The Old Customs

"The Old Customs" by Talia R. BarNoy

Issue 3.2 | Fiction

Cover Art: L. Erickson

With Ruth’s permission, Franz pulled her dressing room’s curtain aside. She watched through her vanity mirror as he fiddled with his hat. He dressed like he came from money and had introduced himself from behind her curtain like he was raised by Rothschilds and their French governesses. She waited for him to speak, enjoying the feeling of him floundering.

“You were magnificent,” he said, finally finding the words, his eyes darting to Ruth’s backside. She was dressed in costume, her Yiddish theater troupe’s estimation of a pagan king.

Her brows twitched into a near scowl. She understood the tone of his compliment quite well.

Ruth took a drag from the cigarette holder she held between her fingers. Blowing smoke out of the corner of her mouth she said, her words as dry as poorly cooked chicken, “It’s Lear in Yiddish.”

“It’s fantastic,” Franz enthused.

Ruth took another drag. “It’s Shakespeare. A thief like all other writers.”

Franz looked behind him, clutching his hat tighter. “Ruth,” her name sounded sour in his mouth. “Do you really not know how wonderful you are?”

May he crawl on his belly, she thought. Of course she knew.

"You embodied King Lear, embraced him,” he continued.

Ruth looked at herself in the mirror, cheeks ruddy with makeup, still half-man. She leaned against the table, her painted face close enough to the mirror that her breath fogged up the glass. Through the mirror she watched as Franz’s eyes lingered again on her backside. What a shame this man is, she thought.

Ruth, leaning back into her chair and reaching over several pots of makeup, snuffed her cigarette out on an ash-filled ceramic dish. She turned to Franz, the actress teasing out of her smile.

He flinched at the attention, and she liked how scared he was. He was perfect. An audience member, wanting more, even backstage.

“Franz,” she said. “My troupe leaves Prague tomorrow. What say you to a nightcap?”

His eyes widened, a satisfied quirk to his lips. He was skinny, she noted, his cheekbones protruding like no meat had a chance of sticking to his bones. Still, he’d do.

“I know a place,” she said.

He nodded, eager, willing.

“Just a moment,” she said as she turned to wipe the king from her cheeks. She stood up, moving to hide behind a screen to change, slipping back into the role of a woman. She hooked her skirt, thinking it was unfortunate that even in a big city like Prague, even in 1924, women couldn’t traipse around in pants.

She emerged from behind the screen, catching the soft pink tint of Franz's cheeks before he hid it behind his hat as he placed it back on his head.

“Are you ready?” she asked him.

He nodded. “This place, is it—?”

“Nice? Yes, I think so." She pushed past him. “Come.”

He followed her like a duckling as she walked through the streets of Prague towards the edge of the city. She led him past its roads and walls and into the woods. He hesitated then, fear spilling out over his lips in unuttered phrases. She smiled at him, and he smiled back. It was enough to keep him moving, still following her, still saying nothing.

When they arrived at the bar, treetops looming over its thatched roof, Franz stopped to gape at a wooden sign swinging above the door that read, “The Old Woman’s Cottage” in twisting Czech.

“I’ve never seen this before,” he said.

She glanced back at him. “Truly? It’s an old place. I’m surprised.”

Red tinted his cheeks again. He was easily flustered. She started to feel a tug of regret at the pit of her stomach. He reminded her so much of her childhood, before she’d learned to act, when the world still seemed kind, but then his eyes drifted to her chest, and her resolve hardened. Men like him did not see people like her as human beings. She was quite sure she knew what he expected from her after their drink.

Her lips curled back into a smile, and she beckoned him inside. He followed her, trusting that he knew what she was.

Ruth sauntered up to the bar and knocked on it. Berchik, the old woman’s son and barkeep, turned to her. He glanced up at Franz and then back at Ruth, his face never changing. It was what she liked about him: how unemotional he could be when needed.

“How’s your mother?” she asked him, smiling still.

“She’s resting upstairs,” he said, his voice a monotone, a small tick in the left corner of his mouth. She knew he found this question amusing. It made them sound almost normal: a casual exchange between acquaintances.

“We’re in dire need of a drink,” Ruth said. “Last night and all.”

Berchik nodded, glancing back up at Franz. Franz had removed his hat and was staring at Ruth, confused at how forward she was, unsure if he liked it. She knew, by the way his hands gripped at the brim of his hat, that he didn't, and she leaned back, looking up at him with adoration as if she were the fan and not him. His cheeks tinted red once again.

“Next town over?” Berchik asked.

“Never a town like Prague,” she cooed, aiming the comment at Franz, pleased to see his shoulders relax.

She knew what he was thinking. It was all right for her to be an actress, to play a man and to drink as a man does, but to speak like one was a step too far. In life she was meant to be a feminine creature, the object of his desires. This was the society he grew up in and she pitied him, for it wasn’t really his fault.

She dared to touch his elbow, to keep him thinking that, keep him standing beside her. His blush deepened.

Berchik pulled out a bottle of vodka and two shot glasses.

“Ruth,” Franz said, clearing his throat. “What do you intend by asking me here tonight?”

Berchik raised an eyebrow as he poured. It was an excellent question, Ruth thought, one she and Berchik knew well. Berchik moved the glasses forward and she lifted one up to examine it.

“Well, what do you intend with me?” she asked.

"Nothing!” he exclaimed. “I only—” The words died on his tongue.

She grinned, something tooth-filled, and downed the shot. Berchik poured her another and left to attend to his other customers. She sat and gestured for Franz to sit too. He did, resting his hat on the counter.

With Ruth’s encouragement, Franz lifted his glass and sipped, the red in his cheeks spreading to his forehead.

“What’s your father like?” Ruth asked him.

He spluttered into the glass. “My father? He’s a butcher.”

She raised a brow. “Are you close?”

“No, I’d say not.” He shrugged, the flush fading from him. “He’s like his knife, I suppose. Hard and unyielding.”

Ruth glanced at Berchik as he closed out the other tabs. “A mother? Sisters? Brothers?”

“My mother is as my father and my sister ran off with a philosopher.”

“A philosopher?” she mused. “Quite a story. So, you are a man alone. What more?”

“I wouldn’t say alone. I live with my parents.” He sipped at his vodka again and made a face at it. “I’m nothing so grand as you. Just an accountant.”

He is a bored man, then, Ruth thought. Not just alone. Rather, far too surrounded. Definitely not a Rothschild. She’d painted him right the second time, then.

He’d work perfectly.

She knocked on the bar three times. Berchik glanced at her and nodded as the last of the other customers trickled out the door. When the bar was empty of anyone save Franz and her, Berchik ventured further into the cottage.

Franz had finished his second glass and was still talking. He told her of his recent gripe with his father, and she smiled, pleasant, pouring him another glass held in his eager outstretched hand.

He does not drink often, to be this drunk already, she thought. It was a comfort to know that he wouldn’t crave it when she left him.

As Franz spoke, the cottage shivered awake and stood up. Franz, not noticing, downed the third glass and gave Ruth a wide-toothed grin, revealing a pair of twisted incisors. As the chicken legs stretched, Franz continued talking, moving on to his thoughts on the philosopher, thinking him truly too idealistic of a man. He placed his glass on the bar and didn’t notice as it rolled away. Ruth reached out a hand to steady the bottle of vodka, using the other to finish the second shot Berchik had poured her. She felt the cottage begin to move, heard the gentle familiar squeak of the sign on its hinges.

“Franz,” she interrupted as he was about to complain about his mother. “What do you know of the old customs?”

“The old customs?” he slurred.

She swirled the last dregs of vodka in her glass. “Mm.”

“Nothing,” he scoffed and laughed to himself. “We Jews of the west hardly even know how to pray but Prague, she is an old crone with talons in my back. She is the only old custom I know.”

He plucked the glass out of her hand and placed it on the bar, not noticing when it rolled to the floor with a crash alongside his long-since-abandoned one. He took her hand in his, holding it as if it were delicate silk. “It’s why your performances are so intoxicating. They are the world I wish I could have had.”

She looked at his hand. Assessed it for what it was. He could do hard labor despite his frame, she thought. He would need it.

Ruth clasped Franz’s hand and pulled him up to stand. Taking the bottle with her, she led him to the window, smiling still as he grinned at her.

She turned to the window, admiring what lay far below the cottage’s foundations. Franz followed her gaze and froze, turning to look again, his eyes widening in disbelief. He released her hand and stumbled back into a table.

“You live in an archetypal world, Franz,” she said, tucking the bottle to her side.

“The bar—”

His words stuck in his throat, the rest of it emerging in a low murmur.

“You thought of me as a thing. A costume. An idea. A wish.”

He looked at Ruth now. He was fear-soaked, his skin pale, his breath shaking, his hands grasping. He ran one of them through his hair as if searching for his hat.

“That’s a very narrow view of the world,” she chided. “And what do you know of me, really?”

“Where are you taking me?” he asked, his voice strained, his words clear, sobered.

“Good question.” She stared out the window. “A good, Jewish question. Answering a question with a question. See, you weren’t too far from what you wanted. Didn’t need me to fuck you to show you the way. You should know, anyway, that there are never answers, that I never held them like a boon in my hands. There is no solid definition of what the world is. What we are. Really, you should have listened to your brother-in-law more. Talked about death, maybe; how, just as life, it is undefined.”

“Will you kill me?” he asked, shrinking into the tables ever so slightly. She realized then that she’d gone on a bit of a tangent.

“Have you heard of Baba Yaga?” Ruth asked, looking to the back of the house.

He shook his head.

“Mm, and I thought you enjoyed stories. Although, her stories don’t move this far west. Not like Shakespeare. The Yiddish theatre could not hold her, but she lingers in the air.”

Outside, the woods thickened. Darkened.

“Who was she?” he near whispered.

Ruth smiled, watching as he pulled himself up to stand, one hand outstretched as if to block her from him. These men usually thought she was telling them who she was when she spoke of the great witch.

“What is fear?” she asked. “Is it a witch living in a cottage that roams the world on chicken feet? Or is it the unknown? The other?”

“Ruth.” He was standing now, determination shaking through him, his palm facing her as if that could protect him. “Enough questions.”

Ruth pushed herself away from the window. “You’re right. Now is not the time.”

She stepped closer to him, dropping the bottle so that it rolled on the floor, letting her hands fall against his chest. He did not stop her.

“You yearn for what I am, Franz: an other. You want it so dearly, you forget your own othering.”

“Ruth,” his breath was heavy and smelled of vodka tinged with old herring. “What do you want with me?”

She gave his chest a pat. “Ah, but we said no questions. Besides, didn’t you ask me that already?”

The cottage stilled, its legs contracting.

Ruth pulled Franz by the collar, and he let her. She was disgusted by how easily he let her guide him, even now as her cards were being laid out for him to see.

Ruth pulled him to the front door, pushing it open. Outside were the woods, haunting in their silence, the tips of some of the smaller trees brushing against the house's underbelly. Franz peered outside and he clung to her arm, the one holding his collar, his feet scrambling against the floor.

She loved the wildness here, ever since she’d been a little girl, newly orphaned, when it had devoured her up in its maw. She’d lost that little girl in the woods that day, had given it up to the earth. This was how she knew these woods were a den of transformation, how their branches held life and death beneath their bows. She’d learned, over time, how one could die and live again amidst the strong scent of pine.

The house continued to lower, letting its body rest neatly into the ground, settling itself as if it planned to stay.

Despite Franz’s struggle, she could sense his desire now, the way he looked out at the trees the same way he’d looked at her. She’d chosen him well. He was, in the end, a bored man, and a bored man was due for a change.

“I don’t believe in punishment,” she said, soft as the wind, releasing him, knowing what he’d do next, untethered.

Franz took a step forward, away from her, hesitating in his curiosity of what lay outside the cottage. He didn’t know it, but with that step, he was no longer inside the house.

Ruth snapped her fingers and the cottage rose. She heard Franz scream and smiled to herself.

“Really,” she called down as Franz gaped up at the cottage, stepping away from the chicken legs as they shuddered. “I believe in lessons. Here, I believe, you will get what I could not give you. I’ll be back for you when the troupe is next in Prague.”

This was what Ruth told all the men she left in the woods. And she did come back, only they were never the same men who had leered after her. They were hardly men at all. The woods held them and bore something new, something lonely and ravenous. Something closer to what Ruth thought humans should be, what she’d become when she was younger: malleable.

As the cottage stomped away, Franz cried out for them to come back. It was a sound like money changing hands, a simple truth, an answer. Ruth ignored him and picked up his hat from the bar counter, wondering if his accounting would help him in this new chapter of life. Understanding value could be useful in the woods. There, however, value was made simple.

The bottle of vodka rolled past her, and she stopped it with her foot. At the sound of footsteps, she looked up.

Berchik emerged from the main home of the cottage, his mother’s withered arm in his. She was smiling, her teeth sharp, her hair matted, white and wild and branch-filled.

Ruth donned Franz’s abandoned hat and bowed to the old crone, paying deference to the witch of the woods, to the questions unanswered, to change unending, to Baba Yaga.

—

Talia R. BarNoy (they/them) is a Queer Jewish writer from New York City who co-runs the NYC Writer's Circle Reading Series. They have a love for strawberries, bagels, fencing, and archaeology. Talia has been long-listed for Frontier Poetry's 2023 Hurt & Healing Prize and has previously been published in Door is A Jar, Lilith Magazine, and Monologging as well as in other locations.