Her throat was aching intolerably but she was no longer crying. She managed to say quite evenly, "I don’t think I matter much either. What does matter is you. I can’t bear the idea of your going overseas with nothing to come back to at the end of it but a world in which there is no place for you and me".
He said despairingly, "Eric, I can’t… I can’t…".
"It’s all right, darling", she said quietly. "I know you can’t".
When they, got back to the hotel, the church clock in the village down at the other end of the lake was striking six. A telegram had come for Erica some hours before; it was from her father and contained only the four words, "Anthony is reported missing".
Chapter XIII
The town of Manchester lies sprawled along the shore of a lake and faces outward over a few scattered granite islands toward an empty western horizon. At the back of the town is a stretch of open country cleared and farmed by French Canadian families, with fields and pastures which become steadily poorer and rougher as they approach the bush. The bush is a stony, tangled wilderness of trees and undergrowth cut by a few roads, spotted with little blue lakes and crossed and recrossed by innumerable small streams. Behind the bush are the Algoma Hills, rising high, strong and magnificently colored against the clear northern sky. This is the edge of the mining country; this is the beginning of Canada’s North.
Manchester itself is a tribute to the Canadian talent for choosing a remarkably fine natural setting for a town, and then proceeding to ruin it as far as possible. There is an interminably long, straight main street running parallel with the shore, flanked by the inevitable collection of two- and three-story office buildings, shops, gas stations, beauty parlors, Chinese laundries, pool rooms, soda fountains, cheap restaurants, movie houses, and the usual Protestant and Catholic churches, apparently dedicated, like most of the buildings of English Canada, to the Puritan proposition that even in architecture, beauty is unnecessary and possibly even dangerous. Below the main street are warehouses, run-down dwellings, a few factories, great piles of lumber, a saw mill and the docks. The whole region smells slightly of stagnant water and rotting wood. Above the main street is the residential district, a series of tree-shaded streets intersecting at right-angles, with houses set well back and surrounded by lawns, bushes and scattered flower-beds.
In Austria the Reisers had been timber merchants for some generations, and when Leopold Reiser came out to Canada in 1907, he bought a small planing mill in Manchester and settled there with his wife and four-year-old son, David. Marc was born two years later in the house in which his parents were still living when he went home on his last leave in September, 1942.
It was a comfortable house painted white with green shutters and a wide front porch screened on three sides by lilac bushes. In the living-room there was an upright piano which nobody ever played, some glassed-in bookcases containing, among other works, a complete set of Schiller which nobody ever read, a chesterfield suite upholstered in dark blue plush but fortunately covered with chintz of an inoffensive pattern during the summer months, a canary named Mike which never sang, and half a dozen ferns in polished brass pots. Behind the living-room was the dining-room which was fairly large, but still not quite large enough to do justice to the fine, old, highly polished and somewhat massive furniture which had been brought from Austria. The kitchen had windows on two sides and took up most of the remaining space on the ground floor except for cupboards and a sort of drawing-room opposite the living-room which nobody ever used. Up the wide oak staircases there were four bedrooms, a bathroom and sun-room, and on the top floor, one room well furnished for the general servant of the moment, and three others full of trunks, hockey sticks, skates, schoolbooks, fishing tackle and everything else which Maria Reiser could not bear to throw out.
The town was about two thirds Protestant and one third Catholic, with only a few Jewish families who were too small a community to afford the upkeep of a temple or synagogue. For the two most important festivals of the year, they were accustomed to hire the public hall down on the main street, and one of the older German or Polish Jews would conduct the services. The hall was a long, narrow building facing almost due north, so that the small congregation had to sit at right-angles to the platform at the other end, and with an expanse of bare floor on either side of them, in order that the Ark might stand against the east wall.
In the third year of the war, the services of Yom Kippur were taken by a young student rabbi who had arrived in Manchester a week before to visit his cousins, the Rabinovitches, who owned the clothing store. Neither Orthodox nor especially devout, the Reisers had come to Kol Nidre on the eve of the Day of Atonement and then did not return until early the following afternoon. It was Monday, September 21st, of the Jewish year 5703.
Although the rows of hard wooden chairs were divided by an aisle down the middle, with most of the women on the left and the men on the right, the Reisers were sitting together near the back, first Leopold Reiser, then Marc and then his mother. The opening of the service made no impression on Marc; after four days at home he was still unable to stop thinking of Erica, and he got up and sat down as the rest of the congregation got up and sat down, his eyes wandering from the little pulpit to the high reading stand and the tired face of the young student rabbi, and then to the Ark with the two seven-branched candle-sticks on either side, fourteen points of light flickering in the rather dusty air of the hall, and finally back to the student rabbi again. His leave was almost up; by Tuesday night he would be on the train for Montreal, where he would see Erica again for a few hours, and then take the seven-thirty train to Halifax. Except for those few hours he might never see her again, and he had not only failed her completely, he had also failed himself. He did not know how it had happened or when it had begun to happen, but he did know that it was he himself who had got off the track, and that if he hadn’t, in spite of Charles Drake and everyone else, it would not have turned out like this.
A thick-set, middle-aged man had been summoned to the high reading-stand and through some kind of break in his thoughts Marc became conscious of a new voice, less fine and resonant, but fresher and stronger than the voice of the tired young rabbi. He missed the first few sentences and then heard the words,
So the shipmaster came and said unto him, What meanest thou, O Sleeper? Arise, call upon thy God, if so be that God will think upon us that we perish not.
What meanest thou, O Sleeper?
If he could find out what he, Marc Reiser, actually meant, then he would know what to do, if it were still possible to do anything, when all the time he had left was the time between two trains. For some reason or other he had expected the problem to clarify itself once he was home and back in his own environment, but after four days he was still living in two worlds and the world in which he had grown up was less real than the world he had left on Wednesday night, after going with Erica as far as the front door of the house up in Westmount and then returning to the station to catch the westbound train for Manchester, on the transcontinental line. He was not, in fact, back in his own environment in any but a purely physical sense, and with only one more day to go, his own existence was as meaningless as ever.
Someone coughed, and one of the women in the front row on the left was wearing a taffeta blouse which rustled every time she moved, but the profound silence which was heightened by the steady voice of the reader, continued unbroken and undisturbed by the faint noises from the street outside. You would not have thought that forty people could be so still and make so little sound, when many of them were old enough to be stiff with fatigue from twenty hours of fasting and many hours of prayer, and some of them were very young. The dusty, commonplace, small town public hall was pervaded with a spirit of unity and faith which went back to the remote beginnings of this people in a country far away, and then returned, steadily broadening out until it had encompassed the world and made these men and women and children one with those who had died long ago, and with those who had died only yesterday and those who were dying today, and with those who would die tomorrow. There was no past and no present; the interminable, timeless stream ebbed and flowed and from synagogues and temples, houses and hired halls, barracks, concentration camps, prisons, torture-chambers and pitiful, futile barricades, the Jews of the world were drawn together across time and space on this Day of Atonement and were made one with God.