The Glatstein Chronicles (32 page)

Two young women, both a little taller than average, were on the path behind him. They had shawls around their shoulders—one red, the other green. They were talking in low voices, almost whispering. Now and then one of the two craned her neck to see whether the little boy had managed to get free. “Zalman dear!” she called after him. She was quite some way behind the little boy, but from her voice it was clear that she was someone near and dear.

Behind the two women came a group of ten or twelve men, all with beards, red, black, and gray. They walked in no particular order, strung out across the whole width of the promenade, and talked in loud voices. When they had caught up to us, they seemed momentarily taken shy, and everyone of them said “Good evening, Mr. Steinman,” in a very respectful voice, rather as though chanting, turning their heads toward my companion who now stood leaning the whole weight of his body on his stick.

“Did you notice them?” Steinman said after the little troop had passed. “I know the whole history of that family, better than they do themselves. I could tell you stories about their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, all the way back to Ba’al Shem, stories to make their hair stand on end. They don’t begin to suspect.” After a pause, he added in a mocking tone: “We’re lucky the young prince didn’t see us. He’s a terrible bore. He likes to argue and we’d never have gotten rid of him. How about sitting down for a bit?”

He led me to a bench that stood wholly in shadow under a big tree, some way from the promenade. I reminded him that his daughter had said he must be back early. He sat down unhurriedly, made himself comfortable, and spread his coat around him like a blanket.

“Oh, I don’t pay any attention to her,” he said. “She doesn’t run my life. I’ve been here for three weeks, and I’m fed up with being pushed around. I’ve done everything you can think of—I’ve taken salt baths, mud baths, sulfur baths; I’ve drunk waters that tasted like deadly poison; I’ve gone to bed with the chickens. Once in a while a man has to celebrate.” He leaned over, as though to impart a secret. “The fact is, I overindulged a bit at supper tonight. When I have one drink too many, I feel it at once in my feet. My head is clear, but my feet are as though paralyzed.”

“Everybody here seems to know you,” I said.

“It’s high time they should know me,” he replied. There was a note of pride in his voice, although he did his best to conceal it. “This is the seventh year I’ve come to this resort for treatment of hardening of the arteries.”

He went on in great detail about how “arteriosclerosis” actually has two meanings. In the medical sense, the term indicates that the arteries are calcified, that the pipes are getting rusty. But in this resort, he said, the word is used in a different sense, to signify a hardening of the brain. The people who first came here did actually suffer from hardening of the arteries, but gradually the news got around that the place was good for the nerves, and real mental cases began to come. Only the quiet kind, of course, not the violent ones. Thus here you find people in full possession of their faculties alongside madmen: kind of a microcosm of life. You never know whether you’re talking to a mental case, and everyone looks at you suspiciously, too. It drives you to drink. “As for the lot that just went by, I know a bit about them,” he concluded, waiting for me to ask him for details.

“Relations?”

“No,” he said, waving his hand. “I come from Jews of a different kind, Jews who earned their living by the sweat of their brows. There were some great scholars in my family, but still they worked hard for a living. I am a writer myself. I write Hasidic stories for newspapers. Only in that sense are we a bit related. There was a time when there were Jews of a different mettle, really great men who truly saw themselves as the Lord’s representatives on earth, and, no mistake about it, they were real prophets. They knew all the tricks of the Almighty, and He knew theirs. For years on end they wouldn’t be on speaking terms with God—nothing personal, you understand, the argument was about the people of Israel. They would make up with Him on the Sabbath and on holidays. At those times, the Jews would forget all the troublesome things and make their peace with the Lord. Do you follow me? I have a Hasidic soul myself, I am a hundred percent Hasid. But there is no saintly rabbi for me to make my pilgrimage to.”

He proceeded to tell me about the rabbi’s family we had just seen. “The old man travels about from city to city and village to village. He works hard. He is the sole support of the entire family; none of the others lifts a finger. The old man was a fine Jew, but when you have to support such a big crowd, bless them, you have no time to pray for yourself, you’re kept too busy praying for others. A man like that has no time to look at a book. He told me once that if it weren’t for the dignity of his ancestors, he would feel that he was an out-and-out fraud. For what is he himself? What has he got to sell? Has he the time to take stock of himself? To intercede with the Lord that the Jews may be more prosperous? Has he the authority to give orders to those on high? How long can he depend on his grandfather’s favor with God? There is a limit to everything. You can’t forever hide behind your grandfather’s skirts.

“The old man used to tell me all this himself. The burden of earning a living weighs heavily on his shoulders. You should see how well his family lives—like kings. But recently he has become embittered, taciturn. When I run into him, I can see that he is dying to pour his heart out to me, but he just shrugs his shoulders as though to say, ‘What’s it matter? My days are numbered anyway.’

“Did you notice the one who walked ahead of the others, with the elegant hat, the unkempt beard, and the rosy-red complexion? They brought him all the way from America. And he, too, is of noble descent. Did you see his wife? She was the one with the green shawl. A real beauty, though that’s not her own hair—she wears a wig. She is pregnant at the moment—you see how much gossip I know?

“Shall I tell you what went on when the pampered young man came over from America? It’s almost beyond my powers. It was arranged that the young people should meet in Vienna. The future bride came from Poland, her fiancé from America. They feasted their eyes on each other, and parted—she went back to Poland, and he to America. Did they like each other? That is beside the point—they had been betrothed long before this. A year later they were reunited in Poland, and the wedding was celebrated. I’ll be brief, but you must have read about it in all the newspapers. Fifteen thousand Hasidim carried on for days on end in an outdoor celebration. They were lodged like gypsies in tents, there were theatrical performances every day, the masters of ceremony cracked jokes and made up funny poems. The men dressed up in women’s clothes and wrapped kerchiefs around their beards. They rode horses, too—just like real Cossacks. This went on for all of two weeks. I myself attended the wedding—and, well, I’ve seen quite a lot, a lot of things during my lifetime, but I’ve never seen anything like that. There were about a thousand shnorrers—beggars—it was as though all the Jewish poor were holding a convention. The quarrels and brawls at their tables were indescribable. The waiters, the cooks, the helpers, the supervisors—you should have seen how hard they worked: they were really run ragged. And all the different orchestras, the magical violinists, the singers with their special accompanists, and the little boys whose voices hadn’t changed yet, each of them with his own instrument and really God-given talent. Whole oxen were slaughtered, not to mention the chickens, the capons, the geese, and even the turkeys that were consumed. They ate and drank and danced—they danced until they dropped from exhaustion, and all this because it’s a great merit before God, a sacred duty. They really did their best to observe this commandment at least—I wish I could say they were as careful about all the other 613 commandments.

“During all this, the old man wandered around looking like a ghost. He knew that he’d have to pay for it all in the end, that he was now getting another mouth to feed, and another household. None of his sons has achieved anything of the slightest importance. When one of them loses his position as rabbi in a small town, he doesn’t hesitate a moment but moves back, lock, stock, and barrel, with wife and children, to his old father. More than once during the wedding celebration, the old man stopped near me and was just about to tell me what he was really thinking, but then he would sigh, make a resigned gesture, and walk away.”

Suddenly we heard someone close to our park bench, panting hard. It was Steinman’s daughter, out of breath. She had found us despite the dark. “You’ve played a trick on me, father. How could you do such a thing?”

“What’s the matter? What happened?”

“I’ve been sending out search parties. I myself have been all over the park trying to find you. You should have been in bed two hours ago!” She dropped onto the bench, breathing heavily. “My own father is going to give me some serious condition—heart or lungs, or some other ailment. And it’s all your fault,” she said to me. “He behaves so long as he has no one to talk to. But the moment he makes a new acquaintance, there’s no holding him.”

“Frania dear,” Steinman said, stroking his daughter’s head. “You won’t have to suffer much longer, you know—another fifty years at most.”

“Cheep! cheep! cheep! Come, come, chickens, ducks, geese! Come and get it! Cheep! cheep!”

I opened my eyes and looked out the window. Everything was still, except for the Gentile girl of the night before who was calling the barnyard to breakfast. The little chicks, still unsteady on their feet, fought over every grain of corn. She teased them by throwing the grain as far as possible, but they were all over the yard, clucking angrily. I don’t know what it was that had wakened me—the noise from the poultry yard or the quaint kind of Yiddish the hired maid spoke. She darted barefoot among the fowl, like some older sister of theirs. The pullets looked like children wearing shorts next to the fully feathered adults, but they were the most arrogant in their greediness, and no matter how much they got, they wanted more.

“Chickens! Ducks! Geese! Cheep, cheep!” The girl went on with her quaint accent, stressing the last syllable of every word. Then she noticed my head at the open window. Seeing my surprise, she proceeded to dazzle me by wishing me “a good awakening” in Yiddish, and before I could reply, she burst out laughing. Her big, slightly irregular teeth laughed more than her voice did. Then she went back to her chickens, now fluttering angrily around her, as though to reproach her for not giving them her full attention. As she nimbly threw bread crumbs to them, she sang:

She sang lustily, all the time eyeing me to observe my astonishment.

The morning was still damp with the freshness of dawn. The fowl kept running in and out of some sheds, next to which was a privy. You could see through its closed door where golden strips of light slanted, and big yellow and green flies getting in through the larger cracks, buzzing angrily a moment inside, and then coming out again. The buzzing was the only sound, apart from the servant’s young voice.

The ducks stood around a big basin that held soaked bread. Buchlerner was already up and about, turning over the chairs which been piled upside down for the night.

“I see you’ve gotten up early your very first day here,” he called, and stopped what he was doing for a moment. “Today, God willing, we’re going to have really superb weather. Just look at it—a sight like this is a real treat. Look at that hill over there—it’s not going to be too hot a sun today, just a nice, gentle, caressing sunshine.”

On the hill he pointed to there was a little wood which, from where we stood, looked like a clump of five or six trees. It was a serene hill, and the sun was just crowning the few trees at the top with its first rays. The patch of sky immediately above glowed copper, but to left and right the sky dimmed gradually to a less brilliant light.

Buchlerner was still gazing at the rising sun. His features now looked shrunken like a mummy’s. Nearly all his hair had disappeared. There was no highlight to give relief to a single feature—his face looked like some piece of fruit from which all the juice had been squeezed out. He was wearing a tattered shirt with sleeves cut short, linen trousers, and bedroom slippers.

“Since you got up with the birds, you should take a long walk to work up an appetite. You could make the tour of the village, or you might visit the hill over there. The climb will do you good. There’s a little stream to cross, where people splash about all day, but there’s a narrow board across it. I warn you, walk straight ahead, don’t look back, because if you do, you may not turn into a pillar of salt, but you’re sure to fall in. Well, nothing to worry about, the stream’s very shallow, you’d only get your clothes wet. But you may not want all that exercise. After all, a hill is just for the pleasure of looking at it. Go to the park, and see what it looks like without the crowds. The grass is fresh, like in the Garden of Eden, and the flowers are beginning to open.

“I know, I know,” he went on, “I’ve no call to give advice, don’t pay any attention to me. If you’ve got young healthy legs, it can’t hurt you to climb the hill. We really have a smaller hill, though, something between a walk and real climb. Not that it’s very steep, you know—you won’t even be winded. Just turn to the right when you’re past the village. It’s not very big, but there are historical associations. Poniatowski made a heroic stand on that hill. But why am I boring you with all this? Our shikse here knows more about it than I do.”

“I’ve told you a thousand times, Mr. Buchlerner, that my name isn’t shikse. My name is Andzia.” Her Yiddish came out singsong, with a coquettish effect.

“Do you hear how well she speaks our language? Better than my daughters do—they’re ashamed of speaking Yiddish, but she likes to speak nothing else, just for the heck of it. Unfortunately she is deaf—when you ask her to sit, she lies down. This
besulah
”—he used the Hebrew word for
maiden
—“is a native of the village.”