The Escape (a short story)
Appelfeld, Aharon
THE ESCAPE AHARON APPELFELD TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL SW1RSKY The ruse worked well. After a month his features were no longer recognizable. Another, counterfeit face had been stamped upon him, so...
...He sat in the tavern, went to church, stopped off at the shrine...
...Yet he knew in his heart that it was not from the horse that he had gotten this smell of goats and butter, but, as it were, from within...
...He broke off half a loaf for him...
...They crouched in the grass, lapping water from the stream...
...But there were times when a distant melody would, as if out of spite, well up inside him, seemingly wrenched out of his innards...
...Their voices had a certain subdued quality...
...He hadn't made any special effort to learn the others' way or take on their expressions—these things seemed to flow of their own accord...
...I walked in the villages and no one knew...
...The others have been taken away...
...He had a horse, not an especially well groomed one but an ordinary, all-purpose workhorse...
...Noblemen shut themselves up in their castles...
...He walked with it, slept with it...
...The evening smoke rose from the chimneys of the village...
...Stock ran out...
...The stillness rippled...
...So well-balanced was its flight that it seemed to glide just above the ground without ever touching it...
...His features where white and tortured, as though he had been pinned under a rock, gasping for breath...
...All his movements together amounted to an expression of helplessness...
...But more than anything else he loved the company of the peasants: talking with them, getting drunk...
...They won't chase you any more...
...And no one recognized you...
...And you're not afraid...
...It withered in his hand, and within him...
...By morning they had vanished into the field of golden grain...
...If he happened into town on a Sunday or feast day, he knew how to conduct himself the way they did...
...Even from a distance his Jewish features were discernible, as if he were no youth at all but the specter of fear itself...
...Sometimes out of weariness he would linger in the open fields...
...There was no human sound, only the melody of the forest...
...cried the Jew in a voice that had not been used for some time...
...It it hadn't been for our feet, we'd have been caught by now...
...They showed no outward sign of their enslavement, as if it were their natural condition...
...He would beat the animal the way a Jew beats a dog...
...It was not his weakness which spoke, but a whisper of superhuman strength...
...He would rein in his horse and study them...
...My son," the old man said...
...As the peasants say, "Beware of the song of the birds, lest it lull you into laziness...
...Our feet froze during the winter...
...He wanted to tell them something Jewish, but it came out gentile...
...They would cringe, pausing in their tracks, watching and listening intently...
...The old man studied him, the way one studies a gentile...
...The voices rang with emotion...
...At night the movement pressed onward with a muffled rustling...
...His own thoughts stayed close to home, focussed on his immediate needs: the things he himself required, never mind profit...
...The grass suddenly lost its black spots and shone smooth and green once more...
...A slow gait, feet that know the dust of footpaths...
...Yaroslav's forces advanced...
...The looted property found its way quickly into the homes of the peasants, lost its Jewish coloring, and flowered on the sideboards...
...Another, counterfeit face had been stamped upon him, so convincingly moulded one could easily have taken it for the work of nature itself...
...Only here and there, like a last whisper, did a forgotten door swing on its hinges, a blind window...
...Now and then he would laugh...
...But he stood gazing, frozen in the sea of wheat that was turning golden...
...A white hand thrust out of the brush and cupped water from the stream...
...The waters of the stream would show him his face, the peasant face blotched by the sun...
...The riddle slowly unfolded for them...
...He was ready to give them his horse and his supplies if only they would go away and leave him alone...
...The man did not look up...
...His mind wandered, farther than the soul can grasp...
...The clothes did it, apparently," the older son tried to explain...
...Merchants who had lost businesses and whose voices sounded like the clatter of coins, weaving plans for some commercial onslaught...
...And the Jew fell on all fours...
...All day long he ambled about in the fields...
...How can a man change so much...
...His purchases went well, and he returned laden with crates...
...Finally he began cursing his own tongue, in the way gentiles curse...
...By turns, he would pay heed to them and brush them off...
...The black clothes hung loosely on them...
...A gentle morning caressed the sheaves...
...The latter he drew from some internal source, and it cast up a mighty dam within him—like those peasants who take their strength from the harsh air...
...But sometimes it was a real whisper: the hem of a shabby garment, a hand, a head, so alive and unghostlike that he saw them before his eyes once again in all their fearfulness: their wares on their backs and their clothing tied up, like scouts sent out after a flood...
...I hardly recognized myself at first...
...Astonishment lit up his eyes, the way it does with Jewish boys who hear tell of the wonders of the world...
...Bread...
...They were scattered nearby...
...He used their own language...
...And together they made a comfortable pair, unseparated by any barrier of strangeness...
...The boy disappeared...
...His grey hairs earned him respectful terms of address...
...That night, the forest was bathed in moonlight...
...He had been traveling when the storm hit...
...They took everything we had...
...It always happened during some kind of lull, in a place where one didn't expect to hear ghostly voices...
...Sometimes he would take grass and hide his face in shame...
...He knew how to eat as they did, how to cross himself...
...The lowing of the cows and the voices of the peasants sounded to him like a demand: for salt, kerosene, sugar...
...A young man was standing there in the woods...
...They crawled along only on the country paths, never venturing into the village...
...Subdued voices...
...He would stand there, trapped in his own toils...
...His Jewishness lay next to him like fallen leaves beside a tree...
...Awareness was not enough to burn away his madness...
...Sometimes the horse would have to bear the brunt of it...
...The old man said, "Let's go," as Jews are wont to say in the evening...
...He traded in salt, kerosene, turpentine, vodka—commodities that were in demand...
...He unloaded the crates by the stream and left the horse to graze...
...And that, coming like a soft blow, was so utterly unexpected that all the old man could do was to grin like a stammerer...
...He was a prisoner of their gaze...
...They began to be afraid of him...
...It had been a long Moment/55 time since the breath of a Jew had whispered in his ear, and it suddenly licked his face like a flame...
...So that's how you were saved," the young one said...
...It crossed his mind that unless he made himself known to them they would fly at him one day like irate summer insects, swarming over him in their final rage and biting his alien flesh...
...He seemed like one of those who work as servants in Jewish households and learn a little of our language...
...But what about the dogs...
...Maybe the summer will heal them...
...He had no trouble picking up the others' movements and expressions, the fierceness of the bargaining and the placation that followed...
...They drew near and sat down next to him...
...No one knows yet...
...Don't you want the horse...
...He pulled himself up and the hand withdrew, leaving no shadow...
...He dismounted and called out, but the boy fled, breathless and stumbling...
...Mounting his horse, he set off in pursuit...
...The summer here is full of feelings...
...Fear seemed to put words in his mouth...
...Their voices were more familiar to him than his own...
...Had it not been for your voices...
...But, like fugitives who have found a kindred spirit and don't want to let go of him, they didn't budge...
...He bought himself a fur coat and a horse...
...He learned to enjoy the rustic vodka, to drink himself into a stupor and sleep the whole day, to bathe with his horse in the river...
...He heard tell in the tavern about the heroic deeds of Yaroslav's army...
...He knew how to talk to respectable householders, to the village mayor, to the priest...
...A dark tranquility stretched out over the night...
...The reading exuded a kind of longing, as if it were not rote study but prayer...
...He could reach them with a single gallop, as a hunter might...
...Their presence was hard for him to bear...
...He got up humble and submissive that morning, as if his dreams had plucked out his whiskers...
...No sooner was it dark than they made off, like nocturnal creatures who suck energy from the darkness...
...The Jewish houses must have been overgrown with weeds by this time, their roofs caved in, the common enclosure merged with the abandoned fields...
...he asked, suddenly stirred...
...There's no sign...
...An old man was teaching them, Hebrew and translation alternating...
...scandal, larceny, and theft...
...The obsequiousness of the Jew resounded in his ears...
...They had disappeared completely from the area, leaving behind a few words that, in garbled form, became part of the vernacular...
...Then, with the crack of dawn, it faded away...
...And the horse gave him in return what a domesticated animal can give a man: broad shoulders, a wise step, a look...
...They were exposed, like moles which an early-rising predator has taken by surprise...
...Sometimes fear can do it," said the old man, trying to console him...
...The Jew stretched out a white hand and disappeared like a snail into the forgiveness of the grass...
...He too was caught up in this powerful rhythm...
...He carried on his affairs in the villages, greeting and cursing as circumstances required...
...The song of summer exulted now in the fields...
...You can go to the villages and do business...
...They stopped to ask why he wasn't coming to the village...
...And it was thus that the first feelings came over him...
...The initial silence returned to obstruct the space between them, a silence no words could fill...
...Crouching in the paths, they seemed like oversized estival creatures, driven from their lairs by the heat...
...Maybe he had read forbidden books before that," said the young one, his emaciated face aglow with innocence...
...stooped and scurrying, like magnified beetles in whose eyes fear flashes like phosphorus...
...His dreams were a strange mixture of crude, amorphous figures: heaven and hell, angels and devils...
...Like non-Jews who have served in Jewish houses and picked up a few Jewish words...
...How much you must have changed...
...Evening had already descended upon them, and this was the boundary...
...The day's sights passed over him like gusts of wind...
...Other matters occupied the center of attention: village notables, landowners, tenants...
...What...
...He knew: it was the cowardice inside him that had brought him to a halt...
...Aharon Appelfeld, one of Israel's leading prose writers, is the recipient of several of its prestigious literary prizes...
...He stopped to greet them...
...I am one of you," he said in the gentile language...
...their steps restrained as if this were not soil at all but a field of hissing coals...
...He seemed to have been crouched in hiding for days, the grain growing over him...
...The man put a hand over his brimming eyes...
...The first wagons were being drawn up from the river-bank, laden with the harvest...
...Then the children resumed their chanting...
...We've been here...
...He was trapped now in his own enigma...
...He was attached to the horse as though it were an extension of his own body...
...And the odor that seemed to accompany him was that of peasants who spend time with animals...
...His face trembled in the stream, trembled unshaded...
...It is a horse, after all," he said, speaking the way drunkards do when they offer other men their wives...
...The only dogs are those that were here before Yaroslav's invasion...
...He resembled them in every way...
...one of them asked, suddenly finding his voice...
...An alien sweat warmed him...
...Their white faces were frozen with fear...
...He brought water and gave it to drink...
...He lost the gnawing sorrow too...
...He was hemmed in by the standing grain, close to the breathing of the horse...
...The summer silence, that breathing patchwork of green and gold, would then return...
...It was a summer melody without a human voice...
...The thought of revealing himself to the next Jew he met crossed his mind...
...If it hadn't been for our feet...
...Slowly the blue of evening deepened, and the silence cleared...
...It had begun nearly a year before, he told them...
...Then the older one spoke to him...
...As if from a camouflaged lair, a Jew stepped out into his path...
...Good morning," one of them mustered the courage to say, speaking in the language of the peasants...
...That night he didn't return to the village...
...There was a strange excitement for him in his adjustment, an intoxication beyond fear...
...Of course," the old man interjected...
...So soft was it that only one very nearby would notice it at all...
...His life receded further and further into the distance, leaving no residue within him...
...The trees stood silently by, the wild cherries reddening...
...Summer breathed freely...
...Little by little the darkness exposed itself...
...He had only stopped there for a moment, he replied...
...We can't go far...
...The older son managed to say, "You're past the barricade now...
...They recoiled at the sight of him...
...how to narrow his gaze when a buxom lass came into the tavern...
...But the voices did not frighten him...
...The horse bore him along, but in its gait too there was an unaccustomed lightness, as if it were trying to fly...
...Paths led down to the river...
...He would stand gazing at it...
...He was obviously very young...
...They would flee and disappear, like animals running off into burrows...
...the old man said...
...The other two, who were evidently his sons, hovered at his side...
...Fruit ripened: cherries, plums, the first harvest...
...The horse plodded slowly along, part and parcel of the chill breathing of the woods...
...From time to time, he would make camp, the horse at his side, the sounds of the forest streaming to his ears...
...And they studied him as Jews study a gentile...
...As the night deepened, the words grew quieter, and a song arose...
...The body knows how to protect itself by the lowliest of means, even to the point of emitting odors...
...The saddle was pulled tight...
...His movements were untrammeled, and as a result he made a better peasant than the peasants themselves...
...It lay by the crates like a neglected pet...
...He felt at home in the forest, as though he had never heard of robbers, wolves, or bears...
...At times they were the voices of merchants who had lost their businesses and whose imaginations were being inflamed by the pursuing night...
...He was on his way to replenish it at the barge depot...
...Three Jews lay in the high grass like a thick patch of darkness left behind on the ground and shriveled up...
...The old man asked questions about the village, the way practical men do...
...What are you going to do...
...He would make his way along on horseback, staggering as if against a current...
...There was a manhunt...
...He peered sharply, like a hunter...
...Have mercy," said one of them, getting up on his hands and knees...
...If they came any closer, he would flee...
...The summer made its demands...
...A kind of estrangement came between them now...
...But the actions themselves, the material artifacts, spoke most loudly of all...
...His language was a strange, unfused mixture of Jewish and gentile speech...
...the monasteries demanded apostasy...
...I'm giving you clothing and the horse...
...These too accumulated dust, taking on the hue of the soil...
...he said without moving...
...Sometimes he could clearly make out a man, a woman, a child...
...It was evident that he would have liked to bless him, to advise him, had it not been for his rough peasant appearance...
...All that had happened to him lay behind him like a yawning abyss...
...He looked like a giant beetle that had lost its sense of direction...
...His raids were no longer discussed...
...Once again, the old feelings crept over him...
...The singing flowed all night long, like inner voices by which the singers alone were rocked to and fro...
...Are you afraid of them...
...At dusk he sat down to a meal with two peasants, tenant farmers from the south...
...What could he have told them...
...What a change...
...Man, woman, and child, they made their way along the narrow, weed-lined paths or sat conversing in the underbrush...
...Silence hung rigid between them, the freezing shudder between hunter and hunted...
...Except for the tracks of animals, there were no footsteps...
...But elsewhere—in the meadows, in the places where water roared— he would unharness the horse and his whole life would come back to him...
...Later there arose from the murky darkness the sound of little boys learning the Pentateuch...
...Experienced with traps and ambushes, he suddenly found himself exposed to the light of day, before a real live heathen...
...While they were wrapped up in their prayers, he sat like a defendant in the shadow of the cherry tree, visible in the twilight, apart...
...And you can move about freely in the villages...
...The first light of morning wrapped itself in blue...
...And so a year went by...
...The high grass gave us cover...
...Near the river, a row of peasants stood cutting hay, brandishing their sickles with a broad stroke, like the blowing of the Angel of Death...
...So much one of them did he become that they ceased referring to him as the trader and began to speak of him by name...
...You completely forgot...
...The words came to him as if of their own accord...
...The spasms of memory were not strong enough to upset his equilibrium...
...Yaroslav's cavalry had broken out like a summer storm, mowing down the villages...
...The tip of the old man's nose trembled, a remnant of his fear...
...He's a gentile, isn't he...
...The villagers no longer spoke of the Jews either...
...The evil shadow clung to his flesh...
...The wagons moved on, leaving ruts in the trampled mud...
...They passed him like shadows that he himself had cast...
...Praying, he would whisper torn verses...
...Then, with time, he had a chance encounter...
...He didn't know how this total transformation had come over him...
...Get the hell out of the way...
...The silence grew clear...
...He asked as if it were possible for them simply to get up and go...
...To date, he has published seven volumes of short stories, six novellas, one novel, and a recent volume of non-fiction...
...he shouted...
...He would sleep outdoors in the perfumed air...
...He would stretch out on the ground, trying to rekindle his memory...
...And you...
...The horse lifted its feet as if preparing for some other, steadier movement...
...An undisguised sorrow contorted the face of the horse, which seemed to sense that it no longer enjoyed the same affection from its master that it once had...
...We alone are left," the old man said, clutching the ground beneath him as if preparing to make some kind of sacrificial offering...
...Here and there a cross, the blue roof of a shrine—these too seemed part of the stifled silence...
...Even the cows have...
...another, darker fear echoed within...
...The horse plodded along at its own pace, and evening followed after them across the seemingly endless stretches of the meadow, the sheaves swaying in the wind...
...They told him about their lives, the years they had spent working another man's land...
...He sensed that, unwittingly, he had shed some part of his body...
...Only now, belatedly, did he notice how loose the soil was there, how the sheaves seemed almost planted in its crumbling surface...
...Michael Swirsky is a writer living in Boston...
...And the summer came...
...As if he had actually been a peasant...
...It did not occur to any of the villagers that he might be a stranger...
...Here and there a cow, a horse—they, too, creatures of this stillness—stood hemmed in by the grass...
...The 54/Moment peasants wanted salt, kerosene, sugar...
...That night the sounds became clearer and reached his ears with a naked lucidity...
...Sometimes weariness would overtake him en route...
...Now and then a stray dog or abandoned horse would leap out and pursue them...
Vol. 5 • March 1980 • No. 3
