The Little Bride by Anna Solomon Page B

But Galina’s work was hasty, nothing more than a rough winding of cloth, and the contents spilled out before Minna was prepared: stuffed in with the pillow was a fall of silk, the color of . . . she held it up, then brought it down, trying to see without drawing attention to herself. Lilac. She was almost certain. She found a neckline, trimmed with lace. A hem, more lace. A white satin belt. Attached to the belt was a note, in Galina’s surprisingly graceful handwriting, the product of private tutors: When my mother wore this, it was very modern, very up-to-date.
    “Help.”
    The man stood in front of Minna’s bunk, the right side of his head and jaw wrapped in a bandage—which was simply a rag, she saw, blackened with filth. He was the one who led the “bearers,” as Minna had come to think of them. In and out they went, carrying the sick, though it never helped: the patients didn’t revive; the babies didn’t stop dying. In his arms was a girl, Minna’s age perhaps, or younger, or older—it was impossible to tell anymore how old anyone was.
    Minna stuffed the wedding dress into the pillowcase and hid the bundle behind her. “I don’t feel well,” she said. “And my hand hurts.” Which was true, but barely—her sprain from her final night at Galina’s was almost healed.
    “I can’t hear you,” called the man, “and I don’t care what you’re saying. Get down from there and help. The only person who’s done less is your downstairs neighbor, and he’s got his filthy pigeons for an excuse.”
    The man was not large. He didn’t look particularly strong. He was working hard, it was clear, to hold up the girl. Yet Minna felt an odd immobility, a heady delight at staring down at him. His Yiddish was the old kind that sounded like a song, the kind spoken by the oldest men in the smallest villages, yet he was young, so it only made him seem more self-righteous. Minna couldn’t help herself. She leaned down and shouted: “What happened to your face?”
    He narrowed his eyes. “You would like to know?”
    “Yes!”
    “Come down and I’ll tell you.”
    “I’d rather not.”
    “I can’t hold her up forever.”
    Minna shrugged. Where she’d come up with this game, what she wanted from it, she didn’t know. All she knew was that she didn’t want to work on the man’s useless assembly line. She didn’t want to work for anyone but herself, in her own house; and even then, not carrying work. Certainly not carrying other people. She willed herself to throw up, but her stomach was calm as a stone. Then the man had suddenly handed off his burden and jumped halfway up the bunk to face her. He yanked off his rag and glared. Minna flinched. But there was no blood, no deformity. There was only the man’s forehead, pouring sweat, and a vague imbalance to his face, so vague she could not at first locate it, until he shook his head roughly and she saw: one earlock swung at his cheek, but the other was missing. Only a few uneven hairs were left, ugly as chewed thread, sprouting from a patch of raw, red skin.
    “There you are. Your Majesty. The Russians had no shears. They used rocks to shred it off.” Then, to himself, “Forgive me, God, I use my wounds as money.” He gripped the bunk and pulled himself closer. He might be crazy, she thought, the kind of crazy that compulsively shared the most personal business, like the drunk who used to roam through Beltsy, stooping into people’s faces and listing off his sins. “Say what you think,” he commanded Minna through clenched teeth. “Say you think it was our fault. You think we did not resist. We asked for it. We are weak. We are men of air. Say it.”
    Minna had heard of synagogues where the men had gone on praying even as the windows were smashed. In Balta, two towns over from Beltsy, there had been a pregnant woman who volunteered herself to be shot, as long as her other children were spared. But Minna’s thought, right now, was that she hadn’t