After a pause Erica added, trying to steady her voice, “It wasn’t her fault. That’s what is so rotten about it.”
“Yes,” said Marc.
A little later she said, “You’ve got to understand why I could-n’t give in to Charles. It’s not facts that hurt people, it’s their attitude toward facts. I’m not responsible for Charles’ attitude toward you and toward something that only concerns us. I can’t make you pay for it, because it’s not fair. I can’t help his attitude, I can’t change it. He invents half his own suffering, and I can’t make you suffer instead, simply because my father chooses to think that ...”
“I know what he thinks I am.”
She turned to him and put her arms around him and said with tears running down her face again, “Marc, I love you so much!”
“Don’t cry, darling. It doesn’t help.”
She knew now that there was no longer any chance, even for a miracle, and she said, “I wanted these last three days to be perfect, so that when you went away, you’d remember what it was like at the end, and maybe the rest of it wouldn’t be so important ...”
“But you see, Eric, this is just the end of the rest of it.”
He took out his handkerchief and wiped away her tears and smiled at her. Then the smile faded from his oblique, greenish eyes and he asked, “What else did you want, darling?”
“I wanted you to believe — to believe in us. I wanted you to go overseas believing in us. I don’t care how long I have to wait, that isn’t what matters.”
Her throat was aching intolerably but she was no longer crying. She managed to say quite evenly, “I don’t think I matter much either. What does matter is you. I can’t bear the idea of your going overseas with nothing to come back to at the end of it but a world in which there is no place for you and me.”
He said despairingly, “Eric, I can’t ... I can’t ...”
“It’s all right, darling,” she said quietly. “I know you can’t.” When they got back to the hotel, the church clock in the village down at the other end of the lake was striking six. A telegram had come for Erica some hours before; it was from her father and contained only the four words, “Anthony is reported missing.”
XIII
The town of Manchester lies sprawled along the shore of a lake and faces over a few scattered granite islands toward an empty western horizon. At the back of the town is a stretch of open country cleared and farmed by French-Canadian families, with fields and pastures which become steadily poorer and rougher as they approach the bush. The bush is a stony, tangled wilderness of trees and undergrowth cut by a few roads, spotted with little blue lakes and crossed and recrossed by innumerable small streams. Behind the bush are the Algoma Hills, rising high, strong, and magnificently coloured against the clear northern sky. This is the edge of the mining country; this is the beginning of Canada’s North.
Manchester itself is a tribute to the Canadian talent for choosing a remarkably fine natural setting for a town, and then proceeding to ruin it as far as possible. There is an interminably long, straight main street running parallel with the shore, flanked by the inevitable collection of two- and three-storey office buildings, shops, gas stations, beauty parlors, Chinese laundries, pool rooms, soda fountains, cheap restaurants, movie houses, and the usual Protestant and Catholic churches, apparently dedicated, like most of the buildings in English Canada, to the Puritan proposition that even in architecture, beauty is unnecessary and possibly even dangerous. Below the main street are warehouses, rundown dwellings, a few factories, great piles of lumber, a sawmill, and the docks. The whole region smells slightly of stagnant water and rotting wood. Above the main street is the residential district, a series of tree-shaded streets intersecting at right angles, with houses set well back and surrounded by lawns, bushes, and scattered flower beds.
In Austria the Reisers had been timber merchants for some generations, and when Leopold Reiser came out to Canada in 1907, he bought a small planing mill in Manchester and settled there with his wife and four-year-old son, David. Marc was born two years later in the house in which his parents were still living when he went home on his last leave in September, 1942.
It was a comfortable house painted white with green shutters and a wide front porch screened on three sides by lilac bushes. In the living room there was an upright piano which nobody ever played, some glassed-in bookcases containing, among other works, a complete set of Schiller which nobody ever read, a chesterfield suite upholstered in dark blue plush but fortunately covered with chintz of an inoffensive pattern during the summer months, a canary named Mike which never sang, and half a dozen ferns in polished brass pots. Behind the living room was the dining room which was fairly large, but still not quite large enough to do justice to the fine, old, highly polished and somewhat massive furniture which had been brought from Austria. The kitchen had windows on two sides and took up most of the remaining space on the ground floor except for cupboards and a sort of drawing-room opposite the living room, which nobody ever used. Up the wide oak staircases there were four bedrooms, a bathroom and sunroom, and on the top floor, one room well furnished for the general servant of the moment, and three others full of trunks, hockey sticks, skates, schoolbooks, fishing tackle, and everything else which Maria Reiser could not bear to throw out.
The town was about two thirds Protestant and one third Catholic, with only a few Jewish families who were too small a community to afford the upkeep of a temple or synagogue. For the two most important festivals of the year, they were accustomed to hire the public hall down on the main street, and one of the older German or Polish Jews would conduct the services. The hall was a long, narrow building facing almost due north, so that the small congregation had to sit at right angles to the platform at the other end, and with an expanse of bare floor on either side of them, in order that the Ark might stand against the east wall.
In the third year of the war, the services of Yom Kippur were taken by a young student rabbi who had arrived in Manchester a week before to visit his cousins, the Rabinovitches, who owned the clothing store. Neither Orthodox nor especially devout, the Reisers had come to Kol Nidre on the eve of the Day of Atonement and then did not return until early the following afternoon. It was Monday, September 21st, of the Jewish year 5703.
Although the rows of hard wooden chairs were divided by an aisle down the middle, with most of the women on the left and the men on the right, the Reisers were sitting together near the back, first Leopold Reiser, then Marc and his mother. The opening of the service made no impression on Marc; after four days at home he was still unable to stop thinking of Erica, and he got up and sat down as the rest of the congregation got up and sat down, his eyes wandering from the little pulpit to the high reading stand and the tired face of the young student rabbi, and then to the Ark with the two seven-branched candlesticks on either side, fourteen points of light flickering in the rather dusty air of the hall, and finally back to the student rabbi again. His leave was almost up; by Tuesday night he would be on the train for Montreal, where he would see Erica again for a few hours, and then take the seven-thirty train to Halifax. Except for those few hours he might never see her again, and he had not only failed her completely, he had also failed himself. He did not know how it had happened or when it had begun to happen, but he did know that it was he himself who had got off the track, and that if he hadn’t, in spite of Charles Drake and everyone else, it would not have turned out like this.
A thick-set, middle-aged man had been summoned to the high reading stand and through some kind of break in his thoughts Marc became conscious of the new voice, less fine and resonant, but fresher and stronger than the voice of the tired young rabbi. He missed the first few sentences and then heard the words,
So the shipmaster came and said unto him, What meanest thou, O Sleeper? Arise, call upon thy God, if so be that God will think upon us that we perish not.
What meanest thou, O Sleeper?
If he could find out
what he, Marc Reiser, actually meant, then he would know what to do, if it were still possible to do anything, when all the time he had left was the time between two trains. For some reason or other he had expected the problem to clarify itself once he was home and back in his own environment, but after four days he was still living in two worlds and the world in which he had grown up was less real than the world he had left on Wednesday night, after going with Erica as far as the front door of the house up in Westmount and then returning to the station to catch the westbound train for Manchester, on the transcontinental line. He was not, in fact, back in his own environment in any but a purely physical sense, and with only one more day to go, his own existence was as meaningless as ever.
Someone coughed, and one of the women in the front row on the left was wearing a taffeta blouse which rustled every time she moved, but the profound silence, which was heightened by the steady voice of the reader, continued unbroken and undisturbed by the faint noises from the street outside. You would not have thought that forty people could be so still and make so little sound, when many of them were old enough to be stiff with fatigue from twenty hours of fasting and many hours of prayer, and some of them were very young. The dusty, commonplace, smalltown public hall was pervaded with a spirit of unity and faith which went back to the remote beginnings of this people in a country far away, and then returned, steadily broadening out until it had encompassed the world and made these men and women and children one with those who had died long ago, and with those who had died only yesterday and those who were dying today, and with those who would die tomorrow. There was no past and no present; the interminable, timeless stream ebbed and flowed and from synagogues and temples, houses and hired halls, barracks, concentration camps, prisons, torture chambers, and pitiful, futile barricades, the Jews of the world were drawn together across time and space on this Day of Atonement and were made one with God.
Then said they unto him, Tell us, we pray thee, for whose cause this evil is upon us; what is thine occupation and whence comest thou? what is thy country and of what people art thou? and he said unto them: I am an Hebrew....
Once a barrister and now a soldier about to go overseas, born and bred in Canada, a Canadian of Jewish origin.
What is a Jew?
Now, if ever, with his eyes fixed on a seven-branched candlestick and the words of the Yom Kippur service in his ears, surrounded by his own people and only by his own people, he should be able to find the answer to that riddle once and for all, and he waited, but the answer did not come.
He realized that his sense of identity with the men and women around him was more of race, of race suffering and race achievement, than of religion, for his religious convictions involved only a simple belief in one God, one God for everyone regardless of sect and regardless of the form or worship. Nothing is so timeless as the atmosphere of a synagogue, and whenever he had gone into one of the great synagogues of Montreal or Toronto or London, his immediate reaction had been one of an almost overwhelming sense of history and tradition so ancient and so powerful that even if he had wanted to escape, it would have bound him indissolubly and forever to his own people.
Yet even the word “race” was misleading, for even supposing there had been such a thing as a specifically Jewish race, the racial force was not by itself strong enough to survive and, from a sociological, much less from an anthropological point of view, to identify a Jew whose family had lived for centuries in England or Austria with a Jew whose family had lived as long or longer in Poland. The English, Austrian and Polish environments were too dissimilar.
Having been forced to rule out both race and religion on a logical basis, he was still a Jew, however, and he could not conceive of being anything else. He could feel his own Jewishness in his very bones and he was proud to be what he was, partly because of that long, unbroken continuity of history and tradition, that unending record of faith and sheer guts, and partly because, in spite of everything which the so-called Christian nations had done to them, his own people had continued to give the world such a disproportionately large number of great men to whom humanity would be eternally indebted. As a Canadian and a Jew, he had to admit that eleven million Canadians had so far failed to produce one individual as outstanding as uncounted living Jews, out of a total world population before Hitler of approximately sixteen million — let alone the innumerable Jewish scientists, philosophers, and artists no longer living.
Have mercy upon Zion for it is the home of our life.
He knew that his mother was looking at him again with that expression of uncertainty and concern that he had seen so often in her face during the past two days before she had caught his eyes and quickly looked away again. She was worried about him. So was his father, who was staring straight ahead with his prayer book open at the wrong page. What were they worried about? What did they think he could do between trains? The danger had been averted; they were safe now, the Drakes were safe, everybody was safe except Erica and himself, and since they were bound to get over it sooner or later, no one doubted that for a moment, then presumably sooner or later he and Erica would be safe too.
So what does it all add up to? Apart from safety, of course. It adds up to everybody going on forever playing the game according to the rules, each on his own side of the fence. It adds up to precisely nothing.
Blessed art thou, O Lord, the Shield of David.
The young student rabbi left the high reading stand and went to the Ark. One of the readers pulled a cord and the doors of the Ark rolled back, revealing the sacred Scrolls. And from one of them the rabbi read:
Let them praise the Name of the Lord; for his name alone is exalted.
Then from the congregation Marc heard a low murmur of voices, and he glanced hurriedly down at his mother’s prayer book. She put her fingers on the place to show him where they were, and he repeated with the others:
His glory is above the earth and heaven. He also hath lifted up the horn of his people, the praise of all his saints, even the children of Israel, a people near unto him.
A people near unto him — in this year, 5703; in this year, 1942. Yet the unbroken and unbreakable faith contained in those five words had finally caught him up and carried him along with the others, through the psalm, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” and the replacing of the Scroll. The doors of the Ark were closed again and the rabbi said:
O Lord open thou my lips and my mouth shall declare thy praise.
Blessed art thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob.
Soon after that his mind began to cloud over and he lost track again. He found himself watching the people in the rows in front of him, thinking that although Erica understood so much, she could never really understand his feeling of having deserted them, in some way, by marrying her. It would be like going over to the other side, or like deliberately creating a breach in their own defences — if not in his own mind, then in the minds of the other Jews. Now more than ever before, the ranks must be closed to all outsiders.
His father had said something like that to him when he had told him about Erica on Sunday night. Although he had arrived late on Thursday, he had said nothing about her to either of his parents until he had been home for three days. He had slept late on Friday morning, exhausted from the strain of being with her for two days and yet not feeling as though he were with her at all, then taking her back to Montreal after that telegram about her brother, and finally, the interminable aching hours in the train.
When he had come downstairs on Friday morning, his father had already left for the mill on the edge of town, but his mother was still sitting in the dining room waiting for him. They had talked for almost two hours. She had asked him questions about himself and the Army and going overseas, and had given him news of various people, sitting at the head of the big mahogany table with the sun coming through the windows of the dining room and lighting up her dark, greying hair and her lovely
dark eyes. She was almost sixty, but she looked younger, and unlike his father, had never put on weight, in spite of the fact that she was naturally seRené and rather passive, while his father was nervous and extremely active.
He had thought that she had noticed nothing; it was just like all the other long and leisurely breakfasts on his first morning home, until she asked suddenly as she was getting up, “Marc, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” As she went on looking down at him, he added, “I’ll tell you some other time. It’s nothing to worry about.”
It was characteristic of her that she had let it go at that, and left it to him to bring up the subject again in his own time. It was characteristic of both his parents. He had been brought up in a family of four very different individuals who respected each other and would argue passionately and at length on impersonal issues, but who said only what was necessary and then usually only when they were asked for an opinion on questions which affected any one of them directly.
On Sunday night, after they’d got home from Kol Nidre, it had taken his father less than a quarter of an hour to say all that he had to say about Erica.
He had spent most of those three days wandering about the town where the first seventeen years of his life lay spread out like the pieces in a puzzle, simply waiting to be put together. Three blocks away from the house was the public school where he had started in kindergarten. There were some Jewish children in the upper classes and later a few behind him, but he had gone through the next six years on his own. He didn’t mind it; small towns are more democratic than big cities, and apart from a few peltings with snowballs and a couple of fights with an Irish Catholic whose parents had become violently anti-Semitic after their badly run tailoring establishment had failed owing to competition with the new and well-run firm of Rabinovitch and Son, he was never singled out because he was Jewish. Protestants, Catholics, and Marc Reiser skated together in winter, played baseball and went fishing in the spring, fished, swam, and played more baseball in the summer, and switched to football, rabbit hunting, hiking, and corn roasts in the autumn. Marc was popular, good at games, liked fishing and football best of all, and didn’t particularly like to work.
Earth and High Heaven Page 28
