“No, I’m just catching my breath.”
“Are you going up to Vera Lessing’s party?”
I nodded. He was just slightly taller than me, very dark, a neat little mustache, no sidelocks, probably a Jewish merchant from Europe. His Yiddish was formal—he didn’t come from Kishinev, that was certain. He smelled of cologne and cities. Then I understood. We looked at each other closely. The gas lights flickered. Her eyes were a light golden brown that shone from the olive of her face.
“Dovida Greenbaum,” she said, “though mostly I am called Dovid.”
“Gutke Gurvich.” I didn’t know what else to say. I kept staring at her face, the little mustache. How did she make it seem so real? Maybe it was real. Many women I knew had hair they plucked. If they tended and shaped it instead, I could imagine some might have a mustache as handsome as Dovida’s.
“Are you shocked by me?”
“Oh. No. Not shocked, surprised.”
“Surprised. Well, that’s honest. May I have the pleasure of escorting you upstairs?”
Such manners. Then I really felt like a peasant although I could see that Dovida meant to charm, not shame, me.
Vera’s three rooms were stuffed like kishkes with women. I assumed they were all women, though if you saw them on the street at least six or seven you would think were men. And I thought I had seen every possible kind of woman in the bathhouse! I had never spent more than a minute thinking about what it would be like to move in the world as a man. Long ago I divided men up into patriarchs, demons and ghosts. Patriarchs were worse than demons, because they made the rules. Demons just tormented you. Ghosts mouthed rules but had no spirit in them. Reb Kohn was like a ghost to me.
Now here was Dovida and other women who looked like Turks and Gypsies. Women who could walk where they wanted at night, who could attend any university, if they had the money. Most of the women looked as if they had rubles enough for anything, though plenty appeared to be ordinary working women.
“What are you tisking about?” Dovida came up behind me.
I sighed. Well, I was what I was. I wasn’t going to pretend. “I have never been at a party like this.”
Dovida examined me closely. “How did you get invited?”
“I board with Golde—over there—who is with Vera five years now.”
“And you?”
And me what? Oh. I wanted to look at the floor but I looked in her eyes instead. Then I wanted to look in her eyes for a long time and not speak. But I did. “I—I am just a midwife.”
“A midwife. Well, well. That’s a very important trade. But—,” she took my hand. She was wearing white gloves, what a thing! “—that’s not exactly what I was asking.”
“I know. I just have never talked about such things with anyone. Just a little with Golde.”
“Ah.” She let go of my hand and I felt ashamed for not having words. It was with words God made the world, and now I couldn’t find the words to make my life. “Then you’re just here as a friend, an observer?” Her tone was arch and her voice deepened.
“No.” I didn’t want her to misunderstand me. “No, not that at all. I just—” What words could a person possibly use? “I just am innocent of my own desires.” Oy, I thought, now she’s going to laugh at me.
And she did. Then she took my hand again. “That’s charming. You mean, you have never had the opportunity to act on your imagination?” She said something in French, which of course I didn’t understand though I had heard it in the bathhouse. Heat was spreading through my face and legs. Embarrassment, shame, anger, longing. Was that what desire was?
“I’m not a joke.” The anger won. Anger was cool and relieving.
“Please forgive me. I didn’t mean to laugh at your expense. I have seen many women with desire and no opportunity, and that seems like a sin to me.”
A sin? I looked around. For a moment I was glad my mother was not alive to see such a party. Then I was ashamed for thinking any bad thoughts about these women—how amazing for them to have found their way here, how difficult.
“I suppose you have taken it upon yourself to right this sin?” I looked at her directly.
She laughed. “You know the Talmud says that we will have to account to God for the pleasures we did not take.”
“The Talmud says that?”
“I don’t suppose they intended us,” she gestured across the room, “but every generation of Jews has to make its own interpretations, no?”
Golde came up behind me, put both her hands on my shoulders.
“Already you’ve made a friend! Introduce me.” She shook Dovida’s hand, moving beside me, putting her arm around my shoulder. I couldn’t remember when she had been so affectionate or happy. Who could have known she’d come alive at a party? “Now don’t take advantage of my roommate, she’s an orphan.” That she had to say! I was furious but before I could even give her a look she was off to another part of the room.
“An orphan. I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t be sorry for me. I loved my mother, may she be blessed by God, but she is dead seven years now. I have my own life.”
“Yes. I apologize. I seem to just be blundering here. Perhaps you’d like to meet some of Vera’s other guests?”
“No. I mean, if you like.” But instead we just stared at each other.
“Perhaps some wine?” We went to a table that was full of pastries and cheeses, very nice. Kosher even, it looked. Well, the plates couldn’t have been kosher but it was all dairy and I thought that was very respectful of Vera. In fact, suddenly I liked Vera much better.
“So, now you know I’m a midwife, an orphan and Golde’s roommate. But all I know about you is that you dress like a man.”
“Is that any way to ask me about myself?” We got a little wine and cheese and made our way over to the corner. I noticed the innkeeper’s wife in the middle of the room with Golde’s second cousin. Who would have guessed?
“I’m sorry if I’m rude but I am curious. How did you—?” I asked.
“I ran away from my home in Krakow when I was sixteen. My father got me engaged to marry a furrier, ten years older than me. Oy, how disgusted I was.”
“He was ugly?”
“Really, I don’t know. He was ugly to me. My parents were Orthodox. It was against my father’s wishes that my brothers taught me Hebrew, and I used to sit in the back of lectures at the gymnasium to learn German. I couldn’t imagine being stuck at home with a man who stank of animal skins and petty ambitions. I left.” Dovida wiped a crumb of cheese off her lip with an embroidered handkerchief.
“You just ran away, a sixteen-year-old girl?”
“No, not a girl. I stole one of my brothers’ pants and jacket, his hat, everything. I took every penny I could find in the house. It would have been my dowry, am I right? And I got on the train to Warsaw. I wanted to go to Berlin but I didn’t think I spoke German well enough yet. I never meant to pass for a yeshive bokher, like my brother, so I went into a tailor’s shop and got a nice, modern suit. My breasts were still very small and if the tailor thought something was odd, he didn’t let on. This is what I’ve learned, though I hate to say it—money is freedom.”
“Why do you hate to say it?”
“Because it means so many are slaves. Do you read Marx?”
I was embarrassed. I didn’t read much, medical texts and once in a while pamphlets that the socialist mothers gave me. I’d read
The Travels of Benjamin the Third
the year before but I didn’t really care for the shlemils of Yiddish fiction. “I don’t have much time to read.” Then I was mad at myself for lying. “Besides, I’m not an intellectual. I read biology, for my work.”
“I read for my work too.”
“For what kind of work do you have to read Marx?” At least I knew who Marx was.
“I’m a banker. Not a banker, exactly, but I work drawing up and transferring negotiable instruments, especially between banks and companies in different countries.”
I was almost frightened. What did that mean? How could a Jewish woman do such a thing? And I was confused. “What kind of banker reads revolutionaries?”
“Bankers who want to understand what they do. The more I know, the easier it is for me to move around in the world. And that’s what I really want, the freedom to travel and do what I please. Even I myself don’t exactly approve of what I do for a living.” Dovida hid her grin by stroking the edge of her mustache.
This was the most interesting person I had ever met. All over Europe she went, speaking German, Polish, French, Yiddish, who knew what? She knew intellectuals, revolutionaries, the daughters of barons and now a midwife. I was afraid she would find my little life—just that, little. You could take my life like a pinch of snuff to clear your nose and never think about it again.
I may have talked to other women that night, Dovida may have left me and come back at least once. I don’t remember. She offered to give me a ride home in her carriage. On the stairs she stopped and looked at me.
“But perhaps you might like instead to come to my hotel?”
Almost everyone else had been afraid to hold my gaze. But for her, my eyes were a doorway, a scene where there was a mountain and lake, and she could never decide whether she wanted to rest staring at the mountain or the water. Back and forth her eyes went, into mine, so far I could feel her walking inside my breastbone. She had strong legs but each step was gentle.
“I am afraid to make a scandal.” Of course what I really wanted was to make such a big scandal that I would have to leave Kishinev in the morning and never come back.
“Gutke, in 1884 it is not such a big scandal for a woman to go to a gentleman’s hotel room. Besides, I have a feeling not too many of your patients live by the hotels on Alexander Street.”
So I went.
Even now, sixteen years later, going with Dovida was the best decision I ever made.
Sixteen years is a long time but we had plenty of natural separations when she traveled.
“You could give up being a midwife and come with me,” she’d say. “I make enough money to support you in style.”
Then we fought. Why should I give up my independence, my trade? Could she really have believed style would be important to me?
“You shouldn’t confuse dressing like a man with being a man,” I said.
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
“I love you for your courage, for deciding to make your life on your own, for not letting what other people think women can and can’t do stop you.”
She paced around the room with her hands in her pockets. “And?”
“And I want the right to live my life the same way. If I became dependent on you, you would tire of me in a year, like one of those spoiled bankers’ daughters you used to romance.”
“Tire of you?” The coppery tinge in her eyes caught the light behind her wire spectacles. I loved looking at her eyes. While she worked on documents at the table late at night I sometimes played with the bristly hair of her mustache, just to get her to look at me. “A week in Venice would only give me new inspiration in loving you—and taking a vacation, how could that possibly spoil you?”
Jews taking vacations! Well, those were the circles Dovida moved in, and she liked the adventure. I couldn’t see myself floating around in a gondola. “Maybe, sometime, if it would really make you so happy, I’ll go to Venice or Vienna with you,” I said. “But this month I have three women due. I’m not going anywhere.”
She peered over her glasses at me and gave an exasperated sigh. “You won’t even consider pleasing me?”
“Yes, I’ll consider it,” I said smiling. This was the way she usually got us out of the argument. If money and traveling were sore spots, we knew how to rub the ache out of them. Dovida was such a pleasure to me that even when other opportunities presented themselves—an unhappily married woman reaching for my hand, a friend of Dovida’s from Berlin trying to sweet-talk me—I was never tempted. The way it was between Dovida and me was what I wanted, not because it was the only possibility but because Dovida absorbed my attention, even when I wasn’t sure I liked her. The flame I saw the night I met her never left, though it often changed shape, intensity or color.
But the words for what we were to each other? Every part of the body has a name. Sometimes I lay in bed with Dovida—she slept sound and late—and I would name each knuckle on her hand. I named the crease behind her knee, I traced the big muscles of her forearms, I called the left one Simkhe and the right one Latke, it was good enough to eat.
“What are you doing?”
“Just talking to Simkhele here.”
“Should I be jealous of my forearm?”
“Well, you, you’ve known so many women, I have to make it up somehow. If I find twenty women in your body, will that even the score?”
She was sleepy, chuckling, pulling her arm around me. “Are we keeping score? You’re the one who gets to look between other women’s legs. You can’t fault me for what I did before I met you.”
Once something comes into being, shouldn’t there be a name for it? I could call this love, like young girls dreaming about who they’ll marry, but to call it love would be like to call it God, no offense to the Creator. Everything is God’s, isn’t it? And all pleasure in life is love. What is between me and Dovida must be very close to God, because even if there were a word for it you could not say it out loud. Just like the name of God, you must not speak it. You can look at it, written out, but not even a whisper should cross your lips.
“So serious, my Gutke, always wanting to understand what makes us love. Maybe it’s not such a serious thing. Don’t your medical books tell you human beings are mostly water? We are just water, moving towards each other. Like this—.” She rolled towards me and took my lips in her mouth. Her lips were soft and expanding, until I thought my entire body was inside her. So much sensation—I had to pull back, to look at her.
I have to pull back a little, so often she’s away on business. Now we rent an apartment together in Odessa, as if we are man and wife. But I keep my room at Golde’s in Kishinev, so I can still bring new lives into the world among the people who know me. Once in a long time when a girl is born, I see that flare I saw when I first looked at Dovida. This one, I think, will be like us.
Even if I have no words for it.