In the olden times, in the old country of Latvia, a girl walks out of the city into the forest to gather mushrooms in a basket, like a child in a fairy tale.
Her name is Mina Mendel, just turned fourteen years old.
She’s on the brink of something but doesn’t know it. Folk tales begin when a person sets out on a journey; then a story is in the making, with a beginning, a middle and a satisfactory conclusion ending in a marriage and the defeat of all your enemies. Peace reigns, fortunes are restored, wrongs are righted. Granted, these tales of myth and legend generally concern young men embarking on heroic deeds and quests, but on this occasion it’s a curly-haired Jewish girl who picks up her basket, steps from the house and walks with purpose along the streets until the city runs out.
The rules of the forest are not those of the town. Primal creatures of pre-civilisation are supposed to live there – spirit animals, ancient beasts existing now only in folk-memory. At the very least, there are wolves. Weaving through the trees, spotting likely fungi, plucking the thick-capped stems from the damp earth shaded by the canopy of trees through which sunshine weakly glimmers, she hears in the distance the sound of voices singing. There is nothing eerie or other-worldly about the music, it is a harsh utterance from the human throat. It sounds to her like drinking songs, and the singers sound drunk.
Young girls are right to fear drunks, it can’t end well. Young Mina is not so innocent as to be ignorant of this basic truth. It is the responsibility of her father to protect his family from the evil eye which lies not only in supernatural forms but also in rowdy taverns and on the streets and in the form of anti-Semites riding on tooled-leather saddles borne forwards on a quartet of clanging metal hooves. She has heard of inebriation which turns men into animals, addles reason and causes them to lunge, fall, vomit. Drunks are ridiculous and contemptible, low, unclean. You can detect the stench of liquor coming off their faces, their clothes. What a drunkard could do has no limits, it is where the moral centre gives out, collapses into bestiality. Drunks wearing crucifixes are the very worst. Worse than actual wolves, they are never sated in their hunger for blood. And Christians are the natural predators of the Jews with no known predators themselves.
Now Mina recognises the trembling sensation of danger, alone without protection, stumbling over tree roots. They could violate and kill her and her body would be eaten by wild animals, only a collar bone, a hip bone, a thigh bone scattered on the mossy earth. There is every reason to be afraid, she thinks, they’ll have your guts. Oh! I will never see my mother and father again, and all for a basket of mushrooms. What was I even thinking? I could slap myself, I could turn my cheeks red with such a slap, and— But wait a minute, what are they singing?
There is a point at which you go forward or you turn back, you have to choose, you can’t stay rooted to the spot. If you did, time would freeze, history would end. So Mina Mendel steps towards them. The story begins.
The singing stopped. The world stopped. She could hear the wind in the trees, the boughs bending, the branches live with birdsong now the raucous clamour of their voices had died down. She felt a great tension. The air vibrating, or her own body trembling? Adolescent faces turned and stared at the young maiden advancing towards them with a steady uninterrupted step, they saw curves beginning in all the right places, clothed in a grey everyday woollen dress, a raspberry-coloured scarf tied around her hair. An ordinary girl of what they would call Semitic appearance – the lack of delicacy in her features, the lumpy nose, the crow-black hair and currant-coloured eyes.
The boys were all thinking different things as they watched her approaching. Some experienced a simple shaft of desire, others a more aesthetic appreciation for her healthy young features and flushed skin, the prelude to lust. For others it was simple curiosity, questions about who she was and what she was doing there and how one needed to keep up one’s guard against spies and agents of the police. One was reminded of his cousin who had died of diphtheria, inducing sad memories, and he made up his mind that his rowdy friends would not lay a hand upon her.
Looking at one another for confirmation and with some whispering and finally general agreement, the boys started to stamp their boots, smiling, gesturing in a friendly way, and the one with the dead cousin came forward and gently (for him), relieved her of her mushroom basket, took her hand and brought her into the middle of the crowd, where they asked her name and introduced themselves, and some added their ages. The youngest was seventeen, the oldest was twenty-three. After these awkward formalities were complete, they asked what she was doing in the forest, where she had come from, was she alone, did her parents know she was wandering through the trees by herself, was she not frightened, did she need a chaperone home to her front door? When they had the measure of her, were reassured that she was not a spy, just a harmless young girl, then they were willing to let her in on their secret, why they met in the forest. Not, like her, to collect fungi but to take refuge in the beauty of nature from a hostile society and to avoid being seen and overheard.
‘We are Bolsheviks!’ they explained. ‘We are agents of the coming revolution.’
What were they talking about? She hadn’t a clue, had never heard of Bolsheviks. She was the daughter of a flour merchant, a middleman. She lived in a good house and her mother had maids to help her with the running of everything. Mina went to school and learned basic mathematics, history, geography, but she had never been taught about revolution. Was it to do with the rising and setting of the sun? She tried to look wise, she nodded and smiled, as though she was familiar with these matters and Bolsheviks were not something you ate fresh from the oven with butter and a smear of honey, accompanied by a glass of tea.
Her basket rested under a tree, the boys raised their voices in an unfamiliar song but with a half remembered melody she had once heard. The notes flew about above them, it was rousing and exciting. Then once again their voices dropped and they started talking.
After a few droning minutes of lectures on political science and contemporary Latvian history, one of the boys asked her to dance. Mina thought that would be fine; she got the picture that their minds were on higher things, reminding her of her studious brother Jossel at home to whom she would return to get to the bottom of this situation, for if he didn’t know from Bolsheviks, no one would. And dancing would shut them up with their labour and capital, and this and that she couldn’t remember a minute later. So she accepted the extended arms of a young man who took her by the waist and started to stamp and roar and twirl her around. She began to sweat patches under her arms, and her thighs were slippery with heat. Her tongue licked the perspiration from under her nose.
The sight of the young men, their joy and humour, though they were outcasts and oddballs, struck a chord – a bronze clapper beating against a dinner gong. She breathed a new kind of oxygen, the potent chemical mix of freedom. Frei, frei! thought the girl who was a good Jewish daughter, destined to become a good Jewish wife and a good Jewish mother. Exultant under the trees, she felt something dislodge in her, the mechanism that was winding her down like a cheap clock to early marriage and a replica of her mother’s pale floury form. Because who wanted to be like her mother, that silent, sad, resentful lady who emitted no light of her own? Whatever weak radiance she had had was banked down long ago into some interiority that had no outward expression.
What animated Mina now was the sight of something so immensely different from rooms full of relatives breathing too hard, and the smell of fatty cooking, the fug of the shul – the sight of the men’s heads bent, praying, seen from the separation of the ladies’ gallery. Everything at home was enclosed, it was all inside. With her cloth-covered basket, her shawl, her headscarf, she might have resembled Little Red Riding Hood, and the boys wolves in sheep’s clothing, but here under the trees with the handsome young men with their stamping boots and wild eyes there was nobody around to tell her what to do. Which meant anything could happen. That was really the point. All the doors of possibility were open to her at a time when there was no possibility at all but to live the way your mother lived and her mother before her and so on until back into the dawn of history. There were no female prophets in the Bible and the only women who did anything interesting were queens. Take Queen Esther, for example, who married into the Persian royal family and stopped the persecution of her people stone dead with her clever stunts. But mostly it was mother of mother of mother of mother of wife of wife of wife of …
She passed a couple of hours in the forest, dancing and singing and talking. Was she a bourgeois or a worker? they asked. Was she on the side of capital or labour? These questions required her to consider her father and his flour business and the extent to which he was an exploiter of others. Did her mother exploit the young maids? Should they be sent home to their villages and the children make their own beds? But then what was to become of those two meek, hardworking girls? Should they starve for want of work? These naïve questions were dealt with firmly but with good humour. The maids would be given labour more dignified than picking up the dirty linen of the bourgeoisie, they would be sent to work in factories to produce useful commodities for the benefit of all mankind. They would take part in the great electrification of the country, no more filthy gas or tallow candles. This seemed to Mina fair enough, the camaraderie of the factory floor, everyone in it together, no bowing and scraping to your betters. Bread would be made in vast industrialised plants, millions of loaves every day feeding the people. What a nice dream, she thought. There had to be something in it. Ideas, she would say to herself as she lay in bed that night. I never knew.
The boys were trying as best they could to behave like young gentlemen, to argue with reason not threats because they were hoping she would come back a second time. Mina was not a great beauty but at fourteen she was pleasantly attractive, with abundant coarse black curly hair. She was sturdily built with a tight neat waist and broad hips. She had an open, smiling, affectionate face and even as a suckling baby her aunt had looked at her and said, ‘That one is full of mischief!’ Dancing under the trees, her forehead gleaming with perspiration, a sweat moustache glowing above her upper lip, she seemed slippery and sensual. They felt a great tug inside their trousers. Their underwear, worn by those who could afford such luxurious garments, was getting tight.
At last Mina pulled away from the dancers and ran home, excited and out of breath and feeling guilty about what she had done and wondering if she had had a lucky escape not to have been mauled by their male hands or if they were genuinely welcoming her to their secret fraternity. What she knew was that she had had fun. She felt drawn to these muscular figures who seemed to have access to a code, a cryptology which unlocked the door into another life. She didn’t understand much of what they said, but oy, how they said it!