The Featherbed. Джон Миллер

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      “Your bubbe, my mother, I hardly saw her. She was up before me, baking bread and peeling the potatoes. When I came home from work, she was always in a bad mood. She spoke to my sister Rivkeh sometimes, and some to another sister, but not to me. Me, I was the baby, and another mouth to feed. And I was the last one she thought of with six older and louder children.

      “We didn’t dare complain too much, because my mother wouldn’t hear of it. I remember once Rivkeh complained about her work, and my mother, whose father was a rabbi, told her a story about another rabbi who suffered from ailments known to involve great pain. He suffered without a word. When his doctor asked how he could be so strong, he said he thought of pain as the scrubbing and soaking of the soul in a strong solution. And since he thought of pain in this way, he could not do otherwise than to accept such pain with love and not grumble.”

      Rebecca shook her head. “That’s crazy. Who would think like that?”

      Her mother swatted her. “My mother, that’s who. This was my mother’s crazy philosophy too. Except that I would not say she accepted her pain with love. More like resignation. Once she said to a neighbour, ‘Everyone has his pack of troubles. Sure. But if everyone laid those troubles out in a row, and each person had to choose whose troubles to take, each of us would choose his or her own. At least they would be ours!’

      “Your zayde, he was another story. He complained all the time. He made caps, like your papa, but he was gone a lot to other villages, peddling his wares. When I was eleven years old, your zayde went away to another village and never came back. We all said it must have been a pogrom, or an accident of some kind, but I know my mother wondered if he just ran off to a better life.

      “Sometimes even now when I walk through the streets here in New York, I see someone who looks like him, and I stop in my tracks. It seems crazy, I know, but he could be here as much as he could be anywhere.”

      She stopped talking for a moment. Her eyes were misty. Rebecca looked at her and said softly, “Do you really think Zayde could be alive?”

      Her mother blew her nose with a handkerchief and composed herself. “Who knows?! What does it matter anyway? It was so long ago. Anyway, after he left, that’s when I started working. Until I was fourteen, I went to work without shoes. Everywhere I went it was with bare feet. In the winter, I ran from one house to another with my bare feet in the snow. Finally, at thirteen, I begged my mother for shoes. It took me six months to convince her, but at last I got my first pair.

      “I wanted squeaky shoes with sugar in the soles, so they would make lots of noise like the shoes of some fancy adults in the village. But the shoes with sugar soles cost more, so I got the kind without any noise — not as good, but to me they were like gold anyway. I felt so big, wearing those shoes. My sister said they made me look like a lady.

      “Because I felt big, so I started thinking like a big person. I started thinking I might soon be a woman. And within a few months of that, I was. My mama and papa, they had promised me as a baby to a boy in the village, but he got conscripted into the Russian army when I was five years old and was sent to the Turkish front. Like all the Jews who were sent to the front, he was killed, of course. If you were a Jew in the Russian army, it was a death sentence. Everyone knew that.

      “So you see, Beckeleh, there I was, a child whose parents didn’t want her, whose father disappeared, and who now found herself a woman with no real marriage prospects. I’m not saying my childhood was without happiness. We did laugh and play. Maybe you would say we were too stupid to have the sense to be miserable all the time, I don’t know. But you see, kinderleh, at least I was smart enough to realize that my future was not in that Russian village.”

      Her mother got up from the table and got a log for the stove. She went through to the front bedroom and made sure the window was shut tightly. Then she placed another piece of wood on the floor to hold open the door between the bedroom and the kitchen, so that the heat from the stove would reach the other rooms.

      Rebecca looked at her father, and said, “Russian village? I thought you and Mama were from Poland.”

      “I will explain, sweetheart,” her mother said, sitting back down at the table. “Your papa and I met in Poland, but my village was on the other side of the Russian border. What does it matter anyway? The czars rule Poland. Poland, Russia, it is all the same for the Jews. We spoke Jewish at home, and learned Russian at school. So did your father. Polish, he learned from the villagers where he grew up.

      “When I met your father, at first I spoke Russian to him, because I was ashamed of my Jewish, and I was afraid I wouldn’t understand his — it was full of Polish words and expressions. Later, we taught each other the missing words from each other’s dialect and got used to the different accent.

      “In those days, everyone had a story about someone who had a relative in America. In Kovel, my friend Ilana had an uncle who went to Chicago ten years before, and who wrote back about how a poor Jew could make a fortune in America. Now I realize he never actually said that he made a fortune himself, but then what were we thinking? Our lives were hunger and hardship, we were not so critical. We wanted to believe it was the Golden Land.”

      “When I was eighteen years old, I told my mama that I was going to America. I had no plan, only that I would go first to Kiev, then to Krakow, and find my way from there. When I told my mama, it was the first time I saw her cry. She didn’t try to convince me not to go; she simply got up, and went to the bedroom.

      “She brought out two featherbeds that she had made and gave them to me. She said I would need them for a dowry, so that I could attract a rich husband in America. I knew I could not take them both, and I tried to refuse, but she persuaded me to take one with me.

      “I never thought before that she would care if I gave her a thought after I left, and I certainly never thought she would miss me at all, but when she offered me the featherbeds, I realized that she did as best she could, but when she finished with all her duties, she had nothing left for me.

      “The day I left for Kiev, my mama packed the featherbed, along with my clothes, in a bundle of cloth that she tied to my back. She made a criss-cross with the four corners over my shoulders and under my arms, and tied the knot between my bosoms. Then she turned me around, adjusting the bundle so that it would carry properly and wouldn’t give me a sore back. When I turned to hug her goodbye, I saw she had already started down the road. She walked quickly away, and I could see her shoulders heaving up and down. That was the last time I saw my mother.”

      Rebecca squirmed uncomfortably in her chair, trying to think of what to say. Her mother was breathing deeply with her eyes closed, and her father was stroking her forearm.

      “Beckeleh,” she continued once she had composed herself, “I went to Krakow the day after my nineteenth birthday. It seemed that everybody was on the move. It took me four weeks to get there what with the poor transportation, all the people going here and there, and my stopping to earn some money. When I got to Krakow, I took the money I had saved, and I looked up a man about whom my friend Ilana had told me.

      “I paid him some money to arrange for immigration to America. He took my papers and then took me in a buggy and said we needed to go to the settlement office, but after an hour, when we arrived outside of the city at a big fancy house, I felt something was wrong. He took me by the arm, and we went in the door.

      “Inside, there were other women standing and sitting just here and there, some of them in only underclothing. I remember one of them looked at me with the saddest eyes. Another also looked at me, but she looked at me with worry — from my eyes to the door, and back to my СКАЧАТЬ