For six months they lived this way. I could never find out if they even knew each other as husband and wife. By the time I was old enough to ask, my mother had made a complete legend of him: good, kind, smart, shy, the prophets would drink honey from his lips. They were children, only, walking in adult clothes. Sometimes it just goes that way. You start walking around in your mother’s big shoes and the next time you look down, your feet are all swollen and sore, the shoes barely fit. Then it’s too late to say you were just pretending, am I right?
Since before the time of Catherine, Jews have lived the same way in Russia. We bend under one tsar, straighten up a little under another. So Tsar Nicholas died, my mother married the innkeeper’s son and the innkeeper, maybe he thought he didn’t have to bribe the police anymore for protection. Of course anytime you think you’re safe from the authorities is an illusion. Seeing how much suffering a Jew can take is a game to them. And Jews—they turn away. I’ve heard the Gentile women talk about their Christ. “Turn the other cheek,” he said. If he said that, then it must be true he was a Jew.
In Kamenka some soldiers came by, made a joke about the Jews. Feygele’s young husband defended his faith. They laughed. “We need to show this Jew what it means to be a man, a Christian man! He looks eighteen. What is he doing, carrying books, when he should be defending the motherland!” And they took him away. Maybe they hadn’t heard Nicholas was dead and the draft had changed, maybe they just wanted a Jew to polish their boots. So into the army he went. His innkeeper father tried to buy him out, spent I don’t know how many rubles, but the rubles went into the pocket of the provincial governor and my mother’s husband stayed in the army.
By then she was maybe fifteen. Feygele did everything a pious, faithful wife should do. She embroidered beautiful lace for the sister’s dowry. One day by the river, while she did the washing—hours this took, she had washing not just for her family but for maybe two or three others—a man forced her. When I was young I often tried to imagine that man, my father. Was he a Jew, a Gypsy, a Russian, a tramp, a magistrate? My mother never even whispered it in her sleep. It’s an odd gift I have, to see bits of the future but never any part of the past. I remember well, though, what I’ve been told.
She came back late from the river. All the laundry was clean; that’s how my mother was. But her own clothes were torn and she was wringing her hands. My poor little mother, Feygele. Of course, her mother, Bathsheba, found out what was what. It was close to the time for the sister’s marriage and no one wanted to spoil the occasion. Feygele was sent to her father’s grandparents’ home in Orgeyev, where I was born.
She told them she never saw her attacker’s face. They had sympathy for her, a little, despite the shame, because she was so pious and sweet. But they were very poor and as soon as I was born, my mother shleped back to Kamenka, thinking now that her sister was married, everything would be all right. And still she thought her husband would come back and be my father. You can imagine what happened. It was only a poor shtetl of tormented Jews, and torment is like a river forced underground. Up it comes like a fountain somewhere else. The slightest breach of rules, Jews jump on each other like dogs on a piece of rotten meat. That’s what happened to my mother.
I don’t think she ever had much more use for men than I do. Her husband was only a hope, a little flame on a candle far away, the one who would save her. Maybe five years went by; if her husband had escaped the army, someone perhaps told him what happened to Feygele and he didn’t come back. She was without divorce papers and all the town knew she had a bastard daughter, a mamzer. Worse yet, when they looked at my different eyes, one black, one gold, it was like a curse to them. They wouldn’t let their children play with me and if, God forbid, a hailstorm should break their windows, they blamed my mother for bringing in the evil eye. The village was too small. Not even the women who had sympathy could befriend her. Feygele was alone, swept into a corner by her family.
Around the time I was five, she finally understood this was no life for us. She had nothing. Bathsheba, her mother, gave her a pair of brass candlesticks, some black bread and dried apples, a featherbed. My Bobe made me little bags of salt for my pockets and to wear around my neck. Bobe was always singing and talking, but on the day we left, she couldn’t bring herself to open her mouth, not even to say goodbye. Feygele made up a roll like a wanderer, put a kitchen knife in her skirts and waved goodbye. My mother never saw her own mother again.
So we set out walking for Kishinev. Sometimes we got rides from peasants, and I remember how my mother pressed me to her breast, as if I was a shield. This was just after the Tsar freed the serfs and many peasants were on the road. Throughout the journey she held me close and mumbled prayers in Hebrew. I think it took years, well, weeks to get to Kishinev. My mother would sing and tell me stories. She would call me her brave little walker, her soldier. There must have been other Jews walking too, luftmentshn without homes or occupations, because after the serfs were freed times got harder for the Jews. Who can remember when they haven’t been hard? I remember barns and once a Jewish family let us sleep on the floor and fed us borscht. That soup comes back to me, steaming sweet, thick with onions, potatoes and beets, the extravagant color alive and clinging to the sides of the bowl. Beets are proud vegetables; they love to show off in your nose and on your clothes. They take over in the bowl, claiming everything with their purple-red. Even though I was only five, when I think of that soup now I have the sharp sensation of hunger and pleasant fullness all at once.
We arrived in Kishinev. I had never seen such balconies, iron porches. I thought we had come to a land of castles until we came to the poor section, which looked almost the same as Kamenka, long ditches beside the roads, all the houses made of mud and straw. But so many! Even then, before most of the factories were built. My mother offered to do washing and chores. The women laughed at her. What would poor women pay with? When they saw my bright eye, they got nervous and sent her away.
On we went. My mother certainly couldn’t have known where she was going. The city was vast, first a wooden section, then stone, one side by the river and the other on the cliffs, looking down. We came to a busy place and saw a sign for the public baths swinging on a chain. Now we were lucky—some spirit opened its heart to lead us there. I felt it like a soft kiss on my eyelids. Pesah Kohn, who ran the baths, was just that minute in her doorway, surveying the street. Yes, she had work—one of the bathhouse attendants had quit only that week. I suppose she was moved by my mother’s pitiful story about her husband the dead soldier, her little fatherless girl, who walked all the way from Kamenka.
Pesah Kohn had room in her house for a boarder and she offered to trade my mother board for labor, a few rubles in a couple of years if it worked out. This was the best offer my mother ever had in her life, so you can see how small her life was even when she had good fortune.
Kishinev was already such a big city there were separate bathhouses for men and women, open every day except, of course, Friday afternoon and Saturday. The baths were on two sides of a big building in a fairly well-off part of the old city by the river, where most buildings were built of stone and streets were wide. Many Russian merchants and factory foremen lived in that district then, as well as some Jews who were doing all right for themselves. But all kinds of Jews came to the baths, anyone who could scratch up a few kopecks. The goyim say Jews are dirty—they should only know how religiously we bathe. All the grown men came at least once a week, for the steam and to gossip more than to be clean, but there they were. If they put on the same dirty coats when they left, that was all they had.
The women and children, it depended. Usually in the warmer weather they came every week and got a good scrub. So maybe the mikve water stood a little—it was still rain water, ritually pure. In the winter things were harder but still they came as often as they could. Why not? In the baths the women took off their wigs and shook their hair down; they got to talk and complain with their heads uncovered. Women are supposed to be modest but everyone looked at each other, compared how much hair, what kind of hips, if the children were healthy. As they say, all are equal in the baths. On Monday afternoons no married women came, only prostitutes. Prostitutes could travel anywhere in Russia if they had a yellow identity card. Usually on Mondays Pesah would send me all over town on errands—it wasn’t until I was eleven or twelve I figured it out. Now I’m ahead of my story!
Pesah Kohn never had a child of her own. Reb Kohn had three boys from his first wife, who died in childbirth, but he was already old when Pesah married him. He wanted her to raise his sons. She had a reputation for being good with figures; she would be an asset to the business. By the time we arrived, the boys were married and gone. The Kohns had their own stone house behind the baths. They owned the property in the name of a White Russian living in Kiev whom Reb Kohn had helped somehow when they were young. Reb Kohn liked to spend his time talking in the men’s baths and of course he had his religious duties. So Pesah really managed everything, even sometimes hiring the boys who were attendants to the men.
Pesah Kohn—I love to think about her. She was the most wonderful woman I ever saw. She was twice, maybe three times as wide as my mother, and at least a head taller, her hips filling the whole doorway. She smelled of sweet bathwater and roasted chicken all the time. I believe she was the first Jew I ever saw with green eyes. She was never frightened of my one bright eye, or if she was, she never showed it. I think she terrified my mother but Feygele couldn’t resist Pesah’s offer that first day in Kishinev. Pesah gave us a little room behind the kitchen that had been for the boys.
The first night we had finished eating (and that food tasted good—salty herring, fresh sweet onions, black bread and plums) when Reb Kohn came in. “What is this?” he asked, peering at us.
“Our new bath attendant.” Pesah introduced my mother and me by our full names.
“And the husband?”
“Dead in the Tsar’s army.”
“Ahah. And this husband—the girl’s father—what was his name?” My mother turned red. I tugged at a loose button. Pesah watched us.
“Gutke’s father was Shmuel Gurvich, of blessed memory, who died in the Tsar’s army,” my mother said, exactly as I’d heard her rehearse on the road. As far as I know, this was the only lie she ever told. Even at five I knew at least part of the truth about what happened in Kamenka.
“No Jew is the father of that girl!” Reb Kohn said, not to my mother but to Pesah.
“The mother is a good Jewish woman who has walked more than a hundred versts and recited psalms the whole journey. You know what could happen to them in the streets of Kishinev. What could bring more honor on us than to make another’s honor possible?”
“It’s they who bring dishonor, and you will spread it to my whole family with your foolishness, Pesah.”
“No, Reb Kohn, we will be doing the work of angels by making it possible for them to live an honest Jewish life. It’s a mitsve. The child, only the breath of Lilith when she was born.”
“Lilith! A Gypsy or a Turk touched her face. That child’s a Gypsy.” He fumed.
“Gutke is a shayne maidele, the daughter of a Jewish woman,” Pesah said. She moved to where I sat, still as a fish looking up from under ice, and pulled me against her huge breasts. “Shayne maidele,” she said. All the fear I ever had in me thawed in her arms.
“You have your way, as usual. But you—,” he said, pointing a finger at my mother, “you must behave as if you were the pious daughter of Rabbi Hershel himself. The minute I find you breaking the sabbath or sneaking off with bathhouse boys, back on the street!”
All the time walking from Kamenka my mother never cried, she would just sing and tell stories. Now she sat in the Kohns’ kitchen with tears coming down her face. “Thank you for your great kindness,” she said. “I swear on my life you will never be disappointed in me.”
“We’ll see,” he said. Pesah put me down. Feygele and I moved like feathers into our new room while Pesah gave Reb Kohn dinner. That was the longest conversation we ever heard them have.
Whenever you tell the story of one woman, inside is another. Tending the enormous wood cooking stove with its three blazing chambers, Pesah would confide in me those early weeks, her voice low, crooning, while my mother went about her chores. They say children don’t remember, but I remember Pesah’s song.
“I always start with an onion. What Jew doesn’t? Garlic is nice. With an onion and garlic, a little shmalts, you cook a smell that koshers the house.” She dipped her finger in the hot chicken fat, blew on it and held it out for me to suck. “That’s a good baby. You can taste how I keep a kosher house. My mother never needed to say such a thing. It was understood. My mother—” here Pesah stopped to sigh and wipe her forehead with a rag, “my mother was a farmer and a farmer’s wife. What did they grow? With fourteen children, it was their joke that they grew me. Here I am, tall and round as a potato.” She held up one of the potatoes she was cutting so I could see the similarity in shape. I laughed.
“That’s good, Shayne, laugh,” Pesah said. “Laughing is one way to fool your appetite when times are hard. I could never get enough of anything. My family used to laugh at my appetite. Not just for food, which I can eat my share, but for work and knowing what’s going on in the world. Outside the farm there were wanderers who could capture your face in a box and put it on paper, a frozen mirror. I heard about them, and about the great new machines, from the traveling magidim, our storytellers. I loved the feel in my mouth of foreign words. Russian, Greek. I always talked to strangers. I’m too big to be afraid. Always there is a road, just like the road you traveled to get to me. From the road comes news.”
She kept slicing the potatoes, throwing them in the onion, garlic and fat mixture. The smell was like perfume. “My whole family murmured, ‘What to do with such a girl?’” She made a clicking noise with her tongue. “As quick as they could, they sold me—believe me, I know what a dowry’s for, every odd-shaped girl knows—sold as an ox, along with a team of mules, some boy could plow his field with me. What do you think: Am I worth a pair of mules?”