The Glatstein Chronicles (35 page)

The coolly deliberate death of the unknown man, the abrupt end of the young man who had worked so hard at his geometry in order to make a new start in life (he was a buttonhole maker), and the sudden stifling of the teacher’s sardonic laughter—all these deaths had gripped the boy mightily, as though to pull him forcibly out of himself and to put some kind of foundation under his feet. He needed a foundation after all—if only one of sadness—for how much longer could he wander around phlegmatically with that original wonderment as if his destination were still the army barracks with his father wearing a soldier’s cap?

But a dark cloud descended over the world. The little boy decided to postpone his efforts to get ahead in New York, even to postpone adulthood, until his alter ego—the thin young man who had come to America and lately traded perspectives with his younger self—had done with his homesick excursions to Lublin and learned why there had been no letters and how his father and mother, brothers, and little sister were doing.

He sat in Doctor Tenenbaum’s office and looked into the doctor’s old eyes. How long ago had it been when the doctor had come back from the Russo-Japanese war, a young man with a clipped blond beard and earnest desires to be a healer of the poor? How many years had it been since he had come to our house, looking wistfully out the windows over the yellow-green meadows that spread for miles in every direction? “Air! Air!” he had said on that visit, putting into it all the hunger of children condemned to live in stuffy basements. “You are to be envied. You don’t know how much you are to be envied.” Doctor Tenenbaum had visions so vast that he could not see what was under his nose. He never noticed that before the meadows started his eyes had been offered the spectacle of poor, draughty, rain-soaked rooms, and one privy in the backyard for the entire household.

But Doctor Tenenbaum had been young then, and now he was old. He sat there in a patched-up coat and comically short trousers, which must have had the cuffs trimmed several times. He was a tiny man, but he looked even tinier when he was sitting down—his feet did not reach the floor. It was said that people in the city had stopped going to him, that rumors about him had been spread so systematically and cruelly that a few months earlier he had been evicted from his apartment. Soon he lost his entire practice. He sat all day long playing chess with retired doctors in a club. Father still consulted him out of loyalty to that other man, the doctor he remembered coming back from the Russo-Japanese war, out of loyalty to the years when Father’s beard had been blond, too, and the doctor took care of the children. Mother had always suffered from one complaint or another, but she rarely paid attention to her own troubles; as for Father, he was sure that there was no illness that could not be sweated out in the bathhouse.

Now the doctor was sitting on a rickety chair in his shabby office, swinging his short legs, and was saying that there was no hope for her. You could touch it with your hand—a tumor as big as a walnut. By now anyone could feel it, it didn’t take a doctor.

There was no hope! Not for himself, not for Mother, not for the whole generation of men whose beards had been blond during the Russo-Japanese war; not for any of the mothers in labor at that moment, or bringing up their children.

No hope—that was the diagnosis of the whole generation. His own wife had died a few years earlier. It was as though he was marching at the head of his army of patients, leading them resolutely down, down, down.

“You see, your mother is not really suffering from any illness. She is sick with the disease of death. Death is the very opposite of life.” When he said it, he gave his little child’s legs with their tiny shoes a swing.

The doctor was not saying this to the little boy nor to his alter ego, the East Side companion, but to a third party, one who could scarcely extricate himself from their tangle. He could recognize this third embodiment of himself only in occasional flashes. For instance, whenever he remembered the teacher who had died suddenly on his way to school, what he saw was the figure of Richard Corey. But Richard Corey did not belong, he was sure of it, in the storehouse of the boy’s memories, nor did the young man on the prowl ever notice him in his wandering between Lublin and the East Side. Richard Corey was part of the dream baggage of a third party that had become entangled with the other two precisely because of his efforts to disentangle himself from them—grasping at every straw that would help him achieve clarity.

It was obvious that the man the doctor had been speaking to was the same man who had just been riding in a droshky, and who could not keep from screwing up his eyes, even though the dusk was darkening. It was like a dream come true. It was just a short ride from the railroad station to his father’s house, but the street was as though paved with miracles. Every stone, every rock, whole mountains and valleys cried out to be noticed, so that it had seemed the drive would never end. But it had lasted only a moment, and he had not captured it all. The sky had indeed been rent open, but his eyes had been closed. Now he was traveling on the other side of his dream. His mother had died on the first side, old friends had come up and spoken to him, the old houses had given him a message, but the droshky went no farther—it had stopped for a greeting, a wink of the eye, a smile, a sad memory, a forgetting—and now it was already leaving again.

And if he had had the strength, if he could be sure he would be obeyed, he would have begged the driver to take pity, he would have cried with his last strength, “Let me out! Let me out! Stop!”

The droshky and the driver’s indifferent back were leaving everything behind. A dream may last a whole twenty years, and the moment of fulfillment be only a moment, barely caught hold of, barely glimpsed in the impetuous onrush of time. Now he was already weaving around himself the strands of a new dream, one that devours time and flesh and bones so greedily that it scarcely matters whether you wake up or just keep on sleeping. The dream will dream itself on and on, and gradually your own children, your own grandchildren, one by one will appear in the dream.

A little rabbit paused, one leg slightly raised. It scratched itself, listening intently for the least sound of danger. I lay flat on my back, careful not to frighten the creature. For its sake I broke off the thread of my memories. It was warm in the sunshine. Suddenly I heard footsteps, and the rabbit, startled, scampered away.

Steinman was standing there. He had caught sight of me in the grass the moment he got to the top of the hill. “How have you already discovered my hill?” he exclaimed. “I come here every morning to enjoy the view. What do you mean coming here without my permission?” He sat down on a bench, and I pretended to apologize.

“Well, the fact is I don’t resent your being on this hill as much as your having gotten up early and come here ahead of me. Usually, I am the first here. I make it up here slowly, groaning and cursing like Balaam, but the moment I’ve gotten to the top and look out on all this, I bless what I see. I look around at all the little hotels the Jews have built here, and I am overcome, I sing out loud, ‘How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob!’

“Over there, to the left, is an old monastery with an old graveyard. A great deal of blood has been shed on this hill, and not only way back in the days of Poniatowski. In the Great War the hill was an important strategic spot. It changed hands several times. The Russians fought like lions, driving back the Austrians time and again. There weren’t any Jews here until just a few years ago, and no Jew would have dared climb the hill. Now most of the Gentiles have moved away. Do you see the tents? ‘How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob!’—may they stay here for years to come.”

I glanced at him sidewise and could see that he had not had enough sleep. He half-closed his eyes when he spoke, but his voice was all the warmer. Time and again he would lose the thread of what he was saying, then pick it up again, lightly. His tone was wistful.

“I don’t think you slept well?”

“When you’re as old as I am, young man, you won’t sleep well either,” he said. It was almost a rebuke. His eyes closed but he forced them open again, and he shook his head several times to drive away his sleepiness. Then he went on, talking in the tone of someone who has been interrupted in a long speech:

“I’ve been a widower for twenty years now. My daughter is all I have left. It’s because of me she never married; she nurses her old father instead. Believe it or not, but the older I get the more I understand the importance of having male heirs. The Oriental longing for a son, an heir—how well I understand it now. I too am looking for an heir, though if you ask me what I have to bequeath, I would find it hard to reply. Very often I sit and think, and—a flash of lightning, thunder, hocus pocus—and I see my son and heir standing there. But what have I got to give him? It’s a difficult problem. My father reached the ripe old age of ninety-nine. He just fell asleep in his chair. Once I believed I’d live as long, but my heart tells me that isn’t to be. Well, if I am asked to go, I have no choice. By the time father died, I was myself a father, I already had gray hair. I turned gray at an early age. I know, your generation is a generation of skeptics. You’ll want to know what I have to pass on to you. I often think to myself that I’d like to adjure you to hold something dear, but what it is I haven’t found out yet. And time is moving on.”

He spread his coat on the grass and lay flat on his back beside me. The words that came out of him were like soap bubbles, rising and bursting in the air. He closed his eyes and hummed a little tune.

“Even as a little boy I knew I was not alone, though I want you to know that the word
alone
fits me perfectly. I was raised by an uncle of mine, in a Polish woods where he was forester. Have you any idea what a Polish woods was like in 1860? Just close your eyes and try to imagine.

“However, being alone never bothered me. I knew all about my ancestors. Oh, what saints and scholars! On my father’s side I descend from Maharam Tiktin, on my mother’s from Magen Abraham. I knew that I was descended from nineteen generations of rabbis. The continuity was broken in the woods. But with such prominent ancestors, how can anyone be alone, even in the woods? Note also that my uncle was a fiery scholar, and that he had written my father, asking that I should come and stay with him, so he could study with me. He had a license to be a rabbi. But he was obliged to work, and work hard, for a living.”

He again began to hum a little tune, his sleepy voice growing still sleepier. “Ah, a tune. A tune solves everything, even the toughest problems. There were among the rabbis inarticulate souls who couldn’t speak to God through the Torah, so they spoke to Him through melody.”

Unexpectedly he sat up, pressed his hands hard against his eyes, and wiped the lids, as though to squeeze all his weariness out of them. When he reopened his eyes he actually did look refreshed.

“A little nap like this, talking in my sleep, rests me more than a night in bed. In bed my tired old bones have a hundred complaints. Well, let’s go back, you surely must have worked up an appetite by now. Buchlerner’s herring is one of the marvels of the world. You have to be a connoisseur to appreciate it. It is reddish, it does smell a bit, and it looks a bit rotten, but for gourmets that’s the thing. It has a tonic effect.”

We walked leisurely down the hill, and he led me to the hotel by another route. “Think over what I’ve told you,” he said to me on the way. “A man cannot calmly close his eyes for eternity if there’s no heir waiting for him, ready to take over his father’s riches. My father in his old age used positively to long for death, the way a pious Jew longs to do some new good deed. Needless to say, his shroud had been ready for him for many years. He often took it out and looked at it. To him a Jewish funeral was one of the good things every Jew is entitled to. But I walk alone, as the Bible says, and who shall be my heir?”

In front of the hotel several dozen guests were waiting impatiently. As we came up the walk, the hotel owner came out and began impassively to summon his guests by ringing a not very loud hand bell. He shook it in all directions like a lulav, but on seeing us he began to ring it more cheerfully. He raised the bell higher and walked toward us, as though to make a special welcome for Steinman.

Steinman understood the gesture. He walked a little faster, pleased by the special attention, and held himself more erect to give himself dignity. Not until he had gone into the hotel did the rest of the guests surge forward.

After the meal, when Steinman was on his way out of the dining room, his daughter brought him a pill and a glass of water. He popped the pill into his mouth and washed it down with a swallow of water, not even turning around to look at his daughter. The pill interrupted him while he was speaking, at the very moment that he was carefully analyzing an idea.

He had been talking to a man in a light-colored cap with checks. The man was shorter than Steinman, and his considerable paunch made him look even shorter than he was. Tufts of curly hair stuck out here and there from under the cap. Even with his head covered, you could tell this was all the hair he had left. Indeed, the tufts might almost have been part of the cap.

Steinman introduced me to the man, who asked me a number of questions, then suddenly cut off my attempts to reply. “That’s fine, I know who you are now, no need to go to the trouble of telling me. And now I want to tell you something. You missed being my son only by a hair.

“Ah, I see you’re surprised. Well, I was strongly urged to marry your mother, and the match was well under way, but your mother just as strongly objected to my background. I liked her very much. I wish she had felt the same. On top of it all, I was a poor boy and couldn’t make her forget my humble origins by a show of wealth. Anyhow, we had almost reached the point of celebrating our wedding when suddenly the whole thing was called off. You see, Mr. Steinman, he is almost my son.”

I was about to tell him that the girl he once wanted to marry had recently died, but he did not give me the chance. He was too carried away at discovering that I was a sort of relative of his.