The Invisible Wall

by Harry Bernstein

  Lily spoke at last in a very low voice. “I don’t think we could ever have found anything to agree on.”

  “Except the one thing I reminded you of before,” the rabbi said, “and that is the most important of all things.”

  “Not to me,” muttered Lily, still not looking at him.

  “Ah, but it will be,” the rabbi assured her. “Someday, you will find that out. There is nothing more important for any of us.”

  Lily refused to talk further, and the rabbi handed her his package. “I brought this for you to read on your journey. It is a book. I know you like them. This one is very famous. I hope you will read it.” Then he held out a hand. “I will say good-bye to you now, and wish you a safe journey, and a good, happy life in America.”

  Lily took his hand, and he held it for a moment, then turned and walked out of the room. Both Lily and I were silent as we listened to his footsteps going down the stairs, and waited still as our mother escorted him to the door, then closed it after him.

  Lily unwrapped her package. Inside was the book. It had a black leather cover, and on it in gold lettering were inscribed the words: The Old Testament.

  THAT SUNDAY Lily put on her white dress. It was just two days before she was to leave for America. My father would take her to Liverpool. This was a man’s job, a father’s job, and he was taking his responsibilities seriously for once. My mother could have had no quarrel with that, though she would have liked to go to Liverpool herself, to see Lily get on the boat and sail off to America. What a thrill that would have given her! But there was not enough money for that.

  She was busy packing for Lily, though, and that in itself gave her a vicarious pleasure. She loved every moment. Somehow, she had managed to get hold of an old metal trunk, and was putting Lily’s things into it, all her clothes, all her belongings, including her books, except the ones she was leaving for me. She would have left the rabbi’s book behind if she’d had her way, but my mother insisted on putting that in too. She was proud of the gift the rabbi had given her daughter; she had spoken of it to everyone.

  Then they came to the white dress, the one my mother had made for her when she had won her scholarship and was to have gone to the grammar school. She had never worn it, but it was still in good condition. My mother saw no reason it should not go in with the other clothes. “Who knows,” she said a bit sadly, “you might still wear it for some special occasion.”

  Lily was staring at the dress. Suddenly, she said, “Don’t pack it now. I want to wear it today.”

  “Today?” my mother said, amazed. “But what for? You’re not going anywhere special.”

  “I want to wear it,” Lily said stubbornly.

  “If it still fits you,” my mother said, giving in.

  “It will fit,” Lily said.

  Yes, it did, and it looked as beautiful on her as it did that memorable day when she first put it on, when my father had dragged her by the hair to the workshop. All of us, except Rose, who turned away contemptuously, admired her in it when she came downstairs in the white dress, her long dark hair hanging down to her waist much the same as that same day years ago.

  “Take good care of it,” my mother said. “They’ll want to see you in it when you get to America. You must put it on for them as soon as you get there.” Then she asked, “Where are you going?”

  “Just for a walk,” Lily said. “Would you like to come with me, ’arry?”

  “Yis,” I said, promptly.

  I remember as we were leaving, my mother called out to us, “Don’t be long, Lily. You’ve still got a lot of packing to do.” Then, just as we reached the door, she added, “Better take an umbrella along. It might rain, and you don’t want to spoil your dress.”

  Lily pretended not to have heard this. As did I. We both hated to carry umbrellas. Besides, Lily seemed in a hurry.

  It was not the most perfect of days. Warm enough, yes, but with clouds in the sky, and the sun peeking in and out of them. Yet we enjoyed walking, and people all along the street standing in their doorways called out their admiration for Lily’s white dress, and how lovely she looked in it.

  We had soon left the street behind, and I saw that we were heading for Mersey Square. “Where are we going? “I asked.

  “You’ll soon find out,” Lily said a bit mysteriously.

  It was not until we boarded a tram that I discovered that we were heading for the country, and the Seventeen Windows. I was a bit startled. I hadn’t forgotten our last trip there, and my mother’s discovery, and the row that followed. Lily had not been there since.

  Nor did I think she’d ever go again, nor see Arthur again, and so far as I knew she had not seen him since that day. “Won’t Mam be angry?” I asked.

  Lily was silent for a moment, as if mulling over my question. I waited a moment before asking her, “You won’t want me to tell her, will you?”

  For a little while longer she still seemed to be thinking, then she said, “Yes, you’ll tell her, if you want.”

  Her answer struck me as strange, and I puzzled over it for a while before asking, “Will Arthur be there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t tell Mam about him,” I said.

  “Perhaps you will.”

  This too was strange and left me more puzzled than ever. But I didn’t say anything further. Lily’s manner seemed strange, for that matter. She did not chatter, as she usually did on these outings, or laugh with excitement over the anticipation of meeting Arthur. She was silent and seemingly lost in her thoughts all the way. When we got off the tram and started walking through the countryside, she seemed nervous and kept glancing backward, as if afraid someone was following us.

  The sun kept up its game of hide and seek through the clouds, and once indeed a light shower of rain fell and pattered softly on the leaves as we hurried through some woods. But it soon stopped, and a fresh smell rose from the earth. Lily drank it in deeply.

  “I love this place,” she said, suddenly, breaking the silence between us. “Do you?”

  “Yis,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice to live here all the time?” she asked. “To be able to step out of your house and smell all the flowers and trees.”

  “Yis,” I said.

  “Perhaps someday I will,” she said confidently. “And you’ll come to visit me, and stay over, and we’ll have long walks through the woods and fields.”

  “But you’re going to America,” I reminded her.

  “Yes,” she said, and that was all. She became silent again, and remained silent until we had climbed the hill and come to the top where we could see the Seventeen Windows below.

  Lily stopped, and I looked at her, wondering. She had become nervous again, and was hesitating, as if she did not want to go farther. She put a hand to her heart, and I could see an expression of pain on her face.

  “What’s the matter,” I asked anxiously, “do you have that pain?”

  She’d had it before in the house, and my mother had asked the same question, and sometimes made her lie down on the sofa. She dropped her hand, and took hold of mine, and clutched it hard, and I could feel its coldness. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I’ve just got to stop for a while.”

  Her face had gone pale, too, and we both stood there with her hand holding mine, tightly. But after a moment she seemed to recover, and we went on. Just as we neared the bottom of the hill, Mrs. Fogg came forward to greet us. She was wearing what she usually did, a long blue-striped dress almost like the petticoats the women who worked in the mills wore, a white apron over it, and a white bonnet fastened under her chin. She was smiling, and showing her large buck teeth, and as she approached she reached forward with both hands to touch Lily.

  She held her off a moment, and said, “How beautiful you look. Just the way a—”

  But Lily stopped her, putting a finger to her lips, and looking at me.

  “Doesn’t he know?” Mrs. Fogg whispered.

  “Not yet.”

&
nbsp; “Perhaps he should.”

  “Later.”

  This talk went on between them in whispers, but I heard it all right, and couldn’t help feeling puzzled by it. We went on, Mrs. Fogg walking beside us with her long, masculine stride, and chatting away in her hoarse voice about the weather, her flowers, various things I am sure were designed to take my mind off anything I had heard.

  When we came to the inn more people seemed to be about than usual. They all gathered around Lily, embracing her and saying things I did not quite understand. It seemed to me that something very unusual was about to happen, whether I was supposed to know about it or not. Then Arthur appeared, emerging from the inn, and I thought he was dressed unusually well, wearing white flannel trousers and a dark blue blazer, a cricket shirt with a school tie, looking very handsome and tall, and smiling.

  He went straight toward Lily, and the others drew back a little to make way for him. He took Lily in his arms and kissed her. It was a long kiss, and everybody watched. I watched, too, embarrassed. Arthur had never kissed her like that before in public. But for once neither one of them seemed restrained.

  Someone said, “That’ll do for the while, Arthur,” and everybody laughed, and the couple broke apart.

  Then Arthur came over to me and put his arms around me, and said, “We’re going to be brothers, ’arry.”

  “He doesn’t understand,” Lily said.

  “Haven’t you told him yet?”

  “No, but I’m going to now. ’arry, come with me.” She led me away from the group, and over to one of the tables on the lawn, where we both sat, opposite each other. She leaned across toward me and spoke earnestly. “’arry, you must try to understand what this is all about. I’m going to marry Arthur this afternoon. I know Mam doesn’t want me to marry him because he’s a Christian, and I know this is going to hurt her very badly. But I can’t help it, ’arry. I love Arthur, and he loves me, and this is all that matters to us. I brought you here because I wanted one of my family, at least, to be here at my wedding. When you go home I want you to tell Mam you saw me getting married and how happy I am. You’ll be going home alone, because Arthur and I will stay here tonight. Later on we’ll go to Manchester to live, and I’ll work there, and Arthur will finish his studies at the university. We will come back to the street tomorrow to get our things. I’ll talk to Mam then, and maybe she won’t feel so badly about it all. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded. But I was a little bewildered by it all, and something else hadn’t been explained. “But aren’t you going to America?” I asked.

  “No.” She shook her head. “Mam will know that I’m not going.”

  Arthur came over to us. “Everything all right?” he asked.

  Lily nodded. “’arry understands. It’s a bit of a shock to him, I think, but he’ll get used to it, and so will they all.”

  “I’m sure of that,” said Arthur. “Can we get married now? They’re all waiting for us.”

  Lily rose, and I got up with her and followed them. The wedding took place there on the lawn in front of the Seventeen Windows. There was nothing religious about the ceremony. The man who performed it was an official of the Socialist Party, a short, stocky man with red hair, and the words he spoke bore little resemblance to those of any ordinary marriage ceremony. Arthur and Lily stood in front of him, holding each other’s hands. They made a lovely couple, Arthur so tall and handsome in his white flannels and Lily in her beautiful white dress and dark hair flowing behind, everyone gathered around them silent and still, and in the background, as the red-haired man intoned the words that were to unite the couple, came the sweet, faint sound of birds in the trees, and the rich scent of flowers all around us.

  There was something very beautiful in the setting that has always stuck in my mind, and when it was over the silence broke suddenly as everyone swarmed around the couple to congratulate them, and then bursting into the Internationale, singing it in hearty voices. Much laughter followed, and Mrs. Fogg’s waitresses began bringing out refreshments and drinks. Then it began to rain, and there were little screams and shouts as everyone rushed inside to keep from getting drenched.

  The rain was heavier than before, but didn’t dampen spirits. Inside, everybody crowded around the tables that had been pushed together to make a long one. Lily and Arthur had me sit right near them, and she made sure that I had plenty of Mrs. Fogg’s watercress and cucumber sandwiches. These were being served along with her custard tarts and scones, and pots of tea, and glasses of champagne and stout and porter. I had never eaten so much in my life, and my face grew red and swollen with contentment. All around me there was talk and laughter and singing, mostly revolutionary songs, and one irreverent piece I have always remembered:

  “Long-haired preachers come out every night,

  Try to tell us what’s wrong and what’s right.

  When you ask them for something to eat,

  They will answer in voices so sweet.

  You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”

  I heard that sung by the red-haired man who had married them, with all the others joining in toward the end, accompanied by much table thumping. It was over at last, for me, that is. Lily thought I should start back before it got dark. Arthur said he would walk me part of the way to the tram. We set off together, after Lily had kissed me and hugged me and wept a little and told me again to tell Mam how happy she was. She would see her tomorrow, Lily said, and talk to her then about everything. Mam was not to feel too bad about Lily not going to America.

  Arthur had to pull me away from her, otherwise she might have held me still longer. I had to trot to keep up with his long stride. He seemed anxious to get away from the inn, but I think it was chiefly because he had something to say to me. The rain had stopped, and the sun had come out again, though it was low in the sky. You could hear the dripping from the trees as we climbed up the hill, and a fresh, sweet smell rose from the grass.

  Arthur began talking when we were halfway up the hill. “’arry,” he said, “I can’t tell you how happy I feel today, how good everything seems, and how right. But I know it must be very strange to you. Especially to a lad from our street, where there’s two sides, and each is supposed to be different from the other. That’s how we grow up, isn’t it? That’s how it used to be with me when I was your age. But it’s all wrong. It isn’t like that at all. We’re not very different from one another, not different at all, in fact. We’re all just people with the same needs, the same desires, the same feelings. It’s a lie about us being different. It’s something they cooked up so we’d be fighting one another instead of them, the ones who keep us down and make their fortunes off our labor, the same ones who send us off to war when they get to fighting among themselves over the spoils. You’ll find that out someday. They’ll be calling on you to go to war for them, you can be sure of that, because there’s going to be lots more wars in the future. I got in one myself, as you know. I saw men getting killed and wounded and crippled, and I must have killed a lot of men myself, and I’m just sick every time I think of it.

  “Why? Because we were fighting one another instead of those who’d sent us out there. Oh, they’re clever, those capitalists. It’s hard to beat them at their game. They’ve got us fooled with words like patriotism and duty and honor, and they’ve got us divided up into classes and religions so that each one of us figures he’s better than the other. But it’ll all change, ’arry. Believe me, it will. People get smarter. The human brain has a potential for development. Someday it will grow big enough so that everybody will see and understand the truth, and then we won’t act like a bunch of sheep, and then that wall that separates the two sides of our street will crumble, just like the wall of Jericho. Maybe Lily and I gave it a little push today. But one day you’ll hear a trumpet blow, and then it will be all gone. Oh yes, ’arry, we’re going to have a better world. Things won’t always be the way they are now. There’ll be good times for all of us, not just a few. Mind what I say now. I
promise you, there’ll be a better world than the one we’re living in today.”

  He was drunk. He had one arm around my shoulders, and leaned down to speak to me, and I could smell the champagne on his breath as he spoke. But he was drunk with happiness as well. I had never heard him speak so much and so rapidly without a pause. I had not said a word the entire time.

  Before we knew it, we were at the tram stop. Arthur came to with surprise. “I never intended to go this far,” he said. “But I did, and now I’ll say so long and you can get on the tram, and don’t you be afraid, ’arry of what you have to say when you get home. Your mother will listen to you. She’s a good woman, your mother. I like her a lot, and respect her, and you can tell her that if you want.”

  I sat on the top deck of the tram going home. It started to rain again and I was all alone up there. When the conductor came up to get my penny he grumbled and asked if the bottom deck wasn’t good enough for me, and he muttered something under his breath I managed to catch. “You Jews are all alike.”

  It was still raining when I got off at Mersey Square, and by the time I got home I was soaked. My mother looked at me in consternation, and said, “I told you to take an umbrella, but you didn’t listen. Where’s Lily?”

  I told her.

  DEATH WAS DARKNESS. I had learned that already in the one or two funerals we had had on our street, one during the war when Sam Harris was killed and the Harrises sat shivah and my mother took me in there to sit with them. So I already knew. Window shades were all drawn down. Any mirrors that might have caught a gleam of light from somewhere were covered with dark cloth. Everyone sat in the darkness in their stocking feet.

  And now I sat in my own house in my stocking feet in the darkness, with my older brothers beside me, and Rose next to them holding my baby brother, and my mother and father on the other side of her. Other people, neighbors, sat about the room, some on upturned orange and apple crates, because there were not enough chairs. Everyone was very still, my mother especially. How terribly silent she was, with her head bent to the floor. I kept looking at her, wishing she would move or say something.