In the Beginning

  “They should have come,” I heard her say in a barely audible tremulous voice. “Master of the Universe, what did they do?” She looked again around the room. Her hair lay long and lose upon her thin shoulders. Then, silently and without a further word, she opened the door to her room, slipped inside, and closed the door quietly behind her. I stood very still, and for a long moment thought I could still see her face in the mirror.

  I dreaded the night I would again be wakened by her murmured incantations. In school one afternoon I asked Saul what the Rambam said about charms and spells. He quoted by heart, as if automatically, “One who whispers a spell over a wound, at the same time reciting a verse from the Torah, one who recites a verse over a child to save it from terrors, and one who places a scroll of phylacteries on an infant to induce it to sleep, are not in the category of sorcerers or soothsayers, but they are included among those who repudiate the Torah; for they use its words to cure the body whereas these are only medicine for the soul.”

  I had asked him the question in bitter jest. The response turned the jest to bile in my mouth.

  But she did not return to the old darkness of spells and incantations. Perhaps she finally recognized its infantilism and worthlessness; perhaps she thought it unworthy of use in the case of her parents; perhaps the menace was not immediate enough: they were, after all, thousands of miles away and not deathly ill in the next room with a very high fever or a punctured throat or a seriously infected leg. Instead, she began to pray morning and evening from the Book of Psalms. And she became rigidly, zealously, almost compulsively wary about her observance of the commandments and about our own religious behavior. “Did you pray yet? Then come and have breakfast.” “Did you wash your hands yet? Then come and make Hamotzi.” “Did you pray the Afternoon Service yet? It’s almost sundown.” “I must light candles no later than four-twelve. A moment later it’s Shabbos.” “Your tefillin look worn. You should take them to a scribe.” “You should get up now and go to synagogue or you’ll come too late for Borchu.” “Who put the meat spoon in this drawer? Who? You will make my entire kitchen unclean.”

  She continued this way for months. Alex chafed under it but said nothing. My father would nod, thank her for reminding him to check his tefillin, to pray the Afternoon Service, to do this or that, to avoid this or that; he was extraordinarily meek in the face of her relentless watchfulness over our religious lives. Sometimes in the early evenings after supper I would sit at my desk and hear him talking with my mother in the kitchen before he went into the bedroom to work on his watches. “You will hear from them,” he said. “How long can the war last? Soon you will hear from them, Ruth.” But as the war in Europe went on, he ceased his vacuous soothing and bore with patience and expressions of gentle gratitude my mother’s need to make firm the outlines of the world immediately around her. Still I remained upset over the way she would fall asleep in a chair in the living room during the chill nights of winter and I talked to my father about it one Shabbat morning in early March on the way to the yeshiva synagogue. Alex was in bed with a slight cold and I thought this was as good a time as any to tell him how I felt.

  “There is nothing I can do,” he said into the icy wind that blew along the street.

  “I don’t understand. I found Mama asleep in the chair last night without a blanket. She was freezing cold. She’ll catch pneumonia.”

  “She will not catch pneumonia. You will catch pneumonia if you get yourself excited and overheated in this weather.”

  “Why don’t you help Mama to bed after you finish your work at night?”

  “She does not let me. Every night she tells me she wants to sit up by herself awhile longer.”

  “Then give her a blanket.”

  “No,” he said. “I do not want your mother to start using the chair for a bed. That is not good for her.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Where is it written that you must understand everything? There are things between a husband and wife that no one else has to understand.”

  “She’s my mother.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Your good head should therefore tell you that I know her longer than you do. I tell you that I know her better than you do. She may lose some of her family in Europe. But she will be all right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  We crossed at the corner of Washington Avenue and 170th Street.

  “It is only rumors. But they have a smell of the truth about them.”

  “Are the Germans killing Jews?”

  “Yes.”

  I shivered in the wind. “Is anyone doing anything?”

  “It is not officially known as yet. When it becomes officially known, then governments will meet and decide that nothing can be done.”

  “Nothing?” I said. “Nothing?”

  “David, the Jews are doing nothing to save themselves. Why should the goyim help us?”

  I was quiet. The wind stung my eyes. We stood at the foot of the stone steps that led up to the yeshiva building, the stone steps down which I had once fallen with a lollipop stick in my mouth.

  “Between the mentality of Tulchin and the mentality of the Hasidim, we will lose many European Jews because of this war.” He hunched down in his winter coat, his hands deep in his pockets. He looked up and down the deserted Saturday morning street. “There are those who are trying to smuggle weapons into the ghettos. Certain friends are helping. I tell you this because you are no longer a child. Do you understand?”

  I nodded slowly, staring at him.

  “Jabotinsky was right. We should have got them out. But I could not get out my own family. So we must save what we can. And we must be patient. Until after the war.”

  I stared at him. His face was grim. The scar on his cheek was starkly white within the flesh reddened by the bitter wind. It occurred to me at that moment as we stood there in the March cold outside the yeshiva that his eyes were seeing this war in a way utterly different from mine. I saw it in newspaper photographs, in movie newsreels, in the images I conjured up for myself as I listened to radio broadcasts; but this man, my father, had led men in combat, had killed men in war, knew the smells of battle and death, and was able to enter the photographs and newsreels and radio broadcasts to see the war. In that same way, he could see Jews being killed. And again I shivered in the winter wind.

  I woke one night that April in the second year of the war and heard voices in the apartment. I felt it to be a dream but realized quickly enough it was not. One voice was that of my mother crying; the other was that of my father speaking to her softly, gently, soothing. I could not make out what they were saying but it went on a very long time until silence settled deeply once again into the apartment. Then I heard a stirring inside my room and Alex quietly called my name.

  “I’m awake,” I whispered.

  “What happened?” he whispered back.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Something is going on. They’re hiding something from us.”

  I was quiet.

  “I don’t like that,” he whispered. “I can’t stand it.”

  Still I was quiet.

  “I can take almost anything. All the nagging and the gloom and doom over this place. I can take that. But I can’t take being treated like a baby. They keep everything from me.”

  “They used to keep everything from me too.”

  He stirred in the darkness. “Used to?” he whispered. “Used to?”

  I said nothing.

  “What’s going on, Davey?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Davey.”

  “I really don’t know, Alex.”

  “I can’t stand it,” he whispered, his voice muffled as if he had abruptly turned his head away. “Don’t they realize I’m not a baby anymore?”

  In the morning I said to my father in the living room as he was removing his tefillin after the Morning Service, “Are the rumors true, Papa?”

  He stopped, stared at me, nodded on
ce, then went on unwinding the black leather strap from his left arm. I watched the muscles of the arm move. Had he killed men with that arm? It was strange how frequently these days I thought of my father as a soldier. A few weeks ago I had asked him if he ever had any photographs of himself in uniform. Yes, he said. But they had all been destroyed in a pogrom.

  “I told your mother because I do not believe in concealing such matters,” he said now.

  “The Germans are killing Polish Jews?”

  “Polish Jews and Russian Jews. The picture is not clear. But they are killing Jews.”

  I told it to Alex. He stared at me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said.”

  “How does Papa know?”

  “He knows.” I stared out the window at the people on the street. The world was the same. Nothing was changing. The same street, the same stores. “He knows,” I repeated. “It’s his job to know.”

  Then I was ill for a while and when I returned to school I had to work hard to catch up on what I had missed. And then it was summer and fall. Alex was in high school and was reading novels and writing into the nights; Saul was working for his ordination; my uncle’s law business was doing very well and he was traveling a great deal for the Revisionist organization; and my father was talking about opening his own store and moving from the neighborhood, perhaps to Clay Avenue. He began looking at store sites. At first he would go out alone in the late evenings or early mornings. My mother would sit alone waiting for him to return. One evening during supper she announced abruptly, “I must get out of the house.” She looked around the kitchen, blinking nervously. “I cannot stand it any longer, Max.”

  We stared at her in silence.

  “I am going to look at a store tonight,” said my father very calmly.

  “Yes?” she said. “Where?”

  “Near the Concourse. A nice walk.” He sniffed at a forkful of baked potato and said, “We will go together, Ruth.”

  She nodded. They went out together after supper. The next night they went out together again to another site. They were out often together that fall and Alex and I were in the apartment alone.

  I remember one cold rainy night of that fall with particular vividness and poignancy, a November night after an entire day of rain. I had been to see Dr. Weidman in the morning. “It’s time, David,” he had said, his aging pink face sober. “I want you to have it done in the summer.”

  I lay on the examining table and felt myself beginning to tremble.

  “I will get you the best man in the city. We will have it done in Mount Sinai.”

  “The summer?” I heard myself say in a voice that was suddenly dry and dead. Then again, absurdly, “The summer?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It is definitely time.”

  I wanted to say something that would effect a delay, cause him to change his mind, give me another year. Next summer? Next summer was only eight months away.

  “Are you sure?” I heard myself say in a tense rising voice.

  “David,” he said quietly. “I am absolutely sure.”

  I rode to school in a bus and sat in my Talmud class looking out at the rain. It fell in a slant and a wind came across the river and blew it along the wide cobblestone street. Toward late afternoon it changed briefly to snow. Then it became rain again, thick, grayish, dirty-looking, as it fell onto the city from the darkening sky. I walked to the bus stop after school and rode home and felt the rain let up and then stop as I walked home.

  During supper I told my parents and Alex what Dr. Weidman had said.

  I saw my mother’s face freeze. My father looked at me and his face was suddenly drained of expression. Alex’s mouth opened slightly and he took a sharp deep gulping breath.

  No one said anything. For what seemed to me to be an interminable length of time I heard nothing but the simmering of the kettle on the stove and the ticking of the clock on the shelf above the sink.

  My father broke the silence. “If Dr. Weidman says it is time, then it is time. We will have it done.”

  Sweat ran down my back. My hands were icy cold.

  “I will call him in the morning,” my father said. “Did he say who will do the operation?”

  “The best man in the city,” I heard myself say.

  “I will talk to him in the morning. It will be all right, David.”

  “I’m a little scared, Papa.”

  “It will be all right, I tell you. Everything will be all right.”

  “Dr. Weidman said they have to go near the brain.”

  My mother’s eyes flew open.

  “Whatever they have to do they will do,” my father said after a moment. “Afterward you will be a new person.”

  Two days before my father opened his watch repair and jewelry store there was a heavy snowstorm. We watched it from our kitchen window during supper. “It is a good sign,” my father said. “Snow is an excellent sign.”

  “On the farm snow in early spring was considered a blessing for the year,” said my mother.

  I looked at them. They seemed excited, eager for the future.

  “The customers won’t consider it a blessing,” Alex said.

  “It will be a good year,” my father said. “I feel it.”

  He opened the store in the first week of March, three months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and America entered the war. It was located on a busy corner two blocks west of Grand Concourse in a neighborhood dense with recent apartment houses and stores. On the front window, in large gold letters, were the words JEWELRY & WATCH REPAIR. In the lower right-hand comer was my father’s name: M. LURIE. When I rode by on the bus back from school the first day the store was open, I saw it crowded with customers. It was crowded with customers the second and third days too.

  “The trouble is the bride is too beautiful,” said my father at the kitchen table later that week. “I am so busy waiting on customers I can no longer repair watches.”

  “Max,” my mother said quietly.

  He looked at her.

  “Is it difficult to wait on customers?”

  “It is a job that a person with sense can learn,” my father said.

  She nodded and was quiet. The next day as I rode by in the bus I saw her inside the store behind the counter. The store was crowded. She wore a pale blue woolen dress, had her hair combed back in a bun, and wore a thin gold necklace. The store stood at a bus stop. The bus was crowded and many passengers were getting on and off. I watched her a long time. The bus pulled away from the corner and she receded from view.

  At the kitchen table that evening she said buoyantly, “I think I will enjoy being a business lady.”

  My father smiled around the drumstick he had been chewing. Alex and I looked at each other.

  “Yes,” my mother said, her eyes shining. “I think I will like that very much.”

  Every day I would ride by on the bus and see her in the store with my father. It was a large spacious glittering store. In its front and side windows rings and watches nested in folds of black velvet. It was always busy.

  Two weeks after he opened the store my father announced at the kitchen table that he felt it was time for us to move to a new neighborhood.

  “Closer to the store,” he said. “Your mother agrees.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Your mother and I are looking.”

  They would go out together after supper and be gone for hours. I would be alone with Alex. The snow was all gone. The weather carried with it a vague tinge of warmth. I saw the summer and the darkness and I did not know what to do.

  They came home one night from one of their forays. I heard them in the hallway putting away their coats. “I need a glass of coffee, Ruth,” my father said. A moment later he was in our room. They had found an apartment, he said.

  Alex looked up from his writing pad.

  “Where?” I asked.

  He told us. His face wore a controlled smile of pleasure. “Hard work,??
? he said. “And a little luck. And patience. Piece by piece. I told you.”

  We were all delighted that we would be near my aunt and uncle and Saul. We moved during the last week of April when warmth was unmistakably in the air and the trees in the park on Clay Avenue had begun to open their buds. It was a lovely first-floor apartment in a large six-story house with an elevator and an entrance hall furnished with mirrors and lamps and chairs. The room I shared with Alex looked out on the wide brick-paved street and the park. I could see the trees above the tall stone wall that bordered the park. I would be able to watch them turn green.

  My aunt and uncle came over the first night to help us get settled. But Alex and my father had already put up the beds and were arranging the living room furniture and there was little for my uncle and me to do. We stood near a window talking quietly while Alex and my father finished unrolling the living room carpet.

  “This is different from the last time you moved, isn’t it?” said my uncle in his gentle smiling way. “Do you remember?”

  I remembered vaguely a time of darkness and horror.

  “Yes,” he said. “This is different.” He watched Alex and my father handling with ease the heavy living room sofa in response to my mother’s directions.

  “You should replace the carpet, Ruth,” said my aunt.

  “We bought it when we were married,” my mother said as if in the carpet’s defense.

  “And the curtains,” said my aunt. “You will need new curtains. There is an excellent place on Fordham Road and Grand Concourse.”

  “That’s quite a pair, your father and brother,” said my uncle to me. “They move furniture around like it was matchsticks.”

  I looked out the window at the wide dark street. “Uncle Meyer?” I said very quietly.

  He looked at me. It was my father’s face looking at me. Alex and my uncle and my father. Squarish shape and hard bony features and brown wavy hair and protruding lower jaw and small gray eyes.

  “Are the Revisionists going to fight the British after the war?”