Rachel Korn | Short Stories

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RACHEL KORN - SHORT STORIES / EARTH

Earth

Translated by Miriam Waddington

It wasn’t easy for Mordecai to find a second wife. Behind his back, people in the surrounding villages whispered that he had worked his first wife to death the same way he had his horses. In the forest nearby there was a deep hollow pit, and almost every spring, when the ploughing was over, Mordecai would harness his team to a new corpse and drag it off to the forest. The next day, on their way to pasture, the cows would stir up the powdery dust and reveal the long narrow furrows made by the ribs of the dead horse.

When Mordecai had the hardest of the spring work behind him, and only part of one hill was left to plough, the last of the three new horses he had bought to work alongside his stallion toppled over in the midst of the ploughing. Mordecai tugged at its tail and put a prod under its stomach. A tremor ran through the chestnut, which lifted its head and rose up on its front legs. But soon its knees buckled, its head dropped to one side and only its large gentle eyes followed the movements of the man who was applying the whip and prod to its dying body. “Come on Chestnut, whoa there, whoa!”

Seeing that nothing was to be done with either kindness or cruelty, Mordecai finished the ploughing with the stallion. The horse now stood on trembling legs while his whistling breath filled the evening air. As Mordecai surveyed his field, a stray smile hovered and was lost in his thick round beard, then he doffed his cap, bowed three times and gave thanks to the stallion in a loud voice: ‘Jancoyen tzi bulanki.’ Three days later Mordecai was dragging the stallion’s corpse into the forest.

Everyone in the surrounding countryside also knew that Mordecai was courting Zisha’s daughter Sima. On Saturdays after supper he went into the village to sit with Zisha in front of his house. He would throw covert glances at Sima, who sat on a bench with her two sisters and their friends-Yona’s daughter, Eli’s son, and the steward’s son. The latter could never keep a job and came home every other month. The boys kept moving closer the girls and touching their new dresses while pretending to test the quality of the material. From time to time Zisha would turn his long thin neck towards the young people and said: “What’s going on there? Why don’t you go chattering some place else? This isn’t a café!” Mordecai understood that Zisha wanted to establish his daughter’s respectability, so shrugging and smiling grudgingly he said: “Oh leave them alone Zisha! They’re like young colts when you turn them loose in their first pasture!”

Ever since Mordecai began his visits, Zisha did not have to worry about ploughing his bit of meadow. Mordecai did it for him. When Zisha pretended to offer to pay, Mordecai smiled and answered blithely, as if every one of his words was bestowing good luck on the whole world, “We’ll settle it all later-with happy celebrations!”

Sima pretended she didn’t understand Mordecai’s glances, which crawled over her body like insects. She never interrupted her work during Mordecai’s visits, but when she saw him approach with his heavy swaying walk, she would quickly put on a fresh blouse or a fancy crocheted shawl. She couldn’t depend on the steward’s son who had been courting her for the last three years without purpose or plan.

But things turned out differently, and not at all as Mordecai had imagined. One evening when he had unharnessed the horses, hi son Yankel came walking towards him on the path behind the stable. Mordecai’s look contained a question about his son’s sudden and unexpected return from the village. Later, when Mordecai came into the house, he found Yankel sitting on a bench with his long legs stretched out in front of him. His hands were in his pockets and he was poking his fingers through the holes in his worn-out trousers:

“Father, I need new pants, I’m ashamed for people to see me.”

He drew his words out as if he wanted to taste the flavour of his father’s future anger ahead of time.

Mordecai’s voice left nothing to the imagination. “Who’s telling you to go where people will see you? Can’t you stay at home like me and work? Who’s going to get up at dawn tomorrow to do the ploughing? Who’s going to drive the horses into the forest and stay there overnight with them? It’s always me, me, me! And when it comes to work-there is no one. All you want is to feed at the trough!”

This time Yankel did not oppose his father or even bother to reply. He simply shrugged his shoulders. Mordecai sensed that there was something in his indifference, something elusive, something odd, that at an inconvenient moment would turn nasty, like a snake on the forest path. Silence descended in the house like a thick mist through which it was difficult to breath. Yankel kept playing with his clothes, as if afraid that his hands might be forced to do some kind if work if he stopped. He straightened his vest and turned to his sister.

“Ita, have you bought a new dress yet? You’ll soon e a bridesmaid.”

Without curiosity, with the hopelessness of one who expects nothing from life, Ita asked: ‘Who are you talking about?’ And while Yankel told her about Zisha’s daughter becoming engaged to the steward’s son, he gave his father a look that repaid him for the torn pants, for being wakened in the middle of the night to go to work, and for all the verbal jabs that had mocked him and shattered his hopes. Mordecai was stunned by the news. His legs suddenly felt heavy, heavy as two logs. He banged his fist on the table and then the choked-back sarcastic laughter that everyone feared filled the house.

‘Ha, ha! You’ll dance too! Dance in your torn pants, you! Your mother’s youngest brat!’ Then he walked to the threshold and slammed the door. A tall shadow flickered outside the window and mingled with the sound of horses’ hooves and the shrill tune of a village song. Mordecai whistled between his teeth as he drove the horses to their far-off pasture in the woods.

III

Now old Kopel began to visit. He and Mordecai whispered in corners, but when Ita came into the room they stopped and Kopel began to tell little stories. Whenever he hit on a juicy phrase, the lines on his face would dissolve into a broad smile.

Because of his visits, Ita would put on a white blouse, but Kopel didn’t even notice. He frowned, and under his thick eyebrows his eyes became narrow slits.

‘It’s hot in your house.’

He turned to Mordecai in order to avoid Ita’s glance as she stubbornly sought out his eyes, reminding him that not so long ago he used to visit here because of her. In those days her mother was still alive. Maybe Ita hadn’t yet forgotten that dark young man, Berl’s son, whom Kopel had once brought to meet her. He could see well enough, even through his squinting eyes, how her hands trembled as she removed the plates from the table, and how she tried to hide the shame and vulnerability of her lumpy, graceless body.

After Kopel had signaled to her father and both had gone outside, Ita took off the white blouse and, along with it, her smile. Her cheekbones stood out under her eyes naked and knotted.

Mordecai’s married daughter, Hassia, must have heard about these goings on, because she stopped by one market day, having gotten a lift on the village elder’s cart. Her hungry brown eyes roamed into every corner as they counted every new pot, every new dish, every egg on the shelf. Her pregnant stomach was just as greedy as her eyes, and so as not to lose any time a new child was added to her family every year.

‘So, father, you raised a daughter, may no harm befall her! Well then, have you thought of arranging a marriage for her?’ And Hassia began to list all the good points of her father-in-law’s son. Maybe fate would still favour Ita with unexpected good luck, maybe even with a rich broad-shouldered cattle merchant. If only her sister hadn’t demanded her inheritance the day after her mother’s death! Two string pearls, a diamond ring and earrings! Mordecai did not even bother to answer Hassia. He simply smiled while his eyes ran around like squirrels in a narrow cage. Ita, who knew-and dreaded-that smile, quickly grabbed the hoe and ran out into the garden. She could hear them quarrelling; her sister’s thin high voice grated like a saw against the hard substance if an unbending will, while her father’s bass voice sounded like the heavy blows of an axe.

Through the tangled mish-mash of incoherent words Ita realized that her fate and her hopes for the future were retreating further and further from possibility. Suddenly Hassia ran out of the house, her face flaming, holding a bag in her hand. She fell on Ita’s neck with long wailing cries. ‘Oh our poor mother! We have no mother, our mother’s gone!” Her sister’s tears tickled Ita’s neck and she was revolted by the sweetish odour of mould which came from Hassia’s black knitted shawl.

The two sisters had not talked to each other lately. Ita was longing to ask what Hassia’s brother-in-law looked like. Perhaps a bit like Berl’s son? But Hassia quickly bade her sister good-bye and hurried off to the village to rent a cart to take her home. As she was leaving she turned around once more and said, loud enough for her father to hear: ‘You can tell him that I’m going to send my husband, Chaim, to speak to him, and if he refuses to give you a dowry my husband knows what to do!’ Ita knew that Chaim was afraid to raise his voice in his own home and that he wouldn’t dare come to Mordecai to collect his mother-in-law’s jewellery. She gazed after her sister until she had disappeared behind the trees. Then she began turning the earth, breaking it into lumps with such force and energy that as it crumbled it spurted around her feet like a heavy black rain. When she stopped digging for a moment and straightened her back, she suddenly felt such a heaviness in her knees, such a weariness through her whole body, that she thrust the spade into the hard ground and leaned against a tree. Never had the young grass smelled so fresh as today. Its fragrance assaulted her nostrils with a moist sweetness that made her feel as dizzy as if she had been drinking wine. She dropped to the ground and stretched out. In every pulse she suddenly sensed the rhythm of the ripening, awakening earth as it answered the wild beating of her own heart. A sob, passionate and poignant as the mating call of water birds in the short summer nights, escaped her. Then her body dissolved and her spirit was released into a quiet weeping.

On this day Mordecai awoke earlier than usual. When he led his horses out to pasture the first wind of dawn parted the mists between day and night. The money that Mordecai had readied for the squire, which he kept under his pillow, burned a hole in his mind and wouldn’t let him sleep. The money reminded him that the field he worked day and night was not his own, and because of a loophole in his contract he might have to move and abandon everything. Mordecai remembered that only a few years ago a dense forest had covered his plot, shutting the sun out on the sunniest day. He remembered when the squire first began cutting down that forest. At the beginning only coarse brush grew there but soon the squire found a tenant to watch over it. The next morning the tenant appeared with a waxen face and, crossing himself, said the following: ‘I wouldn’t stay there another night for any money. There’s something evil in that place . . . It’s unclean.’ From that time on ever everyone in the village had avoided the logged-over forest, even in daylight.

The clearing was quite far from the squire’s estate, and before his peasants came with their horses and ploughshares the sun was already high in the sky. Not having a foreman over them, the peasants didn’t hurry, and every half hour they stopped working, lit their cigars, and told stories about Preussen in Germany, where half the village intended to immigrate. The whole business scarcely merited the squire’s interest. At one point he had Mordecai brought before him.

‘I want to rent that site, that clearing behind the forest. Find me a tenant who understands how to run a farm and who know how to pay on time.’

‘Well squire, it’s going to be hard.’

‘Why hard?’ The squire jumped up from his chair.

‘Well, people say there is something frightening there.’

‘Nonsense, the devil’s not going to grab them.’

‘Well, I’ll ask, I’ll ask around, squire. And how much of the harvest will you take?’

‘A tone and a half of corn. Just to be rid of it.’

‘A ton and a half of corn or wheat for a distant field like that isn’t exactly cheap. Not everybody will want to rent such a small holding.’

Mordecai thought about the matter all day. The idea of renting the field and the old clearing gave him no peace. He busied himself with his pots of sour cream, figuring and figuring the whole time. He didn’t even hear what his wife, sitting in her corner, was saying to him. He was tired of his rickety old wagon, tired of driving around to the houses of the rich day in day out with a rusty milk can and a litre measure. More than once, in winter, his fingers had frozen to the metal of the can and his skin had peeled down to the raw flesh. Now Mordecai began to feel that all those years when he had been delivering milk, in the deepest corner of his heart, there had been the longing for some land of his own, like that farm they used to have at home, before his father had wasted it all in litigation with his own brother.

Mordecai went ahead and rented the clearing from the squire for a period of twelve years, even though his wife filled every corner of the house with her wailing, bemoaning her face to all the neighbors.

‘Where’s he dragging me to? Where? How does he expect me to live in the backwoods, where you never see another living soul? And besides, they whisper that there’s a …’

And she would put her hand up to her mouth, choking back the words. ‘May it wander without rest through the desolate forests and fields.’

She even sent Reb Yanzia’s wife to try to talk him out of it. But in vain did Zissel of the wide hips make the whole floor shake. Mordecai had answered her quietly and reasonably while smiling his mocking little smile-the smile that was so familiar to his family, who knew how much anger was hidden in it.

‘Since you have taken the trouble to come, Zissel, sweetheart, tell my Hannah from me that I, for one, am not staying here. Let her do what she likes. Let her stay here and deliver the milk herself to those rich little madams in town, why not?’

No one had slept that first night in their new home. It was the end of March, and a northwest wind kept rattling the roof and the eaves. Part of the time it sounded like people in bare feet cavorting in the attic. The children dragged themselves around all day, pale, tired, and listless. They kept their eyes on the sun, jealously hoarding the hours before dark. His wife had gone about her chores red-eyed, lamenting her fate and that of the children. But Mordecai had refused to budge:

‘I’m staying here, and that’s that.’

And he had his way. And not only when it came to staying. On the meager, neglected plot of land he had cultivated twelve acres with one pair of horses. In the barn he had five cows and two calves. Mordecai begrudged himself a single free minute, and the same was true for his wife, his children, and his horses.

‘For the time being I’m a tenant; I have nothing of my own. When I own land we’ll all be able to take it easy, and even eat challah on weekdays.’

The peasants, on their way to church from one village to the next, stopped to look at his fields. They pulled the broad green ribbons of wheat through their fingers, saying:

‘When a field falls into the hands of a good owner, it rewards his hard work with interest. Doesn’t it brother?’

The Jews in the village began to whisper among themselves that Mordecai was planning to buy the whole field from the squire, and that he had already saved up enough to buy half of it.

‘If a man doesn’t allow himself even the smallest luxury and lives poorer than the poorest peasant, why shouldn’t he have money? But just wait and see. His daughter will be an old maid. He’ll never give her a dowry.’ With such talk those who envied him consoled themselves.

Whenever Mordecai was at home he kept fingering the money in his breast pocket, and although he spent more and more time rejoicing at the rustling of his paper notes, he still needed something to which eh could attach his anger.

Ita had guessed that on this day her father was taking his installment payment to the squire, and she did her best to avoid him. But he stopped in front of her in the corner where she was churning butter while chasing away the flies.

‘Lazer-Nota is wondering why you bring him so little butter and cheese these days.’

Ita knew that whatever she said now would only serve to feed his anger. Nevertheless she tried to answer. ‘Father, you know that two of our cows are about to calve.’

‘That’s just an excuse. Everyone eats too much, and there’s no housewife looking after things. You’ll make me go begging in my old age! I know that’ what you want-you and your brother! He’s busy in the village chasing girls and playing cards! Don’t you ever dare to let him into this house, do you hear?’

He took the churn from Ita's hands, and as id it might pacify him, began turning it. From time to time he shook the churn and listened to its contents as if the fragments of butter, were calling to him. Afterwards he removed the butter, washed off the whey, and locked it in a cupboard, hiding the key in the purse where he kept his money. Only then was he at peace. Satisfied with himself at last, he took his stick, and with a heavy tread started out on the most difficult road of all, the road that led to the squire’s where he would have to pay the semi-annual installment of his rent.

One time Kopel, the matchmaker, stayed overnight. Ita prepared a bed of straw for him in the middle of the house, and all night long the old man groaned and muttered so that no one else could get a wink of sleep. Several times he woke up, rubbed his eyes and called to Mordecai. ‘Reb Mordecai, reb Mordecai, is it time yet?’

At dawn while the dew lay on the ground like net of sparkling spider webs, Mordecai harnessed the horses and drove off with Kopel. No one knew where he was going or for how long, but when Ita went to take the little mirror off the shelf, she saw that her father’s phylacteries were missing.

One the same day Yankel learned from a cattle dealer of a neighboring village that his father was visiting Chaim-Leib, and that Kopel was arranging a match with his daughter. Yankel came home that evening and reported to Ita with an I-told-you-so-smile.

‘Didn’t I tell you, Ita not to work so hard, not to kill yourself0none of this is for you!’ That devil will take it all! Didn’t I wan you?’

Ita shook her head in disbelief. ‘Go on-people like to talk. If you aren’t busy working there’s always some nonsense to fill your time.’ All the same she decided to air out her mother’s things. But the cupboard was locked and the key, which was usually kept in an old bucket beside the stove was gone.

Three days later, after Ita had finished milking the cows, Mordecai drove up with his new young wife. She was sitting in the back seat of the wagon, her hands folded in her lap. Mordecai unharnessed his horses who were champing at the bit, and asked: ‘Why don’t you come down off the wagon, Bailtsche?’

Bailtsche remained seated, taking in the freshly patched roof and the forest surrounding the house and field like a black frame that separated it from the rest of the world. The rays of the setting sun swept over the stalks of wheat and gilded their heads. A greenish mist of pollen from the blooming corn hung over the fields, and there was no human sound anywhere. Everything around seemed dead. Bailtsche shuddered, The Turkish shawl slid down from her shoulders, and her narrow, freckled little face peered out from under the black headscarf like a newly hatched egg in a bird’s nest.

Mordecai held out his hand to help Bailtsche off the wagon, but soon he dropped it, feeling ashamed. He imagined that his daughter was spying on him from a crack in the stable door.

After Mordecai’s marriage, Yankel stayed at home more. There was more to ear, his stepmother lit the stove three times a day, and his father stopped nagging and urging him to go to work. But Mordecai himself worked twice as hard, as if his strength had been renewed. He ploughed both fields and the orchard, and cut and stacked the wheat by himself.

Ita’s eyes under her sparse, colourless lashes were now always ringed with red. Since her father’s marriage she had begun to sleep on a straw pallet in the lean-to beneath the ladder that led to the attic. Very often she was awakened during the night by the frightened fluttering of hens. And often too in the morning she had to brush the hens’ dirt from her face.

Bailtsche soon grew accustomed to her new home. She had been used to living in a different house every few months when she was a maid, and with a housemaid’s instinct she soon knew where to find everything. Not once had she asked Ita for anything; right from the beginning she had sensed a bitter enemy in Ita.

She made a face at what she found in the small brown cupboard-four flowered bowls, several tin plates, tall iron pots, and wooden spoons. Every Sabbath she insisted on meat and challah, for Bailtsche had taken on some of the well-fed solidity of wealthy Jewish homes, and she scorned the mean and stingy counting of every mouthful. Even now, Bailtsche secretly added extra fat to her own plate of soup, and often devoured a chunk of cheese in the orchard when no one was looking. The secrecy added an extra flavour.

Sometimes she was seized with a longing for people and the life of the town, as well as with a nameless fear. Her father would often stop by on market days on his way home. He never ceased to praise Mordecai while eating a bowl of cottage cheese with sour cream:

‘You’ve got yourself a diamond of a husband, so I look after him! You’re hardly worth a man like that, I swear. May I die on the spot if you are…’

Bailtsche was ashamed of her father and thanked G-d when the old man left. His whisky-laden breath reminded her of her childhood, and her mother’s wild screams when her drunken husband beat her. But even the4 strongest whiskey couldn’t drown out the smell of dead animals; a smell that imbued all his clothing, his hair and his hands. Chaim-Leib was known as the best skinner of hides in the district. He could skin an animal with a single cut of the knife, and he never refused a job. That way he had all the more money to spend on whiskey.

He admired everything in his son-in-law’s house, and his eyes always lighted on something he had immediate need of. Sometimes it was a frayed bit of rope, sometimes an odd piece of lumber, a pound of salt, or a bag of feed for his chickens.

After the old man’s visit Yankel would puff out his cheeks, half close his eyes, and imitate Chaim-Leib’s oafish, stumbling way of talking. And Ita would ask Bailtsche, making sure that her father could hear, if she hadn’t seen the hammer with the broken handle, or the little ladder from the stable, or the bundle of flax.

‘After all, no thieves come here,’ Mordecai would say crossly, ‘so where are the things? Why don’t you take better care of them?’ Ita wouldn’t take her eyes off Bailtsche for a second, until the latter could feel her face reddening. But she would merely turn towards the window and say, ‘Look Mordecai, it’s clouding over.’

VII

The fields unfolded in waves of ripening wheat, as if rivers brimming with sun had flooded the world.

The old people in the village could not remember such a plentiful harvest. In the meadows people bowed as if to the gods before the ripening bread. The sickles, like the silver crescent, glittered and were extinguished among the thick stands of wheat. The sweetish smell of dry straw mingled with the coolness of the earth while the sun like a heated fireball warmed the bent heads of the wheat. Peoples’ bodies dripped with sweat that glued their shirts to their skin and darkened their vision.

Suddenly the news, in the red headlines of distant cities, surrounded the fields with a bloody border. Somewhere someone had started a war. People straightened their backs and searched the skied expecting to find a dark stain shaping the single ominous word: war.

All the more powerfully did the sickles cut through the wheat, and all the louder did the scythes ring in the hands of the peasants. Wives began preparing parcels for the road, and the village chief sent out call-up notices to all the healthy young men in the area.

These days Yankel felt elated. It was as if some long-wished for happiness had finally come his way and opened a new road to the world. He looked at the village head’s letter and read it over at least ten times, laughing with pleasure all the while. When he left home, no one came to the train to see him off, though Ita shed a few tears. Bailtsche waited for him in the orchard, behind the fence, with a small parcel hidden under her shawl.

‘Yankel, go in good health. This is from Golda. She came this morning while you were still asleep, but she couldn’t wait. She’s afraid of your father. Yankel, what message shall I give her?’

He gritted his teeth as if biting on a hard kernel, and waved his hand.

‘Say nothing. It’s better that way. I’ll never come back, whatever happens.’

VIII

Before there was time to harvest the crop and store it in the granaries, the hooves of Cossack horses trampled the fields. The nights held up the starry sky with fiery posts. During the day gray ribbons of smoke from burning houses were wafted by every whim of the advancing wind. People fled into the neighboring forest with crying children in their arms, dragging their cows on ropes behind them. The village emptied as if everyone had died. Chickens were locked in the barns with water and corn in wooden bowls, unchained dogs ran wild with their tongues hanging out, not knowing what to do in their new-found freedom. The sick dragged themselves from their beds and followed the crowd, groaning all the while. Only two people remained in the village-the crippled Hrinka in his daughter-in-law’s house, and Mendl Sodevnik’s wife who had gone out of her mind from fear. She tore off her clothes and ran naked and shrieking through the crown crying children, ‘May the devil take Mendl, your father, you bastards!’

Her words like bandages ripped from a wound that has festered for years. All the helplessness of her prematurely withered body, which had been forced to bring forth a child every year, was now transformed into a wild hatred for the while world. But primarily for her husband and children. The neighbors chained her to the wall and took away the bawling children.

Mordecai was the last to enter the forest and he had to hunt for a long time before the trees saw a heavy cloud of dust advancing towards them, with the occasional gleam of a bayonet. People held their breath, and quickly bound up the mouths of the cattle. Mothers forced open their infants’ mouths and sprayed milk from their breasts into them to silence their crying. Every leaf that stirred in the wind, every sound of a dry twig crackling pierced their ears and sent their blood pounding.

Only when the last of the dust had settled on the leaves, covering them in gray fuzz, and the sound of horses’ hoove

s had been swallowed up by distance, only then did people push the branches aside and stretch their cramped bodies.

‘Did you see?’

‘Cossacks.’

‘How many can there be?’

‘A thousand!’

‘Go on, what do you know? You’re only good at peeling potatoes for your mother! Ask me, I’m an old soldier! I cut my teeth on Franz Josef’s army bread! I say there weren’t more than three hundred.’

The animals were unmuzzled and the horses sneezed; the cows opened their mouths in wide yawns, licking their faces with their hard tongues, while the branches shook with the children’s held-back crying.

Hrinka’s youngest suddenly appeared, out of breath, and covered with sweat.

‘Father, Yantek who lives under the hill is coming here.’

‘Which Yantek?’

‘The one who went to work on the Krisavitz estate.’

The lad ran forward to greet the newcomer and hung on his coat.

Yantek wiped the sweat from his face and looked around him with wonder.

‘What’s going on here?’

‘Where are you coming from that you don’t even know the Russians have invaded us? A while ago three hundred Cossacks rode by with their bayonets.’

‘So what? You have something to fest? Let the rich squires and the Jews worry. I’ve just come from Krisavitz-the Cossacks arrived their yesterday. Did they kill ay of you or what? The truth is the landowners have all fled like poisoned rats. Not a single one stayed. But the Russians, good fellows that they are, left their reinforcements to keep our girls company.’

The Young men broke into laughter, but the older ones frowned and answered slowly: ‘It seems Yantek was tight.’

But it was nightfall before people began returning to their homes. Mordecai remained in the neighboring pasture with his wife, daughter, and cattle waiting to see how things would turn out. But he couldn’t beat to be away from his own place for long, so at dawn when Ita awoke she saw that her father was gone. She hunted for him everywhere and woke her stepmother: ‘Auntie, Auntie, where is father?’

But Bailtsche groaned crossly and turned over. Ita hurried through the fields to their homestead. Even from a distance she could see her father’s massive frame. The lonely figure was walking slowly. His booted tefs, knee-deep in ripe oats, stubbornly dug their heels into the earth so as not to yield to the habit and rhythm of the scythe. His arms described large half circles in the air.

Mordecai managed to harvest his late oats. The hard ripe heads of the oats rang like the little silver bells on spice boxes at the least whiff of wind.

Somewhere behind the forest the first rifle shots were heard, as if some wild bloodthirsty beat had been let loose and was attacking the morning.

Ita bound the oats into sheaves and in the wake of her path a trail of low-lying stocks raised their disheveled blond heads.

Morecai walked home from the village on the path that bordered the forest. All the talk of the elders in the village chief’s house had intoxicated him more than the strongest whiskey. Under his heavy shadows crept out of the forest, and, like the hands of a blind man, touched a different part of the meadow each time. The forest that just a few minutes before had risen like a green wave of tree tops was now bending to reveal the naked wounds of its chopped-down trunks, and the first frost silvered the beds of sprouting winter wheat. Soon, Mordecai thought, his sweat-soaked field would belong to him, he would own it all. He wouldn’t have to work his horses to death in order to make the earth yield enough for both him and the squire. A good thing he hadn’t tried to marry off his daughter. If he had given her a dowry he wouldn’t have been able to buy even an inch of land. He would have had to leave this place, to rattle his bones once more on the broken-down cart, delivering cans of milk to the villagers. Someone else would have taken his place and sown the fields that he had ploughed and manured with so much effort.

By the time Mordecai reached his house the lamp was already lit. Bailtsche was just raking some baked potatoes out of the coals and blowing on them as she tossed them from hand to hand.

‘Why so late?’ she asked without raising her eyes from the fire.

Mordecai seated himself opposite the open kitchen door. The reflection of the fire licked his boots like the ref tongue of a dog. He answered her in his thick heavy voice: ‘The squire’s wife wants to sell the fiel. She sent the steward to the village.’

Ita was sitting at the table nehind the lamp plucking chickens. She sat quietly without talking. That afternoon when no one was in the house she had searched for the white handkerchief. She had found it under Bailtsche’s pillow. All four corners were knotted around some folded diapers and lace-trimmed under-shirts. She had held the undershirts in her hands, staring at them, while a cold dread crawled up her back. Lace, she thought, where does she get the money to buy lace? He must surely give it to her. He…and Ita suddenly remembered how her father had refused to give her mother the money to buy shoelaces for the children. In order to buy them her mother had secretly had to sell a few eggs to the village shop.

The diapers burned her hands and still she could not put them down. The unknown, someone else’s secret, that had intruded so suddenly into her life sent the blood to her throat, to her large mouth, to her lumpy cheeks. Now Ita began to observe Bailtsche closely, to notice her slow movements, her freckled face. She would have liked to insinuate herself inside the serene smile that momentarily flared Bailtsche’s nostrils as she looked into Mordecai’s eyes with the confidence of a wife who knows she is loved.

‘Well, that’s good-it mneanse we can leave here soon, so let her sell it,’ Bailtsche said,

‘What are you saying? I intend to buy the field myself.’

‘If you want to buy it, then buy. I won’t stay here in the middle of the forest in times like these. A person can be killed here without even a rooster crowing.’

Ita read uncertainty in her father’s facem and uncertaintly that she did not recognize. Her father, who had worked so hard in order to have his own piece of land in his old age, was now ready to ruin everything for Bailtshce’s sake. Bailtsche, the intruder, the lazybones who didn’t even know how to hold a spade or a hoe! Ita’s face, with its white eyelashes, trembled.

She rose from the bench, her eyes narrowed into slits: ‘Father, don’t listen to anyone, and buy! If you have the money, then don’t wait until someone else buys. It will be your own, and wherever you step, it will be your own-‘

. Bailtsche bent her head as if to avoid an impending blow. Suddenly she felt that the ugly stepdaughter wanted to chain her to the twenty-acre field forever, wanted to enslave her to the land just as she herself was enslaved, just as Mordecai was, just as the tree on the roadside was. And she burst into helpless childish crying.

‘So I’ll go away by myself.’

Not Ita could no longer contain herself: ‘If you find it so awful here, go on! No one is forcing you to stay. Go back where you came from-be a housemaid!

Mordecai banged his stick against the bench and said in Polish, ‘That’s my business!’

For him to speak Polish was the sign of deepest anger. It was a thousand times worse than his smile.

‘With the money I’ll do what I likem and the devil take all of you!’

Ita’s head bent still lower and the veins on her neck tightened and throbbed with envy and hatred.

From early morning on the jays and crows chattered wildly. Their reslessness foretold snow. The wind lay coiled and tense along the valleys like an animal r3ady to spring. Later it spiraled into the air, knocking off the dried leaves still left on the trees from the summer.

It pulled the clouds together like balls of cotton wool,m trying to stuff them into the space that separates sky and earth. In this the wind succeeded, for soon only a narrow crack between heaven and earth remained-a crack into which the short winter day now crawled to die.

Three men came riding out of the forest dragging several cows tied together with rope. The first to spot them was Bailtsche. ‘They look like men from the squire’s estate,’

Ita stepped outside and returned with a blanched face and ashen lips.

‘Father, the Russians are here again, and they’ve taken our cows.’

Mordecai fastened the belt of his trousers. ‘They have nothing to take from me. I’m not one of your squires, and you women, be quiet!’

They heard the horses on the icy ground beside the well. Two Russian soldiers dismounted and banged on the door with their rifle butts while their three companions guarded the cows who pawed the ground anxiously and, sensing the closeness of the barn, made yearning, homesick noises.

The house seemed to grow smaller. It filled up with the smell of cowhide, sweat, and a vague dull fear.

Mordecai greeted them. ‘Good evening! I suppose you’re lost, eh? Not surprising in this drizzly fog.’

One of the soldiers, with a fresh bluish sabre cut along one side of his face, burst into loud laughter. ‘Just look at him, the clever little Jew! No, we’re not lost, sweetheart, in fact we’ve come especially to pay you a visit, and it’s our commander who sent us.’

The whiskers of the other Cossack danced for joy.

‘In that case, please sit.’

‘No, you’d better lead us to the stable.’

Mordecai’s body stiffened.

‘;Are you coming or should we kick you over there with our boots?’

Ita got up from the bench and threw on her mother’s old jacket. ‘Come on, father!’

Her eyes were still and their blue-grey nakedness was reminiscent of the frozen little rivers in winter, but her hands trembled as they buttoned the torn jacket. She went ahead, and the Cossacks followed to make sure that no one was hiding. The door to the house remained open behind them.

Bailtsche cowered on the bench. The sharp cold from outside poured a thick white mist whih crept closer and closer to her fear-paralysed legs. She couldn’t mve. Suddenly her ears were assaulted by a knotted tangle of voices. She wiped the film from one of the panes and pressed her face to the window. The two soldiers on horseback were now beside the stable and holding a rope tied to her two finest cows. Mordecai kept pulling on the rope, until one of the soldiers took the rope end and whipped it across his hands. The blow raised a thick purple welt but Mordecai did not let go of the cows. The strain outlined the veins in his neck and forehead.

‘These are my cows, my livelihood! I won’t give them up. Go to the squire-he has stables full of cattle!’

The soldiers took down their rifles and for a second the metal gleamed thin and sharp as knives.

‘For the last time, are you going to let go of the cows or not?’

Mordecai paled. Pearly drops of sweat rolled down his face, but he stood his ground. ‘Kill me if you like, but I won’t give them up. They’re mine.’

Bailtsche watched Ita run forward and seize the soldier’s arm. Then a r4ed fog veiled her eyes and hid everything.

Neither did she hear it when the raw healthy laughter of the soldier shattered the strained and breathless silence like a bullet.

‘Look at him-this little Jew, this nothing, is opposing the Russian might! If it wanted to, the Russian might could pulverize him, squash him under its heel like a worm, right now, on the spot!’

He laughed as heartily as a child. His laughter was like fresh water rinsing his throat.

And maybe he too would have looked and felt powerless if in his hime he had been confronted by German soldiers?

‘Well, come along with us to out commander-maybe if you beg and plead he’ll let you keep one of your cows. I’ll tell him you’re a poor Jew. I can’t do any more than that. I was ordered to bring th cows, and that’s that.’

When Mordecai came into the house to fetch his sheepskin coat, Bailtsche was still sitting where he had lft her, her arms and legs stiff and lifeless.

‘Bailtsche, what’s wrong, Bailtsche?’

She didn’t answer. Her lips were pressed tight.

Mordecai called Ita in. ‘Rub her chest and temples with snow.’

He himself poured water into her mouth, forcing it between her clenched teeth, until she opened her eyes.

‘Bailtsche, darling, do you feel better now?’

She saw that Mordecai was dressed for travel in his sheepskin and that the flaps of his cap were pulled down over his ears; her fingers clutched his arm.

‘Where are you going, Mordecai?’

‘I’ll be back soon. I’m just going to get my cows, that’s all.’

‘Don’t go Mordecai, don’t go! I beg you, wait till tomorrow morning.’

‘By tomorrow all that will be left is their hides.’

‘I’m so afraid, so afraid-‘ Her voice was full of tears.

‘Go on, don’t be silly. Don’t act like a child. You won’t be alone, Ita is here.’ He ran out quickly and kept running on the path through the orchard to catch up with the soldiers who had his cows.

The two women were alone in the house. The lamp threw a patchwork of light over the uneven plastered wall. It was so quiet that you could heat the lamp’s wick buzzing as the oil burned.

The wind was howling outside, and it seemed to Ita that she could hear someone crying. She opened her eyes wide and all her sense were on the alert as if to penetrate the surrounding darkness. Soon it began to snow and the hard white grains bounced off the window panes with a glassy ring. Ita’s eyes could not break through that thick white blanket, but she could hear a long, drawn-out-wailing. She threw on her jacket and went out, carrying the stable lantern.

She returned with a small calf in her arms. When she put it down the callf stood uncertainly on the threshold blinking its round white-ringed eyes. Only when Ita approached the kitchen did the claf follow her on its helpless, splayed-out lefs, beginning to wail all over again. Its lonely, orphaned call reached out across the distant fields to the footsteps of the mother cow, footsteps that had long since been covered over by the snow.

Ita lifted a pot of warm whey from the stove and offered it to the calf. But the calf wouldn’t touch it and kept tossing its head back. Then Ita dipped her hand into the liquid and put her fingers into the calf’s mouth. The calf nuzzled the spread-out fingers and began to suck vigorously. Ita patted its soft trembling body with one hand and laid her head against its warm side. Suddenly a wild inhuman cry broke the silence. It came from Bailtshce. She lay curled up on the bed. The shawl that she had seized to warm her shivering body had slipped down and was hanging from the edge of the bed like the broken wing of a bird. Her belly rose and fell with short jerky movements; it breathed by itself like a separate creature. Ita sat with her hands folded in her empty lap as if to rest them before they were forced to scrub the small white diapers and the dark blood from Baitsche’s sheets.

Bailtsche’s broken cries stabbed Ita like so many knives while her hands patted her own narrow hips wityh vindictive pleasure.

Actually this giving birth was really Ita’s. It was here on this bed that she hould now have been lying, that she should have been fiving birth to her child. And maybe the dark-haired bridegroom from the next village would have been standing beside her…but she wouldn’t have been shrieking and carrying on like Bailtsche, that intruder. She would have accepted each new pain with joy, knowing it was bringing th ripened fruit closer to the edge of the opening womb. She would have dug her fingernails into the hard wooden frame of the bed and smiled. Just then her head fell to one side and landed on the table, rousing her from her trance.

Bailtsche was now lying stretched out taut as a violin string, with her legs pushing with all her strength against the foot of the bed, readying herself for the next onslaught of pain.

Her tense belly had dropped like a sack with the child’s heavings. From time to time the child seemed to be seized by a fit of unexpected shivering. Bailtshce lay there with her eyes wide open, listening to her body, waiting for the next pains which came with merciless regularity, burrowing into her back and thighs, sharp, pointed, and drawn-out.

‘Ita, come closer, I want to tell you something.’

And when Ita bent over the bed with suppressed disgust, Bailtsche whispered in an ingratiating tone: ‘I beg you-take the lantern and go to the village. Call-you know who to call-the baby is coming too soon-maybe because of what happened.’

Ita sensed the strange woman’s shame. It ran through her mind that she should have felt the shame befor3e, with her father. They used to kiss even in the daytime, enough to make people talk. That was all very well, Bailtsche had taken her mother’s jewellery, had eaten up the family’s hard-earned savings. She had bought lace to trim baby shirts, but when it came to her, Ita, they had refused to let her marry because they didn’t want to give a dowry. And now everything would really fall apart. Because of Bailtsche, her father wouldn’t buy the plot of land from the squire, he would move to town instead, and spend his old age playing the fool with a gaggle of children. Yes, yes, and she, Ita would have to go into service, to take the place of Bailtsche, just as Bailtsche had taken hers.

She answered her stepmother with a whisper, full of an odd tenderness. ‘Go yourself, auntie. I won’t.’

Only then, when Bailtsche looked into her stepdaugher’’s eyes did the meaning of those words become clear to her. There wasn’t a hint of compassion in those eyes. Bailtshce’s body was now covered in a cold sweat. With her last bit of strength she got off the bed, but her legs, filled with pain like two brimming buckets, gave way. She crawled to Ita on all fours: ‘Ita darling, I beg you to go-I can’t bear it any longer; go get old Hanka, Ita take pity on me, Ita, it’s tearing me apart, I wish I was dead-ph mother!’

She began to kiss Ita’s feet feverishly. Only when Bailtsche’s next pains came was Ita able to free herself. She grabbed a shawl and went out of the house.

Bailtsche was left all alone in the half-darkened room. A new fear inserted itself between her ribs, and dissolving, spread slowly through her whole body. Her heart wept and she was nauseated by the smell of manure that rose from Ita’s barn-soaked boots. She dragged herself to the door. The cold icy air embraced her shivering body. She took a handful of snow and began to eat it greedily. Supporting herself against the wall, she slowly got up. Along her legs she felt a hot sticky flow, and when she looked down she saw that the snow at her feet was red.

It had stopped snowing, and from under the knotted clouds a pale stained moon swam out. Ita was nowhere to be seen. She began to call Ita’s name. Her voice fell into the surrounding white silence and was drowned. Suddenly her eye fell on footsteps in the freshly fallen snow along the length of the orchard. The footsteps were black and definite. Bailtsche’s knees grew weak with unexpected hope. It meant that Ita had gone for help after all! Her eyes followed the footsteps to the crossroads by the river. Then they opened wide, and grew dark with primitive pain. At the crosasroads the footsteps were thick, all in one place, as if the personwho had walked there had thought better of it, stopped, hesitated, and returned. From the crossroads the footsteps led in one direction-back into the forest. And now she could see Ita walking fast, almost running. The wins filled her shawl, spreading it open like black wings that carried her high, high into the air.

‘Ita, Ita!’

Bailtsche called despairingly. She choked on her own voice. The veins in her throat were tight almost to burstin. For a second she imagined that Ita could hear her, that she had stopped to look back…

But soon Ita’s head sunk down into her shoulders and she diappeared among the trees. Only her footsteps were lef to darken the endless white of the fields.

Bailtsche’s knees gave way. She lay with her eyes closed. From time to time her blood reddened the snow beneath her.

Translated by Miriam Waddington

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