The Sacrifice

by Adele Wiseman

  “Death,” Mrs. Plopler enlarged eagerly, “before and after, and now. Oh!” Mrs. Plopler wept.

  Ruth’s mind functioned independently of her will. With a dreary clarity it recorded Mrs. Plopler’s oft-repeated satisfaction, expressed to Mrs. Knopp, that there had been a good turnout at the funeral. It did not fail to register the fact that Mrs. Knopp’s presence in the house indicated that Isaac’s death, as nothing else had been able to do, had convinced her of their social eligibility. And it caught also Mrs. Plopler’s shrill-voiced opinion that the reason Mrs. Polsky had not come to help make meals for the family during the mourning period was because she was afraid to visit a house of death.

  Even when the old men of the synagogue brought, on Monday and on Thursday, the very Torah that Isaac had saved, to be read, she was aware that some of them watched eagerly, with a sort of ardency, for signs of heightened grief. But she felt none of her customary tongue-sharpening woman’s anger. Perhaps later, when the shock of the greater grief had worn away, she would be indignant over lesser evils. Now she resented only her sister’s words. It was not true. I have had luck, I have. Isaac, she thought. Isaac Isaac Isaac.

  In the kitchen Mrs. Plopler and Mrs. Knopp talked about their gastric troubles. Mrs. Plopler discovered to her relief that the older woman had had symptoms much like hers before her second operation, although they had not occurred in quite the same part of the stomach, nor in quite the same way. Still, they had been severe pains. Mrs. Knopp was eager to convince Mrs. Plopler that what she needed was an operation. Mrs. Plopler was not so easily convinced.

  “I don’t like the knife,” she said again and again. But Mrs. Knopp spoke with authority. And finally Mrs. Plopler had to admit that it was worth it to let them use the knife for the sake of a complete cure. Here was Mrs. Knopp, a very old lady already, and she had come out alive. Mrs. Plopler became enthusiastic.

  Mrs. Knopp began to reconsider. Mrs. Plopler should not be too optimistic about these things. She herself had almost died during her operations. And furthermore she had never been the same afterward. How can you be the same when you have whole pieces of you cut out? And besides, an operation is an expensive thing. It should only be used as a last resort. Hers had been cheaper because, after all, her son-in-law was a doctor and in the profession these things can be arranged. An ordinary person, however, had to think twice about such things. What, for instance, did Mrs. Plopler’s sons-in-law do?

  Mrs. Plopler, for the moment even more convinced by the very exclusive sound of it that an operation must be the thing for her, countered sweetly that of course an operation, like everything else, was in God’s hands. But she had the advantage of being young enough so the risk would be lessened.

  “Lessened?” Mrs. Knopp could not contain her short derisive laugh. She waved her hand in the direction of the living room. “There,” she said almost triumphantly, “is your lessened risk. Even the young can die.” Mrs. Knopp smiled with a certain bitter satisfaction.

  Mrs. Plopler turned her eyes reluctantly toward the living room. The child appeared in the doorway. “Oi!” Mrs. Plopler stretched out her arms and bore down on him. Before he could more than half turn to escape she had seized him in her arms. “My poor little orphan, oi!” Mrs. Plopler wailed energetically. “An orphan!” Mrs. Plopler drew out the word so that it keened through the house, shrilling up and down Abraham’s nerves. The child, frightened as he was by all that had happened, stilled by her breath and the grip of her arms and helpless against the nibbling wetness of her nose, parried her shriek with a terrified wail of his own and struggled to free himself.

  In Abraham’s head the word echoed and re-echoed. Back it dragged him to the years of his childhood, to all that being an orphan had meant. Everything that had been since then, the gradual building up, the rich, fine growth of his sons, stretching out like the arms of some fine tree, the reaching upward – all this swept away. His mind was like a churning ocean on which bobbed the bits of wreckage that had once been his life. Again and again he broke the surface, staring about him with salt-washed eyes, caught sight of some fragment, and because it was only a fragment and the salt had burned his eyes clean saw it with a ruthless, useless clarity before he sank to the massed confusion below. And now there remained only this frail sprout, again on the brink of life, unprotected, as though all his prayers and his efforts had never been, no further ahead. Was this it?

  Something in him cried out then in protest. He wanted to rush forward and drive from the house this woman with her wailing and her empty cries. A real fury overcame him. He heaved himself up from the floor and rushed to her and seized her by the arm. He wanted to shout. He wrenched her away from the child, who stood there smearing the cold wetness of his cheeks where her nose had touched. Mrs. Plopler whimpered and turned her eyes up to him. He opened his mouth to speak, but in her eyes there was such misery and such fear, and something else too, a sort of pleading. It was as though she weren’t looking at him at all, as though when she had hugged the child and wailed her shrill cries over him it had not been the child that she had addressed at all. The fury went out of him. “You don’t look well.” He scarcely heard himself say it.

  “I don’t feel well,” she said quickly, and her nose started and jerked slightly after she had ceased speaking, as though to add something more. For a moment even Mrs. Plopler felt as though she had lost her footing, and she grasped in vain for some platitude that would assure her that whatever it was was bearable. She began to snivel and murmur to herself.

  “That dame,” sobbed Moses to his mother. “That – dame!”

  “Shh, it’s all right, never mind, it’s nothing.” Ruth crooned words of comfort to her son.

  Abraham turned away from them. No words of comfort for him, only shattered sounds in his head, fragments of a life. Wait, he told himself. What he had to hold back were those feelings that threatened him. Almost something had broken out when he had rushed at Mrs. Plopler. Wait, wait, it isn’t final. There’s something to be said yet, something, perhaps, to be done. Once before he had rushed to the extreme conclusion, and what had happened? Well, what had happened?

  He sat down again on his sackcloth and covered his face so that he could see only the space where Isaac had lain. The day his mother had died came to him and washed over him; the death of two of his sisters from the cholera; the whole of the lives of Moses and Jacob telescoped in the memory of the moment when he had found them dead; the passing of his wife, Sarah, clutching the relative happiness of having seen her grandson born and not having had to see the last of her sons die. Only Isaac he could not recall in death but as he had been alive, touching with wistful fingers and caressing his father’s beard, clinging to it as though to life itself. The beard burned against Abraham’s skin as though it were afire. He pressed his hands over his face. He tried to shut it all out, to hold it back. He tried to concentrate his mind on the prayers. But it waited there for the moment when he relaxed his grip, when a kind of sleep slipped, unrecognized and unacknowledged, past his defenses.

  All of them merged together now in his memory, a series of long, narrow boxes, lying horizontally side by side in the bareness of an empty room. And he, in a sort of dream, rushed in and out among them, from one to the other, trying to pry open the tops, trying to find something. But the lids had been closed very tightly. He tore at them with his fingers, hammered on them, cried out to them, one after the other, unintelligible things. Now he called to them, each one, begging them. He pleaded with his wife. Intimate things that he had long since forgotten came to his lips to make his voice sweet and persuasive. But the coffins remained still. And he didn’t even know who was in which one, and this suddenly became of enormous importance, and he was asking tentatively, on all fours, beside each coffin. Like some four-footed creature he scuttled from one to the other, calling out their names. “Let me in,” he was begging them finally, and it seemed to him that all he wanted now was just this, for one of the lids to lift itself so that he coul
d fling himself in too and lie silent with the rest of them, without having to see or hear or know or care.

  In the kitchen the women looked at each other and leaned forward to listen to the sounds that came from the living room. Mrs. Plopler shuddered. Ruth, who sat across from her father-in-law on the living-room floor, peered anxiously at where he sat, cross-legged with his face hidden in his hands and bent over so that his hands almost touched the floor. Suddenly, as though awakening, he jerked himself upwards. His hands fell momentarily away from his face. His reddened eyes descended on Ruth and went through her.

  Could they really be shut away there separately in their boxes? Or were they all together now somewhere? Did they weep for what had happened? Or did they sit now, all of them, at a table from which only he was missing? At the thought he felt again the great longing that he had felt in his dream. Never in his life had he wanted to think too much about such things. It was a sin against life for a man to pry into the ways of death. But his thoughts kept slipping back longingly. He would sink deep, deep down. He would no longer grasp after the bits and pieces of his life. He would forget. He would leave the surface noises. A deeper current would carry him swiftly, noiselessly, indifferently.

  —

  On the ninth night, when the period of mourning prayers was officially over, Ruth got up late in the night from the bed in which she was sleeping for the first time since her husband’s death. The last of the mourners had left after the evening prayers. Mrs. Knopp had filled their glasses with schnapps, and they had drunk to the soul of the departed. Ruth had helped Abraham to his feet and had taken the two sacks out of the living room. Finally they were physically alone, the three of them, almost for the first time. But the impact of being physically alone together at last did not, as yet, seem able to break through their individual aloneness. Ruth put the child to bed in Abraham’s room and chased the cats from Abraham’s side of the bed. Unable in her exhaustion, as well as unwilling, to try now to think, although she knew that she would have to think soon of what was to be done, she said good night to Abraham and walked automatically around the place where Isaac had been laid, pushed back the curtain into what was now her room, undressed in the darkness, and dropped into bed.

  Now, partially asleep, she did not bother to turn on the lights but groped her way with hesitant familiarity to the curtain that separated the bedroom from the living room. By the time she reached the curtain her eyes had begun to make out the familiar shapes of objects. She slipped through the curtain and made for the opposite door, which led to the hallway and the bathroom. Not until she had taken a step forward did Ruth see the figure on the floor.

  In the first moment of shock her sleep-fuddled brain grasped only that her dead husband lay before her. She stepped back automatically and felt something give, like a live thing, behind her. She whirled round with a wailing intake of breath. Only the fact that her hands struck out and grasped the curtain prevented her from slipping to the floor. A thousand stories that she had never believed sprang to her mind. For an instant she was convinced, though she knew of no reason why, that it was all due to the fact that she had not changed the sheets on their bed since Isaac had died. But this was her husband! She whirled again toward the apparition. It lay still, a dark mound in the middle of the living-room floor.

  “Isaac,” Ruth whispered.

  For answer, in the darkness came a soft, chilling, sibilant sound, as though he were struggling to speak with queer sounds brought back from the grave. Ruth shuddered. But as she listened, paralyzed, the noises resolved themselves into a regular rhythm. Standing there, she listened for its recurrence above her heartbeat. Often in the last few months she had awakened and listened for reassurance to Isaac’s breathing beside her. She released her own breath in a series of gasping whimpers. A part of her mind was beginning to function clearly. Slowly she edged along the wall to the light switch.

  Even with the light full on his face Abraham did not awaken, but lay there, stretched out, an effigy of death, marring the illusion only by the persistent regularity of his breath. Ruth switched off the light and closed her eyes in the same instant as she heard the soft, explosive spluttering of her own giggles. Forgetful of her earlier errand, avoiding another glance at the figure on the floor, Ruth found her way back into her empty bed and collapsed, unable to control either the quivering, or the raking sobs that tore through her. Her fingers grasped and twisted the sheets that warmed to her body. For the first time she lost herself utterly in the realization of her grief.

  After the first violent reaction had worn itself away Ruth tried to consider what she had seen and what she should do. She tried to think of some reasonable explanation. He had forgotten that the time of mourning was already past. He had walked in his sleep. Worse, it was some madness of grief. She could believe anything now. Should she wake him? Maybe he would get up by himself and go quietly back to bed. She pressed herself, face down, into the sheets and waited hopefully. No.

  The more she thought of it while the tears dried, tightening the skin on her face, the more she realized that it was wrong for Abraham to be lying there, stretched out in the middle of the living-room floor as Isaac had lain – fantastic. She prodded herself. Bizarre. She must find out. She pushed herself out of bed finally. The blue light of an early dawn was already filtering through the living-room curtains. It gave his face an eerie, unearthly tinge and highlighted his beard, which was now almost completely gray. There was a frailness about him as he lay there that she had never noticed before. It occurred to her now that, no matter what it was that was wrong, she alone would have to cope with it. It was something that she had not before given a thought to. There were the two of them to care for. The knowledge brought a certain order to her thoughts.

  Abraham heard a familiar voice calling him. He listened with a lazy pleasure, trying to identify it. Who had come to meet him? Soon he would have them about him. How they would laugh together with relief and gratitude after he had told them how he had been made to believe that Isaac had died, how he had begged for his own death as well, not knowing all this time that it was he who lay dead and not his son. And God, seeing how he suffered, had realized that he had been punished enough. The voice was closer, more urgent. He would tell them first about the child, or perhaps about the saving of the Torah. No doubt they already knew. But they would want to hear again, at first hand. Sarah no doubt worried about this ailment of Isaac’s. When a man died he lost his deafness, Abraham noted clearly, for the calling voice rang clear in his head. “I’m coming I’m coming,” he said a little teasingly. Smiling a little, he opened his eyes.

  Ruth saw his face change and wrinkle up, as though he were a child who has just discovered some terrible truth about the hidden adult world and is about to oppose it with his only weapon, tears. But the expression passed almost immediately. Without a word, Abraham got up from the floor. Without looking at Ruth, he went out of the living room and quietly into his own bedroom.

  Ruth wanted to call out, to ask a question. But she didn’t, too weary to cope with a possible answer. Best to leave him alone.

  —

  In everything else that he might have talked about, Chaim would have been forced to remind Abraham, willingly or not, that he himself had four children, all of them still alive. This fact would not be softened, no matter how often he mentioned that his wife, however, was doing poorly. So he talked instead of Hitler, of the world situation, of how everything seemed to be going wrong nowadays. He talked because he could not bear the long silences, because he was afraid of what lurked behind them. Abraham had never been a man of silences. It made Chaim nervous.

  “If Bassieh, my wife, dies – God should prevent it,” he blurted suddenly, “but the doctor says we should be prepared for everything; after all she’s no spring chicken. If she dies you know what will happen? The children won’t want me to live by myself. They’ll want me taken care of. They’ll all want to take me to live with them. But then each one will want the honor
to have me first. They will argue, and the end will be that to keep the peace they will send me to the Old Folks’ Home.”

  Chaim looked at his shoes and laughed nervously. Why had he said it? In one mouthful he had mentioned death and his children and had thrown in some of his own troubles. There was such a contrariness in him. No matter how much he tried to control himself, if he met a man who limped all he could think to talk about was cripples; if he was with someone who stuttered all he could remember were stories about people with speech impediments. What would his friend think of him?

  Chaim gazed mournfully out the window, where blue shadow figures hurried through the descending snow, beyond the frosty tracings on the glass. “They say,” he was surprised to hear his own voice resume, “that Mrs. Plopler is a sick woman.” Chaim seized his tongue between his teeth and glanced quickly to where Abraham stood, feeding little bits of meat into the grinder. Perversely he remembered a story that Polsky had once told them about Mrs. Plopler. Polsky had been walking down the street one day and passed a funeral procession. It was a long funeral with cars and people following behind. Chaim glanced again quickly at Abraham and lifted his hand to his mouth to make sure he wasn’t saying it out loud. At the end of the procession there was Sonya Plopler, following. And she was crying, and she was wailing, and she was beating her chest. Polsky thought to himself, Maybe I know this person; it must be somebody if poor Mrs. Plopler is so upset. So he ran up to her and took her by the arm. “Mrs. Plopler, Mrs. Plopler, who’s dead? Who passed away?” And Sonya Plopler looked up at him, sniveling and swallowing. “I should know?”

  In spite of himself Chaim felt his lips twist into a smile. He quickly turned his face away from his friend and forced himself to frown severely at the window. “You’re going into your second childhood,” his wife’s voice reminded him. Second childhood, Chaim repeated to himself, knowing that if he repeated it often enough it would frighten away all traces of unnatural levity from his mind.