Tzili: The Story of a Life

9

THE NIGHT WAS full and starless. Tzili walked along the paths she now knew by heart. For some reason she kept close to the river. On either side, the cornfields stretched, broad and dark. “I’ll go on,” she said, without knowing what she was saying.

She had learned many things during the past year: how to launder clothes, wash dishes, offer a man a drink, collect firewood, and pasture a cow, but above all she had learned the virtues of the wind and the water. She knew the north wind and the cold river water. They had kneaded her from within. She had grown taller and her arms had grown strong. The further she walked from Katerina’s hut the more closely she felt her presence. As if she were still standing in the scullery. She felt no resentment toward her.

“I’ll go on,” she said, but her legs refused to move.

She remembered the long, cozy nights at Katerina’s. Katerina lying in bed and weaving fantasies about her youth in the city, parties and lovers. Her face calm and a smile on her lips. When she spoke about the Jews her smile narrowed and grew more modest, as if she were revealing some great secret. It seemed then as if she acquiesced in everything, even in the disease devouring her body. Such was life.

Sometimes too she would speak of her beliefs, her fear of God and his Messiah, and at these moments a strange light seemed to touch her face. Her mother and father she could not forgive. And once she even said: “Pardon me for not being able to forgive you.”

Tzili felt affection even for the old, used objects Katerina had collected over the years. Gilt powder boxes, bottles of eau de cologne, crumpled silk petticoats and dozens of lipsticks — these objects held an intimate kind of magic.

And she remembered too: “Have you ever been to bed with a man?”

“No.”

“And don’t you feel the need?”

Katerina’s face grew cunning and wanton.

And on one of the last days Katerina asked: “You won’t desert me?”

“No,” promised Tzili.

“Swear by our Lord Saviour.”

“I swear by our Lord Saviour.”

Of the extent to which she had been changed by the months with Katerina, Tzili was unaware. Her feet had thickened and she now walked surely over the hard ground. And she had learned something else too: there were men and there were women and between them there was an eternal enmity. Women could not survive save by cunning.

Sometimes she said to herself: I’ll go back to Katerina. She’ll forgive me. But when she turned around her legs froze. It was not the knife itself she feared but the glitter of the blade.

Summer was at its height, and there was no rain. She lived on the fruit growing wild on the riverbanks. Sometimes she approached a farmhouse.

“Who are you?”

“Maria’s daughter.”

Maria’s reputation had reached even these remote farmhouses. At the sound of her name, a look of loathing appeared on the faces of the farmers’ wives. Sometimes they said in astonishment: “You’re Maria’s daughter!” The farmers themselves were less severe: in their youth they had availed themselves freely of Maria’s favors, and in later years too they had occasionally climbed into her bed.

And one day, as she stood in a field, the old memory came back to confront her: her father lying on his sickbed, the sound of his sighs rending the air, her mother in the shop struggling with the violent peasants. Blanca as always, under the shadow of the impending examinations, a pile of books and papers on her table. And in the middle of the panic, the bustle, and the hysteria, the clear sound of her father’s voice: “Where’s Tzili?”

“Here I am.”

“Come here. What mark did you get in the arithmetic test?”

“I failed, father.”

“You failed again.”

“This time Blanca helped me.”

“And it didn’t do any good. What will become of you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must try harder.”

Tzili shuddered at the clear vision that came to her in the middle of the field. For a moment she stood looking around her, and then she picked up her feet and began to run. Her panic-stricken flight blurred the vision and she fell spread-eagled onto the ground. The field stretched yellow-gray around her without a soul in sight.

“Katerina,” she said, “I’m coming back to you.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth she saw the burly peasant in front of her, examining her thighs as she lifted up her skirt. Now she was no longer afraid of him. She was afraid of the ancient sights pressing themselves upon her with a harsh kind of clarity.