But the daughter hangs back. She talks of the young man whom she married and who went away to war.
"He is dead, poor child," the father says.
"No, no, he isn't dead. I dreamed he was still alive," she answers.
But the festival starts. The starving ones sing in the broken synagogue. There will be a wedding. Life will begin. But there is something in the ruined doorway. A uniform stands in the doorway. A dark, waxen-faced young man who seems asleep, whose arms hang limp, whose fingers curl in. He comes forward and stands, a terribly idle figure. He is the young man.
* * * * *
They greet him. His bride weeps with joy. His aged mother presses his hands and weeps and murmurs in a whisper: "Oh, how changed he is!" The synagogue shouts and cries its welcome. But the young man's eyes stare and it would seem almost that he is dead. Then he talks. His voice has a lifeless sound, his words are like a child reciting sleepily. There is a gruesome oddity about him. But an old man explains. "They come back like that," he says. "There is one who came back who shrieks all night. And another who cannot remember anything."
Yet how strangely he talks! Of a country from which he has come—on the other side, it lies. Hysterical questions arise. Is there food there, are there houses there, is there milk for children and synagogues in which to pray? There is everything one desires, he says. So the questions rise and the answers come—curious child answers. But why is he so pale and worn if the country whence he comes is so remarkable? Ah, because he was lonely. All who are in this country are like him—lonely for the homes they left so soon. For their people. All who are in the country whence he came sit and remember only the things of the past. Yes, that is all one does in this marvelous country—remember the things of the past, over and over again.
* * * * *
They will go with him. The miser who has hidden away his gold, the widow and her two orphans, the hungry ones and despairing ones—they will all go back with him.
One comes out of the theater with a strange sense of understanding. The dead have spoken to one. It is never to be forgotten. The youth that was ripped to pieces in the trenches reached out his limp arms across a row of west side footlights and left a cry echoing in one's heart: "My unlived days! My uneaten bread! My uncounted years! They lie in a little corner waiting and no one comes to them."