by Rose Zwi
‘Dovid!’ Hershl’s face crumbled in dismay. ‘What is it? Why are you so, so, bitter? So strange? I hardly recognise you. It’s not a terrible thing to change a name, to add a name. To my friends I’ll always be Hershl Singer. In business one plays their game.’
Dovid sat down in the leather armchair and passed a hand wearily over his eyes.
‘Forgive me, Hershl. I’ve not been myself lately. I think I’m going mad.’
Dovid’s skin was drawn tightly over his cheekbones and a vein beat rapidly at his temple. His eyes, as he lifted them to Hershl, glittered unnaturally from their sunken sockets and were full of pain. Not so long ago, Hershl thought sadly, Dovid was talking about a golden age in Lithuania. His hair had faded to a powdered auburn and lay damply against his creased forehead. He slumped in the chair and rubbed his right hand nervously with his left.
‘What is it, Dovid?’ he asked gently. ‘You look as though you’ve peered into the blackest pits of hell.’
‘Haven’t you?’ Dovid began aggressively. ‘Or are you insulated from misery by wealth? Money, they say, can buy anything, even peace of mind. Certainly an easy conscience.’
‘Dovid, how can you say that to me?’
‘So you give employment to the poor and the crippled and the old. And you give money to charity and your Zionist cause. Does that help the doomed Jews in Europe?’
Hershl did not reply. He looked down at the papers on his desk and sighed.
‘One does only what one can.’
‘I’m sorry, Hershl. Words pour out of me before I can stop them. But how can one breathe, live, eat, when the civilised world is collapsing about our heads? I lie awake at night and wonder which fate has befallen my family. Were they among those who were shot before open graves, the dead buried with the dying? Or were they among those herded into synagogues, starved, then burned alive? Or are they languishing in concentration camps? I hear nothing but the screams of dying people; I smell nothing but smoke and scorched flesh, and when I shut my eyes the nightmares begin. And I do nothing about it. How much can the flesh endure before it disintegrates in agony?’
Dovid covered his face with his hands. Sobs shuddered through his emaciated body. Hershl squeezed his eyes tightly together and dug his nails deeply into the flesh of his palms.
‘Dovid, Dovid…’
‘Help me,’ Dovid turned his tortured eyes onto Hershl. ‘Help me at least to dispel the uncertainty, to complete my nightmare. I must know what happened to my family. You know people in high places. Ask them to find out what happened to the people of Ragaza.’
‘We’ve tried, Dovid. I have two brothers and a sister in Vilna. Faigel’s whole family is there, was there, who knows these days? Last week Yaakov Koren came in to enquire about his wife and children. We’ve traced no one. All we know is that Ragaza was occupied by the Nazis and that the notorious pogromist Zappenpfennig has been appointed Governor of Vilna.’
‘Ask the Red Cross. They find people.’
‘We have. They can’t help us. Foreign embassies don’t know. We’ve been in touch with organisations in Switzerland, but nobody’s been able to pierce the black cloud over Nazi-occupied Europe. We’ve got to be strong, Dovid, and learn to live in uncertainty, in helplessness and to do only what we can. Take heart. The war’s taken a turn for the better. With the Americans in, it will be over soon…’
‘When they’re dead, when they’re all dead!’ Dovid cried. ‘Hershl, my life is tied up with theirs. I should have been there, suffering with them, dying with them. What am I doing here, a stranger, a deserter? When they were alive I hardly wrote, didn’t send money, but I belong with them. Their fate should be mine.’
‘Don’t lose hope, Dovid. The Russians have evacuated civilians into the interior. Perhaps your family is among them.’
‘They’re all my family; the ones who are trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Lithuanians, the Russians, the Poles. And they wouldn’t take me into the army. On the South African fascists I broke my hand while the Nazis slaughter my people in Europe.’
‘There’s little we can do except harass powerful statesmen, hope and pray. The Americans worry about what Congress will say; Britain is afraid to offend the Arabs. So that even those who might still be saved are left to their bitter fate. Dovid, I feel as helpless as you.’
They were both silent for a while. Why had he come to see Hershl? He could tell him nothing new. Dovid had been haunting the offices of Jewish organisations for months. He hardly worked and his hand ached unbearably at times. After he had closed down his workshop in Mayfontein, he did alterations and sewed trousers for other tailors, barely earning enough to keep his family clothed and fed. He had finally become a haizenschneider, a trousermaker.
‘…and give up your tailoring,’ Hershl was saying.
‘What? I, I was, my mind was wandering. I didn’t hear you, Hershl.’
‘I said you should give up tailoring. Come and work for me.’
Dovid laughed.
‘Thank you. Another social case, another cripple on your staff. I don’t want your charity.’
‘I’m not offering charity Dovid. I need you. It’s impossible to get honest reliable men these days. And I’d like to work with you. One gets so cut off from people one really cares about.’
‘You don’t need me. You’re a successful man, with a well-organised business. You can get anyone you need without encumbering your staff with yet another misfit.’
‘So you think I’m such a success? In a way I suppose I am, but I don’t measure happiness in gold. All I ever wanted was money enough to emigrate to Palestine. I’ve never been further from my dreams than I am now.’
‘Dreams? Who dreams? It’s all a nightmare.’
‘Dovid, you don’t have to give me an answer now. Think about it. It’s a quiet job I’m offering you, away from the crowds in the shop. You’d be the storeman for the shop, in Leib’s old smithy. I’m telling you the truth. I need you more than you need me…Yenta!’ he cried as she burst into the office, pale and agitated. She had both hands over her breast and was quite breathless.
‘It’s Yaakov…Koren, unfortunate man. He’s thrown himself into the dam. They’re there now, dredging it, looking for his body. Widow Kagan’s screaming, crying. He left a note. “I killed my wife and children. I go to join them.” That’s all. Hershl, who can plumb the depths of human suffering? Such guilts he must have had. And he wasn’t sure that his wife and children were dead.’
‘They’re dead,’ Dovid said woodenly, getting out of the chair. ‘Grodno was razed to the ground by the Nazis.’
‘Foolish tortured man,’ Hershl said bitterly. ‘Another victory for Hitler. Another Jew dead. But who can judge?’
‘Goodbye,’ Dovid said softly and walked out of the office with a stoney expression on his face.
‘Stop him, Hershl,’ Yenta pleaded. ‘God alone knows what he’ll do.’
‘Leave him Yenta, Every man is responsible for his own fate.’
‘I shouldn’t have burst in like that. Such ideas Dovid doesn’t need. Gittel says he’s off his head as it is. He won’t touch meat, says there’s a smell of burning flesh everywhere. Throws windows open as soon as he gets into the house. He doesn’t sleep and he doesn’t work. He just runs around from office to office trying to trace his family. He’ll land up like Koren.’
‘He might have,’ Hershl reflected, ‘but he’s got too much pride to follow a mere trousermaker to the grave. Yentala, the heart’s stronger than iron if it doesn’t burst from pain and from helplessness.’
Hitler’s march on Moscow stemmed, Berka read. But Smolensk lies devastated, he thought wearily, and Kiev had fallen. Chmielnicki’s hordes have risen again with perfected means for death and torture.
He looked up from his newspaper into the haunted eyes of Dovid. Like a spectre from the grave. Berka nodded, then turned away his eyes from the thin, pitiable figure on the corner of Lover’s Lane.
Enough work. Berka looked with
wry amusement at the untouched shoe on his last: Mrs. Melamed could wait until Monday. Now for the real work of the day, the walk up Main Street hill. Every year it grew steeper.
He folded up the newspaper and left it on the workbench. It was good only for wrapping up old shoes. He no longer charted the course of the war. His map hung untouched on the wall between the yellowed patches where Yenta’s relatives had simpered and smirked in sepia.
He should hang Ruthie’s drawings up in the lounge and cover up the ghosts of the past, he thought as he walked around the shop slowly, stopping now and then before a dog-eared drawing. Here was one of him on an ox wagon with Zutzke, kindly lent for company. She had captured the feeling of desolation so well. Loneliness is grey, she had said. Even his moustache drooped wearily. And here was a picture of people huddled under a tree while a plane spat fire from the sky.
‘Words’, she had said gravely when he asked after her first day at school what she most wanted to learn. Her drawings were more eloquent than any words she would ever learn. Poor child. His heart ached when he thought of the toil, hope and disillusion that still lay ahead of her.
He walked out of his shop and took a deep breath. Spring. The first rains had washed the mine dust from the air and through the smell of damp concrete, exhaust and Hershl’s fresh bread, he thought he smelled blossoms. By now the veld fires had charred the grass to black stubble, the farmer had taken to his plough and a new cycle would begin.
Perhaps on the land life had retained some meaning. Or perhaps there too it was reduced to the monotonous cycle of birth, growth, death and rebirth. It wearied him to think of it.
There was definitely a smell of blossoms in the air. Berka drew in another deep breath and his lungs caught on the smell of exhaust. Spring. It was a season for lovers, farmers and warlords. For old men it was a mockery.
He looked beyond the Dip towards the city and mourned for its transience. A few bombs and it would suffer the fate of older, nobler cities. Like a proud fortress it towered over the suburb at its gates and he had never suspected its vulnerability.
Yet life went on. He viewed it with detachment, surprised at his former involvement and passion. Along the same arteries flowed the old with the new: the miners’ wives he had pitied; the black men whose lot he had lamented; the hungry children he longed to feed, and the shoppers who arrived in their shiny cars from other suburbs.
There would always be poverty and oppression alongside of wealth and greed, whether he hammered away at his last all day or whether he sat back to read the chronicle of daily disasters.
He walked slowly up Main Street, stopping for breath only when a jagged pain pierced his chest. Tolerance, he thought. It was a word whose meaning he had forgotten. For him the line between tolerance and indifference had become smudged. In the shadow of death one became obsessed with one’s mortality. Not that he was afraid of dying. It was a process which one experienced throughout one’s life. If a man could live in isolation, without emotional bonds, without love or hate, he might live forever. As it was, his life was tied up with that of others and was diminished by each death, withdrawal or rejection.
But when he looked into the dark interior of Nathan’s Drapery Store, he was surprised to find that the shell of his being still ached with longing and nostalgia.
It was some time before he sensed the excitement in Main Street. Everybody seemed to be hurrying in the direction of the mine dumps.
‘What is it?’ he asked a group of miners who stood outside the bar, talking earnestly among themselves.
‘That crazy Bolshie Koren drowned himself,’ one of them replied. ‘Just walked into the dam and disappeared into the slime. They’re looking for his body.’
Berka walked past First Avenue towards the plantation. People were converging on the dam from all directions. He paused at the top of the hill and looked about him. The mine dumps shimmered palely in the warm spring sun and the bluegums hung sadly over the dam. In the distance the headgear turned ceaselessly and the roar of the crushers reverberated throughout the suburb.
‘My kingdom,’ he thought grimly, and breathing heavily, made his way down to the dam.