Part 4

Softer and weaker became the raving and the groaning, and at last he lay quiet, motionless. Dense darkness hovered over him, enveloped him, engulfed him. His eyes were closed, but he felt the darkness. Like a heavy load it pressed down upon him. He knew, in an obscure way, that he had struck somebody and had been beaten up badly in return. And now he was quiet and peaceful, and he wondered at the peaceful feeling. He began to grope about with his hands, his eyes still closed. He struck against a hard, dusty floor. Where could he be? The question flew through his entire being in a most undistinguishable manner. With a great effort he raised his eyebrows. The dense gloom settled upon his open eyes. He could see nothing and his eyes shut heavily again. Once more he began to scrape about with his hands and opened his eyes. Wider, this time. Something dazzled him. Above, on the ceiling, shone a small gray light. It entered from the single window, which was built in high on the wall. Itsye looked first at the strip of light and then at the little window with the iron bars. He eyed it for a long time. As one who has awaked from a dream and has not yet come to himself.

Suddenly the blood rushed to his head. He sat up quickly. He recognized the bars and now realized that he was in jail. They had given him a good drubbing and had thrown him into a dark hole. He became strangely warm. In a moment’s time he foresaw everything that awaited him; the blows that were yet in store,--the trial and the sentence,--prison and convict labor. He groaned in deep despair. Ah! And now he felt that his head pained excruciatingly; his face and his whole body, likewise. He hastened to feel his head and his face. His hat was gone. His hair was moist and sticky. He touched an open wound. With his fingers he followed the sticky trail. Blood everywhere. On his head, all over his face and on his bare chest.

He had a desire to weep at his great misery and boundless despair.

“Father!” he wished to cry, and “Mother, dear!” and “God!” Words that he had rarely used; beings he had never known. His heart contracted bitterly and he lay with his face to the floor; his body shook convulsively with his deep lamentation.

For the first time in his life was he weeping so. His was a bitter nature, and as often as life had brought him tears he had been able always to swallow them. He knew that his tears would soften nobody,--that they would only make him ridiculous. They would mock him as a soft-hearted fool, and that must never be. With teeth clenched together this wretched orphan had gone through life in eternal hostility to all about him. His eyes had been often suffused with blood, but never with tears.

Now, however, he neither could nor desired to hold them back. He wept until the tears refused to come. Then he was overcome by a fainting sensation, and he thought that death was near. It would come to him just as he lay there. He stretched himself out, closed his eyes and waited for death. To lie thus, to fall asleep forever and cease to be. To be liberated once for all from the desolate days behind him and from the misery ahead.

He yearned for death.

“Ah, to die!”

Before his sight there began to float dead bodies that he had seen during his life. Such he desired now to become. Then he beheld before him the hanging form of water-carrier Kirillo. All at once he sat up. A certain thought had raised him: he, too, would hang himself. This waiting for death would not do. He would not die so soon, if he waited. He peered into the thick darkness and thought. The impression of his whole life rose before him. Not a single day of happiness; not a moment of rest. Years of unceasing care and of constant struggle, of laborious toil and frequent hunger. And the future threatened still worse. As black as the dense gloom about him. Long years of incarceration, in the prisoners’ ranks, and then--hunger once more.

He raised his eyes to the iron bars of the window and felt the thick rope by which his trousers were held in place. Then he looked around and cocked his ear. Was anybody there? He heard no sound. He could scarcely lift himself up. His legs barely sustained him and he was so dizzy. He reached out to the wall and leaned for a moment against it. Then, with soft step, he investigated the room, groping about with hands outstretched. Nobody was there. He had frightened some mice and could hear the patter of their retreating paws. He stopped at the window and stretched his arms upward. He could not reach the bars. In one of the corners, however, there was a bench, against which he had stumbled as he groped about the cell. With difficulty he dragged it over to the window. The effort so weakened him that he was forced to sit down. Slowly he untied the rope around his trousers. He began to fashion a noose, lapsing into thought as he did so. Once more he looked back upon the wretched past and forward into the dark future. Again he could see not a ray of light, neither behind nor before. With teeth tightly clamped he made the knot and cursed life, and his heart seethed with bitter hatred for all mankind. With the self-same noose that he was now making, how gladly would he have encircled the necks of every human being and strangled the whole world. So, and so, and so!

The noose had been ready for a long time, yet he still sat meditating. He cursed and berated humanity, calling down upon it all manner of misfortune. Ah, how gladly he would revenge himself upon them!

Gradually one thing became clear to him. His death in itself would be a good vengeance. When day should come, and they would prepare to resume their ill-treatment of him, they would find him dead. Ba-a-a! A plague upon all of them! Good-by, Itsye! No more Itsye! No more Itsye to oppress, to persecute, to abandon to starvation! They would stand before his corpse like whipped curs, crestfallen, and would vent their intense disappointment in a vile oath. Ah, that was a precious thought!

He sprang hastily to his feet, jumped upon the chair, reached to the bars and tied the rope around them. His hands trembled; he shook with fever. He poked his head into the noose and kicked over the bench.

And as the rope tightened he was seized with a desire to laugh. To laugh like a conqueror, like a master. But his eyes began to bulge out, his tongue protruded, and his face turned a pale blue.

But the protruding tongue still mocked.

“Ba-a! Good-bye, Itsye! No more Itsye!...”

--Translated by Isaac Goldberg.

A STRANGE CLIMATE

SHOLOM ASCH

Dr. Lazarovitch came home from the hospital in the evening, locked himself in his cabinet, as his custom was of late, and remained alone till supper. The servant had already knocked at the door several times, calling him to eat. The doctor gave vent to the usual grunt that meant he would soon come out, and remained locked in his cabinet. But this time he was not let alone as usual. From the next room was heard his wife, Anna Isakovna’s, soft, weak voice, saying: “Boris, we are waiting.” The voice woke the doctor from his day-dream. He felt as if he heard a strange, unusual sound.

For more than a year, ever since his oldest son, Mikhail, had gone to Moscow, and had been admitted to the faculty of medicine in the university, Dr. Lazarovitch tried to avoid his family. The family consisted, besides his oldest son, of his wife Anna Isakovna, who was always sick (and whom he saw seldom, anyhow), of a daughter, Jeyna, and of a boy, Solomon, who attended the fifth grade of Gymnasium, and whom he loved very much. The doctor avoided his home, trying to be there as little as possible. And when he did come home from the hospital, he always locked himself in his cabinet, as if he were working. But to tell the truth, he did not work. He had not held a book in his hands since he left the University. He thought of his oldest son, who had gone to Moscow, and had entered the University through the good offices of the doctor’s good friend, Vasili Ivanovitch, the president of a District Court. Dr. Lazarovitch knew, as well as the rest of the family, that his son had not been admitted through any good offices. The “good offices” were mentioned only before other people. Mikhail had adopted Christianity. Though no one spoke of it, and the family never mentioned it, yet Dr. Lazarovitch had begun to feel lonely since that time, and used to sit whole nights locked up in his cabinet. And when, after two hours he left his room, he would find the table deserted, and laid for one. His whole family had become very serious, each being occupied with his own concerns, and Ana Isakovna went to bed very early, as was her custom. The doctor would thoughtfully and hurriedly finish his meal, go back to his cabinet, take up an old “Ryech,” and bury himself in a year-old speech of a Constitutional Democrat regarding the Budget.

It was his custom to fall asleep over the speech. Sometimes he would not awake until morning. Sometimes the old servant who had been with him many years would come in and wake him. Then he would undress and throw himself on a lounge that stood in the corner, on which he examined patients in the daytime, and above which hung an old magazine reproduction of Rembrandt’s “School of Anatomy.”

Because of this, the doctor was so much surprised when he heard his wife calling him. He understood that something new must have happened, and he was afraid of this new thing. When he came out of his cabinet he found his family waiting for him at the table. This was so new to him that he grew glad and thought to himself that it was a very good thing to eat together with his children. But in his heart of hearts he was afraid of the sudden innovation. He was too nervous to wait long, so he asked as soon as he sat down: “What has happened?”

The children looked at each other, and remained silent. Anna Isakovna, who felt better than usually, answered: “Nothing has happened.”

At the silence that reigned at the table, the doctor became still more excited. He cried that something must have happened; that they ought not torture him, but tell him at once. Anna Isakovna answered him as if imparting a great sorrow: “Mikhail writes that he is coming home for Passover.”

The doctor grew silent. The rest were silent also, as if a dead man were in the house.

That night the doctor did not fall asleep over the “Ryech.” He was thinking of himself and his son. Truth to say, he did not understand why Mikhail’s apostasy had made such an impression on him. Neither he nor his had ever been religious Jews. He himself remembered very little of his religion. Passover and Yom Kippur were to him merely vague memories of childhood. His father, a storekeeper in a little town, had been a pious Jew. But since he had left the town in his youth going to study in Moscow, he had not seen his father and had lost track of the holidays. Anna Isakovna, with whom he had become acquainted in Moscow, and whom he had married there, also knew nothing of Jewish holidays. And his children were reared like the children of so many parents in his circumstances, without any traditions. They lived according to customs and holidays of his Gentile neighbors. And naturally, Mikhail grew up ripe for Christianity. He was able, and from the fifth grade on he began to show an exceptional faculty for mathematics. When he began to study in earnest, no one of the family had the slightest doubt that Mikhail, in order to avoid the obstacles that lay between himself and his career, would have to adopt Christianity. The father, the mother, and Mikhail himself, had always thought so, though they never said a word about it. Then, why did it torture him so, now that Mikhail had already done it? What new thing was it that was waking in him, making him a stranger in his own house?

The doctor had thought much about this in the last days, trying to revive the memories of his own lost years to the utmost of his powers. But it was hard. When he began to think of them he would grow tired. His broad-boned body grew heavy and he became sleepy, for in the twenty-three years that he had spent in the provincial town within the Pale, he had forgotten how to think. Once upon a time, like other students of his age, he had been an idealist. He would finish his studies, he then thought, and go to the people. He would establish himself in some out-of-the-way village, there to heal the peasants and their wives and teach the little boys to read and write, for many students talked of that at the time. But when Dr. Lazarovitch was graduated he did not go to any out-of-the-way village. He fell in love with Anna Isakovna, a daughter of Director Solomon. Solomon, an old, worked-out factory invalid, who had four daughters, was often visited by the Jewish students in Moscow. The girls played the piano, and the Director’s home was aristocratic. The lackey, an old Gentile, served at the table in gloves, though there was not much to serve. The gloved lackey and the piano-playing made a deep impression on Dr. Lazarovitch, and to his share fell the weakest and ugliest of the Director’s daughters, Anna.

But as soon as he married the aristocrat he forgot all his ideals. He went with his wife, who began to ail shortly after the wedding, to a town in the Jewish Pale, where Director Solomon had many relatives and acquaintances. Here he began to build up a practice. This partly meant that even in the Pale one could do much, that ideals are necessary not only in the village, but also in the town. But soon the doctor became acquainted with the intellectuals of the town, with the druggist and the President of the Court, and spent most of his nights at the club, with them, playing cards. He tried to avoid being at home. He did not love his wife over much after she began to ail, but this did not prevent his having five children with her, two of which had been still-born; the other three had grown up almost without his knowledge, till his card-playing had been interrupted by the apostasy of Mikhail.

* * * * *

Dr. Lazarovitch became more and more restless as the time of his son’s arrival from Moscow approached. The entire house lapsed into silence. All seemed afraid of something. The doctor began to feel like a stranger in his own house, and could not find a place for himself anywhere. He ceased to go to the club, and could no longer sit over the “Ryech” in his cabinet. First it seemed to him that he was restless because he was unused to things, and was afraid of the new event in his home life. As soon as he would get used to the fact that his son was a Christian, and the town would know of it, and all would cease to talk of it at last, he too, would become quiet, and his life would resume its natural course. But soon he realized that his restlessness was not due to any _strange_ circumstances, but lay much deeper. He was afraid of something, and did not know the cause. He said a thousand times to himself that nothing had happened, that his son’s apostasy had changed neither himself nor his son. He himself was not so religious and fanatical as to believe that his son’s change of religion should have a deeper meaning, because, in truth, neither he nor his son believed in God. So how could his son’s outer metamorphosis change his inner psychological condition? And again, would it pay the able young man to give up his career, his abilities, his future, all for the sake of a religious superstition? Had not Mikhail acted logically when he removed once and for all the obstacles that barricaded the path of his future? But all these explanations could bring the doctor no rest. He felt that something more than a mere outward change had taken place; that a wall stood between him and his son; that it divided one generation from the other; that his son was not a continuation of himself, but that something ended in his own self, and something new had begun in his son; that they already belonged to two different worlds. And he was afraid and restless when he contemplated the wall that stood between them.

Two days before Passover, Mikhail came home. The doctor could not see him. He was afraid to meet him face to face. He would run about among his patients and come home late at night, and when in the mornings he heard his son’s voice in the next room he would tremble. He would look through a crack in the door and try to see how the boy looked. But his son had not changed at all. The same childish face with its familiar childish eyes which always touched the doctor’s fathering heart. The doctor wondered that his son had not at all changed after baptism. He still looked exactly the same. But the doctor was afraid of him.

Throughout the time Mikhail was at home the house seemed dead. The usual noise of the children on their arrival from school was heard no longer. The children, who always walked on tiptoe now, could not be heard in the next room. They sat reading, each in a different corner, as if they were ashamed to look at each other. The silence strained the doctor’s nerves still more. He wanted to go to the children many times, and play with them, as he used to do when they were small. But as soon as he saw Mikhail through the keyhole, he grew frightened and restrained himself.

And yet the apostate touched his heart more than the others. It seemed to him that the boy looked weaker and sadder since he had become a Christian, and the doctor began to pity him. He had never felt so near to any of his children before. He was glad and yet sorry that he felt so toward his son. Once he saw him through a window reading in a corner of the room, dressed in the blue uniform that fitted him but poorly. The boy felt strange in the house, and was afraid to talk loud. His face was pale. In his eyes and about his lips lay the shadow of a great grief like that which lingers about a girl who has lost her innocence. The doctor noticed it and a wave of pity swept over him for the child who was inaugurating his career in such a sin. He could not restrain himself, walked into the room, approached the boy, laid his wide, thick hand on the weak, childish shoulders, and looked into Mikhail’s eyes.

“Mikhail, how do you feel?”

The boy trembled. At sight of his father he grew pale, and confusedly and involuntarily pressing himself to his father, cried: “Papa.” But he soon reminded himself of something, and remained standing, silent and shamefaced. “How did you enter the University?” Dr. Lazarovitch asked roughly, and wiped his thick face with a broad hand.

The boy was silent for a moment. At last he viciously bit his thin pale lips and answered: “I didn’t know you would take it like this.”

The father was silent.

In a minute the boy again said:

“If you want me to, I will leave the University, and become a Jew again. Do you think I liked to do it?”

“It is unnecessary,” the father sternly answered.

“Why?” the boy asked.

The doctor moved closer to the boy, looked straight in his eyes, with a moody, sinister glance, and said: “We aren’t talking of religion. You know I am not religious. We are discussing a principle. And you have denied that principle once. What would the good be in your becoming a Jew again? You can’t change what you have done. Just like a girl who has lost her honor--she can’t regain it. Understand?”

The doctor seized the boy’s head and kissed him, perhaps for the first time in his life. Then he left the room.

* * * * *

A few days later the doctor heard another bit of news: Joseph Kalmanovitch, Mikhail’s schoolmate, had also turned Christian. It was an open secret that Joseph was in love with Jenya. The town considered them already engaged. The doctor waited till the young man came to his house to see how his daughter would treat him. In a few days the doctor found the young man in his house, and Jenya went out with him as if nothing had happened. Joseph had been treated as usual. The doctor began to wonder and it occurred to him that after all, it was only he who was so reactionary and superstitious that apostasy made too deep an impression on him. Yet the doctor could not understand how his daughter could receive the young man after Mikhail’s apostasy, and how Anna Isakovna bore the thing so patiently. He promised himself to talk to his daughter. She told him clearly that she did not care whether her husband was a Jew or a Christian. She loved the man. If her father objected to a marriage between them, she would live with Joseph anyway. It was only then that his situation grew clear in the doctor’s eyes. His children were leaving his house and his religion, and he himself would remain in his old age lost among strange beliefs and perhaps be supported by his children, and bring up strange grandchildren. And maybe his children would baptize him before death so that he should lie in the graveyard together with them. This woke the doctor from his apathetic condition, and he resolved to take action.

At the same time the doctor persuaded himself that he had become religious, and he would seek out small groups that congregated to pray at certain places and visit them between evening prayers. But he could not deceive himself. The prayers of the common, every-day Jews who ran into the small synagogue to free themselves for an hour from a day’s work, and to give God His due, desirous of getting through with their duties as soon as they could, made no impression on him at all. He did not understand the prayers. He did not understand the grimaces they made, and their continued whining and shaking struck him as being wild. Yet he did not lose hope, and was inwardly sure that somewhere there did exist a great, strong Judaism, a Judaism that repaid the burdens borne for its sake, a Judaism that gave Jews strength to bear suffering and still remain Jews--and it was his to seek out that Judaism which would repay him for the happiness lost in his children.

He tried to observe the Jewish holidays in his home. He himself did not know much about them. He remembered nothing about them, and appeared comical in his own eyes when he went out on the street to buy Kosher meat, or bread, or matzoth and bring it home. Yet the people in the house had taken it all very seriously; on Passover the matzoth were placed on a serving dish, put on the table, and all were afraid even to touch it. They all tried to be as serious about it as was he himself--but he knew that it was a farce. No one in the house knew anything about the holidays. The holidays they kept were the holidays of their neighbors. Where any part of the town celebrated, the doctor’s house celebrated with it--Easter with the Russians, Christmas with the Catholics, but of their own holidays they knew nothing. Because of this it was rather comical that he should all of a sudden try to celebrate their “own” holidays.