The forbidden book, p.1
The Forbidden Book, page 1
This is an Arthur A. Levine book Published by Levine Querido
www.levinequerido.com • info@levinequerido.com
Levine Querido is distributed by Chronicle Books, LLC
Text copyright © 2024 by Sacha Lamb
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023951872
Hardcover ISBN 978-1-64614-456-3
Ebook ISBN 978-1-64614-482-2 (Reflowable EPUB)
Published in October 2024
Pip—this one is for you.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOME NOTES ON THIS BOOK’S PRODUCTION
CHAPTER
1
ON A FULL MOON NIGHT, after a day of fasting, the young bride Sorel Kalmans leapt from a window and left her life behind.
All day, Sorel had been pacing up and down her room like a caged fox, a feeling building inside her that she could not ignore. She could not marry. She would not marry. The girl who was supposed to walk to the wedding canopy, to walk seven circles around the son of her city’s rebbe—she could not imagine herself as that girl. Her hands were not that girl’s hands, which her nursemaid had scrubbed free of dirt and bathed in milk for a week to soften. When she looked at herself dressed in the heavy embroidered skirts of her wedding dress, her red hair pinned up and braided and threaded with gold, she saw a stranger. The modern cut of the dress, with its nipped waist, gave her body an alien shape. Her own feet, too light in delicate slippers, kept tripping her.
You have to leave, the stranger told her from the shadowy reflection of her polished silver mirror. She might have found the face pretty, had she not been trying to see it as her own, and beneath the plucked brows and lip and the delicate brush of powder over her freckles, she couldn’t find any trace of herself.
“How can I leave?” Sorel asked. “Kalman Senderovich’s daughter, who’s supposed to marry the Esroger Rebbe’s oldest son and heir. Where would I go? Everyone would be looking for me.”
Some things, said the girl in the mirror, are simply unbearable. It does not matter where you go or what you do, as long as you do not let this happen.
And then another voice, as clear as if someone were standing directly behind her. The sound of it made her turn, startled, to find the room empty.
If you can’t run alone, the voice had said, I’ll take you.
It was dizziness. The fasting, and the pacing, and the heat in her room—she felt the room was stifling, for a spring night. She was as good as dreaming; she’d heard nothing.
But she said, “Please.”
And with her next breath, she felt herself changing. The trapped fox had seen that the trap was only a loop of rope, so simple to undo. There was the window, and there, across the cluttered stable-yard, was the gate that led to the road and the river and the woods.
Her maid was waiting in the hall, with strict orders not to let Sorel cause a scene—her father had already seen the glint of madness in her eyes and locked her in her room to stop it from showing until it was too late. But she didn’t need to use the door. She suddenly could not remember how it felt to be afraid of the jump.
In a single motion, she ran to the window, threw open the sash, and leapt.
* * *
FOR HALF A BREATH, Sorel thought she might never land. That she was flying, or that the earth would open up and swallow her. Then some instinct made her twist herself sideways, and she landed on her left hip in the mud, gasping at the pain of impact on her wrist. She crawled a few steps and hauled herself up by the wheel of a carriage, one of several the rebbe’s disciples had left scattered around the yard.
Earlier, she remembered, she had seen the gentile stable-boy go into the house, joining the other servants for their portion of tonight’s feast—everyone but Sorel herself would be celebrating. The boy slept in one of the stalls; he would be wearing his Sunday clothes for the feast, but he kept the clothes he wasn’t wearing wrapped in a bundle in the rafters.
Energized by the unfolding of a plan, Sorel slipped between the carriages and into the stable. There was the boy’s coat, wrapped around his spare shirt and trousers. She tucked it under her arm without stopping to unwrap it. A long knife hung from a nail beside the bundle, and her hand reached for it before she could give it any thought. She knew it was a prized possession, clean and polished, its leather sheath lovingly decorated with a motif of flowers. But it would be foolish to go anywhere without a knife, so she took it.
No one had yet raised an alarm as she left the stable-yard, turning not right toward town but left, toward the forest. There was a little footbridge, and there she paused to strip out of her gown, already heavy on its own but now dragging her backward at every step, its hem clumped with mud. After cutting through the bodice with the stable-boy’s knife, she stepped out of the gown, balled it up, and threw it in the water.
A dog barked somewhere in the darkness, and then she heard a man cry an alarm. Without waiting to see the dress sink, she slipped into the trees, shoving her way through the underbrush as the clamor of voices rose and spread behind her.
The brambles caught at her hair. She reached up, yanked out the hairpins, and tucked them into her stocking. She chopped wildly at her braids until they fell from her shoulders, and freed from the trap, she leapt forward, not caring what direction she ran.
* * *
SOREL WAS THOROUGHLY LOST by the time she stopped, panting and shivering, to unwrap her stolen bundle of clothes. The stable-boy was shorter than herself, but broader, so she belted the trousers with a stocking, tucking her hairpins into the pocket. There, they jingled faintly, a comforting weight. She could at least trade them for a meal, she thought, a little practical worry catching up as she noticed that her embroidered slippers were pinching her feet, her chest ached, and her wrist was twinging from the way she’d landed in the stable-yard.
“All worth it,” she told herself out loud. She wrapped the stable-boy’s coat around herself and took a deep breath, smelling horse and forest and mud. Her feet were cold, but now, dressed in wool, the rest of her was warm enough. She no longer heard the voices of her pursuers: she might have lost herself, but she’d lost them, too. She heard only the soft scuttling of little night animals and the creaking of branches in the slight breeze overhead. After a moment a dog barked, far away, and quieted again.
She did not feel alone. She had herself, and she had the knife, which felt good in her hand and hung with reassuring weight at her hip when she looped its cord around her stocking belt. Without the weight of her hair, her head felt lighter and she could stand with her shoulders back, proud. Even the aches and pains came to her with a sense of curiosity, as if she were learning the feel of someone else’s limbs, the numbness of panic wearing off.
She started walking, slower now, savoring the texture of the ground below her feet, trying to stay on a straight path by keeping the moon to one side. When the sun rose, she would know her directions, and she could make her way to Esrog. The city was big enough that surely she could find a way to disappear, to become someone else.
She felt capable almost of walking all the way to Krakow or Odessa or Paris.
* * *
THE CITY OF ESROG sat within the gentle curve of a river. Kalman Senderovich, the lumber merchant, sent his wares to the sea down that same river, from the shtetl he ruled over miles upstream. Between the shtetl and city was the tangle of forest in which Sorel had lost herself, walking until her eyelids drooped and the ache in her feet became overwhelming. At some time during the night she’d come upon a stone wall, tucked herself into its shadow, and fallen asleep curled up beneath her woolen coat.
She woke to the sound of a woman’s voice singing. The spot where she was sleeping lay low down, not far from the river, and the sound carried oddly in the morning fog. Sorel sat up slowly, wrapping herself again in the coat. The voice was a clear, low alto, unexpectedly beautiful, singing a folk song in Yiddish from the other side of the wall.
When Sorel got to her feet, she saw that her resting place was just outside the boundary of a cemetery. The stone wall, moss-eaten, barely kept the trees back from the cluster of gravestones, their weathered faces whispering names in Hebrew letters.
The singing woman was walking between the jumbled lines of headstones with a rag in her hand, brushing dead leaves and dried mud from their surfaces as she sang to herself. A couple of crows hopped after her, searching for grubs in the earth that she’d disturbed. She was old, stooped, her voice stronger than her frail appearance, and dressed in rags. Sorel must have made some noise, because the old woman stopped singing and turned, but tilting her ear rather than looking: she must be blind.
“Is there someone there?” she asked. The crows, at her feet, echoed her with a harsh “rekh, rekh.”
Sorel opened her mouth to speak, coughed, and said hoarsely, “Good morning.”
The old woman laughed. “Are you a ghost, or a living boy? Let me feel your hand.”
She reached out, and Sorel went to her.
“A living boy,” she said, pleased with how it felt, and shook the woman’s rough, dry hand.
“Are you on your way to the wedding feast?” the old woman asked. “I was on my way, but I always stop by the cemetery first, to bring the news to the dead, whenever something happens.”
A klogerin—a cemetery caretaker. Sorel wondered if this was the same old woman who sometimes haunted the cemetery back home, where her mother was buried.
“Wedding feast?” she asked, and, grasping for a story, “I’m not from here, I’m traveling. Only slept here because I was lost in the dark.”
“The rebbe’s son is getting married,” the old woman explained. “The Esroger Rebbe—you’ll have heard of him, surely! They must know him all the way to the Holy Land. The rebbe has invited a hundred beggars to a feast at the Great Synagogue, in honor of the occasion.”
Sorel felt herself smiling. Why not? She thought. Why not attend her own wedding feast? Her stomach was griping at her anyway. Would anyone look for her among a crowd of beggars at the Great Synagogue in Esrog?
“Like I said, I’m lost,” she said.
“I’ll show you, if you’ll give me your arm,” the old woman said, taking it without waiting for an answer. She had seemed perfectly capable on her own, but she leaned her weight on Sorel with a sigh of relief, so it must have been taking her more effort to walk the rough ground than it had appeared.
The little cemetery was tucked among the trees, a root heaving the stones of the wall aside here and there, and the path back to the road scarcely visible. Keeping her eyes down to help the old woman place her feet and to avoid pebbles on her own bare soles, Sorel felt a chill at the sight of large pawprints crossing their path. They were nearly half the length of her feet, belonging either to a massive dog or a wolf. Had someone brought dogs to look for her? She would surely have heard them. It must have been a wild animal, and soon enough she’d be inside the city wall and sleeping among people, instead of on bare earth.
“What is your name, tatele?” said the klogerin, interrupting Sorel’s thoughts.
“Israel,” she said, grasping for a name that sounded familiar. “Isser … Jacobs.”
“They call me Rukhele,” the old woman said and patted Sorel’s arm. “Don’t you worry. All the beggars and thieves in Esrog know Old Rukhele, and no one will bother you while you’re with me.”
It hadn’t occurred to Sorel to worry about beggars and thieves. She’d been thinking about lumbermen, the gentiles her father hired, or the rebbe’s disciples. “Thank you, Rukhele. I do also have a knife.”
Rukhele patted her arm again, as if Sorel were a student who’d made an astute observation. They picked their way along the path until the underbrush opened up and Sorel saw on one side the river, and on the other side the dust and mud of the road, churned up by horses’ hooves and cut deeply by wheel ruts. Rukhele had not exaggerated about the wedding feast, for little knots of people clad in rags were making their way along it, and Rukhele, hearing a voice she must have known, steered Sorel toward one of these groups. It was a group of old women, clearly old friends, and they had soon slipped into a conversation she didn’t understand, Rukhele releasing Sorel’s arm to lean instead on one of her companions. She was glad that she could see the city ahead—she didn’t think she could stand to walk much farther. She could scarcely walk any faster than bent little Rukhele, though Sorel’s legs were much longer.
Her mind wandered until she felt a prickle in the back of her neck, as if someone were watching her. When she turned, there was a young man a few paces behind—better dressed than the beggars, but with the worn shoes and bulky pack of a peddler. He had been staring at Sorel’s back with intensity, but when she caught his eye, he smiled at her. There was nothing wrong with the smile, but she didn’t trust it. It looked a little bit like the smile a boy might give a girl, when he thought he was handsome. And this one was handsome, with ink-dark curls falling over his forehead and golden skin, sun-warmed, his sleeves rolled up over muscular forearms. Instinctively, she glared back at him.
Unfazed by the glare, he slung the pack off his back and dug through it, extracting a pair of felt boots, which he held out to her. “Your foot is bleeding.”
Sorel looked down and saw to her annoyance that it was true. He wasn’t flirting; he was trying to sell her something.
She didn’t want to acknowledge it, but on the other hand, she couldn’t keep going barefoot. She slowed her pace to separate them from the old women and reluctantly took one of the hairpins from her pocket. “What will you give me for this? It’s worth more than those cheap shoes.”
The boy took the pin and inspected it closely, his eyebrows going up. He gave her a searching look, and Sorel clenched her fist, ready to grab it and run, but all he said was, “This is so expensive, you could have ten pairs of shoes.”
“So?”
“So, anyone would think you’d stolen it.”
Sorel snatched the pin back from him. “I didn’t. It’s my mother’s.”
The way he looked her over made her want to push him into the mud. “And what happened, God forbid, to your mother, that she can’t send you out in the world with a good pair of boots?”
“None of your business,” Sorel snapped.
The peddler spread his hands in a gesture of conciliation. “Listen, I’ll take your trade, and I won’t accuse you of stealing it—only, that’s because I’m honest, and you’re very young, and it’s a mitzvah.”
Sorel gave him the same once-over he’d given her, only putting as much hostility into the look as she could manage. “Not much younger than you.”
He shrugged. “I’m Sam. Who are you?”
The name she’d pulled from nowhere for Old Rukhele came back easily. “Israel.”
“Isserke. You haven’t been on the road for long, have you? I’ll give you the shoes for nothing and trade you advice for that pin instead. Snapping and biting only gets you so far—we Jews have to stick together.”
Sorel wasn’t convinced by the ahoves yisroel argument, but her feet hurt. She snatched the boots out of Sam’s hand, and they stopped by the side of the road for her to put them on.
“Don’t think I’m taking just advice for this,” she told him when she offered him the hairpin again.
She expected more bargaining banter, but he just took a purse from his pocket and counted out a few coins. Sorel resented most of the education her father had insisted she have—what use was speaking German and playing the piano, in the real world—but in this moment she was grateful at least that she knew the value of material things.
Another little worry crept into the back of her mind: were there things she didn’t know that would leave her vulnerable to being cheated?
You can always cheat people back, returned the part of her that had the confidence to run.
“Are you going to the wedding feast at the Great Synagogue?” Sam asked. “It’s all anyone has been talking about on the road for days.”
Sorel wished he wouldn’t have taken their exchange as an invitation to a longer conversation. She shrugged, hunching her shoulders and turning away from him a little in hopes he’d give up and talk to someone else.
“The rebbe makes grand promises,” said Sam, ignoring the signal. “I keep hearing that he’s going to feed a thousand beggars. They say the bride’s family is very wealthy. Everyone knows the name in these parts, but I’ve never stopped by them—Kalman the lumber merchant, isn’t it? Do you know the family? I heard the daughter is very beautiful.”
“They always say that about brides,” Sorel scoffed. And what difference did it make? The rebbe’s son wasn’t marrying her because she was beautiful, which she wasn’t. He was marrying her because her father was indeed wealthy, and she was marrying him because her wealthy father wanted to ensure the rebbe’s blessings for himself forever. As far as she was concerned, it wasn’t a marriage between a bride and groom at all: it was a marriage between two old widowers who spent their evenings together drinking brandy and deciding the fates of everyone around them with a sweep of their tipsy hands.
