The Sacrifice

by Adele Wiseman

  “Well, you can’t deny that he was your friend,” said Dreiman. “Wasn’t it always ‘Avrom this’ and ‘my friend Avrom that’?”

  “That butcher!” said one of the elders vehemently.

  “I don’t deny,” said Chaim. “The Avrom I knew was my friend.” He shook his head. “Avrom the murderer I didn’t know.” And yet he knew that this answer was an evasive one. Why didn’t he say right out what he thought? He thought as they thought, that the man had done a terrible thing, a dreadful thing. He wished fervently and deeply that he had never known him. That he, Chaim Knopp, who had always led an honorable life, who was respected – looked up to, even, by some – should have associated with a murderer! It was a blot on his old age. Thinking about it, he felt for a moment that if Avrom were to appear before him now he would spit on him publicly – or he would feel like it, anyway.

  “There were two Avroms, then?” Dreiman asked. “Yes, you’re right. Two men. One was the man he wanted us to see, full of big words and fine phrases; and the other, the real one, the woman-crawler, the knife-wielder, the God alone knows what.”

  The words fell with a flat unreality on Chaim’s ear. He could not seem to connect them once and for all with the person they were intended to describe. But he wanted to acquiesce.

  He has killed. Chaim shuddered. Shun him.

  “When I recall him now,” said Dreiman, “and it was just a week or so ago I spoke to him here, I wonder that I didn’t see, that I didn’t let myself see, really. I always had a premonition about that man.”

  Recall him. Chaim tried. Yes, he was one to give premonitions, more than premonitions – a man who walked toward his destiny familiarly, a man who had suffered. Involuntarily, he sighed. “Poor Avrom.” No. Mentally he corrected himself – He would not have liked me to call him poor. No. Internally he corrected himself again – Who cares, who cares what he would have liked?

  “Poor?” Pleschikov laughed with a certain scorn. “I should say it was poor someone else, wouldn’t you?” The old men muttered various assents.

  “True.” Chaim agreed. He closed his eyes, and from the past a voice, familiar – “You too shall have a grandson by your son Ralph” – a voice confident of miracles, and the figure of a man, turning to him gaily, with authority – “Who can be my equal now?” The heavy feeling began to oppress Chaim’s chest, and he sighed again.

  “…not that I can blame you entirely, Chaim.” Dreiman was talking. “It’s your nature. You are a little too quick to trust. You judge a man by his fine words. Often I used to watch you and think, Why is it that one of our leading members chooses to give his friendship to that butcher? But we can see now what mistakes even the wisest of us can make. A man goes around, thinking that he owns the world, chooses this friend, goes from here to there, retired, rich sons, doesn’t have to worry where his next bite comes from. But the One Above has His surprises.”

  “My friend,” Chaim felt himself constrained to say, “I did not give my friendship to a butcher, I gave it to a man.”

  “But what kind of a man?” asked Dreiman quickly, leaning toward him.

  “A madman,” said one of the elders.

  “Ay, ay,” said Chaim, “mad.” He seized on the word. When a man is mad, then things he does become more understandable because they do not have to be understood. That madness should sneak up on a man so!

  “Madness,” said Pleschikov. “This is what I call a fine madness. A man who has the sense not to turn the knife on himself but on someone else is not my idea of a madman.”

  “In the papers it says,” the elder continued, “that they are examining his mind, and that the doctors think –”

  “Sure, sure,” said Dreiman, “a lot of things it says in the papers. A fine name he has given us. ‘The first time,’ they keep writing over and over again, as if he had discovered America, ‘the first time in the history of the district that a Jew has committed murder.’ ”

  “Mazeltov,” said Pleschikov.

  “They would have had to look a lot farther than this district.” Dreiman snorted. “What Jew would kill? But no. He had to go and show them that we can have murderers too, just like them. And everybody knows he was from our synagogue, and now the congregation of this synagogue are complaining too. They too are given a black name because he came here after our synagogue burned down. I myself am ashamed. Is this the way we repay your hospitality?”

  “It’s all right; nobody blames you, Dreiman,” said Pleschikov.

  “I spoke to the rabbi himself,” the elder persisted. “He too thinks that it could not be other than madness.”

  “So if he was mad why didn’t he go bang his own head against the wall?” Dreiman turned on him.

  “Does a madman know what he is doing?” asked the elder gently.

  “I know what you’re thinking of, Cohen,” said Pleschikov, “but what has your son to do with this? Everywhere you push your son. It is true, your son was an unfortunate man, but does that make you a head doctor to tell us who is mad and who isn’t? Who can compare him with this outcast?”

  A powerful movement had taken place in the heart of Chaim Knopp as he listened to them arguing. Here was this man Cohen, a man who had scarcely known Avrom at all, looking at him through eyes made tender by the sight of his own mad son. And what did he do, who could almost feel the actual physical presence of his old friend, but turn with the pack, condemning, afraid to admit that he did not feel exactly as he himself expected he should feel. How to explain what he felt?

  “Who knows?” Summoning courage, Chaim began. “Who knows? Even the papers don’t know. He was not such a man – What he did – Madness, a madness of grief. He was such a man who couldn’t stand, couldn’t bear – It is a hard thing to explain, but a man like that – he could be pressed in, pressed in, but there was such a longing in him. You say just a butcher, but he was not, not like some others. He was not like me, afraid, treading the safe middle path. In his mind he was not afraid to climb, to soar, to walk the edge of the ravine. I would have liked to be such a one sometimes. But when such a man falls –”

  “To hell,” broke in Dreiman, “where he belongs. Does he have to drag the rest of us with him, through the mouths of the whole country?”

  “Friend,” said Chaim, “friend, what are you saying? It is a terrible thing. We all feel it is a terrible thing. But to curse in the House of God, when none of us knows where he is going –”

  “He knew where he was going.” Dreiman laughed scornfully. “In the dark he knew where he was going. I wish I were still young enough to sniff my way so well.”

  An ill-placed giggle from one of the elders was quickly subdued.

  “Listen,” said Chaim, “listen. They are looking into his head and finding out all kinds of things to say about a mad old man. But what do you think they would find if they could look where God looks, in his heart? What would they find? I myself cannot even bear to think of it.” Chaim was surprised at what he was saying. It was almost as though someone else were speaking through his lips. And yet everything he said seemed right, unalterably, from the moment he heard himself say it, the moment even it entered his mind. It was as if his heart, ignoring the cautious warning in him that he should not antagonize these old friends, ignoring his own horror, had leaped to an understanding of what his mind could not grasp. “I know what they would find if they looked in his heart,” he heard himself saying, and his whole being acquiesced in what he said. “They would find the knife!” In his excitement Chaim had started up. Now he sank back on the pew, his voice sinking to a whisper as he repeated, “The knife he used in his own heart.”

  Dreiman raised his eyebrows and looked knowingly about him, then back to Chaim. “You don’t have to excite yourself so, Reverend Chaim,” he with the faintest irony in his voice.

  Chaim became aware that there was an air about him in the synagogue, a tight feeling that was pressing in. The other men seemed to have formed a circle about him, their eyes pinning him around
like a tight band. His head quivered nervously.

  “All I am saying, Chaim,” said Dreiman softly, relentlessly, “is that they found the knife elsewhere, remember? And who put it there, eh?” Dreiman appealed to the others. “How many places can a knife be at once? I am surprised to hear you, Chaim, defending him.” Dreiman had adopted the deadly, patient tone of one who is speaking to a child, trying to force a confession of some misdeed from him. “You will excuse me if I say it right out. But I have always looked on you as one to respect, a man to come to for advice, more reverend, perhaps, than some of us. Not all of us have had the same opportunities for study. It is not that I – that we respect you any the less now, but here you come before us, sick from what has happened, and yet you will not admit that you have been wrong. In fact you still boast of your friendship with this murderer, and even compare him with yourself! What are we to think?”

  “I don’t know,” said Chaim, “what we are to think. I too renounced him. In my mind I said, Pooh-pooh. He has more than sinned. Henceforth he is dead. But I cannot prevent my heart from aching. I cannot forget the years that we talked together and helped each other and gave each other the comfort of love. I weigh one thing against the other. Is this Avrom real? Or is that Avrom real? And the Avrom I knew is the real man for me, no matter what he did, no matter what madness his sorrow drove him to. He is the Avrom who said to me, ‘Chaim, not to worry, be comforted.’ I wish now that I had known how to say it to him so well. Whatever his madness is, you can be sure he does not need your curses; he suffers enough. Which of us has lost three such golden promises as he? I tell you he’s sick.” Chaim was pleading now. “Pity him, if only for the sake of his son, who saved your Torah.”

  It seemed to Chaim that in this last he had finally hit on the exact note that would soften their hearts toward Avrom. He looked around him eagerly, hopefully, when he ceased speaking. There was a moment of restless silence. The elders looked at one another, and finally at Dreiman and Pleschikov, avoiding Chaim’s questioning glances. Chaim began to get the feeling that his was a trump card that had somehow been marked all along. Surprisingly, Dreiman was smiling, a rather sly smile.

  “Some of us,” said Dreiman after a long, deliberate pause, “have been thinking about this Torah-saving during the past few days. How indeed, from such a family, can one be a murderer and another a hero? Oh, it can happen, no doubt, but is it likely? And then we began to wonder – have we been seeing things as they actually happened? Or have we been seeing them as your friend Avrom and his son wanted us to see them? There are so many unanswered questions about that fire. What man here really knows what happened? Do you know? Do I know?”

  “What else is there to know?” asked Chaim. “I know, you know, we saw it with our own eyes. You yourself were shouting like a madman. All of a sudden, like a prophet, flaming, he came rushing out of that oven!”

  “Oh, yes, you’re right, you’re right,” said Dreiman. “We saw him rushing out, and I must admit that I myself was so overcome to see the Sepher Torah carried so that I cheered like the rest. It never occurred to me then to wonder what he was doing inside the synagogue at that time in the first place. How long had he been there? Was he in there before the fire started? Did he maybe have anything to do with the starting of the fire?”

  “He was coming from work when he saw –” Chaim began. “He had a pupil –”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Dreiman interrupted. “In many ways I am like you, Chaim. I have a trusting nature. Even afterward, when people were spreading stories that it was all my fault because they could think of no one else to blame, and threatening not to make me shamus of the new synagogue – though there isn’t a shamus in the city as conscientious as I, except my friend Pleschikov here – even then it didn’t occur to me to wonder. All right, he happened to be around – fine, fine. There is no one more than myself who likes to see a man made a big hero. But now I am beginning to open my eyes. What do we know after all? It would be a fine thing, wouldn’t it, if all this time we have been kneeling down and kissing his feet for saving the Torah, for being good enough to save the Torah though he burned down the rest of the synagogue?”

  Chaim was too stunned to speak. He stared at Dreiman with unbelief and made one or two efforts to open his lips, but for a long moment nothing would come out.

  “I’ll tell them that too,” said Dreiman, “if they think they’re going to give my job away. I’m tired of whispering behind my back.”

  “Dreiman,” said Chaim finally. “What are you saying? You know this isn’t true. It doesn’t make sense. Why should he burn down the synagogue?”

  “Why should his father be a murderer?” asked Pleschikov.

  “But he died from it,” Chaim insisted. “If he hadn’t rushed to save the Torah he might have been alive today.”

  “Who knows what he died from – perhaps a punishment from God?” Dreiman suggested.

  “And besides,” said Pleschikov, “he had a heart sickness. From a heart sickness you can drop off any time. He might have died anyway.”

  “But you saw, yourself. Dreiman, you are blackening your own face when you talk like this.” Chaim looked around at the others, who stirred and shuffled uneasily. “Can you prove what you say? I believe in what I saw, a brave man who risked his life and forced even from you a cry of wonder. Now, now just because his death has driven an old man mad you will set on his memory, like a wolf. Beware, Dreiman, God hears, God sees.” Strong in his sureness, Chaim stood up, looking around at the other old men. They looked uneasily from him to Dreiman.

  “I am not afraid to be seen by God,” said Dreiman. “I have nothing to fear. I say openly, perhaps you are right, perhaps he was a hero. But perhaps also you are wrong. Let God judge.”

  “What kind of a man are you,” asked Chaim, “that casts a shadow where the sun was and hopes the sun is dead?”

  “What kind of a man am I? What kind of a man is your friend Avrom, eh?” Grievance rang high in Dreiman’s voice. “I am not that kind of a man, whatever I am. I am a man who watched while others were falsely exalted and bit my tongue and said nothing, though I myself was looked down on and maligned. But I see clearly. Too often our people have sought false gods. You with your fine-speaking Avrom and his son for whom synagogues burn down. And when I speak up and say the truth you tell me I shouldn’t dare, just because you have maybe a little more education than I. But I am as close to God as you. He will tell who is right.”

  Chaim shook his head. All of a sudden it seemed to be he himself who was on trial here, before these men who had always been his friends, had listened respectfully to his words, had even come to him, some of them, as they would have to the rabbi, for advice. He turned away from Dreiman and appealed to the rest. “Is it so much harder to turn to a man with pity than to turn away with loathing? He is sick; he has sinned; pity him.”

  “You look sick yourself, Chaim,” said Dreiman. “You shouldn’t have come out so soon. It’s all right. Go home. Lie down. The synagogue won’t fly away when you’re gone. We’ll take care of it, and if any miracles happen we’ll let you know.”

  Chaim smiled a little. “If a miracle happens –” He shook his head. “Miracles could happen yet,” he said. “Avrom used to say there is plenty of room for miracles.”

  “Our new prophet?” Dreiman sneered.

  Chaim sighed and turned away from them helplessly. “There are many ways to kill,” he said sadly.

  “Go go,” Dreiman called after him. “Go to your rich son. It isn’t fitting that I should tell you in a synagogue; otherwise I’d let you know that the world knows how some men get rich.”

  Chaim had begun to move down the aisle toward the ark. Wounded by this final gibe, and by all that it seemed to betray of what men knew and thought, he moved now, doubled over almost in his haste, down and across toward the side door of the synagogue. Surrounded suddenly by enemies, he moved blindly, without pausing to listen to the voices that had raised themselves up in argument, or to gl
ance back to see that some in that solid, hostile group had wavered in his favor.

  —

  “What are you talking about?” said Polsky with heat. “I’ll tell you in plain English what I think. The papers themselves don’t know from nothing. First they say he had a key to the apartment; then they say he rang the doorbell to get in. At least that’s what the dame from next door says.”

  “Like I say,” said Hymie, “maybe she had two visitors. Maybe Avrom came up afterward and found the corpse.”

  “I’d think twice before I’d believe anything that dame said,” remarked the barber. “Getting her mug into all the papers, smiling like a priest at a pogrom.”

  “If he just found her,” said Mandelknaidel to Hymie, “what did he wait around for, sitting in a pool of blood, hanging on to her?” Mandelknaidel sighed. It seemed like such a waste.

  “For all we know,” said Hymie, “the other guy could have drugged him or hit him on the head or something. I’ll bet it was one of those gentiles of hers. And the paper said he was in a condition of shock, or a shocked condition, or something, when they found him.”

  “What I want to know is where and how he got his hand cut,” said the barber. “He knows how to handle a knife.”

  “He might have come in in time to see this other guy knifing her,” Hymie explained. “So he makes a dive at him, see? And he grabs at the knife, but the other guy’s quicker and pulls it out of the way, and it cuts him that way.”

  “So if he’d seen the guy, you think he wouldn’t have told by now?” asked the barber.

  “Maybe he did,” said Mandelknaidel. “Maybe they wouldn’t believe him. Or maybe they’re working on it. You think they tell everything to the papers?”

  “They could tell by fingerprinting the knife,” said the barber musingly.

  “Nah!” Hymie snorted. “You think he’d be dumb enough to leave his prints? He wiped them off; then, while Avrom was still unconscious, he put his fingers around the handle so Avrom’s prints would show. A perfect frame.”