Eve passed her eighteenth birthday. With the matter of Chaim and his reign of terror, as she referred to it, apparently settled, she looked forward to the birth of her baby and Dora’s. The future really looked bright for the Family Markoff and for the children to come.
She left the manor house that day with an order for a third maternity dress. Not only was the Countess delighted with her gowns but she had also asked Eve to start work on a layette for her expected child. For the first time the Countess had offered Eve tea, a very lavish tea. Yes, things were going well, Eve reflected, far better than she had anticipated, and her anticipations were always high to start with. Even the business was going well. While the brothers weren’t getting rich certainly, they were managing to do enough business to feed the household, pay the rent on their house, and have a few kopecks left over at the end of the week to divide up among the three families.
As she walked, Eve could see the peasants working in the fields now that the ice and snow was gone except for those places well hidden from the increasingly warming sun. When she neared that part in the road where the fort held sway overhead, Eve crossed over as had become her custom each time she walked home from the manor house. She did this each time since she had no idea of the exact day when the supply wagon made its monthly visit to the fort—she hadn’t actually seen the wagon since that first time. She searched the ground each time she came by to see if anything had dropped from the wagon for her to discover. Today she saw nothing—not a potato, not a beet or cabbage, and she turned to go on. But then she glimpsed something in the ditch, something mostly covered by a bit of remaining snow slush, here where the icy drifts had mounted so high one could have imagined they reached almost to the heavens which had first strewn them. She clambered down to investigate further, forgetting that she’d soil her skirts badly. The second her fingertips touched the soft leather pouch her heart leaped then fluttered. . . .
“Three hundred rubles!” David repeated in awe. He had never even heard of such a sum, much less seen it. “But what? Where?”
“I can only imagine that it must have been the monthly pay for the soldiers quartered there—”
“And fell out of the wagon? Does that make sense to you?”
“It’s the only answer I can come up with.”
“But surely they know the money’s missing? It’s impossible that they don’t!”
“Of course they had to realize it was missing when they didn’t find it on the wagon, but the point is it must be missing a long time already. The pouch was all but covered with snow. And almost everywhere else the snow’s been gone for two, three weeks already, which means the pouch must have been covered by the first snowfall and covered more deeply each time snow fell, six, even seven months ago. The search for the missing money must be over, forgotten by now.”
“Maybe we’d better give it back, Eve . . .”
“No, we can’t do that. First of all, they’d never believe we found it. They’d say that since we’re crafty Jews, we managed somehow to steal it, but since all Jews are also cowardly, we became frightened and decided to give it back. No, David, we can’t take that chance.”
“No, I guess you’re right. But what will we do with it? We can’t spend it. If we spent three hundred rubles, someone would be bound to get suspicious.”
“No, we won’t spend it. Not yet, anyway, and not ever all at once. We’ll keep it and spend it slowly. Or rather, dispense it slowly.”
“What do you mean—dispense?”
“You won’t laugh at me if I tell you something?”
He laughed right then and there. “I’ve learned never to laugh at you.”
“David, I really think that money was sent for me to find.”
“Really? And by whom was it sent, may I ask?”
“You are laughing at me and you haven’t even heard me out. I don’t say it was God specifically. But somehow that very first day, when I saw the wagon climbing the hill to the fort, it came to me that if I kept on searching the ground all around there, some day I’d find something truly wonderful. And now I have! David, I’m sure I was meant to find that money and with a purpose! Not for us to use for ourselves but whenever there’s a good reason—to feed the hungry or if, say, there was an impoverished carpenter who had no tools. We could buy him some so he could make his living. Or maybe if it becomes necessary to grease an official’s palm for whatever reason. Oh David, I’m sure of it! I was meant to find that money!”
He looked at her amused and bemused and wondered why he had been lucky enough to have found her. “Are you sure you’re really Elijah Brodkin’s daughter?”
She laughed. “Why? Who do you think I am?”
“I’m not sure. Some lovely princess from some mystical land. Or maybe just a beautiful, crazy Russian gypsy . . .”
“Ah, if I’m a beautiful princess then you’re my beautiful prince. And if I’m a crazy, beautiful gypsy then you’re my beautiful man. Come here and I’ll tell your fortune and there will be no need to cross my palm with silver. For you, beautiful man of destiny, it’s all for free.”
This was the second time she had called him that—man of destiny. The first time, when she had sent him with the book of commentaries to settle the question of the needle in the cow’s stomach, he had asked her then to explain the term and she had said it referred to a man who was predestined to make the world a better place. Now, hearing the words again, he knew that it was the other way around—this incredible magical girl was the one who had the great gift of making the world a better place to be, the very, very, best place to be, and it was his luck that he had found her.
A week later the Russian world was in an uproar. The Tsar Alexander II, the greatest reformer Russia had ever known, was dead—murdered! And who was responsible? Greedy ingrates not satisfied with the progressive reforms made in their behalf—workers, peasants, the always scheming malevolent Jews! What was needed was a return to harsher times and punitive measures.
Accordingly, in all the towns where Jews lived the shops and stalls were closed down by the Jews themselves as a precautionary step, and all those usually engaged in dealings with the gentiles stayed home behind locked doors and gave themselves over to prayer. They prayed not for Alexander’s soul but for their own salvation, and waited for the bad time to pass.
But Slobodka was not one of the towns slated to be spared by divine intervention. The night came when they heard the hoofbeats of many Cossacks riding on many horses. There was nothing to do but huddle together for comfort, in bed and in corners, and mumble more prayers, this time praying only that the hoofbeats wouldn’t falter and come to a halt at their door.
Through the windows they saw the night lit up by orange flames. Immediately David pulled on his boots.
“David!” Eve screamed. “What are you doing?”
“Somebody’s house is on fire! Some miserable wretch needs help, not prayers!”
“No!” Eve wailed. “You can’t help. Not tonight. Nobody can help tonight. I won’t let you go!”
“But you said I was a man of destiny,” he offered bitterly. “It’s never been true. I’ve never been that but tonight I will be!”
“No, you won’t! You’ll just be dead! Dead! Our baby will be an orphan before it’s born. And for what? What can one man do? One man against fifty Cossacks? A hundred Cossacks? They’ll cut you down with their swords before you go twenty feet and you’ll accomplish nothing!”
“I don’t care! If I kill one Cossack before I die, it’ll be worth it!”
“But how will you kill even one Cossack? You don’t even have a weapon. What will you take? A kitchen knife? You’ll never even get near enough to the Cossack that slices off your head to use that knife. Can’t you see? It’s not your night. Wait until it is, when at least you’ll accomplish something by fighting back, even by dying. If you die tonight, you’ll die for nothing.” But not sure this time that her words would work, she threw herself against the door barring his way, calling out for Yacob and Hershel to hold him back forcibly.
When the night grew quiet again David went out with his brothers to find that it wasn’t some family’s house that had burned but the town’s House of Worship. The demonstration had only been a minor punitive action, a warning. In the morning the townspeople went about congratulating each other for having had their collective lives spared and thanking God for His mercy. That their Temple had been destroyed? What was new about that? They would rebuild as they had for centuries.
“We’ll give a few rubles from the three hundred toward rebuilding the synagogue,” Eve told David. “Not more, or everyone will wonder where we got it.”
“Give the money!” David said with so much venom it broke her heart. “Let them rebuild! But I won’t enter it! I’m through with synagogues and prayers!”
“But David,” Eve protested. “We have to go on having faith!”
“Why? And faith in whom? They call us the Chosen People. No! That’s not true! We call ourselves the Chosen People and they call us drek! But what were we chosen for? You tell me, Eve. What did God choose us for?”
Oh, she had answers for him. Words, words from the Torah and the Talmud, words that wouldn’t mean anything to him now. What answers could she herself give him from her heart? But her answers wouldn’t mean anything to him. Not now. She had failed him. When she had first come to live with him she had promised him manhood if he stood up to his father. And he had—he had stood up to Chaim and gone off with her on his own. A man, certainly! But she had prevented him from standing up to them, the true oppressors who made Chaim a mere puddle in a raging flood. Had she stripped David of his manhood for all the time to come? He seemed to have lost faith in everything—in God, in himself, in his Jewishness, maybe even in her as well.