There were more people in the synagogue than Reuven had expected, including his Uncle Chizor. Reuven and his father would not stay all night like many, but he was glad that they had arrived in time for the reading from Exodus of the miracle of the Red Sea.
He squeezed his eyes shut and pictured the scene. Reuven never imagined the sea as completely dry. There was just enough water to wade in, to splash, and kick up. There might be a ball the children could play with, and the sun would shine brightly. It would be very hot, but the splashing of the water would cool the people down. And Moses was not the big towering stern figure. He was kind, and he would speak to the children in a very soft voice, not the one that gave the commandments, but like a very gentle teacher, the likes of which Reuven had certainly never known. “Don’t tarry, little ones,” he would say. “There is still a far piece to travel. We must get on with it. I know you’re all having fun, but splashing and frolicking in Red Sea puddles won’t do just now. We’ll never make it to the Promised Land at this rate. Hurry along, Zipporah. And you too, Jacob and Yitzak and Rachel and Reuven.”
Miracles, Reuven thought. Did anyone ever get tired of thinking about miracles? When he grew up, he would like to compose an entire concerto. He would call it the Miracle Concerto for the Violin in D major.
Reuven and his family were in the back of the room. Up toward the front, he saw Reb Mendel and several of the village’s most scholarly and holy men. Had any of these holy men been the ones to put the name of Isaac, the orphan, on the list? For the first time in a while, Reuven thought about poor Isaac. All these days he had grieved over the loss of Muttle, his best friend, and God knew the village had grieved over Muttle, their prize student. But had anyone given a thought to poor Isaac? Maybe they didn’t deserve miracles.
Reuven’s father nudged him in the ribs, the sign that they would be leaving. They followed Uncle Chizor out into the street. The evening was damp. A mist hung in the air outside the synagogue. Chizor took a small enamel box from his pocket, snapped it open, and got a pinch of snuff. Uncle Chizor was very fashionable, at least for Berischeva. He liked his snuff, and he ordered expensive brandy from Warsaw, and he had a large collection of books. Chizor often talked of moving to Vilna in Poland, and he always promised to take Reuven with him. Vilna was a center of music and culture and literature. There Reuven could study with the great violin teachers. As a tailor, Chizor made a good living. But he dreamed a rich man’s dreams of drinking tea from magnificent silver samovars, served not in glasses but in porcelain teacups. He dreamed of leather-bound books and rich fabrics that he rarely touched in his everyday trade except, of course, when he tailored for the Baron Radzinsky.
“Well, boys!” Uncle Chizor always called them boys when it was just the three of them together. Reuven liked it. It made him feel as if he was part of a daring rugged little society. Not like these holy men, who could not see beyond their prayer books. “So we got away with it again!”
“Got away with what?” Reuven asked, but as soon as the question was out he felt stupid, for he had known the answer.
“Worshipping our God!” Chizor exclaimed. “What kind of a crazy place is this where you have to fear for your life to pray? My last time.”
“What do you mean your last time? You giving up being a Jew?” Aaron Bloom asked.
“Don’t be an idiot. Here, have a cigar.” Chizor drew two out from his inside pocket. They stopped walking, and in the dim light of a street lamp that hung in the mist like a blurred pearl, he struck a match and lit the end of his brother’s cigar and then his own. A rich dark smell swirled up in the dampness of the night. “Good, isn’t it?” Aaron Bloom grunted his assent. “Havana.”
“What?” Reuven and his father both said at once.
“Havana—cigars from Cuba. They’re the best.”
“Havana? Cuba? What’s that?” Reuven was glad his father had asked and not him.
“An island! Cuba’s an island. Havana is the capital.”
“Where? The Black Sea?” Reuven blurted out.
Chizor smacked his forehead in disbelief. “No! The Caribbean.”
“The Caribbean!” Both Reuven and his father said the word slowly. It had a music, a rhythm that Reuven had never before heard in any word. That it was the name of a sea was even better. “The Caribbean.” He repeated the word slowly and perfectly.
“Yes, it is a sea just west of the Atlantic and south when you get to America. Yes, you turn left and then go down.” Chizor was inscribing the air with the glowing tip of his cigar.
“Uncle Chizor, how did you get a cigar all the way from there?”
“The baron,” both Aaron and Chizor said in unison. Of course it was the baron, who could provide everything from sheet music of Dvo?ák to cigars from a place called Cuba that floated in a sea that sang its name.
Aaron Bloom coughed, cleared his throat, and took a puff on his cigar. “So Chizzie, what is this about tonight being your last Shavuot service?”
Uncle Chizor stopped walking and held his glowing cigar aloft, as if to punctuate whatever came next. “Last in this farshtinkener country.”
“Farshtinkener country? Chizzie. It is our home.”
“Tell the tsar that, Aaron. And it’s going to get worse.”
“How so?” Reuven’s father asked.
“New laws against Jews. We can’t do this. We can’t do that. We’re no longer permitted to do business on Sunday or any of the Christian holidays. No more mortgages. And every day we hear about another pogrom. A supplier of damask I have dealt with for years now is forbidden to sell to me because I am a Jew. And that’s the least of it. It’s crazy. In what other country are Jews forced to serve in the army, and then that same army is given license to tear through their own villages and burn them? You know, I heard a story that in Bukova a mother cut off her boy’s fingers so he would not be conscripted into the tsar’s army.” Reuven curled his hands in his pockets. He felt the calluses on his string hand against the softness of his palm.
Chizor looked up to the black sky swirling with stars, as if appealing to God. “So what’s to be done? People either leave or get mad.”
“What do you mean, Uncle? What do people do when they get mad?”
His uncle slid his eyes first toward Reuven’s father, as if he was asking for permission.
“The Bund,” Aaron said in a barely audible whisper.
“There are people,” Chizor said quietly, “who stay but try to change things. These are very angry people; some call them revolutionaries.”
“What do they do?” Reuven asked.
“They organize strikes, worker strikes, for better pay, better conditions. Some do sabotage.”
“Sabotage? Sabotage what?”
“Weapons in the tsar’s armories, maybe train tracks.” Chizor flicked the ashes from his cigar. “But you see, Reuven, I am not a revolutionary. I am a tailor. I have nobody to save except myself. I have anger. But I guess not enough to stay and turn the whole place upside down. And I have no patience. Yes, I am an impatient man. Very impatient, and that is why I choose to leave.”
There was a fierceness in his uncle’s voice, and the glow of the cigar now clamped between his teeth as he spoke cast a red shadow on his face. He looked quite angry to Reuven. His eyes were like two furious dashes. His black brows with their tufts of white slid together at steep angles. His mouth drew back in a weird grin, with the cigar still clamped between his square stained teeth. He looked like the devil, a dybbuk come to life on this little alley off Krupinsky. There was silence, an uncomfortable one. The smoke, the mist hung between them. Reuven bit his lip lightly.
“Uncle Chizor where are you going? Poland? Warsaw? Vilna?”
“Naw,” he said roughly, then spat into the gutter. “They’re still too close. No good for a Jew.”
“Chizzie, are you going to America?” Aaron Bloom asked.
“Probably, but who knows? Maybe the Caribbean.” He winked at Reuven. The old Uncle Chizor was bac
k, not a trace of the dybbuk.
The three continued to walk up the hill of the narrow street that twisted like a corkscrew.
“New York, they say New York is good, Chizor,” said Aaron.
“Ah New York—every tailor goes to New York. They got too many tailors there already. I’ll go some-place where I can stand out. I don’t know, maybe Canada, Montreal, Chicago, or someplace out west—the prairie—Minnesota.”
“Minna—what?” Reuven asked
“Minnesota.”
Reuven walked quietly as his father and his uncle continued to talk. Reuven wished his father would consider such a thing, but he never would. He knew his father. His father believed that Russia was their country. Their home. That they had a right to be here. Besides, his father had a wife and three children. Uncle Chizor had nothing but fine books and bottles of good brandy. He could leave tomorrow and take nothing, or perhaps a few books and a couple of bottles of brandy.
They walked on, talking and smoking, taking the long way home. The mist blew away; the night was black and starless. Reuven listened and wondered and thought. Even on this darkest night he could pick out the cats sliding across rooftops, the chimney pots that sometimes looked like hunched little men, the heap of rags that might be a beggar, the swift shadows that belonged to boys sneaking out of their bedroom windows. This was his home. He had learned how to sift the shadows of the Berischeva night, to pick out the blackness of a cat against the darkness of the evening, or the gray of a weathered fence from the dimness of a muddy yard. Why should they leave?
SIX
SPRING PASSED into summer, and before the green leaves turned to autumn gold, Uncle Chizor left for America. True to this word, he would not celebrate one more Jewish holiday in the farshtinkener country of Russia. Reuven had mastered the Bach concerto, and was even mastering the intricacies of the Dvo?ák, which had seemed deceptively simple. He had improved since that first night of seder when he had played it. He had learned that nothing was simple, and many things were deceptive.
But not a day went by that Reuven did not think of Muttle, and now Uncle Chizor was gone too. Reuven had been thinking of him often in the three weeks since he had gone. He sat by the river now and thought about the deception of things, of appearances, of people, of music, of holiness, of words, and of the river itself, where he had last spoken with Muttle five months before. It was still unbelievable, unacceptable, that those words would be the last that he and Muttle would ever exchange. How placid the river had been on that day. How placid it was on this day. Yet Reuven knew that there was a strong current. It was a dangerous river. Here at this very spot the current might not be so strong, but one hundred meters down it grew fierce. Still one would never know, for it never showed on the surface because the river was so deep. Anyone weighing under thirty-five kilos had no chance if he or she were to fall in.
How many children had been sucked away by this river? Too many. Yet this was the very river that he had run to on the night Rachel was born for cold water. This river, which sucked away life, had caused her to breathe, to yowl, to turn pink and lively. Maybe it wasn’t deceptions but contradictions that filled life. Maybe in order to begin to understand the world, one had to begin to accept contradictions as a fact. But was it a contradiction or a deception now that the high holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur had passed? There had been no pogroms, no violence, no rumors of harassment from other villages. Why were they being left alone by the tsar and the Cossacks, who loved to kill and kidnap on the holidays?
Tonight was the first night of Sukkoth, the harvest festival. It would be the first time they had built the sukkah hut without Uncle Chizor. For seven days they would have their meals in the outdoor little lean-to constructed against the side of their house. It would be made from wooden planks, branches, and old doors that they had kept over the years just for this structure. Sometimes Reuven had slept out in the sukkah with Muttle and through the spindly tree limbs they had watched the stars all night long.
But it’s not the same, not without Uncle Chizor, not without Muttle.
These thoughts stayed with Reuven, clung to him, and would not free him long after he had left the river and gone home.
“Reuven, you don’t like the noodle kugel?” his mother said. “Reuven! Reuven! You’re a million miles away.”
“You going deaf?” his father said. “Not good for a musician to be deaf—except Beethoven. He seemed to do all right.”
“What?” Reuven suddenly was aware that all of his family was looking at him and that they had been speaking to him.
“You’re a million miles away, I say. You haven’t touched your food. You’re not feeling well?” his mother asked.
“No, I’m fine, Mama,” Reuven said. But she was right. He had been a million miles away. He had been looking through the pine boughs of the sukkah roof at the stars, the same ones that were shining now on Uncle Chizor, who was maybe in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Or maybe they were shining on Muttle, and only God knew where Muttle was. If the same stars shone over every place and everyone, why … why … But his mind could barely finish the thought. Why was Uncle Chizor having to leave this farshtinkener country and why had Muttle been snatched by the tsar?
Rachel crawled onto his lap. She seemed to know that he was thinking about the stars. Perhaps she had watched him looking through the pine boughs of the sukkah roof.
“Up! Up!” She pointed at the roof. She wanted him to hold her up so she could touch the branches. “Up! Up!”
Reuven raised her in his arms and let her touch the pine branches. She reached out and then suddenly she stopped and pointed her finger right through the bristles.
“Moon … piece of moon,” she said quite clearly.
They could hardly believe their ears.
“What’s that, Rachel?” Reuven asked. “What did you just say? What’s that?” He pointed his own finger right through the branches at the sliver of moon sailing overhead.
“Moon … piece of moon,” she repeated.
They all exclaimed with wonder. The child was barely sixteen months old. She had not just spoken the word moon but was so smart that she recognized it as a piece of the moon and not the whole.
“Maybe you’ll grow up to be an astronomer!” Shriprinka cried with delight, and chucked Rachel under her chin. “Or a mathematician.”
Reuven was excited too, until it suddenly dawned on him that she would be none of these things if she grew up in Russia. There was no place for Jewish astronomers, let alone women who were Jewish astronomers, mathematicians, or writers. In fact, Reuven thought as he raised her once more to touch the roof, what is the point of growing up at all in Russia? His uncle had been right.
That was the night when Reuven stopped playing his violin.
SEVEN
IT HAD taken the rest of autumn for the calluses on Reuven’s string fingers to soften, then disappear almost entirely. Now it was winter. A stinging cold had set in, and as Reuven went out to the woodpile with a wheelbarrow to load up with logs for the stove, he had to blow on his hands to keep them warm. Had the calluses, he wondered, insulated his skin? It was certainly true that the wood felt rougher. He paused and looked at his hands. They were no longer the hands of a violinist. Odd, he thought, how those thick patches of rough skin that made it so easy for him to finger the strings with just the right pressure could vanish, and yet the music still lingered in his head.
In the beginning, his family questioned him. But Reuven was unwavering. Soon they stopped asking him if or when he would play again. It didn’t matter, however. For they didn’t have to say anything out loud. They asked a thousand times a day in their own way. His father would pull out his watch every afternoon at the time Reuven had gone to Herschel’s for his lesson and then look from it, as if to say, Why are you still here?
His mother, who was not exactly musically gifted, had taken to humming disjointed snatches of the pieces she had remembered Reuven practicing. And Shriprinka,
more on key, would also hum. Rachel had taken a more direct approach. She toddled over to where Reuven’s violin case rested on a shelf and pounded her chubby fist on it, then looked at Reuven. He merely walked over and, feeling every eye in the room on him, put it on a higher shelf.
“Not now,” he had said firmly to his baby sister. The unspoken word When? seethed in the air.
“All right, enough is enough!” Herschel stood at the foot of Reuven’s bed. Herschel’s father, Reb Itchel, was there as well. Reuven blinked. It was late. The sun was up.
“What’s he doing here?” Reuven asked, nodding toward Reb Itchel.
“You need all the help you can get, young man. I’ll bring the cursed tsar in here if I have to, in order to get you out of bed.” He held up the violin, which Reuven had not touched in several months. “You see this? This is what you were born to do. This is your gift. You must play.”
Then Reb Itchel muttered an old Yiddish phrase. “Az me redt tsu im, is azoy vi me redt tsu a toyte vantz.” Talking to him is like talking to a dead bedbug.
“Oh, you’re some help, Papa! You’re supposed to be praying for this stupid boy.”
“Oh!” said the old rebbe, suddenly remembering his role. He began to rock back and forth in prayer. Reuven’s eyes fixed on the little wisp of the white beard. He had once played Bach while watching the beard keep the rhythm and quiver to the vibrato.
Herschel continued. “I’ve had enough of your parents’ thoughts on this subject. ‘Oh, go easy. He will come back to it. He is just a boy.’ No, enough is enough. You be at my house tomorrow. We begin with the Dvo?ák. Also, be ready with the Beethoven Romance in G major, and you take a look at the Kreutzer Sonata. You were making a real mess out of that one last time.”
Herschel pulled on his fathers shoulder. “We’re going now and leaving this miserable piece of a boy to his thoughts.” Just as he was about to walk out the door, he turned. “By the way, tomorrow evening Hanukkah starts. Hanukkah is a time for miracles. So it would be a miracle if you could play the first four measures of that Dvo?ák with anything approaching subtlety after so much time with no practice.”