For many nights, Fanny Keismann had been unable to sleep. Mende’s sad eyes reminded her of their mother, during their Grodno childhood. Deep black eyes with bags underneath. When she was a girl, there was nothing that Fanny would not try to raise their mother’s spirits. She helped with the chores, made kreplach and krupnik, learned to read the Tzena U’Renah and the Teutsch Pentateuch, and even drew water from the Neman. She would spill half of it on the way back, but she carried as much as a young girl could. But whenever she approached her mother, hoping for a hug and a kiss in return, she was always met with the same answer: “Not now, Fannychka, not now. Mamme is tired.” A sigh.
Her father, Meir-Anschil Schechter, who was usually a stern man, had one joke that he liked to tell. He dismissed any theory that a dybbuk might have possessed his wife, and would never hear of exorcism and talismans. “Your mother,” he explained to Fanny and her sister, “is actually quite a happy woman, and there’s nothing in this world that she loves more than you two. But she can’t help being the righteous woman that she is. And if it is said ‘In pain shall you bear children’, then she must act accordingly.”
“There is no such commandment!” Fanny said with indig-nation.
“You are a bright child,” her father replied, his countenance softening. “Very clever.”
Throughout her childhood, Fanny used to tug down on her cheeks to avoid getting those same bags under her eyes that were so characteristic of her mother. And recently, having spent all those hours with Mende, she has noticed that her hands are once more pulling at her cheeks and her thoughts have been drawn, against her better judgment, back to those faraway days.
Even in the dead of night, at the second hour past midnight, as she left her home and climbed into Mikhail Andreyevich’s cart, which was waiting for her as arranged on the outskirts of the village with his horse, she felt as if she was racing to her mother’s final place of rest, somewhere between the fields of potatoes and the fields of wheat.
Fanny was ten when her mother’s light went out, and the child had watched as her mother’s dead body was laid out in the kitchen on a thin mattress covered with a white sheet. Her father explained to her that they were waiting for the lady morticians of the chevra kadisha, who had been delayed by a snowstorm. Her mother lay on the floor in this way all through the night, between the kitchen table and the oven, and Fanny could not sleep even for a moment. When she thought she could hear breathing and gurgling from the kitchen, she dared to leave her bed and go to her mother. She felt her mother’s cold hands and crept underneath the sheet that covered her. For the first time in her life, she encountered neither her mother’s broken voice saying “Not now, Fannychka, not now. Mamme is tired”, nor that damned sigh. The child clung to the body and held its hand, until her father found them there at the break of dawn. These hours were among the happiest she had ever known, and her father smiled down at her without any sign of alarm.