We were sitting around the dining-room table in Reb Kiva’s house; Reb Kiva, my father, and I. My mother, Reb Kiva’s oldest daughter, had gone out to visit a friend in the neighborhood, and the Aunt (this was the family’s name for Reb Kiva’s second wife) was spending the week with her son. The unaccustomed stillness and emptiness of the big house, the darkness of the adjoining rooms and of the hall, accentuated by the bright lights over our heads, were having a depressing effect on me. Every now and then, distracted by memories of bygone festivities at which my many aunts and uncles and cousins had gathered around the table, their voices raised in shouts and laughter, I glanced up from my book, half expecting to see them there again, all jabbering at each other at once. My eyes came to rest on one or another of the empty chairs, and my thoughts drifted slowly into reverie, until my father’s cough recalled me to my book, or to Reb Kiva’s glass, to see whether it was time to pour him more tea.

We had been reading in silence for about an hour or so when I heard Reb Kiva rustle his paper. A few minutes later I looked up to find that he was staring down his nose at me, thoughtfully fingering his broad rusty beard. He studied me a long time without saying anything. Finally, as I began to fidget, he announced: “I have a proposition to offer.”

I turned my head aside, thinking that my mother or the Aunt had come silently into the room. Reb Kiva had never addressed me or seemed to take the slightest notice of me before; it would have surprised me to learn that he knew anything about me beyond the fact that I was the son of one of his daughters. I assumed that I merely drifted somewhere on the farthest shores of his awareness, lost among the vast flotsam of grandchildren that deluged his house every half year and left it a shambles. The idea that the remote, the majestic, the terrible Reb Kiva could have any kind of business to transact with me was inconceivable. But he was looking directly at me, and was evidently growing impatient.

“A proposition for me?” I asked.

“For who else—Charlie Chaplin? Don’t be a fool.”

I kicked my father, who was sitting between us. He had undoubtedly heard Reb Kiva, and he undoubtedly knew that I would need his help; but he went on reading Victor Hugo. I gathered from the deepening of his frown, however, that he was listening to us, and faced Reb Kiva with a little more assurance.

“Five weeks from Saturday you’ll be thirteen,” he informed me. “A Bar Mitzvah. A man.”

He gave me some time to ponder the event and its significance, and during the pause I kicked my father again. This time he raised his eyes to me and shrugged, as if to say, “This, whatever it is, is between Reb Kiva and you. Why drag me into it?” and returned to his book.

“I’ll give you a pen for your birthday,” Reb Kiva resumed, placing all the stress on his offer and slurring rapidly over the rest, “I’ll give you a fountain pen if you come here every Friday night and go to synagogue with me. Of course, you’ll have to sleep over, so you might as well go with me on Saturday morning as well. For that you’ll get a fountain pen.”

_____________

My father had drawn his legs out of range, abandoning me completely, I discovered, and had covered his mouth with his hand. I was sure that he was smiling, for a reason that had no connection with his book, and agreed with my mother’s verdict that he could never be depended on to do the normal, the sensible thing.

My feeling of helplessness was increased by the note of urgency in Reb Kiva’s voice as he demanded, “Nu—yes or no?”

“What kind of pen?” I stalled.

“What kind of pen!” His mouth fell open with shock and outrage. “Aha! I see you’re a rascal, too, just like your father. What kind of pen!” he repeated indignantly. “It’ll be a good pen, don’t worry.”

“Every Friday night and every Saturday morning,” I mumbled slowly, trying to make his terms sound inhumanly oppressive.

“All right, you don’t have to come Saturday morning if you can’t get up that early. Lie around as late as you want to, have lunch with me, and then go home.”

“I’m not so lazy. I get up early every morning.”

“So much the better.”

“But Saturday morning. . . .”

“Nu, I told you we’ll forget about Saturday morning.”

“Every Friday night?”

“Yes,” he nodded, “just like him. Every Friday night.”

Suddenly I was inspired. “Suppose I’m sick some Friday night?”

“If you’re sick stay in bed. Don’t be a fool.”

“Suppose. . . .”

“Suppose nothing. Agreed?”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I pleaded desperately. It didn’t seem likely that he would make any more concessions (he had obviously been prepared beforehand to yield Saturday morning), and I was afraid of the consequences of further bargaining, yet I didn’t want to risk his contempt by surrendering too easily. But for the moment I could think of no other conditions. My father, of course, was absorbed in his book.

At last a new idea presented itself. “For how long?” I asked.

I noted with satisfaction that my question caught him by surprise—but in an instant he had regained the upper hand.

“Let’s say . . . let’s say for a year. That’ll be enough.”

“Enough! A whole year!”

“A whole year!” he mimicked. “Terrible tragedy! What’s a year? Settled?”

Now I was really at the end of my rope. The situation was too complicated to be dealt with in such haste. The promise of a fountain pen I could discount easily, for what could be more commonplace than to get a fountain pen for my Bar Mitzvah? I would probably get two or three more from my aunts and uncles, and if Reb Kiva’s reputation for miserliness had any basis, they would be far superior to his. Besides, I would merely have to stay alive for five more weeks to get the others; Reb Kiva’s I would have to earn.

But how could I get out of the trap? Reb Kiva was unscrupulous, I complained to myself. To require me to come to his gloomy house week after week for a whole long year so that he could drag me off to stand mumbling for hours among a bunch of old men, for nothing more than a pen—to ask this, knowing I couldn’t refuse him, was to take a shamefully unfair advantage. On the other hand, his proposition held out a vague but exciting challenge of new experiences, responsibility; and I could not deny that I felt myself honored by his attention.

I was ready to submit when at last my father spoke.

_____________

“A Fine bargain,” he said, and though he said nothing more for a while, I knew he was coming to my rescue at last. My mother misunderstood him completely, I decided. She failed to realize that while he had a peculiar and sometimes exasperating preference for the roundabout way of doing things, he could always be relied on to get them done.

Reb Kiva darted a mistrustful glance at him. Ample experience had taught him to look for double meanings in every word my father spoke to him, especially in those words which seemed most innocuous. He took out his tobacco box and began to roll a cigarette, obviously displeased at my father’s intervention, but curious in spite of himself.

“Yes,” my father nodded, as if in appreciation of some master stroke of strategy, “a fine bargain. For you,” he pointed at Reb Kiva. “For him . . .” he shook his head dubiously, “for him I’m not so sure.”

“Why not, Pop?” I asked eagerly.

With maddening deliberateness he put down his book, lit a cigarette, and blew out a few meditative puffs before he spoke again.

“Look,” he said, with his eyes on Reb Kiva, “don’t you see what he’s after? He buys you a fountain pen. All right, fine. You can probably use one. But what does a pen amount to? A toy, a trifle, two or three dollars; let’s be generous and say five. That’s what you get. That’s all you get.”

He paused, inviting Reb Kiva to challenge what he had said, but Reb Kiva glowered and said nothing, and my father continued.

“Now, what does your grandfather get out of this proposition? Oho! One—” he thrust out his index finger—“he gets your company. Two—” out came his middle finger—“and this is the important thing—he gets credit with the man upstairs for having saved a soul. A priceless, immortal soul. What an exchange! And he has the nerve to offer it as if he were doing you the biggest favor in the world. Why, I’d be glad to make an exchange like that every day in the week. A soul for a pen—ha!”

I was horrified. My father’s blasphemy had long ceased to shock Reb Kiva, but his interpretation of his motives was certain to touch off a blast that would shake the house to its foundations. Reb Kiva was a Galician by birth, and Galicians are notorious for shortness and violence of temper; his was short and violent even for a Galician. I had seen him storm at Aunt Lily, my youngest aunt, for an hour because she had had the effrontery to pour him a glass of tea that was hot instead of boiling. Out of the corner of my eye I watched fearfully as he hunched his massive shoulders, gathering himself for the retort.

“Goy!” he exploded with a blow that made the table jump. “You goy you! Isn’t it bad enough you’re a goy? Do you have to corrupt him, too? Don’t you have any sense of shame, to talk that way in front of your own son—and just when he’s about to become Bar Mitzvah! What kind of example do you think you’re setting him? What kind of a father are you, anyway?”

Then, to my amazement, when it seemed that he was just beginning to warm up, a brief struggle was reflected in his face, and a smile broke over it. “Ai, is that a shlak,” he chuckled, his tremendous belly bouncing up and down, “ai, a rascal.”

My father winked at me and delivered the coup de grâce. “He was probably planning to give you a pen whether you agreed to his so-called proposition or not. So you see he’s trying to get something in return if he can. And what a something—your soul!”

“Enough, enough!” Reb Kiva sputtered.

“All right, I’m through. Just give him a little time to think it over. After all, it’s an important decision he has to make, setting a price on his soul.”

“All right, all right,” Reb Kiva said weakly, still shaking with laughter. “Who’s rushing him?”

I breathed a sigh of relief, foreseeing weeks in which I would have leisure to examine Reb Kiva’s proposition in the minutest detail. If enough time passed, he might even forget about it entirely. But he quickly disillusioned me.

“He has an hour and a half yet before you go home. Ai, are you a goy” he shook his head at my father, “ai, a rascal. What do you say to a page of Talmud, goy?”

_____________

My father’s treatment of Reb Kiva, and, even more, Reb Kiva’s response to it, was a source of endless puzzlement to me—and to the rest of the family, for that matter. My father was the only member of the family who ever spoke to Reb Kiva in English, and though Reb Kiva would frown at him sternly and either not answer at all or answer haltingly in Yiddish, my father continued to speak English. “Why don’t you talk to him so he can understand you?” my mother once asked him crossly. “He can speak Russian, Polish, German, and Yiddish—so you, of course, you have to talk to him in English. Why is it that you must always be Moishe Kappoir, the upside-down one? Why can’t you be like—” “Oho!” cried my father, cutting off the familiar refrain. “You imagine Reb Kiva doesn’t understand me? That’s a good one!” He was continually poking sly fun at Reb Kiva, telling him preposterous stories with a straight face, manipulating his interest at will, and then asking innocently, “By the way, you don’t believe all this, do you?” He liked to play practical jokes on him, like spiking his Passover wine with rum, or, as I heard he did one summer afternoon in Atlantic City, when Reb Kiva said that he wouldn’t mind a glass of beer if one could be had, taking him on a tour of speakeasies.

Nobody but my father had the imagination to conceive such pranks, much less the hardihood to carry them out; yet when they were exposed they usually evoked nothing more dreadful than a sheepish, half-concealed smile—at worst, a token scolding. Reb Kiva’s always surprising mildness at such times was due in part to his willingness to overlook much in my father that annoyed or embarrassed him—if it did—because of my father’s training: my father was the only one in the family who could read the Talmud with him at his own level. And perhaps it was also his sign of recognition that there was no real disrespect behind my father’s raillery; indeed it often seemed that the exposure of my father’s jokes was wholly unnecessary, that Reb Kiva had been in on them from the beginning.

That my father was proud of Reb Kiva everyone knew. He never tired of repeating that he had married my mother not because of her beauty, but because of her father’s. “What a beard Reb Kiva had then,” he would sigh, “a pillar of fire!” Sometimes he would intimate that Reb Kiva was a good deal more broad-minded than he wanted anyone to suspect; but if anyone else, taking his lead, expressed doubt of the sincerity of Reb Kiva’s faith, he would declare menacingly that Reb Kiva was the most upright man alive. Of Reb Kiva’s intellectual prowess he used to boast that you could wake him out of a deep sleep and quote a passage, or only a phrase, of the Bible to him, and have him continue from there right through to the end without a pause—and throw in Rashi’s commentary for good measure.

Reb Kiva was not a rabbi (his name, by the way, was a corruption of Akiba), but he was accorded as much deference as if he were. This deference, which took concrete form in his election year after year to read the Torah to the congregation at his synagogue, was based on a number of reasons. His contemporaries knew that he came of a fine family; others, that he was rigorously orthodox, a lamdan, or scholar, and a shochet, or killer of chickens, a profession requiring knowledge of Hebraic law. He was, besides, a man of considerable substance, owning both his house and his slaughterhouse, for both of which, it was known, he had paid in full and in cash. There was also the matter of his temper. And he had sired nine children, eight of whom were living, and four of whom were sons.

_____________

A patriarch of the old school, Reb Kiva was a tyrannical husband, and my grandmother’s life with him an unmitigated ordeal. I remember that whenever I saw her (I saw her perhaps a dozen times; she died when I was six), she was either standing before a cavernous oven, flushed and perspiring, baking mountains of bread, or else she was scrubbing floors, washing clothes, or trying to compose squabbles among my aunts and drawing on herself the combined anger of all three, and of Reb Kiva besides. A hint that she needed a new hat would send Reb Kiva flying to our house to rail a whole Sunday against her viciousness. She had bought a hat, he would shout over and over again, in the kitchen, on the porch, and all around the park (where my father led him around the same four tennis courts for hours and then, when it grew dark, straight into one of the nets)—that woman had bought a good, solid hat only three or four years ago, and here she was trying to extort a new one. Had anyone ever heard of such vanity, such downright corruption? My grandmother would get her new hat eventually—and it would be an expensive one, in the latest fashion—but only after Reb Kiva, having visited each of his children over eight successive Sundays, had called the whole family to witness how she was ruining him by her wild extravagance.

If most of his children hadn’t been grown by the time they followed him to America, and then scattered beyond his control, he would undoubtedly have ruled them with an equally despotic hand. As it was, he was forced to spend on his youngest three daughters, who lived with him for several years before they were married, the fury that would have sufficed to overwhelm all eight of his children.

Towards most of them he was, in his mildest moods, indifferent. Ordinarily he seemed to look down on them as from some grand height with a mixture of disbelief and acute revulsion. His sons he held in open contempt. “Fools” he called them, and “fool” was the most damning term in his vocabulary. (It was impossible to determine the exact meaning he attached to it, since he applied it pretty freely to very dissimilar people, and for a variety of reasons; but it was plain, at any rate, that as far as Reb Kiva was concerned a fool was an unspeakable wretch who would be much better off dead.) His view of women in general precluded the possibility of any more flattering view of his daughters. Like all women, they were garrulous, empty-headed, irresponsible cattle.

Only towards my mother could he be considered at all affectionate. And just as no one cared to emulate my father’s success with his practical jokes, so no one envied my mother Reb Kiva’s regard. She was the first of his children to come to America, and he had lived with her and my father for two years after they were married.

When the family gathered at his house on holidays and other special occasions, he snorted with disgust at the effusiveness with which his daughters greeted each other; when they embraced him and exclaimed over his appearance of good health, he thrust them from him and stormed off, demanding of an invisible audience whether it had ever seen such vile exhibitions. I didn’t realize until long afterwards how much he enjoyed these invasions. Even when he trailed after us grandchildren, muttering savagely as he picked up each scrap of paper we had dropped on the living-room floor, threatening swift destruction if we didn’t stop throwing pillows around—even then, I came to understand, he was enjoying himself.

_____________

The family assemblies dragged out to a bitter ending. After my grandmother died (she had been bedridden with a kidney ailment for six months), there were rumbles that her life would have been saved if Reb Kiva hadn’t been too tight-fisted to have her examined by a specialist. For a long time he paid no attention to the insinuations, but finally he struck back in full force. There were long sessions of nasty recriminations; they grew more and more corrosive, and less and less frequent; one by one his children stopped coming altogether; and when my three youngest aunts married in quick succession, he was left alone. Only my parents visited him occasionally.

At the end of his second year of widower hood he remarried. The family, which received formal notification after the event, was as scandalized as if he had run off with a chorus girl. There were rumors of senility and whispers about the lechery that overmastered old men. They had been out of touch with him a long time; they had shown no concern for his welfare all the while he was alone; but it was argued that they should have been consulted, if only for form’s sake, on the advisability of his taking so grave a step. His independence of action seemed like a decisive and final break, and no one wanted that.

Several months after his marriage, Reb Kiva invited the family to meet his new wife. They could not fail to be impressed by her appearance. Her figure was constructed along familiar lines; that is, she was short and stout; she was tastefully dressed; and her thick gray hair, which lay in a coil at the top of her head, lent her kindly face an air of distinction. Neither was her respectability in the least questionable: her first husband had been a linen merchant, her son was a doctor, and her daughter was married to a lawyer. She had considerable charm, and she exercised it conscientiously in an effort to engage Reb Kiva’s children.

But her admiration of the women’s dresses, her respectful attention to the opinions of the men, and her kindnesses to their children were all doomed to failure. The general antagonism gained focus and intensity when Aunt Sarah came downstairs, ostensibly from a visit to the bathroom, to report in a shocked whisper that there was a new suite of furniture in the bedroom. Some time later, it was learned that a new heating system had been installed. I never dreamed how like a curse the words “the Aunt” could sound until I heard my aunts and uncles discuss my new grandmother that evening.

On each of her visits with Reb Kiva to his children (my grandmother and he had rarely gone visiting together), the Aunt wore a different dress. The fact was noted and commented upon with mingled gloating and bitterness after the visitors had gone.

“Sure, what else?” asked Aunt Sarah. “Did you think she married him for his good looks? For his brains? I’ll bet he’s got plenty of money.”

“No question about it,” Uncle David agreed solemnly. “None at all. He’s been making good money for years. Years. Let’s see now, he came to this country in 1904, no, 19. . . .”

“Nah, how could it be 1904,” said Uncle Morris, “when I came here five years after him, and I didn’t get here till—”

Aunt Sarah brought the discussion back to the point at issue. “What I’m worried about is, who knows what a woman like that mightn’t do to him to get his money? Listen, I’ve heard about cases. . . .”

“The only thing is, it probably won’t last. Affairs like that never do. Why would she stay with a man like him?”

“Maybe she loves him,” my father said.

Aunt Sarah turned to him in surprise. He had been playing checkers with me all afternoon, and had contributed nothing to the conversation; in fact, he hadn’t seemed to hear it. Her nostrils curled in scorn. “Another King Solomon,” she said.

The family had no aversion to repetition, but the subject of Reb Kiva’s folly was gradually exhausted through lack of new substance and eventually crystallized into the smug conviction that before long he would be divorced or poisoned, or else the Aunt would steal everything he owned and run off with a lover. Reb Kiva and the Aunt had been married for five years when I agreed to his proposition.

_____________

On the first Friday night that I came to his house in accordance with our agreement Reb Kiva thrust into my hands an oblong blue box. He was gleaming. As I observed subsequently, he came home early Friday evening and took a steaming hot bath in a full tub, the bottom of which he had coated an inch thick with epsom salts. After toweling himself until he was all aflame, he would put on a suit of long underwear and pad down the hall to the bedroom in his bare feet.

“Kiva dear,” the Aunt would warn in her gentle, good-humored voice, “if you don’t put on your bedroom slippers you’ll catch pneumonia, God forbid.”

“Don’t be a fool.”

My grandmother and my aunts, I remembered, had issued the same warning and received the same reply.

The pen surprised me. For some reason I had expected that it would look like Reb Kiva himself, short and thick, or like his furniture, plain, solid, and indestructible. But it was just the opposite: long, black, and slender, it weighed almost nothing; it had a delicate silver band around the cap and an extremely fine point. It showed an exquisiteness of taste that seemed incongruous, until it occurred to me that it might have been selected by the Aunt. I fumbled for words to express my gratitude.

Reb Kiva cut me short. “It’s time to go.”

For the sake of convenience, and to show that he was on good terms with his neighbors, he attended Friday night services at the house of a rabbi who lived around the corner. We were early that first night, and while we were waiting for the rabbi to appear, Reb Kiva introduced me to several of his acquaintances, in his impatient no-nonsense way. They made a great fuss over me, exclaiming, “Aha! So this is Reb Kiva’s grandson. Aha!” as if my presence merely confirmed what they had known all along, that if Reb Kiva produced a grandson it would have to be me. It was plain even to me that their smiles and cluckings were directed to Reb Kiva, but I was flattered nevertheless. Services were brief, and though I lost my place in the prayer book a number of times, I found them much less of an ordeal than I had anticipated.

As we were walking home I ventured to remark that the rabbi, who had an awesome reputation throughout the city for his piety and learning, looked like a very wise man.

“He’s a fool. A lamdan, yes, but a fool.”

That left nothing more to be said on that particular subject on future Friday nights, or at any other time. Reb Kiva never explained his opinion, but from hints he threw out later I gathered that he considered the rabbi a fool for two principal reasons: he was more interested in mundane things than Reb Kiva thought a rabbi ought to be; and his six children were all daughters.

We had the customary Friday night dinner of gefilte fish with powerful horse radish; chicken soup with knaidlach; boiled chicken, peas, and potatoes; rice pudding with raisins; and tea and sponge cake. As far as cuisine and cooking skill were concerned, I could see no difference between my grandmother and the Aunt; and the Aunt, I admitted to myself with a sense of treachery, was better looking and pleasanter company.

_____________

After pushing aside his last plate, Reb Kiva unbuttoned the top of his trousers, leaned back in his chair, and belched softly and steadily for what seemed a considerable length of time. Without saying a word, the Aunt got up and poured him another glass of tea. Since he drank it scalding hot, his hands clasped around the glass, the kettle remained over a full flame all evening; as soon as he finished one glass, the Aunt got up and poured him another.

“How’s your father?” he shot at me abruptly.

“P-p-pop’s fine,” I said.

“Your mother?”

“All right.”

He thought for a moment. “School—you’re still going to school?”

“Of course he’s going to school. What else would he be doing?” the Aunt said with a smile. “Your grandfather asks funny questions, doesn’t he, sweetheart?”

She won my undying gratitude by turning away before I could reply.

From then on we read in silence. At intervals, Reb Kiva looked across the table at me, spanning his beard and stroking it slowly. Several times it seemed that he was on the verge of saying something, something of great import, and after I got used to his scrutiny I tried to indicate that I was eager to hear whatever it was he wanted to tell me. But he only went on stroking his beard a while longer, then pushed his glasses back on his forehead, and went on reading.

At about ten o’clock, after a little colored boy had come in to turn out the lights, we climbed the stairs, past the closed, unused rooms of the second floor and on to the third. Reb Kiva told me I was to sleep in the bedroom next to his and the Aunt’s. It had been Aunt Lily’s room until, renouncing Rudolph Valentino, she accepted Uncle Sol instead and moved to Wilkes-Barre. On numerous occasions in later years I had slept in this room with my father, while two of my uncles slept on a mattress on the floor. A long time passed before I ceased hearing their voices and fell asleep.

Reb Kiva woke me at half past five. The Aunt was still asleep. He set out our breakfast of tea and bread and butter, and then we walked to his synagogue, a distance of some two or three miles. By the time we got back home, at noon, I was faint with hunger and desperate for sleep; I could see that I might exercise my option with regard to Saturday morning in the future. After lunch, which was last night’s supper warmed over, we took a nap. At sundown I took the streetcar home.

“Well, Bar Mitzvah,” my father greeted me, “how did it go?”

“Oh, all right, I guess.”

“How did you find your zaydeh?”

“Grandpop’s OK.”

My pose of indifference probably didn’t deceive my father, for I was too elated to preserve long an appearance of composure. I had undertaken a serious engagement, and I had acquitted myself honorably: I was on the way to becoming a real Bar Mitzvah.

_____________

All that week I was filled with secret excitement. I kept hoping that one of my classmates would invite me to go somewhere with him on Friday night, so that I might decline with a show of reluctance and, being pressed for an explanation, mutter something tantalizing about the inviolability of certain commitments. But I was shy and had made no friends at school and no one ever invited me anywhere, and so the opportunity for dramatics never arose.

But my excitement really needed no additional sharpening. As the weeks passed I came to look forward with great eagerness to the fulfilment of my obligation to Reb Kiva. The quiet routine that filled our twenty-four hours together never varied, but sometimes, as we were walking home on Saturday morning, he would tell me stories of his boyhood and young manhood, stories of suffering and terror in the old country, and of dark, desolate loneliness here. I have long since forgotten the details of his experiences, but I still remember how impressed I was by his manner of telling them—without either bitterness or sentimentality, as if they had happened to someone else. Once he showed me a large volume which he kept locked up in the closet outside his bedroom. In it were recorded, in his precise hand, all the important events that had befallen the family: births, graduations, marriages, anniversaries—even the date when my father had had a wen removed from his neck.

Our agreement had run about two months when I caught a cold. Despite my violent protests that I was well enough to go to Reb Kiva’s house, I wasn’t allowed to leave my bed. Late at night, when I was reading under the bed lamp, enjoying the luxury of an unexpected holiday and wondering whether the colored boy had put out the lights in Reb Kiva’s house yet, a bulky shadow moved into the room. It was Reb Kiva. Realizing immediately that he must have walked the seven miles from his house to ours, since he couldn’t have taken the streetcar on Friday night, I had to struggle hard to greet him nonchalantly. He asked me how I was. I told him there was nothing serious the matter with me, and that I would be sure to come next week.

“Was the doctor here?”

“I don’t need a doctor.”

“You can never tell.”

“I’m all right.”

“Are you sure?”

“Don’t be. . . .” I caught myself just in time. “Positive.” I saw his lips begin to curl upward.

He sat with me in silence, studying me, stroking his beard, and again I had the disturbing sense that he was on the point of communicating something vital to me. But he said nothing, and after about an hour he got up suddenly, kissed me on the forehead, and left.

The next Saturday morning, when I was at his house again, he failed to wake me. He made no comment about this when he returned, and neither did I. I never went with him to Saturday services again.

_____________

Reb Kiva’s slaughterhouse was situated at the bottom of a steep cobbled street near the waterfront, on the fringe of the city’s most unsavory district. A strange setting for Reb Kiva, I thought as I rode down there for the first time on my bicycle one fall afternoon. The stench of the river, which reached out half a mile or more, grew almost overpowering as I walked down the last block, past slaughterhouses and packing houses and warehouses and wholesale fruit stores, all bustling with mysterious activity.

“Which is Reb Kiva’s place?” I asked a little man with a scraggly goatee who was standing at the curb rolling a cigarette.

He scanned me closely before he answered. “Reb Kiva? What do you want with Reb Kiva?”

“I have something to tell him.”

“Are you a relative of his?”

“What’s the difference to you?” I shouted. My vehemence surprised me, but I was startled even more by the tone of my voice. It was a high, angry tone with which I had grown familiar; but it had never issued from my throat before. “I have some business with him,” I said more quietly. “Private business.”

The little man peered into my eyes again. “You’re Reb Kiva’s grandson,” he said. “He talks about you sometimes. He’s very proud of you. He says you—”

“I don’t want to hear it. Do you know his address or don’t you?”

“Sure I know his address. But listen, better see him some other time. Reb Kiva—excuse me for saying so—Reb Kiva is not an easy man to deal with. He’s a fine man, understand, and with his learning he could have been . . . anything he wanted. But that temper!” He shuddered. “He doesn’t like one should disturb him when he’s working.”

I felt my throat tighten. For a moment I regretted not having consulted my father on what I was going to do; but I hadn’t done so because I had known what his answer would be. “Do whatever you think is right,” he would have said, and there would have been no doubt about what he thought right. I wavered until I looked into the little man’s face again; seeing a glint of mockery in his eyes, I conquered my impulse to turn back.

“What’s the address?” I asked him again.

Carefully, he broke his cigarette in two and fitted one half into a long holder. “What’s the matter with you?” he shouted. “Who doesn’t know where Reb Kiva is? Number 12.”

As I entered the large, damp front room of Number 12, two huge black rats scampered across the sawdust-sprinkled, feather-strewn floor. From tier on tier of chicken coops there came a deafening cackling. The air was close and full of unpleasant smells. Reb Kiva was standing with his back to me under the glare of the naked light bulb in the rear room.

“You damn fool!” he was shouting in slightly accented English at a truck driver who was towering over him. “When I order something I want what I ordered. Understand? Now get this junk out of here.”

The driver stooped meekly, picked up a crate, and walked out of the room without saying a word. As he passed me I heard him muttering curses to himself.

I tripped over the threshold. Reb Kiva turned around, the neck of a chicken clutched in his left hand, a long bloody knife in his right. His knobby white arms were spattered with blood up to the elbows. There were clots of blood on his apron, his shirt, and his trousers. Bits of feathers clung to his heavy shoes.

“You! What do you want here?” he asked me in Yiddish.

“I’ve come to tell you something. Something important.”

_____________

His eyes narrowed. After a moment, he threw the chicken into a coop, laid the knife on the chopping block, and disappeared into a side room. I heard water splashing. When he returned, drying his hands, his expression was grim.

“Nu?”

Looking down at his feet, I remembered painfully how easy it had been for me to face him the night he visited me.

“Out with it.”

I stammered miserably.

“All right, I’ll tell you what you came to tell me. You’re not coming any more. Right?”

“Not coming any more?” I lingered over his words, surprised that he had so nearly guessed the reason for my visit, and yet had missed it; and then, that he had understood it better than I. I had come to tell him, on some flimsy pretext, that I would be unable to come that Friday, but as I repeated his words I realized that what he had said was true. I did want to be released from the proposition entirely: my adventure had long since turned into a millstone, and I had grown tired of waiting for the word that was apparently never to be spoken.

“Right?” he thundered.

“Well, not exactly,” I said. “You see, they’re giving us a lot of work at school, and I—”

“All right, so go!” He struggled heroically to control his rage: he clenched and opened his fists; his face grew fiery red; the veins on his forehead swelled and throbbed. The sight was so dreadful that I was relieved when his fury exploded at last.

“Go!” he burst out. “Who needs you? You think I can’t live without you? How do you think I managed to live before you came, before you were born? You think I need you—you, a boy? Ha! I don’t need you or your favors! I don’t need anybody’s favors! I’ve managed all right by myself a lot longer than you’ve been here in this rotten world, and I can go on managing by myself. I don’t need anybody! Go! Out!”

_____________

He sank down on the stool beside the chopping block and pushed his skullcap back over his shaven head. Beads of sweat gleamed in the gray stubble. Neither of us said anything for a while. And then I made a horrible blunder.

“I brought the pen,” I said.

“You brought the pen,” he repeated dully, as if he hadn’t understood me.

“I didn’t keep my part of the agreement,” I explained hastily, “so. . . .”

“Get out,” he said quietly. “Get out and don’t let me ever see you again. I thought you were like your father. I was wrong.”

“I’m sorry, Zaydeh. I didn’t mean. . . .”

“All right, all right!” His voice was raised, but there was no passion in it, only weariness. “Don’t be a fool. Who ever saw a Bar Mitzvah cry?” He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face and forehead. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have expected. . . .”

For a moment his face wore an expression of bewilderment, as if he didn’t recognize his surroundings, and couldn’t understand how he had got there. Then he pushed himself up, put his arm around my shoulder, and led me to the door.

“The pen . . . it’s only a cheap one. And what does a pen amount to? A toy, a trifle.” He smiled wryly. “But I didn’t give it to you to buy your soul, as your father said, the gay. Believe me. I gave it to you. . . .”

His voice trailed off and he stood beside me stroking his beard, staring thoughtfully at the warehouse across the street. It was beginning to grow dark and cool; the street was desolate. On the river, the lights of the ferries were on, and a heavy blue mist had gathered around the buildings on the other side.

“I gave it to you. . . .” he began again. And then, abruptly, “Well, if you don’t want to come. . . . All right,” he waved away the correction I was about to make, “we’ll say you can’t come. Maybe you could come. . . . No. If you can’t you can’t. Is this bicycle yours?”

“Yes, Zaydeh.”

“Such a big bicycle! Let me see how you look on it.”

I unlocked the chain and mounted.

“You know your way home, I guess?”

Not having been there before, I wasn’t sure that I did. But I nodded anyway, for I was impatient to be free, and I didn’t think there was any danger of losing my way.

“Well, if you get the chance, come to see me sometime. Will you do that, son?”

“Sure, Zaydeh, sure.” I’ll surprise him, I promised myself. After I’ve been away for a week or two, I’ll begin to come regularly again. I’ll even go with him to synagogue on Saturday morning again, and not just for a year. . . . But Reb Kiva’s smile told me that I was only trying to fool myself. He placed his hand on the rear mudguard and gently pushed me away.

_____________

Two months later—six months, a week, and a day after our agreement went into effect—Reb Kiva was dead. While undressing for bed one Saturday night, he complained to the Aunt of heartburn. Suddenly he clutched his throat, there was a strange sound, and before the Aunt could reach him he was dead. He was about sixty-five, he had never known what it meant to have a headache, and everyone had marveled for years at his firm pink cheeks, his robust vigor. But according to the doctor, his insides must have been going bad for a long time.

Although he left no will, it was a simple matter to dispose of his possessions. Besides his two properties and his furniture, he left less than a thousand dollars. The Aunt refused to take anything. My father claimed, and took without argument, only the family chronicle. From it I learned that Reb Kiva had lied to me about the pen. Beside the entry dating its purchase was the figure “$15.00.”

By the time I read the chronicle, the pen was useless. As we were leaving the cemetery after the burial (my mother had gone with the rest of the family to Reb Kiva’s house to sit in mourning for him), my father asked me to let him see the pen. I held it out to him, but before he could take it I dropped it, not entirely by accident. It cracked on the pavement. My father glanced at me, picked up the broken pen, and muttered, as he dropped it into his pocket, “I’ll get it fixed for you.” But he never mentioned it again, and I never asked him for it. I was Bar Mitzvah enough to know that I had already had the best of Reb Kiva’s proposition; even if I had kept my agreement ten times over I would still have had the best of it.

_____________