The Sacrifice

by Adele Wiseman

  Nowadays it was easier, Chaim found, to talk about his friend than to talk with him. “I have just come from my friend Avrom the butcher,” Chaim would say when he got to the green synagogue, where the miracle Torah was held temporarily till they collected enough money to build the new synagogue. His friend Dreiman the shamus, who was helping the caretaker of the green synagogue till their own should be rebuilt, would shake his head understandingly. “And how is he?”

  The caretaker of the green synagogue would come and sit down with them for a little while, and anyone else who happened to be around would drift over. Chaim would sigh. “How should he be?” It was not for them to question the will of God. Still, it did not seem, somehow, quite fair. Such a young person, still in his early thirties, younger even than Chaim’s youngest. So talented, so good to his father. He had rushed like a martyr into the flames. Hadn’t he and Dreiman seen it with their own eyes? And then to be taken suddenly like that. But what could one say? God knew best.

  God knew best, they agreed. And someone who was particularly intrepid in his thoughts would finally mention, “We all must die sometime.” And the old men would nod their heads and murmur over this fact. It was an unbelievable truth that had superseded all others. Loyally, however, Chaim would have the last word. “But we don’t all have to be preceded by our sons,” he would remind them.

  “God prevent it,” they would exclaim in horror, and each one would return to his prayers.

  Chaim sighed heavily and glanced up at Abraham, who was weighing out the ground meat.

  “Did you say something?” said Abraham.

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Chaim. Lately Abraham had developed this disconcerting habit of asking a person suddenly if he had spoken, when, as far as he could make out, he had been merely thinking. Sometimes it gave Chaim the queer feeling that Avrom was somehow listening for something – perhaps he was even just on the edge of reading his thoughts. On the other hand, how could he be sure that he had not spoken? His wife had assured him several times that he had taken to talking aloud to himself. It was part of her campaign to convince him that he was going into his second childhood.

  “What?” said Abraham.

  “Nothing,” said Chaim, “nothing. It’s just my Bassieh.” Chaim sighed.

  Hymie Polsky came in from outdoors and stood for a moment, stamping and blowing in the butcher-shop doorway. He nodded and walked past them into the kitchen and stood making loud noises in front of the hot-air vent before he took off his overcoat.

  “There will be a war,” said Chaim. He shivered under the blast of cold air that had followed Hymie into the shop. He did not want to leave the shop just yet, to head into the cold wind, but it was so hard to find things to say. “A terrible war. They won’t be allowed to go on tormenting us. The world won’t let them. The people will rise up.”

  “There’ll be a war all right,” said Hymie, rubbing his hands and blowing on them as he emerged from the kitchen. “But not because anybody gives a damn about us.” There was authority in Hymie’s voice. He enjoyed letting the old man know. As he spoke he glanced sideways at Abraham, who busied himself behind the counter.

  “God will help us,” said Chaim.

  Hymie laughed patronizingly. “Yeah.” He went into the delicatessen, glanced at the empty booths, and moved toward the kibitzarnia. Chaim watched him with an expression of distaste on his face.

  “It is said” – Abraham spoke suddenly – “that thousands are being murdered.”

  “Thousands? Millions,” said Chaim. “They say that they want to wipe out all the Jews in the world.” Chaim snorted. “Can you imagine that?”

  “Where is God, then, Chaim?”

  Chaim’s eyes rolled instinctively upward.

  “Where is God when all this is going on?” Abraham repeated.

  “God knows,” said Chaim. “He knows what He’s doing.”

  “Is He doing it, then?” Abraham persisted.

  “Ah, well, no I wouldn’t say He was doing it exactly Himself.” Chaim squirmed on his honorary barrel. “It’s being done, it’s true, by our enemies, by His enemies. He won’t be quiet for long. They say it’s getting worse day by day. The refugees tell such stories they make the skin shudder on your body. But there is action. They are making campaigns for other countries to let in the refugees, to save their lives.”

  “But they don’t want to,” said Abraham slowly. “God sees. He sees this too. And everything He writes down in His book. Isn’t that so, Chaim?”

  “Yes,” said Chaim.

  “And yet everything that happens seems to be trying to say something else. Do you hear it, Chaim, like a whispering around you?”

  Chaim looked around him. “No,” he said reluctantly. “But I talk,” he confessed eagerly, “to myself sometimes, my Bassieh says. Maybe you hear me too?”

  “What does it matter who hears if He will not hear? Does He hear, Chaim?”

  “It is written that He hears everything,” said Chaim. “Even my Bassieh.” Chaim sighed. “Even God is to be pitied sometimes.”

  “It’s not,” said Abraham, “that I don’t believe. I made the mistake once of throwing myself about like a wild man. But the strangest thoughts take hold of a man sometimes. Before, just like that, it came to me all of a sudden – But does He believe? And then I think, But He knows. He doesn’t have to believe. And then I ask myself, What is it that He knows?”

  Chaim turned Abraham’s thoughts over in his head and could do nothing with them. Strange thoughts can be forgiven a man who has lived through so much. Who knew what thoughts he himself would have had if – Chaim shuddered inwardly.

  The door of the delicatessen opened and slammed shut. Hymie Polsky came out of the kibitzarnia to serve his customers.

  To listen. To listen with concentrated attention and to try painstakingly to piece together everything that went on in the world about him; that was the only way, Abraham knew. It was clear that it was intended for him to go on living yet awhile. But pray though he might, he could not come close to what it was that he lived for now. The child? Yes. But that too was in God’s hands. What plans could he make that could be assured for the child? What could he, who had not even been able to keep his sons alive, do, now that he was an old man, for the child? Try to insure the moment, yes, and that was hard enough with Polsky’s eye upon him and Hymie muttering in Polsky’s ear. Oh, yes, he had seen it. He had not let on, but he had seen. And the way Hymie only half looked at him when he spoke to him.

  Only the other day Polsky had overheard him groan as he hoisted a section of meat into the refrigerator. “Your arms aren’t what they used to be, eh, Avrom?” he had remarked. “Don’t strain yourself.” It had been kindly enough said, but Abraham, straining, had caught an undertone of hidden meaning. And it had caused a sweat to break out all over his body so that now when he thought that Hymie or Polsky was about he found himself trying to work more quickly and watching them with a feeling of anxiety that was new to him, out of the corner of his eye. He should be afraid of Hymie? What had happened to him? What had happened to the whole world?

  —

  Polsky yawned and stretched, scratched his belly under his pants, listened for a moment as Hymie banged the cash register, and then, alone in the kibitzarnia, picked up a deck of cards from the table and began to shuffle through them absent-mindedly.

  Why should she come here to make scenes anyway? Did she make them with those “gentile” friends she talked so much about? What did he owe her, when it came to that? Whatever you said to her nowadays, you got from her like from the horse’s rear. It hadn’t been that way once – a temper, yes, Laiah the red, but not such airs, such demands, like the Queen of Sheba. And if you happened to say something she didn’t like, hoo-ha! Right away she was tossing her ass to the empty air. And with Hymie? At knife’s edge. So if she found those “gentiles” of hers, whoever they were, so satisfactory, let her keep them and not expect everybody around here to – But Hymie could rea
lly squeeze her gall bladder over those new friends of hers. Every time she mentioned her “Christian” or her “gentile” friends, he made like he didn’t know from nothing. “Your what? Your who? Oh, you mean your friends the goyim!” Scenes then! With Hymie and Laiah swearing at each other in the kibitzarnia and Avrom in the butcher shop, he didn’t know whether he had a whorehouse here or a synagogue.

  Not that it was up to Avrom to judge what went on in his own business. But who said he was judging? There he himself didn’t agree with Hymie. The old man had enough of his own troubles to worry about.

  That was the trouble with Hymie – Polsky ran his hand thoughtfully over the smooth skin at the top of his head – with the whole younger generation. The old dog can’t work any more, throw him out, have him shot. “We can’t cry for everyone.” Those had been Hymie’s words. True enough, in their own way. Polsky had never in his life wasted many tears over anyone else. But that was not the point now.

  It had been a long time, a long time when it hadn’t been just a question of paying a man a salary. There had been a time when Abraham had virtually run the shop when he had busied himself elsewhere. And even now Hymie couldn’t claim that the old man didn’t pay his way. Who could pickle meat like him? There were still customers from the heights who came to Polsky’s and nowhere else for their briskets. It was all right to talk about streamlining the business, all very fancy. But it was still what you gave the customer for his money that counted.

  Polsky dealt himself a hand of solitaire. Avrom had got it up the wrong end, and it hurt, naturally. But what the hell? And what would people say if he threw him out now, after all that had happened? When it came down to it, Polsky was after all a religious man.

  The thing about Hymie – Polsky didn’t bother to fight the temptation to cheat – the thing about Hymie was that he liked the idea of being boss. Sometimes he even liked to let himself forget that his father was still around. Polsky listened for a moment. The door to the delicatessen had closed but he had not heard the cash register ring. Polsky frowned. The register banged belatedly. Polsky cheated again, and the game moved smoothly.

  In a way he felt a certain kinship with Abraham. He himself was no old man yet, but a man in his fifties is no longer a youngster either. Someday the time would come for him too. But he would be smart about it. There are ways an old dog can make sure of having his warm bed to die in, even when he’s useless. And there are ways of keeping your sons clucking love all over you. Polsky triumphantly collected the cards. Just keep the property in your name, and they’ll love every senile part of you.

  Still – Polsky scrupulously reshuffled the cards – there was something in what Hymie said. It might do to give Morton a bit more experience in the place. Someday, when they expanded and Hymie had a shop of his own to manage, Morton would have the run of this one. It might not be a bad idea, for a while anyway, while Avrom was still in mourning, to let him go home earlier and let him deliver the afternoon parcels on his way to or even back from the synagogue. He had to leave early anyway to say Kaddish.

  That was an idea. Polsky dealt again. It was sound business and at the same time generous to old Avrom too, like a gesture of sympathy. A man was always better off to sit himself down and figure out all the angles. He always ended up more right that way. The butcher-shop bell tinkled and the cash register banged simultaneously. Polsky sneaked a look at the next card.

  —

  Abraham paused at the foot of the stairs, startled by the frivolity of his thought. He had been just about to mount the stairs when it had occurred to him that surely Laiah could not now be what people claimed she was. It was not practical. A few years ago, perhaps, yes. For a young man these stairs would be nothing, a brisk run before a heavy meal. But what could a man of her own age aspire to after climbing three steep flights of stairs? It was the sort of thing that Isaac might have said to him; it was almost as though Isaac had said it to him laughingly just now. And he would have answered reprovingly, for how could he go up to her now and hand her her parcel and look her straight in the eye with such a thought in the back of his mind?

  Oh, Isaac. Abraham shook his head as he started up the stairs. You would have said it right out, just like that, in front of Ruth, in front of Sarah, even in front of Sonya Plopler. And the next thing, Sonya Plopler would be asking you questions with a funny look in her eye. “Hm,” she would say, “I didn’t know she went after young men too.” It would be all over town in no time that Laiah was having business with men half her age, and my son, yet, would be given as the authority. How many times have I told you, in front of that woman bite your tongue. Abraham stopped and gripped the banister, staring down at the stairs. Then he looked around him sharply, from the brown stairs to the brown walls to the dim gray ceiling. With one hand on the banister he pulled himself upward again.

  Every afternoon now, afternoons that were dark with the premature winter evening, Abraham stood in doorway after doorway and smelled the smell of supper being prepared by plump, busy women, and saw their children running about the kitchens. Often he had to step aside to let a husband, returning from work, into a house that was warm and noisy with the shouts of children and their scolding mother. He could not help remembering how – wasn’t it only yesterday? – his life too had been full of the cries of children. Sometimes his heart seemed to cry out in him with pain and a sort of hunger. And it seemed to him that there must be something more for him, something that would bring him hope, that would help him to understand.

  All around him everyone but he had settled back willingly, easily into life. Only he stood, alone seeing how everything had gone wrong. What could the child know? – so small, so distant from him, so unaware that something lurked around every corner. Ruth had her work now, in a dress shop somewhere on the heights. He could see that each new day brought her entirely new things to think about, things that had nothing to do with them, with what had happened. The gap where Isaac had been was still there. But all the ragged underbrush was beginning to creep up, to cover the wounded earth, to try to hide the spot where something fine had stood.

  Even in himself he found sometimes that he could relax into a sort of – No, it was not happiness but a sort of acceptance, almost of pleasure, over certain things, like trudging through the snow with nothing to fight against for the moment but the wind and nothing to contemplate but the sparkling crispness of the ground. At such times his mind would wander away into his memories, and he would relive for a few moments happier times and rediscover scenes that he had almost forgotten. Or else things that had never really even happened would come to him, as though they were actually happening, and they would extend the bounds of his actual life, until he remembered.

  Laiah’s door was opened by a strange woman who stared at him with large, rather vacant eyes.

  “Butcher,” said Abraham.

  “Laiah, it’s your butcher,” the woman called over her shoulder in English, then turned back to stare at Abraham, who was fishing a parcel out of his canvas sack.

  “Tell the boy to come in, Jenny.” Laiah’s husky voice caroled from within.

  Jenny smiled and gestured to Abraham to follow her. “It’s no boy,” she said as she entered the kitchen. “It’s Father Christmas.” Her eyes widened in startled pleasure at her own witticism.

  “Avrom!” said Laiah, brushing past her friend. “But you look frozen! How come you’re delivering? Is Morton sick, or is Polsky trying to make an errand boy out of you?” Laiah could not resist this dig. Of late she had not been feeling very kindly toward the Polskys. “Walking around in the cold, and then having to climb three flights of stairs so that you get all sweated up inside – what kind of business for a man like you? Look how it’s dripping from your beard. Jenny” – Laiah turned to her friend – “set the teacups now, will you? You can do my nails afterward. Avrom will have tea with us.” And in Yiddish, to Abraham: “I’ll hang up your coat. No, no, it’s absolutely no use to argue with me. You should know that by n
ow. Remember the other time you had tea with me? After tea Jenny will read our cups. But you drink from a glass, don’t you? I’ve become assimilated. I like to have my cup read. My friend Jenny,” Laiah explained, “is a gentile, but a very fine one. Jenny,” she called, “will you set a glass for my friend?”

  Laiah felt the afternoon’s boredom slipping away from her. She was a little annoyed with herself for sounding so eager. It was his deafness and having to yell up at him that made it sound so, she told herself. “Your coat,” she said, laughing. “No one will steal it here. I’ll just hang it up a minute.”

  Jenny busied herself delightedly in the kitchen. In her heart she positively thrilled with the strangeness of this exotic Jewess who was her friend. They did things differently. Here was this bearded old man. What could she call him? Distinguished. He certainly didn’t look like a butcher. Could it merely have been a code word? Jenny felt the parcel on the table. It could be meat.

  Ever since she had moved into this district, into the attic room across the hall, and had made the acquaintance of Laiah because they shared the same toilet on the landing, she had really learned; it had been an education. At first she had been just a little wary of this woman with her peculiar accent. But Laiah had been so friendly and really so interesting. When they had got to talking about personal things that first time, and Laiah had asked her with such an incredulous voice, “You mean you really haven’t, not ever?” – why, she hadn’t known where to look. Of course Laiah had been married. But Laiah knew very well that she was single. It wasn’t marriage that Laiah was talking about. She could still see Laiah’s unbelieving full-lipped face leaning toward her, her moist eyes, and feel the delicious horror of realization that, even without marriage, Laiah had. What would her mother think if she were still alive? Jenny cast a shy, darting glance at the back of the bearded man.