Letters from Rifka: Letters 1–8

If the guards discovered only one of us, perhaps the others might still escape. Behind me, in the dusty corner of a boxcar, sat my own rucksack.

The guards hastened down the track toward me.

But as the guards inspected me, from the worn toes of my boots to my hair spilling out from under my kerchief, I hoped my looks would be enough.

They would have killed Papa for those boots, but their battalion marched into sight.

Only there was another guard. He had a thin face and a straight back. His eyes were like the Teterev in the spring when the snow melts, churning with green ice.

Stones skipped out from under my boots as I scrambled alongside, jumped on board, and, sprawling on my belly, pulled myself in.

And with a sword he clove my breast,
Plucked out the heart he made beat higher,
And in my stricken bosom pressed
Instead a coal of living fire
—Pushkin

And with a sword he clove my breast,
Plucked out the heart he made beat higher,
And in my stricken bosom pressed
Instead a coal of living fire
—Pushkin

I huddled beside Mama as we stood in our underwear in the waning daylight outside the boxcar.

Why is it that if a Russian peasant does not get what he wants, he feels justified in stealing it from a Jew?

In the building, a woman sprayed us with something vile. It burned my skin and my scalp, my nose and my eyes.

Finally the Polish guards allowed us back onto the train. They returned our clothes to us and our bags, stinking of fumigation.

Casual gift, oh, gift unutile,
Life, why wert thou given me?
Why should Fate thus grant us futile
Terms of doomed mortality?
—Pushkin

I lapsed into sleep on the floor in the miserable little shed while the typhus raged inside me.

In my dreams and when I woke, I fretted over Mama and Papa and Nathan.

A thirst in spirit, through the gloom
Of an unpeopled waste I blundered...
—Pushkin

The innkeeper hosts a large market outside his establishment every Wednesday. Merchants bring their wares and the innkeeper sells tea and rolls and buns.

I drag myself from the drafty room Saul and I share and stand, swaying unsteadily in front of the bakery cases, staring at the innkeeper’s food.

She took her free hand and flipped the wisps of hair over her shoulder.

There was a boy running across a frozen field with a black dog loping along at his side.

For a moment I saw Poland as she saw it.
Then my eyes saw the bleakness outside the window again and I felt a chill creep down my spine.

I stumbled back up the aisle of the lurching train, thrown against this one’s shoulder, squeezing past that one.

Life’s monotony rolls o’er me,
Tired with longings unfulfilled.

I think doctors are the crudest men upon this earth. This doctor, who worked for the steamship company, took me and Mama into a room. He examined us for deformities and disease.

“Oranges,” the old man answered. He had no teeth in his mouth.
“How much for one?” I asked, inhaling the bright smell of fruit wafting up from his basket.

There are carriages that move without horses to pull them. They are called “cars,” and they prowl the streets like frenzied wolves.

Sleep evades me, there’s no light:
Darkness wraps the earth with slumber,
Only weary tickings number
The slow hours of the night
—Pushkin

Mama hung the gold chain around my neck. I wrapped my hand around it and felt Mama’s warmth in the etched metal.

My hair is gone. All gone. I am as bald as the rabbi of Berdichev.

“Listen to this, Rifka,” you would say, and you would read me something from one of Uncle Avrum’s big books. Or you would open the Pushkin and sometimes your voice would go deep and husky.