Free The Lion Seeker by Kenneth Bonert Page A

cheeks then; he shouts out, hotfaced in his lie: —Course I know! Course I do! Then, thinking furiously: —Smuts didn’t put that Quota! It was . . . Wait, when was it? . . . Smuts didn’t put that!
    â€”Was years and years ago, says Rodney Epstein.
    â€”Exactly
, says Isaac. Was before Smuts, was Nats in charge then, isn’t it? Isn’t it hey?
    â€”Ja, Professor Rabies. But now your great Smuts he
is
there and he hasn’t gotten rid of Quota has he? Has he? Nooo—nothing. Ach, he’s just the same. Go and look it up man, I got no time, Rabies.
    Big Benny: —We make an ambush. Catch a few. Skiet them in the balls. Right in the balls.
    Shimmy Kahn: —Hey Rabies, how is it in Bez Valley there, that yokish school? They make you eat a pork chop or what?
    â€”It’s oright, says Isaac.
    â€”We shoot their kneecaps, says Big Benny. Go for the kneecaps.
    â€”Hey Rabies, there’s your old man hey.
    Isaac looks up to see his father in the doorway, waving at him with the whole of his arm. Isaac goes in, his father limping off ahead of him, leading the way, anger in the stiffness of his back. Inside they find their seats in front, his father’s cane hung on the pew. The women sitting in the galleries with their hats overlook all. On the bimah, the chuzen’s face turns pink under his black cap, twisting out the high notes that to Isaac are a kind of wailing, a tormented wailing, as if a suffering infant is trapped inside the man’s chest. This shul with its old men with hairy ears sitting in rows and muttering and watching, people whispering and holding in their farts, the shrewd widows in their black hats noting every move from above, the endless droning through hours—it’s just like a schoolroom, oppressive to his jittering spirit as it always has been. Except that now he also sees the black paint, the broken lion outside, and it dawns in him what a weak place this is, a monument to victimhood, helpless.
    He thinks of Kaplan, of Mame. That dark bandage on her face all through his early life, tied in his mind to Dusat. Dusat was the cause. He tries to remember back, really for the first time, to glimpses he had of her face uncovered? Something else he was told about it? . . . But of Dusat he can find only vestigial memories, as if the blinds are being drawn in that part of himself. Inside that dimming chamber he summons the houses built with wooden sides, some yellow, some dark green, and with steep-slanted roofs of tin sheets or wooden shingles or sometimes thatched straw. He breathes again the cramped human smells in the little rooms. And cow manure and woodsmoke. Muddy yards with woodpiles as tall as the houses. A stove made of large bricks inside called a pripachik, with a round hole in front and a door in the side and another door in the brick back, facing into the room behind, that opened as a heater in winter. Everything revolved around that pripachik, purveyor of hot meals and life heat. On very bad nights they blocked the chimney to a trickle to let the orange warmth of the coals throb to the walls; the best place to sleep was on the pripachik’s flat top. He remembers: Stay off the lake! Its whiteness looked solid but it could swallow you. And the cathedral on the rise, that fearsome overlooking cross. An arrowhead of ducks against a white sky. A field of painted crucifixes. Playing in the bright twinkling shallows in the summer, copper pots and pans scrubbed there by the kerchiefed women, scoured with handfuls of coarse river sand white as flour. The streets in spring turning to mud glittering with melt ice, and the village inspector hanging bags of disinfectant and sprinkling powder on the turds the melting unveiled, left by those too cold in winter to make it to the outhouses, and the neighbours pointing and laughing, calling the frozen stools
treasures
. Winter: the way of that brittle sky, how the line