In the Beginning

  “Bud bud bud,” my brother was saying loudly and joyfully. “Budee budee.”

  I held him tightly. The path had thinned to a narrow wedge between dense growths of underbrush. I wished he would be still.

  “Budee bud bud,” he kept saying. “Alek thee budee.”

  “Yes, Alex saw a bird.”

  The path widened, its dark earth crisscrossed by snaking roots. Up ahead my mother had stopped for a moment to look back at us.

  “Are you all right, David?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Be careful, darling. Watch that Alex doesn’t fall.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “And here we are,” I heard my father say loudly around a curve in the path that concealed him behind a dense clump of pines and brush. “Look who’s here. Either you are early or we are late.” There was a brief pause. “We are late. As usual.”

  My mother turned and was gone around the curve in the path. I came into the curve in time to see my father step quickly from the bluish shadows beneath the pines into the pool of shimmering opalescence that was the clearing. A moment later my mother followed him, moving quickly into the light. They would both move quickly into the light just like that, walking softly and quickly from my room after they put me to bed and stepping from my darkness into the light of the small hall and the living room. Quickly, as if they were glad another of my days had come to an end and they could be alone to talk together in the kitchen or living room. And I would lie awake and listen to them talk, for sleep would come to me swiftly only when I was feverish and had been given medicine. After a while they would cease talking quietly and use their normal voices. I would hear strange words and strange names from a world that was not my own. I could remember some of them clearly: Warsaw and Lemberg and Lodz and Pilsudski; the names of relatives in a distant place called Poland; the word Cossacks; and two words that seemed resonant with peculiar menace, the words machine gunner. The words and names entered the darkness of my room and echoed softly between my walls. I hungered to understand their meaning but would not ask, for I was afraid my father would hit me if he discovered I lay awake listening to him talk. Sometimes they quarreled. But I could not understand what they said then, for when they raged at one another it was in a language other than Yiddish. I lay in terror listening to their voices. I could not imagine what my mother’s pale gaunt face might look like as she screamed at my father; she rarely spoke above a nervous murmur to anyone when she was with me. The quarrels were fierce, loud, and brief. They would end with my mother breaking into tears and often my father’s strangely subdued soothing words in Yiddish, “It will be better, Ruth. It will be better. We blame ourselves for what the goyim did.” Finally, exhausted, I would hunger for sleep; but it would come only of its own will, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, uncaring of my needs and fears. And always before it came there would be the light and the talk on the other side of my door, just as now there was the milky white light of the clearing beyond the trees and the talk between my parents and my aunt and uncle and Cousin Saul.

  “Good afternoon, brother mine. You’re late.” It was my uncle’s voice, gently chiding.

  “Of course we are late. When aren’t we late?”

  “If I were buying a property you would be on time.”

  “For a customer I am never late. How are you, Sarah? Your back is better?”

  “Much better, Max.”

  “God in heaven, Saul. What happened to your lip?”

  “I fell, Uncle Max.”

  I heard the talk through the trees as I came along the path to the clearing. There was a brief silence. Then I heard my uncle say, “He’s all right, Max. It looks worse than it is.”

  “Yes.” It was my father’s voice. “Well. Let’s get settled.”

  “You look pretty today, Ruth. I like your dress.” It was the musical voice of my aunt.

  “Thank you, Sarah.” My mother’s voice was almost indistinct.

  “We will put the blanket here,” said my father. “How did you fall, for God’s sake?”

  “Against an open drawer in my room.”

  There was another silence.

  “Tall?” my brother said suddenly. “Tall?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s Saul.”

  “Tall, Tall, Tall,” cried my brother elatedly. “Tall!”

  “Who leaves drawers open in a room?” said my father.

  “Here, I’ll help you with the blanket,” my uncle said.

  “An open drawer,” my father said. “God in heaven.”

  “Don’t make more of it than it is, Max,” said my uncle. “Watch where you’re stepping. You’ll make ash and dust of the chicken.”

  “You should be more careful, Saul.”

  “Yes, Uncle Max.”

  “Pull your corner over to you more,” said my uncle. “All right. Fine. Now we forget about lips and other troubles and we have an enjoyable day. Let’s settle the details now before the others come.”

  “Tallee!” my brother cried out again with joy and pulled me from the shade of the wood into the brightness of the clearing. I blinked in the sudden white sunlight that stung my eyes. The ground in the clearing was level and grassy. I released my brother’s hand and watched him break into a waddling run toward Saul, who sat in the sunlight on a blanket in the center of the clearing.

  “Tallee!” my brother cried joyfully. “Tallee! Tallee!”

  “Be careful of the lip,” I heard my father say. “It is a boy’s job to—”

  “Max,” my uncle said. “For heaven’s sake.”

  My brother flung himself upon Saul with a cry of delight and they went down together on the blanket.

  I stood alone on the edge of the clearing. Through the pine wood came the distant trumpeting of an elephant. The sound sent through me a vague sense of alarm. A bird called softly from the canopy of pine boughs overhead, its song rising and falling and rising again; then a brief flutter of wings, and silence. I felt weary and warm from the walk through the wood and there was a slight pain behind my eyes. That was the signal: I would be sick again soon. The pain, and then the fever and the stuffed nose and the choking sensation of not being able to breathe, of a mask clamped over my face shutting off the air. I would breathe through my mouth, and my throat would become parched and the pain of its raw dryness would reach down into my chest, and I would cry and the pain would get worse; and my mother would comfort me and sit with me; and sometimes Saul would come over and tell me stories about Adam and Noah and Abraham and kings and battles, stories from the Bible; and sometimes in the night I would wake inside my fever and think I heard my father in my room praying softly, his short, thick-shouldered form vaguely outlined within the darkness; but I was never certain if he was really there or I dreamed it, and I did not ask. I could not remember clearly when I had last been ill but it did not seem to me I had been well a long time.

  “Hey, were you sick again, Davey?” Tony Savanola had asked in a kind voice when I had come out of the apartment house after my last illness. He lived in the ground-floor apartment directly below us and was my age. He was a little taller than I and had olive-colored skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. His father owned a shoe store somewhere in Manhattan. “I didn’t see you for a while,” he said.

  “Yeah, I was sick, Tony.”

  “You’re sick a lot, Davey.”

  I did not know what to say and felt a little ashamed.

  “You want to play immies?” he asked in a gentle way.

  “Hey, Davey!” a woman’s voice called. “Davey Lurie!”

  I looked and saw Tony’s mother leaning out of her ground-floor window. She was a very fat woman with many chins and many children. Tony had two older brothers, three older sisters, and one younger brother. She waved a pudgy arm at me and gave me a big smile.

  “How you feel, Davey?”

  “Better, thank you, Mrs. Savanola.”

  “You look thin like a stick,” she said loudly. “What your mother feeding you? L
otsa fettina you should eat, not the skinny pollo. You look pale like a ghost. I gonna talk to your mother.” She disappeared behind the curtains of the window.

  I looked down at the sidewalk. Cars and trucks went by on the cobbled street. I was vaguely aware of the shouts of playing children and of the clang and clatter of a trolley along the boulevard that paralleled the zoo a block away. My legs were weak. But I wanted to play. It had been such a long time now since I had played with someone my age. The last illness had seemed interminable: in my bed staring out the window at the sunlight on the maple; the way it played on the leaves; the sounds of the street below; the fever; interminable.

  “I’ll play you immies, Tony.”

  “You got any?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Nah, don’t go back upstairs, Davey. I’ll lend you some. Come on.”

  We played a long slow game of marbles and I won a few and paid him back the ones he had loaned me.

  “You’re a good player, Davey.”

  “Thanks, Tony. Thanks for lending me.”

  “I hope you don’t get sick again too soon, Davey.”

  His wide dark eyes were kind and earnest. I felt buoyed by his presence. He wanted to play another game but I needed to rest.

  “What’re you hanging around with that Tony Savanola for?” Joey Younger asked me later that morning.

  “I like him.”

  “He’s a goy. You got to be careful with goyim.”

  “But he’s nice, Joey.”

  “Yeah? My brother says they all hate Jews. You going to play with Eddie Kulanski?”

  “I don’t know Eddie Kulanski.”

  “He moved in while you were sick. You going to play with him?”

  “I don’t even know him, Joey.”

  “He’s a goy. My brother says he’s a Polak and all Polaks hate Jews.”

  “What’s a Polak?”

  He looked at me with disbelief and vague contempt. His family lived on the fourth floor of our apartment house; his father sold furniture. He was a few months older than I, and almost two inches taller. His thick brown hair was in wild disarray and he was sweaty and dirty from the running games he had been playing all morning. He explained the word to me without concealing his disdain at my ignorance. “Boy, you miss a lot because you’re sick so much,” he said, and bounded up the front stoop and into the house.

  I sat in the sun next to my brother’s carriage. A moment later, the entrance door to the house opened and Mrs. Horowitz emerged. I cringed in my chair as she passed by giving me a black raging look.

  “I see you’re well again,” she said in her brassy voice. “Whose dog will you kill today?”

  She woke my brother. He began to cry. I rocked his carriage and it was a while before he went back to sleep.

  Yes, there was the pain behind my eyes now and I would be ill again soon; perhaps by the end of the day but certainly by tomorrow morning. Should I tell my parents? My father would not let me play the picnic games with him. I stood uncertainly on the edge of the clearing and watched my little brother playing on the blanket with Saul, and my father and uncle talking quietly together, and my mother and aunt setting out the food. The air of the clearing vibrated softly with the insect hum of the wood. Birds sang. The noise of traffic was indistinct. I looked down at the grass and the earth and listened to my brother’s laughter.

  Again, faintly through the dense pine wood yet still edged with shrillness, came the trumpeting cry of one of the elephants in the zoo. It seemed a cold, frightening sound to me now. Was someone hurting the elephants? Who would dare hurt an animal so huge and powerful?

  “They live a long time,” Saul had once said. “Hundreds of years.”

  “Really?”

  “And they have very good memories. They never forget anything.”

  I had difficulty remembering things sometimes: days blurred; time fused into a shapeless gray mass; I could not call back to memory the correct order of events.

  “You came to America first, Mama?” I had asked when I was last ill.

  “No, darling. Your father came to America first.”

  “From where did he come, Mama?”

  “Lemberg. A city in Poland.”

  “Before the big war?” Words came from me in an uncontrollable rush when I was ill with fever. I could not stop asking questions and talking. “From Og?” I asked. “From Logz?”

  “No, darling. After the war. Your Uncle Meyer also came after the war. Your Aunt Sarah is from Lodz, not Logz.”

  “Where are Papa’s papa and mama?”

  “They are still in Lemberg.”

  “And your papa and mama?”

  “Near Lemberg. In Bobrek. You should be quiet now and rest, David.”

  Bobrek. Mr. Shmuel Bader had recently traveled to Bobrek. With a package of medicine for Mama’s mother. He had returned and had come to our apartment to see my parents. They had talked a long time in subdued voices.

  “Why are they there?” I heard myself ask.

  “They can’t come to America yet, darling.”

  “Where is America?”

  “America is here, darling. We are living in America.”

  “Why did you and Papa come to America?”

  “We were running away from goyim who hated Jews.”

  “Is America far from Poland?”

  “Yes,” she said, and her voice trembled faintly. “Very far.”

  “Mama, could I have some more water? My throat is hurting me.”

  “Yes, darling. Yes. Did you have a dream last night?”

  “No.”

  “No dream? Nothing? You’re sure?”

  “I can’t remember, Mama.”

  She seemed disappointed.

  “Joey isn’t sick so much,” I said. “Why am I sick so much?”

  “Sha,” she said. “You’ll be all right. You’ll outgrow it. Your nose will become all better when you grow up and become a big boy.”

  It was difficult to remember things clearly. I remembered the canary and the dog clearly. But I could not remember clearly why I had so loosened my hold on the canary as to let it fly off or why I had really hit the dog so hard. But they had been accidents. I remembered them clearly as accidents. I had thought the canary would fly back into the living room and the dog would scamper away along the sidewalk.

  “You killed my poor dog, you miserable little boy!” Mrs. Horowitz had screamed at me later that day in the entrance hall of our apartment house. Her words echoed and reechoed between the marble walls.

  I had cringed in terror against a stuffed chair.

  She put her gray, powdered, wrinkled face close to mine. I saw the mole on her upper lip; small ash-gray hairs grew from it like pygmy vegetation. Her breath was warm and stale and reminded me of the dirty teeth of her dog. She had dry gray hair and wrinkles on her lips.

  “You evil little boy!” she screamed in a thin, shrill voice. “If you hate everything because you’re sick all the time, why don’t you turn the evil eye on your own family? What did you want from my poor dog? Do you know what it is to be all alone?”

  I did not understand what she was saying and I cried out in fear and bewilderment. A door opened. Mrs. Savanola stepped into the hall.

  “Why you shouting?” she shouted at Mrs. Horowitz.

  “Stay out of this, you!” shouted Mrs. Horowitz, her face going crimson with rage beneath the layer of powder.

  “Stop you screaming!” Mrs. Savanola screamed.

  “He killed my poor dog! He is an evil boy!”

  “You crazy, you screaming this way! I call the police!”

  I fled upstairs.

  “I will give her, that lump of a cow, that stinking witch,” my father shouted with rage when he came home and was told by my mother of the incident. “I will go down right now and give her.”

  “Max, don’t make trouble. Please.”

  “It was an accident. What does she want from the boy?”

  “The pain is not easier b
ecause something was an accident,” my mother said. “Last night I dreamed of Avruml.”

  I sat at the kitchen table and saw the dark silence that fell across my father. I saw it descend over his raging eyes and his hard-boned face and jutting lower jaw. My mother looked down at the floor, her hands beneath her apron.

  “What is there to eat?” my father said finally in a cold, quivering voice. Then he said, “I need a glass of coffee.”

  The entire house had talked about the dead dog. The entire block had seethed over the dead dog.

  “So hard you had to hit him?” Mr. Steinberg, who owned the corner candy store, asked me. “He was such a friendly dog.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “And you kicked him yet, too.”

  “I didn’t kick him. Who said I kicked him?” I could not remember having kicked him. I had hit him with my open hand, the way my father had hit me when the canary had flown through my open window. I had no memory at all of having kicked the dog.

  “On the street people are saying you kicked him.”

  “But it’s not true.”

  He blinked his pink-rimmed watery eyes and shook his bald head. “A pity and a shame. Such a nice dog. I used to sometimes give him candy to eat.”

  I went home and lay on my bed. I would not go outside. I lay awake in the nights and listened to my parents talking. Sometimes my brother’s crying woke me. A few days later I was sick again and I gave myself over gratefully to the darkness of drugged sleep.

  I had not kicked the dog. Why had someone said I kicked the dog? I could not remember ever having kicked the dog.

  “Does an elephant really remember everything, Saul?”

  “That’s what people say.”

  “It must feel good to be able to remember everything. I wish I could remember everything.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’d be the smartest man in the whole world. No one could fool me.”

  “You think so? Why?”

  “Because I’d always know what the truth is.”

  “Maybe,” he said, smiling. “Hey, you want to feed your billy goat some candy? We have to go home soon.”

  Each time I came to the zoo now I liked to feed the billy goat. He was young and small with white shaggy hair and a goatee and warm moist lips. Sometimes I could feel his breath on my face. I had fed him again today on the way through the zoo to the meadow and the wood.