and there a crocus had broken through the crust of the earth. Having been so long away from the natural world, Jocheved almost resented how it persisted without her, squeezing the clod of dirt she was meant to drop into her mother’s grave until it crumbled in her palm and was scattered by the wind. After the ceremony the mourners, some of whom were strapping teamsters and bare-boned yeshivah scholars, escorted the girl back to Zabludeve Street. They were solicitous of her frailty, protective of her personal safety; and letting her guard down, Jocheved felt that, for the daughter of her parents, there would always be a place in the ghetto. Perhaps she might yet revive the halcyon satisfactions of her ice-making enterprise. But as the teamsters crowded about her with a brazen forwardness and the scholars kept their distance as if from a contagion, the girl remembered the shame that could never be erased, let alone the lingering danger. She was appalled by her selfishness, that her grief over her own corruption should have displaced, if only momentarily, the grief for her family, for whose deaths she was in large part responsible.
In Jocheved’s absence old Shulamith had dusted and cleaned the cellar, having removed (no doubt as her due) some of the luxury items—the Tuscan bronze egg beater, the enameled douche pan—that the girl had lavished on her mother in more prosperous times. May they serve the old ganef well, thought Jocheved, noting that in exchange for what she’d taken the woman had also contributed, beyond her labors, some pot cheese and a bottle of schnapps for the guests. The stench of the cheese helped neutralize the stench of sickness and death that still pervaded those recessed rooms. After the chalk-faced men of the Chevra Khadisha had finished saying Kaddish, the guests departed and Jocheved was finally alone. Utterly spent, she slumped onto a wooden stool, laid her head on a noodle board, and slept a while, dreaming of a despondent child with wings too heavy to flap. When she awoke she heaved a ragged sigh, got slowly to her feet, and took down the large copper kneading trough that hung from a ceiling beam. Since the apartment’s single mirror was turned to the wall, she gazed at her distorted reflection in the trough’s tarnished surface and saw only a ghost gazing back at her. Having already ritually torn the pongee collar of her mourning dress, the only store-bought frock in her wardrobe, she tugged at the lapel until she’d ripped the bodice from her shoulders. Then with both hands she tore the cambric corset cover underneath, wrestling herself out of her ravaged garments until she stood naked and shivering on the cold flags of the cellar floor. Further compelled by the tattoo of her pounding heart, the girl located her mother’s teak sewing box, extracted from it a pair of tailor’s shears, and with only the ill-defined reflection in the copper pot to guide her hand, she clipped off her mane of crow-black hair. Thus shorn, she flung the pot and kicked at the fallen hair that encircled her, releasing a sob that collapsed her chest as would a wrecking ball. This was her sorry state when the door to the hallway scraped open and Shulamith, midwife, rootworker, and sometime enema lady, crept in.
Without a word—had they ever exchanged a word?—the hag took in the situation. Jocheved looked on sniffling, hugging her bare breasts as if she meant to stifle them for good and all, while the old woman went straight to the clothes press and in a gesture that had about it something of the miraculous (she was regarded by many as a kishefmakherin, a sorceress) lifted the lid. From its camphor-reeking confines she withdrew a man’s suit of clothes—the dark navy worsted with an alpaca lining and rolling lapel that Jocheved had purchased for her father during better days. Salo, who slept in his peasant smock and sheepskin, had never found occasion to wear it; though he took pride in possessing the suit and pledged to put it on when Mashiach finally arrived, or on the day the rabbi disenthralled himself from the ice, whichever came first. His wife sneered that he was waiting to be buried in his gladrags and, seized with a sentimental urge that he realize that end, had quarreled with the burial society, which pronounced such off-the-rack apparel a desecration.
Passive after the energy she’d expended in cutting her hair, Jocheved looked on