Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (27 page)

Yankl ran out early every morning to take a look. He was searching for something in the trampled snow. He had a dead expression on his face, with spittle running down his chin.

On such mornings, Yankl scared me. I couldn’t bear to look at his dead face. It seemed to me, too, that he smelled bad.

One day Yankl told me that the day before he had talked with Big Yuzhke. She had offered him some sunflower seeds, patted him under the chin, and said that if he brought her a gilder, she’d take him inside. Now his plan was to save up enough money, sneak out of bed one night, and go to visit Yuzhke in the wooden shack.

I didn’t understand him clearly.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Aren’t you scared?”

“What’s there to be scared of?”

“I don’t know, the soldiers … Big Yuzhke …”

“You don’t know anything,” he said with a contemptuous flick of his wrist that made me feel completely inferior. Really, who was I compared to Yankl? He was acting like a grown-up. And I? After all, didn’t I run away from Hodl? Many times, I had wanted to tell him the whole story, but now that he’d spoke with Big Yuzhke, I was sure he’d make fun of me.

It was no wonder, then, that Mother had taken a dislike to the nice, bright dwelling. Father couldn’t care less. He was told about the goingson in the guard house, about Big Yuzhke and the soldiers. But he never saw it for himself. Whenever he happened to pass through the lane at night, the revelers would call out to him from inside the shack, but the voices never reached his deaf ears.

That was one reason why Father didn’t mind the new place. The second reason was that now Mother was always at home. She wasn’t forever running off to Aunt Miriam’s or Grandma Rokhl’s. Father didn’t have to warm up for himself the scraps of leftover food. He didn’t have to sit alone at the table, like in the former residences, or stare at the four bare walls and the sad little flame of the kerosene lamp.

In the old places, Father had hardly ever laughed. He was always complaining to Mother about being left alone, about having to come home to a cold house. He once told her that it drove him crazy when she wasn’t home.

Mother, however, was afraid to go out at night by herself, to venture forth from the house into the lane. Aunt Miriam had already sent someone over to find out why Mother had made herself scarce. Even Grandma Rokhl had taken the trouble to come by in person to see what was going on. Mother then told her tearfully that she had made a mistake about the new place, that the real prison wasn’t outside, over there behind the house, but right here, inside the house. She spoke in whispers to Grandma, she winked in my direction. She also whispered a lot to Father, although he couldn’t see anything wrong.

“I don’t know what you want,” he said. “What do we need a better place for?”

“What’s so great about this one?”

“It’s warm, it’s dry. What else do you want?”

“I’m telling you, Leyzer, we have to get out of here. It’s a coop, a jail.”

“But you’re the one who found it. Who else is to blame? Who?”

“Had I know it would be like this …”

“You never seem to know …”

Mother didn’t answer. She pursed her lips and turned sullen.

Father sleepily murmured the after-meal blessings. He was tired from the long day’s work. The beds were turned down. He stopped in the middle of his recitation. His head drooped to a side. He gave a start and picked up where he’d left off, then nodded off again.

It was still early in the evening. The hands of the clock showed eight.

At other times, this would have been the hour for Mother to go out to visit Aunt Miriam, when the neighbors gathered to chat and the children played their games. Yitskhok the teacher, who tutored the sons of the rich, was often a visitor. It was homey at Aunt Miriam’s, bright and warm. But between Mother and the delights at Aunt Miriam’s lay a barrier, the dark, accursed lane. It was like a wall, a partition separating one world from the other.

Father was dozing, but mother wasn’t one to turn in with the chickens. She threw a shawl over her shoulders and went over to the chief prison guard’s place, just one door down.

The guard, a Pole who liked to speak Russian, had yellow whiskers and a face lined with creases. He was no yokel. He’d been around in the world and had many stories to relate. A talkative sort, he liked to reminisce about the Russian rebellion and the Turkish war. But most of all, he liked to talk about the murderer Sczepka, who was a prisoner in the jail, shackled in irons.

“They’ve shaved half of Sczepka’s head in prison,” he said, “and one side of his whiskers. He’s so tall that he wouldn’t fit through the door of this room. He used to be a stone-cutter, a tombstone carver of some kind. He used to do jobs at the cemetery, he knew how to carve birds in flight. No one knows what happened exactly, but somehow he teamed up with one of those
zhidkes
, that Jew Sherman. And from that time on, he became a murderer.”

Sherman was also confined in the same prison. The jailers slashed off half his yellow beard, shaved his head and, like his companion, half of his mustache. Both criminals were to be deported to Siberia come summer, to serve out their sentences of hard labor. Over there, in Siberia, the guard knew for sure, both men would be chained to wheelbarrows. They would eat with the wheelbarrows, sleep with the wheelbarrows, sit down with the wheelbarrows, walk with the wheelbarrows, and, when they died, be buried with the wheelbarrows.

The guard also told us that Sczepka had a wife and two children. The children, he said, had blue eyes and flaxen hair. Whenever his wife and children came to visit him at the prison, Sczepka would burst into tears.

I could have listened to the chief prison guard all day and all night. He had a colorful way of describing things, lingering over every detail. Mother also knew how to tell a story, but she couldn’t compare to the guard. Besides, in the guard’s house, it was warmer than our place, and homier too. There were flower pots on the window sills, and on the wall above the double bed hung a dark picture of the Holy Mother.

Sitting on the other side of the room was the guard’s wife, a tall, blond woman, her hair coiled in thick braids around her entire head. She always looked freshly washed and combed. She smelled of soap and of starched laundry.

She herself was Russian, from a remote district, but she had been living here in Poland for a long time. She had learned Polish and spoke it with a drawl, in incomplete sentences. She, too, liked to tell stories, especially about her native village, somewhere on the banks of the Don River. The river, she said, was bluer than the sky, bluer than the bluest eyes. There was a church nearby with a small dome and gold crosses. The church was also blue. It had a young priest, with a black beard, who had wanted to make her his wife. Had she married him, she would have been the wife of a priest, with everybody paying her their respects. But that’s not what she wanted. The Polish soldier serving in the Russian army, the present chief prison guard, suited her better. She fell in love with him and chose him over the priest.

There were also Jews where she came from, she said, but they were altogether different. They didn’t wear long
kapotes
, had no sidelocks, and didn’t speak Yiddish.

There was no end to the stories the guard and his wife could tell, but it was getting late. The clock kept marking the passing of the hours. Our empty stomachs began to growl. When the clock struck twelve, we knew it was time to leave.

Back home, the wick of the lamp had burned down almost to the end. Bits of shadows, like pieces of shredded sacks, climbed up the wall. Father’s head rested on one edge of the table. He was fast asleep, worn out from the day’s labors.

The house was dark and dreary. To me it seemed as if the room had emptied out, to make space for Father so that he could better be seen, so that he could sleep with greater ease.

Mother sighed, deeply. “Ah, how sad, how sad!”

Her voice remained hanging in the air above Father’s sleeping head, like a demand for money owed.

The question arises: How did my mother, who, with her first husband, the
feldsher
, resided in spacious rooms, with brass handles on the doors, come to be with Father, a village Jew who lived in a place known as the New Mill, a good judge of hay, who feasted on sour milk and sour cream from large earthenware bowls, who liked to bathe in the local river and sleep in the forest under a pine tree? How did these two people ever get together?

The story goes as follows.

Before Mother and Father decided to marry, neither was aware of the exact number of children each had had with their first spouses. In drawing up the marriage contract, they forgot to note the names of all the orphaned children. It had been mentioned that there were several such, but that they were already grown and not dependent on either their father or mother for support.

The wedding canopy was set up and a repast prepared for the guests. The bridegroom returned home, and then Mother packed all her belongings into a trunk, left her few pieces of jewelry with Aunt Miriam, and went out by herself to the New Mill, where Father had lived with his first wife. When mother arrived, her eyes fell upon a large, dark room with an earthen floor, many clay pots strewn about in the corners, two broken windowpanes stuffed with pillows, and four grown girls, dark-skinned, bedraggled, dressed in loose cotton blouses, hiding behind the headboards and staring in wonder at the new wife their father had brought home from town.

When Mother saw all this, her young face shriveled up like a fig. She didn’t remove her head scarf, she didn’t take off her coat, but just stood there.

“Is this the farm that you told me you owned?” she asked.

“Yes, this is the farm,” Father replied.

“And who are the girls?”

“My daughters.”

“All four of them?”

“All four, may they remain in good health.”

“But you only spoke of two.”

“Well, what does it matter? A person says things …”

Mother felt a pressure on her heart. She couldn’t speak. What good would speaking do? If she hadn’t been ashamed to do so, she would have fainted right there and then.

However, she pulled herself together and said, “No, Reb Leyzer! That’s not what we agreed upon. You keep your daughters, and all the best to you, but I will not be your wife.”

“What do you mean? What about our marriage ceremony?”

“We’ll get a divorce, Reb Leyzer!”

And with that, Mother and her trunk returned to town.

She went straight to Aunt Miriam, her younger sister, crying and lamenting, “Miriam, dear heart, what did you want from me? Why did you talk me into this marriage? He’s a pauper! There are four girls in the house, like four hunks of wood. What am I to do with four girls?”

Aunt Miriam knew that Father had four daughters at home. She also knew that Reb Leyzer of the New Mill was nothing but a pauper, that the “farm” cited as an inducement in the marriage negotiation was nothing more than one room with an earthen floor and the clay pots for the sour milk. On the other hand, Mother was a widow and Reb Leyzer didn’t ask for any dowry. Besides, she was left with children of her own, from her first husband, may he rest in peace. So why all the complaints?

“Why shouldn’t I complain?” Mother insisted. “After the spacious rooms I had with my first husband, I should now go live in a single dark room with an earthen floor?”

Aunt Miriam’s heart went out to her, and whoever heard about what happened felt sorry for the young, pretty Frimet. But it was a lost cause. What use would it be to complain?

At that point, everybody began to lay into Mother. Aunt Miriam, and Reyzl, Itshe Bik’s widow, and Father’s sister, Aunt Naomi of the refined lips—all gave Mother to understand that a person’s fate depends on God. Nobody knows what will be. It might very well turn out that, for Mother’s sake, Father’s fortunes would improve, enough to provide his wife with spacious rooms with brass handles on the doors.

What could Mother do? She didn’t want to become a laughingstock among respectable people. She wept, complained some more, and finally let herself be persuaded. But she refused to return to the New Mill.

“Let him move into town,” Mother said. “He’s a pauper, no matter what. So he’ll be a pauper in town.”

Before long, Father said goodbye to his clay pots, to the meadows and to the forest, and moved into town together with his four dark-skinned, bedraggled daughters.

Four such daughters couldn’t sit on their father’s impoverished shoulders forever. It was time to start thinking in practical terms about them. Bit by bit, Mother took it upon herself to see that they were provided for.

Ite, the youngest, became a cook for rich families in Warsaw. Once in a while, on holidays, she would come home to visit her father, always bringing gifts.

Khane-Sore, the eldest, tall, swarthy, and with a pair of big, strong hands, Mother married off to a butcher in a nearby village. She had nothing to complain about. Things went well for her. Wolf, her husband, a short man with a dark, pinched face, loved his wife. In due course, she bore him three daughters and four sons—may they live and be healthy—all like their mother, dark-skinned, green-eyed, quiet, and with abundant hair.

Khane-Sore herself came into town only once in a blue moon. She would come to buy a dress for a daughter and at the same time use the occasion both to drop in on her father and to practice her silence.

Father and his eldest daughter, both tall and proud, like spreading, deeply rooted poplars, would sit facing one another and looking into each other’s eyes. They sat in silence, broken only by a brief exchange.

“How are you, Father?”

“How should I be?”

“What’s new?”

“Not much. Wolf?”

“Fine.”

“And the children?”

“God be praised.”

That was all. They continued looking at each other. Once more, silence. Then she was gone, not to be seen again for another year, or two years, or five years.

Father took great delight in his eldest daughter. She was well-off, mistress of the largest butcher shop in her village, had happily married off all her children, and presided over many a circumcision and celebration of the birth of a male child. She invited Father to all her festivities, from which he returned well-fed and well-rested.