The Sacrifice Read online

  THE AUTHOR

  Adele Wiseman was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1928. She graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1949 and then, to support her commitment to writing, found employment as a social worker in England, a school teacher in Italy, and executive secretary to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.

  In her first novel, The Sacrifice, which won the Governor General’s Award, Wiseman recreates, through the lives of Jewish immigrants in a central Canadian city, the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. All her writings bring into Canadian literature the culture and the tradition of her Jewish heritage.

  In Old Woman at Play, an illustrated account of her mother’s doll-making, Wiseman explores and meditates on artistic creativity.

  Adele Wiseman died in Toronto, Ontario, in 1992.

  BY ADELE WISEMAN

  BIOGRAPHY

  Old Woman at Play (1978)

  DRAMA

  Testimonial Dinner (1974)

  ESSAYS

  Old Markets, New World [Drawings by Joe Rosenthal] (1964)

  Memoirs of a Book Molesting Childhood and Other Essays (1987)

  FICTION

  The Sacrifice (1956)

  Crackpot (1974)

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS EDITION, © 2016

  Copyright © 1956 by Adele Wiseman

  This book was first published by the Macmillan Company of Canada Limited in 1956.

  New Canadian Library edition published by McClelland & Stewart in 2001.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780735252806

  Ebook ISBN 9780771090257

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover image: © Dominik Pabis/Getty Images

  Penguin Modern Canadian Classics

  Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.pengu​inran​domho​use.​ca

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  By Adele Wiseman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dedicated to my mother and father

  ONE

  The train was beginning to slow down again, and Abraham noticed lights in the distance. He shifted his body only slightly so as not to disturb the boy, and sank back into the familiar pattern of throbbing aches inflicted by the wheels below. A dim glow from the corridor outlined the other figures in the day coach as they slept, sprawled in attitudes of discomfort and fatigue. He tried to close his eyes and lose himself in the thick, dream-crowded stillness, but his eyelids, prickly with weariness, sprang open again.

  Urgently the train howled the warning of its approach to the city. Facing him, Abraham’s wife seemed to seize the same wailful note and draw it out plaintively as she sighed in her sleep. Her body huddled, strained and unnatural, on the faded green plush seat. He could feel the boy, slack and completely pliant, rolling to the motion of the train. The whistle howled again, the carriage jolted, and his son lurched heavily, almost lifelessly against him.

  Enough! With a sudden rush of indignation, as though he had been jerked awake, it came to Abraham that they had fled far enough. The thought took hold in his mind like a command. It came alive in his head and swept through him angrily, in a wave of energy, a rebellious movement of the blood. It was as simple as this. Enough. He must act now.

  He sat up carefully, shifting Isaac’s limp form into another position, fired in his new determination by the boy’s weak protesting mumble. Slowly, he stretched, feeling his joints crackle, willing the cramp out of his body. He looked about him impatiently.

  As though summoned, the conductor entered the coach. Abraham turned his head and beckoned imperatively.

  “Where are we?” he asked in Ukrainian, tentatively, his red-rimmed eyes gleaming with excitement, his loud voice muted to a hoarse whisper.

  The man stooped, his face polite, questioning, and to Abraham offensively vacant in its noncomprehension. “I beg your pardon?” he said in English.

  “Where are we stopping, please?” Abraham asked urgently in Yiddish, speaking slowly and patiently so that the man must understand.

  The conductor shook his head. “No speak, no speak,” he said, pointing to Abraham’s mouth, then to his own, with a deprecating gesture.

  Abraham looked at the man with irritation. Was there anyone on the train who could do anything but make faces and smile? “Why does the train stop?” he asked suddenly, hopefully, in Polish.

  The conductor shook his head helplessly.

  Abraham leaned forward and gestured wildly toward the window to where the lights blinked in the distance.

  The conductor, as though realizing something, smiled a broad, reassuring smile, shook his head vigorously, patted Abraham lightly on the arm, and made as if to move on.

  “The train! stop! why? What city?” roared the Jew in exasperation, spitting out the words in broken German.

  At the sound his son jerked suddenly awake, frightened, and looked blindly about for a moment. Other passengers groaned, stirred their numb bones, and mumbled in protest. The conductor swayed on down the car, shrugging apologetically at drowsy faces.

  “Animals here,” muttered Abraham, subsiding and turning helplessly to his son. “They can only gibber and gesticulate.”

  “What’s the matter, Pa?” Isaac yawned. “Can’t you sleep?”

  “No!” With a gesture, he flung aside the overcoat he had used as a cover. “The train is stopping. We’re getting off.”

  “But we have two more days.”

  “Who awaits us?”

  There was no answer to this that the boy knew of. Who awaited them? What awaited them? It did not really matter whether they stopped here, blindly, or went blindly on to the other city for which they had bought the tickets. Isaac crouched for another moment and watched his father, who was collecting their bundles. His own limbs were so knotted that it took him a moment to gather the strength to get out from under his warm coat and stretch.

  The conductor called out the name of the city.

  “No; enough, I say,” said Abraham. “Fifteen months and eleven days. If I had to spend more days and nights worrying about a new beginning I would not have the strength to begin. Two more days and nights in this position, and this whole human being that you call your father will make sense only to an upholsterer. I do not know where we will sleep tomorrow, but at least our beds will lie flat and we will rock no more.”

  “But our tickets –” Isaac rubbed his eyes with numb fingers and shook his head to clear his thoughts.

  “Ah
, our tickets.” Abraham scratched the itching skin under his forked beard reflectively. “Well, it’s senseless trying to explain anything to that fellow. Listen to him. Me he can’t answer a simple question, and now he wakes up the whole train with his shouting up and down. Well, I suppose he can’t help himself. Would I have understood him even if he had understood me?”

  Strength and humor returned with his decision. He moved around and stretched; his blood began to circulate again. Like a young man entering deliberately into an adventure, he felt excited at making a positive gesture in the ordering of his fate.

  “In fact, come to think of it, we’ll be saving money. If we get off here we save the rest of our fare, so just in case they’re not clamoring for a butcher and I don’t get a job here right away, we’ll save that much more money to live on in the meantime. That’s why it’s such a good idea to get off here. You see, your father has not lost his common sense. In fact, it’s a wise decision I have made with God’s help. And we can see about our tickets in the station.”

  Lights flashed by; at the other end of the car a young couple were gathering their belongings.

  “The important thing now,” Abraham continued, “is that we must stop running from death and from every other insult. We will seize our lives in these scarred hands again.” He paused to consider his words with pleasure.

  “Come, boy, we must wake your mother – but gently. How weary she is.”

  When the train grunted to a halt Abraham and his family, his wife blinking and shivering with sleep, stood among the few waiting with their bundles in their arms. The conductor, noticing the group assembled to leave, rushed up to them.

  “No, no, no!” He shook his head and reached for Abraham’s suitcase. “This isn’t your stop!”

  Abraham brushed his arm away firmly.

  “Shalom,” he said politely, yet with a certain fierceness that prevented the conductor from persisting. They descended to the platform. The conductor stood shaking his head in exasperation over these immigrants. Abraham cast him a last, forgiving glance. As though it were written, he could see what they must do. First, to find the immigration barracks – to sleep, at last, without the artificial pulse of engines to remind them even in sleep that they were wanderers. Then, with the new day, to settle themselves gingerly on the crust of the city, perhaps someday even to send down a few roots – those roots, pre-numbed and shallow, of the often uprooted. But strong. Abraham felt strength surge up in him, excitement shaking the tiredness out of his body. No matter what is done to the plant, when it falls, again it will send out the tentative roots to the earth and rise upward again to the sky. The boy was young, the boy was blessed, the boy would grow.

  —

  Isaac shifted his bundle uncomfortably under curious stares and raised his eyes upward and ahead in imitation of the oblivious purposefulness of his father. He moved stiffly, aware of the difference in dress between these people and himself, and listened, lonely among the strange rhythms about him, for voices of warmth.

  That morning they had found a place to live, and now they were bringing their belongings to install in the room. Isaac thought of the new home with trepidation, perhaps not so much in spite of but because of the fact that the landlady had told him happily that she had two daughters just his age. What would two native girls think of him? What if they were like their mother – two garrulous girls with sharp noses, the tips moving like rabbits’, incessantly up and down as they talked?

  Sarah, Isaac’s mother, who had lived for months as in a dream, found herself hypnotized, watching the face of Mrs. Plopler as she talked. When the woman addressed her persuasively, woman to woman, reiterating the merits of this furnished room with its bed, its couch, its bureau, its chair, and its big window, she merely nodded up and down, unthinking.

  The landlady was a thin, flat-fronted woman with nothing to draw the eye from her hyperactive nose other than a head of tightly grizzled hair that started upward from her head in stiff, small waves. As she talked she examined her prospective roomers and saw that they were no longer young, this straight-backed Jew with his beard thrust forward, as though starched, away from his chest, and his wide-eyed, unresponsive wife. Still talking, she swept her eyes over their pale adolescent son, who stood looking at her in a way which she found vaguely irritating. Her eyes took in their portable belongings. She concluded that they were lucky to get her room, and, reminding them again that they would have the benefit of a furnished room with a bed, a couch, a bureau, a chair, and a big window, as well as kitchen and bathroom facilities, which they would share with her family, she asked for her rent in advance.

  Half an hour after they were securely installed and she had their rent pinned away warmly, their landlady was telling a neighbor how she had taken a poor immigrant family into the house, practically right off the train, and how she had made them feel immediately at home. “Why, they’re taking baths already.”

  Shortly afterward she met her adolescent daughters at the door with the whispered news that she had rented the room to an immigrant family with a son of about sixteen, who, however, didn’t look like much, but that they would nevertheless have to stop running about the house half-naked in the mornings. She added that the tenants had taken baths already, three separate baths, and that she had served them tea in the kitchen and had gleaned that the father was a butcher. At present, she told the girls, they were asleep after their long trip.

  Leaving her daughters at home – two overgrown girls who began to wander up and down outside the room, pausing to listen and giggle at the door of their tenants – she went off to shop for supper. At the grocery she mentioned that she had taken an immigrant family into her house, people she knew nothing about, that they had taken baths already, that she had served them tea, that the husband was a butcher, that they were resting at present, and that it was hard for two families to share one bathtub.

  When her husband came home she told him that they had finally rented the furnished room to an immigrant family, that the husband was a butcher who didn’t have a job yet, though they’d paid rent in advance, that they were at present asleep in their room, that they had taken baths already, and that she wondered how often they intended to take baths during the week, all three of them.

  “You have to show them that we have a bathtub right away,” said her husband, who was a joker and a jolly good fellow at a party but surly, with secret grievances, at home.

  “Well, it’s by the toilet,” she defended herself. “They would have found out anyway. And besides, it’s because of the long train ride that they bathed. They’re greenhorns; they won’t want to bathe very often. You know how filthy these people are apt to be.”

  “We have too much hot water for you,” he grumbled.

  “She served them tea, too,” chimed in Gertie and Goldie eagerly, happy for some diversion after having palpitated around the house all afternoon in vain.

  The Ploplers waited to get a glimpse of their tenants, but Abraham and his family slept on until the evening. Then the Ploplers noted that the lights went on and heard their voices murmuring, the man’s louder than the rest. But they couldn’t catch the words. From the moving about they assumed that the new tenants were unpacking and putting the room in order. Possibly, even, they were eating something from one of their outlandish bundles. Then the lights went out.

  “Certainly sleep a lot,” commented their landlord. “Why you didn’t knock on the door and ask them if they want anything is beyond me. I think I have as much right to see them as you have. I go out in the morning and come back to find half my house rented away, and nobody thinks to introduce me to my new tenants. Nobody thinks fit to ask me if maybe in my opinion they’re not suitable for tenants in my house. Who rents a room just like that?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me when the lights were on to knock on the door?” said his wife. “You’d think they’d come out by themselves to be sociable. They know I have a husband.”

  “Thank you for telling the
m you have a husband. What are they hiding themselves away for?”

  “Maybe they’re tired,” suggested one of the girls.

  “I’m tired too,” said her father. “So what?”

  “What does the son look like?” asked the other girl, who had heard at least half a dozen times before. They both listened eagerly while their mother described how thin and wretched-looking a boy he was, but not, for all that, entirely ugly. The landlord resigned himself sullenly to waiting till morning.

  —

  Maybe they’re whispering that we might want some water during the night. Isaac lay, sleepy and thirsty, conjuring up this fanciful hope because he was ashamed to venture out of the room in his bathrobe among all those feminine voices that whispered in the kitchen. It seemed to him that he had not had any water for a long time. The taste of salt herring was in his mouth. He got up and brushed against the chair, making a noise so that the whispering in the kitchen held its breath for a moment. His father’s deep, open-mouthed breathing continued to purr and chortle from the bed, and his mother lay silent, curled up under the bedclothes. Isaac found an orange to suck and lay back down on the couch with it.

  It was different when they had changed boats and were in England for a short while. There it didn’t matter that his clothes were different. He could walk with his hands in his pockets, knowing he’d be leaving soon, and pretend he was a tourist – wealthy, idle, indolent, even perhaps at times a bit supercilious. He saw himself back in London when he had stood for a long time watching people buy bananas, wondering what was done with them. Yet he had not let on, just cocked his head carelessly to one side and whistled a short snatch of melody, as it were absent-mindedly, as though speculating on some subject far off from these petty transactions.