The Invisible Wall

by Harry Bernstein

  Even that episode vanished from our minds as the day of the interview grew closer. We were all excited. The whole street, in fact, was excited over it. When the women came into the shop there was little else they talked about, that and the future that lay in store for Lily, a future vastly different from that of the other boys and girls who would be leaving St. Peter’s this year, all of them doomed to work in the mills or the tailoring shops.

  My mother glowed with pride and quiet joy, though perhaps occasionally I saw a troubled expression come on her face. It would appear at different times, when she was alone usually, and I watched her from a distance. She seemed to brood for a moment, and then would rouse herself, and go about her work quickly, as if determined not to think about whatever it was that had been bothering her.

  Lily herself was clearly nervous as the day approached, and with her usual pessimism was quite sure that she would fail the interview. Over and over my mother had to assure her that this couldn’t possibly happen, until finally she grew exasperated with her insistence and burst out, “If you keep on like this you’ll talk yourself into it and them too and you will fail.”

  Lily burst into tears. “That’s what you want me to do.”

  My mother looked at her in astonishment. “Why should I want that?”

  “Oh, you’ve got reasons.”

  “What reasons? What reasons could I possibly have for wanting you to fail the interview?”

  “You’re not too anxious for me to go to the grammar school.”

  “Why? Why?”

  But Lily refused to answer. She ran away from my mother. She would not explain and my mother would not press her, but brooded a great deal over the strange accusation.

  Finally the day came. For the first time we were to go to school without Lily, but she would walk with us as far as the Devil’s Steps. We hurried downstairs in a state of suppressed excitement. Lily, taking more time today in getting dressed because of the new white dress, would follow later. As we burst into the kitchen we came to an abrupt halt. He was there, sitting at the table, still eating his breakfast, head bent low.

  We glanced at our mother for explanation, and she replied with her eyes, telling us to be silent, to seat ourselves at the table, to say nothing. We did so. Not a word was being spoken, and the only sounds came from the smacking of his lips. Why was he here? He was usually gone to his workshop long before this. Nor did he seem to be hurrying, as if he had all the time in the world. We ate feeling uncomfortable, wanting to leave as soon as possible. Already we could hear the sounds of other children out in the street going to school, but we couldn’t go without Lily.

  At last we heard her footsteps on the stairs. My mother looked eagerly toward the doorway, and the rest of us looked too, and in a moment Lily appeared clad in her new white dress. It was long and came down to her ankles with lace ruffles and lace cuffs and bodice, and her long dark silky hair flowing behind her. She looked beautiful and very grown-up, her figure long and slender, a slight flush that was excitement on her cheeks. I think even my father must have looked up for a brief moment, and I think that what he saw may have startled him, though he gave no indication of it, and bent his head again over his plate almost immediately.

  My mother clasped her hands together with delight, and could not take her eyes off Lily. “Oh, you’re so beautiful,” she said. “So very beautiful. You look like a regular woman.”

  Lily was obviously embarrassed. “Do you like it?” she said, meaning her dress.

  “I love it,” my mother said, and there was delight in her voice, and something made her turn toward my father then and ask, “What do you think of your daughter today? Doesn’t she look lovely? Aren’t you proud of her?”

  They were questions she would never have asked before. Never would she have dared draw him into the family picture. But her enthusiasm was so great she could not help it. And he in turn—we all looked at him to see his reaction, a bit amazed ourselves at our mother’s daring—he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and swung around in his chair, and said, without looking at Lily, “Where’s she going? To a ball?”

  “No, she’s going to the grammar school for an interview. You know she passed the exam. She came out at the top of the list.” He must have known all this. It would have been impossible for him not to have known with all the excitement her victory had created on the street. Surely it had been talked about in the tailoring shop, too, as everywhere else. Surely he must have heard, and wasn’t it altogether possible that one of the bolder men had ventured to break through his sullen barrier and mention it to him?

  Yes, it’s very likely that he knew, and that this could have explained his presence among us this morning. But he was feigning ignorance. “She’s going to the grammar school? Then she’s all through with St. Peter’s?”

  “Yes,” my mother said, and for the first time a bit of uncertainty came into her voice.

  “Then,” my father said, crossing one leg over the other, “her school days are over. She doesn’t need any grammar school.”

  A stunned look came over my mother’s face. Over Lily’s too. Over all our faces. There was a brief silence, then my mother burst out, “What are you saying? Do you realize the honor she’s won, top of the list, the best of all of them, and now a chance to go to the grammar school without any cost, and to become a teacher?”

  He cleared his throat. It was a habit of his that usually preceded an outburst, and we all tensed and drew together for comfort. “It’s time she started earning a living, never mind becoming a teacher. I was earning a living when I was five years old. They sent me out to work in a slaughterhouse. I cleaned up the blood and entrails of the animals and the shit and the hair and the eyes that rolled out of the heads.” His voice was rising and beginning to choke with rage. “Five years old, I was. Did I have an education? Did I go to school? She’s been going all her life. She’s twelve years old. Girls younger than her are working already and making money. It’s time she started helping out in this house.”

  “But she’s got this chance. It’s her one big chance. She’ll never have it again.”

  My mother was pleading, even begging, but it was no use. He got up suddenly from the table, pushing the chair away from himself with that familiar scraping sound, and reaching out a hand to Lily, said, “Come on. Let’s go. I’ll give you a new kind of education.”

  Lily shrank away from him and said, “No, I won’t go.”

  “You’ll go,” he roared. “You’ll go, or I’ll drag you there.”

  He grabbed hold of her, and Lily screamed, “Mama, don’t let him take me.”

  My mother tried to stop him, and he pushed her away so savagely that she fell, and we all rushed to help her. He paid no attention and grabbed hold of Lily’s arm again, and then with the other hand he twisted her beautiful hair into a rope and pulled on it, now with both hands, and Lily, screaming and still trying to resist, was pulled along.

  My mother, on her feet now, and sobbing, rushed after them, and we followed, sobbing too. He dragged Lily out of the house, and I could see people standing outside, staring. Some of the children on their way to school stopped to stare. I saw Arthur among them. He had probably been waiting for Lily to come out, hoping that this time my mother wouldn’t mind if he walked with Lily to the grammar school. He was standing in the middle of the street, his eyes wide with horror.

  My mother, sobbing hysterically, stood in the doorway with her hands over her eyes, and we around her crying too. For a long time we could hear Lily’s screams as she was dragged through the streets by the rope of her hair, and her voice coming to us clearly, screaming, “I won’t go! I won’t go!”

  Chapter Seven

  “MY DEAR MOTHER-IN-LAW, FATHER-IN-LAW, BROTHER-IN-LAW, SISTERS-IN-LAW, and all the children, just a few lines to let you know that we are well, and hoping to hear the same from you.”

  It began that way, as did all her letters to America. My mother paused in her dictation, as my pen scratc
hed a little longer to catch up with the words she had just said. I was seven years old, and had learned to read and write quickly, and to spell. I was quite definitely the letter writer of the family. The job had been passed on from Lily to Rose, and then to Joe and Saul, and now to me.

  It was a summer evening, and we were alone in the kitchen. I could hear the sounds of children playing in the street. Perhaps I was a little envious and wished I could be out with them, but I did not mind too much. I liked writing to America. I had come to feel much as my mother did about wanting to go there, and a letter always seemed to put me a step closer to them.

  As I waited, as my mother gave still more thought to what she was going to say next, I dipped my pen into the little blue inkpot, trying to be careful, remembering the shouts of my standard three teacher, Miss Daniels, and the way she went among us scolding and rapping knuckles with a ruler if you got too much ink on the nib and made blots on the paper. I was perhaps one of the worst in the class. My handwriting was an illegible scrawl slanting across the notepaper and full of blots, and I usually came away from the lesson with ink on my hands and face, and my knuckles sore from Miss Daniels’s rapping.

  It would be that way now by the time the letter was done. Already, as soon as I lifted the pen out of the inkpot, a huge drop fell onto the paper, and I had to sop it up with the blotter before my mother could continue. At last we were ready.

  “I only hope,” she dictated, “that this letter will reach you safely. With this terrible war on, and the Germans sinking our ships one after another, you never can tell. But with God’s help let us hope it will find its way to you. I would not want to lose touch with you, for you are the only relatives I have, and you are all very dear to me.” The thought made her start to cry a little, and I had to wait uncomfortably while she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. However, she soon continued. “And I know you will want to hear the latest news of the old street. Much has happened since I last wrote to you. The war has changed a lot of things. For one thing, Mrs. Turnbull no longer has her boarders to drink beer with. They have all gone off to fight, and so we don’t have to worry anymore about their getting drunk on Saturday night and shouting “bloody Jews” across the street at us. I suppose her poor husband doesn’t mind their going either, because now she remembers to take him in at night.

  “I suppose the Harrises feel better about their being gone, too, though they have another sorrow. The army took Sam. He was half-blind, you know, but they took him anyway. Last month he came home on leave, and the shul gave a party for him. It was the night before he was to go back. The poor boy got up to make a speech, but he couldn’t, because he started to cry, and everybody cried with him. He didn’t want to go back, but of course he had to.

  “Well, I’ll tell you of one man on our street who really wanted to go. That’s Mr. Finklestein, our next-door neighbor. You remember how they always used to fight, and the terrible things that went on in their house. Well, it was never Mr. Finklestein’s fault. He was really a very nice man. He used to come into my shop many times just to get away from his wife—Little Thripenny Bit, we used to call her, because she’s so small. A real madwoman, too. Well, I suppose he’s a bit wrong in the head, too, but in a nice sort of way. When he came into the shop he’d ask me to make him a sponge cake and herring sandwich. I’d cut up a herring and put slices in between two pieces of sponge cake, and he’d eat it with a lot of sighing, and the juice dripping down his sleeve, and he’d say, ‘Ah, this is the life,’ as though he were in heaven.”

  My mother laughed, and I laughed too, remembering it, and she went on, wiping her eyes again, but this time from laughter, and my pen scratched again as she said, “I really miss him. But they fight just as much as ever next door, and Little Thripenny Bit is as mad as ever, and maybe even more so. But there has been a change in her too. Remember how proud she used to be of being English-born and how she stuck her little nose up in the air when she passed us, and sometimes used to call us ‘those Russian Jews’? Even when you were here she was like that.

  “Well, now she talks to everybody, and all she talks about is her husband and how he is leading the men in battle and capturing Germans and winning medals. Everybody knows that Mr. Finklestein is just a cook behind the lines, but we don’t say anything. We just wink at one another. One of these days they’re going to carry her off to Macclesfield and put her away.

  “Oh, yes, there’s another one went off to fight. That’s Freddy Gordon. I wrote to you about him before, and that terrible time when he and Sarah Harris got caught walking together out in the country, and how lucky the Harrises were they caught it in time and were able to send Sarah off to Australia. Thank God she’s getting alone fine there, and just before the war broke out we understood she was engaged to a well-to-do man who owned a general store in Melbourne. She might have to wait until the war’s over to get married, but at least she’s safe. Annie Green was not so lucky. She’s the one who lives across the street and had that baby, and everybody believed Freddy was the father. He was no good, that boy. As soon as Sarah left, he took up with Annie again, and I suppose he made a lot of promises he never kept. Anyway, he’s off to war now, and poor Annie is all alone again, and her mother is gnashing what’s left of her teeth. She feels as if she’s been cheated, because what she really wanted was for Annie to marry Freddy so that she’d have free beer whenever she wanted it. She claims the shaigets broke his promise.”

  “How do you spell shaigets?” I interrupted.

  “You’re asking me?” my mother asked, amazed. “How should I know?”

  “Well, I don’t know how to spell it. What shall I do? Shall I ask Lily?”

  My mother hesitated. There was no one else in the house except Lily. The others—Rose, Joe, and Saul—were outside with their friends. But Lily was upstairs in her bed, tired from her day’s work.

  After a moment, she shook her head, and said, “Put something else. Can you spell goy?”

  “Yis.”

  “Then put goy.”

  I wrote this word, and we continued with the letter. “Now I have some really sad news to tell you,” my mother dictated. “It’s about our rabbi and his son Max. The boy ran away. First, he was supposed to go into the army, but he didn’t register, so the police came looking for him. It was a terrible disgrace for the rabbi. He’s a very patriotic man. He’s always told us that without England taking us in we could have all been lost. He always ends the services with ‘And God bless our King and Queen.’ And now his son has refused to serve and is being sought by the police. But you’ll never guess where he ran to. This is the worst of it. To Russia. They got a letter from him finally. He begged their forgiveness, but he said it was something he had to do. He could no longer go on pretending to be something that he was not. And he couldn’t serve in a war that would only create more misery in the world, no matter who won. He was going to fight to end misery, he said. For the revolution. He was going to fight with the Bolsheviks. That’s what he wrote, and you can imagine how the poor rabbi felt. It almost killed him.”

  There was an interruption just then, a timid knocking at the front door that meant a customer, some child probably, for the women knocked louder or simply walked in. My mother rose and went to answer it, and I sat with my pen in my hand waiting for her to come back.

  From outside there still came faintly the shouts and shrieks of children playing, and from somewhere in the background the Forshaws’ gramophone playing a war song: “Pack up all your troubles in your old kit bag…and smile, smile, smile,” the voice sang. But I was thinking of what I had just written for my mother, and remembering the rabbi’s haggard face and his absentmindedness, and how we had taken advantage of all this to torment him still further…how Zalmon had secreted himself in the closet that contained the doorbell mechanism and kept making the bell ring, and how the rabbi used to jump each time and spring toward the door, thinking probably that it was someone come about his son, some more bad news, and how we had chok
ed with laughter and almost fallen out of our seats.

  My mother came back from the shop smiling. “It was a little batesky from Back Brook Street,” she said, “a little ragged girl. She was so frightened she couldn’t talk at first. She just stood there shivering and staring at me with big wide eyes. You see, it was the first time she had ever been in a Jewish house.”

  My mother laughed. She would tell this to Fanny Cohen later and they would both huddle together with their shoulders shaking. But she was keeping her laughter in as she told it to me then, and there was something almost like tenderness in her voice.

  “Then, finally, when she could talk she wanted to know if we had any pigs knuckles. I told her we didn’t carry such things and she’d better go to Gordons’. “And then…” she was having a bit of difficulty now controlling her laughter, “…she was so frightened she just peed in her drawers, and she ran out leaving a puddle on the floor.”

  I laughed too, but then my mother grew serious and said, “Where did I leave off?”

  I had to read the last sentence to her, rereading my own handwriting with a great deal of difficulty. My mother then continued.

  “I don’t think the rabbi will ever recover from the shock and the loss of his son. It shows in the way he conducts the services. He stumbles over words, and he loses his place. Mr. Harris has to stand by him all the time and show him where to read. There is some grumbling among people in the congregation, and some talk about maybe we ought to get a new rabbi. But most of us won’t hear of it, and we plan to stick by him.” She paused a moment and finally went on.

  “I have told you most of the sad news about the street, but now I must tell you some more sad news about ourselves. I said at the beginning of the letter that we are all well, but that isn’t quite true, and I am very unhappy about what is happening. I suppose I should thank God that we are making a living. Even Rose is working now and all done with school. Lucky for her she didn’t have to go into the tailoring shop with her father. She got herself a job in a fancy dressmaking shop and is learning the trade and is quite stuck up over it. She hardly ever talks to any of us. She goes about with her nose up in the air, just like Mrs. Finklestein. Almost all the people who come into the dress shop are rich people, and she has begun to think she is one of them. Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. But there are worse things, believe me. There is poor Lily, stuck in that shop with her father. She never got over it. She was so close to becoming something, and then he had to drag her into the shop.”