The Glatstein Chronicles (33 page)

“
Besulah, besulah
—phew, I hate such words!” the girl said with a grimace.

“Of course she hates to be a besulah. How long have you been fed up with being a besulah?” When he said this, I realized it was a standing joke between them, repeated for my benefit.

“Ah, Mr. Buchlerner, you’re being naughty!” She shrugged her shoulders, and went back to her ducks and chickens.

In the village I passed a little shop out of which drifted odors of kerosene, herring, and tobacco. In the street, an old beggar had already taken his place, sitting against a tree. He scratched himself; and made the sign of the cross, while his old jaws chomped away. He would break off a small piece from a very dry larger piece of bread that lay in the lap of his tattered short overcoat. When he chewed, he made such dreadful faces that his poverty and blindness were much more affecting than normally. Each time he had softened up a piece of bread and swallowed it, he would open his mouth and yawn, as though to celebrate the achievement. When he yawned, you could see that he had not a single tooth left. After all this hard work, he would start to beg, holding out a palsied hand, but then he would change his mind and go back to another chomping session, tearing off another bit of dry bread from the piece in his lap.

The hill stood in the center of the village. I climbed up the narrow path that ran around it. From the top there was a view out over sparsely wooded orchards, among which a surprising number of summer cottages were hidden away.

I lay down on the grass. The sun was getting warmer by the minute, and I imagined that it was I who communicated my warmth to it.

I was conscious only of a hazy glow behind my closed eyelids, and I felt that everything around me was drenched in sunlight. This is the place, I thought, where I would rest up from my weeks in Poland before returning to the United States. For twenty years I had been looking forward to this visit, and now I lay there, my bones aching, half-asleep.

Now and then I could not resist the temptation to open my eyes. There was a tree on my right, from which hung a brass image of some saint. The saint had a long beard and a severe, anguished expression. I admired the marvelous workmanship of the icon; it would be easy, I thought, to steal it. But then the silly idea occurred to me that all the church bells would instantly begin to ring, alerted by some secret alarm, should I so much as touch it. It was foolish, but I was afraid even to touch the saint who was watching me with eyes that seemed very much alive. I noticed with pleasure that the old man was a true product of the New Testament. Although he was, in one sense, as much of a patriarch as Jacob, still he came out of another world entirely—perhaps he had been born a Jew but then had been baptized. I wondered what human hand had managed to suggest all this with a few lines on metal. The old saint looked down at me with shrewd eyes.

Looking back at him, I recalled that not so long ago I had been made to play a part in a real Old Testament drama. It had been an exhausting experience, and it was because of it that I was lying here as I was, longing for sleep, long days and nights of sleep.

The Old Testament drama had been set in the building which housed the offices of the Jewish community. On the walls hung portraits of the elders, men whom I had known as a child, but who were long since dead and buried. I had been formally summoned to appear—a messenger was dispatched to say that I, “the American son,” was wanted at the community offices.

At a long bare table, on a long worn bench, sat a row of men with heroic faces. When I came in, all stood, bowed to me, and sat down again without a word.

“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” I asked.

The men who answered my question were modern Jews in the city of Lublin, but they seemed to have stepped out of the pages of the Bible. They were the sons of Heth. One of them, a man with a long, gray, pointed beard, told me that the piece of ground the community was giving me for my mother’s grave would be a bargain at one thousand dollars, but considering that my mother had been a saintly woman, and that I was a guest, and that they did not want to take advantage of a guest, I would not have to pay any more than five hundred dollars. “Five hundred dollars, what is that betwixt me and thee? Bury therefore thy dead,” this Hittite said, like Ephron. “Today is Friday,” he added. “Your mother was a woman of great merit, to have died on Sabbath eve: this means that she will be admitted to Paradise without delay.”

“There is no time to lose,” another Hittite said. “You’re getting the plot practically for a song. You’ll see for yourself, it’s right next to the rabbi’s tomb. There is the tomb”—he pointed to an imaginary plan on the table—“and there is the plot we’re giving you for almost nothing, so that nobody can say we’ve taken advantage of you. Your mother surely deserves that you should act toward her as a faithful son.”

Ita Rachel had lived some seventy years, according to her Russian birth certificate. I was mentally unrolling my own Bible and saying to myself, “These were the years of the life of Rachel.” Ita Rachel was standing impatiently before the open gates of Paradise. There is a death notice with big black letters on her house, but I have still to conclude my deal with the children of Heth, and buy the cave of Machpelah, just a few steps from the rabbi’s tomb.

I got up from my seat and bowed deeply. “I am a stranger, but I am a native of your city. Here I was brought up, and here I came to bury my dead.”

“You’re getting the choicest plot in the cemetery, because she was a pious woman,” a broad-shouldered Hittite said.

I took out the papers, I weighed out the Polish silver to Ephron, and the pact was concluded. The Hittites got up from their bench and bowed deeply to me. “The funeral will take place in half an hour!”

Soon the streets were black with people, and the shops closed their shutters. They would reopen again once the hearse had made its mournful journey across the ill-paved streets, humped like camels.

The sun now weighed heavily on my lids. I knew that the hushed street, and the charity box with its rattling coins, and the advancing carriage, and the men and women following the cortège, and the broken cry that hung in midair—I knew now that none of these things was real, that the movements and noises were only an illusion, that actually they had come to full stop, an absolute stop, that each and all of them had fallen silent for all eternity, and that there was no way of changing this, not by a single hair, that it was the end… . And now that it was all over I wanted to go back to the beginning, to what came first. What did come first? When does the first become the second, the third, the seventieth? Is the first really the first? Who was “first”—could it be the little boy in a dark blue suit and cap, the little boy I now suddenly saw before me in my waking dream?

A little boy wearing a dark blue suit and a cap with visor was skipping along. His mother had buttoned his shoes with a buttonhook, and they squeaked. Now he had put the town far behind him, and his shoes were covered with dust. The houses grew smaller and smaller, until there were no houses at all. Instead, orchards appeared, with all sorts of fruit trees. The pears were just beginning to grow red, and the green apples made your teeth tingle just to look at them. The cherries were big and fat. Flowers were crowding against the iron bars confining them. On a meadow with yellow daisies a cow was lying down, as though too lazy to stand.

The little boy was intoxicated by the smells and colors and began to run. His shoes picked up more dust than before.

“Stop! Don’t run, you’ll get lost!” The woman who scolded him was his Aunt Etka. She was holding a basket in one hand, and with the other was trying to keep a firm grip on him.

Aunt Etka had to squint, walking into the sun. The little boy teased his aunt, and at one moment he succeeded in wrenching free from her, and skipped ahead pretending that he was riding a horse. Then he heard a dog barking and he ran back to his aunt for protection.

“Stop! Don’t bump the basket! You’ll spill the broth, and father won’t have anything to eat.”

By then the boy was wondering whether any broth would be left for his father. The overladen basket was already wet, and the drops of soup made a little path in the sand behind them.

Aunt Etka sat down on a rock and wiped her perspiring face. “It’s quite hot,” she said. “Don’t sit down, you’ll get dirty, you’ll ruin your new pants.”

The basket was still warm although they had walked quite a distance from their home near the Castle. The boy felt fine and was making sounds like “oo-oo-oo.” Suddenly he asked, “Is it still a long way to the barracks?”

“I don’t know. There’s still quite a stretch. It’s so hot!”

“Is it true that father is in the army?”

Aunt Etka was still wiping her face. “Of course he is. Poor man, they gave him no choice.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“The Russkis.”

The little boy could just see a big fellow, with a big Russki nose, standing over his father, ordering him to aim a gun and make it go bang, bang! Father had often showed him with a stick how this was done.

“What does it mean ‘to serve,’ Auntie?”

“To serve is to be a soldier.”

“What is it ‘to be a soldier’?”

Aunt Etka had gotten up and walked carefully with her basket. She did not speak, for the boy had asked his last question casually.

“What’s a soldier?” the boy asked again, this time earnestly. He kicked at the ground and raised a cloud of dust.

“I don’t know, my word, I don’t know.”

“You do too know! Tell me, tell me!” The boy was insistent. Now he began to make a noise like crying, but without tears, because he felt so good, because the orchards smelled so good, because the sun was so warm, and because the dogs had stopped barking.

Every day his aunt carried lunch to his father, who had been called up for three weeks’ duty. That way he didn’t have to eat the tsar’s garbage. Today the boy had made up his mind that he would go along with her, and there had been no way of holding him back. He wanted to see his father wearing his military cap, he wanted to see his uniform.

“Army service!” the aunt said with distaste.

The boy began to gallop away from her on his imaginary horse, shouting, “Service, service!”

“Stop! Don’t, you wild thing!”

Aunt Etka rarely laughed. Her expression always seemed to the boy like a dripping candle. Every year a bit more dripped off it, every year her face shrank and became less firm in outline. But this time, when they walked together to the barracks, her face still had all its original seductiveness. The dripping off had just begun.

His mother stayed at home. She had warm hands when she stroked his head or combed his hair. Somewhere far away his father was doing his term of duty, living in barracks, and now he was walking with his aunt from where his mother was to where his father was.

“Don’t forget to kiss your father’s hand,” his aunt reminded him.

He walked and walked. No one walked behind him or in front of him, no one looked at him, no one was there except for his aunt—and perhaps also a young man, a thin, emaciated young man, watching the boy.

He truly did not take his eyes off the boy or the aunt, as he walked on and on, all by himself in the bustling crowd. And now the young man was by himself once more, without his aunt, in a foreign city, elbowing his way through the others and keeping a bit apart from them. Had he not kept himself apart, in later years, no one would ever have known him as the same little boy who once wore a dark blue suit and a cap with visor.

Now, in the foreign city, he could smell the red watermelons and slightly decayed tomatoes on the squeaky pushcarts. A penny apiece, ladies, only a penny apiece, come and get them, a bargain at six for a nickel!

The air had a cool, clear fragrance. The lights in the windows, the little lanterns on top of the pushcarts, the warm coolness, the signs on the movie houses, the man on the wagon with the watermelons, the Jews leaving the synagogues after evening prayers—all this seemed far away and foreign—more than that, in some other world. For some unknown reason, the most ordinary things had an aura of extraordinary strangeness, of fairy-tale remoteness. This had something to do with the nights and how light it was at night, with the way the colors shimmered at night. It had something to do with the way the nights penetrated your pores, settled around your heart, and even got under your fingernails, the better to sing in every finger.

It was a foreign world, but in the familiar friendly East Side which had just sent Meyer London, one of its own sons, to Congress. He could still see London’s noble features, twinkling eyes, thin sensitive nose. He remembered being in the crowd which had just elected one of its own to Congress, in that foreign world, that foreign city where he was alone, even in the crowd, and walked and walked and was perhaps no more than a pair of eyes still watching the little boy and his aunt carrying the basket.

In the midst of all the delights of the foreign city, the eye of the young man never lost sight of the little boy, kept track of mother at home and father in the barracks, and strained to glimpse again the earliest memory of father and mother, the little boy standing on some sort of precarious bridge between them. Had he ever allowed the little boy to fall out of his sight, the young man would have become no more than an eye that looks ahead, forward, forward, as he makes his way through the enormous bustling crowds—a man apart.

Had this young man not kept his eye on that past, thinking back and always struggling to know where he had come from, no one at all would have seen the little boy with his aunt. Their image on that road would have evaporated like smoke. They would have arrived at the army barracks where the little boy could see his father in the military cap. He would have been too surprised to remember to kiss his father’s hand. His father would have shown him around, the shiny clean guns with their gleaming bayonets, stacked neatly in threes, each three held by a clasp. The black-mustachioed officer would have picked him up and taken him for a ride on his shoulders, the little boy afraid to cry.