As the Clinic flourished, Eve frequently wondered which was the more important—the idea or the individual. The more she thought about it, the more she wondered if the two would ever fit together, if the needs of one would reconcile with the needs of the other. Though she fought discouragement, gradually she became resigned to the realization that no matter how hard she and David and others like them strove to make Russia a better place to live, it was going to take more years than they all had, totaled up.
As the Clinic flourished, their school prospered as well. Eve thought it was Russia rushing, trying to catch up with the rest of the world, but whatever the reason, they were besieged with requests to let yet one more child into their classroom. There were requests even from the most downtrodden of peasants, the most ignoble of Jews—people who had never before even dreamed of the possibility of one of theirs reading and writing. Occasionally one of the peasants pointed out that he wanted it clearly understood that it was Russian his child was to learn and not the Yid stuff, not even aware in his ignorance that he was using a word that was offensive to the patrons whose largesse he was seeking.
“No more! No more!” Ruth protested. “And I don’t care if the child is Jewish, Lithuanian or Polish. How many more can we make room for? Look at you!” she accused Eve. “You’re worn out. Your dress is hanging on you! You’re even thinner than I am. It’s not enough that you run between here and the School all day long, but you stay up all night writing that garbage for those pamphlets of David’s—”
“It’s not garbage! How can you say such a thing?”
“Because all those words don’t help. Not anything or anybody. It doesn’t do any good. All it does is get people killed. Last week, over a hundred people were shot in Minsk. Striking workers were shot down in the street, stirred up by the same kind of garbage you write!”
“But Ruth! We have to keep trying. If one strike fails, the next might succeed. If we don’t keep trying how will anything ever get better?”
“There’s no use in us fighting over this. Let’s stick to the matter at hand. I say: no more pupils. It would be different if we had more teachers. But as it is, there’s only you and me. Hannah and Miriam are worthless.”
“They help here in the Clinic.”
“I’m talking about teaching.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, and I think it’s time we let some of the older children teach some of the beginners. Hannah’s and Miriam’s children are very good at the Hebrew lessons and your boys are good at everything. And Dorie’s excellent with numbers. . . .”
There was a bit of an embarrassed silence over the exclusion of Yitzhak’s name, but then Eve laughed. “Now if we had a class in horseback riding or even in lifting a horse from the ground, I could offer Yitzhak’s services. Or maybe if we taught handwrestling or the sport of seeing how far one can spit . . . Well, at least he is a help to David. There’s nothing Yitzhak would rather do than go out with his father rounding up livestock, unless it’s hanging around the marketplace seeing what mischief he can get into there.”
Ruth gave a perfunctory little laugh out of politeness but her thoughts had already moved on. “It’s never going to be done with, is it? The pamphlets, the School, the Clinic. We’re never going to be free, are we? We just get in deeper and deeper.” She held up a hand to Eve who was about to speak. “No. Don’t bother to correct me. Deeper and deeper. More pupils. More patients. More pamphlets. More people with their hands out. And you and David are never going to walk away from it—this grasping, greedy need that’s consuming us all. You’ll never leave. I can see it. You’ll never leave and we’ll be stuck here in this mudhole until we’re all dead!”
“Ruth, no!”
“Yes! How will you ever walk away from it? When?”
“You’ll see. There’ll be others to take the torch from our hands and go on with it. Just as in the races in ancient Greece. Or as in battle. When one warrior drops the flag, someone else picks it up and goes forth.”
Ruth snickered. “Yes. They pick up the banner from the fallen, the dead! And these torch bearers. Where will they come from? The Slobodka marketplace?”
“Listen, Ruth. The ones we teach today will teach others tomorrow. And the Clinic—when Dr. Gorkin died, didn’t Dr. Shenko take his place? And the pamphlets. If we stopped printing today, tomorrow, in some other town others would write the same material, twenty others, thirty . . .”
“If that’s the case, do it. Stop today. And let the others take over tomorrow.”
When Eve didn’t respond, Ruth smiled grimly. “See. You can’t walk away from it. And if you could, David can’t. So much for your fallen banners. And as for your Clinic, if you left tomorrow, how long do you think your Dr. Golov would carry his humanitarian torch? He comes here and brings the other doctors only because he’s in love with you. If you’re so smart, why don’t you know that?”
“Ruth, that’s a terrible thing to say!”
“Why? It’s the truth. Didn’t you tell me there’s one thing that can never be denied and that’s the truth?”
“But it’s not a truth. It’s only your guess and it’s . . . ugly!”
“Ugly? You’ve also told me that beauty is only in the eye of the beholder.”
“I’m sick and tired of being told what I said!”
“If that’s the case, then you’d better stop saying. But the truth of it is that you can as soon stop saying as you can leave here and trust that there’ll be others to pick up your banner, to carry your torch for you.”
Eve wondered about the truth of what Ruth had said. Did Dr. Golov come to help at the Clinic only because he was in love with her? She fervently hoped that wasn’t so. Would she ever be capable of leaving the School and the Clinic and the pamphlets to others? It was true that at first she had remained in Russia because of a certain set of obligations. Then, as that set of obligations dwindled away one by one, there had been new ones, new reasons to stay. Wouldn’t there always be new ones, unless once and for all she did walk away? Then, if she herself were capable of walking away from these obligations, would David be?
It was in the fall of 1890 that David came home at a gallop. He rushed to the stable, dug up the printing press from under its pile of straw and manure, dismantled it and dropped the pieces in the river, one by one. Eve asked no questions until the last piece was gone.
“Yitzhak . . .” David blurted. “Yitzhak and two of his friends from the village. They printed up broadsheets! Kill Alexander! Kill the Tsar! I caught him at the bridge going to Kovno. He was actually going to drop them in the streets, just let them drift on the air!”
“Oh my God! Where is he? Is he all right?”
“Yes, he’s all right. But he’s in hiding now—from me! After I grabbed the broadsheets from him and while I was dropping them into the river, making sure they sank, he rode away, laughing! When I find him, I’m going to flay his hide!”
“But are you sure he’s in the clear? That no one saw him with those leaflets? That he never dropped any of them?”
“They were in his saddlebag. And he said he had them all.”
“Then why did you have to destroy the press?”
“Because I couldn’t take a chance on all our lives. How can I be sure those louts from the village, Yitzhak’s friends, didn’t take some of the broadsheets with them? Or that Yitzhak himself didn’t drop a few somewhere? You don’t understand, Eve. To them, this was all a lark! A lark! Can I risk all our lives on witless children who’d do something like this for fun? For an adventure? When I find Yitzhak, I’m going to pound some sense into him, I can tell you that.”
“Don’t be too hard on him, David. He’s only a child, for God’s sake. I know he’s big and strong. That’s why you forget that he’s only a boy and expect him to act and think like a man. And don’t forget from whom he comes . . .” she teased, trying to banter David out of some of his rage. “After all, that wild Markoff blood isn’t all his fault.”
David was neither amused nor impressed.
“Printing up declamations that say ‘kill the Tsar’ isn’t a boy’s game, Eve. And now we’ve lost the press because of his foolishness. If they’d caught him, they wouldn’t have stopped to ask his age. He’d have been sent to Siberia along with the rest of us. If we don’t teach him to assume responsibility for himself, not to mention others, then we’ve taught him nothing.”
“But David, we are teaching him. Don’t you see? He’s just trying to be you, doing the things you do because he wants to grow into the kind of man you are.”
“No, Eve, this time you’re wrong. Yitzhak did this thing not because he wanted to do what I do but only because it was fun. And you, of all people, should know there isn’t time for anybody to grow into anything. This is Russia in the year 1890 and you know what that means. It means there’s no time for a Jew to be just a fun-loving boy.”
1891, 1892. The years of the Great Famine, and hunger was the order of the land. In the Markoff household, less emphasis was placed on teaching and more on the Clinic as physical maladies flourished in the wake of starvation. Livestock became almost unavailable as did the products of the field. Eve traveled, among other places, to the Squire’s manor where there was no apparent dearth of food, to beg for provisions for the townspeople, for the villagers’ children, for the patients of the Clinic. The Squire was unable ever to turn her away completely empty-handed and would have a few heads of cabbage, a half-sack of beets, a sack of potatoes placed in her wagon.
“I have my own people to think of—” he murmured in apology for the small quantity, knowing she would be back the following week.
The Countess still offered her a lovely tea with pastries and tiny cakes and dainty finger sandwiches, chocolates decorated with walnut meats and candied raspberries. Eve drank the tea with the very thin translucent slices of lemon while she emptied the porcelain dishes of their offerings, sweeping all into her market bag, leaving not even one cherry tart or sugar cookie on a plate. When the Countess inclined her head at this breach of good manners, Eve only smiled. “You’d be surprised to see how a sweet can cheer the sickest of children.”
But then the Countess was gone.
“She’s taken the children to St. Petersburg,” the Squire explained. It seemed that there was a growing disquiet among the peasants, and the Countess feared for her own and her children’s safety.
“And will you join her, Squire?”
“These are my people on my land that are hungry. I can’t desert them.”
When Eve repeated this conversation to David, he laughed out loud, then said: “I’d say he’s less worried about deserting his peasants than he is about coming back to find that these peasants had taken over his land.”
Eve looked at him, shocked. She had apportioned scant time of late to keeping up with what was going on in the outside world, immersed as she was in searching out food and in caring for the sick at the Clinic. It had been some time already since she had stopped writing the pamphlets intended to fan the sparks of revolt.
“Has it really reached this point, David? That the peasants would or could dare try to take over the Squire’s land?”
“What’s happened to you, Eve? Haven’t you been reading any of the newspapers? There’s something emerging out of this famine besides starvation. Something good! Those hunger pains in the belly are stimulating even the thickest of heads. Alexander had almost managed to squash all thoughts of rebellion and dissension with his persecutions and edicts, but now—now it’s breaking out all over again! And Russian socialists are no longer preaching just land reform—”
“Oh?” Eve asked wearily. “What are they preaching instead?”
“Marxism! Total Marxism! The peasants and workers taking over the State completely.”
Eve shrugged. She was too worn in body and spirit these days to be impressed with those who preached and talked and discussed instead of doing. “Marxism is a philosophy, David. Something for intellectuals to debate about—mind exercises. What can it possibly mean to women who see their children dying while they squat in the fields gathering rotted potatoes into their aprons?”
David laughed softly, sadly. “What has happened to that girl I stood under the wedding canopy with? That firebrand who told me it was more important to feed the mind and the spirit than the stomach? Where has she gone? That girl who said freedom was all?”
“She’s grown up, David. Grown up to realize that there is no Utopia. That’s what Marxism is all about, really. A promise of a classless Utopian society. When I said it was more important to feed the mind than the stomach, it was the words of a foolish, self-important, thoughtless child. Now that I’m a mother I know one thing. You have to fill your children’s stomachs first so that they can live. Then maybe they’ll be able to find a Utopia in their future. But not here, David, never here. Maybe Russia, like the potatoes the women claw out of the ground, is too far gone, too rotted to be tasted of ever again.”
Sorrowfully, David pressed Eve’s body to his. He mourned for that bright, fiery girl who had grown into this wise, strong woman, disillusioned by times and circumstances even stronger than she herself. Even as he loved this woman more than the girl she had been, he also yearned for that girl with her burning, shining enthusiasm for life, yearned for that girl more for Eve’s own sake than for his own. In America, she might be that girl again.
He buried his face in her breasts and murmured into them. “Oh, Eve, why don’t we just give it all up now? Not wait any longer. Why don’t we just go to America now? Right away?”
But now it was she who smiled sadly. “No, you’d be doing it for me and I can’t let you do that. You see, I know who you are now, David. If I’m no longer the girl you married, you’re not the boy I stood under the chupah with either. Now you’re the man of destiny who wouldn’t be able to forgive himself if he walked away from this deathwatch we’re keeping over Russia. No, you and I have to see it to its bitter end.”
He lifted his face from her bosom. “But you, Eve. you keep moving ahead of me. Once this would have been what you really wanted and now it is no longer. I tried to grow into the kind of man you wanted me to be when you were a girl and now that I’m here, your heart’s desire is elsewhere. You’ve moved on without me— Oh, Eve, wait for me!”
“Oh, David, David!” She kissed him—his throat, his cheeks, his lips, almost in desperation. “I would always wait for you, always, whenever, wherever. But David, I have the feeling you’ve passed me. Oh, David, if that is the case you’ll have to wait for me. You will, won’t you?”
“Whenever, wherever. We’ll always wait for each other.”
1892, 1893. Cholera swept the country like an evil wind in the wake of that terrible storm, the Famine, but it was much more democratic, claiming its victims from all levels of Russian society—gentry and peasants, gentiles and Jews, Poles as well as Lithuanians and Russians. Many fell, most succumbed.
These days there was little mention in either Markoff household of escape to America. That was for daydreaming and there was no time for dreams or even talk of dreams. There was only the business of caring for the sick, the business of trying to stay alive, the business of the rites of death.
There was the boiling. Everything that was part and parcel of living was boiled. They spent all their time away from nursing the ill or burying the dead, boiling. They carried in the water in the huge pots kept especially for this purpose and they boiled everything they touched, everything they ate. The clothes and the sheets; the towels and the dishes. They boiled the chickens and the beef and even the herrings. They boiled the vegetables and the fruit. A child caught eating an unboiled plum or cherry was severely punished. What they couldn’t boil, they disinfected. Every stick of furniture in the house, the floors and the walls. They warred on any fly daring to enter within, poured lye on the feces of the animals without. Still many fell and most succumbed.
Terrified eyes watched for the terrible symptoms—the colicky stomach pains, the looseness of the bowels, the copious rice-water stools, the vomiting, the headaches and the mental depression, followed quickly by a general collapse. This collapse was accompanied by a great thirst and the growing cramps in the hands and feet. The skin turned blue, cold and wrinkled; the voice grew husky while the pulse could hardly be detected at all.
Miriam’s Becky fell ill and recovered, but then Hannah’s Golda, recently wed and with child, sickened. Hannah never left her daughter’s bedside as she kept feeling for the fading pulse, wetting the dry lips, forcing barley water into the resisting mouth, applying cups to the chest. When nothing seemed to work or quicken the heartbeat, she scolded Golda, first yelling then beseeching—“Golda, you listen to me! Goldie, listen to your mother! You’ve got to get better. Your mother wants you to get better! Goldie, you were always a good girl. Listen to your mother!” In answer, Golda first aborted the child inside her, then died, whispering thickly at the last, “Mama . . .” from between cracked lips. They had to tear the girl from Hannah’s arms.
Weeks later, Hannah said to Eve, “Remember that first night when we all sat down at the table with Chaim. You sat down first and then we all came over to the table, one by one. Later that night Golda said that when you first sat down, she was terribly frightened for you. She said she was scared Chaim would hit you, but then when Dora, may she rest in peace, came over to help you and then, Ruth, well, Golda said she was happy for you. But then she said that, at that moment, she was happy for herself too. Strange, she was only a little girl. She was a sweet girl, my Golda. Such a sweet girl . . .”
“A sweet girl . . .” Eve repeated, realizing that Hannah was still recalling all the days of Golda’s short life. Day by day. Hour by hour. Word by word. She knew that forever and a day, Hannah would never stop recalling. Even in a land where death was a daily given, Hannah would never stop recalling, dipping into the recesses of her broken heart for a nearly forgotten word.
The very old succumbed first, and then the young. Ruth’s Aaron died so swiftly Ruth had almost no time to steel herself, to brace herself with the defensive bitterness she screamed to the heavens afterwards, at the graveside and during the mourning period immediately after. But even this postmortem bitterness offered no comfort.
Then she herself fell victim to the plague and again her bitterness didn’t help. Not even the bile-filled words she mouthed as she took her angry leave of the world of which she had despaired— “The worst of all is to die in this godforsaken mudhole,” she croaked.
“No!” Eve shrieked in protest. “Oh, God, no!” She clutched Ruth’s lifeless body to her breast, clung to her friend in death as Hannah had clung to her daughter. But in the end she had to yield in the presence of Hershel’s wailing, Ruth’s three remaining sons’ sobbing as they too clutched, holding on to Ruth’s blue and wrinkled hands. Eve knew that her own grief had to retreat before theirs. And her guilt . . . It was she who had kept Ruth in “this godforsaken mudhole” to die of its plague, no matter how hard Ruth had pleaded to escape to a better and sweeter place.
“She’s gone to a better place,” Eve mumbled to Hershel and the boys. “She’s with God now, and with Aaron,” she told them, only hoping that it was really so.
Then she went out into the yard where night was falling and she looked up into the gray-black sky searching for solace for herself. Once again she intoned the ancient words that were becoming more and more familiar to her, year by year and day by day:
“Loheyn baal horahamim yastireh-hol beseser k’nofov leolomim, ve’itzror hahayim es nishmosh, Adonoy hoo nahalohsoh, yesohnuah besholom al miskovoh veomar omain. . . .
“O God, full of compassion who dwellest on high, grant perfect rest beneath the sheltering wings of Thy divine presence among the holy and pure who shine as the brightness of the firmament, to Ruth who has gone to her eternal home. . . .”
But reciting the prayer didn’t help. She could forgive God for calling Ruth but she could not forgive herself for keeping Ruth here in this misbegotten Mother Russia to be so cruelly taken. Spring was almost at hand and the land was black and wet and soggy with the melting snows. Not able to bear her guilt, stronger than even her grief, Eve flung herself to the ground to wallow in Ruth’s forsaken mudhole.
David found her lying there, her skirt and blouse soaked with the wet dirt, face and hair bespattered with the soil, clutching handfuls of the sodden dank earth within her fists. “My poor girl, my poor sweetheart,” he murmured helplessly. Tears rolling down his face, he stooped, picked her up, held her body close to his, covering himself with her mud, rocking back and forth, and he, too, began to intone the Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, although he hadn’t prayed in years. Eve knew that this was his way of helping her atone, of sharing her guilt.
There was a new edict that the bodies of the cholera dead were to be cremated instead of buried. This was an additional burden to the Jews, a violation of their ancient law that their dead were to be committed only to the earth. “There won’t even be a grave to visit . . .” Hershel wept as the acrid smoke crept upward to the sky.
“No,” Eve allowed, “but instead, you’ll be able to feel Ruth all around you, looking down on you always from up there—” She indicated the heavens by lifting her head. She thought of Shelley’s words—“heaven’s ebon vault.” But she knew these words would hold no beauty, no comfort for Hershel. “That way, she’ll be there for you no matter where you are.”
In the weeks that followed, Ruth was there for Eve too, everywhere. She couldn’t stop thinking of all the things she had said, even as Hannah had thought of every word her Golda had uttered, every deed she had ever performed.
Ruth, unveiling her crop of newly grown curls, laughing, saying, “I decided that by the time we get to America, I’m going to walk around as beautiful as you.”
Oh Ruth, you’ll never see America now. But beautiful? Oh yes, beautiful, and it didn’t matter if you wore curls or if your hair was shorn. It was your beautiful spirit that kept me going so many times when I thought surely I was too weary to go on.
Ruth, so determined to go to America, deploring everything that stood in their way, and still the one who had suggested using Eve’s dead father’s room for an official Clinic, knowing full well that the Clinic would only be another obstacle to their leaving. And why had she done this? Because she wanted to fill the void formed in her, Eve’s, heart created by her father’s passing. Oh, a loving, giving Ruth . . .
And a courageous one. When the printing press had first Come into their lives Ruth had worried about the danger the press represented to their families. But when Eve had told Ruth that she would understand if Ruth and her family went to live with the other Markoffs, Ruth had replied: “And what kind of a person would I be then if I left you by yourself with this danger?”
Oh, I know what kind of a person you were, Ruth. Not only scaldingly honest but valiant. And loyal. As true a friend as I have ever known. Or will ever know. I will miss your tart tongue but loving heart, your satirical view of life that was tempered by your wonderful humor. Oh, we cried together, you and I, but oh, how we laughed too!
The images of Ruth kept appearing before Eve’s eyes; her words kept reechoing in her ears. Eve could not run away from them.
Ruth, enthusiastic, falling in love with literature. Reading War and Peace, rising at four in the morning after being up to midnight to read it. Raving over the novel’s Natasha—“Don’t you think Natasha is a wonderful heroine?”
No, you were the heroine, Ruth. Working day and night—teaching, nursing, toiling and sacrificing even as you pretended to complain. Natasha?—a toy woman, a doll, a vain, indulged and self-indulgent girl-child. You, Ruth, were a flesh-and-blood woman. Real. With a dream. Of being a free and educated woman in America—your boys, American school boys.
The vision of Ruth and her voice followed Eve no matter where she went, what she did.
Ruth, saying to her when they first started teaching their children, “I guess we should start with Yiddish but we should definitely get to the English right away. That’s our language of the future. And the children—they’re the future . . .”
Oh yes, Ruth, English was supposed to be the language of our future. And our children, yours and mine, they are the future, yes . . .
The truth was, much as it hurt to admit it, that she had cheated Ruth of her rightful future and now it no longer mattered whether she had been right or wrong in delaying the family’s departure for the New World; right or wrong in deciding which obligations had deserved precedence; in choosing her priorities. There was only one thing that mattered now—what she could do to make up for having failed Ruth in her lifetime. And she had the answer to that; she could see to it that Ruth’s boys, along with her own Yitzhak and Dorie, realized their future in America. For them, at least, the dream could still come true. This time she would not be put off. This time there would be no delay.
Without a word to anyone, Eve began to solidify her plans. She began with making lists—those possessions they would take, those they would leave, those things they would try to sell. Then, a list of names of people to be consulted and contemplated as to the possibility of taking over the responsibility of the Clinic; a list of those who could possibly assume leadership of the School, with a subsidiary list of those who could teach what. Too, she compiled a roster of possible buyers for the Markoff Brothers’ Livestock business, if Hannah and Miriam and their families decided to make the trip into the future with them. Finally there was a summary of their assets. Soon, she would be able to surprise them all, including David, with a complete set of plans.
She was counting on David’s acquiesence, his fervent willingness to go along with her decision. Hadn’t they sworn to wait for one another, whenever and wherever? Of course that vow had been only a figure of speech, rather a vow of allegiance, meaning that one would go along with the other wherever it was that either of their hearts led. David would understand that her decision had been made with a heartfelt urgency and with a rightness to it that could not be denied. It was, after all, a matter of trust.
But before she could announce her plan, to tell David of her desire to leave while the season was still summer, David moved first, and past her. Or perhaps, as she would think about it later, it was time and circumstance, even destiny, that propelled them all into a situation that left no room for personal desires.
Eve was out in the yard hanging up the wash—all the articles of clothing she had just boiled, even though the epidemic had waned. For as long as she still passed her days in Russia, she was incapable of not boiling. It had become habit, as natural as breathing. More than habit; in the wake of death, it had become compulsion. It was late afternoon on a particularly hot day, and her thin dress clung to her body in the humid heat. When she straightened for a moment to wipe the perspiration from her brow, she saw David riding in from the west. Quickly she shielded her eyes, then squinted them. Silhouetted against the setting sun, David appeared to be enveloped in flames. Her heart pounded as she rushed to the gate to meet him. Then she saw that he was not enveloped in flames at all but apparently drenched in blood. “David!” she screamed.
He jumped off his horse and she realized that it wasn’t his blood; there was no wound. She almost swooned in her overwhelming gratitude to a merciful God. She rushed to throw her arms around him, forgetting or perhaps not even realizing that in doing so she would taint her yellow dress with the blood that covered him.
David tried to push her away but he was too late and her dress was blemished. “Into the house!” he ordered. “Quickly!”
They ran, hand in hand, and as she did Eve wondered whose blood it was that streaked her dress, soaked David’s shirt and breeches, caked his face and soiled his hands. But there was no time for questions.
“Take off your dress!” David commanded. “We’ll have to burn it too.” Just before he began to strip himself of his shirt, he threw some other articles of clothing that he had been carrying on the floor. Eve hadn’t even noticed that he had been carrying them but now she saw what they were—the blouse and breeches of a Cossack!
“David?”
“We’ll talk later!” He threw his own shirt and breeches into the fire where the pots of water for the washing still boiled. Wordlessly, she handed him her dress and he threw that in too. Glancing at her in her white petticoat and chemise, he told her to go put on another dress and to bring him another shirt and pants. “We might be having unexpected company! And I’ll need a basin of water to wash up. Quickly, Eve!”
“Yes, but here— You’d better throw these in the fire first!” She picked up the pieces of the Cossack uniform with only her fingertips. The cloth was already stiffening with the drying blood.
“No! We’re washing those!” He grabbed for the uniform, intending to throw the two pieces into one of the pots of boiling water.
“No!” she cried out instinctively, not knowing if she meant for him not to wash the uniform, or not to throw it into the boiling water if he wanted the blood stains out. Between stiff lips, she said, “If you want to get rid of blood stains, you use cold water, not hot.”
As they dried the uniform before the fire, David spoke in a low voice, constantly looking through the window for any sign of an alien visitor, or one of the family coming home: “I had no choice, you understand. I was on my way home from the meeting in Barkan’s cellar. I was already crossing the bridge when I realized this Cossack was following me! I didn’t even have time to think or plan. All I knew was that he must have been following me ever since I left the meeting, that he even guessed what kind of a meeting it had been. All I could think of was that he would follow me home and that we would all be denounced—you and me and Hershel. Maybe even Abraham and Shlomo. And maybe all the men of the organization. I knew there was only one thing to be done. So, as I came off the bridge, I hid in the stand of trees. When he came riding off, I rode out and—”
“With what?”
“My stiletto.”
“And what did you do with the body? Just leave it there?”
“No. I buried it where they’ll never find it.”
“And his horse?”
“I considered taking it here, painting it as the gypsies do—but I decided it was too risky a business.”
“But what will they think when they find his horse?”
“I hope the gypsies will get it first. If not, they’ll know its rider is missing anyway. They’ll already be searching for him. When they don’t find him they’ll assume he has deserted . . . They desert all the time.”
“But if they can’t discover the body but assume the man deserted with or without his horse, and we’ve burned your bloodied clothes and my dress, then why, in God’s name, are we saving the only remaining and most incriminating evidence of all—the uniform?” She pleaded with her voice and her eyes but she already knew the answer. Dear God, she already knew the answer. “Why, David? Oh why?”
His eyes answered hers, blue-black and burning like hot coals. “But you already know the answer to that, don’t you Eve? If certain tasks become necessary, if certain actions must be taken, can you think of any disguise that might be more effective? Eve! Eve! Just think of the possibilities!”
She helped him bury the uniform in the stable where once the printing press had been hidden, covering the hole with forkfuls of straw and piles of manure, thinking of nothing but David’s possibilities and her own, now, impossibilities. But mostly, she was afraid. David’s organization, a group of National Socialists, were not men whose work was carried on in violence. Rather, they were men who used the word, vocal and written, and who planned strikes, not killings . . . But times were changing in Russia; every year there were more men joining the legion of protestors, there were more groups and organizations, there were more strikes leading to uprisings, more acts of rebellion. What more enticing inducement could exist to move from one form of protest to another than an almost foolproof disguise, the uniform of the enemy?
So once again her own desires had to be put aside, their urgency diminished by the times and circumstances, and maybe destiny. Still, Eve wondered what would have happened if she had made her announcement that they were all leaving for America yesterday . . . Would the Cossack uniform have gone into the fire as well as her dress and David’s shirt and breeches? Now she would never know.