*Excerpted from THE COUNCIL OF WISE WOMEN, a novel
As soon as the door was safely closed, Yohon Abrahms ran back to the dining room.
Sarah Cohen was standing there, beside the table. Her hands were filled with broken teacups. Blood was dripping from her fingertips. Her empty eyes lifted and stared at him with growing anger.
“You’re married?” she said. It was little more than a whisper.
He couldn’t speak.
She wore a slender silk dress that she had found in Rabbi Sarnoff’s cedar chest. The scarves she had used to mask her face from Rabbi Kibbitz had fallen around her shoulders.
“You’re married?”
He nodded his head. Yes.
He watched her squeezing a broken teacup in her hand. He stepped forward and took it from her. He set it on the table. He led her into the kitchen and lifted and pulled the hand pump until the water began to flow clear into the basin. He held her hands under the cold water, rinsing away the dirt and the bits of broken china. The basin turned red and then pink.
He sat her at the kitchen table, where they had usually eaten their meals together. From a cupboard next to the kitchen sink, he took the small box of ointments and bandages he had brought with him from Chelm. He smeared her hands with a salve that Mrs. Chaipul recommended for cuts, and then gently wrapped each palm and finger with light gauze, which he carefully tucked in under itself, so it wouldn’t unwrap.
He went back into the dining room and looked at the wreckage on the floor. Everything was broken. It could wait.
He returned to the kitchen, took two sturdy mugs from the shelf, and filled them with hot tea from the samovar. He added milk to his, and a teaspoon of sugar and a splash of milk to hers, which he set on the table in front of her.
Sarah Cohen had been silent the whole time. At last, when she spoke, she asked the question again. “You’re married?”
“Yes,” he said, staring into his tea.
“Were you going to tell me?”
He shook his head. “No.”
Her eyes widened and her nostrils flared. “Why not?”
He sighed and rocked in his chair as if he was davening just a bit.
Then he told her…
* * *
When I was a rabbinical student there was a coffee shop in Moscow that we would frequent. It was not a reputable place. There was music and poetry most evenings and always arguments and shouting. But we went there because, for the price of a cheap cup of coffee you could sit for hours and read or play cards. The coffee was awful, the pastries were stale, and we didn’t dare ask if they were kosher or not. We went there because there were girls. Single girls, who would come in and play guitar or smoke cigarettes.
The owner was a thin Ukrainian woman who always had a cigarette dangling from her lips. The ash would grow longer and longer and we would sometimes take bets about whose coffee it would fall into. It was part of the charm.
The first time I saw her, I was struck by her beauty. She had straight dark hair, intense eyes, and a smile and laugh that filled the room with joy. Every man in the room was envious of the journalist who had brought her in on his arm. But he said something stupid, and she slapped him in the face, and he left in anger.
And then she looked at me.
My friend Izzy and I had been listening to a scrawny hirsute poet with bad teeth spewing a horrible rant about the government and bread.
There was a smattering of applause, and then a pause, and I leaped into it. I stood up. I walked to the front of the room. I had never done anything like this before. I cleared my throat and from the center of my heart I spoke to her.
I translated the Song of Solomon directly into Russian. I told her the entire psalm as if I had written it myself because at that moment the words of the wisest one were my own.
The room was silent. Not even a teaspoon clinked in the sugar bowl.
When I was done, they clapped, as if I had done something remarkable, which I suppose I had because it was rare to command that level of attention in this place of agitation and dissent.
When I was done, she walked to me. She kissed me on the lips and held her body against mine.
I had never touched a woman, except for my mother. It was electric. It was sudden. It was real. All of my studies, all of my life, none of that mattered inside that kiss. And I kissed her back, as if I knew what I was doing.
From then on, we spent almost every moment together. I neglected my studies, and she neglected her painting. She was an artist, of course. A painter, who worked with colors. She showed me her pictures, but I didn’t really like them. She laughed and said that I was the only man she had ever slept with who hadn’t complimented her work.
Yes, we slept together. And two weeks later I asked her to marry me, and I still can’t believe that she said yes.
Because she had told me she didn’t believe in marriage. But she said yes for me, because she knew that I did.
We told no one. Not our families. Not our friends. She wasn’t Jewish. I didn’t believe in Christ. We went to a rabbi on the other side of Moscow and bribed him with some money. It was done.
I thought I would feel different. Calmer? But I didn’t. I still felt consumed and impassioned.
I went back to my studies and she went back to her painting, and in the afternoons we would meet at the coffee shop and smoke cigarettes and play cribbage for hours before sneaking away to her studio in the attic of a four-story apartment building where we lived as husband and wife.
The days and the weeks passed, and I remember every single moment. We met near the end of winter. We married on the third day of spring. We picked mushrooms in the woods and cooked them in soups and stews because we had no money. When the attic grew hot in the summer, we rejoiced and roamed about in our small stuffy garden as naked as Adam and Eve.
Then, one morning in late summer, I woke to hear pounding at the door downstairs. It sounded like drums. She lay next to me and I brushed her hair with my fingers. Then I heard the front door open, and footsteps, like marching, like running, like a horse galloping up the stairs.
The pounding this time was closer. The door in the floor of our attic was shaking with violent angry continuous pounding.
“Did you pay the rent?” I asked her.
But her face was white as a sheet.
The door burst open and in they came. Three large men ran up the stairs. They took her. They laughed at her nakedness, ogled her beauty. One of them struck me with a leather sack as I stood to object, and I flew backward across the room, stunned by the blow.
They made her dress, and they dragged her away. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t stop them. One of them showed me a pistol, but he didn’t even have to draw it.
I was naked and alone and bleeding, and she was gone.
We had known that the secret police were always a risk. But we laughed at their stupidity. Everyone spoke against the government. Everyone had a litany of complaints. Everyone dreamed of a day of revolution and rule by the people. We thought we were safe because we were all alike. We thought we were safe because we were young, and we knew in our hearts that we did not mean it, and that we did not matter. We were not the ones who would rush to the barricades. We were the ones who liked coffee and pastries and cards and poetry.
But she had painted a canvas showing a man having relations with an animal, with a pig. It was a horrible and disturbing and ugly painting. It was so ugly that it was the best painting she ever made. Naturally a gallery owner hung it on his wall. Naturally it caused a stir in the newspapers. Naturally the secret police looked at it, and when they did they saw that the face of the smiling man was the face of the Czar himself.
The gallery was burned to the ground. And they took her away.
I asked. I looked. I tried to find her. She was gone. No one knew where. I couldn’t find her. It was as if she never existed.
I went back to my studies. I graduated. Time passed. I read in the newspaper one day that a village was looking for a mohel.
And so I came to Chelm.
* * *
Sarah had listened without speaking and when he was done, she asked, “Did you ever see her again?”
He shook his head.
“She could be dead,” she said.
“Maybe,” he whispered. “But I don’t think so. And I don’t know. So, technically I’m still married.”
“What was her name?”
“Malka. Malka Abrahms.”
Sarah nodded. She stood. She leaned over and kissed him on his cheek.
He closed his eyes and felt the soft brush of her lips.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. Then she went back into the dining room and began cleaning up the mess.
With his eyes still closed, Yohon Abrahms touched his jacket and felt the pocket. There was the onionskin letter from Moscow in its thin envelope that he had received three weeks earlier. As if reading with his fingers, he remembered the words his friend Izzy had written.
“There is a rumor of a general pardon this spring. They say that there are just too many people in prison, so they’re letting them go to save money. I don’t know if Malka is still alive, but I thought you should know.”
Izzy Abrahmson is a pen name for Mark Binder, an Audie Award nominated storyteller and author of more than two dozen books and audiobooks. The Village Life books and stories have been published and performed around the world. THE COUNCIL OF WISE WOMEN will be available August 25 in print, ebook and audiobook. in stores and on most platforms. For links and info: https://lightpublications.com/