excerpt
Written by CAIT JOHNSON
Illustrated by ANIA ALDRICH
There may have been a village like this, not all that long ago: a place where people say they distrust strangers, but where they long to be heard. Where, given half a chance and willing ear, they’ll tell their stories – and where everyone has one, from miserable drunk who lives alone in a shack to the wife with bruises on her arm, from the rich banker in his big house to the women whose mind is still six years old.
When you listen, you may learn something about what it’s like to be human, maybe even something about yourself. In small village where it’s quiet, the streets are narrow, and the world is very far away, it’s sometimes easier to learn such things.
As you whirl like an autumn leaf through the streets and houses, listening, listening, you learn that the dead can speak here, and the cows, and the pebbles left on the graves. And the living sometimes speak in poems. This is the journey you take, not knowing where it will end up. Like a dream.
It’s morning in the village and people are stretching and sniffing the air, grumbling about the weather. Geese embroider the skies like feather-stitching on an old woman’s blouse and dry leaves leap from the ground to swirl around your ankles. Houses begin to wrap themselves in coats of woodsmoke and the fields bed down for the winter. Soon Zalman the farmer’s son will unhitch the busy horses for the season and take himself off to the chimney bench, where his clothes will steam and firelight shine like bits of precious amber in his baby’s eyes, the baby he dandles on his homespun knee. Khava, his young wife, will fuss over them both, leaning over his shoulder to pat the baby’s cheek, and the brisket simmering on the stove will be made from his mother recipe, just the way he likes it.
Inside the door of his skinny old house on the hill, the Rabbi jams his hat lower on his head and winds a scarf, knitted by his mysterious sister, a recluse for twenty year, tightly around his neck and chin. He ventures out into the leaf-swirling, goose-honking day to visit Old Anna who was friends with his mother, and whose kind words are a balm to his sadness, quickening his steps down the crooked lane, the dark wooden houses squatting on the either side like troll children, trailed by smell of baking bread and the sound of bubbling samovars like a pack of friendly dogs.
Down the hill, in a corner of the shed beside Raisa’s house where she sometimes sleeps, Gittel tries to curl away from the cold, but the wind’s prying fingers slither under the door and tangle in her dirty hair. She rocks back and forth and sings:
It’s dark in the
cellar, gritty, and you can hear little scratchy sounds.
It’s mice, I don’t mind mice, it’s the rats.
In this village there was a baby that got its nose eaten off by rats.
In the corner if you dig you might find a potato.
I found one a nice little one once.
It had a bump on the top like a head.
It was cool and under the grit it was
smooth it smelled like dirt, like something
safe and sweet.
I didn’t eat it,
I wrapped it in a scrap of black.
It was my baby.
I hid my baby in my apron and nobody knew
it was there, like that woman at Rabbi’s.
his sister, she’s his sister - -
nobody knew there was a baby hidden in her apron
but I knew.
I know things sometimes.
But then one day the baby was gone and the woman
had red eyes
I loved my potato baby.
I sang it a lullaby.
It made me feel safe -
but my baby didn’t grow it changed.
It got slimy like a frog and its skin was wrinkled and it shrank
it shrank and wrinkled like my Bubbe did
before she died
and it didn’t smell sweet anymore, the dirt
had all rubbed off and it had dark patches
blooming up from inside like bruises,
like the bruises I had on my arms from Him.
Nobody knew about Him.
And one day I took out my baby and knew
I was carrying death in my apron.
So if you thought this story was going to be all honey and roses, now you know better.
In the village square, Haskel opens his shop for the day, arranging the packets of tea with military precision and cursing the mice who have been at the sugar again and left small brown seeds of chaos on the countertop that has been polished till it squeaks.
Upstairs, his wife Freyda, who loves to talk, opens the door at your knock and says, “Oh, that must have been Gittel you heard. She’s slow. In the beginning she was just like the other children and then, I don’t know when it was, maybe the year we had the summer with no rain, anyway, you know what a doll looks like when you throw it down and its little arms and legs are all crooked? Nothing looks put together the right way anymore? That’s how she was. And that was how she stayed. She got taller, but in her mind she was maybe six. She sings sometimes and I have to say her voice has a sweet sound to it, watery like a brook. But if she thinks you’re listening, she stops.”
Freyda offers a cup of tea, and you see five fingertip-shaped bruises on her arm. She pulls down her sleeve.
“I give her a kopek or two for helping out, simple chores a child could do. Sometimes I let her pin the washing on the line, she can manage the pegs and the sheets. I wouldn’t trust her with the shirts, though, my Haskel is particular about his shirts, they have to be just so and folded nice once they’re dry so they stay smooth. I do his shirts myself, pin them just right at the shoulders so it looks like my Haskel flapping on the line there but with no head or hands. He has big hands.
She sits down across form you and toys with her sleeve. “I’m lucky to have a man who works so hard,” she says. “And so if he gets a little angry if his shirts aren’t just right, what’s wrong with that? We always have enough on our table, not just on the Sabbath, either. He always reminds me. “Where do you think this bread comes from, Freyda? This chicken?” he’ll say. “It comes from the sweat of my brow.” Not that he sweats much in the shop. One time when he said that, may the Great One forgive me, I thought of tiny chickens hatching out of his forehead in little beads of sweat like eggs and I started to giggle like a girl, I hadn’t giggled like that for so long – but he didn’t like it. And who cooks that food? And washes the dishes and dust the table?
“Well,” she says. “It could have been worse, I could be with someone like that man Salomon who lives by the milestone in that shack, it’s a mercy his poor wife died with the second child, always he would be stumbling and falling down drunk even in the morning, and I don’t know what happened to their first child after his wife died with the second one. Some thongs we can’t know. Like poor Gittel who is six years old in her head even though she’s – how old? She’s my Raisa’s age. Raisa, my rose. Old enough to have children up to her waist by now, like Raisa’s.”
She fetches a plate of pastries and offers it, then picks up a circlet of sugar and flour and fat and takes a small bite. Crumbs sift down on the tablecloth like snow.
“In this life,” she says through the crumbs, “It’s enough to have roof and food, so many people don’t have enough food.” She swallows hard. “Once I tried to give Lev a little something – not much, just a loaf and some hard cheese, a few dried apples. Have you met Lev? Such a gentle man. We were children together and anyway I saw how he was not getting enough to eat, anybody could see that, but you don’t make much from writing – he’s a scribe, that’s what he does – and once his poor wife died, his clothes were growing holes in them and you could see he was wasting away, he looked like a crow and this hungry look in his eyes. So I made a little basket of food for him. Haskel didn’t like that. I never tried to do it again.”
She looks at the crumbs, makes a pattern in them with one finger. “The wives die young here.” she says. “To tell you the truth I think they’re just plain worn out. You’re not going to write that down, are you?”
*
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