protection from her husband’s cruelty.
Who knows what pain we could have prevented if we had only responded sooner?
A young girl who must have been her daughter was sitting on a wobbly stool sewing a patch on a rather tatty pair of leggings. Maybe it was the dim light, but she appeared to turn a little green when she saw me, and she hopped off the stool and ran into the other room.
“Yes, I must be quite a sight in these muddy clothes,” I said, ducking my head under the doorframe and stepping inside.
The woman’s name was Havvah, and she said that her husband the locksmith would be home any minute. The Fettmilchs’ front room was cold, and saturated with the kind of moist, chilly air that penetrates the bones. It was barely illuminated by a damp wood fire that produced little heat but plenty of smoke, and soot coated the furniture like the drifting remnants on the day after the plague of darkness.
This weak flower of womanhood didn’t stand a chance under these conditions, and it’s a good thing Anya was there, because Havvah wouldn’t even look at me.
So the two women huddled together by the fire and whispered things not fit for a man’s ears while I sat on the wobbly stool and soaked up the heavy sense of depravation permeating the room. I wondered how many houses felt this dreary, whether in the ghetto or among our Christian neighbors, then I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the minutes ticking away. I even started rocking back and forth and reciting the tractate Sanhedrin just to keep myself occupied.
I had made it all the way up to the words, If one comes to kill you, be first and kill him, when Anya tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I can tell that something truly awful has happened to her, but she can’t bring herself to tell me what it is.”
“Then she should go to the rabbi,” I said. “We could even take her with us. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind—”
And at that moment, which required the utmost delicacy, Lazarus Fettmilch burst into the house. His dirty blond hair stuck out at all angles as if he had just stepped out of a whirlwind, and his face flushed with rage when he saw me.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, clomping toward me and leaving dark puddles wherever he walked.
When I explained that we were here to ask him about the key to a certain lock, he told us what we could do with our locks and keys, then he threw us out. The door slammed, then we heard a heavy crash as he screamed at his wife and daughter for letting us in.
Anya gave me a pained look, then she told me that Havvah had anticipated her husband’s foul mood, and had given her the names of several other locksmiths in the ghetto.
“That’s just what we need. You’ve done a terrific job, Anya,” I told her.
“Then why don’t I feel terrific about it?”
“Because you’ve just seen the face of a lost innocence that can never be completely recovered.”
She stopped and faced me.
“What?” I asked.
She regarded me as if taking my full measure, and said, “So there are other Jews like Yankev. And I thought he was so unique.”
“He is unique, he’s just…”
“Just what?”
She stood with one hand on her hip, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
I searched for the words, but even when I found them I couldn’t meet her eyes. He just tried to escape from the ghetto without you. So I looked away and said, “Just like the rest of us. He’s toiling forever toward perfection without ever achieving it.”
“Yes, that’s him, all right.” She clasped her hands and hugged them to her chest like any young woman dreaming of her lover.
“Thank you for everything,” she said, reaching out to me. I backed away abruptly.
“We still have a mission to complete,” I said.
And a grim mission it was. We passed through house holds weighed down by the iron claws of melancholy, from grimy hovels tucked away in dark passages to three-story town houses on Golden Lane, before we found a locksmith who could tell us that it would be a simple matter for any competent cracksman to pick the lock that went with the heavy key that Anya held in her hand.
I still didn’t see how two big men could have crept into the Janeks’ bedroom and taken their little