The Glatstein Chronicles (19 page)

“Or maybe like rubbing the cold feet of someone you love.”

“Exactly! But he is a bit cheerless.”

“He hates women, truly detests them.”

She sighed. “Who knows how many he’s hated!”

A couple walked by. She was young and pretty, but only in left profile. She was quite otherwise seen from the front. Her right eye was blind, covered by a patch that was heartbreaking to see, making a shambles of her pretty mouth, magnificent head, and the other bright, blue, frightened-looking eye. Her husband was older and altogether decrepit. He waddled on flat feet as if on crutches. She held on to him tightly, as to a sole support, and he clung to her adoringly, like the answer to his prayers. Their love was touching to behold.

“Maybe it’s because the trip is almost over,” said the teacher, “but I feel sad. I’m going to have myself a good cry tonight. Be warned, it may be on your shoulder. Everything makes me cry. You saw that couple? When I think of how that half-blind girl must have grown up carefree and mischievous, until the mirror told her clearly that she’d have to make compromises, and of how she’s accepted her situation, old husband and all—well, it makes me want to cry. I tell you, I only feel this way because the trip’s almost over and my mind is jumping ahead, and it depresses me. I see the whole summer slipping away all too quickly and coming to an end. I see myself standing at the train, bidding farewell to my new friends and to my little bit of Paris freedom. Another wonderful summer gone, and it’s time to return home! Each time I take a trip, it seems to me, I’m already returning. Who knows how many good summers I have left? Who knows when I’ll have no other alternative but to latch on to some old man for security? Do you want to know how old I am?”

The pianist hurried by again, book in hand. She looked at him longingly. “Do you know what?” she said. “Let’s kill some time and go down to third class.”

“A great idea!” I concurred. “I even have some young acquaintances there, the ship’s musicians. They were the first people I met, but we became separated by class.”

We stood at the companionway leading to third class. It was only a half-flight down, but during the whole time at sea, its passengers and ours only gazed at each other as though through a telescope. They looked up at us, just as we did at first class—a whole other world. Down below, on the narrow stretch of sundeck allotted to third class, the days passed quietly and indolently. Their activities seemed the same as ours—shuffleboard and sunbathing—but a cloud also seemed to hang over everything, or so it appeared to us. There was little joy below. For us the journey was a pleasant interlude, a time for relaxation. Not so for the third-class passengers, if one was to judge from their worried expressions, which said that the voyage itself was an ordeal, because awaiting them were destinations that anxiously preoccupied all their thoughts.

But even from above we could see that the sunniest ones below were the students of the ship’s band. In their white summer jackets and dark trousers, they looked out of place among their doleful fellows. When we descended, the young men gathered around me, instantly recognizing the passenger with whom they had spent the first hours at sea. Since we had come just at the moment when afternoon tea was being served, they invited us to join them as honored guests. My companion took to them right away. For her, the young students represented a greeting from her everyday life. True, that was the life she was happily running away from, but it was also nice to be reminded that somewhere there was a place where she mattered. She talked with the students about college life and they exchanged campus stories, which were like inside jokes, boring to outsiders but hilarious to those in the know. The students were overjoyed; this was the first time they had ever had such intimate contact with a teacher. The anecdotes began to take on risqué overtones, but the professor withstood them handily, which delighted the youths, barely pushing twenty. They laughed loudly, an unrestrained, earsplitting, boyish laughter. All the barriers between teacher and student fell, and it wasn’t long before she was sitting on someone’s lap and being called by her first name.

The musicians slurped their tea and, like true cavaliers, fussed over the teacher, who was pleased with all the attention. I noticed, however, that one of the students wasn’t joining in the laughter. It was like the scene you sometimes see in a burlesque house, when the line of naked chorus girls prances out and they begin to sing in their nasal voices, shimmying like mad. They kick their legs, shake their hips, their bodies quivering like fish jelly. They lob allurements at the loge, the orchestra, not ignoring the balcony—just put out your hands, boys, and catch. The beat of the drums and the clash of the cymbals are like hot coals under their feet, like whips lashing their bodies, inciting them to turn up the heat. Suddenly, amid all this tumult, you notice one dancer who is separate from the rest, going through all the motions, but mechanically, like a calisthenics routine. She moves a bit faster than the others, kicks higher, upsetting the group’s harmony, and the more you look at her, the more you become aware that she’s mocking the simulated gaiety of the performance.

The mirthless student caught my eye and drew closer. Out of thin air, he asked if I was Jewish. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “for sticking my nose into your business, but I simply have to know, because I’m Jewish and it seems to me that you’re also a member of the tribe.”

“Is that really so important to you?” I asked.

He didn’t answer directly, but instead told me that his father was a doctor in a small town in West Virginia. He’d once made a fine living but that was no longer the case. Behind the doctor’s back, a quiet boycott was organized, and most of the Christians were now going to the other doctor in town, also a Christian.

“It was a good thing,” he said, “that my father put away some money for a rainy day and we’re able to manage. As for the university, being Jewish isn’t really a problem, because there are so few of us. Still, as few as we are, there’s no great love for Jews. Maybe you can explain to me why. My father didn’t teach me any Hebrew or any prayers or any Jewish history. He never even instilled any desire in me to learn about Jewish history. I actually know very few Jews—my parents and a few aunts and uncles, all very fine people. You’re from New York, there are lots of Jews there. Maybe you’ve got the key to explain why Jews are so hated. I don’t understand it.”

I attempted to accommodate his puzzlement as best I could. “There are many keys,” I said. “Take your pick, whatever suits your temperament best. There’s a nationalist key, a Marxist key, even a masochist key. Many Jews exaggerate their own faults in order to rationalize away the hatred toward them. And then there’s the genetic key. After so many generations of hating Jews, it’s simply transmitted in the blood. A child suckles hatred from its mother’s breast, from the breast of the priest. Say, are things bad for you here?”

“God forbid!” he hastened to assure me. “Everybody here treats me wonderfully, like royalty. We play only one hour in the afternoon and a few hours at night. The food is good and the other band members have to be especially nice to me since I’m the pianist, the leader of our little band.”

“There,” I said, “there you have another key, if you will. You are the leader and they must behave themselves, that’s like a taut string that has to snap. They need your leadership. But maybe it’s time we let them lead themselves. Let them be the leaders for a few hundred years and we’ll see what they achieve. And what should one do with one’s natural talent? What if you really are a good doctor, a good pianist, a good economist? Should you suppress your talent, because that’s what the goyim want? What should you do when you’re propelled to the front because of your innate abilities? That particular key is not to your liking? Well, pick another. But the problem, I see, has grabbed you by the throat and won’t let go that easily.”

Two middle-aged women came over to our long table and sat down to drink their tea. One wore a large, black crucifix. Both had sallow faces, work-worn hands that looked like dead branches, and feet so crooked and twisted that not even shoes could conceal the disfigurement. The leather was stretched out of shape by swollen toes, corns, bunions, and all the other woeful adornments that ornament bad feet. Their hands were clean, as were their necks and faces, but the cleanliness was streaked with grime so embedded in the skin as to give it a special pigmentation—a grime that bespoke years of scrubbing laundry and floors, cooking and cleaning, and that had burrowed itself deeply into their thick flesh.

Both women were speaking Polish. I turned away from my Jewish pianist-friend and his problems and threw some friendly remarks their way. The woman with the cross didn’t answer at all. Her companion did, albeit with an air of suspicion, even though I spoke their language. I finally managed to win a measure of the latter’s trust once she discovered that we were both on our way to see mothers and fathers in Poland. She was headed for somewhere in Galicia, now part of independent Poland and no longer under Austro-Hungarian control as formerly. Her parents were very old and very poor. The hovel they lived in was on the verge of collapse, and the rain poured into it. She was bringing them money for repairs, or even for building a new dwelling, if possible.

“Do you miss Poland?” I asked.

“No, I don’t. I have grown children in America,” she replied without hesitation. Nor did she miss the little town in Pennsylvania where her husband and two sons worked in the coal mines. “I’m too worn out from work for all that,” she sighed. She examined my face for a few minutes, then suddenly burst out, “What I do have a longing for is Russia, the worker’s motherland.”

“You’re a Communist?”

“What if I am?” she said, looking away. “My husband’s a blockhead, always drunk. He has no idea how we’re going to take over the coal mines and leave the bosses to rot there and blacken, may they suffocate to death, may the walls fall in on them. But my sons are different, they’ve read the Communist literature and had no trouble convincing me. A mother’s heart understands. They’re wonderful children, serious young men. They don’t drink, they bring home the little they earn, when there’s work. My daughter’s a different story. All she knows is painting her face, lazing around, and thinking about boys. Phooey—American girls! My sons are perhaps a bit too serious. ‘Why do you always look so worried?’ I ask them. ‘What’s not to worry about?’ they tell me. ‘We’re waiting for the day when you, Mama, will live to see a Soviet America. It’s about time. They’ve stepped on us long enough. Now it’s time for us to step on them.’”

The woman with the big crucifix around her throat, who had been silent until now, burst into tears and sobbed in agreement, “It’s time for us to step on them.” The Communist mother told me that the sobbing woman’s husband had died in a mine accident a few years earlier. She had one son, who supported her, a strong, handsome young man, who had no interest in marriage, not wanting to leave his mother alone. That woman was also on her way to somewhere in Galicia, where her uncle had left her an inheritance worth a few hundred dollars in American money.

It was almost time for supper, but the university instructor could barely tear herself away from the students. They promised that they would sneak over to our deck later that night, after they’d finished playing, so that we could all spend our last night at sea together.

I couldn’t get the third-class tables, chairs, and floors out of my mind. Everything there was neat and tidy but smacked of institutional cleanliness. True, there was no trace of the poverty, the sheer hell, of what used to be called steerage, which I myself had never experienced but had heard about from older immigrants. However, the whole time that I sat there in third class, I couldn’t rid myself of the notion that somewhere a door would open and somebody would poke his head in and shake it from side to side, to signify bad news, which would leave everyone stunned. We would all rise from the benches, feeling ourselves to be most unfortunate. Indeed, in its very neatness third class smacked of a waiting room—in a hospital, say, or an unemployment center, or the office of a society offering free loans, as necessary to the petitioners’ well-being as air for breathing. Soon the door would again open and someone would again shake his head in refusal: “No.”

In my continued imaginings, the two Polish women get up. Their twisted, misshapen feet are barely able to support the weight of their ample buttocks and pendulous breasts. Their heavy feet are worn out, the first of all the overworked body parts to capitulate. The toes are entangled one with another; the little toe, minus a toenail, is curled over a second toe, the second having buried itself in a third, which, over time, has made a place for it to lie comfortably, as in a sheath. One big toe, unusually large, with a distressed black nail, protrudes from the side of a shoe, looking to burst out. The shoe itself is crinkled and worn. Both work-weary women are about to get down on their knees to scrub the floors with huge brushes, which they dip into pails brimming with soapsuds.

On deck it was already dark. You could scarcely see the water. You had to lean far over the railing to make out the white spume glinting on the black sea, like a mouthful of white teeth in a dark face. The air was damp, and with every shudder that passed through me I heard the words of Aunt Gnendl’s letter about my mother. “Her ears are as yellow as wax,” she had written. “Pack your things and come immediately, and may God help us all and bring you here in time to find her still alive.”

My mother’s ears … I remembered them as of twenty years ago—small, with tiny holes for large earrings, narrow slits. As a child, whenever I thought of how they had pierced her ears with a red-hot pin when she was a little girl, I would have to shut my eyes and I’d begin to tremble. Her face—serious, tearful—was sallow-complexioned but beautiful. She seldom laughed, preferring a smile. Her forehead was bright, becoming even brighter when she took off her wig. Now her ears were yellow as wax. I was seized by a profound feeling of hopelessness. It was now twenty years since that night when she stood in the dark at the railroad station, wringing her hands, awaiting the train that she believed would take me straight to America, without stopping. Twenty years … and now I was coming home to look at her yellowed ears.