Read The Little Russian for Free Online

from him once and knew better.
    Tateh came back and handed her the letter. It was short, on Rosa Davidovna’s stationery, and she recognized her hand. Berta skimmed the contents . . . express regrets . . . no longer in need of . . . love and gratitude . . . just like family. There was a rumbling somewhere down below, the earth was beginning to move, to cave in; rocks were tumbling down the hillsides; there was the sound of rushing water . . . just like family . She wasn’t family. She was just like family. It was something one would say about a trusted servant or a pet. We all think so highly of her.
She is just like family. There was a roaring in her ears. Her stomach was twisted into icy knots. A deep crevasse was opening up, whole trees and houses were sliding into oblivion. Berta lay down on the bed, her head on her arm. Her father was speaking, but she could barely make out the words.
    “Is it really that bad being home? You are wanted here. This is where you belong.”
    She closed her eyes and for the moment she was back in the foyer the morning she left Moscow, her footsteps echoing off the high ceilings, off the brightly colored sphinxes that observed her coolly from atop their columns. There was the amber table and the huge display of orchids, the damp envelope with four tickets and the unexpected money. She didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her at the time. Why it hadn’t seemed strange that there was no one there to see her off. No one to say good-bye, to hug her, to kiss her on both cheeks and make her promise to hurry home.

Chapter Two
    September 1904
     
    THE BELL on the front door of the Lorkis grocery never stopped ringing. It rang whenever the peasant women came looking for dry goods or pickled fish. It rang when their slow-walking men came in for axle grease or vodka that Tateh sold out of the back room. And it rang for the Jews of the town. The little bell had a cheerful jingle, although it was anything but cheerful to Berta. It jingled when they arrived, when they left, when they forgot something and came back. It jingled all day long, until Berta wanted to rip it off the door and throw it into the river.
    It had been a year since she returned to Mosny. The time had passed slowly. At first she hardly slept and thought of nothing but her life in Moscow at Number 12 Leontievsky Street: swimming in the river at Mogolovo; the barges they decorated with fairy-tale characters for Zelda’s birthday; Rosa Davidovna tiptoeing into the nursery to say good night before going off to the opera, trailing her scent behind her. For a while, Berta would wake every morning before dawn, hollow eyed and exhausted, wrap up a few pieces of bread, and leave the house. There were few people in the streets at that hour and that was the way she liked it. She didn’t want to meet anybody she knew and since the entire town was Jewish, most everybody knew her or at least knew her story. She was the grocer’s daughter. She had lived in Moscow in a big house. She had been sent home when the job was done like any factory girl at the end of the season.
    For weeks she wandered out of town and walked the rutted cart paths that bisected the fields of stubble and dried corn stalks. The crows came for what was left after the harvest, and clouds of insects rose up off the winter squash that had been left to rot in the field.
She didn’t notice the heat and was grateful for the emptiness and the endless expanse of blackened fields fresh from the autumn burning. She was glad to be alone. It felt honest, and there was some comfort in that.
    Eventually she started sleeping again and for a few weeks she slept well into the morning, sometimes not even getting out of bed until after noon. Tateh soon lost patience with this schedule and told her she was needed in the grocery. She protested, saying that she wasn’t feeling well, that she was too tired, that she needed more time, but he wouldn’t be put off.
    It was lonely in Mosny.