“Wolves?” I cry out. “Are you there?”
An echo throws these stupid words back into my face. They have tricked me. And now I wait for them to pounce, to tear my dead body into a thousand pieces.
Quickly, I recite the Vidui, as one must before one dies.
Of course, if I am already dead, the prayer may be superfluous.
I drop to my knees and brace myself. The snow moistens my trouser legs.
“Look, wolves!” I shout, throwing away my walking stick. “I have no weapons now! Nothing to beat you back with. Nothing to defend myself!”
But nothing happens and, finally, I must stand and retrieve the stick, which I shake at them in a rage, screaming into the copse.
“I’m not going to wait all night! In the freezing cold!” I shout. And the echo shouts back at me. “If you’re going to devour me, devour me now! Or else let’s forget the entire thing!”
“Wolves!” I scream, listening for a reply.
The snow begins to fall, with its soft sounds.
“Wolves? Can you hear me?” I say.
But they must have moved off.
“Wolves … ?”
25
By the time I return to our camp, limping and frozen, my hand swollen where the wolf has bitten it, there is a red glow low on the horizon. Dawn. A cadre of volunteers moves silently among the sleeping Jews, stirring and shaking them, rousing them gently for morning prayers. I watch as various ones rise and begin to move about, shaking the feeling back into their legs, careful not to damage the morning’s fragile silences. Their eyes are bleary with sleep, and they look about, uncertain where they are or even how they came to be here. Some wash their hands in the snow, reciting the blessings softly. Others simply rub a handful into their gashed faces. Attempting to stand on uncertain legs, a woman falls back onto her haunches, stifling a giddy reel of laughter. “Avigdor,” she whispers to her sleeping husband. “Come, help me up. We’re alive.”
The sun slips, like a thief, through a crack in the clouds, tossing a spray of solar diamonds onto the slanting fields.
Wrapping their blankets about them, many of the men begin to pray. The women pray, in groups, behind them. They whirl and sway, like ghouls, these half-devoured Jews. I watch from a copse of trees, unable to join in. What can God be thinking? I turn away and lean my back against a tree.
It’s then that I see him.
My hands instinctively rise above my head. Elevated, the bitten one pulses and throbs with a searing blue pain.
A young soldier points his rifle at my face.
“One step more,” he says, “and I’ll kill you again.”
26
What can God be thinking! This blasphemous thought forces its way back into my head, like an anarchist into the czarina’s bedroom. His gun against my spine, the soldier pushes me into the woods and away from the others. My wounded hand, raised high, aches and throbs. It’s growing infected, I can tell. I can feel the pus collecting in the piercings of the teethmarks. This, more than anything else, infuriates me. That I should be marched off by some hooligan with unsound morals when my wounds need tending!
“Keep marching, keep marching, that’s right,” his voice is flat and nasal. It cuts into my nerves like an acid. The circular tip of his gun keeps poking into my back with a bruising indifference. The crunching of his heavy boots in the dry snow is finally more than I can bear.
“All right! Enough foolishness!” I say, turning to face him. Taking its long barrel between both hands, I thrust the other end of his gun against his chest, knocking sharply into him with a hard dull thud. Where I receive the strength to pummel him so brutally, I have no idea. Clenching my fist, with its infected bites, around the cold metal only aggravates my pain, and this increases my fury. I rap the gun butt a few more times into the direct center of his chest, tearing the scabbing off my hand in the process. He struggles to maintain his balance and releases the gun. To my horror, his head topples from his neck and falls, like a melon, at his feet.
How hard have I hit him?
“Now look what you’ve done, you impudent dog!” the head barks these hateful words at the laces on my shoes.
I menace it with my foot. “Stop talking like that,” I say, “or I’ll kick you down the hillside!”
Paying no attention to my threat, the head shouts frantic commands to its body—“Over here! Schnell! Schnell!”—but, of course, the body is deaf without its ears. It cannot hear a word. Indeed, it stumbles blindly about, searching on its knees for the lost gun, lashing out with its fists to fend off a slew of imagined aggressors. A wool scarf hangs loosely around the empty pedestal of its neck. With this, I assume, it had wrapped its head into place.
“You stinking yid,” the head screams up at me. “I’m giving you an order! Do you understand? Put me back on my body or I’ll kill you right now, right now!”
“Enough!” I roar. I’ve heard enough. Without thinking, I give the head a swift kick and away it goes, rolling down the hill.
“My eyeglasses!” it screams, spinning and cutting a wobbling path through the drifts.
Running to catch up to it, I kick it a few more times and swat it once or twice, for good measure, with the butt of its gun.
“Will the killing never end?” I shout. “Does it not cease, even after we are dead?”
“Ouch! Ow! Stop it! I’m ordering you! You are my prisoner!” it clamors, whenever its mouth, wheeling in its many revolutions, is not muffled by the ground.
“How do you like it, head?” I shout, delivering a few more kicks.
Perhaps because of the pain in my hand, I am unusually severe.
At the base of a small hillock, it stops, and I grab its hair in my fingers and bury its face in the snow.
“I could suffocate you! Do you hear?” I shout this into its ears, grinding its nose against the icy ground. “What is wrong with you? They give you a gun and so you think you own the world!”
“Please, Herr Jude,” it coughs out small morsels of snow. “I can’t see without my glasses.”
I lift the head, like a globe, in both hands and hold it at arm’s length by the ears, turning it so that I may look at it directly. Ganglia dangle like strands of seaweed from the bottom of its severed neck, but the brow is well formed, and even handsome. A firm, square jaw, dotted by a day’s beard. Deep sorrowful eyes, the color of chocolate. A long straight nose, with two pink triangles, one on either side, where the glasses had ridden.
Carefully licking its bloody lips, the head probes its wounds with its tongue.
It squints into my good eye.
“Please, Herr Jude,” it says, “can’t you help me find them?”
“Your glasses?” I say.
Raising my eyes, I scan the fields, but all I see is a headless body running like an escaped lunatic through the trees and deep into the woods.
“Oh dear,” the head says, squinting in dismay.
27
Carrying him, like a pumpkin, in the crook of my arm, the gun hanging by its strap across my back, I climb the hill, retracing our path, in search of its lost eyeglasses.
“This is very kind of you,” he says, all meekness now. “The first time this happened, I was not so fortunate. My body panicked, was running everywhere. Well, you saw for yourself how it reacts. If I hadn’t accidentally stumbled over myself, I don’t know where I’d be.”
“You’d be exactly where you are now,” I point out. “No worse, no better off.”
“True,” it agrees. “Still, before, I had my eyeglasses and so perhaps I didn’t feel quite so bad.”
It’s not many more steps before I hear a soft tinkling underneath the sole of my left shoe.
“Ah, well,” he says, trying to conceal his unhappiness.
Balancing the head on my thigh, I bend down and search cautiously with my hand. I lift the spectacles, covered now with scales of transparent snow. One lens is shattered and the golden frame is bent and ruined.
“They were
buried,” I say.
“Yes,” he says tightly.
“I must’ve stepped on them,” I say.
“I realize that,” he says. “But straighten them out, if you can. And perhaps they’ll not be entirely worthless.”
I place the head between two forking tree roots, securing it there.
“Ah-h-h,” it says. “The snow is very cold, Herr Jude.”
“But I don’t know what else to do with you,” I say.
“It’s perfectly all right.” And he smiles gamely, squinting at my hands as they begin to probe and work the metal rims.
“I have an additional pair in my breast pocket,” the head won’t cease its endless chattering. “They wouldn’t allow me into battle otherwise. Without them, I’m as good as blind. I’m hoping you didn’t smash those as well when you pummeled me in the chest.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” I say. I can’t help growing cross with this garrulous head. “You should never have poked your gun into my back!”
He smiles grimly. “I’m not prepared to argue the theoretics of warfare here and now with a dead Jew.” He spits this last word off his tongue as though it were an annoying scrap of tobacco. “If it weren’t for you,” he says, “I’d still be at the conservatory, working on my compositions.” He stretches his lower lip into a frown.
“If it weren’t for me?”
“For your people.”
“And what did we have to do with it?”
“Let’s just say I’ve been denied everything, because of you, including a heroic death.”
On their own, my hands clench into fists, and a shard of the broken lens pierces my folding palm.
“I tell you this in the strictest confidence,” the head continues. “I wasn’t killed in battle. No. I died ingloriously. A big peasant snuck up behind me and cut off my head. With an axe.” He laughs bitterly. “Lord knows what my family will think, my mother. I barely had time to cry out.”
I consider kicking him down the hill again, so tired am I of his blathering.
Instead I say, “Your glasses are beyond repair, I’m afraid.”
I conceal from his blurred vision my bleeding palm and the crumpled golden rims, tucking both into my pocket.
“I was afraid of that,” he says.
I stand and look to the horizon.
“Well,” I say, drying my palms with a handkerchief. “It’s been a pleasure knowing you.”
“You’re not leaving me, are you?”
I sigh.
“I’m completely dependent on you. You know that,” he says.
Even his voice sickens me.
“I’m sorry I pointed my gun at you, Herr Jude,” he cries, “but the woods are full of wolves.”
“Yes, it’s true,” I say, my hands smarting in my pockets. “How, I’m sure, they’d love to nibble at your ears!”
“Herr Jude, stop it! You’re scaring me!” The head rolls around in little circles of fear. “Don’t be cruel! It isn’t fair of you to take advantage! You mustn’t leave me here!”
He looks blindly up at me, squinting past my knees, begging for my help. He’s pathetic! I’m certain he’d have me on the ground before him, groveling for my life, given half the chance.
I feel like kicking him in the teeth.
And yet I can’t help feeling vaguely sorry for him. Poring over his musical charts, a student, late into the night, certainly he never imagined that the tired head, which he lovingly cradles in the cup of his hands, would one day be thrown about the countryside by an enraged and vengeful Jew. How difficult it must be for him to humble himself and plead.
“All right,” I say, lifting him with one hand by the hair.
“That’s a little painful, Herr Jude.”
I curl my arm around his ear, pressing the other ear against the side of my hip.
“It’s difficult for me to hear this way.”
I rotate his head, so that both ears are now uncovered.
“Is that better?”
The head shakes itself. “I can’t seem to get comfortable.”
In its panic, his body left a melee of footprints in the snow. The pattern crosses and recrosses itself so many times that it’s virtually impossible to follow.
28
Searching through the fields, we come upon a portion of the trail that branches off into the trees. Although the footprints here remain equally chaotic—here and there, more often than I can count, they lead directly into a heavy solid tree!—one can discern in their looping meanderings the arc of a general direction. And so this is the trail we take, the head and I, moving deeper into the woods.
There is no use in calling out, the body cannot hear us. Surely panic and confusion will exhaust it. Otherwise, I shall never overtake it, old and weary as I am. Its strides are too vigorous and muscular from its military training. Also the head is heavy and I must continually shift it from arm to arm, in order to sustain its weight. Although these reshiftings slow us down, the head endures them patiently. How else are we to continue? Keeping my hand, like a strap, beneath its chin, I can feel it swallowing periodically. The sensation is unnerving, needless to say, but what am I to do? Carrying it on my shoulder is out of the question. I couldn’t bear having it so near. Kicking it along in front of me, although pragmatic, seems needlessly cruel and surely the head would protest. I’ve left my satchel back in the hollow tree trunk where I slept (was it only a night ago?) before the wolves disturbed me. If only I had thought to snatch it—although why would I have?—the head would now ride in comfort and any time I tired of its rantings, I could close the flap over it, pinning the wooden peg through the leather loop, sealing it in.
Instead, I’m forced to lug it through these woods like an invalid lugging a medicine ball at a spa!
At other times, and at the head’s behest, I carry it backwards so that it may observe the trail behind us, in case the body, in its blind stumblings, doubled back, and we have inadvertently passed it.
These winter days are short and, soon, it’s impossible to see further and we are forced to give up our search and stop to rest for the night. I lay the head, not gently, on the ground. My arms ache.
“Brrrr,” the head’s teeth chatter. “It’s so very cold!”
“Yes, it’s cold,” I say, leaning the gun against a tree. “Of course, it’s cold.” I sit upon the frigid ground.
“You couldn’t perhaps hold me on your lap, could you, Herr Jude?”
“On my lap?”
“Because the ground is frozen.”
I am tired and cross after so many exertions on the head’s behalf and so I refuse.
“You at least have clothes,” it persists, whining. “How can I spend all night up to my neck in the snow!”
“You should have thought of that before you joined the army! Before you attacked me!” I turn my back on him.
“Heartless,” it mutters. “All of you.”
“What was that!” I snap, standing. I point a warning finger at the uneven part in its hair.
It apologizes quickly.
“You apologize,” I say. “Of course, you apologize! But only when it’s in your advantage to do so! Everything you say is corrupt! I can’t stand listening to you any longer.” And I move as far away from him as I can.
“Don’t leave me here, Herr Jude!” The head rolls after me, knocking into my feet. I nearly trip over him in the fading light.
“I’m frightened!” he shouts these words up at me, spitting snow from his mouth. His hair is wet, from perspiration or from his travels in the frost, it’s impossible to tell. He bites into my shoe leather to keep me near, and I am forced to shake him off with a few sharp kicks. He bounces a short distance across the field once or twice before knocking into a rough spruce.
“Was that necessary?” it shrieks.
“You, I’ll see in the morning,” I say and turn away from him to make my bed against a sheltered oak, but the little sounds of his weeping are more than I can bear.
Standing, I rip the woolen scarf from my neck.
“Such nonsense!” I exclaim.
He sniffs, “Thank you, Herr Jude,” as I wrap the scarf in loops around the puckered circle of his neck. “I only hope my body has found someone equally as kind.”
“At least you can be certain it hasn’t hanged itself from a tree in despair!”
The head is silent for a moment.
“There’s no reason to be so cruel.”
“Please.” I finish tucking it in. “I have no idea why I am helping you. Don’t make it worse for me by constantly speaking!”
I’m about to drift off to sleep, when I feel the head nudging against my arm.
“Herr Jude,” it whispers, snuggling against me.
“What now?” I manage to say through a drowsy veil.
“Are you sleeping, Herr Jude?”
Annoyed, I turn over to peer at it through the darkness. It has rolled next to me, pulling my scarf along in its teeth. Because my head is also on the ground, we are, once again, face to face.
“I couldn’t sleep,” it says.
“No?” I say.
“I can’t get comfortable.”
“I’m sorry,” I say
“I generally sleep on my stomach,” it says.
The stars shine through our canopy of bare trees. The head sighs, rolling back, so that its eyes may search the Heavens.
“As a boy, when I couldn’t sleep, my grandfather would take me in his lap,” this the head confides to me. “He worked making Mercedes Benzes. I’d sit in his lap, he’d bring me hot cocoa. The smells of the oil and the grease from his work would mingle with the chocolate and the honey.” The head sighs. “Ah, what I wouldn’t do right now for a cup of hot cocoa!”
“It would run out the bottom of your neck and spill all over the ground,” I say, sitting up stiffly and yawning.
29
“Herr Jude,” the head whispers to me. Without my realizing it, it has inched its way into my lap, as though it were a child. “I have a story to tell you.”
A Blessing on the Moon Page 8
