Boy meets girl. Meets papa.

The boy’s attention shifted to the man approaching who was much like Mauritz’s papa in age, only larger and with no beard. But a brush mustache, a bit of paunch. His jaundiced hat collapsed toward his brow, his boots held steady to the ground in his march that stopped in front of them. And how his thick arms did bar his broad chest as in their dialect he addressed Brishen, eyes gouging Mauritz in a manner declaring itself that he was his papa.

***

Certainly, as taking in the sum of this gangly gadjo, with his sprouted chin and disc cap, trailing tucked scarf, so lost in his coat that his fingers had disappeared, Milosh said to himself with, Here is the Jew boy who should have remained disappeared.  

Then, from the hilltop, in a sprinkling downward of well-acquainted chatter joined to the song of their wooden pail handles, he turned his head to the girls meandering to them from the river. Plumped youthfulness, impetuousness, and willfulness, ill-timed with this distraction of eyes that gravitated and held. A business that lit upon one face and spread to budding breasts, her sway of hips. What ended, to his discerning eye, in panting as with a daring stride, a smiling wave she led Dodja, Anika, and their cousin, Mossia forward. Then, with a beguiling flick of her hair, pail tipping, paused in front of the boy, water splashing on his toes, her eyes alighted on him as a bee drawing pollen from a flower.

***

But here was the girl who could surpass any dream, her eyes planted on Mauritz in a shade of blue whisked in green meadows, her hair a cascade of sun’s fiery blush. All that caused enough stirrings of his heart and body to entirely disarm his fourteen years.

All that seemed quite enough for the Papa standing beside them, who, with a jerk of his chin and an arrow stare, rumbled to the girl, “Ro-sa,” his warning index finger upthrust toward away — where she skipped, leaving Mauritz gaping after her under a scathing frown and, “My daughter. Best forgotten.” In Yiddish. With a distinct growl.

From Mountains Never Meet, Miracles