by Chaim Potok
I went upstairs.
That afternoon I walked up the side street to the boulevard. An old man helped me through the heavy traffic. I entered the zoo. It was very hot in the sun. I stood in the sunlight and fed my little billy goat. He licked my hand and I laughed. I wished I could climb over the fence and hug him to me. After a while I took the curving path that led between pens of camels and bucks and sheep and deer to the meadow. For a moment I stopped at the pond in the meadow and stared at the fish swimming smoothly in the dark still water. How I envied them their cool silken life! I left the meadow and entered the wood and came to the dead pine that lay across the path. I sat down on it and rested.
The air in the wood was warm and silent and filled with bluish shadows. I closed my eyes and smelled the pines. Why don’t we use pine needles for spices during Havdalah? I thought. It would remind me of the wood and the clearing and the silences I loved. I wondered why I was so sleepy. There was a small clear area in the shadows near some undergrowth a few feet from the fallen pine. It lay not far from where my brother had seen the dead bird on the Sunday of the picnic. When had that been? Two Sundays ago? Only two Sundays? It seemed an age since that picnic. I had not yet run over Eddie Kulanski’s hand then. They had used that as an excuse to begin bothering me. Why were they bothering me? How could someone enjoy threatening and giving no peace to another human being? It was because they were goyim and I was a Jew. I could not understand it and I decided I was too tired to sit any longer on that dead pine. I rose and went over to the tiny clearing and lay down on a bed of pine needles. I lay on my stomach and saw, very near my eyes, an exquisite network of fallen needles, some brown, some blue-green, covering dark moist earth.
There was a noise somewhere in the wood toward the meadow. I lay very still. An animal had broken loose and was in the wood! A lion or a tiger! I felt my heart thudding upon the earth. A low shield of brush lay between me and the path. Looking between the thin leaves and branches, I saw, coming carefully up the path, Eddie Kulanski’s cousin, followed by Eddie Kulanski, and heard, faintly, Eddie Kulanski say, “He went in here, Mike. I saw him.”
“Keep quiet!” the older one hissed.
They came to the dead tree and stopped. A dragonfly moved like a winged dart through the warm shadows. I closed my eyes. They’ll go away if I don’t see them. My eyes will attract them. I breathed through my mouth, soundlessly.
“He’s where they all had that picnic,” Eddie Kulanski said. “They had a whole gang of them there.”
“Quiet, for Christ’s sake!”
They moved on up the path. I waited. They walked on, then stopped again. I heard them whispering. I could not see them but was certain they were coming back. I jumped to my feet as Eddie Kulanski’s cousin turned in my direction. There was a shout and a heavy scrambling through the brush. I was on the path and running and I fell across the dead tree and they were both on top of me.
I remember the words they used and their breath on my face. One of them smelled as if he had just eaten a pressed apricot candy. They were not hitting me but their hands were all over my body and one of them was doing something with my shorts. I lay pinned down by the enormous weight of a body on my chest and stomach, and there were hands tugging at my shorts and underwear. Out of a corner of an eye I saw a face and I brought up a foot and the face went away. There was a shout and I was suddenly free and I ran, holding up my shorts to keep them from falling. I could not hear anything behind me for the noise I made rushing through the trees. I broke from the wood and ran past the pond to the other side of the meadow. I looked behind me. They had not yet come from the wood. I buttoned my pants and tucked in my shirt. They had still not come from the wood. I had hurt one of them. I was frightened I might have hurt him badly. I turned and ran along the path. I went past the billy goat. Outside the zoo I asked a woman to help me cross the boulevard. I waited a moment on the corner. They were still inside the zoo. I walked hurriedly home, feeling inside myself the trembling of panic. I must have hurt one of them very badly. I must have hurt his eye or his nose or his mouth. I must have hurt his head. Joey Younger was on the stoop. I saw him watching me as I went past him into the house. Inside the apartment my brother was crying. My mother let me in and went back to my brother. I lay down on my bed. I could not stop trembling. My head hurt and there was the pain again behind my eyes. I saw smashed eyes and noses and mouths and when I closed my eyes I saw them still. My brother went on crying. I heard my mother’s weary, soothing voice. “Sha, sha, little Alex. What’s the matter, darling? What? Is it too hot? Yes, the heat is terrible. Terrible.” He grew quiet. A few minutes later she came into my room.
“What’s the matter, darling?” She put her hand on my forehead. “You have no fever. Are you tired from the heat? Rest, darling. Your brother’s asleep in his bed.” She looked at me closely. “Are you all right, David? How did you make yourself so dirty? Look at you.” When I said nothing, she sighed, and went from my room.
I lay in bed with my eyes closed and waited. But no one came to the door. The hours of the afternoon went by. Still no one came to the door. It was in the night, after long hours of lying awake, that I began to understand that I probably had not seriously hurt anyone after all and that they had not come after me because they had already seen what they had set out to see.
The heat lay like a flame over the neighborhood. Leaves drooped on the trees. Eddie Kulanski and Tony Savanola were playing a game of marbles near the stoop when I came outside. Tony Savanola acknowledged my presence with a vague smile in my direction. Eddie Kulanski grinned to himself and ignored me. I joined a group of boys in a bottle-cap game near Mr. Steinberg’s store. A few minutes later I saw Eddie Kulanski and Tony Savanola run down the street together and turn the corner.
Mrs. Horowitz’s dog came out of the house. He walked slowly, salivating in the heat. I saw him moving along the block, sniffing at trees and lampposts. I waited until the end of the game, pocketed my winnings, and went into the house.
Mrs. Horowitz answered my faint tap at her door almost immediately. She tilted her small head on her birdlike neck and gazed at me eagerly out of her bulging eyes. Her wrinkled lips formed a smile. She looked so thin and withered and lonely. A parchmentlike hand made a faint beckoning gesture. I had the impression she had been expecting me and wondered if she had been using any of her special prayers to get me to her door. It made no difference. Her magic had not worked on Eddie Kulanski and his cousin. She was as helpless as I. We were kindred souls. I went inside.
The apartment was small and dimly lighted. There was a musty odor in the air and the vague smell of camphor. Damask and dark-wood furniture from another age crowded the living room. The drapes were drawn but she would not turn on the light. Her eyes were sensitive to light, she murmured. She hoped I would understand. Did I want a glass of milk and some cookies?
In a tiny kitchen I watched her putter around near her icebox and sink. Her hands trembled faintly as she put the glass of milk and the plate of cookies on the table in front of me. Then she sat down and watched me eat and her withered face took on a look of quiet joy. She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them I saw they were moist. She blew her nose daintily into a lace-edged handkerchief, which she tucked back into the long sleeve of her prim, high-necked, dark-blue dress. The apartment was strangely cool and still as if by shutting out the light she had shut out heat and tumult as well. I liked the stillness. It surprised me how much I really liked the cool calm of this tiny musty apartment.
Then, in a halting voice, she began to tell me how kind I was to be paying a visit to a lonely old lady. Her only companion was the Angel of Death, she said, and when I had come in the door she had seen him slip out of the apartment through the outside wall. The Angel of Death never spoke, she said. He just sat there, waiting, his poison-steeped sword still sheathed, for it was not yet her time. But now he was gone. For the first time in as long as she could remember, he was gone. She was grateful, very gratef
ul. Did I want another glass of milk and some more cookies?
Sitting there in the dim tiny kitchen, listening to her soft querulous voice, I began to sense her loneliness. I felt deep remorse for the pain I had caused her by bringing about the death of her first dog. To sit alone with the Angel of Death. I could not imagine it. That would be like having Eddie Kulanski and his cousin inside my apartment. I felt a trembling nausea begin to rise within me and I fought it back.
“Are you all right?” she asked, peering at me.
I nodded hesitantly.
“Are you frightened of me?”
I shook my head.
“Sometimes I think people are frightened of me. Such a thought fills me with despair. I am only an old woman. But often I see a frightened look in your eyes. You are frightened of those creatures? Don’t be. You will overpower them when the time comes. I have seen to it.”
I said nothing. The sugar cookies had turned to dust in my mouth.
“I have given you weapons,” she said, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You need no longer be frightened.”
I did not like it when she talked like that.
“My father, may he rest in peace, said they contained the strongest weapons. He knew about such matters even though he was not learned. I have no school education. I know only what I learned from my grandmother and mother. I cannot read them. But when you learn to read well, you will come here and read them. Finish your cookies, David. How good it is to sit and talk to you. Finish your cookies and I will show you the books.”
But I did not see the books that day. I heard a loud coughing bark that sounded as if it had come from inside the apartment. “Ah,” Mrs. Horowitz said, rising. “I must let Bilam inside. Please do not go away.” But I told her I had to go upstairs or my mother would begin to worry about me. Outside in the hall I thanked her for the milk and cookies.
“Visit me again, David. Please.”
I nodded and went upstairs. The pain behind my eyes was severe but not yet difficult to bear. The illness seemed to be coming on very slowly this time, as if it were encountering opposition.
That afternoon, as I sat on a chair next to my brother’s carriage, Tony Savanola came over to me and said, “Hey, are you okay, Davey?”
I nodded vaguely.
He said quietly, not looking directly at my eyes, “That stupid Eddie Kulanski told me. He bragged.”
I turned away from him, my face burning.
He said, “I don’t like what he did, Davey.”
I said nothing.
After a moment he said, “You want to play me a game of immies?”
I shook my head. I was frightened.
“You don’t have to be scared, Davey.”
But he could not take away the fright merely with his words.
He regarded me in silence for a moment. Then he turned and went slowly into the house. I did not see him again until the middle of the following week when I lay seriously ill with fever and pain and a calm willingness never to leave my bed again.
That was a strange Shabbat. My father returned from his office Friday afternoon and I knew immediately from the look on his face not to do anything that might upset him. He was distraught. I moved quietly about the house trying to be unseen and unheard. Our Friday evening meal was dense with silence. My mother’s eyes roamed and darted nervously about and seemed unable to focus upon anything. The skin of her face was drawn tight; she looked to be a bloodless mask of herself. My father’s squarish, scowling face retreated deeper and deeper into solitary moodiness. At one point in the meal he even spoke briefly to himself in the language I did not understand, though I thought I heard the name Avruml among his words. My mother stared down at the white tablecloth and seemed close to panic and tears.
Later, as I lay in my bed, I heard them speaking together. But they were talking very quietly and I could not make out their words.
I said during our Shabbat afternoon dinner, “Will we go to the country soon, Papa?” I had only thought the words; I had not meant to speak them.
But he seemed not to have heard me. My mother gave me a swift warning glance. I was glad he had not heard me and did not repeat the question.
Later that afternoon I went downstairs and tapped lightly on Mrs. Horowitz’s door. It was opened immediately. I went inside and heard her close it behind me. The lock clicked softly.
Just off the small narrow hallway was the living room, deep in shadows. Out of the shadows a huge dark form rose and came slowly toward me. I heard his heavy breathing and smelled his foul breath and felt his cold wet nose upon my face. He sniffed at my feet. Then he turned slowly, ambled back into the living room, and melted into the shadows.
“I am so glad you came again to see me, David. Come, sit with me in the kitchen. I leave a little light burning there for all of Shabbos. Would you like some tea and cookies?”
I sat in the kitchen and drank tea and nibbled at her sugar cookies. The tiny table was covered with a white cloth and had on it two tall silver candlesticks. She wore a gray dress with a lace trim at the high neckline. The folds and wrinkles of her neck disappeared inside the dress. She kept looking at me with an eager smile and putting cookies on the table. I was a good boy, she said repeatedly. I kept my promises. I had come to see her again as I had said I would. Yes, I was a good boy. Not like other boys she knew. I was a fine son.
“Please take another cookie, David. Then I will show you the books.”
A huge shadow suddenly appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. It glided across the floor and drank noisily from a water dish near the icebox. It raised its head and peered at me out of reddish eyes. I saw Mrs. Horowitz looking intently at it. After a moment it lowered its head and went silently from the kitchen.
“A good sign,” I heard her say. “Bilam has given us a good sign.” I did not ask her what she meant. I did not want to know.
She pattered eagerly about the kitchen, giving me a second glass of tea and a third dish of cookies. I could drink and eat no more. She brought me into a small dark room and pointed a bony finger at two of its walls.
We were in her bedroom. A fourposter bed stood in the center of the room opposite a heavily draped window. The carpet was thick. Dark furniture stood near the bed and against the walls. Against the wall to the right of the door stood a narrow dark-wood bookcase. Another narrow bookcase stood against the wall opposite the door. They were jammed with books. The air of the room was dense with the odor of moldy carpeting and dusty bindings.
“A wandering bookseller would come by our house every year and my father, may he rest in peace, would buy from him. They would bring good luck, the bookseller said. They were weapons against the goyim.”
They had lived in a village in the part of Poland that had been annexed to Russia. Her father had been a dairyman and his reading skills had extended only as far as the prayer book and the Book of Psalms. But the bookseller was a link to a Jewish world he hungered to believe in; that world somehow made his misery tolerable. So he bought books. Special books. Powerful books. One day his son or grandson would read them. He had no son and only one daughter. In America, to which they fled during the bloodbath that followed the unsuccessful 1905 revolution, her father ran a grocery store with his son-in-law, a Russian Jew with a walleye and a stutter. The father died. Her husband died. Her son became wealthy in furs and stocks and put her into this apartment with books neither of them could read. She lived alone with her books and her dog and her memories. And now I had come into her life and she would take care of me and protect me from the creatures and the menace they brought to the world. And one day I would read the books and tell her the secrets they contained. All she was able to read were some books in Yiddish which told her what to do in certain cases and how to behave and not behave because of the danger. It was important to know what to do in order to overcome the danger. She kept talking about the danger. I had not understood some of what she had said at first and was barely listening to her now.
I had gone over to the bookcase near the door. Some of the books had titles in Hebrew letters; others were in a strange spiky alphabet I had never seen before: peculiar dark letters with hooks and sharp daggerlike ends and saberlike curves. I removed one of the books from its shelf. A faint cloud of dust rose to my nostrils. I felt my nose begin to burn. The pages were old and yellow and crowded with the strange dark jagged letters. I put the book back and felt on my hands the dust that enveloped it. I wiped my hands against my shorts. But the dry sensation of grime remained on my fingers. I would be going to school soon, yes? Mrs. Horowitz was saying. How long would it take me to learn to read? When would I be able to come in and read the books to her? That was all she had left, these books. Would it take long?
She peered at me wistfully. I told her I did not know how long it would take but that I would read the books as soon as I could; that seemed a safe and honest thing to say. Then I needed to get out of that dim and dusty room. My nose was beginning to hurt and there was pain now in my forehead.
She went with me to the door.
“Please visit me again, David.”
I nodded and thanked her for the tea and cookies.
She reached over and patted my cheek with a dry bony hand. I was surprised that I did not mind her doing that to me. In a vague way I understood that I had made her happy and somehow that was important to me.
I went upstairs. Eddie Kulanski passed me as I reached my floor and went by as if I were not there, his eyes looking straight ahead; but a little smile formed on his lips and as he went out of sight beyond the turn in the stairs I thought I heard him laugh.
Inside the apartment my father was asleep. My mother, who had opened the door for me, returned to the living room and sat listening to the canary sing. I lay on my bed and thought of Mrs. Horowitz and wondered why it was taking so long for the sickness to come this time. Falling into a restless sleep, I dreamed strong bony hands were stripping me naked and touching me everywhere. Over and again, coarse knobby fingers poked and prodded and squeezed. I woke bathed in sweat and feeling faintly nauseated, and was frightened of returning to sleep. I lay in my bed until my mother called me into the kitchen for supper.