Emmy walks up and down the room, hands caught behind her back, too agitated to sit.

“The fish took the bait,” Emmy says eventually.

Ernst looks up. “These arrived here? To the house?” he asks, sharply.

“No, Papa.” Felix comes to their rescue. “We put down a post office box. We collected it all this morning. No one knows who we are or where we live.”

Emmy’s voice is defensive. “It was Sarah’s idea.”

“Sarah’s?” Ernst looks at Hannah, who nods slightly. “We went to ask her advice.”

He dips his head in appreciation and she nods in return.

“And?” he prompts.

Emmy picks up the thread. “We wrote to— how many, Mama? Twelve?”

“Yes.”

“Twelve traveling circuses and said that we have a matter of inheritance to discuss with a woman of small size, whom we have been searching for, and who might have been employed by their show. It wasn’t a lie. It is about an inheritance. Her family.”

Hannah nods. “We asked them to send identifying photographs. These places all have pictures taken, you know, for advertisements. We thought it would not be too difficult for them to send us a picture.”

“And here we have them,” Felix says. “Probably most of these people do not even exist. Or, they do not belong to the circus. They are praying we will be naïve enough simply to send off a banker’s draft for a fat sum of money, not caring where it gets to, as long as we have done our duty.”

His cynicism makes her shiver.

Felix scans the pictures, one after the other. “And do you recognize any of them?”

Hannah lifts both her hands in defeat. Her throat feels like it’s closing. She takes a deep breath and tries to swallow.

She hadn’t thought they’d receive any replies.

Felix gathers up all the photographs, then places them side by side on the table. Most show just the head and shoulders. Two are full portraits. In theory, these should be easier to appraise, for Hannah could estimate the height. Of those, one shows a woman standing next to a horse.

She looks carefully. Felix sees her attention and peers over the picture. He seems to read her mind. “It is not a horse, Mama. It is a pony.”

She looks again. Of course it is. Could it be Perla? She does not know. The woman in the picture certainly has a resemblance to the girl who disappeared. Perla would be in her forties now, so she would have wrinkles. But there’s the shape of the face, too. Her cheeks were always full, and some of these women have jutting cheekbones. Or is that the face paint? Or the latest style?

“You know, it was one thing for Sarah to talk about this,” she says slowly. “But these are… this is…”

“Yes, dear?” Ernst asks.

“This is filling me with sorrow.” She says slowly. “Any of these women could be my sister. Or, none of them could be my sister.” She turns to Emmy. “I always wanted you to have a sister.” She glances quickly at Felix, but he does not seem to be offended by her words.

“A sister… You sleep in the same bed and elbow each other and whisper secrets. You look at each other and know, just know, what you are both thinking. When she’s hurting, you hurt just as much.” She laughs suddenly. “No, you hurt more. For Perla would not waste her time licking her wounds, she would plot revenge. She left me to carry the ache.” She swallows. “And it still hurts.”

She puts the photograph down on the table. “And then, one day, she’s gone. And you lost that.”

And all these women. All these eyes. Big eyes, staring out at her. Are they indignant? Or pleading? Protective of their secrets, of what they have seen? Of the times when they closed their eyes to escape and painted pictures of hope under their eyelids.

Emmy’s eyes are wide.

Hannah continues. She’s not sure if she’s talking to Ernst, or Emmy, or the photographs, or to herself. “And yes, I have Becca. But Becca is more like my daughter than my sister. She’s years younger. It was never me and Becca. It was me and Perla.”

She turns to Emmy. “You understand, I know you do, that this isn’t just an interesting search to uncover the past. It is losing her, all over again.”

She closes her eyes and leans her head on her hands. Those days. That day. Where is Perla? Down by the river? Perlaaaa! In the store at the back of the house, sorting through the beans and the barley? Perlaaaa! At the shul, waiting for Tatte to finish Minchah? Perlaaa! By the cheder, looking for Schneur? Perlaaaa! Maybe she’s in her bed. Maybe she’s at the neighbor. Maybe she went for a walk in the woods. Perlaaaa. Perlaaaa. Per-l-a–a-aaaah-aaaaaah

***

Leib’le reaches into his pocket and closes his fingers over the paper that’s inside. He pulls it out. As Chasya would put it, the boy is getting a little heimish.

“What is this?” he asks.

“This… this is a letter from very far away. A place called Turkey.”

“What’s it like in Turkey?”

“Well.” He crouches down to meet Leib’le at eye level. “The people who live there don’t look like you and me, and they believe in different things as well. But my aunt — you know what an aunt is?”

Leib’le shakes his head, no.

Chasya intervenes, “It’s mishpachah.”

Felix nods. “Yes. Well, I have mishpachah, in Turkey. My mother, my mama’s sister.”

“And what did she say?”

Felix laughs. “I have not yet opened it.”

“So open it now. Turkey! Turkey! Is it longer than Russia?”

“You mean, is it farther than Russia?”

“Yes, yes.”

He looks up to Chasya, searching her face for permission. It’s not exactly etiquette to open a family letter in company, he had simply seen it on the letter tray as he left the house and slipped it into his pocket. She gives a bemused face; why are you asking me?

He pokes his finger through a small hole at the top and slits the envelope open with his finger. Then he tears off the stamp at the front and hands it to Leib’le.

“Keep it,” he tells him. “You’ll show other people that you know someone whose aunt lives in Ottoman Turkey. That you have something from a faraway land.”

Leib’le shrugs. “I do not need to tell anyone, I can just know for myself.”

Felix laughs and pats the boy on the cheek. Like mother, like son.

He opens the letter and sits down to read. His eyebrows furrow and he chews his finger.

Then he looks up at Chasya.

“Is there bad news?” she asks.

“It is not bad news per se. Just troubling.”

“Go on.”

“My aunt — Mama’s sister — is in Izmir. She’s supposed to be a teacher, but isn’t making much of a success of it. She has found a girl, or rather, a girl has found her, who comes from Istanbul. And it seems that she was taken there, or sent there, by her family.”

Chasya lowers her voice. “To be a domestic help?”

He looks up at her pained face and nods.

“What else?”

“And she seeks advice.”

Chasya holds out her hand and reads the letter.

“Tell her to bring the girl back home. What else?”

“It was home that sent her away.”

“Then we will find her another home.”

“Listen, she was taken against her will. It is kidnapping, is it not? Or false pretenses. No one told her parents that she was going for anything less than a perfect opportunity. So there must be some legal protection afforded to her.”

“Perhaps.”

He looks up at her large gray eyes. “You do not think this way, do you? You do not believe in the law and its capacity to maintain a moral society.”

She hands Leib’le a cup of milk. “I have not experienced that, no. I prefer to believe in people’s kindness and care.”

“We need both.”

“If the law is all you think it is, how did this girl get to Izmir?”

“I told you. A loophole.”

She shakes her head and returns to the kitchen, where she begins checking barley, her long, tapered fingers deftly moving the grains across a plate.

“No. It is not just a legal failing. It is a… how would you put it? A… a failing of human.”

“Of humanity.” In some place inside, he registers that she has adopted one of his phrases.

“Technically, if they were to go to the Austrian Embassy and claim that this girl was brought to Turkey as a slave, the embassy would be bound to care for her welfare.

“And bring her in safe passage back home?”

“And provide her with safe passage home.”

“Well, you had better write to her then. There is no time to spare.”

“I shall do better than that.”

“Oh?

“There is a wonderful new invention, called a telegram. I shall send her a telegram. And hang the expense.”

She abandons the barley and turns. “We once talked about knowing who you are.”

He nods. He would not admit to her that it is a conversation that he plays and replays in his mind.

“Well, I think I made a mistake. You know very well who you are.”

He will not let her see how her words touch him. “Well, either that or I am learning.”

Chasya suddenly turns and snatches the baby from the floor, even though she is not crying.

“There’s something I wanted to tell you.”

“What is that?”

“Sarah Goldschmidt came to see me today.”

“Sarah? Oh, Sarah. Yes, Sarah and her lists.”

“Exactly.”

“She asked me when I think I will be ready to move on, continue my journey West.”

All kinds of things swirl inside him, but he keeps his face neutral. “And what did you tell her?”

“She told me that the baby is getting older and strong enough for the journey, and it looks as if I am strong enough, too. And that the community cannot support me forever.”

Rage, hot and white flushes through him. The community can and will support Chasya for as long as she needs. Chasya spends her weekdays happily eating bread and butter, kasha, with whatever meat and chicken that his mother sends her. She asks for nothing.

He tries to keep his voice neutral. “And what did you tell her?”

“I told her that the baby is still small for the journey I want to make.” She gives a weak smile. “And she told me that this was codswallop, for the trains are wonderful, so comfortable that you would never believe it, and that I could stay for a few weeks in Paris, before going to Marseille for a boat to America. And even then, I could think of England instead of America, if it suited me. It is a shorter trip.”

Chasya lapses into silence.

“Yes?”

“But I told her, that this was not my intention at all.”

Something of hope lifts inside him.

“So what is your intention?”

“If I am to be cast into the world, alone with my children and my faith, then I will go where we have always prayed to go.”

“Meaning?”

“I will go to Eretz Yisrael.”

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 712)