by Chaim Potok
“Yes, Max.” I could barely hear her voice.
“It was a cruel winter. But the snow at least covered the burned-out earth. We could pretend the world was clean.”
My mother said nothing.
“I would have asked David if he had been alive.”
“I know, Max.”
“I would never have made such a decision alone.”
“It was a correct decision.”
“Are you sure David would have said so?”
“Yes,” she murmured. “I know David.” She said know, not knew.
There was a long silence.
“What do you think I should do, Ruth?”
“You’ll find something.”
“Why do people think I am able to make decisions? I am a doer, not a thinker. Why did they all come to me and make me decide without David? Why did they come to me all the years we were here? It frightens me to make decisions, Ruth. I am frightened to make a wrong decision about a person’s life.”
“You do not force your decisions upon them, Max.”
“God in heaven, I wish David were here.” There was a pause. Then, “Look at the snow, Ruth. Look at it.”
“Do you remember it on the trees in the forest outside the farm?”
“Yes.”
“I taught David the names of the trees all around the cottage,” she said. “He remembers them all. He has David’s head. When I wanted to teach David the names of the trees around the farm he laughed and said my father and mother would not count tree knowledge to his dowry credit, only book knowledge. But he learned all the trees in one afternoon and never forgot them.”
There was a silence. The wind blew through the alleyway, making a soft moaning sound.
“I miss them,” she said. “I see them walking in the snow or riding on the sleigh, and I truly miss them. I will never see any of them, Max.”
“You will see them,” he said.
“No. I am reconciling myself to it. I will never see any of them again. They will die and be buried in the snow. Like David.”
There was another silence.
“I have to find something to do,” he said. “Something I can build with. Start very small so it does not involve much money and build and see results.”
“You will find it, Max. You will find it. Like you found the idea to bring everyone to America.”
“I hope it is a better idea than that, Ruth.”
“You are so sure it was a bad idea, Max? Can you see all the way to the end of that idea that you can say with such certainty it was bad?”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, in a voice I could barely make out, “You are a wise woman. Not many know how wise you truly are. And how strong. David was worthy of you. Am I worthy of you, Ruth?”
“Do not speak like a foolish man. Would I have let you marry me? If I did not truly care for you and have respect for you I would not have married you. You are my husband and I love you.”
“It was my idea to come to America. Only mine. There was no David to blame. I am afraid of making another such decision now, Ruth.”
“But you will make it.”
“It has to be something small, something I will want to do, something I can build with, something that will hurt no one if it fails.”
“Do you want a glass of coffee, Max?”
I heard them get to their feet.
“God in heaven, look at the snow.”
“It should make the world clean, Max.”
Two days later I slipped on a patch of ice going down the stone front steps of the yeshiva. I had spent a few minutes in the warm vestibule talking with Yaakov Bader and finishing a lollipop. The stick of the lollipop was in my mouth when I fell. It penetrated my throat.
I lay on the sidewalk and felt snow and cinders on my face. There had been shouts as I fell and there were shouts now as I looked at my schoolbag which I had dropped when I felt the sudden loss of traction beneath my right foot. The schoolbag lay very near my eyes and I noted, absurdly, how cracked and frayed its leather was and how worn were the ends of the straps. Someone had me by the arms and was helping me sit up. I started to speak and my tongue encountered a thin rigid object. It pushed against the object and I felt a pressure inside my throat. My tongue curled back and up, trying to push the object out. I coughed and gagged and tore off my glove and put my fingers into my throat. I was coughing and choking. All around me there were shouts and people rushing about and faces close to mine. I had my fingers on the object. It was slippery. I tugged at it and my fingers came away empty. Then someone’s hand was in my mouth and I felt the lollipop stick being pulled out of the flesh deep inside my throat. A sensation of moist warmth filled the back of my throat and trickled into my mouth. I coughed and choked and coughed again. Blood sprayed the sidewalk. I looked at my hands and at the front of my jacket. It seemed to me there was blood everywhere. I could see blood on the dirty snow and the schoolbag. I sat and stared in astonishment at the blood on my gloveless hand. Why were they all making so much noise? I started to my feet and vomited.
Then the pain began, climbing steeply to the level familiar to me for years, then on beyond the pain I had known only two or three times before, and then on beyond even that to the unanimous pain that is the weather of the dark land ruled by the Angel of Death. I coughed and vomited again and the pain was beyond endurance. The shouts became a single howling wind. I was lifted on the wind and found myself in a violent landscape of crooked gray fields cut by narrow black-topped roads that had no curves but only sharp sudden right-angled turns. A red sky arched overhead. The fields changed to green and white and brown; they creaked as we moved across them. The wind brought me to a white meadow; I coughed and the meadow turned crimson.
I could not breathe. I choked and coughed and took deep grasping breaths. The wind roared in my ears. It came from a forest and brought the noise of tumultuous foliage and swaying trees. There were faces everywhere, flickering, moving in and out of my vision. I took a breath and felt air flood my lungs. I breathed again and coughed. The dull thick quivering that had clutched at the base of my neck abruptly released its grasp. I lay back upon my crimson meadow. The last thing I saw before the wind lifted me once again and brought me into the shadowy heart of the forest was the face of my father faintly silhouetted against the upper part of my window. It wore a look of horror.
There was silence and cool darkness. Moist leaves brushed against my face. From somewhere in the darkness came the lap and wash of water upon a shore. A single firefly flew on a lone and lazy course through the forest. I cried out and coughed and lay still.
“There, there,” I heard Dr. Weidman say. “There, there. Everything will be all right.”
Icy drops of water tickled my chest and back and I knew I was alone again and dreaming in the forest. Nearby the lapping wavelets of a darkly iridescent lake had altered their gentle thrusting course upon the shore and were turning to parallel the wet black earth of a flat embankment. The water ran dark and murmurous into the infinite night of the forest. Before a stretch of brown viscous earth three figures stopped and set their torches in the ground. Bent, working swiftly, two of the three figures shaped a clay man. They permitted me to mold the head. When it was done they stood around the clay figure. Prayers were chanted; the secret name of God was uttered. Water poured from the figure; it glowed a fiery red; it rose from the earth. The three robed figures vanished. From its huge height the clay man gazed down upon me. Golem, I whispered. Something must be done. Something. It gazed steadily upon me. Then, slowly, it bowed. I clothed it in a gray woolen shirt and dark baggy trousers and sent it into invisibility by means of the charm I placed about its neck. The night was still. The river ran on without end into the infinite time of my rectangle. And I slept deeply and without further dreams.
I woke and saw my brother reading. He sat propped up on a pillow against the wall near his bed, a book on his knees. He heard me stir and sprang to the floor and stood by my bed, his young squa
rish face hopeful, frightened.
“You’re up,” he said eagerly. “You’re up.”
I nodded but would not use my voice.
“You scared us,” he said. “I had nightmares. But you’re up. Someone tried to shoot President Roosevelt while you were sick, Davey. I’ll get Mama.”
My parents told me later that I had severed a small artery and blood had entered my lungs. Dr. Weidman had feared pneumonia and had wanted to take me to the hospital but I had fought going. How did I feel? Was I all right? The throat would be healed very soon. Did I want any more ice cream?
I listened and nodded and would not speak. There was a vague choking sensation inside my throat—I feared the coughing and the blood. I lay back on my pillow. I did not have to speak. I could nod and shrug and shake my head. You could do a lot and still remain silent. Yes, I thought. Yes. You could do a lot. And silence would keep away the coughing and the blood. Two days later I got out of bed and was silent.
I was back in school the following week and I remained silent. A note from Dr. Weidman in a sealed envelope was handed by me to my Hebrew and English teachers. They read the note, stared at me, and nodded. They left me alone. My classmates kept away from me—all except Yaakov Bader.
“Is there anything I can do for you, Davey? Anything? Just tell me.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Whenever you think you need help, Davey. With anything. My uncle said I should take care of you. When he comes back he’ll ask me about you.”
I looked at him and raised my eyebrows.
“He’ll be back before Pesach, Davey,” Yaakov Bader said.
Yes, you could be silent and listen to your teachers and get excellent grades in your examinations. You did not have to talk at all. There was comfort in that. The coughing and the bleeding would not return. And the choking sensation, which never went away, would not worsen. And you could look into the rectangle of the classroom window and watch your brother on the tricycle and see the way he seemed to gather to himself friends from everywhere on the block. They were drawn to him with no effort on his part. He roamed the street with the exquisite self-assurance of a person for whom the presence of friends is as smooth and natural as the presence of water is to fish.
One day the front door of the apartment house was pushed open and my father came out, leaning on my mother’s arm. It was a cold sunny day and he wore his coat collar up and his wide-brimmed hat low over his eyes. They walked slowly and I could see them talking. They stopped in front of the shoe repair shop and at the newsstand. They walked to the corner, then turned and went on up the side street toward the elevated tracks, and I could no longer see them. After that they were often inside my rectangle as the days went by. And one afternoon in late February they came out of the house and walked along the street and I noticed my father was holding my mother’s arm.
There was a fire that night inside the window shade of my room. The shade glowed red. A vast German building burned, its tall outdoor pillars blackening with smoke, its chamber and dome wreathed in tendrils of flame. Plush curtains and wooden paneling were on fire; carpets and draperies burned. I gazed at the flames and was frightened. Were the flames an accident? Their most precious building was on fire. It had to have been an accident. Golem, I thought.
A brief restless stirring came faintly to my ears from somewhere inside the chill darkness of the room. It doesn’t know, I thought. How can it know? It’s only a golem. It knows only what I give it to know. It was a long time before the flames dimmed in my window shade. I closed my eyes and slept.
Nights later curls of smoke climbed into the dark sky. A synagogue was on fire. It burned inside my window shade. From its dark angled roof and the narrow arched windows in its dome came swirls of dense gray smoke and the wild leaping of flame. Golem, look what they’ve done, the brown-shirted servants of the Angel of Death. We must save the Torah scrolls! He came then out of the invisibility in which I had left him and stood beside my bed in the darkness. He bowed in mute acknowledgment of my words, bringing his face close to mine, the face I had molded, my face; then he straightened his massive seven-foot frame and in a leap my eyes could barely discern was suddenly inside the window shade. I was inside the window shade plunging into the smoke and flames that enveloped the synagogue. Through the flames! Into the smoke and through the flames! The flames tore at me but I felt nothing and I moved swiftly through smoke-filled corridors and burst into the heart of the synagogue where the pews were burning and the flames licked at the curtain of the Ark. A long finger of flame traveled up the curtain and suddenly the curtain was a sheet of flame. I raced through the burning sanctuary and slid open the doors to the Ark. Sacred scrolls in purple and deep red covers, silver crowns and breastplates glinting dully, reflecting the fire. There were six large Torah scrolls there; I would never save them all. I clutched three to myself and sought a wall and lunged toward the stone and crashed through to the street. Bewildered men in dark clothes took the heavy scrolls from me and I leaped back inside. One of the scrolls was burning! I tore at the flames with my fingers, beating them away from the sacred words. I gathered the scrolls into my arms and left them with startled sleepy-eyed men on the street. The flames roared in my ears. I slipped from the rectangle and lay in my bed listening to the long clattering of an elevated train. You did well, I murmured. Slowly, the Golem bowed.
Saul came over to me in the yard the next day during the mid-morning recess. He had begun to grow quickly in recent weeks. His face and neck had thinned, his voice had deepened, his eyes had turned sad. There was hair on his upper lip. He seemed awkward, uncertain, and went about in a slouchy, loose-jointed manner.
“How do you feel, Davey?”
I nodded.
“Your throat still hurts?”
I nodded again.
“My mother said your mother told her it’s all healed, Davey. There’s nothing wrong with your throat anymore.”
Oh yes there is, I said, thinking the words.
“What?”
Yes there is, I said. It feels choky and it will bleed if I talk.
He stared at me. “You’re driving everyone crazy. Doesn’t your father have enough trouble? What’s the matter with you?”
I said nothing.
He gazed at me, the sadness darkening his eyes. “We’re moving in a few days,” he said. “Everything is a mess. I hate it.” He kicked at the chain-link fence near which we stood. “Why does the whole world have to be such a mess? I wish I could live away from the world in some place that’s quiet. Does that sound funny to you?”
I shook my head slowly.
He peered at me intently through the lenses of his glasses. “What goes on inside your head, Davey? You’re so quiet all the time. What are you thinking?”
I looked down and did not respond.
“My quiet cousin,” he smiled sadly. “My brainy quiet cousin. Rabbi Akiva said, ‘The fence of wisdom is silence.’ Did you know that?”
I nodded. Pirkei Avot, three, seventeen, I said, thinking the words.
“We have to have faith in God,” Saul said. “But why does everything have to be such a mess?” He continued to talk but I was no longer listening. Down the block, the door to the church had opened and Eddie Kulanski had come out together with a priest. Eddie Kulanski wore his dark winter jacket. I saw him put on his knitted woolen hat. The priest wore a dark coat and hat. They walked along the street and passed within two feet of me on the other side of the chain-link fence, talking quietly. As they passed me, Eddie Kulanski turned and looked directly into my face. He gave no sign of recognition. A shiver of dread ran all through me. Golem, I thought. He’s the one.
That afternoon the entrance door to the apartment house was opened and my father came out alone. He stood on the stoop for a moment, gazing up and down the street. Then he walked over to the shoe repair shop and went inside. He was inside a long time. When he came out, he turned up the collar of his coat, walked slowly to the corner, pausing for
a moment at the newsstand in front of the candy store, turned the corner and was gone. I looked out of the window at the drab street and the worn houses. My brother came outside dragging the tricycle. I looked away and closed my eyes.
“David,” my father said to me in the kitchen the following morning. “Look at me when I speak to you.”
I will look at you. I see color in your face and decision in your eyes.
“There is nothing wrong with your voice. Dr. Weidman says you are entirely cured.”
But I felt the coughing and the blood. No one else felt it.
“Are you listening to me?”
I am listening.
“There is no reason in the world why you should be afraid to speak.”
It’s better with silence, Papa. If the whole world were silent it would be better for everyone. And the fixed and quiet photograph would return. Don’t we all want the peace and stillness of that photograph? Papa, I need a quiet photograph. And the forest was so still with the snow covering the earth and ice on the trees and the flags silent and not whipping and snapping and no roaring shouts and no hate. Now all the photographs seethe with hate. What can we do? We must do something. But I won’t add to the noise.
Golem.
He was there, unseen, somewhere inside the kitchen.
We must do something.
My father turned away, a faint scowl on his face. The radio voice spoke smoothly from the shelf near the icebox.
“The maniac dictator,” said my father. “He also built piece by piece, small piece on small piece. He also built an organization.”
“For the Angel of Death,” said my mother.
Piece by piece. You have to build piece by piece. Are you listening, Golem? The maniac also built piece by piece and now no one knows what to do.
Every night now there were fires and men marching and a din of infinite flags and boots and voices. I would bring the Golem out of his unseen world and we would speak briefly of the day and I would find myself inside the rectangle of my window shade, putting out fires, breaking up demonstrations, shouting down the tumult of rage boiling up from tree-lined boulevards and cobblestone streets. I entered paneled rooms and listened to their schemes; I walked through alleys, watchful, searching for the dreaded cars that came in the early hours. They would see me and flee in terror. The Golem! they would cry. The Golem! But there were so many of them and I would return and lie wearily in my bed and the Golem would stand in the shadows, looking somehow smaller each night, tireder, shabbier, lines now in the corners of his eyes and his forehead.