In the Beginning

  “Did you know that elephants can pull trees right out of the ground with their trunks?”

  “No,” I said, staring in wonder at the gray wrinkled giant beings in the pen. “Really?”

  I grew to love that zoo, its curving paths and grassy knolls, the animals in the cages, pavilions, and pens on its sprawling grounds, the wooden benches beneath its trees, and the drinking fountains located precisely at those points where thirst was likely to be most acute. I laughed at the monkeys, gazed with delight at the tropical birds, marveled at the silken movements of the swimming seals, and befriended a young white-haired billy goat to whom I fed peanuts, chocolate, and an occasional ice-cream bar, which he often swallowed together with its wooden stick and paper wrapper. And I stood in awe before the sleek-skinned tawny lions, the restless tigers, and lumbering elephants; they roused in me lurid and exciting visions of the steaming jungles my cousin told me had once been their home.

  Early one Sunday afternoon about two and a half months after my accidental encounter with the photograph of happy Jews celebrating a wedding in a forest, I walked with my parents and two-year-old brother through the zoo and the meadow toward the clearing in the pine wood. We were going to the annual picnic of an organization to which my father belonged. I had been taken to this picnic before, and remembered dull speeches and the extraordinary sight of my father expertly engaged in a soccer game and a wrestling match. I regarded with distaste the prospect of sitting through the speeches but looked forward keenly to the games and the wrestling.

  It was a sunny, windless day. The air was blue and warm. At the edge of the wood I paused to watch a flock of small, shrill birds wheeling in wide circles against the sky.

  In our apartment the new canary sang often. But my father would not let it out of its cage. It was the job of a canary to sing and not to fly, he said. And so our canary sang and did not fly. I was jealous of its lovely voice and the way everyone who came into our apartment would gaze at it in rapture when it sang. It would not hurt it to let it fly. Only after our first canary had flown out of my bedroom window had my father thought to say that it was the job of a canary to sing and not to fly.

  “Starlings,” I heard my father say now. “It is the job of starlings to make noise and dirt. I do not like starlings.”

  “How they fly,” murmured my mother. “A starling is sometimes a good sign.”

  “Vultures also fly,” said my father with faint derision. “Should the world admire vultures?”

  He had said to me after the canary had flown out of my bedroom window, “I told everyone to leave the windows closed. Since when does a four-year-old boy open windows? What did you do, stand on the chair? You could have fallen out.”

  “I thought it was back in the cage, Papa.”

  “You thought. It is the job of a child to listen to his father. Now a cat will eat it.”

  I shuddered.

  “Yes. A cat will eat it. All of it, bones and flesh and everything, except the feathers. It is the job of a cat to eat birds. But it does not have to be our bird.”

  And he smacked my hand. “So you should remember that your job is to listen.”

  He saw the world as firm and fixed. He said it gave him comfort to know that everything had its place and task; for example, he said, it was his task to provide for his family, and that was why he went away to his real estate business every morning and sometimes returned late in the evening. But he did not have to like everything in the world, he said. Some things had gone wrong of themselves after God had created them. He did not like volcanoes, tidal waves, large flesh-eating birds and animals, anti-Semitic goyim, diseases that killed or crippled people, children who did not obey their parents, and numerous other prevailing evils. These things made the world unsafe and dirty, he said. What he did not like he let us know about, often derisively.

  For the picnic he had put on white summer trousers, a striped shirt, a white collar and dark tie, and a light blue jacket. His hard straw hat was tipped back on his head. The large picnic basket he carried in his right hand had been packed to the brim with food earlier in the day by my mother. He held it as if it were one of the weightless birds wheeling about overhead. In his other hand he carried a blanket.

  “I do not like starlings and vultures,” my father said. “Starlings are gangsters with wings.”

  “But they tell us guests are coming,” said my mother. “On the farm when we saw starlings Mama would send us out to bring in another chicken.”

  “They are noisy birds and they dirty the world. That is their job, but I do not have to like them. Are we going to the picnic or shall we stand here all day talking about birds?”

  She gave the starlings a final uneasy glance and retreated from the conversation. Often she would wilt like a flower in the cold winds of a disagreement. Her face would dissolve, all the parts of it would melt and flow together under the slightest strain: a diaper pin that pricked her finger; a hot iron that scorched a blouse; a sudden pool of ink from the unpredictable Waterman’s pen with which she wrote her letters to her family in Poland. It seemed about to dissolve now under the strain of my brother’s efforts to free his hand from her grasp.

  “Stop pulling,” she entreated. “Alex, please.”

  I went quickly over to him and grasped his free hand. My mother released him. He looked up at me with delight. He liked me to walk with him.

  A moment later the four of us entered the pine wood.

  The air changed abruptly from sun-filled warmth to pine-scented shadowy coolness. A narrow dirt path pointed a curving finger through the trees. My father sniffed at the cool air, smiled briefly at a private memory, and led the way, ducking agilely beneath low branches and helping my mother across a fallen tree. I followed behind my mother, holding tightly to my brother’s hand. He stopped at the fallen tree and bent to inspect a colony of ants that had made a home in the earth beneath the torn roots. I pulled at his arm and he pulled back at mine. I squeezed his hand hard and he yielded, first giving me a puzzled look as if to ask what right I had to cause him pain. Then his gray eyes and small squarish face flashed with sudden anger and he pulled hard against my arm. He wanted another look at the ants. My mother reached over from the other side of the tree and, straining her short thin arms, lifted him across. I took his hand again. He walked beside me but he was angry now and every so often he gave a tentative pull at my hand to test how strongly I was holding him.

  The cool piney air of the wood was delicious. I felt it like cool water on my hands and face and on my bare legs beneath my shorts. I loved places dense with trees and leaves and blue shadows beneath the leaves and moist dead leaves on damp earth; like the forest behind the small white cottage we owned somewhere near tall mountains far away from the city. We went there in August. My father called it going to the country. We went to escape from something called polio that made people very sick and sometimes paralyzed or killed them. “The Angel of Death is doing his job again,” my father would say, and he and my mother would pack quickly and we would go off in a car to the white cottage and the forest. I was not permitted to go more than a few feet into the forest. “If you get lost, you will give the police a hard job to do,” my father warned me. “Who needs a job like that, eh, my little David? You can go into the forest only until the stream, that is all.” The stream lay about ten feet into the trees. “You go beyond the stream, it will be my job to smack your behind. You understand?” I understood. But here I could walk deep into the pine wood and breathe its scented air and listen to the mysterious rustling of its branches when I stood still and closed my eyes.

  I followed closely behind my mother. My brother walked docilely beside me. I liked him to walk beside me like that: quiet and obedient. Insects swam lazily in the shade and glittered with brief incandescence as they flitted in and out of the beams of sunlight that penetrated the pine-needle roof of the wood. Here and there along the path, as we walked its beckoning curves into the heart of the wood, a huge gnarled root showed
its dark power as it lay pushing up the earth. I really loved this pine wood. I loved its silences and the still sounds of a summer breeze in its branches. I liked things to be quiet. I did not even like it when our new canary sang too long. But I did not open my window to let our first canary fly out. I would not do anything like that. It had really been an accident.

  Like the accident with the dog.

  The woman in our apartment house who had owned the dog was a middle-aged, thin-chested, flinty widow with a mole on her upper lip and a brassy voice. She let the dog roam through the neighborhood. He was a large dog with long, shaggy brown hair, rheumy eyes, and dirty teeth. He would upset garbage cans, relieve himself against the maple in front of our house, and squat to empty himself right on the sidewalk. The woman’s name was Mrs. Horowitz and the dog’s name was Shaigitz, a derisive Yiddish colloquialism for a non-Jew. No one on our block liked Mrs. Horowitz, and no one disliked Shaigitz, except our Irish janitor who had to repair the carnage of overturned garbage cans the dog left in his wake. All the kids on the block would pet Shaigitz and feed him candy and cookies. I would pet him when he came over to me while I watched my brother asleep in his carriage. He had a moist, dirty smell about him and his breath was hot and odorous, but I petted him and liked him because everyone else did.

  My father came home early from his office one day and saw me with the dog. He shooed the dog away with his Yiddish newspaper and said to me, “Dogs are dirty.”

  I hung my head. It was two or three weeks after the canary had flown out of my window.

  “In Europe dogs were trained by the goyim to bite Jews. I detest dogs. Keep that filthy dog away from the carriage. Do you hear?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “And do not put your hands in your mouth or your eyes until you wash them.”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “And do not look so unhappy. It is not the end of the world.”

  He peered into the carriage, smiled briefly at my sleeping brother, and went into our apartment house. The dog sniffed at a tree near the edge of the sidewalk and went off to join a crowd of kids playing with bottle caps near Mr. Steinberg’s candy store.

  My mother said to me that night as she put me to bed, “A dog once bit your father.” Her eyes blinked nervously. “Sometimes the soldiers had dogs,” she added.

  “Which soldiers?”

  “Soldiers,” she murmured. “And Papa would pay them to keep it quiet.”

  “Papa?”

  “My papa,” she said. “Your grandfather.”

  “Keep it quiet?”

  “Go to sleep, David.” And she shuddered.

  The next day I saw the dog urinating on one of the wheels of my brother’s carriage. Then he got up on his hind legs and stood there, his forelegs on the carriage, his head poking around inside, his tail wagging. I had moved away from the carriage to join a game of marbles. I rushed back and with my open hand—my father had smacked me that way when the canary had gone through my open window—hit the dog hard on his hindquarters above the wagging tail and shouted, “Go away!” The dog yelped, ran into the street, and was struck by a car.

  The front left wheel of the car ran over his head. The rear wheel ran over his back. The car braked to a stop. All up and down the block everyone froze. Heads turned. The dog let out short, ear-piercing, yelping cries, lifted himself from the cobblestone street, his head crushed, his back broken, dragged himself to the curb, and died. There was a lot of blood. His long shaggy brown hair began to turn orange with blood. There was a trail of glistening blood on the street and a pool of blood along the curb. One eye hung from its socket by a bleeding thread of flesh.

  A crowd was gathering around the dead Shaigitz. My brother continued to sleep peacefully. I leaned against his carriage, cold and trembling, my legs barely able to support my body. Mrs. Horowitz came rushing out of our apartment house, led by Joey Younger, a thin-faced, unkempt busybody about my age. She looked at Shaigitz and screamed.

  I leaned forward away from my brother’s carriage and vomited my breakfast onto the sidewalk. My nose began to bleed.

  “It was an accident,” I kept saying, holding a handkerchief to my nose.

  “What did you hit him for?” the kids on the block kept saying.

  “He had his head right in the carriage,” I kept saying.

  “You could have told him to go away,” they kept saying. “What did you hit him for?”

  “It was an accident,” I said to my father.

  “Do not worry yourself over it. He was a filthy dog. Who needed him around making dirt on the sidewalk and overturning the garbage cans? Do not look so sad. It is not the end of the world.”

  “It was an accident,” I said to my mother.

  She blinked her eyes nervously. “In Europe they made less fuss when a Jew was killed than they are making over this dog.”

  “I thought he would bite Alex.”

  “Of course,” my mother said. “Why else would you have hit him like that?”

  “It was an accident,” I said to my cousin.

  “Sure,” he said, and gave me a pitying look which I did not understand and was afraid to ask him to explain.

  “You killed my dog!” Mrs. Horowitz screamed at me one afternoon in the entrance hall of our apartment house. “I’m all alone!”

  “It was an accident,” I cried, cringing in terror.

  “You did me a favor, sonny,” said the barrel-chested Irish janitor of our house when I went into the alleyway one day after a ball. “That dog was a pain in my ass.”

  “But it was an accident, Mr. Ryan.”

  “Sure it was, sonny. Sure it was. But you did me a big favor.”

  At night I dreamed of the dog and the blood and the eye dangling from the socket by the single thread of flesh. I cried in the darkness when I woke from my dreams. They had really both been accidents. But I cried bitterly—for the scattering of yellow feathers that had once been our bird and for the crumpled mass of hair and flesh and bones that had once been Mrs. Horowitz’s dog. And for the feeling I had that somehow no one really believed me when I said that they had both been accidents.…

  I stepped very carefully over a root, holding tightly to my brother’s hand. He pulled again at my hand but I would not let him go. I felt his small fingers straining against mine. He had short chunky arms and legs. My arms and legs were like sticks. He wore dark brown shorts and a white shirt and diapers beneath the shorts. He had stopped abruptly, attracted by something on the edge of the underbrush alongside the path. I pulled at him but he would not move.

  “Bud,” he said, pointing. “Bud.”

  I looked and saw a small gray-feathered bird lying dead on the moist dark floor of the wood. Its black eyes were gaping, its beak was open wide, the feathers stood out starkly from its head—as if death had crept up on it and shouted in its ear before striking. I felt cold and nauseated looking at it. My brother seemed fascinated. He bent closer.

  Dead birds were common in this wood. The week before we had seen gray feathers scattered on the path. No bones or flesh; only feathers.

  “An owl ate it,” my father had said. “Owls eat that way. And cats,” he added.

  My mother had looked away. I had felt my stomach knot and turn over. The blood beat in my head. I had feared another nosebleed.

  My brother bent closer to the dead bird on the dark earth of the wood.

  “Bud,” he said eagerly.

  “Yes, bird,” I said, turning away from the decayed and pulpy form. “Come on.”

  He bent still closer.

  “Come on,” I said.

  He reached out to touch it. I raised my hand to hit him, and stopped. I lowered my hand quickly.

  “Look where Mama and Papa are already,” I heard myself say. “Look. We’ll be lost.”

  He straightened. His dark eyes gave me a brief frightened glance. I led him away from the dead bird.

  The canary had flown in from the small hallway that led from the living room to my
bedroom. I heard it before I saw it—the rushing flutter of its wings. It struck the upper closed part of the window and fell onto the sill. In a wild panic I reached for it and held it in my small hands. It struggled and pecked at my fingers. I felt it straining against my fingers. I did not want to crush it. I eased my hold on it and suddenly it was free and out the window and gone. I had been ill again and had opened the window because I could not breathe in the hot airless room. My throat was dry and sore. I was feverish and had opened the window for air and the canary flew out and had ended up only feathers or moldering in death. In my lunge for it after it had gone out the window I had almost fallen out the window myself. But I did not tell that to anyone. I thought my father might hit me again if I told him that.

  “Putty bud,” my brother said happily.

  “Yes,” I said. “Pretty bird.”

  He toddled along beside me, his squarish baby face glowing with delight. Had I been so unknowing at two years of age? Probably. I could not remember. I was almost six and I could not remember having been two. What was my earliest memory? My parents talking softly together in Yiddish in the kitchen or living room of our apartment. I would lie in my bed and listen to them talking together in Yiddish.

  “You’re sick a lot,” Joey Younger, the neighborhood busybody, had once said to me.

  “You get sick too, Joey.”

  “Yeah, but you’re sick practically all the time.”

  “I am not,” I said.

  “You want to race me to the candy store?”

  I could not race. I had been ill and had to sit in the sun and rest. He knew I could not race.

  “Why am I sick practically all the time?” I asked my mother that evening as she put me to bed.

  “You’ll outgrow it,” she said, and turned her nervous eyes away from me.

  She had gone out of my room and later I heard her talking quietly with my father in the kitchen. Sometimes they would listen to the radio or the Victrola in the living room and then sit there and talk. But listening to them talking at night was not a very sharp early memory. I could not remember my earliest memory.