The Invisible Wall

by Harry Bernstein

  Nothing was different. The shop was empty, and from the back room came the sounds of Mrs. Turnbull’s voice and the voices of her boarders, their laughter, and the clink of glasses. Those of her boarders who had survived the war were back, and those who had not survived had been replaced by others, rough, coarse, loud men who wore gaiters and cleaned out middens and chimneys.

  I rapped on the glass top of the counter long enough to draw her attention. She came lumbering out, grumbling, “Always bothering me. Never give me a minute’s peace, the bloody little buggers.” Seeing me, she said, “If it isn’t little Lord Muck ’isself. Don’t tell me you went and inherited another fortune…well…what’ll it be? Don’t you keep me waiting all day long. I got other things to do besides wait on you.”

  I made my choice quickly. A penny’s worth of clear mixed gums. As I went out with my bag of sweets clutched in my hand, I heard one of the boarders mutter, craning his neck around the doorway to see me, “Those bloody Jews, they got all the money. They were making it by the bucketsful while we was over there in the trenches giving our bloody lives for them.”

  It didn’t strike me as being any different from all the other things I had heard them say all my life, and I wasn’t the least bit disturbed by it. I went home, with my bag of sweets, but this time I shared it with my brothers, though without explaining how I had got the penny. Lily’s secret was locked deep inside me.

  There was just one moment when it very nearly came out, and that same day. Perhaps Arthur should have waited a bit. A day or two more wouldn’t have hurt. At least if he had waited until after dark when fewer people could see him. He couldn’t wait, though, and he was in a buoyant mood at being home, and so confident of this new world of his that he went striding across the street with a small package in his hand, and knocked on our door.

  It was tea time. We were all sitting at the table when we heard it. My mother thought perhaps it was a customer for the shop, and hurried to answer it. I think it was Lily who recognized Arthur’s voice first. She got up in such a hurry that her cup of tea spilled. But she paid no attention to it and ran out, and we followed her out of curiosity. We stopped in the lobby behind Lily. There was Arthur, all right, smiling and saying, “I just brought this for Lily…it’s a book, something I bought in London and I thought Lily would like it. Would you mind if I gave it to her?”

  It was a book of poetry, a collection of Browning’s, as we discovered later. To my mother, it wouldn’t have made any difference what it was.

  “She’s having her tea right now,” she said. “I’ll give it to her.”

  Arthur was looking over her shoulder. He could see Lily standing there. She was staring at him, not daring to speak. He understood, though he must have been terribly disappointed and perhaps a bit disillusioned right from the start of his homecoming. But he didn’t press the matter.

  “Oh, all right,” he said. “Just give it to her, if you would. And thank you. I’m sorry for interrupting your tea.”

  My mother took the package from him, and after the door had closed she walked back through the lobby and handed the package to Lily.

  “Why didn’t you let him give it to me?” Lily said. “He saw me standing here.”

  “I didn’t know you were there,” my mother said, and it was the first time I had ever known her to lie, because I’m sure she had known we were all there.

  Lily must have felt sure of that too, and she said bitterly, “Even if you didn’t, you could have called me and I’d have come to the door. He’s just come home from the war. I don’t know how you can be that way.”

  She burst into tears then, and ran upstairs with her book. My mother stood looking after her for a moment with that familiar troubled expression. We all finally went back to our tea without Lily. She remained in her room for the rest of the evening, probably reading the Browning poems, the love poems he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett.

  People had seen Arthur come to our door with the package in his hand. My mother had a lot of explaining to do when her friends gathered in the shop. She passed it off lightly as nothing at all, just a little friendly neighborly gesture, and whether they believed her is hard to say. But soon there were other events of importance taking place on our street that took their minds off this topic completely for a while.

  THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION had been over for more than a year now and there was less talk of it than there had been, and not so much mention of it in the newspapers, but it was far from forgotten by our rabbi. In cheder at night he smoked cigarette after cigarette until all his fingers were stained a deep yellow, and the long holder itself had become yellow, and showed a faint crack at the end from too many cigarettes being slipped in and out, and his hand trembled as he lifted it to his mouth.

  He went among us, smoking, more abstract than ever, pointing out a mistake now and then with a yellow finger, but hardly bothering with us, ignoring the giggles and the mischief that went on behind his back. He had to keep moving, it seemed. He could not stand in one place for very long. And so he paced about in front of the fire, sometimes with one hand behind his back, the other holding the long cigarette holder with the burning cigarette in it.

  There had been no word from his son in all these years. Rumors had it that the rabbi had once contemplated going to Russia to search for him, but had been dissuaded by his wife.

  Meanwhile, he was going out of his mind worrying about the boy. He could not rest at home, in the house up the park where he lived with his wife and daughter, pacing about there too, as at his various duties in the synagogue or the cheder. He did the same when he performed a wedding or a circumcision, or when he slaughtered the chickens for us on Friday afternoons in the little concrete yard behind the cheder.

  He strode through the streets en route to his various duties, sometimes to visit a sick person, or to officiate at a bar mitzvah, wearing his long black coat, carrying an umbrella in one hand, and the little ragged batesemas tagged after him chanting, “the rabbi, the rabbi, the king of the Jews, he bought his wife a pair of shoes.”

  This time he paid no attention to them. His head was bent, and he was far away in his thoughts. The little cobbled streets with their sad rows of houses slipped past him. He was oblivious to everything. The days, the weeks went by, and finally the letter came. Who sent it nobody knew. It was not signed by a name, and it was a hastily scribbled piece of writing in Russian that the rabbi was able to read because he had come from Russia.

  We only heard about this later. It spread quickly among us, how the letter had been delivered by the postman, how the rabbi had stared at it first, the address badly written, many different postmarks stamped on it, and then the realization that it was from Russia, and tearing it open with trembling yellowed fingers, and his wife clasping her hands together and tense with fear at what the letter might contain.

  He read it slowly, because it was badly written inside as well, and hard to read. But he read it, to himself at first, with the cigarette holder in one hand, and the wife’s eyes glued on his face saw the expression change, then saw the jaw sag, and the cigarette holder fall from his hand. She hastily picked it up before the carpet could burn, and put it back in his hand, and said, “What is it? What is it? Tell me?”

  “It’s all over,” he whispered.

  He could hardly talk. His eyes began to fill with tears—this is how the wife related it afterward to others—his eyes filled with tears and his lips trembled and he said again, “It’s all over. God has spoken at last.”

  He gave her the letter to read, because he could not read it himself. The badly scrawled letter said simply, “Max asked me to write this to you if anything happened to him, and I am sorry to say that it has happened. Max died a hero, fighting for the revolution.”

  That was about all it said, but it was enough. There was a funeral ceremony. The letter had failed to say if there had been one in Russia, or if he had even been buried. The rabbi held a funeral. My mother attended and came back dabbing at her eyes.
It had been sad, too sad for words. The expression on the rabbi’s face as he performed the service for his dead son, the trembling of his voice, and the weeping of his wife, and the little girl.

  It was in the autumn that this happened. It had taken two years for the letter to arrive from Russia. We were preparing for the Rosh Hashanah holiday. The garden at the back of the synagogue and cheder was filled with crisp red and yellow and brown leaves that had fallen from the trees surrounding the garden. We had leaf fights, dashing handfuls at one another, shouting and yelling. The old-time residents of the once-fashionable houses glared at us over the garden walls. The rabbi said nothing. He stood at the bay window of the cheder looking out at us, saying nothing.

  The synagogue was packed that first evening of the holiday. Even my father attended. He sat a short distance from us with a siddur in his hands and his head bent sullenly over it. The siddur was upside down, but he did not know it. Our mother and sisters were upstairs in the gallery. There was hardly enough seating space for all of them, so many of the girls had to stand. Several of them came to the rail and leaned over and giggled and called to men downstairs, and had to be reprimanded and sent to the back of the balcony.

  The place buzzed with talk until everyone was settled, and then it grew still as the rabbi entered, swathed in his long talith that covered him from head to toe. All eyes were on him, more so this year than any other year because of the tragedy that had taken place, and because of what we had heard was happening to him, and there was a lot of wonder as to how he was going to bear up throughout the longer-than-usual service.

  It was clear from the start that he was not himself any longer. The deep, resonant voice had weakened, and at times was barely audible. He missed his place several times and had to be helped by other members of the congregation.

  No, he was not the same anymore, and heads were being shaken throughout the service, and eyes met one another, and there was one point, I remember, when my father gave a savage little laugh and muttered, “I could do better myself.”

  People glanced at him sideways, but said nothing. We were careful to keep our heads down over the one siddur we shared. The service dragged on. It seemed longer and more tedious than ever. We were hungry and annoyed with the rabbi’s slowness. At last it came to the end, to the final part where he was to blow the shofar that ushered in the New Year.

  The rabbi took the ram’s horn in his hands and raised it to his lips. It was a yellowish color, almost like the tobacco stain on his fingers. His hands trembled slightly as he lifted it, and there was a deep silence as everyone waited for the wailing sound to come out—a sound that said, “kee-yoah, kee-yoah.”

  But there was nothing. His cheeks were puffed out, his eyes strained, and all we heard was the laboring breath. It took strength to blow the horn, and he did not have that strength any longer. His cheeks ballooned out desperately, and his eyes started out of his head, and a disturbed murmur went through the synagogue. Something was wrong, very wrong, and then suddenly the horn fell from his hands, and a loud cry went up as he collapsed.

  ANOTHER THING CAME to occupy everyone’s mind on the street. This was the return of Freddy Gordon to his home, or what was left of him. They were clearing out the hospital so that it could be a school again. The soldiers who were better walked out and went home. Those who were not and who still could not walk were carried off to other hospitals that were less packed now than before, or else, if nothing further could be done for them, they were shipped home. Freddy was one of those.

  They brought him home in an ambulance. We watched as it came, and we rushed down to the Gordons’ shop to see Freddy being carried out. One of the attendants did it all by himself, lifting the half-body up in his arms and carrying him as if he were a baby being taken out of a pram. Freddy smiled at us and waved a hand. Inside the shop, old Mr. Gordon had risen from his chair and was standing, staring, his thick fleshy cheeks ashen and deathlike. Florrie had come out of the taproom and was staring too.

  His homecoming had been a bit of a surprise to them. We got this from Mrs. Green later. Florrie had been trying to delay it as long as possible.

  “She warn’t too anxious t’ ’ave him,” the toothless old woman cackled, the Friday after Freddy’s return. She spoke to the fire as she prodded with the poker and brought the flames leaping upward. “After all, what’s she going to do with ’im? Pickle ’im? He wouldn’t be any good to her in th’ shop. The old man’s just a step away from death’s door, and that’d set her free, and that’s all she wanted, to get away and marry that man in Birmingham. He’s still waiting for ’er. But now Freddy’s in the way. She’s been trying to get the hospital to ship him out to one of those soldier homes where they’ve got a lot of other fellows without legs or arms and things like that. And they were going to do it too, except that Freddy didn’t want it and got ’em to send him ’ome, and ’ere ’e is, and I know what Florrie’s going to try next. She’s working on me Annie to take Freddy off ’er ’ands, but I’ll see to it that doesn’t ’appen. Not as long as I live.”

  She poked furiously, and sparks shot up in the fireplace, and all of us listening said nothing. We felt sorry for Freddy. How could you not? Especially when Florrie began putting him outside in the wheelchair the government had given them. There he sat wrapped in blankets, the lower part of his body, the missing legs, well covered. It made people think of Mr. Turnbull up at the other end of the street. There he sat, too, all day long, looking miserable. We now had one at the top and one at the bottom of the street.

  “Just like two ornaments on a dresser,” said Mrs. Humberstone sadly, coming over one day to chat with the Jewish women, about the only one who still did that after the war ended. “The poor lad. He just sits there.”

  She went over there to talk to him too, and a lot of other people on the street did the same thing. He wasn’t yet strong enough to wheel himself about, and he was always glad to have people come over or to stop and chat when they were on their way into the shop.

  I went to the shop one day to get a cob of white bread for my mother, and his face lit up at the sight of me.

  “Ar, lad,” he said. “You’re still growing, aren’t you? Bigger than me already, though that wouldn’t take much doing, would it?” He chuckled, and looked up at me with something glinting in his eyes that looked suspiciously like tears. But it didn’t last long. He kept right on chuckling. “Remember the old days, when you used to come in for ginger beer for Sarah? Eh? And how is Sarah? You ever hear from her?”

  I told him what I knew, what her mother had told my mother, and he nodded, and stared straight ahead of him up the street and said, “Well, that’s good. I’m glad to hear it. She deserves her luck. She was a nice girl, Sarah. A good girl. We had some fine times together. When you write to her give her my best. Tell her I still think of her.”

  I didn’t say anything. I felt awkward, remembering the talk in my mother’s shop and the things they’d said about Freddy, and thinking how unlikely it would be for my mother to let me write what he asked to Sarah, if ever we should write to her.

  I went in and bought my bread, Florrie waiting on me. When I came out, Freddy reached up for the bag and said, “Look here, lad, you do me a little favor, will you? Give me a push up the street, and I’ll hold the bread for you.”

  I gave the bag to him, and grasped the handles at the back of the chair, and just as we were about to start off Florrie came to the door.

  “Where d’you think you’re going?” she asked.

  “We’re taking a little ride,” Freddy said. “Just up th’street a bit. Maybe I’ll stop off and see Annie.”

  “That’s not such a bad idea,” Florrie said. “Maybe she’d like to come on back with you and have a glass.”

  “Maybe,” said Freddy. “I’ll ask her.” He chuckled. “I’ll ask the whole family, her mother too.”

  “That old hag?” Florrie snapped. “You don’t have to bother with her. I can do without her.”

&nb
sp; “I know that.” Freddy chuckled again, and we set off.

  It was easy pushing the chair, and I rather enjoyed doing it. I think some of the other lads on the street, watching, envied me. I suppose our journey up the street, the first time Freddy had done it, attracted a lot of attention. People came to their doors and stared. When we got to the Greens’, Annie was already out there, looking flustered and glad.

  “Oh, hello, Freddy,” she said.

  “Hello, Annie. How you be?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “And how you be?”

  “I’m fine. How’s little Peter?”

  “He’s just champion. You want to see him?”

  “That’d be nice.”

  But before Annie could turn to go in, her mother was there at her back, her eyes murderous and glaring.

  “Now, what’s this?” she said. “What’s going on ’ere?”

  “I’m just visiting,” Freddy said.

  “Well, you go and visit somewheres else,” she snapped.

  “I don’t see what you got against me,” Freddy said, and he was calm enough, and even smiling a bit, as if he found the old woman amusing. “I’m not going t’arm Annie or little Peter.”

  “That’s right, Mam,” murmured Annie, but her voice was shaky. She was clearly terribly afraid of her mother.

  Mrs. Green simply ignored her. She spoke directly to Freddy. “Nobody said you was going t’arm anybody. You just go and visit somewheres else. I know what you did for king and country, and I got respect for you, but I got me troubles too and Annie’s got ’ers and you got yours, so let’s just everybody take care of ’is own troubles and everything’ll be all right. I’ll ’elp you go back where you come from.”

  She thrust her way forward suddenly and snatched the handles away from me. Freddy handed the bag back to me in time before Mrs. Green started pushing him vigorously back down the street. I ran across to give the bread to my mother, who had been standing in the doorway with all the rest taking in the scene. I then ran back down the street, joining the other boys, who sensed a row about to start, and were excited at the prospect. There was nothing like a good row between two women to liven things up for us, and quite a crowd had gathered around the Gordons’ shop as Mrs. Green arrived there with Freddy.