The Little Bride Read Online Free PDF Page A

laughed in front of men like these? And what kind of man would be waiting for a German girl named whatever name they would give her? No one. Or the wrong someone. Whereas the man in the photograph in her bodice was waiting for Minna. Of course, she didn’t know his name yet, and the picture was too grainy to clearly make out his features, but she could see that he looked down at the camera slightly, and that he stood in front of nothing but sky, as though he’d chosen to be photographed on a city rooftop. Which showed, it seemed to Minna, a certain confidence. Men like Galina’s would pose themselves in armchairs, surrounded by whatever trinkets they’d managed to hold on to, samovars and candlesticks and oil paintings bunched together as on a stage set, suggesting they went on forever. Minna would not mind marrying rich, of course. But she imagined herself preferring a quieter, more self-assured kind of wealth. If a man stood on a roof, it was likely to be his roof. Which meant that now it would be Minna’s. A roof and the house beneath it. A sink and running water. And beyond these comforts, beyond these dignities, the man was waiting for her as a man waited for a woman.
    When she shook her head, the men let their laughter die. Their faces melted back into a collective fatigue. They looked disappointed, but not surprised—as if they’d known all along that she didn’t have it in her to escape herself.

FIVE

    O DESSA fog arrived like a street cat woke: suddenly; ominously. This time, it flew up from the docks, bringing rumors of violence. Osip Pirigov, who ran the shop below, came up the stairs to tell them. Osip was a small man with a habit of importantly, nervously, checking his pocket watch every few seconds—as if he was still allowed to practice law, as if someone might still be waiting for him at the Fankoni for a lunch of Italian pastry and wicked confidences. His nervousness was heightened by the news. His tongue seemed to shiver. “All Moldavanka is shuttered, the defense is on high alert, what you need from me buy now I’m closing I’m taking the family we’ll be gone within the hour.”
    Galina laughed as Osip’s watch came out and he slinked back downstairs. “And where will they go?” she said, stretching out on the tattered divan. “And when nothing happens? When nothing. Happens. How stupid we’ll be. Like every time. Like mice running from our tails.”
    It was true that since the last pogrom two years ago, none of the warnings had materialized. Everyone hid and prayed, then they came out a few hours later looking stunned and pleased and also somehow guilty, and they went about their lives. And the “defense forces,” the yeshiva students with their wooden sticks, looked vaguely embarrassed: a team of boys without a sport, boys who’d never climbed a tree let alone beat anything.
    Yet what could one do but prepare?
    Minna locked the gate. She stood in the fog for a minute, breathing, then hurried inside. She snuffed out the lights, closed the shutters, drew the drapes. A queer, involuntary thrill gripped her limbs, the same charge she used to feel just before a storm in her father’s house. He would always sense it, and chastise her—there was wood to cut, and lightning to fear!—but Galina snored on the divan and Minna indulged the moment. It was ridiculous, arrogant, but she felt as if the rumors were for her, to make her departure a necessity, a flight, instead of the unremarkable exit she’d been making for days now: a long, wobbly slide through the city, off the continent, into the sea. She swept the house, then mopped. She dusted what remained to dust. She cleaned with the puerile joy of someone who did not have to clean.
    It was nighttime before she remembered Rebeka, in the cellar. She found her sobbing in the dark, draped in a washing she’d abandoned, sheets and towels twisted round her arms and head as if to make herself a ghost. Everything was soaking wet. The girl