The General Murmurer

Tales of the Chelm First Ward

Zusa Cohen loved the feeling of mud on her skin. She had lost track of her water gun and didn’t care. This was how every battle ought to go: winning and losing forgotten, sides abandoned altogether. After all, who needed a cause on a sunny afternoon? 

But no paradise lasts forever. Eden closed up after Eve got hungry; Zusa had just finished a long slide when Bina and Bluma asked her if she could please murmur up a little lunch. 

“I don’t want them forgetting to feed us,” Bina said. 

“Or doing anything else weird with the food,” Bluma added. 

“I’d bring it up myself,” said Bina, “but I have too much respect for your general murmurer assignment.”  

Zusa didn’t feel very hungry yet. Thinking about passing on complaints, in fact, she didn’t feel hungry at all. But she didn’t want to be selfish; she knew that everyone was depending on her to complain. “All right,” she said. She looked over at the leaders. They were busy throwing blades of grass at each other. “When they have a minute, I’ll bring it up.” 

Bina gave her a long, skeptical look. “Waiting for the right time to bring something up is not a complaint. That’s just a conversation.”

Bluma put a hand on Zusa’s shoulder. “Since you’re new at this, do you want some advice?” 

“Please,” said Zusa. “I’m good at following instructions.” 

“Never wait to speak up,” Bina said. “And never take no for an answer! If you won’t treat your own needs as urgent, what’s to stop the world from putting you off forever?” 

“Don’t be afraid to be dramatic,” said Bluma. “Don’t just mention that a few people want lunch; march up and ask if they’re planning to starve us!” 

Zusa was glad to have the support of people who would not only tell her what to say, but how. “Thank you,” she told the twins. “I will try to remember that.” 

Zusa marched up to the leaders before she could forget. Sister Schwartz and Tzipa were still tossing grass at each other when she reached them. They looked so happy, she hated to interrupt. But she remembered a good complainer doesn’t wait. Zusa squared her shoulders instead and prepared to be dramatic. “I have a complaint!” she announced. 

Sister Schwartz and Tzipa turned away from their grass game. “What is it?” Sister Schwartz asked.  

With a leader’s attention fixed on her, Zusa felt self-conscious and tongue-tied. It was good that Bluma had given her exact wording to fall back on. “Are you trying to starve us?” Zusa asked. 

“No,” said Tzipa. She retrieved Sister Schwartz’s watch from the top of a nearby rock and her eyes grew wide. “We just lost track of time. Would you like me to cook again? I can try to be quick.” 

At the thought, Zusa’s mouth began to water. But then she remembered that a good complainer never takes no for an answer. “What do you mean, ‘no’?” Zusa said. “I’m the complainer and I’m here to demand you say yes.” 

 Tzipa gave her a puzzled look. “I don’t understand. Do you mean you want me to say that yes, we are trying to starve you?” 

That wasn’t it at all, but before Zusa could think of what had gone wrong, Sister Schwartz looked over at the watch and interjected. “It’s not that she wants to starve,” she said to Tzipa. “Clearly, she’s upset about the lost time. We’ve played so long, we spent all the time that we had planned for lunch. Instead of letting the whole day go, she is asking us to remember our duty and skip ahead with the schedule.” Sister Schwartz turned toward Zusa. “The answer is yes. You’re right. Call the girls together—it’s time to learn from the scriptures about how to treat snakebite.” 

Zusa was not sure how to respond. Sister Schwartz seemed so proud of her that she didn’t have the heart to complain further, but she knew that Bina and Bluma would be disappointed about not getting any lunch. While Sister Schwartz and Tzipa prepared for the next lesson, Zusa went back to deliver the bad news. 

“I’m sorry,” she told them. Bluma’s face fell. Bina’s stomach growled. The only comfort she had in the face of her failure was that she had followed their advice. She hadn’t waited. She’d been dramatic. And she had refused to take no for an answer. 

Golda just sighed. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “It’s easy for leaders to talk people in circles. Do you want some advice?” 

Zusa nodded. Bina and Bluma had done their best, but Golda was older. It would be good to have her wisdom. 

“Don’t be too discouraged when things go wrong. Another moment will come. Just wait for it,” Golda said. ”And when the moment is right to bring up your complaint, keep it simple.”

“How simple?” Zusa asked. “What should I say?” 

Golda’s forehead wrinkled with concentration. “A good protest should fit into a chant. Something like, ‘What do we want? Food. When do we want it? Now.’”

Bina, Bluma, Chava, and Perla all agreed that sounded like a perfect reflection of their heart’s desire. Zusa rehearsed the words in her mind.  

“Try it again as soon as you see an opening,” Golda said.  

“Thank you,” Zusa said. “I will try to remember that.” 

What makes a good opening, however, is in the eye of the complainer. Zusa didn’t want to end up eating snake, for example, so she waited through the snakebite lesson. That turned into a lot of waiting. Sister Schwartz had put together a long list of scriptures about snakes and snakebites, which they had to look up. Then Tzipa took over with some practical guidance.  “Some people think that if you’re righteous, snakes won’t hurt you,” she explained. “But if you’re purposely picking up a venomous snake, you’re seeking a sign and putting God to the test. Those are both sinful, so the snake is probably going to bite.” She shrugged. “When it does, don’t blame the scriptures and don’t blame the snake. You knew what they were when you picked them up.” Tzipa taught them that with the bronze serpent melted down, the best thing was to call a doctor. Then she drew bite marks on each of them so they could practice keeping the wound still and lower than the heart, taking off any bracelets, watches, or rings that might get in the way of the body’s natural process of swelling, and washing the wound site with soap and water to keep dangerous bacteria out and make the venom do its work alone.  

One thing led to another. Once they started washing off their imaginary wound sites, it became clear how much mud the rest of their bodies were still carrying and the hygiene exercise expanded. In the middle of the scrubbing session, Golda gave Zusa a pointed look and gestured toward her mouth. Still, advice was advice—and such a soggy time did not strike Zusa as the ideal moment to ask to eat. Then again, as soon as they were finished washing, it was time to hike back to camp. At the beginning of the hike, Bluma shot Zusa a desperate look. But a hike felt too dusty and dirty to ask about food. By the end of the hike, Bina was shooting her increasingly dark looks, but Zusa remembered Golda’s advice and waited for a window of opportunity to arrive. 

The moment, apparently, had been waiting at camp the whole time. The other girls, exhausted from the day’s activities and the mounting hours of fasting, collapsed in their tents for a rest. But Zusa noticed that the leaders sat down instead, near the ashes of the previous night’s fire. She slipped over to join them.  

“Excuse me,” she said carefully. “But I have another complaint.” 

“Of course!” said Tzipa. “I’m glad you’re thinking about your assignment. What’s bothering you?” 

“It’s simple, really,” Zusa said. And she repeated the words she’d held in her mind all afternoon: “What do we want? Food. When do we want it? Now.” 

“It is almost dinner time,” said Sister Schwartz. 

“I’m happy to cook again,” said Tzipa. “Though it may take a while to build up a fire. Would the girls feel all right about resting a little longer while we wait?” 

Lying down at all sounded lovely to Zusa, but she didn’t want to stray from her message and get talked in circles again. So she simply repeated the message they’d all agreed on, though a little more quietly this time because she hated to talk back. “What do we want? Food,” she whispered. “When do we want it? Now.” 

“Are you saying you don’t want me to cook?” Tzipa asked. “Would you rather eat cold beans from a can?” 

Zusa felt terrible for even implying such a thing, but before she could apologize, Sister Schwartz interjected. “I think I understand what our dear murmurer is saying,” she told Tzipa. “It’s a hot day. Heaven knows we’ve all done our share of sweating. Zusa realized that fire will only serve to make the evening hot. What’s more—burning fuel causes global warming and summer camp is at the wrong time of year to be doing that. It’s nothing against good cooking, but she’s right. I agree with her. Cold beans are better than a hot night.” 

“All right then,” Tzipa sighed. 

Sister Schwartz called the girls back out of their tents at once. Bina looked tired and annoyed. When Tzipa dumped cold beans onto her plate, Perla made a gagging face. But since no one wanted to interfere with Zusa’s job, they ate without complaint.

“What do we want?” Zusa ventured when the dinner was done. “A nice, slow-cooked breakfast. When do we want it? Tomorrow.” 

There are few camping experiences quite like an early-evening telling of scary stories around a not-campfire. Golda went first with a tale about a clown who got more and more lost in the woods because people would run away screaming whenever he tried to ask them for directions. Perla went next and told a story about a haunted tin can that went from tent to tent, attacking sleeping campers to get its cold beans back. Then Bina told a story about a bear. 

That reminded Tzipa that she needed to secure the rest of the food extra well in the hopes of making a better meal the next day. She tied it to a smaller branch farther from the center of a tree and suggested that someone make a few traps around the tree to discourage any animal from breaking in a second time. Chava and Zusa volunteered. 

As they worked, Zusa shared her heart’s worries with Chava. “I’m trying to complain right,” she said, “but everything seems to go wrong. If I hadn’t said anything, I think we would’ve gotten lunch. And we definitely would have gotten a better dinner. When I try to speak up, I get so nervous and I don’t know what to say.”

Chava finished the knots in the trap she was laying. “It’s not my job to complain about your complaints,” she said. “But I guess I could give you some advice.” 

Zusa hesitated. “Only if you’re sure it’s good advice,” she said. 

Chava laughed. “Then all I can say is that it’s hard to decide anything. So maybe next time, you eat first.” 

Zusa smiled. After a long and hungry afternoon, Chava’s advice sounded excellent. “I’ll try to remember that,” she said. 

And then they spent a blissful hour together digging and camouflaging a small spike pit. Zusa hoped no bears or other animals would come back, because she would hate to see an animal hurt. But working with Chava, the spike pit was clearly a labor of love, a work of art with a value all its own. 

Far above the heads of the sleeping members of the Chelm ward that night, grand meteorological forces were in action. The evening’s breeze, so soft on the cheek, had enough power at high altitudes to carry heavy clouds. And the cooling dark was just enough to convince those celestial travelers to drop their baggage. A few hours before sunrise, raindrops began to pitter-patter—and then pound—on the roofs of the Chelm ward’s tents.

Perla was the first to notice. Waking up in a storm was enough to wash her shyness away, and she screamed. That woke Tzipa, and the next thing everyone heard was a string of words Zusa had not expected from a Mormon leader. She bolted from her tent across to Perla’s, first aid kit in hand. Sister Schwartz was not far behind her, ready to comfort her daughter in the face of whatever catastrophe had struck. Once she realized that anyone who screamed like that would also surely want to complain, Zusa followed. She zipped up the tent behind her to keep it from flooding. 

But the closed door didn’t matter. Water was running along the ground and seeping into sleeping bags. “Screaming is for emergencies!” Tzipa was shouting. “If you raise your voice for every little thing, how are we supposed to tell when there’s a real problem?” But as far as Zusa could tell, there was a real problem, even if no one had been mauled by a bear. Someone ought to say something, and that person happened to be her. 

“It’s soaking wet,” Zusa said. “We can’t sleep like this.”

“That’s a valid complaint,” Tzipa observed. 

“Agreed,” said Sister Schwartz. She groaned. “After all we’ve been through, I can’t believe we’re losing the morning today.” 

They both looked to Zusa, as if expecting her to tell them what to do next. But Zusa was not sure what to say. Then she remembered Chava’s advice. “It’s bad to make any decisions on an empty stomach. Before we give up the morning for lost, we have to eat.” 

Tzipa stared at her. “Now you want me to make something? At this hour? In this weather?”

“This is our moment of opportunity.” Zusa told her. “I won’t take no for an answer.”

Tzipa’s shoulders slumped in resignation. “Then I suppose someone better go and get the food down and bring it to me.” 

Zusa supposed it wouldn’t hurt to be someone twice. Chava agreed to come with her. 

With the help of a flashlight, the two of them could see centimeters and centimeters in front of their faces. With some experimentation, they were able to find the tree where the food was hanging. Zusa found the bag at roughly the same time Chava found their spike trap. With her foot. 

Chava choked back a cry. She bit her lip. For a moment, she just stared at Zusa. “Don’t you have anything to say about this?” she asked. 

“Oh! Yes! Ouch!” Zusa said. “That hurts!” She bent down to inspect the damage to see if she also needed to scream or curse. The thick sole of Chava’s shoe had been enough to flatten their improvised wooden spikes, but the pit must have given a painful twist to her ankle. “Can you walk all right?” Zusa asked. 

Chava leaned on Zusa for a moment and carefully tested her weight on the foot. “It’s not too bad, actually,” she concluded. She looked disappointed. “We should have made a better trap.” 

Zusa was too relieved to feel particularly upset about that. “I’ll decide after breakfast whether to complain about us,” she promised. 

Together, they retrieved the food pack and delivered it to camp. Since fire was out of the question for the moment, Tzipa did her best to offer them a breakfast of bits of damp dried fish and leftover syrup over chunks of cheese. 

It was delicious. 

After breakfast, Zusa felt clearer. Insight had not exactly distilled on her as the dew—it was more like it was running through her socks (which was, coincidentally, what was happening with the water on the tent floor). “I am tired of trying to get things right and waiting to have a good time,” she announced. “If we don’t do some more activities right now, I’m going to be really disappointed.” 

Well? The murmurer had spoken. If she had chosen to worry about boredom instead of the rain, who had any right to say otherwise?

The next several hours went by in a blur of unhinged productivity.  Sister Schwartz would never have imagined planning so much in so little time. The girls were able to swim without even leaving their tents. They packed up their things and loaded them into the van in record time. There were other unexpected efficiencies. Tug-of-war, for example, lasted all of 30 seconds. Their fire-building contest ended almost immediately in a draw. And they didn’t have to go out on a nature walk to identify five different animals: huddled beneath a tarp, they saw frogs, newts, and several species of worm. 

The only thing that the rain made any worse was the afternoon water balloon fight. “Having a water fight was nice yesterday,” Zusa admitted, “but I don’t want to get wet when I’m already soaked!” 

When Perla looked at the large plastic bucket where the water balloons were stored, she had to agree. After all, she reasoned, the balloons were the only thing that prevented the bucket from becoming filled with rainwater completely. 

Halfway through the day, when the rain finally slowed to a drizzle and then stopped, the girls devised a service project for each other. It consisted of stringing up improvised clotheslines and pooling whatever dry clothes, towels, or blankets they could find to wear while everything else had a chance to dry. With help from a little gasoline Chava siphoned out of the van’s tank, they soon started a roaring fire and basked in its heat. 

Around that pillar of fire, the girls held a testimony meeting. Golda bore a lovely testimony about sustaining leaders and then turning into one. Bina expressed thanks to God for somehow sustaining them in the wilderness. Bluma told the story about Jesus saying “Peace, be still,” and expressed her hope that someday, his instructions would stick. Perla talked about how much she loved her mom. Chava talked about what a fantastic job God and anyone else involved had done with putting together nature. 

And Zusa, moved by the spirit of the day, let loose in a long, meandering rant. She complained about bears who eat campers’ food and mosquitoes who eat campers. She complained about hot days and small water guns and mud sliding sessions that end too soon. She complained about the awful responsibility of being the general murmurer, which everyone thought they wanted without grasping the responsibility of bearing the group’s burdens. She complained about leaders who think they understand what you’re telling them when they’re really not listening to you at all. Having built momentum, she moved beyond camp. She went back to her quiet frustrations with her second grade teacher, lingered on a description of her aunt’s awful cabbage rolls, and detailed her frustrations with Chelm’s transit system. She talked about how sad she found it that a field of dandelions is only beautiful for a week. And about how much she hated that flowers begin to wilt as soon as you put them in a vase—so that the very thing that’s supposed to bring you joy reminds you of death. She talked about how tired she was of being the only one at home who ever seemed to properly wash out the coffee pot, even though she had only recently gotten old enough that her parents even let her drink coffee. She narrated the time, at age nine, when she broke out in hives at a friend’s birthday party because she was too polite to leave even though she was allergic to their cat, or the time at age six when she wet her pants at school because she kept letting other people go to the bathroom before she took a turn. She confessed that it made her anxious when her parents told her, as they often did, what a sweet and perfect girl she was. She felt buried, she said, under their expectations. 

She didn’t finish in the name of Jesus Christ, but everyone still said “amen” when she was through. 

Zusa felt new and light. Somehow, she had fulfilled the measure of her calling. 

Elazar and Shana Cohen kept checking their clock the next afternoon. They’d pace, look out the window. Pace some more. Any minute now, their daughter would be home. With any luck, she’d be holding back tears. She would fall into their arms, and they would tell her it was all right and all was forgiven and they’d never make her go through something like that again. 

Finally, a van pulled up. Elazar watched through the blinds while Mirele Schwartz stepped out of the car and helped Zusa get her bags. Then he pretended he hadn’t been watching as Zusa came up to the door and let herself in. 

She smelled awful. Like smoke and sweat and dirt and damp socks. He was still willing to comfort her, but he thought it would be all right if she took a shower first. 

“How was your trip?” Shana asked. 

“I complained and complained,” Zusa said brightly. “It was the worst experience I’ve ever loved.”

Artwork by David Habben.

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Tales of the Chelm First Ward: Introduction