The Sacrifice

by Adele Wiseman

  “In the town the peasants and the townspeople are preparing for their Easter. They are beginning to be restless. The church bells ring more often, and the priests call them for meetings. Suddenly, from nowhere, a troop of cossacks appears. It is quartered in a neighboring village, but the cossacks wander about everywhere in the town. The goyim look at the Jews. The Jews start to look at each other. The air becomes harder to breathe. At night I crawl into my root cellar and bury my valuables, some here, some there, as my mother used to do. Everything that is small enough is hidden away. Other Jews that I know slip silently out of town, those that have a stronger premonition. We begin to be happy that Jacob and Moses are away. We barricade our doors at night and go as little as we can out onto the streets. We do not let Isaac out of our sight. Above the neighboring grocery store three families have gathered together and have already barricaded themselves in. There is a quietness in the town that is not of sleep. Still, Sarah prepares for Passover and we help her about the house, hoping that nothing will really happen this time. But in bed we lie awake and listen and wait.

  “On their Good Friday evening the Christ dies. The church bells begin to clamor, and at the signal the cossacks come thundering into the town. The church doors burst open, and the goyim surge into the street, looking for Jews. Your neighbor is no longer your neighbor. A fiend has possessed him. Is this a man? No. He reveals what is inside of him, a beast.

  “For three nights and days the church bells ring, and for three nights and days we hide. First of all the townsfolk lead the cossacks to the grocer’s. The house is dark. They start to shout up at the Jews. They have been told that the families are hiding there. They make loud jokes and tease them to come out. Inside the house remains dark and silent. Those within – you can imagine how they clutch each other and pray. Then the crowd grows noisier. They start to shout and curse up at the house. Our neighbors, the townsmen, egg the cossacks on. A group of townspeople run to get kerosene and fagots. The cossacks set fire to these. All night the house blazes. Those inside are trapped by their own barricade. The night is filled with screaming. It vies with the church bells for an audience in heaven.

  “That was the first. All night they go from house to house. What are our barricades to them? What are our lives to them? Barbarians. Mikhail Michlosky invited me to the wedding of his son. We drank wine together. They told me afterward that he was one of the worst of them.

  “In the meantime we find our way to the home of a peasant with whom I have dealt for years. His wife takes us in and hides us in the vegetable cellar. For three days and four nights in all we are in darkness. From time to time the farmer or his wife brings us water. We eat dirty carrots and raw potatoes. But that is nothing. At least here we know, frightening though it is to spend all this time in darkness, breathing rank air – especially for the child – at least we know that we are safe for now. Then, on the fourth morning, they come to tell us that all is still. The Jews are beginning to return to the town. Christ is sated.

  “We emerge from the cellar as from the tomb. We are alive again, but even the light seems hostile to us. For a while we are nearly blind. It hurts us to see. Perhaps, after all, now that I think of it, the light was our friend and wanted to shield us. I say a prayer because we have survived. We wonder how long it will take to get word from the boys that there has been no pogrom at the seminary. The streets of the town are nearly empty. The townspeople are sleeping off their orgy, or perhaps they are tired from their exertions and care only to stay within and fondle their loot. Who can understand the minds of barbarians? The cossacks, too, are gone. A few Jews like ourselves hurry back to see what has become of their homes. We greet each other but scarcely speak. There is still smoke in the air from the fires.

  “On the way to the center of town we are met by a neighbor of ours. When she sees us she bursts into tears and runs past us. I call after her, ‘Rachel, what is it? Whom have you lost?’ She does not stop, does not answer. My wife begins to cry. My heart is suddenly heavy. As we walk toward the square we see a knot of people gathered. They are looking upward. On two long – I don’t know what they were – poles, something is hanging, two bodies. Something in my heart gives a – a rip. I start to run toward the crowd. Ahh-h-h!”

  Abraham moaned as though something were strangling him. He looked away from Chaim. His fingers worked convulsively in his beard. His throat was constricted and painful so that he had to speak slowly. His face was red, and there was sweat on his temples.

  “Can you imagine what good boys they were?” There was an edge of pride in his voice. “To walk all that way. Money they didn’t have. Their shoes were worn through. All that way to be with us for Passover. How fine, how fine. What could have possessed them? Why couldn’t they have stayed at the seminary this one Passover? Pesach comes – every year. Foolish boys. Oh no, not foolish, my sons – my fair fruit. To give us pleasure, to be with us. For one year we could have done without it, and still have that pleasure now. It’s useless to argue. It’s done, it’s done. Can you wonder that she stands now, Sarah, in one place for so long, and forgets what and where? And for the boy to see this!”

  Abraham got up. He wiped his hand across his face. He walked to the corner of the synagogue and stood for a moment, looking across the street toward his house. For a few moments he moved about aimlessly, quickly, back and forth. Sweat and tears ran down his face. His arms moved as though he had no longer any control over them. Chaim could think of nothing to say.

  Finally Abraham sat down again. “We thought that my wife had died right then,” he resumed in a voice that was, for him, quiet. “The women carried her away. I remained with the men to cut down my sons. For a while this problem occupied all of my thoughts: how to get them down without hurting them. As though they could be hurt any more. They had been clever to get them up so high. I don’t know what happened to Isaac. I think he ran first to his mother and then back to me, and could not find a place for himself. I know that when we brought the bodies back to the house he was beside me.

  “Well? Death cuts a gap in life. Suddenly you see nothing, the pit. A piece is wrenched away from you. An arm? A leg? No. These you can do without. A piece of your soul. A piece of what ties you to God. The death of a friend makes you think. It makes you look about you and wonder that your own life goes on. You must put your life together again differently, without his smile, without his hopes. When I was young I heard that a friend of mine had died.”

  Abraham spoke more quickly now that he was speaking impersonally. He was regaining control of his voice.

  “A young boy, too. I had to remind myself time and again that now I must no longer ask, ‘And what has become of Daniel? Has he learned to dance yet, or does he still knead the dough with his feet?’ He was not even a good friend. I didn’t even like him particularly. Still, he was young. Who cannot pity the delicate green things that die? In the end I told myself that God knew best whom to take and whom to leave. It was not for me to argue His decisions. So Daniel gradually became just a boy who died. And after him there were others – sickness, pogroms. God knew best. My mission was my family, to bring up my sons. And what sons they were! What could not a great singer and a great scholar have done for our people?

  “It was meant to be. We cut them down and brought them home for burial. We laid them on the floor that they had first crawled upon. In the next room my wife lay as dead. Isaac went from room to room. A friend wanted to take him home with her, but he would not go. Finally he fell asleep on the floor in a corner of the room with his mother.

  “The house was empty. The furniture was broken. Some of it had been carted away. The samovar that I had tried to hide was gone, and so were clothes, cutlery, and, as I discovered later, some of the things that I had buried. Even the pictures on the wall, of my father and mother and sons, had been ripped. I saw all this clearly. My head was clear and empty. I saw all and felt nothing – nothing but an emptiness of the heart, as though my heart had gone to hide from what it
had seen.

  “What more can be said? To give such sons is to make a promise. To take them away again, and in such a way – I felt it was unholy. I was mad. I turned, in my heart, away from God. I felt that my soul was gone. All I had now was my frantic body. All I wanted was to move, to run run run. My body screamed to wear out all its movements in violence and to drop down in a heap, unfeeling, somewhere, anywhere.

  “I started to sell everything that was left: my buried valuables, my little shop. Anything to get away. On the streets some goyim turned away when they saw me. Others wanted to make it as though nothing had happened. I said nothing. I looked at them. If God was not human, how could they be expected to be?”

  Chaim looked up at him. “You turned away from God?”

  “So,” said Abraham, “but not now. When I speak of it my blood surges about. Another time.”

  For a few moments they were silent. Above them evening had dimmed the sky, and night was beginning to throw its long shadows. Isaac came around the corner, looking for his father. They watched him approach.

  “My life,” said Abraham. They rose and went to meet him.

  FOUR

  There certainly was a great deal of vulgarity in the shop, Isaac discovered; more than his father realized. The men and girls in the stuffy factory, which smelled of sweating bodies, were very free and easy together. Not that much was meant, in general. Sometimes Isaac himself thought of something to say that was clever and vulgar. But the vulgarity wasn’t limited to the workers. Everybody in the shop knew that the big boss himself had only two joys in life: penny-pinching and fanny-pinching.

  There were fights in the shop too, between the workers – sometimes over the work, sometimes over vulgarities that were said too sincerely and taken as insults. One of the girls had thrown a pair of cutting scissors at one of the men halfway across the room, because of something he had said. Luckily the scissors had only caught his scalp lightly, but there had been a big gash and much blood. They had had to call a doctor to treat the girl for hysterics. That was a month ago. Now the two were engaged to be married, and a collection had been taken up among the workers for a wedding present.

  The work itself was not what he had expected. It was not as in the old country. There, when you learned a trade you learned it all. A tailor was a tailor, from the first snip of the scissors to the last button. Here he couldn’t call himself a tailor. If he could have made a pair of pants, a jacket, it would have been something – out of his hands, something whole. But from the first day when he had sat down at the machine, months ago, to the present, he was on pockets. Sometimes, for a variation, it was belt facings – but mostly pockets. Isaac had a fantasy that had occurred to him during those months when the pockets had sped at an increasing tempo from his machine.

  Someday I’ll stand before God, and He’ll say to me, “What can you do to get into heaven?” And I’ll say to Him, “God, I can make You a pair of pockets.” And He’ll say, “I’m sorry, I’m a working man. I have no time to keep my hands in my pockets.”

  There were many thoughts that went through Isaac’s mind as he worked. They came as though drawn out by the loud, whirring machine. Sometimes they set him smiling and chuckling to himself. Or else they were warm and promising and he’d glance up from his work, blushing. Then there were the gloomy thoughts that so often settled over him, those that went beyond laughter and love and that stopped and hovered over the uncertainty of life.

  Of late he had taken to reading more and more books from the English library. That was something that his father approved of. Books were to make something fine of him, an educated man. The Hebrew and the Yiddish books weren’t enough. They dealt with past things, old solutions. Perhaps these books could answer the questions about his life, about people, the questions that sorely needed answering. But the books, though they pulled him further and further into themselves, brought him no closer to certainties. Neither, when he turned from them to his life, was there any certainty. What new friend could yield him an answer to his unvoiced question, “You, are you good or bad?” What action could answer definitely to the demand, “Are you right or wrong?”

  Good and bad, right and wrong had been connected with childhood. When had he been a child last? Reluctantly Isaac remembered Nikolai Korodin and his wife, Manya. In the middle of the night his father had knocked on the back door. The dogs had not barked at them when they entered the yard because they knew his father and the scraps of meat from the butcher shop too well. Without a word Manya, in her long nightdress and her cap, had led them in the darkness to the root cellar. She had let them in and closed the door behind them. Ah, but she had looked funny. In the cellar he had had long spasms of helpless laughter that exploded from between his clenched teeth and ran out of his eyes. His parents had thought that it was fear and hysterics. Perhaps it had been, a little bit. The cellar was blacker than night, because it was closed and night is open. It was stuffy and cramped, and there was little air, but vegetable smell and earth. Not until much later did Nikolai bring water and bread.

  It was such a long time to be in the darkness. There had been only the feel of his father and mother to protect him from all the shapes he sensed. There were moments when the fear had made him feel as though he were suffocating, unable to catch his breath, and had put stitches in his heart. The air had grown worse and worse, as though they were being buried deeper and deeper. Always there had been the double hope and fear, the hope that Nikolai would come at last and open the door, perhaps to bring food, or just to get some vegetables. Carrots, Isaac had prayed. Let them want carrots. Then when he imagined that noises approached there was the sudden stifling fear that it would be someone else, some monster come for them. As the time crept by, another fear gradually grew in him. What if Nikolai and Manya would never let them go? What if they intended to keep them locked in here forever?

  Nikolai or his wife came to them only in the night, for the neighbors must not know. When he opened the door Isaac strained past him to see if there were really stars left, to catch a glimpse of something – any shapeless thing in the yard to try to focus his eyes on. He took great rasping breaths of air that filled his lungs to the coughing point. Then Nikolai shushed him and he felt his father’s hand grip tightly his own. But it was so good.

  On the fourth morning the door was wrenched open. “It’s safe now. Get out quickly!”

  They crawled from the cellar, unable to move quickly, although Nikolai urged them on. What a cramp his body was! How his eyes ached – unbearable shooting pains from the sudden light! How dazed, yet how good he felt! It was safe now, Nikolai had said. How good Nikolai was, in spite of his gruffness and the rough haste with which he had helped to pull them out of the cellar. As he walked along the lane, a little behind his father, who was cautiously advancing, he had to keep pressing his fists in his eyes to ease the hurt. But he thought of Nikolai and Manya, of how different they were from the others.

  Even after he had seen what waited for them in the square, after all of the terrible events had unfolded themselves, he had remembered Nikolai and Manya; at least they were good. He had clung to the idea. Why were they good? What was it that had made them different? On the street they looked no different. Nikolai was a surly peasant. They weren’t half as friendly as Mikhail Michlosky, who, everybody said, had led the cossacks to the grocery store. Yet there it was. The thought of them remained like a streak of light in the darkness.

  The darkness. In the middle of the night he had awakened and crept to the door of the living room, where his parents sat mourning on the floor by the bodies of his brothers. He did not want to go in to where his brothers, who had lain beside him, lay; but he was a man too, and this was his place. And besides, he did not want to stay in this room by himself with the broken furniture and the torn pictures and the walls that had also been mutilated in the search for plunder. He had crept into the living room and sat down on the floor beside his father.

  As he watched, his eyes swollen and he
avy, he caught his brothers breathing once or twice under the heavy velvet cloth. Aha! he thought – fooling me, pretending. Before he fell asleep against his father’s shoulder he smiled at the sheets. Soon they would throw them off. They would stand up and smother the candles that threw horrible shadows on the wall and on the faces of those who sat beside them. When they laughed he would tell them that it was not a good joke. It was a time, even after they were buried, before he fully realized that there would be no more joking between them – not until after they went to say good-by to Nikolai Korodin and Manya.

  There had been such an agitated, silent bustle of preparation to leave. He had scarcely even left the house by himself. His father didn’t want him to. When he saw his friend Menasha it had been as though from a great distance. Menasha had looked at him with such timidity and respect that he had felt himself completely set apart. Menasha, he knew, had lost only an uncle.

  Only once did he and Menasha get together again as of old, in Menasha’s back yard. Menasha, to say something, had suddenly said a swear word. Isaac followed suit with another. Then together they solemnly called forth every curse they knew to fall on the heads of their enemies. It surprised them how many oaths they knew, and how easily they could say the ones they had always known but had never dared use before. But they dared now. So long as they didn’t shout loudly enough to bring out Menasha’s mother, who would have indignantly put an end to their cursing with a sharp flow of oaths of her own because she didn’t want her son to grow up a grobion, a vulgarian, they were both safe. They stood there, facing each other, standing with their legs apart, as though to brace themselves against the shock the world would have at their words, and heaved their mighty oaths. The sound of their own words had a heady effect on them. Excited, they repeated themselves, elaborating their curses until it became a sort of contest between them. Finally, his ingenuity exhausted, Isaac burst into indignant sobs. Menasha, in sympathy, broke into tears as well.