Reindeer Nights, Jerry Ratch [books to read in your 30s .txt] 📗

dark circles under her eyes, because she was out until God knows when. Well, I'm sure God knew. She'd leave saying she was going to the outhouse as soon as the reindeer appeared at the door. I knew where she was going. I followed her once and watched them. She doesn't know about that to this day.
"You want your little Boris," I kept on.
"No. No."
"I'll bet you still have the hats — did I say hats? — for that Pollack back in Krakow, don't you? What was his name? Still pining away for him. Feh! Nasty, Jew-hating people, the whole lot! I'll bet he sure misses his little Jewess!"
"You stop talking that way about him, or else I'm going..."
"You're going? You're going? To where? To do what?"
She hid her face in her hands.
"You'd marry him in a minute, Rifka."
"No, I wouldn't."
"No? I bet! But he wouldn't marry you, Rifka, not once he got his pig paws on his little Jewess. That's all he ever wanted, with that sour singing under the window all night. That's all he ever wanted, so it's better to forget about him, with his pig snout. Don't worry about him. He's already dropped you like a Russian potato and goes running around with his nunnery girls, with their flaxen hair wrapped up in tight braids. Any of them, all of them the same."
"Stop it, stop it!" she pleaded, holding her hands up to her ears. "Why are you doing this to me? You're just the same as any of us! You were the same — with your army lieutenant!" She came close with that one. I held my breath. I bit the back of my lip.
Then I wouldn't let up on her. She was my younger sister, someone had to say these things.
"I'd stop thinking after that Pollack if I were you, Rifka. That part of life is over. They're all dead back there. That's what the rumor is. The Poles too, they're hunted by the Germans, mowed down just like the Jews."
Rifka screamed. She made a tight face and refused to open her eyes. Then she bolted out the door, sobbing. I made her tears come out that night. It was an unusual sight around our camp.

* * *

But it didn’t end there. One night when I came back from counting the fallen trees, our mother and our grandmother cut off all her hair. Rifka looked like a boy. They had her stripped down bare and sitting in a makeshift tub. They were heating water, bringing in buckets full of hot water and pouring them into the small round tub. She was sitting cross-legged in the tub, wailing and sobbing, trying to hide herself. Then I saw what she was hiding. It wasn't her skinny breasts, but a belly.
She had a real belly going. It was a strange sight. That was when I remembered: she'd no longer take off her clothes when the light bulb was burning, only after it was switched off. We had to unscrew the bulb to turn it out. She became the one to do that every night, saying: Ow! Ow! Then she undressed. Now I saw why.
Momma and Bubby brought in a real old Yakuty man. It was said he practiced the old ways, not Christian, not Communist, but real old ways of a shaman. He brought roots and they put them in a pot and boiled them and he stirred, saying strange words in their own tongue the Yakuty have. They applied a balm to Rifka's belly. They made her drink this concoction he boiled up. They made her drink it all, even though she kept sobbing and moaning. Then they did something to her I never witnessed before or again, even though I gave birth myself once, which was a pure horror, barely I'm able to remember that pain.
Then the old Yakuty, who was dressed in clothing made from reindeer hides and wearing short reindeer antlers, began slowly to turn in a dance. He danced and danced. Up and down slowly he rose and fell with his back so straight it was a wonder he didn't fall over backwards. Slowly and slowly he was turning in a circle, he went up, and back down into a full squatting position. Then suddenly he kicked out, first one leg, then the other, and before we knew it, it turned into a Cossack dance. And he began humming something that at first sounded foreign, then slowly it became something familiar. Then we knew it for what it was. We all knew what this dance was now.
It was Jewish. Who invented this dance, no one knows.
Later I caught the terror in Rifka's eyes. That's when I understood what she was in for. It was the same look we witnessed in the eyes of Lena the reindeer, struggling to get her still-born calf out of her. That same overwhelming bigness of reality, same in life as in death.

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Publication Date: 11-20-2009

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