That Glimpse of Truth

by David Miller

  Later, he heard footsteps approaching. He thought it better to disappear, in case it was Major Peverill. He climbed to the top of the rocks nearby and, hidden by a holly tree, looked down. It was the girl.

  This time she was wearing a flowered dress, a shapeless effort with smocking and puffed sleeves. It was accompanied by the same crinkled stockings and sturdy shoes. The great difference was the hair, no longer in plaits but flowing loose on to her shoulders. It still framed her face but in a way that made it less round and doll-like. He scrambled down the slope toward her.

  “I thought these must be your things. What’s been happening to you?”

  “Oh, I’ve been very busy,” he said.

  She laughed, as though he was too young to be eligible for this word. “When Uncle Maurice said he had found you down here, I came back several times.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “In the end, I guessed that he had probably frightened you and you wouldn’t come back. ‘The poor boy’s frightened,’ I thought.”

  He blushed so hard his face was ready to explode. She was teasing him but, now that the pigtails had gone, you couldn’t really tell what she mightn’t know.

  Now she went to the end of the jetty, pushing her hair back behind her ears and posing in profile against the water.

  “It’s nice that you’ve come back,” she said.

  “This is the last time.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I’ve got to go back to school tomorrow.”

  “Have you caught the big fish yet?”

  “Not yet.” He felt embarrassed by something which two months ago had been the most important thing in the world.

  “Not yet!”

  She laughed. All at once, she pulled her long hair in a curtain over her eyes and, staring through it with a funny spooky face, she turned on him, waving her arms with the hands ready for clutching. He nearly fell off the jetty.

  “Nervous, aren’t you?”

  To get a bit of his own back, he asked: “Where’s that Australian person?”

  Rowena stroked her hair into place behind her ears, and looked remote. “Oh, she left. Ages ago, actually. I’m going to school in Switzerland after Christmas.”

  While they were talking he had forgotten to keep watch on his two floats. The smaller one was still there, but the other had vanished. He picked up the sea rod and pulled hard. The float jerked back from where the water lilies had hidden it. He reeled the line in, and prepared to cast again.

  “You’ve caught a little frog. Look, it’s wriggling.”

  He tried not to let this display of female ignorance put him off his stroke. He cast out smoothly towards the middle of the lake.

  “Didn’t you see it?” she asked him in wonder.

  “That was the bait. When you’re fishing for pike, live frogs are good bait.”

  She stared as though she could not believe him. “But that’s horrible. It must hurt it dreadfully. Do you know what you are? You’re a sadist.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “If you don’t know, I’m certainly not going to tell you. Poor, poor little thing.”

  “They don’t feel like we do.”

  “You little beast. You mean you don’t feel.”

  He laughed. “No, they don’t really.”

  He watched her doubtfully. No boy would ever make a fuss like this: at Chalgrove Park you could easily collect a crowd by burning a worm or an insect with a magnifying glass. He was quite shocked to see that she was crying in earnest.

  “They all said you were horrible. They were quite right.”

  “Who said?”

  Rowena did not answer, but turned around and fled, large and splay-footed, into the darkening woods.

  “Who said? Tell me,” he called after her.

  He followed her to a point where the path forked, and the rhododendrons were too tall to allow him to see which way she had taken. Her tears had scattered his wits completely. Returning, still thinking about her last statement and not looking where he went, he tripped headlong over an elbow of tree-root sticking out of the path.

  With the skin grazed off both his knees, he limped back to the jetty. There, a curious noise hung in the air. He could not identify it until he noticed that the big rod had fallen over and the noise came from the ratchet of the reel as the line was being dragged off it.

  He grabbed the rod and held on. Whatever had seized the bait was now in the middle of the lake, fighting deep down. Though he was still sniveling with pain, the usual mixture of rage and glee took hold of him. Each time he started regaining some line, the fish headed off again, and he knew it must be deeply hooked because its strength was fighting directly against his own. This made him sure that it was the same pike he had hooked on the day Jeremy had gone home early.

  After about ten minutes his arms began to ache. Hot water ran down his leg, though he hadn’t felt himself peeing, and made the scraped knee sting. His eyes stung too, and he wiped the back of his hand against them. He couldn’t see any better because it was getting dark, although a piece of the setting sun was still visible through the trees on the opposite shore.

  By now he knew the battle was going his way: the fish had tired itself fighting out there in the open, and each failing effort gave him a little more slack line, so that he could steer it nearer the water lilies around the jetty. Suddenly he saw the rounded back fin, the one near the tail, break the surface: it was like a dark sail against the luminous water.

  All his dreams came to a quiet conclusion as the pike slid gently towards him. To keep it from tangling among the lilies, he held the rod as high as he could. This brought the great head out of the water, the body looped and thrashed wildly, but the hook held. Gradually he eased the pike alongside the jetty, like a liner coming into dock, and into the shallow water. He dropped the rod and plunged in on top of the fish and manhandled it on to the bank. In the wild stink of mud and marsh gas it lay there, huge and terrible to him. While he watched it, a mounting sense of triumph began to break through all the webs of disbelief.

  To stop the line from tangling, he cut the knot above the wire trace. The pike gave a number of violent heaves, and its scales became covered with dry leaves and earth. The two eyes that glared from the corners of the head belonged now to a monster of the woods more than the water. In the twilight, Andrew lay on the ground and worshipped it.

  For a time, the only noise seemed to be of the blood pounding in his ears. This turned into the murmur of voices, not far off. He had just time to heave the big pike down the bank. By the faint shine that still came from the lake, he could see it indignantly right itself and then the furious swirl with which it regained the deep water.

  When he had clambered once more on to the top of his rock, he was aware of several people approaching down the path between the rhododendrons. They carried electric torches, and soon you could see the long cylinders of light shifting to and fro, stopped by tree trunks and then reaching out again among the shadows.

  He heard Major Peverill’s voice, high-pitched like a well-bred sneeze. “The poor girl got back to the house in a terrible state.”

  Other voices answered, in the lower tones of country people accustomed to agreement.

  “He should not have been allowed to come here in the first place.” By now Major Peverill was standing about directly below. “It was a misunderstanding, which must be put right without more ado.”

  There was complete darkness under the holly tree on the rock. Andrew kept his head down, in case a beam of torchlight should sweep across to show his face as a pale patch among the bristling leaves. If you hated people enough, he thought, you could hold out as long as they could. In a short while they would find his gear lying where he had left it by the lake. It would hardly make much difference; they knew he was still here, but it was improbable that they would ever find him.

  Soon after this, though, he saw other, different torches flash out on the far side of the lake. He hear
d his mother calling, and knew he would have to surrender.

  THE PAGAN RABBI

  Cynthia Ozick

  Cynthia Ozick (b.1928) is the author of Trust, The Messiah of Stockholm, Heir to the Glimmering World (or The Bear Boy) and Foreign Bodies, as well as a number of story collections, including The Shawl, Dictation as well as several collections of essays. She lives in New Rochelle with her husband. Her work has won the O. Henry Award three times, the PEN Malamud Award, the PEN Nabokov Award and the National Books Critic Circle Award. She was once described as “the Emily Dickinson of the Bronx”, and said: “One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal …”

  Rabbi Jacob said: “He who is walking along and studying, but then breaks off to remark, “How lovely is that tree!” or “How beautiful is that fallow field!” – Scripture regards such a one as having hurt his own being.”

  – from The Ethics of the Fathers

  When I heard that Isaac Kornfeld, a man of piety and brains, had hanged himself in the public park, I put a token in the subway stile and journeyed out to see the tree.

  We had been classmates in the rabbinical seminary. Our fathers were both rabbis. They were also friends, but only in a loose way of speaking: in actuality our fathers were enemies. They vied with one another in demonstrations of charitableness, in the captious glitter of their scholia, in the number of their adherents. Of the two, Isaac’s father was the milder. I was afraid of my father; he had a certain disease of the larynx, and if he even uttered something so trivial as “Bring the tea” to my mother, it came out splintered, clamorous, and vindictive.

  Neither man was philosophical in the slightest. It was the one thing they agreed on. “Philosophy is an abomination,” Isaac’s father used to say. “The Greeks were philosophers, but they remained children playing with their dolls. Even Socrates, a monotheist, nevertheless sent money down to the temple to pay for incense to their doll.”

  “Idolatry is the abomination,” Isaac argued, “not philosophy.”

  “The latter is the corridor to the former,” his father said.

  My own father claimed that if not for philosophy I would never have been brought to the atheism which finally led me to withdraw, in my second year, from the seminary. The trouble was not philosophy – I had none of Isaac’s talent: his teachers later said of him that his imagination was so remarkable he could concoct holiness out of the fine line of a serif. On the day of his funeral the president of his college was criticized for having commented that, although a suicide could not be buried in consecrated earth, whatever earth enclosed Isaac Kornfeld was ipso facto consecrated. It should be noted that Isaac hanged himself several weeks short of his thirty-sixth birthday; he was then at the peak of his renown; and the president, of course, did not know the whole story. He judged by Isaac’s reputation, which was at no time more impressive than just before his death.

  I judged by the same, and marvelled that all that holy genius and intellectual surprise should in the end be raised no higher than the next-to-lowest limb of a delicate young oak, with burly roots like the toes of a gryphon exposed in the wet ground.

  The tree was almost alone in a long rough meadow, which sloped down to a bay filled with sickly clams and a bad smell. The place was called Trilham’s Inlet, and I knew what the smell meant: that cold brown water covered half the city’s turds.

  On the day I came to see the tree the air was bleary with fog. The weather was well into autumn and, though it was Sunday, the walks were empty. There was something historical about the park just then, with its rusting grasses and deserted monuments. In front of a soldiers’ cenotaph a plastic wreath left behind months before by some civic parade stood propped against a stone frieze of identical marchers in the costume of an old war. A banner across the wreath’s belly explained that the purpose of war is peace. At the margins of the park they were building a gigantic highway. I felt I was making my way across a battlefield silenced by the victory of the peace machines. The bulldozers had bitten far into the park, and the rolled carcasses of the sacrificed trees were already cut up into logs. There were dozens of felled maples, elms, and oaks. Their moist inner wheels breathed out a fragrance of barns, countryside, decay.

  In the bottom-most meadow fringing the water I recognized the tree which had caused Isaac to sin against his own life. It looked curiously like a photograph – not only like that newspaper photograph I carried warmly in my pocket, which showed the field and its markers – the drinking-fountain a few yards off, the ruined brick wall of an old estate behind. The caption-writer had particularly remarked on the “rope”. But the rope was no longer there; the widow had claimed it. It was his own prayer shawl that Isaac, a short man, had thrown over the comely neck of the next-to-lowest limb. A Jew is buried in his prayer shawl; the police had handed it over to Sheindel. I observed that the bark was rubbed at that spot. The tree lay back against the sky like a licked postage stamp. Rain began to beat it flatter yet. A stench of sewage came up like a veil in the nostril. It seemed to me I was a man in a photograph standing next to a grey blur of tree. I would stand through eternity beside Isaac’s guilt if I did not run, so I ran that night to Sheindel herself.

  I loved her at once. I am speaking now of the first time I saw her, though I don’t exclude the last. The last – the last together with Isaac – was soon after my divorce; at one stroke I left my wife and my cousin’s fur business to the small upstate city in which both had repined. Suddenly Isaac and Sheindel and two babies appeared in the lobby of my hotel – they were passing through: Isaac had a lecture engagement in Canada. We sat under scarlet neon and Isaac told how my father could now not speak at all.

  “He keeps his vow,” I said.

  “No, no, he’s a sick man,” Isaac said. “An obstruction in the throat.”

  “I’m the obstruction. You know what he said when I left the seminary. He meant it, never mind how many years it is. He’s never addressed a word to me since.”

  “We were reading together. He blamed the reading, who can blame him? Fathers like ours don’t know how to love. They live too much indoors.”

  It was an odd remark, though I was too much preoccupied with my own resentments to notice. “It wasn’t what we read,” I objected, “Torah tells that an illustrious man doesn’t have an illustrious son. Otherwise he wouldn’t be humble like other people. This much scholarly stuffing I retain, Well, so my father always believed he was more illustrious than anybody, especially more than your father. Therefore,” I delivered in Talmudic cadence, “what chance did I have? A nincompoop and no Sitzfleish. Now you, you could answer questions that weren’t even invented yet. Then you invented them.”

  “Torah isn’t a spade,” Isaac said. “A man should have a livelihood. You had yours.”

  “The pelt of a dead animal isn’t a living either, it’s an indecency.”

  All the while Sheindel was sitting perfectly still; the babies, female infants in long stockings, were asleep in her arms. She wore a dark thick woollen hat – it was July – that covered every part of her hair. But I had once seen it in all its streaming black shine.

  “And Jane?” Isaac asked finally.

  “Speaking of dead animals. Tell my father – he won’t answer a letter, he won’t come to the telephone – that in the matter of the marriage he was right, but for the wrong reason. If you share a bed with a Puritan you’ll come into it cold and you’ll go out of it cold. Listen, Isaac, my father calls me an atheist, but between the conjugal sheets every Jew is a believer in miracles, even the lapsed.”

  He said nothing then. He knew I envied him his Sheindel and his luck. Unlike our fathers, Isaac had never condemned me for my marriage, which his father regarded as his private triumph over my father, and which my father, in his public defeat, took as an occasion for declaring me as one dead. He rent his clothing and sat on a stool for eight days, while Isaac’s father came to watch him mourn, secretly satisfied, though aloud he grieved for all apostates. Is
aac did not like my wife. He called her a tall yellow straw. After we were married he never said a word against her, but he kept away.

  I went with my wife to his wedding. We took the early train down especially, but when we arrived the feast was well under way, and the guests far into the dancing.

  “Look, look, they don’t dance together,” Jane said.

  “Who?”

  “The men and the women. The bride and the groom.”

  “Count the babies,” I advised. “The Jews are also Puritans, but only in public.”

  The bride was enclosed all by herself on a straight chair in the centre of a spinning ring of young men. The floor heaved under their whirl. They stamped, the chandeliers shuddered, the guests cried out, the young men with linked arms spiralled and their skullcaps came flying off like centrifugal balloons. Isaac, a mist of black suit, a stamping foot, was lost in the planet’s wake of black suits and emphatic feet. The dancing young men shouted bridal songs, the floor leaned like a plate, the whole room teetered.

  Isaac had told me something of Sheindel. Before now I had never seen her. Her birth was in a concentration camp, and they were about to throw her against the electrified fence when an army mobbed the gate; the current vanished from the terrible wires, and she had nothing to show for it afterwards but a mark on her cheek like an asterisk, cut by a barb. The asterisk pointed to certain dry footnotes: she had no mother to show, she had no father to show, but she had, extraordinarily, God to show – she was known to be, for her age and sex, astonishingly learned. She was only seventeen.

  “What pretty hair she has,” Jane said.

  Now Sheindel was dancing with Isaac’s mother. All the ladies made a fence, and the bride, twirling with her mother-in-law, lost a shoe and fell against the long laughing row. The ladies lifted their glistering breasts in their lacy dresses and laughed; the young men, stamping two by two, went on shouting their wedding songs. Sheindel danced without her shoe, and the black river of her hair followed her.