The Way Back: Chapters 1–3

On a bright summer day in the year eighteen hundred and twelve (by the gentile reckoning), a girl left her mother’s house—the little house where she had been born—and went to the brambles on the far side of the forest to gather the small summer strawberries that grow in the shade.

Now horses came as well, and taller men in splendid uniforms astride them.

An officer on a dappled charger came cantering up to his elbow, and the emperor turned his head.

The first was a scrawny boy, born before his time into a blustery, rain-soaked evening.

Tupik was leaning forward in anticipation this morning, silent and still in the gloaming.

The gray clapboard houses huddled over the muddy streets as if to steal the rising steam of the passing people's breath, and at the outskirts of town, the tall pines seemed to bend inward over the roofs as if to better see what might transpire.

She'd made the scarf with her own two hands, stitch by stitch, the thread passing between her ruddy, cold-stiffened fingers night after night until finally it was done.

A boy with no red scarf.
It was itchy. And it choked him.
Yehuda Leib couldn’t stand being constrained.

Not only could he therefore say which kitchens and larders were likely to go unattended, but he could also guess which routes he might safely take to get into them without being seen—and, consequently, blamed once he'd acquired what he'd gone for.

Not that he was prone to lifting enough to be noticed—on either the taking or the receiving end, for his mother would never approve of his appropriations—but all the same his face and reputation were familiar enough in town that he knew it was best to avoid notice if he could.

Once the worshippers began to mill about the threshold, the day's schmoozing would start in earnest, and if he slung the brim of his cap low over his bright, keen eyes, huddling into the corner where the railing met the wall, their chat would flow freely: who had what errands to run, who was traveling, who sick in bed.

It was in this moment that Moshe Dovid Frumkin, the stern and pious town butcher, came forward and, mercifully, broke the silence.

And, to make matters worse, Issur had two very different faces. The first, which he always wore in his father’s presence, was deferential, humble—the picture of Reb Frumkin’s expectation. The second, which he had a habit of turning on Yehuda Leib when others—particularly parents—were not around, was bratty, sneering, and superior.

And there he was now, standing in the synagogue door, doting cloyingly on his father, trying on his new hat.

Now Issur was asking to keep the hat with him at the study hall, and his father answered with the fond admonition that it was new and expensive, and he must be very careful.

Yehuda Leib did not react, keeping his eyes low beneath the brim of his cap, chewing assiduously on a hard rind of cheese.

Coming in from Zubinsk, you had to pass through the little cemetery on the hillside to reach it, and if you didn’t take care to lose sight of the clutch of leaning headstones before turning to the baker's door, you might have had the uncanny feeling that you carried some residue of the graveyard inside with you.

Her only fault was a slight overfondness for the fleeting territory between sleep and waking, where the eyelids are heavy, the blankets are warm, and the entirety of the world seems to be confined behind a thick sheet of glass.

Yehuda Leib remembered looking up at the raucous, colorful ceiling of the synagogue, painted with vines and figs, eagles, lions, and unicorns, red and blue and tawny and white, and then his father had pulled his attention down to the front of the room...

...someone had blown the ram's horn, and there had been a great riot of supplication from the congregation, and he'd looked up, and there had been tears in his father’s eyes, and he'd reached out and taken the edges of his father's beard softly in his fat little fists, and his father had smiled, and the tears had fallen onto his cheeks.

“He says,” continued Frumkin, “that Avimelekh has racked up some heavy gambling debts. He’s set on coming to Tupik today or tomorrow—before the Rebbe’s wedding. Says he can get a good amount of money finding conscripts for the Tsar's army. Now, would it be such a terrible thing if we just let him have the boy?”

Shulamis stood, consternation gathered around her shoulders like a heavy shawl.

Just beyond the far shore of the muddy river, the ground became first unpleasantly moist, and then impassably swampy, and to make matters worse, a series of precipitous drops and rocky rapids in the river downstream made it impractical to pilot a boat, a barge, or any other vessel out on the water.

Of course, the nobleman who had granted the charter had been dead for hundreds of years, and his descendants had long since lost track of the bargain, but to the denizens of Tupik—like the rest of their people—it was no small thing to abandon an ancient agreement.

Down on the water, Yehuda Leib could hear him shatter a thin layer of ice; he could hear the clanking of the heavy chain, and the river beginning to buffet the edge of the ferry as it edged out into the current.

“It is entirely immaterial to me what you believe, Dvorah Leah. I am here to do you a service."

“Take my counsel: You begin only once and end only once. There is no reward or exception for the irreverent."

“It is your prerogative, Dvorah Leah, to squander your final moments if that is what you wish to do. But it is unwise to tempt the wrath of such a one as I.”

But the reflection was odd: slow, delayed, as if it had traveled a long distance through something thick and viscous.

First, the members of the Holy Society were sent for, and they assembled in the front room of the bakery, one by one, somber, respectful, their eyes cast downward. Once their quorum was gathered, they tramped en masse up to the third floor and carried Bluma’s bubbe down on her straw mattress.

The straw pallet was laid down in the front room, and there, in the presence of the Holy Society, Bluma's father mumbled a rote blessing and tore his shirt and jacket in a ritual of mourning.

As soon as the members of the Holy Society returned, one by one, to their homes, Bubbe’s name passed from lip to lip, spreading like a virulent cold.

The sanctuary door creaked open and swung shut behind the last straggling worshipper like a final amen.

If he so much as cracked the sliding panel beneath the wide synagogue eaves in order to leave, he could be seen.

The funeral had seemed simultaneously endless and perfunctory.

She thought she remembered odd things—frost, cold metal on her skin, a strange, lugubrious reflection—but her mind was not at all calm, and by now she had begun to wonder if she hadn't been imagining things.

Shortly, though, in the spoon's reflection, she came padding up the stairs—weary, dour, sad.

Gradually, Yehuda Leib was wrapped up in creeping darkness; quietly, almost furtively, the snow began to swallow up his tracks.

Slowly, deliberately, the horseman leaned forward, thrusting a thin kindling taper into Issur’s lantern.

Yehuda Leib could feel his heart beating in every extremity of his body.