Read an Excerpt
The Cross and Other Jewish Stories
By LAMED SHAPIRO YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2007 The National Yiddish Book Center and The Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-300-11069-2
Chapter One
The Cross
1
His appearance:
A gigantic figure, big-boned but not fat, thin really. Sunburned, with sharp cheekbones and dark eyes. The hair on his head was almost entirely gray, but oddly young, thick, lushly grown, and slightly curly. A child's smile on his lips and an old man's tiny wrinkles around the eyes.
And then: on his wide forehead a sharply etched brown cross. It was a badly healed wound-two slashes of a knife, one across the other.
We met on the roof of a train car which was crossing through one of America's eastern states. And as we were both "tramping" cross-country, we agreed to do it together until we got tired of each other. I knew he was a Russian Jew just like me, and I didn't ask anything else. People like us live the kind of life where you don't need passports.
That summer we saw practically the entire United States. By day we used to travel on foot, cutting through woods, and bathing in the rivers we found along the way. The farmers provided food. That is, some of them gave, and we stole from the rest-chickens, geese, ducks. Afterwards we'd roast them over a fire somewhere inthe woods or on the "prairie." And there were also days when, with no other choice, we made do with forest berries.
Sleep came whenever night fell: in the open fields or under a tree somewhere in the woods. Sometimes on dark nights we "hopped a train." That is, we went onto the roof of a car and hitched a little ride. The train flew like an arrow. A sharp wind hit us in the face, carrying the smoke of the locomotive in bits of cloud, dotted with many sparks. The prairie ran and circled around us, and breathed deep, and spoke quickly and quietly, with a multitude of sounds in a multitude of tongues. Distant planets sparkled over us and thoughts entered and swum about our heads, such strange thoughts, wild and open as the voices of the prairie: they seemed each unconnected to the next, they seemed knotted and linked and ringed together. And at the same time, beneath us, in the cars, people sat and reclined, many people, whose path was set and whose thoughts were confined; they knew from whence they came and whither they went, and they told of it to each other and yawned while they would do it, and they would slumber, not knowing that above, atop their heads, there were two free birds resting a while on their way. From where? Whither? At dawn we would jump down onto the ground and go to snatch a chicken or catch fish with makeshift poles. On one of the last days in August I was lying naked on the sand on the bank of a deep and narrow river and was drying myself in the sun. My friend was still in the river and was making such a ruckus that it seemed like a whole gang of kids were bathing there. Afterwards he got out onto the bank, fresh and gleaming from head to toe. The brown cross on his forehead stood out particularly distinctly. We lay on the sand next to one another for a little while, lay there and kept quiet. I wanted and didn't want to ask him what sort of mark that was on his forehead. Finally, I posed my question.
He raised his head from the sand and gave me a curious look with a hint of mockery. -You won't get scared?
I hadn't been shocked by anything for years.
-Tell me, I said.
2
My father died when I was a couple of months old. From what I heard about him, I understand that he was a "somebody." A man from another world. I carry around his picture-one entirely made up by yours truly-in my imagination, because, like I said, he was a somebody. Anyway, the story I'm going to tell isn't about him.
My mother was a thin Jewish woman, tall, big-boned, dry and gloomy. She had a little store. She fed me, paid my tuition, and hit me plenty, because I didn't grow up the way she wanted.
What was it she wanted? I'm not completely clear on that. I think she probably wasn't clear herself. She always used to fight with my father, but when he died, she, a thirty-two-year-old woman, used to shake her head at any suggested matches:
-No, after him it's not right, I don't need anybody, and how can I take a stepfather for my child?
She never remarried. So I, naturally, had to be like my father, only without his faults. He never really belonged in this world of ours, he was, she used to say, "too passionate." And so the story went. She used to beat me brutally, without mercy. Once-I was about twelve then-she started to beat me with an iron pole that she used to close the shutters of her shop from the inside. I got furious and hit her back. She stood there pale, with big eyes, looking at me. From then on she didn't hit me any more.
The atmosphere between us in the house got even colder and tenser than before. About half a year later I went out "into the world."
Describing everything would take too long and it wouldn't be interesting either. Let me get to the main point. Fifteen years later, I was living in a big city in the south of Russia. I was a medical student and lived off tutoring. I took my mother in, but she was only living with me, she was taking care of herself: she bought and sold used clothing at the market. She didn't have anything to be ashamed of about the living she made, but she looked down on all the other old clothes dealers: who is she? Who are they?
She was as cold to me as before, at least on the outside, and I was just as cold to her. It even seemed to me that I hated her a little.
But if you went a bit deeper, she didn't bother me as much. I lived in an entirely different world.
3
It was a minor matter: we wanted to remake the world. First Russia, then the world. In the meantime we focused on Russia.
At that time the whole country was feverish with excitement. Larger and larger groups of people were being pulled into the stream, and above their heads exploded, more and more often, like a rocket, the hot, red, fire of individual heroic acts. Well-established heads, high and low, were falling one after another, and the old order was responding, and responding well, among other ways by pogroms against the Jews. The pogroms made no particular impression on me: we had a word for them then, "counter-revolution." It explained everything perfectly. Yes, I had never at the time actually lived through a pogrom: our city was still waiting for its turn.
I was a representative in the local committee of one of the parties. This wasn't enough for me. A thought, sharp as a knife, had slowly but surely cut its way into the depths of my brain. What was it? I wasn't clear exactly and in the meantime I didn't want to know. I just had the feeling that my muscles were becoming stiffer, tenser, and I once found that I absentmindedly had used my bare hands to shatter the back of a chair in one of the houses where I was giving lessons. I was left standing there completely confused. Another time my student asked me, wonderingly, "Who's Mina ... ?"-and I understood that, lost in thought, I had said the name "Mina" out loud. And I also understood, that though my thoughts were about one thing and "Mina" was seemingly just a girl's name, that thought was always connected to Mina's picture, to the sounds that come together with the name "Mina." That particular feeling of significance and importance that was always in the air when Mina was present.
Besides me, the committee consisted of four men and one woman. I don't know what color eyes the men had, but Mina's were blue, bright blue, and at certain moments they grew dark, black and finally deep, pitch black, like a pit. Black hair, a regular, graceful figure, and something slow and serious in her movements.
At our meetings she didn't argue much. She used to make a suggestion, or give her opinion about a situation in two or three pithy phrases, and then sit quiet and attentive with her shortsighted eyes squinting slightly. And very often it turned out that, after a long time, once we had heatedly debated and gone over the question and had cleared up all the misunderstandings, we, a little amazed, came to the same conclusion that had already been formulated in Mina's two or three pithy sentences.
She was a daughter of a senior Russian official. That was all we knew about her. At the door of our underground cell each of us would throw away our personal lives, like an overcoat in the foyer.
4
In our city the cloud of a pogrom was quickly approaching the Jews. Strange sounds swirled around the city, sharp and quiet sounds, like the hissing of a snake. People went around with their ears perked up, with quick, sideways looks, and gestured with their noses as if detecting a suspicious odor. But quietly and with cunning.
One hot afternoon we gathered together for an additional meeting at Mina's apartment, which also served as our underground cell's headquarters. The meeting didn't last long: short deliberations, no debates, and a decision to organize in self-defense as quickly as possible. In the course of the meeting I noticed Mina glancing at me occasionally. When the members of the committee began to leave, she gave me a sign that I should stay behind.
I remained there with my hat on my head, leaning my back and both hands against the table, while Mina, with her head bent and her hair spreading over her breast, paced back and forth across the room. We were quiet. After a while, she raised her head, stopped, and looked straight at me. She was pale, very pale, and her eyes were dark and black, as only Mina's eyes could be.
I felt cold. In a flash, as if illuminated by a strong and sudden outbreak of fire, my thoughts became clear to me: to become one of the "rockets" who light the way of the revolution, and who pay the price doing it.
And Mina was the first to understand! She saw it on my face, before it was even clear to me. Why ...?
-Have you decided? She asked after a while, with a voice half hushed.
-Decided. I answered slowly and firmly, feeling like the decision was being made that very second.
She looked at me for a while, and started pacing around the room again. After a few minutes she became as serious and still as always.
-Anyway, we'll still see one another, she said and gave me her hand.
Going home to mother, I felt that every bone in my body was singing. And I thought about the strange fate of a person, whose life's short path takes him between one woman he practically hates to another that he's beginning to love.
Before I opened the door of my apartment, I took a look at the city. The sun was just going down, and a light, delicate veil, spun of gold and happiness, lay in soft folds on the streets and the houses. Our city was a beautiful city.
5
We were too late. That very same night the pogrom broke out. Suddenly, like an explosion from a buried mine, and right in the area where I lived.
The first screams were mixed up with the haze of the dream I was having. Then I suddenly figured it out, got out of bed, lit a fire, and started quickly getting dressed. At that moment my mother sat up in bed and gave me a funny look.
I felt creepy. It was like she was looking at me coldly and ironically, as if the pogrom were aimed at me and not her. I stood there motionless for a minute, half-dressed. I looked at her, confused. And at that very moment the house trembled, as if it were in the arms of a storm.
The windows exploded with a crash, one door was smashed after another, and a gang of pogromists tore into us along with a foaming wave of broken screams and cries from the street.
I'm a strong man. But until that night I had never had to hit someone in anger. Until that night I didn't know the meaning of true rage which intoxicates, like powerful wine; of anger, that instantly boils your blood, that fires up your whole body, that hits you in the head and pervades all your thoughts. When the pogromists, a varied group, young, old, some with "homemade" weapons and some without weapons at all, attacked me, at first I coldly defended myself. But I was dazed at the same time, as if I didn't exactly understand what it was they wanted from me. Suddenly, after some little thing-I think that someone smashed my writing utensils on the ground-a white heat took control of my whole body, my head started to get dizzy and my hand raised up of its own accord. Across from me there was this short little goy, not very big at all, with a thin, pale face, a stiff yellow mustache and small, pointy eyes full of cold-blooded murder. I remember how I slammed my fist into that face, and couldn't hold back a strange bellow, like a wild ox. After that everything spun around me and in me, spun around fast and hot, and I was having a great time.
I don't know how long it lasted. My anger and my enjoyment grew at the same rate that my strength met resistance and overcame it. At the same time, a kind of chirpy, unyielding voice reached me from some- where far away, like the buzzing of a mosquito, along with disjointed words in Russian: "Don't have to ... don't have to ... tie him up! Tie him up!" The resistance started to grow quickly, more quickly than my strength, from all sides, from above, from below, until it suddenly froze around my entire body, like a stone skin. The joy disappeared, and the anger, the pure hellish anger, scorched my breast and choked my throat. Little by little it cooled, froze and then settled in my heart, like a heavy shard of ice. I came to my senses.
I was lying on the ground tied up, almost entirely wrapped up in rope, hurt, bloody, and the little goy with the pointy eyes was dancing around right near me, but with a really bloody and rearranged face. I also noticed blood on the faces of the other guys standing around me.
They picked me up off the ground like a full gunnysack, and tied me to the footboard of my mother's bed.
My mother! Only now I remembered about her. She had jumped off the bed, apparently to help me, but now someone had dragged her back onto the bed where I was tied up.
I almost didn't recognize her in her shift. Wide, thin bones. Wildly disheveled gray hair and sparkling eyes. Her teeth tightly clamped together and silent. They had thrown her into the bed, across from me.
6
Just imagine:
What's a hair, one single gray hair, pulled out of a head? Nothing, nothing at all. And two hairs? And a clump, ripped out all at once? And many clumps of long, gray hair? Pssh! Absolutely nothing.
Sure, when you break bones they crack. But if you break little sticks, dry wood, and-who knows what else?-they crack too; that's a "natural occurrence."
Just imagine:
What are two old, shriveled breasts? Flesh. Matter. They consist of certain "elements"-just go ask a chemist. Even when they're your mother's breasts. Two modest breasts that nursed you, and that you've never, not even once, seen uncovered since you were a little kid. Even if they're torn into tiny pieces by filthy fingers right in front of your eyes?
Tell me, I ask you:
What does nature, the world, know about filth and shame? There's no such thing as filth or shame in nature.
Yes, it's true: never, never was a human body, the glorious body of man and woman, so degraded and debased! But-why should I care? Because-you should know: there's no such thing as filth and shame in nature.
A year or two pass by, and ten, and a hundred, and two hundred. How is this possible? How is it possible that I can live so long? Can a man live so long?
Mama: scream, oh scream! Damn you! What do you think, it's one of those times when you used to hit me so wickedly and you kept so quiet! Just one scream, just a groan! Oh, God! ...
Years and years ...
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Cross and Other Jewish Stories by LAMED SHAPIRO Copyright © 2007 by The National Yiddish Book Center and The Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature. Excerpted by permission.
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