“Where is my mother?” Samuel shouted.
The man twisted his hands in a gesture of desperation.
“She stood up to these savages. A group of men were in your house following Anna, they were shouting at her for having stood up to the women in the marketplace. One of them grabbed hold of her and Esther protected her daughter like a wolf, biting the attacker and scratching him with her nails. Grandmother Sofia tried to protect Friede, but someone hit her on the head with a stick and knocked her out . . . I don’t know how it happened, but one of the candlesticks got knocked to the floor and the fire affected not just your house, but also the two neighboring ones . . . Only several hours later could we put out the fire. We found the remains of your family in its embers. We buried them in the cemetery.”
The pain and confusion they suffered on hearing what their neighbor had said was such that for a moment they did not let fall a single tear. Samuel held his father’s hand tightly, and leaned against him, trying to control his nausea.
They couldn’t move or speak, they felt that their souls had been torn out.
The man stayed silent for a few moments, allowing them to take some measure of control over the pain that flooded over them. Then he turned again to Isaac and pulled him gently by the arm.
“You can’t stay here. You need to rest. I’ll give you a bed in what remains of my house.”
They couldn’t eat anything, for all that their neighbor’s wife insisted. Neither did they feel prepared to hear more details of the brutality that had taken place. The woman took them to a room and left them there, with two bowls of milk on a tray.
“It will help you rest. Tomorrow is another day. You will have to find the strength to start again.”
They were exhausted from their journey, but that night they scarcely slept. Isaac felt his son tossing and turning beside him, and he himself found no rest in the bed they shared.
Dawn had not yet broken when Isaac found his son staring at him fixedly.
“It’s a bad thing to be a Jew. That’s why they killed mother and Anna and Friede and grandmother. I don’t want to be a Jew, and I don’t want you to be one either; if we are, then they’ll kill us. Father, how can we stop being Jews? What can we do to stop being Jews and for everyone to know that we have stopped?”
Isaac held Samuel tight and started to cry. The child tried to wipe away his father’s tears, but it was an impossible task. He wanted to cry as well, so his tears would mingle with his father’s, but he could not. He was too distraught.
The sun was already high in the sky when they heard a soft knocking at the door. The good woman who had given them shelter asked if they needed anything and if they wanted to come down for breakfast. Samuel told his father he was hungry.
They got up and washed themselves before going down to meet the family.
“I’ll take you to the cemetery,” the woman suggested. “I suppose you’ll want to know where they are buried.”
“What about your husband?”
“He’s gone to the printer’s, he has to carry on working.”
“The printer still lets him work in spite of everything?”
“He pretends that he doesn’t know what happened, and Moses is a good worker whom he pays very little.”
“Because he’s a Jew, is that right?” Samuel asked.
“What are you saying?” the woman asked.
“That he gets paid little because he’s a Jew. Maybe if he stopped being a Jew they would pay him more,” Samuel insisted.
“Shush, my boy, shush! Don’t say that,” Isaac begged him.
The woman looked at Samuel and stroked his hair, then murmured:
“You’re right, yes, that’s right, and even so we have to be content with our lot. We’re alive and we’ve got enough to eat.”
They felt cold when they reached the grave that held the charred corpses of Sofia, Esther, Anna, and Friede.
Isaac took a handful of the earth that covered his loved ones and squeezed it tight until it ran out between his fingers.
“Are they together?” Samuel wanted to know.
“Yes, we thought it would be better for them to be together,” the woman explained.
“It’s what they would have wanted, and what I want,” Isaac confirmed.
“Will they bury us here, too, when they kill us?” Samuel asked with a note of terror in his voice.
“No one is going to kill us! For God’s sake, son, don’t say that! You’re going to live, of course you’re going to live. Your mother wouldn’t want anything else.”
“He’s a child, and the loss is very painful for him,” the woman said, taking pity on Samuel.
“But he will live, no one will hurt him. Esther would never forgive me.” Isaac burst into tears as he embraced his son.
The woman took a few steps back to leave them alone. She also had cried until she was exhausted. She felt Samuel and Isaac’s pain as though it were her own.
“We would like to be alone,” Isaac asked her.
The woman nodded and left, after giving Samuel a kiss. She, too, had sought solitude when she’d needed to mourn her loved ones.
Isaac sat at the edge of the grave stroking the rough earth as if it were the faces of his wife and his two children. Samuel stood a few steps farther back and he too sat down on the ground, looking at his father and the small heap of earth under which his grandmother, his mother, and his brother and sister now rested for eternity.
Samuel knew that his father, though he appeared to be sitting silently, was in fact murmuring a prayer. But what could he be saying to God? Perhaps it was their fault for not being at home to stop their family from being killed. If they had been there then, then maybe they could have asked God to do something, but now? It was too late.
After a while, Samuel said he had a headache, and they decided to go home in case he got sick again.
They spent the rest of the day rummaging through the remains of what had once been their house.
Samuel found the covers and a few pages from the family Hebrew Bible. He carefully tried to piece them together and put them in order, because he knew that this old book was important to his father, who had gotten it from his grandfather, and so on back through several generations.
For his part, Isaac had found a couple of Esther’s embroidered handkerchiefs on the ground, trampled but still whole. His wife’s earrings and ring had disappeared from the box where she kept them, but he found her thimble, as well as Sofia’s.
There were a couple of books that still had all their pages. They were also able to find the remains of a painting that showed Esther’s smiling face. It had been a wedding gift from a family friend, a keen painter. He had faithfully captured the delicate beauty of Isaac’s wife, her eyes a mixture of chestnut and green, her dark blonde hair, her white, almost transparent skin.
Isaac was about to burst out crying again, but, in front of Samuel, he managed to stop himself. He didn’t want his son to see his desolation, so he sighed deeply and held back his tears, while he used a handkerchief to clean what was left of the portrait. Then they carried on looking for any object that was still in one piece and that could be useful, or at least serve as a memory.
“Father, here is your Bible.” Samuel handed the book to him carefully. “There were lots of pages scattered everywhere, but I think I found them all.”
“Thank you, my son, some day this Bible will be yours.”
“I don’t want it,” Samuel said, but regretted saying so as soon as the words had left his mouth.
They fell silent. Isaac was surprised by his son’s words, and Samuel was thinking about how he could explain to his father why he didn’t want the book.
“My father gave it to me, and his father gave it to him, and I will give it to you. I hope that when the day comes you will not reject it.”
“I don’t want the Jewish book because I don’t want to be a Jew,” the boy replied sincerely.
“Samuel, my son, people do not choose what they will be, they find themselves in what they already are. You did not choose to be a Jew, and neither did I, but it is what we are and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Yes, there is. We can stop being Jews, we can tell everyone and they will leave us alone. If we are Jews then they will kill us.”
“My son . . .” Isaac took Samuel in his arms and burst out crying. They cried together in each other’s arms until each felt that he had no tears left.
Isaac was upset by his son’s distress, and understood his despair, and how in his child’s mind the fact of being Jewish had become synonymous with death and destruction. The father did not blame the son for wanting to dispose of what he thought was the cause of his family’s deaths.
They carried on searching amid the remains of what had once been their home. After searching through the house, they went to the shed that he had used to store his furs. There was nothing left. Before going to France he had selected the best of his skins to sell, and had left some pieces behind to trade with when he returned. The mob had taken them.
He had lost everything that had been his. His mother, his wife, his children, his house, his business. Why? Why had God been so merciless to them? What had they done wrong? He bit his lips so as to let no cry escape him. All this that had fallen upon them, was it just for the fact of being Jews? But he could not let the pain overtake him. Samuel was at his side, very quiet, holding his hand, looking at the remains of the shed.
“At least I have a son,” he thought. He held Samuel’s hand even more tightly. Yes, at least he had a son. At least he had Samuel, and his son’s presence would give him strength to carry on living.
When they got back to their neighbors’ house they were exhausted.
“What are you going to do?” asked Moses, the man who so generously had taken them in.
“Start again,” Isaac replied.
“Will you stay here?” the man asked.
“I don’t know, I will have to talk with Samuel. Maybe it would be better to go to another city . . .”
“I understand. Every day when I go out of the house I think that the same thing could happen to my children, my grandchildren . . . Sometimes the pain is so great that I think I need to escape, but where would we go? We are old, and in spite of everything I still have my job at the printer’s. My wife and I can keep ourselves on what I earn. We can’t escape, we are too old to move.”
Isaac thanked Moses for everything he had done for them.
“Don’t thank me, you know that my wife was a friend of your mother. She has wept for Sofia as much as for our family. We do not do anything that our heart does not tell us to do. We don’t have much, but whatever we have is yours, our house is your house, stay as long as you need.”
That night Isaac asked Samuel if he wanted them to rebuild the house.
“We could set it up again. It would take time, but we could do it. I have some money, as they paid me well in Paris for the furs I took. What do you think?”
Samuel said nothing. He didn’t know how to reply. He missed his house, naturally, but he felt a sense of loss for something greater than just four walls. His house was his grandmother, his mother, his brother and sister; if he couldn’t be with them he didn’t care where he and his father lived.
“You don’t want to live here?” his father asked.
“I don’t know . . . I . . . I want to be with my mother.” And he burst into tears.
“So do I,” Isaac murmured. “So do I, my son, but we have to accept that she is not here anymore. I know it’s not easy to accept, I feel the same. I have lost my mother as well . . . Sofia, your grandmother.”
“Can we go?” Samuel asked.
“Go? Where would you like us to go?”
“I don’t know, somewhere else, maybe with Grandfather Elijah . . .”
“To Paris? You said that you didn’t like there it that much.”
“But that was because I missed my mother. We could go to Warsaw, with Uncle Gabriel.”
Isaac understood that his son needed a family, that he himself was not enough to soothe his son’s pain.
“Let’s think about it. I’m sure Grandfather Elijah would happily take us in, as would Uncle Gabriel, but we have to think about how we will earn our living as we can’t be a burden on the family.”
“Can’t you sell furs?”
“Yes, but for that we need to be here. The best furs are in Russia, those are the ones the fine ladies of Paris and London want to wear.”
“And couldn’t you do anything else?”
“The only thing I know how to do is this: my father taught it to me and I will teach you. Buying and selling. Buying here and selling over there, where they don’t have what we can get for them. That is why I have taken furs all these years to Paris, to London, Berlin . . . We are traders, Samuel. Maybe we could go to another city. What about Saint Petersburg?”
“Would they let us live there? Would we get permission?”
“Perhaps, Samuel, or at least we could try. At court they always like Parisian fashion, and in the trunks that we brought back with us we have several coats that your Grandfather Elijah made. It wouldn’t be the first time that we’d sell furs to the fine ladies of Moscow and Saint Petersburg.”
“And what would I do?”
“Study, you have to study; it’s only studying that will get you a firm foothold for the future.”
“I just want to be with you, maybe you could teach me how to be a trader, a salesman . . .”
“I will teach you, of course I will, but only after you have completed your studies and only if it’s what you want to do. It’s still early for you to know what you want.”
“I know that I don’t want to be a moneylender. I’ve heard that they ruin people.”
“People who lend money are generally hated by the powerful.”
“Yes, but I still don’t want to be a moneylender. It’s a dirty job.”
The next morning Isaac spoke with Moses and his wife.
“We will leave in a few days’ time. I’ll try my luck in Saint Petersburg. My father had a friend there, a chemist, and his medicines are much sought after by the aristocrats of the imperial court. I will ask him to get me permission to live in the city.”
“You’re leaving? But you still own the land your house was built on, and your family is in the cemetery . . . ,” the woman said with regret.
“And we will always carry them in our hearts. But I have to think of Samuel now. It is very difficult for him to carry on living in a place where he used to have a family, a grandmother, a mother, his brother and sister, and where he now has no one. I have to give my son an opportunity. I know that my life is finished, but he is only ten and his whole life is in front of him. We must never forget anything of what has happened, but I need to help my son overcome the pain that torments him. It will be more difficult if we stay here. Everything reminds him of his mother.”
“I understand,” Moses said. “In your place I would do the same. Like I told you, use our house for as long as you need. Do you want me to find someone to buy your land?”
“No, I don’t want to sell it. It will be for Samuel, in case one day he wishes to return, who knows. But I will ask you to take care of it, and if you wish you can use it to grow food. I will sign a document that lets you take advantage of it until the day that Samuel returns.”
One week later, Isaac and Samuel left the village on a cart drawn by two mules. They took with them the trunks that held the coats from Paris. Also, under his shirt, close to his skin, Isaac wore a leather wallet with all the money they had.
Moses’s wife gave them a basket of food.
“It’s not much, but at least you
won’t be hungry on the road to Saint Petersburg.”
It was cold and damp. It had rained during the night. They started out in silence, knowing that their path would take them past the cemetery. Isaac did not want to look, did not want to see where his family had been laid to rest. He kept looking straight ahead, bidding farewell in silence to his mother, to his wife, to Anna and Friede. He held back his tears, but Samuel burst out crying. He didn’t try to console his son, he couldn’t. He wouldn’t have known which words to use.
Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead Page 3
