He was supposed to be sitting shiva, but whenever he got the chance, he climbed up to this room and fingered his secret things. That morning he had cried and it scared him. It was so intense that he thought his insides were pouring out of him. At first he couldn’t breathe, poised on the edge of something impenetrable and overwhelming. Then he tumbled down into it, his shoulders juddering, his breath ripped from his lungs in big, gulping sobs. Afterward he felt a little better and wiped his face on his sleeve. Even so he didn’t want to do that again. It could easily get out of control and no telling where he’d end up if it did.
The idea of the mantel came to him the day after Sura died. He thought if he gathered enough things that she liked, she might come back to look at them. He told himself that he wouldn’t be scared. He wanted her to come. He wanted to say that he was sorry for not reading the titles to her at the moving pictures. If he had it to do over again, he would’ve read them to her. Every word.
He waited for five days but nothing happened. Then on the sixth day, just as he was about to climb down the beam to the second floor, he heard someone walking in one of the rooms down the hall. Footsteps. He listened. “Who’s there?” he called out softly.
Silence.
“Who is it?”
Silence.
He listened again. The sound came from his room, the one in the back, as if someone had crossed the floor from the window with the jagged glass to the mantel. Her mantel.
He stood by the hole in the floor, barely breathing. He told himself that if he heard another footstep, he would investigate. Part of him wanted to hear it. The other part wanted to run out of the building. But he forced himself to wait in the gathering darkness. At first he only heard the sounds of the street below, then the sighing of the wind through the charred bones of the building, and then nothing. He waited for a few moments more and then climbed down the beam.
Once outside on the street he didn’t go home. Instead he did what he always did when he was bored or when he wanted to be taken out of himself—he used the shadows, trees, doorways, garbage cans, anything that could give him cover to spy on his friends, neighbors, and strangers. From these vantage points he heard about mysterious ailments, unwanted pregnancies, the theft of a pair of shoes, a feud between brothers, and all about loss: the loss of a sister, a husband, a business, a job, a home. It seemed that all of Dulgaya Street had lost something. The whole neighborhood was suffering from a broken heart.
That night, Samuil became a lamppost, the wheel of a cart, and a barrel. He heard about a cheating husband, a colicky baby, and a boil that wouldn’t burst. He melded into an old oil drum and heard two peddlers complaining about the new edicts outlawing private enterprise and the black market. They were strangers to Cherkast because he had never seen them before. Both wore long gabardine coats that looked as if they had been bought and sold many times. One wore a pair of battered shoes with flapping soles and the other had a thick black beard and wore shoes that bent up at the toes.
Samuil knew about peddling, about how you had to keep your wares hidden in your pockets and under your clothes, or risk getting shot as a speculator. How you had to hide buttons, soap, suspenders, pots and pans, rope or cooking oil, anything you could trade for food in the countryside to sell in the city. He liked to listen to them because they traveled from town to town and brought news from the rest of Russia and sometimes even from Poland or America. There were stories of pogroms and battles between the Whites and Reds, starvation in Petersburg and Moscow, farmsteads looted, kulaks shot, suspected counterrevolutionaries shot, speculators shot, ordinary people shot for no other reason than they were on the wrong side of the street or wearing a warm coat or boots that looked new. Better to execute ten innocent people than spare one who is guilty.
“They pulled him from the train,” one peddler was saying to the other. “He had sacks of bulgur in his pants. He was so scared he peed himself and one of the sacks broke and the grain ran down his leg.”
“What did they do to him?”
“You really want to know?”
The other nodded.
“What do you think? Shot him. He was a speculator.”
“Right there, in front of the whole train? Was it just him?”
“No, there were others. As a reminder, they said. There was a woman with three plucked chickens under her skirt and others, I forget.”
They stood in silence. They may have been wondering how long it would be before they suffered the same fate. Then the one with the flapping shoes asked: “Nu, you looking for someone?”
“Selensky. You heard of her? An old woman from Spasova.”
The other one shook his head.
“Her son is looking for her. Big reward. You hear of her, you tell me. We’ll split the reward.”
The peddlers were often looking for lost family members. There were families in America and Europe who offered big rewards to anybody who located their relatives. They passed the word from one to another and in that way the search extended beyond the borders and spread throughout the Pale. Samuil was never much interested in missing relatives. He was about to move on when he heard the one with the turned-up toes ask, “Nu, what about you? What do you have?”
“A woman and two children.”
“There are lots of women and children.”
“This one lives in the Berezina. She has a girl and boy. A pretty woman. Lives in a big house on a hill. You heard of her?”
This stopped Samuil and for a moment he didn’t know what to do.
“A Jew in the Berezina? This shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
Samuil jumped out from behind the drum and asked, “What’s her name?”
The peddlers gasped, startled by his sudden appearance, and the one with the turned-up toes snapped: “Hey, you little pisher, you don’t sneak around like that. You could give a person a heart attack.”
“I just want to know her name.”
“What for?”
“I just do, that’s all.”
“You know this woman? A big shot like you. You’re acquainted with a fine lady from the Berezina?”
“Maybe.”
The peddlers laughed. The one with the flapping shoes rubbed his hands together to warm them. “So how much you going to pay me for this information?” Samuil looked at him in confusion. “You expect it for free?”
He shook his head, thought for a moment, then dug into his pocket and pulled out a pearl button and a piece of hard candy that a woman in his building had given him because his sister was dead. The button belonged to Sura and he was going to put it on his mantel, but then he thought his mother might miss it so he was bringing it back. Now he had another change of heart and held out his hand. The peddler took the button and turned it over and over. Then he looked up at Samuil. “Debishonki. Her name is Debishonki.”
“Debishonki?”
“That’s right.”
Samuil thought for a moment. “It couldn’t be Alshonsky?”
“It could. But Debishonki is what I heard.”
“Who is looking for them?”
“The father. He lives in America. I forget where.”
That’s all Samuil had to hear. He ran home and found his mother as he had left her that morning, lying on the straw mattress in front of the stove in the kitchen. She had been like that since Sura’s funeral, curled up with her knees to her chest, staring at nothing. She was dressed in the same blouse she had worn that day and her hair was unwashed. The only light in the room came from the gaslight flickering outside in the street. The room was cold and the fire had gone out. He heard scratching in the walls and tried to remember if he covered the bread that morning. He was hungry and was counting on it for supper. He didn’t want to have to go next door and lie to Mumeh Lhaye about where he had been all day.