Crackpot, p.2
Crackpot, page 2
“‘Yes that’s fine, that’s all. You can go.’ When I heard those words I felt such a surge of friendship, I wanted to stop and thank them, but your mother wouldn’t let me; she dragged me right out of there. When she got me out on the street she began to cry; ‘What for? Now is no time for tears.’
“‘Oi, Danile, Oi Danile, the Book is still upside down!’
“But upside down though it was, and held by a blind man, it led us safely into this land. You see how right my father was? The Book is holy; knowledge is a wonderful thing if you know how to use it, even ignorant people, like your mother and myself. Sometimes I sit with the Book in my hand and think how close the Almighty has let me come to wisdom while I must remain so far. And yet, He lets His words come to our aid in His own way.”
“All right, Danile,” called Rahel, “enough now. Let the child get to sleep.”
“No ma!” bawled Hoda.
“Not that I’m completely ignorant,” Danile continued, as though trying to correct a false impression. “While he lived my father would take me every day to the synagogue and I would learn with my ears, just as your mother and you take me now on the way to work. My ears are quicker than many another student’s eyes. Often I heard far more than they could see. ‘That’s Reb Simcha coming in the door, scraping his feet so: chuff chuff chuff.’ Or I’d call out, ‘Shahmus, bang on the rail there, and shout for the women to keep quiet upstairs. Maya the herring is having an argument with Petya long finger’s wife.’ And sometimes the Rov himself, not just the Shahmus, would shout up to them on my say-so: ‘Women up there, Maya and Gitl! Be quiet! Aren’t you ashamed to be arguing in the House of God?’ And they would be silent in shame and in wonder that he had recognized and called them by name.”
Hoda liked the funny parts. The quickness of her father’s ears, though she had never seen them move, was a source of great pleasure. When she came home with her mother from work, while they were still blocks away from the house, she would try to coax her mother up on her toes, so that they should approach the house without him hearing. And when he called out, invariably, “Who’s there?” as the door creaked open, she would rush forward with mingled disappointment and delight.
“You heard me! You heard me!”
And Danile would reply, “Oh no, I didn’t hear you; I heard a tiny little mouse go ‘squeak squeak squeak!’ When did you come in?”
Rahel waited for them to finish laughing to call Danile finally away before he could begin to speak again. Left alone he would go on as long as the child demanded. Such was his nature. She could still remember those first few bewildering days of her marriage, which had been also the last few days of her mother-in-law’s life. When Malka, known perversely in the town as Benyamin the tailor’s needle, because she was so stout, had raved in her sickness, it had been Danile she had raved about, and his blindness, and the brightness he had stolen from the sun on the day of their contest, that brightness which she swore he had stored in him forever, for he had a nature of extraordinary sweetness. Of course that was a mother’s view. That same sweetness made some people feel that there was something unnatural about him, as though he were a little feeble-minded and incapable of truly understanding the gravity of his own plight. And incapable too, perhaps, thought Rahel, not for the first time, of feeling the insult of being married off to one they called a hunchback, a man as handsome as he, and under such circumstances too. And yet, he too had some cause to consider himself lucky, even to her way of thinking. If the plague hadn’t carried her off so soon he might have found himself married to Selma the idiot, who slept in the fields and covered her head with her skirts when she heard a man approaching. Who would be looking after him now?
What more do you want from life, Rahel? she often asked herself as she went about her work, her mind not foreign to a certain private irony. You have been nurtured by the open hand of God Himself. Who would have believed that even plagues can be good for somebody?
As Danile told it, “What’s a plague? A sickness. A cholera. In a plague everyone is blind together. It runs about of its own accord, invisibly, attacking without respect, rich and poor, high and low, good and bad. Plague has no favourites, except, so they say, it has a little bit more respect for Jews than for other people. It’s true, it kills fewer Jews, and that’s a fact. The others say to themselves, ‘Look at that, the Jews are only lightly brushed by the plague; so few of them fall, while we are being carted off in wagon-loads. It must be true they have a God!’
“But their priests and their leaders don’t like that. So they say to them, ‘Beware the Jews. They make evil magic that sends the plague your way. To get rid of the plague you must get rid of the Jews.’ That’s when these people become a plague in themselves, through their ignorance. When I stop to think of it, in actual fact your mother and I, with God’s help, really saved the town from a double plague. Because of course it’s all a lot of nonsense. They could see for themselves the only magic we made was the same magic they were making. We drew the same circles around our houses with charcoal to keep out the sickness. We too hung cloves of garlic and lumps of camphor in sachets, around our necks for they have great strength in them to ward off plagues. You can smell their power. The only difference was that we had our God and no magic works without Him, and they want everything to come easily and if it doesn’t come they go berserk.
“Well, that was in the old town, in the old country, where your grandmother lives still, and all your aunts, and maybe even your grandfather by now, though when last we heard he was still serving the Czar, poor man. If things hadn’t gone so badly for him, and the Czar hadn’t got such a murderously tight hold, how much easier life might have been for your mother’s family. The trouble is there are so many things to look out for in life, and your grandfather, Shem Berl, is a simple, trusting soul. They put a paper in front of him and tell him to sign his release from the army, after ten long years, so he signs. Can he help it if he can’t read Russian? So they toast him tovarich, and he finds he’s signed on for another five years. So he serves his time honourably, as fine a tinker as you could meet in any army in the whole world, and when it comes time for his discharge they say to him, ‘All right, Shem has served his time. Now what about Berl?’
“So he says, ‘I’m Shem Berl.’
“But the Czar’s tail won’t hear of it. ‘Two names, two soldiers for the Czar from your family! Shem has served and Berl must serve!’ So Shem Berl called on both his dead grandfathers, after whom he was named, for double strength, and he served again.
“When the time came for him to be discharged a third time, he swore up and down he would sign no more papers. No one could hold him now. He was going home. And home he came, at last, to his wife, to his family, to his responsibilities. When he arrived he found the whole family in a turmoil, his wife biting her lips, his sisters wailing, his mother in hysterics. They had come, those brutes, to demand that his baby brother, who had grown up in his absence, should now serve his time. His mother was convinced the Czar had cast his evil eye all the way from Petersburg especially on her boys. She knew once her little Mendl was dragged off to the army he would never return, for if Shem Berl was desirable to the Czar, Mendl must be half again as desirable, for he was the joy of her old age.
“What was Shem Berl to do? His wife begged him; his daughters pleaded with him; his brother-in-law, your rich uncle Laib who sent us here, threatened him, but your grandfather shouldered his pack once again and gave himself as a substitute for his brother.
“That’s how it came about that in the time of the plague, luckily for us all, he was far away, for had he been home he might not, poor man though he was, have allowed them to take his daughter, even for the sake of the dowry. He had too much pride. But now was not the time for pride. Now was a dreadful time. Even sitting at home, for my mother would not allow me out of the house, and hearing the stories of what was happening, and the cries and the groans of the sick and the bereaved in the streets, and without ever imagining the part I was to play, I knew that such frightful events were meant to show something, if only a man had the wisdom to understand. People fell to their beds like wheat in the fields, tossing and turning and flinging themselves about senselessly like grain being winnowed in God’s private machine. Many flew straight into the afterlife, where the Almighty must have made a very fine loaf of his harvest, for some of the town’s best never stood upright in this world again.
“They tried everything to fight it. Soon there was not a clove of garlic to be bought anywhere in our district at any price. Nothing helped. The sickness held its breath and fell upon people and turned them inside out before the strength of the medicine could take hold. It leaped over the black rings of safety and raged within the barriers as fiercely as without. Once it had forced its way into a person it burned, it flamed, it tore out everything he had inside of him and sent it blazing out both ends.
“I know. I heard it. I think I actually heard it enter our house. I know I heard it edging into my mother’s voice. I could hear it in her breath. I heard it wrestling with her. I heard her pleading with it. I heard its cry of triumph when she fell writhing on the bed. At first she tried to help herself. Then she couldn’t. She could only struggle. That wretched smell grew stronger. Her cries went on and on. I wanted to help her, but she kept screaming, ‘Don’t come near me, Danile! Stay away! Don’t you come near me!’ in such a voice, as though I were another enemy. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to fetch help, but she screamed at me not to leave the house. The plague was all over, out there, waiting for me.
“Not to come, not to go, not to be able to see, not to know what to do. I went to the door. I shouted out, ‘People, help! People, have mercy! People, save my mother! Help us! Help us!’ No one listened. No one came. I wept. I asked my God why he had made me less than a man. Then I took my Book, and I held it in my hands, and I sang. To drown out her suffering I sang, not to hear her cries so nakedly and so that she should not hear me weeping I sang all the holy words that I knew, ignoramus that I am, over and over again, in the strongest voice I have so that perhaps, if nothing else, the power of the words and the strength of my voice alone would sustain her with the help of God.
“And she was still alive when they came. At first, when they burst into the house, and they cried out joyously, ‘She’s still alive!’ I thought that they had come to try to save her. But that was not to be. They were glad for another reason.
“You see my child, these plagues do not concern simply individual persons. They are not simply a matter of this one collapsing and that one dying and of one blind boy’s sorrow. Things had by this time reached a point where the whole community was threatened, not only by the epidemic itself but by the madness of the surrounding peasants. They were jealous because the Jews were not dying off as quickly as they, and word had come that unless by some miracle the sickness could be banished they would fall on us and destroy what the disease had not dared to touch.
“It was a time for desperate measures. The beautiful ones of the town came together to confer, those who were not too frightened or too afflicted, the wise and the holy and even one or two of the rich. Among them was your mother’s uncle.
“When all else fails there is an action which can be taken, a gesture which, made properly and with God’s blessing, can restore the forces of life where only the forces of death reigned before. The beautiful ones knew that the time had come to make this gesture.
“Now the thing to do is to take the two…”
Rahel noticed that Danile always hesitated slightly at this point, as though even he were flinching at what he was about to say. But the hesitation was so slight it was perhaps perceptible only to her, or perhaps she only imagined that he was flinching too.
“…they take the two poorest, most unfortunate, witless creatures, man and woman, who exist under the tables of the community; they dig them up, he out of his burrow in the woods, she from the heap of rags in which she crouches, and they bring them together to the field of death. It is the tradition to take the craziest and the most helpless you can find. Who else would go? But after all the community is trying to do them a favour too. The town provides the bride with a dowry, furnishes, if they are homeless, a little mud hut for them, and undertakes to look after them. Everything is done just as for a proper wedding, which they would never have been able to afford for themselves. Indeed, usually they did not have the wit to know what it was all about anyway, and wandered off to their own separate burrows afterwards.
“So the beautiful ones decided that now was the time to marry off such a pair and lift the curse of the plague and the threat of the pogrom from our heads. But whom to choose? There was a shortage of idiots in our community that year. The man the children called Golgol had been killed in a pogrom the year before. When everyone else was barricaded behind doors and the bandits were approaching he suddenly ran out from somewhere, beckoning to them and shouting in the friendliest fashion, ‘Kill Jews! Kill Jews!’ Strong as an ox he was. He was still running and they were still shooting bullets into him long minutes later. And the unfortunate Selma, a true grotesque; I remember her from when I could still see; she too had been taken off by the plague.
“So your mother’s uncle spoke up. He reminded the others of his eldest niece, far from an idiot, of course, a very intelligent girl, and not even homely; and furthermore, he dared say, and who would dare deny? from a decent family; indeed she was herself a hard-working, good-natured girl, as who should know better than he, the child of his own sister? Hers was merely the slightest deformity; nevertheless if the town were to offer a reasonable dowry, he himself would contribute to the cost of a marriage not dishonourable. He was in a position to influence his sister; she would see the sense in it, and the community would, naturally, in gratitude, keep their pact with the Almighty and continue to take care of the couple, if, that is, a suitable mate could be found. He’s a clever man our uncle. And we can’t blame him entirely. He had daughters of his own to provide with dowries.
“Then someone else remembered that I had been seen at the door of our hut, weeping and pleading with the world to come to the aid of my mother. My father was dead, my mother dying, my prospects poor. If by chance my mother was still alive I would be a logical groom. If my mother was gone already it would be too late. The situation was too desperate for them to be able to wait over a period of mourning.
“That was when they came running to our house. At the same time the uncle hastened to speak to your poor grandmother. What could she do? If it was anything like the way it happened to me she did not get much time to think about it. Nor did your mother. They carried her off for the examination, saw that she was whole, that is healthy, and took her to the ritual bath.”
Rahel squirmed but dared not interrupt. If the child asked for an explanation here, then she would really put her foot down, she promised herself. Why he had to go through every little detail she didn’t know, she really didn’t. But Hoda was too engrossed at this point to ask questions.
“As for me,” Danile was saying, “before I knew it I was being led–no, dragged–no, carried from the house. It was a hot day, clammy. I struggled like a wild thing, slithering about in their hands and my sweat. They had a hard time holding me. They tried to explain what we were about to do but all I knew was that I should not be leaving my mother now, without a voice to cry out for her. ‘Have mercy on her,’ I pleaded with them, over and over again.
“‘Yes, yes,’ they made me hear them finally. ‘Don’t worry. She will be taken care of. The plague will disappear if you come with us now. God will aid us, if you will come.’
“Their words forced me to begin to realize what it was all about. I had been begging for God’s help. Dared I refuse to play my part? Perhaps it was fated. If this was so I must be calm. My heart must cease flinging itself about. I must no longer weep like a child. I must make no sound. I must pay attention, yes, perhaps for the first time in my life. There was a question being asked and soon, soon, perhaps even now, I and only I would be called on to reply. But how reply? Who was I? What was my attention worth? Strain though I might, I would never suffice. All I could know was my immeasurable ignorance. Very well, I thought, if that is all I can know let me know that at least. And even as I was floundering thus, words fell away. I became one living alertness. Nothing could pass me by. Everything that existed had to pass through me, even the breeze that sprang up and whispered in my face as we approached the home of the dead. They led me carefully here, for there were many newly dug graves. I trod on damp clumps of newly turned sod that seemed to move beneath my feet like living things. That was so; there was no stillness anywhere. There was only movement, anticipation, the breath of the universe. And I was no longer a blind boy being led beneath the canopy to meet his unknown bride in the village of the dead. Do trees have eyes? What can the stars see? I saw what they saw and I knew what they knew then. Don’t ask me what it was, I couldn’t grasp the wholeness of it for long, but for one moment I knew, I acquiesced, and I was known.
“Since that moment I have never been truly afraid, not in the holy way, with the fear a man might wish for. Ordinary fear I knew again, and soon. Who marries without tasting that? That returned when I felt Rahel at my side and knew she was trembling too. Who was I to have a bride trembling beside me? I was so frightened I don’t even remember how it went, what they said, how I replied. I fumbled for a long time with a ring and a soft little hand that kept disappearing. It was not so much that I couldn’t see, but all of them, the ring, my hands, her hands, wouldn’t stop moving, all in different directions. Finally, a gentle little voice took pity on me, as she has taken pity on me ever since. ‘Let me,’ she whispered, and all was well.”
