The Glatstein Chronicles (28 page)

The little Jew, who was Abush’s father, swayed alongside. He drew comfort from the fact that his son managed to earn a living: for many years now they had been trudging through muddy towns and villages and as God the Father was witness, they made it through the week and came home Fridays, in time to welcome the Sabbath at their rebbe’s synagogue. Abush had a gift for singing. The father himself could also give out with a good “Ve-khoyl ma’aminim”—but not as melodiously and without his son’s soulful sigh. Parts of the father’s mind were already dulled, and his words came out muffled. Without Abush the old man surely would have gone to his grave by now.

The young boy with the pious cheeks looked around to make sure that no one was watching and offered Abush another piece of his roll. “Abush,” he said, “can you tell me the time?” The father closed his eyes. He knew what was coming, even though he had never agreed to such things, but he also knew that this was part of earning a living. Abush fiddled with his trousers and took out his “thing,” turning his hand clumsily around the exposed part, as though he were winding a clock. The boy, who had seen this performance any number of times, let out a shriek and raced off to his heder.

The Gentile market was already bustling, filled with incoming wagons, tended by peasant women selling chickens, eggs, vegetables, fruit, and a variety of berries. Jewish housewives were haggling and examining the hens for plumpness. A peasant relieved himself alongside his wagon, leaving a huge puddle that trickled its way to the horse, which proceeded to lift its legs. Meat cutters in bloody aprons sharpened their long, pointy knives. One of them grabbed hold of a girl and lifted her high in the air. Several others jumped in and shoved their hands under the girl’s skirt, which was blowing in the wind. The girl squirmed and kicked her legs, screaming, “Have you no fear of God?”

The market smelled of ripe melons, strawberries, raspberries, fresh carrots, lettuce, cucumbers, and radishes. It was a feast for the eye and nose. An old peasant woman, who looked like a witch, was milking a compliant goat. She handed a fresh glassful to a young Hasid with curly sidelocks who sipped the milk with fierce concentration, clutching his heart after each swallow, as though partaking of a miraculous cure. Mixed with the fragrance of vegetables and fruit were the animal smells of cows, chickens, dogs, and horses, particularly the latter’s fresh deposits. Angry dogs with aged faces were tied to the wagons, pulling at their leashes and barking. Half-smothered hens, buried under a mountain of rags, somehow managed to poke out their heads and let out a choked cackle before collapsing into a stupor. A Gypsy woman slipped through the crowd, tugging at everyone’s hands, her bracelets and necklaces jangling. Jewish housewives consulted one another, and Jewish men sniffed about, in search of bargains for the Sabbath. No one paid any attention to Crazy Dvoyre, who lifted her skirts up to her eyes and shrieked hysterically, in a childish voice, “Jews, the Messiah will come! The Messiah will come!” The day was humid and the peasants were sweating under their heavy coats. One by one, the wagons began pulling out, back to the small peasant villages, where a cool sky hung suspended over huts scattered among the thick woods.

A blind old beggar sat in the middle of the marketplace, playing a concertina and singing a hymn that everybody already knew by heart. In his hands the concertina looked like a hand mill, grinding out the same tune over and over.

In and out went the concertina, turning in all directions, like a slithery snake. The beggar’s singing was so saccharine that it lay disagreeably on the lips. Everybody avoided him, including the dogs and horses. Even the ducks and the hens circled around, trying not to touch him with feather or foot. A consumptive-looking priest with a long, thin nose and a freckled face stopped beside the old beggar and engaged him in discourse, singing:

The beggar slowly wound down his playing, and answered with the words of his hymn, no longer singing, but accompanying every few words with a quiet wheeze of the concertina:

“That’s good,” said the black-clad priest, piously closing his eyes. He took out a groschen, examined the coin from all angles to make sure that it wasn’t a gold piece, and dropped it into the beggar’s cup. The beggar immediately resumed playing his hymn, his crouched body swaying back and forth.

The priest then went from one stall to the next, stalls hung with rosaries, statuettes of Jesus, red glasses for votive candles, thickly painted Marys in gilt frames, bleeding hearts, pictures of Jesus with a crown of thorns on his head. He touched each religious article devoutly. Peasants followed his progress, kissing his hand. He approached a young woman, who was sitting surrounded by tall, earthen pots filled with raspberries. She jumped up and, blushing, grabbed the priest’s hand and pressed it to her lips. The priest helped himself to some raspberries and popped them into his mouth, smacking his lips. He held a few in the palm of his hand and inspected them closely. “Very good, a successful yield,” he said as he chewed. “This year the good Lord has blessed our trees and our soil.” While the priest was contemplating his palm, now stained red from the berries, the entire marketplace, from one end to another, suddenly turned somber, perhaps because darkness had descended, the darkness of a Sabbath eve.

The man with the twisted stick was still racing down the main Jewish street, banging on all the shops. At a signal of the priest’s reddened palm, the Russian and Polish church bells began to ring out. But then suddenly they fell silent of their own accord, and would not resume despite the red palm’s bidding. The blind beggar went on playing his concertina beside a urine-streaked wall:

On the train to Warsaw, I had emerged from this dream with the disagreeable taste in my gums of the old beggar’s song. Now again, as I was being tossed about in the carriage, I had the same sour sensation as I had then when I emerged from my dream to see, through sleepy eyes, real Polish cities and towns rushing past the train’s windows. I was grateful to my sleepy head, which had concocted such a welter of images. Thanks to my dream, I was returning home after twenty years not only with a strong sense of home, but also with its sad tonality. I now felt as if my pockets were stuffed with the homey goods of my dream which I had preserved through twenty years of estrangement. Now, at last I felt like emptying my pockets and scattering my memories over the Warsaw streets. See, I never betrayed your trust! My tongue truly cleaves to the roof of my mouth, but I have not forsaken you, O Jewish Poland, with your terrors and sad celebrations. Do not forsake my right hand as I have not forsaken you.

Early-morning Warsaw hadn’t welcomed me yet, the city still slept. I was saving my passion for Lublin, the city of my dream, of my fearful Jewishness, ever seeking shelter between two sets of enemy bells, the Russian Orthodox and Polish Catholic. That I was now on my way to my aunt via New York struck me as peculiar, as if I had detoured so as to enter by a different gate and approach her house by the back door. Once upon a time, I traveled from Lublin directly to Warsaw. Now, having left Lublin for New York, it takes me a mere twenty years to return via Warsaw to Lublin.

The direct trips that I took between Lublin and Warsaw were for social visits, big-city experiences, knocking on editors’ doors—and to take the entrance exams at the Krinski Business School.

A bookish Hebrew was spoken in the Krinski corridors. The classrooms were not as solid as those of the Lublin Gymnasium, the Russian high school that I had attended, but rather looked as if they had been hastily slapped together, like a flimsy sukkah for the Feast of Tabernacles. Krinski students lacked the high spirits of youth. Their brows were furrowed with practical considerations. Even the youngest among them felt rejected by the world and forced to stay within the Jewish fold. Seen in their overcoats Krinski students may have looked like those in the government business schools, but the missing brass buttons on their uniforms and caps let out the secret that these were makeshift outfits. The Krinski administrators made a heroic effort to transcend the distinctive ghetto mixture of Jewishness and worldliness, an effort as hopeless as Jewish life itself. The students hummed the Zionist hymn “Hope is not yet abandoned,” but nagging at them was the common fear: What would they actually do after graduating from the Krinski Business School?

Krinski’s was the destination of those with no other alternative, after the Gymnasium examiners had completed their annual dashing of Jewish hopes for advancement to a Polish school of higher education. Climbing the squeaky, unsteady stairs, you absorbed the taint of the Jewish world of trade that permeated the building and, indeed, the entire neighborhood, Simon’s Arcade, with its leather and yard goods and Krinski’s Business School. Business and trade … school … rags and business.

The Lublin Gymnasium was a one-story building. A few marble steps led into the forbidden temple. The wooden stairs at Krinski’s creaked, ghetto style, taking you into an atmosphere of no-choice-in-the-matter Jewishness and a hothouse secularism that saw no sun and felt no rain. Its chief adornment was its director, a man with a prominent red nose and a beard so expansive it looked pasted on. Rozhdestvenski, head of the Lublin Gymnasium, could permit himself a thin, black mustache, but his Krinski counterpart Woskresenski felt that he must sport the broad, red beard of a Russian Orthodox priest. He served as Krinski’s advertisement of its Christian secularity. But Rozhdestvenski’s little mustache inspired more fear than Woskresenski’s pan-Slavic beard, which looked more like the caricature of a Jew trying to pass for a non-Jew. Woskresenski’s function was to serve as the Gentile gatekeeper of Jewish education, but his close association with the students consigned him to the same fate as theirs. He was ejected along with them from the Gentile world.

I arrived at the Krinski school with a younger student I was tutoring. He had lively brown eyes and a stubborn lower lip. I assumed that he saw the same things I did as we traversed the hallways, but he said nothing. He, too, grew heavy-hearted, his head bent, as if ready to receive the Jewish yoke that would be placed on his shoulders in these classrooms. Our passage through the corridors felt like an exhausting climb up a mountain. I, the mature fifteen-year-old tutor, and he, the twelve-year-old pupil, were both seeking opportunity and purpose, and coming up against a blank wall.

On the other hand, the Szwienteduski hospital did bear a certain similarity to the Lublin Gymnasium, at least as far as I was concerned. Only in the corridors of the Gymnasium did I, a Jewish boy, feel the same tightening in my chest as in the hospital. Every time I had to stand for examinations, which were administered in the Lublin Gymnasium, I felt as if I were terribly ill. The teachers were surgeons, with scalpels at the ready. The walls gave off hospital coldness and the clean rooms smelled of disinfectant. The examiners flashed me a chiseled smile as they called out, “Yakov Isakovich Glyatshteyn,” accentuating the last syllable. “Heh, heh,” it implied. “Yakov Isakovich! A little Jew wants to share our privileges.” The teachers chatted with a priest, who was present during the exams, to lend solemnity to the occasion. Once in a while he would also throw in a question. “Yakov Isakovich,” he would begin. I don’t believe that he expected an answer, he only wanted to dig around in me with a little knife. It was at the Szwienteduski hospital that they cut out my appendix.

The nuns of the Catholic hospital washed and bathed me and jabbed my veins tenderly, asking over and over whether we Jews had any institution like theirs, where sick little Catholic boys were so well cared for. A fellow patient, a Gentile boy who had just had his leg amputated, asked me innocently why I hadn’t gone to a Jewish hospital. This was at the height of the Polish anti-Jewish boycott, and there I lay, a single Jew among thirty-six Christian hospital beds, surrounded by Christian charity. Everyone was kind to me, and everyone kept repeating how much kindness I was being shown, even though I was a Jewish boy. A man in our ward, with a black mustache and a yellowish complexion, died, with a kindly smile on his face, as if apologizing for making us feel uncomfortable. He was a train conductor who had been brought into the hospital following a train accident. He received last rites, his family standing by quietly at his bedside.

Red lamps in the corridors … stifled groans from the beds … the Russian doctor, with the good, thick hands, who took out my stitches … The last few nights of my stay, when I was able to walk around, I kept feeling that I, Yakov Isakovich, an ailing Jew, was walking the hallways of the Christian Lublin Gymnasium.

Weariness permeated every bone in my body. I looked out from the carriage at the Warsaw streets as if from behind a pane of glass, trying to reconstruct the past. We were now crossing the bridge to Praga. After twenty years with all the world upheavals, my aunt still lived in the same courtyard. The building manager, who often sparred with his sons and boasted about his dalliance with the cabaret singer Kavetska, must now long be dead. His eldest son, who had always threatened to convert to Christianity, was as good as his word. In the honeymoon months of restored Polish independence, he underwent conversion and became the chief of police in a small town. In good apostate tradition, he then proceeded to make life miserable for the local Jews. This I learned from the younger brother, the one who used to instruct me in manners. He, too, had converted in order to study at a Catholic seminary, but his fellow seminarians gave the new convert such a hard time that he ran off to America, where, with his mesmerizing manners, he quickly found himself an aged millionairess. Whenever we met in New York, he asked my advice, whether to marry the old woman, who was agreeable to the idea, and become an instant millionaire, or to give in to the pleadings of the old lady’s daughter and run off with her.