The Little Bride Read Online Free PDF

shivered wildly. Minna dried her off, brought her up to the attic, and tried to distract her from her fears: this is where you’ll sleep when Minna is gone; watch your head, yes, the ceiling’s too low to stand, even for a girl, it was the same for Minna when she first came, you’ll get used to it, your back will grow strong. She talked like this, in a brothy, falsetto voice. She lay with Rebeka on the narrow cot, the girl’s face mashed against her shoulder and thought, I am comforting her, I am giving her something like kinship. But as Rebeka’s sniveling slowed, it grew ugly and deep and knocked like pebbles in her chest. She sounded like an animal.
    “Don’t cry,” Minna said. And now her voice had a sudden, iron rod down its middle. “Shush shush. All the children will be fine.” Then, though it was a lie in every way that mattered: “You live in a very beautiful house.”
     
     
     
    A LL night, nothing happened. But the next day, the streets stayed empty, the rumors persisted, Osip Pirigov did not return to his shop, all through Odessa and beyond, in the cellars and barns and attics of the southern Pale, Jews waited. The second night passed the same way, the only sounds Rebeka’s weeping. By afternoon, Galina was practicing old dance steps in the dining room, stomping to her own needle-throated, tuneless music, her fat arms embracing the air. The noise was making Rebeka cry again, which made Galina sing louder. Minna walked the girl back up to the attic, twisted a rag around stockings for her to hold as a doll, and half rocked, half shook her to sleep. Then slowly, clandestinely, deliciously, she took out her photograph. Tilted toward the window, he could almost be smiling; tilted away, he seemed to frown. His age was indeterminable. The picture was too poor to make out much more than that he wore a beard—she couldn’t even tell in what style—but he looked sincere, she thought, in any case. A little anxious, maybe, but that was probably being up on the roof.
    Or maybe it wasn’t anxiety, Minna thought, but impatience. Maybe her fiancé had been interrupted for the picture.
    She liked this last idea. The man she would marry was a busy man. He would not bluster into the house like the suitors, as if they’d been standing outside all their lives, waiting for Galina to let them in. Minna did not think she could bear such demands. She imagined a good husband being a little bit like a good dog, the ones the wealthiest Russian girls walked on Nikolaev Boulevard: they walked alongside but not too close; they told everyone you were respectable without saying a thing. When Galina first urged her to sign up for Rosenfeld’s—an idea that stunned Minna by becoming more than one of Galina’s passing fancies—she’d said, being married is like you can breathe for the first time. Granted, Galina had never been married. But knowing the opposite of a thing often seemed to Minna to be the same as knowing a thing itself. Hunger, after all, was made of food, and thirst of water. On corners, she’d heard the beardless maskilim arguing about whether people had once been apes, yet their excitement seemed to her unwarranted—was it so difficult to imagine hair when you were covered in skin?
    She named her husband Ilya, after the dairy boy. Ilya was older than Minna but not by much. He wasn’t rich, but he was industrious; he pushed his cart with an ease that masked its weight. It was an ease Minna associated with his being a gentile. Ilya was so fearless, so certain of his place, that he didn’t even bother trying to hide his fondness for a maidservant: no matter how busy he was, no matter how raggedly Minna was dressed, when he arrived and when he left, he always called her fraylin and blushed slightly as she dropped kopecks into his palm.
    She was sorry for having stolen that bottle from him, for the doctor’s visit. He would never think to suspect her. His toes turned inward as he walked.
     
     
     
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