolous.)
The children’s mother was brusque to them all, so busy they remembered her mainly as motion—sewing, darning, cooking, planting, sweeping—all the -ing words, her hands flashing faster than barn swallows. There wasn’t much left of her for loving, although they knew that the motion was somehow meant for them. Chaya was the one who, back in the grim city where they were born, caught Asher’s first word—two words, actually, spoken clearly at six months, while their mother dozed over his nursing: “It’s curdled.” Or so her mother heard it.
“Curdled?” she gasped back at him, rudely awakened. Her nipple, abandoned, quivered like a lip before tears. “Shoyn!” Finished.
Chaya tried to console her mother. She had been a smoother, a reassurer, a peace-bringer from the first day she discovered discord. It was a treasure and a fault, this desperation she felt to rush ahead of anyone headed for a painful confrontation, to cushion the blow about to land, whether out of kindness or, out of her own need to be loved, in gratitude.
“Mother,” she whispered, looking regretfully at the basket into which her baby brother had been thrust to quell his thirst alone. “Mother, sweet.” Which she was not. “Little Mama.” But she saw the way the affront misted her mother’s eyes. Who was this Asher, stranger than any of her other children?
He was the most curious child who ever lived, Chaya understood, and he became, early, early, a little mill for grinding words into questions, a memorizer, a challenger, a declarer; it was not her mother’s imagination that he seemed to have been born talking. He was never still and never silent. “Gay avek!” she would shout at him—“Go away!”—and swat at him as if he were a horsefly. Silent herself, Chaya was glad to give him her ear. She loved them both.
So, in a single gesture, Asher had been weaned, and, in spite of Chaya’s placating murmur, his mother never forgave him. He seemed to have slipped between this year’s pages of who-shall-live and who-shall-die as a special case, larger than mere life, exempt from all that burdened the rest of them into ordinariness.
Asher was not relatively astonishing; he was an absolute. Still, condemned to crawl on a cold Russian floor in the lee of the drafts that came in under their door, his genius was not—except to his sister—cause for celebration.
And now they lived in a place called Christa in the state of Wisconsin. A joke, such a name for a pack of disheveled Jews, some of whom swayed and prayed, others of whom blasphemed. The pathetic piece of land they lived on, seventeen of them before the addition of any new life or the subtraction of old, had been assigned by the powers of the Hebrew Emigrant Assistance Society. With the best of intentions and a dangerous optimism, the association’s clerks moved pins randomly on their map as the hordes poured by the thousands out of the Pale, ahead of (or behind) the pogroms, the empty stomachs, the laws and the threats and the curses. Undoubtedly, they looked at their maps with satisfaction: they were not making exiles, they were making Americans.
CHAYA-LIBBE was fourteen, newly arrived at the age of self-consciousness, when they left Zhitomir. She would forever remember their arrival with feelings of exhilaration turned to shame: how Asher came leaping down the narrow stairs of the SS Stettin into the crypt called steerage, slipping on the damp floor, clinging to the walls, shouting, “We’re here! We’re coming in! Everybody on deck, schnell, schnell!” Her brother was now eight: small, lithe, with slanted gray eyes that looked for action wherever he could find it, movement, sparking energy, and danger if there was any to be found. One of those boys
fueled by risk. He had a map of ringworm on his scalp that had eaten his spiky hair away in a spiral. His eyes, when he yelled at his family to hurry, were as round as the portholes no one in steerage had so much as glimpsed. He blinked them rapidly, signals of his earnestness, and was gone.
And so they hurried. They washed themselves off as best they could without much water, mothers showing the way to children, and straightened their stringy hair that they had sweated in for weeks, adjusted their clothes—Chaya’s thick dress smelled vaguely of vomit and, worse, not even hers—and as if it were shabbos and they were rising into its light and sweetness, trusting, they rushed up the many narrow sets of stairs single file to crowd against the rail. The air was so thick with fog it beaded up on the steel sides of the ship, making the rivets shine.
Their mother had one fist over her heart the way she did on Yom Kippur when she beat her breast for her sins. “Oh Lord, let it not be London!” she muttered (to herself; she could never alarm her children on purpose). But she had heard of cases where a family bought a ticket to New York and found itself dumped with frightening finality on the dock in Liverpool or London, duped by the agent and out of luck.
In America, Father had said and said again, in public and alone, they encourage Jews to be people of substance, not only the people of the Book, which doesn’t feed their children. Here we will take care of ourselves, eating from our own crops, owing nothing, working with our animals—though no one had animals in Zhitomir, no one had crops, it was not even a shtetl with a concave cow and yards full of geese—ruling ourselves without fear of pogrom or famine. We will support ourselves cleanly and healthily, not in the city and not in the village which everyone knows is a foul sty, a blight of dependent paupers. “Faivel,” she had heard him say. “Every town has a Faivel like ours, or a Velvel or a Yossel, who sits on a box at the corner of our street. The most decrepit of beggars, a walking swarm of flies, an animated rag pile. Is that what we want the world to see when they see a Jew?”
Chaya-Libbe would listen, a little moonily, respecting and slightly fearing the avid swell in his voice. “Now imagine Faivel sitting on a bench beneath an apple tree, watching his sheep graze.” She knew Faivel: He was lazy, he was inept, he might even be a little bit mad. But that was not the point here; it was the saving balm of the barnyard her father wanted them to think about, when the mysteries of the farm still seemed simple to unmystify and master.
He himself was a bookbinder, adept at intricate finger movements, which, though the work kept his hands busy, left his mind (and his mouth) free for endless political debate. In another world, he could have been a senator, possibly a journalist. In his world he was only a dreamer, which meant that his wife worked harder than he did to keep his family in herring and stale heels of bread.
“And when we arrive, the Americans will meet us with a band,” the dreamer assured them. “This I have heard.” Ah, he could be persuasive. She ought to have asked where he had heard it, but even had she doubted, she would not have dared. “Trumpets and a drum?” one of them asked, smiling, and he said yes, really. “And with flowers. They will give us tools and the animals we will need to start our new life, and bring us in a wagon and show us to our own spot of clean dirt.” His father, their grandfather, had farmed a piece of a peasant’s land illegally and had been stripped of his goods, beaten in the farmyard by the Czar’s inspectors and laughed down the road and out of sight, long before their father was born. To be a farmer, legally . . .
But the children had to wonder what he meant by “clean dirt,” the planting dirt he promised. Their mother and Chaya and the other girls had enough trouble keeping the house straight, swept, swabbed. There was no such thing as dirt that was not an affliction. But their father tended to be right most of the time. A wise family did not separate its hopes from its father’s.
Up on the deck Zanvel-the-hatter had the flag; he had kept it standing up out of the muck. He wore a smile so wide his stubbled cheeks crushed up under his eyes while he struggled to pull the flag loose from its carefully tied binding of rags. Then, with a flourish, he shook it out and it sent a sharp report like the crack of a gun. It was a moment they had dreamed of. There it was, still crisp and clean, never yet used in the real world that preceded this dream: AM OLAM carefully embroidered in gold upon a red field, below that all ten commandments (the sewn letters tiny as ants) and a plough standing by itself waiting to be seized, its two handles wide as the horns of a barnyard bull. Across the bottom the words, proud and square, in a Yiddish with grand serifs: ARISE FROM THE DUST, THROW OFF THE CONTEMPT OF THE NATIONS, FOR THE TIME HAS COME!
Zanvel, having protected the flag from Zhitomir to Hamburg to their ship, was the one they chose to hold it up. They raised their fists and cheered and shouted and made a happy racket, this unspeakable journey almost done. The children jumped so that they could come down hard and noisily on the damp deck. Zanvel was wagging the banner in the fumy air, gold on red, a rag of color against a cloud, and all of them were cheering, when a man in a dark blue uniform and a hat—he looked rather like a trolleyman but did not carry himself like one—poked through the rows with a face like a hard fist made for bruising. What, he demanded none too nicely, were they doing. No—what did they think they were doing, as if they just might be misinformed. Between them, as it happened, there was no more than a thimbleful of English, but because Zanvel had already been in America before, “in Bal-de-more,” (and returned in a fury, full of himself, when his wife threatened to divorce him if he stayed away a minute longer, so they heard when their mother spoke in her gossip voice) he was able to say something about celebration and (perhaps badly put) the land, the land, he said, something about taking over the land: Am Olam means People of the Earth. It must have seemed that he dragged his words under the man’s nose like cat scent to a dog. He meant ten acres, a fence, a barn. The official repeated Zanvel’s last words with astonishment: Take over the land?! By the descending movement of his hands they could see that he was ordering Zanvel to lower the flag, couldn’t they? Couldn’t they?
“No,” Zanvel said. He was a squat man, amiable, hairy as a hound. Now, though, he looked like a small guard dog ineptly preventing passage.
“Or else,” the man threatened.
“This is a free country, that is why we are here,” Zanvel flung at him, something like that, though not comprehensibly. The crowd tried to make taunting noises in their own language, or halfway in it, in something they took for the sound of democracy, in which they knew they were free to say anything they pleased.
The trolleyman’s face deepened a few shades and a cord beat in his forehead as if it were counting off time. Under a wide mustache he bit his lip, considering. Then, like a schoolchild, with an awful sound he lunged at Zanvel, whose cap flew off over the rail as if it were a shot bird, and floated for a while till it picked up the weight of the water. Then it sank.
They tussled for a moment or two—the rest of the men cried out in anguish and leaned in to try to help but they were afraid to be too bold. The women simply shrieked and the trolleyman managed to seize the broomstick that was the pole of the flag, bang it angrily against the shiny rail to try to break it in half, then in frustration raise it over his head whole and fling it as hard as he could into the white wake of the ship. It came down slowly and spread itself out for just an instant like a tablecloth, a fancy shabbos cloth, against the dirty greenish spume—ARISE FROM THE and one horn of the plough—and then, whipped into a frenzy of bubbles and shreds, it was dragged under the body of the ship and down.
He smoothed his mustache with both his forefingers, restoring his dignity, as if he were soothing it. There, there. Then he nodded curtly at the rest of them and disappeared behind a curtain of fog.
So much for the flowers and the ploughs. Chaya was afraid to look at her father. Blame, and its suppression, would come later. Now she wanted so devoutly to go home that she’d have been grateful, would have borne another two weeks of stink and turmoil gladl
y, if the ship were to turn and make for Hamburg, to return them to Europe, all of them, safe.
The vibration that had thrummed under her feet as steadily as a heartbeat had broken off for good and she was overcome with panic laced with disappointment and, another layer beneath that, a roiling anger for which she had no words.
2
WAS THERE a Biblical curse that promised five years of squalor, spoilage and rot? They called themselves the Fields of Zion and, for all their hope, they came naked to their future. Native-born farmers from Massachusetts, from New York and Vermont, flowing westward on a river of restlessness and ambition, faced every cruelty of nature but, not innocents, at least they were familiar with the soil, with animals; they knew how to build.
But the Fields of Zion farmers were gray-faced and weak-fingered from too many years in a murderous city. Their lungs were coated with factory smoke, their minds fixed either on a book full of holy exhortations (“O Lord our God, be gracious unto Thy people Israel and accept their prayer. . . . Remember us this day for our good, and be mindful of us for a life of blessing. O may our eyes witness Thy return to Zion”) or on the Socialist mission to undermine all that and blame Forces equally abstract for every evil. None had ever stood behind a plough, or seen hail flatten a greening field.
Their first bewildering night, fresh from Castle Garden and an endless train ride, they had slept in a field in one large circle, feet toward the center like the spokes of a wheel. They managed to find a sawmill, and with no English, bought wood—more costly than they’d expected—and built the fewest buildings possible. Given the cost of pine, the Commons, one large building, was going to have to suffice for a very long time. Each family had a single porous-walled room.
The wood that had been loosely assembled was so green it still bled sap; in time, great rivulets ran down its surface like those marvelous paintings of the Madonna that weep miraculous tears. It rejected nails, actually gobbled them into ragged holes that meant that no one could hang any ornament or picture without quickly discovering it in a tangle on the tilting floor. Then—not counting two outbuildings, one for men and one for women so that modesty could remain at least technically unbreached—came a barn, leaky and canted, and finally a chicken coop that the chickens avoided when they could, never confiding the source of their dissatisfaction.
The Lake on Fire Page 1
