The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Hee! The internet connection lives!

Here, for masochists, is the first part of the final for my crit class. I think, after reinstalling Word and restarting my computer twice, I have gotten the clipboard to know it exists. Happy reading. Oh, and the ending? Yeah, the ending was me realising I was a hundred words over my count for this section.

Hooray owning up to your mistakes...

            She woke on the floor, with the sheets coiled round her. A fold of the comforter had followed her – she did not remember falling, in the dream – and she struggled from beneath it and half swallowed a stray feather. The alarm was never loud enough to disturb Raissa, in the room beyond, but the noise was real, and it was gone a quarter seven.
            Violeta cursed, in Russian; it was the language she kept for curses. She swore cholera down on nobody, or everybody, crashed her four splinted fingers on the bedpost as she got up, and cursed again, for pain.
            She wished Raissa would call to her, from the other room, tell her to shut up, tell her anything at all, but there was nothing.
            It made racket enough, she thought, just dressing. She asked no help from the chambermaids that still shadowed the place: skirt, jacket and shoe-buttons could all be managed with her one hand, her thumb and her teeth. She broke the ice in the basin by the window, to wash her face and do something about her hair.
            She stood like a witless creature, her hand numb against the sharp edges of the ice. It had not snowed in the night. The snow hung over the city, and made her head ache; and nothing moved, nothing changed.
            Her muffler and beret were over the door into Raissa's room. She would have left them behind, but the maids had been in the room again, and now beneath them hung her coat.
            On the threshold, like that, she could no longer hide. It would make her late, to stay for an instant, but she would not turn away.
            She jammed her hands down the coat's sleeves. Excellent wool, and it fit her. Someone had made it to fit her, not a month past, because the solemn elder brother who would not look at her, could not speak to her, had thrown down money enough that she should not go cold.
            Or maybe it was Raissa's money.
            Violeta hooked her thumb under the silver chain that held the one treasure she owned, around her neck, and made sure it was tucked well down beneath the collar of the coat. Then she took two steps forward, and stood in Raissa's room.
            Nothing stirred, and the girl in the bed knew nothing, not when Violeta's good hand clutched over hers, not when she cried out, in Yiddish and Polish, French and Hebrew, in tongues not heard under the sun for a thousand years, beloved, beloved, come back to me, please.
            Far below, on the other side of the river, the trolley bell clanged.
            "I love you," she said, and every morning it was like this, and she kissed the cracked lips softly, as though she feared to steal breath.
           
            "Miss Stern, did you come at the back of the North Wind?"
            "Mr. Lutski, I'm sorry, Mr. Lutski," she gasped. The library door stuck, even when she threw her weight on it; ice had grown across the sills, and melted a little way inside the room.
            "It's only nine, Miss Stern. There's tea in the samovar yet. And lemon, the way you unnatural Russians like it." He put a lump of sugar between his own teeth, and slurped tea through it, before speaking again. As he spoke, he stood, and he was moving around her, very like a turtle on tin-can stilts, unwrapping the frozen length of her muffler, seeing to her coat. "The work has kept these two hundred years. It will keep."
            "I meant to be here for eight."
            He shrugged. "No harm, Miss Stern, no harm. And how is your… Ah. How is young Miss Gellerman?"
            "They say she improves," Violeta lied.
            "The young are very resilient." Khaykl Lutski was not, himself, far past forty; there was a dusting of ashes at his temples and in his beard, which he wore long and combed, in the old Litvak style, but he was not as old as Violeta's father. "And one hears that her family left her very well-provided."
            "Yes," she said. "They left her."
            Mr. Lutski's mouth silently shut, after a moment, and he gestured to one of the public reading desks. "Bring your work down here, Miss Stern, if you like; Herman hasn't gotten the upstairs stove to draw. It's too new for him."
            All of the library was still new, and still beautiful. The desks and common tables shone without a mark. The great globe of the world, with Yiddish-speaking countries picked out in red marble, still gave the smell of hot bronze and expectation. Over the stairs winding up to the archives and private holdings, the motto marched: the foundations of a borderless, free, Jewish cultural nation. Violeta could not help smiling at it, would smile at it every day until she died, as she ascertained that Mr. Lutski's tea was far from her documents, and went to work.
 
            The Vilner Rav had been a matchless thinker, maybe, but no graceful writer, and his hand was not improved by a hundred years moldering in some cellar. She found herself misreading, though the light was good. She mistranslated the same sentence three times, into nonsense about love and madness. She pushed the papers away.
            She had strained her eyes, then, in the utter darkness for days on end, in Berlin; it seemed the crabbed writing rounded out, and slanted hard and lazily to the left, and was Raissa's.
            She saw sharp roads, and knew them, but saw no road for herself.
            She saw cliffs, the strange knife-edge of mountains, though she was not let near                            the edge.
            She saw the sand of the shore, ground that would not steady her feet.
            She saw the sea, which she could not understand,
            And saw instead the lifetime of her own tears.[1]
            A notebook scrap, in her breast-pocket, in her shoe. She forgot when, at last, she had lost it; sometime near the end. Barefoot in half a shirt and prison trousers, and she hissed whenever Raissa touched her, without meaning to. Down in the dark, she had learnt to keep time by the sounds from above: dogs jingling their leashes, and the twice-daily thunder of changing shifts on the guardroom floor. She marked months as Raissa's hair grew back, still wildly curled, with a single shot of silver above her right ear.
            All the cruelty came in full light.  After the first time, Raissa had learned a mask for herself; she might have been looking at constellations through the ceiling.
            She did not look through Violeta.
            "Don't leave me and I won't leave you, all right?"
            "Don’t go where I can't find you."
            The words were in her head, as the poem was in her head, for always, but she could not now remember whose voice was whose.
            Violeta, shaking, shook herself. She was alone on the ground floor of the YIVO library, and the light around her was dusty and dim. She had fallen asleep with her cheek on the Vilna Gaon's papers, she thought for a horrified moment, snapping upright and savaging her neck muscles.
            Her own transcription, only, and little enough of that. She could hear Khaykl Lutski upstairs, seemingly beating the kettle against the stove. She felt blood itching back into the fingertips of her plaster-cased hand. The clock told noon; she hoped Lutski's bean soup would not bring the building down, a cinder.
            "Bloody hell!"
            "Mr. Lutski, are you all right?"
            No answer for her, only something in Polish, to the new coal stove. Violeta stood and stretched, swung the pain from her arms, and started up the stairs.
            "Call for you, Miss Stern, while you were working," said Mr. Lutski as though coal soot had not narrowly missed a stray cardboard box of source material. "Bloody telephone thing," he added, as though the city had not had wires since 1923.
            "A call for me?" Violeta repeated. "For me."
            "How many other Violetas have we got, here in the Museum of the Yid? Two Shulamits, an Elanit, two Rivkes and a Sorele, but –"
            Violeta was gone, without her coat, without a word more for the archivist Lutski.
           
            Raissa was not dead. Violeta caught at the dull-silver ring on its chain. Could not be dead. Absently, she tried to work her left ring fingertip through the band. I thought she was dead once before, and I was wrong. She has been in Death's hand so long, surely Samael is bored with her…
            She remembered the color of the boot that had crushed her hand, caught Raissa so hard in the back that she folded, and both of them screamed. Nothing else, after, but her bleeding hand bound up in rags, and the tall figure of the brother, golden-haired, yes, here in Berlin, here, as they carried her beloved up into the light on a stretcher, silent, still and drenched with fever-sweat.
            Violeta had made it onto the sidewalk before every string in her was cut, and she supposed it was Raissa's brother who had saved her from the pavement.
            She stood now with her back braced against the door of Raissa's bedroom, her knuckle and the ring tasting of blood between her teeth. She heard the nurse, within, the same nurse who had been there from the beginning, and the Riga accent of the surgeon from the Levite hospital.
            "Bastard! Ow! Violeta! Violeta!"
            It was not much of a shout. It was a shout two, three months old, with none of the strength or petulance of the girl who had gone to Berlin.
            It was Raissa, and she would have heard it across the world.

[1] "Calais", Raissa Gellerman, ca. 1936.
 
'Night.