Beyond the Pale: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

all the best marriages are. After we had the ceremony, I had my photograph taken on the steps of the baths. Wouldn’t my mother have been surprised! Of course she’s gone and there are no more Jewish farms. We all scattered. If hunger didn’t send us off, the decrees did. The less you ever know about that, the better.” She stopped for a moment, staring at the back of the stove.
    “I like the baths, though. I’ve learned how to read people and how to keep what I know to myself. For instance, I can see you think I’m just going to spoil you, that I have a weak spot for little girls. But I’m not all that good-natured. You’ll have work of your own, Shayne, any minute now, you’ll see. I just want you to get strong again, after your long walk. Everyone thinks I’m a soft touch and you can’t stop what they think about big women any more than you can stop the Jew-haters, but when you know me, you’ll learn how tough I can be. Oh, don’t be scared. I’d never hurt a child like you!”
    I gulped down the fruit in my mouth. When I looked at Pesah, an orange-red light seemed to fringe her body, as if she were an autumn leaf. “I’m not scared,” I said. “I’d like to work.”
    “You would, would you? Plenty of time for that. Do you like peach jam? This is going to be a very good batch. You’re lucky to be living now. When I was a girl there wasn’t so much as a train. I comfort myself with the wonders of steam and engines. And my work. I have garlic, I have onions. This year both the potatoes and the peaches are good. I feed whoever comes.”
     
    I had never been in a bathhouse before. We always washed in the river, and in winter wiped ourselves clean from well-water heated on the stove. The bathhouse was a fairy tale, full of steam and pipes, faucets and pumps, with a hallway of rooms with doors and, of course, the mikve pool at one side of the main room, where women immersed for purification after they bled or gave birth.
    In the courtyard between the Kohns’ house and the baths, a horse moved ceaselessly around a treadmill, pumping water from the river into the bathhouse. There was a little stable on one side of the courtyard and two plum trees shading a garden on the other, with grape vines all around and olive trees beside the rear entrance. Behind the Kohns’ house were another eight fruit trees—peaches and a different kind of plum. This was a whole world to me, and quite enough of a world after the ordeal of walking.
    Pesah had convinced Reb Kohn they should have two horses that could each work a half day, so they might last longer and give more value. When my mother and I arrived, one of the horses was very old and one fairly young. The young one was spotted gray and white and was harnessed for seven hours a day, the old one for six. I could pet the unharnessed one, feed him oats and a little dried fruit, but the one going round and round had to be left alone.
    My mother worked like those horses, though at least she had a bigger circle. She was up before dawn lighting the kitchen fire and pumping water for the house. Then she was cleaning the bathhouse, scrubbing the floors, stoking the fires for steam. Then she was helping the mothers with children undress and washing their towels.
    Pesah was a magician in her own way. She never spoke harshly to anyone, never let anyone whip her horses. She just told my mother how to scrape the benches in the steam room or let her know that the windows needed washing, and my mother understood it was her job. She would work and sweat without stop until Pesah would notice her and say, “Enough for a little bit. Come have some cold soup and bread, a plum maybe you’d like?” And then it would seem as if Pesah was the fountain of relief instead of work.
    And often enough I think she was. I was kept busy from the week after we arrived, cleaning the dirt off potatoes, and later filling buckets in the bathhouse. My mother worked harder than Pesah ever asked, to show