“As my tongue stumbled over the words of the prayer I blinked at the creature, trying to understand that it was going to die, and by my hand. I looked up, searching the sky that wafted down the pleasant air, and the sky crowded into my eyes piercingly, blindingly. Inside of me I could hear someone crying – so strange, so isolated. A living creature is different from the dead meat that I was used to handling. The difference frightened me. In front of me the cow was looking downward in a sort of modesty, with her eyelids covering her eyebulbs, which seemed so fine and large under their veil.
“ ‘Well, are you asleep?’ my master shouted. The noise startled the cow, and she looked up at me. Her eye was large and brown and moist, and very deep. It made me dizzy to look. I closed my eyes and fell upon her. Will I ever forget that moment? It was as though I too were sinking with the knife. It was, as I have said, as though I were somewhere between living and dying. Not until I saw that the creature was dead did I realize that I was still alive. I have wondered since if that is what our forefathers felt when they made the sacrifices to renew their wonder and their fear and their belief, before they were forbidden to make them any longer. It is a mystery too deep for man.”
Abraham broke off, and he and Chaim were still for a moment, while Chaim shook his head from side to side and Abraham nodded his up and down.
“Well, what happened?” Polsky leaned forward over the counter. “Did they catch him out or did the butchers get away with it? What difference did it make to the people,” he answered himself, “as long as they thought it was kosher?”
“The villain,” said Chaim. “The villain!”
“At first my master laughed at me because I stood there crying, with the knife bleeding in my hand. And then he began to shout at me to stop blubbering. But the dealer took my part and scolded him for forcing me to do the slaughter. Still, before I left he dug down into my shoulders again to let me know what would happen if I told anyone about this.”
“Did you?” asked Polsky.
“When I went home I flung myself down and wept, and at first would tell my mother nothing. And when she asked me I shouted at her that my father had not meant for me to become a butcher. My poor mother wept with me, protesting that neither would she have wanted it so. Finally I told her everything. We must go to the synagogue! We must denounce the butchers! But my mother would not hear of this. Who would protect us? What can a poor widow do? The butchers could kill us all and no one would raise a finger. She made me swear I would say nothing.”
“Ah.” Polsky looked relieved. “Well, what could you do? To those who ate it the meat tasted no different.”
Chaim cast a reproachful glance at Polsky. “Of course, you could do nothing.”
Abraham shook his head. “I don’t know. I know that my master was punished. A few years later he had his skull split in an argument with another butcher. Perhaps God has punished me too for not denouncing the butchers.”
“But what of your mother and your sisters?” said Chaim.
“That is what I felt.” Abraham sighed. “Yet it is hard to know the will of God. And would the people have believed me? I have since learned a great deal about men. But that’s the story. I have often wondered since then if a shoichet has any such feelings as I had when I killed that beast. Or was it merely because I should not have done it that I felt as though there were strange doors on the verge of opening for me. There are thoughts that draw a man in spite of himself. How often have I wished that I had a proper education. You are a fortunate man to know why you must do what you do. For me it was a terrible thing, but for you your work is a vocation with a purpose. I don’t suppose that you, with your knowledge, could ever have felt this way.”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t even remember the first time I had to slaughter. It has become such a habitual thing,” explained Chaim. “I know that each day when I wake up I will have to kill so many chickens, and, if not, what will I eat? I think that if you have to do it every day it is better this way. You don’t waste time over it but cut cleanly, and it is over with. You were young, and it was something new and unexpected. I can imagine how you felt. Ah, those villains, God has repaid them, you can be sure of that. As for me, I was trained for it. It’s my profession. Mind you I have always preferred to do circumcisions. It’s more delicate work. Yes, I was trained to do circumcisions too. But people need chickens more often than they have sons, so economics have driven me to concentrate on chickens.
“Although, between you and me, I can’t understand personally what people see in chickens. Myself I can’t eat them. I can’t stand the smell. You work around them all day, and they squawk you a headful; then to have to eat them at your meals too, it’s just too much.
“I remember in the old country how my heart used to sink when a man would come to me and say, ‘Here now, Chaim, I can’t afford to pay you money now, so if you kill these five chickens for me you can keep the sixth one.’ Well, can you refuse? So I’d kill the five chickens, and all afternoon I’d wonder whether I could sneak away and sell the sixth one to a peasant at the market.
“But my wife has eyes on her. She’d come into the shack as though she had smelled that chicken out, and she’d say, ‘Chaim, and who’s that chicken for, the one struggling in the bag?’ And I’d say, ‘What one? It’s just a chicken.’ And she’d say, ‘Ah, Chaim, did someone pay you in chicken again?’ And I’d have to nod my head.
“Sometimes I would ask her hopefully, ‘Maybe you’d like to run down to the market for me, Bassieh, and try to sell it. We could buy meat.’
“ ‘Meat?’ she used to say. ‘What are you talking about, meat? Everybody buys meat. Even the poorest family buys a little meat occasionally. But they hoard their chickens for special occasions.’
“When you kill a chicken and the rest set up a din, everybody for miles around says, ‘Those rich Jews, all the chickens that fellow has running around.’ My wife, this makes her a grande dame, even if sometimes there’s no bread to eat the chicken with. Everybody else eats chicken only on holidays, and we can have it nearly every day.
“ ‘Remember,’ she used to say, ‘anyone who walks into the house can see a table spread and a fine chicken laid out. Only yesterday the rabbi dropped in with his wife, that stuck-up, and I was roasting the chickens that Shloimehle left you, and believe me, this time she held her nose in the air for a different reason.’
“ ‘But Bassieh, I don’t like chicken.’
“ ‘You’re always saying you don’t like chicken. But yesterday, when the rabbi and his wife let themselves be persuaded to sit down with us, you didn’t say a word.’
“ ‘Maybe I didn’t say a word in front of others, Bassieh, but I’m warning you, one of these days I’m going to set up such a crowing!’
“A lot of good it did me. If I didn’t manage to sneak out to the market I’d choke on chicken.”
“Well,” said Abraham, who was rather surprised that such a dignified little man as Chaim should have such a wife, “and you still have to eat it?”
“No – sometimes, perhaps, the occasional spring. Now that her son’s a manufacturer she’s too busy learning the modern ways. She entertains now. You know, this entertaining. When I come home there are ladies with colds in their noses drinking tea. She serves them fancy little sandwiches and lets them know that her son’s a manufacturer and that Lucy married a doctor and Paulia married a rich man’s son. Mind you, she’s a good woman, my wife – don’t think I’m criticizing her, you’ve got to accept your luck – but she is apt to blow herself up a little, now that the children are doing so well.”
He had educated children, this shoichet. Well, in that way Abraham himself did not have to be ashamed. But how did one tell a man who could say to you, “Look, this is my son, he does such and such, lives in such and such a place; here are my daughters, they are married to such and such”? How could one tell him of this son who already was and might have been, and that son who also was and should have been? Th
ere remained only one, and he was yet to be what had been ultimately intended for him. He felt himself very much drawn to this shoichet. They had much in common. How he would like to tell someone, to let it all come flooding out of him, to tell someone who might understand – and sympathize a little, perhaps. Much as he knew that no sympathy would be adequate and that he would remain as before, with the fullness of it only stirred about in his mind, the desire was on him to talk. To whom to talk? It was too easy to remind Sarah, to send her mind spinning back, too hard to make her forget again. And Isaac had a life to create ahead of him. One could not, because of one’s own need, force a youngster on the brink of life to reminisce with the dead.
“Do you know,” Chaim was saying, “that there is a trend nowadays against having the mohel perform circumcisions any more? There are actually doctors in town that went especially to learn the blessings.”
“What?” said Abraham.
“Yes. It hurts that they don’t trust us any more. Sometimes I feel like asking these young mothers, ‘Did we do any wrong to your husbands?’ They talk such nonsense. They say our instruments aren’t clean. They say our beards get in the way. We have to live in fear that somebody might start a rumor that our hands shake. I’ve heard of a case. And once that happens –” Chaim shrugged. “But what’s the use of talking? The ceremony isn’t what it used to be, either. Remember how it was with us? A boy is born – we used to dance on the rooftops! When did they use to send a mohel away sober?”
“The mohel only?” Abraham laughed. “Three times in my life have I drunk the casks dry. Three births.”
“Times have changed.” Chaim sighed. “Places have changed. We must dance to the tune of the stranger.”
THREE
Abraham looked the place over, inquired about rent, and made all the necessary calculations before he broached the subject to his family. It was an old semidetached gray wood bungalow with a small open veranda, two feet of front lawn, a bedroom for himself and his wife, a living room that could be partly curtained off to make a bedroom for Isaac, and a kitchen. It already had a woodstove and an old wooden table in the kitchen. The woodstove they could pay for in installments. The table the landlord said he would throw in with the woodstove. There was a summer kitchen to store things in, and a small cellar that was reached by a trapdoor in the kitchen and housed the furnace.
The house, Abraham considered, was very low on the ground, and with no large cellar the cold would come up through the floors in the winter. But if he kept the furnace well stoked – and in addition there was the woodstove – they could make it do. To look at, it was shabby. The kitchen floor needed linoleum, and the whole would be pitifully bare at first. But gradually they could fill it in with furniture, paint a little bit, make it fresh. There were things a man could do himself in a place like this. And Sarah would find an outlet too, fixing and cleaning.
Before mentioning his plans, Abraham made a few visits to second-hand stores, priced one or two iron-frame bedsteads, speculated about a new mattress, and carefully inspected an old davenport that didn’t look too bright but seemed to have some spring left.
All in all, the idea seemed good. How much longer could the three of them squeeze their bodies and their personalities into Mrs. Plopler’s big room? Of course it would run into a bit of money, but rent he would have to pay anywhere. So long as he was working – and Isaac too brought in a little money from his paper-carrier’s route. Not that Abraham had spent a cent of it for themselves. Everything that the boy turned over went behind the counter into the bank. Isaac would need it someday.
The more he thought of it, the more he felt that it was absolutely necessary to move. Of late the landlady, for lack of anything else to occupy her mind with, had taken to watching Isaac and her girls. She had told both Sarah and Abraham on separate occasions, in conspiratorial whispers, that the youngsters were of an age where it was dangerous for them to be too familiar too much of the time. Doctors said – She didn’t enlarge on what doctors said, but shrugged and sighed. “Well, it’s nature.”
Abraham had told her that Isaac was old enough to take care of himself, that he trusted his son, and that he hoped she could feel the same way about her daughters. Mrs. Plopler was horrified that he could think that she might mean such a thing. It wasn’t that at all. Still, she managed to appear from unexpected places when Isaac was valiantly holding English conversation with the girls, and her smile and attitude paralyzed the boy’s shy tongue into silence.
Abraham took his family to look at the house. The landlord occupied the other half of it, but there were separate front doors and separate verandas, with a solid veranda wall between that insured them a certain amount of privacy even on the porch. There was a back yard too, which could easily yield a small vegetable plot, once they had moved the garbage can farther back and cleared away the litter of wooden crates. The landlord’s half of the back yard was almost completely occupied by a makeshift garage pieced together of boards, bits of corrugated tin, and old soft-drink advertisements. But he had promised to let them pile the crates on the garage if they wanted to. Crates and garage were necessary to his business, the landlord had explained importantly to Abraham, who now repeated it to his family, though he could not tell Isaac what this business was, since it had not occurred to him to inquire.
“Well?” Abraham turned cheerfully to his son as they paused for a second time to admire the window that was set in the front door. It was made up of pieces of colored glass cut in fancy patterns, and with the light from the outside shining on it, it threw colored shadows on the coat rack in the front hall. “What do you think, Isaac? Shall we take it?”
Isaac studied the window, aware that for the first time he was being asked to share the burden of an adult decision, and that the time was coming when he would have to make one for himself. “I think so,” he said seriously.
—
Mrs. Plopler was not certain of how she should react. Sarah, with inspired tact, partly solved the landlady’s dilemma by making her a partner in the decision. She was invited to an inspection of the new premises before they moved in. She was assured that she would always be a welcome guest. She was consulted as to the best type of coal for the furnace. By the time they left she had been won over and was even telling them why the move was a good idea.
“Of course, of course, I understand,” she would repeat. “You are after all a family. One room is not enough, even though it’s a very big room. It’s not very nice for a grown boy to have to sleep in the same room as his parents. It’s really a very nice little place you’ve found, even if it’s not in such a good district. But what can you do? You can only afford so much, after all. And it’s very nice that people who, after all, have not been in the country so very long, should be able to rent a little house for themselves. It was years before we moved out of our apartment into this house. Of course, we didn’t want to move until we found exactly what we wanted. The minute I saw it, I thought how lucky you are. What if there are a lot of bootleggers around there? Do you have to have anything to do with them? Of course we can be just as good friends as ever. It’s not so far, after all, although it’s what we call the real old flats. And if I am a little bit afraid of walking through those streets in the dark, then your husband can take me up a ways.”
Thus with a mixture of determined good nature and acidity Mrs. Plopler resigned herself to the loss of her tenants. All the same, she felt a little cheated, as though they had played a trick on her. It had all gone so smoothly, no disagreements, no arguments rising to a crescendo. It was almost as though the whole thing had happened behind her back.
When the time came and Abraham started to pull away at the borrowed handcart on which were piled the heavier of their recently accumulated belongings, while Isaac guided from behind, there were even a few tears from the landlady. Gertie and Goldie also watched from the steps. Isaac, with embarrassment, fancied what a funny picture he must make from behind as he leaned forward and pushed the clat
tering cart along. But he didn’t care so much now. The girls were quite happy to be seen on the street with him, he knew, in spite of the fact that he was a greenhorn. He was no longer so green as before. They might giggle occasionally at his accent, but they were silent when he mentioned books that they didn’t know.
Sarah carried the blessing of bread and salt into their new home and placed it on the kitchen table. Then they brought in their belongings. They left her to arrange things while they went with the borrowed handcart to collect first the davenport and afterward the dismantled frame bedstead. The new mattress was delivered later in the afternoon.
They brought in three boxes from the back yard to sit on while they ate their first meal in their new home.
“With my next week’s pay,” said Abraham gallantly, raising his glass of lemon tea, “I will invest in a chair for you, Sarah.”
The Sacrifice Page 5