1916–19
The bad time in my home began when I was about seven, on the morning Uncle Pinchas came back. That should have been the happiest moment for our family, but it turned out to be the beginning of the end.
One Shabbes in fall, Nechama and I slept at Aunt Friedka’s house.
“Stay with your aunt this Shabbes,” Mama had told us. “She’s lonely.”
Very early on Saturday morning, Aunt Friedka, Nechama, and I were all asleep together in the big bed. Suddenly we were awakened by the loud clatter of a cart stopping outside the door.
“Your man is home,” a rough voice shouted in Polish. “Come and get him.”
I reached for my aunt, but my fingers touched empty sheets. Aunt Friedka was already out of bed, at the door. As if even in her sleep she had been waiting a year for this moment. I pushed sleepy Nechama aside and jumped out of bed, too. I heard the clopping of hooves and the rattle of uneven wheels as the cart continued on its way.
I stood blinking at the door. Uncle Pinchas? It couldn’t be. Aunt Friedka was leaning over a broken wreck of a man lying on the ground, dirty, gray-faced, and still. Still except for the bubbling, stuttering wheezes that seemed to come from a wet place deep inside him.
“Easy, easy, you’re home now,” Aunt Friedka was murmuring again and again, her voice surprisingly calm and low. But when she turned to me, I fell back a step. Aunt Friedka’s face was white, her eyes empty.
“Send Nechama for your parents and the barber,” she ordered. “Then help me carry your uncle into the house.”
I fled inside. “Nechama! Nechama! Wake up!” I shouted, and pulled her roughly to her feet. “Run home and get Papa!” She stared at me, her mouth open. “Run!” I shouted again, pointing through the open door. “They brought Uncle Pinchas back. He’s— Go get Papa.”
Still in her nightdress, she scampered outside, gaped at the figure lying on the ground at Aunt Friedka’s feet, peered back at me in horror, and disappeared in the direction of home.
“Take his legs,” Aunt Friedka ordered.
I couldn’t touch that filthy, wheezing bundle. I had to. I couldn’t. Then I saw his hand outspread on the ground. It was Uncle Pinchas’s long, slim hand. The last time I saw him, that hand had held hot tea, when Uncle Pinchas was master in his own home on another Shabbes morning a lifetime ago. I crouched down and lifted Uncle Pinchas’s cracked boots as firmly as I could, while Aunt Friedka carried him by the shoulders. Together, we managed to lift him onto the high bed.
“Chanah’s gone for the barber,” Papa said as he ran in the door. The nearest doctor was more than a day’s journey away and no one in the village could afford his fees, anyway. So we had to rely on the village barber.
Papa and I struggled to take off the boots, while Aunt Friedka began unwrapping something stiff and mud-soaked that had been wound around Uncle Pinchas. One single sob broke from her. “It’s the blanket I gave him. When they took him away.”
There was a cough at the door as the barber announced his arrival. Lifting his bulging leather bag of medicines onto the table, he squinted at the long names on the labels.
Mama followed him in. “Go home,” she ordered me. “Go home and look after Nechama. She’s very scared.”
I’m scared, too, I wanted to whisper. I don’t want to be alone. But Mama was busy boiling hot water to heat the barber’s poultices. I walked out very slowly—maybe she’d change her mind and let me stay with her. She didn’t. Nechama, it was always Nechama who had to be taken care of.
Late that night, I heard Papa talking bitterly to Mama. “There’s no medicine that will help Pinchas. The German gases eat up a man’s lungs. That’s how they poison thousands of men as they lie in the trenches.”
Mama’s voice was tearful. “The army didn’t want him any longer,” she said. “He was already half dead, so they sent him home. Your poor sister.”
I fumed silently. When I’m big, I’m going to organize the women of the village to hide our men in the forest, or in the cemetery maybe. I’ll never let them steal our men when I’m big.
The next day I was allowed to help Mama and Aunt Friedka nurse their patient, while Nechama played outside. Uncle Pinchas lay on the bed heaving for breath, his eyes always on Aunt Friedka. Even when she walked across the room to heat a brick in the stove and wrap it in a cloth to warm his feet, he strained to see her. Mama said he must have longed for the sight of his wife for so long that he dared not let her disappear for even a moment. He watched her for six days and then he had to let go. He died with his eyes open, looking at Aunt Friedka.
“Aai,” Aunt Friedka gasped. “Aai, aai, aai.”
When the members of the Burial Society came to take away the body, she cried. I couldn’t bear to see that; not strong Aunt Friedka. Mama had her arms around her and I threw my arms around both and squeezed with all my might.
But it was the only time I ever saw Aunt Friedka cry. After that, she closed her face and straightened her back, and she stayed closed and straight until the Night of the Burning.
Some months after Uncle Pinchas died, I glanced up from my plate at dinner and caught a strange expression on Mama’s and Papa’s faces as they watched Nechama and me eat. Their own plates were scraped empty, and I realized suddenly and certainly that they were hungry. I looked down again right away; they wouldn’t want me to notice. It was true: there was less and less food in our house. Mama didn’t buy fish except for Shabbes and there was never any fruit. Potatoes weren’t merely a part of the meal anymore: potatoes were usually the entire meal, with goat’s milk to wash them down.
Then one sad day, Mama, Nechama, and I took Tsigele to the marketplace, taking turns leading the goat with the leash for the last time. A butcher from a nearby town bought her after some hard bargaining with Mama, and we returned home silently. No more friend Tsigele, no more cheese. After that, we walked to the dairyman’s barn at the edge of town each morning, and Mama bought just a cup of milk for Nechama and me to share.
“Thanks be to God we have saved a little, Chanah,” Papa said softly one night. “The peasants do not know how to save, even though they can make money from farming and we are not allowed to farm.”
“But how long will the savings last us, Bzalel?” Mama whispered back. “The fighting goes on and on.”
Since I was a little girl, I had known that there was a war going on in the world. But all I understood was that the Germans were fighting and killing the Russians. Then I had begun to hear my parents whispering about something called the Revolution. It meant nothing to me at all, except that first the Czar wasn’t the Czar anymore, and then he and the Czarina and their children were dead. The children’s deaths worried me especially.
“Papa, did the Czar’s children know they were going to die? Would a czar’s children have to be especially brave?” I asked.
But Papa had less energy to answer questions these days. He was very tired because he had to pull the wagon himself now. I still couldn’t believe it, but Papa had sold Soos. Mama had cried when she saw Papa coming home one night without the big horse. He had sold the heavy wagon, too, and was using a kind of harness to pull a smaller cart, with all of his old goods piled high. Papa made light of the change, saying he’d received a good offer for Soos and the wagon and couldn’t turn it down. He even pawed at the ground and neighed to make Nechama and me laugh. But when he slipped the harness off his shoulders, I heard him groan softly.
The worst part was that every night when he trudged home, his wagon was still filled with the same goods. “Very little sold today,” he would say to Mama as he sank down in front of the stove. “The peasants don’t have money to buy things anymore.”
Mama didn’t answer, but she took off his boots and brought warm water in a basin for his cold feet. One evening he reached up and pulled her against him, burying his face in her skirts. “There was typhoid in two villages,” I heard him mutter.
I saw Mama shudder and slip her hand over Papa’s cheeks and forehead. “A fever,” I thought. “Was she feeling for a fever? Typhoid must be a sickness.” Something else to worry about.
Like Papa, Mama, too, worked harder. She washed all our clothes herself in the big barrel in the kitchen, rather than paying Panya Truda to do it once a week. She bargained more firmly in the marketplace, but I could see that the peasants bargained just as desperately in return. Everyone was worried and there was little conversation between the Jews and the peasants. At least I didn’t have to endure the taunts of the children on the other side of the pond: there was no more cholent to keep warm at Panya Truda’s house.
I did feel scared, though, of the occasional loose bands of soldiers passing through our town. They were usually on foot and wore odd scraps of uniform. Some spoke Russian, others Polish. I was scared by their unshaven grim faces.
“Who are these soldiers, Papa?” I ventured.
“Soldiers?” he said in disgust. “Those are just thugs, bandits stealing food from poor people like us.”
“Papa,” I began, and then I stopped. The thing I was about to do was a hard sacrifice. I’d had the idea for days, and for days I’d been pushing myself closer and closer to doing it. It took some force—talking and talking and even a little shaking—until I finally persuaded Nechama to go along.
Papa looked at me inquiringly, and then he sat down and took me on his knee just as he used to in the old days. “What is it?” he prompted.
I had to swallow a painful lump in my throat. “Papa, you can sell our dolls for food. Nechama and I don’t mind.”
Papa grabbed me in a tight hug and I squeezed him back, blinking away the tears in my eyes.
Papa blew his nose. “Devorahleh.” He smiled at me, stroking the hair back from my face. “You and Nechama are fine girls and we appreciate that you would give up your dolls for the family. Always take care of the family, my big girl. But you can keep your dolls.”
“We can?” Nechama squeaked from behind the door where she had been eavesdropping.
I glared at the door.
“Yes.” Papa laughed. “Enjoy them and play with them, because the peasants have no money for dolls now. Even potatoes are more precious today.”
Papa pulled the cart alone for about half a year. I felt a little sick each morning to see him dragging it onto the rutted dirt tracks, turning to wave goodbye after adjusting the thick leather harness over his shoulders. Three kisses he would blow, the first one for Mama, of course, and then one each for Nechama and me, before pulling his cap down and making his way up the slight hill. The cart creaked and swayed behind him. It was lucky, I told myself, that Papa conquered the upward slope in the morning when he was fresh, while he descended the hill in the evening.
But one chilly fall morning when I was ten and Nechama seven, Papa couldn’t pull the cart uphill. He couldn’t even get up. I heard Mama lighting the fire to boil water while it was still dark. Then she bent over me. “Papa is sick,” she whispered in a shaky voice. “I’m going to ask the barber for some medicine.”
My stomach tightened. I slipped out of bed and ran over to stroke Papa’s forehead. He smiled faintly at me, but he didn’t look like my papa.
Mama returned alone, carrying a bottle carefully wrapped in some rags. Her face was pale and drawn.
“Go outside,” she told us. “Go outside to the well and wash your faces.” She began to lift the covers off Papa.
I left the room unwillingly, pushing Nechama in front of me. At the door I turned back for a moment. Mama and Papa were both looking anxiously at Papa’s stomach, which seemed swollen and strange.
I turned the handle of the well to pump up a bucket of water. It felt icy, but I washed Nechama’s hands and face and my own until they were red and shiny. Dear God, I prayed silently as I scrubbed, I’ll be very good and I’ll make Nechama be very good, and we’ll do exactly as Mama tells us, if you’ll only make Papa better.
The next day, Papa’s face was grayer and he slept a lot. Neighbors and friends came to visit, whispering rather than talking. Papa didn’t seem aware of any of them. I held his hand and wiped his face with care, but mainly his eyes were closed.
On the third morning, I woke from a cold, huddled sleep. Mama was crying, little peeping cries like a bird. I sprang out of bed to Mama’s side and held her tight. Papa looked as if he was sleeping and there were no lines of pain or hunger around his eyes and mouth. But Mama’s face was scrunched up and wet.
“He’s gone, Devorahleh, Papa is gone,” she whispered.
The world stopped. “No, no, no,” I protested into Mama’s shoulder. It could not possibly be that Papa was … dead.
Nechama squeezed into Mama’s arms, too, her eyes confused as she turned from Mama to me and back again. She kept her face averted from Papa.
Mama held us both for a long time. A weight of cold and grayness pressed down on us. Then Mama put Nechama on my lap. She tucked the bedcover close around Papa, his shoulders, his legs, his feet. Then she slipped in next to him and pulled the cover around both of them. I think she was trying to keep the last bit of warmth in her bed.