It had been some time since Hodel had met her family in her dreams. She had reached the place she longed for when she began. At the cliff’s edge of all she had known, accepted as true, or thought she could bear, Hodel, since her departure, had continued to take step after step into the abyss—only to discover that firmament would materialize beneath her, so that she might take even one more step.
She noted the cleanliness of their garments—the freshly laundered blouses and pressed hair ribbons—and suddenly felt so poorly dressed in comparison that she nearly turned on her heel in shame. But when she looked down, she noted that she too was finely dressed, her fingernails clean, her hair long and styled, and so she quietly moved to the chair that was always her own at the end of the table and slipped into the scene without a sound.
There were three women’s commandments to be observed:
First, niddah, preventing men and woman from intercourse during menstruation. Second, the lighting of the candles on the eve of the Sabbath and on holidays. And last, the challah—the tradition of separating a piece of dough from the unbaked bread, which was originally put aside for a kohen in biblical times. She recalled her mother’s words: “This custom of setting aside a part of the bread continued, which is why the separation and destruction of a portion of challah has become one of the duties incumbent upon us as women.”
Associated with all these tasks were prayer recitations, at times in Hebrew, but for the more mundane affairs of the home, the women would spout Yiddish prayers, or tkhines, that addressed these everyday concerns.
Golde had a printed tkhine collection, which she kept safely in a handwoven cover in a secluded corner of their living area, and Hodel loved to remove the sheath and quietly thumb through it. Each individual prayer began with a heading that described when and sometimes how it should be recited. She thumbed through it now. There was a thkine to say on the Sabbath and one to pray for your husband and children. There was a thkine for confession. There were thkines to say when the shofar is blown on Rosh Hashanna, on the eve of Yom Kippur, and when emerging from the ritual bath. There were thkines for confessions, for fasting, for the new moon, at weddings, when a baby is born, and more and more.
Delightful, she thought, grinning to herself as she wore the pages ever thinner with the truth of her devotion, thinking on how many hands and fingers, how many generations of women had graced the pages before her.
As she sat down at the family dinner table, she observed them all, their heads bowed as her mother prayed over the candles.
Devotion and faith were not the same thing. Hodel knew countless women who did not love their husbands but were devoted and obedient nonetheless. Was it not the same with faith?
Tzeitel accepted. Tzeitel’s God was in the home. She had things to do, babies to raise, and the traditions of their ancestors to uphold. That meant something to her. Yet God’s message did not appear to be a personal one to Tzeitel; it was shared, descending from a long line of biblical matriarchs upheld in the beauty of symbolic traditions.
Chava questioned. Chava’s God was in books, in thinkers and kingdoms and imaginary worlds beyond. Chava went along, for there was no discernible alternative, but Hodel often looked at her sister and recognized the line between obedience and belief.
But Hodel truly believed. This was a difference between her and her sisters. The first thing Hodel ever remembered knowing was that God was present in her life whether she was always aware of it or not, and nothing in this world felt as though it was happening without His direct supervision and guidance. She did not fear God; she trusted in Him.
It was strange to sit at the table of her past so full of her present understanding. As she sat there she thought back on her sojourn, her torture, her isolated imprisonment, and on what it meant to be here: simultaneously both years before and beyond life’s road. Harshness ventilates perspective, makes one resilient. The trials she endured were necessary—necessary to truly see the beauties and wonders of the past, to prepare for the trials of the future.
As the scene dissolved, as her conscious mind overtook the table like a burst of rising light, Hodel awoke to another morning in exile.
It was all part of the same path.
How long would any of them wait? Here, unable to go either back or forward, she felt herself rot day after limitless day.
Hodel lay atop a blanket of what was once her hair—cooing, stroking it mildly, nursing it back to life, encouraging it to thrive as she herself could not. The release of her chains was a great relief, yet despite her new physical freedom she remained almost always on the floor, rising only to pace or kneel in prayer for her survival, for Perchik’s, and for what she had to believe was a reunion with him in a location she also prayed to discover. She seized a moldy crust from her secret storage and nibbled on it heedfully before turning her head to the wall once more and closing her eyes.
Guards came and went—some watched her closely, others slept, some thrust themselves at her with leering eyes, but more often than not it was the jailer with the marks of VOR upon his face, holding his chain of keys and aggravating her grief so. Her bare head lifted upward, tears falling silently onto the mass of her former hair.
Tonight it felt as if only she lay awake—or at least only she and the miserable jailer, for she heard him stir outside the bars. What makes that man so restless? she thought as the flame from his lamp blazed.
seven
THE SISTERS LAY IN BED TOGETHER AS THEY ALWAYS DID—THE windows of their room covered as they always were. Their warm breath flowed outward in billows as it struck the cold of the air in their bedroom; it was (according to the depth of the darkness) two, perhaps even three o’clock.
Chava was restless, and as a result Hodel was not sleeping well either, for the bed they had shared all their lives was beginning to feel smaller.
“Hodel,” Chava whispered, careful to shake her sister just enough to rouse her without her starting or making too great a noise. Hodel half woke and nudged her sister with her leg—she was so very near the edge of slumber.
“Hodel!” she whispered again, this time more insistent.
“What is it, Chava?” Hodel replied, not moving from her position, her tone unmistakably put out. Chava had a tendency to be full of talk at very late hours, and Hodel was always the bearer of her chatter, whether she liked it or not.
“Well, Bird?” Hodel bit into the darkness.
The little bird. That was what they called her. Chava would flit around the house, the barn, the fields, the town, leaving her “bird droppings” everywhere. Handkerchiefs, books, apple cores, bits of glass or string or pretty stones she had collected, then lost within a day. She was an innately childlike presence in their household, a luftmensh—a dreamer with her head in the clouds—her wide-open mind preoccupied with other things. Books, mostly. Dreams.
Chava was clever and could not stave her appetite for reading, for any kernel of information she could collect from a world beyond their own. Even her appearance was birdlike: delicately framed, enviably long hands, a small bust, a milky-pale complexion, and an open face with two of the sincerest eyes one could ever gaze upon.
Having spent so many of her earliest years as the youngest child, Chava quickly grasped a sense of her headstrong family and went about catching her flies with honey; she was mild and genuine, the baby, endowed with an irresistible disposition.
“What in the world is it, Chaveleh?”
Tonight, apparently, was a poor example of that.
Chava hovered above her sister for a moment, then uttered a swift, “Oh, nothing.”
“I hate you; I really do,” grunted Hodel, returning to her pillow with new purpose. “Go to sleep!”
“It is just that,” Chava said, her voice fragile, her breath against her sister’s ear. “I dreamed . . . I dreamed we were both sent very far away.”
“Well, I suppose some day we shall, all of us, be sent away from home. To join a husband.”
“Shall
we?”
Hodel turned her head and sighed. “Well, of course. You know we shall.”
“Yes, but must we? Can we not stay like this in this tiny bed for always?”
“Chaveleh, you know we cannot stay here for always; we should become very cross with each other if we were to grow old and gray and still be in this bed. Besides, I would sooner marry Reb Avrahm’s hideous boy or that invalid son of the innkeeper than remain in a bed with my sister into eternity. Now, go to sleep.”
But Chava could not. Hodel felt her lying there, still but rigid. She could feel the beating of her sister’s heart.
“Hodel?” Chava said, this time her voice so full of anguish that it woke Hodel fully.
“Oh, Chaveleh. What is it?” She reached for Chava’s open face within the darkness, cupping it between her hands.
Chava spoke again, her voice even fainter. “Hodel . . .” Then she stopped.
Hodel could feel the moisture upon Chava’s cheeks. “What on earth is the matter, Bird?” she asked.
“Hodel,” Chava continued haltingly. “Do you—do you think I am a fool?”
The question unsettled Hodel. “A fool?”
“Oh, then you do,” Chava said woefully.
“No!”
It was difficult for Hodel to be objective; they had been reared so closely, born practically on top of each other. At times, it felt as though looking upon Chava was rather like looking into a glass.
“I want—I so want to be worldly. Discerning,” Chava said.
I want to be asleep, Hodel thought but refrained from uttering aloud. Instead, she tried to comfort her sister. “A clever girl like you, who has read all those books?”
“Hodel,” Chava said. “I wish you would tell me—”
Hodel could feel her sister steadying herself to broach some dreadful thing as Chava held her breath. At last the words poured from her, as if a final drop of torment had made her heart overflow.
“I wish you would tell me,” Chava said, “what you thought of Fyedka.”
At that, Hodel flushed. Perhaps Chava flushed too; she could not know, so dark was the room. Heart pounding, Hodel was rigid, her stomach tight and lurching. “Fyedka?”
“Yes,” Chava said.
Hodel should have known it; Chava must have been getting up her nerve to ask for several weeks. “The young Russian man who is so often in the bookshop.”
“I think . . .” Hodel said simply, “I think him very kind. And very . . . considerate of us. Of our ways. I like him.” She hesitated only slightly before adding, “I do.”
“You do?” Chava’s voice lifted.
“I do.”
Chava relaxed within her grip, the tears upon her cheeks coming harder now, but in relief perhaps. “And do you think I shall be sent far away like in my dream for so looking forward to seeing him in the shops every day? Am I a fool indeed?”
Hodel rose from the pillow and took Chava up in her arms fully, her closest sister, her soul’s companion. “We shall all go away someday,” she said. “How far is up to us, I suppose.”
Chava nodded, wiping her eyes, enveloped there in the arms of her sister. “Yes.”
“Now, for goodness’ sake, do go to sleep, Bird, before I squeeze the talk right out of you.”
“Yes, Hodel. Good night.”
And just like that, they slept.
eight
JUST AFTER DAWN, HODEL WAS ESCORTED INTO A ROOM FILLED floor-to-ceiling with files, bookshelves, and cabinets, as well as a great number of tall desks, where several prisoners sat writing upon high stools while overseers paced lazily, keeping loose eyes upon the workers. This was administrative exile: the punishment of pushing papers, which required no trial or sentencing procedure, ideal for insipid, nonviolent, or academic-minded political prisoners so often useless for hard-labor sentences.
All the eyes in the room darted toward her. They knew who she was. Once the supervisors were out of view, they approached. These were the sentenced Jews—some from as far as Lyubavichi and Slabodka, even a handful from Zolodin, Kasrilevke, and Rabelevka, near her own Ana-tevka. They held out their hands and quietly addressed her in Yiddish.
An overseeing commandant entered, and the men scurried back like mice. One of the men in particular caught Hodel’s eye; she could see him watching her eagerly, even as he pretended to continue his writing. When the commandant was out of sight again, he rose, tilted toward her, and bowed with his cap.
“You are the intended wife of Perchik Tselenovich, yes?”
She nodded.
“I am an ally,” he whispered urgently. “Listen closely to me: they have scheduled your hearing before the Commission of Inquiry and Deportation.” He continued, “I have been keeping watch for your name, attempting to hold them off, but last night your case arrived on my desk. I filed the papers myself this morning. You require a strategy, ma’am.” He explained that this place was the seat of government in the region, the artery for all other encampment points eastward. He looked over his shoulder, hands shaking. It was here, he whispered hurriedly, where most political revolutionaries were received. “All the wives are processed and assigned to the future destination of their husband,” he explained. But because Hodel had made the journey in her own right and was not yet the legal wife of Perchik Tselenovich, she was therefore in a most precarious circumstance.
“Wives are practically obliged to follow their husbands to internment,” he said, taking her hands in his. “But they have a tight leash on Perchik and thus have many reasons to keep you close. You are suspicious—you may be his conspirator. And you are valuable collateral. Perchik may be moved to talk if they threaten him with harm to you.”
“And when I am no longer ‘valuable’?”
He tightened his grip upon her hands. He explained that the Chief Commander would determine her fate. “They have the authority to make it appear as though you never existed at all!” he said.
It was worse than she feared.
“Give them anything they ask,” he urged. “They shall sentence you regardless. Stay alive. You must. Perchik held out hope for you even as he was being carted away.”
“But where is he, friend?” she asked, quaking.
“East. A labor camp—that is all I know. I deal only with hearing papers—deportation documents are accessible exclusively to those with the keys! So that’s most important: befriend anyone with keys.”
“Oi! Seven eighty-eight!” a commandant shouted from across the room. “Back to it!”
The man put his hand upward in apology and turned back to Hodel. “Go with God,” he said, bowing once more, and then returned to his post.
“You!” the overseer called to Hodel. “Come, girl. We need you on the books at last. Your prints and things.” She was carted away into the processing office.
nine
FOR THREE DAYS, HODEL CONVINCED HERSELF THAT SHE WOULD resist the stranger. She may have succeeded had it not been for her sisters.
“What is he even teaching you?” Hodel asked as they cooked together, dismissing the stranger with each angry flick of potato peel.
“Yesterday we learned about Psalms,” replied Bielke. “It’s a part of the Bible.”
“I know that,” Hodel replied, with another flick of potato. “What about Psalms, then?”
“About giving—and fairness and things,” said Shprintze, a little pensive. “It was all things we already knew about the charitable giving of tzedakah, but this was for many people, rather than just a few. ‘He has distributed freely; he has given to the poor; his righteousness endures forever; his horn is exalted in honor.’”
“That is from Psalms,” Bielke whispered to Hodel, at which Hodel smirked and threw a potato peel at her sister.
“I will say,” said Shprintze, “for someone so concerned with giving things away, he sounded very . . . cross.”
Chava laughed below her breath.
“What, Bird?” Hodel demanded.
“Nothing.” Chava
put her hand to her mouth, as if to keep the laughter from spilling out. “I just thought you didn’t care about the lessons.”
“I don’t!” Hodel replied. “I’m just trying to protect my sisters.” She threw her head back in defiance.
“From what?”
“Why, from stupidity,” she sputtered, “naturally.”
The others stared at her, still and blank.
“Right,” said Chava with a little raise of her eyebrow, “naturally.”
The next morning, Hodel watched the stranger as she cleaned and re-cleaned the milk pails.
The lessons had not yet begun, and he was washing himself by the well. Hodel studied him as he did: the particular angles of his neck, the way his hair fell into his face when his head was uncovered, the arch of his brow, the natural openness of his face, the pure, undiluted brilliance and distinctive sadness in his eyes. Her breath caught, and she was all at once quite faint, and as her head fell heavily upon the wall of the barn, she reveled in its roughness. It felt accurate, deserved—the thought of him leaving her weak with something she had no language to express.
She gazed at the scene laid out before her: Perchik and her little sisters poised like figurines, acting out a kind of parable. She jolted as the lesson ended.
“It was a very interesting lesson,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Though I’m not sure that the rabbi would agree.”
He kept his eyes intent upon his reading and did not look at her; he spoke laconically, as if he expected her to be there and that fact was far less interesting than his book. “And what about the rabbi’s son?”
Hodel spun on her heel—you little snitch—her eyes raged at Chava, and she chased her out of the yard.
At this, Hodel fought with him. He was smart, arrogant, insufferable. With every sentence from his mouth she longed to burst his logic to dust, and she might very well have succeeded had the next sensation not been the rough, bare skin of his hands against hers. The vine of tendons creeping from his arms and down through his fingertips sent a surge of indescribable heat straight through to her own, and neither dared to breathe. At last she inhaled sharply. What if someone saw us touching! Alone and unchaperoned, out here in the open daylight! But she did not release her grip. She would not move until he allowed her to.
After Anatevka Page 4
