In the Image by Dara Horn

Author:Dara Horn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

THE FOLLOWING EVENING after everyone else had filed out of the factory, Leah remained at her sewing machine as usual. But as soon as all the other workers had left, Leah stood up and marched toward the door. When she got there, Aaron was standing in front of the exit.

“Aaron, please move. I need to go home.”

“No.”

“Aaron, get out of my way.” She pushed toward the door.

He stuck his arms out and blocked the doorway. “No. I have something to show you. It’s important. Will you give me just a minute to show you?”

Leah paused. For a moment she felt her blood running faster, until she saw him step back to his desk. He picked up a large piece of paper and walked back with it toward her sewing machine.

“Do you know what this is?” He spread the paper out on one of the sewing machine tables for her to examine, smoothing out its creases and then stepping back to the wall to turn up the flame on the gaslight. As the little blue flame grew and blazed orange, the paper on the table began to glow, a shining white rectangle like a framed picture of pure light. Leah’s eyes adjusted, and soon she could make out what was written on it.

It was an inventory sheet from the factory, with lines and columns for bookkeepers to fill out the number of garments produced each day and how many remained in stock. But instead of neatly written lists in English of skirts and petticoats, someone had ignored the column lines altogether, writing instead in a tiny, racing Hebrew script from right to left straight across the columns as if they weren’t there, filling the entire page. At the bottom of the page were two signatures in different handwriting: “Abraham son of Elijah” and “Mordechai son of Israel.” She tried reading the text itself, but she couldn’t understand it. She could tell it was something rabbinic, a Jewish legal text, but since she had the misfortune of being born female, her education had been limited and her reading ability was poor. A few lines down from the top of the page, however, she recognized two names: “Aaron son of Jacob” and “Leah daughter of Aaron.” Her heart began fluttering, but she said nothing.

After a long silence, Aaron took a deep breath and spoke. “It’s a marriage contract. I copied it out today, after the morning shift. Signed by two witnesses. You know Abe and Mordy, the foremen?”

Leah laughed, a sighing laugh of a woman much older than her seventeen years. “Aaron, this isn’t going to work. We can’t get married. You can show this to my parents or to ten thousand rabbis, but it still isn’t going to work. Forget it, please? Just forget it!”

But then Aaron shook his head, his eyes flashing in the semidarkness as his hands began to flutter in the air. “No, Leah, I figured out how it can work! We don’t need your parents or a rabbi or another horrible wedding celebration for you.

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