by Chaim Potok
I said nothing. We entered the school building in silence. I went into the study hall and sat down at my table. Most of the tables were still empty. A number of dormitory students stood near the podium, praying the Morning Service. I sat staring at my closed folio of Talmud through the red haze that would not leave my eyes. The study hall began to fill with students. Irving Besser came by and went to his table. I saw Yaakov Bader enter the hall. He caught my eye and waved at me, then stopped for a moment to talk with a classmate. I saw him laugh and pat the classmate on the arm. His uncle used to do that to me, pat me reassuringly on the arm. I thought of his uncle and saw the years of journeying back and forth on trolleys between Washington Avenue and the apartment where I had studied Genesis. The voices, David. Listen to the voices talking to one another across the centuries. Yaakov came over to the table and said a cheerful “Good morning.” I told him about the cable.
He sat down slowly in his chair and leaned back, tipping the chair dangerously but restoring its balance in time. He brushed a faintly tremulous hand across his pale blond hair. He seemed not to know what to say. His dark eyes were wide and moist.
I opened my volume of Talmud and told him we had better start preparing for the class.
He stared at me. After a moment he nodded slowly. We sat at the table, preparing for our Talmud class.
Later that day I sat in the class and could not keep my eyes upon the words in my volume of Talmud. I gazed out the tall wide windows at the street, and there, upon the cobblestones, saw the photographs of Bergen Belsen. Grotesque forms with skeletal arms and legs and rib cages and heads lay stacked like macabre cordwood on a stone ramp. Behind the ramp was a sloping slate roof. Off to the right there were trees and a patch of sky. I sensed a shudder of dread deep within myself and looked away and rested my eyes upon the volume on my desk. But the words would not enter my eyes and I turned away and gazed once again out the windows. I saw a deep rectangular pit scooped out of the earth. Women SS guards in long-skirted uniforms were filling the pit with dead bodies. In the foreground two stocky women, standing with their sides to the camera, their faces turned toward the pit, were lifting off the ground the shrunken corpse of a woman. One held the corpse by both legs, the other by its right arm. The upper portion of the torso was turned to the left, the breast dangling loosely downward. A few inches in front of the two SS women, in the immediate foreground, lying directly on top of the lower border of the photograph, was the body of a young girl. She lay face down, the curve of her shoulder coming to just below the line of her lower jaw. I could see one side of her face. The eye was half-open. She seemed pretty even in ghastly death. There was no sky in that photograph.
I saw other photographs. I saw them through the windows and could not penetrate them. Rav Sharfman’s raspy voice went on and on over a passage of Talmud but I needed to enter the photographs of Bergen Belsen and I could not do it. I did not understand it. I saw them and could not enter them. I could not walk inside them. I stared out the window at the photographs in the street and did not know what to do.
At three o’clock that afternoon I came out of the Talmud class and walked quickly downstairs to the locker room. I left my books in my locker, then went back upstairs and out of the building. I crossed the street and entered the little park. I sat for a few minutes on a bench, looking at the river. It was a warm day. The afternoon sun was behind me; I felt it hot on the back of my neck. I rose and went to the stone parapet and looked down the side of the bluff to the roadway and river below. There was light traffic on the roadway. The river looked dark and still. Across the river lay the railroad tracks and the shantytown and the lumberyard and farther along the river in the direction of the Hudson was a factory of some kind with two tall chimneys pouring smoke into the air. I looked at the chimneys for a while. The red haze lay across everything my eyes saw. I felt cold. A tightness spread itself slowly inside my throat. I would enter those photographs. Somehow I would enter those photographs. I sat down on the stone parapet and looked carefully down the side of the bluff. I saw its trees and boulders and scrub brush and the dirt path that ran along it like a wedge of raw skin. After a while I climbed down off the parapet and walked to the small break in the stonework where the path began. I left the park and started down the bluff.
The path was a little more than two feet wide. For a few yards it ran almost perpendicular to the bluff, slanting gradually downward between boulders and leafy trees. I walked it with guarded ease. To my right was the earthen wall of the bluff, leading upward to the park; to my left was the almost sheer drop to the roadway and the river. I walked slowly and with care. Overhead an aircraft droned by, vibrating the air. I did not look up. The path was strewn with small stones. I felt them through the soles of my shoes, painfully reminding me of the pebbled bottom of the lake shore near the cottage where we had lived years ago. It was strange how I suddenly remembered that lake and Saul rowing me along the shore and Alex digging along the beach in his efforts to get to China and sometimes in the water along the shore a dead fallen tree, black and moidering, with green moss on its underside where it lay in the water and its stripped branches jutting from it grotesquely like—like the arms and legs of the frozen dead. I stopped on the path and rested.
There was no sunlight here and the air was cool and redolent of moist earth. After a while I went on. A small tree, growing directly out of the side of the hill, sent its branches across the path, partially obstructing the way. Its exposed roots clung as if in desperation to the dark brown earth of the bluff. I bent low and went carefully beneath its branches. One of the branches brushed against my shoulders and snapped with the sound of a dry twig. I went on down past the tree and suddenly, after a few feet, the path turned as if it were being pulled upward along the right side. It turned and flattened and began running straight down the bluff between brush and trees and boulders. I looked up. I was about fifty feet below the top of the bluff. A moment later I halted.
My legs shook, the muscles tensing as if in anticipation of the descent. A tugboat made its slow solitary way down the river. I turned sideways, leaned forward into the side of the bluff, bending my right leg, and started down. Slowly, moving sideways, leaning hard into the bluff, I continued downhill. Prickly brush pulled at my trousers. Here the path was almost indiscernible; it did not seem a path at all but a vague shallow draw. I went carefully across a cluster of small rocks. Then the earth suddenly seemed to give way and slid out from beneath me. Stones and pebbles and loose soil cascaded downhill. I slid feet first and then threw myself heavily upon the earth and clawed with my fingers. I came to a stop a few feet above a boulder and lay without moving.
My heart pounded against the dark soil. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the boulder, its surface pitted as if from some disease. I looked up. The bluff towered over me now. I was a little less than halfway down. I released my hold upon the ground and let myself slide slowly toward the boulder. I clutched the earth. My feet touched the boulder. I lay upon the near perpendicular earth and rested.
My hands were badly scraped. The forefinger of my left hand was cut and bleeding. My trousers were curled up over my knees. I turned my head and looked up at the afternoon sky and saw it red and filling with smoke. I closed my eyes and lay very still. After a while I began slowly to move around the boulder. I held tightly to myself its hard cold pockmarked surface and made my way around it and saw the steep folds and undulations, the stretch of corrugated earth and rock-strewn cliff that remained between me and the roadway and river. The path was gone. I slid and slowed myself, clutching the earth. I slid again, steeply, almost tumbling into a headlong fall, but grasped a bush, feelings its branches scratching at my face and slowing my descent. Rocks and pebbles slid with me down the bluff. I saw its earth against my eyes, the intricate patterning of its various stones and wild leafy shrubs in the dark moist soil. I stopped near a scraggly bush and lay my head upon the earth.
For a long time I lay very still, feeling the thick bea
ting of my heart. Sweat ran down my face and stung my eyes. I started downward again and slid, grabbed desperately for earth, slowed, then slid again. I cried out, for I was beginning to roll. And then, abruptly, the earth beneath me altered its contour, slanted sharply and began to level. I fell heavily to the foot of the bluff in a shower of pebbles and soil.
I rose to my feet and brushed at my clothes. The forefinger of my left hand had been split by a rock and was bleeding profusely. It left stains of blood on my jacket and trousers. I looked up. The bluff loomed monstrously above me. I could not see the school. On the roadway a car passed by, the driver looking straight ahead. I put my handkerchief around the bleeding finger. Then I crossed the roadway and the length of grass along its side and stood at the low stone wall that bordered the river. The water was gray, its current swifter when seen from here than from the parapet above. I could hear it running quickly and lapping upon the stone embankment. It ran dark and foamed white as it licked at the stones; then it foamed dark too, and then red, and I looked and saw the river running red, and I closed my eyes. But the redness would not leave. I opened my eyes and all the world was red. Across the river a train moved slowly upon the bed of rails and I saw it was a freight train. I had seen many such freight trains before, running long and often slow upon these tracks, with strange shapes on flatbed cars covered by tied-down tarpaulins, the boxcars sealed. This train moved quickly. I watched it go past the shantytown and the lumberyard and on down along the river past the factory with the two tall chimneys. I closed my eyes and leaned upon the stone wall. It had been an ordinary freight train but I had seen through its sealed doors a multitude of writhing human beings packed together riding in filth and terror. I turned away from the river and felt the heavy beating of my heart. Again I looked up at the bluff. Then I looked away and began to walk along the river. How red it ran, licking and foaming at the stones. For a brief interval the low wall fell away, leaving only the embankment. I came upon a length of wet earth where water lapped across the stones of the embankment onto the flat of the ground. I bent down and touched the earth, felt its clayey softness, and scooped out a handful and brought it to where the stone wall began once again above the embankment. I put the earth on top of the wall. It oozed upon the stones, wet and gleaming red beneath the red sky. My fingers played with it, shaping it. You did nothing, I said. Nothing. You died in the flames of the burning books and then you did nothing. But what could you have done, my golem? Who can expect miracles anymore from clay?
I left him there beneath the red sky and walked on along the river. The shantytown lay almost directly across from me. I stopped and stared at its shacks and hovels. Then a cold wind blew across the river and someone called my name. I shivered and looked again at the shantytown and saw in its depths huddled beings waiting for death. I looked down the river at the lumberyard and saw rows of barracks behind electrified fences. I looked farther down the river and saw the factory and the chimneys pouring smoke from burning flesh. I closed my eyes again and saw the photographs. I lowered my head and trembled and knew now I could never have entered those photographs; instead they had entered me. And the wind blew again across the river and again I heard my name.
David, he murmured. David.
The wind blew cold and I shivered.
You climbed down well, he said in the wind. You climbed down very well. Did you see the stones and the earth and the boulders? Did you see?
Yes.
These are the roots, my David.
Yes.
Do you see the roots?
I was silent.
Do you see the roots, my David?
Yes.
Who will water the roots? he murmured. Who will give them new life? The leaves are already dead.
I opened my eyes. The red world pushed heavily against my vision.
David, he said softly. David. Will you start again?
The wind touched me with an icy finger as if it blew from a winter sky.
I’m afraid, I said. I’m so afraid.
Yes, he said. Yes. I understand. But will you start again?
They kill us, I said.
Yes, he murmured into the wind.
I hung my head and leaned heavily against the stone wall. The wind gusted across the river, bringing distant echoes to my ears. I brushed at my eyes and saw before my face the blood-stained handkerchief. I shuddered and closed my eyes. And, slowly, I nodded.
My David, he murmured. My precious David. What a burden you take upon yourself.
I bowed my head in silence.
How you have grown, he whispered. It is so good to see how you have grown. You are making your own beginning.
I bent low and leaned my head upon the cold stones of the river wall. Then I felt myself weeping for all the years of pain I could remember and all the years of pain I knew lay yet before me. I wept a long time near the river, my head upon the stones. The wind grew slowly warm; the air grew still. I became silent. Below me the waters of the river lapped gently against the embankment. The river ran with a silken sound, gathering in little pools upon the stones, murmuring softly the hopes of all beginnings.
After a while I straightened and opened my eyes to the blue afternoon sky. I wiped my face with my handkerchief, cleaned myself up as best I could, and took a cab home.
Rav Sharfman said to me in Yiddish when I came off the bridge the following morning and he saw my scraped face and bandaged finger, “What happened to you, Lurie?”
I told him I had tripped and fallen in the park.
“Take care of yourself,” he murmured. “You have an obligation.”
We stood together for a moment on the corner. It was a warm June day. I could see the river below the bridge and the steep drop of the bluff. The sun on the surface of the water stirred within me a quiet ecstasy.
“How is your mother?” he asked.
“Not well, Rebbe.”
“I am sorry to hear that.”
We began to walk. I told him briefly of my decision.
He turned his face to me without breaking his stride. Beneath the wide brim of the dark battered hat the hooded eyes gleamed. Passion, controlled but clearly apparent, entered the saturnine countenance. A minute play of smiles moved across the curling lips. Then impassivity returned to his face and he said, “It is a good decision.”
I thanked him.
“But I do not envy you the price you will pay.”
I said nothing.
“No one will understand what you are going through. They will call you a traitor. It will become intolerable.”
Still I said nothing.
“But you will withstand them. You have your roots in this world. Others with roots elsewhere are not able to make such a decision.”
I was moved by his words and his faith in me. And I understood the echoes that linked him to his world and would not relinquish him to the world outside. His self-appointed task was to send others and to wage his own dark war in the solitude of his own torn, restless soul.
He asked me if I would stay on to study for ordination. I told him I would.
“I will give you your test any time you are prepared.”
“The Rebbe will give me ordination despite what I told him?” I ventured the question that had been on my mind through much of the night.
We had stopped at a corner to let cars pass. He turned toward me, contemptuously. “I will not investigate your ritual fringes, Lurie. That is between you and your obligations to the past. Are you telling me you will not be an observer of the commandments?”
“I am not telling the Rebbe that.”
“What are you telling me?”
“I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular scholarship there are no boundaries and no permanently fixed views.”
“Lurie, if the Torah cannot go out into your world of scholarship and return stronger, then we are all fools and charlatans. I have faith in the Torah. I am not
afraid of truth.”
We crossed the avenue and entered the school together. The entrance hall was deserted. He turned to me. I felt his eyes move across my face. He said to me in Yiddish, his voice rasping, “I am not bothered by questions of truth. I want to know if the religious world view has any meaning today. Bring yourself back an answer to that, Lurie. Take apart the Bible and see if it is something more today than the Iliad and the Odyssey. Bring yourself back that answer, Lurie. Do not bring yourself back shallowness. Study Kierkegaard and Otto and William James. Study man, Lurie. Study philosophy of religion.”
I bowed my head beneath the rush of his words.
He was silent. He regarded me without expression. “I do not envy a Jew who goes into Bible today. Goyim will be suspicious of you and Jews will be uneasy in your presence. Everyone will be wondering what sacred truths of their childhood you are destroying. Merely to destroy—that is a form of shallowness, Lurie. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Rebbe.”
“Lurie.”
“Yes, Rebbe.”
“Come and see me from time to time.”
I thanked him.
“If I tell you that you are coming too often, you will understand.”
“Yes, Rebbe.”
“I have wings enough only for one man.”
I looked at him. His face was impassive. He turned and walked away, alone, his tall form moving quickly up the stone stairs. He went through the metal doors and was gone.
He called on me that afternoon to read and explain. He called on me again the following day and the day after that. For all the rest of that month he called on me every day. I would read and explain. At times he would let me go on for a short while. At other times I would read for over an hour. Once I read for the entire two hours of the class. I walked out sweating and drained. It was clear enough that my ordination test with him had already begun.
I dreaded the hot weeks ahead. I had decided to wait until we were all out of the city and resting in the bungalows before telling my family. But I could not tell them that summer. In July I helped my father in the store and in the last two weeks of August, when we lived in the bungalows near the lake and the summer camp, I saw my mother resting in the wicker chair beneath the tree, color returning slowly to her weary face, my aunt and uncle and father hovering over her, caring for her, and the very last thing I would do then was destroy their efforts to restore the delicate balance of their lives.