East of Time (23 page)

I got home almost an hour past curfew. Mother was trembling with fear. Father, although engaged in a discussion with our good friend, the ever-starving Mechel Schiff, fixed me with a questioning gaze. I wanted to explain my lateness, but our guest wouldn't give me a chance: he was an excellent talker, a terrific dialectician, and he was running hot.

‘Language is the physical manifestation of man's spirituality,' he declared, raising his voice slightly.

‘I agree,' answered father, forgetting my indiscretion for the moment. ‘But I am curious as to how you arrive at such a fine postulate.'

Apart from his erudition in philosophy, Mechel was a poet at heart. ‘A mundane explanation may pose some difficulties,' he suggested, after a considerable delay. ‘It's hard to articulate because it is buried in one's subconscious, hidden in the crevices between spoken words.'

How they could debate metaphysical propositions on an empty stomach was beyond me.

‘My dear Mechel,' said my father, ‘I'm afraid this is all a bit above my head.' I detected a hint of irony in his voice.

‘Is that my fault?' said Mechel.

Mother placed before him a dish of hot floury liquid and a slice of bread. Our visitor was overwhelmed with gratitude. The steam rising from this feast masked his tears as he ate — with vigour and a good deal of noise. Finally, wiping his mouth with his dirty handkerchief, he turned his attention to me.

‘And so tell us, young man, what detained you for so long? Was it worth risking your life for?'

We had never had any secrets from Mechel — he was one of us. ‘I attended a meeting of our underground cell,' I said at once. ‘Our cell leader, Bono, spoke about the hunger in the ghetto, the deaths. We decided to compile a list of all those who have now conveniently discovered that they're
Volksdeutsch
.'

Mechel stood up in his seat. ‘There won't be any retributions!' he cried. ‘Jews are not a vindictive people. Get it out of your hot heads, it goes against our psyche—'

‘What
is
our psyche?' I cut in.

‘A spirit born of a marriage between exile and promise. An ethos born of an eternal Exodus. Jews quickly forgive and forget
— little wonder that the Bible repeats the word
Remember
a hundred and sixty-nine times. Obviously our scribes knew us well.'

At this point father spoke up, doubtless to interrupt Schiff's homily. ‘So tell me, friend,' he said, holding up his open palm. ‘Your home is but a shed, you have no wife, no children, not even a relative to speak of. Why didn't you escape like many of the others — like our heroic government did before the Germans invaded our city?'

Mechel grew suddenly tense, pensive, framing his response. At last he announced:

‘A city can survive without a king, but not without a fool.'

The light outside had grown dim. We had known that the evening was coming, but now that it had arrived we were thrown off-balance, almost shocked. ‘You can't risk going back at this hour,' mother told our guest, ‘I won't let you. It's far too late.'

‘What's more, the yellow sentry is on night duty,' my father added. ‘You must stay.'

Mechel stayed, and left at daybreak. We never saw him again.

 

 
Those Incredible Believers
 

The city of the waterless river was renowned for its colourful working class, its many political parties and factions, its stormy May Day demonstrations, and the socialist fervour that so passionately guided the Jewish working community in its unshakeable belief that it was an integral part of the one great universal fraternity.

My neighbourhood had good reason to be proud. Though famous for its poverty, it was inhabited by hundreds of gifted
artists, singers, musicians and thinkers who had never had the chance to display their skills, along with scores of religious and secular messianic redeemers. I lived in the heart of an iridescent kaleidoscope, a veritable bazaar of diverse people and ideas — the kind of place you would expect to experience only in a storybook. A local wit put it another way: out of the nine thousand denizens of our precinct, at least ten thousand were poets!

Back in 1934, the socialist uprising in Austria and the Schutzbund's heroic stand against the Fascist forces had converted my street into a raging ocean. From daybreak, crowds gathered around newspaper stands; men forgot their starving families, downed their tools, talked only of joining the bloody fray. As a rain of coins drummed into the tin fundraising dish, Sam Samionov, the local baritone, had clambered on the shoulders of two burly revolutionaries and, in concert with the whole swaying, rhapsodizing clamour, burst into the inspirational song of the moment:

O lead us, flaming red flags —

into a new dawn we stream;

towards those men and women,

our fighting comrades of Wien...

To our great dismay, a few years later some of our Viennese comrades, the very ones for whom we had been ready to lay down our lives, would volunteer to become guards patrolling the ghetto perimeter — to reassure themselves that none of their Jewish friends would escape its fate. Yet even then, our ghetto Bundists, those incredible believers, continued to commemorate Lassalle, Sacco, Vanzetti, the fall of the Bastille — while the French did their dirty work in Drancy. May Day, the day of hope, of international brotherhood, retained a special
place in the hearts of these starving, betrayed Jewish workers, and despite repeated setbacks and adversities they never failed to uphold its significance.

By this time I was employed as a machinist in a clothing factory at 13
Å»
abia Street, which had once housed a primary school. The building was situated almost directly across from the border with the forbidden outside world. My unit consisted of twenty men (tailors) and three women (finishers). May Day had to be celebrated in great secrecy, since our factory commissar, a man in his mid-twenties and an officer in the Jewish police — with a face resembling an elderly sheep and the voice of a young rooster — was a noted squealer. On the festive day, we arrived at the entrance earlier than ever. I was greeted by my daring friend, Blumenfeld, our oldest and most respected tradesman. He presented me with a piece of red thread, to be wound around the little finger, and before we knew it someone had coined the idea of a ‘Day of the Red Threads' — a day of tension, sabotage and revolt.

In the course of the working day, however, our rebellious mood fizzled out. We left work at dusk. Walking out the gate, we were immediately confronted by the border fence, and beyond it the other side of life. I happened to look up. Through the dusty pane of a lit window, a carefree little girl was waving sweetly to us. Perhaps it was this that, without warning, provoked one of the younger members of our team to brave the treacherous silence:

So comrades, come rally

And the last fight let us face;

The Internationale

Unites the human race...

Abruptly, someone grabbed the child from behind and quickly doused the light, and darkness shrouded the dusty window once more.

 

 
Anna
 

We met in 1940, in the late autumn, at night, on a narrow unlit winding staircase. The stairs were not wide enough for two, so we had to struggle to squeeze past. Although we could hardly see each other's face, the momentary contact between our bodies was electrifying, and the repetition of the experience — which became decreasingly ‘accidental' — eventually brought us together. Before coming to the ghetto, Anna had been a mathematics teacher at a high school. At thirty, she was twelve years my senior, and married, but her husband was missing in the war. ‘I live by myself,' she told me. ‘It's not easy.' And so, after several more staircase encounters, most of which I cunningly arranged, she invited me to her room.

‘What do you do with yourself,' she asked me, ‘on these long and tedious ghetto nights?' Anna was a plain-spoken, strong-headed woman, physically and intellectually superior to me, not to mention a head taller. Her hair was a dark shade of blond, and she had deeply-set eyes, blood-red lips, and whitish skin which firmly enveloped a nimble figure. She was beautiful, if not particularly pretty.

‘When there's peace,' I replied, meaning the times between murder and murder when we hallucinated respite, ‘I read and write.'

‘Are you a writer?'

‘I hope to be.'

‘And what do you write about?'

‘Life, people, love and hate.'

‘Would you write a story about me?' She raised a mischievous eyebrow.

‘Certainly...'

‘You know that most writers long to go to bed with their heroines, if only in their imagination. But nothing can replace the real thing — it's an act that reveals one's true character.'

What a great opening for a story, I thought.

A story opening wasn't the only thing on my mind.

The next evening I went straight from work to Anna's room. I had the impression that she had been expecting me, though she seemed unusually nervous. Turning away, she began to unbutton her white cotton blouse. I watched mesmerized as her little breasts played hide-and-seek. A moment later she let her navy-blue skirt fall to the floor. She wore no underpants. I stared at her snow-white buttocks, and, when she finally turned towards me, at her long red nipples, which seemed disproportionately large for her small thinlyveined breasts. My body and my mind were on fire, my blood was pounding. I tore off my own clothes, and before I knew it the thing was done. Anna was visibly disappointed, even angry.

‘You express yourself so fluently when we speak,' she remarked, not without sarcasm, ‘yet in the language of sex you're still a beginner.'

I tried to apologize.

‘Don't,' she said. ‘Lovemaking is not about being apologetic, but more about being... apocalyptic. Union between a man and a woman embraces the whole universe. Each encounter is a new act of destructive restoration.'

I was growing extremely uneasy; in fact, I was sinking into a deep distress. What was worse, Anna felt sorry for me. She was clearly looking for a way to revoke what, just minutes before, had appeared so irrevocable.