Sapphires, p.3
Sapphires, page 3
‘It’s not such a bad place,’ Lev says. ‘Sometimes it even reminds me of Russia.’
‘It certainly gets cold enough,’ says Morris.
Isaac Lavan is stiff, impenetrable. His hair and beard are white and his features are starker than his son’s, not quite as elegant or refined. He is past the age when one might call him a dandy, but Lev wonders if once he had been less stern, his manner softer; he can’t imagine this but he can’t dismiss it either.
‘In early summer,’ Lev continues, ‘the prairie is covered with wildflowers, and then I can hardly believe I am gone. Poppies, cornflowers, sunflowers. It can be very beautiful.’
Isaac Lavan says nothing, though his wife’s eyes are rimmed with red. She is a stout woman with kinky grey frizz stretched into a bun, so that it forms a series of ridges on her crown. The light from the window plays over the jet beads of her necklace, against her sallow skin.
‘And there is no sight more wonderful than the corn. Miles of green, tall as a man, growing as you watch. When the wind comes it makes waves, as in the sea, and you can hear it—a noise like hundreds of birds flapping their wings. Of course, it’s been harvested now …’
Lev glances up at Morris who stands with his arms folded against the door. He seems troubled yet at ease, with the look of a man who has done as much as he can and has handed over his burden. Lev rubs his back. If it is a mitzvah to give comfort, he is sure that it wasn’t meant to be as hard as this. He tries again. ‘We have a schul,’ he says.
‘Hah!’ says Isaac Lavan, so suddenly and with such force that Lev looks over to his son-in-law again.
‘It’s true, the schul is small, and the rabbi is a little wet behind the ears …’
Lavan has composed himself. His manicured hands with the pearl-pink fingernails rest on the knob of his cane.
‘Think of your son,’ Lev says. ‘Think of Morris. He has worked and saved to bring you here.’
‘You are a kind man, Lev Kozminsky. But can’t you see that we are in mourning?’
‘It is past the time for that.’
‘For you, maybe.’
Lev can hear his voice rising. ‘You are alive. So are your children.’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Lavan says. Today he has children in Latvia, in Palestine, in Argentina—places like this, Lev supposes, that he has no more than snapshots of, places he can scarcely imagine. Lev’s eyes roam over the bare walls of the room, and now he remembers the silver menorah on the table in the dining room. He glimpses Lavan’s fingers and the glowing white of his collar and the black beads around his wife’s neck; and it is though he is staring at the mirror again, through the tarnished glass, at an image that could or could not be his own. But he wonders if Isaac Lavan could stoop to deal with the bootleggers, or if he would even know how.
‘I was once in Odessa,’ Lev says. ‘I remember the sparkle on the water and the smell of the sea, the great ships at anchor. And the acacias, and the bookstores, and the Bessarabian wine they served in the cafes. And Deribasovak Street … so elegant …’
‘Please,’ says Isaac Lavan.
‘And the mud—it was autumn …’ And here Lev pauses, before bellowing out in a voice he hardly knows as his own, ‘And the way that the Jews stayed on one side of the street!’
Lavan stands up, glaring at Lev. He brushes his dark coat and fingers the point of his beard; he takes a step towards the door but seeing Morris there, he stops. Then his pupils cloud, his shoulders sag, and he sits down.
‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘How long is it since you have been in Russia?’
‘Twenty-six years. Twenty-six years and seven months, precisely. I have counted every day.’
‘It has changed.’
‘When? How? When was it different?’ Lev is feeling ashamed, he is losing all patience. But the man is a fool. They made rich fools in Odessa. ‘I was glad to leave, I couldn’t wait for the chance. A young man with a head on his shoulders, why would I want to stay in a place where whatever I had would be taken, if the army didn’t get to me first? Get out and about a little, Lavan. Look around you, this is a house, not a grave!’
It is the most passionate speech that Lev has made for a time. Though he can be eloquent he is normally a taciturn man, slow to anger, sparing with words. Only Ruchel can make him so angry, stubborn Ruchel who stuck to her shop through the Cossacks and the rampaging peasants, the taxes, the quotas. Only when he had given her children and she could see no future for them in Kapulya would she come. And Lavan, the clod, did he think that he could have escaped all that?
‘We should give thanks!’
Suddenly, Hannah Lavan moans, a deep, tremulous cry that sends her son to her side and Lev’s glance moving swiftly towards her, and he realises that he had forgotten she was there.
Miriam and the children walk him to the streetcar. She is dressed in Ruchel’s warm coat and her cheeks are bright in the tingling air. So, she is really better. He squeezes her hand. With Miriam time is precious. This makes Lev grateful; his heart is full. He looks at the sky: the pinks, the purples, the clouds’ wondrous shapes, animals and castles, he points them out to the children. Abe sees a pig with a cap on, Bernice sees a duck, Harry dreams about shutouts and goose eggs. Miriam laughs, and Lev sees tears in her eyes. ‘It’s so good to laugh, Pa,’ she says. ‘You have no idea.’
‘They will get over it. One day.’
He climbs on the streetcar, the one on which Morris has carried so many meals. The bell rings and he waves to Miriam and the children who stand in the descending dusk. Yet he can’t chase Isaac Lavan from his mind. If a man stops believing, it is because he thinks too much of the world; he is bound to be disappointed when the world offers little but evil, pain and loss. For Lev there are no surprises, and so he is always surprised. And that’s when he hears the music, above the scrape of the metal wheels as the streetcar lurches on its tracks. He hears voices rising from one of the mean wooden houses: a low ululation that rises in a tumultuous shout and dies down again, the voices of the coloured people singing their version of the Torah. They rise in a crescendo and die down again, like the waves on the windswept prairie.
Dough
In the shtetl where Ruchel Kozminsky lived and worked and waited for her husband, there was a clock. It had been installed in the sixteenth century, when the province was still a part of Poland, and it stood in its carved wooden tower in the centre of the town’s market square. The town had prospered under the benevolent rule of the local noble, who had pressed the peasants into producing grain and cattle for export, and he himself had commissioned the tower. Carpenters built it from thick planks of oak, and the clock, with its cast-iron bell that struck the hour, was imported from England. The town, too, was constructed entirely of native timbers, and as such was subject to frequent fires; and in the middle of the following century Cossacks led by the infamous Bohdan Chmielnicki burned it down. But wood was plentiful in the region and such was the shtetl’s spirit that within two years it was rebuilt completely, including the synagogue and the nobleman’s clock.
It was the first thing that Ruchel saw when she came at dawn to set up her stall. The tower, with its straight sides and pointed, pyramid shape at the top, would be licked by a rosy, golden light that reminded Ruchel of flames, and it seemed as though the clock had indeed stopped and was at that very moment being consumed by Chmielnicki’s fire. She would give a little shudder, adjust her kerchief and set to work, balancing the timber slab on the trestles, snapping out the starched white cloth and letting it drift down onto her table, unwrapping her hot braided breads and placing them in artful piles on the cloth.
Through the day, as the sun grew hotter, and her mind grew tired of the chatter of the marketplace, she would find herself staring at the clock again. At midday, when the bell gave out twelve deep, clanging reverberations, the shadowless tower seemed as squat and smug as the local nobleman, the drunken descendant of the man who had commissioned its original. It was as if time itself had lost its soul, that Keteb, the noonday devil, had stolen it; and, as if to confirm this, the face of the clock, too, seemed to have lost all expression. Ruchel blinked, she was losing her mind with loneliness: it was all superstition, Lev had told her so.
And yet. And yet. There were many things she did not understand. When she was younger she thought that time was like the day, the early sunlight climbing over the horizon like honey pouring onto the land and then the sun rising higher and burning brighter in the sky and falling at last like a molten ball singeing the boughs of the pine trees on the hills. And the days became years, circular in their seasons; the hard frosts of winter melting into the muddy slush of the thaw, the sudden thrust of mountain springs and the joyful babble of the birds. Then came the flocks of new rabbits chasing through the thickets and next the tall bending grasses of summer and autumn’s blanket of leaves. And she saw all the ages since creation spiralling, uncoiling, circles within circles tumbling towards her, time like the spinning spokes of wheels, or the hands of the clock in the tower before her, slowly extending its shadow across the square.
The year was marked also by the feasts, the grand cyclical procession of holy days. And thus it had been, for centuries, until one year there was a tumult, far away in France, and time shot forth like an comet, and everything, forever, was changed.
As a rule, girls and women were not to know of this. As a matter of fact, for many of the old people the Haskalah, the Enlightenment, was a curse, a blight, a plague, for men and women alike, to be stamped out as the worst form of trayf. But only the most pious were immune. All men are born, and remain, free and equal, the Frenchmen said, and this was to include the Jews. Into every far-flung ghetto and shtetl this notion crept, to some like a stealthy demon. What Ruchel had learned she had learned from Lev Kozminsky, the quiet, fervent scholar from Vilna. Litvaks were known to be sceptics, but this one seemed to gobble up uncritically everything he read. It was not that he would abandon the Torah, he told her, but that things from now on would be different—in the wider world a Jew could command respect. And she had thought that though he was naive and foolish, for even in the marketplace it was easy enough to see the respect that Christians had for Jews, his words stirred something inside her, something like a dim ancient memory whose precise delineations she could not yet grasp, and which frightened her for that very reason. But she went ahead and married him, in spite of her fears and the knowledge that though he would want her to leave with him she would not go, and even then she was fearful, not that he was wrong but that he might be right. So who was the more stubborn? He or she?
At the end of the day Ruchel shook out the crumbs from her tablecloth, folded it into a square, slipped it into the basket with the money she had earned, dismantled her trestle table and began the slow, weary, market-day trundle home. Her youngest daughter, Zipporah, was there to greet her when she got to the gate of the house, and Ruchel propped the table and the trestles against the gateposts and embraced her, worrying as she did that her thoughts were making her absent and aloof. For it seemed sometimes that she was all alone in the town when in fact not a day went by when she was not surrounded by people. Her mother, her father, her sisters, her friends, were all dear to her, so much so that she couldn’t imagine a life without them, but for all her resisting it was clear that her marriage to the stubborn Vilna chachem had set her apart. And even as she was thinking this Zipporah was telling her of the letter that had arrived, was dancing about her, begging her to hurry inside and open it so they all would hear the news.
Dearest Ruchele, Lev Kozminsky wrote. Last week I bought a horse, a little spotted mare, not young but in reasonable condition, and a cart in which I am able to transport many more items than before. Out here in the west there are not many landsmen but the farmers are good customers. Pots, pans, boxes, bottles and cloth are popular—I get bolts of flannels and a tough-wearing denim from Des Moines. The farmers give me a bed but tonight I am lying in the cart, reading and writing under the stars with the help of a kerosene lantern. It is better for studying this way. The sky seems very low and bright with stars, this is what I notice, the vast expanse of it, that is at the same time close …
It was then that the eldest, Miriam, cried, ‘Oy, there are Red Indians out there!’
Her brother, Carl, kicked her and laughed. ‘Stupid! Des Moines is the capital, a city.’
‘It is only at night that he studies?’ asked Ruchel’s mother.
When she had finished reading, Ruchel laid the pages in her lap. She shook her head. ‘Does he need to work, with me as provider?’
‘He’s saving for us, Mama,’ Zipporah said. ‘To take us to America.’
‘How much does a yeshiva bucher save?’ grumbled Ruchel’s father.
Ruchel lifted her burning gaze from her lap. ‘I will write at once and tell him to come back.’
All this running, scurrying over the globe. She looked around her, at her two frail parents and the dirty faces of her children and felt secure. This was home, where she could feed her family, bless the candles, bake her bread. If part of her knew it for a dream, that it all could go up in a moment’s rush of flames, and whispered like Lev’s voice in the night that she must flee, then this is the part that most frightened her, and she would pay it no heed.
The good thing was that everyone needed bread. Not only the fine white challah for Shabbes but the coarser, weekday varieties, the pumpernickels and ryes. In theory, every woman could bake her own, but not everyone did when Ruchel was around. Some had too many children, some had too many clothes to sew, another might have had too much work in her dairy. Others were too old, or too poor, and in summer perhaps the fear of fire kept some from running their stoves throughout the day. Only Ruchel could have told me for sure. Of course, I didn’t know her well, and didn’t think to ask her when I did. But one thing is clear. It was not at all unusual for a woman to earn money in a shtetl. It was needed, it was expected; it was tradition.
So, with the children scrambling around her and the old people grumbling in the corner, Ruchel tended her oven and kneaded her dough, except in the summer months when she would work when they were sleeping and it was cool. In the deep silent dark of the morning she would wake with the chimes of the nobleman’s clock, creep with her candle into the kitchen where Zipporah was still fast asleep, arrange the pile of kindling in the stove, setting larger, slower-burning chunks on top of that, set the mass of it alight, and begin the expert process of sifting, mixing, kneading and shaping for which she was praised far and wide.
If you have done it yourself you would know that there is something deeply soothing in the simple, humble act of making bread. You take the flour and shake it through the sifter or a sieve, you take the yeast, dry or caked, and crumble it into the tepid water, mixing it with the sugar or molasses and salt and oil, now you add some flour (no need to be exact), then some more, you beat the dough, add more flour and then, when by touch you sense that it all has reached the requisite pitch of elasticity, you begin the marvellous business of kneading. An ancient art, it can have the same effect as gazing at the moon and stars, a sensation of having transcended the boundaries of space and time. I have known people to take up breadmaking suddenly, unexpectedly, at crucial moments in their lives: a man who started after breaking up with his wife, a bank teller who taught herself to make croissants on receiving a promotion. I suspect it is due largely to the kneading. They say, in the utilitarian, instrumental fashion peculiar to Sunday supplements, that it’s a means of releasing tension, all the wrapping and squeezing and folding and punching, and the man who’d divorced his wife claimed that he was only doing to the dough what he had regularly done to her breasts. But now that I know Ruchel’s story I believe that dough can be more than just a device for assuaging hungers, sexual as well as visceral, although with Lev away for such long stretches at a time, there could have been something of that for her too. But still, there was more, definitely more; deeper, and different.
This particular summer night was in the middle of the week, so Ruchel was not making the light, slippery, oily dough for challah. Her recipe called for a thick grainy dough that required a good deal more kneading—at least fifteen minutes, and probably two or three extra spurts of five minutes each. Moreover, this dough was a sticky dough, which made the kneading that much harder again. In the winter she welcomed the labour and, besides, the children would often pitch in, to fold, push and turn and fold, push and turn, and their squabbling over who would do it next and for how long at least gave her muscles a rest and broke the monotony, and if Lev was home he would sometimes take over. But here, in the dark, aside from the sleeping Zipporah, Ruchel was alone, and as she worked her fingers and the heels of her hands into the tacky dough, her thoughts circled aimlessly, like the gnats bobbing and spinning in the waving air above the candle, and she began to think of time again, and space, because I suppose of the very great distance that lay between her and her husband. She pictured the stars above him in the farmers’ fields, and the warm steady glow of his lamp, and the greater her concentration on these the more she sensed that the distance was really nothing, if time, as her thoughts, could stop circling, to move straight and clean like a silvery comet through the sky. And she imagined him, her sweet yeshiva bucher, her luftmensch, lying with the Torah in his cart, and it was as if she were actually there, lying in the straw beside him. She pressed the heels of her floury hands harder into the dough, then, relaxing the muscles of her arms, lifted the furthest end of it and folded it once more into the middle, rocking with such force she might have been davening as she did. And after several more minutes of this the world seemed plunged in silence, out of which a low, humming, buzzing noise began to slowly gather strength, blotting out any visual register of her surroundings: the rough, smoke-darkened walls, the packed earth of the floor, the black flaking iron of the stove, her sleeping child, the worn, scrubbed wood of the trough where she worked. Ruchel squeezed the dough, gripping it now in her sweating palms as the trance seemed to grip her soul. The buzzing got louder, a shriek that bounced off the bones of her skull. Was she being possessed? Had a demon—a dybbuk—jumped inside her? But no, she was neither agitated nor raving. She was calm, peaceful—the only disturbing thing was the noise. And that, too, Gott zu danken, was fading now. She was only vaguely aware of her hands on the dough and the yeasty fragrance rising up from it. Ahead was a swirl of stars; it was as though they were spinning through a tunnel, or perhaps it was she who was spinning; it was hard to know. But after a second or so, maybe less, the dizziness stopped, and ahead she could see a wide, green land, green everywhere, with tall leafy plants coated with silvery drops of dew, and all this under a bright hard sky a dense, vibrant shade of blue. She could feel herself enter, the broad leaves sprinkling moisture in her face as she brushed against them in passing, the soles of her boots sinking deep into the black, spongy earth. The buzzing that assaulted her before was now the singing of pearly-winged insects, and the warmth of the sun high in the blue overhead caressed her as she walked. She saw, in the near distance, what appeared to be the skyline of an enormous city, a city of ziggurats and onion domes, which glittered and shimmered in the sunlight cascading from the sky; and it seemed like no time at all before she had entered the gates and was surrounded by these fabulous golden constructions. And at her feet were cobblestones, so smooth and so clean that they glowed, and when she looked again she saw that they too were gold, just as she had heard from the storytellers who visited the village. So this was what Lev has been drawn to, she whispered, sucking in her breath—America, El Dorado, the goldena medina! So beautiful, so foreign that she was more afraid than she’d ever been. But then, her eyes at first quizzical, then wide with a grateful wonder, as if she were relieved that in all this beautiful strangeness there was still something familiar, something that she, a humble woman, might understand, she saw a clock. A clock like the nobleman’s clock and yet, not like it, different in one or two arresting respects, but similar enough to make her feel, well, at least partially at ease. The clock had its tower, though needless to say this tower of solid gold had a dazzle altogether different from the dawn-kissed oak of the tower in the market square. And her heart gave a kick when she saw that the clockface had no hands—yet the crenellated tower cast a shadow, odd, she thought, with a noonday sun so high in the gleaming sky. And her eye, following the line of this shadow, laid like a dark velvet cloth over the phosphorescent ripples of the cobblestones, almost overlooked what was central to the picture. A woman, an astonishingly beautiful woman, whose beauty Ruchel was unable to compare with anything she had ever seen. Her hair—what can I tell you about her hair? By what means could I describe it? Well, it was the deep, red, tawny colour of the woods in autumn, an intense, lustrous scarlet speckled and streaked with gold, and it spread over her majestic shoulders in a fury of waves and curls. Her lips were the darkest crimson, her skin was as pale and luminous as pearls. She wore a mantle embroidered with them, and lapis lazuli studded here and there, so that the vestment had the sparkle and the deep blue solemnity of the evening sky. Her eyes were a strange, dark, glittering grey, the colour of hematite, glowing as if from some implacable iron strength within. Her white arms peeked out from the billows of her hair; her left hand pressed against her hip and on her right was perched a beautiful mauve-pink bird. She held it out, shoulder high, but from time to time would bring it in close to her face and nuzzle its feathers with her splendid nose. Her legs, in sea-green trousers shot through with threads of gold, were crossed at the ankles, the right over the left, in a curiously jaunty pose, and she leaned back against the tower as if deliberately relaxing her regal bearing for Ruchel’s sake, to lessen her awe. And, accordingly, a smile appeared on the crimson lips, gentle and beneficent, but revealing a set of such perfectly shaped, brilliant teeth that the effort to calm her onlooker was almost immediately undone.
