The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

and wriggled and cried, “I don’t want to wander forty years in the desert! I don’t want to go to the bottom of the map!” I wailed, “I don’t want to go to Africa! I want to go to America! I want to be with the moving pictures!”
    My father froze. For a moment I was sure he was going to give me such a wallop as I had never felt. But instead he regarded me slowly, with a sort of delighted amazement.
    “Do you, now, kindeleh ?” he said. “Well, then.” Exhaling, he reached out, rumpled my hair, and drew me toward him. He gave me another loud, wet kiss on the forehead. “Then it just so happens,” he said, “that this is exactly what you and I are going to do.”
      
    For days, the new tickets burned like six little coals in the secret pocket of my coat. Oh, how I wanted to tell Mama! The minute she and my sisters were released from quarantine, it became agony. Every night I lay beside my sisters, imagining Mama’s delight when we finally boarded the ship and Papa and I announced that we were going to America instead. I tingled with the thrill of it— it would be like Purim! I didn’t think I could keep quiet, but anytime I looked at Papa, he gave me his special wink and brought a finger to his lips. Even if I so much as hinted, he warned me, it would ruin the surprise utterly.
    And so I continued to wear my gray coat all day long and to bed at night. But it was my silence that raised suspicion, not my words. “What’s wrong with you? You’re too quiet,” Mama said with a frown one night, touching the back of her palm to my forehead. “Don’t tell me you’re getting sick now. That’s all that we need.”
    When Mama asked Papa if they shouldn’t exchange the old tickets to Cape Town for the next steamer to Africa, Papa informed her that he’d already gone ahead and done just that. For one heart-stopping moment, Mama looked at him darkly.
    “Oh,” she said tightly. “And how much did that cost you? I suppose you had to go ahead and spend the rest of the money as well?”
    Papa gave her a severe, wounded look. “What? You don’t trust your own husband to make a simple exchange? Steerage on one ship costs the same as another, Tillie.”
    He hadn’t spent any of the remaining marks, he insisted, beyond what we’d needed for food, of course. And if she didn’t believe him, so help him God, she could see for herself. “Malka,” Papa called out, motioning me over. “Please. Take off your coat. Show Mama the money we have left.”
    When he said this, my father appeared perfectly at ease—so at ease, in fact, that I wondered for a moment if he’d forgotten about the new tickets altogether. My heart beat furiously. But before I could undo the first button of my coat, Mama waved me away.
    “Fine, okay, I believe you,” she said wearily.
    But I needn’t have worried. You see, my mother could do and survive many things: She’d had seven children, ripped from her loins on a burlap mattress beneath the spastic flame of a kerosene lamp—two of the babies stillborn—and the last one, me, nearly bleeding her to death.…She could till the potato fields that remained hard as a fist and yielded little all year.…She could pay bribes to keep my brother, Samuel, out of the Russian army for another year, only to have him die of influenza.…She could give birth to me after the pogrom that my father insisted would never happen—in which she saw her own father beaten to death, blood and teeth spraying from his mouth like water as two soldiers batted at him with the butts of their rifles while he writhed on the floor—the crowd outside torching our forlorn barn and cheering as she hid with my siblings, petrified, in a neighbor’s chicken coop.…She could help my father arrange for counterfeit papers, and she could endure the nighttime ride across checkpoints hidden in a cart beneath piles of rotting cabbages with her hand clamped over my little mouth.…She could look piously, then flirtatiously,