He twisted his arm free, put both hands on her shoulders, and looked into her face. “Listen to me, you have to calm down. Now go back to her. She needs her mother. Keep her warm. Keep her head up. Other than that, there is nothing to do.”
He started to turn back and she grabbed his arm again. “No, no, you can’t,” she said, sliding to her knees. “She’ll die. I know she will. She doesn’t have a chance without you.” The other mother was calling to him, her voice rising with hysteria. A shell fell in the garden outside the house, but didn’t explode. The mailman was shouting, “Go to her. She’s calling for you. What are you waiting for?”
“Please,” Berta was sobbing and holding on to his arm. “She’s only a child. You can’t let her die.”
“Take this one next door,” the doctor said to Ya’akov firmly. “Take her to the community center.”
Without another word the mailman picked Berta up and carried her to the front door as the doctor headed back down to the cellar. She struggled to get free, but the mailman held her fast while he opened the door and shoved her out. He slammed it behind her and turned the lock. She pounded on it and begged to be let in, but soon the light from his lamp moved off from the window and disappeared down the cellar steps.
She was standing in front of a dark house. A shell exploded down the street in the square. Her ears were ringing and the ground jittered beneath her. She knew if she didn’t leave now, she would never make it back, so she turned from the door and ran out through the yard and up the street toward the bridge. She heard a thud, a high-pitched scream, and a deafening explosion. She turned just in time to see the community center blast apart into a roiling cloud of fire, smoke, and debris. Pieces of it fell on the mailman’s house and soon it too was ablaze. She thought she could hear screams coming from inside, although that may have been the timbers screeching in protest as they came crashing down, one on top of the other.
Not long after that, she was running up Podkolokony Street. Explosions, mortar fire, sharp report of rifle fire, and shouting from every side. She was by the clubs and the artists’ lofts. A child was screaming. A brief stutter of machine gun fire and a reply from another. She was in the middle of it. It was all around her. She dove for a doorway and crouched down low. Bullets hit the doorjamb and bits of flying wood and glass rained down on her. When she looked around she found that the lock on the door had been shot away and the door was swinging open. She crawled into the building over broken glass, cutting her hands and knees, too frightened to stop. Once inside she dashed over to the stairway and climbed up the stairs, ducking as bullets raked the wall above her head.
At the end of a short hallway on the second floor she found a loft fronted by floor-to-ceiling windows. Some of the windows had been shot out and the wind was blowing in a light sprinkling of snow and the acrid smell of smoke and gunpowder. On the other side of the room she saw three men crouched down behind tables that had been turned on their sides. One man was fully dressed, the other one was wearing a coat but no shirt, and the third was nearly naked. Berta crawled over to them.
“Were you out there?” asked the shirtless man.
She nodded and struggled to catch her breath.
“Lucky to be alive,” he said to the others.
“Lucky and stupid,” said his fully dressed companion. “Who are they?”
“I don’t know. Reds and Whites.”
“What difference does it make?” said the shirtless man. “The bullets are all the same.”
“I had a customer tonight,” groaned the nearly naked man. He was shivering and his lips were turning purple. “Now I’m going to freeze to death.”
Berta noticed their ink-stained fingers and saw sheaves of blank paper blowing around the room. She guessed that they were copyists, waiting all day and night by their tables for lawyers, playwrights, and professors to come by with papers to copy. Business was never very good and now with the fighting it had to be worse. She imagined them selling a shirt or a pair of shoes in the morning to buy bread and then waiting all day for a customer so they could buy it back by nightfall.
“Help me out, citizens. A blanket, a shirt, anything,” the nearly naked man was saying with chattering teeth. “You’re not going to let me freeze to death, are you, brothers? Not after all we’ve been through?”
“Is there another way out?” asked Berta.
“You’re not going back out there?” asked the fully clothed man.
The nearly naked man shivered violently and wrapped his arms around his knees. “Please, I’m freezing here. You’re not going to let me die. A scarf, a hat, a scrap of anything. Comrades, I’m begging you.”
The shirtless man said, “There’s a back door. You go down the hall to the other stairs. It’s one flight down.”
Berta crawled across the room and out through the door. She followed the hallway across the landing. It was dark and difficult to see, but she thought she could make out a water barrel and several pairs of boots lined up by a door. It smelled of mold and rat piss and there was pile of rotten boards and chunks of plaster in the corner. She found the stairs and took them down to a back door that opened out onto an alley. It was foggy and dark. She could just make out a line of overflowing trash cans across the dirt track. It seemed safe, but she didn’t trust it, so she found a rag lying on the floor, balled it up in her hand, and threw it out the door. A loud report drove her back among the bags of garbage and old newspapers.
As she crouched there in the dark, her thoughts became increasingly frantic and disjointed. Sura will live. She will not. God will watch over her. There is no God. Tonight there will be a God and he will watch over her. She made bargains with Him. She begged her dead mother to intercede. She thought about leaving Cherkast. If only she had the money, she would go to America, even if Hershel were dead, which she now believed he was. She would bring her children to a place where they could be safe. Tears rolled down her cheeks and soon she was sobbing silently into her hands, hopeless, terrified, and filled with rage at the men who were keeping her from her child.
Sometime later in the night she heard a shot and a man scream and after that she could hear him moaning out in the alley. He called out to his comrades to help him and later, in his delirium, to his mother. He whimpered for mercy, begged for release; another shot and then nothing.
When the sky began to lighten, the shadows evolved into distinct shapes: a garbage can, a sledge, an old bed frame lying on its side. With the coming dawn a breeze blew in from the river and the fog began to lift. Berta heard shouting through the doorway and saw men running in from all directions. They were Reds. They jumped on each other, slapped each other on the back, playfully punched each other, and laughed. She stopped a man in a black leather jacket wearing a visor cap with a red star on the front.
“What is it? What’s happening?”
“No Whites! They’re all dead or on the run. We’ve been firing at each other all night. The goddamn fog had us all turned around. Yankovsky!” he yelled to a comrade holding a coffeepot. “Save me some of that.”
Berta ran on through the city, slipped on the ice, and broke her fall with a bloody hand. People were coming out of their cellars. Some were picking through the smoldering rubble; others were searching the streets for missing loved ones. There was a sobbing woman crumpled over the mangled body of a man. A boy led a roan mare down the street, talking to her the whole time. Farther on two men were unloading mangled corpses from a cart and laying them out in a neat row in the snow.
Soon she was climbing the hill that stood between her and the Jewish section. At the top she paused to catch her breath and searched the landscape below for Dulgaya Street. She thought she could see it through the haze of the smoking chimney pots. She imagined that the light she saw burning in one of the windows was from the lamp in the kitchen. She took it as a good sign for no other reason than she needed a good sign.