For some moments Yael was rooted to her stool, confounded at his kindness. She stood up nervously and went to kneel by the tin tub. The water was deep enough to cover half her thigh and the tub wide enough for her to sit in. Lifting the cuff of her shirt, she tested the temperature. Steam rose from the surface. Stepping back across to the doorway, she delicately lifted the edge of the curtain. The mute had lit a candle and was seated by the far window, a book in his hands, engrossed once more.
She stripped slowly and carefully, peeling the clothes from her body. Lice dropped onto the floor and scuttled across the bare floorboards, fat, gorged with blood. Her body was etched with numerous strings of bites, where they had moved across her, the scabs picked at, bloody and sore. Her feet were blistered and sores and bruises peppered her legs. The months of hard living showing on her skin.
She placed her clothes across the stool. The water she stepped into was hot, but bearable. She lowered herself into it and felt the heat rush through her. The steam rose and moistened her face. Droplets soon condensed on her skin, on the split tips of her lank hair, on the pink, delicate skin of her nipples. She cupped the water in her hands and poured it over her, rinsed her face, felt the delight of the hot water running in rivulets down her back. The wooden box contained an old bar of fragrant soap, dry and hard. She dropped it into the water and let it moisten a little.
When she had scrubbed herself so hard her mottled skin turned pink and looked for a moment almost healthy, she stood up. The itching remained. Stepping from the water, she tiptoed across the boards, leaving a trail of water on the floor. She found what she wanted by the side of a small mirror. Taking the mirror and the razor back across to the tub, she carefully shaved the fine pale hairs from her body; the disgust she felt at handling the flat-bodied lice that clung to her was considerably less than her desire to be clean of them.
When the water had grown cooler, she got out. Taking the bucket of cold water stood by the door, she heated it up, feeding more wood into the stove, until the heat was so intense she was forced to close the door. With the hot water she washed her hair over the tub, scrubbing it hard, so that the water, when she had finished, was dark with the dirt. Then carefully she dried herself. She found a comb on the shelf and combed through her hair ferociously, taking handfuls of it out in the process. Cleaning the comb and the shaving knife as best as she could, she dropped them into the pot of bubbling water on the stove and let them simmer there.
She could not bear the idea of putting on her old clothes, so she wrapped the damp towel around her and slipped the mute’s coat over the top. Opening the door of the stove, she carefully poked in her clothes. Her underwear first, which popped and crackled as the lice exploded, then her blouse and finally her skirt which dampened the flames and sent up an acrid, foul-smelling smoke that hung in a fug beneath the ceiling.
She found an old curtain folded on a shelf. The material was coarse cotton, faded by years of sunlight. She found a needle and thread and she sat sewing a skirt, taking enormous pleasure in this task, carefully drawing up a pattern, making sure the seam was neat. She heard the mute’s footsteps and then his nervous cough as he stood behind the curtain. Trying the skirt on, together with one of his shirts, she stood and admired the effect in the small mirror, having to hold it at many different angles to see herself properly. “I’m decent,” she called, realising only as he hesitantly poked his head through the cloth that she had used Yiddish, as if he were her brother.
“Almost human again,” she said.
The mute had seemed oblivious to the change in her appearance. Whenever it was possible he avoided her, working for hours outside in the freezing conditions, coming in, covered in snow, hands blue with cold. If she attempted to care for him at these times he reacted angrily, brushing past her stiffly, eyes averted, as if she did not exist. When inside he would busy himself with some chore, or take up a book. Only occasionally would she glance up and find he had been watching her, before he quickly looked away.
When one evening she caught his eye, as she was at the table drinking a cup of scalding sweet tea, she smiled. His face flushed with embarrassment and he stood up sharply, knocking over his chair with a clatter. Picking it up, he stumbled. He pushed his feet into his boots and grabbed his coat from the peg. The door slammed back against the wall and a flurry of snow skittered across the kitchen as he plunged out into the darkness.
“Aleksei,” she called from the doorway as the wind whipped at her clothes and snapped her hair back from her face. “Aleksei…”
Yael huddled in the corner of the kitchen she had made her own, the flame of the candle dancing in the wind that found the gaps around the door and window. “Aleksei,” she whispered, trying the name on her tongue, finding that with the use of it he became more real, a person, somebody whose presence she desired back in the kitchen. “Yael,” she whispered too, and wondered how long it had been since she had heard her own name spoken. How long in fact it had been since she had properly spoken to somebody. Not since Rivka’s death and that had been in the autumn, when it had still been warm enough to sleep in the woods.
If nobody knows I am here, she thought, if there is nobody to say my name, then do I really exist? But the mute knows I exist, she thought, Aleksei knows I am here, that I’m alive.
At intervals during the night she went over to the door, and opening it carefully, called out into the darkness. The wind whipped away her voice so she was barely able to hear it herself. The light from the candle immediately went out, sizzling in the sticky, liquid wax. Yael curled herself into a small ball beneath Aleksei’s coat and finally slept.
She dreamt of her father, on the doorstep of their home, tacks sticking from between his lips. ‘It’s in stillness God is found,’ he said. But the tacks became black teeth and instead of her father she found she was sitting with a lunatic who had passed through the town when she was a small child, his beard reaching almost to his waist, his hair as white as icicles. ‘Ódem yeséyde mey-ófer v’séyfe l’ófer!’ He whispered as though this wisdom was a secret, to be shared covertly. ‘Béyne-l’véyne iz óber gut a trunk bromfin!’ And with that he laughed, loudly, rudely, slapping his knees. Man is from dust and will return to dust. In the meantime it’s good to have a sip of vodka! ‘He’s not wrong,’ she recalled her father saying, when she had awoken and lay breathing heavily, sweat dampening her brow.