396
PARTISAN REVIEW
step was taking him somewhere. Going somewhere, this is what he
had wanted for a long time. Being on a road, going past blue vine–
yards, feeling the summer sun hot on the back of his neck, feeling the
dust of travel, knowing there was somewhere else. He had a feeling
that always there was somewhere else. But when he tried to explain
it to friends, they could not understand. Even looking down to the
harbor, the gray bulk of ships from all over the world, most people
he knew turned their eyes to family, to home. They did not want to
know, did not want to see where the ships came from . They did not
understand his itch to move.
If
he did not belong here, he did not be–
long anywhere . He did not belong anywhere. Right now he belonged
to the road, to his legs beginning to ache and his dusty shoes, to the
pain in his neck from the pack slung at an angle across his shoulder,
to
~.sagging
wooden villages, crippled dogs hiding in the shade
of droopy porches, blank-eyed peasants staring through him, and
churches, always churches, dark and ramshackle or sunny white,
straight lines soaring towards heaven, topped with a golden onion
dome.
Arrogant towers, arrogant gold. And always next to graveyards
where we cannot be buried. Nor they in ours, and who would want
them? These churches, this soil, the dust of the graveyard, the crum–
bling crosses. Not ours, never could be ours. Decrees stamped by the
Czar, his ministers, locked away in St. Petersburg's tomb-like vaults.
And if we could make it ours, it would be no use. It would be a game,
a deception. Then we would be like them. The land is not to own.
It
is not ours, not theirs.
If
anybody's, it is His. Yet He probably does
not exist. Or does He look down and laugh when I think that? Let
Him laugh.
If
He's such a big shot He'd let us know about Him, let
us see sometimes. Why does He speak in books, why must we learn
to read to understand His words? That's for the rabbis, smart types
all their lives with eyes white on the pages of a book.
Chaim Baer put his hand to his face, touched the newly-smooth
cheeks, the one tuft of hair sprouting from the chin. It is like being a
boy again, a bar mitzvah boy with this smoothness. And this hair
shows the joke of life. Red, a tiny red beard on the chin. Everyone
will notice and comment on the contrast from my dark hair. Young
ladies, won't they be interested? They'll think I am one of them,
maybe, a red beard and these blue eyes. Strange eyes, my mother
said, the eyes of my father. Such a strange story. In each generation,
one male in the family with blue eyes. Is it a special sign? Or some–
time in the past did a
muhjik
or a strange tribesman lie with a woman
