A Tale of Love and Darkness (26 page)

He was almost a Communist, Papa, your grandfather. He always used to leave his father, Grandpa Ephraim, eating with a knife and fork and a white napkin at the desk in the mill office, while he sat with his workers down by the wood-burning stove and ate with them, using his hands, rye bread and pickled herring, a slice of onion with some salt, and a potato in its jacket. On a piece of newspaper on the floor they used to eat, and they washed their food down with a swig of vodka. Every festival, the day before every festival, Papa used to give each worker a sack of flour, a bottle of wine, and a few rubles. He would point to the mill and say—
Nu
, all this isn't mine, it's ours! He was like Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, your grandfather, that socialist president who drank wine from the same goblet as the simplest soldiers.

That must surely be the reason that in 1919, when the Communists came into the town and immediately lined up all the capitalists and
Fabrikanten
—factory owners—against the wall, Papa's workers opened up the cover of the big engine, I can't remember what it was called, the main motor that gave power to the
Walzen
—the wheels—to grind the corn, and they hid him inside and locked him in, and they sent a delegation to the Red
povodir
and said to him, Listen to us real good, please, Comrade Governor, our Gerz Yefremovich Mussman, you're not to touch him, not even a hair on his head, right! Herz Mussman
—on nash bachka
(which is Ukrainian for "he's our father").

And the Soviet authorities in Rovno really did make your grandfather the
upravlayushi
—the boss—of the mill, they didn't interfere with his authority, on the contrary, they came and said to him something like this: Dear Comrade Mussman, listen please, from now on, if you have any trouble with a lazy worker or a
sabotazhnik
—just point him out to us and we'll put him up against the wall. To be sure, your grandfather did just the opposite: he was very crafty at protecting his workers from this workers' government. And at the same time he supplied flour to the entire Red Army in our district.

One time it so happened that the Soviet governor apparently took delivery of a huge consignment of totally moldy corn, and he was in a
panic because for this they could put
him
up against the wall right away, What's this, why did you accept it without checking? So what did he do, the governor, to save his skin? Late at night he ordered the whole consignment to be unloaded near Papa's mill, and gave him an order to grind it into flour urgently by five in the morning.

In the dark Papa and the workers didn't even notice that the corn was moldy, they set to work and ground the lot, they worked all through the night, and in the morning they had foul-smelling flour full of maggots. Papa understood at once that this flour was his responsibility now, and it was his choice whether to accept the responsibility or to blame without any proof the Soviet governor who sent him the moldy corn: either way it was the firing squad.

What choice did he have? To put all the blame on his workers? So he simply threw away all the moldy flour with the maggots, and in its place he brought out from his stores a hundred and fifty sacks of best quality flour, not army flour but white flour, for baking cakes and
cholla
, and in the morning without saying a word he presented this flour to the governor. The governor didn't say a word either, even though in his heart he was maybe a bit ashamed that he tried to shift the blame onto your grandfather. But what could he do now? After all, Lenin and Stalin never accepted explanations or apologies from anyone: they just put them up against the wall and shot them.

Of course the governor understood that what Papa was giving him was definitely not his filthy corn, and therefore that Papa had saved both their skins at his own expense. And his workers' too.

This story has a sequel. Papa had a brother, Mikhail, Michael, who had the good fortune to be as deaf as God. I say good fortune, because Uncle Michael had a terrible wife, Rakhil, who was so nasty, she used to shout and curse at him all day and all night with her rough, hoarse voice, but he heard nothing: he lived in silent calm, like the moon in the sky.

All those years Mikhail hung around Papa's mill and did nothing, drinking tea with Grandpa Ephraim in the office and scratching himself, and for this Papa paid him a fairly handsome monthly salary. One day, a few weeks after the moldy flour incident, the Soviets suddenly took Mikhail away and conscripted him into the Red Army. But the same night Mikhail saw his mother Haya in a dream, and she was saying to him in the dream, Hurry, my son, hurry and flee, because tomorrow they plan to kill you. So he got up early in the morning and ran
away from the barracks as if they were on fire: a deserter,
rastralki.
But the Reds caught him at once and court-martialed him and sentenced him to be put up against the wall. Just the way his mother had warned him in the dream! Only in the dream she forgot to say that it was the opposite, that he should on no account run away and desert!

Papa went to the square to take leave of his brother, there was nothing to be done, when all of a sudden, in the middle of the square, where the soldiers had already loaded their rifles for Mikhail—all of a sudden this governor of the moldy flour turns to the condemned man and shouts: Tell me please,
ty brat
of Gertz Yefremovich? Are you by any chance the brother of Hertz son of Ephraim? And Mikhail answers him:
Da
, Comrade General! And the governor turns to Papa and asks: Is he your brother? And Papa also answers, Yes, yes, Comrade General! He's my brother! Definitely my brother! So the general simply turns and says to Uncle Mikhail:
Nu, idi domoy! Poshol!
Go home! Off with you! And he leans toward Papa, so they can't hear, and this is what he says to him, quietly: "Nu, what, Gertz Yefremovich? Did you think you were the only one who knows how to turn shit into pure gold?"

Your grandfather was a Communist in his heart, but he was not a red Bolshevik. He always considered Stalin to be another Ivan the Terrible. He himself was, how should I say, a kind of pacifist Communist, a
nar-odnik
, a
Tolstoyshchik
Communist who was opposed to bloodshed. He was very frightened of the evil that lurks in the soul, in men of all stations: he always used to say to us that there ought someday to be a popular regime common to all decent people in the world. But that first of all it will be necessary to eliminate gradually all the states and armies and secret polices, and only after that will it be possible to start gradually creating equality between rich and poor. To take tax from one lot and give to the other, only not all at once, because that makes bloodshed, but slowly and gradually. He used to say:
Mit aroapfalendiker.
Downhill. Even if it takes seven or eight generations, so the rich almost don't notice how slowly they're not so rich anymore. The main thing in his opinion was that we had to start to convince the world at last that injustice and exploitation are a disease of mankind and that justice is the only medicine: true, a bitter medicine, that's what he always used
to say to us, a dangerous medicine, a strong medicine that you have to take drop by drop until the body becomes accustomed to it. Anyone who tries to swallow it all at one go only causes disaster, sheds rivers of blood. Just look what Lenin and Stalin did to Russia and to the whole world! It's true that Wall Street really is a vampire that sucks the world's blood, but you can never get rid of the vampire by shedding blood, on the contrary, you only strengthen it, you only feed it more and more fresh blood!

The trouble with Trotsky and Lenin and Stalin and their friends, your grandfather thought, is that they tried to reorganize the whole of life, at a stroke, out of books, books by Marx and Engels and other great thinkers like them; they may have known the libraries very well, but they didn't have any idea about life, about malice or about jealousy, envy,
rishes
, or gloating at others' misfortunes. Never, never will it be possible to organize life according to a book! Not our
Shulhan Arukh
, not Jesus of Nazareth, and not Marx's
Manifesto!
Never! In general, Papa always used to say to us, better a little less to organize and reorganize and a little more to help one another and maybe to forgive, too. He believed in two things, your grandpa: compassion and justice,
derbaremen un gerechtigkeit.
But he was of the opinion that you always have to make the connection between them: justice without compassion isn't justice, it's an abattoir. On the other hand, compassion without justice may be all right for Jesus but not for simple mortals who have eaten the apple of evil. That was his view: a little less organizing, a little more pity.

Opposite the
chyorny khod
there grew a beautiful
kashtan
, a magnificent old chestnut tree that looked a bit like King Lear, and underneath it Papa had a bench put up for the three of us—we called it the "sisters' bench" On fine days we used to sit there and dream aloud about what would happen to us when we grew up. Which of us would be an engineer, a poet, or a famous inventor like Marie Curie? That was the kind of thing we dreamed about. We didn't dream, like most girls of our age, about marrying a rich or famous husband, because we came from a rich family and we weren't at all attracted by the idea of marrying someone even richer than we were.

If we ever talked about falling in love, it wasn't with some nobleman or famous actor but only with someone with elevated feelings, like a great artist for example, even if he didn't have a kopek. Never mind. What did we know then? How could we possibly know what scoundrels, what beasts great artists are? (Not all of them—definitely not all of them!) Only today I really don't think that elevated feelings and suchlike are the main thing in life. Definitely not. Feelings are just a fire in a field of stubble: it burns for a moment, and then all that's left is soot and ashes. Do you know what the main thing is—the thing a woman should look for in her man? She should look for a quality that's not at all exciting but that's rarer than gold: decency. And maybe kindness too. Today, you should know this, I rate decency more highly than kindness. Decency is the bread, kindness is the butter. Or the honey.

In the orchard, halfway down the avenue, there were two benches facing each other, and that was a good place to go when you felt like being alone with your thoughts in the silence between the birdsong and the whispering of the breeze in the branches.

Beyond that, at the edge of the field, was a little building we called the
ofitsina
, where, in the first room, there was a black boiler for the laundry. We played at being prisoners of the wicked witch Baba Yaga who puts little girls in the boiler. Then there was a little back room where the gardener lived. Behind the
ofitsina
were the stables, where Papa's phaeton was kept, and a big chestnut horse lived there too. Next to the stable stood a sleigh with iron runners in which Philip, the coachman, or his son Anton, drove us to the hairdresser on icy or snowy days. Sometimes Hemi came with us—he was the son of Rucha and Arie Leib Pisiuk, who were very rich. The Pisiuks owned a brewery and supplied the whole district with beer and yeast. The brewery was enormous, and it was managed by Hertz Meir Pisiuk, Hemi's grandfather. The famous men who visited Rovno always stayed with the Pisiuks: Bialik, Jabotinsky, Tchernikhowsky. I think that boy, Hemi Pisiuk, was your mother's first love. Fania must have been about thirteen or fifteen, and she always wanted to ride in the carriage or the sleigh with Hemi but without me, and I always deliberately came between them; I was nine or ten, I didn't let them be alone, I was a silly little girl. That's what I was called at that time. When I wanted to irritate Fania, I called her, in front of everybody, Hemuchka, which comes from Hemi. Nehemiah. Hemi Pisiuk went to study in Paris, and that's where they killed him. The Germans.

Papa, your grandfather, was fond of Philip, the coachman, and he was very fond of the horses, he even liked the smith who used to come and grease the carriage, but the one thing he really hated was to ride in the carriage, wearing a fur coat with a fox-fur collar, like a squire, behind his Ukrainian coachman. He preferred to walk. Somehow he didn't enjoy being a wealthy man. In his carriage, or in his
fauteuil
, surrounded by
buffets
and crystal chandeliers, he felt a bit like a
komediant.

Many years later, when he had lost all his possessions, when he came to Israel almost empty-handed, he actually didn't think it was too terrible. He didn't miss his possessions at all. On the contrary: he felt lightened. He didn't mind sweating in the sun, with a gray vest on, with a thirty-kilo sack of flour on his back. Only Mama suffered terribly, she cursed, she shouted at him and insulted him, why had he come down in the world? Where were the
fauteuils
, the crystal and the chandeliers? Did she deserve at her age to live like a
mujik
, like a
hoholka
, without a cook or a hairdresser or a seamstress? When would he finally pull himself together and build a new flour mill in Haifa, so that we could recover our lost position? Like the fisherman's wife in the story, that's what Mama was like. But I forgave her for everything. May God forgive her too. And he will have plenty to forgive! May God forgive me too for talking about her like this, may she rest in peace. May she rest in peace the way she never gave Papa a moment's peace in his life. For forty years they lived in this country, and every day, morning to night, she did nothing but poison his life. They found themselves a sort of tumbledown hut in a field of thistles behind Kiriat Motskin, a one-room hut with no water and no toilet, roofed with tar paper—do you remember Papa and Mama's hut? Yes? The only faucet was outside among the thistles, the water was full of rust, and the toilet was a hole in the ground in a makeshift shelter at the back that Papa built himself out of bits of wood.

Maybe it's not entirely Mama's fault that she poisoned his life so. After all, she was very unhappy there. Desperately! She was an unhappy woman altogether. She was born unhappy. Even the chandeliers and the crystal did not make her happy. But she was the kind of unhappy person who has to make other people miserable too; that was your grandfather's bad luck.