The Glatstein Chronicles (36 page)

On the floor of the porch, a woman lay sprawled, smoking a cigarette. Several plush-covered cushions shielded her bulky figure from the wooden hardness. She had a big head topped by a towering coiffure which called to mind the treasure cities the Jews built for Pharaoh. Looking at her, with her back against the wall, you could not miss her broad bosom, and her legs were stretched out in front of her so that no one could get by. People who got as far as those legs turned back: no one wanted to take the responsibility of disturbing her. She looked like a big but precariously balanced building: were she made to move, the elaborate coiffure would tumble down, the bosom would fall to the floor with a thud—it would be a disaster. But for all that she looked so comfortable, she was managing to make her long earrings jangle noisily as she disposed of the ash from her cigarette with masculine neatness. At closer quarters she looked like a gray-haired gypsy.

“Roza,” my new acquaintance said to her, “I want you to meet this gentleman—he might have been our son. I’m sorry, I meant to say my son.” He still could not get over it. He looked at me tenderly, as though I really were related to him, and he told the whole story all over again. She went right on smoking, an expression of studied boredom on her face.

“Now, Mister Finkel, Mister Finkel,” she said in a mocking tone and gave him a look as though he ought to know better than tell her such things. Not only he but I too was taken aback by her attitude. He looked at me helplessly.

“My second wife,” he said in a scarcely audible whisper, with a wink, as though this explained everything. “My second wife.” I must understand his position, and see for myself there was no arguing with her. He made a slight show of character, nonetheless, affectionately linking his arm with mine, as if to show that nothing had come between our kinship, no matter what his wife might think. He resumed his favorite topic.

“No,” he said, “your father may be a fine man, but speaking from a practical point of view, your mother didn’t make the right choice. I am known in Lublin as a wealthy man. I own several big apartment houses, one right next to the Saxon Garden. Do you know what property is worth in that neighborhood? And people think that I am worth”—here I expected him to drop a big figure like a bomb, but he softened the shock, “People think that I am worth about five times as much as I am.”

Steinman was getting restless, just a bit irritated that no one was paying any attention to him. He turned away, but my Lublin acquaintance caught him by the sleeve. “God bless you, Mr. Steinman, you can’t just stop in the middle of your story and walk out on me.”

Steinman was not appeased. He walked over to a chair and sat down with the air of a man who wants to be alone. But when we drew up rocking chairs next to his, he became friendly again.

“You didn’t interrupt me at all,” he said modestly. “After that enormous meal, I was remembering how we used to eat fifty or sixty years ago. Food is an important matter. We speak of national eating habits. And it is true that food has a character all its own. When I think back to when I was a child, I always remember a slice of bread rubbed with garlic. I can see the bread and smell the garlic, and see my mother’s hand holding it out to me. It is part of my childhood. But I’ve come a long way since then—I must have been about four. Now I eat pills.”

“May you live long, Mr. Steinman, I wouldn’t want to miss anything you say,” Finkel said warmly. “You explain everything so clearly that it’s a pleasure to hear you talk. As a young boy I once happened to go to Galicia, and whenever I remember the food there, everything comes back—the sights, the smells—and all my senses are reawakened.” Finkel was very pleased with his eloquence. “Take a word like
beans,
which we call
bonen.
In Lublin some call them
boyne,
others say
bob
or
fasolyes.
But when I use the Galician term, I can at once see the water carrier leaving the Saturday services. His clothes are shabby and ragged, but on his head is a worn fur cap, which makes him look like a poor rabbi. That was Galicia.”

A tall army officer came up the front walk through the trellised gate. He came right up the steps and walked straight up to a man sitting by himself. The officer beckoned to him with one finger, and the other rose and followed him as though hypnotized. It looked like some unusually important occasion, but without a word they sat down at a table nearby, set up some chess pieces, and in a moment were deeply engrossed in a game.

“I remember the barrels with pickles,” Finkel went on—and Steinman gave him a friendly smile. He enjoyed this kind of light conversation after breakfast. “I remember the sauerkraut, and an apple that was dug up from the cold barrel, an apple that could have brought the dead back to life. Chopped onions with eggs was a royal dish. We also used to eat something which I can call only the semblance of a soup. Once in a while there was a bit of meat in it, and you had to fish for it with your spoon—yes, really, we had to fish for it in the soup. Just imagine—this Galician family of six trying to divide half a pound of meat, a rare treat for them. Ah, the poverty was terrible!”

Warming up to his subject, he took off his cap and wiped the sweat off his ruddy hairless head. His skin had large yellow spots. The strands of dead hair stood out wildly around the bald pate.

“You couldn’t complain about the bread. The dough was mixed on Thursday, and Friday at daybreak bread was baked for the whole week. We also had pancakes with milk, or kasha with milk. Beans and meat were served with a spoon, but on Saturdays we had
cholent
and one meal with fish which, even when it was stuffed, tasted like inferior herring. Also peas, and noodle pudding with fat. On weekdays we had fish once in a while too but this was a different kind of fish, with lots of bones. You had only to taste it to know it was just an ordinary day of the week. And then the little rolls, and the potatoes baked like chestnuts, which had a special taste when eaten with sour cream. A slice of bread with chicken fat and salt was a great treat. And all this poverty and misery was washed down with a chicory brew black as ink, with a muddy foam. Ah, it was grand to be alive!” Finkel was almost out of breath just thinking about it, and he put his cap back on. “I was then a boy of fourteen. Galicia!”

“Excellent! I didn’t want to interrupt you,” Steinman encouraged him. “It was excellent.”

“Thank you for letting me pour out my heart. When I try to tell my wife about my childhood, or about food, she makes a sour face and she purses her lips like a little bird. It bores her. She is my second wife, you see,” he added by way of excuse. But he looked in her direction to make sure that she couldn’t hear him.

He pointed at a guest who was just going by, and asked me whether I knew who it was. “See if you can’t remember,” he kept saying, holding up one finger as though he were putting me to some test.

The man did look familiar, as a matter of fact, but I couldn’t remember who he was.

“I’ll give you a hint. He is a feldsher from Lublin.”

“Berl the Medic!” I exclaimed.

Finkel laughed so hard he almost fell off his chair.

“Berl, indeed! Berl the Medic has been in his grave for about twenty years. He was in his eighties even in your time. This one is Szpak—he too is about eighty. But look how straight he walks, like a sergeant. He is deaf as a post. He can’t hear a thing.” He beckoned the old man over and performed introductions. Szpak stood rigid, without saying a word, and left us a moment later.

“He walked away,” Finkel explained, “not because he thinks he is important but because he has entirely lost his sense of hearing. He doesn’t even bother trying; he knows he has been deaf for the last twenty years, so why should he make a fool of himself? And since he can’t hear others, he is too proud to let them hear what he has to say.” Finkel laughed again. “That’s a good one—Berl the Medic! This one gives you quinine for fever, and charges you all of forty pennies, while Berl never asked more than a gulden and used to say with a frankness that could really be touching—are you listening?—he would say, ‘I haven’t the slightest idea what’s the matter with the child.’ Then a woman would come in who could say the formula against the evil eye, she would have the patient urinate on some freshly stewed prunes, and he’d get well in no time at all.”

He looked back in the direction of his wife to make sure she could not hear him reminiscing. She had just lit another cigarette and leaned more heavily against the wall.

“Well, hurry up, it’s your turn!” the officer urged his partner. “Come on, make a mo-o-ove!” he chanted.

His partner said that if he wasn’t allowed to think he’d quit at once. He hated to be hurried, he said, he had to figure things out. After all, chess wasn’t marbles!

“All right, all right,” the officer said, patting him on the shoulder. He was humming a little tune, and it was obvious that he was pleased at having driven the Jew into a corner. But when his Jewish partner calmed down, the officer began to chant again, aping the singsong of Talmud students. “What’s the matter? Make a move, Mister! You can rest on the Sabbath.”

By now his partner was deeply absorbed in figuring out his next move. He was holding a chess piece and took up the singsong tone himself. “Rest up on the Sabbath, rest up on the Sabbath! Make a move, make a mo—o-ove. All right, a move I’ll make,” he intoned. The officer too became absorbed, and soon both were chanting like a duet of sleepwalkers, adding little squeaks to punctuate the silly chant.

“Make a move, make a move!” Then the Jew suddenly switched to a deep bass voice: “Some Sabbath that is, some Sabbath!”

“These chess players are both slightly deranged,” Steinman said. “The Jew is crazier than the army officer, but the officer has an insane hatred for Jews. It’s his misfortune that he is a passionate chess player, and can’t do without Jews. No Jew dares refuse him a game. This man here out of fear sometimes plays ten games on end, and is so exhausted when he is through that he can hardly walk. The officer is a better player, but you should see him when something goes wrong and he loses a game. He turns into a maniac, a murderer, a pogromist, and calls the whole Jewish nation a bunch of cheats and swindlers.”

“It doesn’t take much to turn them into pogromists,” Finkel said in a low voice. “Just look at him—you can see he is out to murder. But psst—he can understand Yiddish.”

“A great-uncle of mine was obliged to play chess with the landowner from whom he leased his farm. He had to be careful never to win,” Steinman said. “Every time he lost a game the landlord abused him, calling him a bungler, an idiot, but once my uncle was careless and won a game. The landlord beat him with a stick so badly that he was in bed for three weeks.”

“They are pogromists by instinct,” Finkel said. “They’d be happy to bathe in our blood.” Now he was speaking in a louder voice, “It started with Pharaoh who bathed in the blood of Jewish children. Why, oh why, why do we deserve this, Mr. Steinman? What do they have against us, Mr. Steinman?”

“Ah, you’re raising fundamental questions,” Steinman said. He had become grave. “You want to go to the root of things. Well, I’ll tell you: they want to destroy us, nothing less. Yes, to destroy us. For instance, take me—I am a patriotic Pole. And yet they’d destroy me too. They want to exterminate us, purely and simply. Yes, exterminate us. May they not live to see the day!”

“But why, why?” Finkel asked with dismay. “After all, there must be a reason. When I was poor they hated me. Now I am a rich man, God be praised, and they begrudge me that too. My father, may he have a bright life in paradise, was a pious Jew, and they hated him. But my son, my only son, is a trefniak, he eats pork and lobster, and never goes near a synagogue—yet they hate him too. Sometimes this thought oppresses me so much that I feel like screaming in the street—why, why?”

“Why? For the Sabbath. What a question! Do you want me to start from the beginning and explain why Cain killed Abel? Cain is their ancestor, they’re the descendants of Cain. They hate us for observing the Sabbath, and they hate us for violating the Sabbath. They hate pious Jews, and they hate freethinkers who eat lobster. They hate our capitalists and they hate our beggars, they hate our reactionaries and they hate our radicals, those who earn their bread and those who die three times a day from starvation. They invent beautiful names for all this, economic causes. Sometimes the ringleader is called Pharaoh, sometimes Torquemada, and sometimes Hitler, may he be accursed, but—

“You know what?” Steinman suddenly switched to another tack. “I witnessed the famous pogrom in Kalisz personally. It is usually called the first pogrom in Poland, though I can’t guarantee that our Gentile friends never went on a murderous binge before that. But since that is the opinion of the historians, and since I am a historian too, I am obliged to stick with the others and call it the first—after all, there always has to be a first time for everything. So we’ll assume this was the first one, though the truth is that anti-Jewish pogroms have no beginning and no end. And the pretext for this first pogrom was the wire marking the Sabbath zone—the eruv. The Gentiles spread the rumor that this wire was a secret Jewish telegraph. This happened fifty-five years ago. Jewish blood ran in streams. I was saved by a miracle, hiding in the synagogue in a book closet. All around me the synagogue was being made a shambles, the hoodlums smashed everything, plundered, stole, tore to shreds, desecrated scrolls of the Torah, they didn’t even spare the famous Torah scroll of Rabbi Yehudah ben Nissan. I suppose you never heard of that relic, but just to give you an idea, there is a legend recorded that when this scroll was written, sparks flew from every letter. And this precious scroll fell into the hands of the wicked ones. Fortunately, the hoodlums didn’t catch sight of me. It was pure luck. A book from that closet where I hid is still in my possession. It is a frayed section of the Talmud, the Book of Baba Bathra. I shall never let go of it as long as I live.”

Finkel’s eyes filled with tears. He looked at Steinman with awe—Steinman who had survived the pogrom in the synagogue. Finkel mentally re-created the scene, and his mouth seemed to be saying the gomel blessing, praising the Lord for rescuing Steinman from mortal danger. “I don’t know whether you’re much older than I,” he finally said, “but there is a difference between one old man and another. When I tell stories, they’re about eating, but when you talk it’s as if someone were reading me a storybook.”