A Blessing on the Moon (3 page)

“These are not toys, Pani Chaim!” Matulski rails.

“These are your company’s ledgers!” Shumski needlessly points out.

“Official documents,” Matulski stresses.

“What will people think?”

“What people?” I tell him. “You and Matulski are the only ones who see these books.”

“And what will
we
think?” says Shumski, hiding behind his glasses.

“Exactly,” rails Matulski.

“But if it makes the children happy,” I try to console them.

“That there have been children drawing in these books,
children!
” Shumski points wildly at the floor. “That’s what Matulski and I will think!”

For myself, I rather like the little drawings. I write the story of Shumski and Matulski right over the flying boat and a sleeping moon Izzie or Solek must’ve drawn. Absentmindedly, I find I have even added my own sketch—an inky portrait of Shumski and Matulski flailing their arms at me in disgust, throwing their hands into the Heavens.

But I have been daydreaming. It must be late. Although I carry my pocketwatch, the numbers no longer make any sense to me. The golden sticks whirl around and around, chasing each other, but I have forgotten how to understand the little races they daily perform.

Sighing, I close the ledger book. Its heavy leather casing is cool to the touch. Although my senses have survived intact, since my death I must say the sensation of touch never ceases to surprise me. Holding the closed book before me, I see several tiny convex reflections of my ruined face in the bright brass buttons that form a border around the binding. I hide the book away for the night, tucking it under the cushions of the daybed, and go out to stroll along the river.

The bleeding has begun again. There is apparently nothing I can do. I imagine I have lost everything and am completely drained, when I feel it gurgling down my neck, leaking from the wounds in the back of my
head. The spillage collects inside my shirt collar and I tighten my necktie in the hopes of stanching its flow. Because I no longer breathe, I’m able to pull the knot remarkably tight. But the blood simply reroutes itself and emerges from the star-like pattern of holes across my back and chest. It drains into my pockets and pools there, eventually cascading over like a fountain. My shoes fill with the stream issuing from my anus. My feet slide and stick in the puddles I leave, until the shoes pull off, despite the suction created by the fluids in them. I hobble around, searching for a comfortable position and, like a tubercular uncle, I leave scores of dampened handkerchiefs, little poisoned roses, all about the house.

Instead of suffering politely and considerately this time, waiting for the wounds to drain, in the tub, for instance, or in the garage with my old car on top of the straw, I walk through the house, leaving trails in the hallways, through the rooms, on the staircases. I roll around like a dog on its back in the beds, smearing the sheets. I leave red handprints on the patterned wallpaper, at every level, so they cannot be missed. Crimson palm prints on their family photographs. They’ve lined them up on the mantels of the fireplaces and on the piano top. For these, I rummage with two fingers inside my opened skull, leaving bits of brain in the stain like a painter’s impasto.

I open the kitchen drawers and shake my moistened sleeves over their utensils and their pots. My blood rains down in a vibrant cascade. May they eat with it in their mouths!

I mark a slanted vermilion slash across every lintel and on the doorposts
of their house, and upon their gates. But, of course, they do not see it.

They never will.

A cup out of place or a toppled lamp, these they notice and shrug over, but my blood is invisible to them.

Eventually, my fury abates and I am exhausted. I struggle but can barely keep my eyes open. My throat burns. It’s on fire, like a burning desert. This is how it is every time I bleed.

I stumble up the stairs, holding on to the railings for support. My socks, slick with the drying blood, slip on every other stair and I bang my knees and shins when I fall. Drowsy, my head spinning, I drop, barely conscious, in a heap, like a bag of soiled laundry, on the threshold of the nursery. Across the room, the white sheets of Sabina’s tiny bed look like a brilliant snowy mountain. My emptied wounds burn as the air whistles through them, whistling through the drying passages in my body’s empty cavity. If only I could sink into the bed, into that mountain of white, and lie in its cooling sheets, like a hiker stranded beneath an avalanche, forgetting everything, even my name. But unpleasantly I am awakened.

One of the daughters is screaming.

“Mama! Mama! Mama!” she shrills.

“Ola, calm down!”

“Blood! Everywhere!”

“Ola, what is it?”

“Everywhere! Mama, it’s everywhere!”

“There is no blood. Look! There is no blood!”

“Mama, you’re covered with it! Mama, the house! All the houses in the courtyard, Mama, look!”

All the houses in the courtyard?
I wasn’t that ambitious. Clearly, the poor girl is raving.

“You’re dreaming, Ola. Little Ola, you’re dreaming.”

The daughter, quivering in her mother’s thick arms, twitches in convulsive spasms, as she tries to wipe my blood off her translucent shift.

“Mama, please, it’s in my mouth. Mama!”

“Ola, enough of this nonsense. Andrzej, help me!”

And the Papa trundles up the stairs, annoyed to be called away from his game of Sixty-Six. He wipes his hands against his vest.

“What am I supposed to do?” he bellows. “What’s wrong with her?”

“Papa, the hallways are filled with blood!”

“Put her to bed, Andrzej. Help me carry her at least!”

Together, they lift the skinny girl by her arms and her legs. She flails uselessly against them, crying out. I watch through one eye, my head
on Sabina’s bed, the dried blood causing my ear to stick to the pillowcase. I fall asleep again, but am wakened moments later. The Mama and Papa have laid the poor girl into bed, but of course there is blood over all the sheets and her shrieking has started again. She is nearly out of her mind. Finally, a slap and some harsh words from Papa put a stop to the whole drama, followed by the daughter breathing too fast to catch her breath. The Mama and the Papa thump down the hallway, bumping into one another, passing accusations back and forth between them like an unwanted shoe.

“… she’s always been this way …” “… but she’s sick. You shouldn’t have hit her …” “… blood in the hallways. Ridiculous!” “… how long is she going to be sick? She can’t stay in bed her entire life …” “… it’s not her fault if she sees these things!” “… you spoiled her. So of course, it’s not her fault …” “… you’re the one who insisted she was too frail to work. Me, I wanted to hire her out long ago!”

Ola is curled up in a rocking chair, sucking her thumb, shivering, staring through the window, although there is really nothing to see from where she sits, besides an empty sky. I have dragged myself along the corridor to take a peek at her. I lean against her door, grab onto the knob and raise myself up. I see her through the keyhole. She is about thirteen or fourteen, with large black patches underneath her eyes. Her skin is pale with red blotches and her brown hair lies lank and stringy against her bony shoulders. The shoulders, like her knees, which are pulled up to her chest, have little knobs on them. Did I say her chest is bony? It’s practically concave.

Her weeping is interrupted by a coughing fit so violent it nearly shakes her off her chair. She covers her mouth with two flat hands. Her knobby elbows rise and fall against the sides of her chest. Her throat scrapes against itself like a rusty hinge.

When she lowers her hands from her mouth, they are smeared with a bright pink blood. “Oh God,” she moans. “Oh God.” I look on, horrified, as she rubs the blood violently across her face and into her hair.

The day is clear and crisp. The chilled smells of autumn fill the air. Lonely and with nothing else to do, nothing to keep myself occupied, I have come for a stroll in the forest. The sun pours its thickened light, like honey, through the trees. It must be nearing the month of Cheshvan, but without the moon, who can tell for sure?

I’m not certain what draws me here, to the mound the soldiers made when they covered our pit. I had worried the place might be difficult to find, but the ground virtually rolls and buckles from the bluish gases erupting in balloons beneath my feet.

Leaning on my cane, I lower myself and sit upon the mound. I haven’t been here since I climbed out, scrambling over the edge, looking back only once, and quickly at that. Their bodies, still writhing, lay twisted in great heaps like so many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, unassembled, on a parlor table.

The wind blows carelessly through the trees, tearing the leaves from their branches. I dig with my fingers, softly, into the dirt.

My lumber business used to bring me to all parts of the forest, but looking about now, I can’t recall if I was ever here.

It’s not a long walk from our house and yet it must have been more strenuous than I had at first thought, for suddenly, I find I have no strength at all and can barely remain sitting up. I lean over, lowering my ear to the ground, resting my head against it.

Faintly at first, but then more and more distinctly, I’m able to make out the sounds of Yiddish being spoken. How is this possible? I crawl about the mound, keeping my ear flat against it. Directly below me, mothers are clacking out tart instructions to their daughters. I nearly weep to hear it! To my left, there must be a cheder, for a class is clearly going on. The teacher remonstrates with his students, spitting out the alef-bais for the hundredth time. Below me, to my right, two men argue passionately. About what, at first it’s difficult to hear. But so persistent are they, each one repeating his entrenched position over and over again, that soon I understand their disagreement concerns the price of trolley fares in Warsaw. I laugh, holding my sides with joy. I can’t believe it. In a far corner, a deep voice drones a portion of the Mishnah in a lilting cantillation. How long has it been since I’ve heard the mother tongue!

“Landsmen! Landsmen!” I cry out to them.

“Who’s that?” “Who is that up there?” “Reb Chaim, is that you?” The voices come at once.

“It’s me! It’s Chaim Skibelski!” I shout. “Is that you, Reb Motche? Who is that?”

“Reb Chaim, what are you doing out there?” Reb Motche asks me, amazed.

“I thought I’d visit you!” I say, laughing.

“You’re alive then? Yes? You survived?”

“Not really, no.”

“And the Rebbe?” another voice asks.

“One at a time, one at a time!” someone shouts thickly.

“He’s well. He’s alive, God be praised! He’s well.”

“Chaim?” Yet another voice.

“Yes, who is it?”

“This is Reb Elchonon.”

“Elchonon! Praise God! How are you?”

“Reb Mendele and I have a question for you concerning trolley fares.”

“And your family, Reb Chaim,” his daughter Tsila Rochel interrupts him bluntly. “Where are they? We don’t see them here.”

“In Warsaw. Ester and my daughters are in Warsaw and in Lodz, and also my two sons. The others, of course, are in America, thank God.”

After the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty, I bundled Ester up and, together, we boarded the train for Warsaw. A city is safer, we thought, bigger, a Jew less conspicuous there. We’ll be with our daughters, and besides, people are more civilized in a city, even the Poles. Unfortunately, we arrived only to discover that she had gone to Suwalk, our Mirki, in search of us! Our trains must have crossed paths, each on
separate tracks. Immediately, I reboarded the train to bring her back, only to arrive in Suwalk on the night that the police went round, knocking on the doors where the soldiers slept, telling them where to go in the morning with their guns.

“Reb Chaim,” someone calls up. “Why are we not in the World to Come?”

“The Rebbe will explain it when he returns,” I say. “The important thing is to be of good cheer.”

“Where
is
the Rebbe, Reb Chaim?”

I shout into the ground, “The Rebbe will explain everything, everything, when he returns.”

How can I tell them that the Rebbe became a crow and flew away?

AT HOME, ANDRZEJ
and his cousins are playing cards. A bottle of potato vodka stands in the middle of their green-felt card table. There are small tumblers for everyone.

“If the yids want the moon,” Big Andrzej says, removing one of my best cigars from between his teeth, “then what’s it to us?” His lips are full and wet and his face, I notice for the first time, is not altogether unpleasant. “Let them keep it,” he says. “They’re the only ones who ever used it. It’s not as if they took the sun.”

“Now that
would
be a crime,” his wife says, moving through the room with an armful of dirty plates.

“But Andrzej,” one of the innumerable cousins looks up from his cards with a disagreeable face. “It simply isn’t fair,” he says. “They
have no right to it. What will happen to the tides? And to women’s cycles?”

The cousins laugh. “And what do you know about women’s cycles, Miroslaw?”

“Not enough to pump up the tires!”

“But Miroslaw, look at all they gave us!” Andrzej gestures about the room with two sturdy arms. “And you’re going to begrudge them the moon?”

“How do we even know they’re the ones that took it?” cousin Stanislaw puts in.

Andrzej nods and grunts, encouraging the talk. It’s evident he’s enjoying the conversation.

Jaroslaw replies, “The yids disappear and the moon disappears and you’re telling me they didn’t take it?”

“Where
are
the yids anyway?” cousin Zygmunt insists.

“What do you care?”

“Maybe whoever took the yids took the moon?”

“Possible, it’s possible,” Bronislaw murmurs.

“So? So what? Who cares?” Andrzej barks, dealing out a new hand.

“But Andrzej, you think they’ll stop with the moon?” cousin Zygmunt says. “Soon they’ll want the stars and then the entire planetary system!”