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

they went on working, like that, the biscuits divided precisely between them. It seemed to Minna the kindest thing anyone had done for her in a long time. And though Faga’s mother’s biscuits were heavy as mallets, and made as much noise when they broke between the teeth, they never turned moldy.
    In she and Faga went, out they went. Minna learned how many steps it took to cross from the deck’s railing to the hatch. She knew, heading back out into the gray glare, how thinly to squint her eyes to prevent blindness. She could balance on one leg, hold up half a body, and kick a latch closed all at once. In, she held her breath. Out, she inhaled deeply. She would forget to keep her lips closed and catch herself slack-jawed, then shut her mouth until she forgot again.
     
     
     
    A woman was found, her skirts soaked in blood. At first the bearers thought it was a miscarriage, and tried to stanch it with straw, but when they brought the woman outside they saw that the blood was brown, sometimes black, and fell away in clumps like wet paper. Three men fought over who would summon the ship’s doctor—each one wanted to see cabin class, each one must have dreamed he might be adopted and never have to return—until Faga swatted them apart and went herself.
    The doctor was mustached, his cheeks and collar clean. His Russian was pure. He looked tired but in a temporary way, as if he’d been playing whist in his cabin for too long. He knelt next to the woman’s head, his lips near her ear—an intimate gesture, Minna thought, until she saw his nostrils convulse and realized he was simply avoiding the woman’s lower half, from which an unspeakable stench was rising. The woman could not make words. No one knew her, or where she was from. As the doctor asked her questions, she nodded her head or shook it, or nodded and shook it at once, her mouth open so wide, baring so many teeth, that her pain began to look like hilarity.
    The diagnosis: the woman had been so appalled at the lack of privacy on the ship, she hadn’t emptied herself since they left Hamburg. She hadn’t even urinated until last night, when her bladder began to tear. By now it was too late. Her bowels had ruptured.
    The other burials had been infants. Their parents had carried them to the rail, swaddled in the cleanest available linens. Falling, they could have been bundles like any other. Feather beds packed with rolling pins. China. A mortar and pestle.
    But this woman could only be handled from the waist up. The men lifted her by the arms, dragged her to the edge, and heaved her up until she was performing a backbend over the rail. The dark, clotting stench trailed after her. The men rocked her slowly, pushing her farther out each time, and when they could no longer reach her arms, or chest, or waist, someone grabbed an oar.
    She was unconscious, Faga assured Minna, though she did not look certain; her hand, on Minna’s shoulder, began to shake.
    She must have had a weak bowel to begin with, the doctor said. But no one was listening to him anymore.
    A woman, falling, was unmistakably a woman. Her boots pointed like a ballerina’s slippers. Her dress flew up around her stained thighs. It might have been better, Minna thought, if they could have undressed her. If they’d made her naked, as she so hated to be, she might have been spared from recognizing the falling woman as herself.
     
     
    I N they went, out they went. Minna felt a growing gratitude for the sick passengers’ abundance, and for their permissiveness. They never felt any better, yet they let the bearers go on, lifting, struggling, bearing. So that the bearers, at least, could feel better. For this, Minna was beginning to suspect, was the true purpose of their work. It might be dull, and repetitive, and irrational, but the act of carrying afforded those who carried a certain pride, even a pleasure. Even Minna experienced this. She let herself indulge it. She found herself itching, during breaks,