his bloody sheepskin, on the cot behind the stove, drawing the curtain to give her some privacy. Then, while his wife excoriated him for a hopeless ninny and threatened to increase his wounds, he lay himself down on his own bed and slipped away.
Or had he been a walking dead man all the while he was carrying his daughter home from the shandoiz? For that was the version that evolved in the ghetto, a story that thrilled its citizens, some of whom still recalled how Salo had entered their city preceded by legend; he’d been the guardian of a celebrated tzaddik’s remains, hadn’t he? though there was still some controversy as to whether the holy man was actually deceased. This was all long ago, but the memory, vague though it was, supplemented the perception that Salo Frostbissen was a holy warrior, come forth from his dormancy in Pisgat’s icehouse to do battle with the evil element. So emboldened was the local population by the tale of Salo’s martyrdom that, when Zygmunt the Pimp returned to claim his stolen property, he was met by a party of implement-brandishing neighbors standing outside Jocheved’s door. Zygmunt swore on his hip-pocket siddur that he would come back with reinforcements and proved as good as his promise, returning with a cadre of crime-syndicate shtarkers to break the heads of those who’d dared to defy him. But as he’d been in no special hurry to stage his reprisal (and was himself not exactly a popular cause), by the time he reappeared Jocheved’s mother had already followed her husband’s lead: Having hounded him throughout his days, she had apparently no intention of allowing death to come between them, and so pursued him into the hereafter with a stinging fund of leftover abuse that she’d neglected to unload on him in life. She had expired (this was the coroner’s diagnosis) of a ruptured heart that few gave her credit for having, and her daughter had since vanished without a trace.
But that was sometime after Jocheved had woken from the nightmare that trailed her like the raveled train of some spectral gown into consciousness. Her body ached from what she now understood were injections—the subcutaneous pinpricks and intravenous invasions of the hypodermic syringe—that Zygmunt the Pimp had administered to break her spirit and render her his virtual slave. Over the indefinite weeks of her captivity, almost no part of her anatomy had remained unpenetrated by needles, and her arms, legs, and buttocks bore the angry cipher of those marks. Now the inflammation of her flesh had infected her insomniac mind, which could no longer confine the horror of her waking to a faraway dream; and in her increasing awareness the horror grew until the dream took dominion everywhere, supplanting the mean interior of their basement flat. In the throes of her morphine withdrawal, Jocheved thrashed and flailed, fighting her exhausted mother, who was forced with the aid of the midwife to tie her daughter with leather straps to the sides of her cot. It was during this period that the girl, recalling another instance of being bound, came to realize that the worst she could imagine was true.
The facts revealed themselves by degrees through her mother’s running rant. “Oy, your papa, the yold, the mule,” keened Basha Puah. “I tell him go to the authorities, but he says they don’t care, the police, what uses the Jews put their daughters to. Your daughter’s lost, I tell him, so why’s he got also to lose himself? But he don’t listen, di zikh onton a mayse, the suicide; he sets out all alone for Gehenna, to hell he goes alone to fetch you back.” The tears she refused to release scalding her eyes.
And so the thread of her mother’s piecemeal narrative provided a logic that strung together the fragments of Jocheved’s dream, an awful logic through which she understood that she no longer belonged in the broken bosom of her family. She was a fallen creature, soiled and defiled, and must return to the sty whence she’d been snatched. Her whole body affirmed the urgency, though she was too weak to act on her need, and during the occasions when she attempted to rise from the bed, her mother and Shulamith, the vartsfroy, tightened her bonds. Then it was as if the girl had to be lashed to this world lest she escape to another—though it was paradoxically to another world, a new one, that Basha Puah in the end enjoined