Unto the Soul

by Aharon Appelfeld

  Gad roused from his fatigue and said, “You don’t say ‘May he rest in peace’ about a dog.”

  “What do you say?”

  “You don’t say anything.”

  “He lived with us for seven years in a row.”

  “What do you want from me?” he said, and his body sank onto the couch.

  CHAPTER 22

  Next day they slept late, and when they woke up the sun stood high in the sky and it was ten o’clock. “All night I dreamt about our town,” said Amalia, without moving from her bed.

  “And what did the dreams show you?”

  “The town was quiet, but no one remembered me. I remembered everyone, but they didn’t remember me.”

  “And you didn’t remind them?” He intervened.

  “I didn’t know what to say, as though they hadn’t ever seen me. I wasn’t afraid, but I had a feeling of heaviness. It was hard for me to walk. It was summer, like here, but still it was very hard for me to walk.”

  “And you didn’t say, ‘I’m Amalia’?”

  “It didn’t occur to me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went down the narrow street to the Ruthenian market. There they remembered me and asked about you. I told them I was pregnant.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Nothing. They were glad to see me and handed me pears.”

  Gad went outside. Limzy greeted him with barks of joy, and he gave the dog leftovers from the night, sausage and spinach pie. The courtyard was open and lit up, and from the shaded corners arose the odor of damp plants. Mauzy’s death didn’t show on Limzy. He ate with a good appetite, seemingly happy not to compete for food. The sky was high and pure, and a sharp silence was spread over the peaks. Not until he opened the barn did Gad remember and know that dreams had tortured him all night too.

  In the empty women’s section of the synagogue had sat the old teacher Reb Hayim Yosef, who examined him on the subject of the ash of the red heifer. When he was a boy he had known that chapter perfectly, but now it was virtually erased from his head. His prolonged silence aroused the old man from his fatigue, and he asked, “Don’t you remember anything? Not even a single detail?”

  “No, sir, Rabbi.”

  “Why are you calling me ‘sir’ and ‘Rabbi’?” The old man opened his eyes wide.

  “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be called?”

  “I’m not a sir and I’m not a rabbi.” The old man raised his voice.

  “Pardon me.”

  “When you were six years old you were tested, and you knew it, and now you don’t know a thing.”

  “What can I do?”

  “If that’s how things are,” said the old man, “I can close my eyes. There’s no good in examining your deeds. Without memory a man is comparable to an animal, and an animal is judged neither leniently nor harshly. Do you understand?” He closed his eyes.

  When Gad returned from the barn, Amalia was still lying curled up in bed.

  “Didn’t you make a cup of coffee?” he asked in a crushed voice.

  “Right away,” she said and jumped out of bed.

  Amalia poured a little kerosene on the chopped wood and lit the stove. She took butter and cheese out of the pantry and placed them on the table. Light filled the kitchen and the two bedrooms.

  “Did something happen?” Amalia asked.

  “Nothing. I’m hungry.”

  Amalia sliced the bread, put down two plates, and touched the kettle with her fingers. “In a little while,” she said in her normal voice.

  Nevertheless, he couldn’t restrain himself. “Couldn’t you have lit the stove and made me a cup of coffee?”

  Amalia did not reply. She bent her head, and the brightness from the window illuminated her.

  After the meal Gad took the spade and the hoe and headed toward the peak near the house. Amalia did not ask him where he was going. She followed his movements closely as he departed until he was out of sight. Apparently his senses had betrayed him. Mauzy had not fallen immediately. He had kept running. Gad found him with his mouth wide open, sprawled in a ditch. An expression of anger had congealed on his face. Dogs always leave the world with an expression of anger. The thought flashed through his mind.

  He immediately set to work. He dug a long deep trench, and without hesitation he walked over to the carcass and picked it up with his two hands, immediately laying it in the trench. That work, which didn’t take a long time, left his arms very weak, but he recovered himself, took up the hoe, and within a few minutes filled the pit.

  Afterward, as though distracted, he loaded the spade and the hoe on his shoulder and turned in the direction of the cemetery. For a long time he walked without any thoughts. The morning lights were warm, and they filtered through his shirt. That contact evoked a desire to lay his body on the earth, to close his eyes and be absorbed into the pleasant silence for a while. But he immediately grasped that first he must return home and wash his fouled hands.

  When he got back to the house, Amalia was standing by the window. After he left the house she had stood up to watch him. In her imagination she had seen Mauzy, not shot and dead but sunk in a deep slumber. That impression had grown stronger within her when she saw how he had picked up the carcass with his two hands and placed it in the trench. But when he had taken the hoe in his hands and started to heap clods of earth into the trench, she knew the truth and called out loud, “Don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him,” and she immediately froze in place. Thus she stood by the window until Gad entered the house.

  “He apparently died without pain.” He tried to sweeten her sadness a little. That consideration raised a twisted smile on Amalia’s lips, and she hid her face in both hands. Now it seemed to him that she was about to burst into tears, so he addressed her clearly, saying, “You mustn’t weep over animals. Even over humans you mustn’t cry too much.” Hearing that reprimand, she took her hands away from her face and the twisted smile slipped on her lips. Gad added, “The Sages warned us not to become too attached to animals. They corrupt the spirit.”

  Afterward he approached the water barrel and washed his hands with lye soap. The angry expression of the dog once again appeared before his eyes. The desire to bite had not ceased with his death. It’s good that he departed the world, Gad thought.

  Amalia asked, in a voice not her own, “Are you going to the cemetery?”

  “I have to finish the fence and prepare the gate. The pilgrims are about to show up.”

  “We’re going to have cucumbers in the garden again,” she replied irrelevantly.

  “We have to guard the vegetable gardens and the orchard. That’s a secure living. Who knows who will come and what they’ll bring?”

  At first he was going to take the spade with him, but he remembered that the spade was impure and he had to plunge it into the earth to purify it, which is what he did.

  On the way he remembered that Passover and the Feast of Weeks had been lost in time, and there was no sign within him that they had come. A sort of belated remorse pinched his chest. In the first year of their sojourn on the mountaintop they had still held a Passover Seder. Amalia had made the stove and their utensils fit for the holiday, and they had baked matzoth, not according to all the strictures of the Plain, but still they had made everything fit. The winter had been hard, and the winds had plucked tiles off the roof, and the two of them, at the height of the frost, had had to repair what could be fixed. Hardest of all had been the collapse of the barn. They had saved the cow from the ruins and, having no choice, they had quartered it in one of the bedrooms.

  The cemetery was lit up by the sun. The night rains had watered the earth, and, despite the lateness of the hour, the moist odor of weeds still wafted up from the gravestones. Seven years ago they had arrived there. Then too the day had been high and bright, and Uncle Arieh had stood at the door of the house, raised both his arms, and said, “It’s good that you’ve come.” His face was broad and pockmarked, and he had the
n seemed, at first glance, to be a judge hewn from the Bible. During the few days they had stayed with him, he had taught them lessons in construction, irrigation, plowing, and harrowing. About matters of faith he barely spoke. Once Gad had asked him what one does when one loses track of time. “Nothing,” was his surprising answer. Afterward he corrected himself and said, “You go down below, stop a wagon, and ask.” He spoke little, to the heart of the matter, and without ornament. They were not used to that kind of speech, and they were perplexed. Later he had shown them the peak. He did not raise his voice or use any exceptional word. He did not even quote a single verse. Gad had been astonished in his soul that a man who had lived for years in the company of holy tombs wouldn’t speak even a single word out of the Bible. Now he clearly remembered the robust expression of his uncle’s face, the way he sat straight in the straw-cushioned chair, as though he had not gone to his eternal rest but rather still sat and looked at the peaks as they gradually grew darker in the evening.

  CHAPTER 23

  The next morning, as though they had risen from a deep pit, the first pilgrims appeared, a group of tall, lean people. Before them stepped two boys dressed in long linen tunics. The boys looked, perhaps because of their erect gait, like gentile choirboys. Gad, who had intended to ask for payment immediately as they entered, was surprised and did not stop them. They overran the place, without asking permission or offering a word of greeting, and then headed straight for the cemetery.

  When he had recovered somewhat he let Limzy off his chain, clipped a short leash to his collar, and went toward the cemetery too.

  “Where are you going?” Amalia tried to delay him.

  “Don’t you see?”

  “What am I to do?” she cried out loud.

  “Watch over the house. That’s all,” he said and ran out.

  Amalia shuttered the windows, lit the lantern, and went down to the cellar.

  When he reached the cemetery the people were already scattered among the tombstones, praying and weeping. The two boys stood near the entrance gate. Earnestness clung to their features, as though they were about to start singing.

  “Where do you come from?” One of the lean men addressed Gad.

  “What do you mean? This is my place,” Gad said out loud.

  “You have property rights?”

  “Dating back five generations.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about the place, but I myself am here for the first time.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “By foot.”

  “There weren’t any wagons?”

  “We were afraid to enter the villages, because of the dogs they sicked against us.”

  “This dog is a good one,” said Gad.

  “I can see,” the man replied, smiling.

  The people scattered about reminded him of the summer before, but this time they seemed more miserable. That was evident in the women’s faces. Their hair was gray and disheveled, as only grief will affect a person’s hair.

  “What happened in the Plain?” Gad asked the man standing at his side.

  “A typhus epidemic has spread through the entire area. People are dying like flies.”

  “What can one do?” asked Gad, immediately regretting his question.

  “People do everything and nothing at all,” said the man, smiling again.

  “And who suggested that you come here?” asked Gad in the gray voice of a storekeeper.

  “What do you mean, who? Is there any more holy place? If the gates of heaven do not open here, where will they be opened? You tell me.” The man’s voice drew him on.

  In the past healthy people had also joined the pilgrims, people who had not been tried by afflictions, in solidarity with the sufferers. They used to give to charity and take care of the elderly. At the end of the visit something of the sadness of the sufferers would also cling to them. This year no one like that was to be seen. Grief was stamped on all faces, and it was clear they had not only come to pray but also to tear open the tombs, to awaken the fathers from their sleep so they would defend babes who had not sinned. At one time Gad too had been involved in those prayerful struggles, participating and helping, but this time murky selfishness swamped him, and he looked at them from a distance as though they were not brothers in sorrow.

  A woman, no longer young, dressed in a long buttoned dress, approached him and said, “That dog frightens me.”

  “I’m holding him tightly on the leash,” Gad replied.

  “All the way, dogs molested us. I thought that here I’d find a moment of repose.”

  “Who will guard this place?” Gad raised his voice.

  “Do the martyrs need to be guarded?”

  “A cemetery is a cemetery. If one doesn’t guard it, the fence will collapse, the tombstones will fall down, and the place will fall prey to crows and wolves. Don’t you understand that?”

  The woman bent her head as though reprimanded and asked, “The dog won’t bite me?”

  “I promise you,” he said without looking at her.

  At first he had it in mind to open the synagogue, but he didn’t open it. He took the alms box out of the back room, stood at the gate, raised the heavy box, and in the voice of a gravedigger he proclaimed, “Charity will save you from death.” He immediately put the container down at the gate and stepped back a little. Limzy uttered a few clipped barks. The people were alarmed but didn’t flee. The women prayed in Yiddish, mentioning the names of the sick and asking mercy for them. No one stepped up to the alms box to slip a coin into it.

  Thus it had been the year before, as well. No one had bothered asking how one lived here. Where does the firewood come from? The food? Who drives away the vandals so they won’t profane the graves? He was almost about to raise the box and shout, Without charity there can be no redemption. Whoever doesn’t give charity, Limzy will drive him off!

  That very moment one of the old men rose and called out, “Children, afternoon prayers.” Everyone rose from where they were lying and went out to the clearing to stand and pray. Gad did not join the worshipers. He stood at the side and looked at them, and the more he watched, the more anger flooded him. Without delaying another moment, he turned and went away.

  When he reached the house, he found the door locked and the windows shuttered, and a suspicious silence lay all about. He immediately pounded on the door with his fist and shouted, “Open up!” For some reason it seemed to him that the man with whom Amalia had conversed two years ago had sneaked in, and now they were copulating in the bed. When she was slow to open, he pounded, this time with both fists.

  “Who’s there?” he heard a panicked voice.

  “It’s me.”

  Amalia opened the door. Her face was wrapped in darkness, and a kind of foolish smile hovered on her lips.

  “What have you been doing?” he asked like a peasant.

  “Nothing at all. I was in the cellar.”

  “How come?”

  “I was frightened.”

  “And you didn’t prepare lunch?”

  She hid her face in both hands. Now it seemed to him that she was about to cry.

  He immediately changed his tone and said, “No one bothered to slip a cent into the alms box. I left the box in the middle of the gateway, so they can’t say they didn’t see it.”

  “Didn’t you say anything?” asked Amalia in a frightened voice.

  “They are busy with themselves,” he answered in a gentile voice.

  “I’m glad,” she said, and the foolishness returned to her face.

  “We should have stopped them at the gate.”

  “Correct,” she said, and she knew that with that word she had won his heart.

  Later, when he had consumed the meal, his face relaxed. The thought that the people had not discovered her pregnancy was comforting to him, as though he had managed to delude them. After the meal he did not return to the cemetery, as was his habit. He leaned on the wall, beside the shuttered windows, as though he were s
tanding in order to hear the noises outside.

  “Why don’t we have a drink?” he said.

  “Right away,” she said, glad he wasn’t scolding her.

  After a few drinks he sank to his knees and said, “I felt very bad.”

  “Why?” She wanted to draw close to him.

  “I was afraid of them.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll go straight to Moldovitsa. The gentile crones will take me in. No one there asks where you come from or where you’re going. It’s a pretty place.”

  This was the first Gad had heard about the plan, and he was shocked. He too knew who went there and for what purpose. “It’s a Christian place.”

  “Only a woman can understand another woman’s sorrow.” She remembered a saying she had heard in her childhood.

  “You should go to Jews and not to Christians.” He spoke without meaning it.

  “The old women in Moldovitsa know just what has to be done. They are experienced, and there’s nothing to fear.”

  “And you won’t come back here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “As for me,” he said, “this place is stifling.”

  “And where do you want to go?” She chuckled for some reason.

  “I swore to Uncle Arieh. Were it not for that oath, I would renounce my claim to the place.”

  She knew he was lying, but she didn’t make any comment.

  Later, Limzy’s hoarse barks were heard outside.

  “He misses Mauzy,” said Amalia.

  “How do you know?”

  “He never barked that way before.”

  “Dogs have short memories,” he said, but he himself, as though in spite, now remembered Mauzy’s stiff carcass and the two bare fangs, and a shiver passed down his body.

  CHAPTER 24

  That night they drank slowly, but a lot. The slivovitz kindled his imagination, and he spoke about a high wall that would surround the peak. Entry would be granted only to a few, not to sick people anymore, nor to those who had been in contact with the sick. There are enough cemeteries in the area, and they mustn’t dump all their troubles in one place. Entry would be granted to quiet people, who don’t raise a hubbub, and who don’t mix into other people’s lives, but who pray quietly, and without unnecessary contortions, and who return home after their prayers.