The Sacrifice

by Adele Wiseman

  He still had that feeling now as he watched her, that she was a stranger to him, capable of hidden things, of different thoughts and actions. And was only she a stranger? When he had heard himself shouting a few moments ago, when he had realized the bitterness in himself at what she had said – and not only at what she had said, a general bitterness, bubbling up inside of himself – he had felt for a moment capable of God alone knew what. The sense of strangeness grew upon him now as from the bedroom the first few hesitant notes of the child’s violin broke in his ears.

  Unnoticed, the dusk of an early spring evening had crept in through the kitchen window, muting the clear distinctions between one object and another. The notes of the violin laced through the dim-lit air. There was a fuzzy blueness about Ruth, close though she was to him. He did not even know what he himself really looked like any more. He had only a feeling of face. Here his arm lay in front of him loosely on the table, his fingers drumming, a thing apart from him. He had only a feeling of arm, a throbbing feeling of two aching arms. The threaded violin pierced in and out, tied him to the table, bound him to Ruth, looped through the room. Where was the knowledge that had given form to his existence once? Where was the whole man, Abraham? What is man without meaning, without purpose? Best to die like this, merging gradually with everything about you, with only your spirit singing its last frail notes in your ears.

  It was with an effort, with the deliberate movement of all his body, that he restored the feeling of the whole outline of his physical self. He dragged himself up from the chair and went to turn on the kitchen light. Ruth shifted slightly as he came back to his chair. What was she thinking? What did she plan in her mind when she was alone? They talked so little nowadays to each other – a question, an answer. What was she, this young woman whom he had taken for a daughter because his son had taken her for a wife, whom he thought he knew once and who now told him so shrilly not to interfere? “I didn’t even know that he’d spoken to you,” said Abraham again.

  “I know, Pa.” Ruth lifted her face from her hand, and he saw that her cheeks were damp. “I don’t know how it happened. I worry so much that he’ll go wild. He’s alone so much. I don’t see him from morning till night. I don’t know what kind of children he plays with all day, where he wanders around. At lunch time I worry, is he running around on the streets? What does he do until it’s time for Chaider? What are they teaching him, those friends of his? It’s not the district for a child to grow up in, alone all day. And when he asks to go out again after supper, when I’ve hardly seen him – I’m sorry, Pa. He’s growing so quickly; sometimes it seems as though he’s slipping through my hands altogether.”

  “Long ago,” said Abraham slowly, not looking at her, “when my Sarah and I were just married and had started to raise a family, we decided that no matter what happened, no matter what should come about and how angry we should be with each other, we would not quarrel in front of the children. We were angry sometimes, not very often. You know what an appeasing angel Sarah was. I found myself anyway doing her will, though it always appeared to me that she was giving in to me. But never in front of the children; never did the children see one of us speak rudely to the other. It was the way my mother had taught me. And it was the same with you and Isaac. I said to Isaac, ‘Don’t let me hear of anything that goes on between you and your wife. Don’t call on your mother and me if you have an argument.’ So it was, and it was well!”

  Ruth felt a mixture of shame and irritation at the rebuke. She tried; God only knew that she tried. Why did he have to throw up to her how she fell short of them, of his family? And yet he was right. The child should be shielded. The child should not see them quarreling. If only there were someone to talk to, to discuss things with. It was all very well for him to criticize. But when she tried to talk to him about something constructive, about opening a dry-goods shop as the salesman had suggested, what help had he been? He had scarcely listened. He had seemed almost unwilling to understand that it might be necessary for them to move out of here, to take some steps toward reordering their lives more satisfactorily.

  “If only,” she began, “we could plan things out so that I could have him home for lunch, maybe even both of you. We could have a small place, maybe with living quarters in the back. As long as I’m near him, so I won’t have to worry about him all the time. You understand, Pa?”

  “About me you don’t have to worry,” said Abraham. “You can be sure that no one will ever say that I have been a bad influence on my grandson, even though maybe once I did accidentally tell him that he could do something his mother had forbidden.”

  “I know, Pa, I know. And if he grew up to be like you I’d have nothing to complain about.”

  Abraham frowned. “I don’t want him to grow up to be a butcher.”

  “That’s why we must plan,” said Ruth quickly. “Pa, we could start afresh. We could start to plan for him. This is no way for him to be brought up, wandering about in the streets.”

  How did she mean to start afresh? One started afresh when one knew where the start was, and when one thought one knew where the end was. And it seemed to him that her starting afresh involved, somehow, her demand that he should not interfere. Not interfere? How could he not interfere? What about the child? What about the future?

  Ruth waited for him to answer her, but he seemed to have forgotten her words. Perhaps if she tried again another time, when he was not so upset, he might understand. She would find out more about it from Harry. The salesman really thought it was a good idea, and he had offered to help. Maybe if she planned it all out carefully herself and then came to him when it was all ready to be put into action, he might realize that it could be done.

  …She deals with the child. What can I say? She treats me as though I too were a child. She won’t even argue with me properly, to hear my full opinion. When Isaac lived it was not like this. When she speaks to me gently, with consideration, with tact, I can see that she is choosing her words for tact, for gentleness, not so as to come to grips with me as a human being, as though I were really someone to consult, to listen to. She evades; decisions are already made; the child has already been told before I have been consulted, and I am told not to interfere…

  Ruth had risen and stood by him, putting her hand on his shoulder. “Why do you still frown like that? Won’t you forgive me for what I said? You can see that we will have to plan to move for the boy’s sake, can’t you, Pa?”

  At the touch of her hand Abraham felt a warmth stirring in him, mingled with an obscure sense of shame. For a moment he didn’t look at her but mumbled guiltily into his beard.

  “You look tired, Pa,” said Ruth gently. “And Moishe must be, too. Listen, he hasn’t stopped playing. Maybe we should thank him for the concert.”

  Because he was ashamed he allowed her to help him up from his chair, although at the same time he told himself that he was no cripple. “I am tired.” He straightened up and removed her hand from his arm, taking her instead firmly under the arm. “Forgive me too,” he said. “I too think of the future. But a man’s life moves in a circle. Though he thinks he’s moving upward he finds he’s back where he started, not knowing, not understanding, waiting for a word. Only now he’s old,” he added wryly, “and maybe too deaf to hear, eh? But not too old to escort a lady.” Abraham laughed, and the child paused in his playing, startled to hear the once familiar sound. With a flourish, and feeling immensely better, Abraham led Ruth to her son.

  —

  Chaim waited while Abraham came down the steps and along the short walk, readjusting the shoulder strap of his delivery sack. In silence Abraham turned out of the gate and they walked on down the street. Chaim glanced up at his friend, who was fidgeting still with the shoulder strap. There had been a time, when Polsky had first set Abraham to doing deliveries, that Chaim had shaken his head over the fact that his friend should end up so. “What does a man foresee?” he had said to the others at the synagogue. But now the sight of Abraham trudg
ing through the streets with the delivery sack over his shoulder had become a familiar thing. Neither did it bother Chaim any more that very often, when they were together, he had to make most of the conversation. He had become used to chattering into the sympathetic silences of his friend.

  “Did you speak to Dreiman at the synagogue today?” Chaim hurried to keep up.

  “No.” Abraham slowed down slightly as he felt Chaim’s hand restrainingly on his arm. “No time. I still had these to do. With Dreiman you have to stand awhile.”

  “Poor Dreiman,” said Chaim, “he’s so bewildered with the news and the rumors; they’re driving him crazy.”

  “Is it true,” said Abraham, “that they’re not going to rebuild on the old site?”

  “Well” – Chaim sighed – “since Schwarzgeist’s son is taking a money interest for the sake of his father’s Sepher Torah, it’s practically certain they won’t. This district is too low-class. In fact, they’re talking of a site on the heights, near some big church – only it should be bigger.”

  Abraham said nothing. He was thinking of how Isaac had foreseen this. They would build far out. How would he reach the synagogue on the Holy Days when riding was forbidden? And they would have an expensive membership, too, in their rich man’s synagogue, so that even if he could walk those miles he would not be able to afford to pray before the Torah that his son had saved.

  “Dreiman doesn’t know what to do with himself,” said Chaim. “Yesterday he phoned all the big ones on the committee and told each one of them that he knows they’ve heard rumors about him, that it was through his negligence that the fire started, but that it’s not true. All along he’s been afraid they’d blame him. But since no one said anything to him he just stayed on at the green synagogue, keeping watch over the Sepher Torah, helping out Pleschikov there, and doing odd jobs around that he has been doing for years. Now that they’re starting to plan he’s gotten wind that they might not appoint him shamus of the new synagogue.”

  “He’s not good enough for them?” asked Abraham.

  “Who knows? None of them gave him a straight answer. Nothing’s for sure yet. They’re still making plans. He shouldn’t upset himself. Pleschikov says he almost burst out crying when he was talking to Schwarzgeist on the phone – how he wasn’t so old as they thought, maybe; how Manishin, if they were thinking of Manishin for the job, as he had heard, was half blind; how hard he worked, all the time; how it wasn’t true that he had left the synagogue unattended to run an errand for somebody else, how it was anti-semites who had set the fire. You know how when Dreiman gets ahold of you he doesn’t let go so easily.”

  “Meanwhile they’re keeping him dangling?”

  “Who knows what they intend to do? He’s maybe exciting himself for nothing. He made me promise that I’d ask Ralph, because Ralph is tied up with these big shots. Everything they think Ralph can do. Well, I’ll ask him if I see him. Of course he’s very busy. I told Dreiman, ‘Wait,’ I said, ‘you’re expecting the worst; it means the best will happen.’ If Ralph gives me a chance I’ll ask him. I’ll maybe even see him today. He may be even at the suite later on when I get home.” Chaim sighed and bobbed along in silence for a moment.

  “A man comes to a time in life,” Chaim resumed, pressing forward a little breathlessly to keep pace with Abraham, “when he should be able to sit back. His last few years he should be able to enjoy in peace. But instead?” Chaim spread out his arms in front of him, threw back his head on which his derby sat glued, and took a deep breath of spring air, as though it were a heavy chore. His eye, caught by the rich blue of the sky, squinted upward a moment, and he breathed again with less difficulty.

  “But instead will she let you?” Chaim went on. “Not my Bassieh. If I’m not an old no-good who runs around all day like a young dandy then I’m a doddering fool in my second childhood. I say to her, ‘Bassieh, for the past three years already now you’ve been pounding it in my head that I’m in my second childhood. All my life I’ve only been a year and a half older than you. Isn’t it right that for the last year and a half you’ve been in your second childhood too?’

  “So she says, ‘Oh, because you’re crazy you want me to be crazy too?’

  “So I say, ‘No, I don’t want you to be crazy and I don’t want to be crazy myself. But you have no more reason to call me crazy than I have to call you crazy.’ You can see I talk to her reasonably.

  “ ‘I have had two operations,’ she says to me. ‘Is this the way you talk to me?’

  “ ‘What has this got to do with it?’ I say to her. ‘Did you have the operations in your head?’

  “So she gives me one poisoned look; she gets her hat, and she’s gone. At noontime she is still not home, and there is no lunch for me. I begin to worry about her. After all, no matter what she’s like, she’s still my wife. She has never left me without lunch before. Then she comes flinging into the house, and she says to me, ‘It’s all right; you’ll hear what Ralph has to say; you’ll hear what he thinks about his father telling his mother she needs an operation in her head.’

  “ ‘But Bassieh, I didn’t say –’

  “ ‘It’s all right, wait wait, you’ll see,’ she says. So I’ll tell him if he comes, not that he’s likely to rush over so fast, I’ll tell him it’s nice to see him occasionally. And I’ll tell him that he has no right to criticize; a golden home, golden children, and where does he spend his time?

  “I know what she’s after, too,” Chaim resumed after a moment. “She’s decided that the suite is too much for her to take care of. She complains. She is a sick woman. ‘A room,’ she says, ‘is enough for us at our age.’ She still wants that Ralph should sweep us up and have us in a room in his house. That’s what she wants. I know. Many years have taught me.

  “And he doesn’t want us. And I don’t want it either. Why should I sit at the bottom of his table when for my few remaining years I can still sit at the head of my own? But no. What will happen is that she will convince Ralph that I am getting a little childish, and that the suite and me are too much for her to take care of, and that it will be a good idea for us to move into a room where we can be taken care of. Then she will get the shock of her life; she will find out where they send old people, even with rich children, when they’re not wanted.” Chaim couldn’t keep the grievance from his voice. “You shouldn’t think I mind so much the Old Folks’ Home,” he went on quickly with a heroic shrug. “I have friends there. I know the superintendent personally. He’s no youngster himself, when it comes to that. But why should she push so? Why should mother-love be so blind that she will rush to dig her own grave?”

  Abraham stopped, and Chaim pulled up short beside him, eying him with damp, inquiring eyes. “We’ve walked past.” Abraham gestured, and they turned and walked back a few houses and then stopped again. “Well,” said Abraham and pointed upward to the top story of the house. “A long climb.”

  “Ah, aha.” Chaim scrutinized upwards. “My two feet would never carry me.”

  “Bit by bit” – Abraham adjusted the sack – “I pull myself upward.”

  “Well –” Chaim hesitated.

  “She keeps me, too.” Abraham waved his hand apologetically. “Talks. Doesn’t let me go. Customers.” Abraham shrugged and squinted fiercely upward.

  “Well,” said Chaim, “I won’t wait, then. I promised Dreiman anyway I’d drop in again before I go home.”

  “Not to worry, Chaim,” said Abraham. “Sholom aleichem.”

  Chaim smiled. “Aleichem sholom, my friend.”

  “Not to worry” was an easy thing to say, a gentle way when you had to cut off to go about your business. But who could so easily forget all that it covered over? What comfort could his words be to Chaim, when stirring in Chaim’s eyes there was a deeper apprehension? There are more ways than one to lose a son. Was this how it always ended? Did all a man’s finer expectations wither like dry twigs in his hands? Oh, there must be something else!

  “Ofte
n,” he was telling Laiah a little while later, “how often it used to happen that my Isaac used to teach me things. He would uproot an old idea and plant in its stead a fresh new thought that would grow in my mind until I knew that this was a truth. I would show it to my friends and say, ‘Here, here is an example that the young can teach the old.’ I myself am a man who has looked always to the new, who is always willing to learn.”

  Laiah nodded sympathetically. “Of course. I know.”

  “Sometimes they upset me, though, Isaac’s ideas. It was because they were so grimly anchored to the ground. It was as though a man who could fly deliberately descended to the earth and declared that he could not really fly, and to prove it henceforth he would walk. And then he would go on to explain things, step by step, as seen through the eyes of a man who has clipped his own wings. But surely what he sees now are only the pores on the earth’s surface, and not the deep breathings and gentle swellings of her breast.” Abraham stared into his glass of tea.

  Laiah fingered the bodice of her low-cut housecoat. “You express yourself so poetically,” she said gently.

  He didn’t hear. “Yet I admired his courage, misguided though it was, and his young man’s determination. Surely God knew, God understood. I tried to explain to Him sometimes in my prayers, when I knew that something Isaac had said might offend, that he did not mean it exactly so. And wasn’t I right? Didn’t he save the Torah? No matter what he says, a man like Isaac, when the testing time comes, will lift up his wings.”