Beyond the Pale: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

her gratitude and ensure our safety. Pesah was usually up before my mother, checking to see if there were enough towels and wood in the baths, checking the cleanliness of the men’s side before the men appeared. She was the last to turn down the lamps at night, after she finished her evening’s sewing.
    She also had a little wine-making concern, plum and grape wines, which both she and Reb Kohn sold to their bathhouse customers. They were always very careful and secretive—God forbid the authorities should know, though I am sure the rabbi blessed it for kosher. Making wine was only supposed to be for rich Russians, but many Jews still kept taverns and had licenses to deal in liquor. Pesah was always giving a bribe to someone, even though she told the police it was part of the business of the bath, something about Jewish ritual she made up to confuse them.
    “You see how they are,” she was instructing me how to be in the world. “They are always suspicious, always wanting an excuse to take what we have away. But they know nothing about us, except what their priests tell them. So you can tell them anything, twist their ignorance in your hand like the braids of a challah loaf, make something from it for yourself. But don’t make a mistake or ever show you’re laughing at them. They don’t want to ever see you smile. Their stupidity has no innocence in it. Ignorance is not like a child—you are a child, my sweet sugar lump, my shayne, and you are curious about everything. Ignorance is the opposite, closed, frightened, spiteful. Russians!”
    Pesah hired Russians sometimes. Usually only the stablehand, who would be the Shabbes goy as well, and sometimes others for outside repairs or heavy digging, but never for inside the baths. I never saw a woman—or a man, even—stronger than her. Proverbs says, “She girds her loins with strength, she strengthens her arms,” and that’s how Pesah was. She ordered flour by the sack and would lift the sacks off the cart as if they were featherbeds, while the men strained with their burdens.
    Pesah fed all the workers a midday meal: the yardhand, four boys from the men’s bath, the barber who did cupping with leeches for the men, three women who came every day for the women’s side and to help with the children, her friend Sadie who did the cupping for women and helped her with cooking, my mother and me. For everyone it was a feast compared to what they had at home. Always black bread and onions and cucumbers, radishes, cold or fried potatoes with salt and oil, olives, fresh fruit, watermelons in season or plum preserves in winter. If it was very cold, maybe a barley soup, and on Tuesdays Pesah usually added herring, sometimes a stew with a little chicken or beef tongue when times were very good. Because on Tuesday, she would say, it was easiest to forget the promise of the sabbath and think that we were nothing more than horses turning around endlessly in our tracks. And besides, it’s written that on a Tuesday, God looked at creation and was pleased. So Tuesday is a lucky day.
    Everyone worked hard and ate as much as they could hold. Reb Kohn hardly ever ate this meal with us. He thought it was both extravagant and demeaning how Pesah fed the workers and ate with them herself. “And isn’t it said that after the destruction of the Temple, the table became the altar of the Jewish people?” was her reasoning. She listened to everything people said at the baths, the women’s arguments, the men’s disputations on the steps, the students Reb Kohn brought home for dinner—and she never forgot anything. He couldn’t make any arguments against anything she did. She was a giant and he was just an ordinary, little man.
    The workers got paid two rubles on Thursdays so they could get what they needed for Shabbes, but I don’t remember Pesah ever paying my mother. To her, we became like her own family. We needed something, she would get it. She would give me a few kopecks every