Burning Girls Read online

  Shayna’s face turned pale, and I was sure mine had too. It was rare not to know a family that had sent a daughter or husband over to America, di goldene medine. Yetta’s family owned a sweetshop, and even they had sent over Rifka. I had always thought it was because they had found out about her disgrace, but perhaps it was not. Money came every week, and letters too. In America, Rifka wrote, children went to school together, Jews and gentiles, with no fees to pay and no limits on the number of Jews. There was not gold on the streets, and she lived with a family that had her sleep on a board placed on two chairs and made her do most of the housework, but still she sent home more money in a week than her parents could make in a month.

  “Bubbe would not want that!” I cried. “How could you say so? How can you talk about sending away your own daughters?”

  Mama was so surprised to see me that she nearly swallowed a pin. She coughed and said, “But she wrote to me about the idea. She didn’t say anything to you?”

  “Not last I saw her, and that was only a month ago.”

  “Well,” Mama sighed. “My mother keeps secrets. She keeps secrets and she makes plans and catches us all in her net. Her own feet, too, sometimes, she tangles.” She looked at me tenderly. “I have wanted to warn you sometimes, darling. You need to be careful of my mother’s plans. Once when I was young she decided—”

  I did not wait to hear what my bubbe had decided. “Bubbe would not send me away! She needs me!”

  Mama frowned. “Well, I would never force either of my girls to go. But you should think hard about it, both of you. Bubbe has sent me a letter and she is unhappy with what she sees in store for our city. I shudder to think of any danger, and between that and the money.… Now you go away, Deborah, go chatter with Yetta or brew up some broth. Your sister and I have work to do.”

  I wandered out into the street. It was true what Mama said, that business was not good for her and Shayna, but to go across the sea! It was not as if we lived in one of those places where, as Bubbe said, they killed you after every bad harvest. Bialystok was modern and the chief of police was a man of decency, who did not hold with the killing of Jews. Besides, our young activists had formed a self-defense league, and I would not have wanted to be on the wrong side of those knives and guns. I thought we were safe; at least, we did not fear every moment of every day.

  I kicked sullenly at rocks until I wandered over to see Yetta, and then we played at singing games, which we could only do when Shayna was busy, because her voice sounded like a sick cat.

  * * *

  Later that year, Cossacks killed my grandmother.

  My grandmother’s village was too small for word to reach us before we visited. Papa and I found most of the village’s houses destroyed. Just cottages, built of mud and straw. Easy to kick apart. Easier to burn.

  Papa had grown up in a village like this one, and his face twisted as he surveyed the wreckage.

  “Back into the cart, young one,” he said. “We leave now.” He didn’t raise his voice, just spoke as if what he said was fact.

  “Without burying Bubbe?” I said, trying to match his calm.

  “Where is there to bury her? The shul and graveyard are destroyed. We will take her back with us. This is not a good place to be.”

  “Papa,” I said. “Let us at least say Kaddish—surely we have enough time for that?” The wind blew my hair in my face.

  We went inside and I lay my bubbe on a ragged old blanket, too worthless to bother taking. I cleaned her body with water from the well and closed her eyes, arranged her arms and legs decorously alongside her body, not all splayed out at odd angles like we found her. I do not think she had died from violence; I think the terror was too much for her heart. When I was finished, she looked almost as if she had been sleeping when the Angel of Death took her, not cowering and hiding as men no better than beasts destroyed her village. But I could not wash away every sign of decay, and one look at the remains of her home showed the peaceful arrangement I had made for the lie that it was. Papa said Kaddish over my grandmother. He let me have another fifteen minutes to go through the house and take what was left to bring home to Mama. I found Bubbe’s box of needful things behind the loose stone in the hearth where she usually kept it, and a small pouch of old jewelry with it. That was all.

  In the cart I cried all the way home.

  Mama and Papa had grown up in small villages, and they feared the pogroms every time the wind changed. But I had not been touched by such fear before. Hadn’t our own chief of police said, “As long as I live, there will be no pogrom in Bialystok”?

  * * *

  Soon after Papa and I had returned with the news of my bubbe’s death, Shayna and I were sitting together in the main room when Mama came in with sadness in her eyes and the box and pouch in her hands.

  “You should have these to remember and think on my mother by,” she said.

  She took out a locket, an ivory cameo carved with the profile of a fancy lady, and stroked it with one finger. “Shayna, darling, you look like my mama did when she was young, when I was little—hair so gold it puts the sun to shame. You should have this locket. Mama wore it when I was a little girl, and she said it was fine protection.” My mother looked near tears. “I hope the new one coming is another girl. A girl I can name for my Mama.”

  Then she turned to me and tilted her head, thinking. Our sharp-eyed mother was back.

  Mama took the ivory box from her lap and shook it suspiciously. “I can’t open it, and believe me, I’ve tried. But the symbols carved into it—I suppose they mean that Mama would want you to have it.”

  I took it and traced out the carvings with my fingers, the same way Mama had touched Bubbe’s cameo.

  Mama stroked my coarse black hair. “Be careful, baby girl. Use your judgment.”

  Deborah was a judge in the land of Israel, and Mama never let me forget it.

  That box was where Bubbe kept prayers for women whose husbands traveled, special inks, blessed talismans, and one photograph of Mama, Papa, Shayna, and me that we’d paid a traveling salesman for. I’d never had any trouble opening it. I was different from Mama.

  I waited until I had some time to myself and went to a place I knew, secluded by bushes, not too far from our home. There I opened the box, expecting Bubbe’s familiar collection of blessed things to tumble out onto my lap. What I found inside was a length of deerskin wrapped around a silver-plated knife, the photograph, and a piece of paper. It wasn’t a blessing. It was long and complicated and seemed to be some kind of contract.

  I tried to puzzle through the contract but the words swam in front of my eyes and made me dizzy.

  As I refolded the paper and put it back in the box, I heard a rustling

  “Who’s there?” I called out, a little frightened.

  No one answered, so I picked up a stick and walked briskly over to the bushes.

  “Come on out!”

  There was another rustling and then the patter of a large rat scampering away. I parted the bushes with the stick and saw some long gray hairs stuck to the tree branches, and a trail like something made by a long, ropey tail dragging in the dirt.

  * * *

  Our baby brother Yeshua was born three months later.

  After the baby came, we began working the clock around in order to get to America, where, Mama said, they didn’t let you burn. Papa began working seven days a week; he wouldn’t handle money on the Sabbath, but he would go to his workshop instead of to shul, and Mama prayed the whole day for God’s forgiveness. I already was working as hard as I could—I had never turned down anyone who called for me, and I didn’t start now. But I worked harder at home, casting spells of protection around each of us. Mama wouldn’t let me or Shayna talk to boys—she said that we had enough trouble saving for five tickets without one of us girls dragging a husband or baby into things. This was fine with me; I never had much use for boys. When I could sneak away, I went to Yetta’s family’s sweetshop. Sometimes Mama and Papa ta
lked about sending Papa over to America first, so he could send money back, but everyone knew women who’d done that and then never heard from their husbands again, and I was not sure my protection could keep him safe far across the sea, so we just stayed the way we were: Mama, Papa, two sisters, and baby Yeshkele. And every week, we put what money we could spare in a jar that Mama kept buried in the back garden.

  Mama was always telling me, “Look after the little ones,” as though I was not already wearing my tongue thin speaking spells of protection over Shayna and Yeshua. It does not come without cost, the work I do, and I grew tired of Mama’s constant worries, especially because in my heart I did not believe that anything could happen to us. Not in Bialystok.

  Every so often I would take out the contract and pore over it. But trying to read it hurt. The ink seemed to be made of blood and vomit. A stench like cowshit rose off the page. My stomach churned every time I unfolded the paper. The writing itself snaked obscenely in my brain, displacing any meaning the words themselves might have. I would spend hours and come away with a headache strong enough to make gravel of boulders and only enough words to know that my bubbe had signed a contract of some kind.

  What this meant, I had no idea.

  * * *

  Take care of the baby, Mama said.

  Yeshua was always wandering off. He would get bored watching Mama work, and of course it was always I who had to fetch him back. He crawled through and smudged the circles of protection I drew around him and it was almost impossible to get to the end of an invocation without Yeshua trying to eat the herbs I placed around him. I cannot count the times I had to break off in the middle, redraw the circles, and start over. I cannot count the number of amulets I drew up for him, as he chewed each paper with its magic symbols and prayers to bits. It got so I could not tell if any of my work was worthwhile—he seemed so set on undoing it all.

  It became simpler just to take him everywhere I went. That way I could protect him in the moment and keep him out from under Mama’s and Shayna’s feet. The only places I did not take him were to women’s childbeds. Otherwise he was a constant presence on my hip.

  One day, coming home from Yetta’s sweetshop, an old woman with long, straggling gray hair, who looked like a heap of clothing with a cord tied around the middle, stopped us.

  “Lovely baby,” she said. “Lovely baby boy.”

  I waited for her to make a sign warding off the evil spirits she’d attracted with her compliments, and when she did not, I knew she meant us no good and tried to push past her. As I did, she grabbed Yeshua out of my arms. He began to wail and reach for me.

  “Get your pigkeeping hands off my brother!” I yelled, grabbing for him, but she swung him away from me.

  The old woman looked me full in the face and I fell back—her eye sockets were empty holes, and fires burned in them. The creature was a lilit, the lilit my grandmother had spoken with.

  “Pigkeeper, is it, granddaughter of Hannah? Your brother, is it? The boy is mine, and none of thine.”

  I pulled out the silver-plated knife that had been in my grandma’s box. I’d kept it in my apron pocket ever since that day I’d found it. “He’s mine and I’ll send you to the fires of Gehenna if you don’t give him back.”

  Instead of answering, the old woman sprang away from me. I stabbed at her with my small knife, but my aim was no good and all I managed to do was slice into her arm.

  The creature fell to its knees, screaming in pain. Some kind of mucus poured from its cut arm. I grabbed Yeshua back while it pressed on the wound, vainly trying to stanch the flow while it raged at me, spitting and cursing. The mucus ate away at the blade of my knife. I clutched Yeshkele to my breast as though he were made of gold and bolted for home.

  By the time I got there, frightened and out of my breath and my wits, Shayna was the only one at home. I flung myself into her arms and cried while Yeshkele squirmed impatiently to be put down. But I couldn’t force myself to relax my grip.

  “Deborah!” Shayna exclaimed. “What’s happening?”

  “He’s our baby, ours!” I rocked back and forth on my heels. Shayna unbent my fingers, took the baby from me, and set him down gently.

  “Our baby, ours,” I kept saying while Shayna patted my hair and wiped my face. Yeshua crawled off to play with some toy horses our papa had carved for him.

  Finally I ran out of sobs and told her what had happened, that a demon had tried to take our baby brother, who was chewing thoughtfully on one of the horses.

  “How could it?” Shayna asked me. “After your work?”

  I wiped my face. “I must have forgotten something,” I said. “Something that makes him vulnerable. Or I’m just not strong enough yet. Or—” Suddenly I thought of the mysterious contract in Bubbe’s box, and of her long talk with the lilit that had been trying to take Pearl’s baby.

  I ran and got the paper from the box. “Shayna,” I told her, “these words are sick—can you smell them?”

  “I can’t smell anything,” she said. “It’s just a blank piece of paper.”

  “It’s not,” I said. “If I keep these words in my head my eyes burn and my thoughts curdle. So I’m going to read out each word I can to you, not keeping it in my head at all. And you write them down.”

  Shayna looked a little frightened, but she did what I said.

  “Baby,” I finished, and Shayna gasped.

  “Oh, Bubbe,” I whispered. “Oh, Bubbe, how could you?” For our bubbe had killed our brother with ink as surely as if she’d taken that silver knife to his throat.

  The long and the short of it was that our bubbe had struck a bargain with the lilit, whose name resisted my reading, for the power to get us safely to America. In return, she gave the demon the right to take the next baby of the family.

  I’d never realized how much Bubbe wanted to get us out, and I wondered what the lilit had told her about Bialystok.

  Well, she’d been cheated—the mob had taken her and we were still in Bialystok. But our baby brother wasn’t safe yet, and the demon was trying to collect. I tried to put a brave face on for Shayna’s sake.

  “The contract can’t be good still,” I told her. “Bubbe can’t see us safely to America now.”

  But in my heart, I knew the demon didn’t see it that way, and so did Shayna.

  “Don’t be an ass, Deborah! If that were true, you wouldn’t have had to fight it off this morning.”

  I didn’t know how to keep Yeshua safe. But I did know that it was no use telling Mama and Papa, and Shayna agreed. After all, they were working as hard as they knew how to get us across the sea, away from the old demons, and what more could they do if they did know? It was down to me to take care of this kind of business.

  For two weeks, Shayna and I hovered over Yeshkele like two cats over a mousehole. When one of us slept, the other one watched. We took him everywhere with us, and Mama appreciated the help, even if she didn’t know its reason.

  After two weeks of my eyes falling out of my head with exhaustion from useless charms and wardings and my brain boiling with effort, I reasoned like this: everyone knows the power of a contract. The contract was what put Yeshkele in danger. So, if we destroyed the contract, we would release the power and dispel the danger.

  I tried throwing the thing on the fire but it wouldn’t burn. I stuck it right in the heart of the blaze, but when the embers had burned themselves out, I stirred the ashes, and there the contract would be, with not even a smudge.

  Sometimes you need more than herbs and spells of protection. Sometimes it is not enough merely to defend. So Bubbe had taught me the evil eye. The evil eye, everybody knows, works by concentrating the element of fire, infusing it with the power of God’s curse, and directing that cursed fire with one’s vision. Under Bubbe’s supervision, I had practiced by glaring my heart out at dust, at flowers, at old rags. Lines formed in my face ahead of their time and eventually I got good enough to set regular bits of paper alight with my gaze. Now I needed to d
irect my anger at something more powerful than rags. I could feel the anger at my grandmother for making this cursed bargain massing behind my eyes like lightning in a black cloud. And I could hear the crackling in the air around me. Shooting pains ran through my head and I could feel my hair start to snake out from its braid. When the pressure was like a blacksmith’s vise, I’d open my eyes and send my pain at the rag or the paper and it would burst into flames.

  When I felt that I was ready, Shayna and I took Papa’s cart outside of the city and made a pile of oil-soaked rags and dry leaves. We put the contract in the center. Then she held Yeshua and drove the cart well clear of me and the kindling. I had told her to go half a mile; she went barely a quarter-mile, which was just as well for me, in the end. When she and the baby were safely away, I focused on my rage at Bubbe, at the demon trying to take Yeshua, on the mob that had killed my grandma. I heard the crackling and felt my head pulse with pain, and when I turned my gaze on the mound we had built, there was a sound like a hundred gasps, and a tower of flame shot from the small pyre up into the cloudy sky.

  My joints felt like they were made of moss and I fell down hard, hitting my head on a rock. My muscles like cobwebs, too weak to move or even to call for help from Shayna, I watched the fire burn itself out in clouds of oily, acrid smoke so thick you could have cut it into slices and spread butter on it. It took close to an hour to clear, and I could hear Shayna stumbling around with Yeshua in her arms, calling for me. Even when she found me, I wouldn’t let her start for home until she’d sifted through the ashes and found nothing left of the contract.