The Sacrifice

by Adele Wiseman

  “I am too,” said Moses. “I mean about that.” He nodded toward the mountain. They walked on, more relaxed now, until Aaron stopped. “You turn off here?” Moses asked.

  “Yeah. I never told anybody else about – I mean –” Aaron hesitated.

  “You never told anybody, period,” said Moses, eyes still on the mountain.

  Aaron grinned. “Say, give me a call, why don’t you? I’d like to hear more about that crazy old coot of yours.”

  “You phone me,” said Moses. “The dry-goods shop under our name, in the book. We can talk about your old man. I haven’t read any dirty books lately.”

  “All right. Tomorrow?”

  “Sure.” Moses watched while Aaron rounded the corner and ran for a streetcar. He seemed – pretty nice, for a heights kid. It almost seemed as though he had been trying to make friends. But he probably had all kinds of friends. Well, he’d see. Tomorrow, if he phoned, okay. If not, okay too. It was hardly likely; he wasn’t going to bank on it. Moses pushed the hope out of his mind. The other thing crowded in. Yom Kippur. What had he let himself in for? But it was so. He felt as though all along he had known it would have to be. In a sudden panic he prayed that the old man would not die first, before the reckoning.

  —

  Now that he knew what his intention was, it seemed to Moses that all those years of waiting, of listening and watching, all those years that he had spent alone, that core of him that had crouched behind locked doors had waited only for this. Often, in the daydreams of his childhood, he had journeyed to the mountain, confronted a shadowy old man. “See what you’ve done!” His grievances, his accusations, the fury of his attack had finally brought the giant old man crashing to his knees, pleading with him, weeping torrents of rain that tore up the grass by the roots and swept the mud down the hillside, begging his forgiveness. Sometimes the old man finally revealed to him and only to him some amazing secret that explained everything, that showed him to be a hero, as his son had been. That woman had been a part of some evil plot; he had been sent to save the world; secrecy was necessary, and now he was in hiding on the mountain until the time came.

  For a while he had been absolutely certain that his grandfather was a hero in hiding, because after they had found out that Harry was a black marketeer he had heard his mother telling Mrs. Plopler that Avrom had warned her. But this dream had faded too.

  In the more aggressive moods of his early adolescence he had often thought of facing his grandfather sneeringly with his own disbelief, his own impiety, his own rebelliousness. His words would slash at the old man. If he ever asked him, “Moishe, do you go to the synagogue regularly?” – “Nah, I’m synagroggy.”

  Not that he believed any more, not really, at any rate, that a revelation awaited him. He knew – oh, he knew all right what “unfit to plead” implied. He knew that if the old man had not been brought to trial it did not mean, as he had at times imagined, that there was some plot in it, some darker purpose. And yet he had to see for himself. Almost he looked forward to seeing his grandfather a senile old man, slobber-lipped, unkempt, vacant, or even a still raving maniac. That would be that.

  —

  It was not surprise he felt, exactly, that his grandfather was not chained in a padded cell in the madhouse but was standing just over there, beside the path. In a dream there are no surprises, and time stretches and shrinks, as now. Moses floated toward him. Unmistakably it was he, though his clothes hung limply about him in a way the boy didn’t remember. He measured himself, as he went forward, against the familiar figure that faced away from him, eastward. His first sharp sensation was a curious pleasure that he was almost as tall.

  Now he was at the old man’s side. The beard was there, though in memory it had been whiter. And it was the same profile, though more elementally, more austerely so, with the skin cleaving more closely to the cheeks than he remembered. A voice that was loud, yet somehow weaker than he remembered, startled him by breaking suddenly forth in prayer, intoning to the eastern air. The old man thumped his chest – the prayer on sin.

  Though he stood right beside and only slightly behind his grandfather, the old man seemed totally unaware of his presence. The height of the mountain might still be separating them. There was his deafness, of course, and his complete absorption in prayer. So he prayed still!

  Moses was rather pleased that he could stand so close and so unemotionally, so automatically, register details. He would be able to tell Aaron that he had felt – practically nothing, just this almost otherworldliness. He could not remember in his grandfather this frailty. The old man swayed in the breeze of his own words; the crack of his fist on his chest echoed hollowly; his clothes flapped about him in the gentle autumn wind.

  A murderer. Moses tried to comprehend that this was the murderer. But the word was something remote.

  “Grandfather.” He was annoyed at the thumping of his heart as he had to repeat the word in the old man’s ear. Slowly the old man raised his head. For a long time the deep eyes gazed at him out of the still face. Then Abraham dropped his eyes and bent his head to look at the ground. At last – “Isaac?” he asked, and in his voice there was such a yearning that his grandson trembled.

  “No, it’s I, Moishe.”

  “Moishe,” repeated the old man, his head still bent.

  “Moishe Jacob,” said Moses, not sure that the old man understood.

  “Moishe, Jacob, Isaac,” the old man repeated slowly, nodding his head, closing his eyes, and climbing over each name as though it were an obstacle.

  Moses stood there beside the path and tried to make himself realize that this was the adversary.

  “Yes, yes,” said the old man half to himself, “it’s the little Moishele.” He nodded to himself several times while Moses tried to digest the pleasure that he felt in the fact that his grandfather had recognized him after all.

  “Sit down,” said his grandfather and sank rather suddenly onto the bench. Moses sat. “You’ve come to see me.” The boy noticed that his grandfather still kept his face slightly turned away from him. Now was the moment for accusations, for harangue, for the imposing of his will, the reckoning. Where were all these notions now? There was the longest silence, during which the boy searched his mind desperately and could find nothing, nothing to say, almost nothing to think. None of those thrusting things that he had thought of, those brutal things, seemed to have any place here on the bench under the trees. Every thrust would turn in his own side. How could he wound without being wounded? He wanted to say, Don’t turn away. Foolish words he wanted to say, of pity and comfort, that he did not even understand. Instead he kept very still.

  “I have built a crooked house for you,” said his grandfather finally.

  Moses didn’t answer. There was another long silence, into which memories of his early childhood came rushing and frolicking so that Moses had to bite his lip and mutter inwardly, Soft, you’re soft. Bawl, why don’t you?

  Again his grandfather spoke. “You lay in my arms, beautiful, alive. You called me ‘little father,’ and still I did not understand.”

  Moses stiffened and glanced around him. The old man said “you,” but whom was he talking to? He seemed to be looking through things, into a different world. His madness…

  “You spoke of love,” his grandfather said gently. Moses repressed a shudder. “And still, though something in me reached out, I did not understand. Nothing was necessary. I could have blessed you and left you. I could have loved you.”

  Was he talking to – that dame? Whom he had killed? From the way he spoke he sounded almost as if he had loved her, real love, not just – whatever it was. And yet Moses had the feeling that, though he was addressing someone else, his grandfather was somehow addressing him, too.

  “I took what was not mine to take,” said Avrom, “what was given to me to hold gently in my hands, to look at with wonder. Moishe –” Moses started. “When a human being cries out to you, no matter who it is, don’t judge him, don’
t harm him, or you turn away God Himself. In her voice there were the voices of children. Do not harm her, lest you hear them weeping.” His grandfather shook his head. “He wouldn’t let me die. What right had I to die, like the innocent?”

  Moses wished his grandfather – wouldn’t – cry – like – that. “Grandfather,” he said loudly. Anything to stop him, before – he himself –

  “Do you hate me?” Abraham asked painfully. “I think of you; I think of her, of how I have wronged you. How you must hate me.”

  Moses shook his head violently from side to side, though he could only whisper, “No,” from his tightly clogged throat. He hated himself for being soft like this. All right, so he was sorry for – Did he have to start bawling with him too?

  After a moment the old man spoke again. “Ruth says you will be a fine fiddle-player.”

  Moses shrugged almost angrily, still unable to raise his head.

  And again, with a curiously positive note in his voice, which was vaguely an echo from another time, almost as though he were thinking of something he was afraid to rediscover, Avrom added, “God willing, you will grow.” Almost timidly he reached out his hand, finding Moses’ own hand that lay in his lap. The boy started a little at the initial contact. He looked down at the hand that lay warm on his own, only partly hiding it – a large hand, with the knuckles swollen and reddish, coarse with the signs of many years’ labor, thin with fasting. Underneath he could see part of his own, effeminate by contrast, white and cared-for. He could neither move his own hand nor look away from his grandfather’s. This was the hand of a murderer. His eyes, fascinated, saw that the hands were not really different in shape, one from the other. And for a moment so conscious was he of his grandfather’s hand on his own, of its penetrating warmth, of its very texture, that he felt not as though it merely lay superimposed on his own but that it was becoming one with his hand, nerve of his nerve, sinew of his sinew; that the distinct outlines had disappeared. It was with the strangest feeling of awakening that he saw their hands fused together – one hand, the hand of a murderer, hero, artist, the hand of a man. He could not for the life of him pull his hand away, nor did he want to. It was as though he stood suddenly within the threshold of a different kind of understanding, no longer crouching behind locked doors, but standing upright, with his grandfather leading him, as he always had. Avrom. Impulsively he brought his other hand down on the hand that held his own, and squeezed tightly, feeling his eyes swell up and the tears burning hotly down his cheeks. His insides ached, and he could not really think of why this should be so, except that his grandfather’s hand trembled between his own two hands, and his grandfather’s face, still partly averted from his own, wore an expression of joy.

  —

  Even afterward, as he sat in the bus that rattled its way down toward the city, with his hand shielding his swollen eyes from the possibly curious glances of the other passengers, he could not understand exactly what had come together for him. Nothing had happened, really. He had not wrenched from the past a confession or a cry for forgiveness; he had not won an exoneration or wreaked some petty revenge. He did not even know concretely, in any way that he could explain to himself as yet, any more than he had known. And yet he knew that he was a different person from the boy who had gone up the hill.

  He knew that when Aaron asked him, as he was bound to ask him when he met him at the bus depot, if it had been as bad as he’d expected, if he still hated his grandfather as much, expecting him to say yes, so that he could then go on to tell him again how much he, too, hated his father – “Listen,” he would say. “No, no, there’s more to it.” All kinds of sentences and words and thoughts that he would say raced through his mind. He wondered if he would have the nerve to say right out, “I love him” – just like that. Funny about his grandfather. He could still hear his voice raised up, addressing a power that he himself had long ceased to believe in: “You Who have shown him to me, beautiful and straight; Mysterious, Merciful, bless him!”

  Again he tried to formulate the things he would say to his friend. “Listen –”

  “Depot!” the driver called.

  With a gesture that was vaguely reminiscent of his grandfather of another time, Moses lifted his hand away from his face, straightened up in his seat, and looked curiously about him at his fellow men.

  This book was previously published under the

  New Canadian Library imprint.

  THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY

  General Editor: David Staines

  Advisory Board:

  Alice Munro, W. H. New, Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Founded in 1957 by Malcolm Ross in conjunction with Jack McClelland, the New Canadian Library was, by design, indeed a library, indispensable to a knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of the country itself.

  The first paperback series dedicated solely to Canada’s literatures, the New Canadian Library acknowledged and celebrated the country’s literary achievements. Its attractive and authoritative volumes spanned more than two hundred years of Canadian writing, and confirmed the astonishing diversity, range, and wealth of Canada’s literary cultures.

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  The texts have been reprinted in their entirety.

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