For Melynda C. Reid
1. PRELUDE: WEDDING DANCE Beyle married Kalman in the fourth year of Chmielnicki, went under the canopy, defying danger and fate: stood with her bridegroom, thought only of him, this pale, graying man with his scholar's soft hands and sad gentle eyes. The wedding jester howled with laughter, perched like a crow on the synagogue roof, shrieked out Bride-to-be, bride-to-be, think but a little of what now awaits you! and they laughed at the jest, even Beyle herself, solemn in thinking of her new estate. Their families danced round them, pulled them apart: men with men, women with women, circling in the dark. Beyle sought Kalman with her dreams, her spirit in the air, apart from the dancers and decorum of the Law: and felt his spirit move toward hers in darkness, thinking indeed of what awaited them: for Beyle, at sixteen, and Kalman, at thirty, saw in each other the meeting of souls beyond age, and longed to cleave together, fire and air, according to their spirits: and then soared above themselves, joined together in air and fire, one within the other, accepted first in fear, then in joy: looked down on the lights below, saw not Chmielnicki but Heaven in the distant- nearing flames, drifted in each others' arms, and laughed to themselves, laughed to each other, recalling the jester's summons to think of what awaited: for they felt this night that what waited was their gift to be borne. 2. THE CHILDREN Beyle married Kalman in the fourth year of Chmielnicki, soon fled with him from the village of Wolma to Cracow: returned that winter, heard the nightmares: but because there was nothing to do for them, she could not mourn: so Beyle went like a ghost into her husband's bed, dutifully, as she had been instructed: but at the moment of Kalman's fulfillment, remembered the nightmares: how the Hetman's Cossacks sewed a terrified cat in her pregnant sister's womb, fed the baby she carried to an underfed sow; captured her 10-year-old brother Avruml, poured raw vodka into his gullet, wrapped him like fish in a scroll of the Law, and live-buried him, before their mother's disbelieving maddened eyes, in the synagogue cemetery, laughing drunkenly at the quick-fading shrieks of Mamala! from beneath the lime: and how their mother, reduced to a keening and babbling madwoman who had forgotten her prayers, was allowed at last to die: raped first, repeatedly, on her son's fresh grave, then beheaded; and how a Cossack hurtled her severed head at an innkeeper in payment for vodka and food. She heard her brother's spectral sobbing in the draining cry of the man thrusting inside her, and that night twice conceived: their firstborn child, and her knowledge that hearing the cry of the dead had doomed it. She bore that summer, crying out Mamala! in her pain, as she forced it downward, outward, cruelly, feeling nothing for its unbegun unwanted life, ended as the midwife severed the cord. Kalman mourned, took solace from his books, sought and found answers that only smothered questions, bound the mouth that would protest: and was taught to dull questioning God with his wife's body: so came to Beyle again, to sow within her, this time in joyless silence, focused, as the rabbis taught him, not on pleasure but the task of binding his wife to fertility. So again she conceived, and bore again, and the child lived: but it was the color of moonrise beneath the dark swatch of its hair: a ghostly spectre to take Avruml's name, Avruml himself risen from the graveyard lime-pit, with no more life than he. Beyle resigned herself: and sensed this child would also die, victim of its name, a curse given in devotion. But it did not, and Beyle mocked herself for a false prophetess: for she saw Death's Angel, knew herself his priestess, dedicated to his will, even to renouncing her children: but not Avruml but Kalman followed in the winter that came: not murdered, save by God's pity and the blood-spattering cough that lived in his lungs, that made him weep from pain and shiver through the hottest summer nights, and that finally came to take him. Still Beyle could not mourn: for the sickly child, the changling-Avruml, clung to her breast, demanded all her strength, fought against her darkness, drank, sucked at her breast with the lover's passion its father could not show, lived beyond its foretold days, an ancient soul and wonder to his mother, and would not grow. 3. THE INVADERS The Swede has left his wife six months behind, her face by now a dim memory of resentment, his children, two alive, four dead, all given to fill a parish register or country churchyard, his wife's womb swelling again with the promise of a new chance that neither wishes nor believes, living on a hillside farm that mocks his wife's fecundity in its barrenness: a farm of stones. One morning, he looks without passion or anger at the wolf-mangled body of a sheep, surveys his rain-withered crop that will be neither tithe nor bread to feed his family: shivers and feels himself freeze dead inside, remembering the story in church of how Hagar, cast into the desert by the Jewess Sarah, parted from Ishmael so not to see him die: does not bid farewell, but disappears from the farm, spends the day drinking in an inn filled with men whose every breath united is curses and despair; and flees to King Charles' army and the distant Polish wars. Lost after battle, wandering to the village, he contemplates the woman in the yard, sitting in the sunlight, a baby clamped to a breast, the nipple dark-swollen, visible, a feminine vision to inspire not lust but memory: of his wife on the hillside farm, perhaps alive, perhaps not (it is all one), the child in her womb now born, perhaps alive, perhaps not (it is all one), her body beneath his in the night, a shredded memory of love turned too soon to exhaustion: she, an old woman at 25, without the strength even to dream. He feels suddenly seized without reason, without experience, newborn himself, bereft of memory: and the Jewess before him a strange, darkling creature with wolf-eyes, clutching her child to her teat like a beast. She looks at him, the Jewess, quickly covers her breast, extends the child before her like a shield, shaking her head in odorous terror, a febrile quivering fright before a stranger: and he walks slowly toward her, his boots sucking against the springtime mud like a polluted kiss. What is she crying out at him, shaking her head? He feels himself laugh soundlessly: what would she cry but Don't! as he takes the child, carefully, out of her arms, sets it on the ground, turns and sees her gaping: for he has kissed the child gently, then turned its back to what will take place, quickly, behind the ruined house. She knows the sure signs that she is with child again: and will bear in the winter. What are prayers? she cries: staggers wildly through the village, Avruml in her arms, invades the study house, and pleads for death at the hands of Kalman's friends as she begged the stranger when he was done with her: extends her neck, points at the sword in the belt he had not bothered to remove. But her comforters hold her, teach her the Law: how a Jewish mother bears a Jewish child, that the child will be welcomed: a new child, a new life, in a land that has lost its children: and the words of her comforters thrust into her darkness, drive her shame from her heart, forgive her, save her from her mother's madness. God has abandoned us, He is so distant! cries the midwife that December as she draws forth the red, squalling blonde-haired Viking baby boy whose cry is like the ram's horn blown at the New Year. But Beyle laughs, weeping, holding the child: No, God is close, in my belly, like the cat inside my sister! 4. CRADLE SONG Sleep my little one, show me your future, Sleep and dream, show me your past. Show me my sister, my mother, my brother, Show me your father, show me what lasts. Sleep my little one, don't wake too soon, Sleep and dream, don't wish for dawn. For dawn takes away all your wonderful dreaming, And daylight shows nightmares, a life to be borne. Wake my little one, for you are crying, Wake my poor little one, Mamala's here. Wake, my little one, for you have saved me, The past is a fouled curse, the future is here. Rise with me, little one, come dance in my arms, Rise and dance, come up to the air. Look down at the lights, reach out, touch the stars, For they are as bright as the gold in your hair. Kenneth Wolman, September 1991