The shop stared when the old man appeared after the prescribed three days’ absence. Even the Pole dared not come near him. A film seemed to coat his glaring eye; deep wrinkles contracted his features, and his muscular frame appeared to shrink even as one looked. From that day on, he began to starve himself more than ever. The passion for sailing back to Russia, “to die at home at last,” lost but little of its original intensity. Yet there was something now which by a feeble thread bound him to the New World.
In a little mound on the Base Achaim, the “House of Life,” under a tombstone engraved with old Hebrew script, a part of himself lay buried. But he kept his thoughts away from that mound. How long and untiringly he kept on saving! Age gained on him with rapid strides. He had little strength left for work, but his dream of home seemed nearing its realization. Only a few more weeks, a few more months! And the thought sent a glow of warmth to his frozen frame. He would even condescend now to speak to his wife concerning the plans he had formed for their future welfare, more especially when she revived her pecuniary complaints.
“See what you have made of us, of the poor child,” she often argued, pointing to the almost grown grandson. “Since he left school, he works for you, and what will be the end?”
At this, Zelig’s heart would suddenly clutch, as if conscious of some indistinct, remote fear. His answers touching the grandson were abrupt, incoherent, as of one who replies to a question unintelligible to him and is in constant dread lest his interlocutor should detect it.
Bitter misgivings concerning the boy began to mingle with the reveries of the old man. At first, he hardly gave a thought to him. The boy grew noiselessly. The ever-surging tide of secular studies that runs so high on the East Side caught this boy in its wave. He was quietly preparing himself for college. In his eagerness to accumulate the required sum, Zelig paid little heed to what was going on around him; and now, on the point of victory, he became aware with growing dread of something abrewing out of the common. He sniffed suspiciously; and one evening he overheard the boy talking to grandma about his hatred of Russian despotism, about his determination to remain in the States. He ended by entreating her to plead with grandpa to promise him the money necessary for a college education.
Old Zelig swooped down upon them with wild eyes. “Much you need it, you stupid,” he thundered at the youngster in unrestrained fury. “You will continue your studies in Russia, durak, stupid.” His timid wife, however, seemed suddenly to gather courage and she exploded: “Yes, you should give your savings for the child’s education here. Woe is me, in the Russian universities no Jewish children are taken.”
Old Zelig’s face grew purple. He rose and abruptly seated himself again. Then he rushed madly, with a raised, menacing arm, at the boy in whom he saw the formidable foe—the foe he had so long been dreading.
But the old woman was quick to interpose with a piercing shriek: “You madman, look at the sick child; you forget from what our son died, going out like a flickering candle.”
That night Zelig tossed feverishly on his bed. He could not sleep. For the first time, it dawned upon him what his wife meant by pointing to the sickly appearance of the child. When the boy’s father died, the physician declared that the cause was tuberculosis.
He rose to his feet. Beads of cold sweat glistened on his forehead, trickled down his cheeks, his beard. He stood pale and panting. Like a startling sound, the thought entered his mind—the boy, what should be done with the boy?