Pearl Buck - Peony

A second caravan had been added to the one that each year Kao Lien led toward the west, and besides these, Ezra bought the produce of ships from India, cottons and ivory, silver and jewels, and brought it overland from the south. In return he sent to India Chinese silk from Kung Chen’s shops, and there it was rewoven into the gauzes that Indian ladies loved, and that no Chinese looms could weave.

There was no one even to watch at the synagogue gates. Eli the gatekeeper took care of the smiling mad old rabbi, who would listen to no one else. Eli stayed night and day, for the Rabbi could not be allowed to wander about the house lest he frighten the servants.

In the city the remnant of the Jews, less now than two hundred souls, went about their business and forgot who they were. But Madame Ezra in her own house kept the feast days of her people. It was lonely keeping, for only she and Ezra and David ate the unleavened bread at Passover.

On the first Passover after her son’s marriage she had commanded a place set for his wife. When David came alone his mother looked at him with some of her old impetuous temper.

“Is my daughter-in-law not coming?” she demanded.

David took his place in great quiet. “She says she is afraid to come,” he replied.

“Afraid?” Madame Ezra exclaimed. “What nonsense is this?”

“She fears that our sacred foods will bewitch her soul,” David replied. Then he said strangely. “I will not compel her, Mother. Perhaps she is right.”

Something in his stern still look chilled Madame Ezra’s heart and she said no more. Her proud head drooped, she wiped tears from her eyes, but she did not wail aloud. To what low estate had her people fallen! she told herself. Perhaps in a few other houses families worshiped Jehovah in solitary fashion and would for a few years more, but in most of them, and well she knew it, even the pretense of worship had been forgotten and the sacred days passed like any other in business and in pleasure.

So long as his mother lived, David showed no outward discontent with his life. His first son was born a year after his marriage day, and Kueilan, who was pettish before the child was born, delivered him easily although with much wailing and screaming. When she saw he was a boy she gave over her noise, and demanded all her favorite foods. But she refused to nurse the child, and a wet nurse had to be found. This roused Madame Ezra for a moment.

“Must this grandchild drink Chinese milk?” she asked Ezra.

Ezra smiled ruefully. “His mother’s milk would be Chinese, too, my dear,” he said.

Madame Ezra was struck by her own folly and fell silent, and Ezra had not the heart to remind her that he himself had drunk his Chinese mother’s milk. But thereafter he saw that Madame Ezra did not love even her grandchild, and next year when Kueilan had another son, she merely nodded her head when Wang Ma told her of the second birth.

Indeed, Madame Ezra cared no more to live. They all saw it, and each in his way was sorrowful. This strong good woman was the central pillar in the house, and now the pillar was crumbling. She began to lose her taste for food, and she complained that she did not sleep well. When she was alone with Ezra she asked him often what it was that she had done amiss in her life, that it was not to end as she had hoped.

“It is not that you have done amiss, my dear Naomi,” Ezra told her. “Perhaps you have only dreamed amiss.”

“I have always obeyed the will of God,” she replied to this in some distress.

Ezra had not heart to say how often her will was God’s will, and so he only said, “Ah, who can tell what is the will of God?”

In the midst of Madame Ezra’s own decline, the Rabbi died suddenly in a childish way. As his mind decayed, he had passed from being man to child and then from child to being less than human, and if Old Eli did not watch him constantly, he took up and ate anything he saw upon the ground. So one day he ate some filth, not in hunger, for Ezra kept him well fed and warm in winter and cool in summer, but from some old memory of past hunger. The filth poisoned him and he was racked with cholera and died within a day, bewildered by his pains and begging for mercy from Madame Ezra, whom he now feared as the most powerful being that he knew.

Madame Ezra mourned to see him thus, and she would have stayed beside him to comfort him, but Ezra dreaded the disease and forbade her. The old rabbi died with only Eli beside him, and he was buried in the graveyard beside his wife, who was Leah’s mother. The remnant of his people in the city mourned his death and they followed his coffin, wailing and weeping, and wearing garments of sackcloth, and they stooped and took dust from the road as they walked and poured it upon their heads. All knew that with the Rabbi’s death something of their own death had come upon them, too, and they remembered him as he had been in the days when he was young, how good he had been, how strong, and how he had adjured them to remember their God, who was the One True God. Now that he was gone, who would remind them? There was no one even to read the Torah at his grave. His son, that Aaron, was still lost, and the Rabbi was buried with no kin to mourn him or to do his work for him now. David stood there, aloof and silent. His heart was dark, but he did not weep. Neither had he stooped to take the dust nor did he wear sackcloth.

One day after the funeral Madame Ezra felt lonely and sad and she took the fancy that she would go alone to visit the synagogue. Eli had returned to watch the gates, and she went in her sedan chair, with only Wang Ma with her. When Eli saw Madame Ezra he was confused and he begged her not to go into the synagogue.

“Wait until I have time to sweep the floors, Lady,” he begged. “The dust lies thick on the Chair of Moses, and I am ashamed for you to see it.”

But Madame Ezra would not yield. She had come so far and she would have her way. Reluctantly then he fitted the key to the great lock, and he held the gate closed for a moment.

“Do not blame me, Lady,” he begged. “It was like this when I came back.”

He opened the door unwillingly indeed, and Madame Ezra stepped into the court and behind came Eli. At first she saw nothing changed except the dust the winds had blown there, and the leaves fallen and rotting under the trees. But when she had crossed the last court and had mounted the terrace and come to the synagogue, she saw change. The two stone lions that had guarded the great doorway were gone, and the iron urns were gone; the curtains over the doors were gone, and when she went inside the candlesticks were not upon the great table, or the silver laver for washing the hands. The separate tables that had held the twelve rolls of the law were gone and the fine silken curtains that had hung over the roll of the law of Moses were torn away.

Madame Ezra stared at loss after loss. She could not speak. She stood in the middle of the synagogue, looking for one well-known object and then another. Then her eyes fell upon the western wall, and there she saw the most vile robbery of all. The very gold had been dug out of the deeply carved letters of the Ten Commandments, which Jehovah Himself had given to Moses. Upon this she turned to Eli and her voice came in a loud cry.

“Who has done this?”

Eli hung his head. “Lady, I fear to tell you all,” he muttered.

“Is there more?” she demanded.

In silence he pointed to the door. He led her outside again, and along the walls, and she saw that not only the inside of the synagogue had been despoiled, but thieves had taken the bricks from the walls. These were bricks of a special sort, made new after the great flood that had covered the city two hundred years before. They were finer than any brick made nowadays, for the ancients had the secret of making bricks even from the days when their ancestors had been slaves in Egypt.