SOREL AND ADELA WERE still holding hands when at last, breathless, they came to a stop on the edge of a better-lit street. The noise of shouting and the barking of dogs had faded behind them, and Sorel had caught no more gunshots. She leaned against a wall to catch her breath.
Adela let go of Sorel’s hand and Sorel had only a second to miss her touch before Adela laid her hands over Sorel’s cheeks instead.
“It is you, isn’t it?” she said. “Isser. It’s you, somehow. You’re dead?”
“Sorry,” said Sorel. She couldn’t find Isser anywhere—it was like that burst of anger had burnt him out. “Yes. He isn’t here right now, he’s—I don’t know, he comes and goes.”
Adela searched her face for a long time, looking for traces of Isser perhaps. Her hands were pleasantly cool on Sorel’s face, her eyes dark pools of shadow. “Then who are you?”
“Nobody,” said Sorel. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t confess her secret. She liked Adela, she wanted to be honest, but somehow it didn’t feel any less dishonest to say she was Kalman’s runaway daughter. “I mean, Alter. Let’s stick with Alter. Isser just, I don’t know. Found me. And now I’m helping him.”
Adela stepped away and brushed her sweaty hair off her forehead. “We shouldn’t have left Sam. In a room with all those goyim.”
“And Yoshke?” Sorel asked.
“Yoshke can go to hell. I half think he wanted to set us up, anyway. But he’ll be fine. He always is.” She made a choked sound, like a laugh gone wrong. “Although, I used to think that about Isser.”
“You’ve known each other a long time,” said Sorel. Her chest ached, and not only with the running. She’d never had a friend, not really, and certainly not a friend like what Adela and Isser seemed to be to each other.
“Forever,” said Adela.
They stayed there in silence for a minute or two, until their hearts stopped pounding. Sorel started to notice all the places she ached again—her ribs now joining her legs and feet, and a twinge in her right wrist that she thought she must have landed on in the fall. She brushed mud from her trousers absentmindedly. She’d never stopped to think why the people she saw in the street—peasants, children, poorer Jews—were always muddy. But here she was, practically fresh from the bathhouse, and filthy already.
Filthy and hungry, again. Her stomach gnawed at her as if she hadn’t eaten in days. Where did one get food on the night after shabbes? She could suddenly think of nothing else.
“Should we wait for Sam somewhere?” Adela asked. “Where would he go to look for us?”
“I don’t know.” Sorel checked that her satchel still hung from her shoulder and dug through it, hoping for crumbs, but she’d eaten them all already. “I don’t know Esrog. Where can we go?”
Adela gave it some thought. “Isser’s apartment. I should look at it, see if there’s anything. If he meant it about the counterfeit stamps. That was him talking?”
“Yes,” said Sorel. “But it’s torn apart in there, I don’t think you’d find anything.” Then her hand caught something cool and sharp in her pocket, and she straightened up. “It can’t have been Jews that did it!”
“Why not?”
Sorel took the mezuzah case from her pocket and showed it to her. It must have slipped out of the pouch Sam put it in, and the edge had bitten her fingers. “This! They tore it off his door. Father—Kalman would never do that. An observant Jew would never.”
Adela touched it gently, her eyes sad. “Not an observant Jew, I suppose. There’s a few who might, though. If they’re angry enough that they’re Jewish.”
“You should take it,” said Sorel.
“I don’t think it even belonged to Isser, really. It would have been his landlord who put it up.”
“Take it anyway. Sam said it would protect me, or something. I don’t feel protected. It isn’t keeping the dybbuk out of my head.”
“I think maybe we shouldn’t tell Sam about Isser,” said Adela, taking the mezuzah and tucking it into her pocket. “If we find him again. He’ll think we’re both mad.”
“Of course not,” said Sorel. She hadn’t been planning to tell Sam. He looked at her too closely, and she worried if she told him anything more than she had to, he would see right through her.
“I still think we should go now,” said Adela. “There might be something I’d see that anyone else would have missed.”
“Right. Of course.”
“And it’s a dry place to sleep,” she added, looking suddenly exhausted. “Come on. I think I know the way.”
IT WAS WELL PAST DARK and they were both dragging their feet when they got to Isser’s street. It occurred to Sorel that there would be no light and nothing to eat—her insides continued to gnaw at her viciously—and so she sent Adela up ahead of her and went to knock at the lamp-lit window of one of the neighbors. There she was able to trade a couple of coins for a taper and a loaf of bread with some boiled eggs, although the husband who’d answered her knock kept looking at her oddly as he collected the food. She apologized for the interruption and wished him a good week before he could ask her any questions.
She found Adela sweeping broken pieces of crockery out the door of Isser’s apartment, onto the balcony.
“I brought a candle to light the fire,” she said, through a mouthful of boiled egg. She’d thought she might faint if she waited to eat it.
“Good,” said Adela. “Wait out here a minute, would you? I’m soaked; I need to get out of these skirts.”
“Oh. All right.”
Adela shut the door in her face and Sorel stood on the spot, feeling very silly, picking chunks off the bread. Was she supposed to guard the doorway? Adela was awfully bold. Sorel didn’t think she would have told a boy she was changing, not when she’d been a girl—not that she’d had much opportunity. Why was she so flustered? It wasn’t a complicated request. She was just standing. The door was shut; she couldn’t even hear Adela moving around inside. It occurred to her that she oughtn’t try to hear her, and she turned and went to sit at the top of the steps. She focused very hard on peeling another egg while she waited for the door to open again.
When it did, Adela was dressed in what must have been Isser’s clothes: a man’s shirt and vest, and a pair of trousers that fit tight at her hips, rolled up at the ankles to show her wool stockings. She was holding her dress in her arms and gave it a fearsome shake over the edge of the balcony. She didn’t look at Sorel, which was just as well, because it took Sorel a second to realize she was staring.
“I was freezing,” said Adela, by way of explanation. “I’ve started a fire. Have you eaten everything?”
Sorel held out the peeled egg to her, sheepish. “It’s just boiled eggs and challah.”
They ate the rest of it sitting on the floor by the little stove in Isser’s room. Neither was awake enough to talk much, and Sorel thought she’d start weeping if anything stopped her from sleeping.
“I’ll look around in the morning,” Adela said, when they’d eaten the last crumbs and warmed themselves a little. “It’s too dark now. Isser … he’s not here, is he?”
Sorel shook her head.
“You look a bit different, I think, when he’s here.” She tilted her head, frowning at Sorel’s face. Sorel felt her cheeks warm and was glad it wouldn’t be visible in the firelight. “Something in your eyes.”
“I don’t know why he’s not there all the time, but it feels like he isn’t.”
Adela nodded. There was another silence. Sorel tried to think when she might have contracted a dybbuk. Was it the night of her wedding, when he’d made her jump out the window? But he’d already felt so much like part of herself.
She’d fought with her father constantly since the engagement, coming up with reason after reason why it wouldn’t work—she was too young, the rebbe’s son was too young, her mother wouldn’t have approved, the rebbe’s son was too learned and she too secular, everything she could think of. Kalman had an answer for all of it. Yes they were young, but they needn’t live together all of the time after the wedding, not until the rebbe’s son finished his studies. And yes, Kalman would be responsible for supporting them during that time, but he was responsible for Sorel already. And it was prestigious to support a scholar—a mitzvah and an honor—especially when the scholar would surely grow up to perform miracles, not that Kalman really believed in miracles, but God forbid he admit it. As for her mother’s approval, he had never wanted or needed it. He and Sorel were stuck with one another as father and daughter, absent a son to carry on the business or a better daughter who would not make the smallest thing a tzureh for him.
Sorel had argued that her wedding, her life, was no small thing, and indeed it had been a tzureh for her first so her father shouldn’t complain about her turning the tzureh around on him. Then she’d slammed the door and gone out riding and fallen off her horse in the woods, and while she was lying there in the underbrush it had occurred to her that if she had to marry the rebbe’s son, she would die.
Was it then that Isser had come to her? Had he been dead already?
“What makes a dybbuk take someone?” she asked, staring at the glow from inside the stove rather than looking at Adela’s face. “I never really learned all that—mothers’ stuff, bobe-mayses.”
“I don’t know,” said Adela. “A letter missing from a mezuzah?”
She glanced over at the windowsill when she said it, and Sorel saw that Adela had placed Isser’s mezuzah case there.
“That’s what keeps demons out, God forbid,” Adela said. “Or anyway that’s what I always heard. If you have a good kosher mezuzah, and you, as a man, if you wear your fringes properly.”
Sorel glanced down at her hips. She’d forgotten she was wearing tzitzis. She wasn’t sure how the knots were meant to look, so she couldn’t tell if they were properly done or not. But that wouldn’t have mattered when she was a girl, anyway.
She couldn’t ask if Adela had insights for how a dybbuk came on a woman. That would be a strange and revealing question. “I just always thought it was madness. You know, a sickness of the head—not really a dybbuk at all.”
Adela shrugged. “In that room, when you attacked Pavlikov … well, all right, it looked a bit like madness, but it was freezing cold in there, and the door was locked when no one had locked it. Remember how cramped and stuffy it was when we came in? It was cold as midwinter all of a sudden. And then you broke through the window like a golem.”
“Maybe the door just locked on its own,” said Sorel, aware she was arguing just for the sake of arguing, that she could think of nothing to make Isser’s presence less real. “A latch that was stuck, something like that. And drafts, once everyone went out of the room.”
“I don’t think so,” said Adela.
“No,” Sorel admitted, with a sigh. “I don’t think so either.”
“There’s two blankets,” said Adela. “Let’s rest, while we can. We will try again in the morning.”