feet like an awkward sixteen-year-old.
“Nemt epes in moyl arayn,” she said, offering me a bowl of sour cherries.
Ah. So that’s what a vaynshl was. We call them vishnya in Slonim.
“You don’t need to offer me anything, Mrs. Rozansky. I know it’s late. I just need to speak to Reyzl.”
“Reyzl’s not home,” said her father, his clay pipe clamped between his teeth. He was smoking that fancy New World tobacco which burns up a day’s wages with a few quick puffs.
They couldn’t stop staring at my newly shaven cheeks.
Finally, Mrs. Rozansky said, “She’s staying at a friend’s house at the bottom of Three Wells Lane.”
Reyzl had moved closer to the breach in the gate?
“Why?” I asked.
Zalman Rozansky blew some of that expensive smoke at me. “You’ll have to ask her.”
ONE MORE FLIGHT OF STAIRS, I thought. One more crooked flight of stairs leading to another narrow hallway.
My knocking had roused the landlady, which was a grievous error. She had looked me over, declared that she ran a respectable establishment, and insisted on coming with me, climbing the steps at the speed of honey flowing uphill. We finally got to the third landing and she knocked on the door.
“Reyzl! There’s someone here to see you.”
“Just a minute, Mrs. Leibstein.”
The floor creaked as feminine footsteps approached.
Reyzl’s eyes were laughing when she opened the door. They froze when she saw the strange man on her threshold, then her face went flat.
“Oh, it’s you. What do you want?”
“Want me to toss him out?” said the landlady.
“No, it’s all right, Mrs. Leibstein. Thank you.”
Mrs. Leibstein gave me a look that a less rational being would have taken as a curse, then she hobbled slowly toward the stairs so she wouldn’t miss a word.
“What have you done to yourself?” Reyzl asked.
It was cold in the hallway, but Reyzl just stood there in her thick woolen nightgown, glaring at my hairless face.
“Do you have any idea what time it is?” she said, crossing her arms.
“Uh…No.”
“It figures.” She dropped her arms, turned her back to me, and stepped into her room.
I followed.
The bed sheets were rumpled, but I hadn’t roused her from bed. She had been going through her things. There was a pile of clothes and other items next to a small trunk on a table by the window.
“Make it quick,” she said, selecting a long black skirt from the pile.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” she said, shaking out the skirt. “I’m going to stay with some friends in the Christian quarter until it’s safe to come back.”
She carefully folded the skirt and packed it in the trunk.
“If you’re going to run away, why not come back to Slonim with me?” I asked.
“I am not running away! It’s just for a few days till—oh, forget it. I don’t have time for this now,” she said, stuffing cosmetics into her blue purse with the gold tassels.
“You don’t have time for me?”
“What are you going to do, start breaking furniture?”
“I’ve learned not to do such things since you left,” I said. “I try not to react like that so much anymore.”
“Not so much anymore? How about not reacting that way at all?”
“Believe me, I’m working on it.”
“A couple of years too late, Benyamin.”
She shoved a pair of silk slippers into the trunk.
“I’m trying to do better—”
“And where on earth are the Imperial protectors? Weren’t you supposed to talk them into providing us with some protection? Any sign of keyser Rudolf’s troops out there?” she said, waving her hand toward the window.
Her gesture made the candle flicker wildly.
“How are you going to get past the Judenschläger?” I said. “Where are you going to hide? Unless I can punch a hole in their defenses, you won’t get twenty paces past the gates.”
“Won’t I?” she said, yet I sensed a wavering in her manner.
But she was still winning the war of words. How was I supposed to summon the strength to fight off hordes of Jew-bashers when I couldn’t even convince a headstrong woman to listen to me for five minutes? And suddenly I felt extremely tired. I sat on the edge of the bed before my whole world collapsed like a house of cards.
The Guardian of Israel does not sleep. But I was no Guardian of Israel.
The candle kept flickering by the window, burning through its fleeting life and sending up a thin plume of smoke that would soon be the only sign that it had ever existed.
“Don’t send me away like this,” I said. “The ReMo