Fanny never dreamed that she would don the uniform of the Czarist army. But here she is, in an army camp, wearing a green tunic and baggy trousers, a lone woman surrounded by thousands of men. On one side of her sits a dim-witted beggar and on her other side sits Zizek from the Yaselda. It turns out that Zizek is a famous war hero. How else can one explain the hospitality they started enjoying as soon as the name of Yoshke Berkovits was mentioned? In the past few days, she had actually begun to like him, thinking that she could detect in his bright eyes a heart-wrenching fragility. Instead of the clumsy man who sat in his boat with a bovine mien reeking of gefilte fish, she had started to notice his softer side, his hair always carefully combed over to one side, forehead taut and nostrils alert. And now it emerges that Zizek is a ruthless killer who has butchered enemy soldiers by the dozen, maybe even by the hundreds.
She wonders if it is just happenstance that she has ended up in the company of killers. How could it not have occurred to her as she left her home at two hours past midnight, travelling by back roads, that it would be impossible for her to reach Zvi-Meir without passing through places where a Jewish prayer shawl has never been seen, where no Jewish woman has set foot before?
Her longing for her children is like a rock rolling down a mountainside, subject to the force of gravity and the momentum of necessity. She rolls towards them in dreams that shatter when she wakes. In her imagination she runs her fingers through the hairs on Natan-Berl’s back the same way he touches the ends of his prayer shawl, the tzitzit, one tassel at a time, and then she kneads the fat on his shoulders. She tortures herself for not being there to put her children to bed and watch over them as they sleep, for listening instead to Shleiml Cantor ostentatiously releasing belches that stink of tinned meat. She misses and yearns and she is exhausted, but there is one thing she does not feel: regret. No, she has no regrets. How could she?
As they were led into the army base and made their way through the fanfare, army officers bowing and waving at them, Fanny hoped that her mother was watching from above. Malka Schechter used to sit in her room, overwrought with anxiety, muttering, “With God’s help everything will be alright.” This phrase was her mother’s favourite, always accompanied by a heavy sigh, which perturbed the other family members all the more. Nothing terrified her mother more than the unknown. In her eyes, an uncertain future was a greater threat than a concrete disaster. Malka Schechter never stopped complaining that if only she could be told where and when catastrophe would strike, she would be able to deal with it. It was the element of surprise she could not tolerate. And while she knew that her daughters’ odds of being run over by a cart were close to nothing, the possibility existed nonetheless! If two children out of a hundred died of diphtheria, those two were clearly destined to be her own daughters! What is the difference between the odds of two to one hundred and two to two? For this reason, she wove a dense web of mental constructions of “if . . . then . . .”, thinking that she could at least keep the “if” side of the question under her control. If she does this and that, such and such will happen. And so, with God’s help, everything will be alright.
From a young age, Fanny had watched her mother hiding in her bed as the layers of her humanity peeled away from her, one by one. “Not now, Fannychka, not now, Mamme is tired.” Hearing her daughters moving about the house, she would emit that same heavy sigh that thundered in the girls’ ears like storm clouds, pelting down the words, “With God’s help everything will be alright.” The night her mother died and her body was placed in the kitchen until morning, Fanny could not close her eyes. As disasters raged in her imagination she began weaving her own “if . . . then . . .” constructions. Praying that with God’s help everything would be alright, she had wet her bed.
Driven by an instinctive impulse, she had thrown away her blankets and crept to her mother’s resting place. In the light of the lantern, Malka Schechter’s face had been pale and serene. Fanny had never seen her so calm before. The daughter had squeezed her mother’s lifeless hands, which sent back a strange warmth. The bags underneath Malka’s eyes had softened and her lips were parted as though she was about to say something. To Fanny, her mother’s death was a show of splendour compared to the crushed life that had inhabited her body. With her pretty, peace-ful face, her mother’s lips carried the promise of a tender word. Fanny knew that no game of hypothesis and consequences could overturn the fact of her mother’s death. So she did not beseech the Almighty to bring her back from the dead, nor did she pray that He would protect her from the angels of destruction. She clung to her mother and lovingly stroked her hair. It was by not praying that she felt the closest she had ever felt to the God On High, and it was through her lack of faith that He would bring her mother back that she found her consolation. In the sheer meaninglessness of death, she found God for the first time in her life.
Fanny slept next to her mother until the break of dawn, promising herself that she would never yield to fear. With the same passion with which she dipped her fingers in her mother’s meat stew, Fanny vowed to get her hands dirty in the cauldron of this world and immerse herself completely in earthly life. Alas, her access to that life was blocked when she was forced to become a seamstress. Fanny drifted away from her calling with every day she spent with Sondel Gordon the tailor, as the eye of the needle lay her eyesight to waste. To her, everyone in Grodno was like her mother: isolated from the world in the safety of their homes. A Jew cannot call himself a Jew unless he hides behind the walls of Yiddish and dwells in the citadel of the shtetl. Men cannot fulfil the commandments unless they ward off temptation and enforce the modest conduct of women. Women cannot be whole without their husbands, even if their husband’s virtue is nothing to put on a pedestal. Every minute detail must be regulated and ordained, everything must be in its proper place. Trying to flee the rule of halakha is courting danger.
To Fanny this way of thinking was not just a life of self-deception but actual sacrilege: these people had turned their backs on the work of Creation. So she grew closer to her father and learned his trade, and then went all the way to Motal to marry Natan-Berl and embraced country life, enchanted by the villagers’ customs. Compared to Mende and the women of Grodno, Motal, Pinsk and Minsk, Fanny was a renegade. To them, she was a little crazy, a meshugene. Behind her back the gossipy klaftes whispered that if you lie down with dogs you should not be surprised if you wake up with fleas, meaning that it was only a matter of time until tragedy would befall the Keismanns who dwelled among the gentiles. For her part, Fanny was emboldened by her need to prove to the women of Motal that Jews should not turn their backs on the world, and that their seclusion was actually a recipe for disaster. So she learned to speak Polish and befriended her neighbours and ran a successful cheese-making business, all the while continuing to observe the commandments and running a traditional home. And while we are speaking of dogs, and especially ones with fleas, Fanny had never forgotten Tzileyger, the stray who had endured a lifetime of misery, until the night he had fought for his freedom with every scrap of courage he possessed. Like the dog, she wished she could tear down the boundaries of her fate and mutilate the face of anyone who stood in her path to freedom.
When she was paraded through the barracks, she had believed herself to be in grave danger, and that she had every reason to be on edge. The past has taught her that the gentile soldiers of the Czarist army do not tend to spare any pity for women, and definitely not for Jewish ones. But now she knows that she will not come to harm. She feels safe with these soldiers who bow their heads to her and offer her their food. And she is bursting with curiosity about how Yoshke Berkovits earned his reputation among them.
“Zizek Breshov?” She turns to him.
He does not answer.
“Yoshke Berkovits?” she tries again, sensing that she is crossing a line.
No response.
Like a man hiding in a bunker with his ears covered during a bombardment, Zizek is lying on his bunk with his arms covering his head. Despite the honours he has been showered with, Fanny sees that entering the barracks under this old name has clearly unsettled him. He reluctantly pecked at the bread when they sat down to eat, and then lay down on the bunk and stared at the canvas above him. In the past few days, grey whiskers have sprouted on his usually smooth face, contributing to his scruffy appearance. The beatings he took from the bandits and the agents make it hard for him to find a comfortable position. He looks like a man lying in a barren field trying to clear invisible stones from under his back.
Strange lights filter through the tent flaps, and, for a moment, Fanny fears that they are surrounded by a mob with torches. Peeking outside she sees soldiers approaching the opening of their tent, carrying offerings of candles and flowers, as though Zizek Breshov were a Christian saint.
Delighted by the sight, Fanny raises the flap slightly, thinking it will please Zizek. But he only turns away and covers his head with a blanket. She takes the hint.
Fanny goes out to greet the gawping soldiers. One of them approaches, carrying a canvas stretched on a frame and a brush, and asks her in Polish if it would be possible to paint the Father today.
“The Father?” She is confused.
“Yes, Yoshke Berkovits,” the painter says.
“I’m sorry, he’s not well, we have travelled a long way.”
The painter immediately translates what she says into Russian for the other soldiers, who are buzzing around them like bees. “Of course,” the painter says, beaming. “I understand. Could you ask him if he could manage tomorrow? In the entire Russian army, there’s not a single portrait of the Father.”
“Why do you call him that?” Fanny asks.
The painter draws closer and says, mysteriously, “He is the Father who saved us.”
“Saved you? One soldier saved an entire division?”
“A division? How about a corps? Or an army? Don’t you know? I thought you were his wife.”
“Oh no,” Fanny bursts out laughing, but then she sees that the painter looks offended, apparently on the Father’s behalf. “We are travelling together,” she begins, and the painter looks disappointed. “I am his niece,” she lies, and the painter’s face lights up again. “But we have not seen each other for many years.”
“And you will ask him?”
“Of course,” she promises. Then, unable to stop herself, she asks, “Was he an officer?”
The painter whispers, “A corporal, maybe a sergeant.”
“A mighty warrior?”
“A coward.”
“What? How, then . . .?”
“With the power of words. How else?”
“Tell me more.”
“On one condition.”