His mother’s head rested very lightly on his shoulder. Perhaps she was afraid to lean on him too heavily. He pressed her closer to him, to get her to lean more heavily. She had grown so small.
Discarded suitors, Mrs. Plopler revealed. One hadn’t looked right to her; one didn’t attend closely enough; one – out of pure caprice. Mrs. Plopler pursed her lips and smiled.
Outside the window the snow was falling, banking up comfortably against the window ledge. Soon, Abraham realized, would be Chanukah. And a different celebration it would be from that of last year, he promised himself – last year, when every word and ritual act had been accompanied by a little irony inside of himself that had made it a mockery. He knew now that he had been punished, but he knew too what mercy meant. Nevermore, he told himself fervently.
A clever girl knows, with a word and a look, how to put a boy in his place, opined Mrs. Plopler.
“Amen.” Abraham, stirred by his own thoughts, rumbled his conclusion aloud.
Mrs. Plopler laughed. She allowed herself, caught by the mood of the moment, to lapse into silence. Her husband swam into her thoughts. What was it that he found so attractive about his night out with the boys? God forbid that she should ever ask him again to give it up for one week. That one time had been enough to close up her mouth on the subject forever. This immigrant had not yet picked up the habit. Of course where he came from they had never heard of such a thing. Old-country Jews. Mrs. Plopler smiled to herself in a superior way.
The snow fell more heavily. The kitchen light grew more yellow in its effort to combat the encompassing night. A silence had fallen over them, so that Isaac could almost hear the falling of the snow as he watched it, dropping ever so lightly and evenly on blue mounds outside. Mrs. Plopler’s eyes had taken on a slightly vacant look of reverie, and her nose was almost still in repose. Isaac felt himself on the edge of many worlds, intangible ones, that seemed to exist in the silences and in the cracks and crannies of speech when a group of people sat in a room together. Was there a mind free in the imprisoned silence, that could pry into their separate minds? Isaac looked anxiously about him. No, none could read his thoughts, nor he theirs. God? No. Isaac waited. The roof didn’t fall. Only the snow fell, undisturbed.
—
Now winter was wearing thin; the frost on the butcher-shop windows was gradually turning to water and slipping its hold on the glass, so that there were large circles of clear glass through which they could see that the evenings were not as early as before.
“What time can bring! Who would have thought” – Abraham addressed Chaim Knopp and Polsky during a lull in business – “three years ago that I would ever be in the new world, that I would be wrenched out of my old life, that I would be working in a new place, making new friends, with new people; that I would have learned a new language.” This last was not, he felt, so much of an exaggeration; the language no longer sounded so unfamiliar. He could exchange a few English words on the street, and even threw in an occasional English expression with his Yiddish, like a regular native. And while it was not strictly true that they had made new friends right and left, it all seemed at the moment quite imminently possible. Polsky, of course, was certainly not the type of a friend for him, and not only because he was considerably younger. And as for Mr. Plopler, there there was also little question of finding companionship, as he had discovered.
“It is written down in the statistics,” Plopler’s voice would prick at him while his eyes fixed Abraham with an accusing stare, his mouth forming the words primly, “in the statistics it is written down, that the wage situation has badly deteriorated since the recent heavy influx of cheap labor into the country…”
“You have a new Bible here then, these statistics?” Abraham’s own voice would resound in his head.
And Mr. Plopler’s voice, always elaborately precise and slow when it began an argument, would rise and quicken as it heated itself up. Once when Abraham, to change the subject, had asked him how long he had been in the country Mr. Plopler became offended and, turning away from his tenant entirely, launched into an elegant conversation with his daughter in broken English. That was Plopler, and there had been too much of Plopler unrelieved during the long winter months.
Abraham swept the sawdust more evenly over the butcher-shop floor. The pregnant tabby frisked around the broom like a kitten, playfully hurtling its enlarged body toward the broom, skidding gracefully by, sparring with one paw, and sliding on, cutting a wide swathe through the newly swept sawdust.
“Oi, cat, get away. I sweep, and she makes it nothing.” The cat sparred with the broom that Abraham waggled at her.
“Any day now,” said Chaim Knopp, looking at the round full pink belly and the rows of pendant, heavy teats. “Exercise is good for them.”
“Here, you bugger,” came Polsky’s heavy voice. Polsky crooked his foot under the cat and hoisted it away, while it clung to his pant cuff.
“Watch out for the family,” Chaim Knopp cautioned.
Bogger, thought Abraham, was no good. It must be rejected. One had to watch what one picked up from Polsky. Usually if it sounded like a good, strong, usable word, then it was a word decent people wouldn’t use in any language, which was in a way a pity but perfectly understandable when you got down to the root of it.
But this finding of friends. It seemed now – of course it was early to tell, but it seemed perhaps to be picking up. Isaac had brought home a new friend the other day. A fine-looking lad, a native. There was this learned man, this shoichet, Chaim Knopp. He was beginning to reveal himself an interesting man, and friendly. Unmistakably he sat for longer intervals warming himself by the wood stove than he had at first. The first time he had acknowledged his introduction to Abraham by a few nervous nods of his beard, taken his orders for kosher slaughtered chickens, hastily declined Polsky’s invitation to sit and chat awhile, mumbled a reply to Polsky’s sly questions about the health of his wife, and was obviously glad to get away. But then one day when he and Abraham happened to be alone in the shop Knopp had rather hesitantly explained to him that his wife was very much opposed to his having business dealings with such an openly scandalous man as Polsky.
“She says,” said Chaim, shrugging his shoulders in a characteristic gesture of his, “that she would rather starve than be pointed at. Who would point at her because I’m Polsky’s shoichet, I don’t know, but there you have these women. And why she should starve because of this I do not know either. But you know for a while you have to let them have their way – not to the point of letting them starve, of course, but just enough to keep them quiet.”
Abraham, although he had had little experience with this sort of woman, agreed that the shoichet had taken the wisest course possible in not arguing the point with his wife but quietly going his own way.
“Of course,” continued Chaim, “there is the question of whether it is right for a man in my position to continue dealing with such a man. But I do not honestly think that it is up to me to judge him. In his dealings with me he has always been fair. He is not a very elevated type, it is true, but I have also seen signs at times that he has not a bad heart.”
“He took me in. He gave me work,” said Abraham. “He is not the first man to make a fool of himself over women. At least he came back. He has some sense of responsibility toward his family. To some it may seem strange that a man in your position and with your education would still continue to deal with him, but those are the ones that, no matter what you do, somehow they will find you in the wrong. What good will it do him if decent people ignore him altogether? Then he would have no one to learn from. Let them look in on their own sins; then they will not have time to point at others’.”
“That is true,” Chaim agreed. He liked the way this man talked. “I can see that you too have studied a little.”
“A little, by myself,” said Abraham modestly. “My life has not allowed me much time for study. But what a man does not learn in the books he makes up for in his dre
ams.”
Now the shoichet talked to him quite freely of things that were of interest and importance. This man looked to be someone that one could indeed bring home, provided that one had a real home to bring him to. And even if one didn’t have a proper home, what difference? He did not appear to be a man with airs. That was what Sarah needed, people around her to talk to her, to force her out of herself. The sight of her sometimes as he turned and saw her sitting there, unmoving, her eyes distant and dream-haunted, wrenched his heart.
Perhaps if they had a real home of their own for her to putter about in, to clean and wash and work about, it might help. This question of a home had begun to bother Abraham. Maybe in the spring, or, at the very latest, in the summer. To leave without any ill will, any argument. Some second-hand furniture, two rented rooms and a kitchen, separate – that was important, private, so that they could get to know one another again. It was necessary to be a family, no matter how small. The house was not, after all, destroyed.
“You will be having your kittens tonight,” said Chaim Knopp. “Your cat is having an early spring.”
“Good luck to her, I say.” Polsky chuckled. “It means she’ll have a long summer ahead of her.”
Chaim Knopp reverted to a topic that they had been discussing. As he spoke he watched thoughtfully while his diminutive black-shod foot traced delicate whorls and swirls in the sawdust. “Yes, it’s true, when you first come to a strange country everyone else looks so big, so assured. And you feel yourself so small, so lonely, such a pintele Yid. I remember yet from twenty-five years ago, when I first brought my family over.”
“And you’ve grown since you arrived, Chaim, eh?” Polsky, to whom the serious attitude of the two men toward questions of little importance to him was extremely amusing, laughed. He himself had come to the country when he was still a child, which made him practically a native.
The other day he had given Laiah a very funny description of a conversation between the two, imitating in turn Abraham’s deep voice, his stance, his beard, which he tucked into his collar to avoid contact with the meat; and Chaim’s singsong voice, his bright brown eyes blinking, and his pointed beard making jabs in the air as he spoke. Laiah had laughed and laughed and then shown her appreciation in another way that he found very gratifying. But the person that you make fun of or criticize or tell stories about is always a different person from the one you meet again next day, Polsky found with a twinge of unlooked-for embarrassment when he met Abraham’s level stare again in the morning. Their laughter was not visible on him, had left no scars. There was something about Abraham, thought Polsky; yes, there certainly was. Nine more like him, and he’d have a real high-class minyan in his shop. That was something to tell Laiah, a good crack.
That Laiah, devil that she was, after hearing all his stories had begun to take a bit of an interest in his hired man herself. Now when she came into the shop she headed straightway for Abraham and stood there, flirting and rolling her hips at him. It was the beard, she told Polsky, the beard that she wanted to tangle her fingers into.
Whatever it was, Avrom wasn’t biting. You’d think he didn’t know what she was at. Come to think of it, maybe he didn’t. It rather pleased Polsky to think that Abraham didn’t know, or chose not to know. There were some types she didn’t know about. But she didn’t have much time to spend worrying about it. Their little escapade, through which they had both come impudently unscathed, had attracted the attention of men whose incomes stretched nicely across her imagination. Well, good luck to you. He felt the smugness of the early bird. They could have what he left over, Polsky decided generously. Chuckling away to himself, he turned his attention to his cash register.
He wanted to buy his wife a present. He prided himself that he never forgot those little attentions which keep a woman happy. The electric gadget that he had set his mind on had fairly recently come on the market and was quite expensive. The most unobtrusive way of collecting the money was to take an amount at random out of the cash register every few days, putting it down as expenses and forgetting about it. It was simpler and less troublesome than to wait until he had done his accounts and then deduct from his profits, which he always found harder to do. There were always other things that he wanted to do with the money then. Besides, his wife got a slice of his profits for running the household, and it seemed like too much to give her at one time.
“Do you know,” Abraham said to Chaim, feeling, as he began, as he always did when he told about this, as though he were making an important confession, “I myself once had to slaughter an animal, and in the ritual way?”
Chaim looked at him in astonishment. “But you are not a shoichet.”
“Ah,” said Abraham. “That’s just the point. Nor was I ever intended to be. I will tell you what kind of rascals there are in the world. It happened in our town, when I was yet an apprentice. At this time there was no shoichet living in the town. Whenever we needed meat we had to send to a town some twenty versts away for their shoichet. You can imagine that it was an expense. A man comes from twenty versts away, his journey costs him money, time, trouble. Of course the butcher did not lose by it, he merely charged that much more for the meat, and so it went.
“Well, I had been out to the slaughter already several times. I had often enough seen the killing done. As an apprentice I was being taught how to clean out the carcass and divide the sections. You remember how it was in the old country – a butcher had to know everything. I would come with my master, and when the shoichet was through with an animal we would be waiting to do our work. Those were not the days I looked forward to. You know yourself how unpleasant it can be to mess about with the sticky warmth of a fresh carcass, and the smell.
“On this day my master and I took the tools and went down to the slaughter. When we got there there was an excitement. The cattle dealer was rushing up and down and tearing his beard. What were they to do? It was already late, and word had just been received that the shoichet had been waylaid and beaten up and robbed on the road, and had had to return home for treatment. My master and one or two of the other butchers stood together and discussed the situation. They wanted the meat. What could they do? Amongst the group of them my master stood out as the leader. It was he who spoke heatedly and longest. I stood off a ways, but I could see that he was driving some sort of a bargain, for finally they each one of them dug into his pocket and gave my master some money. Then they turned and left, calling out that they would be back in a little while to see if the shoichet had arrived.
“My master and I remained with only the helpers and the dealer. I stood there, puzzling it out, feeling a vague apprehension growing in me. Why had the butchers talked of returning to see if the shoichet had come, when they themselves had heard that he would not be coming?
“My master climbed onto the shoichet’s platform. When he called me up to the platform I think I already felt what he was about. I trembled in every part of me.
“He took the knife and looked around him at the few of us who stood there. He was a man who was much feared in town as a fighter, and never had he looked more fearful to me, even though I had often before felt the weight of his palm.
“ ‘Perhaps it is written,’ he said, ‘that only a shoichet may slaughter an animal. That may be; of course I am not much of a reader myself. But I am as pious as any man. I too know the blessing, and I too know the ritual method. Who is to say that in the eyes of God I am not as much of a shoichet as the next man, if I please to be?’ He looked around again fiercely, making a gesture with the hand that held the knife. Who, indeed, would gainsay him at that moment? For myself, I think I was paralyzed by the blasphemy and the knowledge of what he intended to do. I was not more than a child. Can you imagine what a moment this was for me? It would have been different if the town were desperate for meat. What may not a starving man do? But this was greed.
“I watched the life gush from the first cow. It died in precisely the same manner as others that I had seen that
were slaughtered by the proper hands. He had not boasted unduly. He knew the words and the method. This was not unusual. I too was familiar with the prayer and with the method of the shoichet. I had seen it often enough.
“In this way he slaughtered two of the cows. Each time I stood beside him and wiped the bleeding knife and held it until he was ready. By the time they brought the third animal my master was in a jovial mood. All was going well with him. In one stroke he was making a fine profit. He had earned the shoichet’s fee, and could still charge the same price for the meat when he sold it. And none who were present would dare to whisper of it, or if they dared to whisper none would dare to state it aloud. Who would risk the vengeance of the butchers? And would whispers affect the town’s hunger? The Jews of the town would not eat the meat if someone came right out and said it was not kosher. But against the whisper of rumor their stomachs had a hungrier and a louder whisper.
“You can imagine how I felt, I who had been brought up by a pious mother to live in the way of the godly. But my trial had not yet begun. When they brought up the third beast my master turned to me as though to take the knife from my hand. Then I realized that he was looking strangely into my eyes, which were wide with wonder and fear. He started to laugh. I can hear him now.
“ ‘What are you afraid of? It’s not hard. Come,’ he shouted as though this idea had just come to him. ‘You are my apprentice. You must learn this shoichet business too!’ He seized me by the shoulders and turned me to face the animal. I looked back at him in horror, but I could see by the way he glared at me that he meant what he said. His hands clamped into my shoulders. Long afterward I could feel the bruises. ‘You remember the prayer. Well, why should I do all the work?’
“I was afraid of my master, afraid to look back to where his eyes threatened and his fists clenched against his hips. I was afraid of his voice that commanded me. Perhaps it is wrong of me to think so, but I have always felt that that was my real Bar Mitzvah. When I had my Bar Mitzvah, in the synagogue, with half the town there facing me, and I choking the words in my throat, it was a great moment, and I felt that I was really becoming a man. But it was not until after I had been forced to take a life that I really changed and was no longer a child. Not only did I see in that moment the depths of baseness in a man, but when I turned, trembling, to face the beast, I approached another mystery. Who has to take a life stands alone on the edge of creation. Only God can understand him then. I looked about me for Him to deliver me. My master shouted at me to begin the ritual prayer. I could hear him dimly, shouting the first few words. His finger jabbed into my back. I started to whisper the prayer that I had heard so often from the shoichet. I felt as though I had suddenly been taken out of myself, as though this moment did not really exist and as though it had existed forever, as though it had never begun and would never end. Where had this happened to me before? I looked at the knife in my hand. Something in me pushed it away, pushed it away, but it lay there quietly, more real than any knife I had ever seen, the stains of blood already there, irrevocably waiting.
The Sacrifice Page 4