The forest was alive. Shadowy figures flitted in and behind the trees. Overhead the dense ceiling of branches creaked and swayed. A pall of yellow smoke rose from a burning tree and blew across my face. I stepped through the smoke and jumped lightly across the stream. Listen, I said. Listen to me. It cannot go on this way. They are all slaughtering us. Each side kills us as if we were bugs. We have to do something! Look what the stinking bastard Cossacks have left behind in Lemberg. Look! Look what they have left behind in Galicia. You are going to sit here reciting Psalms? When did a Psalm prevent a throat from being torn open? Are you listening, Meyer? Are you listening, David? We have to do something. All right, stay with your books. I have to do something. I have to stop them. I have to break their heads. I have to take revenge for my friends the Cossacks killed. Did you see how they died? We must do something! Avruml, are you with me? And the rest of you? We will go in together. The stinking Cossacks. We will sing Yiddish songs as they come charging at us before we turn Pilsudski’s guns on them. Yes, all of us together. You can kill a lot of Cossacks very quickly with a machine gun. This is a Torah I want to learn. Set it up here, Avruml. Near these trees. And you, set yours over there. That’s right. With the sun behind our backs. They will stop to let their horses drink. Look at them. The bastards. In their red tunics and fancy pants and riding boots. The stinking Cossack bastards. And the ribbons on their horses. And their fancy saddles. And the Jewish blood on their sabers. And the Jewish flesh on their whips. Wait. A moment longer. Wait. Wait. Through the bare winter trees a pale sun shone like an uncaring eye. I sighted along the machine gun I had fashioned out of a large damp fallen branch. Now! Now! Kill them! The forest floor shuddered. Horses reared and crashed to the earth. The stream turned red. Glinting sabers fell in the grass. The cold morning wind blew through the trees and the chopped-up cavalry brigade turned and rode wildly away. The earth of the forest rippled and broke into waves. The wind whipped the branches. Trees burned fiercely. The crackling of leaves and the spitting snap of roaring wood thundered in my ears. There was a sudden total silence.
A solitary bird trilled.
I got up, brushed off my clothes, and walked back to the cottage for lunch, leaving my machine gun near a tree beside the stream.
“Where were you all morning, David?”
“I told you, Mama. I went to play in the back.”
“All morning?”
“I like it now in the back.”
“How did you make yourself so dirty? Look at you.”
“Where’s Papa?”
“Talking to your Uncle Meyer.”
“Is there any more news, Mama?”
“Yes. The Angel of Death worked hard last week. Please eat your lunch, darling, and don’t wait for your father. He will be late.”
The sun burned red in the pale early afternoon sky. Deep inside the forest I rode a black stallion, holding in my right hand the long slender curving branch that was my saber. Around the marsh, Nathan, I yelled. We will meet them on their left when they come out. Ride, all of you! Ride! I want to see their faces when they spot us. Ride! Here we are. Now! Now! For Avruml! Now! I circled around a thicket of gray birch. The drooping branch of an oak scratched the side of my head. Wounded! I was wounded! I wheeled the stallion about and slashed away with my saber. Metal rang against metal in the fetid stillness of the marsh. The red sun dipped low in the sky and brushed the earth, leaving in its wake boiling rivulets of blood.
The sky darkened. The air turned gray. A dull yellow sun shone wearily overhead. Dense white clouds came from the mountains and covered the sun and dropped snow upon the silent fields and trenches, upon the still forests and frozen streams, upon the brightly lighted cafes and dark shuttered shops. No, I said. No. It will be in the open. I did not fight all these years so my brother should have a wedding in a cellar. It will be in the forest, under the stars. You hear me, David? You hear me, Ruth? And you too, Meyer. In the forest under the stars. I want the stars to see my brother David take a wife. I want the trees to hear the blessings. And we will be there with the Am Kedoshim boys to make sure there is no trouble. If the bastards come, we will break their bones. Hey, Nathan, it is a good feeling to hold your own weapon and be able to defend yourself against those Poles. Search the trees. What is that, Yitzchok? You brought the flags? And your camera? For what? We are never together for a picture? All right. Fall in, everyone, for a picture. Better for a picture than for a march. Right? Stop pushing! What kind of soldiers are you? The Jews of Lemberg depend on you for their lives and you play games. Yitzchok, take the picture already. These clowns are impossible. My brother’s bride will be here soon. Am I right, David? The guests will be here soon. What are you doing there, Yitzchok? How long can this bunch of heroes and this groom wait for a photograph to be taken?
The camera clicked loudly, freezing the group in memory. All the years of their lives, all their whispered dreams, all their hopes and passions, all the horror they had witnessed and the comradeship they had forged, all of everything they had been since childhood was in that rectangle of frozen memory called a photograph. You could not unfreeze it, you could not make the people in the photograph meaningful, unless you asked questions and listened and caught their words and glances in the nets of your silence. The camera clicked and the photograph within the forest stirred as the men stepped from the rectangle and continued about their tasks.
Nathan, search the area and post a guard. Yitzchok, pack up that camera and come with me. Did you bring the torches? We will make a surprise for the pogrom boys if they come near us tonight. No one will disturb my brother David’s wedding. How many brains like David do you think there are in this stinking world?
The night came. Stars burned icily in the black ink of the sky. I rode my stallion through the darkness. Green-uniformed infantry followed on foot. Now Bolsheviks, Yitzchok. It will never end. There will not be many of us left after this war. Between the Polak anti-Semites and the Bolshevik Cossacks our blood is being thinned to water. Where is Yankel? Go tell Yankel the platoon on the left is falling behind. That is all we need—for some Cossack bastards to drive a wedge into us now.
Villages were burning in the night. The heavens glowed a dull red. All along the horizon flames leaped into the charred sky. The train, winding its way tortuously through the bare winter forest, was halted at a curve in the tracks and boarded by a gang of armed bandits, shouting, Where are the Jews? We only want the Jews. We won’t touch a hair of any of our patriots. Who are the kosher-eaters? You, soldier, tell me quick who are the Jews or you get it in the belly. All right, you patriots, all of you, off with the pants, off, off, now! Is that what you want? Take your hands off me, you swine. I am an officer. Pardon me, officer, sir. What did you say, soldier? A Jew? An officer who is a Jew? You bastard Jew. Where did you steal the uniform? Hey, you guys, this Jew is wearing the uniform of an officer in the glorious cavalry of the Marshal. And you called me a swine, you bastard. You’re lucky I don’t cut your heart out. Give me that pack. You get your hands off my pack. Hey, you guys, this Jew is tough. You want to see how tough he is? I’ll show you how tough he is. There! Now you got a cut on top to match the cut on bottom. Everyone finished? Any more Jews? Off! Off! Get the train out of here and keep it moving!
There was blood everywhere. On the tunic and trousers. On the seat and windows. The floor was slippery with blood. The soldier who had pointed to the Jewish officer moved to another car. In Lemberg, David was dead in a pogrom. Two days dead. All right, Ruth. We know what to do, Ruth. We will bring everyone together and make plans. We will not be destroyed, Ruth. We know what our job is, Ruth. Mama. Listen to me, Ruth. Mama. Mama!
Afternoon shadows drifted slowly into the forest. There was a long faintly resonating silence. And in that silence I thought I could hear the dark anguish of secret weeping. Sha, Ruth. Sha. We will do what is right. The weeping continued, chilling the shadows that filled the forest.
Then I heard a branch snap and low urgent voices, and
there they were, coming slowly from the direction of the stream, walking stealthily, searching. I put down my saber and picked up my machine gun. Crouching beside a tree, I sighted carefully and waited until they were only a few yards away. Then I shot them both. They fell and lay very still. Their eyes were closed. I would never again have to see their sleepy eyes and the little smiles on their narrow high-cheeked faces. I had to kill them. Master of the Universe, how they hurt us. I felt the jumping and leaping of my heart. My hands and feet tingled with cold. I stood very still inside the dark forest, looking down at the bodies of Eddie Kulanski and his cousin and listening to the wild beating of my heart.
After a while I put the machine gun down on the forest floor next to the saber and came out of the trees into the slanting afternoon sunlight on the back lawn. Tomorrow I would play it all over again. Maybe tomorrow I would be Uncle Meyer or David. Yes. Tomorrow I would be my dead Uncle David. I bent down and skimmed my hand over the grass of the back lawn. I still could not grasp that my mother had once been married to my dead Uncle David. I would play again the way they took the photograph in the forest before the wedding. I would play my Uncle Meyer and my Uncle David. But the best was to play my father. He was the strongest and bravest of them all. I would play him again. Mostly I would play when he was a machine gunner and a cavalryman and then came back to Lemberg and organized the Am Kedoshim Society to fight against the Poles who were killing Jews and then returned to the cavalry of Pilsudski to fight the Bolsheviks. And I would play the way his face was cut on the train. And maybe I would play the way he married my mother after Uncle David was killed and then came to America.
Over and over again throughout the few remaining days of that summer I played inside the forest. Sometimes, at the insistence of my parents, I had to be on the beach in the sun. But whenever I could be alone I was in the forest, riding, swinging my saber, and firing my machine gun.
They won’t kill David again, I kept thinking. We have to smash their heads. There isn’t any other way. But always when I came out of the forest there would be the strange wild leaping of my heart and the cold tingling in my hands and feet. And one day I stood silently beside my father as he waited and joked with his brothers and friends, and Yitzchok’s camera clicked loudly and added a new face to the photograph.
We left the cottage in the first week of September. As we drove into the city, I realized with astonishment that I had not been ill during all the weeks we had been away and that I had had only one minor accident. When we pulled up in front of the house, Mrs. Savanola came out of her apartment, greeted us effusively, and informed us that Mrs. Horowitz had died three days before and her funeral had been yesterday. The dog had been taken away by her son.
THREE
Mrs. Horowitz was dead, but for days her voice and face remained fixed inside my head. I would be playing in the street or eating in the kitchen or lying in my bed and my eyes would fall upon an object—a leaf, a glass, a light bulb—and the object would blur and then become sharply focused, and I would see her face and hear her telling me about the dangers and the Angel of Death and the books in her musty bedroom. She would come to me at the oddest times and places, in light or dark, in the shade of the maples that had begun to turn now on our street or in the strong sunlight of the zoo as I fed and petted my billy goat, during a Shabbat morning in our synagogue as Mr. Bader talked about the Torah reading, during a walk along the boulevard with my Cousin Saul. Once I sat in the kitchen watching my mother write a letter to her parents in Europe, who had received their visas but had decided they were not yet ready to leave for America, and I looked up from the moving point of the Waterman’s pen and my mother’s flowing curvy handwriting, and saw Mrs. Horowitz. I closed my eyes and opened them, and the face was again my mother’s. It was a while before I could no longer hear the beating of my heart.
Often I wondered how the Angel of Death had finally claimed her. Had he shouted in her ear before piercing her with his poisoned sword? Had she looked in death as bulging-eyed and starkly surprised as the dead bird I had once seen in the pine wood? Her dog had whined and moaned in the night and all through the morning and the janitor had opened the door with his passkey and had gone inside, first putting a handkerchief across his face to ward off the stench. It took an entire day to find her son.
Two weeks after we returned from the cottage a van drove up and two burly men removed the furniture from her apartment and drove off. Painters came. At the end of the month a quiet elderly couple moved into the apartment. They did not own a dog. Mrs. Horowitz dissolved into the sharp autumnal air of our street and was gone. I could no longer see her face or hear her voice. But I wondered often what had happened to her dog.
Eddie Kulanski did not dissolve; nor did his cousin of the quivering knife and the Spalding ball and the malevolence as poisonous as the Angel of Death. I was ill for a few days during the week we returned to the city. But it was not too enervating an illness this time, and when I came back outside I was able to play. I stayed away from Eddie Kulanski and played with others on the block. Once Tony Savanola asked me to play a bottle-cap game with him. I refused.
His dark eyes looked hurt. “Why, Davey?”
“You play with Eddie Kulanski.”
“He won’t bother you.”
“I’m afraid of him, Tony.”
“He just talks a lot, Davey. He’s got a big mouth.”
“He scares me a lot, Tony. People like him grow up and kill Jews.”
A look of astonishment came over his face. “What are you talking about, Davey? What killing?”
“I’m afraid to play with you, Tony,” I said, and walked away from him to join a marbles game near Mr. Steinberg’s candy store. Afterward I rode my tricycle up and down the block for a long time, leading my men in cavalry charges through exploding shells and whining bullets.
Often I would pass Eddie Kulanski inside the apartment house as I went up or down the stairs. He seemed not to notice I was alive. He looked past me or through me. One morning I was going down the stairs and saw his cousin coming toward me two steps at a time. A shock of cold fear coursed through me and, for the briefest of seconds, I felt myself frozen to paralysis on the stairway. But he ran right past me without saying a word; only the swift raking glance of his eyes gave me any indication that he had in any way noticed my presence.
I did not know if they hated me or loathed me or were simply indifferent to my existence. At times I had the cold raging impression that what they had done to me in the pine wood had simply been for them a lazy summer day’s amusement, a prank, the offhand taunting of a stray dog or cat that carries with it quickly forgotten savagery. Slowly, I began to counter their indifference toward me with a comforting sense of contempt toward them. I despised them for the brutes I thought them to be. Then, in the second week of September, I began to see very little of Eddie Kulanski and his cousin. I was going to school.
My father had bought me a briefcase. It was black and shiny and the bone handle was smooth and cool and dark gray. The leather creaked. It smelled like new shoes. Into the briefcase I put my Hebrew notebook, with its alternating wide and narrow lines, my English notebook, my pencil case, and a soft eraser. For days I walked around inside the apartment, carrying that briefcase and waiting for my first day of school.
The night before my first day of school the Hebron pogrom reappeared in a conversation between my parents. I had not heard any mention of Hebron since we had left the cottage. My father had returned to his real estate business. My uncle had returned to his law firm. My mother wrote interminably to her parents in Europe, pleading with them to come to America. She wrote to her brothers and sisters, to her aunts and uncles and cousins. Yes, her parents had the money to come, she said in answer to my question. Yes, her mother was now entirely cured of her sickness. Yes, they could be on the boat now to America. Yes, we could be meeting them in a few weeks near the Statue of Liberty. But suddenly they had grown fearful of building a new life for themselve
s in a strange land. Life was difficult in Poland under Marshal Pilsudski but better than it had been after the war. Ridding themselves of the farm had become a complicated affair. Papers had been lost in the war; new surveys had to be made of the land; bureaucrats shunted them from one office to another; in the land registry office someone had wondered aloud how it was that Jews could have been sold a piece of the holy soil of Poland. There had been sidelong glances; furrowed brows had been raised; narrowed eyes had given them dark scowling looks. And so they were having second thoughts. Visas finally in hand, the faceless elderly people who were my mother’s parents and whose separation from her had become almost unendurable to her over the years—this elderly couple had gazed across western Poland and Germany and the vast waters of the Atlantic and been chilled by the sudden keen awareness of the looming physical and cultural crossing that lay before them. They would stay a while longer. They would see. They had their visas. They could leave any time they wished. They hoped their daughter would forgive them. Please understand our feelings, dear daughter, wrote her mother. To uproot a life at our age—it is like parting the Red Sea. Papa and I send you and Max and our dear grandchildren our love on the New Year. It should be a year of health and happiness and peace and prosperity. It should be a good year for Jews and for all the world, because if it isn’t good for the world it won’t be good for the Jews. Have an easy fast on Yom Kippur, dear daughter, and if God wills it we will see one another again soon. Amen. My mother read the letter to me and tears overflowed her haunted eyes. I did not like to see my mother cry.
My father would grow angry when she would plead with him to do something that might break the impasse. I lay in bed and listened to them talking about her parents.
“Do what, Ruth? What do you want me to do? You want me to go over to Poland and drag them to America by the hair? What do you want from me?”