The Lion Seeker (62 page)

When he turns back and lets go, Avrom fails to rise; instead the body slumps at once, slips away from him like a sodden blanket and curls up on the bottom. He curses and jumps in. Fool must have opened his mouth and sucked in a breath of water, for the body is waterlogged, heavy and awkward to lift. It takes long panicked moments of bobbing and jamming and thrusting off his tiptoes to get the man's mass up over the tin edge. Then he climbs out and scrambles around and drags him down onto the warm stone ground where the sand coats his side. Isaac puts him on his belly and thumps his back. Water flows out of his mouth. He turns him back over and presses the chest. Avrom spasms, his legs kicking. He gasps. Isaac sits him up and he retches watery vomit down his front. Behind them the banging from the hut changes to a sudden crash. Chester is barking and moving between the hut and Isaac. Isaac looks at the hut's sheet metal door and there's another crash and the door bulges. He curses and picks up the rifle. The door bulges again, then again. The next time the hasp snaps off and Andre comes out headfirst, tumbling hard, a slab of black iron attached to his rear like some demented tail, sliding and thumping musically on the earth behind. Bright red flash of much blood there.

Isaac runs at him with the rifle.

IN THE HUT
Avrom wraps canvas strips around the lacerations on Andre's wrists. Behind them the coal stove is twisted on its base of concrete, its front end torn or kicked completely off, ashen coals scattered. From his seat at the table Isaac watches the tenderness in the way that Avrom winds the soft clean fabric, his left hand bracing Andre's forearm with a touch so gentle it seems more apt for crystal stems or frozen petals.

Isaac says,—When I go, I go. Credit for a debit and books closed. We even.

—Just go, says Avrom. Leave us alone. His voice is hoarse from the retching, his face bloodless, the lips twitching.

—You not ganna try follow me after? Find me?

Avrom falls back into Jewish as if the effort of the other language is too much for his state: We're not leaving this place. It's you who's done the wrong.

—You could send your people.

There's no more my people. Can't you see that?

Isaac switches languages also, drawing closer. If you want me to go, better spill your guts. Don't push me to do more evil here today.

Avrom says nothing: his attention to Andre's wounds absolute. When he is finished, he helps Andre to lie down on the mattress and nods his head and Isaac follows him out, still cradling the rifle. On his way Isaac takes two cigarettes from a pack on the table, and a box of Lion matches. There's a crate near the front door and Avrom sits. Chester comes to him and puts his chin on the thigh. Avrom strokes the dog's skull with both hands. Isaac tucks one cigarette behind his ear, lights the other, putting one foot up on the corner of the crate. Avrom speaks without facing him, speaking downward as if to the dog. Tell me what you think you know about your mother.

I know what happened to her when she was young, if that's what you mean.

Do you?

The seventeenth of April.

Avrom looks at him, nods. What exactly?

Isaac shrugs, tells him what is engraved in him from the words of Blumenthal. How there were fires in Dusat. Easter time. A young woman named Hanna Seft with blond hair like a goy went to the cathedral on the hill, found out a pogrom was coming and gave the Jews time to run or hide, all except for the Felder brothers.

Avrom nods.

My mother I found out was called The Saint before. So religious. Afterwards, she never went to shul again. She never has. Because of what happened to her, which made the veil for years, till she could find a doctor here to help.

Avrom nods again. The story of the great heroine Hanna Seft. How she saved the Jews of Dusat.

Why'd you say it like that?

You never said what happened exactly. What accident with Gitelle.

Isaac draws on the cigarette, his eyes slitting. He picks a tobacco fleck off the edge of his lip. She told me she fell off a cart, trying to get away that day.

You believe her?

—Just tell me what you fuckun know already.

Avrom nods, presses the dog's head, nods again, and starts to tell Isaac of how it was his mother Gitelle Helger who was in truth the one who told Hanna Seft about the pogrom coming on April the seventeenth. Who told Hanna to pretend she had sneaked into the church to hear of it, as a cover story. Yes, it was Gitelle The Saint who truly gave the alarm. Gitelle The Saint who happened to know of it because her sister, Rochel-Dor, was told by a certain young gentleman, Antanas Kavaliauskas, who happened to be a Lithuanian and a goy, a carpenter by trade. He had met Rochel-Dor Moskevitch when she was riding her bicycle in the woods and came across him framing a new cottage by himself. She had stopped to watch him work and he'd given her a piece of cheese, and that was the start of it. A simple piece of cheese that Rochel-Dor had hesitated to taste, knowing it might not be kosher. Afterwards, they began to meet in the woods all the time. No one would have known of it if she hadn't become pregnant.

—Pregnant! says Isaac. What complete kuk you sprouting. By a goy, come on!

It's the truth. Listen.

He goes on, telling how Rochel-Dor was almost ready to hang herself but she confided in her sister Gitelle instead and Gitelle was the one who decided to help her, help them both in secret. She knew an old Tatar woman and she took Rochel-Dor there. Ruta is a kind of flowering Lithuanian weed, with pretty yellow flowers that hold a poison that can kill a baby in the womb. Gitelle took her sister to the old Tatar and for three days she drank ruta tea and put ruta poultices in herself. Her problem was ended but Gitelle's began: she could hardly live with the sin she had participated in committing, the ending of a life, even though there had been no other choice in that time and place. She became even more pious, penitential, spending all of her spare time in rocking prayer at the synagogue on Maskevitcher Gass. Months later Antanas Kavaliauskas warned Rochel-Dor about the planned pogrom and Gitelle enlisted Hanna Seft to spread the warning to everyone else. In her heart Gitelle felt the pogrom was a punishment for the abortion, for her sister's sin with Antanas. She decided to stay behind, in the synagogue.

—Wait now. You mean you saying she didn't try run away on no cart?

That's right. She went to the shul.

—Why would she?

She wasn't trying to hide in there. She was going to protect God's house with her prayers. Like a penance she gave to herself, Saint Gitelle. And that was how the gang who broke in found her, praying in there. They were searching for Jewish gold. Believed Jews have gold in vaults under their temples. She was facing Jerusalem. Her eyes were closed . . . 

Isaac yanks his foot from the crate. Kicks at a stone, walks off a few paces, finds he has bitten the filter in half. He spits the cigarette away, puts his knuckle in between the teeth instead.

Avrom: Should I go on?

How do you know this? How could you?

I know. It's the truth. Do you want the truth?

Isaac nods without fully turning. Tasting a little knuckle blood.

Avrom starts telling how after they had found that there was no gold the gang took it out on her. Defiled her for hours. When they were finished they debated killing her so she could never testify to their crime. But then they thought, being powerfully drunk and illiterate themselves, that . . . cutting out her tongue would do fine . . . 

Avrom pauses. You sure you want to know it all?

Isaac grunts just once, a harsh sound, from deep in his chest; the dog's tail twitches and its eyes roll to watch him but its head doesn't move from between Avrom's kneading hands.

They had knives but they needed a pair of pliers which could not be found. Someone had some fish hooks and they gave those a try. They didn't get her tongue properly but ended up ripping the side of her mouth open so that her teeth and gums were exposed, she was shedding so much blood they got scared and left her, they thought to die. She survived by cauterizing her own wound with a copper menorah made redhot in the fire they'd started. Before passing out, she put the flames out with a rug, saving the building.

Isaac crushes the heel of his palm to one eye then the other. How do you know this?

Avrom's hands stroking the dog's soft face and Chester still looking up at Isaac, only now with hooded eyes that seem about to close in their contentment. Isaac lights the second cigarette. How?

Because I've been told it all. Wait. You'll see.

Now he tells of how when Gitelle's face had healed there was a permanent gash in it through which saliva sprayed whenever she spoke, her moving teeth visible there in the jaw's working. She wore the veil and slushed her words and she could never bring herself to return to the sight of her torment. Who knows what she felt towards God then? Whether she continued to pray to Him in her heart or had lost all of her faith? Though (Avrom says) I think not, because of what happened next.

Two months after the rape she had to admit, finally, that what had happened to Rochel-Dor was happening to her. This time she was the confider of the dread secret. The old Tatar woman was where she'd always been; they made plans. But every time the day came near, Gitelle weakened. This must have been the kernel of faith still, fear of The Holy One and the Law. Or maybe having been brutalized to the edge of her existence she revered life even more strongly. Is it right to snuff an infant like some candle flame only because it's been conceived in pain? It was not the tiny one's fault. Innocence should be protected. So Rochel-Dor helped Gitelle conceal her pregnancy until it could be concealed no longer and then she helped her invent a reason to travel to Vilna that the rest of the family would not find suspicious. They went together and Gitelle had the child and they were able to find a childless Jewish couple to take that baby from them and raise it as their own.

Do you know, says Avrom, we're really talking about a child herself.

You can't know all this, says Isaac. How could you know?

She was fifteen or sixteen, no more.

Isaac drops the cigarette, heelgrinds it. —Bladey liar.

No, it's all true. I
know
it is.

Isaac watches him, his body so tense the whole of it trembles.

Avrom sighs. He turns on the crate, looks at Isaac squarely for the first time since he started talking. The couple took the child to Skopishok, where they came from. Later the husband died and it was the mother who raised the child. Her name was Suttner.

Suttner.

Yes, your mother never had a brother called Hershel, you're right, that's a fairy tale. She made it up as an excuse for that trip when you drove her here, something believable for you, that would seem to make sense. She came inside first that day. While you waited outside she asked me to pretend with her.

But why?

To hide the truth.

I don't understand.

Isaac, I know the real story because the story is mine.

Yours?

You don't see?

Isaac stares, narrow-eyed, unbreathing.

It's me, says Avrom. I'm the child that Gitelle had and gave away. She isn't my auntie and we are not cousins. Gitelle is my mother, just like she's yours. We're brothers, Isaac. Brothers.

WALKING BACK OVER ROUGH GROUND
through the fading light toward the ruin of the farmhouse, other truths come to Isaac, as if these won this day have not been enough. Truths within the truth. What Avrom Suttner, secret child, secret half brother, has not recognized even in himself, especially in himself. He thinks he is at peace in his self-humbled life, he thinks that he served the truth by telling Gitelle about what Isaac did with the money meant for her sisters, but he is not serving truth, no, he is serving the loathing like acid that he will not admit is at his core. He's a child of rape: seared, branded. Product of most gruesome tortures, conceived not from holy love but satanic defilement. And then Gitelle gave him away like the shameful object he is. Now for him to destroy her with this news, and not only her but Isaac too—the legitimate son, the heir to her open love that she dared to bring to see him, even to rub his face in—must be to tap a well of deep satisfaction, to close off a circle of revenge. Avrom has been hitting out at the world for all his life and now he is withdrawing from it, but they are both movements in hatred, a kind of bitter warfare, whether he can admit it or not.

In the end, before he left, Isaac had tried hard to get him to come with, to make a visit to Joburg in order to look upon Gitelle's ailing suffering face at least once more before she passed. To speak to some measure of final peace between them. (And more: what Isaac had not said was that he could use his halfbrother as a means to intercede with Gitelle now, to get her to see him and forgive
him
, to change her iron mind, though he doubted that this or anything would work.)

Avrom had refused.

Isaac thinks: He tells himself this is his holy place, where he does nothing but good. What shit. It's just another way of spitting at the world, that's all. I see it now. What shit. I know exactly what he is.

SHE LIVED THEN AS ALWAYS
in the same little brick cottage in rows of such cottages. Beit Street, corner Buxton, Doornfontein, an Afrikaans word meaning
fountain of thorns
. A neighbourhood of Jews where the pale dust from mine dumps off the northern breeze settled on their lives, their arriving and their leaving, their praying, their teaching, their trading, their loving and hating and dying.

They had cut her open and peered inside and closed her up and sent her home with tablets of morphine. She lay in the cool bedroom with the drapes pulled when she felt bad and when she was better she would get up to go to her sewing room or into Abel's workshop to greet the customers. Or she would pick up her carrying bag and walk out into the white glare of Beit Street to do the marketing she always had, the meat from Goldenberg's, the eggs from Shapiro, the milk and flour and vegetables from Samson unless the Indian was having a special on.