“Don’t be frightened. It won’t be so terrible. It’s not like some of the factories you hear about. The workers are organized. Zevi will take care of you.”
Berta took a sip of the tea and then another and soon color began to creep back into her cheeks. She was beginning to see that moving in there was her only real option and that she was lucky to have it. “Are you sure about this? You wouldn’t mind?”
“Of course I wouldn’t mind. To have you and the children here with me? What more could I want? And besides, you’re my sister. Where else would you go?”
A few days later Berta and Vera packed up the apartment. Professor Bardygin made room in his section of the basement so she could store her furniture there. The rest, clothes and a few toys, she packed up in the suitcases. She and Samuil loaded them into a wheelbarrow that she had borrowed from the green grocer down the street. Vera wanted to help her down the hill, but Berta said no. “You can’t do for me anymore, Verochka. I’m on my own now. I’m going to have to get used it.”
She hugged Vera good-bye, picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow, and started down the hill with the children in tow. It was heavy and hard to maneuver, especially when she came to the corner and had to let the wheel bounce down over the curb. It tipped over, and the suitcases spilled out onto the cobblestones, but fortunately an old porter and a soldier were there to help her put them back again, and they even helped her across the street and up on the opposite curb. Eventually, with Samuil’s help, she got the hang of it and was able to maneuver it down the streets and through the crowds. She didn’t want to meet anyone she knew, so she kept off Davidkovo Street and took shortcuts through the alleys and courtyards whenever she could. Samuil was excited and thought of it as an adventure. Sura wanted to know when they could move back home and be with Masha again, who would now be staying with the professor.
That night Berta, Lhaye, their children, and Zev all crowded around the little table in the front room and ate a supper of soup, bread, and boiled beets. There were three adults and six children in the two rooms, three if you counted the tiny kitchen. Berta’s things were piled in a corner of the front room. This would be her place for now, a corner of an apartment on Dulgaya Street in the Jewish neighborhood.
“No matter what, just know this is your place too, Bertenka,” her sister said as they were clearing away the dishes. “It is not much, but it’s a place of your own and it cannot be taken away from you. So you can stop worrying. You have family that will take care of you. You are not alone.”
Berta squeezed her hand and managed a smile. She looked at her suitcases piled up in the dark corner and at the brown water stain on the wall above them. She thanked her sister, but really she was thinking about the roof and wondering where she could find a bit of canvas to protect her belongings.
Later Lhaye spread out some blankets on the iron stove top so that she, Zevi, and the children could sleep over the dying coals. She offered the spot to Berta, but she declined it and instead made a bed for herself and her children on a pallet in front of the stove. For the first few hours she lay there watching the glowing coals through the cracks in the stove, trying to ignore the scratching and scurrying in the walls all around her. Then she closed her eyes and tried to sleep. After a few hours she gave up and went into the front room. There she put on several layers of clothing and wrapped herself in a blanket. She brought a chair over to the window and wiped off the lacy pattern of ice that formed on the inside of the glass so she could watch the snow fall through the circle of lamplight across the street. It was deserted now. The refugees had been ordered out. Some went on to an uncertain future in the provinces, others to camps in Siberia or northern Russia. The people were gone, but bits and pieces of their belongings were left there: an old straw mattress lying in the gutter, a bundle of old clothes, a handcart with a broken wheel, a pair of shoes frozen stiff in the snow.
She saw an animal race through the gaslight, casting a long shadow on the building behind it. It was small, a weasel or perhaps a sable, something wild in the middle of the city. For some reason it reminded her of Hershel and she ached to be with him. She closed her eyes and remembered what it was like to lie next to him, to smell his hair, taste his lips, to feel his body against hers, the way his muscles worked, the way his pleasure came with hers, and the tranquility they shared afterward.
She tried to send him a thought. She pictured it like a flowing tendril of hoarfrost moving out from Cherkast, to the rest of Little Russia, to Russian Poland, Germany, and on to the western front. It moved west to France, to England, out across the Atlantic to New York and then to Wisconsin, which she pictured as a city like Cherkast. There an icy tendril moved across the cobblestone streets until it found him asleep in his sister’s house.
Are you there?
It would come to him in a dream. He would wake and remember it.
Are you there?
And then he would reply. He too would sit by the window and send it off. She wondered if it would take the same path or come back to her by a different route.
And then she had it, clear as clean water.
Are you there?
But it was only her own thought back again, lonely and lost: It had traveled all across America, across the Pacific Ocean, across Siberia to Russia, to Little Russia. And finally back to the room on Dulgaya Street.
Chapter Fourteen
March 1916
ON THE MORNING before Purim, Berta found the can of kerosene outside the door with a note attached to it: For Madame Alshonsky. She and Lhaye had been up late the night before embroidering gifts for the children and as a consequence had used far too much of it to light their work. Since Lhaye would be spending most of the day baking and preparing the meal to break the fast for Queen Esther, it was up to Berta to rise before dawn and go down to the market for more. It was still dark when she left the apartment that morning and so she nearly tripped over the can on her way out the door.
“No signature?” asked Lhaye. She was rolling out the dough for the hamantashen. The mohnelach was already hardening on the cookie sheet. “Who could’ve left it? Did you do a kindness for somebody?”
“I’ve barely left this apartment, you know that.”
“Maybe it’s for Purim?”
“Kerosene for Purim? And who would give me a present? I don’t even know anybody.”
Lhaye picked up the baby before he had chance to crawl toward the hot stove and handed him to Berta. She took him in her lap and entertained him with a bunch of measuring spoons.
“Maybe somebody thinks they know you?”
“Here? Who knows me here?”
“Maybe they know Hershel?”
“Why should they know him?”
Lhaye took a bite of the mohnelach. “It’s good. Nice and sweet. Know what that means? Going to be a good year.” She went back to her rolling pin. “It’s a mystery, that’s what it is.”
“And even if they knew him, why would they leave me a can of kerosene?”
“Maybe he helped someone and now they’re helping us. Why should we question it? Ven dos mazel kumt, shtel im a shtul. If fortune calls, offer him a seat. Here, give me the baby. I’ll get Vulia to watch him. You pluck the bird.”
That night the neighbors came in to read the Megillah, the book of Esther, and break the fast. They brought noisemakers so that every time Haman’s name was mentioned they could spin the handles and make a loud racket. The men stamped their feet and the children spun their graggers until there wasn’t an apartment on the street where one could find peace and quiet. When the people upstairs came down to complain they were invited in to stay. Soon the little apartment was filled to capacity and people were spilling out into the hallway and even into the street. The crowd stood around, talking over each other and eating mohnelach and hamantashen and washing it down with good strong tea.