Read Online The Little Bride by Anna Solomon - Free Book Online

thought about these events—she hadn’t thought about anything—as thoroughly as the man accused her of thinking about him. Who could bear to? She thought, despite herself, that she liked being called Your Majesty.
    Then she saw the man anew, as if she were looking down on a forest; she saw how in the midst of his thick hair and thick beard, his clearing of flesh was perverse. Like a cat’s asshole suddenly exposed.
    “Or would you rather not, Your Majesty? Would you rather come down from there and be what you are?”
    “Stop,” she said. “Please stop.”
    What she did next, she knew, would look like charity to a bystander. Even she would look back one day and think she’d acted out of a sudden, selfless grace. But in truth she did it out of desperation: she simply couldn’t stand to look at his repulsive wound.
    Galina’s sheet, between her teeth, tasted of lavender and vodka; it tasted, compared to the air in the hold, almost appetizing. She tore a strip from end to end, wrapped it quickly around the man’s head, and tied it off tight.
    He didn’t thank her, but neither did he protest. He looked less crazy, more ashamed.
    So she had ruined her trousseau. It had been pitiful anyway.
     
     
     
    A s Minna carried the sick, she did not look at the bandaged man. He was the bearers’ Moses, but Minna refused to be one of his followers. She was determined not to look apologetic, or poor, or contented with her lot. She adopted a birdlike way of carrying so that her underarms would stay dry, and tried for a face like Galina’s grandmother, who’d stared coolly out from the gilded portrait above the mantel, whose lips looked as if they’d never been apart. Minna’s partner in carrying was a Belarusian laundress named Faga, a large woman who talked about the mother she’d left behind, the cousins who awaited her in Chicago, the spoons she carried in her dress, the candlesticks she kept lashed in her bootlaces. Faga belched and laughed and cried as she talked, as though it was always the first time she was hearing about her own life. A useful skill, Minna supposed, to be entertained by oneself, yet also embarrassing and unbecoming. And Faga’s seeming familiarity with everyone they encountered, her easy smile, her lack of apology for her wide hips and shelf of a bosom, all this produced in Minna a discomfort she could bear only by turning it to judgment. Faga’s calves were thick with fat and candlesticks. She carried a rag at all times, not a handkerchief but a rag, to wipe her nose and hands, to soak up the sweat from her brow. Her arms were thick as a man’s, as if she intended to keep doing this kind of work.
    “Watch you don’t trip!” Faga called gaily as Minna backed out through the hatch, her fingers slipping in the wet armpits of a girl whose skin had begun to resemble the ship’s drinking water.
    The sickest girls were the quiet ones, the ones Minna was not—girls whose husbands or brothers or fathers had gone ahead and sent for them. Their main fear when they’d boarded the ship was enslavement in a strange, tropical land. Now they mumbled that they wanted to die. They wanted a cup of tea. Milk. Slivovitz. Every so often, they gained focus and became aware of the hands on them. Their heads flew up. Their limbs stiffened. They speared Minna and Faga with their eyes.
    “There,” Faga would say. “There there, we’re almost there.” Though they were never almost anywhere but the place they’d been half an hour ago. Each group was allowed only a set amount of time in the fresh air. Then they were carried in again, and another group brought out. These were the rules, dictated by Moses.
    The work made Minna hungry. Her biscuits had molded, but she ate them anyway, until Faga saw and threw them overboard. Then Faga brought out her own biscuits, a special recipe, she said, that her mother had made before Faga left. Faga broke every one in two and gave Minna halves and a pocket to store them in and