Meir-Anschil Schechter was a decent man: “in ehrlicher Yid”, as everyone used to say. Not a scholar, not a sage and not among the tzaddikim, but he was certainly God-fearing. Descended from a well-known family of shochetim, he had continued the family tradition of strictly observing the laws of animal slaughter, scrupulously following the rules of kashrut and naming a fair price for both buyer and seller. He refused to accept coins or notes from his customers. “They are for speculators,” he used to say. In return for his slaughtering services, clients would bring choice cuts of meat, bags of wheat, jugs of milk, fruit and vegetables, and even furniture and clothes. Monetary scepticism had been the hallmark of the Schechter family for many generations, and it had shielded them from worries about the depreciating impact various political situations had on the currency.
Meir-Anschil followed a strict daily routine. In the morning he would rise, wash his hands, say his benedictions, pray, eat his bread and go to sharpen his halaf on a stone. He took care of his daughters with punctilious devotion from the moment they awoke until they left the house, and then went his separate way to the abattoir for his day’s work.
The cattle and poultry would arrive at Meir-Anschil’s business tethered and crammed together, with the fear of death in their eyes. Cows and sheep and goats and calves and lambs and roosters came in, one after the other, on teetering legs, with dry tongues and broken spirits. As they were brought into the slaughtering pen, the animals smelled the blood and tried to resist with all the strength they had left in them. They kicked and bellowed until they tore their throats, letting out exactly the same cries they would have heard a few days earlier, coming from the direction of this very pen. Their owners cracked their whips, trying to crush any lingering resistance, but Meir-Anschil would take the animals from them and ask his customers to wait outside for a moment. Once he was all alone with an animal, Meir-Anschil never felt any real pity. True, he gave the cows water to drink and patted the calves, and looked into the subdued eyes of the lambs; but he did this out of a sense of necessity and respect, not sympathy. The animals registered the stern expression on his face, sniffed the blood on his apron, and knew that this final charity had been granted to them by none other than their executioner. It was his kindness, which exceeded that of their owners, that made them suspicious. Therefore, when he threw them on the ground, their feet bound and their bodies deep in the dirt, they gazed vacantly up at him, as if they already knew that their fate was sealed.
Once he had begun the job Meir-Anschil never tarried, guiding his knife in a single, smooth motion. He cut the trachea and the oesophagus, the carotid artery and the jugular in a single movement, without crushing the neck, or cutting from top to bottom. He did not insert the knife between the trachea and the oesophagus, did not point the halaf anywhere beyond the incision, did not tear at the flesh – either with the blade or with his hand – he did not press or crush the animal, and he never worked when he was tired. Only once he had checked and confirmed that the incisions were kosher and that the pipes of the trachea and oesophagus had been correctly severed, would he wipe his forehead and hands, give thanks to God for the commandment to “cover blood with dust” and throw some earth over the pool of blood to absorb it.
In the evening he returned home to his wife, Malka Schechter, and their two daughters, and because Malka usually confined herself to her room it was he who prepared a feast of a dinner for the four of them. Meir-Anschil and his daughters would eat heartily, dark bread and fresh vegetables and grains and noodles and meat, while his wife watched them with a preoccupied air. Meir-Anschil had built his home on the left bank of the Neman, a fair distance from the market square, and placed the slaughterhouse as far away as possible from the ears of the townsfolk. He never took any interest in gossip and usually resented the pilpul of sages, and therefore few guests ever frequented their home. In the evenings, his only wish was to be left in peace so that he could smoke his pipe and go to bed early.
He loved his wife with a mad passion. His parents had agreed to the terms of his marriage when he had been a boy of ten, and for years they told him about Malka’s beauty and wisdom. He fell in love with her before he had seen her even once.
They married two years after his bar mitzvah. All his life, his parents had taught him that marital relations evolve gradually, out of a sense of duty, but in Malka’s presence he felt like a man caught in a downpour: his face burned, his heart danced, and his mouth uttered nonsense and lies. He found himself unworthy of her beauty, of her round face, pink cheeks, scarlet lips, unworthy even of the little dimple on her chin, and he was riddled with anxiety whenever he was with her. He knew that the only reason for their shidduch was his profession, which guaranteed a good income, but it was precisely because of his job that he could not allow himself to touch his wife. How could he approach her, with hands that had so much blood on them? In his clothes, impregnated with the stench of death? How could he eclipse her splendour with his dark world? On their wedding night, he did not dare enter her bed, and it took months of sleeping next to each another in two separate beds for her to move over to his and lie down next to him, which obliged him to defile her slen-der body with his clumsy flesh and animal-like grunts. In the morning, when she smiled at him with blushing cheeks, he felt that she was only pretending, out of respect for him. He did not love her the way righteous men love their wives, from a sense of duty and a wish to observe the commandments; he desired her like a hungry beast and he was in thrall to her like a slave. Every evening, he returned home, certain that he would find her gone, and was eternally grateful that she was prepared to endure, if even for just one more day, his awkward appearance, his acrid smell, his slow mind and his despicable profession.
He received his warning sign from Heaven in a dream that began to haunt him. He would be at the slaughterhouse waiting for a client, who arrived pulling along a strange animal by a rope: a beast with the body of a cow and the head of an angel – an angel with Malka’s delicate face. They would be left alone, the shochet and this creature, her tongue parched and her eyes wide open. He would call out to the heavens with bitter tears, then raise the halaf above her neck, but in his anguish he would rip at her organs and defile the act. She would die in his arms, slowly, and he would wake from the nightmare drenched in sweat and petrified.
The image of his beloved wife’s face on the body of a cow was bad enough for Meir-Anschil, and the memory of the desperation on Malka’s face was indeed horrific. But something else unsettled him even more. How could his hands have behaved so clumsily and torn the creature’s organs like an inept amateur? He realised that if he were to continue on this path of uncontrollable desire for Malka, he would first lose his livelihood, and then both he and his family would be lost altogether. That summer, he expanded their wooden house into their back yard, built an extra room for himself and moved into it permanently.