by Amy Sorrells
Until finally the night fell silent.
Silence thicker than the several feet of snow around them.
Silence darker than the sky above.
And Jakob knew then that if there were a hell, it would be full of silence.
When Peter and Jakob awoke in the morning, they ate the last of the near-rancid beef and raw beets they’d found in the cupboards of the homes of the last abandoned shtetl they’d passed through. Peter set Jakob on Galya’s sagging back, and they set off again, staying far from where they thought the gunfire had come from the night before. But then they stumbled upon it, the snowy road, trampled flat by what must’ve been hundreds of human feet. Peter stopped Galya, who whinnied and stamped his hoof as though he was annoyed to have another crazed ride cut short. Peter walked closer to the newly trampled path, following it into the dense groves of pine, where it disappeared.
Jakob tugged on his brother’s coat, pulling at him, begging him wordlessly not to go on.
“Shhhhh—wait here.”
Jakob was too afraid to wait alone, and the gap in the trees swallowed them, the thickness of the evergreens darkening with each step they took. The snow-packed path narrowed as the ground inclined heavenward, where a half-dozen hawks, wings as wide as ship sails, floated on the sky above. The muffled moan of an infant echoed the bitter cry of a mourning dove overhead. Part of Jakob wanted to run back to Galya, but the better part of him stayed close to Peter as he kept walking toward the sounds. Finally they came upon a steep ravine, and the sight below caused everything in Peter’s belly to come rushing out of him, splatting against the crushed snow at their feet.
Jakob peered over the edge as Peter heaved behind him, and he was greeted by the stare of an unmoving girl, about the age of their sister Ilana. Her jaw was slack, and a trickle of blood ran down the side of her ashen face. Next to her lay a dead infant, and under the infant, a man and a woman, still clutching each other, half their heads blown off.
There were hundreds of them.
All naked, dead. Twisted and unmoving.
The gaping hole steamed with the warmth of their lifeblood rising and disappearing into the cruel, clear sky.
Was this the pillar of clouds Peter had meant?
The boys didn’t stay to find which infant still made sounds, but ran, as they had run from their parents and sisters, back to Galya.
Jakob ran, but his legs wouldn’t work. He fell and lost sight of Peter. Arms and hands reached up out of the ravine for him, and he screamed at his legs, begging them to move, but still his legs lay limp beneath him.
“Peter! Help me! Peter!”
“Dad! Wake up. It’s a dream. It’s just a dream.”
Jakob trembled, still fighting the darkness and the feel of blackness, of voiceless corpses reaching for him. He pushed against whoever held his arms down.
“Dad, it’s me, Nel. It’s a dream. You’re having a dream.”
He heard a click and light filled the room, nearly blinding him. He squinted as the face before him came into focus, then he grabbed at the person. “Help me … my legs, they won’t work—”
“Dad,” the face said. “Wake up, Dad. You’re home. You’re safe. You’re home.”
“Catherine?”
“No. Nel. It’s me. It’s your daughter.”
He felt the arms around him, rocking him as if he were a child, wiping the sweat off his face and neck. Then he burst into tears. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay, Dad. You’re safe. Let it go now. It was just a dream. Let it go.”
* We will find a way.
CHAPTER 29
“Mind if I watch?”
Nel grinned at her dad’s question as she leaned over the worktable and used pliers to twist the heavy silver wire. “That’s usually my question, isn’t it?”
“Used to be.”
She didn’t take her eyes off the wire as she bent and wrapped, twisted and turned it around the newly shined and tumbled piece of jade. At the same time, she listened to the thump, drag, and shuffle of her dad and his walker as he hobbled into the workroom. It’d been a good couple of weeks since he’d had the night terror, and both of them were feeling more at ease, even in a routine. Nel took to sleeping late, as had Jakob, whom she knew had been relieved to be away from Lakeview’s strict rehabilitation schedule. Up at 6:30. Breakfast at 6:45. First round of physical therapy at 7:15, then occupational therapy at 8:00. There might’ve been time for a nap between occupational therapy and community exercise hour at 9:30, but that had been rare. Though the Lakeside staff tried to cluster their tasks, especially at night, to allow residents regular sleep schedules, she’d learned from the memory-care doctors how even a couple of unnatural interruptions were too much for the fragile rhythms of a geriatric, causing exhaustion, adding to confusion, and compounding tendencies toward anxiety and depression. So much of that heaviness had lifted off her father after he’d come home, and Nel knew this was one reason for what everyone—she, Mattie, and even David—felt was a new brightness, even an extension, of his life.
“Do you remember all I taught you about reflection and refraction?” His question applied to faceting, which he preferred to talk about over cabochons, tumbled rocks, and metalworking. Those subjects were too easy for him intellectually, although he had enjoyed doing some of that work too. He simply preferred the intricate calculations of angles and measurements, the exactness required to bring out the most brilliance in a gemstone.
Nel didn’t have to think hard to answer Jakob’s question. Everything she’d watched him do and listened to him say had stuck with her. “The angles on the outside reflect the light. When the light bounces off the angles on the back of the stone, that’s called refraction. It’s what gives the stone its brilliance and shimmer.”
“That’s my girl.”
Nel paused her work on the bracelet and glanced at the rock Jakob had poked around his containers for and now held in his hand.
“I always liked this tourmaline,” he said. One end of the stone was a pale green, which blended gracefully into the other end, which was pink. When heated, it would turn any number of solid colors, depending on the time and temperature used.
“Prettier heated, I think.”
“Me too,” Jakob said as he poked around some more in a box of old agate.
“I remember those.” She referred to the oval pencil marks on the surface of the agate where Jakob had long ago identified where to make the first cuts to the stone. If he made cabochons, agate was especially fun to work with, vignettes and scenes hidden within the striations and patterns of the stone. She pointed to the image isolated by one penciled-in oval in particular. “That one looks like little blackbirds, or eagles, maybe, soaring over snowcapped mountains.”
“I thought the pattern on this one looked like the outline of sea grass on the shore.” He pointed to another.
“The storyteller’s stone, you always called it.” Nel turned off the brightest light glaring on the worktable and set her wire and tools aside. If she was ever going to talk to him about his past, this was as good a time as any. But she’d start with Mom. “I miss her.”
Jakob appeared startled by the mention of Catherine. They didn’t avoid talking about Catherine, necessarily. It had simply become easier to let the days go by without bringing her up. He sat down heavily on the chair across from her and rubbed his knees.
Nel continued. “I miss her cooking. The way she smelled like lilacs and night cream.”
Jakob inhaled deeply. “The way she sang when she folded and ironed the laundry.”
“To Pat Boone,” they said in unison, laughing.
“Yeah—and that time she tried to teach me to sew,” Nel said. “And when I wore the skirt to the market, it fell apart.”
“Homemade fried chicken on the beach. Homemade gingerbread men at Chri
stmas.”
“Gingerbread girls. She always made girls, not men … for me, she said.”
“Only the good die young,” Jakob said, joy on his face falling as he nudged his bifocals farther up on his nose.
“That’s not true, Dad.” Emotion welled up in her. “You’re good, Dad. And you’re all I have.”
Jakob responded by reaching out and patting her hand.
She squeezed his back, then reached across the table to the box where she kept the kiddush cup and aquamarine since she’d found them, as well as Catherine’s research. “Speaking of Mom, I found this when I was going through some things.”
She pulled each item out of the box, and the moment Jakob saw the aquamarine, his whole countenance changed, filled with emotion she didn’t recognize. She handed the stone to him, and he sank back into the chair and turned it in his hands.
“Does any of this have anything to do with your brother? With Peter?” The only way she was going to find out anything was if she came right out and asked him. She’d heard nothing from the correspondence she sent to Ukraine and had resigned herself to never hearing from them. “Dad, I don’t want to upset you, but I’d love to know more about him, and about your past. Where you—where we—came from. Peter must’ve been important to you, for you to keep these things all these years.”
She watched as her dad struggled with a response, opening his mouth to speak, then closing it again as if having a silent argument with himself about what he would and would not say.
He held the stone up to the sunlight coming in the window, and the facets caught the light, sending dappled bursts of reflections across the walls of the room.
“I will tell you my story.”
CHAPTER 30
Once Jakob began, the words flowed from him like the ripples he used to make while tossing pebbles into the pond behind his childhood home in Chudniv. He told Nel everything, starting with Mama and Papa; his sisters, Zahava, Tova, Ilana, and Faigy; and his brother Peter. He told her about the colorful floral scarves all the girls and women wore, and about listening to the songs of fiddles and bayans as people danced at festivals and at the break of Sabbath. He told her about the wooden churches and synagogues, the sashes of shtetl homes painted pure white, and the doors painted turquoise. He told her about market day, when the peasants came to town, and how the commotion of shopping and playing and bartering felt like a carnival every week. He told her about Sasha the priest coming to visit, and how they learned about Yeshua Messiah from him, and how it made many of their neighbors very angry, but many other neighbors believed in Yeshua Messiah too.
Then he told her about his journey with Peter. About Raisa and the maniac in the barn. Peter losing his fingers. Finding the hundreds murdered in the woods. The cold. The hunger. The burning villages. The kindness of the old and wrinkled Luda. The hospitality of Russie and Chaim. How Peter sold Galya to Zsófia and Makár in Austria-Hungary. About the man who’d tried to rob him on the train. Parents selling their daughters in the shipyards. Two weeks on the ship in steerage. Ellis Island. John and Harriet Stewart. Saint Stanislaus. Mr. Grünfelder. The Battle Creek Sanitarium.
And finally Faigy. Faigy and what happened the night Peter left, the same night the pogromshchik came to the shtetl.
Nel stared at him. “Faigy? Your youngest sister?”
“Yes.” Jakob exhaled, pondering whether or not to go on.
He began with Peter leaving home on Galya.
“Sometimes I wish Peter had never come back.”
Peter always said God had told him to turn back, and that after a day of riding, he couldn’t ignore the constant prompting in his soul telling him to return home. At first, Jakob had thought the sound of horse hooves against the hard-packed snow was another rider from the pogromshchik returning to kill him. And so when Peter found him in the cupboard, Jakob had screamed and screamed until Peter covered his gaping mouth with his gloved hand, then lifted Jakob and pressed his small head against his broad chest.
“Be quiet, brother,” Peter said, swaying for a moment like Mama did whenever Jakob cried. “You must be quiet.”
Jakob sniffed back a sob and his body slackened, if only slightly, as Peter held him on his hip and began to search the home for something—anything—to salvage from the scene of carnage before them. Mama lay half naked on the kitchen table. The arms of her dress sleeves were nailed to the wooden tabletop so her arms stretched out wide, like when she ran to greet Jakob, he thought, as he walked home on the afternoons spent learning Talmud with his siblings at a neighbor’s. Her face was blue, her neck twisted at an impossible angle. Her skirts were torn off at the bodice, her pregnant belly rising into the air like a camel’s lopsided hump. Blood dripped onto a round puddle on the floor through the cracks on the table. Ropes pulled tight around her ankles and secured around the table’s legs had torn clear through to her shinbones.
Faint orange coals burned in the hearth, where remnants of the Bible Sasha had given them and Papa’s Talmud smoldered. Above on the wall, a cross painted with blood spelled out “Die, Jews!”
Choked rage gurgled in Peter’s throat, and he reached for Jakob’s face, as if hoping to shield his eyes and protect him somehow from the gruesome scene. But Jakob brushed him aside, squirmed out of his arms, and walked up to his mama. He placed his hand on the side of her cold belly where he’d felt the kicks of his unborn sibling. Then he moved toward her ashen face and kissed her on the lips. Hot tears ran down the young boy’s face and fell onto hers.
Grasping Jakob’s hand, Peter moved toward their sister Zahava’s body that lay curled in a ball at the base of the potbellied stove. In the center of the room, nails pierced the wooden floor in the shape of her arms and torso, resembling the crucifix-like shape of their mother. Chunks of fabric from Zahava’s dress were still attached to the nails where she had managed to pull herself free.
In minutes Jakob seemed to age ten years as he helped Peter with Zahava. Jakob lifted one of her legs, caked with blood, as Peter lifted her limp body under the arms, and together they dragged their oldest sister to her bed, where they found two of their other sisters, Ilana and Tova, curled around each other like a pair of forgotten rag dolls, heads bashed in at the temples, gunshot wounds in the sides of their necks. Then they loosed Mama from the table and lay her beside her daughters, their sisters.
“Where is Faigy?” Peter asked.
Jakob’s already pale face whitened, and he couldn’t meet Peter’s eyes.
Peter grabbed him by the shoulders. “Did you see? What did they do with baby Faigy?”
Still, Jakob could not meet his eyes.
Peter tilted his chin up gently, and it trembled as Jakob replied, “Vony yiyi zabraly.”*
Peter didn’t ask for details and instead took his hat off and ran his hands through his hair. He searched the room for something they could cover their mother and other sisters with, since they couldn’t stay to bury them. The only thing they could find that the pogromshchik didn’t take was their six prayer shawls, strewn across the bedroom like rags.
“Where is Papa?” Peter asked Jakob, barely whispering the question.
Jakob shrugged. He didn’t know that answer either. He had clambered into the cupboard by the time the men had finished with his mother and sisters, and he stayed there even as the house quieted, the pogromshchik taking their laughter and glugging of alcohol with them. He had only seen what happened to Faigy because the one man in the black robes had returned.
Peter searched the house quickly for anything of value they could collect before leaving the house to look for their father. Meanwhile, Jakob left his side long enough to wander back to the kitchen, where Mama had prepared Shabbat so many times, twisting and separating the challah dough, making the kugel, mixing pepper and matzo flour for gefilte fish. From inside a slightly open cabinet door, an object gleamed—one of the family’s silver kiddush cups t
he pogromshchik left behind. Josef had etched a scene replicating the village of Chudniv onto each of the family’s eight cups and had been working on a ninth for the new baby. Jakob stretched onto his toes to reach the cup and knocked it to the ground, causing both boys to startle severely.
“What was that noise? Are you hurt?” Peter ran into the kitchen and followed Jakob’s gaze to the cup. “Good job, Jakob. We’ll take this cup with us.”
As Peter started to tuck the cup into his coat, a piece of folded parchment fell onto the floor, startling them both again. Wary, Jakob crouched on his haunches, unfolded the paper, then held it toward his brother, who came and crouched next to him. The boys recognized instantly their father’s squared-off penmanship. Words and numbers described precise instructions for faceting the Star of David aquamarine. Papa’s penmanship was precise, as were the design and measurements on the thin, unlined parchment.
Peter stood quickly, as if suddenly realizing once more the precariousness of their situation, indeed the dire danger of allowing grief or fear or emotion of any kind to cause them to linger.
“Come on, Jakob. Papa must be outside.”
Peter refolded the paper and stuffed it, along with the cup, into a spare satchel. He slung the satchel over his shoulder, then helped Jakob put on as many pieces of clothing as he could wear and one of their sister’s larger coats over the top. Together the boys walked out the back of the house to begin the search for their father, which didn’t take long. Blood-soaked clothing, broken lamps, pottery, and books, pages torn out of some of them, others half burned, bindings curved and charred—all of it littered the snowy ground.
They discovered Papa’s fate near the ancient oak by the barn. There was nothing they could do to bring dignity to his grizzly death. The murderers had decapitated him and stuck his head high upon the broken end of the house broom. His arms and legs had each been severed from his body, his torso dragged and dumped near the side road that ran past their home. Peter pulled the pole down and laid it gently on the ground, then turned away and vomited.
