The Sacrifice

by Adele Wiseman

  Laiah made her entry into the delicatessen and had the satisfaction of seeing Hymie’s mouth open and drop even wider open when she greeted him with ironic cordiality. Polsky himself welcomed her with brief extravagance. Altogether, however, the reconciliation wasn’t as satisfactory as she had expected. She did not hold the stage for long, for the place was already humming with the news of the old synagogue.

  —

  When Abraham left Laiah her story was still sounding within him. Remote though the comparison between them might actually be in many ways, the fact remained: they had had similar beginnings, had been scarred by much the same fires. There were so many strange coincidences in life, so many secret sorrows that people shared without knowing it, people who were otherwise as strange to each other as – well, as he was to this Laiah, who had been the scandal of the town for as long as he could remember. It was something that he would like to discuss with Isaac.

  Abraham crossed the street and rounded the corner of his block. As he approached he could see that the child was leaning over the fence, shouting something. Suddenly Ruth appeared, hurrying out the gate. Moses caught sight of him.

  “Grampa,” shouted the child. “The synagogue!”

  —

  There was a certain amount of pleasure to be got from the autumn evening, Isaac found, from walking home with the knowledge that both the factory and an hour and a half with a particularly obtuse student were over with, and that what awaited him was at last his own part of the day. Not that there was much day left, since already it had grown dusky and the sky above him had deepened its blue. Still, just ahead of him were a few hours with his family. This was a fact, and simple anticipation served to dispel some of the habitual melancholy of his thoughts. Three minutes, he calculated – past the synagogue, around the block, and halfway down across the street. Home.

  The frame boards of the synagogue were a dirty gray. The sunset, Isaac noticed, was still casting its glow in the synagogue windows. But that was curious; the sun was already down. The glow came from within. It took him a few puzzled seconds to realize that the synagogue was on fire. Isaac whirled about. On the corner was a fire-alarm box.

  In a few moments two arms of flame had shot up from the synagogue, as though in supplication, leaping up crimson against the royal-blue sky. A crowd gathered as from nowhere as the cry went up that the synagogue was on fire and as the streets were filled with the howl of sirens. Moses and Abraham and Ruth ran with the others, down and across the street and around the corner. A great woeful wail assailed Moses’ ears as the men and women watched the firemen vainly trying to quell the blaze that had shot up its two enveloping arms. The president of the synagogue rushed to and fro, wringing his hands, and was almost hysterical when he remembered the thousand-dollar chandelier. Chaim Knopp, who had appeared as from nowhere, stood beside Ruth, moaning out loud that the Sepher Torahs, the Holy Scrolls, would be destroyed.

  Hot black clouds of smoke rolled upward, and now the flames licked out from the roof of the building, reaching not only upward but down along its side, while in the windows flickered a dance of flame and shadow.

  A woman began to scream hysterically that it was a pogrom. Moses had heard that word. He stood trembling with excitement and fear at the screaming, for the woman’s cry had been answered by a renewed wailing of those who watched. His face flushed hot as the flames seemed to reach out and scorch him. He remembered his grandfather’s stories and crowded toward his mother, looking about him fearfully and telling himself that he would protect her as he sought shelter between her skirts.

  Suddenly there was a shout, and Abraham looked up and gasped. His heart filled his mouth. Leaping out of the inferno, like a revelation bursting from the flaming heavens, ran Isaac, his hair and the arms of his shirt on fire. Clutched against his shirt were the Scroll and the Crown. The great wail hung for a moment in breathless incredulity, and then miraculously it changed in mid air to a deafening roar of triumph, a tremendous “Hurrah!” which lifted Moses’ insides and whirled him up into a vast ecstasy. His father! Never-to-be-equaled sight, bursting out of the synagogue, all in flames of crimson, with his head up, and wild-eyed.

  “Like a prophet,” whispered Abraham.

  Then Isaac fell to the ground, and Moses screamed as he saw the firemen leap upon him. He rushed forward to save him, and was flung down amongst the pressing crowd. Abraham, beside himself, picked up the boy. Carrying him, he pushed his way through to where they were trying to revive his son.

  TWELVE

  Isaac was frightened. He was imprisoned in a transparent bubble of some plastic material. It pressed inward with a constant contracting pressure, forcing him to brace his feet and hands against its inner surface to prevent himself from being crushed. As long as he pushed outward with all his strength it maintained its size. If he relaxed slightly it shrank in on him, so that it was the action of his own body that determined the size of his prison.

  Sometimes, in a burst of energy and desire, he pushed out and outward, expanding his sphere, stretching his limbs beyond any length that they had ever achieved, so that the tips of his toes and fingers alone touched its surface, and he poised in the ecstasy of effort, certain that one final burst of strength and will would stretch the bubble to its limits and he would break through.

  But he could stretch no farther. At the tips of his body it waited, firm and resilient, cruelly patient, ready to spring in upon him and crush him the moment he could hold it back no longer. The pain in his arms and legs was unbearable. His body was torn and exhausted. Slowly he had to relax his pressure, and slowly the inexorable sphere closed in. Now was his greatest danger. If he relaxed his arms and legs beyond a certain point they would collapse entirely and he would be lost.

  But in spite of the pain and the fear and the danger there was always the feeling that someday, perhaps, a superhuman movement would release him, and he endured, waiting for that moment. Gradually, as he strained his eyes to see what lay beyond his sphere, he began to realize that although it was transparent, he could make out only his own face grimacing at him in reflection, the tendons of his neck bulging, and his own body stretched out in agony before him.

  Ruth’s eyes snapped open in the darkness, and she lay for a moment, trying to identify the sound that came from beside her. He was strangling. For a long instant she was paralyzed. In that moment her ears identified a curious note in the sounds, a sort of gasping – no – Confused now, she raised herself up on her elbow. “Isaac, what’s the matter?” She could feel the movement of his head. “Isaac!”

  “It’s nothing,” he said finally.

  “Are you laughing? You frightened me. Why suddenly laughing in the middle of the night?” Her voice became reproachful.

  “It was a dream,” said Isaac.

  “Well.” Ruth dropped back on her side. “It’s nice to know that you’re having good dreams for a change.”

  “It was the same dream, the old dream I could never remember. Only this time I caught it. I was laughing because it’s just the dream for me, a problem dream for a man who has much time to think of problems.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” she said. “You’re not supposed to worry your head about anything. What is the dream?”

  Isaac’s hand searched along her side and found her own. The palm of his hand was damp. “If it’s a bad dream I don’t want to hear it,” she added quickly. “I don’t like the funny way you were laughing.”

  “So you don’t want it to be a bad dream and you don’t want it to be a funny dream.” He tried to tease her. But her fingers tightened in his. He rubbed her hand soothingly. “I don’t even know if it’s bad or good. Nothing happens in it. And yet here I am. Picture it to yourself. I am totally naked, of all things – and a fine figure of a man, too. Does that arouse your curiosity?”

  “You’re joking. It’s not my curiosity you want to arouse.”

  Isaac laughed weakly, and they lay for some moments in silence.

  “I wa
s in a sort of prison,” he murmured.

  “I don’t like it.” She roused herself. “You’ll get sick again.”

  “Sicker, you mean. The horizontal hero.”

  “If only you wouldn’t worry so, you’d get better. The doctor said rest. It won’t be so long,” she said.

  “You’re not talking to Pa now,” said Isaac quietly. “I know what indefinitely means.”

  “No you don’t. Nobody does, not even the doctor. That’s what it means, that nobody knows how long or how short a time. It’s not definite.”

  “All right, all right. It’s God’s will, as Pa would say. God wants me to contemplate His infinite goodness in return for saving His Torah. So He is keeping me on my back. This way I can gaze at the ceiling all day and think heavenly thoughts, and at night sweet dreams.”

  Ruth had raised herself up on her elbow again and passed her hand over his forehead. “You must try not to dream. You become excited and it brings on an attack.”

  “I don’t dream on purpose. And besides, what if it’s the other way around? Maybe when I get an attack my brain doesn’t know what to do with the feelings in my body so it makes a story out of them, if you can call it a story.”

  “What were you doing in this prison place?” asked Ruth.

  “Trying to get out. Don’t ask me why. I didn’t know what I’d find when I got out, if I got out. I don’t know why I longed so for it. I could have stayed as I was, maybe, husbanding my strength, keeping a sort of balance, at least for a little while. But that I couldn’t bear.”

  “What couldn’t you –” Ruth had lost track.

  But Isaac was talking to himself. “Or else just give up entirely, let it crush me. If I broke through I’d no longer have the sphere as my boundary, but I’d lose its protection too. The bubble bursts, and I burst with it, into the unknown. On the other hand, if I give way I collapse, I am crushed, again into the unknown. Aren’t the two things in the end the same, my victory and my defeat both illusory?”

  “What are you talking about?” said Ruth drowsily.

  Isaac chuckled. “I don’t know. That’s why I was laughing. I’ll never know.”

  “Then go to sleep. And tell yourself that you are not going to dream.”

  “Absolutely,” said Isaac.

  —

  At first the fact that Isaac was so ill after he had saved the Torah seemed in a way to heighten the value of what he had done. When the doctors insisted on keeping him for so long in the hospital Abraham, half believing that they kept him not only because of his heart but because they wanted to observe for themselves what manner of man this was who would rush, heedless of danger, into the flames to save the Word of God, used to say to Chaim, “They’ll not find out by listening with a machine to his heart. It’s deeper than that they’ll have to search for the secret soul of a man that only God can know. To them it’s all a great mystery. The doctor told me himself that he thought it was a miracle that Isaac lived through that attack outside the synagogue.”

  Chaim chuckled. “Wasn’t it all a miracle? I can remember it as though it were taking place this very moment.” Chaim shut his eyes, jutted his beard forward, and rocked slightly sideways on the barrel. “Shout?” he recalled. “I shouted myself hoarse. ‘The Messiah will come!’ I shouted.”

  Chaim’s voice rose, and he waved his arm and nearly knocked himself off the barrel. “ ‘The Messiah will come!’ It was the only thing that came into my head, the only thing worthy of shouting at such a moment. And when I saw you run after them and jump into the ambulance I was shouting it still, after you. I don’t know if you heard me, but old Dreiman the shamus says he had to hold one ear while he was cheering because I was yelling so loud. He said to me that he wouldn’t have believed that I could make so much noise. So I told him that God gives us voice for praise.”

  Abraham could not remember whether he had heard Chaim’s particular voice shouting. There was such a shouting in his own head at the time. He had been so frightened. There was Isaac at one moment, leaping out of the flames with the smoke gushing out after him, and the next moment lying so still in the ambulance. Ah, but what a thing to be able to look back on in joy! “It’s true, Chaim, isn’t it?” Abraham leaned forward to ask his friend so that he could hear it once again reiterated. “Wasn’t it – inexpressibly fine?”

  “Inexpressibly,” Chaim agreed. “In-ex-pressibly.”

  So many people knew them for that first little while after the rescue of the Torah. Strangers stopped Abraham on the street to ask about Isaac. Even the papers, the English dailies as well as the Yiddish weekly, wrote about his heroism so the whole city should know. Such a thing spreads.

  “That son of mine?” Abraham would tell people when they asked him. “They say it’s a wonder he’s still alive. Not just the burns, you know; they were minor. He’d tell you himself they’re nothing, although of course what to him is nothing would be much more than nothing to anyone else. It’s his heart. He’s had a heart condition since the old country. What he lived through there you may well ask. Time and again the doctors have warned him not to exert himself, to avoid excitement. But when the time came did he stop to think of that? No!” Abraham laughed his contempt for the doctors and their warnings. “He ran. Without thinking about himself or the doctors he ran, into the fire, into the blazing oven.”

  When they brought Isaac home at last and installed him for what the doctor called an indefinite period in his own bed, Abraham was surprised at first that, at least on the surface, he had scarcely changed at all. For every question he had his own entirely irrelevant answer. He would even contradict you on something you had seen with your own eyes, and when you tried to reason with him he would say, “Look, who saved this Torah anyway?” and make a joke of the whole thing. But Abraham himself could joke a little too. And when it came to argument who stood on ground as solid as he? While Ruth washed the supper dishes and the child practiced on the violin that Abraham had bought for him to surprise Isaac with when he came home, Abraham fled with the cats to the comparative quiet of Isaac’s room.

  “Tell me, my son, if you’re such a heretic, why did you save the Torah?”

  Isaac rolled his head on the pillow. “So we’re back there again, are we? How many times have I tried to tell you? But you’re still not satisfied, eh? So I’m forced to confess the real reason.” Isaac winked and added in a confidential, exaggerated stage whisper, “Because it’s expensive, that’s why.”

  “Is that so?” Abraham laughed. “Every day he has a different answer, and every day the answer gets better.” Abraham’s voice became naïve, with a heavy overtone of mockery. “Then why didn’t you save the chandelier? It’s much more expensive. That’s what the president would have saved, the chandelier. The president and the monkeys would have swung from the rafters to save the chandelier. And if you were a monkey like the president, you too would have saved the chandelier. God should only forgive me for calling a fellow human being a monkey, but then God himself knows what’s in that man’s blood, the way he was weeping and wailing over that chandelier. You tried to tell me once that we come from the monkeys. If that’s the case there is at least one man in the congregation who hasn’t come far enough.”

  Into Abraham’s mind had sprung a vision of the president, a much-respected pants manufacturer, clinging desperately to the chandelier and swinging back and forth among the tinkling crystals, wild-eyed and paunchy. He couldn’t restrain his laughter. He laughed until the tears came to his eyes, until his breath came in short gasps. Isaac couldn’t help laughing too at the sight of his father’s enjoyment.

  “Tell me,” said Abraham cajolingly after he had recovered from his laughing fit and saw that Isaac was smiling at him tolerantly from the bed, “can’t you think of any better reason than that? Why don’t you give your old father the pleasure of admitting to him what is obvious?”

  “I freely admit to you what is obvious,” said Isaac promptly, and they both laughed again, although Abraham
shook his beard and waggled his forefinger.

  “You may think you’re twisting me around again, but you’ve caught yourself there.”

  “What is it that you want me to admit to you, then?” Isaac was suddenly serious. “What I don’t know? I’ve been asking it of myself ever since I woke up to find myself not quite dead yet. You may be right. But it’s not so simple at all. What does it prove? I’ve figured out at least a dozen reasons. You’re welcome to any one of them, although you’ve already picked the one that suits you best. I wish I could. But while you and the One Above are busy congratulating each other, ask Him what I’m doing here. How long will this last? What will happen next?” Isaac’s voice had quickened as he spoke.

  “Don’t excite yourself.” Abraham was leaning over him, frightened at the sudden change in his mood. “Rest. I’ve bothered you too much. You need lots of rest, the doctor says. And the other things you needn’t worry about. Now that the One Above has found someone to go through fire for Him, He’ll know what to do. But you must have plenty of rest to get better.”

  “I have gathered,” Isaac could not resist the sardonic comment, “that I must have plenty of rest so as not to get worse.”

  “Why should you get worse? You don’t have to get worse. Let our enemies get worse. You get better.”

  “Yes, mon capitaine.” Isaac made a mock salute. “After all, my next mission may be to take this Hitler singlehanded.”