The bundle was heavier than its size predicted, as though it contained a miniature cannonball. Jacob picked loose the knot, let the cloth fall open. Inside lay a matte ceramic spheroid, gray mottled with black and green. Its cool surface warmed rapidly as he turned it in his fingers.
A head; a human head, modeled by hand, finely wrought. Of special delicacy were the needle-like fronds of a beard. The same precision had been applied to the sharp jaw; the brow nobly swollen; the parentheses around the mouth; the eyes clenched against a blinding light.
Peter said, “It’s the Maharal.”
“Really?” Jacob said, fighting to keep his voice even.
In his mind, the truth: assaultive, clangorous.
My mother’s work.
My father’s face.
The Garret
Blanketed in night, she patrols a warren of alleyways bent sinister.
Even at that lonely hour, quiet fails to gain a foothold in the ghetto. Snatches of song undermine midnight lamentation. Shutters snap. Glass breaks. Opposing rooflines teeter forward, chins dripping, like drunks coming in for a kiss. Rain falls upward and downward and slantward, filling her boots; rain drums every surface, producing a spectrum of characteristic sounds; rotting timber and corroding tin; quicklime and leather; excrement and feathers and trash.
Prague.
Her home.
There are no secrets here, grubby swaybacked houses stacked close enough for neighbors to answer each other’s questions. A day after being awakened, the worst of her disorientation had passed, and everyone from the biggest macher to the humblest kitchen maid knew about the simpleminded mute found wandering in the forest.
At first she resented this description, but as weeks went by, she realized the protection it afforded her. She has taken her place in the ghetto’s tender pantheon of the grotesque, alongside Hindel, the junk dealer’s daughter, with her shriveled left arm; Sender, who repeats back whatever one says to him; Aaron, the cobbler’s apprentice, whose hair grows red on one side and black on the other.
Nowadays, if people remark at all, it is to praise the generosity of Rebbe and Rebbetzin, taking in an orphan at their age.
With his unchanging face, his treadling gait, Yankele the Giant has become something of a local mascot, popular especially with the children, who run before him in teasing circles.
Can’t catch me! Can’t catch me!
She feigns sluggishness, swiping at them with her tree stump fists while they giggle and scream; pretending to lose her balance and land on her rear; then springing up like a jack-in-the-box to show her true agility, snatching, gingerly, so gingerly, one child in each hand, their tiny hot bodies quivering with terror and delight.
Put me down!
At such moments the curtain around her memory draws back, triggered by a voice or a face or by an idle moment, teasing her with a shining fragment. In those brief intervals she recognizes that this is not the first turn of the wheel. There have been other times, other people, other places.
Names drift up, haunting her with their meaninglessness. Dalal. Leucos. Wangdue. Philippus. Bei-Niántu. Names no better or worse than Yankele.
Men’s names, to match her man’s body.
More telling than any one memory is the negative impression it leaves. She knows that she is hideous, abased, and helpless. Which means that once she must have been beautiful, and proud, and free.
While much about her present existence dissatisfies her, she knows she could do far worse than to live with Rebbe and Perel. They have made her a fixture of their lives, and indeed, it sometimes seems that the house on Heligasse would cease to function without her. But of course this isn’t true. They got along fine before she arrived, and if she were to leave, they would get along fine once more. They allow themselves to depend on her as a kindness to her; everyone needs to feel needed.
Very different people, they relate to her differently. Perel is a maker of things: clothing, challah, you name it. The demands of a rebbetzin are myriad, and her demands on Yankele are practical. A heavy load of laundry. A basket out of reach. Draw water — one bucket only, please.
Whereas Rebbe has been known to have trouble cutting up his food. On several occasions he has sent her to the house of study to fetch a book already sitting open on his lap.
It is the interchange between the couple that elevates them both, their marriage an embodiment of one of Rebbe’s favorite themes: erasing the barrier between the material universe and the spiritual one.
Every afternoon they convene in Rebbe’s study to pore over the Talmud together. This time is sacrosanct, and they have assigned Yankele the duty of ensuring their privacy for thirty minutes. She stands outside the house, guarding the door, listening to them spar with Godly words. The love they share overflows the threshold, spreading out along Heligasse to lap warmly at her deadened feet.
A jangle of keys; an off-key whistle; Chayim Wichs, the sexton, hurries home from locking up the shul.
“Shalom aleichem, Yankele.”
Expecting no answer, he ducks into the wind and carries on, keen to get himself in front of a fire. She likewise pulls her cloak close in imitation of a man feeling cold. To let him know that his discomfort is reasonable.
Such gestures require constant practice. She has become a collector of mannerisms, wrapping her fringes around the ends of her pinkies to signal preoccupation; cultivating the asymmetry of exhausted shoulders. It is of course the Loews’ habits she knows best: the sentimental vibrato beneath Rebbe’s beard when he refers to her as my son, the green slant of Perel’s eyes at the mention of her dead daughter, Leah.
A repertoire performed for her own benefit, it makes her feel something like human. Perhaps in time, her heart — if she has one, if inside the cabinet of her chest there is more than empty space — will follow upon the actions. For her own body remains a fearsome thing, and despite having regained partial control over it, she still suffers maddening spasms of literalism.
Just the other day, Perel asked her to go to the riverbank and bring back some clay, and instead of taking a bucket or a box, as a sensible creature would, she ferried as much as she could in her bare arms, depositing it in the middle of the courtyard, a colossal heap bristling with wet roots. Black-shelled beetles wriggled up to the surface and, confronted with an abyss of open air, frantically burrowed back down.
Oy gevalt. Yankele. I said clay from the riverbank, not the entire riverbank. I’ll have enough to last me a year... Never mind. Put it in the shed, please.
Lately, she’s noticed something disturbing. She has ceased to correct people in her mind. On occasion she has even caught herself thinking of herself as Yankele, and upon realizing it she has felt a mixture of disgust and relief.
What a pleasure it would be — what a burden lifted — to have a self. To relinquish her threadbare memory, agonizingly transient hints of beauty, and accept that she is in fact what others perceive.
Then she reminds herself of her previous selves. They didn’t last. Why should this one be any different?
One night last spring, the week before Passover, she spotted a gummy gray glow spilling from the mouth of the alley behind Zschyk’s bakery. She assumed the baker was forgoing sleep, toiling overtime to make enough matzah to serve the community all holiday long.