I can’t tell you how long we ran. The forest was already behind us. Dawn was breaking. We were sweating like mad, even though a cool breeze was blowing. We came to a street. Another street. A white church. Gardens. Yards. Little houses.
A Jew was coming toward us, driving a goat. He had the longest earlocks I’ve ever seen, a long, tatty gabardine, and a green shawl around his neck. We stopped to say hello. He stared at us. Pinye struck up a conversation. The Jew had a strange way of talking. I mean he talked our language, but he didn’t talk it like we do. Pinye asked if we were near the border. “What border?” the Jew asked. It seemed the border was far behind us.
“In that case, why are we running like lunatics?” So Pinye said, sounding like a different Pinye. He turned around, squared his shoulders, made a finger, and shouted in Russian:
“Take that, you lousy Ivans!”
We all began to laugh like mad. The women laughed so hard they collapsed on the ground. My mother raised both her arms. “Thank you, dear, dear God,” she said, and burst out crying.
WE’RE IN BRODY!
Would you like to know where we are? Smack in the middle of Brody! That means we’re getting near America. It’s a fine place, Brody is. You don’t see such streets and people back home. Even the Jews are different. I mean they’re the same Jews, they’re just more so. Their earlocks are longer, their hats are weirder, their gabardines have belts and hang to the ground, their shoes have no socks, and their women wear fancy wigs. And you should hear them speak German — I tell you, that takes the cake! They say beheimeh instead of beheymeh and sheigetz instead of sheygetz. And the way they sing their words! A person might think they were chanting the Torah.
We got the hang of it pretty quick. Pinye was the quickest. He was talking perfect German in no time. He says that’s because he studied it back home. But Elye says he never studied a word and picked it up just as well. I’m learning it too. The only one who doesn’t cotton to it is Brokheh. She goes on speaking Jewish. She’s on the slow side, Brokheh is.
My mother doesn’t want to speak German either. She says she wants to talk the way she’s used to. Why twist her tongue for no good reason? She has it in for German. Back in Kasrilevke, she says, she thought all Jews who spoke it were honest. Now she sees that the German Jews are no saints. One even shortchanged her in the market. It seems you can be a thief in German too.
Brokheh joins the conversation. “I’ll say you can! Why, each is a worse thief than the next! At least back home we knew the thieves were Christians.”
“Back home, my dear, the Christians knew it too.”
My mother has a story about that. We had a Christian neighbor named Khimke, a fine woman and a thief like all her kind. If she came to visit and my mother left the room, Khimke made sure to leave it too. That’s how afraid she was of stealing if left alone.
Everything is different with the Germans. Even their money is different. They’ve never heard of kopecks and rubles. They have groschen and schillings. One ruble is worth a bunch of groschen. My mother calls them “buttons” and says they aren’t real money. Elye says they melt like snow between your fingers. He goes off each day to a corner, unstitches his secret pocket, takes out a ruble, and sews the pocket back up. The next day he opens it again and takes out another ruble.
The days go by and our baggage hasn’t arrived. It looks like the woman who ran us across the border has pulled a fast one. First her pals stick us up in the forest and now we’re stuck without our things. My mother wrings her hands and cries: “Our pillows! Our quilts! How will we go to America without them?”
Pinye has an idea. He’s going to file, he says, a zayavlenye, which is a protest, with a proshenye, which is a petition, to the natshalnik, who is the commander of the border post. Or else he’ll cross the border himself and find the woman with the wig. He’ll make her rue the day she was born. He’ll give her what for, Pinye will.
It’s all a lot of hot air. All the zayavlenyes and proshenyes in the world won’t do any good. And Pinye won’t cross any borders because Taybl won’t let him. Not for all the Tsar’s gold, she says. Running the border once was enough for her. To tell the truth, it was enough for us all.
We tell our story to everyone: how we met the woman with the wig, and how she told us how to run the border, and how we were taken to the forest, and how we almost had our throats slit, and how Brokheh has a habit of fainting, and how my mother screamed and the soldiers shot and the men ran away and our lives were saved.
That’s my mother’s version. Elye has his own. Before he gets very far with it, Brokheh butts in with hers. But Brokheh, Taybl says, doesn’t remember because she passed out. Taybl tells it her way and is interrupted by Pinye, who says Taybl doesn’t know a thing. And so Pinye tells the whole story from the beginning. We tell it over and over each day, mouthing the words and nodding as we listen. Everyone says we were lucky and should say a special prayer of thanks.
Life on this side of the border is good. In fact, it couldn’t be better. There’s not a stitch of work to be done. Either we sit in our inn or go for walks in the city. I’ve told you what a fine place Brody is. I don’t know what Brokheh has against it. Every day she has some new complaint. This here is no good, and that there isn’t clean, and something else smells bad, and back home it was different. Once she let out a scream in the middle of the night. We all jumped out of bed.
“What is it? Thieves?”
“What thieves? Bedbugs!”
In the morning we went to complain to the innkeeper. He couldn’t make head or tail of it until Pinye explained to him in German what the matter was. Never in his life, said the innkeeper, had he heard the likes of it. Not in the whole kingdom of Austria. We must have brought the bedbugs from Russia.
Did Brokheh blow her top! A Jew like our innkeeper, she said, is worse than a Jew who’s been baptized. It beats me why she said that, because the innkeeper seems like a fine fellow. He talks with a lopsided grin and likes to give friendly advice about where to go and who to buy from and who to steer clear of. Sometimes he even comes along.
Mostly, we buy clothes. We’ve become spiffy dressers. Pinye says it isn’t nice to dress like bums. A tourist, he says, should dress respectably. And especially in a country where everything is dirt cheap. The first thing he bought was a top hat. After that he bought a new tie and a frock coat, the kind that comes down to the knees.
You’d have to be made of cast iron to keep a straight face when Pinye wears his new clothes. He’s tall, he’s thin, he’s nearsighted, and he walks with a bounce, remember? And his nose! My mother says he looks like a circus clown. Elye says it’s more like an organ grinder. Pinye says he’d rather be an organ grinder than a bum.
Elye says he could dress like a German too if he wanted. It’s no trick to throw away your money, he says. In America we’ll need every penny. Pinye says money won’t be a problem there. In America, he says, every man is worth his weight in gold. He nagged until Elye bought a top hat and a frock coat too. Now when we walk down the street talking German, we could pass for natives if not for the women. I mean my mother, Brokheh, and Taybl. They follow us everywhere. My mother is afraid of getting lost and Brokheh and Taybl tag after her like calves. Don’t ask me what they’re afraid of. The six of us are always together. Everyone stares at us. You would think no one had seen a Jew before.