The Glatstein Chronicles (47 page)

“You’re pigheaded,” the older brother said good-naturedly. “I want to teach you some notion of human order, but you think you’re above all that.” Then, turning to me: “What’s wrong with him? He thinks he has it, but he still hasn’t got it. Do you see what I mean? He hasn’t got it yet.”

Two women sat in armchairs. One was doing some embroidering, the other sat as though waiting for an opportunity to join in the conversation. I recognized them at once as the two women in the colorful shawls I had seen in the park, walking in the rabbi’s retinue. The one who was embroidering looked up frequently, revealing an oval face with a pointed chin. Her lips moved as though she were conversing quietly so as not to disturb anyone, and she seemed to get satisfaction from it. The other had a chubby face, little-girl features, and large laughing blue eyes. She got up at one point and passed me the tray with fruit, which made a very rich impression in the room. Somehow, bananas looked more banana-like on this tray.

“He’s just envious,” the younger brother said excitedly. “Didn’t I catch you red-handed? It wasn’t so long ago in the synagogue that I heard you chewing over an idea of mind in one of your sermons.”

“What!” The older brother was so indignant that he stood up. “Do you really think I’m so hard up that I have to borrow your ideas?”

“Not at all. Quite to the contrary. You’re rich, but you can never get enough. Whenever you see a good thing, you grab hold of it.”

The American brother-in-law laughed a great deal at this, tossing his head around as though it were not quite firmly attached to his body.

“You’re very naughty,” the woman with the chubby face said, pouting. “The poor boys are having a serious argument, and you’re making fun of them.”

“But darling, don’t say that. It’s marvelous, it’s amusing, it’s colossal!” And he again choked with laughter.

She passed me the chocolates, and then a tray with pastry. “Do have some, you need to keep your strength up with these people.” When she moved around in the room, it was clear that she was pregnant. It made her look younger, strong and energetic. She appeared to be in her early twenties.

“I cannot permit you to treat a quarrel between my brothers as a vaudeville entertainment.” But her eyes were laughing when she said it.

“But my dearest, you’re not being fair. You’re slandering me.” The American was serious now.

The lady who had been embroidering lifted her face from her work and whispered to herself. Then, lowering her eyes again, she said more audibly: “There is a poem, by Leopardi … ”

All the others fell silent immediately. She kept her eyes down as she talked and did not interrupt her work. She mentioned Bergson, quoted Verlaine in French, recited excerpts from Słowacki in Polish, and referred to the most recent developments in German poetry—all this in connection with the quarrel between the two brothers. The quarrel, she said, was actually a higher type of love—each of them went his own way but both were searching for the truth, and they long for each other with a sad longing.

Her voice was pleasant to listen to. She was generous with quotations, but her manner altogether modest. Coming from her, with her slightly aged face, the lines of poetry sounded like sleigh bells tinkling somewhere in the distance along a snowy road. She suddenly stopped. The others thought it was only a pause and waited for her to go on, but it was as if she had switched off a light around her.

“You must come and see us again,” the younger woman said when she saw me getting ready to go.

“Why should he come? Now that he has been exposed to my little brother’s crazy ideas … ”

“Now, now, don’t get started again,” she said, bringing her hands together with a smart slap.

“Let him, let him. Anyone can see he is envious.”

The American son-in-law once again shook with laughter to the point of tears.

“Wait a minute, don’t go just yet. It’s pitch dark outside, you won’t see the stairs that go down to the garden.” The younger woman took a lamp from the table and walked ahead of me out the door.

The lamp cut the green trees with bands of light. “Watch out. There are three steps there, and the first one is quite high.” She extended her left hand to me. “You must come and see us again. It was very pleasant.”

When I got safely down the steps, I felt ashamed for having sat there with my head uncovered. I felt even more ashamed when I realized how tactful they had all been not to notice it.

When I got back to the hotel, Buchlerner was loud with reproach. “You played a very naughty trick on me. You went out this afternoon and you didn’t appear at supper. Your chair stood vacant like Prophet Elijah’s chair at the seder, and I sent out a search party for you. Have you forgotten that I am responsible for every single one of my guests? However, I’ll make an exception for you just this once,” he said, and his face grew less stern. “Take your seat, and I’ll wait on you myself. But do be quick, please, for we have to get ready for tomorrow morning’s breakfast.”

After scolding me for eating like a bird, he sat down with me over a glass of tea.

“Well, I’ve gotten over it. Here I’ve been nagging at you so much I’d better try to make up with you. I have such a lot of work to do around here I scarcely know where to begin. It would seem I have a couple of fine daughters and a strong Gentile girl to help out, too, but without me nothing goes right. I have to organize everything. If only my wife, may she rest in peace, were still alive, I’d be much better off. She really looked after me, as well as though I were a son-in-law boarding with us, or a woman in confinement. But God took her young. It was heartbreaking to see so young a woman go so soon.”

Two other guests had lingered on in the dining room, at another table—a young woman who looked to be about thirty and a man of the same age. They sat opposite one another but never looked at each other. The woman ate rapidly, as though someone or something were driving her, but the man, who was wearing dark glasses, ate very deliberately, constantly picking at the food in the plate. I told the hotel owner that apparently I wasn’t the only guest late for supper.

Buchlerner’s voice dropped to almost a whisper. “So you don’t know yet who they are. Though, come to think of it, how could you? I have, thank God, some eighty guests here at the moment—a real army. Well, those two aren’t really late for supper. They aren’t quite right in the head—cases of arteriosclerosis in the broader sense of the word. This is their second supper. A couple of hours after supper they complain that they’re starving, and I have to set the table for them again. You see what a hotel owner has to put up with? I have to be a psychologist along with everything else. For instance, I got these two together—I mean to say, I put them at the same table. I have to judge from a guest’s looks whom I can seat him with. As you see, they don’t have a word to say to each other, but at least they sit still this way. Any other arrangement won’t work. The one or the other gets up in the middle of the meal and walks out. I really have to be a psychologist, to figure out which guests are compatible. As soon as a guest arrives, I take one good look at him, and I know with whom to seat him.”

He said that the young woman lost her mind when her child died. She had sat by the empty cradle for a whole week—it was her first child, and no one could persuade her to stop singing lullabies and rocking the empty cradle. May God protect us from such misfortune! She was an educated person, too, Buchlerner assured me, she knew Hebrew and often quoted verses from the Bible. Her husband, thank God, was wealthy and could afford to have someone look after her. This was necessary, to see to it that she was washed and dressed; otherwise, she’d let herself go completely.

“Once she came into the dining room in such a state that I wished the floor would open and swallow me up. When I scolded her for looking like that, she said she just didn’t care about making a good impression on people. The only thing that keeps her going is her appetite. God bless her, she gobbles up two breakfasts, two dinners, and two suppers. Her husband pays me double the usual board, but I’m sure I lose money on her even so. And I really don’t begrudge her the food. Poor thing, she’s a fine person. She never bothers anyone, and her conversation usually makes perfectly good sense. She has one delusion—that somewhere in a little town near Warsaw there is a prince with such beautiful eyes that if she could only once look into those eyes of his, she would be perfectly well again. She thinks it is her husband who, out of jealousy, keeps her from going to see the prince. Her husband is an extremely busy man—he owns a sugar factory. When he comes here weekends she gives him a rough time. ‘Shaia,’ she says accusingly, ‘When are you taking me to the castle, to see the prince?’”

The man having supper with her, Buchlerner went on, was another sad case. He was a teacher of Hebrew, one of the really good, the prominent ones. A bachelor and an only son, when his mother died he grieved so much that finally he had a nervous breakdown. The doctors say that the muscles of his eyes have become so weak that he cannot keep his eyes open, and that it requires enormous effort on his part to focus on things around him.

Buchlerner got up. “Well, there is no lack of troubles in this world,” he said. “People are poor things at best, and some people break down under the slightest trouble. They just can’t bear the burden. Oh—I nearly forgot to tell you—there is someone waiting to see you. I told him to wait because I thought you should have your supper first. If he’s got bad news for you, it’s important you should eat first to have the strength to take it. And if he’s brought you good news, it won’t be any less good after supper—an extra dessert. That’s how I think about these things, anyhow—of course, I may be all wrong, and you can probably find fault with my reasoning.”

In the main lounge, where a few chess games were in progress, a man with a pointed beard was sitting on a bench. He wore thick eyeglasses. When the proprietor led me to him, he took off his glasses and wiped them carefully with a handkerchief. Only after he put his glasses back on, and carefully folded his handkerchief and put it away, did he take a good look at me.

“I must say I don’t recognize you, but I want to bid you welcome anyway. This is a small town. When several persons told me you were here, I had no reason to doubt their word. I assume that this is really you, and you must assume that I am really I. We must take each other on trust, so to speak.”

My impatience to know who he was left him unruffled. “Don’t try to guess, don’t make the slightest effort. Even if you stand on your head, you won’t guess who I am.”

When he finally identified himself as Goldblat, my old teacher of Hebrew, I was angry with myself for not recognizing him. There were still a few strands of yellow in his pointed gray beard. I should have recognized him not only by the beard but also by the shape of his head, the thin nose ending in a stubby bulge, and the reddish nearsighted eyes which had peered at me in just the same way through thick glasses thirty years ago.

“I am furious at not having recognized you,” I said. “I can’t forgive myself.”

“Oh, come now, who can hope to escape the effects of the passing years? When you last saw me, my dear friend, I was about thirty years old, and now I am sixty. When you knew me I was just getting ready to divorce my wife, and now it is five years since I found the courage to do it, and finally got rid of that pain in the neck. As you know, I have no children. In those days I was a teacher of some reputation, and now I am a flop. When people used to say, ‘Goldblat the teacher’—well, they were talking about a fine Hebraist, an enlightened Jew, a man who wrote letters to Nahum Sokolow and to whom Sokolow wrote back that his Hebrew was as clear as daylight. Yes, that’s what he wrote me! I still have the letter. Today, when they say ‘Goldblat the teacher,’ what are they thinking? The name has an empty sound, and it doesn’t evoke anything—not anything at all.

“Thank God, my old reputation isn’t totally extinct, though I am ashamed to say how I do manage to earn a kind of living. You must remember Hillel Tuchman, who had the brick factory. He is a rich man, he swims in money—may we have the leavings from his table. Did you ever meet his father, by any chance? Well, he is still alive, and may he live forever, for if he ever died God forbid, it would be goodbye to my job. Reb Zalman Tuchman his name is, close to a hundred years old, maybe even a year or two over it. He is blind, and so his son pays me to pray and study the Talmud with him. The old man is also hard of hearing, so I have to scream my lessons to him. The old man has a wonderful memory, and when I read a chapter of the Bible with him, he can often recite it by heart better than I can read it aloud, looking at the text. But the trouble is, he falls asleep between one sentence and the next, and when he wakes up he has forgotten the place, and then he quarrels with me. It’s hard to earn a living in the city, too, and here at least I am my own master. The old man’s son rented a fine house for him here, and I live with him. Often I have a young man to replace me, paying him almost nothing, and the old man never notices the difference. Then I walk in the park and meditate on higher things. So now you know what has become of Goldblat the teacher. You can see how low I have fallen when I pray that the old man, already a centenarian, should survive me—for what would I do without him?

“Do you know what?” he said suddenly. “Order a drink—but don’t take it literally, you may treat me to couple of drinks. It’ll be easier to talk then, easier to recall the old days.”

Actually I should have been able to recognize him by the frock coat he was wearing. It might have been the same coat he wore thirty years ago when he came to our house to give me a lesson. It was worn and shiny, of the same greenish black material. In those days, that coat and his rabbinical hat used to inspire me with great respect. It was a great change from the
cheder,
when he appeared in our house. He would usually take off his hat, leaving on a little silk skullcap. In those days Goldblat always overestimated my capacities. Besides teaching me Bible, with the more difficult commentaries, he had me read Peretz Smolenskin’s didactic novel
Hatoeh bedarkhe hahayim,
and even tried to get me started on a treatise on logic. All this confused me quite a bit, but Goldblat would reassure my father, saying that I’d get it all in time because I had a good head. He taught me some German, also, and read me Heine’s poems. “You can’t be an educated man without German,” he explained to my father. But my grandfather looked askance at him, and told my father that once a man had learned German he would be pretty sure to stop praying. So long as you don’t know German, he said, there is some chance you will remain interested in Judaism; German was incompatible with being a Jew.