Headache, he
called it. Somehow Sara vaguely sensed it to be the ache of a fear.
One night there was a furious pink tint on the distant horizon, and
borne on miles of the stiffly thin air came the pungency of burning
wood and flesh across the snowlight. Flesh! The red sky lay off in the
direction of Kishinef. What was it? The straw roof of a burning barn?
The precious flesh of an ox? What? Reb Baruch, with a married daughter
and eleven children in Kishinef, sat up all night and prayed and swayed
and trembled.
Packed in airtight against the bite of the steely out-of-doors, most of
the village of Vodna--except the children and the half-witted Shimsha,
the _ganef_--huddled under its none-too-plentiful coverings that night
and prayed and trembled.
At five o'clock that red dawn, almost as if a bayonet had crashed into
her dream, Sara, her face smeared with pallor, awoke to the smell of
her own hair singeing. A bayonet _had_ crashed, but through the door,
terribly!
The rest is an anguished war frieze of fleeing figures; of running
hither and thither in the wildness of fear; of mothers running with
babes at breasts; of men, their twisted faces steaming sweat, locked in
the Laocooen embrace of death.
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