The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Finished 'The Graves Growing Here'!

I want to throw my head back and ... sing. It was giving me such problems, because it contains infamous historical events that I needed to treat properly, and because it has a character death.

...by 'finished', I mean, it goes now to await the line-editors when the Thing is Done.

Two more stories to finish now: 'Easy, To Die' and 'When The World's Gone Away', whose title may change if I decide to epigram it with the Kruk poem, but he does this weird amphibractic thing that's hard to translate.

And because I really think I'm borrowing some sort of divine fire and ought to use it, I wrote these to go between the stories. They're for character, basically, and they match the style turn I took with the Prologue, and... they were here.

I.                    Fayge
 
            Teach me with kisses what my eyes speak…
            Someone, singing. The phrasing was all right, she thought, half drowsing, before the voice itself made her start up from the firelit pillows, before she remembered. A wireless. On the other side of the bed, he had turned on the wireless. It spared them talking.
            She thought of the man who was not with her in the bed. When they met, she was young and needed a sun to orbit; he was golden and tall and kissed her hands through her gloves. A fne dancer, she remembered, when the mood took him for dancing; a poet, a little, though he said he had a sister who was better. He liked to hear her sing more than he liked to hear her talk. When she ran from Vienna, rather than sing wearing the Star, she found him waiting. He had a company, a small one, they were going to try in Paris. The Star was no great matter. He was wearing one himself.
            In Paris her life started: no small thing, to be sixteen and dancing with silver powder across her shoulders, to be sixteen and filling the house at the Opera Garnier. Benyamin Gellerman’s company got very good notices, and to her his company seemed good. She knew nothing, and he knew less, and he had her with child inside of six months. She was flat on her back in Paris while they broke windows in her home town, burning as the shops and temples burned. She never screamed, not once, lest she shatter her instrument and be nothing.
            Her daughter was the sky, the stars and every kind of music, but all the screams stayed in Fayge’s throat for months after that. She would not sing, not lullabies, not even when he begged.
            East she had come, when he asked it, because he was kind to her and denied her nothing, because he was Miriam’s father. East in a train compartment filled with coal grit, and she had ripped the Star from her coat and found it did not matter, because it had left a dark mark in the wool. He gave her his raincoat to wear. She would be the lady of a fine house, in this eastern city she had never heard of, and there were two repertory theatres there, and she would sing.
            War came. Men from her own city brought it, and she sang. She did not wear the Star, and armbands could be pulled off in the dark. The men looked at her like a gem.
            Her husband did not look at her, the better not to see her starving. He brought her an extra cardigan, pins for her too-long hair, but he could not bring bread. She sang for soldiers – for Miriam, every note on every breath, Miriam, spur nur dich, spur nur dich allein – in rooms where her husband could not hear.
            She thought of bread, of hot soup and hot featherbeds, of how much blood there is in a man. She thought of her wordless daughter.
            She thought of the man beside her, in this bed.
            She thought she would lose her mind.
 
 
II. Raissa
 
            She is leaving the house where she was born. She leaves behind books, silvered mirrors, a box of chocolates half eaten. She leaves her horse and her chambermaid and all her stake in the bank. She has money, a little, three thousand zloty in a silk handkerchief; it’s going to have to do. It’s hers from Loniek, her favorite brother,  no one can say she stole it.
            Down the corridor he sleeps, and she will never see him again.
            She is seventeen years old and finished school, this June, but she will not stay to graduate. She will not stay on this side of the river a moment longer. Her sisters, who have scorned her since she put away her skirts, swear to slaughter her if she steps foot in the street and brings them scandal; her brothers, but for Loniek, no longer speak to her at all. It would be different if Beniek was not so far away: Beniek who could stand against Father and win. But he had been a grown man almost when she was born, and now he was in Venice, Paris, somewhere. For Purim he had sent her a crimson necktie and crimson enamel cufflinks, in a haberdashery box marked in gilt in French.
            The necktie’s gone, she is certain, but Father never thought to look for cufflinks. She puts them in her coat pocket now, in the half-dark towards morning, and tries not to think of Purim.
            There was a party, there always had been, though it was too cold to dance in the garden. Raissa, allowed two guests of her own, had chosen Shaindl Berkowitz and Violeta; Shaindl was a butterfly, in wings of her own design, and Violeta was the Tsarevna Anastasia, very wry, but Raissa had gone as a boy. Just a boy, in a collar and tie and one of Marek’s tailcoats, cut down. The best of Vilna was at that party, and no one whispered yet that the Gellerman girl was unnatural. She was just a young thing in a costume, playing in the shadow of her brothers.
            There had been wine, and Violeta. Raissa had learnt to waltz from her sisters’ dancing-master, though it was a hard thing to do backwards, and they had made three turns around the upstairs hallway before the wine got into Raissa’s brain. The rest of the night, she was less sure of; there was a kiss, she knew, hands and the yielding edge of a bed, skin and the fine red of Violeta’s hair. Violeta was older, protesting, prudent, but Raissa was spoiled and fearless, skilled at winning her own way. This is my home, she’d whispered, where are we safe, if not here?
            But the house was old, and all the upstairs doors opened to one key. It must have been three in the morning, or past, and they were asleep when Ania came knocking. And then she tired of knocking, before Raissa could find her shirt. Ania flung the door wide into their darkness; that odious fishmonger girl had fallen asleep on the downstairs chaise, and would Raissa kindly come and rouse –
            Her sister’s scream – a high and perfect scream, and Raissa will remember it – brought all three brothers. Half-drunk, half-costumed, half-asleep, Marek and Lysiek reached them first. Loniek was behind, a little winded from the servants’ stairs. He shouted, when Lysiek took one of Violeta’s arms and Marek the other, but he was too late to do anything but shout. Raissa had pleaded with him to go after them, before they hurt Violeta, but he had stayed behind. Loniek found clothes for her, a skirt from the back of the wardrobe, shoes, a ribbon to bind back her hair. She did not remember if he had spoken to her, did not recall hearing his voice again at all until she was crouched, near fainting, on the library carpet in front of their father. Blood was slipping down her back and she thought she would fall into the fire, and Loniek was there, crying at Father to look what he’d done, for God’s pity, she’s the youngest. Then Loniek had picked her up, and she really had fainted…
            The marks have faded to briar-scratches beneath her shirt; the linen no longer catches when she moves. Her fingers are cold as, by the cold candle, she finishes dressing. She will leave by the front door, since the dogs are down in the kitchen garden, across the bridge and down into the Jewish quarter on foot, not more than half an hour’s run.
            If Loniek comes after her, she will not know what to say.
            She leaves the house, leaves her brothers, leaves the life that stretches false and stifling before her sight. She makes nimble time, it’s downhill and she can have no fear, even of the dark, while running. Before the pack has grown heavy on her shoulders, she stands before the door she wanted to find. The courtyard is silent, no one in the building yet stirs, but she has the key.
            Home.
 
III.               The Brothers
 
      It was the second cigarette they had smoked in their entire lives,  and Mikah nicked it from Rina’s case on her dresser. He handed it to Hirsh, leaned on the balcony railing, and watched the war. Below them, the swastika on its blood-colored ground unfurled along Strashun. Soldiers, following, shook the pavements, and their crisp columns seemed to stretch for miles. He could see them out on the river bridge, ants along a twig.
      Hirsh coughed, flicking away the cigarette. There was ash on the lapel of his narrow black coat, and he took the coat off rather than brush the ash away, because there would be no getting to the yeshiva.
      The morning had not started out any differently. Hirsh davened, and Mikah did the breakfast washing-up in his shirtsleeves. He had left the Ramayles Yeshiva the year before, without telling their parents why.
      His brother’s thoughts on God were not something either of them needed to speak about. Hirsh had God, really had him, the way Mikah had his violin, and that was all. They had never had this twin-language Rina talked about, just maybe a kind of twinned thought, always silent. Mikah could fill up the gaps in his brother’s long holy quiet, and Hirsh could have told anyone what the violin was saying.
      Rina, three years older, was a nurse at the Levite hospital downtown. Every morning she flew around the apartment like a wild bird trapped, hunting up her bag and her starched white hat, and moving too fast to avoid half the furniture. Berek, her fiancé, managed to still be sleeping, and in the large bedroom off the kitchen, Mikah could hear his father beginning his prayers. He stood the last teacup in the drainer and Rina took it, clattering all the cutlery, to pour herself a cup to bring with her out the door. The clock wheezed and chimed for seven, though it was really a quarter past, and Mikah dried his hands on his vest and took down his violin.
      It was an aged instrument, strung with stories of press gangs and Cossacks, pegs mellowed not with rosin-dust but years. It was tuned to the sons of genteel exiled poverty, to the wailing winter nights of the Pale, and to Mikah. He was the oldest son, if you wanted to come down to it, and Hirsh had never shown love or aptitude for playing. He could play, a little, because Mikah had shown him, but it was Mikah’s fiddle.
      Because the sound of the tuning fork went into Hirsh’s teeth and upset his prayers, today Mikah played without tuning. About six bars of Borodin, and then on, away, in flight: the kind of music that belonged to him and never got set on paper. He played for Hirsh’s morning rites, something like a nigun; then of a sudden his fingers stopped moving at all, and under the bow the strings cried out.      
      Hirsh leaped up, to stare where Mikah stared.
      Mikah stilled the strings with his fingertips, set the violin back in its case, and threw back the balcony curtains, and then the doors.
      Outside, the cavalry was just passing, slow and stately as they could do and still fight the hill. In the horsemen’s wake the river breeze carried up the sickly smell of diesel, smothering the window-box gardens of pansy and mignonette.
      “Hirsh!”
      But his brother was already at his back. Tanks rolled by beneath them, flanked on both sides by infantry in crisp khaki summer jackets and armbands of brightest red. There were tanks on Strashun Avenue, before eight o’clock on a morning in high summer.
      Hirsh pressed a hand to Mikah’s shoulder, and he felt it, so it had to somehow be real.