A Day of Small Beginnings Read online

Itzik nodded.

  She tore at her clothes, then clasped her hands in front of her. “Y-you took a life?” she sputtered.

  “Someone had to stop him. We’re not dogs,” Itzik said.

  “We’re not murderers.”

  “It was an accident. Avrum Kollek said so.” Itzik’s voice wavered.

  “You took a life.”

  “He could have killed them, like he almost killed me. Remember, Mama?”

  Sarah turned her head away, refusing to lift the blame from his shoulders. The little ones on the fireplace ledge began to roll out of their sleep. One by one they rubbed their eyes and let out muted cries like kittens pulled from the tit. With their hands propped under their chins they stared with wide eyes at their mother and brother, and called out to them. “Quiet,” Sarah warned. “And if anyone ever asks, you didn’t see your brother here tonight. You were asleep. Understand?” The frightened children nodded solemnly.

  “It was an accident,” Itzik said to them all, but he seemed less certain this time. The silence between mother and son became terrible. Itzik’s chest had contracted as if she’d punched him.

  I could take no more. It was an accident, I pleaded with her. Look at your son! But she didn’t hear me. She was realizing, I could see, that she was going to lose her child. Pitiful, splintering moans rose from her throat. The children looked at her in terror. It went on and on. She was bent double by the time she could make herself stop.

  Finally, she tore herself from her misery and said, “You can’t stay here and wait for them. What chance has a Jew in such a business?”

  The room was so swollen with grief, I couldn’t bear to stay still. She couldn’t hear me, I knew, so I wrapped my soul around her and hummed one of Aaron Birnbaum’s tunes, the sweet one he whistled to me from the street. We called this his “Bird Tune” because it had a little hop. I thought, God willing, the “Bird Tune” would calm her.

  Sarah began to rock gently. She loosened her clenched fists. The wild terror subsided from her face, and I relaxed too. She was a woman of faith, after all. That much we had in common. We knew what it was to find solace in devotion to the rituals assigned to us, the mikva baths of purification, the lighting of our Sabbath candles, the burning of the piece of dough when baking challah bread. We knew that if we breathed holiness into these daily acts we could sense the presence of the Almighty God. Sarah knew God was with her at that moment. So did I.

  “What will we do?” she asked Itzik, her voice calmer now.

  “I’ll go, Mama.”

  She gave him a nod of resignation. “Take Avrum’s money. You’ll take the railroad from Radom to Warsaw. Poppa’s cousin Mendel the Blacksmith lives near Plac Grzybowski. Ask him to help you get to America. His son, Shima Ganzekovsky, lives there. He goes by the name Simon Ganz. Poppa wrote him a letter.” She sighed. “Such a godless place, America, if a Jew doesn’t even keep his own name.”

  Itzik nodded. “But what about you, Mama, and the children? It’s not safe for you here either.”

  “We’ll manage.” A vein in her neck pulsed like a hummingbird. She turned and for the first time spoke to the boy perched on the fireplace ledge, a ten year old, by the looks of him. “Gershom, tomorrow you’ll go to Chaim the Baker and tell him you’re ready to start as his apprentice.”

  The boy’s face collapsed with disappointment and loss. He sat up and let the single blanket the children shared fall from his shoulders. “What about my studies with Rebbe Fliderbaum, Mama? Don’t you still want me to be a scholar?”

  When Sarah sighed, I heard the echo of her soul, as if it had been dropped from a great height. “You’ll have to take a different path now, Gershom. A baker and his family never go hungry.”

  Itzik was toeing rapid circles on the floor again. I could feel the shame coursing through him and heat scorching the skin of his potato soul.

  “It will be all right,” Sarah said to her children, as much as to herself. “God is just. He will not betray us.”

  “He betrayed me,” Itzik whispered hoarsely. “Gershom too.”

  Sarah spun around. “Ptuh! Ptuh! Ptuh!” she spat. “Keep that faithless mouth of yours out of this house, Itzik. You didn’t make enough trouble for us tonight? You want to defame the name of God now too?”

  “I didn’t make the trouble,” Itzik muttered, his eyes downcast in submission. “God made trouble. God always makes trouble for us.”

  “It’s your temper that makes trouble for us. Just like your poppa.”

  Itzik raised his head and looked his mother in the eye. “And then God leaves us,” he said evenly. “Just like Poppa.”

  Sarah raised her arm. Itzik stiffened but did not resist her blow, which knocked him to his knees beside the broken wood bench at the table. “That will teach you to respect God.”

  Itzik knelt there, head bowed like a Gentile at a roadside shrine. I was afraid what he might become.

  “Get up now, Itzik.” The anger was gone from Sarah’s voice. She lit a naphtha lamp. The smoke-stained globe was patched with paper. Slowly, silently, she began to pack.

  There wasn’t much to take. A coat, a scarf, an extra shirt and pants, some underclothes, a bit of bread for the journey. Sarah went to the cupboard and took out a bottle of the kvass she’d made from beets and sour bread. “Take it,” she said, pressing it between the clothes. “Give it to anyone who won’t let you pass and there’s no other way.” What could she know to tell him about the world outside our town? A whole life in one place, that was her story.

  Without another word, she swiped Avrum’s money off the table and tucked it under the kvass with a little pat. Then she went to the cupboard again and took out a string purse with her mother’s gold ring and earrings inside and put that in too.

  The children scrambled down from the fireplace. “Chana, give Itzik his soup,” Sarah told the twelve-year-old girl. “Dovid, you help.”

  The little red-haired Hindeleh, maybe four years old, hugged Itzik’s leg. “Take this,” she said. Such a darling, how she pulled the red ribbon from her hair and offered it to her brother. What else did she have to give him? A mass of tight red curls now circled her face. Such an angel, how she looked up at him, those light-brown eyes so earnest and wise and adoring, her lips tucked in to hold down the cry that was winding up her throat. “But don’t give it to anyone,” she said.

  “I can’t take it, Hindeleh,” Itzik told her. “It’s your only ribbon.”

  “Take it,” the little one persisted, and draped her offering over her brother’s hand. “Where are you going, Itzik?”

  “I’m going away.”

  “When are you coming back?”

  A fist banged at the door. The family froze, all eyes on the front of the house. Sarah pushed Itzik to the back window and thrust the sack of clothes at him. He already had one leg outside when they heard the whispered voice of Shuli Kollek calling to be let in. Gershom quickly opened the door.

  “They came to my house with torches,” she said to Sarah. “Jan Nowak’s people. They wanted to know who did it. They knew it was a Jewish boy.”

  Hindeleh whimpered. Gershom picked her up and rocked her on his hip.

  Shuli spoke to Itzik through tears. “I saw how they were. They’ll kill you, Itzik. Run. Before they know it’s you!” She took a step closer to him. “May God keep you safe and return you here someday.” Turning to Sarah, she said, “He saved those children tonight. A blessing on your son Itzik.”

  Sarah shook her head, perhaps already worrying what was to become of her and her remaining children. Itzik bit his lip and looked painfully beyond her to his brother Gershom.

  “Hurry,” Shuli cried. “I don’t know when my father will get here with the Russian magistrate’s detachment.”

  “They’re coming?” Sarah asked hopefully.

  “I know they’ll come if my father asks. They’ll come. We’ll be all right here. But, Itzik, you have to go, for now. You’ll provoke them.”

  Itzik nodded, st
ill keeping a formal distance from Shuli.

  I should have left them at that moment, gone to Avrum and made sure the detachment was on the way. But I wasn’t thinking what could happen. I wanted to see Itzik’s farewell to his family, so I chose to believe Shuli knew her father’s arrangements with the local Russian authorities.

  Sarah avoided Itzik’s eyes. “Be careful,” she said to her son. “Go where I told you and remember your prayers. Cut your fingernails every week to clean away the evil spirits under the nails.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  The little ones crowded around him, clutching his arms and legs. He didn’t resist them, but he didn’t say anything to them either. He was too shocked for that, I think. With a last look around the room where he’d been born, Itzik hugged them and pulled away from their midst, waiting for his mother’s embrace. It didn’t come.

  Why she refused him, only Sarah would know. Maybe she couldn’t put her anger at Itzik away fast enough; maybe she couldn’t face parting with her oldest son. But when Itzik grabbed the sack and jumped through the open window, I knew he would take that unforgiving moment with him for the rest of his life. The bright red of Hindeleh’s ribbon in his hand was the last they saw of him.

  5

  ITZIK TOOK THE BACK STREETS, AWAY FROM THE MARKET SQUARE, past the Kestenbergs, the Mandelsteins, the Shlufmans, Goldfarbs, and Flumenbaums, my neighbors who I remembered so well, generations of them in those houses. A few faint kerosene lights from the windows were the last he saw of our town of Zokof, where the Leibers had lived for generations, even before Jan Nowak’s people.

  For the rest of the night he ran across the rye and wheat fields on that flat plain. When he got far enough from the town, he made his way over to the road. It was easy enough to find it, between the lines of trees. Even in the dark, you could see the silhouettes of the willows and the bent apple branches that always made me sad. Why, I asked my father, should something have to be cut until it looks like a cripple for it to make such sweet-smelling blooms and tasty fruit?

  “Freidleh,” he said to me, “food is better than beauty.”

  “Only for the hungry,” I said. “Otherwise, is it not as natural for the tree to reach for the heavens as it is for man?”

  My father, may his name be for a blessing, made his little grunting sound. But underneath the beard, I knew he was smiling at me.

  I floated above Itzik along that road. In the hour before dawn, I watched for trouble from the village walkers. They were on their way to the local farms to trade their grain or leeks or potatoes. When he saw one, Itzik slowed to a walk. He kept his head down. I was sure no one recognized him, bent as they were under the heavy sacks on their shoulders.

  A Jew, Nahum the Driver, plodded by, his wagon heavy with hides for Goldfarb’s tannery in Zokof. “My horse don’t have eyes for humans anymore,” Nahum used to say. “Why should he? I don’t have money to buy him oats.” Nahum didn’t raise his eyes for Itzik either, thank God.

  At morning light Radom wasn’t far off. Itzik fell exhausted onto a patch of dandelions, under a stand of birch trees. Sh’ma Yisrael. Adonoi eloheinu, Adonoi ehad, he prayed. He took off his shoes, and careful as can be, he pointed the toes in the direction of the city, so he should know where he was going when he awoke.

  What? I thought. I should sit here and eat cherries? I had discovered I had strange powers of observation. I could see hundreds of images at once, each stacked on top of the other, but every one clear to my strange new eyes. I saw again the crooked streets and alleys of Zokof. Inside each household, the grandfathers and the grandmothers, the fathers and the mothers, the children and even the great-grandparents were rising from their beds and making their first water of the day in pots and privies. The men laid tefillin around their arms and heads and wrapped themselves in prayer shawls. The women woke the children with prayers. I heard their voices drifting from the windows, hundreds of them, old and young, giving thanks for the new day. As the saying goes, one who takes the joy of waking in the morning without giving thanks to God is like a thief.

  When I lived, those half-sung prayers were as much a part of me as the skin on my bones. How I missed the voices of our Jews. Even the best death, like mine, is still a lonely thing. Who knew that after, when you can no longer speak, the only sounds your soul can make no one can recognize as you. To the living, you are the stray call of a bird in the trees beyond the town, the lift between two notes, the sharp hiss of sparks from a fire. You are not at all the human who cursed your children one minute, sang their praises the next, and every year, on the Day of Atonement, said Al Chet for these sins of cruelty and pride.

  Still, I got a shock to hear the first few notes of Aaron Birnbaum’s tune. It rose above the din of the Zokofers’ prayers like the blowing of the ram’s horn on Rosh Hashanah, ushering in the New Year. Even now, a year in my grave, this melody had the power to clutch my heart, to make me remember feelings I thought I’d lost in girlhood.

  The truth was, despite my love for Aaron, I’d felt a little ashamed to live in Zokof, where the Hassidim believed in the ecstasy they found in their music as dearly as their Torah study, maybe even more. My family was known, for generations, for its scholarly piety. “The Hassidim have it all turned upside down and inside out,” my father lamented. “The music is for the Jew, not the Jew for the music.”

  But on the morning after Itzik and I left Zokof, I hoped the music of the Hassidim would never end. When Aaron’s tune rose like smoke through the chimneys and vanished in the wide Polish sky, I fought the temptation to leave Itzik and fly away with it. It was no triumph to discover Poppa had been wrong, that sometimes a person, his own daughter even, could be for the music and not the other way around.

  Itzik awoke with dragonflies winging around his head and a snail creeping into his shoe. He hugged his bundle to his chest like a rag doll and flicked the snail away. As he set out again, he skittered back and forth across the dusty road into the fields to avoid being seen. Every few minutes he looked nervously back at Zokof, as if the town itself would give chase and attack him like a peasant’s dog.

  When no one appeared to be coming after him, he relaxed. I looked back to Zokof too. Shuli’s innocent face floated above it, contorted by a terrible grief. She’s lost the boy she loved, I thought. Oh, the pity of a girl in love with Itzik. It was easier for him to hate God than to believe he was entitled to lift his eyes to look at her.

  By midmorning, we’d reached the paved streets of Radom. Pots of red and white flowers decorated the high doorsteps of the brick row houses, but I’m sure Itzik didn’t notice them. From the way he kept bobbing his head around every corner, checking his direction, I guessed he had never been there before. He hid under the cap he’d pulled over his face and carefully wound his way through the crowded streets, skirting the noisy open stalls in the market square, until he reached the train station.

  The stationmaster, a Pole with eyes blue and careless as the sea, looked down with a certain disdainful amusement at the ragged Jewish child digging in his bundle for the fare. Out tumbled the money bag. As Itzik grabbed it up, I could see his confusion at discovering his mother’s gift. He hesitated, ground his jaw until the muscles rippled across the sides of his face, and for a moment I thought he might even turn back to Zokof. But slowly, without lifting his head, he muttered to the stationmaster, “A ticket for Warsaw, mister.”

  The stationmaster turned to the porter squatting on a stool behind him, and said, “What’s this, Pawel? Another Yid?”

  The porter, all of whose features were squashed against his flat face as if he’d been hit by a skillet, stood up and nodded in Itzik’s direction. “They say Warsaw is full of Jewish fleas like that one.” The words whistled through the gap in his mouth where his front teeth used to be. “Watch you don’t give someone an itch, boy.” He lurched over the counter and smacked Itzik’s shoulder.

  Itzik shrank back. His hand, which had been reaching up to receive the ticket, now hovered in
midair, staving off further attack. The gesture provoked the stationmaster and the porter to howls of laughter that shook the walls of the stationhouse.

  I watched Itzik’s eyes go slack, as if he didn’t have anything to say to them because he saw himself as they saw him—inferior, unacceptable. The boy had nothing inside to give him strength. I felt the heat of danger all around. A Jew can’t afford to be so starved in his soul. Not when he lives in a country where insults to his character roll off the tongues of strangers every day, cool as idle chatter.

  In 1863, when the Poles tried to oust the Russians from our part of the world, my father, may his name be blessed, spoke to some headstrong young Jews who wanted to join the rebellion and show the Poles they were nationalists too. Poppa had tapped his finger on his Talmud and said, “This is where you show what you’re made of. Here, in a house of learning. Out there is narrishkeit, foolishness. Why should you fight their battles? They don’t trust you. ‘Christ killers,’ ‘host poisoners.’ This is what they think of you! Just remember this. Poland without Jews is like a barren woman. It produces nothing but sausage.” He laughed. But his laughter was as angry as the stationmaster’s and the porter’s, the sound of two sovereign people resentfully sharing the same sad scrap of land.

  The stationmaster flicked Itzik’s ticket in front of him. “Get along, boy,” he said. “Go to America. Poland is for Poles.”

  Such a rage and shame came over me, who had promised Itzik’s mother that I would protect him. And here I was, as helpless a woman in death as in life, unable to keep this child safe, to nourish him any more than his mother. Nourish him, I renewed my vow. As long as Itzik remains with me, I must nourish his soul.

  In my fury, I barely noticed that as I flew back and forth across the room, the tickets on the stationmaster’s desk began to rustle and flutter. The porter glanced down at them. His laughter slowed like a train coming into the station. I paused, amazed at myself.

  In that moment of the stationmaster’s uncertainty, Itzik threw the fare on the counter, grabbed the ticket from the man’s hand, and ran out of the stationhouse.