“I still say that if he’d seen the guy and the cops were working on it they’d have found out by now. Unless they’d rather pin it on a Jew,” said the barber.
“Shock,” explained Hymie. “Amnesia, see? He gets hit on the head and he forgets, see?”
“It didn’t say anything about him getting hit on the head,” said Polsky. “If you ask me it was self-defense. If you knew Laiah’s temper as well as I did, you’d know what I mean. He said something she didn’t like, or he promised something he couldn’t do, or something – or even she just plain wasn’t feeling too friendly. Right away she grabs the knife and starts waving it at him. She likes a little scene occasionally, that one – liked, I mean.”
“She was a wildcat,” said Mandelknaidel fervently.
“Ah, how do you know?” said Hymie.
“Anyway,” said Polsky, “maybe she even jumps at him, just to show she means business. Avrom doesn’t know from any maybes. He tries to get the knife away from her. She cuts him in the hand; by her it would be a plaything –”
“Yes.” Mandelknaidel glowed.
“Finally he gets hold of her wrist and grabs the knife,” Polsky continued with relish. “But by this time she’s really wrestling and her hair is flaming and the sparks shooting from her eyes, and I can tell you he’s got a handful. And just when he thinks he’s got her quiet she gives a twist and a jerk, and he forgets he’s still got the knife in his hand and tries to hold her and accidentally – zzzzzt! her throat’s slit. That’s what she gets for playing around too much. Poor Laiah. I told her she’d burn her fingers someday.” Polsky sighed.
“The police say it was a very clean, professional job,” said Mandelknaidel respectfully.
“Well, there’s no doubt about it, he was a good butcher,” said Polsky. “But that’s the only thing I don’t understand.” Polsky shook his head. “What was he doing there in the first place? I would never have thought that he would, somehow.” He recalled how, long ago, after Laiah had quarreled with Hymie in the kibitzarnia, he had sent Avrom with some stuff, as a little joke. She had said something about it, though he couldn’t remember what. Had it started then? And later, when the old man had taken over the afternoon deliveries…But so quiet, so hush-hush, not like Laiah at all. And he wouldn’t have thought Avrom could be such a – such a sly one. He felt, almost, a funny kind of disappointment. Oh, she wouldn’t have minded, there was no doubt of that. She would get a kick out of someone like him coming to her. That was maybe it; she had teased him. A man like Avrom is not easy to tease. Sometimes Laiah liked to be maybe just a little bit too smart. Why couldn’t she leave him alone, someone like that? He would never have thought that Avrom would – “You never know with those religious ones.” Polsky voiced his dissatisfaction morosely. “I don’t know. There’s more to it. I’ve known them both for a long time. You can be sure there’s more to it. I’m not saying that he didn’t have a case on her. He’s only human, though he never seemed to be exactly her type. But there must have been a reason. She was probably teasing him, telling him she would, she wouldn’t. And he’s not the kind to play games with. If he wanted a little fun maybe, to forget his troubles for a while, do you have to pull your little tricks?” Polsky addressed an absent Laiah.
“If you ask me,” said the barber, “he just went nuts. Read the papers. They’re all saying he’s nuts. They’ve got a bunch of head doctors from all over arguing over him now.”
“I could have told them that a long time ago,” said Hymie, “ever since Isaac died. The way he’d stand there, sometimes, the way he’d look at you. I told my old man –”
“What did you tell me?” said Polsky irritably. “Shut up what you told me. It didn’t have anything to do with him being nuts.”
“Ah, I didn’t mean anything so bad. He used to be not such a bad old guy,” said Hymie, “but you can say what you like, when I used to talk to him I had a funny feeling.”
“So, can you blame him? A guy gets older. And he hasn’t had such an easy life. Maybe he went nuts all right, but that didn’t have anything to do with you trying to tell me how to run my business.”
“I still think,” said Morton, who liked his brother’s earlier theory, “that there must have been somebody else.”
“Guess he won’t be at my wedding, anyway,” Hymie said.
“Big joke,” said Polsky.
“So what’d I say?” said Hymie. “All I said was guess he won’t be – and he’s ready to make a thing of it.”
“You can say what you like,” said Mandelknaidel, “it was still wrong for him to kill her.”
“Of course it was wrong,” said Polsky, scowling. “She was no diamond, but that doesn’t mean you can kill her just like that.”
“A maniac doesn’t ask anybody’s permission,” said the barber. “A cousin of my wife is related by marriage to the wife of the man who interprets for them at the police station whenever they bring in – you know, a Jew who has maybe done something wrong. Not killings, of course, but you know what crooks some of these greenhorns are, and they can’t even talk enough English to hire a good lawyer, some of them.”
“You mean they have a man there at the police station just for that?” asked Mandelknaidel.
“Not just for Jews. He wouldn’t make a living at it. But he’s an educated young fellow. He speaks Polish and Russian and Ukrainian and Rumanian and I think German too, so he can help out quite a bit. Anyway it’s not his real full-time job. He works besides for the welfare, spying on relief cases. Oh, he can turn his hand to a living, that one. Too good to talk to you sometimes. Of course he scarcely knows me. But anyway he told my wife’s cousin that Avrom’s stark crazy. He says –”
“Those filthy relief spies,” said Mandelknaidel.
“Let him talk,” said Polsky.
“He told her,” said the barber, “that the first thing he thought about (they dragged him out of bed to the police station; at first they thought that Avrom couldn’t speak any English at all) anyway, the first thing he thought was, Oh, God, I hope he isn’t related to my wife. They’re a big family. He could hardly wait to get home to make sure. But I was the closest she could trace, and I just work next door.”
“So?” said Polsky. “What has this to do with it? What does he say about Avrom? What did Avrom say?”
“Ah, he said enough,” said the barber.
“What do you mean, enough? Did your cousin tell what he said?”
“It’s not my cousin. It’s my wife’s –”
“Never mind,” said Polsky. “I don’t care what relative it is. I want to know what Avrom said.”
“I don’t know what Avrom said,” said the barber. “Do you think they’re allowed to tell what happened? He could lose his job. I just know that I’m glad I’m not related to that crazy family.”
“They’re not all crazy. Look what his son did,” said Polsky. “Besides, there’s more to it, I know. I wish I had that little Laiahle here right now. She’d tell me, all right.”
“If his son hadn’t done what he did, maybe he wouldn’t have done this either,” said Hymie. “Gone crazy, I mean.”
“And if my granmaw’d had balls she’d have been my granpaw,” said Polsky. They could say what they liked, but there was more to it. For all he knew, Hymie’s theory about the other visitor might have something to it. The boy had a head. Poor Laiah. “Mort, watch the shop,” he said. “Come on, let’s have a quick game. I need something to take my mind off.”
Mandelknaidel trailed behind them into the kibitzarnia. “What I want to know,” he murmured wistfully, “is how he got that key.”
—
“Still,” Abraham complained, more to himself than to the man, “she won’t listen to me. Still she keeps telling me, ‘It’s all right, don’t upset yourself. I understand.’ But it’s not all right. What does she understand? I’m not afraid to be upset. Does she think it means something now, to be upset, not to be upset? Come closer to me, little Ruth, let me know th
at – I would gladly be upset – No.” He shook his head and smiled a little, contemptuously. “Always I look for my own comfort. Even now I try to forget that I am cold and alone.” He remained silent a moment. “Still,” he resumed, “you see how she must have loved my son? Even now she clings to his father, when she should throw him out on the streets, when they should trample him at the door of the temple. The son works to redeem the father, though the father has – She says not to talk if it hurts me. She sees I cry. I shouldn’t talk, she says. ‘It doesn’t matter!’ Does she think I’m mad? Does she think I don’t know? I can hear them calling in the streets, ‘Moishe, what was your grandfather?’ What will he answer? What can he answer? What will become of him?”
The man leaned forward after the interpreter had finished his brief mutterings. “You don’t deny, then, what you have done, and you understand that you will have to be punished if you are found guilty in court?”
Abraham shook his head indifferently. “Sometimes to understand is punishment,” he said softly. The interpreter shrugged slightly as he translated.
“We would like to help you,” said the man patiently. “Can you remember – was there any reason? Was there an argument? What” – the man had an idea – “what exactly is it that you understand?”
The interpreter repeated the question in Yiddish, though Abraham waved him aside to show that he understood. “All my life I wanted only to build, to grow, to understand,” he said in Yiddish. “That is what I thought.” Abraham covered his face with his hands.
The man nodded when the interpreter had finished. He leaned forward and spoke to Abraham’s bowed head. “But you understand that you have killed a woman, that you have taken a human life?”
“That I have taken life” – Abraham swayed – “that I have killed my sons, that I have made myself equal with my enemies, that it was in me, womb of death, festering, in no one else. Who was I? Who was I to demand, to threaten, when it was there, in my arms, breathing, alive. But no. It was in me. I was not content to be, as He willed it. I wanted more. I had to be creator and destroyer. Why did I weep, then, when I saw them hanging, swaying at the will of the wind? Why did I tear my hair when he lay there? When in me, all the time –”
The two men glanced at each other. Abraham was weeping long, rasping sobs. Always he came back to the assertion that he had killed his sons. When he had first been found, cradling the corpse in his bloodied arms and had insisted distractedly that they were dead, that he had killed his sons, it had caused a minor panic among members of the police force. Until they were able to locate Ruth they were convinced that a mass murder had been done. It was plain that in some way he confused the dead woman with his dead children. Sometimes from the way he spoke you could almost believe that he thought he had killed God Himself.
The man decided to make another try, to be brutal if necessary. “You understand” – he spoke clearly and distinctly – “that the punishment for murder is death. Unless you can prove extenuating circumstances, the murderer is hanged by the neck until dead.” His words had an effect.
Abraham was suddenly quiet. He removed his hands from his face and looked uncertainly at the man with an almost childlike eagerness. “Yes?”
Slightly disconcerted, the man repeated, “Hanged,” and made a gesture toward his throat.
The interpreter, also disconcerted at what was almost a smile that lit up the bearded face, leaned forward and hissed into Abraham’s face in Yiddish, “They’ll hang you.” He dropped his head dramatically onto his shoulder and lolled his tongue forward in graphic illustration, to try to bring comprehension to the prisoner.
“Please,” said the man, shocked, and the interpreter moved back, puzzled and a little ashamed of himself, but still irritated that the prisoner would not understand.
Tears had sprung again to Abraham’s eyes. To suffer what they suffered; to pay, perhaps to atone. Oh, my God, it would be too easy, too merciful. “Is this true?” He addressed himself eagerly to the man, bending forward with more outward animation than they had yet seen in him. “Is it true they will hang me?”
“Well, if they find you guilty, yes,” the man stammered and froze with horror, for the crazy old man was crying and kissing his hand.
SEVENTEEN
Moses laid down the novel as in the distance a cluster of yellow lights popped open and peered from behind the Mad Mountain’s hump. Once that had been the signal for him to close his eyes and rush quickly into his disappearing act. His hand would push the bow gently across the violin strings and disappear after it into the open music. His arm would follow, and his shoulder, his side, his back, his hips, his legs. All of him in one fluid turn would flow into the music and remain, invisible, untouchable, floating in sound. Only a mistake could render him visible again while the piece he played lasted. The trick had been never to make a mistake, to be safe at least for a little while. But he was no longer a child. He nodded, instead, at the lights of the asylum. “Hello, Grampa,” he murmured sardonically, and wondered again in which one they had the old demon chained.
He heard his mother come in through the store entrance and fiddle around in the shop before she came up the three stairs that separated the shop from their living quarters. He could tell by the slow way she moved that there would be no good news. He got up quickly and turned on the light and sat down again, pulling his book closer to him. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to hear.
“Hello, Moishe,” she called from the kitchen.
“Hello,” he answered shortly.
“You didn’t go out anywhere?” she asked.
He didn’t reply.
“You should go out sometimes – more.” He heard her speaking the familiar plaint, half to herself. She had come into the room with him. He tried to pretend that he didn’t notice that she was moving about, touching things and making a noise so that he should raise his head for her to talk to him. And it would not be good news. It was not just the news itself that he would hate, it was what she would say inevitably, the comment that would depress as much as the news, and the way he would feel afterward. Already he could feel the heaviness descending on him and with it the need to surrender, to listen. He raised his head. “Well?”
“Well?” His mother shrugged and ran her hand in a familiar gesture through her hair. “She’s very sick.” Sighing, Ruth lowered herself into a chair. “Perhaps it’ll be better. The way she’s suffered the past year. And lately, from day to day, she’s fallen away. You can see how it eats her, from inside, sucking away the flesh. It’s a terrible thing to see what becomes of a person. You wouldn’t know her.” Ruth shook her head slowly from side to side; her double chin waggled gently.
Moses watched the bright, chubby bloom of his mother’s face, imagining the flesh being sucked away, the skin pulled back against the bones. He recoiled from the thought. Don’t tell me any more. You’ve told me; I’ve heard.
“Mind you, she recognized me, I think. It’s hard to tell. She’s so full of drugs to kill the pain. Ah.” Ruth opened her hands, palm upwards, raised them, and dropped them again to her lap. “I said to myself, So this is what becomes of a person.”
“Will she die?” He had to ask, in spite of himself – Her nose will be forever still. Idly he began to draw, with his finger, a long, pointed nose on his book. He had never much liked her. As a child she had frightened him. And yet…
“Nothing is sure till it’s done,” said his mother. She shook her head. “Her two daughters” – she laughed a little, sarcastically – “like twin mountains, sitting there, with their chairs pushed a little bit farther back from the bed than they should have been, as though they are afraid that death is a catching thing.”
Moses bent toward his book as though he thought she had finished and he wanted to get back to it again. Heavily her words weighed on him, dragging down his spirits, forcing him into a presence of which he was afraid, making him think of things he hated. It had been the same when she used to turn on the radio to hear t
he war news, or when people told of the horrors of the concentration camps. Why did she talk to him of these things? Each time she spoke she laid another load on him, and yet her words held for him a sort of fascination, so that though he sank under their burden he could make no real move to escape.
“She is afraid, too, I think.” Ruth seemed to be half musing, softly, yet loudly enough for him to hear. “I wouldn’t be.” Her voice rose, and she looked her son straight in the eye. “I wouldn’t be afraid to die. What’s there to be afraid of? Do they think death will serve them worse?” Ruth gestured and nodded fatalistically. “Only one thing I pray for.” Moses knew what was coming and was tempted to say it for her. Instantly he was smitten with horror that he should, even in thought, for a moment, have had the impulse to mock what she was saying.
“I only pray that I should live long enough to bring you to the shore,” his mother continued earnestly. “If I could only live to see you safely grown and happy, that’s all I’d want.”
“You don’t have to die,” he mumbled in an agony.
“What, do you think we’re immortal? We all have to die,” Ruth said firmly, “when the time comes. But –” She saw that her son was distressed by the elementary truth. He might as well know about life. Better it shouldn’t take him by surprise. “Don’t worry,” she added. “We’ve got time yet. Your mother won’t leave you for a long time yet, God willing.
“Certainly” – Ruth reverted to the Ploplers – “he’s thinking of living, old Plopler. If he waits out his year before remarrying I’ll be surprised. And you think she doesn’t know? It eats her more than her sickness.”
The iniquities of men. Having watched him through the various quickenings and awakenings that revealed themselves not only in his added inches of height and the passing awkwardness of his limbs, but in the molded changes of his face and the deepening, secretive awareness of his eyes, what could she say to him in warning? It was necessary, she felt, sometimes, because he had no father, to throw out an allusion that was almost a veiled threat or an accusation, about the nature of man, the dangers of manhood, about those undisciplined fires which a man, selfish, or perhaps not in control of himself, can unleash, bringing tragedy to others. This much was Ruth’s concession to the theory that the old man’s crime, to which she now never openly referred, was one of what the newspapers called “midwinter passion.”
The Sacrifice Page 36