Free The River Midnight by Lilian Nattel Page A

the girl woke up from her faint, she thought that Lilith would strangle her with those hands. But instead she delivered the baby. And she blessed it, too. The baby grew up to be a scholar. In fact, he was an adviser to kings. So, who can tell about a stranger?”
    That’s as good as one of Shomer’s stories, the women said. Write it down, Faygela. You’ll be famous. When the book peddler comes, instead of calling out, “New romances by the Yiddish author Shomer, famous from Warsaw to Minsk,” he’ll say, “Faygela’s stories, come and look, women, but don’t damage the merchandise.”
    “Shomer’s merchandise,” Faygela sniffed, her delicate nostrils pinched as if she smelled rotten eggs. “With his silly stories of Jewish heiresses and knights in armor.” Holding up a small, sharp-angled hand with an ink stain on the second finger, and flour under the nails, she said, “I swear before God—” The women shifted uncomfortably. It’s a sin to make a vow, they said. Don’t swear, please Faygela, no one meant anything, you might call down the evil eye on yourself. “I swear,” she said insistently, “they should put Shomer on trial for writing lies. A real writer tells the truth, and that’s how he changes the world. But what’s the use of talking? Nothing ever changes in Blaszka.”
    The women looked at one another, eyebrows raised, hands busying themselves with arranging shawls and digging into bags as if suddenly reminded it was market day and there was work to be done. But the blacksmith’s wife, undaunted, retorted, “What do you mean, nothing? I heard in the butcher shop that someone saw a pair of men’s trousers under Misha’s bed. Who do you think they belonged to?”
    You can be sure it wasn’t her former husband. The watercarrier only has one pair, the women laughed.
    “You want to talk about Misha, I’ll tell you about Misha,” Faygela said. “Take a look at Berel.” The little boy, hearing his name, poked his head out of the wooden crate he was playing in. He was a fat little bull, already nearly as strong as his next oldest sister, confident in the goodness of a world made of cinnamon and raisins. “After thirty hoursof labor with him, I was so weak I could hardly breathe. I thought I was finished. When the doctor came from Plotsk, he said there was only one thing to do. He was going to cut me open to save the baby. I knew what that meant. He considered me dead already, because once they cut you open like that, every disease finds a home in the wound. But in walked Misha, like a queen. She threw out the doctor, turned the baby around inside me with her own hands. And you know what happened then?”
    “Out came Berel, pop!” shouted Dina, who was six years old.
    “Out I came, pop!” echoed Berel. He and Dina were playing Train to Warsaw on the floor of the bakery. Berel was the passenger in his wooden crate, Dina the driver who pulled him between the legs of her older sisters.
    “But the
zogerin
always says it was her praying in the cemetery that did it,” Leibela, the middle daughter protested.
    Freydel, the second oldest, folded her hands over her chest and rolled her eyes at heaven. “May the
zogerin
pray for a good-looking boy to become Papa’s apprentice,” she said.
    “Let me assure both of you that dead people aren’t sitting in the cemetery waiting to talk to the
zogerin.
And they don’t stand around in heaven arguing with God, either. A person lives, then he dies, and that’s all. My father told me and I’m telling you. A grave is just for remembrance.” Faygela shook her pen at the four older girls who were now loading the mounds of dough onto the long-handled shovels and sliding them into the ovens. “When a baby is coming out the wrong way, it’s not a time to play patchie-patchie in the cemetery. No, you need a person who knows what’s what. It was Misha who kept me in this world and only her.”
    Ruthie, the oldest, a slight girl of sixteen, dark-eyed