The Glatstein Chronicles (49 page)

That was what could happen to a few words after Reb Levi had gotten through with them. One verse would remind him of fifteen related verses, each of them with a number of various interpretations, and these in turn led to commentaries, to Greek proverbs, to the discoveries of Ibn Ezra, and to the secular sciences—astronomy, anatomy, botany, and philosophy.

Reb Levi suffered from an incurable disease. He was bedridden and received me sitting up, his head resting against pillows piled up high. He always wore a velvet skullcap. His face was yellow, but it glowed like a wax candle. His yellow beard was short and thick and untidy from neglect—but even in the untidiness there was a certain restraint, a proportion appropriate to his features. It was a modest, honest beard, which gave nobility to the face. His nightshirt was always as spotlessly clean as a high priest’s robe. Very often he closed his eyes while speaking, and then he looked to me like a high priest on his deathbed, laid out in his sacred garments and ready to meet his Maker. His arms rested on the down quilt like the motionless branches of a still tree.

In the city everyone knew that Reb Levi was dying, and people spoke of him with lowered voices, reverently, as one speaks about a great saint.

Everyone knew that the wealthy Simon Berger had been struck a terrible blow. He was about to lose the jewel in his crown. Simon had had many children, but none of them turned out successfully by the standards which then obtained in Lublin. This pious rich man, it was thought, whose piety and learning were a byword, deserved better children. One of his sons was a wastrel who chased Gentile girls and worked as a traveling salesman for a candy factory. A second son had gone off to Switzerland to study chemistry and had come back a complete goy, with a green student’s cap that looked as if it were made of glass. His only daughter was a cripple—the poor girl was paralyzed in one hand. His pride and joy was Reb Levi, the one son who devoted his days and nights to serious study.

At this time there were many scholars in Lublin. It was not thought too unusual that Levi should obtain his rabbinical license at an early age. This was admirable, but not extraordinary. At one point he had gone off to live in a small town, where he had married a girl much taller and sturdier than he was. He had tall, gawky children by her who, when they stood up, looked as if they were bending in a heavy wind. Then Levi fell ill, and people began to say that the rheumatism from which he always suffered had reached his heart. He was brought back from the small town to his father’s house and put to bed, in one of the most comfortable, lightest rooms of Reb Simon’s house.

Reb Simon occupied the whole building. Downstairs he had his textile business, with living quarters above it. Downstairs was the physical, the prosaic side of his life, where doglike he chased after every penny, now more than ever needed, as his son required the attentions of the best doctors and specialists. Simon never gave up hope that somehow they would save his son—the soul of his being—but upstairs, Levi’s strength and health were slowly ebbing away, like a lingering Sabbath afternoon.

It was not until Simon’s son was bedridden that the people of our city began to grasp what an unusual man he was. His own father and mother had not realized what a treasure had been entrusted to them for a little while. Levi was no more than thirty-eight years old at this time.

People began to show up at Simon’s house who had never been there before, who had never been to Lublin before. There came great rabbis, scholars, men whose very names filled Jews with luminous hopes. Among the visitors were saintly mystics, Gentile scholars, university professors, famous writers. Simon and his wife would exchange silent glances, weeping with belated joy. “You see whom we are losing!”

Only now did it become known that Levi, while he lived in the small town, had conducted correspondence with these rabbis and scholars, and that these great men addressed him as Master. The Gentile scholars were saying that he was one of the greatest philosophers of our generation. The people of Lublin now said that Reb Levi was one of the greatest saints, perhaps one of the thirty-six just men who by their unpublicized merits keep the turbulent and insecure world in existence. It was also said that he had written works that truly enlighten, works that reveal the most arduous mysteries.

I had the privilege of sitting on a little stool next to his bed. There were usually two rabbis in the room who put their questions to Reb Levi in a businesslike manner, as if he were not a gravely ill man. He would answer them briefly and matter-of-factly, but now and then his gray eyes would light up, his yellow face would glow, and his voice would become a song. Then the rabbis would fall silent and sit very still, fearing to make the slightest move. They had deliberately stimulated Reb Levi to rise above his suffering, they had led him on to where he could get the full light of the sun on his face. His face now glowed so brightly that some of the light was reflected in the faces of the rabbis. Meanwhile I, a little boy who had been told that Reb Levi was dying, gazed at him, trying to discover the secret of a dying man’s last words as well as the secret of fear.

When the rabbis left him, they would tell his weeping mother outside, after they had kissed the mezuzah on the doorpost, that the ears which had heard her son’s words were blessed, that she mustn’t cry, that God would help him, and that his own parents should be filled with great joy and pride.

Only once, I recall, did one rabbi lose control of himself. Reb Levi had ventured into the deepest caverns of thought and had emerged safe and sound, and then ventured again, and again reemerged to daylight with a shining face, when suddenly the rabbi burst out in sobs: “Rabbi, Rabbi, Reb Levi, who will ever take your place when you have left us!”

At this moment Levi’s father and mother came in and began to mourn him as though he were already dead. His mother wept passionately, as though she had long been waiting for permission to weep, a permission she had never dared to ask for.

Having wept themselves dry (if I am not mistaken, I too wept—a childish accompaniment), they were ashamed. They were ashamed because Reb Levi’s glowing face was smiling. And when they had all subsided, Levi spoke about the years he had spent in the small town, where he could not properly fulfill his duty to honor his parents. He spoke about the rare virtue, which is a joyous duty—the sole duty that raises the human species above the beasts, because only in the human species is there a permanent bond linking father and son, mother and child, until the child himself becomes a father.

The real meaning of the term
Karet,
or excision, Reb Levi went on, was precisely this—to be cut off from one’s living parents, from the joy of fulfilling the duty to honor them; and that is also why God gives long years of life to those who honor their parents.

After they had all left, the wrinkles in Levi’s face became smoothed out. Perl, the maid, fed him a few spoonfuls of oatmeal. His face was serene, as if his illness had been only a pretext, an excuse to get away from his tall wife, his grown children, the outside world in general, as if his illness had given him the repose all restless people pray for.

“How is your father? Is he still working in the store downstairs? Come closer, don’t be afraid. What are you studying now? Jeremiah?” And soon a verse would flash out like a brightly painted boat on the water. He would take me aboard and steer it this way and that. I was afraid to sail with him too far, for I could see his dead hands, and I feared that he was calling me with them. Nevertheless I went along with him on these trips, my heart pounding.

At the very moment Reb Levi lay in his father’s house against the white pillows, another man of about his age was lying in a shed in the courtyard of the apartment house we lived in, near the Castle. This shed looked like a dog’s kennel, pieced together of old boards. In the courtyard stood the privies—also wooden sheds—and across from the privies, separated from them by an ill-smelling garbage box and a yard that was freely used by children and even grown-ups who were too lazy to use the dark privies at night, stood the low shed. Formerly it had been used as a place to throw old clothes which even the rag picker had rejected.

One day when we were just getting up, we heard wild screams coming from that shed. We found a man there, lying on the floor, roaring like an ox. The man’s legs were crippled. He could not raise his hands either, but only thrash about in the straw that someone had put under him. He had a jet-black beard and black eyes, which reminded one of the eyes of a cow. His disheveled hair seemed to cover his entire forehead. Around him pieces of bread were strewn, and next to him stood a bowl of water to which he often rolled himself to take a swallow. This freak was chained to one of the boards in the shed. He rolled back and forth uttering terrible screams, all the more terrible because they were not ordinary human cries but the desperate efforts of a mute to speak.

No one knew where this wretched cripple had come from. At all events we children never learned who had rented the shed to its strange occupant. Many of the children threw stones at the shed, and this drove the cripple to utter blood-curdling screams. We somehow learned that his name was Zelig, and the children mockingly called him Reb Zelig. We also knew that a woman had undertaken to perform the good deed of washing him and changing his shirt once a month. She also provided Reb Zelig with bread every other day or so.

I often heard his cries at night. I knew that he was lying all alone in the dark shed, in that ill-smelling courtyard. Eventually, the shed itself emanated such a stench that even we children, ordinarily insensitive beasts, would not go near it. Reb Zelig’s screams grew so unbearable that Yankele the tailor, who lived on the ground floor, and Getzl the baker, who lived in the basement, looked for a way of getting rid of the cripple.

I often looked through the open door and saw him lying there on the ground. He was so weak now that his roar had become a mere bleat, and his unkempt face looked drained of blood. At such moments I imagined that he was about to open his mouth and speak to me in a familiar language, perhaps even to offer a commentary on the Torah, like Reb Levi when he lay in his nice, clean bed piled high with pillows.

Several women consoled the unhappy tenants of our apartment house with the thought that there was no point making a fuss, since the poor man’s sufferings were obviously nearing an end.

I remember both these dying men—the one who was mockingly called Reb Zelig, and the one who was tenderly called Reb Levi—as being with me for days on end. I watched and heard them die, the one in the shed near the privies and the other in his comfortable bed. The one went in silence, the other with luminous words on his lips.

Two days before Reb Zelig was found lying silent, curled up like an animal, the woman who had looked after him went into the shed and washed him. Lying there helpless, when his face had been washed, he did not look so different from Reb Levi, or any less serene—this body could have been that of the soul which lay in the house of Simon the rich man.

Reb Levi died the same day as Reb Zelig was found dead. It was clear to me that there was some connection between the mute animal body that had suffered all the tortures of the damned in the dark, stench-filled shed, and the soul which passed on in immaculate surroundings, with words on his lips that were repeated over and over in our city for a long time thereafter.

Some time after Reb Levi’s death, Father one day brought home one of the essays the great man had left behind. It was written in tiny characters, hardly bigger than pinpricks. Several rabbis came to our house to read it, but afterward they declared with a sigh that instead of illuminating dark caverns, the essay only made the darkness thicker. They feared that Reb Levi had taken with him to his grave the radiance of his spoken words. His writings were no more than the intellectual body of his words; they failed to convey his spirit and his light. “That’s what we always think—that now bright light will at last illumine us and disclose the mystery. But each generation is left in the lurch.” Such was the verdict of a young rabbi with a long, thin nose, a few scraggly whiskers on his chin, and so nearsighted that he had to hold the manuscript up close to his glasses. The hand that held the essay did not tremble, but his head moved right and left with the regularity of a pendulum, racing back and forth over the obscure lines.

Goldblat was reminiscing about his pupils—those he had set on the right road and who had made good. He ticked them off on the fingers of his right hand, finger by finger. One was a lawyer, the second an oculist, the third had made a fortune, and the fourth was elected deputy to the Diet. When he got to the thumb, he said, well, the thumb had grown up to be a coarse, boorish fellow. Goldblat was ashamed of him. He owned several apartment houses with such miserable, damp basements that God preserve us from ever having to stay in one. It was basements like that he rented out to families of nine or even ten people. Really they should be paid themselves to live in such miserable quarters where the damp cold was penetrating, summer or winter. And then the stench, the crowding, the lifeless eyes that seemed to turn on rusty springs, eyes that never sparkled, and the coughing and the wheezing, the complexions as withered as the skin of a smoked herring. Such poverty—it could darken the most beautiful day in May: were it ever to crawl out of these cellars, it would infect the day with all kinds of disease.

Whenever you passed one of these buildings, you saw people who had just been evicted. They lay there on the sidewalks looking like rags, the rags they wore indistinguishable from the people. You couldn’t tell whether this bundle of rags was a child or whether this child simply looked like a rag. And the laments and the curses of the evicted! If only one percent of those curses came true, the landlord would be a goner, too. He had so many evictions that it seemed as though this evil man had gathered together all the poor people of Warsaw in his cellars, just in order to be able to turn them out again, one by one. He was a shark, a usurer, and incapable of begetting children.