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Morning and Evening
Once, in the town of Hanachiv, a boy was born on the night of his father’s death. It was winter, 1881, the night forty pogromchiki took the train from Yelizavetgrad with blades between their teeth. In place of train tickets, they clasped hundred-gram bottles of vodka between their palms. On they came, singing and shouting; first they swept through the town of Przemyslany, which was well-situated and had a railway station, and where the path from the broad hill was paved with cobbles. Down they came stumbling between the church and the general store, and burnt the synagogue. Its roof caved, slowly at first, and then quicker, until it looked like a sagged mouth, and the pale prayer-shawls piled on the lectern burnt from the fringes inward. And they moved on to Hanachiv under the thin moon’s sour grin, plying the air with song.
*
One night in late March Yossel left Oscher Schoenbrun’s house behind the other boys. On other days he ran from his teacher’s house with the other boys, and only then headed homeward, down the dirt path tamped nightly by homeward processions of cows. His mother’s house stood at the far edge of a little hillock, where tufts of fescue showed blue already and fanned up into the approaching dark. The house stood at the outskirts of the town, beside the birch forest that surrounded Hanachiv, and now, in April, the sticky new leaves had managed at long last to unfold completely. Each night except the eve of Shabbes Yossel ran home headlong from Schoenbrun’s house, trying to outstrip the gathering dark, for at twilight a boy had at least a chance to avoid the stones and stinging-nettles that dotted the hill. But in the winter that chase was hopeless, for the darkness set in long before Schoenbrun swung open his door with his spotted hands and let the boys home in a flurry of homespun scarves and dark coats, too often into swirling snows. There were many evenings when Yossel had to follow the angular lines of the letters with his fingers, so dim was the light of Schoenbrun’s guttering candle, with its stinging smoke.
But tonight the spring, so slow in its arrival, had set in at last, lengthening the days, and the light persisted even after Schoenbrun had grunted his farewell to his students. As usual, even before the boys had left, he dipped under his wood lectern for the hundred-gram vodka bottle he kept wrapped in a prayer shawl beneath it. The other boys—all ten—gathered their tattered books and their overcoats and sprang from the low wood benches, their bodies tensed in anticipation of the long race downhill to the town square. Little Leibush was the last of them; the youngest, at six, he was hard-pressed to keep up with their furious pace. Mendel, the eldest—only a few weeks from his bar-mitzvah and already nearly as brawny as his father the butcher—liked to pinch at the boy’s arm where it showed through his ragged sleeve, and put on airs with his own bought greatcoat from Brody. Today Yossel lingered over putting on his coat, lingered until Schoenbrun half-roused himself from his chair, poised to strike the idling boy, and muttered a curse under his breath; but before he could get within arm’s length Yossel slipped out of the narrow room like a shadow and let the door slam behind him. If Schoenbrun recalled this tomorrow, he might make Yossel the special target of his ire; but if Yossel was lucky the drink would plunge him into a dreamless sleep tonight, and dim the wrath in his pin-sharp eyes.
Outdoors the light broke in gold over the big hill outside Hanachiv and seemed to shatter into pieces along its shaggy edge. A cool wind blew, unrelenting, and tugged at Yossel’s coat with its broad hands, and rustled his hair with its palms. Yossel knew that his mother would not return until late tonight from the tavern she ran; it was Thursday, the night the traders from Przemyslany would pass through town on their way to the Friday market in Lviv. She would come home with her hair plastered to her temples with perspiration, and reeking of their tobacco, so weary she braced herself on the doorpost of each room. On those nights she could hardly kiss him before falling into a dreamless sleep; and he would eat bread and onions for supper, which she brought home wrapped in a cloth from the tavern.
After long days in the heder he had helped her at the tavern, sweeping the floors and fetching spirits from the cellar, and tethering the horses of the guests to the posts. How fat they were—the guests—and how they belched and sang—and leered at his black-haired mother when she fetched their cups—Yossel could hardly believe. How different they were from Schoenbrun, with his pale skin stretched over his bones like carding-wool on too big a loom, spittle in his beard, his black eyes made narrow by long hours of squinting at letters in the gloom…his body hunched, his face screwed tight in the service of his impossibly big voice, with its endless, its eternal monologues. The goyim had a thousand songs—and once in awhile one would fetch him a cuff on the ear or press a kopek into his palm; curse him for a Jew, or bless him with good fortune, and sometimes both in the same moment. Their faces were red with drunkenness, and with the sun that fell with careless abundance onto their wagons, filling each crevice with gold. Their hands were rough, and their voices were thick with life—their cruel eyes were blue with abundant life…
But lately Yossel’s mother had shooed him from the premises, telling him a boy this year to be bar-mitzvah had no business blackening his hands as a tavern-keeper, a tavern run by a widow… and she held her own sooty hands to his cheeks, black from stoking the tavern fire, and kissed him on the brow. And said—how fine it would be when he was a rebbe, with students of his own, in a city; and with a fur hat all his own and a golden robe; and how good he must be until then, how good, and work hard in the heder until he could go off to a yeshiva someday; far from the little house where the two of them slept, alone at the edge of a birchwood. Next year—if he were good—after his bar-mitzvah—he might be sent to a yeshiva…and if he were impossibly good and impossibly lucky it might be the most famous yeshiva of all, the Yeshiva of Volozhin—the best in all Russia—and far from Hanachiv—ten days by rail, they said…
Today Yossel’s hands were black as his mother’s. All day he had copied an argument from the Talmud over and over—about the time one might rise from mourning on the Ninth of Av, the day one smeared one’s face with ashes and read a book of laments—and on the eve one ate an egg to recall one’s death and bread dipped in ashes instead of butter…At noon one might rise from the floor and sit on a bench of wood, said Rav Eliezer, and the other, Rav Ashi, said only at night. All day he had tried to understand the argument—it was based on a verse in the Book of Lamentation, a wily rereading of the text; but it fled him and the letters whirled around his head like the demons that the Talmud, elsewhere, prescribed should be caught in an upturned bowl; and he gnawed at his fingers and wondered how such a creature as him could be sent to a yeshiva at all—much less acquire a golden robe—and Schoenbrun had struck him a glancing blow to the nape of his neck, where, he said, the evil impulse sits, clouding the mind…
And now the sun breaking over the hill blinded him when he stared into it, and when he shut his eyes the world shrank to a red egg. He pressed his thumbs against his eyelids and a burst of light radiated from that touch, thin as a star or an aleph. He found his feet climbing – to the crest of the hill... The same light that bled now into the furrows of the hill was dying over Przemyslany, over L’viv, over Volozhin itself. It was sinking between the birches and behind the beechwood fences of the Poles. And beyond that – to places he could not imagine—Warsaw, Lublin—Moscow…
And how brightly the same sun must shine over the desert where Moses once walked, Moses and his weary people, a desert which surely existed even now somewhere in the world…Yossel had walked as a child to the great synagogue in Przemyslany with Heiml’s father, the scribe, a man with perpetual ink-stains on his fingers and a face sour as a carp’s; on they had trekked over too many hills, trampling the heads of the chicory flowers in their shoes. Yossel had been so weary afterwards he drowsed through all Deuteronomy’s curses, until a sharp blow stung him awake, a blow with the flat of a prayer-book printed in Warsaw… If the climb to Przemyslany could weary a boy so, how weary Moses must have been, Moses who had wandered so far over the water before he could even speak. The Talmud said Moses had been struck dumb when a coal fell on his tongue, and God had taught him to speak again when he came to him in the fire… suddenly Yossel felt sorry for Moses, and then for himself, feeling the ache of Schoenbrun’s blow still.
When he reached the top of the hill the light—sifting down through the clouds, like a dust of flour through a miller’s sieve—made him feel flushed, full, ripe to bursting. A hot feeling, like the rush of oncoming sleep, immersed him from head to toe, accompanying the light, and it filled him with unease. It was as if, fully awake, he was caught in the grips of a throttling dream. He recalled a dream he had had again and again in his first year of heder—the year Schoenbrun first taught him the aleph-bais, at five, and let him lick honey off the letters when he learned them, and cuffed him when he forgot… He had dreamed that he was climbing the slope of a great aleph—too wide for him to fling his arms around; on he climbed, scrambling, falling, clutching for any hold on the unyielding black surface, slippery as ink and glossy as marble. For months Yossel had exhausted his strength each night, dangling above a broad and yawning darkness. His heart balked and danced in his chest at the memory.
The cool wind set him shivering. Yossel turned back to the village before darkness could descend. The gold light framed each blade of serge-grass and lit the nettle thorns where they nestled beneath the sharp leaves, and each grain of the sandy earth seemed weighty and precious. He walked slowly down to the valley where the town square lay—grudging each step—watching the gleam of the church dome with its lopsided cross. The church had seven windows, each wider than the last, and a towering flight of steps led up to the arched wood doors. Though it loomed over the low square—taller, much taller than the row of shops and his mother’s tavern, squat as a goose—it was a building never to be entered, or approached. The Poles filed toward it in procession each Sunday, the women in kerchiefs, the girls in plaits, with crosses to kiss dangling at their breasts. And the men barrel-heavy in wool trousers; and Father Arkadi with his censer waiting at the top of the steps; he beckoned with his dangling black sleeves, his brown beard heavy as bear-fur. The Ukrainians had their own church, in the neighboring village of Glinyany… In the lemon-yellow light just after dawn on Sundays, Yossel would wait for the crowd to pass before continuing on to Schoenbrun’s narrow house. Now he stopped before the church—then turned his eyes away—eastward, toward home.
Suddenly he heard a soft voice from above him on the church steps:
“Hey, Jew-boy…”
He looked up with his heart in his mouth—the unsettled feeling he had up on the hill hardening now into fear in his stomach. For a moment the light from the west blinded him; all he saw was a face in shadow and a halo of gold hair lit from behind, a gold dome of impossible brightness.
“Hey Jew-boy!”
And a thin figure began to descend the steps. As he reached the bottom Yossel saw it was the one-eyed Pawel, the Polish boy who sat always on the church steps. He had been born without an eye, undersized, a scrap of a boy; and the villagers said he was cursed. Kazimierz the dairyman, who drank away his wages as fast as he earned them, swore the devil had been present at Pawel’s birth, for his mother had broken the icon-lamp in the throes of labor. And now—thanks to the devil, no doubt—the boy was a weakling, too small to help his father in the fields, and clumsy to boot. The Polish boys, sunburnt and strong, cursed him and drove him before them, and kept him from their raucous games. So he sat on the steps and chewed scraps of sacred bread, sweeping the stairs for the priest and weeding the grave-mounds in the church courtyard.
Pawel was older than Yossel, a boy of thirteen; but he looked twelve like Yossel or even younger, though a few sparse gold hairs had begun to sprout above his lips. He was so thin his shoulders’ bones seemed fit to cut through his shirt. His left eye was empty; its pink lid sagged inward, into the dark cup where an eye never was. His right eye was blue as a disc of glass. He sat each afternoon on the church steps; and he watched, silently. Kazimierz said he must be mad—to sit alone on the church steps all day—mad or an idler, or both. He and Walery the cowherd had agreed, over a long gossip that sent them deep into their cups, that Pawel was a boy set upon by demons, from hearth to hill, and everywhere in between; only Father Arkadi the priest wished him well. At last Pawel reached the bottom stair and sat there, clutching a lump of bread in his hand. He was smiling.
“I saw the other Jew-boys running home together,” he said. “Why are you here all alone?”
“Good evening, Pawel Janowic,” Yossel stammered in response, in the rough Polish he had picked up at the tavern. “I went up the hill...”
“Good evening,” Pawel said, peering at him. His voice was thin, and it cracked when he said ‘evening,’ as if the word were splitting in two in his throat. “What’s your name, Jew-boy?”
“Yossel.”
“Your mother runs the tavern.”
It wasn’t a question. Pawel sniffed at the bread in his hand and began to chew it; crumbs dropped to the hairs that clung to his sharp chin, but he kept his eye trained on Yossel.
“Yes.”
“Where’s your father, then?” Pawel asked.
“He died,” Yossel answered. “He was killed. On the night I was born. My mother is a widow.”
“That’s bad luck,” said Pawel, around his mouthful of bread. “Bad fortune. Christ should bless you with better luck. He has mercy even on Jews… that’s what Father Arkadi says. He says Christ’s mercy is as boundless as our sins, or even more, and no one is cursed that can’t be forgiven, if only you confess to your sins and the blood on your hands.”
Yossel looked at his smudgy hands, for lack of a better answer, and then back into Pawel’s restless eye—bright in the deepening dusk, like a blue hole cut in the night.
“Does Father Arkadi teach you?” he asked, finally—curious about the boy he had passed so often, perched at the top of the stairs like a gangly raven. Up close, Pawel’s face was gaunt, and dappled with freckles.
“He teaches me the good word of Christ. But I can’t read, yet. Father Arkadi says if I sweep the nave and keep the crosses straight on the graves ‘til Easter he’ll teach me to read then.” Pawel looked down and scuffed his feet on the ground like a child. Then a thought came to him and he looked up at Yossel. “You – what do you and the Jew-boys do in that old man’s house? –the old man with the limp – that’s your teacher, isn’t it? I see him go in to Guttman’s shop—he spits on the ground when he walks, too. He should have three hands for all the bottles he tries to carry at once!”
Yossel laughed at that—thinking of the hundred-gram vodka bottles that littered the grass around Schoenbrun’s house, their labels worn blank by wind and water. Pawel grinned back.
“All we do in the old man’s house is read,” Yossel said. “We read our holy books. And when we finish them, we start them over again. A rebbe spends his life that way. –that’s what we have—rebbes—not priests. They sing songs, and they have a hundred students, or a thousand, or ten thousand, and some can work miracles…healing the sick, or speaking with God, or anything you could imagine.”
“I didn’t know you Jews had miracles too,” said Pawel. “—Christ’s will be done. I’ve never talked to a Jew-boy before…though I’ve seen you all from up here...”
The darkness was deeper now, enveloping them, rising up from the rich tamped earth at the foot of the church steps. In the last gleam of light Yossel could see Pawel’s one eye shine icily; and the dusk seemed to enter his parted lips. Yossel wondered if Pawel was truly mad, or cursed, or set upon by demons; his face seemed unnaturally white now, and the wind had returned, seizing fistfuls of his hair and releasing them. The silence stretched between them—Pawel seated, still clutching his nub of bread, and Yossel standing over him, nearly close enough to touch the rough fabric of his shirt and the jutting bones beneath it.
“I have to get home,” he lied, suddenly uneasy; a hot feeling, a radiation of the nerves, was beginning in his belly. “—my mother will be wanting me.”
“Goodbye, Yossel,” said Pawel, and the dark was too deep for Yossel to make out the expression on his face. “Maybe I’ll say hello now when you pass…since you and I are both unlucky.”
“Goodbye,” said Yossel; and turned away eastward, where the first stars were gathering over the birches, heavy with light, strewn carelessly across the sky like ears of summer grain.
*
Sabbath day dawned bright between the blinds. The sun fell on Yossel’s eyelids and roused him, scattering the scraps of his dream. Half blind, staggering, he rose, planting the pads of his feet in the dust at the foot of his bed. The lace curtains his mother had bought in the city were studded now with morning light as if pricked with a gold needle. Yossel dressed mechanically, half-drowsing, and slipped on his shoes in the gloom of the little house. He could hear his mother’s heavy breathing in the next room. She would sleep on deep into the morning, as she always did on the Sabbath.
No women came to the prayers at Guttman’s shtiebel. It was little more than a wood room where the men gathered to pray each morning, between the fish-house and the butcher’s yard. Alter the baker’s boy would stand at the lectern and murmur the prayers aloud, and Heiml’s father the scribe would read the Torah. Whatever light entered the room was squeezed through the seams of the plank walls, and in winter the shtiebel was plunged into darkness. Ganachiv had no rebbe and hardly any prayer-books, and a tattered Torah carried from the railway station in Przemyslany. The men prayed in a guttural undertone, though Srul the butcher and the old men wailed out the name of Jerusalem in plaintive lament, a nasal, ululating cry. Yossel had no father to accompany him, and, not yet bar-mitzvah, he was too young even to wear a prayer shawl. Usually he sat at the back; and when the other boys’ fathers tucked them under their prayer shawls during the priestly blessing, he covered his eyes with his hands. And when he came home his mother would be waiting with a hot pot of cholent, a smell of barley and beef scraps filling the house up to the brim; and she would look at him with gleaming eyes, and touch his earlocks, and say, —my boy, my little rebbe…And sometimes: my little man… Sometimes she asked him to sing prayers to her—and he tried, stumbling, with his tongue between his teeth, clutching the prayer book she could not read. And sometimes they ate in silence, under a hanging lamp of amber glass.
Today Yossel slipped out the door in silence, letting the sun hit him full in the face. The scent of lavender and chicory-flower rose up from the side of the hillock—heady and bright in the dry hot light, which stung his eyes, though it was early yet. This morning his limbs felt strange to him; his arms hung heavy against his sides. Usually he hurried to the shtiebel, and arrived before the completion of the first blessing. But today his steps felt weighty. The dense light pressed him down into the earth. He ordered his feet to move—he whispered a scrap of a prayer… And he found his feet moving not towards the butcher’s yard, where the earth was thick with stale blood, and not towards the fishmonger’s. Limp to an unknown will, Yossel moved like a dreamer through stands of fir, then between the Poles’ fences, where dogs bayed at the gates and penned lambs gave forth plaintive utterings. Red buds clung to the bushes; shrikes and warblers cried out like peddlers, singing their wares to the juniper trees.
And suddenly Yossel found himself in the town square, at the foot of the church steps. He shook himself; up on the hill the cows were lowing, and the hot, rich smell of their dung was carried down to him on the wind. He closed his eyes, letting them hide behind the blinds of his lids. And when he opened them—Pawel appeared to him, descending from the top step clumsily and slowly.
“Good morning, Yossel,” he called out.
“Good morning, Pawel Janowic,” Yossel replied.
When Pawel reached the bottom stair he held out his hand in greeting. The lines of his red palm were thin and deeply etched, his fingers coated in dust; he must have been sweeping the church. Yossel lifted his own hand tentatively; it felt so heavy he thought it might slice the dry air in two. Pawel clasped it in greeting and let it go at once—as if the moist heat of Yossel’s palm might burn him.
“It’s hot today,” said Pawel. In the full light, the sagged lid of his left eye showed a blue vein, the skin nearly translucent. He cocked his head, gazing at Yossel. “Isn’t it your Sabbath day?”
“Yes,” said Yossel. And then: “Today we read prayers from the prayer-book and words from our holy book. And then we go home and bless our bread and sing to God.”
“But you’re not praying now,” said Pawl. “—you came to the square.”
“I know,” said Yossel. Hot light spilled over Pawel’s folded knees, swaddled in brown broadcloth; again he stood silent over the older boy, where he sat on the bottom stair, bracing himself with frail white hands. Yossel wished his shoes were gone so he could feel the hot earth on his feet—hot enough to anchor him here—lest he float and hover, skimming the church spire and the village roofs... His heart was hammering, straining up toward his collar; the sun was big and yellow as a round of fried dough on a blue plate of sky. Yossel felt a thousand miles from the dark shtiebel, penned between muck-yards where even the trees had died; he shuddered, thinking of the fishyard where cut skulls studded the dust, burst eyes, gaped mouths, and a snow of scraped scales draping the sides of the barrels...
Pawel grinned—and spit into the dust, a white mound that bled quickly into the parched earth. “—It’s your luck… I hide during Sunday Mass, behind the altar, in a backroom full of water-jugs, ever since Wincenty Jankowski beat me for a cursed boy in front of them all… and I listen through brick to the hymns. Father Arkadi says – you can pray where you wish, and Jesus will hear you. I don’t know if your Jews’-god has big enough ears for that.”
Yossel had never thought of God’s ears. God was a force—an outstretched arm—a wind that bore locusts and hailstones…God’s ears: he imagined them now—pink; cupped; big enough to take up the whole horizon. He laughed at the thought.
“Come with me,” said Pawel, suddenly. “I’ll show you where I pray best.”
Yossel swallowed. Under the advancing midday sun the day seemed unbearably quiet…even the birds had stopped singing, stilled by the unseasonable heat. The town square—framed by the church and shops—seemed like a magic circle of earth, tamped smooth…. He could not imagine leaving it now—much less in Pawel’s company. The boy’s blue eye glimmered like a gem; and under the other eyelid—a secret darkness…
But somehow his lips let loose an assent. With a last glance up at the church doors Pawel scrambled to his feet—and turned east towards the forest. The two boys moved silently. The bright sun washed the little footpath clean of detail; Yossel tried to focus his eyes as beads of sweat rolled from his brow, clear down to his lips. Soon they reached the little path at the forest edge; Yossel could faintly see his own brown house in the distance, where, no doubt, his mother was just waking.
Pawel beckoned him into the wood. In the shade of the birches Yossel reeled at the sudden darkness. As a boy he had feared the birchwood—though he lived at its edge; he had ventured in a little at times, but never strayed from the path, which was fringed with bright with berry-bushes. Sometimes on the Sabbath he and the other Jewish boys would lie in the mown fields of inattentive farmers, on days when they had gone to market in Przemyslany, and thrown stones at the grouse when they swooped at the oaks. But always the full blue sky hung over them then… and now the canopy of trees swallowed the light, oak and aspen and pine, and the wind picked up again. The branches of pines bobbed and sagged around them, and their trunks dripped with sap; the sticky new leaves of the birches were bright, jagged still where they had unfolded from the bud. Pawel was moving fast under the trees, fading into the shadows in his brown broadcloth; far from the path, as he cut through the scrub, his loping gait seemed touched with sudden grace. Not far off Yossel could hear a stream’s sudden rushing, as he struggled to follow, losing his balance on oak-roots branches fallen to winter storms. Pawel turned to him only when they reached the bank of the little stream; a ray of sun like a spilled flask of medovukha played on the water.
“Follow the stream,” he said, pointing east—deeper into the wood—deeper now than Yossel had ever traveled on his own.
Yossel nodded—he was breathing too hard to speak. But the scrub was sparser by the water, and they moved slower now over the rocks at the bank, which glimmered with mica. They kicked up a fine silt of dust with their heels, following the turns of the stream for what seemed like miles. At last, after a span of time Yossel could not measure, they reached a gap in the trees. Blinded again by the onrush of light, Yossel blinked until the green spots in his vision faded. A lake spread out before them, a rough, brilliant oval sealed in by birches. Pawel turned to him—a sudden shyness creeping into his face, a bow in his shoulders—and he shrugged at Yossel.
“Here it is,” he said, “my little church in the wood…”
And he turned again to the water, skirting the edge of the pool, until he stopped at an outcropping of rock, half-draped in a white cloak of bellflower. He scrambled to the top of the rock, finding holds with a practiced ease. Bending low, he held his hand out to Yossel, who grasped it—clinging with the other to the damp leaves of the vine, and crushing a fragrant bloom with his shaking palm. The rock was hot to his hands, dappled with flecks of silver.
When Yossel reached the top Pawel began undressing. Slowly he pulled the brown broadcloth shirt over his head, damp and clinging with sweat, and loosed his belt with his thin white hands. A gold down grew on his chest and belly, which was a pale white--alabaster white, snow-white, all-white--whiter than the newest prayer-shawl shipped from Odessa… And then Pawel’s trousers, too, were pooled at his ankles, and he slipped off his white cloth shoes; stood looking down at Yossel for a moment from the tip of the rock, all limbs—and dove into the water, so fleet, Yossel thought, he ought to have left a gold trace in the air.
His hands were shaking as he pulled at his own collar, dressed as he was for the Sabbath. The surface of the water shone like a Prague diamond; Pawel was still submerged. The wind calmed for a moment and the lake was smooth as a silver coin. Slowly Yossel removed his shirt; underneath, his tzitzis, the four-cornered garment he had worn since infancy, let his shoulders and neck out to the air. He held his breath and slipped out of his trousers until all he wore was the tzitzit, and its four fringes dangled at his hips. The hot wind plucked at the black hairs on his legs.
Pawel burst up from the water and stretched his arms to the sky. Kicking at the water to stay afloat, he spoke in a language Yossel could not understand.
“What are you saying, Pawel Janowic?” he asked, shivering—resisting the urge to cover himself with his palms.
“A prayer,” said Pawel, in Polish again. “Come into the water!”
“I can’t swim,” said Yossel.
“Why not?”
“The Talmud says a father has to teach his son to swim. But I have no father. And my mother can’t swim and can’t read either.” Yossel sank to his knees on the rock. He could feel the cool breeze off the water on his legs and his hands.
“Unlucky…” said Pawel. And he dove down again under the water, resurfacing beside the rock. He stood in the water by the bank.
“Come in a little,” he said. “—feel God on your belly…”
Yossel stared into his blue, blue eye, and, dazed, put his hand to the fringes of his garment; and slipped it over his head, and walked into the water, hemmed in at the fringes by birches and sky.
Holding his breath for fear he walked out until the water reached his neck, feeling the mud and water-plants suck at his ankles. He was only a few feet from the bank, but he felt utterly immersed. Pausing in the middle of the silver surface, he felt plunged into the sky. The water pulled at his legs and between them; and he stole a glance at Pawel, who floated a few feet beyond him, squinting into the sun. Under the whistling of the wind and the soft slap of the water he muttered a benediction of his own—stumbling, as always, with his tongue between his teeth. Up on the rock the wind seized on his tzitzis until they billowed out like a frog’s throat or a half-slit flag.
Pawel swam behind him, clambered up the rock, and lay there under the sun without dressing, and closed his eyes. Yossel froze in the water. Pawel’s neck, turned up like a swan’s, was open to the wind, and his thin white body was bare on the rock. A lump in his throat—unease, not God, clutching at his belly—Yossel glanced between his legs… and there, rising up from a soft gold tuft, silver drops clinging to each hair, Pawel’s penis dangled down almost to his thigh. Clearing his eyes of light and water, Yossel stared…unlike his own, it was uncircumcised. He had seen, once or twice, the other heder-boys play naked by the river—bathing as children… But now he was almost a man; he was near to bar-mitzvah; and Pawel near-grown at fourteen… A sheath of skin covered the whole length of the penis, its wrinkled dark surface emblazoned with veins. The light caught at the opening where the head showed; the rim of the foreskin flared with light to Yossel’s eyes, like a crown, angled up toward the unsullied sky.
Yossel flushed—he wished suddenly he could wet his dry lips with vodka—and burst out into song like a Polish cowherd—or cry out with laughter and clutch his belly—and strike any man that stood in his way… His cheeks burned like lamps—he stared until the wind stung tears from his eyes—and he licked at his lips, which had til now tasted only dry bread, and stumbled too long over dead men’s words. The sun was better to stare at—it hurt his eyes less than this gold-white boy, who gleamed with silver water... And he thought of the verse from the Song of Songs—His belly is as bright ivory… Pawel was silent now, half-asleep in the sun—to be a rough Polish butcher with calloused hands and without scars between his legs!—red with sun and life—a head of thick curls—broad arms like beams—to take his desire in his hands, and to sing, not in lament or argument, but in praise of all life’s bounty…
The wind rose suddenly and scattered a rain of leaves into the water. Pawel shook himself drowsily and shivered, raising himself on his haunches. The sun was already passing its height; Yossel knew that prayers would nearly be over and he must hurry home before his mother began to worry. Clumsily he climbed from the water, scraping his knees on the rock, and dressed, tzitzis first, the white cloth clinging to his wet chest. He turned away from Pawel—covering the swelling at his crotch with his palm—and hurried into his trousers, which were rough against his wet skin. Pawel dressed too, unhurried, easing into his shoes with dripping feet.
The two of them walked back together along the stream, under the swollen sun; silence hung between them, dense as shadow, wreathing the water, and rising up through the new birch trees.
*
