At the Well

On Wednesday at dawn, she left her village for the neighboring one, in order to figure out when and how to escape. The village was raging with blazing fires and filled with moaning and crying sounds at two in the afternoon. German war planes appeared. Bewildered residents tossed their belongings aside and started running without even knowing where to go. She didn’t run anywhere, but instead stubbornly waited until she could return home again. There she had left behind her husband, her daughter, and three-year old grandchild. 

On Thursday morning at the crack of dawn, she took off toward home. Only yesterday she had heard a rumor that her village had been captured by Germans. All the same, she hastened home alongside familiar carriages while misfortune hurried ahead of her. She knew she no longer had a family or a home—she approached her village and no longer recognized it. Only heaps of ash remained of all the houses, and corpses were strewn everywhere. Among all the dead, a familiar beard caught her eye, as well as a flowery headscarf she had often seen. She wanted to see nothing and know nothing. She went home.

A Christian farmer stood next to a collapsed cottage. “Where are you coming from, Abramova?” he asked her. “A plague upon them, just see what they accomplished in less than a day. And now there’s no one left in the village; none of our people—or theirs.” 

She didn’t answer and continued on her way. Her lovely house with a stable and a well in the courtyard stood isolated on a little hill, a mile or two from the village. The first thing she saw from afar was the well’s beam sticking up high. She forged ahead without taking her eyes off of it. It seemed to her that the well’s bucket was growing, swelling, stretching wide and tall, and no longer resembled a bucket. 

No, she will no longer look at the well. It tires her, slows her down. She could already see her courtyard and house, the only one still intact. A dog was howling in the courtyard and the sound began to reach her. Her heart suddenly stopped for a moment, then began pounding strangely and tearing at her chest. She ran toward her house.

They had hanged her husband Yoysef on the well’s beam. His beard rested humbly on his chest. His drooping shoulders and his hands that hung down listlessly expressed deep resignation: What could I have done to help what happened here? A rock was tied to the other end of the beam so that the body would not descend into the well. 

Next to the well on the ground lay her daughter, the twenty-five-year-old Beylke. Her eyes were gouged out. She was lying on her back and staring at the sky with her empty eye sockets. Their old dog sat next to her on his hind legs and howled heartrendingly with a wide-open snout.

The wooden container where she, Chaya Esther, used to cure meat for the long winter stood along the wall of the house. When she’d left her house at dawn on Wednesday, the container had been filled with water. Now it had fallen over and was laying on its side with both water and little Elikl spilling out. His little body was swollen and blue. 

Chaya Esther, a tall and strong woman, and the best milker on the entire collective farm, suddenly felt old and weak. Very old. She barely had the strength to pick up little Elikl and place him next to his mother. With tear-stained eyes Chaya Esther looked at her dead family. She wrung her hands and lamented her loved ones loudly, chanting a Jewish melody according to custom.

“Yoysef, my devoted husband,” she exclaimed, “do you remember what your father said at our wedding? ‘Here you go, children,’ he said, ‘take this cottage and it shall be a good nest for you. The birds shall be fruitful and multiply in it, and it shall be warm and good.’ And your father also said: ‘Don’t wait for miracles, children! One must pour out one’s sweat and then abundance and prosperity will come.’ We worked hard, Yoysefke, we created our happiness with great effort. What has become of our nest, Yoysefke? The nest is still here, but the birds are not.

“Daughter, daughter!” she exclaimed further. “Do you know that next to you lies your swollen baby? Did your bright eyes that used to shine like diamonds see him drowned or were they closed already? 

“Who did you leave me with, my dears? And to whom should I direct my laments? My sons are far from me and my eldest will never return. I, the old Chaya Esther, am destined to mourn all of you at once. Ah, my dear son, Sholemke, the apple of my eye, the first little bird to leave my nest. Your arms and legs wandered across an empty field, you came to be buried far from home, your mother didn’t see you in your last moments, and you can’t see her pain.” 

Old Chaya Esther continued to exclaim in this manner, sitting hunched over on the ground next to the well. The more she exclaimed, the quieter and hoarser her voice became. The family dog lay down next to her, faithfully looked her in the eyes, and licked her hand.

Chaya Esther felt very tired and let her head hang. Half-asleep, she saw her youngest son, Urielke, next to her. Warmth flooded her heart. He’s basically still a child, Urielke, she smiled to herself. In her exhausted and sleepy mind, words from Urielke’s last letter began to take shape, one after the other. The words painfully warmed her, and she mumbled them inwardly, the same way she had been lamenting her loved ones. 

Dear Mother, Urielke had written, we just shot down a German plane. The plane caught fire. The pilot fell from it. His head bounced off to the side. It was a young, beautiful, and blond head, Mother, but I took no pity at all on him. I remembered that those like him throw bombs on women and children who are running naked and barefoot in the streets. I thought of you all, my dear mother, I was afraid that  a blond man like this could harm you. I hated him, oh how I hated him!, though he was no longer anything more than a dead head.

Chaya Esther shuddered. She shook off the feeling of slumber as something began to pull her into the house. She wanted to look at the photograph of Urielke and grieve with him, the only living part of her body, to tell him about everything. Everything, so that he would know…

She stood up, then climbed the three stairs of the porch with her swollen, heavy feet. The door was busted open. The two big farmer’s baskets had been emptied. The chairs and table were tipped over; broken plates with scraps of food, and bottles of wine and liquor were scattered across the floor. 

She went into her daughter’s room. Her surprised gaze was met with an unexpected sight. A German was lying in the child’s clean little metal bed. His feet hung from the bed onto the floor. He was knocked out drunk and sleeping soundly.

Chaya Esther stared at the German for a while and suddenly felt young and healthy, like in those years when all of the village’s boys were in love with her. Or when she slapped a constable’s face so hard that he almost fell over. She left the room silently and returned with an axe in her hands. She scrutinized the red drunken face again and whispered like a prayer: “Urielke, my child, help me!” She lifted her firm hands high and quickly dropped the axe. The German’s heavy body slowly slid onto the floor. The blond head bounced and came to rest on the white, children’s pillow. Chaya Esther grabbed the head and walked out through the gate. From afar she could hear the clopping of horses; a squad of Red Army soldiers appeared. She waited, holding the head in her hands, until the soldiers arrived at the gate. She approached the commander and said:

“Comrade Commander, take me with you, send me to the partisans, or wherever you want. I will serve them faithfully! Here’s a deposit.” She pointed to the blond head. Then she added, more quietly: “Aside from you, I have no one here. Take me away. Don’t leave me at the well.”