The Invisible Wall (18 page)

He reacted angrily. “Yes, I do mind. I thought we were all done with that sort of bosh. I fought in a bloody war to get rid of it, and I'll not go back to it. No, we're going together, all three of us. Come on, now.”

He had taken command of the situation a bit roughly and forcefully, and perhaps it was a good thing he did; otherwise I doubt if Lily would have had the courage to go along with him. She was doubtless thinking of our mother, who fortunately was not outside when we arrived at the corner. Others were, though, and all they could think of at that moment was that another one of the boys had come home from the war. A flurry of excitement passed through the street, and voices shouted out to Arthur and people came running up to him.

The Forshaws came out of their house to see what all the noise was about, Mr. Forshaw holding a jug of beer in his hand. They stared, then saw Arthur. Mrs. Forshaw, usually so calm and undemonstrative, gave a loud cry and ran up to him, pushed other people away, flung her arms about his neck, kissed him, and wept. Mr. Forshaw stood by grinning awkwardly, stroking his mustache with one hand, holding the jug of beer in the other.

My mother had come out of the house by now, and all she saw was this scene. She also went up to welcome Arthur back and shake his hand, as everybody was doing. It never occurred to her that we had been walking home with him, I suppose, but Lily wanted to be sure that she did not find out. About that and something else.

Just before we entered the house she whispered to me, “'arry, don't tell Mam that we met Arthur in the square and,” her voice growing almost fierce, “don't tell her that he kissed me. Do you promise?”

I nodded.

She thrust a penny into my hand, not much less than what she got from her week's pay. “You can buy yourself some sweets,” she said.

She didn't have to do that. I wouldn't have told. I had not forgotten that other thing. It was still deeply implanted in my mind—Sarah and Freddy, the ginger beer, the notes inside the bottles, the terrible discovery in my mother's shop that day, Mrs. Harris's anguished cry, Sarah's screams as she was being beaten, and then her being shipped off to Australia.

It was still there, along with the frightening consequences that my mother had warned about, the awful thing that could have happened to Sarah if the discovery had not been made in time. Or to any Jewish girl or boy.

I had forgotten nothing. Yet a penny was a penny, and history may have been repeating itself as I dashed off immediately to Mrs. Turnbull's sweets shop. How little things had changed. Poor Mr. Turnbull still sat in his chair outside the shop, shivering in the cold this day, giving me a silent, imploring look as I went past him into the shop.

Nothing was different. The shop was empty, and from the back room came the sounds of Mrs. Turnbull's voice and the voices of her boarders, their laughter, and the clink of glasses. Those of her boarders who had survived the war were back, and those who had not survived had been replaced by others, rough, coarse, loud men who wore gaiters and cleaned out middens and chimneys.

I rapped on the glass top of the counter long enough to draw her attention. She came lumbering out, grumbling, “Always bothering me. Never give me a minute's peace, the bloody little buggers.” Seeing me, she said, “If it isn't little Lord Muck 'isself. Don't tell me you went and inherited another fortune…well…what'll it be? Don't you keep me waiting all day long. I got other things to do besides wait on you.”

I made my choice quickly. A penny's worth of clear mixed gums. As I went out with my bag of sweets clutched in my hand, I heard one of the boarders mutter, craning his neck around the doorway to see me, “Those bloody Jews, they got all the money. They were making it by the bucketsful while we was over there in the trenches giving our bloody lives for them.”

It didn't strike me as being any different from all the other things I had heard them say all my life, and I wasn't the least bit disturbed by it. I went home, with my bag of sweets, but this time I shared it with my brothers, though without explaining how I had got the penny. Lily's secret was locked deep inside me.

There was just one moment when it very nearly came out, and that same day. Perhaps Arthur should have waited a bit. A day or two more wouldn't have hurt. At least if he had waited until after dark when fewer people could see him. He couldn't wait, though, and he was in a buoyant mood at being home, and so confident of this new world of his that he went striding across the street with a small package in his hand, and knocked on our door.

It was tea time. We were all sitting at the table when we heard it. My mother thought perhaps it was a customer for the shop, and hurried to answer it. I think it was Lily who recognized Arthur's voice first. She got up in such a hurry that her cup of tea spilled. But she paid no attention to it and ran out, and we followed her out of curiosity. We stopped in the lobby behind Lily. There was Arthur, all right, smiling and saying, “I just brought this for Lily…it's a book, something I bought in London and I thought Lily would like it. Would you mind if I gave it to her?”

It was a book of poetry, a collection of Browning's, as we discovered later. To my mother, it wouldn't have made any difference what it was.

“She's having her tea right now,” she said. “I'll give it to her.”

Arthur was looking over her shoulder. He could see Lily standing there. She was staring at him, not daring to speak. He understood, though he must have been terribly disappointed and perhaps a bit disillusioned right from the start of his homecoming. But he didn't press the matter.

“Oh, all right,” he said. “Just give it to her, if you would. And thank you. I'm sorry for interrupting your tea.”

My mother took the package from him, and after the door had closed she walked back through the lobby and handed the package to Lily.

“Why didn't you let him give it to me?” Lily said. “He saw me standing here.”

“I didn't know you were there,” my mother said, and it was the first time I had ever known her to lie, because I'm sure she had known we were all there.

Lily must have felt sure of that too, and she said bitterly, “Even if you didn't, you could have called me and I'd have come to the door. He's just come home from the war. I don't know how you can be that way.”

She burst into tears then, and ran upstairs with her book. My mother stood looking after her for a moment with that familiar troubled expression. We all finally went back to our tea without Lily. She remained in her room for the rest of the evening, probably reading the Browning poems, the love poems he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett.

People had seen Arthur come to our door with the package in his hand. My mother had a lot of explaining to do when her friends gathered in the shop. She passed it off lightly as nothing at all, just a little friendly neighborly gesture, and whether they believed her is hard to say. But soon there were other events of importance taking place on our street that took their minds off this topic completely for a while.

         

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
had been over for more than a year now and there was less talk of it than there had been, and not so much mention of it in the newspapers, but it was far from forgotten by our rabbi. In cheder at night he smoked cigarette after cigarette until all his fingers were stained a deep yellow, and the long holder itself had become yellow, and showed a faint crack at the end from too many cigarettes being slipped in and out, and his hand trembled as he lifted it to his mouth.

He went among us, smoking, more abstract than ever, pointing out a mistake now and then with a yellow finger, but hardly bothering with us, ignoring the giggles and the mischief that went on behind his back. He had to keep moving, it seemed. He could not stand in one place for very long. And so he paced about in front of the fire, sometimes with one hand behind his back, the other holding the long cigarette holder with the burning cigarette in it.

There had been no word from his son in all these years. Rumors had it that the rabbi had once contemplated going to Russia to search for him, but had been dissuaded by his wife.

Meanwhile, he was going out of his mind worrying about the boy. He could not rest at home, in the house up the park where he lived with his wife and daughter, pacing about there too, as at his various duties in the synagogue or the cheder. He did the same when he performed a wedding or a circumcision, or when he slaughtered the chickens for us on Friday afternoons in the little concrete yard behind the cheder.

He strode through the streets en route to his various duties, sometimes to visit a sick person, or to officiate at a bar mitzvah, wearing his long black coat, carrying an umbrella in one hand, and the little ragged batesemas tagged after him chanting, “the rabbi, the rabbi, the king of the Jews, he bought his wife a pair of shoes.”

This time he paid no attention to them. His head was bent, and he was far away in his thoughts. The little cobbled streets with their sad rows of houses slipped past him. He was oblivious to everything. The days, the weeks went by, and finally the letter came. Who sent it nobody knew. It was not signed by a name, and it was a hastily scribbled piece of writing in Russian that the rabbi was able to read because he had come from Russia.

We only heard about this later. It spread quickly among us, how the letter had been delivered by the postman, how the rabbi had stared at it first, the address badly written, many different postmarks stamped on it, and then the realization that it was from Russia, and tearing it open with trembling yellowed fingers, and his wife clasping her hands together and tense with fear at what the letter might contain.

He read it slowly, because it was badly written inside as well, and hard to read. But he read it, to himself at first, with the cigarette holder in one hand, and the wife's eyes glued on his face saw the expression change, then saw the jaw sag, and the cigarette holder fall from his hand. She hastily picked it up before the carpet could burn, and put it back in his hand, and said, “What is it? What is it? Tell me?”

“It's all over,” he whispered.

He could hardly talk. His eyes began to fill with tears—this is how the wife related it afterward to others—his eyes filled with tears and his lips trembled and he said again, “It's all over. God has spoken at last.”

He gave her the letter to read, because he could not read it himself. The badly scrawled letter said simply, “Max asked me to write this to you if anything happened to him, and I am sorry to say that it has happened. Max died a hero, fighting for the revolution.”

That was about all it said, but it was enough. There was a funeral ceremony. The letter had failed to say if there had been one in Russia, or if he had even been buried. The rabbi held a funeral. My mother attended and came back dabbing at her eyes. It had been sad, too sad for words. The expression on the rabbi's face as he performed the service for his dead son, the trembling of his voice, and the weeping of his wife, and the little girl.

It was in the autumn that this happened. It had taken two years for the letter to arrive from Russia. We were preparing for the Rosh Hashanah holiday. The garden at the back of the synagogue and cheder was filled with crisp red and yellow and brown leaves that had fallen from the trees surrounding the garden. We had leaf fights, dashing handfuls at one another, shouting and yelling. The old-time residents of the once-fashionable houses glared at us over the garden walls. The rabbi said nothing. He stood at the bay window of the cheder looking out at us, saying nothing.

The synagogue was packed that first evening of the holiday. Even my father attended. He sat a short distance from us with a siddur in his hands and his head bent sullenly over it. The siddur was upside down, but he did not know it. Our mother and sisters were upstairs in the gallery. There was hardly enough seating space for all of them, so many of the girls had to stand. Several of them came to the rail and leaned over and giggled and called to men downstairs, and had to be reprimanded and sent to the back of the balcony.

The place buzzed with talk until everyone was settled, and then it grew still as the rabbi entered, swathed in his long talith that covered him from head to toe. All eyes were on him, more so this year than any other year because of the tragedy that had taken place, and because of what we had heard was happening to him, and there was a lot of wonder as to how he was going to bear up throughout the longer-than-usual service.

It was clear from the start that he was not himself any longer. The deep, resonant voice had weakened, and at times was barely audible. He missed his place several times and had to be helped by other members of the congregation.

No, he was not the same anymore, and heads were being shaken throughout the service, and eyes met one another, and there was one point, I remember, when my father gave a savage little laugh and muttered, “I could do better myself.”

People glanced at him sideways, but said nothing. We were careful to keep our heads down over the one siddur we shared. The service dragged on. It seemed longer and more tedious than ever. We were hungry and annoyed with the rabbi's slowness. At last it came to the end, to the final part where he was to blow the shofar that ushered in the New Year.

The rabbi took the ram's horn in his hands and raised it to his lips. It was a yellowish color, almost like the tobacco stain on his fingers. His hands trembled slightly as he lifted it, and there was a deep silence as everyone waited for the wailing sound to come out—a sound that said, “kee-yoah, kee-yoah.”

But there was nothing. His cheeks were puffed out, his eyes strained, and all we heard was the laboring breath. It took strength to blow the horn, and he did not have that strength any longer. His cheeks ballooned out desperately, and his eyes started out of his head, and a disturbed murmur went through the synagogue. Something was wrong, very wrong, and then suddenly the horn fell from his hands, and a loud cry went up as he collapsed.