4

SARAH LEIBER’S HOME WAS MORE SHED THAN HOUSE, ONE OF the worst of its kind on that narrow alleyway of mud and stench. Itzik opened the door that hung crooked on its hinges and slipped inside without kissing the mezuzah on the doorpost as a Jew should. Itzik the Faith less one, I clucked at him, my heart full of new maternal feeling that was mine to savor only a moment more. His real mother was waiting up past midnight for her eldest son, the man of her house.

I slid through a crack in the wall behind the noodle board, into a room that smelled from the rot of wood, cooked cabbage, dust, and too many children living too close together. The sight of her made my feelings for Itzik seem foolish, a vanity. What was I playing at? To take more from a woman whose eyes were already hollowed out like two halves of an empty walnut?

Sarah Leiber sat by her fireplace, knitting socks. Her hands were twisted and swollen from work, the knitting and sewing, washing clothes for a few zlotys, buying milk in buckets to sell at market. I used to see her, going out to the goose herds for the feathers or taking the slaughtered birds to pluck and sell the fill for pillows. This is what the poor soul did to feed her children.

The musty, unclean smell of her home was stronger than that of the barley soup simmering in the pot that hung from an iron bar in Sarah’s brick fireplace. On its back ledge, four children lay sleeping, rolled next to each other like uneven blintzes on a tray, the two longer bodies curled around the shorter ones in the middle.

“Where have you been?” Sarah’s voice was sharp, cutting. “There’s trouble in the town. Men yelling. All night you expect me to sit up wondering if you’re dead in the street?”

Fear had transformed her completely from the woman I remembered. It quickened her speech and focused her normally bewildered expression. Under the circumstances, maybe she couldn’t afford tenderness. All right, I thought. I’ll be the one now to teach Itzik with sugar, not salt.

She looked at him with an anger I would not have expected from her, this woman who all the town thought was docile as a cow. “In a few hours I have to get the milk. What was I going to do without you here to watch the children until the trouble passes? I don’t have enough to worry about, Itzik, without this?” She flung her hand in his direction.

I felt the wild beat of Itzik’s heart hammering at his shirt. In the dirt between the rough floorboards he tapped nervous circles with the toe of his split-open boot. “I brought you money, Mama,” he said. The voice was soft. He pulled his hand slowly from the folds of his jacket and took a few steps to the room’s only table. Without looking at the money bag in his palm, he laid it down and pushed it across the rough boards as if he wanted to be rid of it.

She stayed in her chair. “Who gave this to you?” she hissed at him. “What did you do?”

“It’s for you, Mama. Avrum Kollek gave it to me. To help you. It’s wages. For later, Mama...” His voice trailed off as he looked over to the children. For the first time that night, I saw his eyes sparkle with tears.

“Itzik! What are you telling me?” She jumped from her chair and grabbed his arm desperately. “Is it for the military service? Is he paying so he can keep you at the mill?”

Itzik avoided her eyes. “Jan Nowak whipped the cheder boys again tonight, on the Gradowski road. You remember. He goes after the little ones.” He checked her face, as if waiting for her to understand. Sarah stared back at him. She dug her fingers into the hair under her scarf, as if she would scream. But no sound came.

“Mama?”

She didn’t move.

“I couldn’t leave them there like that. One of them was younger than Hindeleh.” He paused and looked up at one of the small bodies on the fire-place shelf. Hearing her name, a red-haired little girl’s sleepy face rose momentarily from between the warmth of her brothers’ bodies. She puckered her lips as she stretched and lay down again, asleep. Itzik whispered to his mother, “I couldn’t. I had to stop him.”

“You had to stop him? Why you? You, with a sick mother and four starving brothers and sisters. You had to be a macher—a big shot?” She spat. “Just like your father! What have you done to us? You have killed us.”

A furious look passed between the boy and his mother. It must have frightened them both because they turned quickly away. Itzik’s face had gone white. His body sagged, as if tottering under the weight of her abuse. What kind of mother blinds herself to her child’s suffering, or lunges at him, blaming him without knowing what’s happened?

Sarah rubbed her sides angrily. “What now? Has Jan gone to the police? They’ll arrest you, if the hoodlums don’t get you first. Is that what you came here to tell me?” Her eyes darted around the room, fast as her speech. “Squire Milaszewski will side with them. He needs to fix things with the peasants. It’s him that’s stirred them up, raising their rents, taking Schmuel Cohen’s side about those hides.”

Itzik shook his head. “Jan didn’t tell anyone what happened, Mama. He’s dead.”

Sarah looked at her son in horror. “Because of you?”

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, still 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.