Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (26 page)

The black stallion wasn’t still, either. He tossed his head, releasing a white cloud of steam from his nostrils. I moved closer to Yankl, afraid that the stallion might jump on us and grind us to bits. But Yankl stared straight ahead, eyes all but popping out of his head. He neither heard nor saw me, and I felt him trembling all over.

It was getting hot in the stable. Both horses neighed at one and the same time, as if enjoying a good laugh. The old Gentile released his stallion. The white mare stretched herself out, becoming longer and longer. The stallion reared up on his hind legs and fell onto his victim, sinking his teeth into her neck. The stable filled with the noise of chains rattling and boards splitting under the piles of manure and the cribs of hay. Steam rose from the hides of the two horses, who were both wheezing, as if unable to catch their breath.

Something must have happened to me. My head began to spin. I couldn’t feel my heart beating. My hands grew numb and heavy. Did Yankl take me outside, or what? I sat for a long time in the courtyard, the wind blowing, completely unaware of what went on later in the stable.

I didn’t run into Yankl for several days thereafter. After the encounter with the stallion, the mare stopped whinnying. For a while she also stopped kicking and breaking her horseshoes. But when she started acting up again and the old Gentile returned with his stallion, I no longer had any desire to go into the stable.

It was with these two horses, the white mare and the sorry chestnut, that Yarme made trips to Warsaw twice a week. There, in the middle of the courtyard, stood Yarme’s omnibus, which these two breadwinners pulled, packed with passengers.

The omnibus was big and tall, like Yarme the coachman himself. Its roof, pieced together from old scraps of tin, hung down over the sides in two curved arcs. On the left side, in the middle, the tin covering came to an abrupt halt, so as not to interfere with the door that had been hacked out there, also a window that looked out onto the world. The gloomy window, cracked from the wind and the rain, was stuffed with rags and nailed up with boards.

Yarme the coachman claimed that, from that window, he saw the whole world—haystacks, peasant’s huts, meadows, wooden bridges spanning narrow creeks. He saw small habitations with even smaller Jews, fires burning in villages, crosses on churches, cemeteries, Jewish and Christian.

Friday nights, both summer and winter, one hour before it was time to light the Sabbath candles, Yarme returned home from Warsaw. Filthy and gray with dust, like his two horses, he drove into the middle of the courtyard and cast off his weeklong tossing about in strange inns and eating off of strange plates.

After every trip, Yarme the coachman looked thinner and older. He returned with eyes clouded from lack of sleep. The two horses came back with collapsed ribs.

Nevertheless, though sweaty and sore in every limb, he leaped from his carriage, threw off his hairy, heavy coat, and shouted into the courtyard, “Yankl, where are you? Nu, let’s hurry up. Don’t let the setting sun catch you. Unhitch the horses! Water them! Throw in some fodder! Move, you little bastard!”

Alongside Yankl, there appeared in the courtyard Yarme the coachman’s wife, a woman of about forty, round and plump. All washed and combed in honor of the Sabbath, she greeted her husband with a radiant smile.

“Welcome home, Yarme. Why are you so late today?”

“Who says I’m late?”

“You’re later today than last week, I think.”

“Think what you want, but I’m not any later.”

She helped him drag from the omnibus the few provisions he had brought back from Warsaw, some figs and dates, and a long, hard sausage in a white, moldy casing. She crawled into the omnibus in all her freshly scrubbed girth, warm and clean. Yarme forgot that he was hungry, that it was almost time to light the Sabbath candles, and that he hadn’t even washed up yet. He snuggled up to her and smiled broadly.

“How are you, Golde?”

“Thanks for asking. And how are you?”

“So-so.”

“Did you have a good trip?”

“So-so … Only the mare should go to hell.”

“What’s wrong now?”

“She’s in heat. She’s making my life miserable!”

“Like all females …” Her ample flesh shook with laughter.

“Ha, ha,” Yarme laughed back and, just like that, laid his large hand on her well-filled blouse.

“You know, you’re really some piece …”

“Stop it, you’re crazy.” She moved away a little. “Go in and wash up.”

Yankl—who, I learned, was Yarme the coachman’s son by his first wife—unhitched the horses, watered them, and threw down some hay. In the course of all this, he told me that tonight his father and Golde, whom he called his aunt, would sleep in the same bed, as they did every Friday night.

I helped Yankl wash the omnibus. He showed me how to do it, and he said he would also teach me how to be a coachman. Once I’d learned, we would save up some money and buy a horse and an omnibus. We’d become coachmen ourselves and drive passengers to Warsaw. In Warsaw, he said, he’d show me the boat he’d gone on and also introduce me to the owner of the carousel and the white bears.

Meanwhile, I poured pail after pail of water over the mud-spattered wheels, and Yankl wiped off the spokes with big bunches of straw. I climbed onto the roof and polished the tin patches until they sparkled. Then Yankl and I crawled into the omnibus and lay down on the bunched up straw, still reeking from the sweat of overheated passengers, Jews and Gentiles. Yankl again talked about his aunt who would be sleeping in the same bed tonight with his father, and about faraway, beautiful Warsaw.

As for how things were going in our new place, to tell the truth, Father was angry with Mother, not because of the dwelling itself, but because he’d known nothing at all about her intention of moving out of the old one.

When he came home that night to the old place, at his usual time, he saw that the windows were dark and the door was locked. “Frimet! Frimet!” he called out. But Frimet didn’t open the door. That didn’t bother him, nor was he surprised. It often happened that Mother wasn’t home when he knocked on the door.

However, that night, as he kept knocking, a neighboring door opened and an old woman stuck her head out.

“
Pan kupiec
?”

“Yes, that’s me. Maybe you know,
Pani
Marcinowa, where my wife disappeared to?”

“She moved out.”

“What?”

“She moved out early this morning.”

“What? A pox on my enemies!”

“She moved to a place behind the prison.”

“What’s all this about? Behind the prison?”

“How should I know? She asked me to tell you that that’s where the new place is, where Yarme the coachman lives.”

Father later related the incident to all the family, still fuming and filled with reproach. He walked into the new dwelling, barely able to contain his fury.

He arrived hungry, with the chill of the fields across which he had trudged all day still clinging to his beard and whiskers. By then all the furniture had been put into place with the help of Menashe Chatterbox and Yarme the coachman’s Yankl. I had also lent a hand, shoving a log into place in the kitchen, even breaking the glass of the lamp, until everything was finally set up.

When Father came in, Mother rushed toward him, all disheveled, her sleeves rolled up.

“Nu, Leyzer, what do you say, hah? Take a look around. It’s a palace.”

“But why all of a sudden?”

“I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I was choking there.”

“But you could have said something.”

“I didn’t know myself, and besides, maybe you wouldn’t have wanted to move. Anyway, it’s all over and done with. It should be lucky for us!”

Mother spoke quickly, bustling around Father like a guilty person. Father remained standing by the door, the tip of his tongue sticking out of a corner of his mouth. He slid the tip slowly to the other corner, a sign that maybe he didn’t think the change was such a bad idea after all. But still, why couldn’t she have waited for him?

“Who helped set up all the furniture?”

“Everything’s already set up.”

“The beds, too?”

“You can see for yourself.”

“Of course, I see. And nothing was broken?”

“God forbid.”

“And who put the wardrobe together?”

“The same one.”

“Who?”

“Menashe Chatterbox.”

“Oh, him … But he could have broken the wardrobe.”

“But he didn’t, as you can see. Nu, take off your work clothes and wash up. I’ve cooked some liver for you.”

But Father was in no hurry to undress. First he checked the beds, sitting himself down on their edges. Then he fussed over the wardrobe. He opened and shut the doors, shook his head, crinkled his nose, and tried the doors again.

“Why are they so hard to open? What’s creaking? When I put it together, the doors never creak.”

“You’ll fix them tomorrow, God willing. Now go wash up. Go …”

A large, round loaf of bread lay on the table. It was Father’s favorite, his sinful indulgence, you might say. It came from Shmuel-Shaye’s bakery and was sprinkled with caraway seeds and dusted with flour.

Father no longer kept looking for faults. He cut the bread into small squares and dunked them into the brown liver gravy, though he never took his eyes off the wardrobe that Menashe Chatterbox had put together without his approval.

Everybody seemed pleased with the new quarters, Mother, Father, and, especially, I. Really, was there another place as dry and warm as this?

When summer comes, said Yankl, we won’t know what to do with all the apples and pears, the cherries and currants that grew there. My friend Yankl … who else could tell such wonderful stories about Warsaw? And where else did I have as good a friend as Yankl?

Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before Mother began crinkling her nose. Living behind the prison was somehow not to her liking. She didn’t mean the dwelling itself, God forbid. On the contrary. The place was dry and bright, and she was on good terms with all the neighbors, with Yarme the coachman’s wife, with Itele the flour-seller, as well as with the chief prison guard’s family. What irked her was the approach to the house, the narrow lane behind the prison. She didn’t mind it so much during the day, but once it turned dark, Mother said, she was overcome by a “spooky feeling” that she couldn’t shake off. She never quite explained why nightfall brought on the “spooky feeling,” but I could well imagine.

Yankl had already told me the story of the Russian captain, but it wasn’t the supernatural part that scared me, so much as the story itself. Between the yellow wall of the prison and the abandoned hut where the Russian captain had hanged himself, when night fell, it cast a darkness so deep, you could touch it. In no other street in town, not even in the lane behind the
shul
, was it as dark as this. To me it seemed that the darkness emanated from the sentry house, the wooden shack which by day served as a place for prison guards to take a break, but at night was a gathering spot for demons.

After dark, the sentry house stood completely untended, for it was then that all the guards went on duty inside the prison. That was when the sounds began and you could hear hoarse groans coming from inside the shack. Sometimes there was loud laughter, and occasionally, the unmistakable gasping of stifled moans.

At first, just after we moved in, I thought that all the moaning and groaning came from behind the crooked bars of the prison windows. It was my understanding that in prison, where the inmates were shackled in chains, at night they were whipped and made to undergo all kinds of torture. Surely such murderers as Sczepka and Sherman, who had slaughtered entire Jewish families and set fire to a dozen manor houses, wouldn’t just be locked up without having to suffer additional, cruel punishment. Later I learned that this wasn’t the case. If there was any torture, we didn’t hear about it.

All the moaning and groaning disturbing the darkness did indeed come from the wooden shack. My friend Yankl explained it all.

“That’s where that whore, Big Yuzhke, has set herself up in business,” he told me in hushed tones, and elaborated. “Her face is pockmarked and all her hair’s cropped short, like those Gentile guys who haul sand.”

The soldiers knew full well where to find Big Yuzhke. They came and they went. They cracked sunflower seeds, spat the shells into the sentry house and at Big Yuzhke, and haggled with her over her price. She herself sat on the threshold of the shack, like a hen on her warmed eggs. She cracked sunflower seeds along with the soldiers, spat the shells back into their Russian faces, and asked, “How much can you pay me, my friend?”

The friend in question must have mentioned too low a figure, for Big Yuzhke hoisted herself up and, in her hoarse, grating voice, shouted, “Go to your own mother, you goddam cheapskate. Go back to pig land!”

It was dark. Whatever took place there later, no one could see. Suddenly, all the tumult came to a halt. Now, new noises took over, sounds of heavy breathing, wheezing, sniffling. The whole lane hummed with the noises. The broken-down house of the betrayed captain, the linden trees, the barred prison windows—all seemed to be breathing heavily, sweating, as if in the throes of a terrible dread.

Woe to the poor soul who had reason to be passing through the lane at that hour. Curses and dirty talk, like the sharp barking of strong dogs, rang out from the cobblestones underfoot. From time to time, a stone hit the opposite fence, occasionally striking the head of a passerby.

“Go to hell!” Yuzhke’s hoarse voice cut through the air like a blunt saw.

A booming Russian voice roared back, “Go to hell yourself! You and your mother!”

We stopped going out at night to avoid the lane. We sat in the dark, rather than run out to the store for a quart of kerosene.

In the morning the sentry house was littered with the shells of sunflower seeds, scraps of stale sausage, and empty whiskey bottles. If it happened to have snowed during the night, the nearby ground bore the imprints of bodies that had rolled around in the fresh snow.