The Little Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

OWNSTAIRS, Galina was sulking. She wanted to play backgammon. “Please?” she asked, a dreary pleading in her eyes—which was only ritual, of course, the ritual of pretending Minna had a choice. As if they were friends, or sisters. When Minna first came, she’d fallen for it. She’d smiled and felt flattered and made a fool of herself being kind.
    But Galina didn’t want kindness. She sat at the head of the long table and directed Minna to sit at the other end—so far away Minna would have to lay out across the table to make her moves. Minna climbed onto the chair, set up the pieces, and commenced the fine art of letting Galina win. The board’s felt was faded a pale, splotched green. Its edges were frayed. It had once belonged to Galina’s mother’s father’s father—or at least this was what Galina said half the time. The other half, she said she couldn’t remember.
    A long time ago, Minna had hated Galina for not remembering. She’d hated the indulgence of it, the waste. She’d thought memories were something you could and should choose to keep, that they would not forsake or smother you like real people or things, that if you cared for them, they would be immortal and fixed.
    Then she’d begun to lose her own faces. Smells. Songs. What did her father’s morning voice sound like? Who was the owner of the hand that gently stroked her head once, along the main street, and what had Minna done that she’d expected to be hit instead? Who had taught her, patiently, how to write? Had there been a building on the square that was made of brick? Why had she started collecting pebbles when she was very young, polishing them with her skirt, one by one, and putting them to bed in an old tobacco tin?
    She felt sometimes as though she were walking blindfolded through a room, using only her fingers to see, and someone kept moving the furniture.
    Galina threw the dice, made a face, threw again. She captured two of Minna’s pieces and hooted. If the mobs were coming, Minna thought, they would know which house to attack first.Yet she couldn’t, somehow, summon fear.
    Galina laid one of Minna’s pieces on her tongue, stuck it out, and shouted, Ahhhhhhh!
    The memories came back sometimes. She saw her mother’s face, pale and unsmiling, a rift in her eyes, which looked away. Once, Minna remembered a woman in her father’s house, a faceless, peasant-seeming Christian woman, her skirts wide, her hands coarse, and with those coarse hands the woman plucked every one of Minna’s pebbles off the floor—they had been spread out in clumps, singing and laughing—and threw them in the river.
    Minna didn’t trust recollections like these. She suspected she jumbled things, connected the wrong events, dredged up what was convenient. Maybe she made things worse or better than they were. And then there were the episodes which disappeared again—though how could she be sure, of course, if she didn’t remember them? She only sensed their missing, like one sensed a hair caught in one’s mouth.
    Galina won once, twice. The third time, unsatisfied by Minna’s silent, shrugging concession, she shouted, “Victory!” and shoved the board off the table. “Whoops,” she said drily as the pieces rolled and bounced across the room. Minna’s muscles twitched, as if to action— pick them up! Yet her bones stayed heavy. Early afternoon was turning into late afternoon. Violence suddenly seemed an impossibility. The game pieces settled into the floor cracks. The day after tomorrow, she would board the train, lockdown or not.
    Galina watched her across the table. “I couldn’t help myself,” she said.
    “Of course.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    Minna didn’t answer. The seconds made her feel brazen.
    “You’ll leave,” Galina said.
    “Yes.”
    “You’ll hate me.”
    One of the black pieces stopped at the wall, on its edge. It blended almost perfectly into the sooted wainscoting; Minna squinted and it was gone.
    “You’ll tell people I