SHE’D THOUGHT the sound of the evening service would wake her. Instead, she opened her eyes to moonlight, bright through the high windows, and the faint cracks of wood settling the way it does in an empty building after everyone has left. She was unspeakably thirsty and her back ached. She hauled herself to her feet, leaning on the wall, and stuck her head out from behind the partition. There was a faint lantern-light by the Holy Ark, and a black shape curled up under a blanket at the edge of the lamplight that she thought was Sam, sleeping. The place was otherwise dark and empty. It must be near midnight, she thought.
She sat back down on the women’s bench and fought with herself for a moment over whether she ought to put her shoes back on. Her feet were swollen, but in the end she decided she couldn’t cross town in the dark on her bare, tender soles. She picked up the boots and took them with her as she crept out of the synagogue, holding her breath in fear of waking Sam.
She stopped on the front step and pulled her boots on in the light of the bright moon. The square seemed larger now that it was empty, everything silvered in the moonlight. It took her a moment to remember the way to the bathhouse, but once she did, there was a sense of freedom in walking by herself. No need to rush and no need to hide with everyone tucked away for the night. Kuritsev smelled clean and fresh, with faint traces of roast chicken and challah in the air that made her stomach growl. She had not anticipated how hungry all this walking would make her. She wished she’d eaten more at Adela’s house, that she hadn’t felt the awkwardness of being the only one to reach for the food. She pressed a hand to her belly and silently told it to be quiet.
The bathhouse was at the very edge of the village, next to a running brook that seemed to supply the drinking water and power a mill downstream, if she understood what she was seeing in the dark. She worried there might be an attendant, sleeping by the stove perhaps, but when she cautiously pushed open the door, there was only a damp heat. The lingering embers of the fire still warmed the air. She blocked the door behind her with a wedge of firewood and stripped out of her clothes, shaking them out to try to remove some of the dust of the road.
She sat on a stool and scrubbed herself with a cake of herb-scented soap in water that had gone cold. She would have minded more if it wasn’t such a relief to no longer be grimy. She washed herself twice just for the pleasure of being clean, then crossed to the little alcove that held the mikveh and slipped into the water. Here it was cold as ice. She gasped before her head went under, but the cold pulled the ache from her bones and brushed the wisps of fatigue out of her mind. She hung suspended in the water, holding her breath, until she could no longer stand it.
When she pulled herself up on the lip of the pool, she heard music. At first, she thought it was the ringing of water in her ears. After pushing the hair back from her face and shaking her head to clear her eyes, the sound clearly remained. She recognized the chime of bridle bells mixed with the wailing of a fiddle and the sweet high crying of a flute. Something about it made her shiver more than the icy water had.
She hauled herself out of the water, squeezing her hair—a whisper of some nursemaid in the back of her head telling her not to squeeze water from a cloth on the sabbath, which she ignored—and took a cloth from the stack by the soap in the bathing room to dry herself quickly. She dressed in a hurry and kicked the wedge out from under the door.
There was a parade of people outside the bathhouse. What had been an empty road, passing the bathhouse and the mill on its way to the woods or to nowhere, grey earth under the moon, was now lit golden with lanterns and crowded as a Saint’s day at market. Sorel stood baffled in the doorway, trying to understand what she saw. The road was packed with people in their finest clothes, carrying instruments or lanterns or waving bouquets of flowers, light glinting off gold threads of embroidery and sparkling in their dark eyes. A gaggle of children with the clawed feet of owls ran past her, shrieking with laughter, their mouths full of fangs like cats, and she rubbed her eyes. Back toward the town square, a lady on a shining white horse tossed coins into the crowd.
Enchanted, Sorel stepped out of the bathhouse and caught at the sleeve of a passing young woman. “What is this? Who are you?”
The girl laughed and didn’t answer. “Come dance with us!”
She caught Sorel by the hand and drew her into the procession. They were all following the lady in white, the crowd singing in a cacophony of languages, none of which Sorel could understand. The girl who’d caught her spun her round and round, until she was dizzy and stumbling, then drew her close to whisper in her ear.
“Who are you, little prince?”
“Isser-Alter!” someone shouted from behind her, and she felt a tug on her collar. When she turned, there was the boy from her dream—only he wasn’t wearing her face this time. As himself, he was shorter than she was, with darker hair and deep, bruised shadows under his eyes, but she knew he was the same person.
“Isser,” she repeated numbly. She wanted to go back to the dancing. The girl’s hair was a spill of ink over her shoulders, the lantern light casting shadows beneath her collarbones and painting her lips a bright, wine red. She pouted at the two of them and held out her other hand to the newcomer.
“Dance with me,” she said.
“No,” he said, and pulled Sorel away. “We have to talk, please listen to me.”
Sorel tried to follow the girl into the crowd, but lost her, the boy holding her tight by the collar. She tried to brush him off, and the touch of his skin on hers burned like ice.
“Sorel,” he whispered. “Don’t tell them your name.”
Her head was foggy, as though she’d been drinking wine. She thought she knew him, but she couldn’t remember his name.
“You shouldn’t let Adela go back to Esrog,” he said, in the same urgent whisper. “Please, stop her.”
This, Sorel understood. With a twinge of resentment at his presumption, she said, “I’ll let Adela do whatever she likes.”
“You can’t,” he said desperately. “You have to tell her it’s too dangerous!”
“She knows it’s dangerous. I’m done doing the sensible thing and I’m not going to make anyone else do it, either.”
“It’s not the same,” he said. “And you shouldn’t be going back there, either. You owe me. I helped you run.”
That was where she knew him from—his voice. The voice of her yetzer hara, that told her to take the first step, the leap out her window.
“It’s you, isn’t it,” she said. “Isser. The real one.”
“Don’t go back to Esrog,” he said. “Don’t be so foolish. You have to look for my body.”
“Your body? Where?”
He looked exasperated. “I don’t know; I’m not with it, am I.”
“Then how—” Sorel began to say, but the girl with the red lips was back, hanging on her arm, offering her wine.
“Come with me,” she said. “Come and see the queen! She’ll want to see you.”
Sorel blinked at her and then looked back at Isser, already forgetting what they’d been talking about. He seemed to be standing in darkness, even in the pool of light from the lanterns, as if only he were still lit by moonlight alone, his eyes great black pools of shadow.
The girl was drawing her away.
“Check in your pocket!” Isser shouted after them. “Your pocket, Isser-Alter!”
Confused, Sorel put her hands in her pockets, and gasped as something sliced her fingers, sharp as a razor blade. She pulled her hand out to check if her fingers were bleeding, and as she did, she heard a burst of sound, deep ferocious barking that shook her to the bone. A cold wind blasted down the street, making her cover her head, and when she looked up again, she was standing alone on the dirt road in the darkness.
No one was there.
The dog growled, low, in the shadows. She turned and found it standing between her and the path back to the bathhouse, its massive shoulders hunched, teeth bared and shining.
Someone had told her once never to run from a growling dog.
The advice was no use to her now—she turned and ran, expecting at every second to be knocked to the ground, expecting the bite of its jaws on her neck. She ran flat-out back to the synagogue, shoved a bench against the door, and collapsed, gasping, onto the floor.
SAM WOKE HER to the pink of early morning, tapping her on the shoulder.
“They’ll be coming soon for shacharis,” he said. “We’re meant to meet Adela.”
The bench was no longer wedged in front of the door. Sorel looked, and thought she saw scuff marks on the floorboards where she’d dragged it, but maybe it was her imagination. Maybe she’d been dreaming. Surely she must have been—she could think of no other explanation for the parade of lanterns, the black dog that hadn’t killed her, or even why Sam wouldn’t have woken at her noisy, panicked return.
“Find my body” Isser had said. Isser, her other self. She could almost feel him, hovering just over her shoulder like a worried attendant.
“Adela,” she said, and shoved herself upright. Isser had told her to keep Adela out of danger, but she didn’t see the sense in it. Wasn’t Adela in danger anyway? Why not face it head on? And anyway, how could she find anything of Isser’s without Adela’s help?
“I always feel I’ve slept so well, when it’s a shul,” said Sam conversationally, as they went out into the square. “Don’t you?”
“Not really,” said Sorel. She was still trying to sort the reality of the night from the dream. Her hair was clean, the sweat and dust gone from her skin, so she must really have gone to the bathhouse. Maybe she dozed off on her feet while walking back.
Adela was waiting for them at the edge of the village, sitting on a fence with her braids tucked into a man’s hat and eating a raisin bun. She had more buns in a satchel and handed one each to Sam and Sorel as they said good morning. Sorel ate hers in three bites, still starving, and Sam, watching her askance, handed his to her.
“You’re too skinny, anyway,” he said.
“I haven’t been on the road so long,” Sorel said, defensive. “I’m not used to so much walking.”
“Well, there’s more of it,” said Adela. “I have a contact in Esrog to talk to. He won’t be in shul; we can catch him. A friend,” she added, at Sam’s skeptical look. “We’ve known him forever. Isser and I attended the Russian schools with him.”