—
The house of Reb Zalman the baker was on the forest side of Tupik. 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.
For this reason as well as others, the baker made sure to leave a cup and basin for hand washing by the door.
The ground floor of Zalman’s house was occupied primarily with the necessities of his business: large sacks of flour, wide wooden workbenches, a vast clay oven stoked to blistering temperatures each morning before the sun even had a chance to rise and compete. Baskets of rolls, rugelach, and, on Fridays, shining brown loaves of thick, braided challah crowded close in around the door. If you wished to speak with Zalman, you would invariably find him here, attempting, it seemed, to cover each of his sober black garments thoroughly with flour before his day was done.
It was mainly on the narrower second level that the women of Zalman’s house led their lives. His wife, Feygush, insisted on maintaining a second kitchen there, away from public view, which required quite a bit of schlepping—water and other necessities—up the rough wooden stairs.
This schlepping almost always fell to Zalman’s daughter, Bluma.
Bluma was widely considered a good girl—pretty, kind, generally receptive to the needs of others. 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. Rarely did she rise until midmorning, when she might creep downstairs to steal a wink and a smile from her father—and often a sweet bun besides.
It was because of this abundance of time spent in bed that Bluma was the member of the family far most familiar with the activities of her grandmother, who lived on the third floor.
Third floor, though, was charitable. In truth, it was a cramped attic, almost perfectly triangular, in which Bluma’s grandmother lived with her crabby, toothless gray cat. Attic even was a bit too kind: there was barely enough space among the rafters to accommodate the bed, the table, the chair, the old woman, and the cat all at once. And what little floor space there was hung directly above Bluma’s bed.
Bluma knew the sound that the ceiling made when the old woman first shifted in bed in the morning. She knew the sound of the cat jumping from the pillow to the windowsill. She knew the sound of tiny old feet shifting onto the floorboards, of the chair being pulled from beneath the table.
And on this particular morning, the floorboards above her were dead silent.
* * *
—
“Papa?” said Bluma.
Zalman looked up from his kneading and smiled. “Good morning, darling,” he said.
“Has Bubbe come down?”
Zalman shook his head and began to knead again. “I think she’s still upstairs.”
Bluma shook her head. “I haven’t heard her all morning.”
Bluma’s bubbe was nothing if not reliable. Reliably, she stumped down from her attic in the morning to retrieve a bit of bread and water, and reliably, she creaked back up without having spoken a word to anyone.
This had been the way for nearly as long as Bluma could remember.
“Hope she’s feeling all right,” said Zalman, his voice jumping with the exertion of his work. “Here,” he said. “Take her a bit of milk and some rugelach. She’ll like that.”
Bluma’s bubbe, as a rule, did not care for people. She took what little food she ate on her own schedule and often in her own room. Once a week, on Fridays, she would come down to make a pot of chicken soup, and when they all sat down to eat it, she would quietly wish her son and her granddaughter a good Sabbath.
She never spoke to Bluma’s mother.
Bluma arrived outside her grandmother’s bedroom door and tapped lightly with her knuckle, twice.
“Bubbe?”
For a period of time, Bluma had spent her days reading on the little landing just outside her bubbe’s bedroom door. She’d hardly meant to make a habit of it, but while she’d lain there one morning, her grandmother had pulled open the door. Bluma had expected to be shooed away, but her bubbe had simply stared down at her. After a moment, she’d left the door hanging open and gone about her business.
They had lived quietly in parallel, then—Bluma reading on the landing with her pillow, and her bubbe within, occupying herself with needlework or tidying. Often she would sit in front of the oblong mirror on her wall and make a silent accounting of the dissatisfactions she found in her face.
And then one day the door had swung open in the morning and almost immediately slammed shut again. When Bluma had gone to use the bathroom, her pillow had been moved back down onto her bed, and that had been that.
All the same, Bluma held the quiet certainty that she had shared something with her grandmother that no one else in the house had ever seen.
And this was correct.
Again: one knuckle, two taps.
“Bubbe?”
There was no answer.
The bedroom door was hung to swing inward, and with every creaking moment that Bluma spent pushing it, she still thought she might find her grandmother there, just behind the opening door.
But she didn’t.
Her bubbe was gone.
* * *
—
The sky was heavy, and Yehuda Leib longed for the rain to come and relieve the pressure.
His mouth ached.
Issur had only gotten one good hit in—despite his superior size, he was really worth almost nothing in a fight—but as luck would have it, his fist had caught Yehuda Leib square on the lip, and it was beginning to swell.
Yehuda Leib was too wise to stick around once they’d been hauled apart—it didn’t matter who was at fault when one of the combatants was Issur “God’s Gift to Tupik” Frumkin and the other was a grubby, fatherless thief, and so he’d made himself scarce among the rooftops.
Up here, there was no one to glare—no one to wish he simply wasn’t.
The time passed slowly. Feet and hooves trod the mud below. Fires were kindled, burned, went out. The dim gray sky began to darken.
The hour came and went for afternoon prayers.
It really was a shame. He had promised his mother that he would stay out of trouble.
But he’d had very little choice in the matter. There were a lot of things you could say about Yehuda Leib, but he wasn’t a bastard. That much he knew.