Collected Stories (96 page)

Later I woke again and heard my father quoting Ecclesiastes: “I said of laughter, It is mad, and of mirth, What doeth it?”

“They’re dancing on graves,” Mother whispered.

Soon after the wedding, scandals erupted at Selig’s house. The newlyweds didn’t want to stay in the alcove, and Issur Godel rented a ground-floor apartment on Ciepla Street. Tzeitel came weeping to my mother because her daughter had trimmed Yankele’s earlocks and had removed him from cheder and enrolled him in a secular school. Nor did she maintain a kosher kitchen but bought meat at a Gentile butcher’s. Issur Godel no longer called himself Issur Godel but Albert. Elkele and Yankele had been given Gentile names too—Edka and Janek.

I heard Tzeitel mention the number of the house where the newlyweds were living, and I went to see what was going on there. To the right of the gate hung a sign in Polish:
ALBERT LANDAU, WOMEN’S TAILOR
. Through the open window I could see Issur Godel. I hardly recognized him. He had dispensed with his beard altogether and now wore a turned-up mustache; he was bareheaded and looked young and Christian. While I was standing there, the children came home from school—Yankele in shorts and a cap with an insignia and with a knapsack on his shoulders, Elkele in a short dress and knee-high socks. I called to them, “Yankele … Elkele …” but they walked past and didn’t even look at me.

Tzeitel came each day to cry anew to my mother: Henia Dvosha had come to her in a dream and shrieked that she couldn’t rest in her grave. Her Yankele didn’t say Kaddish for her, and she wasn’t being admitted into Paradise.

Tzeitel hired a beadle to say Kaddish and study the Mishnah in her daughter’s memory, but, even so, Henia Dvosha came to her mother and lamented that her shrouds had fallen off and she lay there naked; water had gathered in her grave; a wanton female had been buried beside her, a madam of a brothel, who cavorted with demons.

Father called three men to ameliorate the dream, and they stood in front of Tzeitel and intoned, “Thou hast seen a
goodly
vision! A goodly vision hast thou seen! Goodly is the vision thou hast seen!”

Afterward, Father told Tzeitel that one dared not mourn the dead too long, or place too much importance in dreams. As the Gemara said, just as there could be no grain without straw, there couldn’t be dreams without idle words. But Tzeitel could not contain herself. She ran to the community leaders and to the Burial Society demanding that the body be exhumed and buried elsewhere. She stopped taking care of her house, and went each day to Henia Dvosha’s grave at the cemetery.

Selig’s beard grew entirely white, and his face developed a network of wrinkles. His hands shook, and the people in the courtyard complained that he kept a gaberdine or a pair of trousers for weeks, and when he finally did bring them back they were either too short or too narrow or the material was ruined from pressing. Knowing that Tzeitel no longer cooked for her husband and that he lived on dry food only, Mother frequently sent things over to him. He had lost all his teeth, and when I appeared with a plate of groats, or some chicken soup or stuffed noodles, he smiled at me with his bare gums and said, “So you’re bringing presents, are you? What for? It’s not Purim.”

“One has to eat the year round.”

“Why? To fatten up for the worms?”

“A man has a soul, too,” I said.

“The soul doesn’t need potatoes. Besides, did you ever see a soul? There is no such thing. Stuff and nonsense.”

“Then how does one live?”

“It’s Breathing. Electricity.”

“Your wife—”

Selig interrupted me. “She’s crazy!”

One evening Tzeitel confided in my mother that Henia Dvosha had taken up residence in her left ear. She sang Sabbath and holiday hymns, recited lamentations for the Destruction of the Temple, and even bewailed the sinking of the
Titanic.
“If you don’t believe me, rebbetzin, hear for yourself.”

She moved her wig aside and placed her ear against Mother’s.

“Do you hear?” Tzeitel asked.

“Yes. No. What’s that?” Mother asked in alarm.

“It’s the third week already. I kept quiet, figuring it would pass, but it grows worse from day to day.”

I was so overcome by fear that I dashed from the kitchen. The word soon spread through Krochmalna Street and the surrounding streets that a dybbuk had settled in Tzeitel’s ear, and that it chanted the Torah, sermonized, and crowed like a rooster. Women came to place their ears against Tzeitel’s and swore that they heard the singing of Kol Nidre. Tzeitel asked my father to put his ear next to hers, but Father wouldn’t consent to touch a married woman’s flesh. A Warsaw nerve specialist became interested in the case—Dr. Flatau, who was famous not only in Poland but in all Europe and maybe in America, too. And an article about the case appeared in a Yiddish newspaper. The author borrowed its title from Tolstoy’s play
The Power of Darkness.

At just about that time, we moved to another courtyard in Krochmalna Street. A few weeks later, in Sarajevo, a terrorist assassinated the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife. From this one act of violence came the war, the shortages of food, the exodus of refugees from the small towns to Warsaw, and the reports in the newspapers of thousands of casualties.

People had other things to talk about than Selig the tailor and his family. After Sukkoth, Selig died suddenly, and a few months later Tzeitel followed him to the grave.

One day that winter, when the Germans and Russians fought at the Bzura River, and the windowpanes in our house rattled from the cannon fire and the oven stayed unheated because we could no longer afford coal, a former neighbor from number 10, Esther Malka, paid a call on my mother. Issur Godel and Dunia, she said, were getting a divorce.

Mother asked, “Why on earth? They were supposed to be in love.”

And Esther Malka replied, “Rebbetzin, they
can’t
be together. They say Henia Dvosha comes each night and gets into bed between them.”

“Jealous even in the grave?”

“So it seems.”

Mother turned white and said words I’ve never forgotten: “The living die so that the dead may live.”

W
HY
I undertook that particular tour in 1956 is something I haven’t figured out to this day—dragging around in a bus through Spain for twelve days with a group of tourists. We left from Geneva. I got on the bus around three in the afternoon and found the seats nearly all taken. The driver collected my ticket and pointed out a place next to a woman who was wearing a conspicuous black cross on her breast. Her hair was dyed red, her face was thickly rouged, the lids of her brown eyes were smeared with blue eyeshadow, and from beneath all this dye and paint emerged deep wrinkles. She had a hooked nose, lips red as a cinder, and yellowish teeth.

She began speaking to me in French, but I told her I didn’t understand the language and she switched over to German. It struck me that her German wasn’t that of a real German or even a Swiss. Her accent was similar to mine and she made the same mistakes. From time to time she interjected a word that sounded Yiddish. I soon found out that she was a refugee from the concentration camps. In 1946, she arrived at a DP camp near Landsberg and there by chance she struck up a friendship with a Swiss bank director from Zurich. He fell in love with her and proposed marriage but under the condition that she accept Protestantism. Her name at home had been Celina Pultusker. She was now Celina Weyerhofer.

Suddenly she began speaking to me in Polish, then went over into Yiddish. She said, “Since I don’t believe in God anyway, what’s the difference if it’s Moses or Jesus? He wanted me to convert, so I converted a bit.”

“So why do you wear a cross?”

“Not out of anything to do with religion. It was given to me by someone dying whom I’ll never forget till I close my eyes.”

“A man, eh?”

“What else—a woman?”

“Your husband has nothing against this?”

“I don’t ask him. There he is.”

Mrs. Weyerhofer pointed out a man sitting across the way. He looked younger than she, with a fair, smooth face, blue eyes, and a straight nose. To me he appeared the typical banker—sober, amiable, his trousers neatly pressed and pulled up to preserve the crease, shoes freshly polished. He was wearing a panama hat. His manner expressed order, discipline. Across his knee lay the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung,
and I noticed it was open to the financial section. From his breast pocket he took a piece of cloth with which he polished his glasses. That done, he glanced at his gold wristwatch.

I asked Mrs. Weyerhofer why they weren’t sitting together.

“Because he hates me,” she said in Polish.

Her answer surprised me, but not overly so. The man glanced at me sidelong, then averted his face. He began to converse with a lady sitting in the window seat beside him. He removed his hat, revealing a shining bald pate surrounded by a ruff of pale-blond hair. “What could it have been that this Swiss saw in the person next to me?” I asked myself, but such things one could not really question.

Mrs. Weyerhofer said, “So far as I can tell, you are the only Jew on the bus. My husband doesn’t like Jews. He doesn’t like Gentiles, either. He has a million prejudices. Whatever I say displeases him. If he had the power, he’d kill off most of mankind and leave only his dogs and the few bankers with whom he’s chummy. I’m ready to give him a divorce but he’s too stingy to pay alimony. As it is, he barely gives me enough to keep alive. Yet he’s highly intelligent, one of the best-read people I’ve ever met. He speaks six languages perfectly, but, thank God, Polish isn’t one of them.”

She turned toward the window and I lost any urge to talk to her further. I had slept poorly the night before, and when I leaned back I dozed off, though my mind went on thinking wakeful thoughts. I had broken up with a woman I loved—or at least desired. I had just spent three weeks alone in a hotel in Zakopane.

I was awakened by the driver. We had come to the hotel where we would eat dinner and sleep. I couldn’t orient myself to the point of deciding whether we were still in Switzerland or had reached France. I didn’t catch the name of the city the driver had announced. I got the key to my room. Someone had already left my suitcase there. A bit later, I went down to the dining room. All the tables were full, and I didn’t want to sit with strangers.

As I stood, a boy who appeared to be fourteen or fifteen came up to me. He reminded me of prewar Poland in his short pants and high woolen stockings, his jacket with the shirt collar outside. He was a handsome youth—black hair worn in a crewcut, bright dark eyes, and unusually pale skin. He clicked his heels in military fashion and asked, “Sir, you speak English?”

“Yes.”

“You are an American?”

“An American citizen.”

“Perhaps you’d like to join us? I speak English. My mother speaks a little, too.”

“Would your mother agree?”

“Yes. We noticed you in the bus. You were reading an American newspaper. After I graduate from what you call high school, I want to study at an American university. You aren’t by chance a professor?”

“No, but I have lectured at a university a couple of times.”

“Oh, I took one look at you and I knew immediately. Please, here is our table.”

He led me to where his mother was sitting. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, plump, but with a pretty face. Her black hair was combed into two buns, one at each side of her face. She was expensively dressed and wore lots of jewelry. I said hello and she smiled and replied in French.

The son addressed her in English: “Mother, the gentleman is from the United States. A professor, just as I said he would be.”

“I am no professor. I was invited by a college to serve as writer-in-residence.”

“Please. Sit down.”

I explained to the woman that I knew no French, and she began to speak to me in a mixture of English and German. She introduced herself as Annette Metalon. The boy’s name was Mark. The waiters hadn’t yet managed to serve all the tables, and while we waited I told the mother and son that I was a Jew, that I wrote in Yiddish, and that I came from Poland. I always do this as soon as possible to avoid misunderstandings later. If the person I am talking to is a snob, he knows that I’m not trying to represent myself as something I’m not.

“Sir, I am also a Jew. On my father’s side. My mother is Christian.”

“Yes, my late husband was a Sephardi,” Mrs. Metalon said. Was Yiddish a language or a dialect? she asked me. How did it differ from Hebrew? Was it written in Latin letters or in Hebrew? Who spoke the language and did it have a future? I responded to everything briefly. After some hesitation, Mrs. Metalon told me that she was an Armenian and that she lived in Ankara but that Mark was attending school in London. Her husband came from Saloniki. He was an importer and exporter of Oriental rugs and had had some other businesses as well. I noticed a ring with a huge diamond on her finger, and magnificent pearls around her neck. Finally, the waiter came over and she ordered wine and a steak. When the waiter heard I was a vegetarian he grimaced and informed me that the kitchen wasn’t set up for vegetarian meals. I told him I would eat whatever I could get—potatoes, vegetables, bread, cheese. Anything he could bring me.