The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel Read online

  And there was Ma trembling in the doorway like a woman woken from a nightmare sleep. Her face was going sick, sallow as if blood were draining out of it. Her eyes were blinking rapidly, flooded with tears. Stammering she was busy, she was so busy. Rebecca heard the visitor address Ma in a strange harsh speech, yet warmly, as if they were sisters, uttering words too quickly for Rebecca to grasp�Sie? she heard�haben?�Nachbarschaft? But Ma shut the door in the woman’s face. Ma stumbled away into the back bedroom and shut that door, too.

  The rest of that afternoon, Ma hid in the bedroom. Rebecca, frightened, shut outside, heard the bedsprings creak. She heard her mother talking, quarreling with someone in that forbidden language.

  “Ma?”�Rebecca jammed her fingers into her mouth, to keep from being heard.

  She was desperate to be with her mother, wanted to cuddle with Ma, for sometimes Ma did allow that, sometimes Ma hummed and sang by the side of Rebecca’s little bed, sometimes plaiting Rebecca’s hair Ma blew into her ears, blew the tiny hair-wisps at the back of Rebecca’s neck to tickle her just a little; not like Herschel who tickled so rough. Even Ma’s sweat-smell that was mixed with cooking fats and the stink of kerosene, she was desperate to breathe.

  Only toward dusk did Ma reappear, her face washed and her hair tightly plaited and coiled around her head in that way that made Rebecca think of baby snakes, you saw coiled together sometimes, in the grass in cold weather stunned and slow-moving. Ma had fastened the neck to her dress, that had been unbuttoned. Her vague reddened eyes blinked at Rebecca. In her hoarse whispery voice she told Rebecca not to tell Pa. Not to tell Pa that anybody had come to their door that day.

  “He would murder me if he knew. But I didn’t let her in. I would not let her in. Did I say a word to her?�I did not. Oh, I did not. I would not. Never!”

  Through a window they could see movement in a far corner of the cemetery. A funeral, a large funeral with many mourners, and Pa would be busy well after the last mourner departed.

  “Hey! Somebody left us some cake, looks like.”

  It was Herschel, home from school. Lurching into the kitchen carrying a baking tin, covered in wax paper. It was the apple kuchen, that had been left by the farmer’s wife on the front step of the house.

  Ma, guilt-stricken, folded her arms over her breasts and could not speak. A fierce blush like a hemorrhage rose into her face.

  Rebecca jammed her fingers into her mouth and said nothing.

  “Pa’s gonna say it’s some bastids wantin to pizzin us,” Herschel laughed, breaking off a large piece of the coffee cake and chewing it, noisily. “But the old man ain’t here yet, huh?”

  11

  “We will have to live with it, for now.”

  So he’d said. Many times. Months and now years had passed.

  Yet: they were so often sick. August, who was small for his age, edgy, rat-like, blinking as if his eyes were weak. (And were the boy’s eyes weak? It was too far to drive him to an eye doctor, in the nearest city which was Chautauqua Falls.) And Rebecca was so often sick with respiratory ailments. And Anna.

  The Schwart family, in the gravedigger’s hovel.

  More and more he was noticing the steeply slanting earth of the cemetery. Of course he’d noticed from the start, but had not wished to see.

  The cemetery slanted upward, gradually. For the river was at their back, and this was a valley. At the road, at the front entrance where the house was built, the earth was more level. Death leaks downward.

  When he’d applied for the job he had asked about the well water hesitantly, for he had not wanted to offend the township officials. It was clear that they were doing him a favor, yes? Just to speak with him, to suffer through his slow excruciating broken English, yes?

  With their genial smiles they’d assured him that the well was a “pure” underground spring in no way affected by leakage from the graves.

  Yes, certainly. The water had been tested by the county.

  “At regular intervals” all the wells in Chautauqua County were tested. Certainly!

  Jacob Schwart had listened, and had nodded.

  Yes sirs. Thank you. I am only concerned…

  He hadn’t pursued the issue. He’d been dazed with exhaustion at the time. And so much to think about: housing his family, feeding his family. Oh, he’d been desperate! That ravaging will of which Schopenhauer wrote so eloquently, to exist, to survive, to persevere. The baby daughter who lacerated his heart with her astonishing miniature beauty yet maddened him, fretting through the night, crying loud as a bellows, vomiting her mother’s milk as if it were poison. Crying until in a dream dense as glue he saw himself clamping his hand over her tiny wet mouth.

  Anna spoke worriedly of the “grave water”�she was sure there was danger. Jacob tried to convince her there was no danger, she must not be ridiculous. He told her what the township officials had told him: the water in their well had been tested recently, it was pure spring water.

  “And we won’t be living here long.”

  Though later, he would tell her bluntly, “We will have to live with it, for now.”

  Was there an odor in the cemetery? A smell after rain of something sickly-sweet, moldering? A rancid-meat smell, a maggoty-meat smell, a putrescence-smell?

  Not when the wind blew from the north. And the wind was always blowing from the north, it seemed. In these foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains south of Lake Ontario.

  What you smelled in the Milburn cemetery was earth, grass. Mown grass rotting in compost piles. In summer, a pungent odor of sunshine, heat. Decomposing organic matter that was half-pleasurable to the nostrils, Jacob Schwart thought.

  It would come to be Jacob Schwart’s unmistakable smell. Permeating his weathered skin and what remained of his straggly hair. All his clothing, that, within a short period of time, not even 20 Mule Team Borax could fully clean.

  Of course he knew: his children had to endure ignorant taunts at school. Herschel was big enough now to fend for himself but August was a timorous child, another disappointment to his father, tongue-tied and vulnerable. And there was little Rebecca, so vulnerable.

  It sickened him to think of his daughter whom he could not protect laughed at by her classmates, even by ignorant teachers at her school.

  Gravedigger’s daughter!

  He told her, solemnly as if she were of an age to understand such words, “Humankind is fearful of death, you see. So they make jokes about it. In me, they see a servant of death. In you, the daughter of such a one. But they do not know us, Rebecca. Not you, and not me. Hide your weakness from them and one day we will repay them! Our enemies who mock us.”

  All human actions aim at the good.

  So Hegel, following Aristotle, had argued. In Hegel’s time (he died in 1831) it had been possible to believe that there is “progress” in the history of humankind; history itself progresses from the abstract to the concrete, in this way realized in time. Hegel had believed, too, that nature is of necessity, and determined; while humankind knows freedom.

  Jacob had read Schopenhauer, too. Of course. They had all read Schopenhauer, in Jacob’s circle. But he hadn’t succumbed to the philosopher’s pessimism. The world is my idea. The individual is confusion. Life is ceaseless struggle, strife. All is will: the blind frenzy of insects to copulate before the first frost kills them. He’d read Ludwig Feuerbach for whom he had a special predilection: it thrilled him to discover the philosopher’s savage critique of religion, which Feuerbach exposed as no more than a creation of the human mind, the projection of mankind’s highest values in the form of God. Of course! It had to be so! The pagan gods of antiquity, thunderous Yehovah of the Jews, Jesus Christ on His cross so mournful and martyred�and triumphant, in resurrection. “It was all a ruse. A dream.” So Jacob told himself, at the age of twenty. Such blindness, superstition, the old rites of sacrifice given a “civilized” cast: all were the way of the past, dying or extinct in the twentieth century.

  He read Karl Marx,
and became an ardent socialist.

  To his friends he defined himself as an agnostic, a freethinker, and a German.

  …a German! What a bitter joke, in retrospect.

  Hegel, that fantasist, had been right about one thing: the owl of Minerva flying only at dusk. For philosophy comes too late, invariably. Understanding comes too late. By the time human intelligence grasps what is happening, it is in the hands of the brutes, and becomes history.

  Broken-off pieces, like vertebrae.

  Oh! I could listen to you talk forever, you have such wisdom.

  Early in their love the young Anna had told Jacob this. Her eyes brimming with adoration of him. He’d spoken passionately to her of his socialist beliefs and she’d been dazzled, if slightly scandalized, by his certainty. No religion? No God? None? Anna’s religious background had been similar to his, her people were very like his, proud of their “assimilation” into German middle-class culture. In his presence she believed as he believed, she learned to mimic certain of his words. The future. Mankind. Shapers of our own destiny.

  Now they rarely spoke. Between them was a heavy, palpable silence. Clumsy rocks and boulders of silence. Like eyeless undersea creatures they moved in intimate proximity to each other and were keenly aware of each other and sometimes they spoke, and sometimes they touched, but there was only deadness between them now. Anna knew him as no one living knew him: he was a broken man, a coward. He had been unmanned. The rats had devoured his conscience, too. He’d had to fight to save himself and his young family, he’d betrayed a number of his relatives who had trusted him, and Anna’s as well; he might have done worse if he’d had the opportunity. Anna would not accuse him for she had been his accomplice, as she’d been the mother of his sons. How he had acquired the exorbitant sums of money needed for their escape from Munich, their flight through France and their booking on the ship in Marseilles, Anna had not asked. She’d been pregnant with their third child then. She had their sons Herschel and August. She had come to see that nothing mattered to her except her children, that they not die.

  “We will live for them, yes? We will not look back.”

  He made such vows, as a man might make, though he’d been unmanned, he had no sex. The rats had devoured his sex, too. Where his genitals had been was something useless now, soft-rotted fruit. Pathetic, comical. Through such a flesh-knob he managed to urinate, sometimes with difficulty. Oh, that was enough!

  “I said. We will have to live with it, for now.”

  As she would not speak of her fear of contaminated water, even after heavy rains when the well water was so cloudy, and the children gagged and spat it out, so Anna would not speak of their future. She would not ask him any questions. How much money he’d saved, for instance. When they might be leaving Milburn.

  And what was his salary, as caretaker of the cemetery?

  If Anna had dared to ask, Jacob would have told her it was no business of hers. She was wife, mother. She was a woman. He would give her money each week: one-, five-, ten-dollar bills with which to shop. Counting out coins on the kitchen table, frowning and sweating in the halo of the bare-bulb light overhead.

  Yes: Jacob Schwart had a savings account. Behind the stately neo-Grecian facade of the First Bank of Chautauqua on Main Street. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Jacob thought of this bank account, its exact sum, almost constantly; even when he was not consciously thinking of it, it hovered at the back of his mind.

  My money. Mine.

  The small black bankbook in the name of Jacob Schwart was so cleverly hidden away, wrapped in waterproof canvas on a shelf in the lawnmower shed, no one but Jacob Schwart could ever hope to find it.

  Each week since his first salary check he had tried�oh, he had tried!�to save something, if only pennies. For a man must save something. Yet by October 1940 he had saved only just two hundred sixteen dollars and seventy-five cents. After four years! Still, the sum drew interest at 3 percent, a few pennies, dollars.

  You didn’t need to be a mathematical genius to know: pennies add up!

  Soon, he would ask the Milburn township officials for a raise.

  Very courteously in his second year as caretaker of the cemetery he’d asked. Very humbly he’d asked. Their replies had been stiff, guarded.

  Well, Jay-cob! Maybe next year.

  Depends upon the budget. County taxes, see?

  Politely he pointed out to them that they had the unpaid labor of his elder son who helped him many hours a week now. Also his younger son, sometimes.

  They pointed out to him, he lived in the caretaker’s cottage for no rent. And paid no property taxes, either.

  Not like the rest of us citizens, Jay-cob. We pay taxes.

  They laughed. They were genial jovial men. Those others who regarded him like a dog teetering on its hind legs.

  Was he doing a satisfactory job as caretaker, well yes�he was doing a satisfactory job. Unskilled labor it was, maintaining the cemetery, except you had to have some skills, in fact. Except you could not belong to any union. Except you would receive no pension, no insurance, like other township employees.

  Except you were fearful in the end of seeming to complain. You were fearful of becoming known in Milburn, New York, as Schwart-who-complains.

  Schwart-the-Kraut they called him behind his back. He knew.

  Schwart-the-Jew.

  (For hadn’t Schwart a Jew nose? No one in Milburn had ever seen an actual Jew except now, Life magazine for instance, Collier’s, were reproducing Nazi anti-Semitic cartoons and caricatures side by side with amusing photographs of inept British civilians training for the defense of their homeland.)

  Damn he vowed he would show them! Those others who insulted him and his family. Those others whose secret allegiance was with Hitler. He had secrets of his own, saving money for his escape. He had escaped Hitler and he would escape Milburn, New York. So carefully saving his pennies for though Jacob Schwart was not a Jew (he was not a Jew) he possessed the ancient Jewish cunning, to slip through the clutches of the adversary, to prosper, and to take revenge. In time.

  12

  The day Gus came running home from school snot-nosed and sniveling asking Ma what’s a Jew, what’s a damn Jew, those bastards on the Post Road were teasing him and Hank Diggles threw corncobs at him and everybody was laughing like they hated him, some of them he thought were his friends. And Ma was near to fainting, looking like a drowning woman, tied a scarf over her hair and ran to find Pa in the cemetery, stammering and panting for breath and it was the first time in memory he’d seen her, his wife, this far from the house, outside in the cemetery where he was using a scythe on tall grasses and wild rose infesting a hillside, he was shocked how frightened she appeared, how disheveled, in her shapeless housedress and in fact her stockings were rolled down to her ankles, her legs were glaring-white and covered in fair brown hairs, fattish legs, and her face now was puffy, bloated, where once she’d been a slender pretty girl smiling shyly in adoration of her schoolteacher husband and she’d played Chopin, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, God how he had loved her!�and now this clumsy woman stammering broken English so that he had trouble figuring out what the hell she was saying, he’d thought it might be those damn kids hiding behind the wall and tossing corncobs at the laundry on the line or at her and then he heard, he heard Jew Jew Jew he heard, and took hold of her shoulders and shook her telling her to shut her mouth and get back inside the house; and that evening when he saw Gus, who was ten years old at this time, fifth grade at the Milburn grammar school, Jacob Schwart slapped the boy open-handed across the face saying these words Gus would long recall as would his sister Rebecca standing close by:

  “Never say it.”

  13

  It was one of the astonishing acts of his life in America.

  From a tradesman in Milburn, in the cold wet spring of 1940, he bought the radio. He, Jacob Schwart! His impulsiveness frightened him. His absurd trust in a stranger’s integrity. For the radio was secondhand,
and came with no guarantee. In this reckless gesture he was violating his principles of healthy distrust of those others he meant to inculcate in his children to protect them from disaster.

  “What have I done! What…”

  Like a random act of adultery, it had been. Or violence.

  He, he!�who was assuredly not a man of violence but a civilized man, in exile now from his true life.

  Yet the purchase had been premeditated for weeks. The quickening news in Europe was such, he could not bear to remain in ignorance. Local newspapers were inadequate. Nothing would satisfy him except a radio with which to hear daily, nightly news from as many sources as possible.

  In a state of barely controlled agitation he had presented himself to the teller at the First Bank of Chautauqua. Shyly yet decisively he’d pushed his bankbook beneath the wicket. The teller, an individual of no earthly significance except he held Jacob Schwart’s bankbook in his hand, frowned at the inked figures as if poised to glance up sternly at him�this cringing troll-figure in the soiled work clothes and cloth cap, “Jacob Schwart”�and inform him that no such savings account existed, he was totally mistaken. Instead, as if this were an everyday transaction, the teller mechanically counted out bills, not once but twice; and stiff freshly minted bills they were, which pleased Jacob Schwart absurdly. As the teller pushed both money and bankbook back beneath the wicket he seemed almost to wink at his customer. I know what you’re going to do with this money, Jacob Schwart!

  For days afterward Jacob would suffer stomach cramps and diarrhea, so stricken with guilt. Or so elated, and so stricken with guilt. A radio! In the caretaker’s hovel! A Motorola, the very best manufacturer of radios in the world. The cabinet was made of wood, the dial warmly glowed as soon as the radio was turned on. It was a miracle how, switching the knob to on, you felt immediately the vibrating life of the marvelous instrument inside the cabinet like a thrumming soul.