of what should have been the most unsuperstitious study of economics.
Before Flora could turn the discussion into a more rational pattern, someone knocked on the door. Flora's mother bounced to her feet and strode to the door with a determined stride, saying, 'A peddler who comes round at suppertime deserves a choleryeh he'll remember for a year, and I'll give him one, you see if I don't.'
But when she threw open the door, it was not a peddler hawking knives or pens or stereoscope slides through the block of flats. Instead, it was an unfamiliar-looking man in a green-gray uniform. 'Yossel!' Sophie exclaimed, recognizing him without his beard where Flora had not.
'May I come in?' Yossel Reisen asked when Sarah Hamburger showed no signs of getting out of his way.
'You may come in,' Benjamin called over his wife's shoulder. When she whirled around to protest, he waved for her to calm down, continuing, 'How long you stay depends on what you have to say for yourself once you are in here.'
Thus appeased, Sarah grudgingly stepped out of the way. Yossel came past her and into the flat. Esther quickly got up. 'Here, find a chair and eat something,' she said, hurrying into the kitchen and returning with a plate piled high with potato kugel.
'Thank you.' Reisen did sit down, and looked around nervously. The grimace with which he greeted Sophie was no doubt intended for a smile, but failed of its purpose. 'Hello,' he said, cautiously, as if she were an armed Rebel behind a wall. 'How are you?'
'As well as I could be-considering,' she answered. 'You know how I am-the rest of it, though. You must have got my letters, even if I haven't heard from you.' She stared at him as defiantly as a Confederate soldier in arms.
He had a mouth full of kugel, and used that respite to good advantage. 'Yes, I know,' he said, and then, 'I'm sorry, Sophie. I didn't intend that to happen.'
Didn't intend which to happen? Flora wondered. Didn't intend to sleep with Sophie or didn't intend to get her with child? But she held her tongue, to see what her older sister would do.
'People don't intend that to happen,' Sophie said, taking him to mean he hadn't planned to impregnate her. 'But it does, and then they have to decide what to do next.'
'That's why I came here,' Yossel answered. 'I managed to get four days' leave. I spent most of one day coming up from Maryland, and I'll need most of another to get back. Between times'-he licked his lips-'we can get married.'
Bourgeois respectability, Flora thought as Sophie clapped her hands together once and nodded. The idea should have carried more scorn than it did. Somehow, the feeling of contempt for bourgeois values was harder to come by when those values benefited her sister.
Benjamin Hamburger also nodded, as if he'd expected nothing less from Yossel. Maybe he had expected nothing less. But he raised an objection: 'Even with the war, you'll have trouble finding a rabbi to perform the ceremony on such short notice.'
Yossel Reisen shrugged. 'Then we'll find a judge, and find a rabbi when I get a longer leave, or else after the war is over.'
'You say that?' Flora exclaimed. 'You, who wanted to do nothing but sit on your tokhus and study Talmud all day?'
'Flora!' Sophie said indignantly. Flora realized everyone else must have heard what she said as an insult. She hadn't meant it that way; what she'd been expressing was astonishment.
For a wonder, Yossel understood that. He held up a hand, which, after a moment, quieted the angry outcry from the rest of Flora's family. 'Yes, I say that,' he answered. 'When you have been where I have been, when you have seen what I have seen, when you have done what I have done…' His voice trailed away. He was sitting across the table from Flora, and looking in her direction, but he wasn't looking at her. He looked through her, to some place he alone saw, some place maybe more real to him than the crowded apartment in which he sat. He needed a little while to realize he had stopped talking, and coughed a couple of times before he resumed: 'When all that is true, you know, right down to the soles of your boots you know, how little time there is. And when you have a little of that little time, you do what you can with it, and what you cannot do now, you will do later, if God lets you.'
No one spoke for a minute or so after that. Then, quietly, Benjamin Hamburger asked, 'Sophie, is this all right with you?'
'Yes,' Sophie answered, also quietly. Perhaps of its own accord, her left hand settled on her belly, which was beginning to bulge. 'As Yossel said, we have only a little time. We'll do as much as we can with it.'
Flora's father looked to her mother. Sarah Hamburger didn't say yes, but she didn't say no, either. 'It is not a perfect arrangement,' Benjamin said, 'but what in life is perfect except God? If Sophie agrees, it will do.'
Flora was temperamentally opposed to compromise of any kind: she was the one who'd wanted to fight to the end against voting to pay for Roosevelt 's war. Here, though… when it was her own family, things didn't look the same. It wasn't her choice, anyhow; it was Sophie's.
'You'll sleep here on the divan tonight,' her father told Yossel, 'as if you were a boarder again.' Everybody smiled at that. Benjamin Hamburger got up and went into the kitchen. He rummaged in the pantry and in a cabinet, and came back with a bottle of whiskey and enough glasses for everyone; Flora's brothers told how the old men at the shul had given each of them his first shot just before his bar mitzvah.
Amid toasts of 'L'chaym!' everybody knocked back the drinks. Isaac might have been emboldened by the whiskey, for he asked Yossel Reisen, 'What- is it like at the front?' Emboldened or not, he sounded hesitant.
Yossel looked into the depths of his glass as he had looked through Flora. At last, he answered, 'Think of all the worst things you know in the world. Think of them all in one place. Think of them as ten times as bad as they really are. Then think of them ten times worse than that. What you are thinking about when you do that is one ten- thousandth of what the front is like.'
Nobody asked him any more questions.
Somewhere in the Yankee lines in the ruins of Big Lick, Virginia, a rifle cracked. About fifty feet away from Reggie Bartlett, an incautious Confederate soldier toppled back into the trench, shot through the face. He wasn't dead, not yet; a scream bubbled through the blood flooding from his nose, his mouth, and the wound between them.
'God damn that fucking sniper to hell,' somebody snarled as a couple of men hauled their wounded comrade back toward the doctors to see if they could do anything for him. 'That's the fourth one of us he's got on this sector this week. We ever catch him, I'll gut-shoot him and watch him die.'
Bartlett hardly looked up, either for the gunshot or for the screams and curses following it. He was hunting lice, a matter that could have taken up most of his waking day if duties demanded by his officers hadn't intervened. Every one of the little bastards you crunched between your thumbnails was one more that wouldn't bite you, one more that wouldn't leave sores and scabs in your hair, one more that wouldn't leave itchy welts on your body.
He tried to remember his leave in Richmond. He knew he'd been there, seen old friends, made new ones, got drunk, got laid at a soldiers' brothel full of bored-looking colored girls. It was a matter of a few weeks, not months or years, but seemed far more distant than that. When you were at the front, everything else was distant.
If you singed the seams of your tunic and trousers, you killed nits and drove lice out to where you could grab them and squash them. Reggie lighted a candle, shed his tunic, and ran the flame along one sleeve, pausing every so often to slaughter the vermin he'd flushed out.
A fat rat came strolling down the middle of the trench. It was light enough not to get stuck in the mud from the recent rains; Bartlett wished he could have said the same. The rat paused and stared at him with its beady black eyes. I'll steal your rations, see if I don't, it seemed to say. And if I don't, one day soon a Yankee shell will turn you into rations — for me.
Shells never seemed to kill rats-or maybe it was just that there were so many of them, every piece of artillery in the world couldn't have slaughtered them all. Well, if wholesale didn't work, there was always retail. Reggie snatched up the entrenching tool beside him and threw it at the rat. The rat was quick and alert, but he'd guessed right about which way it would jump, and it couldn't outrun the sharpened shovel blade, which cut it almost in two. Bartlett retrieved the tool and used it to smash in the twitching rat's head. The twitching ceased. He looked around to see if any more rats were close by. Spying none, he went back to delousing his tunic.
'You hammered that fat, ugly bastard,' Corporal Robert E. McCorkle said.
'Sure did,' Bartlett agreed. McCorkle was a fat, ugly bastard himself, but saying so struck Reggie as impolitic.
