“Good Sabbath,” said Perchik.
Hodel, caught like a startled animal, jerked herself away.
“Good Sabbath,” she replied, almost inaudibly, as she retreated from him in both her shame and her disquiet. She smoothed the length of her hair with her trembling hands and breathed deeply. At least vagrants come and go quickly, she thought as she straightened her spine and followed Chava into the kitchen. That, after all, is the nature of vagrancy.
But he returned again a few days later, as the agreement had been that Tevye’s family would welcome him for the Sabbath if he would provide the two youngest daughters with lessons.
Hodel watched from a safe distance as Perchik sat outside with Shprintze and Bielke, bent over a heavy book that sat between them. She examined the threadbare tunic stretched across the muscular length of his shoulders, the planes of his beardless face. She inched back. She did not want to come too close; something about it felt sinful, so she observed from afar, protected by the distance. Hodel admired how the broadness of his shoulders curved above the volume as if he were cradling the very thoughts upon the pages with his entire body. She could have remained there, eyes intent on him forever, but for the gust of wind that whipped her rippling blanket of hair across her body, forcing her to quickly gather it up and tuck it in a woven knot beneath her headscarf. When she looked up once again, she saw that Perchik was no longer gazing into his book: he was gazing at her.
Hodel bolted upright and returned his gaze. She was self-consciously aware of her neck exposed from the openness of her work shirt. He tilted his head and made a little bow. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but it rocked her.
Despite every attempt to stay away, Hodel returned a few days later, just as the lessons were concluding. As the little ones scampered off to play, Hodel looked over Perchik’s stack of travel-worn books with their lofty titles.
“You don’t belong in the shtetl, do you?” she finally said. “You don’t talk like a teacher, or a Jew, or any other proper man I’ve ever come across. What did you do before you came here?”
“I worked all my youth for my uncle. At university, I was a newspaper editor. Then a barman. I’ve been a joiner, a carpenter, a common laborer.”
“So,” she asked, “does a scholar such as yourself find it very tedious to teach children?”
“Sometimes,” he replied with a wry smile. “Depends on the student.”
Perchik’s expression made Hodel uneasy, and she bristled in his gaze, pinned and squirming beneath the heat of his appraisal.
“Well, then how does such an advanced thinker stomach such a task?”
Perchik paused a moment, gripping his notebook. “When I fall asleep at night, in the moment between sleep and wakefulness, I can feel a kind of crushing panic. I have been experiencing this every night since I was a young boy. It is a dread that this is all life might be made of— that beauty and truth and the simplistic gifts of a righteous life might not be enough.” He looked over her house, off into the distance. “Yet I drift off in peace and sleep quite soundly most nights. For I trust that tomorrow might be the day. It might be the day that may have that new idea or spark. Tomorrow might be the day some kind of glory, peace, or freedom arrives. It gives me courage to continue with my life.” He swept his gaze back to her face, where it rested.
Hodel closed her eyes. He was speaking of the thing that she had felt. She knew his weariness, shared it, felt it creep heavily within her— denser than any Sabbath wine.
“Hodel!” she heard Mama cry, rattling her back to reality. But she ignored the call.
She looked at Perchik sharply. “Why are you here?” she demanded.
“Where?”
“In Anatevka!”
“I am here for the shelter and food your father is paying me in, Hodel.” Perchik smiled. His study of her felt assured, uncompromising. “Why? Should I remain here for any other reason?”
Hodel squirmed in the glare of his scrutiny. But as he took a step toward her, she saw that his eyes were filled with both a blazing intellect and a terrible sadness.
“Hodel! Where are you?” she heard Mama call again. “It is time to wash!”
“Coming, Mama!” Hodel shouted back, then turned away and hurried back into the house.
three
THE BREAD WAS ROTTEN AND THE BROTH NOTHING MORE THAN dirty water, but it was there. Though eating in the iron cuffs was no easy feat.
How she longed for her mother’s bread; the effort of half a day was always worth it. The girls had learned the secrets of bread-making from Golde, who in turn had learned from her mother, and so forth—down six generations. Grandmother Tzeitel was said to have always prepared the very best challah loaves for her family of nine. And, for Golde’s unit, baking bread had become a tradition of family pride, filling their home with the golden aroma of tufts of soft-baked dough and warm crusts glazed with egg.
Suddenly, Hodel was struck by an idea. If hunger was a torture used upon the prisoners, then she would try to protect herself by accumulating what provisions she could. She grabbed the remaining bread and, looking about, hid it in the open pipe behind the stove.
“Oi!”
She heard a cry from the darkness and returned to her corner, praying no one had seen her stash away the loaf.
From the corner, she stared into the dark. Down the bleak dimness of the corridor, Hodel caught a pair of eyes—sunken, like two tiny pieces of nearly snuffed-out coal, burning at her. There sat an ashen-looking man whose vacant expression called to question the triple mark of VOR (for the Russian meaning “thief”) branded upon both cheeks.
It was a jailer.
This, then, was the overseer of the convicts? A felon himself—oh God! Hodel returned the jailer’s gaze, which must have conveyed all the indignation of her spirit, for he rose and moved to stand before her.
His eyes dropped, and he spoke with a complacent posture in heavily accented Russian. “Well, what can I do? They order me to watch you, and I must execute my orders.”
A thief for a jailer? she thought. What has become of me?
She went breathless, sucking in frozen air as a cold sweat burst over her skin still aching from disinfection. She desired nothing more than to open up her chest like great window shutters and rush out. She pressed her head between her hands in a viselike grip until at last she breathed again.
The jailer addressed her. “What is the name of your intended?”
Hodel edged herself upright with renewed hope. “Perchik Tselenovich.”
“Ah. And his prisoner number, do you know it?”
“Nine hundred thirty-seven—it was in the letters he sent to me weeks ago.”
“Mmm . . .” he muttered, scratching a few lines upon the papers before him.
“He wrote that he was being held at this location. He is here, yes?”
But the jailer gave no reply.
“I do wonder, sir,” she said, “why I am being held here at such length.”
“Have you committed a crime?”
“No, sir! None. I only wish to join Perchik. To work beside him.” She mustered as sweet a smile as she was able, entreating the jailer to pity her, but he merely stared with the same vacancy as always.
“Food will be sent,” he said, “though it’s hardly that. Cook’s no good, no—what do you Jews call it? No baleboosteh, that’s certain.” He moved to take his leave of her. “The other prisoners are whispering of your loyalty to your intended,” he added, almost smiling. “Like a little tiger— that is what they are calling you—Tygrysek. It’s Polish.” He shrugged. “So . . .” Hodel watched him as he examined her.
“Now, get up,” he said. “You must be cleaned.”
“Cleaned?”
“Yes.”
It could not be. “I have just been washed.”
“You must be cleaned again.”
“But I am red.”
“Never mind. You will. Until they are satisfied. You stink of Pole.”
The truculent woman returned, hair pulled somehow tighter than before, bucket and scouring cloths secure in her hulking arms.
“Pole? But—”
“Jew, then. Scrubbed.”
“Sir—!”
“Again.”
He unlocked the cell and nodded to the woman. “Every nook and cavity.”
four
TZEITEL ALWAYS HAD BEEN A LITTLE WOMAN. TZEITEL—THE BOSS, the serious one. The wife-in-training.
Their mother, Golde, called her kallehniu—the little bride. “Baleboosteh!” Golde would exclaim, the utmost compliment to a great homemaker, and she’d grin incessantly at her good fortune. Tzeitel was her protégé; she need only teach her daughter a recipe once, and off she went! Even finding ways to alter and improve it.
Tzeitel’s slim, efficient body took after their mother’s—a muscular, upright posture with full breasts and long limbs both strong and lean. She moved like an eldest daughter, with a sharp, exacting precision. Her hands were small but sturdy, crafted perfectly for both work and tenderness. Her gestures reflected that her mind regarded her work as that of celebrated rigor; a lifelong calling unique to women who felt they had been chosen for this life of delicious, harsh exactitude.
But Tzeitel also possessed an incredible softness, a deep kind of femininity different from that of her sisters and mother. This was evident in her dark and lustrous hair, in skin smooth and clean as morning upon her heart-shaped face (and, to Hodel’s great irritation, the button nose she shared with Chava)—a face ignited with a fierce, determined gaze. Slight she may have been, but also beautiful and mighty.
All this filled Hodel with the distant worship reserved exclusively for gods and older sisters, and from that admiration, of course, sprang jealousy. Hodel watched Golde watch Tzeitel—a protégé! A disciple! Hodel seethed, marinating in a wash of envy and inadequacy.
Tzeitel seemed to relish household chores. She attacked the laundry with visible signs of pleasure, extracting every last particle of grime from aprons, tucking a bed linen in a perfectly angular manner. The deep degree of contentment that spread over her after a day of baking, mopping floors, washing, ironing, and giving baths to the little ones left her thoroughly at peace. She was just where she ought to be within her God-given role. Home, Tzeitel would muse. The holy realm.
Tzeitel had always been the one her less-than-domestically-blessed sisters would come to for practical advice. How to dice. How to remove a stain. Holiday traditions. Which food blessing would be expected. How to fold a bed linen versus a tablecloth.
Chava, however, was no homemaker, but she tried her best to hide it. She had a spectacular routine developed to obscure the fact that she couldn’t cook, hoping no one would notice. Tzeitel did. Chava’s sneaky tricks and stealthy dodges might have fooled their preoccupied mother, but not Tzeitel. The only reason Chava could manage even minor kitchen tasks was because of Tzeitel’s watchful eye, her patience, her guidance, and, most important of all, her insistence.
“After all, these skills are to become our life’s work,” Tzeitel said when she asked them to plait the challah, clean the windows, hang the bed linens, and beat the carpets, again.
As young children of seven and six, Hodel and Chava had loved to climb trees and get their knees bruised playing outside. Persuading them to comb their hair or style it neatly was hopeless, for they considered such ladylike things to be bland. Tzeitel was undeterred— it was her role as eldest to set an example, and set an example she did.
One day, when the sisters were finally in the early buds of womanhood, Tzeitel felt it was time for real action. It was now her duty to impress upon her sisters what she considered to be the subtle arts of being a lady (for Tzeitel was, above all else, a natural lady, and as far as she was concerned, that had nothing whatsoever to do with being bland).
She sat them down upon overturned milk buckets in the barn and stood before them with the kind of upright authority she envisioned a yeshiva teacher might possess. She paced back and forth, treading a path in front of their muddy boots and soiled skirts, calmly reciting the pleasures and virtues of womanhood.
“Observant women such as we must make certain to always look pleasant,” Tzeitel instructed. “Not to do so would reflect negatively on the God whose imprint we bear.”
Hodel rubbed her eyes and shifted on her bucket. The movement made a hollow clang, and Tzeitel turned her head sharply and fixed Hodel with her signature stare, which her sisters simply referred to as “the black look.”
“Sorry,” Hodel murmured.
Tzeitel inhaled and continued. “Surround yourself with what prettiness you can find—a lovely tablecloth with a handsome centerpiece on the table goes such a long way.”
Chava yawned.
Tzeitel caught this and winced. She had nothing against her sisters, but she did not doubt that God had given Adam a partner and not a slave. Adam needed Eve.
“Watch your step and posture, and walk gracefully—and don’t walk too quickly if there is no need for it! Also, watch your voice—is it soft and gentle? Is it unnecessarily loud?”
Hodel snickered and buried her face in Chava’s shoulder; Chava responded in kind. They were of course thinking of their mother. Hodel put her lips to Chava’s ear.
“It doesn’t matter how often Tzeitel’s future husband changes his job,” she whispered to her sister. “He is always going to end up with the same boss.” They fell off the buckets in fits of hysterical laughter.
Well. Tzeitel never attempted that tactic again.
Sharing the larger bed with Chava was one of the purest delights of their upbringing. Hodel and Chava would often talk deep into the night, hands folded beneath their heads, face to face, foot to foot for warmth, eyes alight.
“She is in love with him!” Chava cooed, remarking on Tzeitel and her lifelong love of her childhood playmate, Motel Kamzoil.
“Oh yes.”
“Just like you with the rabbi’s son!”
“No!” Hodel protested. “He is merely the best available there is! In truth, Mendel is really a bit stuffy—
“—and humorless—”
“Certainly. No. This is different. Haven’t you seen the way they look at each other? Like in all the books you read to me. Like in the poems.”
“You’re right,” said Chava, smothering a giggle. “But she is so serious!”
Hodel looked away, thoughtful. She had always felt Tzeitel was particularly hard on her, and their lives in Anatevka were dotted with foolish disputes between the two eldest daughters.
“She hates me.”
“No!” Chava insisted, clearing Hodel’s hair away from her eyes.
Three and a half years did not appear to be so great a difference now, but it certainly was when they were children. By the time Hodel was born, Tzeitel had been speaking in sentences and was fiercely independent. Hodel’s arrival was unwelcome at best.
“Oh, Hodelleh, Tzeitel is hard on all of us,” Chava continued. “But perhaps because you were the very first to come along? Like Jacob and Esau, or Cain and Abel!”
“But those are all brothers,” Hodel said with dismay.
“Yes, but it’s the same thing.”
“No, it isn’t—boys are completely different.”
At this, Chava buried her face in a pillow.
When they were very young children, Tzeitel perhaps not much older than seven or eight, they shared a room with two tiny beds— Tzeitel in one, Hodel and Chava in the other, slightly larger one. Tzeitel was adamant that Hodel specifically not cross a self-proclaimed line onto her “side,” nor touch anything she kept around her bed. Of course Hodel did—frequently. Tzeitel never let Hodel borrow anything, not even a hairbrush or a ribbon, unless specifically instructed to do so and only then begrudgingly, out of a sense of obedience.
These days, all the girls shared a larger room divided into sleeping camps: Tzeitel behind a partition in her own small cot, Shprintze and Bielke at one end of the room in small stacked bed
s, Hodel and Chava at the other on a larger mattress. It allowed these late-night talks to persist without too much bother to the others.
“Well, I think it is perfectly unfair,” Hodel said. “One can’t help being born! I have only ever wished to please Tzeitel.” To love her, she added to herself.
“Perhaps it’s how your dark wit developed?” offered Chava.
“Please, Bird, that’s from Mama.”
“No!” Chava thought a moment. “Well, yes, but listen—”
“It is not my imagination, then!” Hodel interrupted, hands clasped around her face. It broke Hodel’s stubborn but lamentably tender heart.
Hodel felt the warmth of Chava’s gaze upon her, felt her fingers entwine with her own in both helplessness and understanding.
“Well,” said Chava, smirking, “one can hardly blame her.”
“Oh, she is just so serious!” Hodel giggled at last, and Chava joined her as Hodel furrowed her face, impersonating Tzeitel’s stern expression.
“I think she is just cross that we do not take life as seriously as she. Tzeitel has so much responsibility on her shoulders,” said Chava judiciously. “Perhaps she is as cross with us as we are with her for being so solemn! Perhaps it is the same?”
“Perhaps . . .” Hodel understood but was still stung. “Zol zein—just let it be!” she cried, taking her sister up in her arms.
Everything Hodel felt Tzeitel did not do for her, she wanted to do and be for Chava. It was the greatest joy in her life.
“And Hodelleh? All I meant before about all the brothers was perhaps that is why she is so much crosser with you than the rest of us. It is as old as the Good Book. It is destined to be. It is not your fault.”
After Anatevka Page 2
