Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (30 page)

Again, somebody moved away, and there, right before my face, stretched the blur of a person, writhing in the snow.

But it wasn’t just any person, and it wasn’t a blur! It was Toybe, our Toybe!

She was lying there in the red snow, torn in two, both legs naked, sticking up like two logs. Blood was gushing from between her legs, or maybe her stomach.

Toybe saw me, but I couldn’t tell whether she recognized me. Her face was red and swollen. She looked up at me with large, round, upturned eyes, like those of a calf. All of a sudden, she raised her swollen face, stretched out her naked legs into the bloodstained snow, and let loose a piercing cry.

“People! Give me some poison! Take pity on me!”

At that moment, I caught sight of Mother in the distance. She was coming closer, her mouth wide open. I didn’t know whether she had just been screaming or was on the verge of screaming. Nor did I know where she had been until now. But the crowd of women moved aside to let her through. It became very still. A dull echo passed over the heads of the crowd.

“Frimet!”

“Frimet, Dovid-Froyke’s daughter!”

“The stepmother!”

Mother elbowed her way through, her face dark, sunken. Her head scarf had slid down to her shoulders. She bent down to Toybe. Apparently, she didn’t notice me. I never heard her talking to Toybe, nor Toybe talking to her. It now seemed as if there were no other people present, only Mother and Toybe.

From the direction of the bathhouse lane, which leads to the canal, a long, peasant sleigh was approaching. It was on such a sleigh that my brother Moyshe had once been taken to the hospital. I think it was the same sleigh and the same peasant driver, wearing the same sheepskin coat.

“Make way,
zhidke!
Move, you Jews!” he shouted, and drove his horse and sleigh right in among the skirts and kapotes.

“What’s with you, idiot?” a young woman yelled, pulling away just in time to avoid the horse’s head.

“Out of my way, bitch!”

“And you’re a son of a bitch!”

“
Sha, sha!
” voices called out from among the crowd. “She has no one better to argue with?”

The crowd moved aside. The sleigh came to a halt not far from where Toybe was lying. The peasant in the sheepskin and his helper crawled out of the sleigh. One of them bent over Toybe and growled into her face, “Damn it all! Couldn’t wait, could you?”

“She had no time …” someone in the crowd answered.

“Shut up over there!” the peasant retorted angrily.

Mother stood close beside him. She whispered something and he quietly nodded his head. Then the peasant and his helper lifted Toybe from the snow. She was no longer screaming. They covered her and wrapped her in straw.

The crowd began to murmur. I could hear snatches of their comments.

“And what’s with the bastard?”

“Dead.”

“A boy?”

“A girl?”

A strange policeman, arriving from the main street, sat himself down at the foot of the sleigh, just as Mother had done when Moyshe was rushed to the hospital.

Now Mother was following on foot, dragging herself alongside the iron spikes of the synagogue fence, all alone, without Reyzl, Itshe Bik’s widow. To me it seemed that she wasn’t walking of her own volition, but was being pushed from behind.

The sleigh took off. Clumps of red snow stuck to its sides. A moving cloud came to rest over the
shul
, black, like dried blood.

Toybe was taken to the Gentile hospital, the very same hospital behind which, once on a winter night, I almost froze to death and had to be rushed to Grandma’s house.

In that hospital the sick were brought in through a red gate. People said that no one ever left the same way. The sick never recovered and their corpses were carried out through the black gate, into Kozienic Street.

All week long, the tall windows of the hospital looked out onto the street in white, sheltered silence. Occasionally an old woman might come by, carrying a basket of food, and would wait half a day for someone to take it from her. Sometimes there would be a woman striking her head against the wall and sobbing loudly. At another time you might find a Gentile man, surrounded by his children, pleading to be let in to see his sick wife.

On Sundays and holidays those white, silent windows would come alive, as young female patients crowded behind them. With winks and gestures, they would try to attract the attention of the Russian soldiers striding in the street below, who kept looking up at the girls and spitting sunflower seed shells out of the corners of their mouths.

The young Gentile girls would hurl curses in sign language, mime derisions, thumb their noses, and stick out their tongues. And if one of the girls was so moved, she would turn around and bare her large, white backside, wagging it against the window and sending the soldiers into fits of raucous laughter. This set off a volley of triple-barreled Russian obscenities, and if words weren’t enough, the soldiers returned the compliment, exposing their own backsides, as well as other unspeakable parts.

That was why Jews avoided the Gentile hospital on Sundays. Altogether, they disliked it intensely. In that place, they said, you were butchered and slaughtered, with no one to complain to. Jews were afraid, not so much of the young female patients or of the black gate, as of Doctor Koszicki, who had the heart of a Tatar and a penchant for cutting people up, no matter what.

“A butcher he is, that Doctor Koszicki, a stomach-ripper,” people whispered.

That’s why I was so worried when Toybe was whisked off to the Gentile hospital. Toybe would never, of her own free will, have agreed to be taken to the haunt of that Angel of Death, Doctor Koszicki. Now, however, when such a terrible calamity had befallen her, she had no choice but to lie there and wait for Doctor Koszicki to cut her up and dispatch her corpse through the black gate. Who knows whether—God forbid!—they hadn’t already carried her out.

Toybe was never seen at the windows, neither on a Sunday nor on any other day. No one called up to her from the street below. No one brought her food baskets. No one inquired after her.

Ever since that fateful Sabbath day, Mother went around with a darkened face. She spoke to no one, stopped visiting the neighbors, and never finished reading the sad story of the innocent Carolina.

Mother seemed scared to look at Father, merely casting him a sideways glance from time to time. In that glance lay a look of frightened surprise, a fear of what must inevitably come out into the open.

“Doesn’t Leyzer know anything?” her look seemed to say, as she waited for Father to emerge from his deafness and self-absorption.

Father, apparently, had no idea of what had been going on. He slept more deeply than ever, snored more loudly than usual. When he returned home at night, tired and frozen, Mother quickly served him his supper. She never sat down at the table beside him, nor asked how his day in the villages had gone.

Most times she stayed in the kitchen, puttering about, stoking the fire, scraping the pots and pans, rinsing them over and over, until Father started to doze off, his head drooping heavily. Only then did she clear the table and shake him by the shoulder.

“Leyzer, go lie down, go …”

But for how long was it possible to remain in the dark? Surely, while Father was measuring hay ricks by hand, or crawling around wagons in the market, some whispers must have penetrated his deafness. Maybe some mischief-maker, an enemy perhaps, had shouted the bad news into his ear? Or could the winds in the field have brought him greetings from his daughter languishing in the Gentile hospital?

Father said nothing. But one evening he returned long before nightfall. He didn’t enter with his usual tread, the slow, heavy steps of those who deal with peasants and stride across fields. He burst into the room with a disturbed look on his face, his beard tangled, as though he’d slept on it, his mouth open. The dire news must have gone into his mouth and now he couldn’t close it. The hood of the coat that his daughter Beyle once sent him with Yarme the coachman had fallen from his head and dangled like a tired, extra limb. His plush cap tilted dangerously to one side.

At that moment, Mother was sitting beside the kerosene lamp, mending a shirt. When the door burst open and Father’s long shadow fell across the room, she instantly felt that it was his discovery of the tragedy that had occasioned the dramatic homecoming. She suddenly put a finger in her mouth, sucked on it, and rose hastily, still holding the shirt in her hand.

Father’s large, blue eyes were shot with little, red veins. Mother stood before him, her back bent, blinking as though it was she and not Toybe who was at fault.

“Frimet,” Father gasped, “come with me for a moment …”

“Leyzer, what happened?”

“Just come with me for a moment.”

He led her into the kitchen. The shirt Mother had been mending trailed along the floor behind her, one sleeve hanging down, like the limp arm of someone who had fainted.

They closed the door behind them, leaving it slightly ajar. I didn’t have the courage to follow them, so I pressed my ear to the opening. I couldn’t make out any words, only the sound of heavy panting, as if they were kneading large chunks of dough and flinging them to the kitchen floor.

Just then I heard what sounded like the rustling of sheets of paper.

“Hush, Leyzer, don’t talk …”

“What do you mean, don’t talk?” Father said in a choked voice.

He was seized by another fit of panting and I felt I should rush to his aid. I plucked up my courage, opened the door wider, and looked inside.

Father was standing in the middle of the kitchen with his hands hanging limply by his side. Never had his hands looked so long and large. Mother was fussing over him as if he were sick. With trembling hands she pulled the coat off his shoulders. He didn’t resist. His head kept drooping, lower and lower. There was no doubt about it, Father was ill. Mother grabbed him under the armpits, led him gently into the other room, and sat him down at the table. He sat there, stiff and cold, as if made of glass. Mother fetched a basin and a pitcher filled with water from the kitchen.

“Come, Leyzer,” she whispered, as if her throat were filled with tears, “wash your hands. I’ve made some fried liver and potatoes for you.”

But Father, apparently, didn’t hear her, or else he didn’t understand what she wanted of him.

“Nu, wash your hands, Leyzer. The food will get spoiled.”

Father’s hands were trembling. The water from the pitcher spilled across the rim of the basin. Mother brought in the liver and potatoes. A warm, sweet aroma wafted across the room. Father tried to eat, chewing slowly and staring with a stony gaze into the flame of the kerosene lamp.

Suddenly, Father’s spoon remained upright in the mashed potatoes. Mother, who had gone back to mending the shirt, though never taking her eyes off Father’s face, fidgeted like a hen.

“What’s wrong, Leyzer? Why aren’t you eating?”

But Father never returned to the meal. The upright spoon leaned toward one side and soon dropped, like a felled tree. Father’s head also leaned to one side.

Everything in the room seemed to be leaning, even the dying flame in the kerosene lamp. A wrinkled, greenish film spread across the dark brown liver.

Ever since that evening, Father’s head was always bent. The lower his head sagged, the higher he raised his shoulders. He began to speak more quietly, to walk more softly, and to eat very slowly.

We didn’t see Toybe again for a very long time. Nobody in the house talked about her. She was forgotten. But one day my friend Yankl, Yarme the coachmen’s son, took me inside his father’s omnibus and, as we lay on the warmed straw, in an excited whisper that welled up not from his throat but from his entire body, he breathed right into my face.

“Did you see it with your own eyes?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Right into the snow, you say?”

“Yes, into the snow.”

“How did everything look?”

I didn’t know how to answer him. Actually, I didn’t want to tell him anything. What business was it of his? What right did he have to stick his nose into Toybe’s affairs?

He promised to have his father, on one of his trips, take me in the omnibus as far as the tavern. But this time, I turned down the favor. All I wanted was to be left alone.

We were done with Toybe, but her name clung to the walls of our house. It lay in Father’s red eyes, lost in thought, on Mother’s pursed lips, and in my inflamed imagination. But we no longer talked about Toybe, not Mother, not Father, not Yankl, nor anyone else.

That was how we gradually got through the winter. The nights grew shorter. Each daybreak the dawn awakened with a rosier, warmer glow. In the wealthy homes in town, windows began to be thrown open and windowpanes polished. There was the smell of hot water in the air. Bedding was taken out for airing.

In Sime-Yoysef’s
kheyder
the approaching summer also made itself felt. Our teacher was now translating for us the Scroll of Esther. Haman’s ten sons already hung from the gallows, like herrings. The righteous Mordecai, by now a lord in the royal court, walked about the palace forever mindful of the welfare of his people, and every night Queen Esther slept in the bed of King Ahasuerus.

Around that time, my friend Yankl seemed to be up to something. He disappeared night after night and stayed out late, returning only after the bread cabinet was locked and everyone had gone to sleep.

The thought crossed my mind that Yankl was planning to run away. He was fed up with his stepmother, who was always pinching him, and with his father the coachman. He wanted to escape, otherwise he wouldn’t have been so guarded with me, nor would he have gone around with such a secretive look on his face.

I was sorry at the thought of losing Yankl. Who else did I have as a friend? But when the week of Purim arrived and the street was already filled with the aroma of
homentashen
, the special Purim pastries, Yankl took me aside and disclosed the secret that, on the coming Saturday night, in Yosl-Tsalel’s wedding hall, there would be a performance of
The Sale of Joseph
, and that he, Yankl, was to play the part of the righteous Joseph.