Katerina

by Aharon Appelfeld

  In a short time, when we got to Czernowitz, I would read to Benjamin from books. Benjamin would open his big eyes and listen. That thought, for some reason, moved me greatly. Now every little movement of Benjamin’s brought me to tears. I must be strong, I told myself, and I stifled my tears.

  The next day the storm died down, and a bright winter sky was revealed in its full splendor. I must set out, I said, as though a home were waiting for me in the distance. During the past weeks I had found that my presence was very burdensome to the landlord. Every time I appeared in the corridor, the landlady drew back. The landlord didn’t show himself very much, either. He ignored me. My room was very close to their bedroom, and they didn’t allow themselves a single superfluous word. Don’t talk, I heard the landlord’s voice.

  I packed up my few belongings, wrapped Benjamin in furs, and paid. The landlord didn’t ask for anything extra, and he didn’t say thank you. No one was in the hall of the inn at that time, and I set out without a blessing.

  The bright sun didn’t lessen the cold. The chill was fierce, but I knew I had to leave that place behind and move on.

  “Climb in.” A peasant stopped his sled.

  “Where to?”

  “Czernowitz.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I guessed.”

  Thus he decided instead of me. He was an old peasant, transporting a few crates of apples, some bundles of dry fruit, and a box of fresh dairy products in his sled. In the front corner he had left a vacant spot for a passenger.

  “I don’t like riding alone,” he confided.

  “How long will we be traveling?”

  “Till evening.”

  Benjamin fell asleep in my arms. Only now did I notice how much he had grown during the winter months. His face had filled out and golden hair covered his forehead; the folds in his cheeks had melted, and a new layer of pink padded them.

  “Where do you live?”

  “In the city,” I stated flatly, without furnishing details.

  “But you’re from the country, right?”

  “Correct, uncle.” I used village language.

  “You work for Jews?”

  “Correct, uncle.”

  The trip was fast and even, and in the afternoon we stopped at a tavern. I had a very strong urge to go up to the bar and order a drink, but I controlled myself. I stayed in my seat and watched over Benjamin’s sleep. It was a Ruthenian tavern, the kind that gave off the stink of manure and vodka day and night, and which one didn’t leave till one had inebriated each and every limb in one’s body.

  When the peasant returned to his sled, he scolded me for not coming in and sharing a drink. A person without a drink isn’t a person. Drink arouses the body and allows a person to speak openly.

  18

  I HAD A PRECIOUS TREASURE, a great treasure. I looked in his eyes, and I couldn’t believe my own. He was all light. We lived in a one-room apartment on the Jews’ street. It was April already, but the frosty wind still blew strongly. I stood at the window with Benjamin for hours, and thanks to his large eyes, I too saw miracles.

  “Bird, Mama.”

  “Bird.”

  “All gone bird. All gone bird.”

  Every word that left his mouth was like a joyous trumpet sounding.

  Once again the nights hummed with quiet joy. I entertained my dear ones in my home, Rosa and Benjamin, and sometimes Henni too. My Benjamin spoke astonishingly well. Everyone called him the little prodigy, and I was astonished that I hadn’t heard that word before, a pretty word. Suddenly, Sammy broke in again, very drunk. I tried to hide him from my guests, but he overcame me, broke into the center of the room, and announced that the tyke was no miracle, just an unwanted child.

  “You must watch over him carefully,” Rosa warned me.

  “I’ll guard him like the apple of my eye,” I promised.

  “He’s a marvelous child.”

  Passover was again approaching, and I stood at the window so that he could see the movement, absorb the odors, and know that every holiday has its own color. The world isn’t confusion the way it sometimes seems. If Rosa were with us, we would celebrate the Seder with her. My dear ones were snatched away from me before their time. Had it not been for Henni, who removed me from the sewers of the railroad station, I would be wallowing there to this day.

  Every few months, I sold a piece of jewelry. Every jewel I sold ripped my body. But the thought that I was raising a child, and that he would brighten everyone’s eyes, slightly sweetened my sadness. The jewels lay on my breast.

  The thought that I had my own room and that my son was standing at the window and looking—those thoughts gladdened me always. In the evening I used to dress Benjamin, and we would go out to listen to the night noises. There were evil creatures in the city: drunkards who remembered me from the station, people from my village who lurked in wait for me, and plain evildoers who accosted me. I wasn’t afraid. When Benjamin was in my arms, I wasn’t afraid. Step aside and don’t stand in my way, I used to warn them, and if they provoked me, I cursed them and the mother who bore them.

  One evening someone from my own village accosted me. He knew me at first glance and wouldn’t let up. I implored him, “We both grew up in the same godforsaken hole, my father knew yours, why are you annoying me?”

  “Put down the bastard and come with me.” He didn’t heed my pleas.

  “Why are you calling my son a bastard?” I couldn’t keep back my voice.

  “Because he’s a bastard.”

  I implored him, You see that I’m a woman alone, bringing up a child on my own. It isn’t easy to raise a child. But I’m doing it gladly, because he’s a good child. I spoke to him the way you talk to a relative, with all the homey words I had, but he stood his ground.

  “Put down the bastard. I have a room not far from here.”

  “How are you talking to a mother? I’m not a young girl anymore.”

  “You sleep with everyone, but you won’t sleep with me.”

  “Don’t talk down to me.”

  “I need to sleep with a woman tonight,” he said to me with a bestial voice.

  “Take some other woman. There are lots of women. Why do you want a woman with a child?”

  “I feel like sleeping with you.”

  I mustered my strength and raised my voice, saying to him, “If you get close to me, I’ll bite you like a bitch.”

  “Whore,” he hissed.

  “Bastard.” I wasn’t mute.

  I was glad I had fought for my life. That night we didn’t stroll around anymore. We went back home while it was still light, and I immediately said to Benjamin, “You must be a brave boy. Without courage, there’s no life. We must exercise every morning. You have to make your muscles firm and be a lion cub.” I myself learned courage the old way. I had two or three drinks, my body warmed up, and I saw my departed mother before my eyes. My mother was a brave woman. Everyone was afraid of her. She never drank in public, always by herself, mainly at night.

  In the evening, when we went out for a walk, I told Benjamin, “Don’t be afraid. When a person overcomes fear, he’s free. Fear makes everything ugly. You have to walk erect.” I doubted whether he understood, but I recited that lesson so that when the time came, when he needed it, it would be ready in his mind.

  Nevertheless, our walks weren’t tranquil any longer. The city was full of peasants and peddlers, everybody shouting, threatening, and cursing one another. The sight wasn’t a pretty one. Except for the old Jews who would stand by the doors of their meager shops at that hour. Were it not for those thin creatures, who always spread awe, I would have shut myself inside my room. I was bound up with the gazes of those old men, sometimes forgetting that the city was swarming with evildoers.

  Sometimes a man accosted me, and I would escape from him into a tavern. In the tavern, I would often meet my old acquaintances. I had met many people in my life. They wanted my body, and I had usually given them what they wanted.
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  “How are you, Katerina?” one of them called. They’d gotten older, too. Vodka had emptied their faces, and the skin of their hands had yellowed. Nevertheless, they asked, “Where can we find you, Katerina?”

  “I’ve come home,” I said.

  “What’s the matter? Has some disaster happened?”

  “A person has to go home, isn’t that right?” I answered them in the language of the village.

  That excuse was acceptable to them, for some reason, and they let me be.

  But that one bully, that revolting villager, didn’t forget me, and every day he lay in wait for me. I sensed he was lurking, but because I didn’t see him, I believed it was just fear. During the last few days I stopped walking in side streets. We stayed in the center of town and went home early. I sensed that the hyena was lying in wait for me. At home I wasn’t tranquil, either. Every noise alarmed me, but I still refused to bolt the door. You mustn’t fear, I repeated to myself. If I’m afraid, Benjamin will be afraid too.

  On Passover eve I was very happy, and in my great joy I swung Benjamin up in the air. Benjamin laughed, and his laughter rang out in the street. Afterward, I bought him some ice cream, and he asked for another portion. I bought it for him and called him my little glutton. He laughed. A few peasants stood at the side of the street, and they laughed too. No one disturbed me. Everyone was busy with final preparations for the holiday, and I, in my great haste, with a kind of recklessness, turned into an alley that would shorten my path home.

  Just as I stepped in, as though out of a pit, that thug emerged and barred my way. I knew that was my end, but I still shouted, “Don’t touch me.” It was the same brute, that Karil, that villain, who had harassed me a few days earlier, but now there was courage in his eyes. He was inebriated but not drunk.

  “Put down the bastard and come with me.” He grabbed my arm.

  “I’m not afraid. You can slaughter me.”

  “I said what I said, and I won’t go back on it.”

  “I’m afraid only of God.”

  “Put down the bastard,” he said, baring his teeth.

  Murderer, I was about to shout, but before my voice could manage, he grabbed Benjamin from my arms and smashed his body against the wall. I saw, God in heaven, the divine head of my son, that vessel more precious than all vessels, smashed in two and spatters of blood darkening the dusk. For a moment I froze, but immediately, swiftly, I took out my jackknife. I leaped forward and grabbed his neck and cut and cut. I felt the knife in the tendons of his flesh and my hands dripping with blood. The thug flopped under my hands, he kicked his feet, but I didn’t let up. I carved him the way they butcher a beast in a meat shop.

  19

  THAT WAS HALF MY LIFE. From now on the color of my life is red. I too was murdered that evening. What remains of me is a stump. Two men dragged me along the streets the way one drags a long sack. “Murderess, murderess.” I heard the voices slipping over my body like ice. Afterward, I didn’t hear, only echoes that shattered with deafening noise. As they dragged it, my body lost its weight and the pain froze.

  For a long time they dragged me, and I was sure that it was my end, but I wasn’t afraid. Relief, the kind one feels after six or seven glasses of vodka, enveloped me. If this is death, it isn’t so dreadful, I told myself. Eventuaily, the men dragging me got tired and left me on the pavement, but they didn’t stop proclaiming, “Murderess, murderess.” People crowded in from all around. In the turmoil I remembered that the Slavo brothers had cried out a similar shout after they had hunted down the wolf that had eaten their younger brother and brought it to the village square.

  “Whom did she murder?” asked a man with a young voice.

  “She murdered and carved him up.”

  “Where are you taking her?”

  “To the police.”

  The questions and answers were so clear, as though they had passed through a fine sieve. I opened my eyes and saw a mass of people surrounding me in a black circle. The men who’d dragged me stood near me and panted heavily. I knew that if they only gave their assent, the mob would trample me.

  The pause didn’t last long. Now they dragged me with renewed strength, as though trying to dislocate my arms. And I felt how my body was borne, pounded and carried up as in a storm, as though they were afraid I might die before it was determined who was the monster in their hands.

  The police building turned out to be close by. “A murderess,” they said, and left me.

  “Whom did she murder?”

  “She carved him into pieces. Everything is lying in the street.”

  Apparently, I fainted or fell into a heavy sleep. When I woke I felt that the blood on my hands had coagulated. No memory was within me, like a bucket that has been emptied.

  “She won’t talk.” I heard a man’s voice.

  “Did you beat her?”

  “I beat her”

  I felt no pain. The thought that they had beaten me and I didn’t feel the blows roused me from my faint. In the next room, which was lit, voices rustled, but to my ears they sounded as though they came from a distance.

  At night I was awake and I pressed myself against the wall. The wall was cold and moldy, and I felt the cold trickling through my pores. My coat was torn, but the lining was intact. I straightened my legs, and then I saw for the first time that my knee was swollen. The swelling was huge and painful. That means, I said to myself, it’s bad swelling. In the next room the voices didn’t cease. First it seemed that they were talking about me, but it soon became clear that they were talking about some old mortgage. One of the voices complained that his mortgage was making a pauper of him. If it weren’t for the mortgage, he’d be a free man.

  It was as if my memory plunged deep within me, but I took in the motions and grating noises that happened around me very well. And I also noticed that the bars of the cell were thick but not close together.

  I managed to take off my shoes. My ankles also proved to be swollen, but not excessively. I remembered that my mother used to say, “Katerina tears her socks so that they can’t be darned anymore. I’ve already gotten tired of telling her that she’s not allowed to crawl on the floor.” I was three then, my father and mother still talked to each other, and my mother, for some reason, complained about me, a fond complaint, and I was glad that my mother loved me.

  Later, a policeman approached and stood at the door of the cell. He seemed gigantic. He looked at me the way one looks at an unruly cow and ordered, “Get up, murderess.” Hearing his voice, I got up on all fours, but it wasn’t in my power to rise. He saw clearly that I was trying to get up, but my efforts seemed insufficient, and he beat me with his club. The blow was strong and knocked me over.

  “What do you want from me?” I said.

  “Don’t talk to me like a human.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Don’t play the innocent. Talk like a murderess, understand?”

  Then two men came and hoisted me up and put me in a lighted room. The sight of my face was, apparently, horrifying. They stood at a distance from me and spoke in Romanian. I didn’t understand a word. One of the policemen addressed me in Ruthenian, asking, “Why did you kill him?” I don’t remember what I answered. They, apparendy, slapped my face and kicked me. I fell, and they kept kicking me. I didn’t scream, and that drove them mad. In the end they brought me back to the cell. I don’t know how many days I was kept away from the light of day. The darkness in the cell was great. All that time I felt that I was being swept away in a broad, deep river. Black waves covered me, but I, with a fish’s gills, overcame the drowning. When I managed to open my eyes, I saw it was the Prut River; its flow heavy and red.

  20

  I WAS TRANSFERRED TO the prison on Sunday. Bells rang, and an autumn sun flooded the streets. Two armed gendarmes led me, and from every side people pointed: the monster. I was empty and frozen, and no pain annoyed me. In fact, it seemed to me that at that pace, I could march for hours. For the first
time I felt my mother within me, not the mother who used to beat me but the courageous mother, who had wanted to teach me courage all those years and didn’t know how. Now I strode with her, indivisible, like a single body.

  Thus my new life began. The women in the prison knew everything, all the details, and they didn’t greet me. In time I learned that they didn’t greet other women with joy, either. A person who enters prison knows that here one doesn’t die, one falls apart. No thread will mend the tears. It wasn’t the walls that frightened me but the faces.

  The trial had not been long. I admitted every detail of the accusation, and the old judge said that he had not met with such a horror to that day. If it hadn’t been the murder of a murderer, he would have ordered that my neck be placed in a hangman’s noose. There was no one in the courtroom. The defense attorney appointed by the court told me, “You can be content. As long as there’s life, there’s hope.” He was a Jewish lawyer, who scurried from place to place and seemed embarrassed by himself. He reminded me of Sammy for some reason, though there was no resemblance between them.

  Life in prison was very orderly. We rose early and lights-out was at eight-thirty. Between rising and going to sleep—labor. One squad went to work outside in a textile factory, another worked in the field, and another maintained the prison. Once the legs of the women prisoners had been chained, but that practice had been abolished. Later they were tied together by a rope and led in groups of three. Each squad numbered thirty women. Some old women bore their punishment with contempt and a straight back. At the age of seventy, the prisoners were freed for life, but not always. There was one ninety-year-old woman in the prison.

  I was attached to the maintenance squad. I was alert and did what I was supposed to, but my life was narrow, like that of a beast of burden. After ten hours of scouring floors, I would sink onto the cot. My sleep was cramped, like in a pressured corridor. When the bell rang, I would rise and report for work. I did my job thoroughly. The women guards didn’t beat me or torment me. My contact with my fellow prisoners was little. They sat for hours after work and talked. Sometimes, at twilight, I would hear their confessions, sounding to me like yearnings that no longer touched upon life.