East of Time (32 page)

 

 
Family Friends
 

The Rabanovs were old family friends. Josef had been my father's comrade-in-arms at the time of the 1905 revolution. They had stood shoulder to shoulder defending the barricade on Wschodnia Street, in the city of the waterless river, against the onslaught of the Tsar's cossacks. Josef was unusually tall, and therefore known among the conspirators as ‘Long Jos', while father was ‘Little Gershon'. Both were textile weavers by profession.

Despite his proletarian status, Josef was always immaculately dressed: black jacket, dark pinstriped trousers and, on weekends, aristocratic white gloves. A yellowish smudge on his thick silver-grey moustache betrayed his addiction to tobacco. His wife Berenice was a petite brunette, well-shaped, with long brown hair, deep-set eyes and a face like that of a white porcelain doll. Berenice always wore a black shirt-dress trimmed with white silk, and spoke with a throaty but pleasing voice
accompanied by lively gesticulation — often she would shape her hands and long fingers into a ball, as if to round off her message or perhaps lend global meaning to her thoughts. She had once been a celebrated actress on the Yiddish stage, where she learnt the beautiful art of merging truth with imagination. The simplest utterance, when imbued with her diction and style, became a festive, a Godly event.

I never tired of hearing her memorable story about the opening night of a well-known drama. ‘We premiered in a disused hall, and as the curtain rose, revealing a dilapidated little synagogue where two starved disciples pondered the coming of the Messiah, a stray black cat happened to cross the stage, stopped in the centre, scanned the astonished audience with resentful green eyes, then haughtily lifted its bushy tail and continued on. The morning papers were mad with excitement, praising this accidental occurrence as the dramatic effect of the twentieth century!'

The Rabanovs were childless and very much in love. Josef, not unlike his biblical predecessor, was full of dreams; some of them even came to fruition. My father, an incurable sceptic, grew to love his friend's fantasies in the ghetto — perhaps, in our hopelessness, they offered relief from the futilities of everyday life. Although the war radically changed the pattern of our existence, the Rabanovs kept visiting us twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays after work, as they had always done.

December 1942 was a gloomy month. The devastating news from the front choked what was left of our waning spirit. In the north, the Germans lay like a boa at the throat of our allies' great city of Leningrad. Moscow was about to do a Kutuzov. The harsh winter got into father's bones and froze his joints; the pain was excruciating and he took to his bed. On his visits Josef would sit hunched in a chair beside him.
‘Gershon, listen,' he would announce excitedly, ‘I had another dream, a glorious dream. I saw a mighty army, like some terrible primordial glacier, rise out of Moscow. It advanced with incredible speed, overrunning the panic-stricken Germans, squashing them like lice.' My father would shake his head: ‘Oh Jos, Jos, will it ever come to pass?' ‘It will, Gershon, it will, and we'll be there to see it!'

The long hard winter that year was accompanied by a cruel famine, a famine that produced a bountiful harvest of death. It catapulted the gravediggers into an enviable elite: people gave away their last crumb of bread just to have their loved ones buried. One Thursday in late January it snowed all day long, and that night there was a knock on our door. It was Berenice. She looked distraught, and I knew something horrible had happened. Taking mother aside, she began in a hushed voice, though the dancing shadows of her gesticulating hands on the dimly-lit wall spoke clearly enough of an insurmountable inner struggle. Soon she had abandoned her whispers. ‘How could he, how could he do this?' she cried.

‘You have to talk to him,' mother was saying. ‘To steal bread in ghetto—'

‘Oh please, please, don't use that word — my Josef is no thief!... I knew I shouldn't have come here, but I just had to share my anguish with someone...'

‘You mustn't despair,' mother tried to console her. ‘It's become an almost daily occurrence.'

‘Yes — and after all, it was only me he took the bread from, and he says he was going to replace it as soon as he got his next ration...'

Well, Josef was unable to tame his hunger, and a darkness descended upon the Rabanovs' once loving relationship, a painful estrangement. Virtually overnight the upright heroic dreamer became a
klepsydra
— ghetto term for a walking death-notice
— and the lively Berenice had become the tragic protagonist of a miscarried drama. The Rabanovs stopped visiting our home. My parents suffered, for they loved their lifelong friends and father missed Josef 's sanguine effervescence.

Dad was the oldest Bundist in the ghetto, so when the party celebrated its forty-sixth jubilee he was asked to deliver a lecture. It took place in an attic somewhere on Łagiewnicka Street; his topic was
Yiddish and Socialism
. Towards the end of father's speech a smart-alec in the audience called out: ‘Comrade Gershon, perhaps you might like to tell us, which are you first, a Yid or a socialist?' My father didn't skip a beat. ‘As far as I know,' he replied, ‘I was circumcised before I ever heard of Karl Marx.' The room broke into laughter. Afterwards, as an expression of gratitude for a well-delivered oration, the organizers bestowed on father a magnificent prize: a voucher from the Bund kitchen for two kilos of potato-peels. Next day I redeemed the voucher. Mother immediately set to work, and in no time had produced a cake fit for a royal feast. When she was about to serve, she asked me to run across to the Rabanovs and ask them to join us in this unexpected banquet.

The door to their flat was not locked, but the threshold was ice. Inside, the windows were covered with dark curtains, the walls coated with a glistening frost. There was not a stick of furniture in the place, except for the wrought-iron bed on which the Rabanovs were resting. I approached on tiptoe, so as not to wake them too abruptly.

They lay in an inseparable embrace, Josef with wide-open bewildered eyes and Berenice with her face buried in her husband's breast. Her graceful arms, thin and lily-white, were pleated around his neck like a noble wreath of forgiveness.

 

 
Red Rebecca
 

My niece Frumetl attended the same kindergarten as I did, but sixteen years later. What is remarkable about that is the fact that we both took our first steps in the outside world under the guidance of the same teacher. Miss Fela, adored by us less for her rare intellect than for the special sense of safety she radiated, was of indeterminate age. In her eyes she carried the love of an angel; on her small back she carried a prominent hump.

Until the middle of 1942 she still ran her kindergarten at 34 Zgierska Street, though after Rumkowski's ‘Give me your children' speech, she was left with just one little girl, Frumetl. As things went from bad to worse, as Germans in collusion with our local agents kept snooping about the clandestine kindergartens, my sister preferred to keep her child in a dark unused room with a rusty old padlock on the door.

I nevertheless returned every fortnight, as I always had, to visit my teacher of old. In Miss Fela's kindergarten room stood an aquarium, where, once beloved of all the children, Red Rebecca still hid among the weeds of her green world. On my visits I would change the water and clean the aquarium. In former days it had been a great honour for any child to be in charge of Red Rebecca's needs, since the goldfish was regarded by all as a real person.

I enjoyed coming to see the teacher of my formative years. Despite the difficulties and the shortages, there was always a hot cup of tea, a slice of brown cake baked from burnt wheatchaff, and a good talk. On one such occasion, as she looked out through a small window upon our narrow world, Miss Fela observed: ‘Those who believed that, thanks to education, brutality would become a thing of the past, made a mistake with a capital M. It seems to me that man's insanity is carried along by its own peculiar inertia.'

It is January 1943, an unbearably frosty winter morning. The angel of death, white and freezing, is impatiently jumping up and down on people's doorsteps. I run up the kindergarten stairs. The door stands surprisingly open. I dash in. Miss Fela is sitting on a low chair; as usual she is wearing her white dresscoat. But droplets of sweat prickle her cheerless face. Her thin white lips are like death, and her large eyes are brimming with tears; they direct my gaze to the aquarium. Red Rebecca, openeyed, is lying on her side, virtually encased in ice.

With a small hammer I freed the little body from the solid matter, and as I took out the goldfish Miss Fela burst into uncontrollable weeping. Rebecca was the only living thing she had. But there was nothing we could do, there is no antidote to death. Lucky little Rebecca — at least she died in her own bed. What a great privilege, in those surreal days, to outwit the ashes.

I kissed my teacher and left, just as the first star appeared and lit up heaven's callousness.

Perhaps three days later there was a knock on our door. Miss Fela had come to say goodbye. ‘I finally received my wedding card,' she said, showing us her resettlement notice. ‘At last I'll be the bride for once. Rumkowski has told me I'll be working in a kindergarten. Forgive me, good people, I must hurry. My children are waiting...'

 

 
Sparks in the Dark