After Jossel found out about Mina’s second excursion to the mushroom forest, and the kiss under the trees (‘What do you think of that? Your little sister had her first kiss’), he told his mother and father that he wanted to have a conversation about the family’s future when the younger children were in bed.
He had a sense of unease. It might have been his imagination but something in the atmosphere of the house was off. Solly cried more, sudden wails; Rivka had not yet fully bonded with her new doll; Itzik was starting to resemble the tsar himself, bloated with power. What did he know? And how did this knowledge infect everything else? Jossel stared down the path of doom, his sister lost forever in the primeval forest where people like them did not belong. All his life he would fear and distrust the density of trees and woods and copses, the antithesis of the modern world, the old places as he thought of them. There were other lands where the horizon was flat and it was possible to imagine the curvature of the earth, the ceaseless rotation through the days and nights and seasons, the impermanence of time.
‘Uh-oh,’ Mowscha Mendel said, ‘what’s this about? Has he come up with some ideas about the business? A young man’s head is filled with wild horses.’
‘Or there’s a young lady,’ said his wife. ‘He wants to get married.’
‘It won’t be a girl, Jossel isn’t the type. He’s a dreamer.’
‘Of dreamers, a certain kind of girl can take advantage.’
The house at night had a breath of peace. The clock ticked in its walnut case, the table linen had been folded and put away. The day was over, the day was something else now, another realm. Father home from business, Father was supreme. His beard was still black, only his face was lined in vertical runnels by his mouth.
His mother tended to the coffee pot. A few months ago Jossel had brought it home from the market and presented it to his mother as a gift, proud of himself that he had chosen such a lovely delicate thing, decorated with hand-painted roses and entwined leaves. It was the kind of thing a woman likes, daintiness, fragility, prettiness, and not entirely useful, for the spout was not what his future wife would say of successive items in their own home, ‘a good pourer.’ Getting out the coffee pot was a sign that something was up, that his mother knew there would be a need to tamp down emotions. Dora knew her husband would not dare slam his fist on the table while the coffee pot rested there. He was an impulsive man, but he knew better than to upset his wife. He did not understand her, never had. She never explained herself. It was her own kind of power. The boy had bought her the coffee pot, sooner or later it would be smashed, as everything was in the end, but Mowscha Mendel did not want the responsibility and the silent blame. He kept his hands clenched, under the table.
Looking across at him Jossel thought, No one in the future, whatever comes about, can say I didn’t make my case like a man. And is his authority really so strong? He must have his weaknesses, you have been too much in awe of him. He’s just a person, after all, a middling flour merchant with a high opinion of himself, not poor, not wealthy, just an average character. And regard him touching his nose like that, tapping the nostril. He looks like a mechanical toy made of tin. No, there is nothing to be afraid of.
Jossel set out his proposition. A plan for the uprooting of the family and its wholesale transport to America. A new start, a new life. His proposal took in everything as if it were a bulletin:
The hostile atmosphere in the city.
The future turn the country might take.
The possibility of revolutionary upheaval and who knew where that would lead, what discomforts and dangers.
The opportunities open to an energetic man of business in the vast grain states of the Midwest.
The chance to provide for the children a brand-new life.
The accounts he had heard from those who had already departed and established themselves amid abundance.
And on and on he went, seeing his father leaning forward in his chair. Mowscha Mendel had heard nothing like it before, not even in shul, had no idea the boy had such eloquence in him, it was worthy, he thought, of a prophet, of Amos and Ezekiel. His wife had not moved, barely blinked, placid and unperturbed, as if she had no say in the matter, was not part of the conversation. Her wig was slightly adrift on her head, she pushed it back into place. How hot it must be here by the fire, Jossel thought.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it,’ he concluded. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never once dreamed of another life.’
The old man pulled himself together, said what he had to say briefly and in the firmest manner.
‘What nonsense, are you out of your mind?’
‘And what do you have against it?’
It scarcely seemed worth the breath to reply, the answer was obvious, the answer was as constant as the sun and moon and stars, day and night. His son had got himself up as Moses, thought he was leading his people out of bondage to the Promised Land, when he was just some light-headed luftmensch with clouds instead of brains. Jossel, a man of action! Tears of laughter should come to his eyes.
Light winked off the coffee pot’s garish floral designs. The coffee pot remained unbroken. There was no need for rage.
His wife pulled his sleeve. Gave him a look.
‘What?’
‘If you have something to say, tell him. He is worthy of an answer.’
But before he could reply they were interrupted. It was Solly, the little one, down from his bed, crying from a bad dream. He dreamed his brother Itzik pushed him down the stairs like his sister’s doll. And here was that nasty boy flattened against the wall outside the kitchen, for purposes Solly could not understand. Itzik put out his foot and tripped him over. Solly yowled. Itzik ran round the corner. Dora took her youngest child in her arms, he sat there on her knee for the remainder of the conversation, silent witnesses to family history, five-year-old Solly, and a cheap coffee pot that didn’t pour well.
Itzik thought he had been seen by his mother, he thought he had heard his name hissed like a snake. From his mother’s lips, a hiss. Now the dialogue was lower when he returned to his place. He did not catch all of it. But he got the general gist.
‘What do I have against it?’ his father was saying. ‘Everything. Who knows me in America? Who remembers that once I was a respected person? Others can take their chance, I’m staying put. That’s it. You have my opinion.’
‘Men have legs, we’re designed for travel,’ Jossel said. ‘Trees have roots, they stand in one spot but Jews dwell in time, not space. We were slaves in the land of Egypt, then we were free. A sea parted for us, we returned to a land flowing with milk and honey, then lost that. We have, and are, a story, not a plot of territory.’
‘That’s not what the Zionists say.’
‘They’re irrelevant. I’m not talking here about sand and malaria swamps.’
‘Anyway, those were different times, a completely different situation, why are you bringing that up? It’s the wrong time of year to talk of such things. Save it for Pesach.’
‘But the opportunities! Here you have a living but only a living, there you could become a wealthy man beyond your wildest dreams. Use your imagination.’
The mushrooms in the forest were nothing to what was sprouting up in Jossel’s mind. A change of gear had been engaged deep in his brain. What began as a stunt to rescue his sister had turned into an ambitious scheme for his own redemption, a pragmatic assault on the passive acceptance of one’s fate. Once they were in America anything was possible; for example, he might no longer be tied to his father’s business but seek out new opportunities, whatever they were. There were great cities, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco. He had seen photographs of these metropolises, had mentally begun to walk their streets. The future for him in Riga was narrowing like a tunnel: an existence of adding up columns of figures, stunted by numbers, the foetid prison of the counting house. And in America he had no doubt Mina would flourish. She would not meet any young Bolsheviks, how could there be communists in America? The land with no tsars would be inoculated against such plagues.
His disdain for his father’s timidity and narrow horizons now led to a growing exasperation in his daily dealings with him, short temper, irritation. His father’s small red mouth yapping in the middle of that glowering bearded face drove him mad.
Jossel described the state of Kansas, which was all grain as far as the eye could see. Undulating plains of ripening maize.
‘Maize I don’t know anything about. I know rye,’ his father said. ‘What has maize got to do with me?’
Rye made a dense chewy loaf, they ate it every day with slices of brine-preserved herring. Mowscha Mendel felt diminished, shrunken in his size and his soul by his son’s description of the Great Plains of the American Midwest. As a landscape it made him feel lonely and insignificant. The whole place sounded far too big, daunting, the scale was all wrong. Too much, too unknown. He did not grow a thing himself, he was a broker; he went out to the flour mills and came back to the bakers’ yards. The transactions were based on having a wide circle of acquaintances, knowing who to trust and who was a gonif. And that was just the business side of things. He had sons and daughters, the daughters would require husbands from good families, how could you know who was who and what was what when you were a stranger?
Jossel was not discouraged. He had expected his old man to dig his heels in, be unreceptive at first. He ignored the maize question, it was a technicality.
‘Mother, what is your opinion?’
‘You want to know what I think?’
‘Of course. The family is nothing without you.’
Diagrammatically, his mother was the radius out to every other member of the household; she had borne the children who originated in her coupling with her husband, who had little to do each day with the younger ones, had been known to mix up their names. Apart from Itzik, the devil child, his name he remembered.
Mowscha was a pillar, Dora was the earth it stood on.
‘A kitchen is a kitchen,’ she finally said, ‘wherever it is.’
But she would not be drawn any further on this enigmatic thought, whatever it meant, and Jossel declared the conference over until his father had had more time to think about it and come to see that this was the correct course of action.