The Glatstein Chronicles (52 page)

One of the violinists, who had an unusually long, drooping mustache, kept tuning his violin, tightening the pegs and shaking his head—he was still unsatisfied. Now and then he would draw the bow across the strings very delicately, as though cutting the throat of a tiny chick. Suddenly he clapped his hands. The couples stopped moving about, tense but gracefully attentive. Then the music began.

Bronski, the mental case, came in, immaculately and elegantly got up. He swayed in anticipation of finding a partner, tapping the time with his leather pumps. Before we had time to turn away, he found a young lady, and danced off with her cradled in his arms, his eyes closed. He danced as if he were walking in his sleep.

Next to him danced the sturdy Gentile, his guard, with Buchlerner’s maidservant. She was wearing shoes tonight, and a large black cross hung dangling on her neck. Apparently we were to understand that although she spoke Yiddish and worked here taking care of the chickens and washing dishes, she was not to be taken for just another of Buchlerner’s guests. Her partner looked preoccupied—besides attending to his girl, he had to keep an eye on Mr. Bronski.

The musicians gave the dancers no respite. The moment the couples were ready to leave the floor, a new tune would strike up and bring them right back. The musicians played as mechanically as a hurdy-gurdy. Finkel time and again danced by with his wife, who bore him swooning on her trustworthy bosom. At one point they dropped out and went to one side of the floor. Finkel bent down to one knee and tied one of his wife’s shoelaces that had come untied.

Steinman’s daughter separated herself from her partner for a moment and ran over to us. “I think you forgot to take your pill today,” she said to her father.

“So I’ll owe you one pill,” he replied testily. “Just pretend that I’m bankrupt and that I can’t pay my debts. Why don’t you for once forget about your father and have some fun?”

“Say something to me,” Steinman asked me a little later, in a sleepy voice, as if he too had fallen into the mood of the dance. “I like to hear people talk against the strains of music. I don’t want to exploit you, God forbid, but after all I’ve bored you enough with my talk, and now is your golden opportunity to get even.”

All that came to mind at that moment were matters of such triviality that I was ashamed to speak of them. Of all things, I suddenly recalled the exceptionally tiny shoes a friend of my youth had been wearing when I went to see him. His feet had simply not grown but stayed tiny, like the bound feet of Chinese women in former times. He had received me with mincing little steps in his beautiful apartment and kept trying to impress me. First it was his wife’s photograph. Such a pity, he told me, that she should be staying in the country for the summer. “Just look at that lovely complexion,” he said. “She is a gift from God.” His shining black eyes filled with tears and his red lips were moist when he showed me his wife’s picture. From his wife he switched without transition to showing off his apartment. “Completely modern, the very latest things, just as you have them in America.” He kept flushing the toilet to show me how well it worked. Each time I got up from my chair, he had another gadget to show me. “Remember how we used to squat in those outdoor privies like acrobats? This is more like civilization!” And he would play with the flush-tank again, unable to leave it alone.

Another foolish recollection that came to mind was a waxen hand that kept screwing a monocle to one eye in a waxen face, the better to survey the theater, three-quarters empty, where the man’s rhymed extravaganzas were playing. “We’re doomed,” he said during an intermission, waving his hand over the empty seats. “You can see there is no hope for us.”

And I remembered another writer, a tall, slim man, smoking his pipe phlegmatically, stylishly, in a café favored by literary men. He ran down the occupants of all the other tables and grumbled about the lack of recognition that—may I be forgiven for saying so—adorned his head like a crown of thorns.

What I finally told Steinman about was my visit to the Jewish children’s sanatorium, set in lovely green fields. I told him how devoted were the men and women teachers, with their sad Jewish eyes, and how keenly they felt their great responsibility. The children there, badly undernourished and low in vitality, many with fear in their eyes, would one day become a people with healthy lungs, strong bones, and powers of resistance.

I had watched the pathetically thin children, boys and girls, doing calisthenics outdoors, where the air was filled with the smell of new-mown hay. Meanwhile a number of Jewish doctors (who were neglecting their own practice to volunteer their services here) were supervising the preparation of big pots of hot beef soup and tasty baked potatoes. The doctors made encouraging comments about the progress of individual children and took pleasure in their neat athletic uniforms.

A Gentile doctor, one of the most notorious anti-Semites in Poland, paid a visit to this sanatorium in his professional capacity. There he forgot all about politics and was full of admiration for the work of his Jewish colleagues.

It was with this same Gentile doctor that I had visited the sanatorium. We were the first visitors ever permitted. Our inspection started by sampling the piping hot potatoes. Then we were given wooden spoons and ate the soup from a common bowl. Our spoons moved swiftly from bowl to mouth, pausing only long enough to savor the marvelous borsht, before plunging into the bowl again with scant regard for manners. Two friendly Jewish women who had cooked the soup stood nearby and awaited our verdict. The doctor and I smiled at them with gratitude, and we looked over admiringly at the teachers and the children, then back at each other with a feeling of closeness that grew with each swallow of the savory soup. Unexpectedly, the anti-?Semitic doctor gripped my hand on the other side of the bowl and gave it a strong brotherly squeeze. “Science will triumph over everything,” he said as though to comfort me. “It will triumph over all diseases.”

Once again we took our spoons out of our mouths and plunged them into the common bowl, in the blood-red liquid ritually affirming our brotherhood.

Now the musicians suddenly stopped playing for a few moments. When the violins struck up again, they played a frenetic number in the course of which the dancers flung their partners and caught them again. It was an American number with Polish trimmings. Steinman had been deeply moved by what I told him, and his big eyes glistened in the dark.

“The Jewish children, may God bless them. And the Jewish doctors, too, who work without remuneration. Ah, they’re a fine group!” he said with tears in his eyes. “Sooner or later the day must come when men will be united in a covenant of eternal friendship. The resurrection of the dead? I don’t know anything about it, but I shouldn’t mind it after lying in the ground a long time. It would be grand to have someone come whisper in my dead ears and give me the glad tidings that the great day of a perfected humanity has dawned.”

A woman with sad, bulging eyes set in a face like a slightly bruised, frozen apple came over to our table. Only after Steinman had gotten up from his seat and politely offered it to her did I recognize her—she was the elder of the rabbi’s daughters-in-law.

“Oh don’t get up, please,” she said, “unless you want to dance with me.”

“I dance to a quite different kind of music,” Steinman said.

“And my music requires a different kind of dance,” she replied. “So you see, we’re very much alike. But occasionally I feel like having a bit of fun, though dancing always makes me sad.”

Her intelligent face, her tall, slender figure, and her becoming dress made her stand out in that roomful of people.

“And you, don’t you dance either?” she asked, bending over me. I felt the warm breath of her perfume as she did so. Her eyes had the trembling glow of experienced middle age.

“Well, that’s my luck when I try being adventurous,” she said pensively. “There is a good Pushkin quotation to illustrate this, but here in Poland, if you quote a Russian author, you prove not so much your education as your age—you prove that you were at school before Poland recovered its independence.”

She had barely finished when Bronski took her under his arm and led her away elegantly, to join the dancers.

“Her husband is a very honest man, but unfortunately he has no common sense in practical matters, and everything he undertakes fails,” Steinman observed. “He isn’t fit to be a rabbi even today. And the poor girl is attracted to people like a moth to a flame. She is a bit older than her husband. Though you might not believe it, she was once a regal beauty. She is to be pitied, but I’m sure I’m the last man who could help her.” And with that he gave me an equivocal pat on the shoulder.

After a few turns around the floor with Mr. Bronski, she slipped away from him and came back over to us.

“I didn’t realize what kind of partner fell to my lot,” she said with a laugh that contained a hint of hysteria. “That’ll teach me a lesson. Madness! It was indeed madness on my part to come here. Why is someone like that allowed to dance freely with the others?” she asked resentfully.

“What guarantee have you that the others are sound of mind?” Steinman said to comfort her. “All of us here have to cope with this kind of world.”

She gave us a hasty goodbye and left the lounge.

“Neither of us was very gallant,” Steinman said to me. “We should have asked her either to stay with us or to let us take her home. She has a long way to go in the dark.”

The three violinists began to pack up their instruments. Several dancers were protesting against Buchlerner’s stinginess; it was mockery, they said, to organize a party that ended almost as soon as it had started. Some others said they would take up a collection to pay for another hour or so of music. But for all these protests it was clear that the dancers were tired. The young people still whirled around a bit, but the others went outside to get a breath of fresh air.

“You should thank me, Father, for having let you stay up so late, carrying on and all. Say good night to me now.”

Steinman stood up and pinched his daughter on the cheek. “You bad girl, I’ll … ” He kissed her and said goodbye to me.

“When Daddy does what I tell him, I love him dearly,” she said as she led him out.

“So you have no use for such silly things, hm?” Buchlerner had come up beside me without my noticing. “Vanity of vanities, isn’t it? But I have to give them a ‘dancing’ once a week, or they’d tear me to bits like a herring. Let me suggest that you take a little walk before you turn in. It’s a beautiful night, every star as big as your fist. God created a great big world with many little worlds inside it. Go out and have a look. Tonight He is displaying all His treasures.”

A knock at the door awakened me. It had been one of those nights of memorable sleep, the kind all the money in the world can’t buy. I glanced at the clock: I had been in bed only four hours. So I wrapped myself tight in my blanket and turned over, sure that someone had knocked at my door by mistake. But after several more knocks I realized I had to get out of bed. The knocks were stubborn and patient, as if saying: We’re not in a hurry, we’ll get you whether you like it or not.

When I opened the door an untidily dressed man stood before me. He held his cap in one hand and a carriage whip in the other.

He said good morning to me in a sepulchral, hoarse voice that came through many layers of phlegm. When he finally cleared his throat, his good morning was more normal.

He was shorter than average, but he had the look of a man once taller and stronger, beaten down by life. The lost height had gone to fill him out in the other dimension, and yet he was still not so sturdy a figure that a few more good kicks might not beat the rest of him down.

He put his cap back on. It was so shabby that instead of making him look taller, it seemed to cut off some of his height. He gave a little crack with the carriage whip and said that his vehicle was waiting for me downstairs. Then, seeing my bewilderment, he grinned, displaying a row of tobacco-stained teeth.

“You’ve overslept, but may I remind you that you ordered my carriage to take you to Kazimierz this morning? I’m punctual, as you see.” I told him that I had ordered no carriage, that I knew nothing about it, and that he had awakened me for nothing.

He studied me carefully to see whether I was not trying to deceive him. “Woe is me,” he said finally. “I’m afraid you’re right. Forgive me.”

A quarter of an hour later, when it seemed that I was finally about to get back to sleep—for the theme of a dream was just beginning to announce itself, the surest sign that one is falling asleep—I once again heard knocks at the door. This time the man with the cap and whip looked about ready to burst into tears. “Forgive me,” he said, “but perhaps you’d like to drive to Kazimierz anyway? After all, it won’t do you any harm to make a little excursion to Kazimierz.”

He went on to say that he had just had a piece of bad luck. The first time he had such a misfortune in all his years as a driver. Some sort of devils or goblins, may God preserve us from evil spirits, were intent on harrying him. Actually, he said, he had had three surefire passengers to Kazimierz.

“One was a young woman, another a priest, and the third was you—I mean the young man whom I mistook for you. It turned out that the young woman was a man, who abused me roundly when I came for him, so that I had to run for my life. The priest said that he was suffering from diarrhea and had to cancel his trip. As for my third passenger, the young man, he has simply vanished. I woke up about a dozen guests here without finding him. He must be staying at some other hotel. But one man whom I woke took pity on me: He said that he couldn’t get back to sleep anyway, so he might as well make a trip with me. That’s when I wondered if maybe you’d care to do the same. Take my advice, get dressed. While you’re dressing, you’ll think, ‘Why the devil am I going to Kazimierz?’ But once you’re in my carriage, you’ll realize it wasn’t such a bad idea. With two passengers the trip won’t be a total loss to me. In any case, I’ll give you a very cheap rate.”