Collected Stories (106 page)

And Morris Terkeltoyb replied in a typical Polish Chassidic intonation, “
Nu
, so be it.”

That winter Morris Terkeltoyb had a long spell of sickness. It started with the flu. Then the doctor discovered that he had diabetes and prescribed insulin. He stopped going down to the newspaper and sent his manuscripts by mail. Margit told me that Morris couldn’t read his own articles in the paper, they contained so many errors. He got palpitations of the heart every time he read one. She asked me to bring proofs uptown for him. I was willing to help, but I rarely had time to go to the paper anymore. I lectured a lot, leaving the city for weeks. Once when I entered the composing room, I saw Margit Levy. She stood there waiting for proofs. She now took the subway downtown twice each week—first to pick up the proofs and the second time to return them. She said to me, “Aggravation does more damage to the health than any medicine can cure.” She also said something that could only have come from Morris Terkeltoyb: “A writer doesn’t die of medical errors, only of printing errors.” Jake, the printer’s devil, tossed the proofs to her hurriedly. Margit put on her glasses and began to look them over. Jake often ran off proofs so sloppily that letters were missing on the margins or lines were missing because the paper was too short to carry the whole column. Even though she didn’t know Yiddish, she seemed to realize that some of the proofs were defective and she went to look for Jake among the humming linotype machines. The boy screamed at her and called her names, she complained when she came back. “Is this the way they treat literature in America?”

Toward spring, Morris Terkeltoyb began to go down to the newspaper again, but Margit had a gallstone attack and was taken to the hospital. Morris visited her twice a day. The doctors found all kinds of complications. They made many tests and took a good deal of blood for them. Morris claimed that American doctors had no respect for their patients; they cut them up as if they were already corpses. The nurses didn’t come when they were called and the sick didn’t get proper food. Morris had to prepare soup for Margit and bring her orange juice. He asked me, “In what way are doctors better than writers or theater directors? It’s the same human species.”

I left New York again for about three months. When I came back in the fall, I read in the newspaper that the Yiddish Writers’ Union was having a memorial evening on the thirtieth day after the death of Morris Terkeltoyb. He had been stricken with a heart attack while reading proofs. Perhaps he died of a printing error. In the evening, I took Margit in a taxi to the hall. It was badly lit, half empty. Margit was wrapped in black. She did not understand the Yiddish speakers, but each time the name of Morris Terkeltoyb was mentioned she sobbed.

A few days after that, Margit knocked at my door. For the first time I saw her without cosmetics. She looked to me like a woman of ninety. I had to help her sit down on a chair. Her hands trembled, her head was shaking, and she spoke with difficulty. She said, “I don’t want them to throw Morris’s manuscripts into the garbage after my death.” I had to give her a solemn promise that I would find an institution which would accept his manuscripts and books, the thousands of letters he kept in trunks and even in a laundry hamper.

Margit lived on for thirteen months. During that time she kept coming to me with projects. She wanted to publish a collection of Morris Terkeltoyb’s best writing, but he had left so many manuscripts it would have taken years to choose among them. There was no chance of getting a publisher. She kept asking the same question: “Why didn’t Morris write in an understandable language—Polish or Hungarian?” She wanted me to find a Yiddish grammar for her so that she could learn the language. Even though she had never read anything he had written, Margit called him a talent, possibly a genius. Another time Margit found a manuscript that looked like a play, and she urged me to offer it to a theater director or to find someone to translate it into English.

Margit Levy spent more of the last two months of her life in the hospital than at home. A few times I went to visit her. She was in the general ward, and her face had changed so much that on each visit I had trouble recognizing her. Her false teeth no longer fit her shrunken mouth. Her nose had become hooked, just like Morris’s. She spoke to me in German, French, Italian. Once, I found her with another visitor—her lawyer, a German Jew. I heard her telling him that she had bought a plot in the cemetery of the Klimontow Society, near Morris’s grave.

She died in January. It was a frosty day and the wind was blowing. Two people came to the chapel—the lawyer and myself. The rabbi quickly recited “God Full of Mercy,” and delivered a brief eulogy. I heard him say, “The privilege of leaving a good name is for villagers only. In a city like New York, a person’s name often dies before him.” Then the coffin was put into a hearse and Margit Levy rode into eternity without anyone to accompany her.

I wanted to carry out my promise to find a place for Morris Terkeltoyb’s packs of manuscripts, but the institutions I called all refused to take them. I kept in my apartment one valise filled with his writings and two albums that belonged to Margit Levy. All the rest the superintendent threw out into the street. That day I did not leave the house.

In Morris Terkeltoyb’s valise I found, to my surprise, bundles of faded love letters that women had written him—all in Yiddish. One woman threatened that she would commit suicide if he did not return to her. No, Morris Terkeltoyb was not the psychopathic boaster I had thought him to be. Women did love him. I remembered Spinoza’s saying that there are no falsehoods, there are only distorted truths. A strange idea ran through my mind: perhaps among these letters I would find one from Isadora Duncan. For a moment I had forgotten that Isadora Duncan did not know Yiddish.

A year after Margit Levy’s death, I received an invitation from the Klimontow Society to attend the unveiling of a monument to Malkah Levy—the Society had given her a Hebrew name. But that Sunday a heavy snow fell, and I was sure that the unveiling would be postponed. Besides, I woke up with a severe attack of sciatica. I took a hot bath, but there was no one for whom to shave and dress. Neither did I miss anyone. After breakfast, I took out Margit’s album, some of Morris’s letters, looked at the pictures, and read the texts. I dozed, dreamed, and forgot my dreams the moment I wakened. From time to time I looked out the window. The snow descended sparsely, peacefully, as if in contemplation of its own falling. The short day neared its end. The desolate park became a cemetery. The buildings on Central Park South towered like headstones. The sun was setting on Riverside Drive, and the water of the reservoir reflected a burning wick. The radiator near which I sat hissed and hummed: “Dust, dust, dust.” The singsong penetrated my bones together with the warmth. It repeated a truth as old as the world, as profound as sleep.

O
UTSIDE
, a thick snow was falling. It had begun at dawn and continued all day long and into the early evening. Then a frost set in. In the Radzymin study house it was warm. A pair of beggars with ropes around their loins sat by the oven roasting potatoes. Jeremiah, an old man, was reciting psalms. He had gone blind but had managed to learn the Book of Psalms by heart. At a long table across from the Ark of the Holy Scroll sat Zalman the glazier, Levi Yitzchok, who suffered from trachoma and wore dark glasses even at night, and Meir the eunuch, a Cabalist, who was known to be sane for half the month and insane the other half, after the moon became full. The conversation turned to pity, and Zalman the glazier said:

“Of course, pity is virtuous, but too much of it can do damage. Not far from our town of Radoszyce lived a Polish squire, Count Jan Malecki, the owner of big estates. Long before the czar had decreed the serfs to be free, the Count called all his peasants to a meeting and said to them, ‘The earth belongs not to me but to those who work it. You’re not my slaves any more. Elect an elder and divide the grounds among yourselves.’ I can see this Malecki before my eyes—a big man, fat, with a red face and with a blond mustache that reached almost to his shoulders. He had no children, but his wife, the squiress, had five sisters and two brothers. They each had many children and Malecki provided for the whole impoverished family. It is peculiar that although he freed the peasants, Malecki himself worked the fields—plowed, sowed, and harvested. He had acquired a machine to cut straw, which he mixed with hay for feeding cattle. He could stand for hours at this machine working like a hired hand, while his brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law and their brats walked around idly, dressed up as if they were going to a ball. Once, his court Jew, Zelig, asked him what was the sense of allowing the others to behave this way and Malecki answered, ‘Every man should do what he wants. I like to carry the burden, so I carry it. They like to be idle, so they should be.’ By the way, all of Malecki’s relatives indulged in quarrels and calumny. The young ones also stole. His nephews got drunk, walked around with pistols; they went hunting in the Count’s forests and sometimes aimed at one another. The girls played the piano and went to parties. The people in Radoszyce gave the Count a nick-name—Jan Schmatte, which means ‘rag.’

“Since he was not a rebel and never quarreled with anyone, the Russians held no grudge against him and made him the judge of Radoszyce and the whole county. He refused to take a salary. I am told that on the day he became judge the thieves held a banquet. They knew that Malecki would never put anyone in prison. And so it was. When they brought him a thief who defended himself by claiming that his boots were torn, he had a headache, he was penniless, Malecki not only let him go free but gave him a few rubles as well. He was satisfied with a promise from the accused to become honest from that day on. The thugs and pickpockets had something to laugh about.

“There was a man in Radoszyce by the name of Maciek Sokal, and they called him the Lawyer. He was as much a lawyer as I am a doctor. He could barely read. Just the same, whenever someone was on trial he would engage Sokal as a defender. Sokal himself was a swindler, a drunk, a low creature. Before he began to appear in court as a defender, he was known as Sokal the Year-Round Witness. For anyone accused of a crime, he would invent an alibi, come as a witness, and swear falsely. Sokal knew that Malecki was gullible and he taught the criminals how to fool him. Things reached such a state that thieves began to come to Radoszyce from other villages.

“Yes, it soon came out that Malecki had created a lot of trouble with his leniency. The storekeepers in Radoszyce did not sleep nights. They hired a watchman to guard their stores with a stick and a rattle, but the toughs beat him up and he lay sick in the poorhouse for weeks. They began to steal horses in the surrounding villages. When the peasants caught a thief and brought him into Radoszyce, Malecki immediately freed him. Some merchants were robbed so often that they sold their stores for a song and moved to other towns. Others left for America. The peasants began to say there was only one way out—to get rid of Malecki. But the Russians were on his side. What did they care if Polish peasants suffered? People maintained that because of Sokal’s shrewdness and Malecki’s pity life had become more miserable than ever.

“Not far from Radoszyce was a hamlet by the name of Bojary. There was a rascal there named Wojtek—a drunk, a murderer, a thief, a rapist. He had no father. His mother bore him from a wandering gypsy. He began to steal when he was five years old. After some time his mother died and Wojtek became a
parobek
, a field hand for a peasant who had acquired land of his own. This Wojtek used to come to the weekly fair at Radoszyce every Thursday, and he always created a scandal. He went into a store to buy a cap or a jacket and then refused to pay for it. He got drunk in the tavern, beat up the peasants, broke windowpanes, turned over tables and benches. He was known as an arsonist. Whenever he had a fight with somebody, he set fire to his house. Everyone knew about it. But when he was arrested and brought to trial there were never any witnesses against him.

“In Bojary there also lived a peasant, Stach Skiba, and he had a daughter, Stasia—a healthy lass, a good worker, able at home and in the fields. She had no mother. Many of the boys wanted her for a wife and came to her with gifts. More than anybody else, Wojtek ran after her. But the girl said to him, ‘Sausage is not for a dog.’ He threatened to stab her as well as her father and any man she married. But peasants are not easily frightened. Stasia finally got betrothed to a strong peasant boy, Stefan, and he told Wojtek that if he ever said a bad word to his fiancée he would break his neck. After a while there was a wedding, and all the peasants came to Stach Skiba’s hut and they ate, drank, danced. In the middle of the celebration a scream and a lament broke out. The house had caught fire on all sides. Some of those who tried to push their way out through the narrow door were trampled to death. Somebody had piled big stones at the threshold. Over twenty people perished in the flames, among them the bride and the bridegroom. Some others were so burned that they remained crippled for life.

“This time there was a witness. An eight-year-old girl had seen Wojtek put rocks at Skiba’s door. Also, a Jewish merchant from Radoszyce named Naphtali Gorszkower told the police that on the day before the fire Wojtek had bought an oversize can of kerosene from him. The peasants caught Wojtek, beat him, and took him on a cart to Radoszyce. Immediately Sokal emerged and began to scold the peasants for hurting an innocent lad. The only policeman in town put Wojtek in jail, but Sokal went directly to Count Malecki and told him that drunken peasants had attacked an innocent boy and broken his ribs. Sokal also told Malecki that Naphtali Gorszkower had been persuaded to bear false witness by the elder of the village, who had bought salt, kerosene, and axle grease from Gorszkower. Sokal demanded that His Excellency order the release of Wojtek at once and punish those who had beaten him. Why Sokal worked so hard for Wojtek was not clear, though people said that the thieves of Radoszyce paid a weekly salary to Sokal for defending every knave in town.