“Aha!” she shouted dramatically, waving the bundles for all to see. Jenny threw the pieces of the first bundle down on her machine and grabbed Bella by the hair. Bella screamed. The women began to take sides and shouted across to them. The men sat and laughed. The foreman tried to get between the girls. What if the boss came in?
Some of the workers, who remembered that time was money, regretfully started up their machines again, so that the variety of noises clashing together in the shop was deafening. Only Rusen had not stopped the steady pace of his work to look up. He continued to stitch, a tight expression of distaste on his face.
The foreman had finally separated the two girls. He stood in a semi-crouch between them and hissed at them to get back to their machines. They would pay, he promised them, they would pay.
“What’s all this?” The boss’s tenor voice shrilled across the room. The machines roared suddenly louder. The boss advanced slowly into Isaac’s vision. “So I have a foreman a ballet dancer?”
The foreman straightened his knees and dropped his arms under the boss’s sarcastic glare. “What’s the matter?” the shrill tenor barked again. “Is it tea time that you’re all sitting around doing nothing?” Isaac, with the others, urged his machine to a more frantic tempo. “Thieves!” The tenor rose, trying to soar above the machines. “When it’s slow season you rush through your work and cry because I don’t give you enough work to do!” Isaac pressed hard against the pedal of the power machine. Others did the same. The boss’s voice was momentarily drowned out. Odd words penetrated. “…busy season…my few cents…you play…” Every time his voice made a fresh attempt to climb the noise, the machines roared more loudly. Jenny and Bella were back at their respective machines, and the cloth was flying from under their needles.
“Saboteurs!” The boss was sure they were doing it deliberately. He would like to make them stop and force them to listen to him. But the money he’d lose! He pitted himself once more against the machines. “I lost my hair over you! I worked my head off and you’re out to ruin me!” The machines raced on. “Pretend you don’t hear me! Moscovitch!”
The machines slowed slightly because everyone wanted to hear what he said to the foreman. “I’m telling you if anyone so much as pauses to go to the toilet to smoke a cigarette – oh, yes, I know why you go to the toilet –” He had worked in a shop himself long ago, before piecework came in. “I want them thrown out, fired! We’ll see if they find another boss like me to tolerate thieves and cripples.”
The boss stormed out. Moscovitch started to prowl furiously around the shop. The machines settled into a steadier tempo. Finally Moscovitch stationed himself behind old Rusen. The old man’s hands trembled as he guided the material into the machine. He did not stop working when the foreman spoke to him, but his furrowed, anxious face began to sweat.
Leave him alone, thought Isaac. Leave him alone. For a moment he saw himself in Rusen’s place, his back misshapen by the years of bending over the machine; slow – even now he was sometimes tired – unable to feed the machine quickly enough to fill the bellies of his family, and not even a master craftsman to be kept on by a whim of the boss.
The foreman continued to stand over the old man. “All right, all right,” Isaac said out loud. “Leave him alone.” The neighboring machines paused suddenly. Isaac felt his body begin to shake as though with a chill. His heart thudded irregularly. He stopped his machine. “Leave him alone,” he repeated, noticing, to his amazement, that he was almost shouting.
When he left the shop he was without a job. His heart still beat too quickly, so that he had to pause, leaning for a few moments against the wall of the building. But the fresh air smelled good. Only now he realized how he had hated the shop. Perhaps he might be able to get work doing something else. As his spirits calmed somewhat, on the way home, he realized that there was not much chance, not in times like these. But it was a thought. He hoped his appearance wouldn’t frighten his mother. He’d have to tell her right away that he wasn’t ill, not really, he’d only been fired. He would have to get work quickly, though. It was a good thing that it was the busy season in tailoring. He would be taken on elsewhere. He did not bother to consider, for the moment, what he had really accomplished in throwing away his job. It was something he had wanted to do. He had wanted to stop the foreman. He had wanted to change things. He was young; he was quick. He wanted to bring a girl home to his parents.
—
“ ‘Take your job, take your miserable pay.’ ” Abraham made up the words as he went along. “ ‘Do you think we’re your slaves here, that you can bully a man who’s nearly old enough to be your father?’ ”
“Ah,” said Chaim. “Aha, that was telling him. Right into his gallstones.”
“To look at the boy you’d think that he wouldn’t utter a contrary word. But just you step on his toes, just try to offend his sense of justice. Ha! Then you’ll hear from him. And can you imagine the sheep, not one of the other workers to lift a finger, not one to take his part. That gross barbarian could have flayed the old man alive, and none of the workers would have stopped sewing. That’s the world we live in. No wonder it took forty years to get across the desert. But wait, wait, just rely on my sons.”
“Has he got another job yet?”
“And that’s another thing. He wanted to get on as a full-time teacher in the Hebrew school. He went to Reb Slotnik. You know Reb Slotnik, how he gargles with joy when he talks about the way Isaac prepares his pupils for the Bar Mitzvah? And well he might! I’ve never missed one of Isaac’s Bar Mitzvahs yet, if I could help it. I don’t have to tell you, you’ve seen them yourself – how the words come out clearly, and the little speech afterward, how cleverly it’s turned, and never the same thing twice. One can see that Isaac teaches them not only the words and the mechanical things, but shows them how to feel what an important thing it is that they are coming into their manhood, into their responsibilities as Jews. And the mothers praise him. Only last week that Mrs. Katz, who has the little barrel Shmillig for a son, spread herself over one of the kitchen chairs and started to sing his praises; her voice still rings in my ears. She wanted to kiss him on both cheeks; she wanted to marry him to at least three different girls that she knew. But this I told her not to worry her head about.
“Reb Slotnik? To praise the boy is one thing, it doesn’t cost him anything. But to give him a job is a different story. The school is poor, it doesn’t pay much, they already have their quota of teachers and not enough pupils, giving jobs is not really up to him – every possible excuse. But he promised Isaac that he would keep him in mind. So, in the meantime he has a job in another shop. He won’t stay idle. And especially now that he has his mind on a girl already.”
“So?” said Chaim.
“So,” said Abraham. “On Friday night we will have a guest for supper.”
—
On Friday evening, with Ruth clinging nervously to his arm, Isaac tried to approach the house as though for the first time. How would she see it? Would she be disappointed? It was true that her sister’s house, where she lived, was not much better. Still – Isaac had explained to her that it was not very modern and that it was rather small. Wishing to be completely frank, he had told her, further, about the landlord’s being a bootlegger – not really a bootlegger, but a sort of contact man, from what they could gather. Sometimes strange things went on around the back-yard garage at night. Trucks drove up, trucks drove away. But all this they tried to pay no attention to. It was, after all, the landlord’s own business if he wanted to risk his neck in dishonest affairs. Isaac noticed the newly painted fence and window ledges gleaming under the late setting sun. Attractive, he thought hopefully. He stopped outside the yard. “This is it.”
“I think I’ve passed it before,” said Ruth, unwilling to admit that she had slipped past this house many times. “It’s been painted?”
“Oh, just freshened up a bit,” said Isaac. “My father and I did it ourselves. Don’t li
ke it to get too shabby.”
They lingered outside for a little while.
Inside, Abraham helped Sarah to lay the dining-room table. He did not usually help with the knives and forks, but today he felt active. “Poor child is an orphan,” he told Sarah. “We must do our best to make her feel at home right away. It cannot be too happy for her to have no real home, to have to live with a married sister. We must make her feel that we’re her own.”
Sarah agreed. The time had come. She didn’t know whether she was happy that it had come or not. It was the first time that any other woman had shared her table with her men.
“There is only one thing that is worse than to be left without your parents,” Abraham was saying. “And that is to be left without your children. And who should know better than we, who have had a taste of both?”
When Isaac and Ruth arrived Abraham set about making the girl feel at home. He monopolized the conversation for the greater part of the evening. If there was a pause he rushed in to fill the breach. He joked and he told stories, and he felt that the evening was a tremendous success.
“Did I have a time in the shop today! A butcher has to be made of iron.” Abraham turned to Sarah. “Do you remember the Slutskys from the old country? Sure you do. He used to speculate. ‘Slutsky the foolish thief,’ they used to call him. Couldn’t read a page of Hebrew. They used to say he had to get someone else to count the money he stole. His father was a fine old man. I remember him. How he could have such a son! And his mother, with one brown eye and one blue – they called her ‘the speckled hen.’ Well, in Canada he’s not such a fool. He’s got a big family. His wife is dressed in honey and in butter – a big feather in her hat, paint on her lips so that she looks as though she’s got something bitter in her mouth.
“This Mrs. Slutsky, she comes in, and I’m making an order for Jack Lazar – you know, with the short foot. He watches the scale like his life depends on it. It always gets busy like this when Polsky is away at the slaughterhouse.
“ ‘It’s all right,’ she calls out. ‘It’s all right. I’ll slice my own corned beef. You’re busy, I’ll make myself at home.’
“So she gets herself paper, and she starts to slice. But I know her already, so while Lazar has his face pushed in the scale – he’s worried maybe I’ll give him a drop less – I’ve got my eye on her. One slice she cuts on the paper, the other slice she slips in her mouth; one slice on the paper, another one in the mouth. And she’s so dainty! Fat little fingers with points like a fork, red like blood. Born to pick up the corned beef. One finger in the air – throws back her big feather, like a rooster, and into the mouth. And thinks yet that I don’t see her.
“Meanwhile I’m trying to hurry and wrap the meat for Lazar, but he’s not in such a hurry. He scrapes off a little bone from the scale, puts on another piece of meat instead, craning around right from the other side of the counter. It weighs too much. He takes it off, looks at me, makes like he doesn’t know anything, puts it on again.
“And she slices, slices, eats, slices.
“At last Lazar lets me wrap up the meat, not until he’s pulled out the paper so it has to lie naked on the scale – thinks maybe the needle will go down a little. And with Lazar it’s funny; he always tries to do all this and yet make like he doesn’t care about it. Stands with his face in the scale and pretends he’s looking at himself in the little glass. Dances on his long foot, dances on his short foot. Pulls the paper out from under the meat like his hand got in with it by accident.
“When he goes out, thank God, I come over to Mrs. Slutsky, take the slicer from her hand. ‘You’ll tire yourself,’ I say to her. ‘How much do you want?’
“ ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘that’s about enough. Just for my family, you know; I don’t eat so much of that kind of stuff. But they like it, so I take.’ And she gives the meat such a look that it almost gets up and crawls into her mouth.
“ ‘I hope your family enjoys the meat,’ I say when I give her the little parcel. ‘It’s freshly made.’ So she burps, if you’ll excuse me, in my face – but not common, no, the red nails in front of the mouth.
“ ‘Excuse me,’ she says. ‘Gas.’
“ ‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s too bad. Is it your diet maybe?’
“ ‘I don’t think so,’ she says. ‘I’m very careful.’ ”
They all laughed at Abraham’s description. “Why do you take it?” asked Ruth. “Why don’t you tell her off? Believe me, I’d tell her.”
“No, you have to be nice to a customer. So much you consider is overhead. Besides, God’s got His eye on her. Who do you think is going to have gall bladder trouble, she or I?”
“Personally,” said Isaac, “I’d weigh her when she comes in and weigh her when she goes out and make her pay for the difference.”
“So, clever fellow, Polsky would need a livestock scale too. One thing I know” – Abraham turned to Ruth – “my grandchildren won’t be butchers or tailors.” Abraham explained to Ruth how he had had a son who would have been a wonderful cantor, and how one of his sons had started his studies at three and had put to shame his teachers.
“And do you think that Isaac would have been a tailor? Even now he makes those others at the synagogue who stare blindly at the holy books look silly, in spite of the fact that he sometimes talks like he is a bit of an atheist.”
Sarah noticed how tactfully Ruth steered the conversation away from this dangerous point, and she watched the girl with a kind of helpless fascination, knowing that the time had really come.
Isaac’s heart seemed to expand in his chest with the pressure of gratitude and love. Fool that he was, he could not resist discussing his ideas with his father, knowing what the result was likely to be, yet feeling at the same time that they were somehow not clean and honest thoughts unless he admitted them to Abraham. It was like a blockade that his ideas had to run to give them the right to exist. But everything went so smoothly with Ruth. How well she fitted in with them. She made herself right at home and insisted on helping with the dishes. His father liked her, he could tell. When she went with Sarah to do the dishes in the kitchen, Abraham decided that he too would help. And there he was, with a towel in his hands, as though he did this every day, talking and joking, telling her about the partnership that he was going someday to form with Chaim Knopp.
It was already some three years since the thought had entered the heads of Chaim and Abraham that they should form a partnership. During that time they had discussed the idea, examined it from every angle and in the light of every development in their respective lives, spent long hours in meeting imaginary obstacles, and repeatedly come to the conclusion that it would be a fine idea. It took some time for Abraham to realize that Chaim, even though he was the elder, would not make the first move. Gradually he began to understand that the shoichet would be content not to make any move at all, just to talk. Having to make a move might even upset Chaim, considering all the real problems that it would present. So he gave up any idea of having the partnership become in reality a fact, although both he and Chaim continued to refer to it as an imminent possibility.
At home it became a sort of joke, and Abraham explained to Ruth how one department of the partnership was devoted to preparing kosher tidbits for the family cats, and how they had expanded the business, just as Polsky always talked of doing, but of course on a grander scale, so that now it was an international affair. Unfortunately they would have to abandon plans for a branch on the moon. How could a good Jew mix meat and cheese?
Abraham was delighted at the sound of this girl’s laughter in his house. He was not now unhappy that the partnership was not a fact. It was getting late for the old to conquer the world. Let the young start anew.
“Do you think he really liked me, your father?” Ruth asked as Isaac walked her home.
“Liked you? You’re a family concern. Did I get two minutes alone with you?”
“Your mother’s very quiet, like you said. It must seem f
unny to her – I mean, you and a girl. The way she looks at you…”
“How –” said Isaac, “I mean what did you think of them, of us?”
“I liked them,” said Ruth, “even from before. I feel at home with them. It’s so good to be able to feel at home.” She pressed against his arm.
“You are,” said Isaac fervently. “You are.”
SIX
She did not like to gloat over other people’s misfortunes, Mrs. Plopler announced as she was struggling out of her winter coat, but she had just heard that the police had raided Laiah’s apartment. Somebody’s wife, so the story went, had not been able to stand it any longer and had phoned the police and told them that red-headed Laiah was running a gambling and bootlegging and who-knows-what-else establishment. So the police had paid her a visit and, according to what Mrs. Plopler had been told, several of the town’s well-known names had been caught – some said on their knees shooting craps, others said with money on the table, others said with bootleg liquor. Nobody knew for certain, because it was all hush-hush.
Obviously, Mrs. Plopler’s nose opined in its significant way, there were too many big names involved. But the red-head had overreached herself this time. Mrs. Plopler knew definitely that she was looking for a new, for a smaller apartment. But no doubt Avrom knew all this already? She and Polsky had always been thick as thieves.
Abraham took advantage of the pause during which she bent to undo her galoshes to bid her an ironic good evening. It no longer occurred to him to take offense at the fact that she assumed that because Polsky and Laiah were as thick as thieves he was expected to know everything the woman did.
The Sacrifice Page 10