SAM CHEERFULLY took on the task of guiding Sorel to a coaching inn. She followed him without really listening as he chattered about the wedding feast, the rebbe’s blessings, and the tzedakah that had been handed out. Her hands were cold as ice, and she found herself shaking. When she closed her eyes, she saw the blank gaze of the guardsman with his throat torn out. Where had the dog gone? How could she have imagined such a thing? But how could it have been real?
She stumbled, and Sam caught her by the elbow.
“You’re exhausted,” he said, steering her to the side of the street. “You left the feast in a hurry, didn’t you? You need to eat.”
Sorel, trembling, could say nothing. She felt she might pass out.
Sam guided her inside a coffeehouse with a card in the window that declared it to be kosher. There he sat her down in a corner and brought her a mug of a strong, bitter drink with a plate of kugel. She drank the coffee, wrapping her hands around it and trying to stop the tremors. The kugel she didn’t touch. Sam sat watching her, his gaze steady, quiet for once, until she’d drained the cup.
“I know who you are,” he said at last.
Sorel had been staring at the table, her eyes unfocused. Her gaze snapped now to Sam’s. She didn’t think she could run again. He was between her and the door in any case—it hadn’t occurred to her that she was trapped.
“You don’t,” she whispered, too tired to put much fight into it.
“I do.” He bent down and opened the peddler’s pack that lay by his feet. After a moment of searching he extracted a cheaply printed pamphlet with Hebrew letters and a woodblock illustration on the cover. Sam flipped it over and slid it across the table to her, tapping with one finger on a hand-written note on the blank back page. “You’re Isser the printer’s apprentice, aren’t you? I’ve been looking for you.”
Sorel’s head spun. The note was an address, here in Esrog—for Isser Jacobs.
Sam leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Those men who were following you, they wanted something from you? Do they know you’ve been printing these in secret?”
Sorel picked up the pamphlet, reading the note again. She felt dizzy, the letters swimming in front of her eyes.
“What men?” Her voice was barely a croak.
“Three men followed you when you left the feast,” said Sam. “Goyim.”
“I don’t know what they wanted,” she said. “They were looking for someone else. I didn’t know them.”
“But you are Isser Jacobs?”
“Not this Isser Jacobs!” She shoved the pamphlet back across the table to him. “It’s just a name! There can be more than one!”
Sam frowned and checked the note a second time, as if he expected it to clarify the situation.
Sorel, suddenly starving, grabbed the plate of kugel and shoved a bite in her mouth, chewing desperately. “I am not a printer’s apprentice, and whichever Isser printed that, he needs to take care of his own business, because I’m already tired of his people. I’m leaving Esrog, I’m going to Odessa, and I’m never coming back—I’ll go to France if I have to! I hate this place.”
“Lower your voice, please,” said Sam. “And don’t talk with your mouth full. I was supposed to meet Isser here, in the city. You don’t have to pretend with me. Just having the pamphlets is enough of a crime, but it would be easy enough to prove that I’ve been selling them, too. Any court would simply assume that I have! So you have nothing to hide from me.”
“I am not the person you’re looking for,” said Sorel. She swallowed the last of the kugel and picked up the pamphlet. She didn’t recognize the address, but she knew approximately where it ought to be in relation to the Great Synagogue. The look of the pamphlet jogged her memory—a boy who came to the estate sometimes. He’d been soaking wet from the rain when she ran into him in the kitchen, gossiping with the cooks. He’d sold her an installment of a Russian novel on the same paper, and at the time, she hadn’t bothered to remember him. Was that why the name “Israel Jacobs” had come to her? “Why don’t we go to his home and prove it? I want a word with him anyway. He owes me—he owes me.”
She didn’t know what Isser owed her. Perhaps she would just give him a slap in the face and curse his ancestors for naming him something so simple, so uncreative that she could mistake it for a name she hadn’t heard. She had no one else to direct her feelings toward, so he’d have to do. Sam left a few coins on the table and followed her out of the coffeehouse, uncomplaining, an infuriating tilt of amusement to his mouth as if he thought she was putting on a performance.
The Isser from the pamphlet lived in an alley off the Street of Bookmakers in the Jewish district, a neighborhood of crooked medieval streets behind the Great Synagogue. It was a building with a courtyard, the sort of place where each room was rented out to a family and every window hung with drying laundry. There was a print shop on the first floor in the front selling women’s prayer books. Isser Jacobs lived over the stables in the back, a room up a narrow exterior staircase to what had once been a hayloft. The stables themselves must now house the presses. The thumping of equipment shook the building with each step as Sam and Sorel climbed the stairs.
It was immediately clear that all was not well in Israel Jacobs’s rooms. At the top of the staircase, Sorel’s foot collided with something that clattered on the floor, and when Sam picked it up, cradling it in his hand like a small fragile animal, she saw that it was a cheap brass mezuzah case, twisted from being torn from the wall. The door was ajar, the lock broken and hanging loosely.
Sorel drew her knife and carefully pushed the door open. Sam was searching the floor for the mezuzah scroll and didn’t stop her. Inside, the room had been ransacked. It was a chaos of broken furniture covered in stove ash and loose feathers from the disemboweled bed. No one was there now, and she thought no one had been there for a while. The heavy air suggested that no one had moved through the space in some time.
Sam followed her inside, tucking the rescued scroll and its case into his vest pocket. “I wasn’t the only one looking for you, no?”
“Not for me.” Sorel nudged a pile of clothing with her foot and found a broken plate and a book in German, facedown. Reading German was impressive for a printer’s apprentice. Most boys she knew read only in Hebrew, and even then, not well. Surely he hadn’t been printing in German? As far as she knew, it was only legal to print religion. “For the real Isser.”
“Lucky you weren’t here,” said Sam, reaching past her to pick the book up. He gave it a gentle shake to dislodge the dirt and closed it with care, though it wasn’t a prayer book. It looked to Sorel like a novel. “Whoever it was, I don’t think they found what they wanted, but they could have just left things alone. Instead of breaking everything.”
He kept picking things up, folding the clothes, and setting a few more books on the table. Sorel stood where she was, feeling useless and uneasy. It wasn’t like she had to keep the name she’d stumbled on by accident. She could just change it, nothing was stopping her. She could walk away from whatever was going on here and go back to planning her new life far away.
But already two people had mistaken her for him. And someone wanted to hurt him. And Sorel knew how it felt to be on the run.
“What was it you wanted him for?” she asked, her voice faraway in her own ears.
“He’s been selling me those pamphlets,” said Sam. “Or anyway, the person who sold them to me said Isser Jacobs was the source.”
Sorel hadn’t bothered to actually read the pamphlet. Sam seemed to realize this, because when she didn’t respond, he continued, “They’re politics, translated into Yiddish. Stories about Jewish Emancipation in Europe. Things like that, that the censors wouldn’t allow. Someone must have found out about it.”
“Then those men who were following me,” said Sorel. “One of them was a city guard.”
“If they haven’t found the other Isser, he’ll be in trouble when they do,” said Sam. He gave her a look as if he expected something from her in response. She wondered if he still thought she was putting on an act.
Then she remembered something else. “The ones who found me—one of them said something about a girl. A Jewish girl, what was the name?”
One of the men had run off, she stopped herself from saying. She didn’t want Sam to ask what happened to the other two. She preferred not to think about it herself; every time she did, she felt a wave of nausea.
She couldn’t remember the girl’s name.
“Look for something that points to her,” Sam suggested. “We can find her first and warn her.”
It was enough to shake her out of her stupor. Better to be doing something, at least, while she tried to shake the memory loose. Together they brushed dust and ashes off of books and broken plates, an ink pot, a milk jug. Sam found a siddur and stopped for a minute to clean it more carefully, whispering too low for Sorel to hear. She felt the creeping sensation that she was tracing the steps of the ones who’d broken into Isser’s room in the first place, trying to turn back time. When she checked inside the stove, just to be thorough, she found a bundle of letters that were crumpled and torn but hadn’t managed to burn. Someone had tossed them on top of the coals, and they’d smothered the flame instead of catching.
“Adela Pinsker,” she said, skimming over them. They seemed innocent, mostly short notes about the weather and the health of family members, but at least she recognized the name. “It says she lives in Kuritsev.”
Kuritsev was another village on the outskirts of Esrog, if she remembered right. In the opposite direction from home, which would be a relief.
“Then we’ll go to Kuritsev,” said Sam.
Sorel didn’t argue. She had forgotten that she wanted to be rid of him.
AS URGENT AS IT FELT to warn Adela Pinsker that she was in trouble, Sorel’s feet were paining her terribly, and Sam noticed the limp. He suggested that they rest for the night and set off in the morning. Sorel expected that they would have to find rooms, to sleep like real people, but Sam brought her back across the river to the cemetery where she’d run into Old Rukhele. Apparently, this was how a peddler slept: wrapped up in his coat, in the grass, after a meal of cold kugel that he’d kept wrapped up in a handkerchief in his pocket. Sorel shared the buns that she’d stolen from the wedding feast, and Sam picked the raisins out and threw them to the crows, who hopped circles around the two of them croaking “Rekh! Rekh!” while they ate.
“Aren’t you afraid that a ghost will find you, sleeping in places like this?” Sorel asked, the foolish question taking her mind off Isser, and Adela, and the rebbe’s men looking for her.
“Not really,” said Sam. Then, not reassuringly, “In any case, there are corpses enough outside of cemeteries. You never know where death will find you. Why not go where you expect it?”
Sorel made a face. She could not say that she had ever found death where she expected it. On the other hand, he had a point—the cemetery was peaceful and smelled of moss and flowering trees, and the grass was warm this late in the day, holding onto some afternoon heat.
“My father is a kohen,” she said. “He wouldn’t be pleased with me for sitting here.”
“And for running away from home he’d be pleased?” said Sam. “Forget what your father likes, that’s my advice. And if you’re worried about the ghosts, here—this will protect you.”
He dug around in his pack and found a little silk pouch embroidered with letters that she thought might be a holy name. Into this, he placed the mezuzah scroll from Isser’s apartment and held it out to her.
“I sell a lot of amulets,” he explained, at the look she was giving his pack. “And the scroll must have been lonely, lying there abandoned, don’t you think?”
Sorel didn’t think the poor lonely scroll had done much for Isser Jacobs. She was now remembering that the men who’d come after her had said he should be dead—maybe there was no real Isser anymore. But she said none of this to Sam, who was watching her expectantly.
Instead, she took the pouch with the mezuzah and tucked it into the pocket of her coat, where she felt its weight on her hip as she curled up to sleep.