Crossing the River

6. Another Fall and Winter

6 Another Fall and Winter Clouds Mother Doesn’t Come Home One day Mother did not come home from work. The stream of returning workers at twilight dispersed into the streets and disappeared into houses, and Mother wasn’t among them. At that time, mothers had to work four or five days a week and we were on our own most of the day. But even when she did return, worn and weary, she would sometimes be late, having been delayed on her way home, stopping here and there to barter. After a long time, another worker from the same brigade came and gave us a message from Mother not to worry—she would be back later that night or, at the very latest, the next morning . She had been stopped at the gate and put in detention. Immediately I took my sister’s hand, and we went to look for her. We may have been encouraged to do so by the people around us, as a means of pleading with the ghetto police. We may also have stopped on the way at Izzia and Shulamit’s house to tell them what had happened. I am not sure that we even reached the gate that evening; I don’t remember much of the next twelve hours. Maybe it all happened the following morning; the curfew on the ghetto began at nightfall, so how could we have gone to the gate and back? Yet I have a dim picture of two small children holding one another’s hands and standing beside the jail near the main gate of the ghetto. It was a two-story stone house on a corner; behind it was a yard with a gate at the back. Along the inner walls were long balconies overlooked by small latticed windows, and from one of them we thought we noticed the wave of a handkerchief or a weak cry. We were two children alone beside the locked gate, trying to locate our mother, with no one to speak to. No one was waving at us through the window. We turned around and went home, still holding tightly to each another. That night, we wrapped ourselves up in Mother’s bed, shedding tears and worrying very much indeed. As the big brother, I tried with all my might to be brave and 90 Chapter 6 consoling and to not think. We felt like helpless chicks whose protection had disappeared , now exposed to the merciless sun and every menacing danger. Never before had we felt so abandoned, so alone. My memory betrays me—why exactly was Mother arrested? She was freed the next morning and sent home. Perhaps her papers weren’t in order, or they had found more smuggled goods in her bag than usual. Perhaps she had exchanged a few sharp words with one of the people in charge at the gate, and he had decided to teach her a lesson. I deduce this from fragments of a picture preserved in my memory: that morning, as we returned with Mother, we met Luria—a tall, smiling man who was in charge of the work schedules for the Komität, and hence the object of a good deal of rage and resentment. One of the ghetto’s songs was specifically about him, sung to the popular Soviet tune of “Captain, Captain”: “Tall man, tall man, give us a smile.” He obviously had some long and special relationship with Mother, perhaps because of her directness and spunk. That morning he greeted her with a teasing , admonishing smile: So, was it worth it? Clearly, he knew all about the incident . Mother replied with a taunt and we went our separate ways. I do not recall that I ever asked Mother how she felt that night, her first time in jail, separated from her children. Or perhaps if I did, her answer may have been more than my memory could bear. Wolf Luria. Some months later, as the vise squeezed harder and harder, this strong, smiling man distributed poison to his family and all of them together tried to commit suicide. My Sister Falls Ill One day as I was helping my little sister get dressed, I noticed some small red spots on her left foot near her toes. That evening I told my mother about them, and she found, after a systematic search, similar spots on her lower abdomen and back. My sister wasn’t complaining, and she had no fever. As...