A Curable Romantic (93 page)

Raising her arm, the woman across the way, whoever she was, brought a palmful of bathwater to her shoulder and her neck. She lathered her underarm and her chest with soap, and she threw the water against her bosom in order to rinse it off. Finally, I could take no more of it. I left the apartment, though no contraband had been delivered. Slamming the door and thundering down the stairs, I ran out to the street and returned to the Zamenhofs’ old house in the ghetto, where I spent a sleepless night, my body alive with electric trembling.

MEANWHILE, AS THE
saying goes, the rebbe neither slumbered nor slept. In addition to his weekly words of encouragement, those fractious disputations with the Holy One held before a dwindling jury of his Hasidim, he was praying to the Same while meditating on the higher realms and performing whatever other feats a rebbe of his caliber performs. It was around this time, if I’m remembering correctly, that he conceived of the idea of immersing in a mikve as a further act of sabotage.

“Ah, Cousin,” he said, removing his glasses and laying them on top of the growing pile of manuscript pages during one of our Sunday morning sessions, “Rosh Hashanah has now passed, and soon it will be Yom Kippur.”

He tossed a melancholy glance through the grey panes of his study window.

“I suppose that’s true,” I said. I recognized a certain tone in his voice that I didn’t like, as it always seemed to mean he was planning some new scheme.

“And during these great days of awe … I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard not to feel the compulsion …”

“The compulsion, Cousin?”

He hesitated. “… to immerse in a mikve.”

“Ah, yes, of course,” I said, “but.”

“Yes: but,” he agreed.

“That would be impossible,” I added, as though I were speaking to a child, to a precocious child, a brilliant child, a child with amazing gifts and talents and abilities, but a child nonetheless. “You know as well as I the mikves have all been closed. You’ve seen the signs yourself,” I reminded him.

Like pious Hasidim, l’havdil, the Germans seemed to know where every ritual bath in the city was, and with their usual conscientiousness, they’d hung a sign on each, which read
OPENING THE MIKVE OR EMPLOYING IT WILL BE PUNISHED AS SABOTAGE, SUBJECT TO BETWEEN TEN YEARS IN PRISON AND DEATH
.

“Strange, isn’t it? Ten years in prison, death.” The rebbe gave a little shrug with his hands.

“Yes, for a bath, yes, I suppose, it is extreme.”

He was silent for a moment; then cocking his head to the side, as if he’d only just heard me, he said, “For a bath, did you say?”

“Regretfully,” I said. “The mikve is, of course, not a bath.” Or at least not in the rebbe’s view. However, I had no interest in arguing with him over this or anything else, for that matter. Working on his book was a sufficiently draining experience. The last thing I wanted was an encyclopedic lecture on the efficacy of ritual immersion and the proper care and feeding of the Jewish soul. And the last thing I wanted after that was to go traipsing after him on a mad trip to a mikve. If he were truly my cousin, he was the only family I had, and all I wanted, really, was to sit in his home, as a visiting relative might, and wait for the war to end.

I pointed towards our manuscript. “Perhaps we should return to our work.”

“I don’t mean to be harsh, Cousin — ”

“Nor I, nor I.”

“ — but I’m afraid that here the enemy, may their name be blotted out, knows considerably more than you do.”

I put down my pen. “I’m certainly willing to concede that possibility.”

“Only ask yourself: isn’t their phraseology a tad queer?”

“Their phraseology?”

“On the warning signs, I mean. Isn’t it queer that immersing in a mikve should be considered an act of sabotage?”

“They’re merely playing with us, tormenting us. That’s all it is.”

“Yes, of course,” the rebbe said, “although I think not. For what is a mikve, my dear cousin, but the very waters of mercy! By immersing in a mikve, a man is purified, all his sins forgiven. Now don’t you see? Once our sins are forgiven, there will be no need for the Holy One to punish us further. Nor any justification for His continuing to do so.”

“Though God might forgive us,” I said, hoping to extinguish the fire I sensed stirring up in him, “I’m not so sure about the Germans.”

“Oh, please! Don’t be ridiculous! Do you really imagine our enemies could have achieved all they have — and may it soon crumble to dust! — without the aid of Heaven?”

“Well,” I said, “it’s illegal and that’s that.”

“That’s true,” the rebbe agreed, “it’s illegal.”

“And that’s that,” I said.

“Ten years in prison is no laughing matter.”

“Nor is death.”

He puffed a little on his pipe before tamping it out.

“And yet you risk it every day. With your smuggling and your …” He searched for an additional word, but could find none, and so he simply repeated “smuggling.”

“And who told you about that?”

“Who told me about that? Are you still so naïve? Everyone talks to me. And as a consequence, I know everything.”

“Whatever I’m doing — ” And here, I stopped myself, not wanting to incriminate him. “That is to say: whatever I
may or may not be
doing, this is an entirely different matter.”

“Is it?”

I lowered my voice and leaned in nearer to him. “If I’m smuggling
items into the ghetto, and I assure you, my dear cousin, that I’m not, it’s because the children here are in need of medicine. And if occasionally I carry in arms for the underground, which I don’t, it’s only because I’ve been asked to, although of course, I haven’t been. And if I’m out there anyway, what would be the point of leaving these hypothetical weapons ownerless, when others have theoretically risked their lives to get them to me? However, there is no need for you to so pointlessly endanger yourself.”

“No, you’re right,” he said. “I suppose you’re right. It’s needlessly risky, and no, you’re right, you’re right, our daily work calls to us.” He patted the manuscript affectionately. I picked up my pen and straightened my notes and prepared to read through them with him, but then he cried, “Oh, how you shame me! You risk your life to help your people merely because someone has asked you to! Well, have I not been asked? No, even further: commanded!”

“Commanded? By whom?”

“By the very voice of Heaven!” he said, his face suddenly filling with an electric glow.

“Oh dear God!”

“No, it’s clear,” he cried. “Someone must sabotage our enemies by going to the mikve!”

“Don’t be absurd!”

Finally, at last, he calmed himself and seemed to relent. “No, no, I suppose you’re right. To risk one’s life over such a trifle is …”

“Precisely.”

“Over such a small thing …”

“Exactly.”

“Over a bath, really, when you get down to it.”

“Although as you pointed out,” I conceded, hoping to further placate him, “it’s not merely a bath, but still.”

“No, that’s right, you’re correct. It’s not a trifle.”

“No.”

“Performing the will of Heaven!”

Ah, here we go! I thought.

“It’s decided, then.” The rebbe pushed his glasses onto his forehead.

“As the Day of Atonement is upon us, we must go to the mikve. Don’t try to talk me out of it, Cousin. If we risk our lives to obey God’s commandments, surely He’ll spare those lives, and in this way, we’ll bring our enemies to their knees!”

The rebbe replaced his glasses onto the bridge of his nose and, as though nothing of significance had transpired between us, we returned to our work. Whenever I stole a glance at him, however, I could see the effect his decision was having upon him. He seemed happier than he had been for days, happier perhaps than I’d ever seen him. He even hummed a little to himself, grinning from time to time inside his extravagant beard. He was like a man with a secret mistress, knowing that the time until he saw her wouldn’t be long.

CHAPTER 7

I told myself it wasn’t up to me to talk him out of his decision. To begin with, he would never have listened to me. Who was I, after all? Only his cousin, the unbeliever. Also, the idea seemed so preposterous, I was certain one of the rebbe’s closer associates, the once well-to-do Hasidim who formed a kind of advisory board around him, would dissuade him from it. I was appalled, however, to see that even these men were helpless in this regard. Each time one of them tried to convince the rebbe to cancel the trip, the rebbe used the conversation as a way to better organize his plans.

“The rebbe can’t be serious,” I heard one of them saying. “Why, we’d have to proceed by cover of darkness.”

“Ah, by cover of darkness, you’re suggesting? Setting out at dawn, you mean?”

“No, the rebbe would have to
arrive
at dawn, or even earlier!”

“Of course. Excellent thinking.”

“And the idea of taking a car is sheer madness!”

“What would you suggest, then?”

“A wagon would be less conspicuous, though slower.”

“Good. Round up a wagon.”

“And you’ll never be able to convince the owner of the mikve to open it.”

“Have you tried?”

“What would be the purpose?”

“Talk to Reb Itzik, and let me know if he agrees.”

Everything had to be prepared in strictest secrecy, although this posed no problem for the rebbe. He kept a million secrets, not only those of his Hasidim, who told him everything and upon whose foreheads, I was becoming convinced, he could read the rest, but the secrets of the cosmos
as well. Everything Heaven allowed a man to know, the rebbe knew, and he kept his mouth shut about most of it.

A secret rendezvous with a mikve was child’s play for a man like that.

HOWEVER, EVERYTHING WENT
wrong from the start.

A small group of us gathered in the rebbe’s kitchen. We’d slept at his house, as there was no other way to be there before five, the hour when Jews were first permitted on the streets. Though I considered it folly to risk my life for a freezing bath in the bitterest days of October, I’d grown rather protective of the rebbe and had no intention of letting him out of my sight. Besides, he’d insisted I come.

No one said anything as we moved about the kitchen. Though my heart was in my throat, the rebbe seemed calm enough. Indeed, his face appeared radiant. At last, he’d gotten his wish: he was a saboteur, and there was nothing the enemy could do about that. The Germans, in any case, hardly seemed to figure into his calculations. They were, at most, a minor detail in the larger conversation he was holding with the Holy One. True, they were fierce — I’d seen one place a pistol to the head of a child and pull the trigger and go about his day as though he’d done nothing more than kick a dog — but when it came to goodness and mercy, the rebbe was equally as fierce.

Our wagon driver failed to arrive at the appointed time, and it was decided we should set out on foot, hoping he’d find us along the way. There must have been ten of us, descending the stairs as quietly as we could, moving along with a sort of rustling hum. The janitor was asleep, and we were forced to rouse him, as he possessed the only key to the front gate.

“And what possible reason could Jews have for needing to be out at this godforsaken hour?” he complained, squinty with sleep.

What would we tell him? Even if he weren’t groggy, I’m certain it would have been impossible to explain that we were off to the baths in order to bring the German army to defeat. He wasn’t a bad fellow, simply a man with whom there was little point in discussing the niceties of Hasidic theology.

Instead we offered him a tip, and he unlocked the gate.

The distance between the rebbe’s house and the mikve was not inconsiderable, and we walked silently in pairs. Periodically, we’d hear footsteps from someone other than ourselves, and these moments were terrifying. The night trolley clattered down its tracks, and we ran to board it, but it was an Aryans-only trolley, and the driver turned us away. A car approached, its headlights blinding us. However, it passed without stopping, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. At this hour, the gates of the houses were all locked, and there would have been nowhere to hide.

A SHADOWY FIGURE
met us in the courtyard next door to the mikve. Without a word, he waved his hand and bid us to follow him. We entered a cellar that was so dark we’d been instructed beforehand where to walk, for how many steps, where to turn left, where right. At last, we reached a hole in the wall, and I climbed through it after the man in front of me, tearing the skin on my shins against its roughened edges. On the other side of the hole, though the darkness was equally thick, I could sense we were standing on a platform made of boards. “Jump!” someone whispered, and I jumped, landing with such force that my teeth knocked together with a resounding clop.

Someone lit a match, and I saw that we were now standing in a tiled changing room outside the mikve. Slowly the morning light began to shine through the windows near the ceiling. Others had already immersed themselves by the time we’d arrived, their emaciated bodies in various states of nakedness. For all our secrecy, word must have gotten out and they’d somehow beaten us here.

“Cousin, pay attention to where your thoughts go beneath the water,” the rebbe told me before he immersed himself. I peered at him through the dark curtain of water. Without my glasses, he was an indistinct watery blur, floating weightlessly, his beard rising before his face.

I drew in a lungful of air and plunged down, hewing through the cold water. As I did, I found myself thinking about my own shipwrecked life. Why had I even come to Warsaw in the first place? Did anyone even know I was still here? The Zamenhofs had all disappeared. It’d been years since I’d had word from any of my own siblings, years since I’d
received the news that Sore Dvore and her husband, Zelig Mintz, had perished from malaria in the Promised Land. I had only the vaguest notion where any of the others had been when the war began. My parents were dead, of course, and Aunt Fania had died, leaving Uncle Moritz to face the German invasion alone.