Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (28 page)

He would tell us about the feasts he had enjoyed, about his grandchildren—may they be safe from the evil eye—who were growing up God-fearing and respectable. He talked a great deal about his son-in-law Wolf who, though small in stature and with a wispy beard, was able, single-handedly, to deal with an unruly young bull, as well as with the neighboring peasants, all of them great haters of Jews.

But Khane-Sore was Father’s only married daughter. After her came Beyle, also big and tall, with long narrow hands and a wide, square chin. Beyle didn’t have her sister Khane-Sore’s prodigious calm. She spoke in broken-off, curt sentences. Every little thing made her cheeks break out in red spots.

Beyle looked at the world through quick, restless eyes. Strangers might have thought her malicious, but nothing was further from the truth. She would gladly have given away her last shirt. She was known by all for her good works. So worthy a woman, people said, couldn’t easily be found, even if one went out searching with lit candles.

Beyle, however, had one great fault. She couldn’t sit still for a moment. Cut her into bits and pieces and somehow she would find a way to get up and go. She was constantly on the move, to Warsaw, to Lodz, to some small town, anywhere, so long as she didn’t have to stay in any one place for too long.

Sometimes, she would stop at an inn somewhere to get warm. If she liked the place and the people, she would hire herself out and stay a while.

At the inn, she would milk the cows, cook huge potfuls of food for Jews and for passing travelers, and set down pans of potatoes and mash for the cows’ feed. She also knew how to work a spindle, to knit, to sew, and to mend clothes. She even knew how to banter with the sons of wealthy landowners, who rode by the inn on their splendidly outfitted horses.

Beyle knew how to do everything—except how to do some good for herself. The years passed. Beyle grew wider in girth, and still she remained unmarried, unable to find her match.

Only once, however, in one of the inns, did an opportunity seem to present itself. It happened in the person of a dark-skinned Jew who was passing through, a stocky man with a pair of eyes black as coal, wearing a hooded coat. A chat revealed that this Jew’s wife had unfortunately died in childbirth.

Beyle handed him a large bowl of grits and gave him milk to drink, straight from the cow. One word let to another, and she was emboldened to ask him some questions. What did he do for a living? Did he have children? Where did he live?

He told her he had no children, that he lived on the other side of the Pilica River, that he made a good living, and that it was only through God’s will that he remained a widower.

Beyle listened in silence. The red spots welled up on her cheeks. The dark-skinned Jew was staying overnight at the inn. Beyle slept in a tiny room elsewhere in the house. In the same little room, high on a ledge, hens were dreaming away. The door had no lock. Who needed one? What was there to steal?

Beyle was lying in bed, thinking about the dark-skinned Jew. She wanted to fall asleep, for she had to be up at dawn to milk the cows and to prepare breakfast for the passersby. But the Jew’s black eyes kept her awake.

The hours slowly passed. Soon the sleeping hens would be stirring.

Just then Beyle became aware of something tickling her face. She could have sworn that a hen had slid from its perch and scratched her face with its leg or its wing.

“Shoo, shoo!” Beyle called out to the hen.

But suddenly it became obvious that this was no hen. The room was pitch-black. Nevertheless, Beyle could make out a pair of big, wide-open eyes looking at her.

She felt her heart constricting. A hot shudder rippled through her entire body. She knew instantly who it was.

“Reb Jew, what is this?” she asked in a very soft voice.

“What do you think?”

“What are you doing here, Reb Jew?”

“What should I be doing? Nothing. My wife—it shouldn’t happen to us—has been taken from me.”

“So you come crawling to strange women?”

“God forbid! Who said so? Only that …”

His hands burned even hotter than his eyes.

Again, Beyle said softly, “Please, Reb Jew, leave.”

“Why? I don’t mean any harm, Beyleshi. God forbid!” He called her Beyleshi …

“What kind of Beyleshi am I to you?”

“If you love someone, you stretch out the name.”

“Since when do you love me?”

“From the very first moment I laid eyes on you.”

“And are you ready to set up the wedding canopy?”

“Why not? We can do that, too.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

There was a sudden tumult in the tiny room. The hens, shaken from their dreaming, began to flap their wings and flew onto Beyle’s and the dark Jew’s heads. Beyle leaped up, slapped him across the face, yanked open the wooden door, and screamed out into the night.

“You fornicator! You should rot in hell! Is this what you want from me!?”

Lamps were quickly lit throughout the inn. Jews in feather-strewn caps hastily performed the morning ritual of the washing of the hands. Women in nightcaps, coats thrown over their shoulders, ran out barefoot.

“Woe is me,” they cried, pinching their cheeks. “And a Jew, yet! Whoever heard of such a thing …”

The noise woke up the children, who started to cry. A dog barked furiously. The black-bearded Jew with the burning eyes vanished into the night, leaving behind his hooded coat.

Beyle sent the garment home to her father with Yarme the coachman. He would have something to wear for the winter as he made his rounds of the villages.

Yarme the coachman told everybody the whole story, from beginning to end. Beyle herself had asked him to do so. She wanted everybody back home to know that, even though she often stayed away overnight, she would never shame her father in his old age.

In fact, she never did. When the time came, she married in accordance with the laws of Moses and Israel.

Beyle was her own matchmaker. The man she married was also a widower, but not dark-skinned and with no burning eyes, like that person at the inn. He was a big, strapping man with a thick blond beard like the Russian Tsar’s, Alexander III.

To be sure, he was nowhere as rich, nor did he have a royal name. He was called Wolf, like Father’s other son-in-law. But he had his own horse and wagon. In addition, he could shoe horses, repair wheels, and lift a packed wagon with his shoulder if its axle broke. When his first wife had been alive, he’d owned a small field and a vegetable garden. But after he was widowed, he neglected the field and the garden. He no longer had a mind for the carrots and turnips that he had planted. Pigs took over the field, wallowing in their own filth. Well, so be it. He would move into town. He owned a horse and wagon. He knew how to shoe horses. With God’s help he’d make a living.

Beyle and her husband lived on the outskirts of town, far away, almost at the edge of Skarszew. At night the winds howled across Beyle’s roof. Wagons rumbled past, coming and going to and from town. The driver’s shouts could be heard through the windows. Beyle cooked large pots of grits for herself and her husband. For the Sabbath she prepared the special
tsholent
with derma.

Her husband Wolf drove his horse and wagon to the fairs and markets. In between trips he shod horses. They eked out a living, they managed. And every year, in the middle of the night, you could hear the cries of the new being that Beyle had brought into the world.

The more children they had, the harder it became to support them. Beyle rented out an alcove and began baking poppy-seed rolls for sale to young wagon-drivers. But she never complained. After all, this is what she wanted.

Sometimes, when Beyle came by to wish us a happy holiday, Mother would ask her how she was getting on. Once Beyle let slip that, when all the children were asleep, her mind sometimes turned to the dark-skinned Jew with the burning eyes. She could still visualize the scene. She didn’t know what to make of it. But after a night of such recollection, she could barely feel her heart beating. Everything went wrong. The grits failed. The young wagon-drivers turned up their noses at the poppy-seed rolls. She quarreled with the woman who rented the alcove.

This is how the restless, impulsive Beyle dealt with things. At circumcisions and celebrations marking the birth of a male child, she didn’t serve the usual gefilte fish and cake, but made do with boiled chickpeas, some kind of tiny fish that wasn’t too fresh, and headcheese. From time to time Father would send her two gilders for the children, a loaf of soft bread, fish for the Sabbath, and matzos for Passover. Beyle showed Father her thanks by coming to visit on a Sabbath afternoon and bringing her entire brood, their heads washed and combed, telling them to go over to their grandfather and kiss his hand.

It was different, however, for Toybe, Father’s third daughter. Toybe was quite unlike any of her sisters. She was taller, broader in the shoulders, and wider in the hips. With her erect carriage and a face open to wind and sun, she resembled those well-to-do daughters brought up on chicken and broth, who sew phylactery bags for their bridegrooms.

Toybe’s eyes were large and round, with a look of constant amazement. They were blue during the day but took on a green tinge at night. Her hair was black and curly, piled high on her head. On sunny days it looked purplish, the color of garnets. When Toybe walked, the panes rattled and the floor creaked. And even though she worked as a servant in a wealthy household, washing dishes, scraping carrots, and peeling potatoes, her hands were soft and delicate, with long, clean fingers.

On Sabbath, after the midday meal, Toybe would come to visit. She liked to listen to Mother’s tales about Warsaw. She also liked to hear about Mother’s son Moyshe, who was taken away at so young an age. She would listen attentively as Mother talked of her favorite subject, the spacious rooms and brass door handles of her former life. Toybe was placid and patient and took everything in with a smile.

She herself also had stories to tell, about the New Mill where she was born, about her mother who could carry a sack full of potatoes on her back. She told about the small water mill where Father had once worked as a miller and where at night, she said, demons would hide. Many times, in the middle of the night, she herself had heard the millstones suddenly start turning all by themselves. Father would then rush out to take a look, but saw nothing. He heard only whistling and the sound of footsteps scurrying away.

Once, around the time of the festival of Shavuoth, Toybe told us, the mill again started up by itself, so that Father had to wake up the mill-owner, who lived nearby with his wife and child. They lit a lamp, the mill-owner crossed himself, and he and Father went inside.

No sooner had they gone in when they heard sounds of scampering and the patter of running feet. The mill-owner was a brave man. He gave chase and soon caught a farm-hand together with another person, who turned out to be … the mill-owner’s own wife! She was young and pretty. What was she doing in the mill at that hour? Nobody knows. But when her husband saw her in the mill, he grabbed her by the hair, flung her to the ground, picked her up again, and then flung her onto the millstones.

The stones were grinding, water was flowing. The miller’s wife fell between the slabs. There was a sound of bones cracking and crunching. Blood gushed and spattered. The whole mill, all the flour, became soaked with blood.

The owner was later sent in chains to Siberia. Father had no further wish to work at the mill.

That was a long time ago. Toybe was then just a little girl. But she remembered how scared she had been and that she had run off to the woods and stayed there a whole day and night. When her mother went looking for her, she found her half-conscious under a tree.

When Toybe was in the right mood, she liked to tell more stories, particularly about the same forest where she had spent a day and a night. She told about the packs of wolves that came out of the woods on winter nights, roaming the roads and attacking horses and people. She told about miserly peasants who engaged in lifelong feuds over a few acres of land. One of them killed his own mother on this account and ended up rotting in jail.

By the flight of the birds and by the smoke rising from the chimneys, Toybe was able to forecast the weather and predict whether the next day was likely to be rainy, windy, or sunny.

I liked Toybe more than all my other sisters. My days and nights were passed with thinking about her cornfields, her woods, and her river. I thought that if Toybe could only write all this down, it would be a thousand times better than the tales in Mother’s storybook, from which she read to neighbors and friends on Saturday afternoons, after the Sabbath meal.

Following the death of Toybe’s mother, and after her brothers and sisters had scattered in all directions, she too had to leave the New Mill and its fields and find work in town, becoming a servant in a well-to-do household, where the doors were kept closed night and day and people addressed each other through pinched noses.

It was Mother who arranged the employment in question. She saw to it that Toybe, Father’s prettiest daughter, would be entering a rich, grand household.

The master of the house was a man not quite forty, with a pale, scholarly face, adorned with a tiny black beard. He wore a silk hat, even in the middle of the week, and, on his feet, little polished boots that squeaked. He walked with dainty, measured steps.

Toybe’s mistress, all pink and white, moved lazily about her bright, roomy chambers, treading with a puffed-up air. Under her well-fed chin, two or three extra little chins jiggled. Her demands were constant.

“Toybeshi, pull off my shoes, loosen my corset …”

“Toybeshi, run down for two or three oranges …”

Toybeshi ran, Toybeshi pulled off the shoes, loosened the corset, peeled potatoes, fired the ovens. For all that, Toybe’s lovely hands retained their beauty and charm. But it was not unlikely that those very hands were also the cause of Toybe’s tragic undoing.

The master of the house, he of the pale face and the silk hat worn even on weekdays, never looked at his maidservant the way any one person looks at another. This refined man never came into the kitchen where Toybe scrubbed away the better part of her life. After all, what business did he have there? Only on very rare occasions, for instance, when his wife was away from the house, did he show up, without warning.