The oddest thing about the evening was that there was no badchen, nobody to tell funny stories and jokes and make up rhymes about the guests and the presents they brought. Nessie Laiser, Yaffa Hamerow, and the milkman’s wife were disappointed by this and were complaining to the official mourners when Berta drifted over. Ordinarily, they would have a few choice words to say about her too, once she was out earshot. But this time they were so taken by her radiance, her beatific smile, and the love that poured out of her for Hershel Alshonsky, for the guests and musicians, even for them, that it left them speechless.
Yaffa Hamerow watched Berta glide over to the next table. Nessie Laiser said nothing and shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Aviva Kaspler murmured something about how in love they were and wasn’t that fine. Yael Schlaifer said nothing. A memory had percolated up from her own wedding and took her by surprise. It was just a fleeting image of her hand in Yakov ’s as they walked out of the synagogue into the sunshine. Pausing at the top of the steps for a kiss, he whispered something that she couldn’t quite remember. Maybe he told her they would always be together or they would have many children or he would always strive to make her happy. It didn’t matter, because two years later there was a cholera epidemic and she buried him in a plot overlooking the river. It was her first funeral.
Part Two
THE WHEAT MERCHANT’S WIFE
Chapter Six
December 1913
TO THE casual traveler, Pavel Ossipovich Lepeshkin looked relaxed. He was seated in the dining car at a table laid for tea. Just inches from his fingertips stood a small, three-tiered silver tray of forgotten finger sandwiches and pastries. A cold cup of tea sat on a sturdy saucer stamped with the crest of the Nord Express. The cream in the cup was congealing, the sandwich bread was growing stale, and the pastries were looking decidedly gray.
Staring out the window at the Alexandrovo station, Pavel looked like a young gentleman dulled by train travel on his way home from school for the holidays. But his face was beaded with sweat and nearly the color of the tablecloth and his hands were trembling. His blond hair was swept back off his forehead, his nose was flat and led down to a pointy chin, and his intense brown eyes hardly seemed to blink as he stretched to look up and down the track. He resembled a burrowing animal caught halfway out of his den by the screech of an owl and the thunder of flapping wings.
The trains from Berlin on their way to Kiev and Moscow always stopped at the Alexandrovo station when first crossing the Russian frontier. After changing trains to accommodate the wider-gauge track, second and third-class passengers were expected to line up, their baggage and passports at the ready, and wait their turn in the customs office. First-class passengers were allowed to send a porter with their passports and remain in the comfort of their compartment. But recently there had been an incident and now the authorities were asking to see their luggage as well. Pavel wanted to go with his traveling case but was told to wait in the carriage so as not to draw attention to himself. So he waited, and had been waiting for nearly an hour, wondering if in the next moment the gendarmes would appear or, worse, agents of the imperial secret police.
Pavel didn’t want to speak to anyone. The last thing he wanted was a friendly passenger chatting him up, so he kept his face turned to the window and his arms crossed over his chest hoping in this way to keep away any interlopers.
An elderly woman seated across the aisle took no notice of these precautions. In a voice that was a little too loud, she declared in barely accented French, “My, what a wait. We’ve been sitting here for nearly an hour. You’d think they’d get on with it.” She was a wisp of a woman with a visible line of powder at her throat and long knobby fingers, who seemed lost in her fur wrap and enormous hat. “I dislike these long delays, don’t you?” she went on, undeterred by his reticence.
A diamond and ruby brooch winked at her throat and reminded him of a similar one his mother owned. Even though he had just been there a few months before, he longed to go home again. He wanted to be back in the nursery, eating bliny and sour cream with his Slavic nanny, Mariasha, to be gathered up in her arms and held to her abundant breasts, to be fussed over and pampered, to be told what a good boy he was and how he would always be loved and, above all, kept safe. The fact that he had outgrown his nanny and the nursery years ago did little to ease the ache he felt now.
“You haven’t touched your cakes, dear. Aren’t you hungry?”
“Guess not,” Pavel said, swallowing hard.
“On holiday, then? Coming home from school?”
Pavel nodded.
“University?”
He nodded again and mentioned the name of the university he attended. It was a fashionable one, favored by the aristocracy and the kupechestvo, the wealthy merchant class.
“Ah yes, my nephew went there. But of course that was a long time ago. You wouldn’t know him, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Chaliapin?”
Pavel shook his head and hoped she’d go away. Instead she chatted on about her nephew at the ministry, her trip to Paris, and the impeccable service at her hotel. Instead of listening he kept his eyes on the crowd outside his window, hoping to see the porter returning with his case. Surely, there must’ve been some trouble. How long could it take? In his mind he saw a gendarme riffling through his suitcase, his big hands pawing through the fine linen shirts his mother had bought at Muir and Mirrielees, digging underneath, past his trousers and vests to the hidden compartment below. There the officer would have no trouble finding a stack of Brdzola, the Struggle, a seditious newspaper started by a former Theological Seminary student turned revolutionary named Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili, later to be known as Koba, and later still to adopt the underground klichka of Stalin. Next to the papers the gendarme would find five semiautomatic Browning pistols. After that, there wouldn’t be much left of Pavel’s life—a speedy trial and an exile order. By Christmas he’d be in Siberia, where the temperature typically hovered around sixty below. How many winters could he survive there? Two? Maybe three?
Pavel was Jewish. More than that, he was a socialist and a member of the Bund, the General Jewish Workers’ League. He attended most of the Bund meetings at the Kleinmikhels’ or at the coffeehouse where he learned about organizing the Jewish worker and about melding the socialist rhetoric into a palatable concoction that promised civic rights and freedom from the anti-Jewish laws of the czar. The particular branch of Bund activity that interested Pavel was forming the self-defense units to protect the townlets and shtetlekh against the ravages of the pogroms that had been increasing dramatically since the October Manifesto of 1905. Factions loyal to the czar blamed the Jews for what they saw as a threat to the autocracy. The day after the czar announced the manifesto granting a constitutional government to the people, these factions launched pogroms in more than three hundred cities across the Pale, beating thousands to death, destroying homes and businesses, and orphaning thousands of children. That was five years ago. Now Mendel Beilis, a minor factory official, had been accused of killing a Christian boy for ritual purposes—the old blood libel from the Middle Ages revived to stir up trouble. The trial had begun in September. It was now December and the Jews were holding their breath.