CYNTHIA OZICK
401
All the same, she listened. What he told was exactly like the
movies. A gray scene, a scrubby hill, a ravine. Germans in
helmets, with shining tar-black belts, wearing gloves. A ragged
bundle of Jews at the lip of the ravine-an old grandmother, a
child or two, a couple in their forties. All the faces stained with
grayness, the stubble on the ground stained gray, the clothes on
them limp as shrouds but immobile, as if they were already
under the dirt, shut off from breezes, as if they were already
stone. The refugee'S whisper carved them like sculptures-there
they stood, a shadowy stone asterisk of Jews, you could see their
nostrils, open as skulls, the stony round ears of the children, the
grandmother's awful twig of a neck, the father and mother
grasping the children but strangers to each other, not a touch
between them, the grandmother cast out, claiming no one and
not claimed, all prayerless stone gums. There they stood. For a
long while the.refugee's voice pinched them and held them, so
that you had to look. His voice made Lucy look and look. He
pierced the figures through with his whisper. Then he let the
shots come. The figures never teetered, never shook: the stoni–
ness broke all at once and they fell cleanly, like sacks, into the
ravine. Immediately they were in a heap, with random limbs all
tangled together. The refugee's voice like a camera brought a
German boot to the edge of the ravine. The boot kicked sand. It
kicked and kicked, the sand poured over the family of sacks.
Then Lucy saw the fingers of the listeners-all their fingers
were stretched out.
The room began to lift.
It
ascended.
It
rose like an ark on
waters. Lucy said inside her mind, "This chamber of Jews." It
seemed to her that the room was levitating on the little grains of
the refugee's whisper. She felt herself alone at the bottom, below
the floorboards, while the room floated upward, carrying Jews.
Why did it not take her too? Only Jesus could take her. They
were being kidnapped, these Jews, by a messenger from the land
of the dead. The man had a power. Already he was in the shadow
of another tale: she promised herself she would not listen, only
Jesus could make her listen. The room was ascending. Above her
head it grew smaller and smaller, more and more remote, it fled
deeper and deeper into upwardness.
