by Chaim Potok
“They are leaving the Brigade and infiltrating the camps,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“It is my job to know.”
“They’re deserting the British army?”
“To hell with the British army! You think all we have to worry about now is the British army? Look what nice gentlemen we all were to the goyim. You know what it cost us? That is what it cost us!” He pointed to the newspapers piled on the kitchen counter. “Stinking bastard goyim. They are drinking our blood.”
My mother could not finish her meal. She went to bed.
The phone rang. My father went out to the hallway. He spoke briefly and returned to the kitchen.
“Nothing,” he said. “No word.”
“Whom do you have looking?” I asked him.
“Everyone,” he said.
“Where?”
“All over.”
“How are you doing that?”
“I am looking for others too. So I look for myself. I am going to stay with your mother for a while.”
“Is Mr. Bader looking?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
“On his way to a German castle.”
I stared at him.
“His headquarters,” he said. He went out of the kitchen.
Alex and I did the dishes. The phone rang again. I heard my father come into the hallway.
“The Jewish people is going to have a big phone bill these next few months,” Alex said.
“What is Mr. Bader doing in a German castle?” I asked.
“The Nazis left behind a few Jews who aren’t dead. Somebody has to figure out what to do with them.”
My father hung up the phone and returned to the bedroom.
I lay awake a long time that night in the darkness of my room. The street light made a dim rectangle of my window shade. I looked through the darkness at the shade. A truck rumbled along the street, rattling the window. I envisioned the trolleys and trains near the streets where I had once lived, clanking and rattling and rushing by. Hey, Eddie. Eddie. Have you seen a concentration camp? Did they look good, all those corpses of dead Jews?
I walked to school the next morning in a light rain. There were more photographs in the newspapers. Now the magazines were out and they had photographs too—large, sharp, black and white and starkly horrifying. Every day now there were photographs. All through May the flow of rectangles continued across the ocean onto the pages of our newspapers: hills of corpses, pits of bones, the naked rubble of the dead and the staring eyes and hollow faces of the survivors. I saw a photograph of dead children, eyes and mouths open, bodies twisted and frozen with death and I tried to enter it and could not. I bought the papers and magazines and saw the photographs of the chimneys and the furnaces and the death trains and tried to penetrate the borders of the cruel rectangles—and I could not do it. They lay beyond the grasp of my mind, those malevolent rectangles of spectral horror. They would not let me into them.
I came off the bridge early one morning in the last week of May and saw Rav Sharfman on the corner, his back to me. Had he been waiting? I came over to him.
“Rebbe?”
He turned slowly and fixed upon me his large eyes. “Good morning, Lurie,” he said in Yiddish. “You have begun to walk again?”
I told him my mother was not well and often woke us in the night.
He murmured a word of sympathy. We began to walk. He walked briskly, slightly stooped forward. He had on a dark gray suit and his dark battered hat. We walked awhile in silence. Then he asked abruptly, “What has your father heard?”
“Nothing. They were all in Auschwitz and were moved to Bergen Belsen. That’s all we know.”
“Who was moved?”
“Everyone in my mother’s and father’s families. There was one transfer of people from Auschwitz to Bergen Belsen and they were in it.”
We walked on for a block. At a comer we stopped to let a line of cars go by.
He said to me, “They destroyed an entire civilization. The Nazis have taught Western civilization that not only making cars but also committing murder can become a mass production industry. You are aware of that.” He did not wait for my response. “If Western civilization is finished, we are all finished. There will be nothing with which to water the roots. Nothing. What are we doing about it, Lurie?” Again he did not wait for my response. “I am as far away from your father’s politics as I am from a belief in spirits and demons. But I admire your father. He is doing something.”
I felt a rush of blood into my face. We crossed the street and entered the school.
In the course of the Talmud class that afternoon I offered an answer to a question he put to us and his face darkened. “That is nonsense!” he said in Yiddish with an impatient wave of his hand. “Next! Next!” He called on someone else for an answer. I interrupted and tried to defend myself.
“Lurie, you are talking nonsense!”
I cited the early medieval commentary whose words I had used as a starting point for my answer.
He cut me short. “Don’t tell me what everyone else says! Tell me what you say! Can’t you think? What’s the matter with all of you? I could sell you the Brooklyn Bridge and you would buy it because Sharfman told you to buy it! I could teach you nonsense and you would accept it as Torah! Have your brains been paralyzed? Lurie, open your eyes and look at the Gemara and tell me what bothers Hillel.”
I was angered and confused by his rush of words. I offered him what I had originally thought to be the answer but had withheld because it contradicted the commentaries.
From a few seats away came Irving Besser’s immediate reaction. “That can’t be right, Rebbe. It contradicts everyone.”
“It contradicts, Besser?” said Rav Sharfman. “So? The commentators understood everything? It is all finished? We have nothing to say? We are swallowers, Besser? That is all? We swallow the waters they give us to drink? We can make no living waters of our own?”
Irving Besser stared at him, a flush rising to his face.
We sat very still. Rav Sharfman, his face dark with his effort to control anger and agitation, surveyed us with a look of contempt.
“Does anyone know what I am saying?” he asked. “Do I speak to the wind?” His eyes fell upon mine. “He who understands will understand. Yes? Now I will explain to all of you why the answer of David Lurie is correct.”
Yaakov Bader said to me in the corridor after the class, “What was that all about, Davey?”
I shrugged.
“I never heard him talk like that before,” Yaakov Bader said. “I never heard any rebbe talk like that before.”
“He’s not just any rebbe,” I said.
I went home by bus that afternoon and passed the store and saw that my mother was not inside. I found her at home in bed. Alex was with her. His face was pale.
I came into her bedroom.
“Mama?”
She had her face to the wall. She turned her head to me. Her eyes were dark and flat and dead.
“David?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Do you remember the names of the trees, David?”
My voice faltered. “Yes, Mama.”
She gave what sounded like a laugh. “It will not add to the dowry, but Papa will be pleased. He loves the forest.”
I stared at her and went icy cold with dread.
“Can I get you anything, Mama?”
“No, darling. We should go back now.”
I went to my room and lay down on my bed and could not stop trembling. Later my aunt and uncle came over and were together a long time in the kitchen, talking quietly.
Two days later I walked to school and again met Rav Sharfman on the corner beyond the bridge.
“You did not walk yesterday?” he asked in Yiddish.
“My mother was up most of the night.”
“I am sorry to hear that. Was there bad news?”
“There’s no news.”
&n
bsp; “Have you seen the pictures in this morning’s papers on Bergen Belsen?”
“Yes.”
“Incomprehensible barbarians. My mind cannot grasp it. Be careful, a car is coming.” We stopped at a corner, then crossed quickly together. “You gave a good answer the other day.”
“Thank you, Rebbe.”
We walked on a few steps. He gave me a sidelong glance.
“You understood my words?”
“Yes.”
He said nothing.
“There is danger,” I said. “I could lose … everything.”
He looked at me, his hooded eyes narrow, the prominent nose flaring slightly. “You want there to be no danger? You are afraid to take risks?”
I was quiet.
“It has to come from you,” he said. “No one can give it to you. If it comes from you, then the risks will be worth taking. And the price will be worthwhile.”
I looked at him.
“Yes,” he said. “You will pay a price, Lurie.”
We entered the school and separated. It was during the Talmud class that afternoon that I realized he had been speaking only in Yiddish to us for weeks and that the baseball terminology had disappeared from his vocabulary. He said to us in exasperation at one point during the class after a poor response from a question he had put to a student, “You want ordination from me? I will test you and give you ordination. All of you. You will give me back everything that I have taught you and I will give you ordination.” He used the Hebrew word smicha for ordination. “But remember this: You must feel upon you the weight of God and the responsibility of the generations. Know that there is a law that if a watchman gives an object to another watchman, the second watchman must guard it with care. If through negligence it is damaged, the second watchman is liable. I will give you the ordination my grandfather, may he rest in peace, gave to me. If you are neglectful of it, you will be liable to my grandfather and to his grandfather and to his grandfather. You will have to go to the graves of those against whom you transgress and ask them to forgive you. But, remember, you may be unable to do that. You may not know where the dead are buried.”
I felt his eyes rest heavily upon my face. There was no movement in the class, no sound.
Then he called on me to read.
I met him again the following morning as I came off the bridge.
“How is your mother?”
“Not well, Rebbe.”
“I am sorry. There has been no news?”
“Nothing.”
We walked in silence.
“All the books you are carrying are for class?”
“No.”
“Which ones are not?”
I showed him a Hebrew book on the Bible.
“It is a shallow work,” he said with contempt. “I detest shallowness. It is the biggest problem with Bible scholars. Their shallowness.”
I was quiet. We crossed a side street together.
“Words and fables and stories,” he said. “That is all they see. Man and God they cannot see. They are shallow people.”
“They’re mostly goyim and secularists, Rebbe.”
“I am aware of who they are, Lurie. The few Jews in it are shallow too.”
We walked on in silence.
“A shallow mind is a sin against God,” he said. “A man who does not struggle is a fool.”
I was quiet. The blood beat heavily against my eyes.
He gave me a sidelong glance. “Do you know how many students I have spoken to this way over the years? Once every five or ten years I find one such student. I have many boys studying Talmud in my classes. I have few students.”
His face was utterly without emotion. The turned-out lips were moist and seemed vaguely curled with contempt. He maintained between us a distance immeasurably wider than the few inches that separated us as we walked. I had heard and read of such rebbes. Unlike the Hasidic rebbe, who controlled the inner and outer life of his followers, the Lithuanian rebbe, antagonist of Hasidim, deliberately sought to make room for the intellectually brave to chart their own lives. He was shy of prying into the lives of his students. Distance with such a rebbe was an act of love.
We entered the school together and parted in the hall.
When I rode by the store that afternoon I saw that it was closed. An icy panic suddenly choked my heart. The remaining few blocks to my house were a nightmare of torturous waiting. I raced up the stairs and threw open the door to the apartment.
My father and aunt and uncle were seated at the kitchen table. Alex had heard me enter and was coming toward the door. His face was ashen. I did not see my mother.
They had heard that afternoon, Alex said in a trembling voice. No one had survived.
I felt my books slipping from my grasp. I clutched at them. A voice said, “There were over a hundred people in both families. What do you mean no one survived?” It was my voice that had spoken but I had not felt myself say the words.
No one had survived, Alex repeated.
“That’s impossible!” the voice said. My tongue was thick and dry inside my mouth. “How do you know?”
There had been a cable from Mr. Bader, Alex said.
I saw someone enter the hallway from the living room, carrying a black bag. For a moment I did not recognize him. He had a round pink face and graying hair.
“Hello,” he said. “I haven’t seen you in a long time. I’ll bet you don’t miss me.” It was Dr. Weidman. His face was grim. “Your mother is sleeping.” He went past me into the kitchen. I wondered where Saul was. “Max,” Dr. Weidman said quietly. “I want to talk to you.”
My father rose with heavy effort from his chair. How old he suddenly looked, the deep lines in his face, the dark circles around his eyes, the network of tiny dry wrinkles in the folds of his skin along the front of his neck. He went with Dr. Weidman into the living room.
I stood in the kitchen doorway looking at my aunt and uncle.
“We’re absolutely sure?” I said. “How can we be so absolutely sure from a cable?”
My uncle looked up. “We are sure.”
“How are we sure?”
“There are witnesses who saw them on the day they arrived at Bergen Belsen. Witnesses who knew them from before the war.”
“You mean witnesses who survived Bergen Belsen?”
“Yes.”
“How do we know they were all killed? Why do we believe the witnesses?”
“Bader spoke to them.”
“In Bergen Belsen?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Bader has been inside Bergen Belsen?”
“What do you think he is doing in Europe, spending Jewish money to have a good time?”
“Meyer,” my aunt said softly. “Control yourself.”
“I am sorry,” said my uncle. “I apologize.”
I leaned against the jamb of the doorway. A red haze had moved across my vision. I shook my head but the haze remained, a film of reddish color over my eyes.
My father and Dr. Weidman came along the hallway toward the kitchen.
“I have to go,” Dr. Weidman said. “You will call me, Max, yes? We should all meet under happier circumstances. Goodbye. David, it’s a pleasure not to have seen you in so long. Professionally, I mean. Goodbye.”
He went out. My father sat down at the kitchen table. They all sat there, staring down at the table. I left them and went into my room and put my books on my desk. Alex stood at the window, staring out at the street.
Something occurred to me. “Aunt Sarah’s family too?”
Everyone, he said, not looking away from the street.
“That’s more than a hundred and fifty people.”
I deserved an A in arithmetic, he said, still looking out at the street.
I lay down on my bed and covered my eyes.
“Where’s Saul?” I asked.
“In bed with flu.”
“Does he know?”
“Yes.”
I lay very still with my
hands over my eyes. But the reddish film remained and I could see it across the darkness of my vision.
In the early hours of the morning I came suddenly awake from the horror of a nightmare and listened to my mother screaming. She was screaming in Yiddish, “Don’t touch me! Stay away from me! Help me, God! Help me!” Her words trailed off into choking sobs. Alex and I rushed from our room. My father was coming out of the bedroom. “A bad dream,” he said. “I will bring her water and a pill.” He went along the hallway in his bare feet. Alex and I returned to our room.
I could not sleep. Out of the folds of darkness that lay across the walls and floor of the room came sibilant whispers. A huge monstrous form rose out of the darkness. There was a beating of wings. A sword glinted murderously. I opened my eyes and felt the deep trembling of my body and the curling horror that clutched at my soul. I lay awake, trembling, my eyes open, defying the darkness. The sword gleamed and moved back and forth in the black air of the night. I stared at the sword, at its poisoned point. I thought in my horror and dread that I would mouth ancient formulas of protection. But I remained silent. Slowly the giant form grew dim, taking with it the wings and the sword. The room was still. In the silence I heard a faint whispering sound. Alex was crying softly in his bed.
I rose very early that morning and prayed and walked to school. As I came off the bridge I saw Rav Sharfman on the corner, waiting for me. I came up to him.
“We heard yesterday,” I said.
He turned upon me his large eyes and waited.
“No one survived,” I said.
The eyes blinked. The face remained without expression. He murmured ancient Hebrew words of solace. Then I heard him say in Yiddish, “I do not understand those words. How many were they?”
“About a hundred and fifty,” I said. “Everyone.”
“All at Bergen Belsen?”
“Yes.”
“You are certain?”
“Yes.”
“Errors are made.”
“The man who informed us doesn’t make errors.”
“Who is he?”
I told him.
“Of the JOAC?”
“Yes.”
He fell into silence. We walked along together.
“You carry heavy baggage with you now,” he said.
“I’m afraid.”
“Then don’t do it. Remain in the yeshiva. It will be”—he hesitated—“very comfortable for you here.”