But I am not – his steps paused with his mind’s anxious scruple – angry with You, Lord, any longer. One son at least shall not precede his father to the grave.
“Tree.” It came to him suddenly, out loud. Tree. This means boim in Canada. Abraham beamed at a stranger who passed him. We will surely walk in the little park by the river this evening. And I will buy bananas. He had become inordinately fond of the new fruit his son had discovered. Isaac should be home soon from the English school. He himself would come in, carrying a bag with bananas, and maybe some thing else, something else that was good. Perhaps he would wait for a little while before he told them. Yes. They would know by the bananas and the other something that it was not bad news. So he would hold it in for a while and wait for the right moment to tell them that he had found work, that they were on their feet again.
Just thinking about it as he walked along, and then while he bought the bananas and the other treat at the grocery – the very thought of it made him feel so enthusiastic about the prospect of coming in and making them wonder a little about what had happened to him that somehow he couldn’t help himself. The minute he stepped over the threshold, his face beaming, he announced that he had found a job. Without even waiting to put down the bags that he carried, he told them everything – where he had been, what had been said, and that he had already worked a few hours just to get used to it.
“Polsky! Him! Not him!” Into their eager discussion erupted the ecstasies of the landlady. “But he’s just the man I was telling you about yesterday.” She turned on Sarah vivaciously. “And this morning – no, wait – yes, I think I must have mentioned him to you this morning too. As though it were fated!”
Sarah looked up at her blandly. “Yes.” She didn’t remember, but it seemed likely that within all that Mrs. Plopler had said this Polsky, who had given her Avrom a job and had enabled him to relax now for the first time in so long, should be included.
Abraham recalled, as he had recalled in those anxious moments of waiting while Polsky dealt with a customer, how the other butcher had sounded as though sending him to this man was something of a practical joke, almost as though Polsky might be dealing in not strictly kosher meat.
Mrs. Plopler, who saw happily that she wasn’t going to get any help from Sarah, plunged into her story.
Polsky was a scandal. One day, suddenly, with no warning, he had walked out of his shop, closed up and disappeared. But that wasn’t it, that wasn’t it at all. Polsky was a married man with a wife and children – a sloppy wife and scruffy children, but that wasn’t the shame of it. The shame of it was that Polsky had a customer, a married woman, a woman who was not so young as she made out and certainly not as attractive as some of the men made out, although he, Avrom, would no doubt have the chance to judge for himself. This Laiah had a husband who was a nice quiet young man, who made her a living. And of course, now it began to appear, who knows how many other men she had as well? Such a woman seems to know well enough how to prevent herself from having children and having to remember how many fathers each child has. So she was free to run around turning other men’s heads. Although what kind of man her husband could be was hard to understand. A man who could stand around and let his own wife make – they should excuse the expression – a public urinal of herself. But. That was the beginning. Without anybody even suspecting, this Laiah had been carrying on a relationship with this Polsky. Only such things can’t be kept from the eyes of the world for long. When Polsky locked his shop that day and disappeared, Laiah also walked out of her house and disappeared – with Polsky.
The landlady paused, surveyed them significantly, and went on that they might not interrupt.
People talked, of course. People were horrified. Here was this wife, here were these children. What was to become of them? Who would have imagined that Polsky, laughing and joking with the customers, would someday desert his wife and children? What was going to happen? The whole world knew that this was not the end. Then one day, just about two weeks ago, after a whole month – pouf! They’re back. All of a sudden a big wagon of meat pulls up outside of Polsky’s shop, right there on the avenue. Polsky jumps out and opens the place for business. But that’s not all. Where is Polsky living? With his wife! They say he brought her presents, and the kids presents, and they’re living the same as before. One thing is certain, that no man could stuff Sonya Plopler’s mouth with presents and sneak in the back way. And that one, his paramour? Pooh pooh! She’s back with her husband. With her own eyes Mrs. Plopler had seen them parading around together at the Free Loan Society banquet. They say she has the nerve to show her face in the butcher shop too. God, what’s happening in the world? Mrs. Plopler took a long, deep breath and exhaled emphatically. “He must be doing good business too,” she added as an afterthought, “if he can afford to take on help again after being closed for a month.”
During her recital Mrs. Plopler had ignored the fact that Isaac was present. Abraham thought of this with disapproval as he noticed that his son was leaning forward with his mouth open, apparently anxious to enter the conversation. He tried with a frown to catch Isaac’s eye.
Mrs. Plopler looked at Abraham. It was time for him to break the significant silence which she had allowed for her information to sink in.
“I suppose,” ventured Sarah, who was, as always, vaguely distressed to see two human beings perish in the jaws of another, “we don’t know exactly what –” she trailed off lamely, made aware by Mrs. Plopler’s stare that she had not risen to the occasion.
“But how do people know,” said Isaac cleverly, bubbling with his brother Jacob’s favorite dialectical approach, “that they were together? Just because they were gone at the same time doesn’t mean –” His voice faded away as he caught his father’s eye.
Mrs. Plopler’s ardor, though dampened, still flickered. To Isaac’s bewilderment, after she had progressed from damning Polsky and Laiah through all the people who by their passivity condoned such affairs, she darted suddenly to the conclusion that it would be only decent for her to patronize the place where her tenant worked. Tomorrow she would go herself to make an order. “I’ll help you to pay your rent,” she concluded in high good humor.
Later on, when they had escaped from the house and were sitting together on a bench in the little park by the river with few words passing between them, each one made his own silent voyage into the past and the future. Sarah remembered with a certainty in her mother’s heart her intuition that Moses had had his eye on a girl already. Isaac watched the double-crested mountain, towering in front of them, and was aware of it even as his mind jumped from thought to thought. It was strange that, no matter where his mind went, the hill remained there, solid in his vision, every time he looked up. It was a comfort that it didn’t change, like the people he had known and the other things that had once stood rooted, it had seemed, forever. It was like the sight of his father’s face when he had opened his eyes for the first time after the fever, towering over him, claiming him.
Now that Abraham thought of it he determined to buy permanent seats at the neighboring synagogue for himself and his family as soon as possible. After all these sorrows, God had chosen to set him and his family down in this strange city to await what further He had in store for them. Very well.
TWO
That first year the winter descended very close on the autumn leaves. The city huddled in its own warmth among the piled-up snow. Although, with a certain fondness for their native landscape, the citizens claimed that Mad Mountain sheltered them from many a violent wind, the winds had apparently learned to circumvent this hazard and blew most persistently from the undefended north.
In the evenings, caged in the square room with the chair, the bed, the couch, and the other landmarks that the landlady had so minutely detailed, Abraham paced restlessly as his past years in their fullness forced themselves over him. Strength, he knew, strength was what was required of him now. His part was to accept, to rebuild, and to wait. It was
no use to dwell too much on those memories that came at a man unawares, with bitterness. The main outlines were clear. Nowhere was it said that it would be a honeyed life – not here, in these alien lands. But how strong the gall had been, how bitter when it came. Still there had been the miracle, the reiterated promise. How would he have stood it else?
Isaac, still weak from the typhus that had forced them to halt their flight temporarily in Poland, seemed to fall prey to every common cold that made its way from breath to breath in the city. From the window of their room he watched now the snow piling up in warm, rounded, shadowy heaps.
“Come away from the window,” growled Abraham. “You coughed all night last night. Don’t think we didn’t hear you. The landlady and her big window,” he continued as Isaac turned back to his homework. “From every big inch of it a big draft.” He peered out at the shadowy back yard, holding his hand at the same time to where the sharp chill that had made its way through the hole in the storm window filtered through the frozen rags that were stuffed into the cracks of the inside frame.
“What are you standing in the draft for, then?” Isaac challenged over the newspaper that he was deciphering.
One son, Abraham was beginning to realize, was as hard to bring up as three. “I haven’t got a chest cold. I don’t cough all night,” he retorted righteously. But he did not linger with his usual pride on the fact that he had so neatly made his point. There was real concern in him for the boy.
He came and looked over Isaac’s shoulder at the newspaper. For a while, twice a week in the evenings, he and his wife had gone to the English classes. Sarah had sat shyly, and blushingly couldn’t answer the questions that were put to her by the young teacher, who spoke neither Yiddish nor Ukrainian nor Polish nor Russian nor German, but had nevertheless attained an appalling fluency in the English tongue. Abraham fidgeted during the class and came privately to the conclusion that, beyond the parts of speech, the teacher did not seem to have much to tell him. In the end, what with Sarah’s indifference and his own overtime at the butcher shop, he had decided that they could teach themselves. So he contented himself with looking knowingly over Isaac’s shoulder at the newspaper and making great leaps across sentences, pouncing on an odd word or two, from which he constructed privately plausible meanings, from some of which Isaac had the greatest difficulty in dissuading him.
Sarah kept Mrs. Plopler company in the kitchen. Mr. Plopler, in the American style, was on his weekly night out with the boys. The landlady probed into their past. She asked about the town they had come from, the state of the country, their business, their home. Sarah spoke a little, and when her words blundered toward her sons she remembered her four men when they had been most fully hers. Four straight backs, waiting for her at the dinner table, the shoulders of the boys gracefully molded, hard and vital under the clean shirts. She began to cry silently. Mrs. Plopler, in sympathy, began to cry as well, tentatively at first, then with great sloppy sobs, rocking herself from side to side and moaning intermittently over the terrible fate of Jewry.
When Abraham emerged in some alarm from the bedroom, Mrs. Plopler at once became terribly brave. She spoke touchingly to them of the new world, new friends, a new life. It seemed to Abraham at times that she was not so uncongenial as she appeared at other times. Perhaps, in the incomprehensible woman’s way that draws courage from tears, she might be able to help his wife to accept their fate. But no. A moment ago Mrs. Plopler had been weeping with Sarah, watering a wound that was far deeper than she could understand. Now, with the tears scarcely dry, the last traces of moisture highlighting the ardent curiosity in her eyes as she leaned forward, with casual eagerness – “This Laiah, you’ve run into her at the shop? How does she strike you? What sort of a type is she?”
Abraham fought back the twinge of impatience. Isaac had come into the kitchen and had pulled a chair close to where his mother sat. The boy put his arm around his mother. Abraham fingered his beard and frowned seriously at Mrs. Plopler. “A type,” he said, “that likes corned beef, pastrami, lamb chops, chuck.” He cast a sly sidelong glance at Sarah and Isaac. Isaac was smiling. He continued seriously. “Leg of mutton, veal, wieners, ribs –”
“Yes, yes.” Mrs. Plopler leaned forward again. “But besides that, I mean, what is she like? I’ve seen her once or twice myself; she was pointed out to me, but myself I can’t see what they make such a fuss about.”
“You can’t?” said Abraham. “The first time I saw her she awakened desire in me.”
Mrs. Plopler’s eyes widened, and she cast an indescribable glance at Sarah.
Abraham’s eyelid scarcely flickered. “I said to myself, With only half the pelts in the fur coat that woman is wearing, my wife could have a fur coat that would keep her warm for ten, maybe fifteen years.
“And her hair!” He was inspired. “You wouldn’t believe it, but that hair is thick and auburn, just like the coat, brown and lustrous. Do you know that at first I could not tell where the hair left off and the coat began? I thought to myself, This must be either a very hairy woman, or else when the coat comes off the hair comes off with it, and she is entirely bald.”
Isaac laughed out loud.
Abraham sighed. “I wonder how much such a coat would cost.”
“You needn’t worry,” broke in Mrs. Plopler excitedly. She felt that she had unearthed a mine of information. “That coat didn’t cost her anything, nothing she isn’t used to giving.” She widened her eyes and distended her nostrils significantly at Abraham. Abraham returned her stare with an equally intense significance in his own.
“What,” cried Mrs. Plopler joyously, “does she behave like in the shop – I mean when she comes in?”
“My dear friend, what can I tell you?” He looked again at his son and his wife. “They say that a cow will stand in a green field and wave its tail and show its rear to every passing bull. Who knows?” And that was enough. He felt a sudden annoyance at having indulged himself so far, even jokingly. What did he have to do with that woman, that he could take it upon himself to bandy her character around with such a one as Mrs. Plopler? What could she have to do with them, with her body that seemed to have difficulty keeping still inside of the luxurious fur coat, and her hoarse, low voice with its persistent animal call? She was what she was. The world was still the same. There were those who felt that, with God’s mercy, if they stretched their bodies and their souls and created and built and grew, who knew what heights they, or their sons, or the sons of their sons might not reach? And there were those who preferred to go through life in other postures. It was not for him to laugh at her because he had chosen to live another life – not, especially, while he could still understand the animal call. No, it was an unworthy thing. A man may choose the sunlight, but he has no right to pass casual judgment on the shadows.
He would have to be more polite to Laiah the next time she came in to make an order. Isaac was still grinning broadly at his father’s wit, but Abraham knew that, although Sarah smiled automatically, she only half listened, her mind elsewhere.
There were some women – Mrs. Plopler was still talking, not willing to drop the subject so easily now that she had caught her tenant in such a sympathetic mood – that didn’t know what decency meant. Yes, and they seemed to think that all the rest of womankind didn’t follow their example and act like animals because they had never had a chance to. They couldn’t understand that some people kept themselves clean and decent because they preferred it that way. Take herself, for instance. You might not think so now – Mrs. Plopler laughed – but she had been a very popular girl in her youth.
Abraham, looking at Mrs. Plopler’s face, lost track of her words. It was certainly warmer here in the kitchen than it was in their bedroom. It was no use, Abraham knew, to think about their own kitchen with its smooth mud walls that he had so frequently whitewashed himself. And their oven – but that was an oven! In the winter there was no fear that your boys would catch cold with that broad, warm oven to sleep on.
Decent, Mrs. Plopler emphasized; she had always kept herself decent – like her daughters, who were even now out having a good time. Mrs. Plopler looked accusingly at Isaac.
Sarah leaned her head against Isaac’s shoulder. He had lengthened out during the last few months, but he had gained very little weight since the typhus. What was this new world that they had come to? Avrom was here, thank God; and Isaac, by some miracle. There was this woman who talked and talked, sometimes with little barbs in her words. Her own eyes grated together when she blinked them, and ached so. When she cried it was no longer as though she cried with tears. The ocean had drained away, and she cried now with only the pebbles on the beach.
Men had wanted her, Mrs. Plopler testified. She had been considered not unattractive. Ah, but she had danced in her day! Mrs. Plopler scraped her feet on the linoleum, and the sound made a variation on her voice.
Isaac listened. He wondered why his father didn’t again break out of the humming coil of the landlady’s eloquence. Had he himself been Jacob he would have picked up his father’s joking vein, and together they would have so entangled Mrs. Plopler that she would still be struggling to find her way out. And then Moses would have sung a funny song that he had made up on the spur of the moment, all about what was happening. It seemed to Isaac that Moses had been capable of that. He himself and his mother would have sat and laughed and joined in sometimes. The whole would have been a riotous evening, and they would have all gone to bed afterward, liking Mrs. Plopler and well contented with themselves. Instead they sat still and listened to her with irritation, or pretended to listen, for the look on his father’s face was not that of a listener. Was he too thinking of what a night it would have been? Why hadn’t he himself been able to think of something clever to say? What was it that he had said the other day that had had his father roaring with laughter?
The Sacrifice Page 3