Prick of the Spindle: Fiction: Grinberg: The Bra Maker

The Bra Maker
A Novelette by Natasha Grinberg

Room 408. Beth Israel Hospital, Newark, NJ, 1998. Once you die, things become fascinating. I promise. But don’t rush. You have such a beautiful life that I almost wish I could hang on longer to glimpse it once in a while. But I’m sure you’ll manage without me, mine hartz, my bubele, my Kostya.

Why have the doctors brought me back to life? What am I good for? An old woman. Three steps to the bathroom and back into my chair, to sit out my days in pain. And to tell you the truth, the extra-strength pills you kept buying me stopped working months ago. I didn’t want to upset you before the time came. But the time is now, and I’ve got to talk to you before I leave for good.

So how do I know I was dead, you want to ask me. Maybe I am old woman, but I’m not crazy. I’ll give you three reasons. First of all, I felt as light as a fluff of goose down and so thin. So thin . . . I haven’t been so skinny since WWII when my chin looked as sharp as a pointed spade and my breasts were so small, I could’ve worn your mother’s bra.

A breeze lifted me and carried me over a forest. It looked exactly like the woods around Gomel: pines and birches and meadows with wild strawberries. And the birch bark was the proper white, not gray like on the birches you planted in your yard in Princeton—so that’s my second point: I was not in New Jersey anymore. But the clincher was that I saw your grandfather Chaim standing in the middle of a dirt road with a group of people. My Chaim, and he’s been dead six years. So, tell me, if I see a dead person and I’m not crazy, then I must be dead, too. And that’s my third point.

I couldn’t make out the faces of the other people. So, obviously I was dying to know if my cousin Klara was there. With me absent so long, she might’ve found a way back into my Chaim’s heart. Believe me, I’d never wanted to see her again. Even in the afterlife.

The women were wrapped in something gauzy. I couldn’t even tell if they wore bras. So I circled to get a better look. The air was fragrant with lily-of-the-valley. I breathed in; the trace of the flowers was so delicate, I couldn’t get enough of it. Chaim might’ve sensed something, too. He gave a start and began to lift his face in my direction. Would he be happy to see me? Would I mess up his new afterlife? After all, he’d already spent sixty-five years married to me.

I began to feel as though a fog was lifting off my mind, and, just at that moment, something smacked me on my head. Why? Why, I’m asking you? Why did they bring me back to life? If they think living is so easy, should they force it on other people? If you’d been in that room, you wouldn’t let them do it to me. My bubele, you have a smart head on your shoulders. You’d understand that they should have let me stay dead. Gazlonim—bandits, these doctors and nurses. Bandits and robbers.

Imagine, to be given a gift, a chance to die suddenly, without being scared or angry, without agony. To be given the death of a righteous person. Who could’ve dreamed of such an easy end?

But just my luck. That’s a point you should learn, Kostya, when you give someone a gift, don’t make a hutzparade—a production—out of it: do it privately, so others are not envious to take it away.

Did your mother tell you how I died? She took me for a CT scan. Four aides hoisted me on the table. In Gomel, the workers would’ve cursed me from here to Berdichev for being so fat, but these nice schwartzes just kept smiling and patting me so I wouldn’t worry. I helped all I could: kept my limbs together and didn’t moan. Finally, on the long table, I looked around. Everything was white and soothing in the room. It got quiet. So I closed my eyes and thought to myself—if I could just be left alone like this. I heaved a breath and floated. Imagine—me, floating.

Kostya, can you buzz the nurse? She forces a muzzle on me, from time to time, so I can breathe. Please ask her not to bother. Who wants to breathe when all I need is to talk to you. There are secrets I must tell you about me, your mother, and about you. You can’t even imagine how much of it I have been holding in.

The cemetery plot you bought for your grandfather and me in Woodbridge is very nice. The grass is trimmed neatly around the stones. But you’ll have a bit of a problem with mine. Jews are supposed to have two first names, but by the time my parents had me, they’d run out of ideas and only gave me one—Musya. So I must tell you what I want my second name to be and why.

My mother was fifty in 1909; I was her tenth child, an accidental pregnancy, and all the love she had, she’d already spent on the other children. Every time she turned to me, it was to scold me for being clumsy and accuse me of scheming or lying. My siblings went out of their way to imitate her, especially my sister Hayka. She was eighteen years my senior and as beautiful as a juicy apple with large slanted hazel eyes, long lashes, and skin so soft I liked to run my fingers along her cheek when she let me. But maybe because I liked her the most, she often slapped me on my hand, especially when I reached into the stew bowl, saying, “Musya, you little rat, the meat is for Papa.” Of course, if tripe is meat, then we had meat—liver, kidneys, hearts, lungs, gizzards. My mother’s nickname at the market was Tripe Fruma.

I was five in 1914 when we received the news that my oldest brother had been killed. Tanyaberg . . . Tanya plus berg. The Battle of Tannenberg. Our only mirror was covered by a bed sheet as a sign of mourning. The Singer sewing machine was folded inside its stand, and its flat surface was used as a night table. On it, a glass of water had been standing for hours. A suicidal fly crawled around the edge of the glass as if marking its last seconds on the watch dial. My mother collapsed on the bed, fully clothed, looking at me without blinking as though I were not there.

Was she dead? I decided to touch her. Her hand sprung violently alive and slapped me away. The fly, too, became scared and buzzed to the corner of the windowsill, but its memory of the offense was shorter than mine, and it returned to the water glass. Or maybe going in circles was calming it down, making it forget its grievances. I got up and began to pace around the room, looking at my scuffed mutt-brownish shoes. They might have been chestnut or gray before I was born.

My second eldest brother had been drafted, too, but so far we hadn’t heard if he was alive or dead. My sister Hayka sat on a small stool next to her sweetheart, Hessel. He’d been sleeping next door in a two-room house with God knew how many brothers and sisters. His father had died several years before of tuberculosis.

I didn’t know that Hessel was not my relative. He looked a bit like all of us: long face with wide cheekbones; fleshy lips; narrow, straight nose; and heavily lidded slanted eyes. There was something oriental in our looks: Chinese, Tartar, or Kazakh, but because many Gomel Jews looked like this, we didn’t think it unusual.

I considered Hessel part of the family because he’d come to our house straight from work and walk in Hayka’s shadow. I conjectured that he had to spend nights at his mother’s house because there was no place in ours. My two sisters and I slept on the sofa like figures on a playing card, ten-year-old Esther and I on one side, Basya, who was fourteen, with her head on the other side, her legs between mine and Esther’s. Sometimes we leg-fought.

Hessel held an open letter. His hands trembled. His index-finger hairs were streaked with lemon-yellow, alabaster caked under his fingernails. He was a house painter, and summer was his busiest season, so I wondered why he was here during the day. My father slouched on a low stool next to him, crying quietly but nonstop, wiping at his eyes with his crumpled handkerchief. I came close to him and caressed his shoulder. He embraced me and pulled me onto his lap, whispering, “Musya, Musya, my dear girl, life is such a tragedy. A man makes plans, but God laughs at them. Why have I let my two boys go?”

Little by little I understood that the letter in Hessel’s hands was his draft notice. It was clear to everyone that if he heeded the call, he’d get killed, too. My father put me down on the floor, slapped his large gnarled hands on his knees and got up. “It’s written—choose life.” He crouched beneath the bed, stuck his hands under the mattress and retrieved a small bundle wrapped in a clean rag. “Take this.” My father straightened and planted the package in Hessel’s hands. “It’s all we have. Should be enough for a ticket to America. I’m not sending another one of our own into this meat grinder. When you get settled—”

But he didn’t finish because Hayka had risen from her stool, took a step, and fell like a severed pendulum onto Hessel. She was crying and tearing at her clothes. I didn’t understand whether she was crying because Hessel was going to America or because he wouldn’t get killed in the war or because she wouldn’t see him until he’d settled down or because she wouldn’t see him at all. I loved Hayka and Hessel, so I spread my arms around their waists and, for good measure, began to wail, too. Hayka pressed her hand behind my back and kissed me on the crown of my head. My sobs intensified, this time they were more out of elation that my sister loved me.

Once Hessel arrived in Boston, it took him two years to save enough money for Hayka’s passage. His letters were read aloud at dinners, but all I remember was that a far-removed relative from Gomel helped him get a job as a house painter and that Hayka couldn’t go by ship from Europe via the Atlantic Ocean because of the war but had to take the eastern route through the Pacific. Her first letter from Boston arrived in 1916. She wrote that during her travel, everyone had thought she was Japanese, a very tall Japanese.

Hessel and Hayka got married right away. She took on an American first name, Ida, which means happy. And she was deliriously happy at first and had a boy, Nathan, in 1920.

When I was little, I thought that war was the way people lived. I also thought sooner or later everyone went to America, and my childhood was just a way station, a preparation to join Hayka, who was now Ida. I spent hours wondering what my name would be once I arrived in Boston: Maria? Monica?

The revolution came to Gomel in 1917. Local Soviets were organized, some big wigs were shot or disappeared, but my father went to work to sweep chimneys every day, except on Shabbat. Then one day, the German army occupied Gomel, and all the members of the local Soviets were shot or disappeared. But my father went to sweep chimneys, and when the Reds came back in 1919, my father continued to come home covered in soot.

Everyone around me was Jewish. Yes, ethnic Russians also lived in Gomel, but you keep calling them Belarusians. After the revolution, Yiddish was made one of the four official languages of the Belarusian Socialist Republic: Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and Belarusian. Now that Jews were allowed to move to Moscow and St. Petersburg, some did. And goyim relocated to Gomel from the surrounding villages. Most were illiterate, but, other than that, they were as poor as the Jews. My mother couldn’t read either because she was a girl and had grown up an orphan. She couldn’t even count money—and that was how I became a little thief. I’d save ten, fifteen kopeks change and buy a measure of calico to sew myself a blouse or a skirt. My sisters pestered me. Where had I gotten the fabric? I told them I’d been paid for cleaning the Katzes’ house.

Oh, the Katzes! They were a different kind of Jew. They lived above their store on Trudovaya Street. Rich. They even had tablecloths and lace doilies for every day and a velvet sofa in the living room. Their three sons went to Jewish gymnasium and always sat with a book. I wish someone gave me books then, but as it was, after the fourth grade, my family thought I’d had enough education. I was relieved to be done with school—what they taught there I wasn’t interested in. I wanted to sing, to act in a theater, to make costumes. But in school, I had been stuck with forty other kids in the same room and studied in Russian. At first, I had understood only every fifth to tenth word—at home and everywhere else we spoke only Yiddish. And to this day, I can only guess why my parents sent me to a Russian school. They might’ve thought the new world had begun and the Russian language would be the ticket to the future.

Didn’t the revolution produce oddities? Cats who bark? Take me, for example. My native tongue is Yiddish, but I can’t read or write it. My second language is Russian, but you laugh at my mistakes. Laugh all you want, bubele—now in America you’ve found out for yourself how it is to think in one language and to speak in another.

The Katzes owned a house and a department store that took a whole block. Do you remember Trudovaya Street? That was where it used to be. After the revolution, the business was expropriated and the father, Reb Kalman Katz, was made its director. His house was expropriated as well and made into a communal apartment. His family was allotted two rooms in it.

The last time I came to clean the Katzes’ place was 1920. There was almost no room to turn—dressers and wardrobes moved from the rooms that no longer belonged to the Katzes were rubbing sides like herrings in a barrel. Reb Kalman Katz, the father, sat at the table and nodded for me to approach him. He still wore a yarmulke on his head, though everyone was supposed to know that Marx said, “Religion is opium for the masses,” and most Jews had stopped wearing their skullcaps in public. But I didn’t exactly understand how this worked since my father didn’t wear a yarmulke yet he went to shul every Friday evening and holidays. Everything was done hush-hush—so was having a shul allowed or not?

“Musya,” Reb Kalman said, “you’re a good and honest girl, but we won’t be able to use your services anymore.” He looked around the cluttered room, his face becoming a shade grayer. He picked up a narrow bundle wrapped in wine-colored felt and handed it to me. “This is something for you. Save it for a rainy day.”

I opened the package to find a heavy silver spoon with a wide engraved handle, still gleaming from the last time I had polished the whole set. Though I was overwhelmed with Reb Kalman’s generosity, the idea of breaking the set—like breaking a family—disturbed me, so I tried to give the spoon back, but he just smiled at me. I realized that the world had been falling apart around me for a long time now.

There was many a rainy day in my life, but as long as I kept that spoon, I knew that I had something against the rainy day. And as long as I believed that, I survived.

Be patient my boy. To get to the crumb, you need to bite into the crust. I’ll tell you what you need to know, but first I must explain.

During the early twenties, Gomel continued to break apart. Families were leaving: some to America, some to Palestine, some to Poland. The new order was like fresh concrete being poured—it hadn’t solidified yet, and you could still extricate objects accidentally stuck in it. The Jews who stayed put were like other people, only more eager: the poor fools and the smart fools were glad to become a part of the new system. Just before the revolution, only a single Jew could be elected to Gomel Duma, but now no one counted Jews, and many got to be in the city government.

My father couldn’t be in business for himself anymore and had to join a municipal cooperative, but—thankfully—the chimneys continued to collect soot, so he had a job. He earned enough for us not to starve.

Put your hand on mine, Kostya, so I know I’m still with you. I hope I’m here long enough to tell you everything.

When I was thirteen, I wanted to join the Young Pioneers. Who they were exactly and what they did, I didn’t know, but what I did know was that they had picnics in the woods around bonfires where they sang songs and staged performances. My mother hadn’t allowed me to go, but I slipped away from home and marched with other young people to the woods. There must’ve been fifty of us. I knew most of them either from school or from the neighborhood. We spoke Yiddish amongst ourselves.

Our leader was nineteen, which made him a sage in my eyes. He wore a linen peasant shirt with a slanted button strip, cinched by a leather belt. His riding breeches were tucked into his high boots. I liked his broad shoulders and the way he looked at me, slightly crinkling his honey-colored eyes. His whole face emanated kindness, and I had to keep myself from hugging him. Only after he’d moved on to the head of the column, did I realize that he was shorter than me by a thumbnail. So what, I thought, I won’t wear heels.

But easier said than done because of Klara, my cousin. She was there, walking beside me. That girl lied even when she was silent, but because she was older than me, everyone believed her. She had delicate skin, her hair was cut just below her ears according to the new fashion, and she constantly licked her lips to make them shine. When I’d hear others call her a beauty, I was happy because we looked very much alike. Unfortunately, she was three years older than me and always liked to win in the games we’d played as children. When she saw me batting my eyes at our leader, she probably said to herself, “Ah-ha, who’s this Musya to think that she could get such a guy?” As soon as we arrived at our destination, she began to circle around him like a fox trailing her prey. I tagged along.

The guy was, no doubt, in heaven—two of the most beautiful girls in his group were vying for his attention. He couldn’t even tell the difference between us yet and kept calling me Klara. But as soon as he found out that she was sixteen and I was still a baby—those are his words—he turned his undivided attention to Klara.

But I knew two things: to her, he was just a prize she’d wanted to win, so she wouldn’t make a good wife for him; and for me, he was the only man I would ever want. It took me a year to convince him that true love was better than a stylish haircut and moistened lips. He probably weighed in his mind: on the one hand, a girl who wants me because she loves to win, and on the other hand, a girl who wants me because she loves me. By now, you might’ve guessed that I’m speaking about your grandfather Chaim.

But as it turned out, Klara had been the least of my problems. The difficulties we see are but the tips of the icebergs of troubles hidden from us. Chaim was also the last child of his parents, and by the time he turned four, both of them had died. He had three brothers and two sisters; some of them had left for Argentina and some for Chicago, so the closest relative Chaim had in Gomel was his uncle. The three years that he’d lived in his uncle’s family were so bleak that when Chaim was sent off to an orphanage, he thought it was an improvement.

His brother in Chicago, who had been the last to emigrate and had played with Chaim when he was a baby, kept sending letters and some money, and by the time I met Chaim in 1922, his brother had become so well off, he wanted Chaim to come and live with him in America. People were still able to leave the Soviet Union back then if they had the means. Lenin was alive; Stalin was yet a nobody.

But Chaim hadn’t told me that his brother had already prepaid his trip. I was fourteen, so he couldn’t marry me yet. Besides, he had only a single ticket to America, and he didn’t want to leave me the way Hessel had left Hayka and then send for her two years later. See, Hessel being drafted was the evil that had some good in it. He was forced to leave. But nothing loomed so large in Chaim’s life that he was willing to part from me for even a day. If only I’d known.

My day began when he came to our house. When I saw him, I was alive. I didn’t know that he’d chosen me over America. He wrote to his brother and told him that he was going to wait a couple of years until we could get married and then he’d come only if there was a second ticket for me.

In the meantime, Chaim worked all kinds of jobs. Book binding, chimney sweeping, assembly work at a match factory. The NEP—New Economic Policy—now allowed small businesses, but he had no capital to start one. He lived with one or another of his friends’ families and usually slept in a mud room. When he’d get money from his brother, Chaim bought a bushel of potatoes and a slab of salted pork, and that was what he ate. We both had been raised in kosher homes, but we didn’t discuss that pork was treyf—why add guilt to hunger.

We got married the day I turned seventeen. Even back then, it was a bit too young for a girl. When the second ticket arrived, we were all ready to go. But as my father liked to say, God laughs when a man makes plans: Soviet authorities sealed the borders, and people couldn’t come and go as they pleased anymore. The name Iron Curtain wasn’t used back then, but we were behind it nevertheless. Stuck.

Ah, mine hartz, your grandfather and I spoke Yiddish to each other, but I have no one to speak it with anymore. The language our forebears used for a thousand years is dead.

Wait! That’s not entirely true. Remember when you’d brought me to Beth Israel in Newark? Is that a smile on your lips? Ah, you remember him. The schmendrik, the little Hassidic man who came to see me in the emergency room. Vey’z mir—woe is me—where did they dig him from? I was going to die laughing just from looking at him. If he was a psychiatrist, then I was Brezhnev. His face looked like it had been flattened at birth with forceps. A psychiatrist with a face like that would no doubt have at least one patient—himself.

What can I say—my tongue is my enemy. I shouldn’t speak ill of people; it wasn’t his fault. But what kind of Yiddish did he speak? Replaced every o with u like a Galitzianer. His relatives had probably come from Kishinev. They all say “tuches” instead of “tochis.” I shudder when I hear it. Besides, what can you expect from people who can’t even make proper gefilte fish?

Remember how he asked me questions to decide if I was sane? A meshuggener thinks normal people are crazy. You want to know why I think his roof slid off? Because a normal person wouldn’t ask an eighty-three-year-old woman what year it is. What do I care what year it is? For me, all years are the same now. With Chaim gone, the years have stopped.

What happened? Am I here? Kostya . . . Are you here? I don’t know what kind of medicine they’re pumping into me, but I feel like I’m drunk—and what a sober person has on his mind, a drunk has on his tongue.

Your mother was here earlier, but all she did was sit and cry. And what should I have done—cried with her?

If I go silent, mine hartz, squeeze my hand. Harder. Harder, so you can pull me back. I must finish telling you—no one else is alive who knows all the pieces.

When the famine started in the early thirties, we lived with my parents. They slept in a separate room, if you could call it that. It was taken up by their bed, which pushed at the walls on three sides, and enough space in the front to get up and walk out. In the larger room, a third was taken up by a high Russian furnace. It was made of brick with stucco over it, and it had something like a lair between the top and the ceiling, so your mother, Chaim, and I slept there. And if I had to climb down to pee at night, I waded my way between arms and legs—the entire floor was taken up by cots and sofas—my two sisters with their husbands and, altogether, five children, all slept in that room. Our four older sisters had gotten married and moved to seek a better life in Minsk.

One evening, we all gathered for dinner around the table and prepared to hear what Hayka had written in the letter that arrived that day. I ladled barley-mash soup into plates. The mash was allotted daily to Chaim as his lunch at the lumber yard where he worked, so when he’d brought it home, I added to it water, fried onions, and carrots. The vegetables made the soup look like food. We also had draniki, potato latkes. What we fried them on, you want to ask? Don’t. It’s not a sin to eat treyf when you want to survive.

My father smoothed his beard and read the opening—the usual dear Tata and Mama, shvesters and such. Then he choked as though on a bone. His nose turned red and sweat beaded his forehead. “It is with great sorrow,” he struggled to read on, “that I must inform you of Hessel’s untimely death . . . pneumonia, and neither the doctors nor my prayers . . . I am left alone with my dear boy, Nathan, the light of my eyes. . . . enough money for a couple of months rent.”

Vey’z mir! A bloody cloud drifted over my eyes. My heart shriveled at the thought of Hessel wrapped in a shroud, the earth weighing down his kind face and strong body with its eternal blanket. Hessel! And Hayka, a widow at thirty-nine with a small son, in goldeneh medina where her gold was now buried two meters under.

My father got up, opened his mouth to say something. His lips trembled. He shut his eyes, lifted his head heavenward, and spread his arms.

The same year, Hessel’s cousin in Boston, Altshuler, the one who’d gotten Hessel the job, lost a wife, God forbid, to cancer. Let the earth be like down to her. But there is no evil without some good in it. Altshuler was from Gomel. Hayka was from Gomel. He was a widower with two boys. She was a widow with a boy. His older one was eleven, and his younger one and Nathan were both nine. Altshuler owned a two-story house of five rooms. He was a painting contractor, a serious man. It was a match. In three months, they got married.

Do you remember the photograph of Hayka standing next to a man? That was Altshuler. He sat on a chair, tightlipped; his hands rested on his splayed knees. I couldn’t see his teeth, but I imagined them as large as a horse’s, with a huge gap in the front. And his eyes were open just a bit too wide. Bullies have eyes like that: to better see faults in others. Hayka still looked beautiful, but her breasts hung low—she’d lost weight, and it seemed that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

Maybe that’s what was in vogue in Boston in 1929, but bras were getting popular in Gomel. I spied a woman wearing a well-made bra at the public baths, and when she took it off and left it in the changing room, I examined it. The construction was easy but ingenious—the important thing was to have a strong middle panel that separated the cups and the strap around the body of about three centimeters to support the breast weight. Ah, Kostya, don’t scrunch up your nose—a shoemaker talks about shoes and a bra maker about bras.

What? It’s not the bra talk—it’s Altshuler that you don’t like? I’m so glad. It’s a tiny thing—to agree about people, but I’ll die happy knowing that you, my bubele, look at the world the way I do. We share this. The minute I saw this picture for the first time, I had a premonition of disaster. Even on the photograph the air between the two was charged with animosity. I could tell Hayka hadn’t married him out of love but out of necessity.

In subsequent letters, she wrote that when Altshuler came home from work, he didn’t want to know what his sons were up to. “It’s your job,” he told her. The boys might’ve listened to their own mother, but they treated Hayka like a servant, and whatever she said went in one ear and out the other.

For several years, there was constant fighting between Nathan and the Altshuler boys: brawls, fistfights, bloody noses. They broke Nathan’s right hand. They peed in the borscht Hayka was making, and she caught them in the act. But dirt clings to dirt, so this pair of hooligans joined a gang. It was Prohibition time in America, and selling liquor was forbidden, so the Altshuler boys in cahoots with their Italian friends bootlegged alcohol. They had guns and played with them at home, pointing them at Hayka and her son. She was afraid that if it continued like this, Nathan would either be drawn into the gang or be physically harmed. What was she to do?

She wanted to leave Altshuler, but it was the Depression in America. Even if she had a profession, it was not a guarantee of finding work. What was a homemaker to do? Then one night, she saw her stepsons come home in torn, bloodied shirts. One of them lunged at her and almost strangled her to death, threatening to finish off the job if she as much as squeaked. Might an umbrella enter his stomach and then open up. Might all his teeth fall out except one, so he would not be deprived of toothaches.

Though Hayka had friends and acquaintances—they were all afraid of Altshuler’s boychiks—might they be healthy and strong like iron, so much so that they couldn’t bend. So where do you find a helping hand when you need one?

She found it at the end of her own arm. When the Altshulers were away one day, she threw her clothes in a trunk, took some cash from the family till, and ran with Nathan to New York. The letter that she was coming home to Gomel arrived after she had returned. Like the fly that had been shooed away, Hayka came back to her familiar glass of water—to Tata and Mama. To her three sisters, their husbands, and six children altogether—no, by that time I already had your uncle Grisha, so it was seven children altogether in a two-room house.

That was a vey’z mir for you. Gevalt! She had thought the Depression and the Altshulers were the worst curse a woman could have—but compared to a menacing bear, a raging bull didn’t seem as dangerous. At least she hadn’t been starving in Boston. At least, in the five rooms of Altshuler’s house—might the cholera drive him from bed to bed in his five rooms—at least she had had her own corner.

It was 1932. Nathan was about twelve and looked like a movie star in his American clothes: the cuffed wool trousers and fedora. He spoke Yiddish, and every girl we knew wanted to be introduced to him. But his eyes reflected sadness as though he could see the future and was none too happy with it. I had no doubt that KGB was following him—the whole country spoke of nothing else but foreign spies and enemies all around us.

Hayka looked at me a bit down her nose. A gitz in paravoz—puff-puff, big deal—she’d seen New York and Boston. And what had I seen? Gomel. But what could I do? I ignored her slights, and let her lord over me because I felt sorry for her.

I could only suspect what she thought after the first night in our anthill. For a week, she melted down like a yarrtzeit memorial candle for Hessel, her eyes a liquid tallow from crying. “I’m old,” she told me, though she was just a bit over forty. “That’s it for my life. Let me now think of my boy only. I must take him back.”

Though I loved Hayka and had been happy to see her again and get to know my nephew, I thought that her return to Gomel had been a blunder. Her memory had rendered her hometown the way she remembered her childhood: carefree and beloved. But it wasn’t the place she remembered, but the time, and the time doesn’t run backwards. So she took her enormous carriage trunk with her fancy mink coat and dresses, bade goodbye to us, and left for America.

Ah, Kostya. It’s only the tale that is told fast, but the deed takes time. In other words—don’t fry a fish before it’s caught. When Hayka tried to board a New-York bound ship in Riga, she was turned away. Her boy could go, but not Hayka. Her documents weren’t in order.

What does this nurse want from me? Blood? Again? She’s like a vampire. But, please, don’t yell at her. It’s not her fault. What’s her name? Tamika? I wish I could make her a proper bra. Look at her back. Even through the uniform, I can tell that it’s hiked up and the breasts are held by the shoulder straps—that’s not right. Her back will hurt.

Here’s what happens when you rush: you become careless. Had Hayka thought of anything but escape when she was leaving New York, she’d realize that in all her sixteen years in America, she hadn’t become a citizen. Hessel had died waiting to be naturalized, and when Hayka married Altshuler, the law had been changed so that a wife didn’t automatically become a citizen when she married one. Eventually, she applied, but the waiting period wasn’t over when she left for Gomel.

She found this out when she was prevented from boarding the ship. With no choice but to stay in the USSR, she came back to Gomel with Nathan, lay down on a sofa, and slept many days and nights. I guessed, when she was dreaming, she didn’t have to face up to the fact that she was trapped. I brought her food and forced her to eat, but she rapidly lost weight. At the end of the third week, she got up a changed person. “I have no choice—I have to live.”

But between you and me, no choice is a choice, too, and she’d made it. She put on a black skirt and white silk blouse. Pinned a small, leaf-shaped brooch under the collar, painted her lips crimson red, and went to look for a job. In two days, she became a machine operator at a textile factory. Not that jobs were plenty, but she knew how to present herself. She even managed to get a factory apartment—a one room on Trudovaya Street, in the communal apartment in the Katzes’ house.

You look like you haven’t shaved for days. I know you’ll miss me. I’ll miss you, too. But there is someone I’ve missed most of my life.

I never told you that your grandfather and I had another boy. Yankel. He was born in 1936. If you’d known, you might’ve asked questions. So I kept silent for your sake and for your mother’s sake. Would it be better if we told you? Maybe better for me—but in such matters, it’s best to do what is best for a child.

Yankel was a boy with golden locks and deep eyes. Your mother, she was about nine then, wanted to hold him, but I kept telling her, “You’ll have plenty of time for that.” Though she loved her first brother, they were too close in age for her to feel maternal about him, but with Yankel she behaved as though a thread had tied the two of them together.

We invited a moyel to perform Yankel’s circumcision when he was eight days old. We knew the old man well—he’d done Grisha’s bris, all my nephews’, and, before I’d been born, Hessel’s and even my father’s. The man was still strong in his head and his hands. He carried his body straight. His silver beard reached to his stomach and was as wide as a shovel, and as soon as he entered our house, he took out a yarmulke from his pocket and put it on his head. By then, any home religious ceremony—especially a circumcision—was outside the law. Ceremonies had to be performed in a synagogue, but all synagogues had been shut down in Gomel. A yes and a no gives you what? Right—a hole of a bagel: nothing; so I was thankful the moyel hadn’t worn the yarmulke when he’d approached our house. In those days, you couldn’t disguise a skullcap; it wasn’t so tiny that you had to look for it with a microscope, but it was an upright black cap with a two-inch flat brim that held it tight on the head. It was a statement that couldn’t be hidden.

My father was more excited than I’d seen him in a long time. It was his tenth grandson and the third one who lived in his household. Unlike the way it was with my mother, my father’s love for his children and grandchildren had grown with the years. Betya, your mother, seemed as bright as the sun for him. He couldn’t even look at her without his eyes tearing up. He held Yankel as though the boy was made of crystal.

I closed my eyes when the moyel snipped the tip of Yankel’s flesh. We drank and smiled, and happiness rose out of us like steam from the chicken soup on our table. In the evening, I noticed that blood continued to ooze from Yankel’s tip. He didn’t stop crying through the night, and when he did stop, his lips were gray-violet and his body was ashen.

We rushed him to the hospital. Chaim and I sat in the waiting room, our lives trickling out of us with each hour. In the evening, Betya, her eyes bugged out with worry, came from home to bring us some food.

I was opening up the bag when I saw the doctor approaching us. He looked like the angel of death.

“Hemophilia,” he said. “I’m sorry. We couldn’t save him. Nothing could—he would’ve died the first time he bled.”

“Gevalt!” Betya screamed. She howled with her mouth stuck open. Her face turned beet-red, her braid became untwined as she flailed her head. Then she stilled for a second and crashed to the floor.

When one end of the rope had been untied, the other one became untied, too. We were all undone.

Kostya? Now what does this doctor want? One can die even without a doctor. He looks like a nice Jewish boy but, please—send him on his way.

Nu, what did he say? He worried about what? My snoring? Sleep apnea? Let his enemies have such sleep apneas. The next doctor might say that I have an inflammation of the pupik, an asthma attack, or constipation. That, of course, depends on their specialty.

At least, I won’t die of boredom. Give me your hand. Before you came in, I was visiting with your grandfather on the other side. You should’ve seen his smile when he pointed out a young man in the crowd. “You know who this is?” he asked.

The young man was almost three heads taller than your grandfather. His face reminded me of a thoroughbred foal’s—long, huge almond-shaped brown eyes. He stared at me a bit too seriously, as you do sometimes when you plan some hoax on me or hide flowers behind your back.

He burst into laughter and ran to embrace me. “Mama. It’s me, Yankel.” See? It’s good to have family wherever you go. Your home is not your house in Princeton or Gomel, Kostya. Those may come and go, but the loved ones make you feel alive. Even when you’re dead.

Of course, you want to know if Klara, my cousin and rival, was there. And where would she be? To me, she didn’t look so healthy: rings under the eyes, parched lips. Or maybe, by making herself look unappealing, she wanted to make me feel welcomed. Anyway, I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

Kostya? Can you dim the light so I can see better? I’m not pulling your leg. To look back, it’s best not to see the present.

Answer this: if you have a bonfire in your kitchen and a blaze on the roof, which one will you pay more attention to? Don’t know?

When I was in labor with Yankel and during the days when he was alive, I overlooked the threat of a small cinder: your mother’s complaints about a stomach pain. In those days, if we had a ruble for every stomach ache, we’d have been rich. We drank water from a neighborhood well. There were no refrigerators; milk wasn’t pasteurized—so every so often, you got the runs. We were used to them.

Thank God, Betya fainted inside the hospital—if it had happened at home, we surely would’ve lost her, too. It turned out that she had an inflamed appendix that ruptured and developed into peritonitis. Betya was such a considerate girl—with the new baby in the house, she hadn’t thought of upstaging him by complaining loudly.

She was in the hospital twelve weeks, for most of which we didn’t know if she was going to make it. She had several surgeries. There were no antibiotics yet, and I had a feeling that the doctors wandered in the dark. When your mother became a doctor herself, she called such doctors Should-we-treat-the-patient-or-let-him-live?

What more can I say? When a girl had several abdominal surgeries in a Gomel hospital in 1937, what were her chances of ever having children? I was grateful that she was alive at all, but she would not be able to be fruitful and multiply, if you know what I mean.

I can’t utter it. My tongue doesn’t turn to say it. Nu, you’re so smart—you say it. . . . You are . . . adop—

Listen to you—the only thing that worries you in this whole thing is if, God forbid, you’re not a Jew. You are, you are.

But that’s not all of it. There’s more. In 1937, when Nathan was graduating from school, Hayka got it into her head that if the boy stayed in the USSR, something was bound to happen to him—a drowning, draft, fight, accusation of being a foreign spy, imprisonment, firing squad—and she wasn’t too far off: people had begun to be arrested at night and disappear. We didn’t know the full extent of what was going on in the country, but almost the entire top of the Gomel administration—school directors, union leaders, the party leaders, the main editor of the Gomel Pravda—had vanished and were denounced as traitors.

Hayka sold half her dresses and bought Nathan a passage to New York. He was old enough to get a job, and when he came of legal age in 1941, they thought, he’d be able to get Hayka to the U.S.

On June 22, 1941, we woke up in the middle of the night. The earth was shaking. The noise of something falling from the sky was deafening. Was this a quake? A meteorite? An explosion? Do people who die in a catastrophe know what is causing their death?

The voice of Levitan on the radio was ominous—he was usually the one to announce the death of a Communist party leader, a natural disaster, or international calamities. The war in Europe had been raging for two years. The rumors of killings in Poland had been seeping in for a while. We felt horrible for the Polish Jews but were unconcerned for our own safety—the USSR had signed a nonaggression pact with the German Reich, and our newspapers had not published a single story about what the Nazis were doing to the Jews and how they governed the occupied countries.

We were caught completely by surprise—being bombed at the same time as Levitan announced “the cowardly attack of the German army on the Soviet Union.”

All Communist party members were leaving Gomel. All the factories were being evacuated to the east: Ural, Kazakhstan, Siberia. The train station was teeming with crews loading heavy machinery. The freight cars stood with their doors open. After one train was filled, it left and a new one began loading in an endless chain.

When the alarm sounded, we ran across Lenin Square into the park to the underground tunnel. The tunnel had been dug for the Count Paskevitch before the revolution. We spent hours there, talking ourselves into frenzied panic. The hair on the back of my neck rose when I thought of parting with Chaim. He’d been drafted and was leaving in three weeks. I’d have to take care of our two kids. We had no savings, no jewelry. All I owned was one wool and one house dress, summer and winter shoes, and a coat. If the kids and I stayed in Gomel, we’d soon wear shrouds and bake bagels in drerd—the other world.

All the people couldn’t be wrong, but my mother waved her hand dismissively. “The Germans were here during the First World War. And so—nu? Did they not give you candy? Did they touch us? I’m not uprooting myself. Where would we go? Who is waiting for us? The war will be over in a couple of weeks.”

“Mama,” my Chaim said to her—there was no use talking to my father: he’d become forgetful and indifferent since Yankel’s death— “you seem to have such a good memory, maybe you can recall when your mother was pregnant with you and you were bouncing in a dark and tiny space. And if you don’t recall—the Nazis will remind you. Start packing now!”

He and I slaughtered the two hogs we’d been raising to sell and salted the fatty meat; we dried bread pieces and stuffed them into bags.

Hayka had been staring at her carriage trunk for a minute. She opened the drawers on the right, grabbed a fistful of her jewelry, and tossed it into a sack, then removed the more valuable silk and wool dresses from the hangers and shoved them into the second sack. We had to be mobile; two sacks could be tied together, then one carried on the back and one in the front. The pins, necklaces, and clothes were now our treasures to be exchanged for food and favors. Money was quickly becoming worthless.

Why do I say our treasures if the things belonged to Hayka? They did, but where did Hayka herself belong? All my sisters, all our children, and our parents were fingers on the same hand.

Chaim loaded our entire garb onto a hand cart and wheeled it to the train station. Through the freight-car open doors, I saw familiar faces of women I’d run into at the marketplace. Some goyim but mostly Jews. We’d be moved like cattle. Somewhere where it would be safe. But where exactly?

How would I ever find Chaim after this was over? Would we see each other again? Betya and Grisha hung like weights around his ankles. I couldn’t see the light of day: tears burned my eyes. We pulled together the widening rip of our parting with kisses. The car had been filling rapidly, so Chaim nudged us in and loaded our sacks inside.

We were evacuated to Gerasimovka in Chkalovsky District. One day in September of 1943, I was returning from a job on a horse-drawn wagon, and Betya, your mother, was running toward me on the village road, waving a piece of paper above her head. A letter from Chaim? Her bare feet sunk in the mud. A stranger would say that your mother’s dress was dirty, but its thundercloud-gray was the result of many washes in cold water foamed with cinder ashes. We hadn’t seen soap in two years since we’d arrived in Gerasimovka.

My two kids had a single pair of shoes. When the weather got cold, the child whose turn it was to wear shoes went to school. It was several kilometers away, in the next village. They only went to be considered students and have food ration cards, but our neighbor, an evacuee, was their true teacher. She taught them Russian and German. They studied algebra and history. With no textbooks, she handwrote lessons from memory for the evacuated kids to learn.

My americanishe sister, Hayka, and I, with my two kids, lived with a robust, taciturn Russian woman. Her husband was in the army. All males from eighteen to fifty had been drafted or volunteered. About half had already been killed, wounded, or lost. But I prayed that Chaim was well at the front. We just didn’t know where he was.

Gerasimovka was a world governed, plowed, and harvested by women. On that day in September of 1943, I was taking bushels of grain to the mill. It was the best job because I could stuff my two large hidden pockets with grain. We’d only thought we’d starved the year before. Our bellies had played klezmer music every night, chasing crumbs from one kishka to another. For our workday units, we’d gotten some potatoes and wheat that we bartered for little bread here, several eggs and half-a-liter of milk there. But in comparison, it wasn’t as bad as this year. Now we got bubkes: a hole of a bagel, nothing. We still had to work. The units were recorded in the register, but we didn’t get anything in return. “Everything for the front! Everything for the army!” the slogans said. Nu, can you make soup out of slogans and stew out of air?

When we had first arrived in Gerasimovka, the locals ran out on the street to look at us. “Where are your horns?” they asked. They’d never seen a Jew in their lives. But after we’d been working as hard as draught horses alongside them, they began to treat us with respect. If not for our landlady’s help, I don’t know how we would’ve lived. She gave us vegetable seeds and a plot in her yard for a garden. Hayka and I worked on the collective farm fields from dawn to sunset. The kids worked in our garden: Betya watered the plants and pulled the weeds; Grisha helped her. He also collected cow dung on the street. We used it to fire the oven. Hayka had become a specialist in gathering stinging nettle that grew wild around the village, and we made cold borsht with it. It tasted like sorrel to those with a vivid imagination.

I’d been getting up and going to bed with the same questions: where to find food, was Chaim alive, had our four sisters and their families in Minsk been evacuated, and why for six months hadn’t we received any letters from my parents and the two sisters who’d traveled with them. They had been separated from us in Saratov district. After our train engine and several cars behind it had been destroyed by a bomb, we were loaded on different horse-drawn carts. They wound up about two hundred kilometers away from us, and from my sister’s letters I knew that their Karlsbad spa was as good as ours.

So, back to the road. Betya was running toward me. “What is it?” I yelled to her and whipped the horse to make it run faster, but it dragged its feet as though its parents should be getting ready to sit shiva tomorrow.

I could already see it was a letter. I stopped the horse, jumped off the cart, and ran to Betya. She handed me a notepaper triangle, the kind used by soldiers, where they wrote on the inside, then folded the paper several times and addressed it on the outside. I recognized Chaim’s handwriting: his Russian alphabet was square and resembled Hebrew. The date was recent—only two months old. As I read, your mother jumped up and down, panting and chanting, “Nu, where is he?”

“In the hospital.” Thank God, he’d been wounded in the left calf and right shoulder at the battle of Stalingrad, and these days, being sick gave you a much greater chance of survival than being well and at the front. A nurse that attended him was from Gomel. Her mother was my parents and sisters’ neighbor in the village to which they all had been evacuated. The nurse’s mother was a yenta. So it was just natural that she wrote everything she’d heard to her daughter, including the name of the village where I lived, and the daughter passed this information to Chaim. Sometimes, a yenta was more useful than an address office.

Kostya? Come, sit on my bed. I feel better when you’re close to me. From the moment I held you my arms, I knew you were somebody. You were more than a golden child, you were my diamond child.

Ah, my poor sister Hayka. It happened more than forty years ago, but my heart is ready to burst when I recall the scene. Why should it have been her? We were all in it together. All as hungry as the next woman. Maybe it was her American life that weakened her to famine. To have known plenty and then to have nothing is harder than to have had nothing and then still nothing, like I did.

We were sitting outside the Chernygov temporary train station built on the site of the regular station blown up by the Nazis. Chernygov was about ninety kilometers from Gomel and had been liberated in the fall of 1943, several months earlier than Gomel. We’d waited out the winter and early spring in Gerasimovka, then left without getting official release papers and, consequently, had no ration cards. We’d been on the road three months along with what seemed half the country.

The refugees inside the station were stacked as tightly as seeds in a sunflower. It was August, so I’d rather we slept out in the open, under a half-burned oak tree. Battles came and went, but the roots had sucked up enough juice from the earth to feed the new shoots and leaves on several branches. I thought, Should I start digging? Maybe I’d find something we could eat? We hadn’t seen a morsel of food in days.

Hayka had had recurring fever accompanied by vomiting. She was on her fourth bout and looked like a corpse. I thought that getting her off the engine car where we’d slept in an empty coal storage area the night before might make her feel better. Or make me feel better about letting her die in peace.

Several men urinated in the shade by the far corner of the station. Women used the other side of the station, but judging by the drek strewn all over the ground, the geographical rules weren’t observed at night. Using a twig, I’d pushed the excrement aside before we lowered Hayka down. She was delirious. The flies circled around her narrow face. During the war, it had thinned up vertically. Betya busied herself with shooing the flies away from Hayka’s head. Grisha was lethargic from famine; I couldn’t tell if he was asleep or awake. I wanted to get up and find water for us, but didn’t have the strength to move.

What awaited us in Gomel? Most liberated cities we’d passed looked dead—demolished to ground zero, the few people on the streets crawling like worms on a corpse. We had no money at all and had been stealing rides. Unlike the evacuation to the east, to come back, you had to pay for tickets. So we’d hidden on freight trains until someone found us and got us off, which happened on every station. We were covered in soot from head to toe. Our clothes were tattered.

Where else should we go? Gomel was our home. I was born and grew up there. My parents, my grandparents, my great and great-great and so on were born and grew up there. I didn’t know who among my friends, relatives, and acquaintances had survived, but I knew that they would all crawl—on their knees, if necessary—back to Gomel. To be together.

Your grandfather would return to Gomel when he was discharged. Nathan knew to look for Hayka in Gomel. If my four sisters and their families made it alive from Minsk, they would search for the rest of the family in Gomel. It was the center of our world. I’d counted the days I spent in evacuation. July 4, 1941, through August 3, 1944: 1,126 days.

I fell asleep and dreamed of a whole loaf of bread that belonged to me. It was fragrant with thyme and sprinkled with caraway seeds. Then I fell into nothingness, and when I pried my eyes open, I saw that your mother had fallen asleep.

My sister Hayka wasn’t breathing. Her blue lips were parted, her sunken cheeks were frozen, her eyes were looking up.

And you know what was the most shocking thing of all? It was that I wasn’t shocked. No wave of horror moved through me, my pulse didn’t quicken, I had no tears. I was too tired to feel. My americanishe sister who’d arrived from the goldeneh medina with her mink coat and silver pins and a trunk full of clothes expired not in her comfortable Boston bed but lying directly on the ground, under a half-burned oak tree. We buried her in Chernygov, a citizen of the Soviet Union.

No, Kostya. I don’t want to eat. I can’t. You’re my sustenance now. I already had my last meal—at my birthday dinner, the night before I came here.

Now, let me finish the story while I still have the strength to talk. Whenever I think of the tragic events that made you my grandson, I weep. So don’t mind me if I start crying now.

In 1948, your mother and her best friend, Sarah, went to study at Moscow Medical Institute, and after graduation they returned to Gomel and worked at The Pediatric Hospital. They had a double wedding in our backyard. I made laundry-bowls full of Vinegret and Salad Olyvie, boiled potatoes with dill and butter. It seemed like a big deal then.

The youngest of Reb Kalman Katz’s boys, the only one of his entire family to survive the war.

Ah, my bubele, may your enemies be as ugly as Sarah was beautiful. If you want to know what she looked like, find your photographs, where you’re about eight, and imagine yourself with long hair. Kostya, Gib a kook—look at me . . . Don’t cry. If not for the fact that your mother, Sarah, and your mother, Betya, seemed like sisters, I would be perpetually afraid that someone in Gomel might tell you that you’re Sarah’s son. Maybe your mothers were fifth or sixth cousins—after all, Gomel wasn’t such a big city. When I get settled on the other side, I’ll try to find out for sure and let you know. Not that it matters—just out of curiosity, because in real life, they loved each other like true sisters.

Konstantin means constant, but your parents named you in honor of your grandfather Kalman Katz, the one who’d owned the block-long house on Trudovaya Street.

You were the center of the universe for your parents. Sometimes I was lucky enough to babysit you. You watched me attentively as I sewed bras, and I let you play with bits of fabric. You liked to touch the strip of satin the color of old roses to your lips and wouldn’t fall asleep without it.

She died during delivery. Your father was so distraught that he paid no attention to anything, and, while he was crossing Sovietskaya Street several days later, he was struck and killed by a bus.

I couldn’t imagine you anywhere but with us, so I did everything to help your parents adopt and raise you. You were a year old at the time.

In the beginning, your parents thought that if they told you that you were adopted, you might not feel like a real member of the family. You’re forty-four, and they’re still afraid to lose you. Where would you go? You’re them and they’re you.

I can’t keep silent anymore—what if, God forbid, you need a blood relative for something? The names and addresses of your two cousins in Israel are in my green handbag . . . Please don’t tell your parents you know. Why worry old people.

I was so happy when you decided to immigrate to America. I’d follow you anywhere, mine harts. But there were things about Gomel that I didn’t tell you then—why pick the old wound? If you knew that Gomel used to be a Jewish town and how prominent Jews were there before World War II, you might’ve taken into your head that you were leaving your Motherland. Nah, Mother is the one who loves you, the one who rejoices in your successes. I couldn’t watch anymore the way the authorities held you on a tight leash everywhere, as if Belarus had been strictly reserved for ethnic Belarusians. See? Names have such consequences.

You know what my biggest coup in life has been? Don’t laugh—though it does seem small in comparison with the wars, the deaths, the emigration—but for some reason it fills me with a sense of accomplishment, as if I’d stitched by hand every seam of an enormous bra and managed to finish it on time, nevertheless: I’d succeeded where Hayka had failed: I not only lived with my daughter and was able to help her raise you but I’d passed my citizenship exam just in time.

Some would say, A gitz in paravoz—what’s such a big deal to die a citizen? Dead American is dead anyway, but I know: if in my otherworldly travel I’m reckless enough to wind up back in Gomel, I’ll be able to leave. Please add my sister’s name to mine on my stone in Woodbridge cemetery—it should read Musya Hayka—so finally she’ll be able to leave, too. We’ll float over America and watch over you.

Natasha Grinberg was born in the USSR and immigrated to the United States in 1980. Her short stories appeared in AIM, Duck & Herring, Cause & Effect, and other literary magazines. Contact her at natashagrinberg@yahoo.com.