The Sacrifice Read online

  At last a man and a little boy had bought some of the bananas, and the little boy peeled one of them and began to gobble greedily. So Isaac had bought and peeled to take, tentatively, taste…. Pleasant…Floating in to confront his parents. Mother’s gasp. “What are you eating?” Father: “Raw!”…Isaac, enormously sophisticated, wearing no clothes at all, prowling a strange house with raw girls, whispering, “It’s a fruit to gobble greedily in English.” Tasting-sipping-drinking deeply. Suddenly, his brothers’ heads crowding among the immigrants. Moses: “Like water.” “No, like herring.” Jacob, the learner, in the darkened room. “Like watered herring” – definitively. “Like water.” Moses, the singer, adamant. “Raw water.” “Can’t get water from a torn bathrobe” – contemptuously.

  The orange didn’t help much, ventured Isaac. She still wagged her yellow nose.

  As Isaac slept.

  —

  After lunch, when Isaac went to the English-language course that had been organized in the district high school, Abraham left the house with him. Isaac pointed at objects, enunciating carefully the English names.

  “Tree. Sky. Cloud. House. Mountain.”

  Abraham would repeat, fingering the syllables clumsily with his tongue, but with immense satisfaction listening to the sound of his son’s apparently adroit mastery. When they parted, the young voice continued to repeat itself in his head, raised, clear, ardent, for to Abraham his son’s voice must be ardent. Nothing grows but by desire.

  Sky. Houz. He stopped in front of a tree, frowning at it demandingly. Now what did he call this?

  His beard jutted out in vexation, and his eyes traveled up the trunk in search of a clue.

  Boim. Isaac’s voice, speaking cheerfully in Yiddish, came to his mind.

  “Boim,” said Abraham out loud to the tree with satisfaction and proceeded toward the busy avenue.

  The little leaves are falling from the trees. Abraham expanded his scope, carefully enunciating his thought mentally, as though it were an elementary language lesson, thinking in Yiddish, but laboriously, so that he could feel pleasantly as though it were the English equivalent.

  He stopped as he reached the avenue and pulled out his little snap purse to look for the address the butcher had given him that morning.

  Today I may find work. Then we will go to night school. It may be that there are new thoughts in English. The Russians, too, have very clever sayings.

  The chill autumn winds ruffled the hair on his face, outlined his bare cheeks where they met his beard, and crept, clean-smelling, into his nostrils.

  Isaac will yet do something fine. He was not spared for nothing.

  He looked into the shop windows as he passed and checked the numbers above their doors.

  The butcher had said, looking at him in a sly way, “Polsky might be needing a new man now that he’s opened up again. His business is booming. The women can’t resist nosing around now that he’s back. You know how women are.”

  Abraham had asked for and written down the address of this Polsky’s shop.

  “Quite a man, Polsky,” the butcher had begun again. “And when the women get hold of something like that their tongues run ahead of them. Can’t talk of anything else.”

  “Yes,” agreed Abraham, who only half heard. “You think perhaps that he might need someone?”

  “Never can tell. He’s got a pretty big place there. Used to have someone to help him. And now that he’s just back from his little holiday, as they say, and his mind probably isn’t altogether on his work yet – well, he probably needs someone.” The butcher chuckled wisely and winked. “Only you’d better watch; it may be catching. How does your wife feel about that sort of thing?”

  Abraham saw himself already on the way. Immediately after lunch he would go. It was no good to go with a hungry look. He thanked the butcher and left, leaving the man to look after him with some annoyance, the frustrating taste of an untold story on his lips.

  That was a strange man, that butcher, full of funny looks and hints. But maybe this man will really need me. Abraham paused before two large windows, aware that he was nervous and anxious. He looked about him at the preparations nature was making for winter.

  If I get work we will walk in the park this evening, he promised himself as he opened the door to the store. The large bell tinkled distantly in his ears. He closed the door behind him carefully. If not – we will walk in the park.

  He straightened up and walked through the sawdust to the counter, where the butcher was waiting on a customer. Standing a little to one side, his hands behind his back, he waited tensely till the man should be through.

  —

  Isaac walked to school, studying signs and faces, learning the contours of the city, wondering what was to come for him. The city rose about him, planted on an undulating countryside that seemed to have spilled over from the ridge of dark hills in the western distance. The life that he remembered wavered uncertainly forward to meet the life that he seemed just about to live. In the morning he had wandered around in the flats of the city, the crowded, downhill area in which he lived. The flats scooped down toward the edge of the brown river with a sort of lilting quality, as though the earth had lifted a shoulder and the houses had slid closer together and the factories had slipped and jostled one another to the river bank.

  Westward, above the flats, grand houses spread themselves. Their rocky gardens and many trees prepared, with an autumnal festival of color, for the austerities of winter. Along the edge of the sharp incline which, like a small cliff, separated the heights from the flats, the streets lit up brightly at night and were crowded with people. In the day they were filled with traffic and the commerce of the city.

  Beyond the river to the east, and beyond the township and truck gardens that dotted its farther bank, was another gradual rise, which gathered breath for several miles and heaved up finally with a tremendous effort to a double-crested hill that dominated the eastern landscape. To Isaac the land seemed like a great arrested movement, petrified in time, like his memories, and the city crawled about its surface in a counterpoint of life.

  He was aware of the hill to the east as he walked. When he didn’t look at it, it seemed to crowd up closer, as though it were watching, absorbing every gesture in its static moment. He looked sideways and back toward it, and the mountain assumed its proper proportion, the sweeping double hump carelessly mantled in splotches of autumn color.

  The mountain reminded him of how he had asked the giggling daughters of his landlady the source of the lights that peered at night from behind its first hump. They had crowded close beside him at the window, Gertie and Goldie, the younger one right up against his side. The older one had held her finger to her ear, described a circle with it several times, then pointed to the lights. The younger whispered, “Crazy-house,” giggled, and shuddered fearfully closer to him. This was why it was called Mad Mountain – a strange name to call a mountain that looked so intimately on all the affairs of the city. Strange to think of the people that it had gathered up to live with itself. It was not a thing to laugh and giggle about as these girls did. But with women it is always so, Isaac told himself sagely. What they said meant little. It was merely to draw your attention to the other things that their eyes and lips could tell you.

  It was because of a girl that his brothers had discovered one night that he sometimes stayed awake and listened to them talking. How young he had been then! That night back in the old country returned to him now with a vividness that banished the warm immediacy of the sun and the keen-smelling breeze from his senses. He had lain awake as he had intended, hoping to hear another argument about God, so that he could finish explaining to the incredulous Menasha Roitman across the street why some great thinkers thought that maybe there couldn’t be a God. He had forgotten, because of Menasha’s interruptions and arguments, the lofty line of reasoning that Jacob had followed some nights before. Now he listened, puzzled, while his brothers crawled into their places on the huge s
tove beside him and whispered about an ordinary girl.

  Minutely they debated whether the carpenter’s daughter had really spent all afternoon picking flowers in her front yard solely because Moses himself had spent all afternoon walking back and forth past her house.

  “You say she was picking flowers for two whole hours?” asked Jacob, the thinker, man of reason. “She must have picked a good many flowers in that time,” he continued thoughtfully. “And what would she do with all of them?” It followed, obviously, that the flowers were only an excuse. And what other reason could she have?

  “Do you really think so?” Moses had asked in such a pathetic voice that Isaac had wanted to giggle. And Moses tried to remember out loud what kind of flowers and how many flowers she had picked, and whether that was all she had really been doing in the garden. He went carefully over the many times that he had wandered back and forth down the street, pretending to be immersed in thought, until the smell of hops from the brewery two blocks down, combined with his excitement, had nearly overcome him. He recalled that she had kept slightly turned toward the walk, that when he glanced her way he had caught her eyes several times lowering hastily to her work in the garden. Once when he had passed she actually raised herself up and stretched, with one hand on the back of her hip and the other wiping across her lovely brow and fine black eyes. But even though her lips seemed to be smiling she might just have been shading her eyes from the sun and not really looking at him. Thus reasoned Moses the singer, humbly, his voice filled with emotions that Isaac had never heard there before, except, perhaps, when he sang one of those love songs that his mother liked with so much feeling that the neighboring women gathered around to hear. The desire to giggle surged up in Isaac again, and he stiffened against it.

  But Jacob was alert and serious in his brother’s behalf. “How could she have been shading her eyes from the sun? You said that it happened in the late afternoon. If it did, since her house is on the west side of the street, the sun would be behind her and shining toward you, so she couldn’t have been shading them; she was just pretending. She must have been looking at you. The sun would be in your eyes. Do you remember if you had to squint when you looked at her?”

  “Squint,” said Moses brokenly. “I love her.”

  Isaac snickered, choking over the piece of bedcover that he was stuffing into his mouth.

  There was a moment of utter silence, during which Isaac tried desperately to fall suddenly asleep. Then Moses pounced.

  “Pest! You were listening! What did you hear? What did you hear, little devil?”

  Isaac, though he was a little frightened, tried to sound innocent and injured and sleepy with Moses breathing heavily over him, but the question itself seemed so silly that his voice broke on a quavering giggle. “You like girls.”

  Now it was afterward, with another sun and a breeze that smelled of laying the old earth to sleep. How old had Moses been then? His own age; and it did not seem so silly now to want a girl to look at him. He thought, as he awoke to the pattern of the stone high-school steps that he was ascending, of what Jacob had said after he had rescued him from the “lesson” that Moses had begun to teach him.

  “Wait, wait, little knacker, you’ll grow up yet.”

  Who could have dreamed then that they would not wait with him? Sometimes the very thought that it was he who still lived frightened him. It made him now, as the high-school bell rang, rush into the classroom and, without even seeing the welcoming smile of his friend who sat beside him, sit down quickly and bury his mind in the grammar book.

  —

  During the absence of her men Sarah stayed in the house and made a home of their room. Gentle as a nutcracker, Mrs. Plopler took her under her wing. She introduced her, with significant looks, to the neighbors. She accompanied her to the grocer’s, and introduced her with more significant looks to the grocer and the customers who were waiting to be served. The significant look was a staple in the social equipment of Mrs. Plopler. She considered herself a past mistress in the art of talking between the lines. So she let Sarah know, or thought she let Sarah know, that this was the grocer about whom she had already spoken and would speak again as soon as they returned home. At the same time she let the grocer know with expressive movements of the nose, eyes, and lips that this was the immigrant of whom she had spoken, and that there was much to be said further about her. Back home, she laid open the lives of the grocer and his customers and the neighbors before Sarah in a constant flow of Yiddish.

  Sometimes Sarah felt as though the nibbling face were pursuing her. Unobtrusive though she tried to make herself, standing in a corner by the sink, preparing a meal for her men, her mind still in its customary reverie, Mrs. Plopler would appear, hair and nose over her shoulder, holding forth on how she herself preferred to prepare that particular dish. Almost invariably, just as Sarah was ready to cook her dinner, the landlady managed to reach the stove and plunk down a kettle on the only empty element. Then Sarah had to wait and listen to the endless flow of words. Sometimes the words seemed to recede and become like little human cries that pierced into the back of her mind. Then Sarah would look up, startled into sympathy, with her dazed brown eyes full on Mrs. Plopler’s face. And Mrs. Plopler would feel the warm reassurance that somehow this silent woman recognized that she too had a soul.

  But Mrs. Plopler’s soul was a voraciously sociable one. She would follow Sarah into the bedroom hungrily, talking. Sarah had to listen, clasping and unclasping her hands, looking one way and another to avoid the peripatetic face. Why did she have to talk so? Why did she have to beat upon the air with sounds? And those things that she said sometimes that were not from the mouth of a friend.

  “You know,” said Mrs. Plopler one morning, “you have the room very nicely arranged, but I’m afraid you haven’t got enough floor space. In all the interior decoration books nowadays they talk about floor space. Just the other day Gertie and I were reading in a magazine with pictures, how floor space gives a room a new look. Maybe you don’t need the chair. It clutters up the place.”

  Sarah roused to what she sensed was a threat to the comfort of her men. “We need the chair. Isaac studies his lessons on the chair by the bureau.”

  “Oh, I thought you could do without it. Why should he study here? Will we bite off his head if he sits in the kitchen?” asked the landlady, who did not particularly want Isaac in the kitchen but thought the boy held aloof from her daughters. Not, of course, that she would approve if they got too friendly. As she told one of the neighbors, it was enough of a worry to her just to have a strange boy in the house. A mother has to use her eyes. Mrs. Plopler let the neighbor know that she was equal to the task.

  “Thank you,” said Sarah. “But he likes to work by himself where it’s quiet.”

  “Oh,” said the woman. “I didn’t know it was so noisy in my kitchen.”

  And she told her husband that night that their roomers didn’t feel that the house was quiet enough for them, that they were complaining already. Her husband grunted what did she expect, with her taste in tenants. Mr. Plopler slept turned away from his wife, and she had to lean forward to catch his mutterings. Sometimes he did turn to her but completed his attentions with a brusque dispatch that left her quickly alone again, like a used utensil.

  Mrs. Plopler had married for love. But never from the first day of her marriage, in spite of the fact that she had brought with her such a nice dowry, had she been able to please her husband. She lay back again. “Cuff for kindness,” she concluded, was all you could expect from these people.

  —

  Abraham paced home over ground that met his strides firmly, as though he had just learned to walk. Before the man, Polsky, who had finally given him a job, there had been a variety of butchers who looked at him, estimated his age, added five years for his beard and the furrows between his eyes, and five more because he spoke no English, and shook their heads. His employer looked to be a good-natured man, large and ruddy and as rudimentary as
the red meat that his arms slung so easily on and off the hooks on the wall.

  “So you’re a butcher.” He looked Abraham up and down. “In the old country they turn out even the butchers like rabbis, ha-ha-ha, eh? Don’t take offense. I’m a man who doesn’t blow in lace handkerchiefs. I say a girl should know what a pinch is for. Straight and to the point, ha-ha-ha, eh? One thing I know about an old-country man. He knows his craft. You can pickle meat?”

  “Of course,” said Abraham loudly, for his voice was loud and strong.

  “Of course. Well, I need a man who knows the subtleties. I always throw in a little bit too much of this, of that. I’m more of a business man myself,” the butcher continued with pride. “We’ll get along, eh?”

  Abraham was grateful to this man – a rather coarse fellow, from the way he talked, but a man who in his own way seemed to have a heart – and some discernment. He had, after all – rather rudely, of course, in keeping with his nature – noticed that he, Abraham, had a certain air about him, that he had the appearance of a holy and a learned man. Well, hadn’t that been the dream of his father? And if his father hadn’t died so young, leaving him with a mother to take care of and five sisters to worry about, would he have been a butcher? And his own sons – did not a man take on dignity from their achievement, their near-achievement of his dream? But what would another care about this? What did it matter to them that he had had a son who would have been a great cantor and another who was a scholar already when yet a child. Did other men care that he had had a son miraculously returned to him? This was for time to tell the world. Now they looked at the furrows about his eyes as though he were the trunk of some tree and shook their heads. And he himself could rely only on his powerful voice, which resounded so in his own head, and on his upright bearing to show that he had still the strength of a young man.

  What did it matter to destiny, the age of a man? A God who could pluck the fruit of a man’s desire when it was scarcely ripe and strangle such seed as could have uplifted the human race did not think in terms of days and years.