The Glatstein Chronicles (54 page)

“Take deep breaths,” Neifeld said. “Polish woods can cure the sickest heart.”

The morning was well advanced, but the woods were cool and quiet. One felt that in them the light and stillness were constant over the days and the years, as if the woods were some ancient dynasty intent upon preserving a traditional amount of light and stillness appropriate to them. Somewhere a bird was testing its voice.

Neifeld quietly ordered the driver to stop. “I want to hear this,” he said, “this is the real thing.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“What else but the world-famous nightingale! Ssh … ”

Crisply it gave us a few short trills, repeated as though the singer wanted to stress the theme, but soon it went on to elaborate on the theme in lengthy embellishments. I was struck by the utterly unsentimental quality of the song. How did so cerebral an artist ever come to be praised by sentimental poets? The song of this nightingale was a recitative with many rests; each phrase was longer and more complicated than the previous one, and after each phrase the singer stopped to catch its musical breath or, perhaps, to study the impression it had just made. While the nightingale was singing, the surrounding stillness seemed more intense; the hushed silence seemed to form a guard around the precious bit of song. The singing itself was part of the primeval light and stillness of the forest, it was as if the mossy stillness had begun to speak its own language, as if the bird were giving voice to the awesome silence of the forest. There was no trace of degrading sweetness in the nightingale’s song, no concession to debased popular taste. To the contrary, this was the perfection of musical expression. It was outrageous to think that this bird should have the reputation of a “sweet” singer when its musical language was so intellectual, so sophisticated.

The nightingale repeated two phrases, but on repetition the second had pointedly become a question. After this, the bird stopped abruptly, waiting for an answer. No answer came, and the singer fell silent.

“This is a late bird,” Neifeld said quietly. “Usually they sing until the middle of June, and mostly at night. We have had the privilege of hearing a rare exception.”

“It was a nice song of praise to the Creator of the world,” the driver said curtly. “Giddy up!” He maneuvered the reins, and the horse set off at a brisk trot as though filled with new strength.

“Maybe it was a song in your honor,” Neifeld said to me, smiling.

I said that in America we had no nightingales but other, far more sentimental birds. Neifeld was pleased that like him I had perceived the absence of sentimentality in the nightingale’s song.

“That rusty-brown bird is as far as you can get from the pathetic in music,” he observed. “Very often when I listen to it I have the feeling that its songs have been written on a special typewriter. Only the coloratura touches seem to come from a vibration of the wings. The short, abrupt notes suggest that it ponders each of them and chooses the melody very carefully. Only the trills have the charm of a genuine impromptu.”

The driver cracked his whip when we came out of the forest. Under the influence of the private concert we had just heard, he honored us with a cantorial selection, imitating all the voices in the choir, from the bass to the little boy with a piercing treble.

“Believe it or not,” he said turning his head around, “but years ago we had a cantor whose name was Slowik—Polish for nightingale. Well, the bird we’ve just heard was just good enough to shine that man Slowik’s shoes. I was just a little boy then, and the cantor is long since dead and buried, but I’ll never forget the way he sang his showpiece on Rosh Hashanah. That cantor had a throat that was like a flute. He came to us from Lithuania, and it all ended sadly—he was caught with a married woman, and he vanished, swallowed up without a trace. You never hear anyone like him today—unless you mistake today’s cantors with their priests’ voices for singers.”

He tried the Rosh Hashanah piece for himself, beating time with his whip, but he sang it quietly, as though hesitating to let strangers share his childhood memory. When he turned to us to say that in half an hour we’d be in Kazimierz, there were tears in his eyes, his own singing had moved him so.

Neifeld was silent. His sallow face was covered with a thin film of seriousness, a momentary cloud over a wistful smile. Whether because he had talked so much before, or because he was caught up in private thoughts, he did not utter a word. Perhaps he was solemnly preparing himself for the entry into Kazimierz.

Along the road we began to encounter Jews with visored caps, which looked like specially chosen Jewish crowns of thorns. Their whole pride and nobility seemed to lie in their finely combed beards. Impoverished kings must, unfortunately, try to make a living. They followed us with sad eyes, which probed our carriage deeply to discover who we might be and what might be expected from us. They walked at a leisurely gait—their whole manner seemed to say that neither their poverty nor their great opportunities would run away. The shepherds of the Bible must have walked like that when they went to the well to draw water for their camels.

“These are our spinners of gold, our international bankers,” Neifeld said when he noticed that I was looking at them. “Here are the Rothschilds of farm and dairy, coming to town to sell a cheese, perhaps, or maybe aiming still higher—perhaps two or three are pooling their resources to buy a calf in common. The Poles are after their wealth too. They are systematically driven from the villages, not by laws but by terrorist acts. Their ramshackle houses are set on fire, in the hope that they will go up in smoke. Agitators inflame the peasants against them, and sometimes these quiet Jews are set upon with sticks and stones. Where can they run to? Only to the bigger cities, where opportunity waits to welcome great capitalists like them. Even the territories for begging are already staked out—there is no room left for newcomers.

“The fact is that a real war is being waged against us, a war of attrition,” Neifeld went on passionately. “There’s no escaping it: all the countries have imposed a siege and try to starve us out by all kinds of restrictions. Here in Poland records are kept, so they can tell just how many Jewish businesses have been taken over by Poles, just how many Jewish mouths have had the bread snatched out of them. Believe me, the Poles are much cleverer than Hitler. They don’t rant and rave, they just pass over our bodies with a steamroller and drive us right into the ground. A war of attrition is supposedly a slow process, but for all its slowness it nevertheless causes real suffering. Tens of thousands of Jews go through the agonies of starvation with their wives and children. Formerly you could escape by emigrating, and American relatives would send you the fare. Today our people are staring death in the eyes.

“Meanwhile the Jews of Poland have been given a bad name all over the world. What is needed is to sound the alarm, to explain to the world that Polish Jews have passion, have faith, have a treasure of faith beyond anything the world dreams. We are intelligent children, we still have a God in our hearts, and we have faith, a marvelous optimistic faith—not just a religious faith, but a faith that nourishes the soul and sustains it even in a starved, emaciated body. The Polish Jews have been slandered before the world, and we have become undesirable emigrants everywhere. The German Jews who preserved only an anemic Judaism are lucky. This is not the time to berate them. Of course they must be rescued now. But how can they be compared with the Polish Jews, whose warmth and spirituality uphold the divine image of Jewishness?”

The driver turned around as though to say something, but Neifeld waved to him vigorously to be silent. He probably feared that the driver would spoil or simplify his argument. He leaned forward and began to look around us.

“My dear friend,” Neifeld said in a voice full of tenderness. “We are now in Kazimierz.”

Neifeld was smiling as though his most beautiful dream had come true when the carriage turned off the road and stopped near a water pump. Neifeld’s smile communicated itself to me and to the driver as he climbed down and gave a hitch to his trousers.

Through this trio of smiles I looked at the old houses lining a very ordinary main street, a street that could have been somewhere in the Catskills. Our smiles, I hoped, would provide the necessary light to illuminate the odd shape of each house separately. They all looked as though they were holding each other up, the centripetal stresses all converging toward the pump which stood in the middle of them like some old weathered sundial—though whether it was recording twelve forty-five, or thirteen hundred years, who could say or possibly care?

Had it not been for the water pump, the old houses would surely have collapsed and fallen to pieces. The pump looked like the fundamental force that held the street together. Neifeld had a little suggestion: since it was so early, why not go somewhere for a bite to eat. Afterward, he would not bother me, I would go my way and he would go his.

The driver liked the suggestion very much. He was starving, he said, and was much too weak to go on without having something to eat. Of course, he added, we should get something light, and what can be lighter than a drink of vodka on an empty stomach?

He led us up a twisted staircase, to a dark door situated halfway up. We entered a room full of children, boys and girls, who scattered like chickens at our entrance. A man with a narrow, longish, black and gray beard and a serious rabbinical face welcomed us and at once set the table. He put a bottle on it, and the driver said a blessing with a pious face and quickly drank two glasses, one after the other.

He cleared his throat and suggested that two glasses are a well-tested recipe used by experienced drinkers, because the second helps get the first one down.

“If you’ll let me advise you, gentlemen,” the man with the rabbinical manners said, “you couldn’t do better than to have a piece of roast duck with your vodka.”

“How about a bit of herring with onion?” the driver asked.

“Now, really,” the man said with a frown. “If I had herring here, don’t you think I’d have it in front of you by now? I’ll tell you the truth, last night I was raided by a dozen heavy eaters who cleaned me out of everything like a swarm of locusts. Please don’t say you don’t want roast duck, gentlemen, because that’s all I have left.”

“But bread?” the driver asked fearfully.

“
Skolko ugodno,
as much as you want,” the other answered with a smile. “We’re never short of bread. It’s our light eternal.”

The driver took up a pitcher of water from the table, opened the door, and washed himself on the stairs. A woman came out, protesting: “What do you mean flooding the staircase like this? Somebody will break his neck on these puddles!”

“Don’t worry,” the driver said to her. “Pretend you mopped the stairs for once.”

When the time came to pay, the rabbinical-looking man vanished, and his wife appeared to take our money. Neifeld insisted that we were his guests. When the woman told us how much we owed, the driver cried out: “You’re almost giving me a heart attack! What are these, wartime prices? How dare you gouge us for a duck that was nothing but skin and bones?”

“Now, now,” the woman said, restraining her irritation with a pretense of surprise. “What do you care? Is the money coming out of your pocket? It isn’t your treat, is it?”

“You’re no honest woman, you’re a highway robber! Where’s your husband? I won’t let anybody pay that much. It’s because of you that little children starve to death. I want to speak to your husband.”

“My husband has nothing to do with money matters.”

“He wouldn’t know the difference between one coin and another,” the driver said, mocking her. Neifeld had his money out, but was in no hurry to pay: he was enjoying the scene and wanted it to last as long as possible. “Call in the poor thing, I bet he knows the value of money.”

“He’ll pour swill on you,” the woman screamed, “if you don’t shut your mouth. I hope it twists into a knot! You’re not worth my husband’s piss. Just imagine, this one here thinks he can tell me how much I am to charge for my duck!”

“Breindele Cossack, I’ll teach you a lesson. Next time I’ll bring you a plague, not customers. I can find my way to the place across the street, you know.”

The woman softened and at once reduced her price by half a złoty. “When you speak like a human being, that’s different,” she said with a face suddenly transformed from anger to smiles.

The driver took the bottle and poured himself another glass. Then he said: “This is my tip. And what you are wishing me now, please God, may at least half of it happen to you. Here’s to you, gentlemen. To life!
L’chaim.
”

When we walked out, I arranged with the driver that he should take us back before sunset. I told Neifeld that if he had no special plans I’d be glad if he accompanied me. He was very touched by my invitation.

I realized suddenly that the low houses and the whole huddling street drew the glance downward. For the first time I raised my eyes and saw a hill, and on the hill what looked to be the ruins of a large house whose entire interior had been burned out. A little higher on the hill stood two other tall structures, but these were more like the unfinished foundations of a castle. The hill was much more cheerful than the houses below. With its green woods and ruins it looked as though it represented some younger civilization than the little houses among which we were standing.

“In my opinion, before climbing up to see Esther’s castle, we should make a tour of the lower town. We’ll go up the hill later.”

He said the words “Esther’s castle” with such indifference that I suspected him of trying to test its effect on me. And the fact is that my heart was struck as though by a golden arrow. The legend atop that hill had captivated me through the folk song of the golden peacock that flew to faraway lands.

King Casimir wore the paper crown of Purim and had a silken beard. He looked a bit obtuse and in some ways resembled King Ahasuerus in the biblical story. But he was a fiery lover and he carried the Jewish girl up the hill in his own arms, higher and higher, up to where the Spanish castles had just been completed. Below stood Mordecai scratching his head in his helplessness. What an idea to carry her so high! Why, one could get all out of breath climbing like that. Esther herself said nothing but lay swooning in the king’s arms as fragrant with perfumes as a casket with spices. It seems that she was naked, or rather, three-quarters naked, for King Casimir had wanted to remove the last of her clothes with his own trembling hands. And during the long days when the king reigned somewhere far away, Esther looked down longingly at the pump, at the grimy houses where her brothers lived. At night she would let down her tresses and sing, “Were I to go out on the porch and look at the town.” During one such sad moment, while she waited for the king with the silken beard, she tied a letter to the tail of a golden peacock. The letter was addressed to the Jewish people for whom she yearned from afar. But the king’s magician conjured up a terrible storm with thunder and lightning to blanket the whole country roundabout. In the bad weather the golden peacock could not find its way to the Jewish people, and the letter got detached from its tail and was lost.