In the Beginning Read online

  While the women busied themselves setting out the food, the men gathered around my father and Mr. Bader near the far edge of the clearing. They stood in a small tight circle listening intently to my father, then to Mr. Bader, then once again to my father. I was too far away to hear anything of what was being said. Nor was I interested. The thought of the coming week had begun to fill me with despair. Wasn’t there any kind of medicine they could give me to keep me from being ill over and over again? No, Dr. Weidman had said without his usual cheer. There was no medicine that could cure the grippe; medicine could only relieve the symptoms and bring down the fever. A mustard plaster could help if my chest became congested; Argyrol could be swabbed or brushed onto my raw throat; there were nose drops for my clogged nose and ear drops if my ears became infected. But there was no way to prevent my becoming ill and no way to cure me once I came down with the illness; there was only bed rest until my fever returned to normal and remained normal for twenty-four hours. I would be spending the remainder of this beautiful late June week in my bed. I looked into the dark cavern of the coming days and shivered with dread.

  Seated on the blanket my father had carried and spread on the grass, my mother was changing my brother’s diaper and talking hesitantly, timidly, with two women who had sat down near her. She kept glancing around as she spoke; once she had looked in my direction but her eyes swept past me and scanned the bluish depths of the wood through which everyone had come. My brother kept squirming beneath her hands and she was finding it difficult to pin one side of the diaper. Her face was pale and taut and I thought she would cry; but one of the women took the pin from her and completed the diapering. My mother smiled nervously and held my brother on her lap. He kept reaching out for Saul, who lay on the grass with a hand over his eyes, his thin face and battered lip turned to the sun.

  No one seemed to be taking any notice of me. I felt as if I were invisible. I rose slowly, feeling the dull pain in my forehead; but the earth remained firm beneath my feet. I walked unseen around some of the women in the clearing and sat down on the grass next to Saul. He looked to be asleep. I stared at his lip; a queer shivery feeling came into the calves of my legs. The edge of the open drawer had struck the center of his delicately bowed upper lip and had split the skin. The lip was purple and blue and swollen to about twice its normal size. The swollen lip distorted his features and I thought what if he had fallen on one of his eyes or his nose.

  “They were accidents!” I had screamed hoarsely through fever and pain during my last illness. The dog and the bird had appeared bloated and monstrous. Mrs. Horowitz had shrieked in my ear.

  “Of course, darling,” my mother had soothed. “Of course. Did you have a dream?”

  “Again with the bird and dog,” my father muttered.

  I felt myself soaked with sweat. I lay in the bed, exhausted.

  “The fever is breaking,” my mother said, wiping my forehead gently with a towel. “Ochnotinos, chnotinos, notinos, otinos, tinos, inos, nos, os.”

  My father stood near the bed. “What isn’t an accident?” he asked suddenly in a raging voice. “When is there ever a time without accidents? The stinking war was an accident, the train robbery was an accident, what happened in the forest was an accident, the pogrom was an accident, your mother catching pneumonia was an accident. Being born a Jew is the biggest accident of all. A man plans and God laughs. God in heaven, if there is a God in this world, how He must laugh! He is not doing His job, Ruth!”

  “Max, the boy is awake.”

  “None of them will come, you know that. Without your mother not a single one of them will come. All or no one, they wrote. All or no one. If her lungs are scarred and weak, the doctors there may not pass her through. You know that. Why did she have to go out into a snowstorm? To deliver a baby! It is a joke. The whole world is a joke!”

  “Papa,” I cried hoarsely, and opened my eyes.

  They looked at me.

  “I’m scared, Papa.”

  They were silent. A trolley car rushed vaguely along the distant boulevard.

  “Max, it is not a father’s job to frighten his son,” said my mother very quietly. She made a motion with her hand and a strange sound with her lips.

  My father sat down on my bed. He smelled of coffee.

  “I frightened you,” he said brusquely. “I am sorry. Sometimes when I feel very upset I say things that are not nice to hear.” His lower jaw jutted out sharply as he spoke. “Your mama is right. Sometimes I do a bad job as a father.”

  “I don’t want to have accidents anymore, Papa. I don’t want to be sick anymore, Papa. Please, Papa. I don’t—”

  “You don’t,” he said. “You don’t. And do you know anyone who does? About accidents we do not have many choices. Our job is to make better the world God gave us. We are partners with God. One day you will understand. We have to work hard to make it a good world. But it is not an impossible job.”

  I lay very still, feeling the heavy pounding of my heart. After a moment he put his lips briefly to my sweaty forehead; then he got to his feet.

  “Good night, David.”

  “My throat hurts, Papa.”

  “Mama will give you medicine to make it feel better. I am going to take myself another glass of coffee, Ruth. Then I have to go over and talk to Bader.”

  He went from my room.

  My mother sighed softly and wiped my forehead with the towel. “You are a little cooler now,” she said. “The fever is going down.”

  But I did not feel that the fever was going down. There was a buzzing sensation in my ears and a throbbing weight against my forehead and cheeks. I felt my tongue light and uncontrollable.

  “Is Mr. Bader back, Mama?”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “Wasn’t he away a long time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he see all your friends and Papa’s friends?”

  She hesitated. “Some of them. You should not talk so much, darling. You will hurt your throat.”

  “He could recognize them all from the photograph?”

  “What?” She stiffened perceptibly and drew away from me. “What photograph?”

  “With the guns and the knives and Uncle Meyer and Papa and the men in the synagogue.”

  “There is no photograph like that, David,” she said in a tense, strained voice. “Once and for all, there is no photograph like that.”

  “It was an accident that I saw it, Mama. People are always angry at me that I have an accident.”

  She was silent.

  I felt the tightness of oncoming tears in my throat, and closed my eyes. The blood beat in my head and the room had begun to spin. I took the medicine my mother gave me and then lay back on the pillow and listened to my parents talking quietly in the kitchen. Then I pulled the sheet over my head and lay with my lips gently touching the cool smooth cottony material. I licked at it with my tongue and opened my eyes. The dresser lamp had been left on. I saw its light milky whiteness through the sheet. This was my quiet world. I had made this world. There were no accidents in this world. I could not understand the world outside. I did not understand what my father had said. It seemed a terrible world, God’s world, and I liked my cool white sheet world where dogs were not killed by cars and canaries flew back through open windows—we had left our windows open for hours that day, hoping, hoping—and where the giant Og, who had promised to serve Noah, would slap Eddie Kulanski and his cousin and keep them away from me; my silent, peaceful, lovely white world where I could travel to the zoo and feed my billy goat and watch the small fish in the pond near the pine wood. Why did I need my father’s world when I had my own world?

  I had slept and woke in the night. The light had been turned off. In the darkness of the room a dark form had sat by my bed chanting softly. I knew it was a fever dream and tried to get the form to go away. But it had been a long time before it dissolved and I was able to slide into deep and dreamless sleep, the kind of sleep that Saul seemed now to be enjoy
ing despite the people all around him who were arranging themselves on the blankets before the food.

  My aunt glanced at Saul and decided to let him sleep. I sat on the grass and looked at his bruised lip. No, I did not like this accident world; I felt alone and frightened in it. I did not know whom I might hurt the next minute or who might hurt me. I did not like people to be angry at me for things God did. If God made accidents happen, why did my father hit me? Maybe he was angry at me. But what had I done? Maybe he was angry at God or at the world. Was that what people meant by hate, being angry at something or somebody so much that you needed to hit somebody? I had never had that feeling, not even about being ill. I did not want to hit anybody because I was ill all the time.

  I sat next to my cousin and skimmed my hand lightly over the grass and closed my eyes and put my face to the sun. Yes. The clearing was almost like my opalescent sheet world. I held its pure and silent whiteness untouched for a long moment. Then I opened my eyes.

  A loud intrusive cheer had hurled itself against my white world. I saw Saul come awake and sit up dazedly. He looked at me, smiled, and winced with the pain from his lip. His eyes looked glassy, as if he too would soon be ill with fever.

  “It hurts,” he said to me.

  “You could have hurt yourself really bad, Saul.”

  “I hurt myself bad enough.”

  “Didn’t you see the drawer?”

  “I tripped. It was an accident.”

  “Let’s make a l’chaim,” someone said. The bottle of amber liquid was being passed around and tipped briefly over the rims of waiting glasses.

  “For ritual purposes,” someone said breezily.

  “Of course,” someone else said.

  “For medical purposes.”

  “Of course.”

  “One bottle for all of us and there’s still plenty left. If goyim drank like this, bootleggers would be out of business in a month.”

  “In that case, I’ll drink a little more. God forbid we should make the gangsters into anti-Semites.”

  “I read this book about the Golem of Prague,” Saul said. “Yesterday I read it. I had it in my mind when I tripped.”

  My father stood up in front of the group, holding his glass. There were now about twenty-five men and women seated on the blankets in the clearing, all gazing at my father.

  “What’s the Golem of Prague, Saul?” I asked.

  “L’chaim,” my father said, raising his glass. “To the families and dear friends who will, God willing, soon be with us.”

  “To the friends who went to Eretz Yisroel,” someone said.

  “To our organization,” someone else said.

  “To our organization!” came the loud response.

  “To the forest.”

  “To the forest!”

  “To Shmuel Bader.”

  “To Shmuel Bader!”

  “To Max Lurie.”

  “To Max Lurie!”

  “I will drink to Max only if he shows us some sharpshooting.”

  “Here? You’re in the Bronx, not Lemberg. To Max, our leader.”

  “To Max! To Max!”

  They drank from their glasses, my father first sniffing at his. Even my mother drank. My father remained standing in front of the group. His hard straw hat was tipped back on his head; his face was flushed. He seemed very content. He raised himself on the balls of his feet and smiled briefly at the people seated in a ragged semicircle in front of him.

  “You know I do not make speeches,” he said. “I let the politicians make the speeches. Ten years ago I said we needed an organization to fight against the pogroms. Otherwise we would be like someone plowing a field with his nose, and nothing would get done. We created the Am Kedoshim Society. We planned, we succeeded, and we came to America. Today we are celebrating our tenth anniversary. We have learned never to forget the harm our enemies inflict upon us. We have learned that when we work together we can defeat our enemies. We will not stand by with our arms folded when our enemies attack us; nor will we do as some of our families did almost three hundred years ago in Tulchin when they decided not to attack the Poles in that city because they feared what Poles in other cities might do to Jews. We leave such righteousness to other Jews, to the Hasidim, to Jews whose pure souls make them unable to shed goyishe blood. We are not so pure. When our enemies come to attack us, we will fight them. Not we but our enemies will crawl up smooth walls. That is my entire speech.”

  “Strength!” someone shouted. “You should have strength!”

  “Strength he has plenty,” someone else said.

  “We should remember those who fell,” someone said querulously. “A minute to remember David and Gershon and Avruml and the others.”

  A darkness came upon the group. My father closed his eyes, then opened them immediately, his face gone rigid.

  In complete silence, everyone rose to his feet. I stood next to Saul. My mother held my brother. The skin had tightened over her features; her eyes seemed to sink into their sockets and become dark grayish pools. I watched her as she held my brother. Her face was turned downward toward the grassy earth of the clearing. She raised her hand absently to brush a strand of stray hair from her eyes, and I saw the smear of ink from her Waterman’s pen on one of her fingers; she had written letters that morning before packing the picnic basket. Her thin shoulders sagged; she seemed to be cringing at some fear or memory concealed within her. I saw my uncle reach over and put his hand on her arm. His face was stiff.

  In the silence, a breeze whispered silkenly through the pine wood and a distant bird trilled a brief song.

  Quietly, my father cleared his throat. Everyone sat down. As I once again took my place near Saul, I noticed Dr. Weidman come from the wood and enter the clearing. He was greeted by a number of people and a place was found for him on a blanket.

  “What’s Tulchin?” I asked Saul in a whisper.

  He shrugged. “I’ll ask my teacher.”

  “What’s the Golem of Prague?”

  “Later,” he said.

  “Mama, Papa dawtin,” my brother said loudly.

  “Yes, darling. Papa’s talking. Sha.”

  Faintly, as if borne on a wind through the dense wood, came the trumpeting cry of an elephant. It was difficult to remember we were in a zoo in the Bronx in New York in America. I had thought for a long moment that we were in the forest bordering my mother’s parents’ farm outside Bobrek. Was it as green there now as it was here? Did it have a stream like the one that ran clear and narrow over smooth pebbles in the forest behind our cottage in the mountains? Was there a meadow nearby with a pond full of fish? I envisioned the forest and the farm and saw cows chewing placidly on the grass of a rolling meadow and my mother’s parents and brothers and sisters—she had two brothers and three sisters, all younger than she; I saw the farm and the surrounding countryside and my mother’s family, all as she had often described it to me; like something out of a book of lovely tales. I did not understand why my mother told me only good memories of her childhood when all my father seemed able to talk about regarding his European past was hate, enemies, and pogroms.

  “We have today,” my father was saying, “assets amounting to considerably more than I was able to report to you at our last board meeting.” And he named a sum of money.

  I saw smiles, nods, and heard a murmur of approval.

  “A sharpshooter and a financial wizard,” one of the women said. “Max, you are a wonder.”

  My father did not react. He stood stiffly on the grass in front of the group, looking at the piece of paper he had taken from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “Of this, half remains in the Free Loan Fund, ten thousand dollars has just been distributed by our good friend, and the remainder is in real estate and stocks and bonds. The dues we have been paying to the organization have been repaying us many times over. Apartments have been obtained for the people who will be arriving after the holidays; jobs await the men, good jobs, not filthy jobs in sweat
shops. It is enough some of us had to work in sweatshops. Meyer has completed all the necessary legal work on their papers, and they have all received visas, with the exception of Ruth’s mother, who is still not well. I am at present in the process of acquiring jobs and apartments for the group that is to come early next year. That is my report.”

  He folded the sheet of paper and replaced it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “A good report!” one of the men said loudly.

  “If there are no questions or comments, we will hear from our friend,” my father said.

  “A cheer for Max the sharpshooter,” someone called out.

  “I do not need it,” said my father quickly. But they cheered anyway, in a language I did not understand, and the noise rang through the clearing. I wondered if the trumpeting elephant would hear it. Do they really remember everything, those elephants?

  My father acknowledged the cheer with a curt nod. He seemed uncomfortable in the presence of praise. My mother’s eyes had darkened once again at the mention of her mother. Alex sat quietly on her lap, chewing a Kaiser roll into moist oblivion.

  “A word from our good friend,” my father said. “He has brief messages for the organization and I have asked him to deliver them to all of us here. Then we will eat.”

  Mr. Shmuel Bader rose slowly from the blanket on which he had been sitting and came over to stand next to my father. He touched his bow tie, buttoned his jacket, and smiled. From an inside pocket he produced a long slender leather wallet which he opened, revealing a writing pad and a small gold pencil. He spoke in a quiet voice.