When she got back from the forest, having forgotten her basket, which lay upturned and abandoned under a tree, the very idea of mushrooms having been discarded during the first dance, she waited until her brother Jossel was available. Jossel was the intellectual of the family, the oldest of the five living brothers and sisters. It was with him that one discussed affairs that were of no concern to the diurnal round of floor-mopping and baking. The house was of a good size, but crowded with people – parents, brothers and sisters, servants. Particularly the devil Itzik who was sixteen and a menace. Who liked to overhear and who lifted bags of flour with his bare hands, up and down, up and down – what for? To build up his runtish strength. A sly, cagey boy, known in the family as trouble. Who Mina and Jossel were indifferent to, as if he were not flesh of their flesh, blood of their blood. ‘He is not one of ours,’ Jossel said. ‘The bad spirits brought him to this house.’
There was a four-year gap between Jossel and Itzik. A missing place at the table, a boy whose name was never mentioned. A sudden high fever had come in the night, a stiff neck, a headache. The next day he lay like a marble statue in the bed he shared with his older brother. Jossel always felt there was absence from his right side, a buttress between himself and the wall. But he was too young to be able to remember his brother’s name. They brought him another brother, Itzik, who squirmed red and screaming in his mother’s arms, angry, Jossel would think, at having to be a replacement, angry for having to be born at all. His birth had been awkward, something had gone wrong, the doctor sent for. But he was saved, he had rat’s eyes in a human face. He seemed to have difficulty blinking.
Next, Mina, then Rivka. The pretty one, the dainty girl, the feminine spirit. A dark braid of shining hair standing crying at the top of the high house because her dolly had fallen and was lying wrecked and smashed on the tiles below and Jossel saying, ‘I’ll go and get it, don’t worry, she’ll be fine.’ But the doll’s mouth and nose were caved in and Rivka let out a wail of anguish, and tears came into her eyes, so Jossel took her to buy a new one. She chose one with yellow hair and a blue ribbon, like the sun and sky. A perfect innocence.
Jossel never told anyone he loved Rivka the most. He would have called his own daughter after her but it was bad luck to name a child after a living relative. And Rivka was still living when his daughter Bernice was born. Rivka was a darling; if she’d gone into motion pictures she would have become the world’s sweetheart. When her braid was unplaited her hair hung loose in shining curls unlike Mina’s coarse wiry mop. The death of her dolly was the greatest tragedy of her childish life and the purchase of a new one proved that reincarnation was possible, the spirit of the old dolly had entered into the new. She told Jossel this crossing the street. ‘You have a mystical nature,’ he replied.
How could she be so unlike her terrible brother? She was the shining star of the Mendel family, the bright filament lighting the way into the future.
Last, of six live births and two miscarriages coming from the womb of Dora Mendel, was Solly, the baby, the little boy aged five, sturdy, boisterous, as boys should be, confronting the world with the repeated question why? Why is the moon in the sky? (‘Moon, go away!’) Why is flour white? Why does Poppa have hairs on his face and mine is smooth like Momma? Why do horses have four legs and people have just two? Why do cats and dogs have no hands? And, unanswerable, why are there corners?
Jossel and Mina were unamused by Solly and his incessant chatter; if they had lived then in the age of volume knobs they would have mimed switching him off. He got underfoot, they tripped over him, he came careering round corners at high speed making whoops. He had learned curses overheard in the street. Jossel, remembering them all in later life, said, ‘Rivka was the beauty, Itzik was the beast, Solly was a happy-go-lucky kid with all the time in the world to grow up and be a prince among men, or if not a prince, a macher, a big shot. The kind of person who makes things happen. A smart arse. I don’t know why, he was just born that way. It was always in his nature to get into trouble; he couldn’t keep his mouth shut but he could make people laugh. Itzik, the little shit, was the opposite. He collected other people’s words and stored them for future use. He harvested opinions, thoughts carelessly expressed, bad jokes, insensitive remarks, hidden feelings that found a way out into the atmosphere. I’m not doing him down, I’m not trying to be negative about a lost soul, he couldn’t help himself, he never had a choice, stuck in that squat little body. I’d have wished him every chance of happiness except for what he did to us.’
To have a private conversation one must accept interruption. Jossel and Mina sat on the stairs and Itzik hung over the banisters and tried to overhear. Rivka plonked herself down on Mina’s knee and was told to go and play with her dollies. Their father was somewhere else in the house, not in earshot, their mother was lying down, feeling unwell, pregnant again probably, Mina thought, with contempt in her heart, and no awe that with her body this person was able to make another human being out of her own flesh.
On the stairs Mina laid out the events of that afternoon in a rush of words, giggles and questions. Jossel said, never mind electrification of industry, did they lay a hand on you? She said, yes, but definitely not the way he was thinking, he shouldn’t worry about that, it was just an arm round her waist, all they did was dance and sing. She would swear on their father’s life that this was true.
He had not expected to hear about Bolsheviks. His sister reminded him of a kitten, one that sometimes found a patch of catnip and could go a bit wild for a short time.
‘What was it that attracted you to them?’ he said.
‘It was just the singing and the dancing. But that kind of thing happens at a wedding, not out in the open air.’
‘Were they good singers?’
‘Meh. They were no chazans. Not all of them could hold a tune. Strong voices though. Very loud.’
‘Manly?’
‘That too.’
Mina thought of the reddish hair on the arms of one boy, and the rough white skin beneath it, and his fingers pressed into the small of her back. Another had white-blond hair like … She tried to think of a metaphor and only came up with a field of wheat under a noonday sun. (She was no poet, she did not have that originality of mind. Her soul arched towards the light but could not describe it.)
‘Did you join in?’
‘With the chorus of some of them, yes. The words weren’t hard to remember, very repetitive.’
‘What else happened?’ Jossel continued to speak, slowly and clearly, controlling himself, with no current of feeling in his voice. One sentence followed the next like candle wax dripping onto a saucer. Best not to get overexcited too soon. There would be time to fly into a rage and threaten to run out into the forest with a gun and shoot them all dead. Not that he wished this on himself, but he’d feel like he had an obligation and that would land him in a predicament. He wasn’t by nature a warrior, actual guns gave him the creeps. He was by definition a man who was no use with his fists: soft, white-skinned, a dreamer, all words, plenty of words.
‘Well, you know, we talked a little, as well as the dancing and singing.’
‘And what did you discuss?’
‘The situation.’
‘What situation? What do you mean?’
‘Mankind is in chains?’ she said with a questioning inflection.
‘Oh yes. Of course we are. Let me explain something to you, Mina, my dear little sister.’
‘Okay, I’m listening.’ She smiled; Jossel really did know everything. He had read books his father said he had no business reading, for everything you needed to know had been written down already in the Torah and the Talmud. It was all there, the answer to every ethical question you had. You might not like the answer, but that was what the answer was. Take it or leave it? Jossel had said to him, smiling. No, you take it. Whomsoever leaves it is damned.
Now Jossel told his sister to imagine that he was holding in his hand a glass.
‘Watch my hand, see what I’m doing? The glass is full of water or something – tea, coffee, it doesn’t matter. Now I am turning it upside down, now this glass is empty. What do you see? Not in the glass, but where I emptied it. Here.’ He pointed to his trousers.
‘A mess. You’re all wet.’
They laughed.
‘I know! Maybe I peed myself. Embarrassing. But listen, some people like a mess, they don’t care. They enjoy blowing things up – what happens when you start again with nothing? That’s what interests them, disruptive people who are attracted to chaos. Like our father, as it happens, he just doesn’t go about it in the same way. You might have heard him say he’d take a gun and shoot the tsar and who wouldn’t want to clap your hands, and whoosh, he’s gone in a puff of smoke, like a magic trick, him and the whole parasitic family? These boys in the forest you met – of course, they’re more sophisticated, they have good intentions, they believe lofty, clever, complicated things, that it is possible to expel human unhappiness forever, everything the same, no more injustice. For them reality is something you reorganise to suit your ends but these are not ideas.’
‘So what are ideas?’
Like many inquisitive, open-minded young Jewish men, Jossel had been studying the philosopher Spinoza. He wanted to discuss with Mina defective reasoning, the inadequate conception of reality and the unity of all that exists. He was trying to penetrate the deep heart of what life means. What is God? How do we prove this ‘being’ is not just an extension of our thoughts? Where do ideas come from? Are they innate in the human mind or implanted by a divine force? Are human rights a human creation or do they exist in nature? These were his musings when he was handling his father’s paperwork, for his role in the family flour business was to be in charge of the accounts, to keep the ledgers straight and to issue and pay bills. But how do you explain any of this to a fourteen-year-old girl who doesn’t read at all and who is just a mass of feelings and sensations and an affectionate, optimistic nature, who is going to be moulded into a reproduction of her mother, a machine for propagating the human race? Which he did not question as an inevitable outcome, he was not that modern.
Jossel could have inducted his sister into his world that evening. He could have inspired in her a thirst for learning, but what would have been the point? Education was not for little girls. Instead his thoughts uncharacteristically turned to practicalities: that he needed to get her away from whoever she had met in the forest. Maybe she was right, and they were nice enough boys who meant no harm, but more likely they were trouble every other way you looked at it. He could not forbid her to go, he didn’t have that authority over her. He could tell their father but he knew where that would wind up. The old man would panic, he would take matters into his own hands and make a rash decision to the benefit of nobody. He would be driven by shame and family honour, he would sacrifice a lively young girl to the shadchan, and his high-jinks sister would be married off in a month to some hastily selected old widower with hairs in his nostrils who would oppress and destroy her spirit. She would wither inside and become a discontented, bitter shadow of herself. He could feel himself withering at the idea of it, his senses alive to all the possibilities of being permanently thwarted in your spirit. Cautiously he tried to find out the lie of the land.
‘And so are you going to go back and dance another day?’
Mina had already accepted without question her brother’s critique of the Bolsheviks because it was the kind of thing he knew about and understood, these clouds of reason and unreason which were the preserve and privilege of men. The forest boys hated the tsar – a familiar impulse, everyone did – so what could be the harm in them? She had listened as they talked about the injustice of the exploitation of the industrial proletariat and peasantry. She had nodded. The words floated past her like smoke. If she returned to the forest she would not be drawn by the magnet of Leninist ideology but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t go. Because what was attractive to her about the boys was the simple impulse of excitement, of, as she thought of it, ‘something different from flour.’
‘I wouldn’t tell anyone if I was,’ she replied. He looked at her. So she was going to go back, he could see it in her face, that pert smile. She winked.
Before she went to sleep, she relived the afternoon in the forest, the light coming at angles through the branches of the trees, some of the young men handsome, others with faces like the pendular udders of cows, but all of them benign, more or less, some coarse jokes but nothing else. She felt that no harm would come to her if she returned: if she wanted to; if she had the opportunity; if it was not raining; if the trees would give shelter if it was; if there were still mushrooms to be picked; if she could get away without anyone noticing her, particularly Itzik, who would spill the beans if it was to his advantage; if her second-best dress was clean, not the old grey gown she had had on today.
In his own bed, Jossel was applying logic to the story his sister had told him. The girl was an adorable dope and there was no way this situation wouldn’t end badly for any number of reasons. There was an outside chance that something would click inside her, she’d start to take an interest, they would win her over to their cause and she would be swept up in the revolutionary times, get arrested sooner or later, rot in gaol for the infantile notion that the world could be improved upon, that man’s nature could be remoulded. At some point, dying on a filthy rat-infested straw pallet somewhere, she would realise she had been duped, that nothing was going to come of this nothing. Waste, all waste, and for what? But before it even got to that would be their betrayal of her. Having lured her into their company with politics they would take advantage of her, rape her, and not just one of them, but a pack of filthy beasts baying for her hymen’s blood, each taking their turn on her still childish body. Corruption on corruption. The worst could happen, she would be pregnant, cast out into the world alone. The least bad scenario was the most likely, that sooner or later the little blabbermouth would tell someone, and when she did, their father would hear of it and before any more harm could be done, her honour still un-besmirched, she would be married off. There was no shortage of nostril-hair widowers who would take on a nubile young girl from a good family.
Their mother had once let slip a thought. Her, a woman he believed had no thoughts.
‘Men are the cause of all misery, Jossel. Men boast they love their mothers, a mother indulges her children, she gives them everything, she gives them life itself, no wonder they love her – but not so much boasting about how much they love their wives.’
He had been startled by this admission, made while she was supervising the pegging out of the washing on a windy day, as if she thought her words would be blown away into the harbour and borne out to sea. He had not forgotten them.
He recognised with a thump of disappointment that there was nothing in Spinoza that would help him here. It seemed to him that Mina was hemmed in by this single chance meeting in the forest, all routes out of there took her to a different undesirable fate.
He didn’t even like mushrooms and she wasn’t so keen on them either, she just enjoyed the act of foraging; she liked the mossy paths, the rustle of leaves, the birds and other manifestations of the natural world he had no personal interest in.
Take himself, born to slave in his father’s grain business, to add up and deduct figures, make calculations, measure out his life in motes of flour dancing in sunbeams. Was there another way? A route out for him?
He found himself very troubled, and scratched his head and scratched his arse, and tried resorting to pornographic thoughts of bosoms possessed by demons to drive out his anxiety, and so he managed eventually to get off to sleep.
In his own bed, Itzik thought over all he had overheard while creeping behind the banisters. It was pure gold. He had never had better information since he learned of the pull of the moon on the strange internal workings of women’s bodies when he had seen his mother wash out a bloody cloth in the basin. He had thought, at first, she was dying, that this silent woman would go where his absent brother had gone, to the other side of the sun, its shadowed darkness, but eventually he had found out the terrible truth. Under the influence of the moon it happened every month, stopped, started again. When Rivka’s doll was smashed and large tears gathered in her eyes, he had said to her, ‘Do you want to know a secret?’
Thinking it was something nice, a spoon of something sugary, she managed a smile. ‘Yes!’
‘And it will happen to you one day. But not to me. Boys aren’t cursed that way.’
Now he knew something else. He had a treasure, riches, more than the tsar himself had.
The house grew quieter, then louder, as internal dialogue was replaced by snoring. The rafters shifted, creaked. The moon was on the city. In the harbour the ships and their crews and passengers lay waiting restlessly on the Baltic swell.