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The Story 

                in memory of M. L. Rosenthal

What are we to make of this story? This is,
after all, the twentieth century, and if any age ever
showed a lack of faith in, among other things,
the structures of a story, surely it must be ours.
It arrived by accident in the afternoon mail,
from a second-hand bookshop in London, a misdirected
copy sent instead of the order I had placed,
months before, for an out-of-print book by a friend.
My friend, who died two weeks ago, was living abroad
at the time, and his lifelong study of the Hebrew elegy
was no doubt mailed to someone waiting, expecting
to receive a copy of the book that I'd received, 
Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust. A mistake perhaps
explainable in any number of ways, including
the one my friend had guessed: "Some closet anti-
Semitic clerk who finds such jokes can pass the day."
Nevertheless, in my own stubbornly secular belief
that those very books which we need most
choose us and not the other way around,
I opened the book right then and read,
at the kitchen table, in a small, square panel
of sunlight that framed the closely printed page,
the first of those tales the author recorded 
just as she had heard them reported to her.

    How late in the middle of a frozen night
in the Janowska road camp, the upper Ukraine,
a voice on the loudspeakers had crackled through,
“You will evacuate the barracks immediately
and report to the field by the vacant lot.”  In the staggered 
confusion that followed, the shouted names
of relatives and friends had filled the air,
and like a broken vessel the barracks soon emptied
in the direction of the field by the vacant lot.
Huddled together against the cold, slowly the prisoners
began to make out, at a distance beyond them
in the looming dark, two wide and freshly dug pits.
Once more, the voice on the loudspeakers crackled through,
“Each of you who values his miserable life
must jump over one of the pits and land on the other side.
For those who fail there is a surprise in store.”
And then, as a child imitates machine gun sounds,
Ra-ta-tat-tat trailed off into wild, uproarious laughter.

  Among the thousands of Jews in the field that night
was the Rabbi of Bluzhov standing with a friend,
a freethinker from Poland he had met in the camp.  
"Rebbe," the friend said, "forgive me, but all our attempts
to jump over the pits are in vain. At best, we'll only
lighten the spirits of the S.S. and those pig-hearted
Ukrainian collaborators. It's just as well that we sit
and wait for the bullets that will end our wretched lives.”
“My friend,” said the rabbi, turning in the direction
of the open earth, “man must obey the will of God.
If heaven has decreed that pits will be dug
and we will be commanded to jump, then pits will be dug,
and jump we must. And if, God forbid, we fail
and fall into those pits, then we will only reach
the World of Truth a little sooner instead of later.” 

     The rabbi and his friend were nearing the pits
which were rapidly filling with bodies and,
now that the dark was beginning to lift, looked
a good deal wider than they’d first appeared.
The rabbi glanced down at his feet, the bandaged feet
of a fifty-three-year-old Jew wracked by starvation
and disease.  He looked at his friend, a skeleton
with a burning stare.  When they reached the edge,
The rabbi closed his eyes and said, “We are jumping!”
And when he opened his eyes, he and his friend
were standing together on the other side.  With sudden,
unexpected tears (he thought he’d forgotten how
to cry) the friend repeated, “We are here! We are here!
Tell me, Rebbe, how did you do it?”  And the rabbi answered,
“I was holding on to the coattails of my father.”
And then, staring into the face of his Polish friend,
“But now there is something you must tell me.
How is it that you have crossed over to the other side?
“I was holding on to you,” his friend replied.
And neither was sure which was the more miraculous.
And neither was sure that they’d even survived
as anything more than the insane and unvarying wish
of two men leaping headlong into a pit. 

     When I closed the book, that small, square
panel of sunlight had shifted a little to my left,
So that part of it still leveled across the tabletop,
while the other part lay, halved and unbroken
on the hardwood floor.  So far as I could tell,
other than that, nothing much had changed in the world,
perhaps nothing at all had changed in me.
My wife came home a little while later, and, as usual,
we went off to collect our sons from school.
In the following days, I returned the misdirected book,
and the one I’d ordered eventually came.
And that was that:  A few years passed, that afternoon
seemed to recede in time, and I didn’t really
think about it much anymore.  But this morning
after breakfast the week-late posted letter arrived
informing me that my friend had died, and suddenly
it all came back again, as clear to me now
as it was that day, the story of the two men
huddled together at the edge of the pit,
the ra-ta-tat-tat, and that small, square panel
of sunlight sliding across the printed page.

Borage 

We're cleaning up after the guests have gone,
the two of us drying the last of the dishes,
a little lightheaded from all of the wine,
a little too familiar with that touch of melancholy
that lingers in the air after parties these days.
Then somehow or other it comes around
I ask about him, who he was, and how was it,
anyway, it happened.  But there's not that much
she remembers, truly, there is scarcely anything
at all.  Oh, his eyes, perhaps...and then,
now that she thinks of it, wasn't it his first time
as well?...yes, his eyes, she remembers, his eyes
when he entered her, his eyes were the same
uncomplicated blue of borage or deep water.

ForPoetry