In the Beginning Read online

  They all looked at him. Slowly, my uncle straightened. I inclined my head and gazed up at his face. My eyes and forehead and cheeks hurt. I could not breathe through my clogged nose and my throat was dry and scratchy. The room seemed to expand and contract in front of my eyes, as if it were pulsating, like the vein in my uncle’s forehead. A strange silence had crept into the room, dark and cold and vaguely resonant with fear. Through the silence came the clang and clatter of a trolley car on the street.

  “I think,” my mother began, in her hesitant, uncertain way of talking, “I think the boy is not feeling well.”

  “Yes,” my uncle said gently, gazing down at me. “He has fever.”

  My father gathered up our coats. We stood at the door.

  “I will come by tomorrow night,” my father said.

  “Tomorrow afternoon would be better for me,” my uncle said. “Tomorrow night I have a meeting.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon is bad—no, it is fine. I can stop by on my way over to the Bader apartment to pick up our umbrella. Fine, Meyer. Tomorrow afternoon.”

  They were all saying their goodbyes.

  “I have better stories than that one,” Saul whispered to me. “I’ll tell you a happier story next time.”

  “I liked it, Saul. It just scared me a little. There was a dog on our block that was run over on its body and head.”

  He patted my arm. “I hope you’re better soon, Davey.”

  We went down the stairs and into the street. I tried to breathe through my nose and could not. Cold night air streamed across my throat and into my chest. I coughed. My father bent over me. I felt his hand on my face. His fingers were icy cold. I shivered. He raised me effortlessly and held me to him tightly. He carried me the long block home.

  We found my brother awake and playing happily with the baby-sitter.

  “He’s such fun to be with, Mrs. Lurie,” the baby-sitter said. She was a thin, pretty-faced girl in her early teens. “He slept two hours and I fed him and changed him. He’s smart.”

  “I need a glass of coffee,” my father said, and went into the kitchen.

  My mother gave me medicine. I lay in my bed and cried with the pain and fever. “Sha, sha, darling,” my mother kept saying. Her voice sounded dim and her face looked hazy, as if I were seeing it through mist. “Mama will tell you a story about the farm in Bobrek.” She told of a new calf and the way she had helped feed it and keep it warm one winter during a two-day snowstorm. The pain in my head and face was excruciating and she put her cold hand on my brow. “You’ll be all right soon, darling. Mama is right here next to you.”

  But when I woke in the night sobbing with pain and fever she was gone. I saw my uncle standing next to my bed with a revolver in his hand and wearing a heavy coat and a Russian-style fur hat. “Sometimes you have to smash,” he said in his gentle voice. “But I’m sorry we frightened you, David.”

  I cried out and my mother came rushing into my room, her robe open, her long hair uncombed and straggly. She held me and murmured words I could not understand. “Ochnotinos, chnotinos,” she said in a whisper. “Notinos, otinos, tinos, inos, nos, os.” The dark room pulsed slowly to the rhythm of the pain in my face and forehead. My throat was sandpaper dry. I talked through the pain and fever, hearing myself and wondering who was speaking. It seemed as if a disembodied being had crept inside me, was talking on and on, uncontrolled, the fever severing the reins on his tongue. Slowly I became aware of my mother’s strange and distant silence. But the words continued flowing from me. I felt light-headed; everything around me seemed to be expanding and contracting. Vaguely I saw my mother rise from my bed and go hurriedly from my room. I heard heavy rain falling with loud pebble sounds on the trees and pavement and on the panes of my window.

  My father stood next to my bed in his pajamas. By the dim shaded light of the lamp on my dresser, I saw his eyes were puffed and weary. His hair was rumpled and his face was tight with strain.

  “What photograph?” he asked in a strangely harsh voice.

  I talked on and on. I could not stop talking.

  He was very quiet. My mother’s eyes darted around the room.

  I said, “The canary and the dog, Papa. They were also accidents.”

  “What?” my father asked, startled. His voice shook faintly.

  “They were accidents, Papa. I didn’t kill them.”

  My mother sat down quickly beside me. I felt her cold, small fingers on my forehead. “Sha, darling, sha. Who is even thinking of the canary and the dog? No one even remembers it anymore.”

  “Of course it was an accident,” my father said loudly.

  “I saw the photograph by accident. It was on the desk and I picked it up. I couldn’t see you too good, Papa. Were you behind the sign? But I saw Uncle Meyer with the gun.”

  “All right, David,” my father said. He was tense and distraught. “Go back to sleep. Mama will give you your medicine.”

  From my parents’ bedroom came the sudden high-pitched wailing cry of my brother.

  “Master of the Universe,” my father breathed. “This will be a bastard of a night.”

  “I am going to the baby,” said my mother. “Give the child his medicine.”

  “The photograph was on the desk?” asked my father quietly when my mother had gone.

  The room had begun to revolve, very slowly, as if a wind were turning it on a tall stick. I thought I heard a rattling, clattering sound on the floor. I shut my eyes in horror. Pieces of shattered heads were rolling back and forth. The crushed head of the dog was there. And yellow feathers, rolling heavily from wall to wall, banging and clattering across the floor. I heard my father say something. The head of the dog made rolling, thumping sounds on the floor. And there was blood.

  I cried out and my father held me to him.

  “You are having fever dreams,” he said. “Let me give you your medicine.”

  I sat up and drank the sour-tasting liquid and the water, and lay back on the pillow. My throat hurt terribly.

  “Go to sleep, David,” my father said. He was silent a long moment. Then he said, “There is no such photograph as the one you say you saw. But we will talk more about it tomorrow.”

  He went quickly from the room.

  The rain beat against the window and the trees and the street. There had been snow and a dense forest with ice and snow on the trees. The ice hanging from the branches had looked like the knives in the hands of some of the men: long and pointed and white against the darkness of the trunks. There is no such photograph. How could there be no such photograph? I felt sleep darkening the fringes of thought. My father had not said that. I had heard him incorrectly. How could he have said that?

  He said it again the following morning. He came into my room wearing his pajamas and I sensed him by my bed and woke. I saw him through a fog of pain and fever. My window shade was gray with morning light.

  “How do you feel, David?”

  “Hurts,” I said, restraining tears. “Throat.”

  He gazed at me intently, his squarish features weary. He had forgotten to shave last night. His face was dark with stubble. From his crib in my parents’ bedroom my brother cried out in his sleep, then lapsed back into silence. My father frowned and shook his head. His gray eyes stared at me dully. He ran his fingers across his head but his hair remained wild, spiky.

  “Can you breathe through your nose?” he asked.

  I shook my head, feeling the heaviness in my forehead and along my cheekbones.

  “I’ll call the doctor to come and examine you.” He hesitated, gazing down at me intently. “David, I called Uncle Meyer. There was never any photograph taken of him with a gun.”

  I did not know what to say. Was that rain on my window? Had it rained through the night?

  “In a forest, Papa,” I said, feeling dry, searing pain in my throat.

  “What?”

  “It was in a forest. And there were flags.”

  My father stared at me. Then he shook hi
s head. I could see his chest through the two top open buttons of his pajamas. He was strong. He exercised every morning before he washed and dressed and prayed the Morning Service. Sometimes he would let me feel the muscles on his arms and stomach and chest. There were muscles in his neck, too. His neck was thicker than my uncle’s. No, it had been my uncle’s face, not my father’s.

  “I called Mrs. Bader. She does not know about any such photograph. There is no such photograph, David. When Mr. Bader comes back from Europe we will ask him what you saw. But you could not have seen a photograph of your uncle with a gun. Now let me help you go to the toilet and wash up. Mama will come in soon with some cereal for you.”

  “There was a photograph,” I said later to my mother through my pain.

  “Your uncle never played with a gun in his life,” she said nervously. “Eat your cereal. Here, let me feed you. In Europe, your uncle went to yeshivas. Gangsters play with guns, not your Uncle Meyer.”

  I lay in my bed, breathing slowly through my tormented throat. There was sunlight on my window now and on the bare trees outside. Soon Joey Younger would be playing on the street. And Tony Savanola. My brother would be in his carriage, sleeping in the sun. I turned my head to the wall and closed my eyes. I had dreamed it. I had dreamed the photograph. Who had entered the darkened study and removed it from my hands? Yes, there had been a forest and faces and knives and revolvers. Why were they all saying there was no such photograph? But perhaps I had dreamed it.

  I heard the door to my room open. I turned my head. My mother came quietly inside. “Dr. Weidman is here,” she said, her eyes looking nervously past my head at a point somewhere on my pillow.

  He came in cheerfully, pink-faced, smiling, vaguely redolent of outside air. I wondered where my father was. Dr. Weidman chatted amiably, took my temperature, looked in my throat, felt the sides of my neck, tapped my chest and back, listened to my lungs, and wrote a prescription. “It’s the same black year,” he said cheerfully in Yiddish. “A more severe case. But the same thing. Maybe we should have you bring him into the office for a complete checkup, Ruth. When he is on his feet again. This medicine is three times a day, once after each meal.” He pinched my cheek, patted my arm, and left, followed by my mother.

  I lay very still in my bed, ill once again from the injury that had not been done to me, and thought of the faces of Uncle Meyer and Dr. Weidman in the photograph everyone was saying I had not seen.

  I was out of bed in a week, suffered a relapse, and was in bed for another ten days. Pale, enervated, I sat on a chair in the sunlight on the street and watched my friends at play. Then I looked at the tiny buds that were slowly appearing on the trees, as my mother had promised, and felt vaguely calmed. My brother lay asleep in his carriage. I touched the carriage and felt it sway. My brother stirred. I removed my hand and sat very still in the sunlight. I was exhausted, drained of will and thought.

  A few weeks later I heard my father’s rage when my mother told him the results of the examination in Dr. Weidman’s office.

  “Is he crazy? This is how he repays me? To make such a mistake! What kind of a doctor did he turn out to be?”

  I shivered in the darkness of my room listening to his raging fury.

  “He is a good doctor, Max. Please don’t shout. Doctors make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes.”

  “It is the job of a doctor not to make mistakes!”

  “Max—”

  “The Bratzlaver was right. A doctor is a messenger of the Angel of Death!”

  “Max, please, please!” Her voice was shrill. “Doctors can’t help anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They are after the boy.”

  “Oh, stop it, Ruth! Women’s superstitious nonsense. That too you learned in Bobrek? It is not enough that you try to protect him with those useless incantations?”

  And there was silence. I lay in my bed and listened fearfully to that silence. It was broken finally by the voice of a radio announcer.

  They did not tell me what Dr. Weidman had discovered. In a vague way I understood that I would be repeatedly ill all my young life. I was very frightened. I would try to forget the photograph that my father, mother, uncle, aunt, Mrs. Bader, and, finally, Mr. Bader himself said I could not have seen.

  “You saw Jews at a wedding holding bottles of wine,” Mr. Bader had told me softly with a kind smile when he returned from Europe. “No, I don’t have it anymore. It wasn’t mine and I returned it. There are many pictures of Jews celebrating weddings out of doors. Do you want to see some? No? All right. But guns? Knives? David Lurie, no one told me you had such a strong imagination. Do you enjoy listening to stories? Yes? I thought so. But truth is more important than stories, David. All you saw was a photograph of happy Jews celebrating a wedding in a forest.”

  There was the zoo and the meadow and the small still pond; there was the clearing in the pine wood and the picnic in the clearing later that spring when my eyes really saw for the first time the scar on my father’s face.

  The zoo was located one block away from our wide street. In its cages, pavilions, and outdoor pens lived lions, tigers, panthers, elephants, giraffes, llamas, foxes, wolves, bears, and exotic animals whose names remain unknown to me to this day. Seals sunned themselves and swam in an outdoor paradise of water and smoothened stone; hippos bathed and snorted; monkeys leaped about and searched in each other’s fur for fleas and lice; tropical birds flashed bright hues through the aviary; lizards and crocodiles lived in primal silence within glass-enclosed terrariums. There were oaks and maples and sycamores and pines; there was grass; there were flower beds that brought wonder to my mother’s nervous eyes.

  The boulevard side of the zoo was rimmed by a high white stone wall into which was set a wide, ornate wrought-iron gate. All day long people came and went through that gate. Along the other side of the zoo, adjoining the pens and pavilions that housed the lions and tigers and elephants, was a low rolling meadow with a small pond. Beyond the meadow lay a dense pine wood within which was a small clearing. As far back as memory takes me I remember picnics in that clearing with my parents and my little brother and sometimes with my aunt and uncle and Cousin Saul. There we would eat and I would play with my father and he would periodically check the muscles of my arms and appear unimpressed and remind me that brains were important but muscles were important too and when would I stop throwing a ball like a woman. There my father and uncle would have long quiet conversations away from my mother and aunt and the noisy boys. And there, after a while, the nervousness would leave my mother’s face and she would sit in the sunlight and smile faintly at memories that seemed to come to her nowhere else but in that clearing.

  We went very often to that zoo, accompanied at times by my Cousin Saul. Together we would slowly walk the zoo’s meandering paths, and Saul would poke his thin pale face and brown curly hair and clear blue eyes as close as he could to the animals and birds, and murmur in wonder about the endless variety of living things created by God. He was deeply religious. He read a great deal and in a firm voice transmitted without hesitation the pertinent contents of his reading.

  He said to me in Yiddish one day as we walked by ourselves through the zoo, “All these animals are alive because there were animals saved by Noah in the Flood.”

  I knew about Noah and the Flood.

  “You know what it was like in the ark? You know what it was like to feed all those animals?”

  That aspect of things had never occurred to me.

  “It was a noisy mess. There were some animals that had to be fed during the day and other animals that had to be fed during the night.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s right. Noah didn’t sleep. The noise was terrible. But the lion was quiet. He had a fever but still he was quiet and didn’t bother anyone.”

  I had always looked with awe at the golden power and grace of the lions in the zoo. Now I admired them for the patient thoughtfulness of their ancestor.

&nbs
p; We stopped once at the pond in the meadow near the pine wood. Small fish swam smoothly in the still water.

  “Did you know that fish weren’t killed in the Flood? That’s right. Because they didn’t have any sins. That’s why God sent a flood. So the fish wouldn’t die.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s right. They just swam around the whole time.”

  I gazed deep into the water and marveled at these descendants of the only sinless beings in all creation now swimming placidly in the sun-warmed pond of our zoo.

  Each walk through that zoo with my cousin brought me new knowledge from his reading.

  “Did you know that before the Flood there were more nonkosher animals than kosher animals in the world?”

  “No. Really?”

  “Noah took seven pairs of each kosher animal into the ark and only two pairs of the nonkosher animals. And now there are more kosher animals in the world than nonkosher ones.”

  I envied him his ability to read and hungered for the day when words would be more than shapeless squiggles to my eyes.

  One day as we walked near the outdoor elephant pen he said, “I read something interesting about Noah last night.”

  “Yes?”

  “There was a giant called Og on top of the ark.”

  “Really?”

  “He was the king of a place called Bashan. He promised that he and his people would be servants to Noah and his family forever. But he couldn’t fit into the ark, so Noah let him ride on the roof.”

  “A giant. With all those animals.”

  “I read something else. Falsehood tried to come into the ark.”

  “What?”

  “An animal called Falsehood tried to come into the ark. But Noah said he was only admitting animals by pairs. So Falsehood looked for a partner and found Misfortune, and Noah let them into the ark. Falsehood and Misfortune became partners together forever.”

  I was about five at the time and did not understand that. My cousin seemed disappointed by my childish inability to grasp this latest truth. He offered me a simpler truth in its place.