by Anna Solomon
“‘The little bride,’ he calls you,” Jacob said.
Otto’s face was warm and frank, so bare of artifice or beard Minna felt slightly embarrassed, and sorry for having thought of the German boys at the border waving urine-soaked sticks in women’s faces. Otto didn’t linger with her hand, and his ears stuck out, an awkwardness which tempered his height and struck her as further proof of his virtue. He took her bundle and lifted it into the back of his wagon, then Jacob helped him load two barrels of kerosene and a tall coil of rope. Otto nodded toward Minna and again said something to Jacob in English.
“You can speak to me in German,” Minna said to him slowly, in Yiddish. “I’ll understand you.”
Otto smiled and looked to Jacob.
“I’ve asked him to talk to me in English,” Jacob said. “For practice. He says you can use that rope, for a pillow.”
It was almost like a nest, once Minna settled in. She found a skin of some kind, and covered herself with it. Buffalo, she learned later. The wagon dipped and jounced, but the rope buffered her from the hardest blows. Her head fell back. She drifted through a haze of tobacco smoke and English, listening to the kerosene shift in the barrels.
Only much later, when she woke, did Minna remember her fear. How long they’d been driving, she was uncertain; she knew only that an utter, saturated darkness surrounded her. The men did not speak. There were stars, and a quarter moon, but these seemed more distant than Minna had ever known them to be. Her eyelids were heavy. She longed to sink into the rope again. But what of wolves? And what else might be watching from the unseeable stillness surrounding the wagon? She pushed herself upright. She rubbed her eyes, pulled on her eyelids, stared alertly into the red-black air.
Later, she would look back and think fear was like that for her, when she was young, and truly had things to fear: a thing to be remembered, like an item on a list. And so often she’d focused on the wrong ones: she’d feared the dark night, for instance, instead of her future. She would feel sorry for herself, that she’d missed certain wonders, and bit her fingers so often. She bit them now, guarding against sleep, but her fingertips were still callused from the yarn and the tactic wasn’t effective. She scuffed her boots against the wood floor, only half aware that she was also trying to rouse the men from their silence.
“We’re almost there,” Jacob said. “See?”
Minna climbed out of the rope and leaned out the wagon’s side. Up ahead was a light—a single, dim orb the color of sap. She couldn’t see the outlines of a house, just the light, which looked so odd, so out of place in the rest of the night, she felt a pity for it—as if it were the traveler and not she.
“Don’t worry.” Jacob spoke in Russian now, as if to keep something from Otto. “Think of it as an adventure,” he said. “That’s what I do. Every day. I just pretend I’m on one big adventure.”
Beside, the light, a figure rose. Otto called, “Hunh!”
NINE
IT was hard to tell, at first, whether Max was unnaturally tall or the doorway was unnaturally short. He stood as he did in the picture—the real picture, that was, undistorted by Minna’s more optimistic contrivances: hands empty by his sides, feet pointed out, knees locked. His beard was not trimmed in any style; it was simply hair, covering much of his face.
Minna didn’t move. This had been her last chance—her arrival. She’d come so far. Now she was here. And that was him.
Otto swung down with the lantern and helped her out. Minna teetered slightly with the shock of firm earth, then she began what felt like a mile-long walk toward Max. For a man standing in front of his own house, he looked nervous; he wore a caught, wincing smile, as if he would like to somehow rearrange himself but feared seeming indecisive. When he spoke, his voice was passably deep but crumbly, like a dough rolled too thin.
“Minna.” He looked at her hand, which she had forgotten to hold out. Then, shyly, he took it in his own, and said, to her horror, “My love.”
Minna almost jerked away, before she remembered that Otto and Jacob were watching. She was embarrassed for Max even more than for herself. He was not young enough to be naive—where had he learned to expose himself in such a way? He could not love her, of course. He’d just met her. And besides, who used that word out loud? Only poor people could marry for love. Minna tasted the salt of rising tears. She was determined, she was desperate, not to fall apart. She thought, At least his fingers are soft—at least they’re not a poor man’s fingers. She ignored the fact that his grip was like wet paper. She ignored what soft hands might say about a farmer. Maybe, she thought, he meant “love” simply as an indicator of fact—the fact of the situation between a husband and his wife-to-be. Like one might look at a bolt of cloth at market and say, out loud, muslin, just to have said it.
She took a deep breath. “Hello, Max,” she said.
“Please. Call me Motke.”
Otto cleared his throat. “Safe and sound, then,” he said, enunciating his German carefully. “I will be going. Tell Samuel I said hello.”
“Wait!” Max dropped Minna’s hand. “I must pay you . . .”
“Nein.”
“But I must.”
“Nein.” Otto held up his palms, turned to Jacob, and said something else. If he was aggravated, he hid it well inside his clipped, clean voice. He stood, as Minna’s father had, with his legs set a bit farther apart than necessary, as if he might be called upon at any moment to hold up a falling rock. Her father, Minna realized, had been younger than Max was now.
“Here, please . . .” Max reached into his pockets, stammering.
“Don’t be stupid,” Jacob said, climbing down at last. He let out a sigh of resignation. “That’s what he’s saying, in a word. Don’t be stupid. He doesn’t want your money.”
Max continued to protest, but Otto had already leaped back into the wagon. He called good night, the wheels creaked into motion. Minna looked up at the house, straining her eyes to see it more clearly, but there were only stars, dim with their own crowding, and the bouncing glow of the wagon. She felt a wretched envy.
Suddenly Max called again. “Wait! Her trunk!” But he didn’t run anywhere. He turned to Jacob. “He left her with nothing.”
“It’s right here,” Jacob said, holding up Minna’s bundle.
Max eyed it suspiciously. “I thought you’d bought flour.”
Jacob smiled. “That would have been smart.”
Max stiffened. “Yes. That would have been smart.”
The night blared its excruciating silence. Then a groan broke through: Minna’s stomach, announcing hunger. She waited for her face to burn, for her mouth to say zayt moykhl—yet neither happened. She couldn’t locate any desire to impress Max. Instead a belligerence welled up in her. She took the bundle from Jacob and turned to Max. “They told you I would arrive with luggage? You thought I was rich?”
“No. If you were rich, you wouldn’t come here.”
“What did they tell you?”
“Almost nothing.”
Minna was suddenly sorry. But this wasn’t remorse, or even pity. It was closer, perhaps, to sorrow. She wondered if Max was as disappointed by her youth as she was by his age. She wondered with what money he’d paid for her crossing. And the Rosenfeld’s examination? Did he have any idea what he’d paid for? She tried to find his eyes in the dark, then thought it better that she couldn’t.
“Then we are even,” she said.
Max’s outline seemed to melt slightly. He turned. She could see his lips now: thick for a man, and alarmingly pink. “This is a discussion for another time,” he said. “You are hungry. My love.”
INSIDE, the house—the room—felt even smaller than it looked, the scale almost miniature, as if built for dwarves. There was a short table. Three shipping crates for chairs. One bed, a small stove, a bench lined with buckets. The floor was dirt, the walls were dirt. In one corner, a hole had been dug out: here she saw, emerging from a blanket, curly black hair. The other one, Samu
el, asleep. Or pretending to sleep, she thought. More likely he just didn’t want to meet her. Which was fine. Minna did not particularly want to meet him. It was enough, for one night, to meet a husband. Better to leave something still unknown—though she wished, instead of a stepson, that it might be a second room. The air smelled of breath and smoke, and something richer, ranker—a pile of horse dung, she saw, by the stove. Their fuel, she realized.
“Please,” said Max, and handed her a steaming plate.
What kind of meat she’d been served, Minna couldn’t tell, but it tasted sweet and was warm. When she offered some to Jacob, he looked to his father, then shook his head. She didn’t offer again. She felt greedy and light, and though the baseness of her hunger disturbed her, along with the baser baseness of how simple it was to ease, she had a sense that her future called for a certain hoarding, and ate the rest without stopping even to say thank you.
TEN
THE men were gone. Minna felt it before she saw. An earthen stillness in the room. She rolled over. The only window looked like it might have been a mistake: a snag of light near the door, white as a rag. If she faced away she could almost be in her attic in Odessa. If not for the smell of dung. If not for the uncovered straw beneath her, or the knowledge that in this room, this plank bed was the trophy. Last night, before laying himself down in the hole with his sons, Max had lowered his eyes and said, “You’ll have the bed.”
She’d been full with meat, and sleepy, and glad to be left alone. She was glad for it now. Still, there was a flatness in her chest, as if she were trapped beneath a pane of storefront glass. She thought of the eggbeater in Galina’s kitchen. She thought: I should have taken it. I should have taken the eggbeater and the good spatula and the good knife. Like Faga. I should have taken as much as I could carry.
The door was lighter than her hand expected, made of brokendown crates, and opened too quickly: the sky was fierce in its light. She stumbled out squinting; seeing no one, hearing nothing, she squatted to pee. Then haltingly, warily, she blinked her way to vision. She couldn’t believe, at first, that her eyes were working properly, for there was nothing to see but grass, the same infinite monotony they’d ridden through on the train. Minna turned to face the house and saw that it was built into the side of a short hill. It was, she realized, more of a cave than a house. She circled around to the other side, where there was no wall or door; if it weren’t for the little tin chimney poking out, the hill would look like nothing more than a hill. So that must have been where Max had stood for the photograph. He’d appeared to be standing in front of nothing but sky because he was. There might be nothing for miles as tall as this meager hill they called a house. She thought of the brick house on Beltsy’s square, and remembered its secret: there wasn’t a single brick. It was a wood house, like all the others, glued over with tin plate and painted to look like brick. A trick—empty as the magician’s rings. And everyone had gone around adoring it.
She stepped carefully up the side of the hill, stopping before she got to the place where she estimated the hollow began underneath. If she fell through, she guessed, she would land on the stove. It would make a fine cartoon.
She raised an arm to shade her eyes. Behind the hill stood a tree, and tied to the tree, like a horse, stood a cow. Near the cow was a small kitchen garden, a few feet across, and a little roof, under which six or so chickens dozed on their nests. The cow was thin, her udders like raindrops about to split from an eave. The tree itself was barely twice the size of a man, and hunched and tangled—stunted, not young. Twenty feet away, a structure of some kind had collapsed into a pile of boards.
This was the yard, then. Minna lifted her eyes slowly, uncertain she wanted to see beyond. But there was a field, a small field yet real, a real field plowed and planted with a respectable crop of wheat. It was something, she thought. Next year—she dared think it, Next Year, and was proud, for she’d made a promise of her own accord, or as close as she’d ever come to her own accord—Next Year there would be more. More rows, more crops, more food, more money. Minna could picture the order of it, the bounty. She could see fields running to the horizon.
Then she saw more clearly through the sun’s glare: the wheat wasn’t right. The seeds had fallen off; the stems were bent and tangled; in some patches they were lying down, all in one direction, as if they’d been flattened by an impossibly massive wheel. Minna was conscious, suddenly, of the air at her back. She was alone, not as she’d been in her father’s house, or in Galina’s attic, but an alone that made her afraid to move in case she’d find herself gone.
At the edges of the ruined field, there were rocks, piled into little mountains. Past these, a long, lopsided swath of dark soil had been turned up but not yet planted. It was nearly September. Hardly time to break new ground. Even Minna, who’d done little more than weed her father’s vegetable patch, knew this.Yet there, at the far boundary of the plowed earth, Minna spotted the horse and mule, and three figures, digging up more rocks.
Minna shuddered, a chill through her bones of too much sun too fast. Her ears buzzed, but she could see no insects. Her eyes watered. She closed them, opened them again. And there, way off, so sudden in her vision that they seemed to have grown just for her, was a line of tall, broad-limbed trees, their branches heavy with leaves, following the path of a small creek. She felt a dazzling relief. An exaggerated dazzle, perhaps; even so, she let it wash over her. She thought: I grew up among trees, in the forest. And maybe that, too, wasn’t fully honest, since Minna had grown up on the edge of the forest, or more accurately at the edge of the town. But she was desperate for the story to cohere. It depended, she decided, on which way you faced, and Minna’s father had preferred to face away from the town and toward the forest and Minna had been his daughter and son and done the same. Yes. Minna and her father would eat their supper facing the forest, sitting in silence, side by side, watching until the birds disappeared into the trees and the trees disappeared into the night.
Minna remembered thinking of their watching as a form of guardianship, a supervision of the most natural and necessary sort—as if without her and her father, the trees would never rest. But now she realized she’d been wrong. Standing in the dry air under the hot sun on the hill that was the cave that was now her house, she thought it hadn’t been the trees that needed protecting, but her and her father who’d needed the trees. To see everything all at once, sky whole, horizon whole, sun whole, was punishing. It seemed to suggest that there was nothing else to know.
A bird circled overhead, high and silent, as still as if stuffed. Minna wanted to run toward the trees and creek, but she wanted to save them, too; some part of her feared that if she was too eager in her attentions, the trees would reveal themselves as mirages by the time she reached them. She shifted her gaze back to the figures of the men—or of two boys and a man—from here, they looked all the same. They worked at a distance from each other, shoveling their rocks into small piles, which were then loaded onto a flat of wood attached to the mule. Every so often, the mule was pulled off a little farther, and the flat dumped, making a larger pile of rocks. Meanwhile the horse was hitched to the plow, but no one was plowing.
The method, Minna thought, was not all that it could be. There was a link missing somewhere, a faulty assumption, a confusion of priority. The horse and mule barely worked. They stood at the edge of the dirt, looking smug, facing all the grass that hadn’t been turned over. There was so much grass, growing so brazenly to the horizon, that the farm—the yard and the field and the newly turned soil, even the trees—appeared to be little more than a blemish. Beyond the grass, apparently, was a country, but it couldn’t be seen from where Minna stood. Up and down the men went, stones spitting out their sides, the sunlight bleaching them so thoroughly that their movements became negligible, as if they were simply larger rocks, tending the smaller ones.
BACK in the dark of the cave, she could barely see. She sipped from the smallest bucket, hoping it was the clean
one, and when the water tasted of nothing worse than wood, she gulped it down. She sat on one of the boxes until her vision returned, then covered her eyes with her hands. Her hands smelled familiar. Blood pounded in her neck. Breathe. She calmed herself in the urgent, giddy way one does when the only other choice is panic. Then she spread one finger at a time, revealing the room in stripes so narrow she could almost pretend that it wasn’t real. Line of board. Slice of blackened iron. There was a clean edge of light. Half a candlestick, curves like knuckles. A scrap of white—
Minna was up, moving toward it, her fingers on the fringe before she realized that it was just the corner of a folded prayer shawl.She stepped back, embarrassed. What had she imagined it might be? A note from her predecessor, offering advice? A piece of lace? Proof, simply, that another woman had existed here? Ridiculous, the very thought—Max’s wife had lasted only two days, barely long enough to see the “house” dug let alone to leave behind a souvenir—yet Minna couldn’t stop herself. She looked under the pillow on the bed, lifted up the blankets in the hole. She peered behind the stove. In one corner was a box with a few shirts, all men’s, all threadbare, the pockets ripping loose. She felt the edge of the table, the undersides—there was no drawer. She opened a sack and found potatoes, opened another and found an inch of flour. In a small tin there were coffee beans; next to the coffee beans was a small stack of magazines which looked to be primers on farming. Under the shawl were two stacks of dishes and tins, a prayer book, a pair of leather boxes—Max’s tefillin— and a possibly dead cricket. Minna laid a finger on its back, easily crushed it, then pulled down the prayer book, which she gripped by the cover and shook. When nothing came loose, she shook harder. Finally a sheaf of paper dropped out and she knelt down to look. But it was only a section of the book, broken off by her assault. She tried to shove it back into place, then realized she was grinding the whole book into the dirt. She yanked it up and the pages fell out again. In the synagogue, she remembered, when a book so much as touched a bench, the women cradled and kissed it. But in Minna’s rush to pick up the pages, she tore one, and in the seconds that followed, which felt like hours, as the letters grew blacker and more accusing, she decided it would be easier to bury the page than fix it. She started to dig. That the floor was dirt suddenly seemed a blessing.
