The Christian Girl

That morning, I had not exactly been spying on the Christian girl taking her bath outside in the strange area my father had rigged up for her, because though it had been permissible for him to get by the women of the house the idea of this young girl who lived with us and who ate with the children, who helped us for some vulnerable reason everyone protected which I didn't understand, no one let her bathe where other women did or use the same small chamberpot since both her bathwater and waste were to be poured out elsewhere and so avoid any mixing with ours. In this way we stayed apart: otherwise her muslin dresses and water-harshed hands were ours as were her apples, jokes, and tendrils of hair escaping her bun. Because of this tender reason that had to be sheltered, she had her own place to sleep and bathe. If you stood on the hill just above at the right hour when no neighbor was around, you could see the care she took, putting the animal-fat soap she used, different from ours, on the stone wall my brothers and I dedicated ourselves to dismantling.

She had a way of undoing her hair with a kind of trick so it fell down around that snub face, followed by a bit of shadowy movement through the slats. While watching her, I could not help my own little body-trick on its own starting to perform and could not also help the feeling she knew about my body-trick. Discovery! Or almost and so I panicked, dislodging a piece of rubble toward where she bathed.

To see her through slats was not so different from how she had first appeared among us, stepping down the path, wearing a brown dress of a kind we had not seen, something that might as well have been made from potato sacks and then belted. Never had I seen a person like her, so soft and foreign yet unhidden.

Our mother was proper, a person cited often for her propriety, and though I understood this meant her airs were great and that many failed in their liking, they always spoke of her education, it meant she could read French, Russian, Polish, German, Hebrew, her skirts sheaths long as this education, highwaisted black affairs with tiny complicated buttons up near her waist that fascinated me, since when I was young, I could not imagine ever having come from that concave belly sheathed by those skirts, and at least those mysterious buttons made me cite my origins or at least offered the hint of a clue. During that time, my mother did not walk so much as sweep through our house, two levels, with an assortment of aunts and others upstairs, but if I watched her swishing too much, a little rush of something flooded my chest as if I had just punched a pillow and only air puffed out.

My job as the youngest was to lie in the beds of each of the women at night, to warm sheets for them, what they always laughed about: that is what he is good for, little Henryk, I heard them saying, he'll make a good bedwarmer, though I never wished to pursue that laugh, one more of those items adults left in their wake which could steal your attention and then vanish like a small fluff of goose feathers I was sure kept following me everywhere in life and not just when our pillows were truly being beat on one of our stultified summer afternoons.

My father scared me, a big man named David respected in the town for his great timber enterprise which in retrospect now seems not so great, just a bit of land outside town where he judiciously planted trees and cut them but called himself captain of the enterprise, an odd unjewlike thing to do for many reasons, I later understood mainly because jews did not usually get to own land, but my father was tall, part soldier and part tree, and...