The Way Back Page 4

  “For all the days of my life, then.”

  “And why in Tupik?”

  This was a question to which Yehuda Leib had been trying to find the answer all night.

  “Because it’s my home. Because I can feel it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He wasn’t quite sure himself. “Tupik. I feel it—the way people’s bodies move in the street, the streets themselves, the buildings, the mud, the water in the river—here, just where the back of my neck meets my head. Do you know what I mean?”

  The Dark Messenger turned toward the boy and regarded him for a long moment.

  Slowly, he grew a grin.

  “You have keen eyes,” said the stranger, and he began to walk again. “Have you ever met a sheepdog, Yehuda Leib?”

  Yehuda Leib shook his head. “No.”

  “I have a deep affection for such animals. They herd, corral, protect their sheep, and they do it all in a very simple manner: they hunt them.”

  “What?”

  “They hunt the sheep. They chase them, stalk them, stare them down. But they hunt without killing.”

  Yehuda Leib’s eyebrows fell. “Is it still hunting if they don’t kill?”

  The dark stranger smiled. “Oh my, yes.”

  “Hmm,” said Yehuda Leib.

  “What I mean, Yehuda Leib,” said the stranger, “is that you might do well to consider the Tsar’s army.”

  This idea shocked Yehuda Leib. “What?”

  “Oh, it is a risky business, war,” said the stranger. “A risky business, to be sure. One stands to lose more than just his life. But unless I miss my guess, I think you might find the work well suited to your talents.”

  Yehuda Leib’s lips were pressed together tightly. “No,” he said. “No.”

  “You seem,” said the stranger, “terribly certain.”

  “Wouldn’t the army…” Yehuda Leib swallowed as he looked for the word. “Change me?”

  The stranger nodded. “It would. As will all things.”

  “I don’t want to be changed.”

  “That,” said the Dark Messenger, “is unavoidable, I am afraid. If you wish to live.”

  Now the dark stranger brought his feet to rest, and with surprise Yehuda Leib looked up to find that he was standing again in front of the house of Reb Zalman the baker.

  The stranger gave a heavy sigh. “Thank you for accompanying me, Yehuda Leib,” he said. “I know my way from here.”

  “All right,” said Yehuda Leib.

  “But there is one thing more,” said the stranger. “You must do me a service: the ferryman would not accept my payment.”

  “No, no,” said Yehuda Leib. “He’s paid by the community.”

  “So he told me,” said the Messenger.

  Yehuda Leib had trouble imagining Mottke telling anything to anyone with much success.

  “But it is a point of honor with me,” the stranger said. “I can leave no debt behind.”

  Yehuda Leib shook his head. “You have no debt. The crossing is free for all travelers.”

  “Yes,” said the stranger. “But still the ferryman is paid. I must provide his payment.”

  “Really,” said Yehuda Leib. “There’s no need.”

  “I am afraid,” said the stranger, “that I must insist,” and he held out his hand.

  In his long, narrow palm, there were two worn coins.

  “Take them,” he said.

  Slowly, Yehuda Leib stretched out his fingers.

  Perhaps he would just hold them and then give them back. Perhaps just for a time. Carefully, Yehuda Leib took first one coin and then the other from the stranger’s hand.

  “Good,” said the stranger.

  The coins were odd: two of the same denomination, cold and heavy, battered, gray. On one face they bore the figure of an open eye, and on the obverse the same eye firmly shut.

  “Until we meet again, Yehuda Leib,” said the stranger.

  And by the time Yehuda Leib looked up, he was gone.

  * * *

  —

  The front door of Bluma’s house bumped, jostled, and swung open.

  The wind was stirring.

  Someone stepped across the threshold.

  A sudden gust of wind swept through the street and slammed the door shut behind the stranger. Feygush, slumped asleep across the front room, stirred, moaned, and rolled over.

  Again, she did not wake.

  But she was not the only one in the house.

  On the second floor, Bluma’s eyelids flew open at the sound of the slamming door.

  Bubbe, she thought.

  Bubbe is home.

  The house gave a groan as a pair of feet shifted from the floorboards to the staircase, and from her vantage point near the wall, Bluma was overjoyed to see the figure of a hunched old woman begin to rise heavily from the first floor.

  It was not long, though, before her joy melted away.

  The old woman was not her bubbe.

  Bluma froze, her breath arrested in her throat.

  Who was it?

  Slowly, a dark stranger climbed the stairs. Her dress was black—blacker than the night, blacker than the darkness hidden inside your eyes—and over her head she wore a blanket, pulled forward, also black, forming a hood so deep and dark that it hid nearly all of her face.

  Only her mouth could be seen.

  The gait of the dark stranger was heavy, weary, and slow, and when she reached the top step, she stopped not six feet from where Bluma lay.

  With a sigh, the dark stranger looked up the last flight of stairs toward Bluma’s bubbe’s bedroom. She reached a knobbly hand into the folds of her black blanket and produced an object—some sort of tool that gave a glint in the cold moonlight.

  Bluma could not see what it was.

  With effort, the old woman began to climb the final flight of stairs.

  Who was this?

  What was happening?

  What did she have in her hand?

  Above, Bluma heard her bubbe’s bedroom door yawn open and swing shut. Quickly and quietly, she laid her bare feet down on the rough wooden floorboards and crept up after the dark stranger.

  She could hear voices.

  * * *

  —

  “Dvorah Leah, daughter of Hindeh.” The stranger’s voice was husky and rough.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Bluma’s bubbe.

  “What?”

  Outside, the wind sauntered by with a low yowl.

  “I tramp around all day making myself ready for you, I go, I sit in the woods, I shiver, I collect snow on my shoulders like it’s gold, I think, I say, Anytime now, and all the while you’re nowhere to be found. Now, finally, I come home, I put in the trouble to get myself ready for bed, and just like that, here you are.”

  “I did not appoint the time of our meeting, Dvorah Leah.”

  “Oh, get out of here. No one’s called me Dvorah Leah in forty years.”

  “It is your name.”

  “I don’t care. Take it if you want it.”

  “I am afraid not, Dvorah Leah.”

  “Hey,” said Bluma’s bubbe. “Hey, did you do something to my cat?”

  “I know nothing of your cat.”

  “Sure you don’t.”

  “I do not lie,” said the stranger.

  “What, I’m supposed to believe that?”

  The stranger sighed. “It is entirely immaterial to me what you believe, Dvorah Leah. I am here to do you a service.”

  “Bah,” said Dvorah Leah. “Some service.”

  “You would be sorry if I were not able to perform it for you,” said the stranger. “Believe me.”

  “I thought what I believed was immaterial.”
/>
  Floorboards creaked as weight was shifted from foot to foot. “Take my counsel: You begin only once and end only once. There is no reward or exception for the irreverent.”

  Bluma’s brows began to fold. End? What did she mean, end?

  Dvorah Leah laughed. “You think I should be reverent? What have I ever been given that I should be reverent?”

  “Life, Dvorah Leah,” said the stranger, and the word fell like a heavy load dropped at the end of a long workday. “Life.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Dvorah Leah. “Do you have any real knowledge of what you’re talking about?”

  There was no response. Beyond the window, the wind flexed its muscles.

  “No,” said Dvorah Leah. “I didn’t think so. I’ll tell you what: why don’t you go away and live a lifetime’s worth of pain, of fear and want and intimidation and abandonment and betrayal and disappointment, and then you can come back here and tell me how I ought to be reverent. How dare you.”

  For a long moment, the house was silent.

  Presently, the Dark Messenger spoke. “It is not given to me to form judgments.”

  “No,” said Dvorah Leah. “Of course not. You’re, what, just the messenger?”

  “I prune the tree so that it may grow.”

  “Oh, go piss into the wind. What, did you come up with that while you were killing an actual gardener?”

  Suddenly Bluma’s heart began to race.

  Killing?

  “I do not kill,” said the stranger. “I retrieve what otherwise might be lost.”

  “Ah,” said Dvorah Leah. “So you’re like a dog, then—like a filthy dog.”

  Slowly, the voice of the stranger began to shift like a gathering storm.

  “It is your prerogative, Dvorah Leah, to squander your final moments if that is what you wish to do. But it is unwise to tempt the wrath of such a one as I.”

  Now Dvorah Leah laughed long and loud, but the laughter was false—pushed and angry.

  “At what do you laugh, Dvorah Leah?” asked the rising storm of the stranger.

  “At you, whatever you are. You’d like to think you’re just a gardener, just a messenger, just a retriever of lost things, but when it comes right down to it, you get crabby when you’re taunted, just like anyone else.”

  The stranger made no response.

  “No matter what I do, I’m not going out that door on my own two feet, am I?”

  “No, Dvorah Leah. You are not.”

  Bluma’s heart was beating so hard that she was afraid it would be heard.

  “All right, then,” said Dvorah Leah. “Here’s exactly what I think of you.”

  Bluma heard her grandmother take a hobbling step forward and fill her lungs with air.

  And then it happened.

  Shuffling feet.

  Falling furniture.

  Her bubbe was angry, but she was prevented from speaking.

  There was something metallic, and as it came into contact with a bedpost or table corner, it rang out reverberantly, like a bell.

  Thrashing. Anger.

  A bump and rumple of bedclothes.

  A choke and a gurgle.

  Metal scraping against something rigid—crockery, perhaps, or bone.

  Outside, the wind had begun to fly by with greater and greater force, quicker and quicker, as if something were trying to flee, which it was.

  Suddenly, terrible, still silence.

  Silence.

  Tears blossomed in Bluma’s eyes.

  And then, from inside the bedroom, footsteps began to approach the door.

  * * *

  —

  Bluma flew down the steps, quickly, quietly, as swiftly as possible without making a sound. Feet pressed into the floorboards above her, and she dropped to the floor and slid herself into the small gap beneath her bed.

  Too late she remembered that she had been atop the bed before. And if the stranger thought to look…

  Too late.

  The stranger’s feet reached the bottom of the stairs. She came to a halt and let out a long, low sigh.

  Bluma stopped up her breath and sealed it in, wrapping her fingers tight against her lips. She must not make a sound.

  Her heart was thundering in her chest.

  She must not make a sound.

  “Unpleasant,” said the stranger to herself. “That is the word. Unpleasant. And unfair.”

  The stranger’s shoes pressed into the floor, one foot first and then the other, and with a surge of fear, Bluma realized that she was moving closer. Her feet were visible now, walking wearily along the side of Bluma’s little bed, moving their way up toward her pillow.

  The feet stopped.

  Bluma started to panic, her vision beginning to whiten at its edges. The dark woman’s feet were not six inches from her face, and if she didn’t breathe soon—well, she didn’t know what would happen.

  Above, there was a sound of plashing and plinking, as if…

  Yes.

  The stranger had begun to wash up.

  Bluma herself had fetched that water in.

  And, all of a sudden, the water stilled.

  Something was moving nearby.

  The dark stranger had heard it.

  Bluma’s thirst for breath had grown so intense that she had to gnaw at the inside of her cheek to distract herself with pain. And now the Dark Messenger stood above her, listening hard for any sound of life.

  “Who’s there?” said the stranger in a hoarse whisper.

  Silence.

  A creaking floorboard.

  Outside, a half-hearted shift in the wind.

  Bluma was dying for breath.

  And then, all at once, a screech, a yowl, a streak of gray fur—Bubbe’s ancient toothless cat leapt out of the darkness, and, out of surprise as much as necessity, Bluma’s bottled-up breath broke through her lips, and she gasped sharply. The stranger cursed and stumbled backward at the cat’s ambush, and, just as Bluma remembered to stifle the sound of her panting breath, the instrument that the stranger had been cleaning in the water bounced to the floor with a clang.

  In time to come, she would look back and ask herself: Had there been some intention in it? Had Bluma meant, on some level, to start what she had started?

  But the plain fact of the matter is this: Bluma reached out and laid her hand over the fallen metal instrument because it was clattering against the floorboards and she was convinced—for good reason—that it would draw attention to her.

  But now her arm was protruding from beneath the bed.

  Now she was out in the open.

  Bluma held absolutely still.

  Gradually, the dark stranger above found equilibrium between her two feet. Again, she cursed softly to herself.

  “Cats,” she said. “I hate cats.”

  Flinging the water from her fingertips, the dark stranger turned and made her way to the head of the stairs.

  Wearily, she began to descend.

  The front door bumped, jostled, swung outward, and then shut.

  She was gone.

  It was over.

  Slowly, Bluma pulled the stranger’s instrument into her tiny hiding place beneath the bed.

  And she was surprised. She had assumed it to be a knife or a dagger of some kind—a weapon—but it wasn’t.

  The Dark Messenger’s forgotten instrument was a spoon.

  And the spoon was strange—preternaturally cool, or even cold. What little moisture had been left on its surface in the washing was beginning now, bit by bit, to transform into tiny pine needles of crystalline frost.

  That was strange. It was cold outside, to be sure, but thanks to her father’s oven, of all the houses in Tupik, theirs was by far the warmest.
In fact, it was because of the warmth of the upper floors that Bluma’s bubbe had continued living in the attic even once her hip had started to bother her.

  And, with a start, Bluma realized that she could no longer say that her bubbe continued living in the attic. She could no longer say that her bubbe continued living at all.

  Bluma curled up as small as she could, threw the spoon against the wall, and began to sob.

  It was only once she looked up again that she discovered the second peculiarity of the Dark Messenger’s instrument.

  When it was not cultivating frost, the round face of the spoon seemed entirely unremarkable: small dings and scratches marred it, and behind these, a person could easily recognize herself reflected. But the reflection was odd: slow, delayed, as if it had traveled a long distance through something thick and viscous.

  This is why, when she looked up, the girl that Bluma saw reflected back to her was curled up as she had been a moment ago, crying.

  Bluma dried her tears and shuffled forward, staring intently at her sobbing double.

  After a moment, the Bluma in the spoon looked up and noticed her. Soon she dried her own tears and inched closer, just as Bluma had done a moment ago.

  And this is how it came to pass that there, beneath her bed, Bluma descended into the sleep of the grieving under the watchful gaze of her own unblinking eyes.

  Bluma was wakened by the gentle hand of her father on her shoulder.

  She rolled over, bleary on the rigid floorboards, and there he was, kneeling above her, red-eyed, tender, and completely clean of flour.

  “Bluma,” he said, a quiver in his voice.

  Bluma couldn’t stand the thought of him speaking it out, and she lunged at her father, wrapping him in a tight embrace, her face buried safe between his beard and his shoulder.

  Softly, his big hands fell onto her.

  Softly, he began to shudder with tears.

  Soon things started to move very rapidly. There were, said Bluma’s mother, necessities to think of.

  First, the members of the Holy Society were sent for, and they assembled in the front room of the bakery, one by one, somber, respectful, their eyes cast downward. Once their quorum was gathered, they tramped en masse up to the third floor and carried Bluma’s bubbe down on her straw mattress.