The Glatstein Chronicles (50 page)

“For whom are you working so hard?” Goldblat had asked him one day, gently, when he happened to run into him. All the scoundrel did was to sigh deeply. “Can you believe it? It was a sigh, I’m telling you, that could have moved the stones to weep. Gangsters like that, for all their thick skins, can still shake their heads and sigh. ‘Isn’t it perfectly clear, Mr. Goldblat?’ he said to me. ‘God has punished me, I am alone in the world.’ I took the occasion to suggest that if he cut down the number of his evictions, God might help him. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘a progressive like you, Mr. Goldblat, you should know better than to say such superstitious things!’ You see, it pays him to believe that God is punishing him, and it simply doesn’t pay him to believe that anything can be done about it!”

The man’s money, Goldblat went on about this former student, had not come from a very pure source. Goldblat didn’t go in for gossip, but everyone knew that his wife had earned all that money, and not in a decent way, either. During the First World War, when the Austrians held Lublin for a time, people made fortunes by obtaining a permit from the authorities to import a carload of merchandise without having to pass customs. His wife was the one who obtained the permits. She managed to make her way up to high-ranking officers, including one general. While her husband stayed at home, she dolled herself up and brought back the permits. The fact is she was a beauty, a very luscious piece. It is said that the officers enjoyed her company a great deal.

“Even if I spent all night and the next day with you,” Goldblat said, getting up from his chair, “I couldn’t tell you all that has happened to my pupils. For instance, one got himself baptized and became a censor. One day he asked me to come to see him, and I went. I had no choice, though I am afraid of converts. He asked me to translate some difficult Hebrew sentences. He is so dutiful a public servant that he is seized with a panic at the thought that he might let pass something that would displease the Polish government. Of course, he wanted me to believe that his real purpose was to defend Jewish honor, to save Jews from trouble. Perhaps, he said, he was like the famous Daniel Khvolson, who was destined to become a Christian in order to champion Jewish causes all the more effectively.

“On one occasion when he was drunk, the censor confided to me that he had become a convert out of revenge against Jewish girls. One girl after the other rejected him, complaining that they could not stand the smell of his feet. You can imagine what sensitive noses the pampered daughters of the Jews must have had. The censor complained that they could smell his feet through the shoe leather. So he married a Gentile girl, a quiet creature who never complains. She has given him five children, and not once has she complained about his feet—damn it.

“Tell you about my pupils? Well, I wouldn’t know where to begin and where to stop. So I’d better not begin at all. But one thing I must tell you. I am no longer what I once was. I shall not deny it, I have become an ignoramus. The little I did know has become fusty, and I haven’t acquired any new knowledge. I am amid strangers, so to speak. All around me people are discussing their problems, forming parties, and so on, but I don’t share any of it or want to. Even my Hebrew has become outdated. Recently I glanced through a Hebrew newspaper, and I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, it was like some sort of hieroglyphics, totally incomprehensible. I wiped my glasses again and again, to no avail. And as for the bit of German I inherited from my father, it was never much. Believe me, when I study now with my hundred-year-old pupil, we understand each other, but the new generation I don’t even begin to understand.”

Goldblat took off his glasses and began to wipe them. He looked at me with myopic eyes which, without the glasses, seemed to stare in opposite directions.

“I am too severe with myself,” he said. “That’s my trouble. I am simply poisoning my life, making myself unhappy. I often feel that the bit of useless knowledge I had, I gave it all away to my pupils, and that I have been left with nothing at all. I feel as though I were walking around naked like Adam. Moreover I can’t stop asking
why
to everything. No matter what happens, even the most trivial thing, I am bound to ask
why.
The world is topsy-turvy. I can’t make out the pattern at all. Take poverty. Every time I see it, it’s as though somebody had punched me in the jaw. I feel ashamed of being a man. And what do I mean by poverty? Well, I suppose, just knowing that there are people in the world who are dreaming of a bit of cooked food, a warm meal, a crust of bread. I know this has been going on from time immemorial, and the sun rises and sets, and the world marches on and makes a noise, and people fuss about. But it’s unbelievable! A fine world this is, that has not abolished hunger, and yet has the nerve to take itself seriously!

“You know what,” he said, digging into his beard with two fingers to scratch his chin. “I’ll say good night now. I’ve bored you enough. Tomorrow is another day, and anyhow we aren’t going to change the world in a minute.”

It was quite late. The Buchlerner hotel was asleep. I walked on tiptoe up the carpeted stairs and tried to find my room in the half darkness. In this way I startled what looked like a two-headed creature. But the creature divided into a man and a girl. The man was the sturdy Gentile who looked after Bronski, the mad student who raved about Egyptian mummies. The girl was the one who helped clear up in the dining room and fed the ducks and the chickens every morning. The man did not run away, but stood there, chin jutting forward, very much the chivalrous male ready to face the music. Or was he merely embarrassed, ashamed of himself? His attitude could even mean that he was ready to fight. As for the girl, she ran barefoot down the corridor, the carpeting muffling her footsteps. She did not sway as she ran, but ran like a boy, briskly, lifting her legs high.

Then I saw that I was a floor below the one where my room was, the top floor. When I finally got to my door and put the key in the lock, a shadowy figure in slippers came out from another door on the landing. It was wearing something on its head—an old cap, a woman’s bonnet, or a skullcap. The shadow sneaked into my room after me and shut the door. Then he snapped the switch and the room filled with a jaundiced light. My guest and I found ourselves staring at each other in a long greenish mirror covered with fly specks. I recognized the proprietor.

“You aren’t asleep yet?” I stammered, vaguely frightened.

“I can’t sleep until my last guest has turned in,” he said. “I’m responsible for the lot of you, you know. That’s the kind of job it is.”

“Have I kept you up?”

“Yes and no. I mean you are the last guest to come upstairs but I shall not sleep until everything downstairs quiets down.”

I listened intently. I couldn’t hear a sound. Did he mean the serving girl and the Gentile? No, I thought, after all it was I who had startled them—and they hadn’t been making a sound.

“Whom do I have in mind?” Buchlerner went on. “I can guess what you’re thinking. The girl is none of my business. She doesn’t work for me at night. If she wants to have some fun, it’s her own affair. As for the Gentile, what can he do?” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “No, it’s neither the girl nor the Gentile, but the door that the Gentile is supposed to be watching, that’s the room that’s keeping me up.

“You see, this is Tuesday, and Tuesday night I always have to keep awake. The mad student has to have a lover once a week. A lover—that’s his elegant way of putting it. But whether she is or isn’t a lover, the man looking after him knows what he means and finds something for him in the village.

“You must realize it’s hard to find a girl who is willing to spend the night with a madman. The whole village knows who he is, and people are simply afraid. So far nothing bad has happened. The Gentile smuggles a girl into his room late at night and watches the door like a dog. If he has a bit of fun in the meanwhile, it doesn’t hurt anyone.

“But think of my position in all this. To be sure, he always gets her out by dawn. You’re a friend, so it doesn’t matter, but if other people staying here were to learn of this, I might just as well cut my throat. Just put yourself in my place. Nothing bad has happened so far, but who can tell with a madman? The Gentile guard says that he will be responsible. But he doesn’t own this hotel, so what does he care? He only has to slip up once—and what could I do, sue him? In short, Tuesday nights I worry myself to death, and wish I’d never seen the hotel. I pace up and down all night. After a while I feel as though the man downstairs isn’t mad at all, on the contrary, he is perfectly healthy—it’s I who am mad, missing my sleep, listening for every creak and squeak.

“Good night, sleep well,” he said, “and don’t give any of this another thought. After all, you can sleep in peace. You don’t own a hotel with mad guests. Oh God in heaven, how I wish I didn’t have to earn my bread in the last years of my life!”

He tiptoed out of the room, soundlessly closing the door behind him.

“Are you looking for a male or female?”

I had been so sure I was all alone that for a moment I thought the solitude was jeering at me, I was flabbergasted to see it was Steinman. He was the last person I should ever have expected to run into along this dark wooded hillside, which sloped precipitately upward on the one side and fell off sharply to a ravine on the other.

Steinman was wearing galoshes that flopped noisily as he picked his way over the damp ground. It sounded as if he were walking through puddles. On his head was a formidably broad black hat, and he wore his overcoat like a cape. He carried a gnarled stick with a carved head.

“If you’re looking for female company, I can’t help you. But if it’s a man you’re looking for, you won’t find a better one. Not in this neighborhood, at least,” he added with a smile.

“I must confess that this last remark is not original with me. That’s what the old rabbi of Trisk used to say. He would take his long beard in his hand and exclaim, ‘Oh Lord of the universe, what art Thou waiting for to redeem us? I swear by my beard and earlocks, Thou wilt never have a finer Jew than I am. So why not send us the Messiah right now?’”

He glanced at my mud-spattered shoes and burst out laughing. “You have optimistic shoes, I see. Apparently you’re unfamiliar with our soggy countryside. There have been swamps here since the creation of the world.”

I felt guilty about Steinman, for I had not looked him up since I first met him. It must seem as though I had been avoiding him. I began to apologize, when he interrupted me. “Now, now, set your mind at rest. Actually, I’ve been afraid you were sore at me for avoiding you. Lately, I’ve been busy putting my papers in order—my poor bit of immortality. When my time comes and I am called to meet my Maker, I want my papers to be in order.”

He began to walk faster, keeping a few steps ahead of me, and from time to time turning around to look at me with the expression of a boy proud of walking faster than a grown-up.

“If you made your way to our mountain pass all by yourself, you must have the soul of an explorer,” he said. “It is possible to stay here for months on end without suspecting the existence of these hidden valleys. Some of them are real wonders—chunks of the primeval world.

“If my daughter knew that I was wandering about like this, she’d come for me with a net and drag me back to the hotel by my ears,” he said, looking around him. “If you think that all this dampness is good for my health, you’re very much mistaken. And yet right after lunch I sneaked away. I suppose they’ve sent out search parties for me. Everyone wants to take care of me.”

All night, he said, he had had no more than a few minutes’ sleep. When he did drop off, dreams beset him in battalions—some of them so stupid, he might have been a ten-year-old boy. “Yes, I even dreamed of a naked woman. Just imagine. Do you know how long since I saw a naked woman? It seems centuries ago. And now, at my age, to have Lilith with me! And how about you? Did you sleep well?”

I assured him that this had been my best night of sleep in the hotel, a night of deep dreamless slumber. I told him that Goldblat, my old teacher, had evoked so much I had forgotten from the past that I scarcely turned over for ten hours.

There was a glitter in his eyes. “You do well to get your sleep, young man. All that good sleep will serve you well when you reach my age. Most people think that old people do nothing but sleep. If that were only true. The sleep of the old is a broken kind of sleep, it doesn’t do you any good at all. To begin with, your bones ache. You feel as though you were fainting with exhaustion—a foretaste of death—or else you just get a kind of light nap. It’s as though someone were holding a drug-soaked cloth over your face, lifting it up every few minutes.

“And the dozing is a time of self-reproach. You should have made this move, you should have held back that one. You go over the whole game, and the terrible thing is that the game is already over—that you can’t play it over again and get it right this time.

“What I regret most is having neglected to tend my own vineyard. Much too early I became a Jewish drawer of water and chopper of wood. I became too busy, too much engrossed in public matters. And now, when I began to go over my precious writings—I was horrified by how little I had accomplished, mortified and ashamed.”

He drew an old newspaper out of his overcoat pocket and spread it over a rock so covered with moss that it looked rotten. He sat down on it, uttering a little groan which he tried to stylize so as to eliminate any suggestion of old age or fatigue. He asked me to sit down, too.

“I am a very ambitious man, but I never became a real writer—at best a teller of little stories about Hasidic courts and dynasties of rabbis. This is not self-deprecation. We are the sons of a poor nation and we must do our duty. In my own modest way I did help too. You must understand that for the time being we have no room for a so-called great literature. Do you know why? Because a great literature is a literature dealing with trifles—little pleasures, little cares, little everyday happenings, little folks with little worries, little hatreds, little loves, little wives and little children, how they work and what they do in their spare time. We have never known the peace necessary to create such a literature. We are simply not settled enough—constantly on the move, driven from one place to another. Ours is a history of heroes and martyrs, and heroes are not people. Ours is a heroic literature on the grand scale and with heavily dramatic effects—perfect for the Sabbath, to read about in books, but not a very healthy literature.