“Where, Gittel?” I heard her voice in the shadows.
“To Jerusalem, Rivke’leh. I already tried to go there once before . . .”
“And what happened?”
“It didn’t work out,” I answered, a lump in my throat. It was as if I had swallowed something and it had stayed stuck in my throat.
In my childhood, I left Kremnitz only once. I took my brother Mote’leh, who was two years younger than me, and together we set out walking to the Land of Israel. We walked toward the hills, in the same direction as the flocks of storks. I remember the moment in which we passed the last houses and stood on a green hill and, all of a sudden, huge distances opened before us.
Blue summer skies with white patches of cloud stretched over our heads. Green and yellow fields lay beneath our feet, and there was a quiet like we had never known, a quiet in which you can hear the birds chirping, the frogs croaking, the cattle lowing—that quiet was all around us and swallowed the sounds of the village we’d left behind. We looked happily at one another and scampered down to the valley below.
For hours, we walked inside beauty and within tranquility, imagining that we had reached paradise. We came upon a river flowing between apple trees, we paddled our feet in the water, and then we drank from it and ate apples. We followed along the banks of the river, enjoying the silvery glint of the fishes’ bodies. Ducks sailed swiftly by, dipping their heads in the water and then surfacing with a screeching gaa-gaa. Everything was so beautiful that we had no doubt we were on the way to Jerusalem.
It was then we saw the goose. Solitary and plump, its white feathers shone in the hot sun. It was floating slowly, like a huge soap bubble, turning its head toward us and staring at us with round black eyes. From the opposite bank, there was a sudden sound of branches snapping. The goose froze and its head turned like a screw. A big fat man with a red face burst out of the bushes, and after him, there came another. They were both holding long, thin, sharp switches in their hands. The goose fluttered and propelled itself forward with clumsy movements. Its neck was outstretched and its eyes bulged from their sockets. The red-faced man and his friend chased after the goose, beating their switches on the mud at the edges of the river. The goose gathered speed, its body lurching from side to side and sharp, high groans burst from its throat. I shouted to my brother, “Run!” and we made a break for the trees behind us. We continued to run as fast as we could, as far as possible from that river, until both of us fell to the ground and my brother burst into tears.
“I want to go home!” he wailed. And suddenly, he clutched his head in dread and said, “My kippa . . . it fell off!”
I stroked his head until I saw that he had fallen asleep. His face was trembling in his sleep and I could see the milk teeth peeping out of his mouth.
I lay on my back, next to my brother, in the heart of a field of hay, and a distress I had never known moved down from my throat and filled my stomach. A cold wave went through me. The sky was blue and the clouds that wafted over it were thin as handkerchiefs. The sun was as warm as before, and yet I felt I was freezing. Wispy thoughts, translucent like those clouds, passed through my mind.
A woman cannot always know what she is thinking of, even when she knows she has glimpsed something important. And that’s what I realized then, that something deep and unclear, dark and threatening, had been revealed to me and I was totally powerless to run away from it.
How long I lay there, screaming without letting out a sound, I do not know. All of a sudden, I heard dogs barking, the sky was gray, and the light had become pink and hazy. The barking grew louder. My brother woke up and burst into tears again. Only when the dogs reached us did I stand up and start shouting, “Gevald! Help!”
My brother pressed himself to my legs and buried his face in my knees. Large dogs surrounded us, baring yellow teeth and sniffing the air with quivering nostrils. Then a pack of villagers arrived. They drove away the dogs and stood gazing at us. They crossed themselves and laughed, speaking a strange language, and I kept silent and looked down. And then one of the men, who seemed to me like the leader of the pack, began to talk in Yiddish.
He spoke a strange Yiddish, guttural and all broken up into bits. A strange acrid smell wafted from his mouth as he spoke, and his rubber boots kicked the ground, scattering clumps of hay. But all the same, I was glad he was there and I answered him readily. I told him that we were from Kremnitz, me and my brother, and that we were on our way to Jerusalem. He scratched his head and told the others and everyone laughed.
An old woman with blue eyes detached herself from the group, pointed to the sky, and said something with great force. The man translated, “She says the real Jerusalem is up there. So where are you going? You’d better return home!”
They took us with them to the house of the leader. A one-room hut, foul and stinking. The women let us sit beside the oven, gave us bowls of diluted beetroot soup and a hunk of black bread. We ate the sour soup and fell asleep curled up at the foot of the stove.
We stayed in the village the following day among vulgar and dirty but hospitable people. When dawn broke, they opened the door to the yard and the smells of geese, pigs, roosters, and cows filled my nostrils. A swarm of barefoot children with shaven heads burst from the houses, and we stood in the yard confused, our feet sinking into the sticky mud. My brother covered his eyes not to see the pinkish sacrilegious pigs and said to me, “Gitte’leh, what have we done? Let’s pray to God!”
A wild spirit gripped me and, when I saw him so afraid, I stomped my feet in the mud and marched right into the herd of pigs. From that moment onward, I wandered among the animals in complete freedom, then left the yard and explored the high grass behind the hut. I hid under a tree whose branches were slender and curly, buried my head among the leaves, and pictured myself as the lost daughter of a king who had been found by the people of the forest. I pretended it was my fate to live among them forever, unknown.
I opened my mouth wide and shouted with sheer delight. Birds in the tree took flight in alarm, so I started to whistle to them and chirp between my teeth. And when the sounds of birds were around me again, I stood still and listened. A long time I spent under the tree of the birds, until hunger gnawed at my belly and drove me back to the hut.
Silent, I stood at the threshold. My brother was sitting on the ground, his eyes closed and his body swaying back and forth as if he were praying. When he heard my footsteps, he opened his eyes and looked shaken. Apart from him and the old woman, there was no one else in the hut. She came over and gave me bread and a thick slice of cheese. I slumped down beside my brother and mumbled the blessing over bread, then swallowed the food with large bites, almost without chewing, and the old woman laughed with her wide toothless mouth. Her black dress rustled. She stood over me and recited a string of unclear but ritualistic-sounding words, of which I understood only one: Jerusalem.
Excitement shook me, and I leapt up and ran back outside. I returned to the tree of the birds and, in some language that wasn’t a language, I told them, I chirped to them, of the wonders awaiting me in the sky-blue city of Jerusalem.
On our second night in the village, I had a dream.
An angel, with sidelocks and a beard, stood at the top of a tall palm tree. He spread his wide wings marked with eyes like the tail of a peacock and leapt down. I was standing beneath him, very close to the tree, and watched him falling toward me. His long black kapote blocked the light, throwing a growing shadow on my upturned face. I wanted to flee, but my blood froze in my veins and my legs were rooted to the ground. I saw his thin legs, their black leggings, emerging from the kapote fluttering under his wings, and I was seized by immense dread.
I awoke from my sleep sweating and confused. The room was not completely dark. Red embers darted in the black belly of the stove. Snores and whistles and sighs resounded in the air. For a moment, it seemed to me that I was in hell. Soon I calmed down and was able to move my limbs again. I shook off my sleep and stretched my l
egs.
It was so hot in the room that the fresh hay on which we were all lying had dried up and cracked. I still felt very excited, as if under the spell of some enchantment. The quiet and the heat, the sounds of the embers crackling, and the oppressive stench of the wooden walls—they wrapped around me and kept me safe from the evil forces running wild outside the hut.
Out there, the hunters stalked geese, dogs barked and ran around the tree of the birds, and from the top of the tree leapt a man who looked like a regular Jew, but with wings full of eyes and a bird’s beak.
Until dawn, I stayed awake. The leader of the group was the first to rise and announced that he was going to fetch a wagon. I did not want to return to Kremnitz, and when we climbed up on the wagon and began to move, a prayer burst from my heart.
“Merciful God, Master of the Universe, why should I live like a sack filled with longing? Wave Your hand, the hand of Your wonders, for my sake. For the sake of Gittel, cause us to travel, but not to arrive. So that we never return to Kremnitz.”
My first journey to Jerusalem came to an end with a blessing of thanks for my safe return in my father’s synagogue, with new restrictions from my mother, and with the loss of my brother Mote’leh’s love.
He was my sweet brother, my dear friend, and my confidant, who had hidden with me among the feather-down covers from our mother’s large figure and thunderous voice. And in that white dusk, smelling of feathers, we’d decided to fight side by side when we were grown. Like Gog and Magog in the Bible, we saw ourselves conquering the kingdoms of Turkey and Russia and Poland, and opening the gates for the Messiah.
So I found myself alone. My brother did not call me a traitor, but I knew he scorned me for how I had behaved in the village. He no longer sought out my company, and when I tried to speak with him, he lowered his eyes and was silent.
His silence tortured me and made me seek his approval. I would walk behind him, pleading in a voice close to tears for him to speak to me again.
Sometimes I would catch him looking at me sideways, his eyes half-closed, as if seeing me from the bottom of a pit full of doubts. And to win him over, I took the blame for things he had done.
And so, I bore punishments that should have been for him: my mother hit me and I was forbidden to eat with the family. Worst of all, I was deprived of the time I loved so much, the hour my father would teach me reading and writing. I felt as lowly and scorned as a worm.
None of these things helped at all. I ate my meals alone in a corner of the kitchen, while he sat at the table, calm and smiling, and from time to time, threw me that same sideways glance.
In the end, I gave up and left him alone.
The utter loneliness after losing Mote’leh was one of the worst times in my childhood. More than six hundred Jewish families lived in our town. My father was a great scholar and my mother owned a stall in the market. Scholars and merchants came and went in our home. And yet I felt as if I were living in a desert.
At all hours of the day, I was subject to my mother’s iron rule. I kept the home while she was at the market, and I took her place at the stall when she ran home to take care of anything urgent. The days were full for both of us, running back and forth. She rebuked me for being so slow, and she raised her arms to the heavens as she sighed, “What a block of wood you are! What a goilem! When will you grow up and become a real woman?”
But the truth was that I didn’t want to be a “real woman,” I didn’t want to be like her, and when I caught myself behaving as she did, I would immediately do something that it would never have occurred to my mother to do—I gave bread to a beggar, I stroked the head of a child who tried to steal from our stall, I smiled at someone who came to buy and refused to accept her money.
Such frivolity earned me a strong tug on my earlobe, or my hair being pulled, two punishments of which my mother was particularly fond. It was because of this that my hair was sparse and weak, and my ears as soft and red as a cockscomb.
Once, when I was home alone, an old peasant woman came into our courtyard. She was known as a witch, and she stretched out her hands and felt my ears and offered me a healing potion for half a zloty. She held out a transparent vial in front of my face; it was filled with a red liquid, and she opened it and brought it close to my nose. A heady scent of flowers filled my nostrils. To pay her, I’d have to steal half a zloty from the pouch that my mother hid under the mattress.
I was seized by an immense desire to possess the bottle no matter what. I ran inside, my legs trembling, and I came back holding the money. “Here, it’s yours. Be off with you!” I whispered and took the precious vial. She bit the coin, and then laughed cunningly and hid it away in her fist.
When she had gone, I went inside, sat, and looked at the vial. I took off the stopper and sniffed, poured a little onto my fingers, and rubbed my earlobes. A delicate, sweetish scent wafted to me. I poured another drop and rubbed it on my hair. In this way, drop by drop, I emptied the entire bottle.
My head was spinning with pleasure. I started to drift about the room with small dancing steps. I opened up the door of the wardrobe to see the mirror and looked at myself fondly. My dress whirled about me and my face was radiant with happiness.
Suddenly, I saw my mother standing by the door, watching me, shocked. I do not know how long she’d been standing there, but I have never forgotten the quiet of that moment. An expression of anger and repugnance distorted her features, her mouth hung open, and her nose sniffed the air. Without moving from the doorway, she held out her hand and pointed at the empty bottle, which was lying on the floor.
Then she blew past me on the way to the inner room. I heard her turning over the mattress, and then she shouted, “You little thief!” I went on standing in front of the mirror, my head bowed. She sat down in front of me and ordered in an icy, furious voice that I had never heard before, “Now you’re going to clean the room so well, there’ll be no smell at all!”
I scrubbed the floor and the walls, I polished the glassware and the silver and passed a duster over all the furniture and all the books, and when I had finished cleaning, she grimaced and said, “It still smells, clean it again!”
Three times I cleaned that room and everything inside it. Then she told me that I had to wash myself.
“Here?” I asked, shocked.
“Here!” she replied.
I dragged the large metal pail into the middle of the room. Then I heated the water and sat in it naked. I scrubbed my body, hair, and face with plain soap, and when I stood before her, washed clean and dressed in clean clothes, she rose and in an unyielding voice she ordered, “And now we’ll go to the mikveh to clean your soul!”
At the ritual bathhouse, my mother lashed my back and neck with a bundle of twigs. I bit my lips and did not show how it hurt, and she went on beating me until she had no more strength. And then she let me go and gestured that I should enter the water.
I started to go down, one step at a time, swaying from side to side, and the cold water rose all round me. Water swirled round my back and covered it, reaching my shoulders. I walked farther along the descending slope of the ritual bath. The waters came up to my head, and slowly covered it. It was then I was gripped by panic. I tried to shout and my mouth filled up with water. I felt that I was choking, my body convulsing. And then I heard someone screaming outside the water. And then I lost myself.
When I returned to my senses, I was sitting on the wooden slats next to the mikveh, my naked body in my mother’s arms.
Someone was slapping my back, and I was throwing up water and panting painfully. The mikveh lady was also bending over me, and her thick, strong fingers were massaging the nape of my neck. Then they wrapped me up in a blanket and laid me down on a bench. I closed my eyes and I did not open them until I realized I was lying in my bed.
But even then I could not rest. My throat was choked with anger and anger misted over my mind. For many days, I lay like this, under a pile of blankets, full of wretched thoughts.
I thought about all the persecutors who had embittered my life, and first and foremost among them, my mother. Ranged behind her there was a small army of “real women”—Feigel, the rabbi’s wife, pale and stingy; the slippery-tongued Dubeh-Dvoireh, wife of the ritual butcher; and Chaya-Leah, the woman who sold roosters and baby chicks. They and their maiden daughters, who resembled them in every way.
To punish this army of women, I wanted to die. I refused to eat or to drink, and when these women tried to feed me forcibly, I vomited into their hands and screamed, “You blood-sucking leeches! You horrible creatures! I hate you all!”
And so I drove them away and was left alone.
They fought back by ceasing to care for me. I lay between sheets that were no longer changed; I had sores and my tongue was swollen and dry. For several days, I was less a person than an animal left to die, lying in its own vomit. Who knows how all this would have ended, had not my father, my beloved father, suddenly descended from the world of his sacred books and religious rulings. He sat down by the side of my bed and looked at me with his sad, wise eyes.
My father did not speak, only looked at me, but from the moment that he entered, the world seemed to grow larger. I turned over on my side and pulled the rumpled sheets over my head. My father leaned over and laid his hand on my head. His hand was so gentle that it felt as light as a small bird. I hid my face in the pillow and asked him, “If I start eating again, can we go back to learning together?”
I looked up at him and saw his face stiffen. “Ask your mother’s forgiveness, and then we can go back to studying . . .”
I beat my fist against my forehead. “But Tateh, that’s not fair!”
He got up and pronounced drily, “If you will not respect your mother, and if you do not keep the commandment not to steal, we cannot study together.”
Trail of Miracles Page 5
