Before she left her house, at the second hour after midnight, Fanny caressed Natan-Berl’s enormous back while he slept. She ran her fingers through the black plumes on his shoulders. How could she tear herself away from her awkward bear? How dare she torment him, how could she make her children so miserable?
To his own mind, Natan-Berl is cumbersome and uncouth, and she knows he does not trust his own thoughts. He waits for her to approve every sentence that comes out of his mouth, and formulates his ideas with her before presenting them to other people. Before turning in, once the children are fast asleep, he likes to smoke a cigarette in the kitchen and listen to her telling him about her day. Yet, in recent weeks, she has been barely able to talk. She has been sitting before him with an expressionless face, mumbling, “Natan-Berl, we must do something about Mende,” and he knows all too well that there isn’t much that can be done.
His wife wants to mend the entire world, but Natan-Berl tends to think that one person cannot walk down the path cut out for another. Zvi-Meir wanted to walk away from his wife, and he did. Mende wanted to be weighed down by melancholy, and she was. What can Fanny do other than console and encourage her? She should sit with her elder sister until she heals, and do her best to stop her from ever reaching Zizek’s boat again. But Fanny, for her part, is relentless in her attacks: “You would think that, Natan-Berl.” And he becomes defensive, because he has done nothing wrong. “Exactly,” Fanny says, “you’ve done absolutely nothing, Natan-Berl.” And he, who so loves to hear her say his name, fails to understand what more it is that he can do. Every morning, he wakes up to milk the sheep and goats, to tend and shepherd, his hands are filled with work from sunrise to sundown in order to provide for his family. A lamb falls ill, the meadows become boggy and he has to venture out to more remote pasture. Tomorrow he has to clean the pen and next week he must mend the fences. And if he has to care for Mende during the day, who will do the churning? “There’s nothing but milk in your head, Natan-Berl,” Fanny says as she walks away, “and this is why the world is going from bad to worse.”
The world? Natan-Berl is befuddled. What’s he got to do with the “world”? It is a word he finds impossible to fathom, and people use it in ways that he cannot understand. He often hears others complaining, “What world are we living in?” But as far as Natan-Berl is concerned, the world is just the way it is; it is what it is and could never be otherwise.
“Of course,” Fanny teased him once. “As long as the sheep are calm in Natan-Berl’s pens, they can be beaten and tortured everywhere else.”
“Really, Fanny Keismann,” he said, offended. “I have a family to care for.”
A sudden thought occurred to Fanny. The injustice that rages in the world derives from the basic and simple fact that she and Natan-Berl have a family to care for. Because she looks after her own children, other people’s children suffer. And due to her unwillingness to jeopardise the foundations of her own home, many other homes fall to pieces. Just look at those women, for example, whose primary duty is towards their children, and whose motherhood is the source of their virtue: they would accept any injustice provided their own safe haven remained unharmed. If these women stepped out of their homes to care for others, husbands like Zvi-Meir would not dare to abandon them at the drop of a hat. But injustice always has its silent agents at work, and every affliction that occurs in one place is made possible by its silent acceptance elsewhere. She is an accomplice to the crime that took place in her sister’s home. No, not an accomplice. Worse than that. A perpetrator.
The world cannot be mended because rupture is what makes it go round. And there isn’t a single Jewish woman who is prepared to go out of her way to fix it. Not even her.
She does not expect anything from men. Why should they undermine their position as masters? Why should they waive the titles granted to them, in the absence of any challenge? Everybody in Motal knows that Zvi-Meir has abandoned his family, yet no envoys have been sent to Minsk. They pride themselves on being a tight-knit community with an influential rabbi, and the last thing anyone wants to do is rock the boat. They all emphatically condemn the wayward husband, but by not chasing after him, they reserve the right to do the same thing themselves. Their denouncement of Zvi-Meir consists of hollow words and no action.
“Natan-Berl, we should go to Minsk. We must bring back this rogue, Zvi-Meir.”
“To Minsk?” He is confused.
“We will all go together, Natan-Berl, the children will be thrilled. People say that Minsk is a lovely city. There’s not a single hungry Jew there. We’ll take them to the theatre.”
“The theatre?” Natan-Berl mumbles.
“Now is the time, Natan-Berl – when the swamps dry up and the roads are easy to navigate. In a few weeks, the mud and the ice will keep us here, we’ll be stranded.”
Natan-Berl says nothing. She can see that he has raised his protective barriers against her and she becomes filled with remorse. Why does she torment him? She takes all of her anger at Mende out on him. Instead of filling Mende’s ears with empty chatter, she should talk to her about the leap into the river, and make sure that her elder sister never again loses the will to live. But instead of shaking Mende back to her senses, she sneaks underneath the white sheet and holds her limp hand, and in the evening, she vents her anger at her husband.
One day Fanny takes courage. She waits for Rochaleh to go out to draw water and shuts the door of Mende’s room after her. She climbs onto Mende’s bed, caresses her elder sister’s head and tries to find a foothold in her hollow eyes. She searches for all the authoritative words that have come to her mind countless times before, but her voice is caged because she can see that her sister does not want tikkun, she does not want to have her soul mended. Mende has always wanted only one thing – a husband and children, or, in a word: a family. Without even one of its components Mende does not feel whole, certainly not strong, and she refuses to rise above her grief for the sake of praise, such as “see how brave she is”. To be frank, the status of agunah, a husbandless wife, does not suit her character, and her precarious family situation contradicts her faith. The dybbuk that possessed Mende is nothing more than sadness and outrage at being forced, against her will, into the world of sin. It is not Zvi-Meir that she is pining for; she yearns for the authority of a husband and for the life of a wife. She does not live for the sake of Yankele and Mirl but for the sake of being a mother. This is why Fanny said nothing and retreated from the bed and sat on a chair next to her sister for a few moments. Later, she left the house and walked north along the town’s narrow paths, all the way to the Yaselda, where she found Zizek’s boat. At her request, he let her board his craft and rowed back and forth, from one shore to the other. Why did she do that? She does not know. Perhaps she expected Zizek to say something or to stop at the spot where her sister jumped ship. But Zizek rowed steadily and calmly and did not stop, his expression detached and his rowing motion constant; it was then that Fanny realised that it was no coincidence that it had been on Zizek’s boat, of all places, where Mende came to realise that her fate was sealed. She must have felt that this was how she would float through the years, how ten months of anticipation for Zvi-Meir would become one hundred, and she would end her life, just like Zizek, with a steadfast forwards motion towards meaninglessness.
Then a bold idea rose up in Fanny’s mind, and she dared to say it out loud. Zizek kept his countenance and continued rowing with a blank face, but somehow Fanny knew that he had heard her and understood. All she said were two words, but at the second hour after midnight, as she left her home with a heavy heart, she hoped that Zizek would find a way to help her.
That evening she was very emotional around her children, jumping and dancing and hugging them too much.
“What is wrong with you?” asked Gavriellah, her eldest. “You are being funny.”
“I trust you, Gavriellah Keismann,” Fanny said, in tears, and her eldest daughter’s eyes searched her with suspicion. After Fanny had put the children to sleep, she came to Natan-Berl’s bed and stroked the small of his back for a long time. When the house resonated with the tender breathing of sleeping children, she went out to the kitchen and sat meditatively at the table.
Before going out into the dark, it suddenly occurred to her that she should leave a note, but her excitement drove the words out of her brain. What could she write? What explanation could justify abandoning five beloved children and one Natan-Berl? Finally, she tore off a piece of paper and scribbled down “I’ll be back very soon”, but immediately regretted this cryptic message and instead wrote “Take care of yourselves until I return”. She wanted to change that too, but time was pressing, so she left the note on the table and stepped outside.
In the dead of night, she met the coachman Mikhail Andreyevich, as agreed, with his cart (and a rifle, to use against foul beasts), and paid him a hefty sum in order to ensure that this rendezvous would remain secret. Together they rode north to Motal, surprising barn owls in the topmost branches of pine trees and startling deer. They advanced along Motal’s main road. Mad dogs chased after the cartwheels until they had left the town, but no lanterns lit up in any of its homes, thank God. When they reached the river, they found Zizek’s empty boat. It was very dark.
Zizek emerged from the bushes, holding a lamp. He quickly pushed his boat into the river and helped Fanny to climb aboard, then jumped in after her and calmly rowed towards the northern bank. When they reached the other side, she did not know how to thank him: words and money meant nothing to Zizek. So she briefly touched his arm, but he nervously shook her off, which alarmed her. She stepped out of the boat onto the boggy ground, and as she walked away, she realised that he was just behind her. She walked towards the nearby village, where she knew a few locals who could arrange for her to hire a cart and horses at dawn. Zizek continued to follow her. She began to fear that she might have trusted him too much. He never leaves the Yaselda, and now he is following her footsteps away from the riverbank. Fanny began to formulate a plan to be rid of him and felt for the knife on her thigh.
Then Zizek suddenly strode past her, took the lead and had her follow him to a grove of trees, where she discovered that he had already hidden two horses and a wagon in preparation. He helped her climb onto the wagon seat, then took the reins and turned the horses. Now his steady rowing motion was replaced by his pulling on the leather straps. Nothing moved in his face. His bright eyes were fixed on the Pole Star, by which he would navigate their route to Minsk, and the two words Fanny had said to him at noon guided his way and blended with the horses’ hoofbeats. Zvi-Meir . . . Zvi-Meir . . . Zvi-Meir . . .