The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,4

smelled her: a scent of rough soap, the dried rosemary she’d carried in bunches to the market, and sixteen-year-old girl.

“Show me on this.” Plucking a parcel from the basket she carried over her arm, she unwrapped the brown paper and freed a corner of the fabric, a bright blue that matched her eyes; it was soft to his touch when he held it and aimed the scissors at it. “No, silly, not that much!” she cried, and snatched the wool from him, her fingers grazing his, her blue eyes teasing.

Emboldened, he handed her the scissors, their touch lasting perhaps two seconds this time. “You do it.”

Agneta folded the fabric back into the brown paper and reached behind her for the braid that fell halfway to her waist. Flourishing her rosemary-scented blond hair between them, she sliced a dozen strands from the end of her braid and held them out to Dov.

“You understand, girls? Agneta was a goy, a Christian. She thought she could say anything she wanted, because I was nobody, a Jew.”

Dov Grinshtayn didn’t believe in such distinctions, however. He intended to abolish them; everyone did at the socialist meetings he snuck off to. And he was a strong, good-looking boy, fonder of walking in the forest and (luckily, as it turned out) swimming in the river than spending all day shut up in the rabbi’s study hall. In a photograph taken in New York a few years later, his jaw is firm, his shoulders solid, and his eyes, under thick, wavy black hair … Even though the photo is slightly out of focus, you can see the challenge in his eyes. The kind of look I pictured him giving Agneta.

“Here,” she said when he just stood there instead of reaching for the lock of hair. “Take it.”

“Why would I want it?”

“To think of me.” She tossed her head, even as the disdained hair grew damp with sweat from her fingers.

“Why would I want to think of you?”

Her jest turned against her, Agneta’s smile lost its courage and became the sucked-in lips of a child fighting tears. And Dov experienced in one telescoped moment everything that was fine and everything that was mean in himself. “Ai, I felt sorry for upsetting her. But living in America, girls, you have no idea. Christian boys used to beat us up; they did it in plain sight of adults and got away with it. Sometimes mobs of Christians attacked all the Jews. It was called a pogrom. Every minute of your life, you were afraid.”

Given the perpetual anxiety of being at the mercy of the Christian peasants, Dov couldn’t help but savor his taste of power over one Christian girl … until tears brimmed in her eyes. Then his heart melted. Gravely he held out his hand. Agneta pressed the lock of hair into his palm. He twisted the hair into a triangle of paper and slipped it in his pocket.

They spoke now only of their transaction.

“Are they sharp enough?”

“Yes, they’re fine.”

“Shall I wrap them?”

But every word carried poetry in its arms.

“Agneta, what’s taking you so long, girl?” A man’s voice at the door, thick as if he’d just come from the tavern, and that was when Dov learned her name.

“Coming, Father,” she called.

“Wait. Take …,” Dov said, before he had any idea what to give her. “Here!” A pencil from his pocket, almost new and hardly chewed at all.

“Oh.” She looked at the pencil as if she didn’t know how to use one. Was she even literate, this girl who was going to hurl him into exile? She thrust the pencil into her basket and scurried out the door.

She came back two weeks later with a pot to mend, but the shop was busy, and he had to focus on the work under finicky Berel’s eye. Nervous, he burned his fingers with solder, but that hardly aroused his father’s suspicion, as it happened all the time.

He was luckier on the next market day. When he passed the stalls in the town square, on his way to deliver tin pails to the dairy, he spotted her and caught her eye. She slipped off and followed him. In a stand of beech trees, he and Agneta were alone at last.

“Did you kiss?” we asked. We went to the movies. We knew what happened when people were in love; not that we saw this kind of behavior between Mama and Papa!

“The ideas you girls have. Once, I kissed her.” But they didn’t dare linger