He, She and It

by Marge Piercy

  “Just one minute.” Shira ran upstairs. Ari must have his blanket, his bear, familiar things.

  “No, Shira!” Yod tried to block her, but moving with the duffel slowed him. He made an aborted noise but did not follow her upstairs.

  In the upper hall, Josh lay on the floor. His neck was turned at an unnatural angle. She knelt over him wringing her hands, with the sense that it was all her fault, that she must do something. She heard herself speaking to him, stupidly repeating his name as if that could wake him. “I’m sorry, Josh, I’m sorry!” Finally she made herself touch him. No pulse at the neck. No pulse at all. His skin was still warm, but he was dead.

  For a moment she could not believe it, and she listened at his nostrils, pressed on his chest. He had to come back to life, he had to. But he would not. His face in death was oddly relaxed, the mouth fallen slightly open, the eyes half shut. She lowered the eyelids, wondering why she felt compelled to do that. It seemed polite. Sometimes he had looked like that in bed. She could almost remember when she had been full of hope for them, in the very beginning, when tenderness for this man had turned her to warm jelly. She began to weep, kneeling over him. Everything felt shattered.

  She was furious at Yod, shocked but unsurprised. Just as she would never be truly astonished if Yod killed Gadi accidentally or on purpose, she was finally not surprised that he had killed Josh. But Ari must not find out. Ever. She got control of herself. She made herself leave Josh, leave the body where it lay. She found Ari’s room, grabbed his favorite bear and his blanket, blue jammies. She ran down with them and stuffed them in her backpack. “Okay, now.” She avoided looking at Yod. He seemed about to speak, then did not.

  The house came on around them as they left. Lights turned on, pop music in the kitchen, security that would report everyone sleeping. Sylvie lay unconscious on the couch. “Should I tie her up?” she asked.

  “We must leave at once. She’ll be out approximately three hours.”

  They trotted along the block to the moving sidewalk. The riders had changed from Y-S personnel in backless business suits to workers in their various color-coded uniforms. Shira and Yod headed straight for the tube station. Behind them rose the sound of an emergency vehicle, but it could have been anything. She did not turn, she did not look back.

  They switched sidewalks twice more, Shira leading the way. She knew the fastest route across the enclave. As they approached the tube, the sidewalk grew more and more crowded. She was jammed against Yod. She interposed her body between Ari and other bodies, so that no one could feel what was being carried. It was awkward, and she was jostled and pummeled, but she kept her position. She must protect him equally from injury and discovery. How frightened he would be! Did she have the right to do this to him? But the life to which she was taking him was a better one, freer, more independent. He was being raised by a hired woman torn from her own daughter in the Glop. She and Malkah and Yod could do a better job. She swore they would. Now Ari had only her and her family. He had no father. They had killed him.

  They passed through the portal of the Y-S enclave and were briefly exposed to the unfiltered sun as they crossed a wide square to the tube station. They were simply bodies in a sea of weary jostling flesh, two bodies carrying a hidden third. Yod elbowed into a car and got her a seat so that she could hold Ari, still in the bag. She longed to check him, but she did not dare. She confined herself to making sure through the cloth that he was breathing.

  They had to change tubes in Chicago. They did not dare pause to rest or spend the night. She pulled Ari from the duffel and carried him openly in her arms. It was past rush hour. They were not the only couple traveling with a child. Ari was beginning to stir, but he had not yet wakened. It was not as crowded on this tube. They were able to sit together. Immediately she asked Yod, “Why did you do it?”

  “Your ex-husband? I’m sorry.”

  She clenched her hands together, willing herself to keep control. “It was unnecessary.” They spoke very softly, their heads close together. She held herself so she would not accidentally touch him.

  “It did not seem so. He was wearing the same device as the guard, and he began signaling for help as soon as he saw me. I had time only to leap across the room and hit him. I only struck him once, Shira. I did not realize he would be injured seriously.”

  “Yod, he was dead.”

  He nodded. He was turned toward her, trying to get her to meet his gaze. “I regret that very much. It was the one blow that killed him, but I only intended to keep him from making the call. As it was, he opened a frequency, and I’m sure they arrived quickly.”

  “Shh. No more about it. Never in front of Ari.” She forced herself to touch Yod’s hand. He had gotten her child back for her. No one else would have done so. She had chosen to sacrifice Josh to her desire for her child. She had chosen that. She must remember. Yod had only acted in her interest, even if his own was surreptitiously involved. She could never give up and go back to Josh quite now. Yod had done as she had wanted, and the guilt was entirely hers to bear, silently and secretly. “You didn’t kill him. If anybody killed him, it must have been Y-S. We left him alive and unconscious, like the nanny. Understood?”

  He nodded, looking frightened. “I cannot alter my memories. They’ll continue to exist. But I can put a block on them such that I never refer to today and such that no one else can ever access them. This is for the boy?”

  “He is now under your protection even more than I am. You must put him first at all times.”

  “Shira, it’s not in my nature to be able to put him ahead of you, but I’ll protect him with my life, the same as you…I’m sorry. I never wanted to give you pain. Once it happened, I didn’t want you to know. I’ll say nothing more.”

  “Good. No more alluding to it, whether we’re alone or together. I mean it, Yod, when I say utter silence.”

  Ari was yawning now and scrubbing his eyes. She held him more closely, wrapping his familiar worn blue blanket around him, the blanket Malkah had sent as a present when he was born. The blanket he would not allow to go off to the laundry, which she had always had to wash by hand, so that it would not leave the house. The difficult time was ahead, when he wakened in the tube in the frightening noise and darkness and bad air, when he wakened to the strangeness of her and of Yod. I wanted my child, I wanted him back more than I wanted anything else in the world. As long as I live I must bear the responsibility and the guilt for the choice I made to take him back. Yod killed, but I let him. I did not order him to protect Josh at all costs, because that wasn’t my priority. She saw Josh’s body crumpled on the floor of the upstairs hall, fallen as if from a considerable height, with the neck twisted and the eyes half open. Once she had loved him. Then she had left him. Then she had had him killed.

  THIRTY-NINE

  The Battle at the Gates

  My daughter is alive. She sends word as an afterthought, and my mourning passes from grief into clownishness. Why did she wait so long to let me know? Daily I study Ari to understand who this boy child is. I am used to daughters and granddaughters, but I know rather a lot about the male too. Ari has appeared like an exotic bird on the tree outside the window, when I was a girl and birds lived everywhere and flew in the air like animate flowers. Now this child comes shouting his demands, loud, healthy, precious, overbearing.

  Yod is working heroically to be human; I see it every day. He wants desperately to satisfy Shira, to be her man, her husband, to father her son. I wonder if the programming I gave him to balance his violent propensities wasn’t a tragic error, if I did not do him an injustice in giving him needs he may not be able to fulfill. I fear Yod experiences something like guilt at his inadequacy, at not being human enough for her. He strains, unsure how far he is from succeeding, because he cannot know what the real thing would feel like. Men so often try to be inhumanly powerful, efficient, unfeeling, to perform like a machine, it is ironic to watch a machine striving to be male.

  Yet Ari obviously
accepts him, far more perhaps than Shira realizes. Ari senses that he can get away with almost anything with Yod, who will often obey him when any other adult would laugh off his requests or simply ignore them.

  “Bird,” Ari demanded the other day. He is always pointing at the birds. Shira’s response and mine varies from the sort of Oh, isn’t he cute, wanting the impossible, to explaining with deepening irritation, if the request gets too vehement, how irrational his desire is.

  Yod plucked a goldfinch out of the air and held it to him, carefully, delicately, but so that Ari could pat its yellow head. Then Yod released it to fly off in a panic but unharmed. I think even Ari understood that something out of the ordinary had happened. He sat and chuckled to himself for five minutes afterward. Now of course he expects us to do the same, and we’re back where we were.

  Shira doesn’t want to tell me, as we await the inevitable response of the multi, how Yod and she managed to steal Ari from Y-S. The sense of being under siege is sharp in all of us. Which brings me back to my story, back to Prague, Good Friday of 1600, the mob stirred up by Thaddeus attacking the ghetto. A more direct attack than I expect here and now, although lately what has been called the multinational corporate peace seems to be showing cracks. I go to the terminal, sit, call up my file and begin talking, my eyes closed, Yod’s dark benign visage in my mind. Dear Yod, our tale recommences.

  Inside the ghetto the assembled Jews hear the crowd roar just outside the wall. Next, thrown objects strike the gates and arc over the top, both those aimed at harm—rocks, sharp objects, bottles—and those aimed at insult: offal, feces, rotting garbage, dead animals. All slam into the gates or fall for the most part harmlessly inside, although a couple of casualties need to wash afterward and one man is knocked senseless by a hurled brick. He is carried away to his family at the Pinkas synagogue, where he will die without regaining consciousness.

  The women on the rooftops shout down reports. The few soldiers of the Emperor march bravely on the crowd, while the Jews wait silently, not daring even to cheer. Armed with arquebuses and pikes, the troops arrest some of the rock-throwers and march away with them, leaving the ghetto gates undefended against the larger remnant of attackers. Now the mob, better organized than that word might suggest, falls back to permit a battering ram through. It is a makeshift ram, constructed from a stout oak tipped with iron. It is dragged on a cart by a team of draft horses. Then the young men Thaddeus has inspired position the ram on the cart, unharness the horses and set themselves to drive the ram full force into the gates.

  The Jews inside the gates can hear laughter, loud cries, curses and great thumps as the ram is rolled into position. Outside the gates a carnival atmosphere rules. The grimness of hatred against the Christ-killers, carefully stirred up and worked into a frenzy, gives way to a mood of being free to do anything. Impulses usually denied or suppressed can dance and leap today and slake themselves with gross satisfaction.

  I have experienced this mood in crowds. In my youth when there were major sporting events, when some hometown team won its division or pennant or trophy, the men would pour out and beat passersby and rape women they found on the streets. One of the sole benefits of the diseases that ran through the population was the end of such public events. Now all spectator sports are stimmies. They are presumably all staged, scripted, faked, so there is never a dull game or a game with too lopsided a score. People bet anyhow. They try to second-guess whose turn it is to win.

  I remember the food riots too. I’ve been in mobs, and I’ve observed them from positions of semisafety. I’ve run before them, in the anti-Jewish riots after the Two Week War. All this is in your memory banks, Yod, and you can also access the history of the founding of Tikva, a direct response to the virulent anti-Semitism of that period we call the Troubles. Anyhow, I’ve helped carry the bodies away afterward. I can hear that crowd muttering, some worked up, some going along with the crowd, some loving the feel of being part of a giant organism, exalted, uplifted, one fierce hot galloping beast. Some are feeling righteous. Some are convinced they are holy warriors carrying out the will of some powerful angry god. But many are having fun. Imagine, you have been given a license to do all the things you think about doing to your family, your boss, your enemies, women you look at, people who push you around, everybody you feel like sticking it to in ordinary frustrating brutish life.

  Inside, as the ram begins to crack on the gates, some are praying, some are wishing they were in Transylvania or just hiding under a bridge. The sound is intolerable, louder than thunder. The gates rock but do not yet give way. They are solidly reinforced. The sound is like a bat cracking on each head. After ten minutes, some inside wish the gates would give way so the noise would stop, so their heads would stop pounding, so that the terrible hammering would release their knees and shoulders and spines from bludgeoning. They feel as if they are being battered with the gates. The ram is attacking every one of them.

  Yakov raises his strong baritone, singing “Adom Alom.” Singing helps them bear the pounding. Almost it seems to keep time now with their singing, like an enormous drum. The gates still hold, and the ram stops. Outside, they can hear voices arguing about how to proceed. “They’re getting more men in line,” the rooftop women report. Once again the ram slams the gates.

  Finally the metal shielding buckles, and the wood splinters. There is a breach in the gates’ integrity. Rapidly the ram widens the breach. Now the gates collapse inward and the crowd pours through, cheering, a harsh ragged cry for blood bellowing across and echoing off the walls of the nearest houses. Men carrying the ram pause when they see the barricade. They consult in shouts, and then they are charging the barricade nearest them with the ram. Joseph leaps over the top to seize the ram by its metal end. All of the men carrying it cannot wrest it from him. He jabs the ram sideways, knocking the men loose. Then he swings it, using it as a huge club. It is much larger than he is and by far the heaviest thing he has ever moved, so he cannot swing it fast or hard, but the weight topples those he hits. It is a slow and clumsy weapon, but it drives back the first attack. It is more the sight of a single man swinging the heavy ram that causes dismay and even panic than the actual numbers he can injure with the weapon, for only the press of the crowd keeps the attackers from escaping the ram’s slow-motion sweeps.

  Both sides begin throwing rocks. Joseph is caught in the middle and retreats hastily, dropping the ram into the barricade so it becomes a piece of the defenses. Some of the attackers take shelter behind the fallen gates. But the crowd outside who cannot see what is going on inside push forward, spilling invaders into the range of the defenders’ rocks. Some go down, more retreat, some try to advance. The women on the building nearest the gates start spilling their caldrons of boiling water down on the attackers. One woman is shot. Another is hit by an arrow and falls into the street. The son of the woman whose body lies crushed on the pavement runs at the mob, swinging a chain. He brings down three before he goes under and is beaten and kicked to death.

  Some of the people who came in a picnic mood are milling around, changing their minds. The sight of bodies in the street, the wounded and the dead from both sides, causes second thoughts in those capable of entertaining them. The mob thins momentarily, but those outside the gates are still shoving in. Some are struggling to leave and others to enter. In the confusion, Joseph calls up to the women on the roofs to drop their loads again. By twos they go to the edge and topple over their heaps of stones and household refuse, broken furniture, crockery. A small group of men armed with muskets begins firing at them. They are not accurate but they keep firing, and two more women are hit and fall; another is wounded but pulled back into safety by her companions.

  “We’re lucky they have only small arms,” Yakov remarks. “With artillery we’d be finished in short order.”

  “We have to stop the musketeers,” Joseph says. He lobs a stone at them hard and fast and succeeds in beaning the nearest. They move to a more protected position, set up the
props for their long-barreled weapons and fire again. In all the ghetto, there is not one firearm. If his side had even a couple of muskets, Joseph is convinced they could defend the ghetto until the mob gave up. Now he is sorry he sent the Maharal to safety, because he needs direction. He is not sure what to do. It stinks already, the reek of blood and gunpowder, the stench of loosened bowels and urine. Between the forces two men are loudly dying, calling for their mothers, one in Yiddish, one in Czech. Nobody on either side is singing any longer. A dog is howling and then yelps as someone kicks it. The many voices muttering, cursing, praying between the walls sound like a nest of disturbed hornets working themselves up to swarm.

  Joseph keeps an eye out for Chava. She stood at the barricade during the first rush, but now she has put down the silly roasting spit and is treating the wounded in a makeshift hospital in the carriageway of Maisl’s house. She has built a little fire and is heating water. Bedding has been put down in the street and a rug for the wounded to lie on. Moshe Fuchs, a doctor and amulet maker, works beside her. They do what they can.

  The musketeers are shooting at the barricade, keeping the Jews down behind it. They are better dressed than most of the mob, wearing light chest armor over shirts with puffed sleeves, hats with enormous drooping plumes. Joseph recognizes Karel brandishing a sword and a stave. The oversized features in his square-jawed face radiate conviction. His voice carries easily. He is haranguing his troops. Now Joseph sees more faces from the tavern up on Hradcany Hill. They are in the forefront now, getting ready to charge. Joseph’s lips draw back from his teeth. He points out the men he knows to Yakov. “If we can stop them, we’ll do a real service to the community.”

  “To humanity, I think,” Yakov says. He grips his old sword tightly. Bad Yefes the Gambler is humming to himself as he checks his own sword and his fighting knife.

  “When they charge, we don’t wait for them. We charge too. Spread the word,” Yakov says. “Everybody tell the next man. Every other one of us goes. The others hold the barricade so no one can get through. Wait for my signal. The musketeers can’t fire when those louts are charging. It’s our chance to rush them.”