Collected Stories (57 page)

And she got up and mockingly put the receiver to my ear. I heard Liebkind Bendel’s nasal voice. He was telling of antiques to be got in Havana and explaining the difference in the exchange. Friedel leaned over to me so that our ears touched. Her hair tickled my cheek. Her ear almost burned mine. I was ashamed—like a boy. In one moment, my need to go to the bathroom became embarrassingly urgent.

Next morning when Friedel called the hospital, they told her that Dr. Walden was dead. He had died in the middle of the night. Friedel said, “Isn’t that cruel? My conscience will torture me to my last moment.”

The following day the Yiddish papers came out with the news. The same editors who Liebkind Bendel told me had refused to announce Dr. Walden’s arrival in New York now wrote at length about his accomplishments in Hebrew literature. Obituaries also appeared in the English-language press. The photographs were at least thirty years old; in them Dr. Walden looked young, gay, with a full head of hair. According to the papers, the New York Hebraists, Dr. Walden’s enemies, were making arrangements for the funeral. The Jewish telegraph service must have wired the event all over the world. Liebkind Bendel called Friedel from Havana to say that he was flying home.

Back in New York, he talked to me on the telephone for almost an hour. He kept repeating that Dr. Walden’s death was not his fault. He would have died in London, too. What difference does it make where one ends? Liebkind Bendel was especially eager to know whether Dr. Walden had any manuscripts with him. He was planning to bring out a special number of
Das Wort
dedicated to him. Liebkind Bendel had brought from Havana a painting by Chagall that he had bought from a refugee. He admitted to me that it must have been stolen from a gallery. Liebkind Bendel said to me, “Well, if it had been grabbed by the Nazis, would that have been better? The Maginot Line isn’t worth a pinch of tobacco. Hitler will be in Paris! Remember my words.”

The chapel where the funeral was to take place was only a few blocks from Liebkind Bendel’s apartment, and he, Friedel, and I arranged to meet at the chapel entrance. They were all there—the Hebraists, the Yiddishists, the Anglo-Jewish writers. Taxis kept arriving. From somewhere a small woman appeared, leading a girl who looked emaciated, disturbed. She stopped every few seconds and tapped with her foot on the sidewalk; the woman urged her forward and encouraged her. It was Sarah, Liebkind Bendel’s mistress. Mother and daughter tried to go into the chapel, but it was already filled.

After a while, Liebkind Bendel and Friedel arrived in a red car. He was wearing a sand-colored suit and a gaudy tie from Havana. He looked fresh and tanned. Friedel was dressed in black, with a broad-brimmed hat. I told Liebkind that the hall was full and he said, “Don’t be naïve. You will see how things are done in America.” He whispered something in an usher’s ear and the usher led us inside and made room for us in one of the front rows. The artificial candles of the Menorah cast a subdued light. The coffin stood near the dais. A young rabbi with a small black mustache and a tiny skullcap that blended with his shiny pomaded hair spoke a eulogy in English. He seemed to know little of Dr. Walden. He confused facts and dates. He made errors in the titles of Dr. Walden’s works. Then an old rabbiner with a white goatee, a refugee from Germany, wearing a black hat that looked like a casserole, spoke in German. He stressed his umlauts and quoted long passages in Hebrew. He called Dr. Walden a pillar of Judaism. He claimed that Dr. Walden had come to America so that he could continue publishing the encyclopedia to which he had devoted his best years. “The Nazis maintain that cannons are more important than butter,” the rabbiner declaimed solemnly, “but we Jews, the people of the Book, still believe in the power of the word.” He appealed for funds to bring out the last volumes of the encyclopedia for which Dr. Walden had sacrificed his life, coming to America in spite of his illness. He took out a handkerchief and with a corner dabbed away a single tear from behind his misty glasses. He called attention to the fact that among the mourners here in the chapel was present the universally beloved Professor Albert Einstein, a close friend of the deceased. A general whispering and looking around began among the crowd. A few even rose to get a glimpse of the world-famous scientist.

After the German rabbiner’s sermon, there was a further eulogy given by the editor of a Hebrew magazine in New York. Then a cantor in a hexagonal hat, with the face of a bulldog, recited “God Full of Mercy.” He sang in loud and lugubrious tones.

Near me sat a young woman dressed in black. She had yellow hair and red cheeks. I noticed a ring with a huge diamond on her finger. When the young rabbi was speaking in English, she lifted her veil and blew her nose into a lacy handkerchief. When the old rabbiner spoke in German, she clasped her hands and wept. When the cantor cried out, “In Paradise his rest shall be!” the woman sobbed with as much abandon as the women in the old country. She bent over as though about to collapse, her face drenched with tears. Who can she be, I wondered. As far as I knew, Dr. Walden had no relatives here. I remembered Liebkind Bendel’s words that somewhere in New York might be found a true admirer of Dr. Walden’s who would really love him. I had realized long ago that whatever anybody can invent already exists somewhere.

After the ceremony, everyone rose and filed past the coffin. I saw ahead of me Professor Albert Einstein looking exactly as he did in his pictures, slightly stooped, his hair long. He stood for a moment, murmuring his farewell. Then I got a glimpse of Dr. Walden. The undertakers had applied their cosmetics. His head rested on a silk pillow, his face stiff as wax, closely shaved, with twirled mustache, and in the corners of his eyes a hint of a smile that seemed to say, “Well,
ja,
my life was one big joke—from the beginning to the end.”

I

As a rule, those who come for advice to the newspaper where I work do not ask for anyone in particular. We have a reporter who turns out a regular column of advice to readers, and anyone dropping around is usually referred to him. But this man asked especially for me. He was shown my room: a tall man—he had to bend his head to come through the door—without a hat, with a shock of black hair mixed with gray. His black eyes, under shaggy brows, had a wild look that rather frightened me. He had on a light raincoat, although it was snowing outside. His square face was red from the cold. He wore no tie, and his shirt was open, showing a chest covered with hair as thick as fur. He had a broad nose and thick lips. When he talked, he revealed large, separated teeth that appeared unusually strong.

He said, “Are you the writer?”

“I am.”

He seemed surprised. “This little man who sits at this table?” he said. “I imagined you somewhat different. Well, things don’t have to be exactly as we imagined them. I read every word you write—Yiddish and English both. When I hear that you’ve published something in a magazine, I run right out to buy it.”

“Thank you very much. Please sit down.”

“I’d rather stand—but—well—I will sit down. May I smoke?”

“Certainly.”

“I should tell you I am not an American. I came here after the Second World War. I’ve been through Hitler’s hell, Stalin’s hell, and a couple of other hells besides. But that’s not why I came to you. Do you have time to listen to me?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Well, everybody in America is busy. How do you have time to write all those things and to see people too?”

“There is time for everything.”

“Perhaps. Here in America time disappears—a week is nothing and a month is nothing, and a year passes by between yes and no. In those hells on the other side, a day seemed longer than a year does here. I’ve been in this country since 1950, and the years have gone like a dream. Now it’s summer, now it’s winter, the years just roll away. How old do you think I am?”

“In the forties—maybe fifty.”

“Add thirteen years more. In April I will be sixty-three.”

“You look young—knock on wood.”

“That’s what everybody says. In our family we don’t turn gray. My grandfather died at ninety-three and he had hardly any gray hair. He was a blacksmith. On my mother’s side, they were scholars. I studied at a yeshiva—I was a student at the yeshiva of Gur, and for a while in Lithuania. Only until I was seventeen, it’s true, but I have a good memory. When I learn something, it stays stuck in my brain. I forget nothing, in a sense, and this is my tragedy. Once I was convinced that poring over the Talmud would be useless, I took to studying worldly books. The Russians had left by that time and the Germans had taken over. Then Poland became independent and I was drafted into the army. I helped to drive the Bolsheviks to Kiev. Then they drove us back to the Vistula. The Poles are not too fond of Jews, but I advanced. They made me a top sergeant—
chorázy
—the highest rank you can reach without military school, and after the war they offered to send me to a military academy. I might have become a colonel or something, but the barracks was not my ambition. I read a lot, painted, and tried to become a sculptor. I began to carve all sorts of figures out of wood. I ended up making furniture. Cabinet work—I specialized in repairing furniture, mostly antiques. You know how it is—inlays fall out, bits break off. It takes skill to make the patch invisible. I still don’t know why I threw myself into it with such enthusiasm. To find the right grain of wood, the right color, and to fit it in so that the owner himself couldn’t spot the place—for this, one needs iron patience, and instinct too.

“Now I’ll tell you why I came to you. It’s because you write about the mysterious powers: telepathy, spirits, hypnotism, fatalism, and so on—I read it all. I read it because I possess the powers you describe. I didn’t come to boast, and don’t get the idea I want to become a newspaperman. Here in America I work at my trade and I earn enough. I’m single—no wife, no children. They killed off my family. I take a drink of whiskey, but I’m not a drunkard. I have an apartment here in New York, and a cottage in Woodstock. I don’t need help from anybody.

“But to get back to the powers. You’re right when you say a person is born with them. We’re born with everything. I was a child of six when I first began to carve. Later I neglected it, but the gift stayed with me. And that’s how it is with the powers. I had them but I didn’t know what they were. I got up one morning and it came into my mind that someone in our building was going to fall out the window that day. We lived in Warsaw on Twarda Street. I didn’t like the thought—it frightened me. I left for cheder, and when I came home the courtyard was black with people. The ambulance was just arriving. A glazier had been replacing a pane in a window on the second floor, and had fallen out. If such things had happened once, twice—even five times—I might have called it coincidence, but they happened so frequently there could be no question of coincidence. Strange, I began to understand that I should conceal this—as if it were an ugly birthmark. And I was right, because powers like this are a misfortune. It’s better to be born deaf or lame than to possess them.

“But, no matter how careful you are, you can’t hide everything. Once, I was sitting in the kitchen. My mother—peace be with her—was knitting a stocking. My father earned good money, even though he was a laborer. Our apartment was comfortable, and as clean as a rich man’s house. We had a lot of copper dishes, which my mother used to scour each week until they shone. I was sitting on a low bench. I wasn’t more than seven years old at the time. All of a sudden, I said, ‘Mamma, there’s money under the floor! There is money!’ My mother stopped knitting and looked at me in amazement. ‘What sort of money? What are you babbling about?’ ‘Money,’ I said. ‘Gold pieces.’ My mother said, ‘Are you crazy? How do you know what’s under the floor?’ ‘I know,’ I said. Already I realized that I shouldn’t have said it, but it was too late.

“When my father came home for dinner, my mother told him what I had said. I wasn’t there, but my father was so astonished he confessed that he had hidden a number of golden coins under the floor. I had an older sister and my father was saving a dowry for her—putting money into a bank was not the custom for simple people. When I returned from cheder, my father began to question me. ‘Are you spying on me?’ Actually, my father had hidden the money when I was in cheder and my mother was out marketing. My sister had gone to visit a friend. He had locked and bolted the door, and we lived on the third floor. He had even been careful enough to stuff the keyhole with cotton. I got a beating, but no matter how I tried I could not explain to him how I knew about those coins. ‘This boy is a devil!’ my father said, and he gave me an extra box on the ear. It was a good lesson to me to keep my mouth shut.

“I could tell you a hundred things like that about my childhood, but I’ll add just one. Across the street from our home there was a store that sold dairy products. In those years, you went to the store to buy boiled milk. They boiled it on a gas range. One morning my mother gave me a pan and told me, ‘Go to Zelda across the street and buy a quart of boiled milk.’ I went over to the store and there was only one customer—a girl who was buying a few ounces of butter. In Warsaw they used to slice the butter from a big chunk with a bow, like the ones children carried at the Feast of Omer when they went picnicking in the Praga forest. I looked up and saw a strange thing: a light was burning over Zelda’s head, as if there were a Hanukkah lamp in her wig. I stood and gaped—how was it possible? Nearby, at the counter, the girl spoke to Zelda as though there was nothing out of the way. After Zelda weighed the butter on the scale and the girl left, Zelda said, ‘Come in, come in. Why are you standing there on the threshold?’ I wanted to ask her, ‘Why does a light burn over your head?’ But I already had a hunch that I was the only one who saw it.