That had been his farewell to Menasha, who was only a name now.
The day came when they went, all three of them, to see Nikolai Korodin and his wife, Manya. It was only right to take a ceremonious parting, although, of course, since they planned to steal across the border, not even Nikolai and Manya were to know that it was a parting. These people had saved their lives. Even though neither his father nor his mother seemed to care very much about this, still it meant something to show their gratitude.
Manya invited them into the house. Nikolai appeared from his orchard. They went into the living room, which was used only on special occasions. It had a stale smell that seemed to have been left over from a bygone celebration. The walls were painted with decorations in many colors. Peasants liked bright things. Their own was white with very little decoration. But of course they weren’t peasants. That smell must come from what they eat, Isaac guessed – pork.
Isaac wondered if Nikolai and Manya understood that they were there to thank them, that the large slab of cow that his father had brought with them was a thank offering. Of course they must. Yet he felt that something should be said as well. It was a time for words, a time to break down the restraint that seemed to hold his father and Nikolai to the topic of crops and the fruit orchard. Maybe his father was waiting for the moment. Isaac listened to the conversation and waited too, letting his eyes rove over the flowery walls. That was one thing about colors and ornaments: there was always something to look at.
Then Manya went into the kitchen to prepare some tea. No more bread and water. Isaac idly watched her move into the kitchen. Would the smell become stronger when she opened the kitchen door? Then he’d know it was pork. Through the open door of the kitchen Isaac recognized with a shock their own samovar that had disappeared during the pogrom. He felt an involuntary shudder run through him. It stood on the sideboard in the kitchen, to the left of the door. It was unmistakable. It had been his mother’s pride. It had stood her for a dowry when she had married. For a moment he felt panicky, as he had felt when he thought he heard alien footsteps outside the vegetable cellar. The room was suddenly filled with danger. He forced his eyes away from the kitchen. The bright walls began to close in on him. He tried to breathe, but his breath seemed to be caught on a jagged stitch in his chest. Had Nikolai seen that he’d noticed? He turned his head slowly around and glanced sideways at his father, who was listening to Nikolai. He saw in Abraham’s eyes that he too had seen. But Nikolai was concentrating on the slow rattling of his own words, punctuating them with a flat forefinger on the table. Isaac breathed slowly, easing his breath over the stitch. His father’s eyes, now perfectly blank, moved past his own, and he said something in answer to Nikolai. His mother was not looking at anything but sat still, her swollen eyes on nothingness. Isaac didn’t want to look toward the kitchen again. But in spite of himself his eyes kept slithering toward the kitchen door.
Then, thank heaven, Manya closed the door. Isaac felt a prickling all over his body, a nervous urging to get up and go – quickly, to run if necessary. But his father sat, impassive and calm. Of course they couldn’t go yet. It would give them away. It was as though they were the guilty ones and mustn’t give themselves away, mustn’t be caught knowing. He felt no indignation yet, nothing but fear and the automatic guilt of the prey.
Manya brought another samovar and served tea. Isaac’s mind had ceased to function, but he could feel the formal little scene that was enacted with few words in a frightening silence. Ages passed for him before they got up at last and said their good-bys. Ages passed before the relief of the open door. And for some reason when they passed through the open door the relief passed as well. As they walked toward the gate, with Nikolai’s dogs ambling along beside them, Isaac felt such a sudden sense of loss sweeping over him that it seemed that not until this moment had he really understood that his brothers were gone forever.
Perhaps for this reason he didn’t like to remember that visit to Nikolai – for the memory of Manya’s low-slung form in the bright dress disappearing into the kitchen, and the sight of the samovar; for that sense of desolation that came so vividly the moment he remembered the first breath of fresh air he had gulped when they left. That was where his father showed his superiority. Not even the mention of Nikolai’s name had ever crossed his lips again since that day. He had not appeared surprised or broken his silence even to condemn. Isaac had often wondered afterward whether his father had really seen.
In the years that had passed Isaac had often found himself thinking about it – not wanting to, but unwittingly finding that his mind had gone back to that point in time. He had thought it out over and over again; he had not even flinched, finally, from the idea that if Nikolai had been abroad on the nights of the pillaging, then he might have been there at the murders as well. Might he not even have taken part? Then why had he protected them? Here thought broke down. How could he accuse Nikolai of goodness? Better, like his father, forget the existence of the peasant. But he found him everywhere, even in the books. They too worked out a question carefully, so that in the end it became two questions, or three.
Why couldn’t he be like his father, keeping his eyes fixed somewhere, at a point, so that everything he saw had to mold itself to his perspective? Instead his eyes wavered from point to point, and nothing remained fixed under his stare but, moving, changed and revealed itself as something new. Even when he looked into himself, his own motives, the things he thought and the things he professed, he could see a thousand hidden sins. Thank goodness they didn’t know what he was really like, his parents – what a sickly son had been saved for them.
But he had been saved; that fact remained. He was alive. At least he was here to feel the mystery of life, its contradictions; to discover, perhaps, its possibilities. If he was confused often, at least sometimes he could sense vaguely what his father seemed to know for a certainty; that he was not here for nothing. There was something in him that rose up sometimes, a feeling, a longing, a power, an astonishment. Was this what his father knew – that there was a purity somewhere, in spite of Nikolai, in spite of himself and his degrading thoughts? There was something in life itself that his father had drawn him back to, that waited for him. He must go on from there.
—
When the butcher-shop cat had kittens again Abraham decided to take one home to his wife. The responsibility would be good for her. She needed something to take care of; something lively would cheer her up. Abraham, Chaim, and Polsky examined the litter carefully, trying to find a he-kitten in the bunch. Polsky subjected each yowling baby to a rude examination in his big red paw. The mother cat, gratified, turned over on her spine, raised her paws up, and lolled about, letting them admire her brood. Polsky teased Chaim because, after all, he should be an expert in these matters. Were they circumcising Jewish tomcats nowadays? And Polsky laughed, not particularly disturbed that they didn’t appreciate his belly-warmers.
They were still bent over the box when a customer came in. The customer pushed her bulk in next to Chaim. “That one’s a boy; the other two are girls,” she said immediately and positively.
“Of course.” Chaim beamed. “That’s what I thought.” He arose and carefully dusted his knee. “Let’s put a mark on him.”
They named it Pompishke – a kind of dumpling. Sarah was pleased. Live things, Abraham told himself, certainly liven up a house.
The house was destined for even more livening up. Shortly afterward Pompishke brought home a scrawny little kitten that no amount of wishful thinking could prove to their now experienced eyes was a male. They called it Knobble, which is garlic. “You can’t have pompishkes without knobble,” said Sarah with a sudden flash of humor that made Abraham feel that if there were ten cats they’d keep them all.
—
“To say that I lost my faith is not enough.” Weeks had passed since Abraham had begun to tell his story to Chaim, weeks during which he had not mentioned the subject. Once in the butcher shop Chaim had menti
oned it, but Abraham had waved it away with an odd expression on his face. “Not now, Chaim; another time.”
Now, on another Friday evening as they sat on the bench outside the synagogue and watched the children playing across the street, he continued as though he had not been interrupted by the passage of time.
“I lost my mind, my eyes that could see ahead of me. I did not merely desert Him, I became insolent. I spoke to Him, to say rudely is correct, but not merely rudely – with storm, with hatred.
“We fled blindly. We stole across the border to Poland. Everywhere I thought I saw how He had turned His hand against me – not merely against me, against all of Jewry.
“We were met at the border by Polish Jews who helped us to escape – helped us! Pious Jews with long sideburns and black frocks – they made a living of it. Big business. They stole the very stockings from the legs of my wife. Everything they saw they took. Of this too I accused Him. How He must despise us, to take my sons and let these grow to make us hated by all the world, to make us even hate ourselves.
“In Warsaw we stopped. Where to next? There was an ocean ahead of us. I wanted to plunge myself into it. Ha! All sorts of things go on in the world, whether you pay attention or not. And when you want to do something, suddenly they’re there. Countries want you, countries don’t. Who wants a Jew? This is our life, to hammer on doors.
“Here they wanted only farmers. So, I am a farmer. I started to make papers to go with my family as farmers. In the meantime I went to work. Papers cost money, and what I had left that I had saved from the various thieves was needed for papers and for the journey.
“The man I went to work for knew well that I was in need. He put me to work as though I were under the whip. I am not such a young man as I once was, when I was strong as a bull and could carry half a carcass as nothing. Sometimes of late I have begun to feel pains in my arms when I must lift a heavy section, and when I go from the warmth to the refrigerator. But for him I worked. And I didn’t care. I was glad that the sweat ran from me in the icebox. I was glad that when I came home to the room with the roaches and the bedbugs at night I lay down and could not move. There are times when all the work that you have done and all the suffering that you have lived through lay themselves down on you. Then you cannot move, you cannot breathe.
“Still inside of me I raged. I do not know what went on between us those few months. We lived together, we moved about, as shadows cast upon the same wall, meeting, touching, unseeing, unfeeling.”
Abraham listened for a moment while a mother called to her children from the house across the street. He sighed – a long sigh – without knowing that he had done so.
“I scarcely realized that they two had been left to me. I was selfish, wrapped up in my own storms.
“In Poland there was a typhus epidemic. Just as our papers had come through and they were already making out our ship’s cards, Isaac caught the typhus.”
Abraham stopped talking again. How could it sound so commonplace? Inside of him an excitement was forming, and pain, like the scar of an old wound, throbbed in his voice when he spoke.
“Do you know the typhus?” Abraham looked about him. How could he describe it? “A fire was kindled inside of him. He lay there and the fever steamed from him.” In his mind he could see it, the dingy room, Isaac tossing on the bed – yes, steaming. “For days I watched him lying there, helpless against the tortures that scalded him. I felt the hot drenched sheets. I looked on his suffering face. It seemed as though I saw him now for the first time. I had not known the way his underlip curved outward. I had not realized that his jaw was so thin. This was my son!
“Gradually the fever built itself up in him. One night he could contain it no longer. He ran screaming from the bed. I caught him in my arms and fought with him. I clenched his body, drenched and squirming against me. It was as though he were swimming in a fiery bath. It was scalding to hold him. He looked at me with hatred. His fingers tore at my beard. He cursed me!
“It was then that I knew, my God, that You had left me one son. And he was leaving me. You were tearing him from me! How fiercely I loved him, I who had almost forgotten him in my selfishness! I fought with You that night. I clung to him. I breathed on him. I carried his kicking, screaming body to the bed, and I held him. I laid my head against his heart and heard the tumult within him, and I prayed. I prayed that You should forgive my great error. I wept! I cried that You should not take from me the gift that I had seen too late.
“All night I held him, I poured my strength into him, I prayed – all the prayers that I knew and prayers that came of themselves. Beside me my wife sat, a frozen prayer.
“Toward morning there was a miracle. He opened his eyes and called me ‘Father.’ We, Sarah and I, we could do nothing but weep.”
Chaim Knopp wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “A miracle,” he said.
Abraham resumed a little while later. “By the time the boy was well enough to travel, our papers were no longer any good. Now the Canadian government wanted something else. We had to make new papers. We waited for months. Now I wanted to hurry because I was impatient to begin again, to send down our roots, somewhere. I was worried about the boy, you know. It left him with a touch of the heart – all he’d gone through. Every time I looked at him I thought: A miracle. I knew I had to bring them someplace soon. My wife could not bear much more. The boy’s illness had sucked what was left of her spirit from her.
“Somehow, at last, we were on the ship. Then we were on the train. We had been running, moving, for so long, I no longer knew how to stop. It was as though the wheels below had taken control of our lives. On and on we rode. It’s strange how we came to this city. All of a sudden I knew, as though I had received a message, that it was time to stop. And so I gathered them up, my own ones, and we came away. The wheels moved off without us.”
Abraham looked about him. It was late. He had not noticed when the street lights had gone on.
“What do you think, Chaim, a wristwatch is a nice thing to buy a boy for his birthday? Not a boy any more, really – a young man. Sarah and I were thinking of a wristwatch. His friends all seem to have watches, and he should not go without, hard-working boy that he is.”
“A wristwatch would be a fine thing,” said Chaim. “I remember how happy Ralph was when we bought him his first watch.”
When Abraham came home he found that they had waited supper for him. The boy, bless him, was reading from an English book.
FIVE
When Chaim Knopp’s youngest daughter finally married her boy friend, who was not a doctor and not a rich man’s son, but a good hard-working boy, Chaim saw to it that Abraham and his wife were invited to the wedding supper and that Isaac was invited to the dance afterward. His wife, whose heart was not in the marriage, and who had put many obstacles in the way of the young couple, did not object very strenuously. There were people whose presence she considered more valuable, but as she had worked herself into an attitude of martyred acceptance of the whole affair, it was a small thing to accept also the presence of a family who, although they’d been five years in the country, she still considered immigrants, insofar as they still really hadn’t arrived anywhere.
They still lived in the little low-lying house with a bootlegger for a landlord. The husband was still the hired hand of a butcher about whom not much could be said that was elevating except that he knew how to make money. Chaim sometimes said something about a partnership with this Avrom, but Chaim was not one to carry a business through, she had discovered long ago. And their son was an ordinary worker in a factory. It was true that this son was a bit of a malomed on the side, but the few pupils that he had did not really make him a member of the teaching profession. What good did it do him to be clever, as Chaim said he was, if he could not raise himself to be anything more than a laborer in a factory?
Not that Chaim’s wife was in reality such an ill-natured person. She was, as everybody knew because she told them so in her def
inite way, clear-headed and far-sighted, unlike Chaim. In the bad times she had taken her full share of work and had, when the family was floundering because of Chaim’s total inability to calculate and look ahead, done more than her share in helping to steer it off the rocks.
When her children grew up and were successful, she wanted to share fully in their success. She insisted on being invited to all of the social functions her daughters and daughter-in-law held, until they finally managed to steer her to the older women’s branches of the charitable organizations to which they belonged. Here she found herself a natural leader. She threw herself into charitable work. Indeed, since her children were rich, she could afford to feel more than charitable; she could feel philanthropic, and she brought with her an aura of philanthropy that lesser women couldn’t quite muster. Presiding over a charitable society was really very much like presiding over a household that one’s husband couldn’t manage properly. One organized teas, one made decisions about benefits, one voiced opinions loudly enough to make the inadequacy of feebler opinions felt. Above all, one worked. No one could deny that Mrs. Knopp was a worker.
It was not at all because of snobbery that she could not interest herself in forming a friendship with the butcher’s wife. Really, if the woman were truly interested in getting to know people she could always join one of the societies. She’d even sponsor her herself. But no, this did not seem to satisfy Chaim. What did satisfy Chaim, ever? He wanted her to come and sit and talk to this butcher’s wife. But she didn’t have time to hold the hand of every immigrant who had a story to tell. What Jew hasn’t a story? She had her own troubles too, and who would sit and listen to her if she put on a piteous face? No, she wasn’t a sitter and talker. She was a doer. Let Chaim sit and talk. He hadn’t done much more all his life. Thank goodness Ralph was like her, a doer. When you came right down to it, it was selfish to sit on your own sorrows when there was so much to be done in the world.
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