by Chaim Potok
“I saw the photograph but I won’t tell anyone or ever talk about it again with anyone.”
He smiled faintly. “Thank you,” he said. “I must say that you are a bright young man. When you know to read Hebrew well, you may want to learn Bible with me. I learned Bible in Europe with a great teacher. It is more than thirty-five years since I have learned with him, but I remember everything. That will be my way of repaying your—how shall I put it?—your forgetfulness regarding a certain photograph.” He leaned forward and patted my arm. “It was good talking to you, David. And you should tell your mother you are not feeling well. A child should never conceal such matters from his parents. Goodbye, David. Shall I give your grandmother your love? I will be seeing her again soon, God willing.”
I nodded.
He rose quickly from the blanket, looked down at me, gave me a smile, and went off toward the people near the game. He had a light tread and he walked erect and seemed to glide across the grass, as he had glided out of the shadows and crossed his study to take from my hands the photograph I had now promised never to tell anyone I had seen. I lay back on the blanket near my brother. My mother seemed to have fallen asleep in a sitting position at the other end of the blanket. Her eyes were closed and her head lay to one side. The brim of her white flowery straw hat was bent against her shoulder. Asleep, the taut skin of her face had slackened, and she looked strangely old.
A few feet away from me, Saul stirred and sat up.
“Davey,” he whispered.
I looked at him.
“Are you all right?”
I nodded.
“You talked a long time.”
I was quiet.
He waited. “I couldn’t hear anything you said, Davey.”
I remained quiet. He put his head back down on the blanket. “As long as you feel all right,” he said.
I closed my eyes and lay very still and began to go over the entire conversation from the beginning. I could hear the conversation inside my ears. I could slow it down or speed it up or stop it, as I wished. When I was done going over it, I waited a moment, and then began to go over it again. I fell asleep.
Through my sleep I heard the thudding of shoes against the leather ball. At times the people watching the game seemed very still. In the warm air of the clearing, the sounds of the shoes striking the ball moved piercingly toward the trees. Very clearly, as if my eyes were open and my head were thrust close upon the swift-moving legs of the players, I saw their shoes striking the ball. Then the ball became a dog’s head. A wave of nausea moved through me. I opened my eyes and sat up.
There was no soccer game going on at all. The length of the grass that had been the soccer field was now a wrestling ring. My father lay on the grass wrestling the tall man with the small eyes who had held both a knife and a gun in the photograph. I looked at the bulging muscles on my father’s arms and chest and back. The crowd was quiet. I could hear the tall man’s heavy grunting breaths. My brother and Saul lay asleep. My mother was not on our blanket. I looked carefully and saw her standing alongside my uncle. I saw again the muscles on my father’s arms. He was intertwined with the tall man, rolling with him on the grass, now holding him about the head, now locking his arms about his shoulders. Sweat poured from both their faces. The sun shone brightly but there were dark clouds now in a distant corner of the sky.
I lay back down on the blanket and closed my eyes. I did not want to sleep, for I was fearful of dreaming once again. I fell asleep.
A voice woke me. It was a strange soft musical voice, sweet, almost whispered. I had never heard it before and knew it was a dream and slid into deeper sleep.
Raindrops woke me. But I thought it odd that there would be rain while I could still see the sun through my closed eyelids. The clearing was still; the wood vibrated softly with insect life. I lay very still and opened my eyes and saw my father and mother.
They stood beneath the branches of a tall pine with their arms around each other. My father had his shirt and straw hat on once again. His hair was combed and his face was dry. He stood gently caressing my mother’s face and head, running a finger across her cheek and chin and nose and eyes and forehead. I felt his finger moving and caressing; he moved it across the bridge of her nose and along the wings of her nostrils and slowly over her lips. And she kissed his finger and the palm of his hand and bent her head. And he cupped her head in his hand and kissed her cheek and forehead and eyes and lips. And she held him; her short, thin, fragile body locked tightly to his strong frame, his arms around her. “How good you are to me,” she was saying. “How I don’t deserve this,” she was saying. “I love you, my husband,” she was saying. “I do, I do. No matter what you may think, I do. David was beautiful, David I loved, David I worshiped, David was from a world of dreams, David was the Garden of Eden, David was like the wind that is the bodies of angels. It is you I love now, my husband. Though I do not deserve it. I am a woman with nothing but fears and superstitions and a sick child and memories. But I do love you. Yes. Yes. Very much. Yes. Hold me and love me. Yes. And what they did to you, the goyim. What they did to David and to you and to all of us, the goyim. What they did to you, to you, oh what they did to you.” With her hand she caressed his cheek and with a finger she traced the outlines of his bony features, the sharp bony jut of his jaw, his firm lips, his straight nose, his high, lined forehead, his small eyes, his cheekbones; and with a finger she gently, slowly, tremulously, it seemed to me, caressed the scar that lay across his right cheek.
The scar was a dry white line that began a little below the cheekbone and ran the length of the cheek almost parallel to the straight line of the nose. It terminated above the jawbone near the dip of flesh that marked the end point of the lips on the right side of the face. It was narrow at its ends and wide and clearly ridged with healed tissue at its center. It was a little less than two inches in length. It lay upon his thick squarish features like a miniature road marker and had, until that moment when I saw my mother’s finger move across it gently and with love, been regarded by me as possessing an invisibility similar to that attributed to the color of one’s eyes or to a birthmark or freckles. Then I saw my father take my mother in his arms and kiss her lips. I lay very still on the blanket and listened to the pounding of my heart.
From somewhere nearby came the rumbling sound of thunder. My brother woke and cried. I sat up. The sky was a mass of dark, boiling clouds. My parents came quickly from beneath the pine tree. Covered by the dense canopy of branches and absorbed in one another, they had not sensed the coming of the thunderstorm. Gathering up the blanket and the picnic basket, my father looked quickly around the clearing. It was deserted and clean. There was not a piece of paper on the grass. I had dreamed it. There had been no one there save ourselves. I had dreamed all of it. We went quickly through the wood and the meadow and along the path between the deer and llamas and camels. There was my silly billy goat. The air was very still and dark. The leaves on the trees seemed paralyzed. Half a block out of the zoo, the rain hit us with a sudden dense slanting rush of thick drops. Then it became a waterfall. My father lifted me and carried me beneath his jacket. The picnic basket bumped against my legs. My mother carried my brother. They ran with us through the rain to our apartment house. The street smelled of hot wet pavement and the excrement of horses. Was my billy goat out in the rain? And what would happen to the Golem in the rain? Would his clay body melt?
I stood at the window in my room and watched the rain falling into the maples. The leaves shuddered. I felt the fever in my eyes and the pain in my forehead and cheeks. Soon I would tell my parents I was ill. There was no hurry. They were busy now with other matters. The pain in my face was not yet unbearably severe. Standing at the window, I saw Eddie Kulanski and his parents walking along the street, laughing and holding their faces to the rain just as the old man on our block would hold his face to the sun. They were drenched. I could see the outlines of their bodies beneath their summer clothes. They passed bene
ath a maple and were gone from view. I turned away from the window and lay down on my bed. The high fever and the facial pain came swiftly then, and I cried out for my mother.
She came in quickly and undressed me and helped me wash and put me to bed. I could not associate her with the woman who had spoken with such love beneath the tree on the edge of the clearing. Now she seemed, as always, dry, brittle, frightened, her eyes darting about, her face gaunt and pale, her fingers cold and moist on my body. She spoke in her nervous, harried, high-pitched voice. Then who had been the woman with my father? There had been no such woman. It had all been a dream. The entire afternoon had been a fever dream. Nothing connected the afternoon to the bed in which I now lay as I waited for my mother to leave so I could create with my sheet the white world of tranquillity which I loved. Nothing, it seemed, except the scar on my father’s face.
My mother gave me my medicine and went from the room. My father came in to say good night. He stood stiffly at my bedside, a short rigid man whose strong arms I imagined I could see through the long-sleeved striped shirt he wore. I looked at the white line of the scar. No, I had not dreamed the scar. Perhaps I had dreamed the picnic. But not the scar.
“How are you feeling, David?”
“It’s my nose and eyes and throat, Papa.”
“The same black year again.”
“Was there a picnic today, Papa?”
“What?”
“Did we go to a picnic?”
“Of course we went to a picnic.” His voice shook.
“I don’t think I liked it, Papa. I don’t think I want to go again next year.”
He stood near the bed and looked at me and was silent.
“You made that organization, Papa?”
“Yes.”
“Is it a big organization?”
“It is big enough.”
“You made it to help Jews?”
“To help my friends and their families.”
“Goyim don’t help us, Papa?”
“Goyim? It is a world that hates Jews. Why should goyim help us?”
“Maybe I’m glad I went, Papa.”
We were silent a moment. The distant clang of a trolley car came dimly through the sound of the rain.
“I wish it could be a better world,” I said.
He stirred faintly and was still.
“Yes,” I heard myself say. “I’m glad I went. But I wish God would make the world clean.”
“David,” he said softly and was silent.
“Papa. The cut on your face. Was it an accident?”
I thought I heard him draw in breath very sharply. The rain drummed on my window.
“Papa?”
“Yes,” he said in a strange, quiet voice. “One can say that it was an accident.”
My eyes were half-closed. I felt the cool smooth sheets on my legs and hands. The lamp on the dresser burned brightly. It would be white beneath my sheet. Soon, soon.
“You fell, Papa? When you were a little boy?”
“No.” I could barely hear his voice for the noise of the rain.
“Did someone cut you, Papa?”
“Yes.”
Someone had cut him. Someone had cut my father’s face. There would have been a lot of blood.
“Who hurt you, Papa?”
“A goy. A Polak.”
His voice, thin and expressionless, had come as if from very far away. Slowly he sat down on my bed. His hands dangled between his slightly spread thighs.
“In Lemberg, Papa?”
“No. In a troop train on the way back from the war against the Bolsheviks. The train was held up in a forest by Polish bandits.” He spoke quietly above the noise of the rain, looking strangely small on my bed, as if his words were diminishing his size. “They came through the train stealing only from Jews. They only wanted the Jews, they kept saying.”
“How did they know who were the Jews, Papa?”
“They knew,” he said after a moment, and seemed to become smaller still.
“Papa?”
“I think you should go to sleep now, David.” His voice was very soft.
“Why did the goy cut your face?”
“He wanted to steal my tallis and tefillin. I would not give them to him. I would not let him take my tallis and tefillin. He cut my face with his bayonet and took them. None of the goyishe soldiers said a word. I had served with them for years. They did not lift a finger to help. The job of a Jew is to suffer, they think, the stinking Polaks. With that job they are ready to help us. So. Now you know. Your mother and I wondered when you would ask about the scar.”
“Was Mama hurt by goyim?”
“What? No.” He rose abruptly from the bed. I felt the mattress move upward. The rain beat loudly upon my window. “It is late,” he said. “I have a customer I must see early tomorrow morning. Aren’t you tired? I am tired. Playing ball and wrestling. I am very tired. I need a bath and then I am going to bed.”
“I like when we talk, Papa.”
“Yes? Well.” He seemed embarrassed. “We talk. Don’t we talk?”
“Am I named after your brother David?”
“What? Yes.”
“He was killed by goyim?”
“Yes.” His voice was very small.
“Were many Jews killed?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill many goyim, Papa?”
“Not enough,” he said. “Good night, David.”
“Good night, Papa.”
He went quietly from the room.
I slid beneath my sheet. Now I was safe. I could hear the pounding of the rain on my window. The world outside was dark with horror. It hurt Jews and I was always having accidents and getting sick in it. But I knew I was safe inside the clean white world I had created for myself. Nothing could touch me inside that world. It was cool and white and the Angel of Death never entered it with his arsenal of accidents. The rain was loud upon my window. I listened to the rain. It fell steadily and strongly upon the earth. It fell from the clouds through the dark night and the trees and the yellow ghostly arcs of the street lights. It beat like fingers upon my window. Perhaps it was another flood. No. God had promised there would be no more floods. But God could change His mind. God could do anything. I lay in my white world and listened to the summer rain and knew it was another flood. Like the first Flood. A flood that would cover the earth and the trees and the buildings and the valleys and the mountains. A flood that would cover the Bronx and Bobrek and Lemberg and Warsaw and Lodz. A flood that would cleanse and not kill. And Og would ride the waves carrying the zoo animals and my little billy goat, and the clay golem would not melt, and Eddie Kulanski and his cousin would turn their faces to the rain and laugh and float cleansed on the surface of the water and talk to me without hate. And afterward, when the water receded and the world outside was as clean and white as my white world inside, my mother would smile often, and my father and I would talk often, and Mr. Bader would explain to me why that photograph had not yet been destroyed if it was so dangerous to so many people.
I lay in my white world listening to the rain and feeling the slow inward curling of sleep and knew in my heart that when I woke in the morning everything outside would be clean and white and the Angel of Death would have less of a job to do because goyim would not kill Jews and the entire world would be free of accidents. Perhaps the Angel of Death himself would die in the flood; the only one to die.
The rain woke me in the night. My head was on the pillow outside the sheet. The light in my room had been turned off. A small dark form stood near my bed. “Ochnotinos, chnotinos, notinos,” it murmured. “Otinos, tinos, inos, nos, os.” But I knew it was a fever dream and did not cry out. The form remained near my bed, murmuring. I slid under my sheet.
Three days later I was well enough to go outside. I ran over Eddie Kulanski’s hand with my tricycle.
TWO
It was an accident.
I had been ill only two days. All of the second day I w
as free of fever. During breakfast the following morning, my mother said quietly to my father, “Two days, Max. I must thank Mrs. Horowitz.”
“Women’s nonsense,” he said, looking up from his Yiddish newspaper.
“But two days, Max.”
“You want me to believe in that witch? She hates the child.”
“But she gave me the words out of pity,” my mother said, and added, “She has a new dog.”
“Mazel tov,” said my father. “More dirt on the sidewalk.”
“What did Mrs. Horowitz give you?” I asked.
“A special prayer, darling. Against your fever.”
I stared at her.
“Eat your cereal,” my father said. “You’ll go outside and play in the fresh air. That is the best protection against sickness. I need another glass of coffee, Ruth.”
A few minutes later he murmured the Grace After Meals and went out of the kitchen.
“Can I ride my bike, Mama?”
“Yes, darling.”
“Can we go to the zoo?”
“Today? I must write letters. Finish your cereal, darling. Look how Alex has finished all his cereal.”
I finished my cereal. I did not feel weak. I could not remember when I had felt so rested after an illness.
Later that morning I came slowly through the glass entrance door of the house, dragging my tricycle. It was a warm sunny day. The street was busy with traffic. Children played all up and down the sidewalk. At the far end of the street the old man sat on a chair, his face to the sun.
A little to the right of the stoop, Tony Savanola and Eddie Kulanski were playing a game of marbles. Tony gave me a smile.
“How do you feel, Davey?”
I told him I felt very good and mounted the tricycle.
Eddie Kulanski was on his hands and knees, gauging an intricate shot. He ignored me.
“Did you have a good time at the picnic, Davey?” Tony Savanola asked.
I looked at Eddie Kulanski. “It was a good picnic, Tony. My father belongs to an organization that has a picnic once a year. They have games and wrestling and things. Do Catholics have picnics?”