“I don’t want to be married. I want to stay and work for you forever.”
“Hear what she says! First you will know a little bit about the world and then we’ll see.” She rubbed the top of my head as if it were the round top of a walking stick.
So she sent me to a school that a rabbi’s wife had for girls. This I loved, even if the other girls called me the Gypsy, just like Reb Kohn. After I had gone for a year Pesah bought me a book for my very own, a little Yiddish fable about an angel disguised as a beggar who tested the hearts of men. First she read it to me, then I learned all the words and I would read it to her and my mother every night. Neither of them ever failed in their attention.
I wanted to be just like them, Pesah and my mother both. At night sometimes I dreamed of pleasing Pesah by becoming the fattest girl in the bathhouse, of Pesah washing me herself, admiring how big my shoulders and thighs were. Once or twice I ate until I made myself sick. Pesah sat me on her legs and rubbed my little belly with warm oil. “Now what is this about? Why keep eating when you’re no longer hungry?” And I confessed I wanted to be just like her, so she would always keep me.
“Oy, gotenyu. First, I will keep you here as long as you and your mother like—you shouldn’t worry with such terrible thoughts. No one is going to send you away anymore. Second, it’s not always so wonderful to be as big as me. I have to have chairs made special, and people don’t like to accept what falls outside their expectations—you understand? No one trusts a woman who’s more beautiful than all the rest. People are afraid of me or make fun. Anyway, you will end up the size you were meant to be, just as you are a Jew with two different color eyes. Did you ever hear the story of the leper boy and Elijah? No? Well, it happened a long time ago, maybe yesterday, in Kiev—”
I learned from her to let myself be. My mother accepted bad and good luck on faith; it was all part of what God had laid out, the road she was meant to walk. Pesah’s understanding was more complicated. By her, you needed more than faith, you needed to admire yourself, just as you came. God was in you, of course, and loving God did honor to yourself, but your own self was also something you moved on your own. You decided to act, not just God—or, God forbid, the Tsar—decided for you. She had a way of understanding that let her do whatever she wanted, if it was good to her and caused no pot to spill. She called it honoring God because it honored her own desire. If she didn’t use the mikve because she thought it was a superstition, she didn’t bother to tell Reb Kohn about her decision. Why was it his business? There were altogether too many laws to control women.
“If I am clean or not clean, it is because of my actions, not because I bleed—and it is between me and God,” she would say to Sadie while they were cutting cabbages.
“But Pesah, maybe you put him in danger, if you touch him during your time.”
“I don’t ever touch him, except by accident.” Pesah’s cheeks moved up to her eyes with her grin. Sadie shook her head, as if this was just too much, but I could see she was smiling too.
Truth be told, what I learned from Pesah and the bathhouse was to love women. I grew to be a good-sized woman but no giant, certainly. Strong enough for what I do. And I am happy with what I do.
After I had studied with the rabbi’s wife for several years, Pesah and my mother concluded I was not going to be one of the 10 per cent of Jews admitted to Russian schools and that I should have a trade. I was ten years old, old enough to apprentice with the midwife Milcah the Thorny.
“A midwife, she can travel even outside the Pale,” Pesah said when she told my mother her idea.
“Why should she ever want to go out of the Pale? Unless she has a husband who wants to travel, God forbid.” To Feygele, Odessa was as far as Berlin, even after the railroad came and you could get there in just one day.
“Being a midwife will be like having the dowry in her own person. She will always have work—there will never be factories to replace midwives.” This argument convinced my mother. No one asked me, but it turned out just as well.
Milcah was called Thorny because of her tremendous knowledge of wild herbs and plants. She thought nettles were good for many things, and she would sometimes apply the sharp leaves to a particular ache, especially in the back or legs. “At least,” she would laugh, “it will make you forget your other pain for a minute.” Sometimes it was a very good cure anyway.
I was just ten but I was healthy and eager to please. Milcah was a weekly visitor at the baths; often Pesah invited her to take lunch with us. They would discuss everything—if eating horseradish made a woman have easy labor, if it was true that they were hiring young girls at the new candle and soap factories. It was not hard for Pesah to convince her to take me on, though at first Milcah had reservations about my eyes.
“Not by me,” Milcah said, “but so much can go wrong in birth, so many babies die. You know they say nine out of ten people die because of the evil eye. She’ll be too open to blame.”
“We’ll start a rumor that she has special power to ward off the evil eye, then,” Pesah said. “We’ll say women should see her early in pregnancy, and you’ll teach her the herbs that help. Unless, God forbid, she isn’t meant to be a midwife, it will be the same with her as with you—most live, yes? And what do you tell them when their babies die?”
“It depends on the mother. A pious woman, I repeat the story, how children are jewels that God only lends. When he calls them back, we must return them with an open heart. A superstitious woman, I tell her it must be her husband’s fault. Maybe he was thinking impure thoughts when the baby was conceived, or maybe they have enemies. A stingy woman, I tell her who knows, it could be a judgment from God if, by accident, she forgot to tithe her challah loaves. A few I can tell the truth: It happens, we don’t know why.”
“So Gutke, she’ll learn to say the same. ‘Even a well-trained midwife is no match for Lilith when Lilith is determined.’” Finally Milcah agreed.
Usually apprentices go and live with their teachers. Boys do, anyway, but my mother and I would not be separated, and besides, Pesah was not ready to see me go. I started rising every morning with my mother, often when it was still dark, and as soon as light came I would run through town to where Milcah lived alone in a small house in the poor quarter.
Milcah was old to me, older than Pesah, though maybe she was only forty, younger than I am now. She had carried nine children of her own. One died in the womb, two in childbirth. A Russian, claiming he was cheated in a business deal, whipped her husband to death when Milcah was carrying the last. She was certain this had caused her baby to die inside her rather than to come fatherless into the world.
She was already a midwife when her husband was killed. I think she took up her trade after her second baby died in childbirth. She wanted to make sure the midwife was doing nothing wrong. Later I heard people say Milcah was bitter, but I prefer to think she wasn’t the kind of woman who would leave things to fate.
When I went to work for Milcah, her daughters were married and lived nearby. Two of her sons had gone off on the road to seek their fortunes, like so many. Her other son was a grain dealer doing well in Odessa, and she was very proud of him.
“Like God in Odessa he lives,” Milcah would say. “Odessa makes Kishinev look like a shtetl—some day you’ll see. They have opera in Italian, every race in the world comes to trade, and they pay more attention to business than to religion. If all of Russia were like Odessa, I think the messiah would come.”
“So why don’t you go live by your son?” Pesah would ask her.
“Kishinev is where people know me and I like to be here near my girls.”
The first time I crossed her threshold, the mixture of scents went right up my nose and I sneezed for ten minutes while Milchah watched, patiently amused. Every inch of wall and rafter was hung with bunches of herbs and what I used to think of as weeds. Green, ochre and lavender bits drifted in the shafts of light that penetrated the twine-wrapped stems. Milcah had to constantly dust the falling pollen and windcrushed petals, a task that soon became mine. I thought her house smelled like secrets. I was afraid of spirits in the herbs, and because I was a stranger, I had the idea they would play tricks on me. Every day I went there, for at least a year, I would stand in the doorway and shout: “It is I, Gutke, the apprentice to Milcah!” so they would know I was under her protection.
“Oh, is it? Come in, apprentice to Milcah!” Milcah always treated me very seriously. Milcah was a wise woman, very strict. Since her husband was dead and she lived by herself, people were a little afraid of her, imagining her a witch. Often she was almost silent, showing me what to do by pointing or mumbling a few words, but once in a while she would make us both a cup of chamomile tea and hold forth, proverbs lacing her monologues.
“You might as well know, people will always think midwives are witches, Gutke. You have two different color eyes, I’m a solitary widow—but that’s not the reason. We deal in the inside organs of women; we concern ourselves with the details of sickness and health. To most women you shouldn’t even mention such things.” She drank her tea with a loud, slurping sound. Accustomed to being alone, she didn’t make any pretense of manners with me.
“Men will be afraid because you are involved in matters of the blood,” she continued. “The Torah instructs that bleeding women are unclean and we must not even drink the blood of animals. Women will be afraid because they will think you know them better than they know themselves—and if you are a good student, it will be true.” She paused, sucking her teeth, and then pointed at me, her fingers swollen at the knuckles. “With men you must carry yourself as righteously as the matriarch Sarah, so they may never have reason to cast a stone at you. With women you will be firm. You must never quiver against their fear. After they know you are set in your course, then be gentle and patient with them. Do you understand? No, not yet, but you will.”
I got used to the herbs and stopped sneezing, fortunately. At first I swept, washed and dusted, but after a few months she let me grind dried leaves with a pestle in a brass mortar and tie up fresh bundles to hang. We made all kinds of concoctions: comfrey and nettles dissolved in oil, a black green, for bruises inside and out; wine and honey mixed with clawroot for vitality after misfortune; tincture of clove for toothache, which I already knew from Pesah; a potion of lavender and an herb she called flaming heart that you were supposed to sneak into the food of the person whose love you wanted; and all the preparations for easy birth—raspberry, spikenard root, lobelia. There were shelves of green, amber, blue and clear bottles, as small as my thumb and as big as a milk jug, that constantly needed replenishing.
After the first year Milcah said that I was still not ready to attend a birth. She laid out seven freshly picked plants and seven piles of crushed herbs. When I could identify each one, tell what it did and explain when to administer it, then I could come with her. It was hard work being an apprentice—it made going to school seem like a distant holiday.
I was right, of course—there
were
spirits in the herbs. The herbs became my companions and when I was alone I started to talk to them. One day, for instance, I would tell them about the pig I saw running down the street beside the baths, three drunk Moldavians who kept bumping into each other while chasing her. Eventually one fell down, the others tripped over him and the pig escaped. The herbs would rustle—I could tell they appreciated the attention. Then they’d tell me a story about foxes licking each other in the forest.
Milcah was always walking. We walked all over Kishinev, into the fields and a little bit even into the Tsar’s forests outside of town. She knew Gentile women, and sometimes they gave her plants from their gardens, crossing themselves as they talked to us. Milcah pointed out the houses of Gentiles who spat and threw stones so I could avoid them.
“But,” she said, “even the spitters come by after dark to ask for a potion that will make them have a boy, maybe, or increase their husbands’ desire. They stand in the doorway with their shawls wrapped around them, God forbid anyone should know they talked to a Jew.”
“Why do you let them come here?”
“This you should know already. They can go where they want. Not us, we go where they tell us. But I charge them double, don’t worry.”
I lay awake worrying about the circle that hatred makes. They say we cheat them, so we do, for spite. When I grew up, I would be more honorable than that, and then the Gentiles would see there was no reason to hate us. And I wouldn’t take money in the dark from people who spat on me in the daylight. When you’re eleven you think every idea is born with you, that no one ever tried it the right way before. Your example, your own honesty, will make you a hero to everyone who knows you—and better, it will make people come to their senses and stop telling vicious lies about each other.
Another year went by and I could distinguish between the whitish powders of yarrow and dried eyebright bloom, and knew that shepherd’s purse stanched hemorrhage, anise increased and sweetened a mother’s milk, blue vervain brought on sleep, particularly during the waning moon. Finally I passed my tests on herbs and was allowed to attend my first birth. Milcah was a short woman. Already, at twelve, I was taller. (“Because, kayn ayen-hore, you always had enough to eat, not like me, when I was growing up.” I remembered how hungry Feygele and I were walking to Kishinev, but I never argued with Milcah.) She had very large hands, though, with wide palms, and each finger was like a fence post, square and knotted at the knuckle. Her hands were a sign from God that she was meant to be a midwife, I could tell. I wanted my own sign. Just having a gold eye wasn’t good for anything.
“I was twenty-seven before I knew what my hands were good for, you’ll know when you know.”
She chose for my initiation a woman who had already had two girls, very easy, quick births, a woman with wide hips. The woman, Rivka Solomon, lived in the wood part of town. Her husband had good steady work in a flour mill. The daughters were with their grandmother, the father at work, Rivka’s older sister was with her. “The best is not to have men in the house; they’re too much trouble,” Milcah said. “If they insist, make them go in the other room to pray.”