Tsipe arrived the morning of Sukkoth eve, a young woman with a rosy complexion, unfamiliar scents, and a foreign, big-city bustle. The whole house suddenly filled up with her presence. She set down her boxes and baskets and strewed her scarves, gloves, and purses on the beds. She fluttered around the room like a startled hen, carried on about everything, and on the very first day complained to Mother that the mirror was hung too high, which made her face look blue.
Mother’s wig slid to one side. She was at a total loss.
“Tsipeshi,” she said, as she went about busying herself, “how are things with you? How’s your health? I heard you had a cough, poor child.”
“I’m fine, Mother,” Tsipe hastened to reply. “I didn’t have a cough.”
“You don’t look that well to me. Is anything, God forbid, troubling you?”
“No, Mother, what should be troubling me?”
“I don’t know. You’re all alone in Warsaw …”
Mother screwed up her face. She probably would have preferred for Tsipe to look unwell.
But Tsipe’s cheeks glowed pink, blood-red mixed with milk-white. Blond down covered her pretty chin, in which a tiny dimple, smack in the center, smiled of its own accord. And when Tsipe opened her small, fresh lips, two more dimples smiled out on each side of her face.
Toybe, now married to Little Shoemaker, had small teeth, white and glistening like Father’s. Tsipe’s teeth were long and wide. If not for those teeth, people would have followed her in the street.
As it happened, though, people ran after her all the same. Her figure alone, with its proud carriage, long legs, and narrow hips, moving with a life of their own, attracted young and old. Apart from that, Tsipe had a head of thick, shining, dark-brown hair, like chestnuts about to burst from their casings.
Leybke couldn’t take his small, black eyes off her, nor could he stop smiling sheepishly at her.
In honor of Tsipe, Leybke had acquired a new pair of holiday shoes, varnished leather, with big, flat toes. He wore his black hat at an angle. In the mornings he washed himself with scented soap and sprinkled himself with a liquid that tickled the nose. He parted his hair in the middle, and was continually flicking feathers off his new suit of clothes.
He spoke Russian with Tsipe. She knew Russian, too, otherwise she could never have worked as a salesgirl in the largest ladies’ wear shop in Warsaw.
She said that in her shop people spoke either Russian or Polish all day long, and sometimes even French. Who the people speaking French were, Tsipe didn’t say, but presumably she was one of them. The customers were the wives of generals and gentry, dancers from the Great Theater, and other high-toned beings.
Tsipe also told us that the Governor-General of Warsaw had a lyubovitsa, a mistress, who was the most beautiful woman in all of Poland. Tsipe knew her as well as, say, her own mother, maybe even better. She went to all the operas and plays without paying a groshen. But she had grown tired of all this theatergoing, and, moreover, she had to rise early in the mornings to get to the shop to supervise things and make ready for the day. After all, she was the starshe panna, the senior salesgirl.
This explained why Tsipe, on her visit to us, slept well into the day. The door to the main room was kept closed, and we walked around on tiptoe. Father had to say his morning prayers in the kitchen. Leybke, dressed all in black, wandered about stiffly, like a temporary visitor. Mother boiled milk with cocoa for Tsipe and served it to her in bed, along with slices of cake. Tsipe didn’t wash in the kitchen, like the rest of us, over the large slop bucket, but in a blue bowl, which Mother borrowed every day from the chief prison guard’s wife.
Tsipe took a long time getting up and an even longer time dressing. She owned a variety of small mirrors and combs. Hairpins, brooches, and all sorts of tiny bottles lay scattered on the table and the windowsill, giving off a sweetish, suffocating smell that even permeated our food.
All morning long Tsipe sang songs in Polish and Russian, not like the one Ite sang, about the lad who went home to Vienna, but about someone called “beautiful Helena,” and another about someone who was thought to have been a priest’s daughter but who turned out to be Jewish. Tsipe said that the song was from an opera called The Jewess, which was now being performed in Warsaw, at the Great Theater. She also told us that she knew one of the singers, Battistine, who sang better than anyone else in the world. Not even angels sang like he did.
“Da, da,” Leybke nodded. “That same Battistine was also in Moscow.”
“I would imagine,” Tsipe said. “He sings everywhere, even before the Tsar.”
“Is he Jewish?” Mother asked in a very respectful tone, not so much because of Battistine but out of awe of her one and only, pretty daughter.
“Must it always be a Jew! Do you think they’d let a Jew sing in the Great Theater?”
Mother’s face narrowed, not just because Battistine wasn’t Jewish, but because Tsipe dismissed Jews so disdainfully. It caused Mother grief.
“But what about Davidov?” Leybke bestirred himself to ask Tsipe. “Have you ever heard him sing? Battistine may be alright, but Davidov also sings before the Emperor, the tsar batyushka, the Tsar-Father.”
“Leybke, have you ever heard Davidov sing?” Tsipe asked quietly.
“Of course I have!” Leybke replied, as he stuck out a foot, waved one hand in the air, and sang in high voice, “Volga, Volga …”
Davidov must have sung it altogether differently, for Tsipe waved her hand in contempt and said, “Leybke, enough already.”
Tsipe always made the same gesture whenever Leybke began to tell his stories about Ekaterinoslav or about his regiment and its commander. She would crinkle her nose and mumble in an aside, “We’ve already heard all about it.”
At those moments, Leybke’s face would drop, his stiff hat would shift on his forehead, and one would notice his big, hairy hand, with one of its fingernails blackened.
Tsipe said that men with big hands were not to her liking. That was easy to understand. After all, she herself was refined. She could purse her lips so small that they resembled a groshen. Not only was she refined, but her large hat that looked like a mushroom, her frilly garments that rustled like silk, and her little, polished shoes on their high, hollow heels—all were at the service of her refinement and charm. And once, when Tsipe put on her short jacket with the raised collar, the one she called her “Mary Stuart,” Leybke twirled one end of his mustache, scraped his foot, and asked her, in his Ekaterinoslav Russian, “Would you like to take a walk with me?”
“Spasibo … thank you,” Tsipe replied with a thin smile, and went out by herself.
Mother stepped outside to see where Tsipe was headed. Yarme the coachman’s wife was in the courtyard, standing with her hands folded across her pregnant belly. The chief prison guard’s wife peered out her window, and the new neighbor living directly above us called down from her tiny window under the roof, “Not to tempt the evil eye, but she looks just like a princess.”
Yarme the coachman came strolling in, with slow, leisurely steps.
“How come she’s alone?” he asked. “Why isn’t she with Leybke?”
“How can you compare Leybke with Tsipe?” Mother replied, with all the haughtiness of a shipowner who has a cargo-laden vessel at sea.
Yet, despite Tsipe’s beauty, and even though Leybke couldn’t compare with her, the atmosphere at home, with Tsipe present, was chilly and strange. Tsipe took no notice of me at all. She didn’t bring me anything from Warsaw, nor did she come with gifts for anyone else. Her songs about the “beautiful Helena” and “the Jewess” didn’t appeal to me one bit. I preferred Ite’s nice lad who went back to Vienna to visit his parents.
It seemed as though there was nobody else in the house but Tsipe. Mother never stopped talking about her. She cooked and baked only for Tsipe, scrubbed all the pots and pans herself, while Tsipe primped and preened before the mirror. Mother herself carried all the food into the sukkah, the tabernacle set up in the courtyard, where we ate the week of the holiday. Not once did Tsipe say, “Let me help you, Mother.”
Even at night, when the whole house was asleep, Mother got out of bed to have a look at Tsipe. She checked to see if the door to the kitchen, where Leybke slept, was properly locked. She looked in on Tsipe asleep in her bed, listening to her breathing.
Tsipe herself was conceited and arrogant. She, too, knew that Leybke wasn’t good enough for her. As for Father, she never spoke to him at all. Even when she first arrived, she never came up to him and inquired, “How are you, Uncle? How is everything?” Bending over her open suitcase, she mumbled from across the room, “So, how goes it, Reb Leyzer?”
Father didn’t respond.
Mother called out to him, “Leyzer, someone’s talking to you. Why don’t you answer!”
But Father didn’t hear. Throughout the entire holiday, he never heard a thing—and kept his silence.
When the holiday was over, Mother packed Tsipe’s boxes. Yarme the coachman, whose horses were all harnessed up, asked for six gilders for the trip to Warsaw. The train cost one ruble and fifty kopeks, and Tsipe preferred taking the train. She wasn’t going to be tossed around for a whole day in a ramshackle coach driven by somebody called Yarme. What would they say in Warsaw?
However, Tsipe didn’t have enough for the train. She was missing a ruble and Mother couldn’t help her out. Father was getting ready to go out. Mother stopped him.
“Leyzer,” she said, “maybe you could give me a ruble?”
“A what?”
“I need a ruble.”
Father didn’t respond. He merely stuck his head deeper inside his collar and left without saying a word. Tsipe followed his departure with her pretty, almond-shaped eyes and, less prettily, yelled out, “Leyzer jolek! … idiot!”
The blood rushed to my head. “Leyzer jolek” was what Mother sometimes called Father. But that was alright. First of all, she was his wife and perhaps she was allowed. Second, all her life Mother was convinced that she had done Father a favor by marrying him.
Tsipe, however, was another matter. How did she have the nerve, after spending the entire holiday with us and eating Father’s hard-earned food, to throw that word at him?
At that moment, had I been able, I would have walked right up to that pretty Tsipe, who kept pestering Mother about missing the train, and smacked her right in her pretty mouth. That would have gained me an extra ten years of life.
The fact that Father pretended not to have heard, and that he didn’t give Mother the ruble, I found highly satisfying—even if, in the end, Tsipe actually took the train. It was Leybke who gave her the ruble, a crisp, new, Ekaterinoslav bill. Leybke also helped carry Tsipe’s boxes onto the droshky.
We drove along Lublin Street. Mother and Tsipe sat on the upper seats, Leybke and I on the little bench below. At the station, Leybke bought Tsipe her ticket and brought all her boxes into the train. The whole time, he kept scraping his feet and stationing himself in front of her, like an officer. When the train started pulling out, he walked alongside, waved his stiff hat in the air, and called out in Russian, “Dosvidaniye! … Goodbye!”
Mother was wiping her eyes. She kissed Tsipe over and over again, and told her to keep God in her heart and not to get into a frenzy. For Tsipe had told her, during the holiday, that she didn’t care for her intended groom, the brush-maker. He was coarse, she said, didn’t know a word of Polish, and felt uncomfortable around people.
Mother groaned and said that Tsipe should have thought about that earlier. Now, after going out with him for so long, it was too late. Moreover, he was taking her without a groshen of dowry.
However, Tsipe insisted that she still wasn’t sure what she would do. Lately, a better match had come her way, with an educated man, a bookkeeper.
That was how Tsipe left, without a “Thank you,” without a farewell to Father.
Mother sighed deeply, and for many days thereafter. Her sighing, together with the scents of Tsipe’s little bottles and boxes, lingered on in the house until well into winter.