by Bari Wood
Three days before the holiday she bought the last of her supplies. She parked the car at the curb because it was easier than going up the narrow steps from the garage and, carrying one more shopping bag full of goods that were kosher for Pesach, she walked up the path to the house. The lights were on. Leah was with Golda and Levy was still at the store, so she thought it was Allan in the living room waiting for her and she hurried up the path, and opened the front door. Isaac Luria got up from his chair. His glasses were off, his eyes were swollen from crying, and his face twisted with grief. Jacob was dead, she thought. She dropped the bag and reached for the wall, but Jacob stood up from the couch and came toward her. He was crying too.
“Leah,” she cried.
“Leah’s fine,” Jacob said. She hung on to him, trying to catch her breath. In the bag she saw that the eggs had broken. Yellow oozed out through the split carton. She picked up the bag and Luria hissed.
“Get her out of here.”
“Please, Isaac.”
“She doesn’t belong here.”
Rachel looked around wildly. They were all there. Dworkin, Fineman . . . Alldmann. Even the old man whose eyes were yellow all the time now, and runny. She backed against the door.
“This is my house,” she said. “Tell that old fucker, this is my house. . . .”
Luria was on his feet coming toward her, the dream come true, but she came away from the door and faced him.
“Tell her,” he yelled. “Tell her what her friends have done. Scum . . . tell her!”
“Which friends, what is he talking about?” Rachel yelled.
Jacob pulled her out of the door onto the path. Luria stayed behind, and her last view was of her shopping bag abandoned at his feet.
It was a beautiful early spring evening. Jacob made her walk to the end of the path, holding her arm. When they reached the curb he stopped and put his arms around her. They were almost the same height, and his body fitted hers perfectly. He held her close, almost like a lover.
“Go to Golda’s,” he whispered, “and stay there until nine. Leah’s there, she’s fine. . . .”
“Please . . . Jacob.”
“There was a terrible fight in the school today. Two boys were killed, one white, one black. . . .”
“Not Tom . . .”
“No, not Tom, nor Eric. But Tom was involved. He and a bunch of other blacks were in on it. They hit Michael Brodsky—a bad hit. Fractured his skull, Rachel. He’s dead.” He let her go and she sank against the car; Michael Brodsky was Isaac Luria’s oldest grandson.
The funeral was on the afternoon before Passover eve. Esther Brodsky, Luria’s daughter, screamed and clawed at her father, then sagged, ready to fall into the mud next to the grave. He held her up, his eyes bleak as they lowered the coffin. It was warm, the ice had melted all at once, and the grave site was a mire. Rachel’s heels sank in mud. The coffin disappeared into the grave. Luria scooped up a handful of mud. It squeezed through his fingers and he opened his hand and looked at the lump of mud, then at Jacob. Dworkin looked up, and one by one, so did the others. When he had their attention, he nodded, then he pressed the mud into his daughter’s hand.
“Throw it on the coffin, Esther,” he said gently.
She did; then Myron Brodsky did the same, and the rest of the men. Rachel couldn’t watch and she turned around just as the Garners got out of the Cadillac and came up the gravel path toward the group around the grave. Rachel saw them first, but a second later everyone else did too. No one moved or said anything. Mud dripped from the men’s hands and the Garners waited. Tom didn’t know to wear a hat; thin sunlight shone on his black hair. Luria let go of his daughter. She sank to her knees in the mud, wailing—the only sound. Luria held a ball of mud and Rachel knew he was going to throw it. She broke away from Allan and jumped and slid between Luria and Willa. But Luria’s arm was already moving, he couldn’t stop and the mud meant for Willa hit Rachel’s cheek and neck with a smack, like a slap. Willa gasped, then cried out.
“Tom didn’t hit that boy. Please, Mr. Luria, my Tom never hurt anyone. . . .”
“Rachel . . . Rachel,” Levy called and started around the grave to get to her. Allan was too stunned to move and only Rachel and Luria seemed to know what they were doing.
Rachel almost wanted to take it back. But she faced Isaac Luria with mud clammy on her skin. Until then, whenever he had looked at her his eyes had been blank, but now they were full of life, full of wonder that anything like her existed, and then he smiled at her. It was the worst, most spiteful smile she’d ever seen. She wanted to cover her face and turn away, but she raised her head, stretched her neck, felt mud slide into her blouse, and smiled back at him.
“Why?” Allan asked. He sounded angry at her for the first time.
“Because he had no right to treat Willa like that. She came out of sympathy, to show her respect.”
“The old guy just lost his grandson, Rachel. Her son was in on it—”
“No!”
“Maybe in on it . . .”
“It was an accident.”
“You were there?” he asked.
She looked at him. “Do you think Tom killed Michael?” she asked softly.
“I don’t know.”
“But he’s black, so he must’ve done something. Right?”
“I don’t know,” Allan said again. Then he shook his head. “The prejudice is there, Rachel,” he said gently, “like it or not.”
He was right. The prejudice was there. Adam had known that, but he’d fought it and won. But Allan wasn’t Adam, she told herself for the thousandth time. Suddenly she wondered if Roger Hawkins had had to fight the same feelings about whites. He must have, she thought, and won, too, or he and Adam could never have been friends.
Chapter 6
Levy carried his big black umbrella as he walked east along the shoulder of the highway. He was alone, there weren’t many cars, and he walked with his back to the oncoming traffic and felt fairly safe. Dworkin said the river was called Wading River and it was perfect. He kept going. On one side he saw a clam stand, shut up, abandoned, gray and peeling. It was depressing and he looked up past the edge of his umbrella at the sky, hoping for some comfort. The sky was gray and he kept going. After a while gravel filled his shoes and mud caked the bottom of his trousers. Ahead to the east it was getting dark and he looked behind him at the last of the light. He had a flashlight with him, but it got dark too fast. He knew he’d never find the place. That was all right too. He didn’t want to find it.
“What’s the matter?” Luria had said in Yiddish, “only Adam is real? Only your children count?”
Levy had said, “I loved your grandson.”
“Then prove it!” Luria cried and Levy had jumped out of his chair and grabbed big Isaac by the front of his jacket. He wished for an extra foot to lift this . . . this bulvan‡‡‡ into the air so his feet dangled and kicked like a corpse on the end of a rope. He hated Isaac Luria that minute.
“Prove what? That I loved the boy, that I love you? How many times do I prove it to you?” He’d actually managed to shake the monster Luria and he pushed him, and Luria sat down hard. The other men were quiet and Levy said in Yiddish, facing the wall, not them, “My son was everything to me. I thought we were safe in Brooklyn, I thought we were safe here.” He shrugged. “Nu, my father thought we were safe in Dabrowa, and who could count how many grandfathers, uncles, cousins thought they and us . . . were safe in one place or the other.”
He looked at Luria. “More killing makes us safe?”
Luria had covered his eyes with one hand. “Yes,” he’d said.
Levy saw a sign for Wading River, followed it, and a few minutes later he saw the small road crossing the highway that Dworkin told him about and he found the path that crossed it and followed it. His feet were soaked, so was the front of his coat and
trousers. Only his hat under the umbrella was dry. The path ended at the river. The bank was covered with dead reeds, broken, beaten down into the mud by the rain. He went closer, too close; he slipped in the mud and his shoe and cuff got soaked in the water. He felt so miserable he couldn’t think of anything to do but laugh. Rachel would laugh, so would Adam. A silly old man in the mud, in the rain, on the bank of the river, at dusk. The mud smelled, the river smelled, he was cold and wet and he knew it was ridiculous, and the past had been a dream. It couldn’t work again, he didn’t want it to work. Then, like a sign, a young buck came out of the reeds, and walked daintily along the edge of the river. A doe followed him. They were so close to Levy as they passed him that he could see the heavy soft tufts of hair in their ears, and the moss on the buck’s antlers. The reeds barely bent as they went by, and it was so dusky they disappeared a few feet beyond Levy into the bushes on the same side of the river. Levy looked after them for a while, straining his eyes in the gloom to try to see them again.
When he was young the forests around Krakow were full of deer. Cabalists were everywhere then, and prophets cried through the village streets, like men with pushcarts, that the Messiah was on his way—the prophets were thin and ragged, as if no one would believe a prosperous man. But the Cabalists wore fur and shiny coats to their ankles. Some of them were fakes who said they could tell the future, cast spells, heal the sick, but some, like Aaron Levy, his father, were mystics who studied, meditated, and said that God emanated and that they could receive the emanations, be bathed in them, feel ecstasy from them. Aaron Levy would kneel for hours alone in the dark or with one candle in the room—meditating down the tree, he explained, from Kether to Malkuth. But his son Jacob liked people and by the time he was seven he had memorized the six hundred thirteen laws in the Torah and by the time he was twenty he knew the Talmud and its commentaries well enough to be consulted as a judge by the people of the village. Jacob didn’t care about the world and about people, not about Zohar, Gematria, the Sefirot, or whether God in his infinite nothingness had gotten out of the way to make space for the universe. “You’re not a mystic,” his father told him sadly. Levy agreed. But when the Germans declared war on Poland and crossed the border, Aaron Levy took his son to a shtetl near Sosnowiec to see the most famous cabalist in Poland. “In the world,” his father told him. The old man lived four miles out of town on a lonely road that was just wide enough for the cart they borrowed. One room of the little house had only three walls; the fourth was open to the forest and the old man was in that room with the April wind blowing his caftan and beard. He sat on the packed dirt floor, in front of an unlit fireplace, and for the first few minutes they were there, he stared at the cold hearth without greeting them. Levy took a step, but his father restrained him. “He knows we’re here,” Aaron told his son, and Levy and his father waited while the wind blew everything around. There was a thin book on the floor next to the old man; the wind blew it open and ruffled the pages, and, as if that were a signal, the old man turned and looked at them.
Jacob wanted to hug the wall when he saw his face, but he made himself stand erect. The skin of the old man’s face was so thin that veins running under it gave it a blue cast; his eyes were blue, like Isaac Luria’s, but sunk into gray holes in his face, and his beard was yellow-white and thin and blew in wisps around his face. Strands of what was left of the hair on his head hung down from under his yarmulke, and only the black hair that stuck out of his ears in tufts seemed to have any life to it. He raised his hand and motioned Levy to come in; the fingers were still straight and long, and the skin on the back of his hands looked fresh, as if the old man’s hands and the hair in his ears had stayed young while the rest of him dried up. Levy crossed the three-walled room and the old man gestured to him to sit on the floor across from him, next to the hearth. Levy did; his father stayed at a distance. The old man leaned toward Levy, and Levy had to keep himself from pulling back. The old man smiled; his teeth were still young too.
“You got a match?” the old man asked, which was so different from what he expected him to say that Levy almost laughed in the old man’s face. He found his one box of matches and gave it to the old man. They were precious. He was afraid the old man would keep them and he’d be too embarrassed to ask for them back. But the old man used two to light the fire, then returned the box to Levy and sat for a long time looking at Levy, then at the fire without saying anything. The fireplace was so well engineered it heated the whole section of the room they sat in even though the wind kept blowing. When Levy felt so warm he thought of taking off his coat, the old man said quietly, “The Germans will be in Warsaw before long.”
Levy said, “The Poles will fight . . .”
“They ain’t such fighters,” the old man said, “and the Germans will be in Warsaw,” he repeated. Levy didn’t interrupt him again.
“Now,” said the old man, “sit back in the warmth of the fire . . . lean on the pillow there.” Levy did as the old man said. “Relax and let thoughts come to you and you will know as well as I do what the Germans will do.” Then he said to Levy’s father, “Go into the house, Aaron. Make tea for yourself. We’ll be a little while.” His father left and after a while the old man said, “Nu?”
Levy had read the newspapers and commentaries. He’d heard the stories from Danzig, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. He looked at the flames jumping in the grate and came to the conclusion that everyone was avoiding. “They’re going to try to kill us all,” he said.
The old man beamed. “See, it’s not so hard. That’s what the Germans have been saying all along, but the Jews don’t listen. Now,” the old man sat up and Levy did the same, “Cabala isn’t dumbheads looking at palms and calling up demons. Cabala is a method of trying to understand the true and profound nature of God”—he sounded like a teacher reading a familiar lesson—“and while there is no possibility of full understanding, of intimate union with Him, it is possible . . . common . . . to feel ecstasy in the attempt.” Suddenly the old man’s eyes filled with tears, and he reached across the space that separated them and touched Levy’s cheek with his young fingers. “If we’d had time you would have felt that ecstasy, I promise you. But we have other work to do.”
He handed Levy the little book. “Read this. It’s only two thousand words.” Levy turned so he was half facing the fire, half facing the land on which the house stood. The sun set, turning the grass in the west pink. The Germans would come from that direction, through the forest, to the little house. Levy picked up the book. It was called Sefer Yezirah, the Book of Creation.
His father stayed in the house and he and the old man lived in the three-sided room for four days while the Germans overran Poland. The old man told Levy what the book meant, and how to use it; and at the end of the time, Levy and his father took the borrowed cart back to the town and from there managed to squeeze on the Krakow train which was packed with Polish officers retreating to the East.
His father died in June, and a year and a half afterward Levy’s name, along with the names of all the Jewish men in Dabrowa, was posted for transportation to Belzec. Levy held Leah against him all night; they made love so many times she tried to joke about not being able to walk in the morning. Then she cried and finally, exhausted, she fell asleep. He lay awake until dawn, then he took the book the old man had given him, crossed the village, and went out the gate, telling the guard that he had a gift for his father’s grave. The guard let him pass, and when he got to the cemetery on the other side of the little river that crossed the fields, he prostrated himself on his father’s grave. “I know what you want me to do,” he said with his cheek against the dirt, “and I know what the old man wants me to do. But I believe that my soul will be in danger if I do it.” He buried the book next to his father’s grave, then he stretched out on his back, lying over the spot where the book lay, and looked up at the sky until he closed his eyes and fell asleep. It was the first peaceful sleep
he’d had since they’d gone to see the old man; but when he woke up, and walked back to Dabrowa, the book’s contents came back to him, along with what the old man had told him, word for word. He tried to forget it, but it stayed with him, like children’s nonsense nursery rhymes. When he and the others were loaded on the train at the siding on the other side of the village, he heard it in the beat of the soldiers marching; when the train started, he heard it in the rhythm of the wheels contacting the rails. He told himself he didn’t have to do it just because he couldn’t forget how, but the day he’d gotten back from seeing the old man he’d told his best friend Isaac Luria about what the old man had taught him.
Levy bent and slid his palm against the muck. It felt right; stiff enough, not slimy like mud, but smooth, cool, and slick, like clay.
Rachel and Willa met at Laurel’s one respectable cocktail lounge in the Cannery Shopping Mall. They got high, tried to laugh, and ended up crying. Rachel ordered a hamburger for them, and they cut it in half; Rachel ate her half, but Willa couldn’t.
“What if Jacob knew you were here with me?”
“Jacob wouldn’t care. It’s Luria; that . . . that pisher . . .”
Willa laughed in spite of herself.
Then Rachel started to cry again and the women faced each other, crying, saw how they looked, then laughed, and the bartender and the two men at the bar shook their heads. Tom Sr. was in St. Louis, Tom and Eric were at the library, and Willa hated being alone, so they had another drink.
“Do you think things’ll be calm enough by June for us to go to the wedding?” she asked.
“You’re going, or I’m not,” Rachel said.
“Luria—”
“Fuck Luria!” The bartender looked shocked, the two drinkers sniggered.
Afterward, they walked through the quiet little town, into the Main Street Extension. April was almost over, the thin tree branches were yellow in the street light, and the air was fresh, damp, cool. They walked close together, brushing each other from time to time, both glad for the contact.
