The Glatstein Chronicles (34 page)

Father’s cap would have made him look somewhat of a stranger, and the boy standing at a distance would have watched his father wipe his plate with a piece of bread while he chattered at Aunt Etka, who sat peculiarly still outside the barracks, eyes lowered, as though dazzled by the sight of so many soldiers’ boots. “Etka, tell Ita Rocheshe from me that may God give her as much pleasure as she has given me. I could kiss her hands.”

Mother’s hands knead little crescent cakes full of raisins and cinnamon. When she takes them out of the oven, their fragrance fills the house. Mother kneads them with her own hands, so that afterwards her hands smell of cinnamon and warmth and butter cookies.

All this would have taken place in any event. The little boy would have walked back by the same road, past the orchards, the flower gardens, the barking dogs, under a somewhat cooler sun. But no one would have seen him, had not that lonely eye on the East Side excavated him out of the faraway past, out of the remote origin of a first, unsteady, childhood step.

The eyes of the young man later searched out the image because he felt that he was at a new point of origin, taking a new first step, that he might become one of the crowd and be swallowed up forever, did not someone seize this image and hold it fast—someone who walked at his side step by step through the East Side, redolent of warm togetherness—fruits, peddlers, girls going to the movies, the cool night air, the flashing lights, the foreign sights and sounds and smells, tangy and invigorating.

And so, now the searching eyes of the thin young man had followed the little boy, followed him back home, where, one day, he found for the first time an adult self-assurance at the sight of another little boy crawling around on all fours like a kitten with a large human head.

Then came glimpses of frost-covered windows, long winter nights oddly discrete in time, shutters shut fast, and then rain and the mud with the coming of milder days.

It was warm at home. Father was back now. No one even remembered when he had not been there. As she worked on her embroidery, Mother sang an old lullaby, “
In dem beys hamikdesh, in a vinkele kheder,
” the widow Zion sits in a corner of the ruined Temple, alone. Little brother no longer crawled on all fours but walked and fell down and got a bloody nose. Grandfather stood by the tile stove warming his hands. And there were now other people living downstairs. That was Sheindele, the whore, who blessed the candles every Friday evening, then put them out, and went to meet her soldiers. The little boy must have grown by then, for the older people were careful about what they said in front of him; yet certain words reached his ears and stayed there like cobwebs.

Sheindele’s daughter, who had red pigtails, enticed him up to the attic and played with him. She spoke Polish. It was dark and suffocatingly hot in the attic, and it was fun when she clapped her hands and sang a song he did not understand. It was ticklish, warm, and dark, like the attic.

The young man who was looking back took the boy and his aunt and built a courtyard around them. There was a house, and a meadow in the distance. There were aunts and uncles, and there was even a synagogue. Now the boy was no longer suspended somewhere between his father and mother but was surrounded by a host of friends in the yard, and there were many grown-ups, and acrobats who turned somersaults, men who swallowed swords, strong men who held up heavy doors, balancing them on their teeth, and blind singers led by barefoot boys with old eyes.

But this was much later, long after the walk to the barracks. This was weeks, months, perhaps years after the first recollection. Many summers and winters had gone by, not just one seasonal alternation—from the cold and dark to the warm and bright. There were the seasons of sunlight, always ushered in at Passover, and there were the seasons of cold and wind always ushered in at Sukkot.

At this point the distinctions begin to blur. It is not quite clear whether the little boy was swallowed up and lost in the eyes watching him, the eyes of the thin stranger, or whether the young man prowling the East Side had become the little boy, and slept with him through a summer, a winter, a summer, a winter, very often sixteen hours a day.

An alarm clock roused the grown-ups every morning. They would scratch themselves, mutter, and grumble as they dressed, flushing the toilet again and again. When they had gone, a faint smell pervaded the rooms where they had performed their hasty morning ablutions. A quarter of an hour later the same faint smells were being exuded through the pores of their skins as legs pressed against legs, buttocks against buttocks, in the crowded subways, rickety elevated trains, and overcrowded trolley cars. To the rumble and clank of the morning traffic, to the screech of brakes, he went right on sleeping.

Because the two had merged, the young boy suddenly found himself in New York. He walked about, looking up at everything. True, now he was no longer accompanied by his aunt. His aunt’s tallow face had by this time lost nearly all its shape. First she married a capmaker who had a daughter by a previous marriage. After she divorced him—he had maltreated her—she married an elderly widower, and this marriage, too, ended in divorce. All these marriages and divorces had so disturbed her that she moved in to keep house for her older sister. She had become even more shriveled up, still tinier, and she spoke less and less often.

The little boy walked about New York by himself and was surprised that he could understand everything he saw. He smiled to himself and never wanted to grow up. The foreign language felt good in his mouth, and he was perfectly happy to make a fresh start all on his own.

He attended a precollege cramming school, where he made a brave show of being grown up. The other young men held down jobs, earned their own living, and the girls kept crossing their legs to make him restless until he felt the legs were around his neck, tickling and choking him. But he was well aware that he was still little, that he had not grown up and was very much underweight. He weighed very little more than he had the day he went to visit his father at the army barracks.

And while the little boy walked about the streets of New York, the grotesquely puny East Side youth, no more than skin and bones, and homesick to boot—little more than a pair of prying eyes—began to play tricks. At will, he could transport himself back to Lublin, every recollection of which he would savor, collect, build into a monument. Or he would use it to invent a whole separate slice of life, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, leaving out no detail of the weather, the time of day, the exact quality of the pinpoint of sunshine piercing the clouds.

The little boy pretending to be an adult attended the school on the East Side, where tired tailors, shirtmakers, and pocketbook stitchers poured their last ounces of strength into the dream of one day making their way out of the dark sweatshops and climbing one rung higher up the ladder. The gloomy shop itself was in the process of renovation, with added windows, shorter working hours, and a proud, demanding workforce. Next on the ladder stood the podiatrist who removed your corns, and he in turn was looked down upon by the not unkindly pharmacist just above him, while from still higher smiled with yet more assured superiority the dentist, the lawyer, and the doctor.

Rather off to one side of the ladder where the angels climb, stepping on the corns of the first professional with his little clippers and nail files—angels climbing down while they imagine they are climbing up—stood one teacher with a fat Mephistophelian face who, when he laughed, laughed until his eyes shrank, growing smaller and smaller.

Afflicted with a Jewish accent, this teacher could not get a job in the city schools. In reaction to this great misfortune, he deliberately exaggerated his accent, vaudevillized it into a kind of Galician–German–English–East Side idiom. He would stand there chanting his Yiddish-English in front of all the ambitious get-aheads, mocking their hopes, their ambitious plans, their careful calculations. Like a very efficient, experienced baker, he would pop a garment worker into the oven, brown him a bit, and then pull him out a pharmacist. He had to move quickly, for time was short, the sweatshop used up your strength, and the years addled your brains. But while he was waiting for his recipe to achieve its work, before the finished product appeared—a man transformed, a new chapter opened in his life—he would stand there and laugh until you thought he would burst, and the whole class would burst out laughing with him. His malice was kindhearted. He would never have gone to the trouble of hurting anyone, though when his students clustered around him, begging for it, his hatred of them was a purely passive hatred.

He would often speak in rhymed couplets, until the walls of the classroom echoed in rhythm. He taught English history and literature in the singsong chant of a reading from the Hebrew Bible. He really knew English literature, and his clowning helped a great deal to make his lessons stick—to impress them upon the slowest students. Some funny tag made every single bit of information memorable. He made fun of Shakespeare’s heroes, of their loves, passions, and murders; he ridiculed the heroes of history.

“Did Shylock go to the synagogue and say his prayers before he set out to cut off his pound of flesh?” he would ask his class. It would answer him as one man, “No! No!”

“Have you ever seen a Jew eating a steak cut out from a living goy?”

“No!” the class would thunder.

“Was Shakespeare a great poet?”

“Yes, sir!” they all answered dutifully.

“Was Shakespeare a great anti-Semite?”

“Yes, he was!” the class would answer, shaking with laughter.

The teacher enjoyed all this as much as his pupils. His eyes grew very tiny when he recounted how one of the Kings Charles cried out to his mother on some historic occasion or other: “Mother! Hand me my rattle, I’m going off to battle!”

His wife was a homely woman, and in his spare time he wrote ardent erotic poems which were published in obscure Greenwich Village magazines. His more innocent poems were posted on the school bulletin board. The principal was enough of a businessman to advertise the talents of his teachers, to stress how far out of the ordinary they were. One poem addressed to a girl began: “You are the horse, I am the rider—You are the wave, I am the rower who wields the oar.”

“What do you want to spend all your time on this for,” he would mock us. “Open a candy store, or sell kiddie clothes! Get married, wear a vest with a watch and a gold chain, make your wife grow a respectable behind.”

When the bell rang for recess, he would stuff his mouth with chocolate and refuse to answer questions. “I am a strict union man,” he would say, “I don’t work overtime.” And he would go right on chewing, cheeks distended like a child’s.

Everyone envied him and would have laid money he was going to live two hundred years. They all lost their bets the day he died on the elevated, on his way to school to give us more lessons in laughter.

At about that time the little boy had a more personal encounter with death; he looked at it sideways so as not to look it straight in the eyes. There was a perpetually tired young man with dark eyes who had flunked his geometry exam five times, but in the end managed to get into college. Perhaps the examiner had felt sorry for him and helped him to get a foot on the next rung of the ladder. They had spent the whole evening walking—the young man and the little boy. The young man planned the life now opening up to him, in the closest detail. He showed his sweetheart’s picture, told how much money he had in the bank. The money would last for exactly two and a half years, and then his sweetheart would help out with her savings. A few days later he was dead of pneumonia. The little boy could not forget his dark eyes, intense with hope. Later he once caught sight of the dead young man’s sweetheart in the street. She was alone, and paced back and forth. He hesitated, wanting to go up to her and tell her he understood how all her planning had come to nothing; he wanted her know that he knew about the bank book and how everything was fixed for two and a half years. But he was afraid to speak to her. Obscurely, he felt that she was in love with death.

Death even knocked at the thin wall of his tiny furnished room. It was Patsy’s hand on the other side of the wall. Patsy was the imaginary name of a man he never saw. The boy had to imagine a face, a figure, for someone who lived so close to him. He could hear him on the other side of the wall, had heard him sing and moan on his creaking bed. Between his bed and the stranger’s bed stood a wall, a poor wall with the paint peeling off, a hopeless wall like all the walls of all dingy furnished rooms.

The boy could hear him groan at night, hear him talk in his sleep, but he never laid eyes on him. Perhaps the man was speaking to him through the wall, in the strange terrifying language of the night, when every creaking noise holds myriad terrors and every human cry seems a scream for help.

One night the man groaned so heartrendingly, and tossed about so wildly on his bed, that the boy was unable to sink back into his own nightmare territory, which all airless, musty furnished rooms turn into when the lights are out. The next morning the whole house was in an uproar. The boy’s neighbor had “taken gas.” He had stopped up every crack, plugged up the keyhole, and stuffed rags around the windows so that no one would smell gas and stop him.

The policemen slapped his cheeks and pounded him on the back. Their attempts to discover his identity were unsuccessful. The old landlady did not even remember his name.

“Patsy! Patsy!” The policemen tried to rouse him from the death he had so carefully arranged, inventing a name as soft as his dead cheeks and as hairy as the hairy chest they were kneading. “Get up, Patsy, hurry, or you’ll be late!”

Patsy, the imaginary man who sang on the other side of the wall and had given up the ghost groaning and tossing on the creaky bed, made no sound. Maybe it was because “Patsy” was not his name, or maybe there had been some secret purpose in his taking his life, and he was resolved not to be called back.