The Way Back Page 5

  She did not look like Bluma had imagined.

  It was unmistakably her: her face, her body, even her unruly hair. There had been no violence done to her, no cuts or scrapes or bruises or holes made, but all the same there was something missing.

  She was a person who had departed.

  It was incomprehensible.

  The straw pallet was laid down in the front room, and there, in the presence of the Holy Society, Bluma’s father mumbled a rote blessing and tore his shirt and jacket in a ritual of mourning. This having been done, the somber company lifted Bluma’s bubbe again and carried her out of the house to the small funeral hut near the cemetery, where she would be washed and guarded until her burial.

  As the door swung shut behind them, Zalman sank to the floor.

  There he remained, leaning back against the stacked sacks of flour, all morning.

  For a short time, Bluma and her mother remained with him. Before long, though, Feygush began again to murmur of necessities, and, rising to turn back to the ordering of the home, she beckoned for Bluma to follow.

  Feygush climbed to her bedroom and gently tucked away the little looking glass that Bluma was sometimes permitted to use. With effort, she lifted her small, heavy mirror and turned it around to face the wall.

  It was in the midst of this task that she spoke to Bluma.

  “Blumaleh,” she said. “Go upstairs and turn your bubbe’s mirror around. Just like this.”

  This was a horrifying prospect.

  Bluma stood, staring blankly, until Feygush noticed her.

  “Did you hear me, Bluma?”

  Bluma had so much to say that it jammed up her throat: How could she possibly go up there? How could she enter that room? How could she violate her bubbe’s privacy? How could she move things that her bubbe had set in place? How, how, how?

  Feygush sighed. “Today is not the day for this. Do as I say.”

  And so Bluma’s feet carried her up to the third floor.

  And what she saw was horrific.

  Some well-meaning member of the Holy Society had tidied the room. Every possession was laid out in perfect parallel, every piece of linen folded, every edge straightened.

  They had taken Bluma’s bubbe out of the house and cleared up after.

  Bluma wanted desperately to get out, to get away from this violent tidiness, and so she moved swiftly to the mirror. Her reflection startled her—it seemed too quick, somehow, too prompt—and as she turned the glass to face the wall, she began to feel some stirring of memory.

  Her reflection.

  What had happened last night?

  Bluma hurried back down to the second floor to find her mother struggling to move the water barrel toward the top of the stairs.

  “Good,” she said. “Come help me.”

  Feygush and Bluma collected all the water in the house, and once it had been arrayed by the door—bottles, buckets, barrels—they began to pour it out, little by little, into the street.

  Up until this moment, Feygush had acted with almost defiant practicality, but as they stood in the chill air watching the wasted water run downhill to the river, Bluma heard her mother’s breathing catch and shudder, and she looked up to find her wiping her eye.

  In the nearby cemetery, the sound of shovels could clearly be heard digging open her bubbe’s grave.

  As much to block out this sound as for any other reason, Bluma spoke.

  “Why?” she said. “Why do we pour out the water?”

  Feygush sniffed and cleared her throat.

  “They say,” said Feygush, “that when the Angel of Death is finished claiming the dead, he washes his knife in the water of the house.”

  His knife? That didn’t seem right.

  And suddenly all the events of the previous night came flooding through the dam of grief and fatigue that had held them back.

  She had seen the Angel of Death.

  And her instrument was not a knife.

  It was a spoon.

  * * *

  —

  The news made its way swiftly through Tupik.

  As soon as the members of the Holy Society returned, one by one, to their homes, Bubbe’s name passed from lip to lip, spreading like a virulent cold.

  Dvorah Leah, they said.

  Who?

  Dvorah Leah. You know, the old woman—Zalman the baker’s mother.

  Ahhhhh.

  Tongues tsked and heads wagged. She had not been a popular woman—she had been very deliberate about that—but just the same she had delivered many of their children, and when death touched even the furthest outpost of their little community, it was a tragedy for them all.

  Hands that otherwise might’ve gone idle that morning grasped onto the hafts of shovels. The digging sped by. Between them all, the grave was ready by lunch.

  In accordance with tradition, she was to be buried as soon as possible.

  Shortly after noon, when news of the grave’s preparation reached the riverbank, people began to tramp uphill. Friends knocked on their neighbors’ windows. Tasks were laid aside. Two feet became four, and then eight, twelve, twenty, slogging through the snow and muck toward the cemetery together, and slowly their number increased until the town ran uphill like an impossible river.

  The young were nervous. The old were reflective.

  Tupik was going to bury its dead.

  * * *

  —

  Yehuda Leib woke woozy and confused, and immediately he was on his guard.

  There were voices.

  It was a moment before he realized he was in the dusty, dim synagogue attic. Morning prayers were under way in the sanctuary below.

  A cacophony of half-chanted melody floated up through the floor, and as Yehuda Leib rose, stretched, began to creep from rafter to rafter, he imagined himself intercepting the rising column of each individual prayer.

  Before long, the worshipful murmuration below fell off into light chat, and then into silence. The sanctuary door creaked open and swung shut behind the last straggling worshipper like a final amen.

  Yehuda Leib was left alone.

  The attic was vast. Four or five of Yehuda Leib’s houses could easily have fit inside.

  The stillness was terrible.

  He wanted to go now, wanted to be on his way, but he was in the very center of town, and the man Avimelekh might already have arrived.

  Across the muddy snow of the road sat the study house. Issur Frumkin would be there for certain. If he so much as cracked the sliding panel beneath the wide synagogue eaves in order to leave, he could be seen.

  He needed a distraction.

  And then, as if by some dark miracle, all the people of Tupik began to march past him up the hill.

  What was happening?

  Where were they going?

  No matter. This was the chance he had been waiting for.

  As the flow of people began to dwindle, Yehuda Leib slid the entry panel back.

  He took a deep breath. Silence held the road below.

  Carefully, he climbed down into the snow.

  It was time to go.

  But there was one last thing he had to do first.

  * * *

  —

  People kept looking at Bluma with pity.

  All she wanted was for no one to look at her at all.

  Just leave me alone.

  The funeral had seemed simultaneously endless and perfunctory. There had been blessings, and the rabbi had said something about an old woman who sounded nothing like Bluma’s bubbe, and then they’d done what they’d all come to do: put her bubbe into the earth and, one by one, seal it up above her.

  Bluma’s father took up the shovel late, but unlike Bluma, Feygush, and the others, he did not stop with a single sym
bolic clod. In fact, he did not stop at all. People shuffled around him to drop their handfuls of earth into the grave—still, he kept shoveling. Bluma could see the veins bulging in his neck as he shoveled, and shoveled, and shoveled.

  And shoveled.

  He had worked up quite a sweat by the time the grave was full, and on their short walk home, steam rose from him like silent prayer into the cold, gray afternoon.

  People began to arrive at their door, bringing food, smiling sadly. Candles filled the house. Before long, the front room was packed with milling visitors—munching, chatting, looking at Bluma with pity.

  Just leave me alone.

  Soon she retired to the empty second level. She could not outrun the chatter of the guests on the first floor, but here, at least, it was muted, as if heard through a thick layer of earth.

  There had been many distractions, of course, but whenever Bluma’s brain had come to rest that day, this was the place to which it had returned.

  The spoon.

  She could not see it, but she knew it was there, wedged against the wall beneath her bed, just where she had thrown it.

  She thought she remembered odd things—frost, cold metal on her skin, a strange, lugubrious reflection—but her mind was not at all calm, and by now she had begun to wonder if she hadn’t been imagining things.

  Had the old lady climbing the stairs just been her bubbe?

  What had she really heard through the bedroom door?

  Had she only been dreaming?

  Perhaps it was just an ordinary spoon.

  Downstairs, the front door ushered in a new crop of guests, and Bluma heard hushed greetings ripple through her front room.

  Quietly, she lowered herself to her hands and knees and peeked below the bed.

  There it was.

  It had frozen against the wall.

  Careful not to allow herself to slide all the way beneath, Bluma reached deep under the bed and grasped the frigid spoon, tugging hard, once, twice, before it came up in her hand.

  She had not been imagining things.

  In fact, the spoon was odder than she remembered, for while her reflection was indeed delayed in the spoon’s surface, the setting it depicted was not delayed at all: instead of persisting in showing the dim surroundings beneath the bed, the reflection in the spoon now showed the larger second floor exactly as it was—except that Bluma had not yet arrived.

  Shortly, though, in the spoon’s reflection, she came padding up the stairs—weary, dour, sad.

  No wonder people were looking at her with such pity.

  Bluma wanted to see herself better, and, bunching up the hem of her skirt, she began to polish the frost from the spoon.

  With a sharp gasp, she dropped it to the floor. Instinctively, she stuck her thumb into her mouth.

  Her thumb. She had cut the pad of her thumb.

  Was the spoon…sharp?

  It was. The rim of its basin had been honed to a razor’s edge, which both confused and disquieted her. All she could imagine was a big mouthful of soup and a long gash along the inside of either cheek.

  Who on earth would want a sharp spoon?

  But as she bent to retrieve it, something else—something stranger—caught her eye.

  The spoon had landed facing up. A small droplet of her blood was creeping down the inverted slope, and in the glossy red trail it left behind, a slice of someone’s face was reflected.

  And it was not hers.

  Bluma lifted the spoon, waiting for her reflection to arrive, and the blood ran and spread, covering more and more of the basin.

  Gradually, the face in the blood began to clarify.

  It was her bubbe. Bluma was sure of it.

  And as if on cue, Bluma’s own face came swimming into focus, perfectly framing Dvorah Leah’s: two different faces, united by a common reflection. Or, rather, one death divided between two people.

  “Bluma!”

  Feygush’s voice came echoing up the stairs, and her footsteps followed close behind.

  Almost without thinking—almost—Bluma stuck the spoon into the pocket of her apron and wheeled about to face her mother.

  “Perla Kraindl’s here. She wants to say hello. Will you come down?”

  Feygush’s face was drawn and weary.

  Bluma looked at her with pity.

  * * *

  —

  The old woman was dead and buried.

  Shulamis had not known her well, but all the same she lingered at the back of the crowd by the graveside until Zalman packed the very last shovelful of earth atop her casket.

  It gave her a chance to cry.

  The sun was low and the sky beginning to darken as Shulamis started the short trudge back to her little house. It would be dark, and it would be cold, and it would be empty.

  But as soon as Shulamis reached the front of her house, she knew. A little sob broke from her throat, and she found that she was smiling.

  Yehuda Leib’s familiar footprints led first into, and then back out from, her front door.

  And the warm red scarf was nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  —

  Yehuda Leib straightened his scarf and hoisted his pack high.

  Now was as good a time as any.

  The shadows between the trees glowered down at him like the darkness between teeth; a breeze stirred the pine needles as if to whisper, You are too frightened.

  And perhaps he was.

  Tupik was far behind him now, over the hill and downriver nearly half an hour’s walk, but he could still smell the toasted aroma of its fires.

  He still might find his way back.

  As much to buy time as to warm them, Yehuda Leib stuck his chill, stiff fingers into his coat pockets. He had mittens, of course, but he didn’t like to wear them. He couldn’t stand being constrained.

  But at the bottom of his coat pocket, Yehuda’s fingers met something cold and hard.

  Two somethings, in fact.

  The coins were thick and heavy in his hand, and when he opened his fingers to look down at them, he felt a little jolt of shock. They had come out of his pocket well spaced, and for a moment he could’ve sworn that they were living eyes, looking straight back up at him.

  Or one living eye, at least. The coin on the right was flipped to display its closed lid, as if frozen in a perpetual wink.

  Somehow, this bothered Yehuda Leib.

  “No,” he said to himself, flipping the coin on the right. “Eyes open.”

  A low, stalking breeze rifled the tree branches.

  The sun was sinking with every passing minute. If he didn’t go now, he would lose what little light he had left.

  Pocketing the coins, Yehuda Leib took a deep breath and began to climb.

  * * *

  —

  The forest between Tupik and Zubinsk was mostly evergreen, and the snow clumped together atop the boughs and needles, forming a barrier against the low sun.

  Gradually, Yehuda Leib was wrapped up in creeping darkness; quietly, almost furtively, the snow began to swallow up his tracks.

  Everyone in Tupik had heard stories of the demons among the forest trees, and Yehuda Leib did his best not to think of them now. As long as he could find the path to Zubinsk before he lost the light entirely, he thought, he would be all right.

  But nightfall is a terrible trick in the forest: just when you think the darkness is complete, it finds a way to grow thicker.

  The ground was completely covered in snow, and the path might’ve been nothing more than a gap between the trees.

  Had he missed it?

  Like a nearing drum, Yehuda Leib began to hear the beating of his heart growing heavy in his chest.

  He had to find the path.

  But now he was unsure
where he had been facing just a moment ago. From which direction had he come?

  The long fingers of the darkness had begun to work their way into his mind.

  And then, all of a sudden, the jangle of a bridle. Hoofbeats in the snow.

  A horse meant a person.

  A person meant a path.

  Without thinking, Yehuda Leib charged forward.

  It was only once he could see the equine silhouette looming up between the trees ahead that he remembered the threat of Avimelekh.

  * * *

  —

  “Who’s there?”

  Warm lantern light shone out like a rupture in the darkness.

  “Hello?”

  Yehuda Leib’s heart fell. The face that swam into view in the flickering light of the lantern was not Avimelekh’s, but possibly it was worse.

  “I know you’re out there,” Issur Frumkin called into the trees.

  Swallowing his pride, Yehuda Leib stepped forward into the light.

  “Oh,” said Frumkin. “You.”

  What Yehuda Leib had taken for a horse in the dim was nothing more than the Frumkins’ stocky little donkey. Issur was seated behind her in a battered two-wheel cart, reins in hand.

  “What are you doing out here?” said Yehuda Leib.

  “I’m going to Zubinsk. For the wedding.”

  “Your father agreed?” This was surprising to Yehuda Leib.

  Issur scoffed. “I don’t need my father’s permission.”

  Yehuda Leib cocked his head to the side. “But you do need his donkey.”

  Issur grimaced as if this notion were so stupid that it had a physical odor. “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. What about you? What are you doing out here so late?”

  “Someone’s after me,” said Yehuda Leib.

  Issur laughed. “Who’d want anything to do with you?”

  Yehuda Leib shrugged past the insult. “Someone called Avimelekh.”

  Now Issur’s face fell. “Avimelekh?”

  “Yes,” said Yehuda Leib. “Do you know something about him?”

  Issur shook his head. “No,” he said, both too quickly and too loudly.