The question arises: How did my mother, who, with her first husband, the feldsher, resided in spacious rooms, with brass handles on the doors, come to be with Father, a village Jew who lived in a place known as the New Mill, a good judge of hay, who feasted on sour milk and sour cream from large earthenware bowls, who liked to bathe in the local river and sleep in the forest under a pine tree? How did these two people ever get together?
The story goes as follows.
Before Mother and Father decided to marry, neither was aware of the exact number of children each had had with their first spouses. In drawing up the marriage contract, they forgot to note the names of all the orphaned children. It had been mentioned that there were several such, but that they were already grown and not dependent on either their father or mother for support.
The wedding canopy was set up and a repast prepared for the guests. The bridegroom returned home, and then Mother packed all her belongings into a trunk, left her few pieces of jewelry with Aunt Miriam, and went out by herself to the New Mill, where Father had lived with his first wife. When mother arrived, her eyes fell upon a large, dark room with an earthen floor, many clay pots strewn about in the corners, two broken windowpanes stuffed with pillows, and four grown girls, dark-skinned, bedraggled, dressed in loose cotton blouses, hiding behind the headboards and staring in wonder at the new wife their father had brought home from town.
When Mother saw all this, her young face shriveled up like a fig. She didn’t remove her head scarf, she didn’t take off her coat, but just stood there.
“Is this the farm that you told me you owned?” she asked.
“Yes, this is the farm,” Father replied.
“And who are the girls?”
“My daughters.”
“All four of them?”
“All four, may they remain in good health.”
“But you only spoke of two.”
“Well, what does it matter? A person says things …”
Mother felt a pressure on her heart. She couldn’t speak. What good would speaking do? If she hadn’t been ashamed to do so, she would have fainted right there and then.
However, she pulled herself together and said, “No, Reb Leyzer! That’s not what we agreed upon. You keep your daughters, and all the best to you, but I will not be your wife.”
“What do you mean? What about our marriage ceremony?”
“We’ll get a divorce, Reb Leyzer!”
And with that, Mother and her trunk returned to town.
She went straight to Aunt Miriam, her younger sister, crying and lamenting, “Miriam, dear heart, what did you want from me? Why did you talk me into this marriage? He’s a pauper! There are four girls in the house, like four hunks of wood. What am I to do with four girls?”
Aunt Miriam knew that Father had four daughters at home. She also knew that Reb Leyzer of the New Mill was nothing but a pauper, that the “farm” cited as an inducement in the marriage negotiation was nothing more than one room with an earthen floor and the clay pots for the sour milk. On the other hand, Mother was a widow and Reb Leyzer didn’t ask for any dowry. Besides, she was left with children of her own, from her first husband, may he rest in peace. So why all the complaints?
“Why shouldn’t I complain?” Mother insisted. “After the spacious rooms I had with my first husband, I should now go live in a single dark room with an earthen floor?”
Aunt Miriam’s heart went out to her, and whoever heard about what happened felt sorry for the young, pretty Frimet. But it was a lost cause. What use would it be to complain?
At that point, everybody began to lay into Mother. Aunt Miriam, and Reyzl, Itshe Bik’s widow, and Father’s sister, Aunt Naomi of the refined lips—all gave Mother to understand that a person’s fate depends on God. Nobody knows what will be. It might very well turn out that, for Mother’s sake, Father’s fortunes would improve, enough to provide his wife with spacious rooms with brass handles on the doors.
What could Mother do? She didn’t want to become a laughingstock among respectable people. She wept, complained some more, and finally let herself be persuaded. But she refused to return to the New Mill.
“Let him move into town,” Mother said. “He’s a pauper, no matter what. So he’ll be a pauper in town.”
Before long, Father said goodbye to his clay pots, to the meadows and to the forest, and moved into town together with his four dark-skinned, bedraggled daughters.
Four such daughters couldn’t sit on their father’s impoverished shoulders forever. It was time to start thinking in practical terms about them. Bit by bit, Mother took it upon herself to see that they were provided for.
Ite, the youngest, became a cook for rich families in Warsaw. Once in a while, on holidays, she would come home to visit her father, always bringing gifts.
Khane-Sore, the eldest, tall, swarthy, and with a pair of big, strong hands, Mother married off to a butcher in a nearby village. She had nothing to complain about. Things went well for her. Wolf, her husband, a short man with a dark, pinched face, loved his wife. In due course, she bore him three daughters and four sons—may they live and be healthy—all like their mother, dark-skinned, green-eyed, quiet, and with abundant hair.
Khane-Sore herself came into town only once in a blue moon. She would come to buy a dress for a daughter and at the same time use the occasion both to drop in on her father and to practice her silence.
Father and his eldest daughter, both tall and proud, like spreading, deeply rooted poplars, would sit facing one another and looking into each other’s eyes. They sat in silence, broken only by a brief exchange.
“How are you, Father?”
“How should I be?”
“What’s new?”
“Not much. Wolf?”
“Fine.”
“And the children?”
“God be praised.”
That was all. They continued looking at each other. Once more, silence. Then she was gone, not to be seen again for another year, or two years, or five years.
Father took great delight in his eldest daughter. She was well-off, mistress of the largest butcher shop in her village, had happily married off all her children, and presided over many a circumcision and celebration of the birth of a male child. She invited Father to all her festivities, from which he returned well-fed and well-rested.
He would tell us about the feasts he had enjoyed, about his grandchildren—may they be safe from the evil eye—who were growing up God-fearing and respectable. He talked a great deal about his son-in-law Wolf who, though small in stature and with a wispy beard, was able, single-handedly, to deal with an unruly young bull, as well as with the neighboring peasants, all of them great haters of Jews.
But Khane-Sore was Father’s only married daughter. After her came Beyle, also big and tall, with long narrow hands and a wide, square chin. Beyle didn’t have her sister Khane-Sore’s prodigious calm. She spoke in broken-off, curt sentences. Every little thing made her cheeks break out in red spots.
Beyle looked at the world through quick, restless eyes. Strangers might have thought her malicious, but nothing was further from the truth. She would gladly have given away her last shirt. She was known by all for her good works. So worthy a woman, people said, couldn’t easily be found, even if one went out searching with lit candles.
Beyle, however, had one great fault. She couldn’t sit still for a moment. Cut her into bits and pieces and somehow she would find a way to get up and go. She was constantly on the move, to Warsaw, to Lodz, to some small town, anywhere, so long as she didn’t have to stay in any one place for too long.
Sometimes, she would stop at an inn somewhere to get warm. If she liked the place and the people, she would hire herself out and stay a while.
At the inn, she would milk the cows, cook huge potfuls of food for Jews and for passing travelers, and set down pans of potatoes and mash for the cows’ feed. She also knew how to work a spindle, to knit, to sew, and to mend clothes. She even knew how to banter with the sons of wealthy landowners, who rode by the inn on their splendidly outfitted horses.
Beyle knew how to do everything—except how to do some good for herself. The years passed. Beyle grew wider in girth, and still she remained unmarried, unable to find her match.
Only once, however, in one of the inns, did an opportunity seem to present itself. It happened in the person of a dark-skinned Jew who was passing through, a stocky man with a pair of eyes black as coal, wearing a hooded coat. A chat revealed that this Jew’s wife had unfortunately died in childbirth.
Beyle handed him a large bowl of grits and gave him milk to drink, straight from the cow. One word let to another, and she was emboldened to ask him some questions. What did he do for a living? Did he have children? Where did he live?
He told her he had no children, that he lived on the other side of the Pilica River, that he made a good living, and that it was only through God’s will that he remained a widower.
Beyle listened in silence. The red spots welled up on her cheeks. The dark-skinned Jew was staying overnight at the inn. Beyle slept in a tiny room elsewhere in the house. In the same little room, high on a ledge, hens were dreaming away. The door had no lock. Who needed one? What was there to steal?
Beyle was lying in bed, thinking about the dark-skinned Jew. She wanted to fall asleep, for she had to be up at dawn to milk the cows and to prepare breakfast for the passersby. But the Jew’s black eyes kept her awake.
The hours slowly passed. Soon the sleeping hens would be stirring.
Just then Beyle became aware of something tickling her face. She could have sworn that a hen had slid from its perch and scratched her face with its leg or its wing.
“Shoo, shoo!” Beyle called out to the hen.
But suddenly it became obvious that this was no hen. The room was pitch-black. Nevertheless, Beyle could make out a pair of big, wide-open eyes looking at her.
She felt her heart constricting. A hot shudder rippled through her entire body. She knew instantly who it was.
“Reb Jew, what is this?” she asked in a very soft voice.
“What do you think?”
“What are you doing here, Reb Jew?”
“What should I be doing? Nothing. My wife—it shouldn’t happen to us—has been taken from me.”
“So you come crawling to strange women?”
“God forbid! Who said so? Only that …”
His hands burned even hotter than his eyes.
Again, Beyle said softly, “Please, Reb Jew, leave.”
“Why? I don’t mean any harm, Beyleshi. God forbid!” He called her Beyleshi …
“What kind of Beyleshi am I to you?”
“If you love someone, you stretch out the name.”
“Since when do you love me?”
“From the very first moment I laid eyes on you.”
“And are you ready to set up the wedding canopy?”
“Why not? We can do that, too.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
There was a sudden tumult in the tiny room. The hens, shaken from their dreaming, began to flap their wings and flew onto Beyle’s and the dark Jew’s heads. Beyle leaped up, slapped him across the face, yanked open the wooden door, and screamed out into the night.
“You fornicator! You should rot in hell! Is this what you want from me!?”
Lamps were quickly lit throughout the inn. Jews in feather-strewn caps hastily performed the morning ritual of the washing of the hands. Women in nightcaps, coats thrown over their shoulders, ran out barefoot.
“Woe is me,” they cried, pinching their cheeks. “And a Jew, yet! Whoever heard of such a thing …”
The noise woke up the children, who started to cry. A dog barked furiously. The black-bearded Jew with the burning eyes vanished into the night, leaving behind his hooded coat.
Beyle sent the garment home to her father with Yarme the coachman. He would have something to wear for the winter as he made his rounds of the villages.
Yarme the coachman told everybody the whole story, from beginning to end. Beyle herself had asked him to do so. She wanted everybody back home to know that, even though she often stayed away overnight, she would never shame her father in his old age.
In fact, she never did. When the time came, she married in accordance with the laws of Moses and Israel.
Beyle was her own matchmaker. The man she married was also a widower, but not dark-skinned and with no burning eyes, like that person at the inn. He was a big, strapping man with a thick blond beard like the Russian Tsar’s, Alexander III.
To be sure, he was nowhere as rich, nor did he have a royal name. He was called Wolf, like Father’s other son-in-law. But he had his own horse and wagon. In addition, he could shoe horses, repair wheels, and lift a packed wagon with his shoulder if its axle broke. When his first wife had been alive, he’d owned a small field and a vegetable garden. But after he was widowed, he neglected the field and the garden. He no longer had a mind for the carrots and turnips that he had planted. Pigs took over the field, wallowing in their own filth. Well, so be it. He would move into town. He owned a horse and wagon. He knew how to shoe horses. With God’s help he’d make a living.
Beyle and her husband lived on the outskirts of town, far away, almost at the edge of Skarszew. At night the winds howled across Beyle’s roof. Wagons rumbled past, coming and going to and from town. The driver’s shouts could be heard through the windows. Beyle cooked large pots of grits for herself and her husband. For the Sabbath she prepared the special tsholent with derma.
Her husband Wolf drove his horse and wagon to the fairs and markets. In between trips he shod horses. They eked out a living, they managed. And every year, in the middle of the night, you could hear the cries of the new being that Beyle had brought into the world.
The more children they had, the harder it became to support them. Beyle rented out an alcove and began baking poppy-seed rolls for sale to young wagon-drivers. But she never complained. After all, this is what she wanted.
Sometimes, when Beyle came by to wish us a happy holiday, Mother would ask her how she was getting on. Once Beyle let slip that, when all the children were asleep, her mind sometimes turned to the dark-skinned Jew with the burning eyes. She could still visualize the scene. She didn’t know what to make of it. But after a night of such recollection, she could barely feel her heart beating. Everything went wrong. The grits failed. The young wagon-drivers turned up their noses at the poppy-seed rolls. She quarreled with the woman who rented the alcove.