Louis Golding
Forward from Babylon
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066231934
Table of Contents
FORWARD FROM BABYLON
BOOK I
FORWARD FROM DOOMINGTON WALLS
CHAPTER I
Russia—here was the first Babylon. Sitting on the metal stool, his second-hand velvet suit fraying against the heat of the oven, Philip's big eyes were round with horror of this immense, inscrutable place. Everything they said was portentous, not wholly real. Many of their words attained a meaning only after laborious thinking.
"Kossacken—big as trees!"
"Big spikes in front of the Gubernator's house! Babies stuck! Rachel, the parchment-maker's daughter, caught up on a white horse! Never heard of again!"
"Blood in the streets, thick!"
A fear and a helpless rage seized the faces there, always only half seen in the gloom of the kitchen. By day, beyond the bars which uselessly scowled against the small glass panes, the drab walls of the house next door kept away everything but a dirty and dubious light. By night, the flare of the coal-gas jet distorted his father, Reb Monash, and his own feet on the fender, and the sofa into things of blurred, awkward lines.
It must be confessed that Reb Monash Massel was not wholly unconscious of his power to produce this atmosphere where terrible and impalpable presences flowed from his lips in a shadowy rout. Sabres flashing! Hilarious ponderous blasphemies tangled in the beards of Kossacken storming onward and away!
"You've heard me talk of Mendel, the Red One? No, not the shoemaker, the clerk! It was when a clerk he was, in the woods! They were cutting the Posne firs. They knew he was a Jew, the wood-cutters, and they put their heads together. Can one be a Jew without stabbing the goyishke eyes, eh? He was working very late one night; it was near the end of the month and he had all his accounts to make up. Well, he was bending over his papers very busy, and it was late, after midnight. There were owls hooting and two or three mad dogs in the woods crying now and again. It was very miserable, but he was bent over his figures. Above his head the air sang suddenly. He lifted his head and a knife he saw, quivering in the log wall beyond him, to his left. The window on his right was wide open because it was a sultry night. He got up quietly and closed the window, then took the knife out to give back to its owner next day. He was settling down to his work again when his eye was caught by something gleaming in the opposite wall. They were very badly built log cottages, these, pulled down as soon as the trees in that part of the forest were cleared. Badly built, big chinks between the logs. It was the gleam of a gun pointing at him through a chink. … "
Somebody uttered a sharp cry. Philip on the fender-stool sat with the points of his elbows striking into his thighs, his chin pressed down into the palms of his hands. A burning coke exploded in the fire and a fragment jumped out on the mat. Mrs. Massel stooped to it and swiftly, with unprotected hands, threw it back into the fire.
"It's already a long time ago," said Reb Monash. "I wasn't fifteen yet. I wasn't married. It's all over now, it's all over. Besides," he went on comfortably, at the risk of disturbing the atmosphere he had created by his subtle modulations of tone, his pauses, his notes of drawn tension, "besides, they'll all be frying in hell, the wood-cutters, one and all! What will you?"
A slight murmur of satisfaction went round among the women. The assurance coming from so authoritative a source as Reb Monash himself, no one could doubt that the wood-cutters had long ago met their deserts and were still adequately enduring them.
"Nu tatte, what about Mendel, the Red One?" This from Philip in an anxious quaver.
Reb Monash looked round and down on Philip, a significant droop in his eyelids, his lips tightening a little.
"Schweig," he said. "Silence! is thy tatte running away?"
"Hush!" Mrs. Massel echoed, very quietly, from her corner of the sofa.
Reb Monash could not resist the temptation of taking out one of his Silver Virginia cigarettes, deliberately setting it in his mouthpiece, lighting it, and drawing smoke two or three times contemplatively.
Somebody's foot tapped in a corner. He resumed. "Yah, a gun pointing at him through a chink. What was there to do, I ask you? If they fired—well, they fired, and he was dead. If they didn't fire, he was alive. And if a man's alive, a man must live. Not so? So he took his quill in his hand again … and he heard a little noise in the wall behind him. He looked round. Another gun. There, held by unseen hands in the night. Another gun. Pointing at him. Two guns pointing at him. He turned round to his table again. A Jew's not a Jew for nothing. He said a few blessings. Thou hearest, Feivel?" turning to Philip.
Philip swallowed