The Glatstein Chronicles (39 page)

“I served as courier for the Congress. I was entrusted with urgent and important letters to Herzl. When he finished reading the messages I brought, his pale sallow face would take on a bit of color. At such moments he looked as though he were tanned by the sun. He would at once write down his replies to the other leaders who were consulting him on tactical questions. I was just the mailman who delivered the sacred messages. Yes, I had the privilege of being Doctor Herzl’s personal errand boy who was entrusted with confidential messages.

“Don’t imagine that we Polish delegates traveled at the time as comfortably—indeed, luxuriously—as the Zionist delegates of today. Far from it. We starved on the trip to Basel. We would take along a few loaves of bread, a jar of butter, and a piece of cheese that had gotten moldy by the time we arrived. We traveled on those hard benches in the third-class coaches of that time, and we had had to work hard to get enough money together for our fares. It was worse than walking there on foot would have been. Many of us were unable to collect even so small a sum as the fare required and traveled without tickets.

“At the Congresses we kept quiet. None of us was ever given the opportunity to take the floor. Had anyone called on us to speak, we would surely have fainted from terror. We raised our hands when a vote was taken. Otherwise we were satisfied to have only walk-on parts in the great drama. But for all that we said nothing, our hearts were nonetheless eloquent with joy, and you could hear them pounding.

“But the moment we who were tongue-tied at the Congresses got back to our little towns, we became so eloquent that no power on earth could have silenced us. Miraculously, in the towns and villages we were the great awakeners. The silent joy we had stored up at the Congresses now burst out in thunderous speeches, our tongues miraculously untied. We shouted out our joy and enthusiasm in the synagogues and the houses of study. We translated the abstruse speeches we had heard into plain Yiddish and thereby made them accessible and understandable. We were the popularizers of the great idea.

“We preached Zionism in the synagogues, but we had our greatest successes in the tailors’ and shoemakers’ synagogues. These good men at once caught the idea that our purpose was not to hasten our redemption but drag it out of the swamp in which it had gotten bogged down. The plain artisans gave us new strength and faith. They were the first to be won over, and not long after them the bastions of the middle class began to come over to us, too.

“They crumbled before our onslaught like the walls of Jericho. True, it took more than a blast of trumpets; it took a great deal of hard work and education. We had to create dozens of different styles of approach—for the pious Jew, for the skeptic, for the agnostic, for the Jew who believed that after his death his body would roll to the Holy Land under its own power. And then there were those who knew all about the signs by which the coming of the Messiah could be recognized. We had to persuade old men, young men, businessmen, and dreamers.

“We turned into poets, statisticians, financial wizards, lay preachers, religious preachers. To each group we had to speak its own language, until even the most pious rabbis began to understand. They were the most difficult group to persuade. They regarded us with the greatest distrust. They, the patient, healthy Jews, had plenty of time to wait for the Messiah. But they finally came to realize that the people was at the end of its tether. They decided that Zionism was, after all, the trumpet signaling the coming of the Messiah. After all, the Messiah could just as well come after the Jews had returned to their homeland.”

Steinman stopped, and his eyes took in the group around him. He looked at each of us in turn, silently. His eyes were sober—or, more accurately, sobered.

“Ah, ah, little children, little birdies, close your eyes,” he said, imitating the tone of someone telling a story to put a child to sleep. “You’re rocking on your chairs like infants in their cradles, and you’re about to doze off. I suppose you’re waiting for the end of my story, but even if I kept talking for a thousand and one days, the story wouldn’t be finished.”

“Well, we understand why that Hungarian witch was happy to give you soup for telling her stories,” one of Steinman’s listeners said. “You’re a real healer of the sick. My word, you could cure the hardened arteries of a thousand Jews with your stories.”

Steinman’s daughter came up and without a word put a pill in her father’s mouth and made him wash it down with a glass of water. Steinman made a face as though he had swallowed something bitter.

“Have you seen the pill? That’s the end of the story. It’s a good thing you reminded me of Jozefa Kubi. This pill takes me straight to Paradise, where Jozefa is enjoying the pleasure of her husband’s company.”

“Don’t say such foolish things,” Finkel burst out. “I won’t let you talk like that. We’ll be visiting this place for many, many years, and you’ll keep on telling us your stories.”

“I suppose you can guarantee that?” Steinman asked with good-?natured mockery.

“I promise you,” Finkel said, jumping up from his chair. “Just a minute, I’ll tell you something. A pious Jew in Galicia once made a wish that whatever my fated life span might be, I should live ten years in addition. Well, I’ll share this gift with you. I declare before all these witnesses that I’m giving you five years.”

“Who else wants to give me a present?” Steinman asked. “Five years is nothing to sneeze at. If everybody here were as generous, I might yet live to be as old as Methuselah.”

“Come, come,” one of the group said to Finkel. “This pious Jew didn’t take your wife into account. She’ll shorten your life by ten years.”

“That’s a silly thing to say,” Finkel retorted, embarrassed. “But just to set your mind at peace, I’ll tell you that my pious Jew did foresee that eventuality. He promised me that my wife would not survive me.”

“Why didn’t you say so to begin with? No wonder you can stand your wife. You have something to live for.”

Everybody laughed at this and there was a general movement of getting up and stretching. At this moment Buchlerner appeared. “Don’t scatter like the chickens,” he said. “We’re about to ring for lunch.”

“We have to take a little walk, at least—we need some fresh air and exercise,” Steinman objected.

“All right, you can have a quarter of an hour. That will give you time to walk all over the village, from one end to the other,” Buchlerner said. “While the tables are being set, you can work up an appetite. I warn you that there’s lots to eat, and as you know, I insist that you eat up what I put on your plates.”

Steinman walked out, followed by his listeners. At first they let him walk ahead, but they surrounded him from all sides, so that people were walking at his right and left, in front and in the back. Suddenly he stopped and said: “If you don’t mind, my friends, if you really don’t mind, let me walk alone with my thoughts. What I told you today brought back so many memories that I must spend some time with them alone.”

“Ah, of course, of course, we understand perfectly,” all of them cried out in one voice. And they walked away, each by himself. Only Finkel stood still and followed Steinman with wistful eyes. He looked like a big bird craning his neck.

“Ah, that’s a real man, a real Jew,” he said. “May he live forever!” His eyes were full of tears.

That afternoon and the whole next day Steinman avoided my company. I could see that he was simply running away from me. He was positively hiding. Whenever he saw me walk toward him, he turned away.

I was surprised, then I realized that it might be just as well. This man was like good wine, and I shouldn’t overdo our intimacy. Perhaps he had some such idea, too, and wanted to give me a rest from his good company, so as not to overwhelm me with attention.

In the meantime a young woman who said she was a cousin of mine looked me up. She had found out that I was here and made up her mind to visit me. What right she had to call herself a cousin of mine I did not quite see. Actually, the only basis she had for considering me a relative was that a cousin of hers, a man, had married into my family.

Her name was Saba, she said, short for Sabina, and she recognized me although she had never seen me before. That was because, she said, she was intuitive. This was not the first time she had recognized someone whom she had never seen before. Having told me all this, she walked silently by my side, keeping very close to me. After about ten minutes of this, she began to splatter me with words like confetti. She was young and sad, and there was about her an aura of oversophistication. She was full of aphorisms, about how beautiful it is to be young, about how happiness blooms only to fade away and die, and about how silence is really the graveyard of buried words.

We walked up a hill. When I sat down, she seated herself a bit lower than me, and looked up at me in silence for a while.

Then she said suddenly: “You know, if my husband caught me here with you, he’d beat the hell out of both of us. I’d get the worst of it, but he wouldn’t spare you either.”

Involuntarily, I edged away and was about to get up.

“My husband is very strong,” she said soothingly, “but after all it wouldn’t do you any harm to act a bit more heroic.”

I told her that to be a hero was never one of my ambitions. If I were to be beaten up on her account, I would have done nothing to deserve it—such blows are the hardest to bear. She then told me that her husband was far away at the moment, though he had the habit of dropping in on her unexpectedly. He was very jealous of her, and he was always investigating to find out where she went and whom she saw. He even questioned their little boy, who was only five.

“And is he faithful himself?”

“You’re joking! He betrays me right and left!”

To begin with, she said, she must tell me what he looked like. He was twenty years older than she, he had a big bald head and a thick neck with suety folds. He was short but broad-shouldered, and he had disproportionately short legs, even for his height. Those legs of his seemed mere appendages for walking, stuck on to the torso without relation to the rest of his body. He had heavy hands, and when they hit anyone, they hurt. He beat her up regularly, though he pulled his punches. He always made it clear that he could have hit much harder. He looked intelligent, but his features were spoiled by anger. He had keen eyes and a fleshy nose, thick rather than long.

“He comes from a distinguished family of scholars and businessmen. I too come from a good family, but mine was very poor. He took me as I was, without a dowry, and everyone said I made a good marriage, for the whole town knew I had had lovers. He has never reproached me for this, although it is obvious that this is the cause of his constant suspicions. He is driving me crazy. My maid spies on me and my child spies on me. But, my dear hero, you mustn’t be scared. I have sent both on a little trip, and they won’t be back till tonight.”

By now I was a trifle more interested. “And how are you making out?” I asked her. “Who is winning—the spies, or you?”

She did not answer at once. She lit a cigarette very slowly. “May I have as many thousands of złotys as the number of men the spies have missed,” she said. “It’s a kind of game to me. Who’ll get whom? When you’re bored, it’s not a bad game. Everything becomes a matter of strategy, and I’m keen on that.”

“Well, has he ever caught you?”

She shuddered. “Bite your tongue off ! God forbid! That would really be my funeral. Many times he has almost caught me, but it’s a long way from almost to catch. He slaps me around quite often, but in the end it’s always he who turns out to have been wrong. His conscience bothers him when he beats me on mere suspicion.”

“How long has this game been going on?”

“About six years. We’ve been married eight years, but the first year I made a real effort to be a good, faithful wife. The second year I learned to outsmart him.”

“How do you know,” I said, “that I don’t belong to your husband’s staff of detectives?”

She laughed. “That would be a good joke on me. It would mean I had gone out of my way to get into trouble.” After a pause she added: “Do you know something? It has often occurred to me as I play this game that I’d like to lose once in a while. I am getting quite tired of it, really.” And she went on to say that she slipped most often when she was sad at heart. “And do you know why I speak so openly with you? Because I know nothing is going to happen between us. I have nothing to worry about.”

Her husband, she said, must now be sweating with worry at his cigarette factory. No matter how hard he works, she went on, it’s nothing in comparison with how he works his employees. A really tough character, her husband. “But I have no right to complain. He showers me with presents—dresses and jewels, and entertainment and pleasure trips, the best candy, the most luxurious furs. I take everything. I’m sure I’m a bad woman.”

It was in Warsaw, she said, that she had first gotten into trouble. For a year she attended courses at the university. She shared a room with a musician, a girl who played the piano. The girl had had many friends—poets and painters, actors and musicians. She was a wild girl, a real glutton for pleasure, who wanted to try everything once. “And I was a stupid little goose. I fell in love with every man I met, and every man taught me to fall out of love. I was in the harness and out of the harness. To artists love is a pretty casual business. As soon as my heart was torn to pieces, they would get free of me with the greatest of ease. Only one clung to me and was quite serious, but there was a drawback—he was a Gentile, and I couldn’t bring myself to disgrace my parents. To this day he puts my initials in the dedications of his poems. He is a well-known poet. I often remember him, and it helps me to keep my sanity. He was a profound man, and a sad one. He never laughed. What he saw in me I have no idea. I’m empty-headed, I have no mind at all. All I possess is an inborn sadness. Maybe he loved me because of my sadness. He wrote many poems addressed to ‘the sad girl,’ to his ‘melancholy joy.’ He liked to play with words, but it is true that the joys of youth are melancholy.”