Broken Song Read Online Free PDF Page B

by the tsar?
    Rachel crawled onto his lap. She seemed to know that he was thinking about the stars. Perhaps she had watched him looking through the pine boughs of the sukkah roof.
    “Up! Up!” She pointed at the roof. She wantedhim to hold her up so she could touch the branches. “Up! Up!”
    Reuven raised her in his arms and let her touch the pine branches. She reached out and then suddenly she stopped and pointed her finger right through the bristles.
    “Moon … piece of moon,” she said quite clearly.
    They could hardly believe their ears.
    “What’s that, Rachel?” Reuven asked. “What did you just say? What’s that?” He pointed his own finger right through the branches at the sliver of moon sailing overhead.
    “Moon … piece of moon,” she repeated.
    They all exclaimed with wonder. The child was barely sixteen months old. She had not just spoken the word
moon
but was so smart that she recognized it as a piece of the moon and not the whole.
    “Maybe you’ll grow up to be an astronomer!” Shriprinka cried with delight, and chucked Rachel under her chin. “Or a mathematician.”
    Reuven was excited too, until it suddenly dawned on him that she would be none of these things if she grew up in Russia. There was no place for Jewish astronomers, let alone women who were Jewish astronomers, mathematicians, or writers.
In fact
, Reuven thought as he raised her once more to touch the roof,
what is the point of growing up at all in Russia
? His uncle had been right.
    That was the night when Reuven stopped playing his violin.

SEVEN
    IT HAD taken the rest of autumn for the calluses on Reuven’s string fingers to soften, then disappear almost entirely. Now it was winter. A stinging cold had set in, and as Reuven went out to the woodpile with a wheelbarrow to load up with logs for the stove, he had to blow on his hands to keep them warm. Had the calluses, he wondered, insulated his skin? It was certainly true that the wood felt rougher. He paused and looked at his hands. They were no longer the hands of a violinist. Odd, he thought, how those thick patches of rough skin that made it so easy for him to finger the strings with just the right pressure could vanish, and yet the music still lingered in his head.
    In the beginning, his family questioned him. But Reuven was unwavering. Soon they stopped asking him if or when he would play again. It didn’t matter, however. For they didn’t have to say anything out loud. They asked a thousand times a day in their own way. His father would pull out his watch every afternoon at the time Reuven had gone to Herschel’s for his lesson and then look from it, as if to say,
Why are you still here
?
    His mother, who was not exactly musically gifted, had taken to humming disjointed snatches of the pieces she had remembered Reuven practicing. And Shriprinka,more on key, would also hum. Rachel had taken a more direct approach. She toddled over to where Reuven’s violin case rested on a shelf and pounded her chubby fist on it, then looked at Reuven. He merely walked over and, feeling every eye in the room on him, put it on a higher shelf.
    “Not now,” he had said firmly to his baby sister. The unspoken word
When
? seethed in the air.
    “All right, enough is enough!” Herschel stood at the foot of Reuven’s bed. Herschel’s father, Reb Itchel, was there as well. Reuven blinked. It was late. The sun was up.
    “What’s he doing here?” Reuven asked, nodding toward Reb Itchel.
    “You need all the help you can get, young man. I’ll bring the cursed tsar in here if I have to, in order to get you out of bed.” He held up the violin, which Reuven had not touched in several months. “You see this? This is what you were born to do. This is your gift. You must play.”
    Then Reb Itchel muttered an old Yiddish phrase. “
Az me redt tsu im, is azoy vi me redt tsu a toyte vantz
.” Talking to him is like talking to a dead bedbug.
    “Oh, you’re some help, Papa! You’re supposed