The Glatstein Chronicles (29 page)

My aunt, as it happened, had made one change in the intervening twenty years; she had moved from the right side of the building to the left. I wanted to slip into the courtyard unnoticed, but it was not to be. A little girl began running toward me, two boys grabbed each other by the hand and skipped around the courtyard like messengers, an old woman with an overgrown nose, as big as a potato, asked who I was looking for, a man with a bandaged beard started to shout across the whole courtyard, a few women appeared on their balconies. The courtyard was stirring. By the time I reached the stairs, my aunt was already halfway down, clapping her hands, her face stained with tears.

As yellow as her face had become, it was the only bright spot on the dark stairwell. I recognized her immediately. And as closely as she resembled my mother, there was yet enough difference so that it would take a journey of another few hours to flesh out my mother’s actual image. It was like straining to recall a face and coming very close, but still missing a crucial detail. There was just enough resemblance to assure me that I was about to see Mother herself, and despite my aunt’s shocking aging, I couldn’t help but feel glad that I was already—almost—seeing my mother. It was like after a dream, when you open your eyes and see standing over you someone who looks familiar, but hasn’t yet fully taken shape. You know that you must open your eyes wider to clear away the last wisps of dream so as to see that person in real life.

My aunt led me into the house, sobbing, “Your mother must be a great saint to have lived to see this day. She must have great merit in Heaven.” For a while it seemed as if she had brought me to a wax museum. Several figures stood stock-still, staring at me. Children rolled about on an unmade bed. One child, with a snub nose like the chopped-off tail of a dog, and only a few upper teeth, made faces at me. A second child, a little older, began to cry, while a third jumped off the bed and disappeared into another room. The waxen adult faces continued staring fearfully at me.

“Don’t you recognize them?” my aunt asked. “These are my daughters. This is the youngest, named after Grandmother Drezl. Don’t you recognize the middle one? You’ve forgotten even the eldest?” Looking at the three yellowed faces, I reflected as never before on the wars, starvation, pogroms, terror, and poverty of the twenty years since my departure. Their fear affected me, they were ashamed of how mercilessly time had dealt with them. But above all, they were afraid because they had been caught unawares, because of the unmade beds, because of the child still making faces, because they were worried that I might not forgive them for wasting their lives since we had last seen each other, because I had surprised them red-handed in the process of their growing old before their time.

I felt even worse when I gradually perceived traces in them of the three mischievous little girls who used to titter, with stifled, impatient giggles, on the mornings following my late-night arrivals as a guest from Lublin. Before I awoke, they would be stretched out on an opposite bed, lying in wait for me, like kittens. My aunt would tell them to let me sleep, but they never had the patience to lie still until I awoke. They used every means to get me to sit up, and when I finally opened my eyes, they broke out in merry laughter, covering themselves with the heavy featherbed. I’d pull them out, one by one, by the hair, by a plump, bare foot, or even by an ear. Now they stood before me, petrified, and the more I began to recognize in them traces of their girlish selves, the tighter grew the constriction in my throat. One of the daughters suffered from goiter, and her eyes were glazed over. A second had lost almost all her teeth, and her bottom half was three times as wide as the top half. The third daughter, the youngest, actually had the oldest, most sorrowful-looking face of all. Two young men emerged from a side room. One, with a sullen, conspiratorial face, was introduced to me as the husband of the eldest. He took off immediately. He was an unemployed baker and was hurrying to a union meeting. The other young man was my aunt’s son, born two years after my departure. Only eighteen, he already had a shiny, bald head and the features of a worried businessman.

In the kitchen I changed into fresh clothing and washed up at the rusty pump. Meat, crawling with maggots, was soaking on a window sill. It was twenty years since I had seen such creatures, and now they gave me the same fright as when I was a boy and they would nip at my toes when I stepped on them barefoot. They were creepier and slower moving than New York cockroaches. The floor, the walls, and the ceiling were the same dingy black. My aunt had never been known to keep a neat house, but now the gloom stemmed from poverty, not sloppy housekeeping. The difference was obvious. Poverty wasn’t merely black but muddy black, the earthy color of things about to crumble.

When I returned from the kitchen, my uncle was already seated, sipping a glass of hot tea. He had once boasted the thick, black beard of a corpulent government functionary. Now that beard was gray and wispy, not so much unkempt as thinned. He extended an aged hand. There was no sign of the onetime vigorous meat dealer, whose face was always so ruddy that he seemed on the verge of apoplexy from an overabundance of good health. I could barely recognize him, apart from his nasal speech and the bitter smile that had always played around his moist eyes, with the warning: “You can’t put anything over on me.” “Let’s eat something, he must be faint from hunger,” my uncle said, uncertain as to whether it was permissible to address me with the familiar, singular “you.” My hunger notwithstanding, I sipped my tea warily, thinking of the crawling creatures and the black stain of poverty.

A man, six feet tall, possibly a bit over, with a large head and a stomach like a kettle drum, bursting its way through the widest of trousers, entered the room. He came right over to me and stuck out a broad hand. “Welcome, welcome!” he said, and then sought confirmation from my aunt, “Mother-in-law, is this him?” My aunt hastily explained to me that this was her “Garden of Eden,” her middle daughter’s husband. I was truly grateful to him for bringing a change of atmosphere into the house. His brimming vitality and protruding stomach swept away all the oppressiveness. “Why is everyone so quiet, like in a house of mourning?” he demanded. “Please! A person’s just arrived in Poland and already you’re serving him warmed-over troubles. Are you afraid that he might miss out on something?” His huge belly bespoke great energy. I had never before seen such mercurial bulk. He darted from one place to another as lightly as a dancer. “Mother-in-law,” he said, “why such a sour face? Don’t you love me to pieces?” He kissed his mother-in-law, then his wife, and in the same breath invited me to his house for lunch. He then dashed out like a whirlwind to shop for provisions and make preparations.

After he and his wife left, my aunt told me his whole “history.” He came from a rich family that never accepted the match. “He’s a boor,” said my aunt, “but the boorishness is his own creation. They tried stuffing him with learning. What didn’t they push down his throat? Lessons after lessons, violin lessons, dancing lessons, gold and silver with diamonds, but he never wanted to stand out. In the first place, he fell head over heels in love with my daughter and took her just as her mother had her. They chased him with dowries of twenty thousand dollars the way a groschen chases a bagel. He has a golden trade, he’s a dental technician, but he hates working. He’s already spent six, seven years in Uruguay. He came back last year and now he’s packing to leave again. He’d be a wonderful person, but he loves to eat and drink and—the less said the better—he even has an eye for other women. He wants everything. He has big eyes, a big stomach, and Gentile tastes, but go reason with him! He’s a bit crazy, but when he starts talking, he’s worth listening to.”

When I later sat at his table, I was given every attention. We drank clear Polish vodka, and he tried to push more and more food on me. “Why do you eat like a bird?” he teased, immediately lapsing into the familiar form of address. “Strength comes from the pot. You’ll need a lot of strength if you’re going home to a sick mother.” The more he ate and drank, the more talkative he became. “As I live and breathe,” he said, “I grow wiser from day to day. That’s because I’ve discovered that it’s better to be a bit of a fool. Once I was a complicated young man, with problems by the bushel. I was always sick. Those were the days when I loved nothing but chamber music, you know, intimate, quiet music. And, Dostoyevsky, son of a gun!” He tossed off another drink. “I tried dieting,” he continued, “but the more I dieted, the bigger my stomach became. I saw that the whole thing was a matter of vanity. Then I thought, what’s so bad about opera? A little Verdi, Bizet, Halévy? And when I started going backward from chamber music to opera, it occurred to me that even opera is too grand for a simple fellow like me, so I kept going backward to popular songs. A touching Yiddish folk song suits me just fine. And when I ended up with folk songs, that was when I first began to feel satisfied, the way you do when you eat a good sour pickle, or some juicy sauerkraut. My heart was always drawn to folk songs, but there I was, dabbling with highfalutin chamber music.”

The way he stuffed himself, you didn’t see the likes of even in the most authentic Romanian restaurants on Allen Street. It was like attending a concert to watch the virtuosity and infectious joy with which he ate. Even his wife, who sat at the table with us, appeared happier than before. She seemed younger and her stony-frightened eyes now looked at me warmly.

“Chamber music,” he wound up, “is sickliness, a refined disease, while folk song is eating, drinking, life. You have no idea what life is, hardly anyone does! The world babbles on about heroism, but heroism, in the last analysis, means death, it teaches you to love death. If I knew that I was about to drop dead, I’d lie down on the floor and scream and holler loud enough to join heaven and earth. Why should I play the hero? They can all go to hell! A man’s going to leave the world one day. That’s no small thing! Me, I’m afraid of death, and I’d scream like crazy, because a life’s being cut off, a belly, a mouth, eyes are shutting down forever. They can all go to hell with their heroism!”

He saw me to the station and put me on the train for Lublin. He fell upon me with his massive head and kissed me goodbye, still carrying on about folk songs and living life to the hilt. “Swallow big chunks of life. Eat, drink, as much as you can, and be less of a hero,” he said. “It was heroism that led to Hitlerism.” He got as close to me as his paunch would allow and whispered a secret into my ear, “If you live in Poland and see all those sad Jewish faces, you lose your appetite for life. That’s why I’m going back to Montevideo as soon as I can. South Americans still know something about living, and they let you live. ‘Live and let live,’ as the saying goes. So what if it’s a cliché? Life is everything!” He squeezed my hand, jumped off the already moving train, and ran a short way after it, stomach preceding him, energetically waving a handkerchief.

A young man of about twenty-three or -four joined me in my empty compartment. He gave me a nod and sat down across from me by the window, which kept framing a series of moving pictures, glimpses of forest, fields, streams, and a smooth, pale-blue summer sky that offered immediate assurance of a full rainless day with no thunder or lightning. The slender young man smiled warmly, even before opening his mouth to speak. I apologized for my rusty Polish, explaining that this was the first time in twenty years that I’d had an opportunity to dust off a Polish word.

“Where are you from? Are you a stranger?”

“Not a stranger—estranged. I’ve come all the way from New York.”

“In that case, you must put on these headphones and let our music be the first to welcome you.”

He pointed to the radio headphones, and I did as he asked and stuck them into my ears. The train sped along as my ears crackled with the squawks of popular cabaret songs. Nevertheless, I was grateful for the young man’s offer. The cheap Polish tunes, and their even cheaper lyrics, had their own peculiar charm and were as singular in their way as the fields and the woods rushing by. “Magnificent,” I said. “The musical version of the native flora and fauna.”

“That’s exactly it,” he beamed. “Our poverty, our joy, our sadness—our very own.” He wiped his glasses and looked at me with misty, brown eyes. Without the glasses his eyes seemed somewhat harsh, but now they were smiling. Twenty years before I had seen few such young Polish faces. The Europeanized countenance across from mine was a long way from those flaxen-haired peasant boys, with their calf’s eyes and pimply cheeks. The cultivated face opposite mine had grown up in, and had been nurtured by, the atmosphere of an independent land. I said this to him as delicately as I could, not omitting the detail of the peasant boys of yore. I said I was as grateful for the way he looked as I was for the musical welcome on his radio; this was something different and new. He wrinkled his forehead in apparent distress. This young man, I thought to myself, practically carried a Jewish hump on his back; we Jews were burdened by our landlessness and he, by the weight of a new land, a young polity afflicted with measles and other childhood diseases. “We’re working hard to raise Poland’s prestige in the world,” he said, again removing his glasses and wiping them, but this time to avoid my gaze. “You’re a Jew?” he asked. He used the pejorative
zhid,
but the word came out softly, without the usual snarl. “There are others among us who would drag down Poland’s beautiful traditions into the ground,” he said, “but they’re like a fungus. We’ll get rid of it.” He gave me his hand, as though making a holy vow to himself. We understood one another and spoke no more of the matter.

He was an engineer, working for the government. For a while he had worked in Warsaw but was now being transferred to another city, closer to home. He said almost nothing more about himself. Instead, he bombarded me with questions about America, President Roosevelt, and my journey home after twenty years. He was also on his way home, but what a difference in our respective homecomings! As opposed to my twenty years, he had last seen his parents only a half-year before. “Twenty years!” the young man couldn’t stop exclaiming. “I should shut my mouth and let you concentrate on your sacred mission. Imagine being away twenty years from your own flesh and blood, and now you’ve come back. What a remarkable drama!” I urged him not to stop, to go on talking.