The Way Back by Gavriel Savit

Author:Gavriel Savit [Savit, Gavriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

That night, Yehuda Leib slept where he’d fallen, crumpled at the foot of a dead end. Bluma slept beside the Rebbe’s granddaughter on the rostrum of the Great Synagogue of Zubinsk, and even the Messenger of Death, accustomed as it was to remaining awake for millennia, stumbled into the cemetery and passed out in an empty grave, scattering imps and goblins in its wake.

But on the other side of the forest in silent Tupik, warm beneath the blankets of his own bed, Issur Frumkin could not sleep a wink.

A small patch of moonlight.

Yehuda Leib, looking very small.

A pool of blood.

A dead man.

He tried to forget, tried to push the memory out of his mind, but no matter how he tossed and turned and squeezed his eyes shut, still, there he was: Avimelekh, bleeding, flat on his back, boots squirming in the churned and slushy snow.

The look in his eyes: knowledge—understanding.

Issur could still feel the reverberation all the way up to his elbow, the way the pot had buzzed and hummed at the impact, and as he lay in bed trying to force his memory to look away, he kneaded the flesh of his arm as if trying to blot the sensation out.

He had never meant to hurt the man.

He’d just wanted to help.

He had to stop thinking about it, had to replace the memory with something else, something pleasant, something that would allow him to drift peacefully off and get some rest.

The smell of Sabbath preparations: warm bread and roasting meat.

The glow of candles.

Light.

With effort, Issur slowed his breathing. Bit by bit, his muscles slackened.

After a short time, he began to doze.

But outside the hallway window stood a bare tree, and when the wind stirred, the knobbled knuckles of its twiggy fingers brushed against the window glass. And from the inside of his bedroom, this sounded very much like rattling spurs.

Issur tore back his bedroom door and peered out into the empty corridor.

No. There was no one here: only the shadow of the tree on the wall, shifting and shuckling in the moonlight.

There was no one.

But at the far end of the corridor, where the stairs descended into his father’s shop below, darkness gathered thick like dust in the corner.

He couldn’t see.

Back into his room he went, fingers shaking at the matchbox, eager to make a little light, to throw back the curtain of darkness and see what hid beneath.

There was nothing, of course, nothing and no one to see: not in the hallway, not on the stairs, not even in his father’s butcher shop below.

But somehow he didn’t believe his eyes.

In the stillness, the candlelight flickered and danced on the cool, clean blades of his father’s knives.

He began to feel it before he even turned back to the staircase: the lurking certainty that he would find no rest until he did something.

But what? What could he do?

Tears began to sting his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, as much to himself as to anyone else. “I’m sorry.”

But this was not to be enough.

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