In This Season
Here is another tale of man’s inhumanity to man in our century, this one set in the Second World War rather than the First. There are powers, and then again, there are powers—and there are also Powers. “In This Season” is the story of a collision between them. I owe Marty Greenberg a thank-you for this one, for letting me put a Chanukah story in an anthology of Christmas tales.
Sunset came early to the little Polish town of Puck as winter began. The Baltic slapped in growing darkness against the shelving, muddy beach. The Poles grubbed clams and cockles and whelks from the mud and fried them or ate them in soups. For Puck’s three families of Jews, shellfish were, of course, forbidden food.
The hunger that gnawed Berel Friedman’s belly made him wonder with increasingly urgent curiosity what fried clams tasted like. In the three months since the Germans overran Poland, Puck’s Poles had come to know hunger and want. As for the town’s Jews—well, falling under Hitler’s yoke made Friedman long to be ruled by Poles again, and what comparison could be worse than that? None he could think of.
A soft knock on the door distracted him from his gloomy reflections. His wife, Emma, said, “That will be the Korczaks. We’re all here now.”
“Yes.” He opened the door, nodded to Jacob and Yetta Korczak, chucked their two little boys under the chin. “Welcome, all,” he said. “Gut yontif—happy holiday.”
“Gut yontif.”Deep lines of worry lost themselves in Jacob Korczak’s graying beard. He laughed bitterly. “As if there are any happy holidays any more.”
“We go on day by day, as best we can,” Friedman said. “What else can we do?” Behind him, Isaac Geller nodded, not so much from conviction (for his nature was less sunny than Friedman’s) as from despair at finding any better course.
Friedman made sure the curtains were tightly shut before he took down the silver menorah and set it on the mantel. For the Poles to see him lighting Chanukah candles would be bad enough. For the Germans to see him would be catastrophic.
He set a slim orange candle in the leftmost space in the menorah, then took another from the box and laid it on the mantel for a moment. He got out a match, scraped it against the sole of his boot. The match caught. Coughing a little at the sulfurous smoke, he picked up the candle from the mantel, lighted it, and used it to kindle the one already in the menorah. Then he put theshamas candle in the menorah’s centermost place, which was higher than the four to either side of it.
That done, he chanted in Hebrew the blessings over the candles, then translated them into Yiddish for the women and children: “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who hast sanctified us with thy commandments and commanded us to light the lights of dedication . . .” (“Which is what ‘Chanukah’ means, after all,” he added in an aside.) “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who wrought miracles for our fathers in those days and in this season . . . Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who hath preserved us alive and brought us to enjoy this season.”
Though Friedman was in most circumstances a man far from imaginative, the irony of the Chanukah blessing struck him with almost physical force. God might have helped the Jews against Antiochus long ago, but what was He doing about Hitler, whose venom was enough for twenty Antiochuses? Nothing anyone could see.
Shaking his head, Friedman read and then translated the explanatory passage that followed the blessings in the prayer book: “These lights we light to praise thee for the miracles, wonders, salvations, and victories which thou didst perform for our fathers in those days and in this season, by the hands of thy holy priests. Therefore, by command, these lights are holy all the eight days of Chanukah; neither are we permitted to make any other use of them save to view them, that we may return thanks to thy name for thy miracles, wonderful works, and salvation.”
All the adults in the crowded little living room exchanged troubled glances above the heads of their children. Where were the victories? The wonderful works? As for salvation, who under the Nazis had even the hope to pray for it?
If there were miracles, they lay in the hearts of the children. As soon as Friedman stepped away from the menorah, his daughter Rachel, the two Korczak boys, and the Gellers’ son and daughter all squealed, “It’s Chanukah!” so loud that their parents looked alarmed. Children didn’t worry about hard times, but they made the most of celebrations. In a moment, three or four dreidels, some of wood, others baked from clay, were spinning on the floor and on the low, battered table in front of the fireplace.
“Here, here,” Jacob Korczak said gruffly. “If you’re going to play with dreidels, you need some Chanukahgelt , don’t you?” He dug in his trouser pocket, took out a handful of mixed German and Polish small change, and passed the little coins to all the children. Friedman and Geller did the same.
The letters on the four sides of the dreidels began the Hebrew words that meant “a great miracle happened here.” The sounds of joy from the children as they played, the delight when the person who spun won the pot on agimel , the moan whenshin landed face up and the spinner had to add to the pile, made the house sound like all the Chanukahs Friedman remembered. In these times, that was not the smallest of miracles itself.
It even began to smell like Chanukah. The rich odors of hot grease and onions flooded in from the kitchen as Emma fried potatolatkes : a man could still come by potatoes. But thelatkes would be the entire Chanukah feast. No fat goose, no brisket marinated in wine, not this year. Friedman could count on the fingers of his hands the times he’d tasted meat since the swastika flag replaced Poland’s red and white banner over the town hall.
“We’ll just stuff ourselves the fuller withlatkes , then,” he declared. Jacob Korczak glared at him. He just smiled in return. If your children were happy, could you stay grim for long?
Someone knocked on the door.
In an instant, the house was silent. The children looked frightened. The adults looked terrified. All the Jews in Puck were gathered together here. Whoever stood outside had to be agoy , then: maybe a Pole; maybe, worse, a German. The Germans were deporting Jews from this part of Poland now that they’d annexed it to their country. Ice in his veins, Friedman waited for the harsh cry,“Juden, heraus!”
The knock came again. But for that, silence.
Emma poked her head out of the kitchen. “What shall I do?” Friedman mouthed in her direction. Opening the door and not opening it were equally appalling choices.
“Open it,” she said without hesitation. “It’s Chanukah, after all. Feeding the stranger is amitzvah .”
If the stranger outside was a cruelly grinning SS man in a coal-scuttle helmet, Friedman did not think even God would reckon feeding him a blessing. Of course, if it was an SS man outside, he had better things to eat than the poor fare a handful of Jews could offer him.
Whoever it was knocked for a third time, not loudly but with persistence. The slow, steady raps helped hearten Friedman. Surely an SS man would not politely knock three times; an SS man would hammer down the door with a rifle butt.
Friedman raised the bar, threw the door wide. Outside stood the tallest, widest man he’d ever set eyes on, dressed in rags far too small for him. Friedman had never seen him, or anyone like him, before. He looked as though he could have ripped the door off its hinges with his little finger.
The big man did nothing of the sort. He just stood quietly, looking down at Friedman even though the living room floor was a tall step above the street. His eyes reflected the flickering glow of the Chanukah candles like a cat’s.
Seeing those candles, even if at second hand, reminded Friedman why he’d opened the door. He forced his voice not to wobble as he said, “Will you come in, friend, and take supper with us? We have an abundance of goodlatkes , so help yourself to all you can eat.” He knew he’d lied—no one but Germans had an abundance of anything in Poland these days—but it was not the sort of lie God recorded in his book of judgments.
The stranger looked at him a moment more. He did not answer, not with words. All at once, though, he nodded. He had to go sideways through Friedman’s door, and duck his head to get under the lintel. When he straightened up inside the house, the hairless crown of his head just missed scraping the ceiling.
Rachel Friedman was only four years old, too little to be perfectly polite. She stared up and up and up at the stranger, then started to cry. Through her tears, she wailed, “If he eats all he can eat, the rest of us won’t have any!” That set a couple of the other children crying, too. They’d all been hungry too often of late to think of losing a promised feast.
As host, Berel Friedman did what he could to repair the damage. He knew with a certain somber pride that his chuckle sounded natural. “Don’t worry about the children, my friend. What do children know? As I said, we have plenty. And Emma”—he raised his voice—“bring out the plum brandy for our guest, will you?”
The big man did not speak. David Korczak, Jacob’s older boy, was twelve. Hisbar mitzvah would have come next summer, had the Germans not come first. Now he nudged his father and said, “Why does the stranger—”
“The guest,” his father hissed, also mindful of the proprieties.
“The guest, I mean,” David corrected himself, then went on, not quite quietly enough, “Why does the guest haveemes written across his forehead?”
“What nonsense are you bleating?” Jacob Korczak made as if to cuff his son. But he was just, as well as stern, and looked before he struck. Friedman looked, too. He’d taken the brown patches above the stranger’s eyes for a birthmark, about which any comment or even apparent notice would have been rude. Now, though, he saw David was right. The marks did spell out the Hebrew word for truth.
For a moment, he accepted that as a freak of nature. Then he remembered the Talmudic teaching that the wordemes was the Seal of God, which had also adorned Adam’s forehead when he and the world were newly created things.
Since Adam, no man had borne that sign. It was instead the mark of a thing newly created, though not by God: the mark, in short, of thegolem . Fear all but froze Friedman’s heart. There were other terrors than Germans loose in the world—and he had just invited one of them into his house!
A low choking noise from Jacob Korczak said he’d come to the same dreadful realization. Isaac Geller hadn’t, but Isaac Geller, while a good man and a good Jew, was not overly burdened with brains.
What to do? What to do? Friedman didn’t dare even moan, for fear of angering the undead creature. He wanted to command it to leave, but feared its wrath since he knew he had no authority over it. Besides, having accepted it as a guest, he could not turn it out when it had done no wrong without incurring sin himself.
That left him no choice but to treat the thing as if it were a man like any other. He waved to the table. When it sat, he said, “Will you honor us by leading prayers this evening?”
Thegolem shook its head, pointed to its throat with a massive index finger, shook its head again.Of course, Friedman thought:it can’t speak—only true divine creations can do that . He racked his fear-frozen wits for other bits of lore, but it was as if he were trying to get money from a bank that had failed.
As if with a magic of her own, Emma had set an extra place for thegolem , shifted her husband’s chair to it, and found him an old splintery stool, all without being noticed. Now, red-faced and beaming, she placed a big tray oflatkes on the table. With her spatula, she filled thegolem ’s plate. Berel pouredslivovitz into its glass.
Since thegolem had declined, Isaac Geller led the prayers. After the finalomayn , he lifted his snifter of brandy and made the usual toast: “L’chayim—to life!”
Friedman was more convinced than ever that his friend had rocks in his head. Of all the things that might enrage agolem , he couldn’t think of one more likely to infuriate than praise for something it would never have.
But thegolem only raised its glass along with the rest of the adults. It let the potent plum brandy moisten its lips, but whatever passed them did not lower the level of theslivovitz by a hair’s breadth. It used its fork to cut a tiny crumb from onelatke , then put the rest of that potato pancake and all the others back on the platter.
That was too much for Emma. She could extend hospitality to agolem with aplomb, but to see the hospitality refused roused her ire. “You’re not eating,” she said sharply, as if in the one accusation she condemned the creature for crimes uncounted.
Thegolem obediently dipped its head to her, then lifted the scrap of fried potato to its mouth. It chewed but, Friedman saw, did not swallow.What need has a thing of clay for nourishment? he asked himself, and found no answer. Politely nodding once more to Emma, thegolem put both hands on its belly, as if to show it was stuffed to overflowing. She let out a loud, unimpressed sniff but otherwise held her peace.
With thegolem so abstemious, thelatkes were enough to feed everyone. Friedman had trouble remembering the last time he’d been so pleasantly full—not since the Germans came, that was certain. He sipped his brandy, savored the heat spreading from his middle. Even that heat, though, was not enough to keep him from wondering when he’d enjoy a fully belly again.
After the last pancake had vanished, Emma started carrying dishes back into the kitchen. She let Yetta Korczak and Bertha Geller help, but when thegolem started to do likewise, she stopped in her tracks and looked so scandalized that even the undead creature got the message. It sat back down; Berel’s chair creaked under its weight.
He didn’t let that worry him. He’d had food and drink; now he lit his pipe and blew a happy cloud toward the ceiling. Then, emboldened and perhaps a trifleshikker from theslivovitz , he turned to thegolem and said expansively, “What shall we call you, my friend?”
The moment the words were out of his mouth, he felt a fool for forgetting the thing of clay was mute. But it answered him even so: it pointed with one finger to the letter written on its forehead.
“Emes?”Friedman said. Thegolem nodded. Friedman raised his own forefinger, something he did only when he’d had a bit to drink. “All right then, Emes, show us some of the truth you are.”
“Berel—” Jacob Korczak began. He stopped there, but Friedman could fill in what he’d meant:Berel, shut up, you damned fool, before you ruin us all. It was good advice; he wished he could have taken it.
Too late for that—thegolem was nodding again. Friedman’s vision suddenly blurred, or rather doubled strangely. He could still see the room in which he sat, thegolem next to him, Korczak and Geller across the table, the children back to playing with dreidels.
But set side by side with the familiar, homely scene, he also saw other things, thegolem ’s truth he had so rashly requested. He saw Jews jammed insanely tight into a tiny corner of a great city he somehow knew to be Warsaw. He saw Germans smirking as they clipped Jews’ beards, more Germans holding their sides and howling laughter as they dipped other beards into oil and set them ablaze. He saw twelve-year-old girls selling their bodies for half a crust of bread. He saw the starved corpses of others who perhaps had not sold themselves enough, leaning dismally against battered buildings. He saw Jews walk by the corpses without so much as glancing at them, as though they’d grown numb even to death.
As if at the cinema, the scene shifted. He saw a big pit gouged out of the ground. Under German guns, a line of naked people walked up to the edge of the pit. All the men and boys among them were circumcised. The Germans shot them from behind. They tumbled into their ready-made mass grave. The Germans led up another line.
The scene shifted again. He saw a wrought-iron gate, and above it, in letters of iron, the words arbeit macht frei. He saw more naked people, these mostly women and children, slowly walking toward a low, squat building. Signs in Yiddish, Polish, and German said to the showers. He saw endless piles of bodies fed into what looked like enormous bake ovens. He saw black, greasy smoke rise from the stacks above those ovens.
Slowly, slowly, the other seeing faded. He was altogether back in his own warm room in his own little house. But a chill remained, a chill in his heart no fireplace could touch. He looked across the table to his friends. Both men were pale and stunned and looking at him. They’d shared the vision, then.
He looked at thegolem , hating it. If it had given him the truth, how much more comforting a lie, any lie, would have been! He’d looked into the open grave of his people. What man could do that and then go on as if he’d seen nothing? He hated himself, too, for asking the undead creature into his home.
While he berated himself, simple, practical Isaac Geller said, “If that’s how it’s going to be, what do we do about it?” Having less imagination than either Friedman or Korczak, he yielded less readily to horror.
“Dear God, what can we do?” Korczak said. But Geller had not asked him; he’d spoken to thegolem .
That second sight returned, this time blurrily, as if the thing of clay presented not truth but only possibility. In fragmented visions, Friedman saw the Jews of Puck walking down the main street of town, saw them approaching a fishing boat, saw them in the boat with sea all around. The compass showed they were sailing northwest.
Again he was back only at his own table. “That’smeshuggeh !” he cried. “The Germans would shoot us for breaking curfew. Nobody among us knows how to run a fishing boat, and the boats have almost no fuel anyhow. The fishermen spend more time complaining than they do fishing.”
As usual, though, Isaac Geller looked at things differently. He asked thegolem , “What happens if we don’t try, Emes?”
Friedman saw that wrought-iron gate again. He shuddered, though the vision lasted but a split second. Set against what lay beyond that gate, any risk at all seemed worth trying. He found his own question for thegolem : “You’ll help us?”
The undead creature nodded. That was enough to satisfy Friedman. He twisted in his chair, called into the kitchen. “Emma!”
“What is it?” She stood in the doorway, the sleeves of her dress rolled up past her elbows, soapy water dripping from her fingers onto the floor. “What is it that won’t wait till I finish washing?”
Our lives,he thought. But that would have taken explanation and argument. He just said, “Get coats for the children and for yourself, too. We’re going out.”
“What?” Her eyes went wide. “The curfew, the Nazis—”
“I don’t care,” he said, and her eyes went wider still. He turned to thegolem . “Show her, too, Emes. She needs to see.”
He never figured out precisely what the thing of clay showed his wife, but she gasped and put a hand to her mouth. Without a word, she walked over to the closet and pulled out coats. “Come here this instant, Rachel, Aaron! This instant, do you hear me? We need to dress warmly.”
Bertha Korczak and Yetta Geller came out of the kitchen to find out what was going on. Like Emma, they started to protest when they learned they’d be out and about in the night. Then thegolem looked at each of them in turn, mud-colored eyes somber in his great ugly face. Argument was cut off as abruptly as a chicken’s head when theshochet wielded his cleaver. Friedman wondered if he could learn that trick himself. But no, it was probably supernatural.
A few minutes later, he stood outside his home. Even wrapped in his coat, he was cold. Thegolem started down the street, toward the docks. The three families of Jews followed. Friedman looked back at the house where he’d lived his whole life. To abandon it suddenly seemed insane. But even more insane were the visions Emes had granted him. Life away from everything he’d known would be strange and hard, but it would be life, for him and his children. Even without thegolem ’s power, he saw again in his mind’s eye naked Jews standing at the mouth of their ready-dug grave.
The main street was almost eerily quiet. Nothing moved—no cars, no bicycles, no people on foot. The town of Puck might have been cast headlong into the strange space from which thegolem drew its visions. Berel Friedman shook his head. The Germans had powers of their own, chief among them fear.
Every step he took seemed to echo from the houses, from the solid stone front of the Catholic church that was much the biggest building in town. Every time one of the children coughed or stumbled or complained, he expected a division of panzer troops to burst from an alley, engines bellowing, cannon and machine guns all pointed straight at him and his. But the silence held.
Puck was anything but a big city; even the main street, the one straight street it boasted, was only a couple of hundred meters long. Soon most of the houses were behind the Jews, the dockside fish market straight ahead. Hope rose in Friedman. Thegolem , after all, was a creature of might. No doubt its spell lay on the Germans, lulling them into taking no notice of the families it was spiriting away.
He had no doubt—until the German patrol came out of the market, heading back toward town. Then fear flooded into him, all the more fiercely for having been held at bay. His legs turned to jelly, his bowels to water. He started to gasp out theShma yisroayl so he would not die with the prayer unsaid: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one!”
Even as the harsh cry“Halt!” rang in the air, thegolem ran straight for the Germans. They were not first-quality troops: who would waste such on a fleabag town like Puck? They were not expecting trouble, so their reactions were slower than they might have been. But they were soldiers, and they did carry guns. Before thegolem reached them, a couple flung Mausers to their shoulders and started shooting.
Amidst screams from women and children, Friedman’s head filled with a sudden urgent vision: thePilsudski , Tadeusz Czuma’s fishing boat. As usual, it was the one moored farthest north in the little harbor. “This way!” he shouted, and the rest of the Jews followed—incidentally, he thought some time later, taking themselves out of the line of fire.
Muzzle flashes from the Germans’ rifles gave them flickering light, like small lightning bolts, as they ran. Bullets slapped into thegolem , one, two, three. The impacts were shockingly loud. A man would have been down and dead, maybe cut in two, with such wounds in him. But the thing of clay had never been alive, so how could rifle fire kill it?
All the Germans were shouting, in terror now, as their prey refused to fall. Then thegolem was among them. It might not have been alive, but it was immensely strong. Its great fists smashed ribs, caved in steel helmets and the skulls beneath them. The Germans’ shouts turned to screams that shut off one by one.
Friedman leaped from the pier down into thePilsudski , then whirled to catch his wife and children as they sprang after him. Korczak and Geller were doing the same for their families. Faster than he could have imagined, everyone was on board. Only then did he remember he hadn’t the faintest idea how to sail the fishing boat.
Isaac Geller was already in the cabin. “Cast off the lines, you two,” he called to Friedman and Korczak. Friedman dashed to the bow, Korczak to the stern. By the time they’d obeyed, Geller had the noisy old engine going.
Booted footsteps pounded toward the fishing boat—the last German soldier, running for his life. Behind him came thegolem , gaining with every enormous stride. The German whirled round in desperation, dropped to one knee, and fired at point-blank range straight into thegolem ’s face.
Maybe he’d intended to hit it between the eyes. Friedman knew even less about matters military than he did about sailing, but he had a vague idea that was what you were supposed to do. If itwas what the German had in mind, he didn’t quite succeed. The muzzle flash showed that his bullet smashed into thegolem ’s forehead just above its left eye.
In so doing, it destroyed the letteraleph , the first letter of the wordemes .Mes was also a word in Hebrew; it meantdeath . Just as a man would have, thegolem ceased when that bullet struck it. But its heavy body smashed into the kneeling German just the same. Friedman heard bones snap, the soldier’s last cry abruptly cut off. Two corpses lay unmoving a few meters from thePilsudski .
The racket from the fishing boat’s engine got louder. The boat pulled away from the dock. Friedman had hardly ever been on the water despite a lifetime by the sea, and wondered if he’d be seasick. For now, he didn’t think so. The motion wasn’t that unpleasant; it reminded him of bouncing up and down on the back of a mule.
He went into the cabin to see if he could do anything to help Isaac Geller. Geller didn’t seem to need help. Despite his long black coat and big black hat, he looked surprisingly nautical. Maybe it was the cigar he’d stuck in the corner of his mouth.
“I didn’t know you could handle a boat,” Friedman said.
The cigar twitched. Geller grunted. “I may not be much forpilpul about the Talmud, Berel my friend, but give me something with a motor in it and I will make it work.”
“This is also amitzvah ,” Friedman said, adding, “especially now.” He looked around the cabin. Once he’d seen it, he couldn’t imagine what sort of help he’d thought to give Geller. For all he could make of the instruments, they might have been printed in Chinese. The only thing he recognized was the compass. He studied that for a while, then said hesitantly, “Excuse me, Isaac, but are we not sailing south and east?”
“Yes,” Geller said.“Nu?”
“In the vision Emes granted us, were we not supposed to go northwest?”
Geller laughed so hard, the cigar jerked up and down in his mouth. “Berel, not even the help of agolem will make this boat sail across the dry land of the Hela Peninsula.”
“Oh,” Friedman said in a very small voice.
“Let me get around the peninsula before I make for Sweden,” Geller went on, “not that we have much real chance of getting there.”
“What? Why not?”
Geller poked a finger at one of the incomprehensible gauges. “You see how much fuel we have there. It isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. God only knows what will happen when it’s gone. I’m sure of only one thing: whatever it is, it will be better than what thegolem showed us.”
“Yes,” Friedman said. “Oh, yes.”
He went out on deck. Emma came rushing up to him. “Will it be all right, Berel?” she demanded fiercely. “Will the children get away from—that?”
He still didn’t know what thegolem had showed her. He didn’t want to know; Emes had shown him too much for him to want to find out more. He shook his head, blew out a long sigh. “I just don’t know, Emma,” he answered, thinking first of the fuel gauge Geller showed him and then of what his friend had just said. “But whatever we find on the sea, how can it be worse?”
His wife nodded. “This is true enough.”
Friedman walked over to Jacob Korczak, who was watching the low, flat coast of the Hela Peninsula flow by. Every few kilometers, lights defined the land: though there was a war on, no British or French planes could reach Poland, and as for Russia—Russia had helped Hitler carve up his neighbor. So the lights kept burning.
Korczak might have been reading Friedman’s mind: “With the kind of pilot Isaac is liable to be, he’ll need all the help he can get.”
“He’s better than either of us,” Friedman answered, to which Korczak replied with a cough. After a moment, Berel went on, “I had thought—I had hoped—thegolem might save more of our people before it met its fate. For a moment, I had even hoped it might save all our people. For what other purpose could it have been made?”
“I asked myself this very question.” By his slightly smug tone, Korczak had come up with an answer, too. “My thinking is this: thegolem is a power in the world, not so?”
“Indeed,” Friedman said, nodding vigorously. “A very great power. This is why I hoped it might accomplish more than freeing us alone—not that I am not grateful to the Lord for preserving us, but what are we among so many?” He had another queasy flash of memory from thegolem ’s vision. That camp with arbeit macht frei on the gate had beenhuge —and were there more like it?
“Thegolem is a power,” Korczak repeated. “But—the Germans, are they not also a power? Ten years ago, who had heard of thatmamzer Hitler? And when power meets power, who that is not a power can say which of them will break?”
Friedman thought it over. “Whether this isthe answer, Jacob, I cannot say:I am no power, as we both know. Butan answer you definitely have, one good enough for mortal men. I will saykaddish for Emes on hisyortzeit each year.”
“And I,” Korczak agreed. He returned to more immediate matters. “Does Isaac truly know enough to keep from drowning us?”
“I think he may.” Friedman hesitated, then told his friend what he had not mentioned to his wife: “He says we are low on fuel.”
“Oy.”
Since that one word summed things up as well as anything Friedman could say, he kept quiet. ThePilsudski passed another light. Emma found some grimy wool blankets. She and the other mothers wrapped the children in them. Before long, in spite of the terrifying excitement of the day—maybe even because of it—the youngsters fell asleep.
Another light, this one higher and brighter than any of the rest. In its blue-white glare, Friedman saw that the long spit of the Hela Peninsula ceased. Isaac Geller saw that, too. The fishing boat heeled in the water as it changed course.Northwest now, Friedman thought, and remembered what thegolem had shown him.
Northwest now, but for how long? He had to know. He went into the cabin, waited for Geller to notice him—who could say how complicated steering a boat was? After a while, Geller turned his head. Feeling as if he were asking a rabbi to explicate a thorny passage of the Talmud, Friedman said, “How do we stand for fuel?”
Geller scowled. “Not very well. I think the gauge is broken. It’s scarcely changed from when we set out.”
“That may be good news,” Friedman said. He was looking for good news. “Maybe it lies when it says we have only a little. Maybe we have a great deal.”
“We don’t,” Geller said flatly. “When I saw the gauge seemed stuck, I put a stick down into the tank to find out how much it held. What the stick says comes near enough to agreeing with what the gauge says.”
“Then—” Friedman quavered.
“Yes, then,” Geller agreed. “Then we will run out of fuel and the boat will stop. If God is kind, a Swedish ship or a Danish one or even a Russian one will find us and pick us up. If God is less kind, no one will pick us up and we will die. If God is most unkind, a German ship will find us.”
“A German ship.” Friedman hadn’t thought of that. Geller was right—it would be most dreadful to come so close to freedom only to have it snatched away by a ship flying the swastika banner. “Surely God would not permit it.”
“After what thegolem showed us, Berel, who are we to say what God would and would not permit?”
“How can I answer that? How can anyone answer that?” Friedman left the cabin; between them, the rolling of the boat in the open sea and the stink of Geller’s cigar were making his stomach churn. So was worry. Back in Puck, running had seemed the only possible thing to do. Now when it was too late, he wondered whether running had been wise.
The last lighthouse faded astern. Friedman cast himself into the hands of God—not that he hadn’t been in them all along, but now he abandoned the usual human feeling that he had some control over his own fate. Whatever would happen would happen, and there was nothing he could do about it.
The fishing boat chugged along. After a while, a thick, clammy bank of fog rolled over it. It left damp droplets in the tendrils of Friedman’s beard. When he held his hand out at arm’s length, he could not see it. Maybe God was stretching His hand over thePilsudski . No German ship would ever find them in this soup. Of course, no Swedish or Danish or Russian ship would, either.
Of course, likeliest of all was that no ship of any nation would come anywhere near. The Baltic Sea all around had seemed incomprehensibly vast, as if the fishing boat were traveling the dark of space between the stars. Somehow the fog intensified the effect rather than diminishing it.
And then, from out of nowhere, felt and heard rather than seen through the mist, a huge shape, vaster than the great fish that had swallowed Jonah, flowed blindly past the bow of the boat. From the cabin came Isaac Geller’s startled exclamation:“Gevalt!” Friedman had not even the wit for that. He waited, heart in his throat, for the brusque hail that might mean rescue or disaster. No hail came. The big ship sailed away, intent solely on its own concerns.
Friedman said, “That was close.”
From out of the fog somewhere close by, Jacob Korczak answered, “That was very close.” He called to Geller, “How are we doing for fuel?”
“I’ll check,” Geller said from out of the pale, milky smudge that marked the cabin’s place. After a pause, he went on, “We still have—about what we set out with.” He sounded surprised, but far from displeased.
“How could we?” Korczak demanded. “We set out quite a while ago, so surely we’ve burned some.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Geller said. “I’d think so, too. But the gauge doesn’t think so, and the stick doesn’t think so, either. The gauge may be mistaken. How the stick could be mistaken, I tell you I do not see.”
“It makes no sense,” Korczak complained. “Fuel burns, it burns just so fast. When so much time is gone, so is the fuel.”
“Tell it to my stick,” Geller said. Korczak subsided with a wounded sniff.
Northwest, northwest, northwest . . . Friedman hoped it was northwest, hoped Geller was minding the compass. For all he could tell, thePilsudski might have been sailing in circles. He recognized Emma’s footsteps on the deck before she came close enough to be seen. “Berel, are you here?” she called. “Oh, you are here. Good. Look—I found more blankets.”
“Thank you.” He took one and draped it over his shoulders like a huge prayer shawl. It smelled of wool and stale tobacco and even staler sweat; Friedman’s opinion of Tadeusz Czuma’s cleanliness, already low, fell another notch. Emma was already swaddled against the chill and fog. He turned to her. “You ought to sleep if you can.”
“So should you,” she retorted. He nodded; he knew she was right. Neither of them lay down. She moved a step closer to him, lowered her voice. “Berel . . . is it going to be all right? Why is Geller going on about how much fuel we have?” He heard the undercurrent of reproach in her voice:why didn’t you tell me about this?
He answered the undercurrent, not the question: “I didn’t want to worry you.”
She amazed him by starting to laugh. “I had agolem come into my living room, I ran from the house where I lived since I was married to you and the town where I lived all my life, German soldiers shot at me and I watched them die, and you didn’t want to worry me aboutfuel ?”
“All right, all right.” He started laughing, too; looked at from that direction, it was funny. But his self-conscious chuckles quickly faded. “The trouble with the fuel is, we don’t have much.”
“We’ve come this far,” Emma said.
“Already it’s farther than Geller thought we could.”
“If it’s already farther, then what does Geller know?” she said, and nodded decisively, as if she’d just won a subtle point of logic. “We’ll sail as far as we’ll sail, and please God it will be far enough.”
“All right, Emma,” Friedman repeated. Oddly, her reasoning reassured him. If he was in God’s hands, then God would take care of things. And if God would take care of things, then Berel Friedman didn’t need to stay awake to watch. He redraped the blanket so it covered all of him. “Maybe I will try and rest.”
“This is sensible,” Emma agreed. They stretched out side by side on the hard planks of the deck. He took off his hat and gave it to her for a pillow. She shook her head. “I’ll ruin it.”
“If everything turns out all right, I can get another hat. And if everything does not turn out all right, what difference will a ruined hat make?”
She put it under her head. “Sleep well, Berel.”
“And you.”
He didn’t think he would sleep at all, let alone well. But when his eyes opened, the black mist surrounding thePilsudski had turned gray. His neck, his back, his legs were stiff; everything crackled like breaking ice as he painfully got to his feet.
The children were already awake. They’d adapted to life on the fishing boat faster than their parents; they sat in a circle round a spinning dreidel one of them must have stuffed into a pocket when they fled the house.“Gimel!” Friedman’s daughter Rachel shouted. She couldn’t read, but she knew her Yiddish letters, and they sprang from the Hebrew ones. She knew something else, too: “I win!”
Smiling, Friedman stepped around the game. In the cabin, Isaac Geller still stood at the wheel. His face was as gray as the fog all around him, gray with fatigue. The cigar in his mouth had gone out; Friedman didn’t think he’d noticed. But he steered on.
Friedman said, “The fuel hasn’t run out, I see.”
Geller jerked violently; he’d forgotten everything but the wheel, the compass, and the window that barely showed him the boat’s bow. “Oh, it’s you, Berel,” he said, as if reminding himself. “No, the fuel hasn’t run out. Ask God why; I’ve given up trying to figure it out.” He sounded indignant; maybe he held Friedman responsible for the engine’s still chugging along, or maybe his friend just made an easier target than the Lord.
Outside in the mist, Rachel Friedman squealed, “Anothergimel ! I win again!”
“If she keeps on like that, she’ll end up owning this boat,” Friedman said, hoping the feeble joke would help keep Geller alert and ease his burden. He went on, “The little one, she’s always been lucky with a dreidel. I remember once when she—”
He stopped. Thinking about dreidels made him think about the letters on them, about what those letters stood for, and about the nature of the miracle they commemorated.
“You remember when she what?” Geller snapped. “Don’t just stand there like a cow, with your mouth hanging open. Say something if you’re going to talk. Otherwise, go away.”
“Isaac, last night was the first night of Chanukah,” Friedman said softly.
“Nu?”Geller said: “So what? I take it back. You shouldn’t talk if you’re going to wander all over creation and confuse me.”
“I’m sorry,” Friedman said, bowing his head. “I just thought to wonder whether God, who made one day’s worth of pure oil burn for eight days in the Temple, might not let a tiny bit of fuel take a few of His people farther than anyone would guess. You said to ask God why it hadn’t run out. I think I just have. On that night, with what happened that night . . . what do you think, Isaac my friend?”
Geller slowly turned his head. Now his mouth fell open. The dead cigar fell out. He nodded, once, twice, his eyes wide. Then he gave his attention back to thePilsudski .
Less than a minute later, the fishing boat came out of the fog bank. All at once, the winter sun sparkled off the ocean, cold and bright and clear. Ahead—not far—lay the Swedish coast. The engine kept running.