Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (23 page)

So what did Mordkhe-Mendl do? …

What he did, I no longer heard.
Reyzl came over to me with a bunch of red and blue flowers which, she said, she had picked especially for me. When I got back to town, I was to put them in a vase filled with water.

Mordkhe-Mendl was going on with his story. When I came closer, I heard Uncle Bentsien ask him, “Nu, what happened to Fleischer?” But Mordkhe-Mendl was so absorbed in reciting the virtues of the estate that he paid no attention to Uncle Bentsien’s question.

He was now leading us out of the farmyard, and once again he made a wide, sweeping motion with his hand.

“Take a look at those fields. Do you see that soil? There’s gold buried there. Did those gentleman owners, those boors, know what they had here? Come, let’s go a little further. I want to show you something.”

We walked on. Ahead of us stretched empty, long-neglected plots overgrown with brambles and dotted with tree stumps. It was obvious that this land hadn’t been worked for a very long time. Father concurred, he couldn’t remember a time when any grain grew here. So where was the great fortune that Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl kept boasting of?

We were walking on soft, slippery mud. A hot, yellow haze hung over the field. Why, then, was the ground so wet? It must be a swamp.

“God forbid!” Mordkhe-Mendl looked up. “It’s precisely this soil, slippery mud that the former landowners here didn’t have enough sense to see was valuable.”

The entire field was, in fact, one large expanse of clay. Mordkhe-Mendl pointed to a deep, square pit filled with puddles of brackish water. Its sides gleamed with shiny, dark-brown clay.

“This isn’t just clay,” Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl said. “It’s oil, it’s meat, it’s food without end.”

From that clay, he explained, he would make bricks and roof tiles, earthenware pots, pitchers, jugs for sour milk, and … what not? Right here he’d put up a chimney. He’d hire Gentiles, potters. There would be such work going on here as the world had never seen.

He reached down into the pit and scooped up a messy handful of the precious clay.

“Take a good look,” he said.

“That’s clay?”

“No, it’s diamonds, not clay.”

He passed a clay-smeared hand before each of our faces. Aunt Naomi squeezed her nostrils with two fingers. Uncle Bentsien gingerly touched the proffering with the tip of his little finger. Father looked at it out of the corner of his eye. Only Mother breathed in the smell of the clay, with a full face.

I wasn’t impressed by that precious clay either. Back in town, in our old house, where Moyshe died, we had once dug a ditch and pitched out the same kind of clay that Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl was now showing us. And Simkhele the bricklayer, who once fixed our stove, also patched it with the same kind of clay. So why was Mordkhe-Mendl making such a fuss?

That Sabbath day he showed us many more things. He took us to the forest, some distance away, which was shrouded in a blue, dream-like mist.

“That forest,” he said, “also belongs to the estate.”

He then led us into a garden with a pond covered in a crust of yellow-green scum that must have been there forever. He would have the pond cleaned, he said, and stock it with fish, carp and pike.

We came to an orchard, but one without any fruit on the trees, because this year there was a crop failure, Mordkhe-Mendl remarked. But under his care, God willing, the trees would be fruitful again.

He showed us everything, even the empty dog kennels.

Later, toward evening, we were treated to cold spinach borsht, along with rye bread slathered in butter. A restful coolness descended on the fields, spreading from the distantly glowing sky and the blue forest. There was a smell of hay in the air. Crickets chirped in the garden. The sound of croaking frogs could be heard all the way from the scum-encrusted pond.

We were sitting outside. The sky was gradually darkening, turning garnet, growing wider and wider, until the eye could no longer take it all in. Now, for the very first time, I could see how many millions and millions of stars there were in the heavens.

Reyzl told me, in a whisper, that every night she fixed her eyes on the largest star, the one over there, imagining it to be an enormous diamond that was about to come loose and drop at her feet. Reyzl was a foolish girl. But it was still better to be sitting here with her than wandering about in our own small, narrow courtyard that always smelled of pigs.

After the
havdole
prayer, ending the Sabbath, Mordkhe-Mendl sent us back to town in a carriage. It was a tight squeeze and we sat piled one on top of the other. But no one minded. The night that surrounded us on all sides was tender and mild. The air was filled with the fragrance of camomile, mint, and almonds.

Uncle Bentsien lay sprawled across almost the entire width of the carriage.

“Ah, this is so comfortable,” he said with a satisfied sigh, as he stretched his entire stomach. “If dealing with community affairs were only this easy.”

Aunt Naomi cut him short with her sing-song drawl, “Be-e-n-tsii-en!”

He gave a little groan and turned to another subject, saying that, in his opinion, Mordkhe-Mendl was now certainly a personage to be reckoned with. If somebody could come into possession of such an estate, without spending a groshen, then it was no small matter.

“Don’t you agree, Leyzer?”

“Yes, it’s certainly no small matter,” Father answered into the dark. “But I don’t approve.”

“What do you mean, you don’t approve? Didn’t you see it with your own eyes?”

“I did.”

“Nu?”

“There is something unreal about it. The whole thing just doesn’t strike me right.”

“Why?”

“I just don’t like it.”

Well, so Father didn’t like it. Nevertheless, Mordkhe-Mendl got exactly what he wanted.

In no time at all, a tall, round chimney sprung up in the middle of the wet fields of the Wyszufka estate, clearly visible from a distance in town. People threw back their heads, stretched their necks, and pointed up to the sky, like stargazers.

“Take a look. That Mordkhe-Mendl …”

Spirals of black and white smoke, thick and dense, like coiled cotton wool, spewed from the chimney. The smoke hung over the white palace, the garden, the orchard, and over the flowers that Reyzl took such delight in. Peasants coming into town said that the smoke settled on the tops of the poplar trees, confounding the storks, who were forced to find new perches where the smoke didn’t reach.

Next to the white palace Mordkhe-Mendl built a squat, red-brick structure, from which sprouted the chimney, and from which issued all the wares that Mordkhe-Mendl turned out in his hot, tiled ovens.

By now the stately pebbled way to the white palace was a shambles. Pots, in all stages of completion—glazed, unglazed, handleless, without bottoms—lay strewn across the once neat and orderly gravel. On the broad, stone steps on which Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl had stood so arrogantly that Sabbath day, in the rooms with the soft armchairs and the tall, white windows—earthenware of every kind was now scattered throughout, milk pitchers, ewers, the little lidded pots that peasant women use for bringing food to their menfolk in the fields.

Mordkhe-Mendl was determined to get rich, and to that end he kept the pottery going day and night. His workers, parchment-faced, sharp-featured Gentiles with big-veined, gnarled hands, were experienced potters.

They sat bent over their wooden contraptions, wheels with shafts in the middle, like the spindles that spin out yarn. With one foot they worked the treadles, which kept the wheels turning. With their bare fingers they threw the wet clay onto the wheels, shaping the pots and the pitchers.

Spinning rapidly, not pausing for a breath, the wheels turned round and round. The clumps of raw clay spun right along, changing from one moment to the next, now stretched, now contracted. The fast fingers of the potters also turned out dolls and figurines of human shape. Then the potters would caress their creations, stroke them, and wipe them clean, until they were fully formed. They would then cut the figures loose from the wheel with a thin thread, as one would separate a newborn babe from its mother by cutting the umbilical cord.

It would appear that Mordkhe-Mendl was indeed getting rich from his pot-making. The Wyszufka estate acquired another horse, as well as a laddered wagon, in which Aunt Khane, her son Borekh, and daughter Reyzl hauled the finished pots to sell in the market every Thursday morning. But the pots never made it to the larger world, as Mordkhe-Mendl had envisioned. Truth to tell, he did—but one time only—load up a wagon with his wares and sent it off to Lublin, but what was unloaded was a heap of shards, corpses of the pots that had been.

The plan to export merchandise to distant parts was abandoned. Thursday then became the day to which the Wyszufka entrepreneurs looked forward all week long. At the crack of dawn, while man and field were still soundly asleep, they loaded up the wagon and, on empty stomachs, started out for town. At the market, they arranged the pots and pitchers, the bowls and jugs, side by side, like children from the same mother. Customers tapped the vessels with their fingers to make sure they weren’t cracked. They haggled over a groshen, walked away ten times, and once in a while actually bought a pot or a pitcher for a small copper coin.

Here, in the market, standing beside the pots, Aunt Khane no longer resembled the elegant lady of the manor who had come down the stone steps to greet us, wearing a black, silk dress with a gold brooch at her throat. Here, she reverted to the Aunt Khane of old, wrapped in her shawl, with the familiar, squashed tam on her head. The overhead sun had reddened her face. The rain and the wind had roughened her skin. Her hands were blackened, likewise her nose. Her forehead was a mass of deep furrows. As for Reyzl, who never forgot to take along her tulips and roses, her pale skin turned brown. When her face caught its reflection in one of the pots, it looked like two pots laughing at each other, nose against nose.

After each of the Thursdays, Aunt Khane returned home with more than she had taken to market, for when the wagon was unloaded, it was discovered that half of the stock had broken in transit. Coming and going, pots had cracked, smashed, and splintered to smithereens. Aunt Khane’s face seemed to have cracked as well. Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl’s black, silky beard began to show patches of white.

He now had time to show up at our house at the first sign of dawn. He didn’t come, like before, to boast or to make fun of Uncle Bentsien’s office as secretary of the community, but to catch Father at his morning prayers, before he left for the day, and whisper something into his ear. He woke up Mother, who quickly pulled the featherbed up to her chin and, in a lazy, sleepy voice, asked, “What’s new, Mordkhe-Mendl?”

“God be praised, everything’s going well. But I’m done with the pottery. No money there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Too many broken pieces, too much waste. What I need is a brick factory. The city’s beginning to build. Mendl Danziger is building. Yudl the gaiter-maker has bought a lot. All the vacant lots on Beckman Street are being snatched up. Anybody with cash to spare is buying a lot and building. But there are hardly any brick factories around. Bricks have to be brought in from afar and that raises the cost. But if I set up a brick factory on the estate …”

“Of course, of course,” Mother nodded her head. “You’re absolutely right.”

“What do you mean absolutely right,” Mordkhe-Mendl swayed from side to side. “It’s as clear as daylight.”

Yes, it was clear alright, except for the fact that he was short of ready cash, which is why he had come to see Father, to ask him to endorse a loan with his signature. Bentsien, said Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl, had already signed. Yes, that’s right, Bentsien.

Father continued praying, silently mouthing the words. From under his prayer shawl, he threw a blank look at his brother-in-law. He’d heard what Mordkhe-Mendl said, but he didn’t seem to have understood.

“Hah?”

“You see,” Mordkhe-Mendl brought his beard closer to Father’s prayer shawl, “I don’t need a lot, just a trifling amount.”

“What do you mean, ‘endorse’?”

When had Father ever done any endorsing? And was his endorsement worth anything? Besides, he couldn’t write. Didn’t Mordkhe-Mendl know that?

Yes, he knew, but that was a small matter. They would teach him how. Frimet would write out the letters and he would copy them.

A smile spread across Father’s whiskers. “Foolish man, that you are!” he said. “Does my endorsement carry any weight? I’m a poor man, barely able to make ends meet.”

“In that case, you have nothing to be afraid of.”

“I just don’t see the point.”

Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl now appealed to Mother.

“Frimet,” he said, “you’re no fool, just the opposite. Make him understand what’s at stake. He’ll save my life without doing himself any harm.”

Mother signaled him to stop talking, to drop the matter. She would take care of it herself.

That evening, after supper, when Father was already sitting on his bed, pulling off his boots, Mother called out to him.

“Leyzer?”

“Hah?”

“I think you should endorse the loan.”

“What do you say I should do?”

“Endorse the loan for Mordkhe-Mendl. I can’t see what harm, God forbid, can come from it.”

One boot stubbornly refused to come off. Father pulled his mouth to one side and bent over with difficulty. Talking to the tip of his boot, he said, “Frimet, do me the favor and don’t make a fool of yourself.”

“But he’s your brother-in-law!”

“So what if he’s my brother-in-law? He’s a Dziedzic, he owns an estate! What does he need me for?”

“But we could do something to save him!”

“You save him. Who’s preventing you?”

“If only my endorsement meant something, then I wouldn’t say another word. You heard yourself that Bentsien signed for him.”

“So Mordkhe-Mendl says.”

“He wouldn’t tell a lie.”

“God forbid! Only twice a year.”

Father lifted the featherbed, shook it out, and rolled over to the wall. “Call it a night, Frimet,” he said. “You’ll think better in the morning.”