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"Can I help with anything?"
The question comes out more as a desperate plea than a helpful offer, at least to Samuel's finely tuned ears. Henry sits at the table, looking too large for the seat he'd chosen, one leg bouncing to escape his idleness.
"You're a guest here, Henry," Mame answers. "Guests do not lift a finger, unless it is for eating."
Samuel snorts, dusting his hands off on his shirt. Fingerprints of flour come away with them, which has his mother frowning and trying to brush away with a strip of cloth. Samuel bends his spine and belly back, neatly avoiding her fussing. "I think it would make Henry more comfortable, Mame, if he is given something to occupy himself with. He is a little unpractised at sitting still." Curling his fingers around his mother's shoulder, he looks over his own at Henry, adding, "Isn't that right, Bruder?"
"I just like making myself helpful," Henry answers, sounding apologetic at the fact.
Mame puffs her cheeks and sighs. "You are both like your father," she says. "He couldn't ever abide empty hands either."
Martin's industrious nature must have been strong-willed if he could impart it between both his blood and his brood. Samuel finds he flinches less at his name now than he had in the months and years prior to today, now that he can find his father's disposition in more than his mother's stories. Henry's smile digs into his cheek at the mention of the man who raised him, lashes touching his cheek as his eyes cast down in brief recollection.
"Why doesn't he help with the challah?" Samuel suggests. "If I could make it as a kind then surely he can manage it as a man."
"I can make holla," Henry says, already sitting forward as though making ready to launch himself form his seat. "That's the bread, yeah? I used to help Ma with baking loads back in Skalitz."
"Samuel with me, as well." Mame pinches the soft middle of Samuel's cheek, the grit of flour between thumb and forefinger. She smiles as he waves her hand away, feeling a flush rise into his ears. "He cried the first time my father told him there were better things for a growing man to do before Shabbat."
"Mame… I do not think Henry came all the way here to hear about that."
"That's exactly why I came, actually." Henry has to stoop a little to wash his hands in the nearest basin, as Samuel must. He ignores the cloth hung near for drying his hands, instead shaking them out. "It's too late to grow up together, but it's not too late to tell stories."
"Easy to say for the one who only has to tell what his pride will permit him."
"Well, there have to be some upsides to having dead parents, don't there?"
They laugh together at the morbid exchange, and gather at the table where the bread is made. More spacious than the small surface mostly used for Samuel and his mother's personal use. There is grit fallen into the grains of the wood that not even the most exacting knife can carve out; a physical reminder that although Kolin has only been their home a few short months, there have been many Shabbosos since then, and many still to come. His mother works upon a board laid out over the table, her ingredients collected in small bowls before combined into one. "I have some ready to knead already for you," she says as she scrapes it out onto the clean surface.
The wet mass of dough seems to exhale as it settles onto the board.
Samuel pats Henry on the back, pushing him as he rolls up his sleeves to his elbows. "Well, Bruder, let us see how you do."
"What, you're not going to help?"
"I'll step in if you are on the verge of spoiling our Shabbat."
"Great," Henry snorts. "Did you use salt when you baked, or did you just let your tears do the honours for you?"
"Boys."
"Sorry, Good- Sara…" Henry trips over the right word for Samuel's mother, neither wife nor 'good' within the eyes of his church, even if Henry himself my differ. "We're just doing what comes natural to brothers, aren't we?"
Samuel lets his lips turn— his smile unlike Henry's in appearance, but may as well be its twin in mischief. "Precisely."
Henry, to his credit, doesn't need to be directed in these first few steps. Samuel had. He'd watched his mother and the other women who came over to prepare for Shabbat knead bread before his first attempt, but the observation and the movement are two separate matters. To his young eyes, it had looked like they were cats trying to make coarse hay soft with their paws, pushing and pulling, pulling and pushing, until they are satisfied with what they have made. In truth, there is a lot more pinching and poking dough than what a cat's paw can hope to manage.
Henry cinches it between his fingers, wrangling it into a shape resembling a gooseneck. It's in moments like these his brother's common rearing is evident: how given he is to the repetitive labour reserved for their lot. Be that striking an anvil, fletching arrows, or kneading flour into bread.
"Careful not to overwork it," his mother warns. She ducks down to observe his progress, humming softly. "I think you might be ready to braid."
"Braid?"
"That's how the challah gets its shape," Samuel says. "Otherwise it would be any other loaf."
"Right…" Henry gathers his dough in his hands, the middle sagging between his fingers as he holds it somewhat helplessly; his own mother's lessons no longer serving him. "So how do I do that?"
"Have you never braided a pretty girl's hair?" Mame teases.
Pink tips Henry's ears. "Erm, my sweetheart's is a little on the short side."
Samuel snorts so hard his ears pop.
"Shut it."
He ignores Henry, pushing in, condescending in a sing-song voice, "I will teach the kind how to braid his bread. Perhaps when he is home he can impress his sweetheart with a new trick."
Henry digs his elbow into Samuel's side. Before it can devolve further he reaches out to yank a portion of dough from Henry's hands. His mouth opens, a protest living and dying upon his lips before he settles into learning. Samuel curls the dough into a smooth ball, working it to and fro with his palms until it begins to grow a tail. It twirls, around and around, like sycamore seeds in spring.
"Looks like you're wringing a goose's neck." Tearing what remains of his dough into two, Henry begins to try to mimic Samuel. A little misshapen at first, it begins to swing downwards, the bottom pulling away from the middle.
"Careful-" Samuel warns, catching it before it falls. "Don't let it get grow too long, unless, of course, you are planning on skipping rope with it."
"Or playing dress-up." Mame adds, insistent that their guest is not the sole butt of the joke. "Do you remember that, Shmuli?"
"Vaguely." It's one of those childhood memories that are half-remembered by someone else, so often and so fondly that someone else's recollection has been transposed over his.
"Out with it, then." By now, Henry has smashed the three braids of bread together to try again. The way they tear from the main body is looking a little dry, but Samuel isn't certain any amount of water can save it now. "I want to hear."
Samuel sighs, but it's his mother who tells it, smile brimming upon her lips with every word. "When he was little, he would try to make a tallit out of his bread." She demonstrates with the air, miming throwing a length of dough over her shoulders. He doesn't remember the act itself, but he sometimes has vague visions of the butt-ends of the dough in the corners of his eyes, which in the overactive imagination of a child are the spitting image of the white shawl his grandfather wore. "Our little rabbi, we'd call you."
"Some rabbi I would prove to be."
"You have been a leader to our people in other respects," Mame assures him, to which Sam can only shrug and say, "Perhaps."
He quickly finds distraction in Henry, who gathers the dough together for what feels like the dozenth time. His tongue is pink between his teeth, face lined with effort Samuel has seen before— fighting at his side upon the field of battle. A gentle snort issues through his nose, reaching forward to touch Henry's elbow. "I think this will have to be the last attempt, Bruder. Unless you like the idea of eating a brick."
"I've got it this time." No sooner does he say that before the braid he's lengthening escapes his hands, looking like a springing snake as he tries to gather it back together, then begin picking it apart. "It's harder than it looks."
"Most work is," Samuel says, minding the fact that his mother is in the room with them.
When, at last, the misshapen loaf is set beside the others, the worst part of the process begins. He remembers watching the bread rise in the draftless corner of the room his mother set aside just for the challah. It felt like watching a golem come to life, although the stories his elders told growing up rarely ended with the golem upon the dinner table.
Samuel touches Henry's shoulder, head falling in gesture towards the door. "We ought to get some air while it rises, let my mother get her home back in order."
"I'm alright helping-"
"- I'm sure you are, Bruder, but she has specifications that no man of mortal makings can hope to emulate." Over Henry, he grins lovingly at her. "Better to let her do it."
They step into the reluctant day. Between the buildings in the ghetto, a strip of sun from the bright blue sky spotlights the little courtyard between them and the adjoining homes. From there, a small garden grows, planted with mostly spinach and herbs sufficient enough to thrive in the small plot. Two chairs sit in waiting for each to take, Henry grunting as he takes his. Unlike himself, Samuel thinks, although such inconsistencies hit him twice— remembering their relation is far from traditional.
For a time, they sit in silence. A full kind of silence, that is happy to sustain itself, but just as happy to be broken. From the corners of his eyes Samuel sees Henry take in their home, and thinks he sees admiration.
"You've settled in well, then." Phrased as a question, but isn't one. Samuel supposes there is little arguing the matter. "That's good."
Samuel puts his heel up on his seat, draping his arm over his knee, so his hand may gesture lazily as he speaks. "There was some friction at first: 'where are we to put them all,' 'what if their luck follows them.' But we are one people, and many had family here— myself included." Before he could set his mother up somewhere else they had lived with a man he had always been told to call Uncle, but had turned out to be more of a cousin. They certainly weren't the only ones plucking at threadbare ties and mending them, making a knot in the middle. "It has turned out alright… for the most part."
"It was the same with the refugees in Skalitz— sort of." Henry shifts in his seat, not bendy enough to lounge in it as same does, he leans against the side of the building. The top of his head presses into the wall, hair flattening across the top of his skull. "Not that we all had family, but… after a while, I think most people forgot what it was they were so scared of. It's turned out better than it might've."
"Will you go back to Skalitz, do you think?"
He watches Henry watching the sky, the small shake of his head near imperceptible. "Will you go back to Kuttenberg?"
Samuel shakes his head the same. No more needs be said.
The conversation moves to gladder tidings: Henry's training for tourneys, Samuel's studies, the little things they busy their lives with. And yet the past wells between the cracks in their words, Martin and his wife, Jana, still live in Henry's stories and the ways he sees the world. His Ma, in how he points to the chives in bloom and lists off a recipe she had for clearing the sinuses in springtime. Martin, in how he immediately offers to hone Samuel's dagger to a cutting edge— or forge him a new one— or forge one together. Henry pulls his own half out of its sheath, pointing to his smith's mark, and suggesting ways he might add an 'S' to it.
He will never see steel and not think of his father. Never see chives and not think of his mother.
Like the bread that rises in the kitchen behind them; both an old pastime Samuel helped his mother with and a way he had once thought he could emulate his grandfather.
"I ought to go check on how Mame is doing," he announces, rising to his feet and putting one arm out to stop Henry from following. "Stay here. I'll return shortly."
It is a hopeless order, but for the time at least Henry remains, following Samuel with his eyes as he enters the household. His fingers are warm with the sun as he brings them to his lips after touching the mezuzah, bright with the verses held within. The home itself smells of bread, an aroma that is both soft and warm, yet somehow guarded. Their loaves cool upon a rack, glowing golden with the egg wash his mother had painted over them with before putting them in to bake.
The loaves made by him and his mother are similar in size and technique, not uniform, but clearly practised. Henry's…
Samuel picks up the loaf, the crust already cool, but not giving under his fingers. He twists it a round to the flat underside and knocks— somewhere inside, deep inside, soft middle knocks back. Curious, he drops it on the table, half-expecting it to break it in half. Instead, it falls, and does not bounce, pinned down by the weight of its mistakes.
"I think this is what killed Abel."
"Samuel," his mother warns. "You've done far worse in your time."
"I have not," he protests. Then, remembering it is his mother, who does not joke about bread. Challah least of all. "When?"
"All the time when we began. Rachel was always giving me grief about the waste of flour, but it seemed worth the price of your smile, Shmuli."
"I don't remember a result quite this…" With one finger he flips the bread like a wooden block. "Dense."
"You wouldn't have. And neither will Henry."
One brow raises in question, but his mother only smiles. She returns to the oven, hands swathed in a towel that permit her to harmlessly lift a fourth loaf from the oven. This one almost artfully rudimentary. He remembers a musician at Solomon's once telling him that it is harder to play poorly on purpose than it was to play at one's level of skill, and although the cooling challah is not the prettiest, it is perhaps the most impressive he has seen. The uneven braids match Henry's fumbling attempts well, and when he gingerly lifts it to the side to test its doneness, the hollow sound is right under his knuckles.
"I used to do the same with yours when you were little," she says. "To keep your spirit up."
"I didn't know..."
To kiss him as she did then she has to lift onto her toes, thumb swiping a stubborn lock of hair she's been battling with since he was two. Samuel feels akin to the bread that cools before them— something soft within responds in kind to her affection.
"There are some things you got from me," she says. "I can keep a secret as well as any spy."