Leivick in Israel 1957, Part 12
A Cry in the Night
Part 11 can be found here, and the series begins here.
A Cry in the Night
Just after four in the morning, there suddenly resounds a terrible cry from someone, one of the sick, who is found in the room just opposite mine. The cry comes unexpectedly, as though something inside a person has somehow burst. A mixture of a scream and of a moan and of a hiccup. The hiccup engulfs both the screaming and moaning, and is continually interrupted by a sort of throat-spasm which doesn’t cease for a single moment.
I have never heard such a thing. My watch-doctor springs up from his seat and from his half-sleep, goes out for a couple moments to see what is happening there, in the room opposite. In the meantime, I hear many footsteps in the corridor and the voices of the night sisters. All the footsteps and all the voices disappear into the screaming room. All the steps and all the voices are drowned out by the unusual howling, hiccuping outburst. It resounds over the whole hospital. Any minute now, it seems to me, the whole night, with the whole building, will be torn apart. All my nerves are frayed. I would like to leap out of bed myself, but cannot. I am needled to it.
The hiccuping cry doesn’t stop. At the beginning, it seems to me that the cry is a young patient, but the longer the cry continues, the more certain I am that it comes from the throat of an older man. Because the hiccuping changes from time to time into a sick, rasping cough, which bursts with an aged hoarseness.
The couple minutes that I am alone, without my watch-doctor, draw out terribly long to me. It seems to me that I haven’t just lain here a single night, but nights and nights without number. Already an eternity that I lie here; already an eternity that there screams, just opposite my door, the old people of Israel, embodied in the present night hiccuping-howling. Screaming and screaming out all of its insides. Screaming — for what? In order to scream everything out and come, after the all the screaming, to rest? Or, God forbid, who knows — where can such a scream lead? Can it not tear the whole body into tiny shreds?
I look through the curtain at my two operated-upon neighbours. They lie sunken in sleep, as before, and do not here, it seems, the cry. Or perhaps they hear, but affected by the sedative they were given, they hear it as the echo of a far-away pain. They do, I see, move their bodies as though they would rise, but they cannot accomplish it.
My watch-doctor comes back. He is downcast.
— What happened there, — I ask, — what sort of scream was that?
— An unusual case, — says my guard. — A spasming cry which the doctors couldn’t quieten. They’ve taken the patient to an operating room.
— A critical condition? — I ask.
— I hope not, — says my watch-doctor, — but it is serious. I see you’re frightened. Don’t be.
— What does frightened have to do with anything? I’ve never heard such a cry from a person.
— It’s quiet now. They took him. It’ll be fine. He’ll recover. Our best doctors are with him. They all came.
The stillness, which is established anew, still holds in it the echoes of the man’s cry. And my ears still ring. All the peace which surrounded me an hour ago is torn. And it does not want become day. It does not.
— Who was the shouting man? — I ask my watch-doctor. — An old man, is it not true?
— Yes, an old man. Over seventy now.
— Do you know who he is, where he comes from?
— Somewhere in furthest Russia, from a region of Siberia. Scarcely succeeded in being allowed to leave there. He has a son here in Israel. It took years for him, the old man, to be allowed to leave that dear Siberian paradise.
— This seems very curious to me — I say.
— Why curious?
— Perhaps he is old R’ Moyshe from my far-off village of exile in the Irkutsk region, near the border with Yakutsk, on the banks of the River Lena, where I was exiled forty-six years ago? Perhaps it is him? Risen in techiyas hametim?1
— I don’t understand what you mean, — says my watch doctor.
— Old R’ Moyshe, when he near death, asked how long it would take him to undergo gilgul mehilos through the frozen Siberian earth, until he would roll to Jerusalem. Perhaps this is him? Perhaps he has rolled to Jerusalem and — this was his first cry after his rising from beneath the earth?
My watch-doctor looks at me. He is certain that I am delirious. He lies a hand on my head. Calms me. He says:
— I don’t believe you have a fever. If so — it’s very low. But I see that you’re nervous. Well — don’t be. Your condition is certainly better than yesterday. I would ask you what R’ Moyshe you’re talking about and how the thought of gilgul mehilos came to you — Do you believe in that, then? But I want you to actually rest and truly try to go to sleep. I don’t want you to speak.
— I’ll obey you, — I say. — But tell me first how the young man with the injured hand who lies three rooms from here is doing. He’s born here, a Sabra. He came to me in the evening. Appeared before me. He said that he knew me. A strange young man. I don’t know him. He said he had something to speak with me about. Do you know him, Doctor?
— Yes, a young man with an injured hand indeed lies in a room not far from here. Exactly who he is, I don’t know. It seems that his hand was wounded in the Sinai action. I’m not sure.
— Is his hand gravely injured?
— No, not very gravely. He’ll quickly be able to go home. Now, since you tell me, I’ll go to him in the morning and give him a greeting from you. And he’ll probably come to see you again himself.
— I liked him straight away — I say further to my watch-doctor. — A strange shyness in him, and at the same time, such a crying-out in his face. His eyes clever, but sad and sharp.
— He’ll be very pleased when I relate your opinion about him. But in the meantime — enough. And let go of your strange dreams about R’ Moyshe and gilgul mehilos.
It’s very well to say ‘let go,’ I think to myself, and surrender myself anew to the stillness and the power of my nocturnal imagining. For him, it’s easy to say, but for me, it isn’t so easy. I recall all the details of my Siberian exile-village forty-six years ago and old R’ Moyshe, who already had grandchildren in Siberia. Three generations of Jewish prisoners. R’ Moyshe lay sick in the house of his Siberian sons, near death. I had, since the day of my arrival in exile, come to the house of R’ Moyshe’s sons. The old man grew attached to me. Before his death — it was the great Siberian winter, dreadful frost — he once seized my hand and said in a trembling voice: ‘When the Moshiach comes and I must undergo gilgul mehilos — how long will it take me — from Vitim to Jerusalem?’ —— Afterwards, I went with his sons to the funeral, carried him to the little Vitim cemetery, and in the fearfully frozen earth, hacked a grave for him into the ice with a pick.
I recall him now, here in a bed in a Jerusalem hospital, and I think: Perhaps he has indeed already rolled here from there — from the Siberian village of Vitim, which is on the Lena? Perhaps it was indeed his hiccuping cry. Perhaps. Who knows? Is techiyas hametim possible? Do I believe in it? — What does it have to do with me believing or my not believing in techiyas hametim? But old R’ Moyshe certainly did believe and certainly wanted to know how long the way was underground from the village near Irkutsk to Jerusalem. And above all, he wanted to know how long the rolling would take him through such frozen ground, through thousands of miles of ice.
A terror takes hold of me when I suddenly feel the shackling earth in which old R’ Moyshe crawls and scrapes with his old, worn-out body through the icy darkness, how he stretches out his hands and gradually makes a way for all of him. It takes him years. Years. — A path — no telling how long!
See, I say to myself, for you it came easily. You boarded a ship in New York and in two weeks you were already in Haifa. Travelled on a Jewish ship, under a Jewish flag. It was good for you. And he — R’ Moyshe, rolled under the earth, through steppes and deserts and forests, through lands of love and hate, to then state of Israel. Through places steeped with the blood of murdered Jews, sated with the ash of millions of burned Jewish bodies, of little Jewish children. — See, R’ Moyshe rolls out soaked in blood and smeared in ash.
My heart breaks with pity for old R’ Moyshe, who I saw die forty-six years ago and now I hear his hiccuping cry here, between the walls of Ziv on the soil of Jerusalem.
My watch-doctor stands over me, touching me on the shoulder:
— I don’t want to wake you, but you’re shouting in your sleep ——
I open my eyes. I come to. I thanks the doctor for waking me from my anguished dawn sleep.
H. Leivick, Tog, 1 February, 1958
Onward to Part 13
The emblem of the nuns who founded what would become ‘Ziv’ Hospital on an archway.
R’ Moyshe’s sons, according to Shmuel Charney’s H. Leivick: 1888-1948, are the ones who helped Leivick purchase his sleigh and learn how to drive it to escape from Siberia — which he did, disguised as a fur-trader with fake papers. Absolutely criminal that the story’s scattered over so many sources — but Charney’s version is probably the most complete, particularly if you supplement with Leivick’s own interview of 1954 with Y. Pat and his piece ‘Pesach at the End of the World.’