Then she was on the street a few blocks away. As she came closer she saw a man hiding in the shadows of her building. It wasn’t light enough to see his face, but she had already made up her mind to kill him if he tried to stop her. She had just picked up an iron bar from the rubble of a bicycle shop, when she saw the figure step into the light. It was Pavel.
“I was just about to look for you,” he said.
“How is she?”
He hesitated and then she knew. She threw down the iron bar and ran upstairs, flinging open the door and rushing into the kitchen. Lhaye was sitting beside Sura, holding her hand. She got up when she saw Berta come in and tried to put her arms around her sister, but Berta pushed past her. She scooped up her daughter and lay down on the bed. Sura’s skin was cold and clammy. Her face was white and tinged with blue. Already the muscles in her face had begun to relax and her cheeks were beginning to sink into her skull. Berta rocked her and prayed, not to God, who had betrayed her, but to Sura, keep breathing. Pavel came into the room and crouched down in the corner. She barely noticed him. She only knew that her daughter was struggling to live, her breath coming in jagged gasps that had no rhythm.
Her eyelids fluttered open and for a moment Berta thought she could see a glint of recognition in the feverish black eyes. “Sura, it’s Mameh. It’s Mameh, maideleh. My darling girl. Tsatskeleh der mamehs.” Sura looked up at her and struggled to move her lips. They were dry, cracked with fever, and blue. Not a sound escaped them, but the word they formed was plain enough.
Mameh.
A few minutes later the mournful cry could be heard up and down the hallway. It spilled out into the street and mixed with the first stirrings of the morning. By the time the day began in earnest—the women hunting in the rubble for anything salvageable, men loitering on the curb looking for odd jobs, the children off to heder or playing cross tag in the ruins—everyone on Dulgaya Street knew that Berta Alshonsky had lost her daughter.
Chapter Eighteen
December 1919
BERTA LAY on a pallet in the bruised light of morning with her daughter in her arms. She could feel the warmth from Sura’s body ebb away as she lay there trying to find the strength to do what must be done. Pavel had been sent away and now only Lhaye remained with her. She came over and closed Sura’s eyes and then lifted her body so that Berta could get out from underneath it. Together they lowered her back down on the bed and laid her arms gently by her sides. Her features had changed so much since death had taken her that now she looked like a wax effigy. Berta kissed her one last time and pulled a clean white sheet over her head and together she and Lhaye placed candles all around the bed and lit them.
There was a knock at the door. “It’s the shomer,” Lhaye said, coming back to the kitchen.
“Tell him to go away. I don’t want him here.”
“Who will stand guard over her?”
“I’ll do it myself.”
“But you are the nihum avelim.”
“I said I will do it myself.”
That evening, Berta and Lhaye washed the body and wrapped it in a tallis. The man from the burial society came and told her that if she did not have the money for a funeral, they would provide her with one. He was a thin man, all angles, with a bushy beard that nearly covered his lips, leaving only a thin line of flesh where the words came out. Berta didn’t have the money, so she was grateful for the help.
“Don’t worry, Froy Alshonsky. Everything will be taken care of. It’s a nice plot, under a tree. A chestnut, I think.” She started to cry. He was used to this and stood there quietly while she pulled herself together. Then he went over a few details, telling her when they would pick up the body and the time of the service.
“I don’t want any official mourners,” she said, thinking of Aviva Kaspler and her partner.
“She doesn’t need them,” said the man. “There are plenty of people who will mourn her.”
That night she brought her pallet into the front room next to Sura’s body and stretched out on it. Lhaye wanted her to come out into the hall to eat something since it was forbidden to eat or drink in the presence of the dead, but Berta shook her head. She only wanted to be left alone. So Lhaye went back to her apartment and her children. Berta could hear them through the walclass="underline" little Rivke pleading for her shoe, Vulia teasing her, Lhaye admonishing him. It was the normal clamor of life and it caused her a momentary pang of jealousy. She rolled over and stared at the flickering candlelight. Then she closed her eyes and saw its dark afterimage. She lay there for some time and waited for sleep to come. Her thoughts became half dreams of disjointed images. She felt as if she had been cut into pieces, her limbs severed, her face halved. She could no longer feel her lips. She wondered if she could move at all.
After the funeral, Lhaye and Froy Wohlgemuth, the old lady from down the hall, came over with bread and hard-boiled eggs. This was the first meal of shiva, the seven-day mourning period. Then the neighbors began filtering in with more food and condolences. Berta sat on her pallet and did not move, did not get up, neither washed nor changed clothes nor greeted visitors. These were the rules of shiva. Even if they hadn’t been, she would have still followed them. She could do little else. She could hear the comings and goings of others from far away, like a child sent to bed before the guests arrived. But she was in another room and the door was closed. She was no longer a part of the world.
NOW THAT there was no one to tell Samuil that he couldn’t go across the street to the bombed-out building and climb up to the second floor, he went up there whenever he wanted to. He liked it up there. He liked sitting on the edge where the wall had once met the floor, with his feet dangling over the piles of rubble below, and watching the housewives in the alleys trade used goods for wood and food. Since he wasn’t going to school, he had plenty of time to make himself comfortable. He staked out two rooms that overlooked the street and furnished them with an armchair that was missing a cushion, two packing crates from the deserted poultry market, and a charred table. These were the rooms that he shared with Sasha Riabushinsky and Moses Sforim, who came by after school to play cards. They would stay up there until their mothers called them down. Since there was no one to call Samuil down, he stayed up there long after they left.
There was another room that he had recently claimed. It was in the back and looked out across an empty lot to the back porches of several houses. It was in the corner and out of the way and had a door that closed. He didn’t tell Moses or Sasha about it. There was no furniture in there, only three walls and a mantel that jutted out from a chimney that seemed to hang in the air.
On top of the mantel he kept his most secret things. There was a broken comb that he found under a cart. It was decorated with bits of sparkly glass and it glittered whenever he held it up to the light. There was also a scrap of lace that he found fluttering from the ragged edge of a fence post and an old silk flower from Mumeh Lhaye’s sewing basket. Yesterday he cut a hank of his little cousin’s hair. It wasn’t much. She didn’t mind. It was the wrong hair from the wrong girl, but the color was right and he put that on the mantel next to the comb. He was always on the lookout for these things. His prized possession was a ceramic cat with a broken tail that looked like Masha. That morning he made a drawing of Arabian horses grazing in a pasture. He balled it up because the horses looked like dogs and threw it off the edge, watching it bounce off the pile of rubble below.