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

to get back to work, to go in and out at the prescribed times and pick up the prescribed people and set them down again and start all over. Only in the moments before her break, when she felt the toll of the lifting on her arms and back, did Minna see the cruelty in the system. She would find herself, in a moment of exhaustion, slapping a girl’s cheek to wake her. Or she would glimpse another bearer wiping a forehead roughly, or using a not quite necessary force to heave a sick passenger onto a bunk. She wondered if maybe she and Faga and the other bearers weren’t all that different from the basement doctor and his assistants, or from the German boys in the woods, sustaining themselves on others’ weakness. Maybe the more irrational a system was, the crueler it had to be.
    She avoided the eyes of the magician, who still looked the part of a gentleman, who did not leave his bunk except to fetch water and relieve himself. He hoarded the same loaf of bread he’d been eating the whole time, singing, “Magic bread!” He broke off a piece for each bird, then one for himself. “Seawater and oatmeal!” he cried, to anyone who would listen. “Wash yourself with seawater and oatmeal!”
    But if there were oatmeal on the boat it would have been eaten already. Faga’s biscuits were running out. Minna shared her sunflower seeds, then these ran out, too. The ship’s soup grew thinner each day, until it was only broth. Even the sick complained of hunger. At first, Minna had dreamed of the simplest food: butter on warm bread. Then it was potato soup, thick with cream, flecked with parsley. Now she dreamed of oranges from Messina, raspberry preserves, a frosted cake like a castle. Someone licked the smell of schmaltz off the mess table. Others snapped splinters off the bunks and chewed. A boy was found dead, in a trunk, curled in his own fluids. No one claimed him. When the bearers came for him, someone had taken the bread from his hand. Minna wondered if dignity was not as formidable as she’d imagined it, neither as elusive nor as profound. If it was merely the ability to keep what belonged inside in, and outside out.
     
     
    O NE morning a cry went up from the bunks nearby: two men warning the magician: they were going to eat his doves.
    “What right have you?” they shouted.
    The magician called back, “I’ll eat your children!”
    “But you have your loaf, you braggart!”
    “What if I’m hungry for taste?”
    “What could be tastier than a dove?”
    “Perform us a trick, Mr. Magician. Make us all something tasty!”
    “Give us something to love!”
    “Let me alone.”
    “He can’t do it.”
    “He’s a fraud.”
    “He’s got contraband in those birdies.”
    “When we cook ’em, we’ll be rich!”
    “Cook the birds!”
    A pounding began, a chorus of hands and feet spreading through the bunks, overwhelming even the engine. The magician, emerging from his bunk, took his time. He tucked his rumpled shirt into his trousers, then buttoned his vest. He winked up at Minna, on her bunk. “A regular humanitarian you’ve become.”
    Minna said nothing. Before, she’d stayed away out of vanity, afraid he’d judge her. Now talking to him seemed dangerous.
    “You won’t assist me, then?”
    But he didn’t wait for her reply. He reached into a bag and spun around to face the crowd.
    “No! A trick with the birds!”
    His hand emerged, flourishing a set of metal rings.
    “Birds, birds, birds, birds!”
    The magician began to move. He turned, in a circle, dropping the rings from one hand into the other, showing that they were unattached. He rocked from side to side, on tiptoes, his thin fingers handling the rings with a lithe, shocking tenderness. The calls began to subside. When the magician held the rings aloft—“Eight!”—his voice had filled with a tremulous bass. He held up two rings, one in each hand, then began, slowly, to cross them above his face. He drew them apart, crossed them, drew them apart