The Glatstein Chronicles (25 page)

The third and last time that I saw Bialik, he was sitting on a platform among Hebraists. When he opened his mouth to speak, another war erupted, this one a civil war, you might say. Voices screamed out: “Speak Hebrew with the Ashkenazic accent!” Others: “No, the Sephardic accent!” Bialik defused the hostilities by shifting from one accent to the other. Present at this Hebrew event were young men and women, Hebrew teachers, and a few elderly gentlemen wearing yarmulkes, who sat there beaming, eyes shut, savoring every word that Bialik uttered. For them the content was irrelevant. It was
loshn koydesh
that mattered to them—Hebrew, the Holy Tongue. The younger members of the audience sat openmouthed, scarcely believing they were in the actual presence of Bialik himself.

When I finished relating my few, fragmentary recollections, I noticed that the painter was no longer at my side. He had slid down the banquette to join a plump woman. I could see only his profile and I searched there for a trace of his former grief. But his wrinkled profile, which looked to be kneaded from black pepper, revealed only a broad smile. The plump woman was unattractive, but I had to conclude, according to an old novelistic recipe, that for the painter she represented the symbol of life, erasing the death of the national figure who had been to him like an uncle.

I suddenly felt someone’s eyes on me. To my utter surprise, sitting two tables to my left was the French teacher from Wisconsin, nursing a half-empty glass of beer. We stared at each other for a few moments, as if trying to determine the extent of our mutual detachment since leaving the ship and to what extent we should remain distant. In my surprise, I failed to greet her. She picked up her glass and sat down beside me. “You know,” she said flirtatiously, “it’s not nice of you not to have left yet on your trip. What are you? A spy? Had I known that you were one of those types who come to Paris and head straight for the Dome, I wouldn’t have spoken a word to you on the ship. As for me, the minute I unpacked, I rushed right over here. Disgusting, isn’t it! I can’t bear to look at myself.”

I explained to her that I was a member of that miserable guild—journalists—who have a string of Domes in our collection. Whenever one of us takes to the road, the first thing we seek out, in whatever big city, is a Dome. How we ever expect to meet a real person under such circumstances is a mystery. Nevertheless, we file dispatches and write books, and people think they’re getting real slices of life, but all they’re getting are pieces of a Dome.

“If that’s the case,” she said, “let’s get out of here,” and led me off to a nearby restaurant. We took a table outside and sat looking silently at each other. “There’s something about the Dome that’s missing here,” she said at last. “Courage, for example. At the Dome I had more courage. There’s something about its atmosphere that would have let me say, oh, just about anything. Here I feel all proper again, shorn of my wings.”

“Should we go back?”

“No! I’ve missed my chance. Let’s eat. I’m starved.” She ordered an apéritif. As she moistened her heavy lips with the viscous drink, I caught a good look at her close up—a tall, oversized woman, with long arms and feet, with wide-open eyes and trembling lips.

“Are you a Jew?” she asked. “I know nothing about Jews.”

“What makes you think that there’s anything special to know about Jews?”

“I’m sorry, you’re right.”

“No, I’m wrong,” I teased.

By now she had drunk several glasses of wine and talked very little, but suddenly she lit a cigarette and resumed the conversation, speaking in a lazy voice. “How long will you be staying in Paris?” she began. “Let’s say five, six days. The first day, you’ll let me get to know you. We’ll walk through the streets and talk and talk and talk. The second day I’ll fall in love with you. The third day, I’ll think that I’m happy, excuse the foolish word. No, we’ll think that we’re happy. The fourth day, you’ll fall in love—no, not yet. The fourth day, we’ll still be in our happy place. By the fifth day, however, you’ll fall in love with somebody else and I’ll be as jealous as a shrew. On the sixth day, you’ll toss me aside.”

“A fine script, except that I’m leaving at midnight for Poland,” I replied. “My mother is sick, very sick. It’s been twenty years since I’ve seen her. I owe her every minute I can spare. I’m only waiting for the train. I even thought of taking a plane.”

“Take me with you,” she said. “No, don’t, you’d have a big parasite on your hands. The playing out of our script will have to wait until your return trip, if I won’t be too busy, that is. Give me your Polish address and I’ll write to you. It’ll be greetings from the Dome, maybe also a greeting from the English language, since you’ll be speaking Polish over there with your family.”

“No, Yiddish,” I set the facts straight.

“Yiddish! Yiddish!” she exclaimed. “I’ve always been intrigued by languages. The French speak French, the Turks Turkish, the Jews Yiddish, and Americans will soon be speaking American. It’s a curious thing, but quite natural. Each of us speaks in our own tongue, in the language in which we were nurtured. It’s as personal as breathing, no translation required, you just open your mouth and out come the words of your native folk songs and lullabies. I like these old, plain words, like bread, water, butter, milk, cows, grass, heaven, heart, sun, stars, and love. I hate fancy, pretentious words. Each language should stay simple and pure, sealed from others, and resist all those foreign, illegitimate imports—those careerists that invade and poach on other languages. A grandchild should be able to speak exactly with the same words as its grandfather.”

She took a few quick drags on her cigarette, tossed it away, and resumed: “I once went back to a little village in Sweden, to seek out my origins. My parents were born in Wisconsin, but my grandfather, my father’s father, returned to his birthplace as soon as my father and the other children were able to stand on their own two feet. He could never get used to the new land. In that little Swedish village, you didn’t even need an address to find my grandfather. He kept pinching my cheeks, but his second wife, my step-grandmother, shot me angry looks. She may have been afraid that I’d come for my inheritance and was concerned about providing for her own children whom she’d had with my grandfather. Several of these children—I didn’t count them—were even younger than I. Other branches of the family came to see me, six-foot-tall uncles with thick mutton chops that looked like they’d been pasted on. They drank to my health, laughed very loud, and talked a great deal, even though I couldn’t understand a word. At night a strapping, idiotic boy, a relative, stole into my bed. I don’t even remember how we were related. He stank of sweat and leather, and I quickly decided that with such an idiot, it was the better part of wisdom not to put up a fight. Why scream theatrically and create a scandal in a small village? Better to submit for a few minutes and be rid of him. But it seemed that young man was so smitten that the next day he wanted nothing else but to marry me. He even sent my grandfather over as matchmaker. My grandfather pinched my cheeks and kept talking up the match in the broken English he still retained. I fled from there without even saying goodbye.”

My thoughts ran along parallel lines, and I said: “I, too, came close to fleeing from the city of my youth, but there was no escape. I wanted to become a new man in a new land. Instead I was a hybrid. I couldn’t forget that I had left behind a mother and a father on the other side of the ocean. For a long time, I wandered around in an unfinished state, trying to toughen myself up. I had fled as you would from a place of horror, because that’s what it was. A Jewish child in Lublin was raised on terror. The Gentiles of our town filled us with terror with their frightening images of the crucifixion. Many of our own festivals did the same, the candles representing flickering souls. Our funerals were scary affairs, with the corpses returning as the living dead to frighten the children. Even in dreams you had to keep your wits about you and remember how to respond when a corpse grabbed you by the hand, saying, ‘Come with me!’ In our building, in the basement, there lived a Jewish baker, who also attended to the dead. He washed corpses for burial, preparing them for the hereafter, where all of us must stand in Final Judgment. With the same hands that washed corpses, he kneaded dough for the rolls that my mother bought each morning. For me these were rolls of death and they often stuck in my throat. But worst of all were our dark, black, tearful funerals. If you’ve never as a child seen a small-town Jewish funeral, then you don’t know the meaning of terror. Even the dogs howl in fear, because the Angel of Death is abroad, and the Angel of Death, as every Jewish child knows, has a thousand eyes, and pulling the heavy quilt over your head is of no use at all. I remember that once my mother fell sick—she was never very strong—and I prayed to God—I don’t know if half-asleep or dreaming—that if she could not be spared, let her be granted a few more years, at least until the time when I would leave for America. (Even as a child I dreamed of going to America.) I thought I would never live through a funeral in my own house, my mother’s funeral. Now my mother is very sick. She summons me home, who knows for what reason, probably for the funeral that awaits my arrival. I’ve already covered two-thirds of the journey. I wanted to escape my mother’s funeral. But how could I? This is my fate, I have no choice but to go. Look, it’s getting late. Come see me to a taxi. I mustn’t miss the train.”

On the way to look for a taxi, as we again passed by the Dome, I ran into a young painter, a New Yorker, who had been living in Paris for the last few years and would come occasionally back to New York to visit family. “You’re here in Paris?” he said. “Finally! When did you get here?”

“Just now,” I answered, “and I’m also just about to leave.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself. Paris and I will never forgive you.”

“I’ll be back.”

“In that case … ”

The Wisconsin teacher looked at both of us, glad for the opportunity to extract herself from the too hasty intimacy that had sprung up between us. She stood there, staring coldly at me and the painter. My friend stared back at her with the open-faced audacity that only a painter can pull off and said to me in Yiddish, “Who is that … that … shikse?”

“From the ship.”

In New York, I had probably exchanged no more than ten words with this painter, but now, standing outside the Dome, he suddenly seemed so dear to me, as if a good deal of the reason for my coming to Paris was to see him. This had nothing to do with any feelings of loneliness on my part, but was owing rather to the warmth he exuded. In New York we considered him somewhat affected, with his long hair, his mincing steps and overly polite way of talking. Here, in the vicinity of the Dome, he seemed remarkably natural. Even his little steps didn’t suggest weakness but their opposite, as if he was eager to conserve his strength. “A shikse from the boat, and straightaway to the Dome? There’s something improper going on here,” he said in a talmudic chant. He then spoke to me in English, overwhelming the Wisconsin teacher with the sudden switch from the stream of Yiddish to perfect English sentences. “So what’s happening in New York?” he asked. “How are all the good and decent people faring?”

“I’ll tell you everything on the way back,” I said. “It’s almost eleven and I don’t want to be late for my train.”

His face took on an earnest, worried look, as if he’d suddenly assumed all my cares. He summoned a taxi and told the driver to take me to my hotel, not far from the Gare St.-Lazare. The Wisconsin teacher stood a few steps away, looking uneasy and forlorn, having been shut out by the unexpected encounter with the painter. I recognized her bewilderment and called out to the pair, one foot already in the taxi, “Introduce yourselves, a painter from New York, a French teacher from Wisconsin.” The painter was hurrying me along, “You’ll be late for your train. We’ll introduce ourselves.”

Before the taxi door closed, I saw the two of them standing together, without me, and noted the strong contrast between the two strangers I was leaving behind, whom I had thrust upon each other—she, tall, blonde, vigorous, the essence of Gentileness; he, short, dark, and unmistakably Jewish. She suddenly broke away and sprung over to the taxi, again looking bewildered. “I hope,” she stammered, “that all goes well with your mother.” She spoke with tenderness and sincerity, sending warm greetings from a woman from Wisconsin to a town in Poland. It wasn’t what she said that touched my heart so much as her spontaneous, deeply felt gesture of concern, setting aside her self-absorption. She had spoken as warmly as it was possible for her to do. She remained standing as the taxi started to pull away, her eyes downcast, looking as if she wanted to add something that she couldn’t quite express. And as the taxi swerved to the left and the right, almost knocking down tens of pedestrians, a thought crept into my mind, that maybe the right thing to do would be to turn around and spend another day or two in Paris. Even when I was already in the waiting room at the station, I still couldn’t rid myself of the feeling of an opportunity missed.

Aboard ship, thoughts of my old home had stayed pretty much in the background. They came to the fore only at those moments when I felt troubled and confused and began to conjure up scenes from my past, to reassure myself that I wasn’t rootless. Mother, father, brothers and sister—all belonged to the past. To be sure, my mother’s illness bobbed up constantly, like the refrain of a sad song, but she herself was no longer quite real to me. Each time I called her to mind I had to uncoil a great ball of memory, rolling it out to considerable length to reach back to my beginnings. I had sent a cable to Poland from the ship, but that was prompted in large part by the wish to play with the magic of technology. Nevertheless, the wireless dispatch created a thin bridge between me aboard ship and the family back home. The bridge held fast for a while and then disappeared like a mirage.

However, once I debarked from the ship, my old home became my destination. What had once been the past now lay ahead, with all the tantalizing mysteries of the future, a future I was impatient to confront. I was even prepared to forgo weeks and months of my life in order to bring that future closer. This is how an invalid must feel, who is willing to age a few months so that he might crawl out of his sickbed and see the sun, or a father, willing to give up a few years so that he might see his children’s futures. There are too many such instances in a human life, when one doesn’t live in the present but wants to vault over time into a dubious future. Everything following the ship led directly homeward. I knew full well that what awaited me was a roomful of sorrow, and yet I wanted to push on ever faster. Was this so as to have it over and done with? I hardly think so. I longed to be home, I envisioned my homecoming—riding in the public carriage from the train station, standing at the door. But never, in my imaginings, did I dare to cross the threshold. That moment I did not want to spoil by anticipation.