In the Beginning

  Later that winter my mother began to accompany my father. They would go out two or three times a week. She would clean up quickly after supper and put Alex to bed. My father would sit in the living room, reading his newspaper. Often the canary would sing but he did not seem to hear it. Sometimes he put the newspaper down and sat with his hands dangling loosely between his thighs, his eyes fixed on the floor. He seemed weary and bewildered.

  There would be a ring at the door and I would go to open it and Saul would be standing there with his books.

  My parents would put on their hats and coats and leave.

  Sometimes if it rained heavily during supper my mother would say, “Max, you should call Nathan and ask him to bring the machine.”

  My father would look at the window.

  “It’s a flood, Max.”

  He would go into the living room and talk quietly into the telephone. Then he would return to the kitchen and finish his food in silence.

  One night during a snowstorm, I said to him, “Are you and Mama going out tonight, Papa?”

  He looked up from his food, which he had been eating listlessly. “Yes,” he said.

  “It’s snowing, Papa.”

  “Nathan should bring the machine,” my mother said from the stove.

  “The machine will not run in this snow.”

  “Papa?”

  He had developed the habit in recent weeks of lowering his head and looking at people out of the tops of his eyes. It seemed to me the lines in the corners of his eyes and along his forehead had deepened. The scar was starkly white in the stubble on his face. He peered at me now and was still.

  “Why are there so many meetings, Papa? There never used to be so many meetings.”

  “There were never so many problems,” he said.

  “What problems, Papa?”

  He seemed not to have heard me. “We have to sit and think together. We have to work together. Then we will see results. When we work together there is nothing we cannot do.”

  “Papa?”

  “It is a catastrophe. But it can be solved with hard work and thinking together. Our job is to solve it.” He looked away from me and down at the food on his plate. My mother came over from the stove and slipped soundlessly into her seat. In his high chair, Alex was chewing steadily at the soggy piece of rye bread he held in his stubby fingers. “Not for one second do I think we cannot do this job,” my father went on, staring at his food. “But we will have to work hard. Isn’t that right, Ruth?”

  “Yes,” my mother said in a very low voice.

  He sat very still, staring at his food.

  “Papa?”

  He did not look at me.

  “What does catastrophe mean?”

  He turned his head and gave me a sudden sharp look. There was a strange glitter in his dark eyes.

  “A catastrophe?” he said. He knitted his brows and rubbed the heel of his palm against the side of his face with the scar. “A catastrophe is a big accident. A terrible accident. It is a way God has of laughing at us. We make plans and God all of a sudden—”

  “Max,” my mother broke in. Then she said something briefly in Polish.

  My father looked at his food and was quiet. After a moment, he said, “But we will make new plans. Won’t we, Ruth?”

  “Yes, Max.”

  “The goyim are ruining everything. But we will defeat them. When is the meeting, Ruth?”

  “The same time as always. Half past seven.”

  “The stinking goyim. Who would ever have believed there could be such gangsterism in Wall Street? Is it still snowing, Ruth?”

  “Yes.”

  “We will go anyway.”

  The snow stopped falling shortly after supper and Saul came and they went out.

  Alex was asleep. I sat with Saul at the kitchen table. Outside the bare winter trees creaked in the icy black air. The kitchen window rattled. Saul sat bent over his books, writing intently. He was left-handed and he wrote with the pencil held above his writing rather than below it, the curve of his wrist lying across the head of his notebook. He used a fountain pen and was writing very quickly in Hebrew, the scratching sounds quite loud in the stillness of the apartment. The lights were out in all the rooms save the kitchen. We had never concerned ourselves with electricity before this winter. Now my mother insisted that lights be turned off whenever we left a room. We were eating less meat. My father had not yet bought himself a new winter suit. My winter jacket was tight; my thin wrists stuck out of the sleeves. But it would have to be worn one more winter. “We have enough put away for a long time, Ruth,” I had heard my father say one night. “But what if your parents come? And my parents? What then? We have to be careful, Ruth. I am not becoming a frightened miser all of a sudden. But we must be careful.” I did not understand what was happening; neither did Saul. It had to do with money, he had told me once.

  “We have no more money?” I had asked, vaguely frightened, though I could not understand the reason for my fear.

  “We have money.”

  “Then what?”

  “Other people lost money.”

  “People in the Am Kedoshim Society?”

  “Yes.”

  “Papa and Mama are helping them?”

  “They all meet to see what they can do.”

  “Do your father and mother meet too?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did your father lose all his money, Saul?”

  “No. He listened to your father. He didn’t lose much.”

  “I don’t understand. How did people lose their money?”

  “I don’t understand either,” he said.

  “All of a sudden? Just like that they lost their money?”

  “All of a sudden,” he said.

  All of a sudden, I had thought. Like an accident. All of a sudden. I could not understand it. But it frightened me and made darker the dark cold nights of that year.

  Often Saul would help me with my reading. I was reading Hebrew on a third-grade level and English on a second-grade level. My teachers did not seem to know what to do with me in the classroom. Sometimes they asked me to help a faltering student. Most of the time they left me to my daydreams. In a reshuffling of seats that had taken place in the middle of December when two boys had suddenly left the school, I was given a seat in the third row near a window. It was easy to daydream near a window.

  When I was done with my homework, I would have a glass of milk and go to bed. Once asleep, Alex slept deeply. We could turn on my light. Lying in bed, I would ask Saul for a story.

  “Tell me the Golem of Prague story, Saul.”

  “Again?”

  “I like it, Saul.”

  And he would tell it to me. And, later, I would lie awake in the dark and see the story inside my eyes. He told it to me again the night of the snowstorm. It was easy to envision the monstrous clay figure moving through the winter night looking for goyim who wanted to hurt Jews. But what had my father meant about goyim ruining everything? Had only Jews lost money? Had there been a pogrom somewhere? They would not talk to me about it.

  “Your job is to study!” my father had once shouted in response to my questions. “Never mind money. You study. I will worry about money.”

  “Max, Max,” my mother had soothed.

  “Enough questions about money!” he had shouted. “Enough!”

  I did not ask him again about money. I had the feeling the questions wounded him terribly.

  I lay awake in the winter night and listened to the wind blow the powdery fallen snow against my window. The snow made little ticking noises like a sword tapping softly on glass. From the kitchen came the sound of Saul’s thin voice as he intoned aloud the notes of the Torah reading he had been taught by Mr. Bader.

  “It’s called trup,” he had said earlier that night.

  “What is?” I asked.

  “These notes on top of and under the words in the Bible.”

  “Really?” I was not very interested
.

  But he was eager to share the knowledge acquired by him during the weeks he had studied with Mr. Bader, who was now away somewhere on another trip to Europe. On this trip he was traveling with his wife.

  “This is called a mahapach and this is a pashto,” Saul had said. “It goes like this.” And he had chanted the notes. “If you learn these notes by heart, you can read any part of the Torah by yourself without help. But you also have to know the grammar of the Torah.”

  His eyes gleamed with eagerness. They had once had that same eagerness when we had walked through the zoo and he had told me stories about Noah and the animals in the ark. We had not been to the zoo together since school had begun.

  “I’m going to know the whole Torah by heart,” he said.

  I stared at him in awe. “How are you going to do that, Saul?”

  “By reading it every Shabbos in the synagogue. You have to go over it again and again to prepare for the reading, and that way you learn it by heart. My father says it’s the best way.”

  It seemed to me an incredible task. To know the entire Chumash, all the Five Books of Moses, the most sacred books, to know them by heart! My estimate of Saul’s journeys to Mr. Bader rose.

  I lay in my bed and listened to his voice float through the darkness of the apartment to my room. I could see him sitting in the kitchen with the large tikkun open in front of him, the double-columned pages of dark print lying like a challenge on the table. He would read a verse in the column of normal type, chanting it loudly. He would chant it again. I would hear a pause. Then he would repeat the verse, often haltingly, and I knew he was reading it from the second column, the one which duplicated exactly the scribal writing found in the actual Torah scroll itself, which was read on Shabbat and holidays and which was without vowels, punctuation, or musical notations. I did not envy him his leaps from the first column to the second. The narrow ribbon of white space that separated those columns in the tikkun felt to me like the yawning gaps between the apartment houses on our street.

  A trolley went by on the boulevard, its wheels muffled by the snow. I knew I would not sleep until my parents returned home. They never stayed out too late; Saul had to be back home by nine thirty or ten o’clock. My father would walk him home through the cold streets.

  “I’m doing it for you, Davey,” Saul had said to me one night when we were together in the kitchen.

  I had nodded my head in gratitude.

  “It’s hard for me. Why don’t you let your mother get a woman or someone you like?”

  “I don’t want to be here with a stranger. I’m afraid, Saul. I can’t be here with anyone else. I don’t—”

  “Take it easy, Davey. All right. I’m here.”

  But I needed to know my parents were back before I could lie at ease in my bed.

  I listened to Saul a while longer, then slipped from my bed and padded on bare feet to the window. My brother’s crib was to the right of the window. He lay on his back beneath his blanket, snoring softly.

  Beneath the glow of the lamps, the snow seemed to be burning with an eerie blue-white flame. The trees, laden with snow, but with trunks and the undersides of heavy branches stark black against the smooth mantle of blue-white snow that lay upon the street, appeared hoary and vaguely grotesque as they jerked and swayed in the wind. I looked up and down the street. It was deserted. I put my forehead to the window and felt the sting of its icy touch. Saul’s voice droned on from the kitchen. He read, repeated, paused, read again, hesitantly. Then he stopped and reread the entire passage he had tried to commit to memory. He paused often, repeated a passage numerous times, then went on. I kept hearing the name Noah. But I could not understand what he was reading. I returned to my bed and lay very still, listening.

  My parents came back a while later and my father walked Saul home. When he returned, they sat in the kitchen and listened to the radio. They listened to the radio a lot now. They had ceased entirely to talk about their Polish past.

  The snow froze to ice on the street and the ice turned black with the grime of the city. Cinders pockmarked the sidewalk. Cars went by slowly, tire chains rattling. Sometimes in the night I would wake to the sound of a whining tire spinning helplessly in fresh-fallen snow. It snowed often that winter. The maples drooped with snow; peering at them from my window, I often had the feeling they were turning into willows.

  Sometimes in the evening people came to the house, friends from the synagogue and the Am Kedoshim Society, and my aunt and uncle—anywhere from ten to thirty to forty of them at one time. They sat in the living room talking and I lay in my bed listening. I heard words in Yiddish and English that I did not understand. How could it happen? someone would say. Who could have foreseen it? There were those who predicted it, somone else would say. No one listened. What good is it to complain? my father would say. We have to think what to do. Tell us, they would say. What should we do? It’s lost, a despairing voice would say. There is nothing to be done. That is not a helpful attitude, my aunt would say. But it’s the truth, the despairing voice would say. There is nothing to be done. Nonsense, my father would say. We must stay together and we will plan what to do. They would talk back and forth in low voices. Sometimes a voice would suddenly be raised in anger. Once I heard a man cry out, “How long can I go on, Max? They are tearing pieces from me!” And they quieted and soothed him, and I heard my mother say she would bring him a glass of tea. Often there were sudden silences, dense chasms in the uneven contour of their speech, and I imagined I could hear the darkness of the night seeping into the room through the minute crevices in our windows. I thought often of the picnic in the clearing. When had that been? Before the summer? I could barely remember. I thought of the way my father had sounded the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, had prayed the Afternoon Service on Yom Kippur, had danced with the Torah on Simchat Torah. The joy of his friends, the ringing happiness that had filled the little synagogue. Now they sat as if it were the start of a war and they needed to make plans to flee from the Angel of Death. Had they met this way in Lemberg during the big war? I listened and was very tired and wished I could sleep. But sleep remained a cool and distant stranger. I wondered if there were some kind of special prayer one could offer for sleep. Mrs. Horowitz would have known. I stayed awake late into the nights, and slept and daydreamed in my classes during the days. My teachers left me alone.

  All through the winter and into the spring those meetings continued. They brought strange dread into the house. With the coming of the warm weather, I began to have the feeling that my father and his friends were having all those meetings not so much for the purpose of making plans as for the simple need to be together and support one another, to drink glasses of tea in each other’s homes, to offer one another words of encouragement, to keep away despair. I did not know what they feared, and I was afraid to ask. I lay awake in the night and listened to the meetings, or to Saul practicing his Torah reading, or to my parents talking very quietly in the kitchen and then listening to the radio—I lay awake and felt alone and filled with dread.

  I was ill often in the spring, once with a raging fever that kept me in bed more than ten days. They met at our apartment during that time. One night I heard their voices distorted through fever; they seemed the cries of dark and fearful birds. The pain in my face and forehead was almost unendurable. The light stung my eyes. I slid down beneath my sheet and blanket. In the living room I heard my uncle’s voice raised in a hoarse shout There were loud, angry responses. I began to cry. The voices continued, subdued once again, a rushing, murmuring, voice-interrupting-voice multiple conversation of frightened people. I lay beneath my sheet and blanket, crying silently in pain and fever, waiting for the darkness to invade my impregnable sheet world.

  It seemed to be everywhere, that darkness; and it grew darker still with the passing weeks. I was ill for the first two days of Passover. But I was in our synagogue for the final two days of the festival and it seemed a weary congregation. There were many empty seats. There
was no picnic in the pine wood that June. On the final day of school I was told by my teachers that it had been decided to skip me an entire year. In September I would begin third grade.

  I went gratefully to our cottage that summer and had a restful time rowing and swimming and lying in the sun. My father and uncle were rarely with us the first three weeks. They remained in the city and came up for the weekends.

  Then in August, my father abruptly stopped going to the city. “There is nothing happening in the city,” I heard him tell my mother early one morning in the last week of July. “The city is like a cemetery. Its dead sell apples instead of lying still. It depresses me. Who needs a real estate broker now? I will stay here for August.”

  He would wake late and come out of the cottage unshaven and stare across the beach at the sun on the lake. He would sit hunched forward on a wicker chair in the shade of the elm and stare down at the grass, his veined muscular arms dangling loosely between his thighs. He grew silent. I feared going near him. His dark eyes burned fiercely and his square bony face seemed a block of carved stone. Long into the nights I would hear my mother talking to him, softly, imploringly. It seemed she did most of the talking now; he was silent.

  One Shabbat afternoon he went into the forest and was gone so long that my mother grew afraid. She was about to ask my uncle to search for him when he emerged from its bluish depths and, without a word, went into the cottage. I saw my aunt and uncle look at each other forlornly. My mother went inside and came back out a few moments later and sat down in the wicker chair. She tried reading one of the German storybooks she had brought with her that summer, but in the end she put it aside and sat gazing at the afternoon sun on the lake. After a while she rose and returned to the cottage and did not come out until it was time to call Alex and me in for supper.