The Little Bride

by Anna Solomon

  THE house fell in on a fine day in what must have been late September. Clouds had filled the sky that morning, splitting the sun into needles. The air was neither cold nor warm. Everything felt balanced, fair. Max had stopped digging to tell his dream. Minna was wearing her quiet smile. She liked the part where Max woke up already drowning, for the way it changed a little every time. Today he said his mouth and nose had filled with water, and the water tasted like chicken broth, so he couldn’t stop swallowing it.

  Minna’s boots thunked against the sides of the hole. And maybe that, Max would later allege, when he blamed everyone except his God for the accident, maybe that forever thunking of Minna’s boots was what kept them from hearing the cow that Otto’s son was meant to be driving. But Max was wrong, because the cow, as it climbed the hill, didn’t make a sound. It moved at its heavy, munching, bovine pace, hip joints sliding, sloping up toward its discovery: a private island of grass. It made no sound until its hooves fell through the earth—the roof—and even then Minna and Max didn’t know what had happened, for the cow gave a cry more like a child than a half-ton beast. Minna had that thought, of a child. She recalled the sickening wails of her brother. Then the cry changed, and rose, and instead of peaking once and then descending into a moo or moan, it went on rising, its pitch tightening, growing decidedly not child, not human: it was a noise so appalling and intimate, it took Minna a few breaths before she could bring herself to look.

  Only the cow’s neck and head were visible atop the wreckage, writhing as it shrieked. There was no accord between its movements and its noise—it seemed to fight itself, jerking now, bellowing then. Minna looked back at Max, who stood frozen, his shock lending his eyes a certain clarity, almost a translucence, so that they looked not brown but yellow, catlike, almost lovely. Then he looked back at her, and in his forehead was that familiar wish for her to fix things. She jumped up and began running toward the cow’s head, and the shrieks, and Otto’s son, who was riding up so slowly from the other side, his horse stepping so lazily that they reached the collapsed house at the same time. Minna gasped for breath. The man was Otto in his strawcolored hair and big ears and in his thin, exacting mouth, but he had none of his father’s warmth, or poise; he slumped in the saddle and wore the horse’s laziness in his eyes, a woeful indifference that passed over Minna and moved on to the cow. He frowned at the cow with disapproval, as if to say, There you go again. Behind Minna, Max began to shout.

  “Rope! No rope? Cowboy with no rope? Where is your rope? Where are your eyes? What is in your head?”

  Max had stopped several paces back. He wouldn’t come closer, Minna thought, unless Otto’s son dismounted, and Otto’s son wouldn’t dismount until Max stopped shouting. “Rope!” he went on. “Shtrik! Shtrik!” until the word made nonsense, until Minna turned and shouted back: “Motke! Stop!” And almost embarrassingly quickly, Max’s tirade came to an end. She was sorry, for she knew that he was right. She even knew the particular rope that might have stopped the cow; she’d slept in it. But what difference did that make now? The cow’s neck twisted frantically, its head slammed the earth. Minna looked up at Otto’s son and saw behind his frown the amused despair of one accustomed to being wrong. To shout at such a person was to shout at a rock. “Can’t you do something?” she asked.

  He looked down at her, but his eyes had retreated. She wondered what he was seeing, whether it was the cow, or his boss in Texas, or his father; if he was more afraid right now than he was sorry or ashamed. Otto was the kind of man, she thought, who faced the world with so much goodwill, so much plain, determined beneficence, that he might beat an ill-behaved son badly; even—or perhaps especially—a grown son. That was the way of things, people: each contained its own cure. The beating would be violent, she thought. But then, too, tonight would be cold without a roof. The clouds were denser now, and taller, like pilings.

  “Do something,” she said, and pulled on the man’s leg, and though it surprised her, the rough canvas pant, the thin hot knee within, the fact that she was touching—yanking—a strange man’s leg, she found, too, that it was remarkably easy. She thought of the dry indifference with which the woman in the basement had touched all those parts of Minna’s body. And here Minna had one of the man’s knees in her grip and there was no peril in it, no explosion, nothing of what she used to imagine happened when one person touched another person—what she imagined, that was, before the basement; before Galina’s knee; before Max. Perhaps the more you’d been touched, the less you suffered it. She began to shake the man’s leg.

  “Do something!”

  He was down from his horse before she knew she’d let him go, clambering up the ruined earth, reaching into his pocket, drawing a knife. Minna winced, but couldn’t look away. She felt as though she’d witnessed the cow’s death before. She had seen this moment, and the moment that would follow. Later she would realize she was confusing things, that it was the bird’s neck in her hands, and the woman’s putrid body falling into the ocean, it was these other mercy killings she remembered. But right then, as the man’s elbow swung back and the knife shot forward and the cow went silent, Minna felt no revulsion, only relief. Max cried out and she ignored him.

  SEVENTEEN

  OTTO’S house. Otto’s bed. Otto’s wife, Liesl, for a bedmate. The bed was smaller than Leo and Ruth’s, but the sheets were softer. The sheets were like the house itself, full of a clean, gently frayed grace. Otto and Liesl had a way of being well off that was apparent only if you looked slightly askance at it, with an eye for use. Their house was not two stories like Leo and Ruth’s; instead the rooms spread quietly out the back, each one tilting slightly off the last at a sort of knuckle, so that you could see the stages of its growth.

  It would take confidence, Minna thought, to build so gradually. It would take thinking that you wouldn’t be chased or have to go chasing anything for a long time.

  She smoothed her hands over the sheets. A delight, a shame, sleeping beside a woman. Yet Liesl, it could be argued, if one should need to make such an argument, seemed less a woman than a form of light. Her skin was pink, her cheeks unblemished, the bones around her eyes like ivory. Her hair grew from a widow’s peak unlike any Minna had seen, so low and blond and graciously pointed that it appeared as a sort of jewelry. Even Max, who’d come into the house bawling, threatening to sleep in the barn rather than endure the hospitality of farbrekhers, was soothed by Liesl’s presence. He’d fallen into silence as she floated past; the day seemed to overtake him; he let himself be fed. Not “their” meat, but their turnips and their black bread and their sweet, cinnamon-scented pudding.

  Liesl smelled of water and soap, a freshness Minna associated with clothes taken off a line but not yet ironed. Otto and Liesl, Minna thought, might be so confident that they saw no need to iron. She pushed the back of her head deep into the pillow, which was tall and plump, its seams visibly sewn and resewn countless times, and pictured Liesl, surrounded by goose feathers, her pink fingers sifting through for only the finest. A woman would have time to take such care if she didn’t have to iron. And why should anyone iron in Sodokota? Max had Minna press his shirts with the kettle, but what for? The grass? The stones? God, she supposed. Max had it all wrong. And Ruth and Leo, too, with their tall house and their bought-new wagon. It was embarrassing, really, if you looked at Otto and Liesl. Real Americans tried hard at working, perhaps, but not at being. To try at that was to confess a vast, simmering doubt.

  At her nape, Minna felt the after-brush of Liesl’s fingers braiding her hair before bed. Liesl had said nothing, she’d simply appeared, a warmth at Minna’s back, with a comb. She had a daughter, apparently, grown and gone somewhere as girls go.

  Minna could still feel the loosening in her scalp, as though a great itch had been scratched. And now she couldn’t help thinking of what she’d been trying all evening to ignore: her wedding wish, under the chuppah and the flour sack and the racket of hands clapping and spoons clanging: she’d wished tha
t she might go home with Otto and his lovely wife.

  And here she was.

  Did that make it her fault?

  But to believe that would be to believe that something or someone had answered her wish. Which would make her wish more like prayer. Minna did not pray. And why would this Something, this Someone, who by all evidence had never given Minna a second thought, suddenly start to answer her wishes—and in such a backward way? Who would think of such a thing as a cow falling through a house? There was danger, it seemed, in making such a wish. Punishment, perhaps, for daring to ask. Maybe you had no right to ask if you didn’t believe.

  She lay perfectly still, on her back. She was determined to stay like this all night, so as not to roll or kick by accident.

  DAYLIGHT, and through Minna’s eyelids: My house! You destroyed my house! She waited, holding her breath, willing her eyes shut as if to send away a bad dream, but the cries returned. My house my house my house!

  The bedroom door was closed. Liesl had already risen. At the foot of the bed, she’d laid out a dress for Minna, plain but of a cloth finer than muslin, and with a collar Minna especially liked, dyed dark blue and printed in yellow flowers. She was glad that Liesl had never met Lina, and could not compare Minna to her. She buttoned the dress slowly, pretending that these were her buttons, and that this was her bedroom. The voice beyond the door was only a neighbor, yes, some man who’d come in blustering about fences and trees and vegetables gone to rot and aching bones and oh, what if the world was just outside, with its gutters and feuds!

  My house!

  She took great pains making the bed. She drew the curtain. She folded the nightgown Liesl had lent her. In a small mirror above the dressing bureau she lifted her chin so that the collar of Liesl’s dress did not sag. She hadn’t seen herself since the wedding, in Ruth’s mirror. What kind of wife, she thought, was not given her own mirror? Lina beautiful-in-the-way-no-one-disputes certainly would have had one. I would look better, she thought, with a plumper neck. Smaller ears. My nose leans to the right.

  She thought of Samuel. She thought of Ilya, who was better to think on, a mirage now, safe. She thought of Max, who was best to think on, and easy enough, for his cries were on this continent; they were in this house; they were close enough Minna could feel them in her chest.

  He was pacing the perimeter of the front room, too absorbed to notice Minna’s entrance, throwing his arms every time he shouted, “House!” while Otto, seated at the table, punctuated the onslaught with sympathetic “mmm”s and sincere nods. His son sat nearby, saying nothing. His name was Friedrich, though Liesl called him Fritzi. Which made Minna feel a little sorry for him. Fritzi. But even when Max daggered a finger at him and shouted, “Nar!”—a word which enjoyed the exact same meaning in German—the boy didn’t flinch. He sat backward in his chair, straddling it as he would a horse, his hands hanging loosely over the back rungs as if to show Max how little he cared. “Fool!” Max shouted again.

  “Motke.”

  But perhaps she’d spoken too softly. She repeated herself with more force, but still he ranted and stomped, and again Minna said his name but now she was humiliatied, standing in this strange room in front of near strangers in a stranger’s dress as her husband paid her no attention. Yesterday, he had listened; she had called his name and he’d stopped and she’d felt a surge of power, a rightness as a wife. But now she felt like a girl playing dress-up. That she was wearing Liesl’s dress didn’t help. And the yellow flowers, she decided, were all wrong; yellow made her look pasty.

  “Motke!” she shouted, and grabbed his arm, and as he spun toward her, raising his other arm, Minna thought that he might strike her, and this thought was not entirely unwelcome: to be struck, at least, would demand a response; she would know what to do; when it was over, he would owe her something.

  But he didn’t touch her. He wrested his arm free and said, “Do not tell me to be quiet. These people—they destroy our home and they—expect us to stay in theirs, ‘as long as you like!’ they say—they expect us to look at their little man”—he pointed at a wooden cross by the door—“and sleep in their beds and eat their treyf.”

  “Motke. It’s only a cross.” This was the only argument Minna could think to make. She was too busy wondering if what he’d said was true—could they really stay as long as they liked? Sheltered from their ignorance, and their lonesome, intimate circling, and the impending return of the boys? And why not? Maybe once they’d retrieved their few belongings, they could haul the rest of the house into the mikvah hole and pack it down and new grass would grow and you’d never have to know either one had existed.

  “Look,” she told him, pointing. “There is no little man.”

  “You’re meant to imagine the man!” Max cried. “He’s there, he’s precisely there, as there as I am here. What kind of God hangs on a wall?”

  “Motke. Please. They have shown us every kindness.”

  “Yes! Kindness! But to leave us a home, to let us alone. Have we bothered them in some way? Does the sight of us—”

  “What? Jews? You think they care?”

  “You think they don’t? You don’t think that’s exactly what they care about?”

  “Why even come here, then? Why bother moving to the middle of nowhere?”

  “To be let alone!”

  Minna felt a sudden recognition—as if she’d had this conversation before. It was Moses she was thinking of, with his shorn earlock and his fury, his determination, in the wake of his attack, to be more stubbornly faithful and different and offensive than ever before. She felt exhausted. Sad. Embarrassed, at Otto and Fritzi’s presence. She said, “They want to help. We might stay a little while—”

  “The whole winter? If we stay now, we are here the winter. As if we have nothing to do these months but thank them—”

  “But, Motke—perhaps—”

  “We stay until the boys return. That is all.”

  “But listen.” The boys. Minna missed Jacob. But not Samuel. Not in the usual way of missing. Samuel she had begun to fear, as one feared sun after days of rain, the brilliant ache behind your eyeballs, the inexplicable desire to stare directly into its glare. “If we stay with Otto and Liesl, we’ll have time to build a better house.”

  “Minna. I will not—”

  “But, Motke—”

  “Do not shame me.”

  Max had switched abruptly to Russian; his mouth looked mean and sad at once, then, as it closed, full of grief. For the first time this morning, Minna allowed herself to meet Otto’s gaze. She expected pity, or disgust, but she found only his frank, kind, solid face, and in it an offer of permission, and expectation—that she console her husband now, that she defend. Which made her grateful and also angry, so that she could not apologize or thank him in the polite way she wanted. She felt for Liesl’s collar, tugged it straight, stuck out her chin, then looked at each of the men in turn, including Max, with a fixed, false smile. “Excuse my interruption.” She went to find Liesl in the barn.

  MINNA ate one piece of bacon, two bratwurst, more chicken legs than she could count, and three bites of a pink, fleshy, frightening, delicious roast they called, simply, ham. She snuck these morsels as she cooked kosher meals for herself and Max, kosher meals in the koshered pan he’d made her scrape and boil and store apart from the others, shrouded in cheesecloth. Liesl cooked beside her, and must have seen Minna’s fingers swiftly plucking, but she made no comment. The two women rarely spoke—not in bed, not as they milked, not as Minna helped Liesl sweep the kitchen—and yet there seemed to be no animosity to this not speaking, no ill will or competition. If anything, Minna thought, the silence expressed a certain communion: as if they agreed, without saying so, that Liesl would lie for Minna if necessary, just as they agreed on the proportion of water to vinegar for scrubbing the stove, and on the futility of their husbands’ bargaining sessions in the next room.

  There were in fact no bargains being made. There was Otto making offers, and
Max rejecting them. No, he did not want Otto to build them a new house. No, he did not want Otto to provide the raw materials. No, he did not want flour and potatoes to last the winter. He wanted justice, he claimed, but for him the only justice seemed to be miracle: to open his eyes and be back in his sod cave. To Max, Otto’s apologies were deceitful, his hospitality insulting, his efforts at reparation laughable.

  Eventually Otto would excuse himself and go to work, and Max would take up his post at the windows, worrying his fingers against his thumbs, loudly chewing his beard, and speculating to anyone or no one as to the whereabouts of his sons. Something terrible had happened. They would never return. Or it was Leo’s fault, Leo was keeping them too long, taking a long route back. Or there, there they were, wasn’t that them? But wait, no, it wasn’t even a wagon—was it just a cow?—a buffalo?—a shadow. Minna left Max alone for the most part, attending his basic needs but little more. Their argument had left her seething, but she seethed quietly, flatly. She developed a habit of nodding as he was about to speak, so as to preclude, or at least disassemble, his complaints. “No wonder Fritzi is such a paskudnyak, his parents should allow him to read those books,” became . . . “Fritzi, paskudnyak, books, anh.” If raising her voice had no effect, she would protest by ignoring him, and stuffing herself with treyf (some of which, if she was honest, made her feel a little queasy), and shrugging at Liesl’s suggestion that Max and Minna take the large bed for a night.