to groom himself; he trimmed his arboreal beard and scrubbed his body in the shower bath of his own construction, a process involving half an hour’s pumping of water from a receptacle tank to the barrel above. Still he deemed the operation worthwhile since his cleanliness (plus the broadcloth shirt and duck trousers) helped, he believed, to conceal the turmoil within. Shprintze, however, showed no appreciation for his efforts, and seemed at first not even to recognize him, until he reassured her he was the same hermit troll to whom she was engaged. Neither was she as fastidious in preparing to meet him, though Ruby was a little intoxicated by the civet scent she exuded.
It wasn’t long before he learned her disturbing secret: that she only pretended to read the books whose open pages she never turned. He asked if she were illiterate, then immediately regretted the question, though she took no offense; she merely shook her head, and later, when he ventured to read aloud to her—still amazed at how the language reprised itself with near lucidity—she might anticipate sentences whenever he faltered, sometimes reciting them from memory with eyes closed. But mostly she was content to remain his passive audience.
It seemed to Ruby that Shprintze borrowed identities from the characters in those stories like costumes from a wardrobe rack in order to sustain her throughout any given day. But those temporary identities would wear thin by dusk and need replenishing from her bag of stories. When her assumed personae had run their course she came to him, and she appeared at those times practically a feral creature. It wasn’t that she was spooked or panicked but merely uncivilized and at sea until the reading domesticated her all over again. Then she could face the collective once more with the forbearance of a Sheyndele from Dovid Pinski’s “The Woodcutter’s Wife” or the vivacity of one of Tevye’s daughters, which would see her through another working day. Watching her Ruby remembered the multiple identities he’d adopted during his term as a fugitive; but since his post office photos had yellowed and been papered over by a new generation of Jewish desperados, he’d done with disguises. Now, but for his bare feet and checkered kefiyeh, he could have been mistaken for just another sunburnt halutz.
The girl’s bag of books contained a volume of Peretz Hirschbein’s stories and another collection of S. Ansky’s; there was Midrash Itzik by Itzik Manger, which included his Hershel Ostropolier tales, the moral fantasies of Glückel of Hameln, and I. L. Peretz’s fables and plays. It was a sweet and sour literature, full of worriers rather than warriors, that superseded in Ruby’s mind the news of Secretary Bevin’s Machiavellian policies and the assassination of Lord Coyne, the decimation by liquid nitro of the King David Hotel. But what of Shprintze’s own history? Was it, like the words in her books, worn so smooth by memory that her brain could find no traction there? This was Ruby’s theory, but every so often, though long out of practice in cajolery, he tried to tease her into disclosing some detail of her past. “A mol iz geven,” he might begin, chunking a shard from an ancient cenotaph at Abimelech harrassing a ewe munching nettles. “Once upon a time, Shprintzele was born…,” making a gesture indicating that she should continue the tale. And when she refused to take the bait, he would wait a day or two and try again. It was a little like trying to kick-start the commune’s old Flying Merkel motorbike, or so he told her, eliciting a flutter he took for the precursor of a smile; he had coaxed a smile. Still he was unprepared when the girl finally took up the narrative on her own.
“My papa was Reb Eliakum Feygenboim, a mokher seforim, a bookseller; my mama who I don’t remember died young. We lived on the Tsvarda Gass in Vilna, in three crowded rooms over the shop that was everywhere books, downstairs and up. As a business, the shop was nit gornisht, a failure, since my papa—if he sold shrouds nobody would die—gave away to his favored customers the prizes and discouraged who he deemed unworthy from buying the rest. It was only when he would leave the city on peddling trips to the villages that he would make from the Litvaks a few groschen. They wouldn’t let girls go in cheder so I never learned to read Toyreh, but I could read from the