by Anna Solomon
“There’s anything you could want, all sold off carts. Sausages, rolls, nuts, coffee. Every street a market. Anything you could dream of. This morning I bought this hat! You like? None’s kosher, of course, but until we’re back on Max land that’s all right with me. Of course I shouldn’t presume. The lady may feel differently.” Jacob did a little jump, lifting his round hat. “Does the lady feel differently?”
Minna giggled and shook her head. If she had the energy, she thought, if she were not stuck with him, she would probably avoid a boy as overeager as Jacob. At the very least she’d be embarrassed for him. He was like a boy actor playing a man actor playing a boy. She followed him into the narrow streets, stumbling as she learned to walk on land again, her feet slamming it unexpectedly. Jacob bought her meat on a stick, then meat in a roll—“Compliments of Max,” he said. “Thank Max!”—then a cup of coffee which scalded her throat. She asked for another cup, to see if Max could afford it, and because she wanted to be awake to see the city.
But no matter how hard she tried to pay attention, Minna would not remember many details. Less than a mile to the east, a great bridge rose above a river, shining in its newness, but they didn’t know to go look. She would remember the streets: the hard, dark stone, America’s granite; the smell of grease and smoke. Brick and marble and carriages and cripples. The whole way to the rail yards one long stumble, her ears vibrating with the ghost of the ship’s engine. New York, she would think—New York, she would say, years later, once she’d found the right words, and then honed her delivery, once she’d begun attending the sorts of evening gatherings where one said such things—New York is like being in the middle of a parade where everyone has been called home, all at once, in all different directions.
Then she was on a train again, and Jacob had enough money to buy them a bench—“praise be to Max”—and before they left the platform, she fell asleep.
IT felt like days, her sleep. She woke only when the train stopped, and even then she woke in sleep, her head flopping against the window. She dreamed the kind of dreams that seem to be dreams of other dreams. She dreamed of Galina curled up in a trunk, and in the trunk a hole leading to the sea. She dreamed of Galina, afraid, not knowing how to swim. Faga holding Galina in her arms, rocking her, cooing. She dreamed she was on a train across America, dreaming. She dreamed of the men who’d shaved, per the magician’s instructions, and of the stark white outlines left by their beards, so that as they stood at Castle Garden awaiting inspection, they looked more bearded than they ever had when they actually were.
Minna felt something touching her face. This went on for years, the fingers traveling her features, again and again, as if the toucher did not trust that Minna was still Minna from one moment to the next. When she finally woke, she was gazing through her own fingers. The train was passing through a woods so thick with ferns it looked bottomless. For a long moment she couldn’t say what continent she was on, then she turned to see Jacob, smiling.
“You’re alive!” He handed her a roll and a square of cheese. “We’re past Pittsburgh. You missed it. Gorgeous, filthy place.”
“Where are we going?”
“Sodokota. That way.” He pointed ahead. “It’s not the most cosmopolitan place, but there’s plenty of land. Well. Plenty of grass and rocks. Yes. I can see you know all about it.” He bent over his lap, removed a long blade of grass he’d tucked into one boot, as if to demonstrate—Grass!—then straightened back up. “Didn’t they tell you anything?”
“They?”
“I don’t know. Whoever Max wrote off to—he’s not a detail man. Or at least he didn’t tell us any details. Where you’re coming from, for instance.”
“Odessa.”
Jacob let out a whistle. “City of Thieves?” He set the grass between his teeth and let it bounce as he talked. “Well. I won’t lie. Where we’re going, in a word, it’s not Odessa. You could call it a farm, but it’s not really that yet either. We’ve got chickens, one horse, one cow. A mule who may or may not be alive by our return. A tool approximating a plow.”
Minna couldn’t tell if he was joking. She couldn’t imagine him a farmhand, though she could imagine him pretending to be. “How long have you worked for Max?” she asked.
“Oh . . .” Again that slippery grin. “As long as I can remember.”
“And still the farm is not a farm?”
“We’ve only been there one year.”
“And before that?”
“Well. In a word. We were just like you. Sailed into NewYork two years ago, hungry as dogs, then got sent to Cincinnati, where the rich old Jews liked us plenty. They housed us and fed us and gave us English lessons and jobs in a furniture factory. Very kind, the rich old Jews. But then people like us kept coming, and they weren’t so happy anymore. Imagine. Their dilemma!” Jacob drew in his chin and spoke in a booming voice. “‘How will we teach so many, all at once, how to dress properly, and clip their beards to a hygienic length, and walk without their feet flopping and their heads in the sky, and talk without their hands flailing, and tell their women to stop looking, every one, like a widow?!’ You can imagine. They’d worked so hard to prove that they weren’t dirty Jews, and then here we were, thousands of dirty Jews! They sent us out into the towns, in a word. But some, who were willing, they sent further.” Jacob raised a finger. “As a farmer,” he mimicked, “even a Jew can be free! He can build a new Palestine!” He laughed. “Am Olam, they called us. Eternal People. As if the name would be enough to sell us on the scheme. Well. It was. The rich old boys . . . well, the rich old boys backed by the richest of them all, the Baron de Vintovich himself, the man who’s concocted the whole mess, they gave us money for tools, and food for the first year—though Max only took half of what they offered.”
“He’s proud?” It was the only question Minna could think to ask, though the answer, she understood, was beside the point. Jacob wasn’t joking. They were headed for a farm. Or a not even-a-farm.
“Proud. Yes. And suspicious. Most of us who joined were sent to colonies like Bethlehem Yehuda. New Jerusalem. There’s even a New Odessa! But good old Max thought it couldn’t be a good idea—so many Jews crammed together all over again. So he decided to go it alone.”
“Did you want to go to a colony?” Minna asked.
“Of course!”
“Then why stay with him?”
A look of despair crossed Jacob’s face. “Well. In a word. Actually.” He winced. “Max is my father. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to trick you. Oh, it’s not funny anymore, I know. Maybe it wasn’t ever funny. Samuel says I’m never funny actually.”
“Who’s Samuel?”
“My brother. He might have come for you, he’s older and most say smarter—and better-looking, too, nose like a Roman—but he’s also the only one of us with half a wit about the farm.”
Minna said nothing. It was hard to tell if the train had sped up or her blood had slowed down.
“I guess they didn’t tell you about the stepmother part. You don’t look pleased, I must say. You look downright Indian, in fact—now there’s a good one for you. You’ll understand soon enough. But I can assure you, we’re good boys. Samuel’s not half the ass I am. At least not so plainly.”
Minna refused to look at him.
“Don’t worry,” Jacob said. “We’ll survive.”
“I didn’t come here to survive.” This was said before Minna could stop herself from saying it, her voice one she hadn’t heard in years, sharp and stubborn—thick as clay, her aunts used to say. The passing trees seemed to be watching her, instead of the other way around. Behind her, Jacob laughed.
“What. You’d rather die?”
“Ha,” Minna said to the window. She didn’t want to be a stepmother any more than she’d wanted to have one. When the rabbis came knocking, encouraging her father to find another wife—Bavegn! Move on!—Minna would stand in the corner and glare. The only stepmothers she’d known—or not known, no, stepmothers one only
saw—were odd, quickly aging women with an acute jumpiness about them. They’d been divorced for not bearing children, or driven from their own villages for unknown but easily imagined reasons, or they were simply too dumb or poor or ugly to have married on the first round. Stepmothers communed with other women, but as inferiors. From what Minna could gather, the stepmother was expected to love another woman’s children as if they were her own, but not so intimately that she was—like a real mother—also allowed to hate or punish them.
“Where are you even from?” she asked Jacob. “Or will you make that up, too.”
“Kotelnia. South of Kiev. It was a town, like the others. Our mother sold wood.” He paused. “That’s the truth.”
“Have you heard of Beltsy? Near Kishinev?”
“No.”
Minna frowned.
“Have you heard of Kotelnia?” he asked.
“No.”
Jacob shrugged. “Well then.”
THE train drove through another night. When Minna woke, the forest had fallen away to clumps and lines of trees. The land was pale and dry. There were fields, and houses, and every so often a dirt street lined with wooden buildings that could almost count as a town. Minna felt blank, almost fine, watching all this. There were yards to go with the houses, and in some cases fences. Everything looked dusty but new, as if the whole country was a woodshop.
“For you.”
Jacob’s voice cracked. She woke more fully. Her circumstances returned to her. She tried to ignore them by making her eyelids heavy, narrowing her frame of sight. Even the people, she thought, looked dusty. Later, she would learn to distinguish them—Swedes or Danes or Germans or Finns—but for now she noted their pale, strangely simple clothes, and the mild way they held their faces, as if without great expectation. She could get off at the next station, she thought, and drop herself down among them.
“Minna.”
Jacob handed her coffee in one of the tins he carried looped around his belt. A couple days ago, she had thought this habit charming, but now it struck her as a cumbersome, impractical thing to do, an American affectation though she suspected he got it wrong, just like the grass between his teeth which he often wound up chewing, absentmindedly, until he’d swallowed it. The tin was too thin for hot coffee, the kind she associated with street people. Minna set it down on the bench untasted, forcing Jacob, when he sat, not to spread his legs as wide as usual. She wondered if his father and brother took up as much unnecessary space; if, at the next station, she could in fact work up the courage to step off the train and be gone. She imagined herself standing on the platform. She imagined herself walking down one of the pale, dusty streets. But she couldn’t fill in any of the details—where she would go, what she would eat, who she would meet and how she would understand them, or they her. It was fantasy, all over again—Minna Losk, lost in fantasy. Which had got her, thus far, where? On a train hurtling past towns that were not hers, heading for a not-farm with not-sons and a lame mule.
“Aren’t you going to eat?”
She had avoided, so far, looking at the rolls Jacob brought for breakfast. She had principles. She had anger to attend to. But now she was defeated, and hungry, and she peeked: the rolls were frosted in white, like little cakes. Saliva sat on her tongue. She turned toward the window as she took the first bite, which left an addictive sting on her tongue—the frosting stiff and perfect, the inner roll flaky, a luxurious waft of vanilla bean filling the roof of her mouth—and when she’d eaten the whole thing, her fingers and lips were sticky. There was nothing to do but wash it down with the coffee, then take the handkerchief that Jacob held out and wipe her hands.
“You could be my sister,” he said.
Minna threw the handkerchief back at him. But he wasn’t joking, she realized. His face was humble, like Ilya’s, a round boy face wanting nothing but to be liked. He didn’t mean it as she’d taken it, as a comment on her age. He meant can.You can be my sister.
“Why don’t you shush for once,” she told him. The roll had gone to her head, all sugar and a longing to give in. “Shush.” Sister . It was an indulgent thing for him to say. Not like a fine piece of jewelry might be indulgent, solidly, tolerably, but in the lazy, shapeless way people talked about places they’d never been to.
AT some point when Minna wasn’t looking, the houses had grown less frequent. The trees were lonesome now, scattered in ones and twos. The fields had the parched look of late summer, the rows overgrown but crisp, as if you could reach a hand in and effortlessly lift the plants out by the roots. Even more of them looked like they’d never been planted at all. They weren’t fields, she realized; just rolling, empty land.
They were getting close, Jacob said—close, at least, to where the rail ended.
Late in the day, the sky began to look bruised. The falling sun followed them, crimson bleeding into plum. Far off, Minna saw smoke, but there was nothing between her and it except the desolate, purpling hills, and she couldn’t tell how far off it really was. It could be a warm house, or a factory, or a whole village burning.
But if there was fire, she thought, there had to be a woods somewhere. There had to be something apart from grass and grass.
“How old is he?” she asked.
“Max?”
“Who else?”
“He won’t tell you. He’s—suspicious.”
“I’m not asking him to tell me.” But already Minna wasn’t sure she wanted to know. “How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“And Samuel?”
“Eighteen.”
She thought of skin as old as her father’s and felt an illness in her throat.
“Your mother,” she said. “How old was she when she died?”
“Oh, she didn’t die.”
Minna was silent.
“She came to see the land, then said she was going back to Cincinnati. I have my suspicions. I think she would have gone somewhere bigger, like Chicago. She likes crowds. ‘Soh-ciety.’ There’s a word for you. But Samuel says she wouldn’t have gone that far from us. In any case, she only stayed two days.”
“It must be quite a place,” Minna said bitterly. “This ‘farm.’”
“She isn’t a rough sort of woman.”
“Unlike me, you mean?”
Jacob pulled a fresh piece of grass from his boot.
“He didn’t have to send away for a complete stranger,” Minna said. “He could have picked a wife the way most people do. Don’t you have any family left in Kotelnia? Friends, at least? Someone who knows someone?”
“A few.”
“Why not ask them to find him a nice wife who looked just like your mother?”
Jacob hesitated. “I don’t know, I guess. Maybe he didn’t want them to know she’d left.”
“So on top of being proud, he’s a coward?”
But Jacob’s eyes had taken on a forlorn glaze she didn’t want to look at, and Minna dropped the conversation. She understood. Max had hired Rosenfeld’s for the same reason that her father had gone to the mines. She turned her face back to the window. Night fell quick and dark between the hills, like rain filling puddles. She wished they weren’t almost at the end. She wanted to ride through to morning and wake in another land again. Farther on, according to Jacob, farther than they would go, there were real hills, even mountains, called Black like Odessa’s sea. Here, though, it was barren. Here was a place like the Russian steppes, where she’d heard wolves sniffed in packs and turned children into meat. She shivered at the idea of walking off the train into the dark. Jacob meant well, but he was not a man you’d trust to protect you. He wasn’t even a man.
He’d fallen asleep.
Or perhaps he hadn’t. It was hard to tell, when he started to talk suddenly, whether he was really asleep or just pretending to be. Minna guessed the latter when she saw his thumbs searching each other in his lap. “Forty to one hundred and twenty,” he said.
It took Minna a moment to understand what this meant
. Then she recalled: in the Torah, Moses had lived to be one hundred and twenty. The men in Beltsy had used this number the same way, saying it after their own age so as to obscure their years and throw off the Angel of Death.
Which was another way to say: Max was forty. Which meant nothing, of course. Which should not cause this burn in Minna’s stomach. It was only years, piled up.
MINNA’S dismay subsided a little as the train drew into the platform. There was a firebox raging, and lanterns swinging, and a reassuring commotion in the air. It was as if they had arrived backstage in the night’s theater—as if all the blackness had only been an illusion, manufactured here. She felt a surge of hope.
“Welcome to Mitchell,” Jacob said.
“Mishel.”
“MiTCHell.”
She tried, quietly; the word made her lips flop out. The air was warm but lacked any dampness. Her face felt taut in the way that made one remember it as a skin, a way she hoped would make her look older when Max first glimpsed her.
But Jacob, standing on tiptoe, was looking for a man called Otto. A neighbor, he explained, who’d offered to drive them back.
“Don’t you have a wagon? At least?” What sort of man missed—twice!—his new wife’s arrival? Minna wanted him to see her now, with her face taut. She had combed her hair—again. She was travel-worn, depleted, yet even this felt somehow womanly—her cheekbones, she imagined, looked high and indifferent. Minna’s cheekbones, Galina always said, were her one stroke of elegance.
“Of a sort,” Jacob said. “But only the one horse. The mule’s not much good for distance. We’re still most of the night from home. Besides, Otto’s picking up supplies off this run.”
Minna huffed. “Otto.”
“A German fellow! This tall.” He lifted an arm as high as it would go. “This broad.” He cupped his hands around vast shoulders of air. “A real American kind of German.”
They found Otto’s wagon, then Otto himself. He greeted Jacob with a handshake—briefer, Minna saw, than Jacob would have liked—then turned to Minna. He took her hand in his and spoke to Jacob in English.
