SHAME

BOTH THE SHEINS AND SPIEGELMANS HAD CONTRACTS in a remote mountain village. In the interests of safe travel and sociability, the competing businessmen had joined forces and—perhaps recklessly—they had invited their families along. The caravan pressed on through the August heat, through rain-carved northbound paths. There seemed to be ever-present dangers of drop-offs, and now and then screams emitted from one of the wagons in the caravan. In the first wagon were Meyer, his wife Alma Lucia, and their two boys, while Abraham and the two Spiegelman brothers brought up the rear. In the middle carriage, Eva Shein nearly threw up for the fifth time that day. Three weeks ago she had given birth. Now all she wanted was beer. Three weeks ago she’d seen a creature come out of her now-numb body. There was no beer, none for her anyway, and she was forced to sit with insufferable Beatrice Spiegelman, who—perhaps in an attempt to distract Eva, perhaps to ignore her own traveling anxieties—expounded upon her plans to build a non-sectarian school for girls.

Not only was Beatrice excited at the prospect of the school, but she also had no shortage of other ideas. She was especially focused on the removal of garbage. Garbage, she said, stirred her soul as a woman—it was woman’s duty to scour a society, to take care that the heart of a city did not become a barnyard.

“Only then,” said Bea Spiegelman, “will the way be cleared for greatness.”

As the carriage wheels sputtered through a series of ruts and Tranquilo lashed the burros, Eva could feel the wagon wheels turning underfoot, under boots that were laced too tightly. Her feet were still swollen, as were her breasts, which—though filling out her dear sister’s oft-worn blouse—were useless.

“Rule Three,” said Bea, a touch wistfully—her oration no doubt reminding her of a long-ago school pageant. “If any animal should die within the limits of the city of Santa Fe, the person or persons to whom such beast or beasts belong shall be required, within twenty-four hours after the death of said animal or animals, to remove the carcass or carcasses out of said city to a…to a distant place, where they cannot incommode by their appearance and offensive smell.” She coughed primly. “That’s an important one.”

Three weeks ago they took her baby girl. Abe took care of it. She had wanted to hold her for just a little longer—her perfect baby, her pretty corpse—but Abe had insisted with tears in his eyes and she hadn’t any will left to argue. Just like her sister, in what seemed like an undeniably pointed turn of events, she had given birth early. And not only was the blue-faced, blood-smeared creature born that night—only to die by daybreak—but also Eva’s guilt, born and reborn, as if the guilt was wholly new. There was no question this was punishment, and though she couldn’t deny she deserved it, she wanted to know when it might stop. There was also no more question of God’s existence. He was proved to her with this definitive horror, with this putrid silence that would not let her rest no matter how tired she felt. She wanted her baby alive. And if not alive, then nowhere—God couldn’t have her down deep in the earth as if she’d been allowed to live and breathe, as if she was one of His own.

“Are you not feeling well?” Bea asked suddenly. She had a tendency, Eva noticed, to spurt out questions in a hardened rush, so that well-intentioned inquiries took on the grave, even hysterical, cast of criticism.

“Not particularly.”

“Poor dear. This will do you good.”

Bea was younger than Eva, younger by over two years, but she did not seem to know it. And since Eva, on making Abraham’s acquaintance, had decided to heed her mother’s advice (advice that much more potent for being rarely given) and never reveal her birthday, she was content to serve out her life as a surrogate younger sister to all who were willing, for as long as she possibly could. “What will do me good?”

“Why, they are having a great party in our honor! A fandango—the bishop says the people are precious—simple and precious.”

“The bishop?” Eva asked, and felt as if tears might be leaking down her face. “Have you visited with him often?”

“I’ve continued riding out to his garden. Theo and I also took a meal with him inside his home, and do you know he insisted we all eat with umbrellas over our heads so no dust would fall into the oysters?” Beatrice laughed, before nervously asking, “Do you remember what a lovely day we had? When you and I rode there together?”

Eva nodded. It wouldn’t have occurred to her that she could have ever done such a thing had it not been for Beatrice. “I was so grateful to you,” she said. She had been grateful then, and though she had carried the baby long after that ride and had felt, for weeks afterward, the baby’s elbows and feet writhing healthily away inside of her—she now saw riding with Beatrice as part of an irresponsible chain of events; she could tell that Beatrice thought so too.

Hannah Spiegelman—Bea’s shy sister-in-law—sat on a rickety bench across from them and attempted to nurse her baby, but the baby was crying and had been crying for what seemed like the entire two hours of the journey thus far. The cries had started as whimpers and had progressed to a crazed wail, with alternating sobs in and out; it was driving Eva mad. She wanted to shut that baby up—shut it up efficiently, like swatting a fly; she could nearly taste the silence. If the baby stopped crying and Bea Spiegelman stopped talking, she might be left to watch the passing sky—an event in itself, watery blue, obscured by voluptuous clouds. Or she could close her eyes and envision the walls of the new house, which Abraham had finally finally begun, after not only securing this mountain contract months ago, but having also bet against a notoriously lucky diamond hunter during a game of high-stakes poker, whose luck (as Abraham put it) had just plum ran out. She tried to shut out the heat and the wailing baby by imagining the winter parties she would have as a new woman in a new house—a snow queen mother presiding not only over fat-cheeked children, but also ice sculptures and candied oranges—a happy woman stringing Bengal lights through tall acacia trees. In the snow of her mind it was silent as a January sky, but in the stifling carriage the little monster kept wailing.

“Can we do anything?” Bea demanded of Hannah, who immediately looked up and shook her head; she had the stunned, black eyes of a rodent.

When Eva started to sing, the baby cried harder. The harder it cried, the louder she sang. It was Offenbach, a light aria—one she’d long since thought she’d forgotten. Not only could she not recall the last time she’d played a single note, she realized she hadn’t even thought of music—not the pleasure it brought her, not the warmth it could send to a stranger’s face, softening into nothing less than gratitude.

Bea Spiegelman looked uncomfortable for Eva, as if Eva had offered up a breast for the wailing child and spurted curdled milk instead of song.

         

PASSING THROUGH THE DOORS OF THE SMALL VILLAGE HALL IN THE late afternoon were mostly Mexican men (a few sunburnt Anglos were sprinkled in the mix) with bowed legs and wily grins, all in need of a washing. There were men without women and women without children, harried-looking families whose husbands, on arrival, immediately hit the whiskey. Sometimes Eva felt like laughing for no good reason and this was one of those times: high-stepping on her swollen feet, parading through a dark, musty hall as if it was the Sofia Luisa ballroom, watching men line up not for a Française or a turn at the waltz, but to get their fill from a gallon of whiskey. Some men looked like burros tied to hitching posts, drinking from a trough. When one woman, with an unconcealed bruise on her cheek, caught Eva staring, Eva couldn’t quite look away until she noticed another—young and plump and sulky—contemplating one barrel among many in the corner.

“Are you well?” asked Abraham, who had approached unnoticed.

She was startled, but—as had become her habit—she swallowed her first response and out came another in a calm almost lifeless tone. This affectation—it was palpable as the pink dust kicked up by burros on any given trail, and it had become as familiar as the mist that had surrounded Rahel (you must hang yourself when you are young… ) or that of a Berlin spring. “You smell like whiskey already,” she said. She tried to make her eyes teasing and bright, the way she was convinced she had once known just how to do, so that censure could pass as charm. “How I wish we had some for that baby. It screamed so dreadfully—”

“Listen,” he said, his gaze diffused, “the fiddler.” And when she followed his gaze toward the corner of the room, Eva saw he was watching the girl beside the barrel, who inspected its contents before plunging her hand in. Between Eva’s damp fingers, she could vicariously feel the masses and masses of bullets in the barrel, harder and cooler than any tablets from Doctor Sam. But what the girl clutched was neither bullets nor screws but what looked, in fact, to be raisins. Eva and Abraham both watched in stilted silence as she devoured them with crooked little teeth, quickly, one at a time.

Screechy strings filled the crowded room, and the fiddler stood on a long, thin table, dancing like a poorly handled puppet. From behind skirts and under tables came the children—fingers raisin-sticky, faces smeared with dirt, lucky little urchin feet moving in a pack. The fiddler’s tune sped up as a stout man in buckskins made whoops and cries, urging the couples lolling by the whiskey to take a spin around the darkening room—Ladies and Gentlemen! Señores y Señoritas! When a man scooped Eva up—a man nearly as small as she, a farmer so drunk she could smell the stench of moonshine through the pores of his hide-brown skin—Abraham did nothing to claim her. She protested as the man’s stiff calloused hands led her forth, but after it was clear he was not about to release her, she tried to relax and let him carry her along. She took in as much as she could as she spun around the room; she looked for other respectable ladies who’d been forced to take a turn, but the figures moving around her were not only unrecognizable, but moving strangely slowly. In stark contrast with the fiddler’s building tempo, they appeared as smudged sketches of real people. When Heinrich flashed into her mind, or came over her, as she had come to think of it—a sort of premonition—she had to briefly close her eyes. The room spun and she could feel his narrow fingers in between her shoulder blades and knew what she felt was the reverse of a premonition—it was the keen recognition of something that would never happen. She would never dance with him in the Sofia Luisa ballroom. They would never take tea along the Kurfürsten-damm. She would never see him again. The dancers all around looked as clumsy and ill at ease as turkey gobblers fighting. “Gracias, Señorita,” said the man when the music ended, as if he was suddenly bashful.

“Señora,” she corrected, before walking out through the swinging slatted doors, into the mountain air.

Everywhere she looked there were children. In the dying ginger light, they ran in a line like a dragon’s tail—chubby fingers grabbing each others’ pliant waists, some without shirts; they played at being Indians—howling, dancing, and spitting, rolling on the rocky ground. She walked a ways into a clearing with a stand of broken corrals and saw four older boys who took turns diving against what looked to be a dead ox, competing to see who could jump harder onto the poor beast’s sun-bloated stomach and who could bounce off, landing furthest away. Gruff men stood over small fires, doing nothing to stop this game. They roasted slabs of meat and strips of chilies, and they pointed not to this revolting spectacle but to Eva—a strange, pale lady leaning on a gnarled, dead tree, hypnotized by children, their dangerous game. She saw the men pointing before she saw Abraham approach, grabbing her arm and steering her to where they were hidden in the tree’s dank hollow. When he slapped her, she had the strange feeling of letting go—it had been a long time coming. He had never once hit her but had raised his fist often—stopping in midair—that it was nearly a relief to feel the follow-through. His hand tore through the atmosphere like a scythe cutting grain, and she went from being a respectable anomaly in a remote mountain outpost to a single stalk of wheat—thin and reedy, useless on its own. She smarted from the sting but didn’t say a word.

“Have you no shame?” he demanded.

“He would not let me go!”

A spiky branch, which persisted in growing from the rotten trunk, nicked the back of his head. He spat at the ground instead of her. “You looked festive,” he said—red face, red eyes. “You looked bright.” She couldn’t help thinking he was exercising control and that should an animal have emerged suddenly, crossing his path—surely he would have shot it dead.

“Meyer still seems worried about you,” she said. “You must tell me. You must tell me what is between you and your brother.”

“There is nothing,” Abraham said, still biting back his anger. “He asked me to secure this contract and here we are. He asked me…” He shook his head—silencing himself—before taking hold of his lapels and smoothing his coat. “I should not have hit you.”

“No,” Eva said. “It isn’t right.”

“Before God, I know it.” He coughed a hearty, stalling cough. “You won’t be worrying over Meyer and me anymore.”

“And why is that?”

“Not only have I secured us this contract, here in this town, but another one is on the way. A big contract,” he said, unable not to boast. “Military,” he said, smiling.

“Felicidades,” she said with a tight smile.

“I swear,” he said. “I do.”

The hollow of this tree smelled of loam, and there was a barely audible hiss, as if snakes were surrounding them in unseen slivers. She wanted to grab his hands. “I did not wish to dance with him,” she blurted. “I wanted you to claim me. You should have claimed me.”

He picked up a few sticks and handled them briefly, as if deciding which one was best. Then he stepped out of the hollow, backing away, throwing the sticks as far as he could. He didn’t check to see where they happened to land, and it was unexpected that he didn’t bother, as he was always in competition, if only with himself. Abraham believed very strongly that there were winners and losers in every aspect of life, and he did not become an American for his fate to be cast as the latter.

“Maybe you do not wish to claim me,” she ventured. “Maybe you think I have brought you nothing but death.”

“But after so much death you still look like a child.” He was still angry but there was also something else. He looked the way he did sometimes before bed, when he was so utterly drunk that he asked her, without bashfulness, to please help him undress. “How is this possible?”

“But I am not a child. I feel one hundred years old.”

He shook his head and cut the tip of a cigar. “God willing you should live so long.”

Plum clouds faded to mauve and finally to gray. He lit a match, took a meaty puff, and as the dark closed in, the children’s cries in the distance finally ceased. The boys had not plunged face first into the belly of the ox, coating their beautiful innocent bodies with dun-colored rotten guts. They had not cried out in disgust and regret. They had only grown bored and simply left the bloated ox to its naturally gruesome decay. The little ones were being taken now to their mothers’ breasts, to share meager straw beds with other faceless children on sloping, muddy floors. She imagined that her babies—the three who never saw the light and the one who died soon after birth—were there with them, those nameless children, poor and dirty but alive. She wasn’t sure how long she’d stood in the dank tree hollow, but the campfires had died down to smoldering orange embers. At a distance they looked pleasing—poppies on black silk—but she knew that as she grew closer she’d see the refuse of merrymaking in a not-so-merry place.

Abraham was gone. She ought to have followed him inside, but instead had chosen to remain here, alone with his lingering impression. At times she wondered whether she preferred memories and spirits to living, breathing people. At this very moment there stood half-wits and half-breeds who—along with Abraham in his fine suit and combed moustache—jockeyed for the spigot on the five-gallon jug, wanting and wanting more. This, she thought, is America.

She heard her name being called, and, ignoring her impulse to retreat farther into the hollow, she emerged to see Beatrice Spiegelman holding a candle. “Eva,” she implored, vaguely horrified, “you are standing in the darkness.”

“I know it is dark, Beatrice. I’ve seen the same sun come and go.”

“Well, for goodness’ sake—”

“Here I am.” She imitated a soldier on the march—which took considerable effort lifting knees up and down under a heavy skirt—but Beatrice did not laugh. Inside the hall, a roar broke out like sloppy battle cries.

“These people,” said Bea, shaking her head and Eva followed her into the fray.

Low burning candles cast flickering shadows on the muslin-covered wall. Eva hadn’t noticed the muslin earlier, but it was now quite apparent how the dingy cloth had been tacked up in an effort toward festivity. But just then festivity was being perverted: A circle had formed (around what was initially unclear), but as she and Bea drew closer, there was hardly a doubt as to whether sin was at its center. Through slivers in the crowd she could just glimpse torn dresses in motion, flailing arms, and swishing hair. At first she thought her eyes must have been deceiving her, but she could soon make out what appeared to be nothing other than two grown women fighting—clutching and striking each other like beasts. The chanting of the crowd rose in a chorus as the dark woman tore a chunk of the tall one’s stringy hair. Eva strained to find Abraham, but she could barely see beyond the people just in front of her, shouting in sick excitement. Boots pounded in rhythm and a group of young men beat sticks together as if these women were no more deserving of dignity than those russet cocks on the massive ship she had boarded in Bremen. Then, as if this were only a nightmare and not her waking life, the women were each given knives by men who inflamed their anger even further—all for what was clearly a blood sport for spectators, a plea for sadistic laughter. There was a flash of brown skin—a calf? An arm?—and she had a flash of certainty that this fighter might have been the sulky girl she had seen before—the childlike raisin-eater—but then she saw a hard jaw line, a heavy bosom, and knew she’d been mistaken. And what did it matter anyway? These were all strangers, all poor mountain people whose fates were essentially the same: to marry their kin, go blind, go mad. The raisin-eater was probably working right about now—working in a back room reeking of whiskey-sweat and hoping to make a night’s wage before the men grew too drunk to function, too mean to pay.

The tall woman slashed at the air with a theatrical flourish—chin held high, balance steady—and the dark one yelled as if she’d actually been stabbed, as if her blood were spurting from a punctured heart. Was this in fact, a show? Would the women later fall into each other’s arms—gleeful at the bets placed in haste, the passions so inflamed?

She turned to Beatrice Spiegelman, and though she expected to see her flushed with outrage or even galvanized by such an absence of morality, primed for hours of indignant conversation—Bea was actually gawking, utterly dazed. As the tall woman took a stab and missed and missed again, Eva imagined Abraham was in the arms of that girl, the raisin-eater—the whore who looked most like her. For that is probably where he was; her defenses were too stripped away today for her to pretend she believed otherwise. Eva pictured how he crushed her into a sagging bed or sloping floor, how her small, sticky hands grabbed his lank, thick hair as he moved like the knife in the tall woman’s hand, as that knife finally struck at the dark woman’s breast…

“It’s shameful,” said Bea, not looking away.

“Yes,” said Eva, “it is.”

         

SHE’D BEEN JOLTED AWAKE BY THE NEED TO TEND TO THE BABY, A need met only with the harrowing fact that there was no baby fussing; there was not even the mysterious promise of a baby, snug inside her body. She had waited all night long for Abraham before, but never in a place like this. What, Eva wondered (and she couldn’t imagine she was the only one wondering), had the men been thinking when they brought their families here today? Outside on the mountain, coyotes howled and the party continued with a never-ending stream of vulgar cries, while inside the ramshackle accommodations only burlap and hides divided the dilapidated space. To her right, Meyer and Alma Lucia muttered in Spanish, while Theo and Beatrice giggled on her left, until all was silent except an erratic snore and the threatening sounds of reveling—shouting and gunshots that grew louder and softer at times, but continued uninterrupted.

When he arrived in bed, Abraham smelled so foul that all she could do was cry. In the grim, gray light, he lay down on top of the scratchy blanket in his boots. “I’m a lucky son of a bitch,” he said.

“Why is that?” she asked, her eyelids slowly closing.

“Look at you, puss.”

“Look at me?”

“You’re a huckleberry above anybody’s persimmon.”

She turned her head away. “Why do you insist on speaking this way?”

“I don’t know what you mean. I speak English. We live in America.”

“You are not a cowboy, Abraham. I am not a whore.”

He unbuttoned his shirt while lying flat on his back. A button popped and rolled onto the floor. “You love Germany so much?” he growled low. “You are more German here than anywhere. Here, puss, you can be as German as you think you are, not as German as Germany will allow.”

“What nonsense you are speaking.”

“They sacked my uncle’s tailor shop,” he said in a drunken slur.

“Who did?”

“They beat him, too—beat him good…down on his bloody knees in the street…he did nothing but hobble away…went to work down the block in the same goddamn city.”

“Why was he beaten?” she asked stubbornly.

He’d shifted onto his side and watched her lucidly, almost tenderly. She looked past him toward the rips in the burlap, the water stains on the ceiling. As he rolled on top of her, her heart raced sickly; there was ringing in her ears. She gagged from his bitter flesh and whiskey smell as he reached for her breasts, but he lay his head down and instantly fell asleep.

BY NIGHTFALL THEY APPROACHED SANTA FE AND SHE NEVER THOUGHT she’d be so pleased to see its low mud-cake hovels, its paltry town square. Her throat was parched from a night of no sleep, not to mention a coating of dust from the trip, so she could barely respond when Beatrice pointed at the Shein store and exclaimed, “Well who on earth is that?”

A young man was under the portal. Abraham stepped down from the wagon and approached the stranger cautiously with a gun and lantern in hand. When the lantern cast light on the young man’s face, Eva could see how he was badly beaten, with blood caked on his face and chest and one eye swollen shut. Abraham helped the boy to his feet, and when Eva heard the poor soul mutter thanks in a muffled, desperate voice, it took her a moment to realize that not only was he a stranger here but that he was speaking German.