The Outsider by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page B

ex-G.I.s and their wives, and the whole thing became so ludicrous that he almost burst out laughing, which he knew he would have done had Lucy been there to meet his eyes; and yet it would not have been laughter-funny but laughter-what-am-I-doing-in-this-insane-world?
    He felt better after that passage of inner turmoil. Tonight was properly primitive; no choir, no sanctuary, no hand-inscribed roll of the Torah, the five holy books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy; only himself and the congregation, the parson’s podium, and a silver goblet of wine. And when at last it came time for him to speak, to preach, David said:
    â€œMy dear friends, I was going to plead time and the pressures of these past few days as a reason for not writing a sermon, but it would not be a good thing for me to begin a rabbinate with a deception. I did write a sermon of sorts, but it was no good, and I threw it away because it said nothing of real meaning or importance. I am not sure that I will ever learn how to say things of real meaning and importance, but I’m only twenty-nine years old, and that’s no time to give up hope, is it?”
    They were grinning at him. His manner was gentle and deferential and sweet, and he appeared to be totally unaware of how gentle and sweet it was.
    â€œSo, if you will, instead of a sermon I would like to tell you something about myself and how I came to be here. That’s important. I don’t want to have any secrets.” He looked around the old church. “I feel somehow that we’re in a good place. Congregations have sat and given thanks to the Almighty in this church for almost two centuries, and from what I’ve been able to learn, those old Puritans were not so different from us. So, if you will, we will thank them for their gift of a house of God — just a moment of silent prayer.”
    He closed his eyes for a few seconds, and when he opened them, the congregation had quieted and there was not even a rustle of sound from the children.
    â€œI went to the Institute,” David continued, “not because I had a calling, as the Christians say, but because my mother, may she rest in peace, desired it so ardently. It was a good education, and my mother was a widow and quite ill. I had to face that fact, and I decided that after the seminary I’d put in a few more years of school and become a physician or a teacher, which was the way my thoughts went at the time.
    â€œThe war intervened. I enlisted and broke my mother’s heart. But there are enough of you in this congregation wearing that funny little pin which we call a ‘ruptured duck’ to understand what motivated me. Even today, so soon after the fact, it is becoming difficult to recall the nature of that cloud of horror that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi movement cast upon the world.
    â€œI am not going to bore you with any account of my life in the United States Army. Suffice it to say that I was a chaplain in the Forty-fifth Division, Seventh Army, and a trail of horror and human suffering and courage and fear led us finally to a place outside Munich that was called Dachau. That was just about a year ago, on the twenty-ninth of April, nineteen forty-five. It was also an eternity ago in another world.
    â€œI was with one of the first rifle companies that went into the place. I can’t truly tell you what I saw there, as much as I might want to. There are bits and pieces of the horror, like standing at an open mass grave and staring at the stiff, naked bodies of those who had been murdered and cast there, and trying to breathe through the terrible smell of decaying flesh. Pieces of memory like that, and I still wake up at night, moaning and frightening my poor dear wife.
    â€œBut there is one part of the memory as clear and lucid as if it had happened only yesterday. With a couple of G.I.s, I was walking toward one of the prison buildings, when the liberated prisoners