Where the Jackals Howl (21 page)

 

The cheap alarm clock started ringing at three o'clock. He got out of bed and lit the kerosene lamp. She followed him, slender and barefoot, and said, “It's not morning yet.” Abrasha put his finger to his lips and whispered, “Sssh. The child.” Secretly she prayed that the child would wake up and scream its head off. He discovered a cobweb in the corner of the shack and stood on tiptoe to wipe it away. The spider managed to escape and hide between the boards of the low ceiling. Abrasha whispered to her: “In a month or two, when we've won, I'll come back and bring you a souvenir from Spain. I'll bring something for Ditza, too. Now, don't make me late; the van's leaving for Haifa at half past three.”

He went out to wash in the icy water of the faucet that stood twenty yards downhill from the shack. An alarmed night watchman hurried over to see what was going on. “Don't worry, Felix,” Abrasha said. “It's only the revolution leaving you for a while.” They exchanged some more banter in earnest tones, and then, in a more lighthearted voice, some serious remarks. At a quarter past, Abrasha went back to the shack, and Batya, who had followed him out in her nightdress, went inside with him again. Standing there shivering, she saw by the light of the kerosene lamp how carelessly he had shaved in his haste and the dark: he had cut himself in some places and left dark bristles in others. She stroked his cheeks and tried to wipe away the blood and dew. He was a big, warm boy, and when he began to hum the proud, sad song of the Spanish freedom-fighters deep in his chest, it suddenly occurred to Batya that he was very dear and that she must not stand in his way, because he knew where he was going and she knew nothing at all. Felix said, “Be seeing you,” and added in Yiddish, “Be well, Abrasha.” Then he vanished. She kissed Abrasha on his chest and neck, and he drew her to him and said, “There, there.” Then the child woke up and started to cry in a voice that was almost effaced by the illness. Batya picked her up, and Abrasha touched them both with his large hands and said, “There, there, what's the trouble.”

The van honked, and Abrasha said cheerfully, “Here goes. I'm off.”

From the doorway he added, “Don't worry about me. Good-bye.”

She soothed the child and put her back in the cot. Then she put out the lamp and stood alone at the window, watching the night paling and the mountaintops beginning to show in the east. Suddenly she was glad that Abrasha had cleared the cobweb from the corner of the shack but had not managed to kill the spider. She went back to bed and lay trembling, because she knew that Abrasha would never come back, and that the forces of reaction would win the war.

T
HE FISH
in the aquarium had eaten all the flies and were floating in the clear space. Perhaps they were hankering after more tidbits. They explored the dense weeds and pecked at the arch of the hollow stone, darting suspiciously toward one another to see if one of them had managed to snatch a morsel and if there was anything left of it.

Only when the last crumbs were finished did the fish begin to sink toward the bottom of the tank. Slowly, with deliberate unconcern, they rubbed their silver bellies on the sand, raising tiny mushroom clouds. Fish are not subject to the laws of contradiction: they are cold and alive. Their movements are dreamy, like drowsy savagery.

 

Just before midnight, when the storm had begun to blow up, the widow had awakened and shuffled to the bathroom in her worn bedroom slippers. Then she made herself some tea and said in a loud, cracked voice, “I told you not to be crazy.” Clutching the glass of tea, she wandered around the room and finally settled in the armchair facing the aquarium, after switching on the light in the water. Then, as the storm gathered strength and battered the shutters and the trees, she watched the fish waking up.

As usual, the silverfish were the first to respond to the light. They rose gently from their haunts in the thick weeds and propelled themselves up toward the surface with short sharp thrusts of their fins. A single black molly made the rounds of its shoal, as if rousing them all for a journey. In no time at all the whole army was drawn up in formation and setting out.

At one o'clock an old shack next to the cobbler's hut collapsed. The storm banged the tin roof against the walls, and the air howled and whistled. At the same moment the red swordfish woke up and ranged themselves behind their leader, a giant with a sharp black sword. It was not the collapse of the shack that had awakened the swordfish. Their cousins the green swordfish had weighed anchor and gently set sail into the forest, as if bent on capturing the clearing abandoned by the silverfish. Only the solitary fighting-fish, the lord of the tank, still slept in his home among the corals. He had responded to the sudden light with a shudder of disgust. The zebra fish played a childish game of tag around the sleeping monarch.

The last to come back to life were the guppies, the dregs of the aquarium, an inflamed rabble roaming restlessly hither and thither in search of crumbs. Slow snails crawled on the plants and on the glass walls of the tank, helping to keep them clean. The widow sat all night watching the aquarium, holding the empty glass, conjuring the fish to move from place to place, calling them after the Spanish towns: Malaga, Valencia, Barcelona, Madrid, Cordova. While outside the clashing winds sliced the crowns off the stately palm trees and broke the spines of the cypresses.

She put her feet up on the ebony card table, a present from Martin and Ditza Zlotkin. She thought about Zen Buddhism, humility, civil war, the final battle where there would be nothing to lose, a thunderbolt from the blue. She fought back exhaustion and despair and rehearsed the unanswerable arguments she would use when the time came. All the while her eyes strayed to another world, and her lips whispered: There, there, quiet now.

Toward dawn, when the wind had died away and we were going out to assess the damage, the old woman fell into a half-sleep full of curses and aching joints. Then she got up, made a fresh glass of tea, and began to chase flies all over the room with an agility that belied her years. In her heart she knew that Abramek Bart would definitely come today, and that he would use his promise as an excuse. She saw the plaster fall from the ceiling as the pole fell and broke some of the roof tiles. The real movement was completely noiseless. Without a sound the monarch arose and began to steer himself toward the hollow stone. As he reached the arched tunnel he stopped and froze. He took on a total stillness. The stillness of the water. The immobility of the light. The silence of the hollow stone.

H
AD IT
not been for Ditza, Batya Pinski would have married Felix in the early nineteen-forties.

It was about two years after the awful news had come from Madrid. Once again a final war was being waged in Europe, and on the wall of the dining hall there hung a map covered with arrows, and a collection of heartening slogans and news clippings. Ditza must have been four or five. Batya had got over the disaster and had taken on a new bloom, which was having a disturbing effect on certain people's emotions. She always dressed in black, like a Spanish widow. And when she spoke to men, their nostrils flared as if they had caught a whiff of wine. Every morning, on her way to the sewing room, she walked, erect and slender, past the men working in the farmyard. Occasionally one of those tunes came back to her, and she would sing with a bitter sadness that made the other sewing women exchange glances and whisper, “Uh-huh, there she goes again.”

Felix was biding his time. He helped Batya over her minor difficulties and even concerned himself with the development of Ditza's personality. Later, when he had submitted to the desires of the party and exchanged the cowsheds for political office, he made a habit of bringing Ditza little surprises from the big city. He also treated the widow with extreme respect, as if she were suffering from an incurable illness and it was his task to ease somewhat her last days. He would let himself into her room in the middle of the morning and wash the floor, secreting chocolates in unlikely places for her to discover later. Or put up metal coat hooks, bought out of his expense allowance, to replace the broken wooden ones. And he would supply her with carefully selected books: pleasant books, with never a hint of loss or loneliness, Russian novels about the development of Siberia, the five-year plan, change of heart achieved through education.

“You're spoiling the child,” Batya would sometimes say. And Felix would word his answer thoughtfully and with tact:

“Under certain circumstances it is necessary to pamper a child, to prevent it from being deprived.”

“You're a sweet man, Felix,” Batya would say, and occasionally she would add, “You're always thinking of others. Why don't you think about yourself for a change, Felix?”

Felix would read a hint of sympathy or personal interest into those remarks; he would stifle his excitement and reply: “It doesn't matter. Never mind. In times like these one can't be thinking of oneself all the time. And I'm not the one who's making the real sacrifice.”

“You're very patient, Felix,” Batya would say, with pursed lips.

And Felix, whether shrewdly or innocently, would conclude, “Yes, I'm very patient.”

 

Indeed, after a few months or perhaps a year or two, the widow began to soften. She permitted Felix to accompany her from the dining hall or the recreation hall to the door of her room, or from the sewing room to the children's house, and occasionally she would stand and listen to him for half an hour or so by one of the benches on the lawn. He knew that the time was not yet ripe for him to try to touch her, but he also knew that time was on his side. She still insisted on wearing black, she did not temper her arrogance, but she, too, knew that time was on Felix's side; he was closing in on her from all sides, so that soon she would have no alternative.

It was little Ditza who changed everything.

She wet her bed, she ran away from the children's house at night, she escaped to the sewing room in the morning and clutched her mother, she kicked and scratched the other children and even animals, and as for Felix, she nicknamed him “Croakie.” Neither his gifts and attentions nor his sweets and rebukes did any good. Once, when Felix and Batya had begun to eat together openly in the dining hall, the child came in and climbed on his knee. He was touched, convinced that a reconciliation was coming. But he had just started to stroke her hair and call her “my little girl” when suddenly she wet his trousers and ran away. Felix got up and ran after her in a frenzy of rage and reformist zeal. He pushed his way among the tables trying to catch the child. Batya sat stiffly where she was and did not interfere. Finally Felix snatched up an enamel mug, threw it at the elusive child, missed, tripped, picked himself up, and tried to wipe the pee and yogurt off his khaki trousers. There were smiling faces all around him. By now Felix was acting secretary general of the Workers' Party, and here he was, flushed and hoarse, with a murderous gleam showing through his glasses. Zeiger slapped his belly, sighing, “What a sight,” until laughter got the better of him. Weissmann, too, roared aloud. Even Batya could not suppress a smile as the child crawled under the tables and came to sit at her feet with the expression of a persecuted saint. The nursery teachers exclaimed indignantly, “I ask you, is that a way to carry on, a grown-up man, a public figure, throwing mugs at little children in the middle of the dining hall, isn't that going too far?”

 

Three weeks later it came out that Felix was having an affair with Zeiger's wife, Zetka. Zeiger divorced her, and early in that spring she married Felix. In May Felix and Zetka were sent to Switzerland to organize escape routes for the survivors of the death camps. In the party Felix was regarded as the model of the young leadership that had risen from the ranks. And Batya Pinski started to go downhill.

W
HEN ABRAMEK
comes, I'll make him a glass of tea, I'll show him all the old papers, we'll discuss the layout and the cover, and eventually we'll have to settle the problem of the dedication, so that there won't be any misunderstanding.

She picked up the last photograph of Abrasha, taken in Madrid by a German Communist fighter. He looked thin and unshaven, his clothes were crumpled, and there was a pigeon on his shoulder. His mouth hung open slackly and his eyes were dull. He looked more as if he had been making love than fighting for the cause. On the back was an affectionate greeting, in rhyme.

Over the years Batya Pinski had got into the habit of talking to herself. At first she had done it under her breath. Later, when Ditza married Martin Zlotkin and went away with him, she started talking out loud, in a croaking voice that made the children of the kibbutz call her Baba Yaga, after the witch in the stories they had heard from their Russian nurses.

Look here, Abramek, there's just one more point. It's a slightly delicate matter, a bit complicated, but I'm sure that we can sort it out, you and I, with a bit of forethought. It's like this. If Abrasha were still alive, he would of course want to bring his own book out. Right? Right. Of course. But Abrasha isn't alive and he can't supervise the publication of the book himself. I mean the color, the jacket, the preface, that sort of thing, and also the dedication. Naturally he would want to dedicate the book to his wife. Just like anybody else. Now that Abrasha isn't with us any more, and you are collecting his articles and his letters and bringing out his book, there isn't a dedication. What will people say? Just think, Abramek, work it out for yourself: what will people make of it? It's simply an incitement to the meanest kind of gossip: poor fellow, he ran away to Spain to get away from his wife. Or else he went to Spain and fell in love with some Carmen Miranda or other out there, and that was that. Just a minute. Let me finish. We must kill that kind of gossip at all costs. At all costs, I say. No, not for my sake; I don't care any more what people say about me. As far as I'm concerned they can say that I went to bed with the Grand Mufti and with your great Plekhanov both at once. I couldn't care less. It's not for me, it's for him. It's not right to have all sorts of stories going around about Abrasha Pinski. It's not good for you: after all, you need a figure you can hold up as an example to your young people, without Carmen Mirandas and suchlike. In other words, you need a dedication. It doesn't matter who writes it. It could be you. Felix. Or me. Something like this, for instance: First page,
QUESTIONS OF TIME AND TIMELY
QUESTIONS,
collected essays by Abraham brackets Abrasha Pinski, hero of the Spanish Civil War. That's right. Next page: this picture. Just as it is. Top of the next page: To Batya, a devoted wife, the fruits of my love and anguish. Then, on the following page, you can put that the book is published by the Workers' Party, and you can mention Felix's help. It won't hurt. Now, don't you argue with me, Abramek, I mustn't get upset, because I'm not a well woman, and what's more I know a thing or two about you and about Felix and about how Abrasha was talked into going off to that ridiculous war. So you'd better not say anything. Just do what you're told. Here, drink your tea, and stop arguing.