Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (34 page)

The blood rose to my head. I was sure that by tomorrow Yankl would be off to the church chapel and get himself converted.

I told him that if—God forbid!—he did that, he would lose his share in this world as well as in the world-to-come. The punishment meted out in the world-to-come was beyond bearing.

“They roast you there,” I said, “and burn you with red-hot tongs. They pull out your hair, single strand by single strand, as well as all your fingernails. First they scald one eye, then the other. And once you’re totally blind, they restore your eyesight and then scald your eyes again. And do you know what else they do there? A demon walks around with a pair of shears every day, snipping a bit off the convert’s circumcised parts.”

Yankl broke into a cold sweat.

“How do you know all this?” he asked. “Did you see it yourself?”

“What do you mean? Who doesn’t know about this?” I replied.

Yankl, it seemed, took my words to heart. He began avoiding Janinka. He no longer came by in the evenings to tell stories. I think he started avoiding me as well. Once, during the Christian Pentecost, Mother came home and said that she’d seen Yankl standing outside the church, bare-headed, watching the procession go by, looking at the crosses and at the statue of the Holy Mother, carried by little Gentile girls in white veils. Janinka herself was in the procession. She was carrying a red, velvet cushion and had a circlet of blue flowers around her head.

I was greatly saddened to hear this. If Yankl watched the procession bare-headed, this meant that he intended to convert. Maybe he already had?

I wanted to ask him and waited for him every evening at our door. But had anyone seen Yankl lately? He seemed to have disappeared somewhere. There was no sign of him anywhere.

It wasn’t until the time of the Shavuoth festival that I happened to come across Yankl again. This time, too, he was sitting on the shaft of his father’s omnibus with Janinka. I knew immediately that he hadn’t converted as yet. First of all, he was speaking in Yiddish, and secondly, had he—God forbid!—become a Christian, he wouldn’t have been sitting there so openly, for all the world to see, cracking sunflower seeds from the same paper bag that Janinka was using.

I asked Yankl where he’d been and why no one had seen him or Janinka. The chief prison guard’s little daughter explained that while she was taking part in the church procession and all the other Pentecost ceremonies, she wasn’t allowed to be friends with me or Yankl. It was a sin, she said. But now that Pentecost was over, she could be friends again.

On the day of the eve of Shavuoth, we took her along with us to the pond, to gather rushes for the holiday decorations. Janinka waded into the pond, with her dress hitched above her knees. Her legs were brown from the sun and dusted with fine golden hairs. Yankl himself didn’t go into the pond but lay on the grass, silently watching me and Janinka picking the rushes. When we came back, in a burst of laughter and screams, Yankl’s eyes looked misty, as if smoke had gotten into them. He didn’t look us in the face. Janinka, still laughing, stood there in her hitched-up dress and fine golden hairs. But all at once, she stopped laughing and it seemed as if her eyes, too, misted over from the same smoke. She quickly dropped her skirt and asked Yankl if he was angry with her.

Yankl didn’t answer. He had a grim look on his face. At that moment, it seemed to me that his face was covered not with freckles, but dark holes.

He took all the rushes from us and carried them back himself. He was silent the whole way and Janinka reproached me under her breath—why did I ask her to pick the rushes without Yankl? But I had done nothing of the sort. It was Yankl himself who didn’t feel like going into the water.

I was sorry that I had gone with them. I must have been the reason for Yankl’s sullen anger and his silence. However, no sooner did we smell the aroma of butter cakes in our courtyard than Yankl became his old self again.

Right away we began to distribute the rushes to all the houses, including the chief prison guard’s, even hanging them here and there. Yarme the coachman’s wife came over to our place to show off her successful holiday pastry and Mother showed off her cheesecake to the guard’s wife, offering her a slice, and telling her that the next day, God willing, she would tell her the whole story of why we celebrate Shavuoth.

Mother loved to show off her knowledge, and so the following day she carried out her promise.

It was going toward evening. The sky was cool, with scattered reddish clouds. Mother and the Russian woman sat on our threshold. In Polish Mother explained who Ruth was and who Boaz was, how Ruth, the Gentile, said to Naomi, “Your God is my God, and your people, my people.” She told of how Ruth came to Boaz’s field to gather corn and how, generations later, this resulted in the birth of King David, who knew how to play the harp and sing like a bird.

Yankl, even though he could tell the most wonderful stories, also sat there, listening attentively. Janinka leaned her chin against one of Mother’s knees and looked up at her with blue, wide-open eyes. I looked at Yankl. It seemed to me that his eyes, too, were now blue, like Janinka’s, and it struck me that Yankl wasn’t Yankl but Boaz, and Janinka, not Janinka but Ruth. But our courtyard wasn’t a field and no corn grew there. Ruth would never come to Boaz in such a place. But this was Yankl, after all. If he could play the part of the righteous Joseph, then why shouldn’t he be Boaz?

On the second day of the Shavuoth festival, I sat with Yankl in the courtyard, staring into the orchard, where the big, red wheel of the sun had come to rest over the top of a tree.

Yankl was angry with his father. He told me that he had come late to services in the synagogue and that his father, in front of the whole congregation, had slapped him so hard that he was nearly soaked in blood. But his father would get what’s coming to him, so Yankl declared. He’d show that man! He would take Janinka and run away with her, as if they were Boaz and Ruth.

I felt a burning sensation under my heart. Only the day before I had compared Yankl and Janinka to Boaz and Ruth, and now Yankl was telling me the very same thing.

“But Boaz didn’t convert,” I said.

“How do you know?” Yankl asked.

“What do you mean, how do I know? It’s written in the Bible!”

“And did I say I was going to convert?”

“What are you going to do?”

“Janinka will convert.”

“And what will her father say about that?”

“He doesn’t have to know.”

I don’t know why, but at that moment I was reminded of Rudolf the deceiver and the beautiful Carolina, who, under cover of darkness, stole away from her father’s palace.

I knew that workmen carried on love affairs with seamstresses and that they went for strolls along the highway on Saturday nights. I had also heard songs about love, but I couldn’t imagine what love really was. But now, hearing Yankl talking calmly, determinedly, about running off with Janinka, it became absolutely clear to me that he and Janinka were having a love affair.

True, I didn’t see them strolling along the highway on a Saturday night, but I did see them once behind the fence of the orchard. When they saw me, they jumped up and ran away. A dog also jumped out from nowhere and ran after them. Another time I saw Janinka holding a cookie between her teeth and Yankl taking a bite of it from her mouth. That must be what they call a love affair.

Janinka was walking toward us. The sun, which had moved away from the orchard, now lit up her flaxen hair. Janinka came closer, then changed her mind, stopped for a moment, turned around, and went back into her house.

Yankl looked at me out of the corner of his eye. After a moment of silence, he spoke.

“Are you going anywhere?”

“No, I’m not. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, I just wanted to know. You see,” his voice hoarsened,

“Janinka and I decided to go pick corn today.”

“What do you mean, corn? Where is there corn around here?”

“I told her”—Yankl no longer spoke in his regular voice but rather breathed out the words—“that she would be Ruth and I, Boaz. I’d stand in the field and she’d come there to pick corn.”

“What field? What corn?”

“It’s only a game. We pretend that my father’s omnibus is the field and the straw on the floor the corn. You understand?”

“I understand, but I don’t like what you call the field, and the straw inside the omnibus, what you call the corn, is all sweaty. Besides, what sort of crazy idea is this?”

“We’re just playing. Why do you care?”

“I don’t care, but I want to play, too.”

“Who could you be? You’re not Ruth or Boaz.”

Yankl was right.

“But where should I go?”

“Just hide somewhere,” Yankl began to speak quickly. “Hide here, under the boards. After Janinka and I are inside the omnibus, go sit down on the shaft. If anybody comes by, just cough.”

Yankl looked at me with a greenish glint in his eyes, the same look as when the lame Gentile had brought over the stallion to service his father’s mare.

“You know what?” Yankl grabbed my hand. “You can have my penknife.”

He could keep his penknife! I had the feeling that this particular

Ruth and Boaz were not a romantic couple at all, that they were playing some sort of bizarre game. But I liked Yankl and didn’t have the strength to say no to him. For some reason I felt hot all over. If I could have been honest with myself, I would have admitted that probably I, too, wanted to have a love affair with Janinka.

The upshot was that I hid under the half-rotten boards. From this concealed position I saw Yankl crawling into his father’s omnibus, a red blur of sun in his wake. Yankl then gave a long whistle, which echoed a while in the empty courtyard, until Janinka came out of her house and crawled into the omnibus. She climbed in rather clumsily, tearing her dress. The bared part of her body wasn’t suntanned, like her legs, but white as cheese.

The moment both were inside, I came out from under the boards and sat down on the shaft, just as Yankl had told me to.

A dog trotted in from the street, possibly the same dog that had once run after Yankl and Janinka. Now it slunk along the walls and sniffed around them. It then came to a halt in the middle of the courtyard and started circling its own tail.

I kept guard over Boaz and Ruth. All was quiet inside the omnibus. The dog moved a few steps closer and stared at me. It must have found something about me not to its liking and began to bark, a single bark first, then a succession of barks, ever louder and gruffer.

My skin turned to gooseflesh. There was no sound from the omnibus. It seemed as if the dog was calling someone to come take a look.

And, in fact, the chief prison guard’s door opened, and out stepped his wife, Janinka’s mother. She gave a quick look around the courtyard. The dog grew even bolder and began to lunge at the shaft, where I was sitting in hellish anguish.

I don’t know whether I actually saw the Russian woman approaching the omnibus or whether I just sensed it. I leaped off the shaft, shouting, “Yankl! Someone’s coming!” and took to my heels, pursued by the alarmed voice of Janinka’s mother.

“Stop … ! Stop … where’s Janinka!”

However, that wasn’t what made me run for my life. It was the dog. It chased me with such ferocious barking, with such animosity, that the back of my head began to pound.

I don’t know how it happened, but all of a sudden, I felt a stab in my right leg, as the dog sunk all its teeth into the thick flesh.

I fell facedown into a gutter. I must have screamed out. I had no idea who picked me up. I saw nothing at all, and felt only puffs of breath on my face, from the mouths of the people hovering over me. There was a dull ringing in my ears, of a harsh, relentless voice crying out in Polish.

“You bastard! You son of a bitch! You’re going to prison!”

Early the following morning, Itshe the doctor was called in. He leaned the black, leather peak of his cap against my leg, tapped it, and pressed around with his old, cushiony fingers.

Mother stood by the bed, her cheeks aflame. Toybe was at the foot of the bed looking down at me. Taking quick breaths, Mother asked Itshe the doctor if the dog hadn’t been—God forbid!—rabid, what ought she do, and where should she run to do it.

Itshe tugged on the peak of his cap and, in a choked voice, retorted angrily, “Don’t run anywhere! If you do, you’re likely to get a stone in your stomach. Here, I’m prescribing a medicine. You should make a compress with it and apply every six hours. If there’s no improvement, call me and I’ll apply a couple of leeches.”

“Why leeches?” Mother grimaced. “My Berl, may he rest in peace, never prescribed leeches.”

“That’s why he died, that Berl of yours,” Itshe replied, not looking at Mother but at Toybe.

It seemed to me that he looked never at Mother at all, but only at Toybe. Although my leg was burning, I couldn’t help but notice that all the while he kept shooting glances at Toybe, his beautiful, white beard turning in her direction.

“What’s your name?” He unexpectedly grabbed Toybe under the chin.

“Toybe,” answered my sister in a frightened voice.

“Whose are you?”

“I’m a member of the family,” she replied.

Toybe tried slowly to move away from him, but the old man’s cushiony fingers suddenly slid from Toybe’s chin down to her full bosom.

Toybe recoiled, and though Itshe the doctor was a respected Jew, considered by everybody in the town to be an expert practitioner, our Toybe, nevertheless, had the nerve to shove his hand away and rebuke him angrily.

“I’m not sick. You don’t have to examine me!” she said.

“Don’t you have any respect for an elderly Jew?” Itshe the doctor replied, as he remained standing, his beautiful beard askew.

“Not if that elderly Jew goes where he shouldn’t.”

Toybe turned around, facing the window, and didn’t respond even when the old doctor said, “Good day.”

They put compresses on my leg. Toybe sat on my bed and stroked my cheek with her warm hand. Father had no idea how it happened that a dog bit me, or why. As soon as he came home, he bent over me, tapped my forehead, and said that I didn’t—God forbid!—have a fever, but it wouldn’t hurt to apply some onion to my foot.