Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (14 page)

Mother was lying in bed, too weak to say anything. But when she got better and was able, with God’s help, to get out of bed, the next time she saw Hodl walking around in her sleeveless blouse, she asked her, “Aren’t you cold, Hodl?”

Hodl stuck her large head into a small saucepan that was bubbling on the stove, and answered back with questions of her own.

“Why should I be cold? Isn’t the stove on full blast?”

“But how can you go around like that all day long?”

“How am I going around? How?”

“Well, maybe you should put something on … it’s not proper.”

“Proper you say! What have I got to be ashamed of? Aren’t these my own clothes?”

“But Hodlshi, at your age … after all, there’s a young boy in the house.”

“Look who’s worried about that little boy of hers!” Hodl pointed her chin in the direction of the other room. “That little boy of yours, that little sissy, he knows more than you and I put together.”

The blood curdled in my veins. Now it would happen! Hodl was finally going to tell everything. Where could I hide? What could I say?

“Nu, hush …” Mother suddenly drew back and raised her two hands to fend off Hodl’s bitter words.

“Tell me, Frimet,” Hodl planted herself smack in the middle of the room and put her hands on her hips, “since when have you become so pious?”

Mother’s face seemed at that moment twice longer than usual. She looked alarmed, as if she’d lost her way.

“It’s not that I’ve become more pious,” she said, “but there are men in the house.”

“You don’t say … such men!” Hodl scoffed. “I bet your own Leyzer likes the same things other men do … ha, ha … !”

She said it with such a smug, victorious smile on her face, with such haughty malevolence, that Mother’s lips suddenly closed, as if she were swallowing not a mouthful of air but a mouthful of blood.

Mother’s distress nagged at me. I might have forgiven myself for my sinning, but Mother’s pain just tore me apart. If only I could have jumped up and given Hodl a punch in the stomach, I would have been happy.

Mother must have noticed something, and looked at me dreamily through half-closed eyes. She seemed to be demanding an accounting from me, asking me to speak up.

I wanted to speak up, to tell everything. But wouldn’t that make matters worse?

For many days following, Mother walked around the house silently, her body hunched over, as though Hodl was bombarding her, not with words but with stones.

The evenings at home turned gray and gloomy, not homelike at all. Mother would be busy mending, darning, patching. Hodl attended to her pots and then sat down to eat, slurping her soup with its chicken wings, her face to the wall, as usual.

In those days we never had meat in the middle of the week. In the morning Mother would make grits, and for supper, borsht and boiled potatoes. The heady aroma of Hodl’s mouthwatering chicken soup taunted our palates. Before going to bed, she chewed on pieces of orange, with her mouth closed.

So, how could anybody like Hodl? Enough that she nibbled on oranges, while we went to bed, our bellies filled only with potatoes. But what did she want from me? And what did she have against Father?

For a long while Mother said nothing, keeping a pained silence. Then, late one evening, while Father was leisurely mashing his potatoes with a spoon, Mother, who had been sewing a patch on a shirt, suddenly stopped what she was doing, moved closer to Father, and in a quiet, contained voice said, “Leyzer!”

The door to the kitchen was closed. I was on the verge of dropping off to sleep. In my dreamy state I somehow sensed that Mother was about to talk to Father about things not meant for my ears. Maybe it was the urgency of her tone, or perhaps the fact of her bitter silence, that made me prick up my ears and eavesdrop on their conversation.

“Leyzer,” Mother repeated, moving closer.

“Hah?” Father’s spoon stopped in its tracks.

“Tell me the truth, Leyzer …”

Father, his curiosity aroused, turned his face to Mother.

“What?” he asked.

“You know, Leyzer,” Mother said, seeming to choke on every word.

“Hodl …”

“What about Hodl?”

“Hodl says … not in so many words …”

Mother placed a hand on Father’s shoulder. Father was apparently getting a little irritated. He pushed aside his plate and looked at Mother with a half-opened mouth.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Frimet. What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying …” Mother’s voice was low and deep. “I’m only asking you to tell me the truth … you and Hodl …”

“What!”

Father and Mother were seated facing the bed where I slept. For a while they said nothing, only looking silently at each other. Mother’s tearful, pleading voice still hung in the air. Father’s face turned pale.

“Frimet,” he finally broke the silence and in a choked voice said, “what made you think of such a thing?”

“She … Hodl herself.”

“What about Hodl herself?”

“She said that you and she …”

It didn’t take more than a moment for Father to decide on action. He stood up at once, pushed back his chair, and took a step toward the closed kitchen door.

“Leyzer!” Mother stood up too and tried to bar his way. “What are you going to do?”

“Just let me at her!”

“Leyzer!” Mother threw her hands on Father’s shoulders. “I implore you, you hear … I swear … I won’t live through this!”

“Don’t swear … Stop talking like that, Frimet! Once and for all, I have to teach that witch a lesson!”

“Don’t go in there!” Mother clung to Father’s neck. “I believe you, Leyzer. If I didn’t I wouldn’t stay another minute longer in this house. Stop it already. Come here, sit down at the table.”

“No, Frimet, I want her out of the house. That cheap piece of filth! That slut!”

“Leyzer, don’t go in there! Don’t do her the honor. Sit down at the table, I beg you.”

Mother managed to get Father to sit down. Still, he kept turning his head toward the closed door. Mother finally prevailed, but Father didn’t touch another morsel.

I was in a turmoil. This was the first and only time I had ever seen Mother throw her arms around Father’s neck.

They talked a while longer, their conversation creeping along the walls like tired, drunken flies. Sleep stopped up my hearing. I fell asleep with the image of Mother’s raised arms, which, in my imagination, looked like a pair of fluttering, snow-white birds.

I woke up in the middle of the night. The inside of my mouth felt as if someone was drilling a hole there with an awl. The place in bed next to me was empty. Father must already have gone off with the peasant to their villages. But what was that unbearable throbbing inside my mouth? Could it be a toothache? And not just one tooth, my whole mouth was on fire! The pain shot from my brain to my back and from there to the tips of my toes.

I was afraid to cry out. I didn’t want to wake anyone. But Mother could hear that I wasn’t asleep.

“Mendlshi,” she said, in a worried voice that suddenly lost all traces of sleep. “Why are you groaning like that? God forbid, is anything wrong?”

“Oy, Mama,” I moaned, “my teeth!”

“Woe is me! Where did you get a toothache?”

She got out of bed and, in the darkness, started fumbling around.

“The matches! Where are the matches?”

The room seemed darker than ever. One could have cut the blackness with a knife. My pain grew worse. I felt piercing stabs down my back. By the time Mother found the matches and lit the lamp, I was writhing in bed like a snake.

“Show me, Mendlshi my darling,” Mother bent over me. “Show me where it hurts.”

She stuck a long finger inside my mouth and began to poke around.

I almost choked, and spittle ran down my chin. I sat up and then lay down again. I rocked from side to side, I cuddled myself. But the pain wouldn’t go away.

Mother searched frantically for alcohol, garlic, pepper. She quickly heated up some sand. The entire room, the dresser, the wardrobe, the clock, everything was whirling around me. Only Hodl kept snoring away, loudly, without restraint, until she too woke up.

“What’s going on out there? What’s all that racket?” her frightened voice called out from the kitchen.

“Oy, Hodlshi.” Mother forgot that she wasn’t speaking to that witch. “It’s his tooth. Poor child! He’s in agony! I don’t know what to do! I don’t have any alcohol. Maybe you have some, Hodl?”

“No, I don’t. Why should I have alcohol?”

“What can I do?” Mother flitted about the room like a frightened bird.

“What can you do?” Hodl shrieked in her high voice. “Look who she’s asking! You can go choke him in butter, that’s what you can do! That kid of yours, he never lets you get a minute’s sleep!”

Mother didn’t ask Hodl for anything more. She kept searching and finally found some alcohol. She made me rub some on my sore tooth, placed the hot sand against my cheek, held me tight in her warm, trembling arms, and in this way managed to relieve some of my pain.

But Hodl didn’t go back to sleep again. Her complaints still echoed in the room, her voice scratchy like a rusty nail.

“Can’t get a decent night’s sleep here! Half the night she keeps whispering with that husband of hers.
Petshe-metshe, petshe-metshe!
If you’re going to whisper all night with your husband, you shouldn’t take in boarders. As for that bastard of yours and his teeth, I would have choked him, big as he is!”

“You should choke yourself. Dear God in heaven!” Mother said in the most heartfelt of tones as she cradled my aching head even more tightly in her warm, deep arms.

Father was determined to get rid of Hodl. He’d rather live in the street, he said, than stay under the same roof with that accursed woman.

Hodl was hardly agreeable. She raged and ranted, shrieking that she was an unfortunate widow, that they were out to make her life miserable, that they had ganged up on her and wanted her dead and buried. But Father stood his ground, until Hodl had no choice but to give in.

The sun was bright that day and the golden reflections glittered on dusty windows and damp rooftops. Girls with disheveled hair, their petticoats hitched up, stood at the sills of open windows, scrubbing and polishing the glass, singing songs about love and orphans.

Passover was approaching, the most beautiful of festivals, which Mother would always greet with a song:

Passover, Passover, that loveliest of times,

When everybody is sated full,

When the wife’s a queen, the husband a king,

And paupers recline on soft pillows.

Our small courtyard, reeking all winter long of pigs and pickled cucumbers, was now littered with broken bedsteads, discarded wardrobe legs, and ripped-out pages from crumbling Yiddish women’s Bibles.

Mother, her head wrapped in a piece of dirty, dusty gray cloth, feather duster in hand, crept into every space left empty by the shifting of the wardrobe and the beds, which were moved to facilitate the cleaning. She wiped the dust from the walls, dislodged the spiders from the ceiling, and erased every footprint on the floor.

On the very day when the house was all topsy-turvy, the same tall youth in the short padded coat, the one who had brought Hodl to us, turned up again. He grinned widely and called out, in a hollow voice that echoed through the disordered house, “Moving again, Hodlshi?”

“None of your business!” Hodl snapped back. “Pick up my things and get going!”

The boy pulled his belt tighter around his trousers, placed his legs apart, like a pair of scissors, and set to work on Hodl’s metal-banded trunk. During the time that Hodl had lived with us, the trunk seemed to have gotten heavier. The boy sweated profusely, twisted his mouth, tightened his belt some more, and began to address the trunk, as if talking to an intelligent, but stubborn, creature.

“Hey, you, get a move on! Damn you to hell! Look who’s had too much to eat … You think you’re so high and mighty, don’t you? Give up already … The devil take you!”

“Who are you talking to? Have you gone crazy?” a puzzled Hodl asked.

“You got to understand, Hodlshi,” the boy winked at her, “this trunk, bless its soul, is a real fatty … it’s developed a rich man’s paunch. A pig like that needs some prodding!”

“Prod that idiotic head of yours, you stupid fool!” Hodl spilled out her heavy heart on him. “Move it already, you dumb ox …”

The boy finally managed to drag the trunk out of the house. He shoved it onto his pushcart, secured it with rope, and then tried to lift Hodl’s clump of bedding, which also seemed to have grown over time. The boy again twisted his mouth and, straining with all his might, spoke to the bedding,

“Got yourself pregnant, huh?”

“Stop that babbling, you clumsy fool!”

And so, in a cascade of jests, directed at both Hodl and her effects, the boy gradually emptied our house of her few belongings.

Hodl herself left without so much as a “Good day,” without turning her head for a last look around. But when she was already out the door and the cart loaded up, she ran over to the open window and shouted into the room, “May you burn in hell like Cain, you and that lecher husband of yours, together with your bastard son!”

From inside the house, where Mother was busy going about her chores, there was no response. This only made Hodl more furious. She stuck the top half of her body through the window and began shrieking.

“Who doesn’t know what sort of woman you are, you phony saint! You think I don’t know that you ran off to Warsaw to see your sweetheart? A black, bitter year should befall you! Don’t think you’ll get away with this. Just look at her, that tramp!”

Mother’s hands trembled. Her eyes searched frantically around the room. The gray cloth dangled down one side of her head, like a deflated bladder. Hodl, all the while, kept up her invective, hurling fresh slanders, until finally, Mother picked up a pail full of water and threw it into Hodl’s screaming face.

Hodl leaped back. Mother hastily shut the window. Hodl’s young porter, standing beside his loaded cart, roared with laughter. All of a sudden there was the sound of shattering glass. A stone sailed across the room, hitting the opposite wall where Mother had hung photographs of her children, leaving a splotch of mud on the nose of her son Avromke.