Inwardly she exulted. He had to come! All of a sudden the weight that she was talking about seemed to fall away from her. Her body felt an internal glow of pleasure such as she had not known since – oh, since a time that might return again. She could feel herself almost blushing under the disturbing steadiness of his eyes, and her own eyes slipped modestly to focus on his beard. Her fingertips tingled to caress that beard, and the tingling spread, an almost invisible shudder, through her body.
Was this love that she felt? She had asked herself this question before in an ironic way when she realized how seriously she had begun to take what she called her “teasing” of him when they had tea together, a teasing which consisted of finding out, of probing to see what he felt and could feel. Not love, she had insisted then, but a kind of game. What else could you do with a man who took you so rigidly at your word? She had urged him to sit and talk sometimes, so he sat and talked sometimes. Often she had had to laugh afterward. But then it had occurred to her, wasn’t this a sign of respect for her as a person? Well, now he was ready for more, and now, in an access of grateful emotion, she was willing to let it be love, let it be anything as long as she could go on feeling this way – young, alive, ready again to show the world. She had scarcely stretched out her finger really, she felt now, and he had come – not just anybody, this man. Look how he suffered from it, his face strained, his eyes dark – for her.
Laiah’s eyes moved with pitying tenderness over his face. She had an impulse to lean forward and whisper those words, as though he might recognize and respond to them. “Little daughter,” her bearded master had whispered as he had crawled in beside her on the stove. “Little father,” she had whispered. But this was no Russian landlord to give her a pair of shoes and a hat with a feather. He would give her back more, all that had been taken since and all that had been freely given. Laiah felt suddenly voraciously hungry.
Abraham waited, not quite sure in his mind what he waited for, not quite clear in his mind what he was here for. Her vivacity confused him. It was not what he had expected. What had he expected? While she was making a whole pile of sandwiches, as if she expected guests at this time of night, he looked around him, examining the tiny kitchen, then turned his gaze through the door into the darkness of the bed-living-room and the hall, as though perhaps someone or something hid waiting there. Nothing. He faced the sandwiches again, which Laiah was urging him to eat. He noticed with a craftsman’s twinge of disapproval that she did not wipe the bread knife when she finished slicing a tomato, but left it on the table with tomato juice and seeds clinging to it. He couldn’t eat, but watched her orange lips fold themselves over a sandwich like separate, living, predatory things. Laiah, chewing, shook her head and made sounds to indicate that the sandwich was good and to encourage him to eat. Abraham shook his head again, picked up the knife, and with a paper napkin wiped it carefully dry. Beyond his uncertainty and his feeling that for some reason he had been brought into an alien place, he was conscious of a special awareness, of a reaching out of his senses. Sensations impinged on him sharply and separately. His eyes brooded on her face, on the masses of orange-auburn hair that lay on her shoulders now in little-girl fashion. This was so far removed from his own life, and yet – Her words had never sent him weeping into the streets. He felt an uprush of resentment against Ruth, and immediately a counterwashing sense of his own guilt, his own degradation.
“You won’t have anything to eat or drink?” Laiah repeated. “Well, I won’t press you.” She wiped the breadcrumbs away from her mouth and pulled her chair closer to his corner of the table so that her knee brushed against his. Why didn’t he speak? It flashed across her mind that he must have waited until his daughter-in-law and grandson were asleep and then sneaked out. How this must have been growing in him. And she hadn’t even gauged it, really. She had thought that maybe – But who could tell, with him? Well, this secrecy was fine for now, for now it was all right. Later on – Already she could see herself dropping by the butcher shop to look in on her husband. Who would say anything to her in the kibitzarnia then? She might even consent to play a game occasionally if they would bite their vulgar tongues. And on the High Holidays she would go with him to the new synagogue they were building in the heights, to worship before the miracle Torah that her stepson had saved. She would sit with the richest women in town. But all that for later. For now – Laiah stretched her arms back; her breasts heaved forward momentarily. Then with a sigh she dropped her arms, wriggled her shoulders slightly, and leaned toward him, smiling.
“Well, Avrom, you’ve come to see me.” She looked sideways at the table and added tenderly, “At last.” Her voice was low, resonant. No use to be coy. He had come to her, distraught, disturbed. She would show him that she understood.
The words caught at his mind. He withdrew his eyes from her breasts, glancing at her guardedly, searching her face. Laiah put her soft hand over his, which toyed restlessly with the handle of the bread knife. “Yes,” she began again as Abraham turned his eyes to her hand, which moved gently on his own – a soft, opulent hand with an odd red freckle here and there. The underlying throbbing in his fingers, on which was now superimposed the caress of her hand, seemed to draw all the nerves of his body to that hand. But this seemed to be taking place apart from him. In another region entirely his ears strained for her next words.
“Yes,” said Laiah softly, caressingly, her words playing, like her hand. “I’ve waited a long time,” she said a little chidingly.
“You have waited for me?” Now it seemed to him that she was beginning to reveal herself. If he listened now, if he could seize the right moment to ask the right question – It had been done in stranger ways. Something about this woman…
How tense he was! All she had to do was to lean over and pull his beard, and she would be in his lap in a minute. No, not yet – not with him. “Those times you’ve come here and sat with me for a few minutes, I could see that you knew, that you had felt it too, underneath. Further back even, from the first time I saw you in Polsky’s shop, I could feel it. There was an affinity between us. I’ve always known that we’d be friends someday, good friends – maybe even more. Polsky” – Laiah gestured with the hand that had lain on his own – “even Polsky was –” She shrugged. “How could he understand me really?” Laiah said this with satisfaction, and her hand dropped back onto Abraham’s hand and squeezed it slightly.
“You’ve known?” he repeated as though to himself. “You’ve waited?” – through all those years when he had suffered and labored and sweated to rebuild? He began to be afraid. Something he had expected, something he had wanted to know. Now he felt suddenly that it was late at night; he wished suddenly that maybe she wouldn’t go on. All this turmoil in one part of him, while another was deathly still, intent, listening.
“How often I’ve thought to myself this last little while,” Laiah continued when he said no more, “what a crazy world we live in. All this time that we’ve known each other, you and I, aware of each other; how often we’ve moved toward each other a little bit, feeling that somehow there was an affinity, that we were made to come together.” Still he was silent. “I’m not hiding anything from you, Avrom. I know you must have heard stories. I was married once – better not to talk of that now. What do people understand? And besides, can you say” – she faced him challengingly – “that there are things you don’t regret?”
“You have never had any children?” he said.
The statement – she didn’t know whether it was a question or a statement – seemed so totally unrelated that Laiah was for a moment startled out of her train of thought and gave him a very puzzled look. But almost immediately another possibility occurred to her, and she laughed outright at the absurdity. Did he think she was a spring chicken? “I am not likely to have any accidents,” she said. “Even if I had to worry I could handle that. I am not anxious for any more responsibilities either. I like children, mind you. But after all – And, you know, I’m not a
s young as I once was either.” She couldn’t help the coyness. Could he be so naïve? She felt again very young and carefree. She looked at him amorously, caressingly.
He could hardly look at her. It was as though he were seized up by something within himself, by a strong hand that gripped his insides tightly, then released them, gripped and released and gripped them again, each time more tightly, so that he seemed to rise and fall on a mounting wave of nausea, accompanied by a feeling of self-hatred that had grown on him from the moment, ages back, when he had left Ruth and the house.
“All my life,” he burst out, “I have wanted only one thing: to grow, to discover, to build. Of all the voices that are given to a man I took the voice of praise; of all the paths I chose the path of creation, of life. I thought that merely in the choosing I had discarded all else. I thought that I could choose. One by one, with such ease, they were stripped from me. Wherever I look there is a shadow, a shadow that all my life I did not see, I tried to ignore. The shadow grows about me, filling in the corners of my emptiness, darkening my desire. You’ve waited for me, empty, all this time.”
Laiah had listened patiently. She had heard, in an occasional word dropped around the kibitzarnia, that Abraham was not quite the same as he had been once, since his son had died. She could understand that. If he wandered off sometimes, as though trying to argue something out with himself, that was all right too. She could ignore it. But she was glad when his rambling took an understandable turn. “Yes, I’ve waited.” He was right. What did the others really mean now? It was so simple. She gestured with her arms, empty and waiting.
“Why?” the question, momentous, was whispered from his throat.
Laiah didn’t answer. Her eyes, large and moist, widened under his own. The game was deeply exciting to her now. Not since a very long time ago had she played it with such enjoyment, had it seemed so new, with whispered words and shadowy nuances. And he took it so seriously.
She didn’t answer either. His impatience grew. “Why?” He was on his feet suddenly, leaning over her.
Startled at what was almost a shout, Laiah recoiled an instant. Then, looking up at him, conscious that her flimsy housecoat was open and that her nightgown was even flimsier, Laiah paused before she said defiantly, laughing a little, “Because.” With a sudden gliding movement she pushed one hand through his beard, up his cheek and around to the back of his neck. At the same time she came to her feet and pressed herself up against him. “Because of this.” She laughed deep, throaty laughter and moved against him. Abraham swayed against the table.
“Closer,” Laiah murmured into his ear, “like one.”
“Like one?” he repeated dazedly, feeling as though he really were sinking into the mass of her flesh. She was pressed up so close to him that it was almost as though she really were a part of him. “Why did you wait,” he managed, “right from the beginning, watching me?”
She laughed again, brushing his beard with her lips.
“Because you knew?”
She laughed compliantly. “You ask so many questions. Haven’t I told you? Of course I knew.”
“Like one,” he whispered. The other part of him – that was empty, unbelieving, the negation of life, the womb of death, the black shadow that yet was clothed in the warm, tantalizing flesh of life. Now she pressed herself closer to him, inward. She was bent slightly backward so that with one arm he was forced to support her, achingly, to keep her from falling. They swayed together, he back against the table and she falling now against him. His free hand reached behind him for support on the table. He felt a sharp pain in his palm as the blade of the bread knife bit into his hand. He moved his hand, which had suddenly become sticky, and brushed it feebly against his trousers before he braced it again on the table.
No matter what a man did, no matter how hard he tried, no matter how great his desire, was it all reduced to this, to a dream pantomime of life, a shadow of meaning? Did he come at last to accept the shadow, to embrace the emptiness, to acknowledge his oneness with the fruit without seed, with death, his other self?
Laughing, Laiah had reached up her other hand and was tangling her fingers in his beard. “Little father,” she murmured in Ukrainian, “will you be good to me?” Her fingers gripped his beard, and she began to pull lightly. “Come into the bedroom,” she whispered into his ear. Her fingers tightened. Her body undulating, she tried to pull him by its very movement after her.
“Don’t!” he almost shouted. “Don’t touch my beard.”
“Shhhh.” She giggled.
His beard, where she was tugging it, began to tingle in every hair root. His arm that was around her was painfully tensed, the pains shooting up and down raspingly from his shoulder. “Don’t.” He tightened his hold and pulled backward. Isaac had grasped his beard. The thought of Isaac made him pull his head back sharply and twist it frantically, trying to dislodge her hand.
“Does it hurt? Hurry, then.” Laiah laughed. “You have to get home sometime, don’t you? You don’t want your Ruth to know you’ve been out all night. She’ll be waiting for you,” Laiah teased, “if you don’t hurry. Listen, we can talk another time. I trust you. I’m not worried about you.”
Her words brought back to him his scene with Ruth. His mind zigzagged back and forth from Ruth to the present moment, rebounding from the unreality of each. “I’ve hurt her,” he mumbled.
Why did he hesitate? His hesitation caused a misgiving to stir inside of her. She didn’t want any misgivings! She threw back her head and leaned against his arm, her hair flowing downward, her lips slightly parted, so that, she knew, he could see into the front of her housecoat. Then she raised herself slowly forward and, opening her eyes wide, looked into his. The nether part of her body moved all the while with practiced, lazy voluptuousness. “Do what you want with me,” she urged. “I’m yours.”
Abraham looked into the auburn eyes, the strange, indrawing, familiar auburn eyes. Again the sense, as of some past memory just beyond his grasp, nagged at his mind.
Still he did nothing. “Don’t you love me?” she said, tugging his beard slightly to pull him out of his trancelike stillness. “Say you love me,” she urged. “Come.” Above everything else she wanted now that her moment should not become absurd. She stifled a resentment that was growing toward him for allowing it to begin to seem so.
He pulled his head back. Love – that word too played along his consciousness as though it belonged somewhere, and he could not quite place it.
“Come,” she whispered. “I won’t wait much longer.” She gave a more violent pull that almost toppled them both over. He grabbed wildly back at the table again; bread crumbs glued themselves to his raw palm and stung. His hand grasped finally the smooth handle of the bread knife. He managed to keep his balance, but she moved a step backward, taking him with her.
“You want me,” Laiah was whispering almost pleadingly, tightening the arm that was about his neck. “I can feel that you want me. I’ve known all along that you wanted me.”
“All I have ever wanted,” he protested distractedly, “is to build for my sons, to grow.”
“Forget,” she said impatiently, “forget all that. They’re dead; we’re alive.”
Just like that she came out with it, just like that, as if it were something good, while her body heat glued her to him, stifling him, trying to stifle his memory. They were dead, and he was lost, and the present was as a dream in which he could find neither them nor himself but only this insidious excitement, urging him to forget.
“Avrom.” There was an almost childish petulance in Laiah’s voice that tried further to confuse him.
What are you? he wanted to ask her. Who sent you to mock me? Who? And the thought leaped, as though it had been waiting, electrifying, terrifying, to his mind. One he could seek who knew, who would speak if he asked, who would give if he offered – if he had the courage.
Suddenly Laiah sensed a change in him. She realized that she was no longer maintaining the emb
race but that it was he who now strained her against him, holding her up. She felt a thrill of relief as his eyes moved with awareness over her. “Come into the bedroom,” she murmured again. She let her eyes flutter closed under the ardency of his gaze.
Looking at her then, he was lifted out of time and place. Lifetimes swept by, and he stood dreaming on a platform, apart, gazing at her with fear growing in his heart, and somewhere his Master, waiting. As in a dream, the knife was in his hand, the prayer was on his lips. Praying over her, at some neutral point in time, he saw her as though for the first time, and yet as though he had always seen her thus, saw her as something holy as she lay back, a willing burden, to offer, to receive, as once another…From inside him a tenderness swelled toward her, and for a moment he forgot his fear and felt as though he were almost on the point of some wonderful revelation.
“…Eloheinu Meloch Hoaul’om…”
Laiah heard with amazement the Hebrew words. Even over this he has to make a blessing. Her lips twitched to a smile.
She was laughing at him, still teasing him, his despair wreathed in smiles, the negation of his life. And yet there was something in him that ached to see how under her eyelids her eyebulbs were large and fine. Her forehead wrinkled and was somehow sad, like that of some time-forgotten creature that had crept out to seek the sun. Her hair flowed endlessly downward, falling gently over his arm. All this he could see, in the sacred place where he stood, and he could feel that it was trying to speak to him, to explain itself, for the moment was near.
Now, now was the time, in the stillness, as he stood once again, terrified, fascinated, on the brink of creation where life and death waver toward each other, reiterating his surrender; now was the time for the circle to close, to enclose him in its safety, in its peace. There must be a word, with them, in the room, hovering to descend. Almost it reached him there, beyond his mind, like the voice of a child, stuttering, excited, trying to break through the barrier of sound. He strained to hear.
The Sacrifice Page 33