The Invisible Wall

by Harry Bernstein

  I thought of that first night when I had gone in there to buy a bottle of ginger beer for Sarah, and how pretty Florne was standing in the doorway staring at Freddy writing his note. That night came back very clearly to me, chiefly, I suppose, because this night was very much like that one, soft and balmy, with the flush of sunset in the sky, people sitting outside their doors smoking their pipes and cigarettes, and the edges of buildings beginning to turn dark against the sky.

  It all flitted through my mind very quickly, and was gone by the time we reached the rec. The place swarmed with shrieking children. All sorts of games were going on, balls, shuttlecocks flying into the air, and the thud of boots against soccer balls mingling with the shouts and cries. Over at the iron fence some of the boys from the mill were playing pitch and toss, kneeling down on the crushed cinder ground, eyes intent on the coins being thrown, some of the losers glaring up at us as we went by and muttering, “Garn, you bloody Jews.”

  We hurried past them, seeking a place for our game. There was an empty spot close to the edge of the grassy slope that ran down from the park. It was not exactly ideal, because the piggy could easily fly over into the park and get lost among the bushes and trees, but it was the only one left for us. We began playing with warnings to watch out for the park.

  For an hour we played without any mishap, then I made the mistake of letting Shloime Roseman use my piggy. Shloime was only about eight or nine, but he already showed promise of becoming another Zalmon. He was thin and short and wiry and mischievous, constantly in trouble at school and at cheder, and loved to fight and wrestle. He’d already had several fights with batesemas, and had come out the victor in all of them. He was a good batter at cricket, and especially at piggy. He didn’t have a piggy of his own, though, so I lent him mine, with some qualms. As soon as he came up to bat, I moved far back to catch the piggy, knowing the distance he could hit.

  He placed the piggy on a little stone, with the snouts raised. He spat on his hand—always a warning sign—then gripped the stick tightly, bent down, and tapped the piggy on one end, causing it to fly upward, and when it was in midair he swung and struck. There was a crack that was like the sound of a whip, and the piggy went soaring. But it went right where it was not aupposed to go, into the park among the trees and bushes.

  I gave a loud yell of despair and raced after it. The others went on with the game as I crashed through the overgrown bushes and grass. I had a fair idea where the piggy had gone, and made my way straight up the incline, searching the ground as I went along. It was like a jungle. I don’t think the gardeners ever touched this section of the park. Vines grew everywhere, wrapping themselves around the trunks of trees and overgrown bushes and crawling along the ground. My feet got tangled in them, and thorny bushes scratched my hands and face as I beat my way upward, looking here and there for the piggy.

  Suddenly I was facing an enormous tree. It was a mass of gold, and I realized that this was the golden willow Freddy had spoken about. I remembered what he had said it about it looking like a beautiful big ballroom gown, and that’s exactly how it was, its branches drooping gracefully downward as if from a hoop, and trailing along the ground. A sweet aroma came from its yellow leaves.

  I stared up at it, fascinated, then heard the murmur of voices. They came from within those branches, and I crept slowly forward to look. I parted several of them with my hand and peered inside. It was like a cathedral inside, Freddy had said, and that’s how it struck me. Although I had never been inside a cathedral, I knew it had to be something big and awesome, and that’s how this was. It took me some time before I made out the two figures lying close to each other, a man and a woman. I knew as I listened that they were Arthur and Lily.

  I could make out what they were saying now, too.

  “Oh, I’m sick of it. I’m real good and sick of it.” This was Arthur’s voice. “I hate this secret business, arranging meetings where nobody can see us, hiding under this tree, like a pair of thieves.”

  “I know, darling.” It was Lily speaking now, quite clearly Lily, and she had called him darling. “I hate it just as much as you do. But what can we do?”

  She sounded quite hopeless.

  “What can we do? I’ll tell you what we can do,” Arthur’s voice was angry. “Instead of skulking about like this we can just simply come out in the open and tell ’em how things are between us, and that we want to get married. That’s what we can do.”

  “No, no we can’t do that. Not yet.” Lily seemed frightened.

  “Why not?”

  “I think it would kill my mother.”

  “It won’t kill her. She’ll get over it in time. Oh, this is such a lot of damned foolishness, this Jew-Christian business. I thought we’d be all done with it when the war was over. I was so sure of it! But it’s as bad as ever.”

  “I know,” said Lily, with the same hopelessness as before. “We’ll have to wait, that’s all.”

  “Wait for what?” “There’ll be a better world. You’ll see. It’s got to come,” said Lily. “My God, Lily, you don’t want to wait for the revolution, do you? It’s got to come, that’s for sure. I’m as much a believer in it as you are, and I know once we get rid of capitalism we’ll have a damned better world, and all these things that separate us will be gone. But it’s going to take some time yet, Lily, and I don’t think we should wait. Not for the revolution, dear girl.”

  “Just a little longer then, Arthur, please, darling,” she begged.

  “Look,” said Arthur, sitting up suddenly, “I know you’re putting it off mostly on account of your mother.”

  “What about your mother?” Lily interrupted.

  “Oh, she doesn’t feel as strongly about it as yours,” Arthur said.

  “But she does feel something.”

  “Yes, there is something. My father too. I’ve spoken to both of them about you. I’ve told them pretty much how I feel.”

  “And they weren’t too keen on the idea, were they?”

  “No,” Arthur admitted reluctantly. “I suppose there’s a touch of bigotry in them too. They advised me to think about it carefully,” he added, bitterly. “I haven’t talked with them about it since. I don’t intend to. I was going to say just before that I’ll be graduating in another year, and then I’ll be getting a job in a law office, and that’s as long as we’re going to wait. We’re going to get married then, no matter who says what. How about that?”

  “All right,” said Lily slowly, still thinking.

  “You promise now?”

  “Yes, I promise.”

  “Well, then, let’s seal that with a kiss.”

  He took her in his arms, and there was a long silence while they clung to each other in a long, passionate kiss. I could have stolen away then, and I think I was about to do it, but just then I caught sight of the piggy. It was lying only a foot or two away from me, off to one side. I crept toward it, but unavoidably stepped on a twig. There was a crack. They separated quickly.

  “There’s somebody here,” Lily whispered.

  They saw me, and I tried to run. But Arthur, springing up, caught me by the arm, and swung me around so that he could see my face.

  “It’s ’arry,” he shouted.

  Lily’s face must have turned white. She got to her feet, straightening out her dress, and came over to us.

  “’arry,” she said in a whisper, “what are you doing here?”

  “I was looking for my piggy. We were playing on the rec and it got hit up here and I went looking for it, and it was right in here.” I was as scared as they were.

  They didn’t seem to know what to do for a moment. Nor did I. Arthur had released my arm, and we stood simply looking at one another. Then Arthur said, “Well, I suppose the fat’s in the fire now.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Lily. “You aren’t going to tell, are you, ’arry?”

  I could very easily have asked, “Tell what?” But there was no use pretending. They knew I’d heard, I hung my hea
d, and muttered, “No.”

  “That’s a good lad,” Arthur said.

  As we walked away together, Lily spoke earnestly to me. “Arthur and I love each other,” she said, “and we’re going to get married someday, but I don’t want Mam to know about it yet. You know how she feels about marrying a Christian. You remember Sarah, don’t you, and how terrible that was to her?”

  I nodded. How could I have forgotten it?

  “It’s not really terrible,” Lily continued. “Not if you’re in love, and Arthur and I have been in love for a long time. It doesn’t matter really what you are if you’re in love. I’m telling you this, ’arry, because you’re a big boy now, and you’re my brother, and I know you understand, don’t you?”

  “Yis.”

  She put an arm around my shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “Thank you, ’arry,” she said.

  “And thank you from me, too,” Arthur said. “I’m sorry it has to be this way. I wish I could be your brother, too.”

  I didn’t say anything to this. The light was fading. The jungle of trees and bushes was a mass of shadow. The sky above it seemed very white in contrast. From the distance below came, faintly, the echoing sounds of children playing. They were still at it and would be as long as there was a little light left in the sky.

  “Go and join your friends now,” Lily said. “And remember what I said about not telling anybody.”

  I left them there. I don’t think they were going back to the tree. They would have stayed much longer, probably, if I had not come along. But I had spoiled their tryst, and they would go home, each going a different way when they came to the top of the hill, making sure they did not arrive at our street at the same time.

  I went back down the slope with the piggy in my hand, but by the time I got to the rec my friends were gone. I drifted about for a while looking at the various games going on, then went home.

  THEY DID NOT GO BACK to the park after that night. They were afraid of discovery. At least, Lily was. Arthur might have welcomed it, but Lily, however independent she might have sounded at times with her new Socialist philosophy, was in deadly fear of being caught. Despite her promise to Arthur I think the problem was far from resolved in her mind.

  A year must have seemed a long way off to her, a good, comfortable distance away, during which time any sort of miracle could happen. Who knows what wild thoughts may have been going through her troubled mind. Even that she could talk my mother into altering a belief that was thousands of years old.

  In the meantime, she was taking no chances. It was fortunate that I had been the one who stumbled on them in the park that night. The next time they might not be so lucky. Yet they had to see each other, be with each other. They were terribly in love, and so they decided to meet somewhere out in the country—much as Freddy and Sarah had done, and probably for the same reason.

  The place they chose most often for their trysts was the Seventeen Windows, a quaint old inn out in the Derbyshire Hills, given that name because it had exactly that many windows. I know, because I counted them every time I went there.

  Lily had taken me, every time she went there, to lull any suspicion my mother might have about her spending a day in the country by herself. Nor was it strange that she should have chosen me to go with her. We had more in common, with our liking for books and music and things like that, than any other two in the family. We went often together to the library, and one time she had taken me to the theater to see a performance of A Christmas Carol.

  It was quite natural that she should have taken me out to the country on a Sunday afternoon, and I think on the whole my mother was quite pleased with the idea. The one thing she would have liked, though, was for Lily to have asked the young rabbi to go along with us. He would have liked it, too.

  He was in the shop one Sunday afternoon when Lily and I were about to leave. Seeing us about to go, and learning where we were going, he said wistfully, “Ah, but it must be very beautiful out there. I have never seen the Derbyshire Hills.”

  My mother took Lily aside and whispered, “Why don’t you ask him to go with you?”

  “No,” Lily whispered back fiercely.

  The rabbi had engaged me in conversation, but we could both hear what was going on. The rabbi, however, smiled, and pretended not to hear.

  Lily was silent and furious for a while as we left. She soon got over it, however, and laughed and chatted as we went along. Her spirits were always high on these trips, filled, I have no doubt, with anticipation and eagerness to see Arthur, though she might have spotted him a dozen times that day already peeping surreptitiously through the window.

  We took the tram at Mersey Square. I loved this part of the trip especially, sitting on the top deck, with the sun shining on my head, feeling the rumble of wheels beneath me, seeing the town slip by, and the countryside beginning.

  I was eleven years old, and I had never been far beyond the town. Just riding on a tram gave me a sense of adventure and being far away. We got off at a little resort town called Marple, which was as far as the tram went, and began walking. I loved this part too. The Derbyshire Hills rose all around us, undulating against the sky. We crossed through fields and woods and alongside little brooks that trickled quietly and glittered in the sun. Flowers grew in abundance everywhere: Fields were filled with shining buttercups and daisies, and there were thick beds of bluebells. A rich scent rose from it all, and we both sniffed it in eagerly, and smiled at each other as we walked.

  We came at last to the crest of a grassy hill, and there below was a little valley with the Seventeen Windows nestled in amidst the green landscape, surrounded by hills. It was gabled, and perhaps two hundred years old, but still sturdy, its brick tawny with age, its seventeen windows glittering in the sun. There were flowers all around it, and tables were set up outdoors at the front. As we approached, within minutes after coming down from the crest of the hill, the proprietress, Mrs. Fogg, came out to greet us.

  She seemed as old and quaint to me as the inn itself, a tall, thin, gaunt woman wearing a sunbonnet and a white apron over her dress, always with a pleasant smile of greeting that showed large buck teeth, and hands stretched out to receive us.

  “Ah, and how be ye?”

  Her accent was not Lancashire, as ours was, but I believe Welsh. I know that her husband had been a Welsh coal miner and had been killed in a mine explosion many years before all this, before she came to own the Seventeen Windows. She had, however, acquired quite a following, and her tables and the little bar inside the inn were well filled on a Sunday afternoon. I had been surprised when I first came here to see how many people Lily knew. I learned later that it was a Sunday gathering place for Socialists and Laborites, and Mrs. Fogg herself was a Socialist.

  As she greeted us with the warmth that she greeted all her guests with, smiling and showing her large, prominent teeth, she said, “Your friend’s here already.”

  “Oh, is he?” said Lily.

  She spoke casually, as if it were of no great interest to her. But I could almost hear her heart pounding, and when Arthur appeared just then coming out of the inn, her heartbeat must have quickened still more. But both she and Arthur restrained themselves as they met, making it seem as if they were mere friends, smiling and just shaking hands. Arthur did not let go of the hand that he shook, though, and they remained like that for a few moments longer, chatting about the weather, smiling at each other, and Mrs. Fogg bustled off elsewhere.

  Arthur held onto her hand as they sauntered to a table. I followed behind them. They were as of oblivious of me as they were of all the other people around them, for a while, that is. It wasn’t long after we had seated ourselves and had begun to eat the cucumber sandwiches on thin white bread that Mrs. Fogg’s girl served us, along with a pot of tea in a cozy and a plate of scones, that people began to come over from the other tables, and we were in the midst of a big noisy circle.

  Discussions and arguments followed, about Socialism and anarchism and the L
abor Party and the man they all referred to as Jimmy, but who was Ramsay MacDonald, the young leader of the Labor Party that so many of them belonged to. It was all over my head. I listened, but scarcely understood what they were arguing about, why the Socialists didn’t like the Anarchists and why the Laborites didn’t like either of them, and why, even though they seemed to disapprove of one another, they all congregated. Supporters of the Communists in Russia were also in evidence, and this seemed to confuse matters even more for me.

  Perhaps all I really cared about was my cucumber sandwich and tea and scones. I was ravenous by the time I got there and devoured most of what was put on the table. Lily and Arthur ate very little. They broke away from their friends after a while, and went off by themselves, and it was always understood that I was to take care of myself during that time. I did that by wandering about the grounds and looking at the big vegetable patch that Mrs. Fogg had at the back of the inn, and the chicken coop that was usually filled with clucking hens and one big, strutting, fierce-looking rooster. She also had several plump white rabbits that were fun to watch.

  After about an hour Lily and Arthur came back from wherever they had been, Lily always looking a bit dreamy leaning her head against Arthur’s shoulder, their two hands clasped together or sometimes Arthur’s hand around her waist. We began the walk back home, with the two of them in much the same position, and I behind them. I could see how Lily kept her head on his shoulder for a while, and how his arm tightened around her waist. I am sure if it had not been for me they would have stopped and kissed.

  I heard Arthur murmur, “I don’t know if I can wait a whole year. It seems like a terribly long time.”

  “Yes, I know,” Lily sighed.

  “Then why must we?”

  Lily hesitated. “Arthur, how would we live? And where?”