The Glatstein Chronicles (56 page)

In the middle of the stream, trees, boards, and patches of grass floated by as peacefully as ducks. Who could tell what the debris meant in terms of personal loss to some poor peasant farther upstream?

The river glinted like molten steel. On the other side we could see the green and yellow edges of the woods that formed part of the hill. On top the dizzily pitched ruins of Esther’s castle looked as though they must at any moment slip down into the Vistula, obviously quite capable of swallowing up the last remains of a legend along with so much else.

The hill was cool and green, but the river glistened with the midday sun. Dazzling reflections extended as far as the eye could see. Even the floating boards and trees glistened in the sunlight.

“Let’s stop a moment at the halfway point,” I said to Neifeld. “It’s too much. Let’s find an outdoor restaurant and have a cool drink.”

“It’s all right with me. There’s no need to rush, we must digest everything bit by bit. Apropos, have you digested the roast duck?”

I looked at him. He was smiling.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said, “if you won’t think me a glutton. The fact is I could really eat a bite.” He took out his watch. “Though it’s only a quarter to twelve. This time we’ll not ask the driver to be our guide. Follow me, we’ll find an outdoor restaurant and eat a homemade Jewish meal, with soup, and a piece of herring for appetizer, perhaps even marinated herring. If we are lucky, we may get a hot cabbage borsht. There is a woman here who makes an excellent borsht with marrow bones. She is also famous for her rich desserts. The dishes she serves taste like paradise. We’ll sit in a garden somewhere, and enjoy God’s world. How about it?”

I told him that the more he talked, the hungrier I was getting and that if he didn’t lead me at once to the woman who made the borsht, I’d drop in my tracks.

“Now that’s the way I like to hear a man talk,” he said. This burly fellow grabbed me by the hand and dragged me off at a run, like a boy.

He stopped suddenly and said with a worried expression: “I must warn you that I’m not sure that there will be cabbage borsht today. It’s a matter of luck. Sometimes the woman has it, at other times she says we should have come the day before. It depends on the day.” He raised his hands to heaven as if expecting a miracle. “Is it clear? I haven’t promised you borsht, so don’t hold me to it.”

His brown pockmarked face was laughing. At that moment I felt as close to him as to a brother. “My word, if you don’t find me something to eat pretty soon—I don’t care what—I’ll kill you.”

“That’s the kind of talk I like to hear,” he said, and once again grabbed my hand and ran.

The woman had two warts on her nose, one with hair. Neifeld insisted that the warts were charming; they were not, he said, the practical kind of wart that sprouts in later life so that one’s eyeglasses may be held up by something. This woman’s warts were on either side of a thick nose, and gave it the look of some curious growth. Her hands, however, were the hands of the proverbial “woman of valor”—good, motherly hands that could cook, bake, clean floors, scour every corner of the house, hands that could sweep out the weekday and carry in the Sabbath, that could plait pigtails, wash dishes, and tend children down with measles, smallpox, or scarlet fever. The half-naked arms were fat but strong, the hands those of a mother rather than a wife; they had a cheerful mobility and aroused confidence in the menu she recited.

We ordered pot roast because, as it happened, she had no borsht. When did she make borsht? This was hard to tell, because she had no system, she made borsht only when it occurred to her that her family were hankering for it. If she complied with every wish of her family and cooked only what they wanted her to cook, they would by now have grown tired of her best dishes. “To tell the truth,” she added, “I often don’t make borsht because of my husband. He has a real passion for it and eats so much of it that at night I have to give him a hot water bottle to ease his stomachache.”

At another table sat a man of whom I could see only the side of his face. But it was a profile I was sure I recognized, even if I couldn’t put a name to it. It would be fun to make the identification without having seen him head on, merely from the profile—that half-blind eye, that long chin, and cauliflower ear—I knew I knew them intimately. In memory I leafed through thousands, tens of thousands of profiles and then stopped triumphantly. I snapped my fingers.

“Do you see that man, with his profile to us? The last time I saw him was twenty years ago. He is a painter, a friend of my youth. His name is Farshtand.”

“Farshtand? Farshtand? Yes, he has some reputation as a Jewish painter,” Neifeld said, dunking a piece of white bread in the pot roast. “It makes sense that he should be a painter: every third man here is one. Since you’re not a painter, nor I, he surely must be one.”

Now the man turned his face to us. He had white eyebrows and white eyelashes, which looked as though made of pig’s bristles. His left eye was smaller than the other, which somehow could not open.

“Well, it would be no credit to me to recognize him now,” I said to Neifeld. I got up and asked the man at the other table if he would join us. He rose apathetically from the chair. He looked like someone sleepy after a heavy meal.

“So you too had the pot roast?” Neifeld asked, wiping his plate with white bread.

“Is that all you wanted to know?” the heavyset man said, apparently ready to go back to his own table. To stop him, I quickly asked whether his name was Farshtand, and whether he was a painter. This interested him a bit more. “That’s what I figured,” he said, and sat down, though without much enthusiasm. The expression on his face suggested that if we bored him, he’d get up and leave.

I reminded him of common friends, I gave him my name, mentioned America, and even recalled the scene when he said goodbye to me many years before, and I asked him whether he remembered the letter he had written me before the outbreak of the war. As I told him, the war had dropped a curtain over everything that had gone before, and the ocean had become a river of fire, like the legendary Sambatyon.

I must have talked with animation, for I grew emotional recalling the days when we all used to walk together in the Saxon Garden.

He said, “yes, yes” to everything, but his eyes were cold, unconvinced. When he realized that his “yeses” sounded mechanical, he replaced them with “sure, sure,” but it was obvious that he did not remember me, and that my warm reminders made not the slightest impression on him. When I was through, he looked exhausted, and his “sure, sure, of course” hung in the air between us. He did not recognize any real link with my childhood memories.

I told him that I had recently seen an exhibition of his work in the home of a wealthy man who had gone down in the world. He had bought Farshtand’s paintings when he was prosperous; and now his home had become a private restaurant for businessmen when their wives were staying in the country. I didn’t tell him that his paintings looked overfinished, that the colors were shrill, the grass too grassy, and that the flesh of the nudes recalled illustrations in out-of-date editions of the Arabian Nights—an olive skin tone which tended to turn black.

The only thing that did interest him was the fact that I had come from America. He assured me that he had many paintings in his studio, and would like to show them to me. Several Americans had bought his paintings. Once he uttered the word
bought,
he became more animated than I. He told me he did not work in Kazimierz—let the others paint here, he came here to sit and think and look around. But back home he painted the whole winter. He hated Kazimierz. Formerly he had come here to paint like all the others, but now he came only to get this place out of his system. He had been to Paris, he said, and had barely escaped alive. Paris was full of great painters and great failures, and he had been unable to decide to which of these categories he belonged, so he didn’t stay. He had been in Warsaw too, but he found life there impossible. The Poles detested Jewish artists and killed them by ignoring them, coldbloodedly. The Jews in Warsaw were just as bad, because the moment you professed to be a Jewish artist, they feted and banqueted you and killed you with all the nationalist whoop-de-do. Once you began to play the part of a Jewish artist, you were a dead duck.

Again he mentioned that he had some paintings and would sell them at fair prices.

Neifeld sat by himself, absorbed in something between sleep and reverie. His sallow face was even darker now, and his pockmarks seemed larger, as if they were breathing in his sleep. The glint of a smile peeped through his half-closed eyes. He seemed to be laughing at me, at my embarrassment, at my warmed-up childhood recollections to which Farshtand had reacted so coldly.

The painter walked with us as far as the path that led up the hill. He walked away quickly, as though glad to get rid of us. Neifeld asked that we walk slowly, unhurriedly, because there’d be plenty of time. On our way we ran into many vacationers, women in shorts, men in unbuttoned shirts. For a moment I thought I was somewhere in the Catskills. Young men carried elaborate shepherds’ crooks, as though they were climbing mountains in operettas, with a song on their lips. And some of them were actually singing songs in Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew.

We reached the first ruin of Esther’s castle. Neifeld touched and caressed the walls. We went inside. Through the apertures that had once been windows we could see the whole town below, with the tranquil Vistula, which looked so much smaller and more sluggish, almost icebound from up here. The tranquility of the river below, its silver immobility, added to the dignity of the ruin in which we stood and made it seem much more like a castle.

“It was here every morning that Esther delighted in the Vistula,” Neifeld observed, still caressing the peeling walls. Here and there were flecks of paint, perhaps the remnants of murals washed away by rains.

Suddenly we heard someone panting behind us, and in a moment Farshtand came up to me. “I’ve come to apologize,” he said. “I’m stupid—it was only after I left you that I recalled who you were. That woman serves too big meals. I was all fogged out. How stupid of me to have forgotten …,” and he evoked several incidents of our former friendship. “No, I’ll never forgive myself—how could I—I’m disgusted with myself.”

He glanced down at the river below and said that he must get back down, for up here he was subject to a peculiar impulse—the moment he was on top of the hill he was seized with a desire to dash down again, at top speed. Since there were so many people around during the day, he could do this only at night, and when he did, he felt like King Casimir in person. As he turned to go, he begged me to visit him in his studio.

At the ruins farther up the hill, children were climbing up and down the shaky stairs. We kept going still higher, passing peasant houses now packed full with vacationers. Finally Neifeld discovered a pleasant spot on a slope in the woods overlooking the Vistula. We sat down on the rough leaves. He took off his shirt and undershirt. “Go on and take off your shirt and get some of the Kazimierz sun. The sun, the coolness of the Vistula, the woods—you’ll have something to remember.”

I reminded him that we had to think of getting back to the driver and the return home. He drew out his watch and put it back in his pocket, then he stretched out his bare torso on the leaves, rolling happily like a little boy.

“Never mind, we can have one more hour of paradise, and I am allowing one hour for the trip back down.”

We had reached the water pump and were about to get into the carriage when Neifeld suddenly changed his mind. He was going to stay over another day in Kazimierz. He asked me not to take this amiss, but he realized he would not have the opportunity to visit the place again soon, and he’d better take advantage of the fact that he was there. He could afford it; in fact he might stay over a couple of days. After all, there was no compelling reason not to stay on. If he knew that I had plenty of time and no other plans, it would have been pleasant to travel with me, and we could have gone to other places together.

“However, since you are soon leaving the country, we’d just have to say goodbye in a day or two anyway. Why not today? What’s the use of my pouring out another bushel of words? This way I’ll know you’re still somewhere around and that we might have spent more time together. I’d have run out of topics, anyway, in another day or two. So it’s better that I say goodbye to you now.”

He held out his hand. His dark face now was lit up by the glow of the Kazimierz sunshine he loved so much, and a restless glitter appeared in his eye.

“Given the present uncertainty of Jewish life, you can never tell. It may very well happen that we’ll meet in New York one day. You’ll be walking down some street full of millions of people—at least they seem so crowded in American films—and I’ll walk up to you and put my hand on your shoulder. And just to make it easier for you to recognize me at once, I’ll say, ‘Kazimierz!’”

The driver merely flicked his horse with the whip, and it set off at an unexpectedly fast trot.

“This horse is a real pearl! He understands the slightest touch of the whip!” the driver said affectionately. “Of course, he has had a good rest, he drank and ate his fill. But I’m sorry we had to leave your companion in Kazimierz. It isn’t the money, I’ll get paid all right, he won’t get away from me, but that’s a very fine young man. He doesn’t look like a boor—to the contrary, he looks anything but a boor.”

The horse began to slow down, and the driver once again caressed it with the whip, this time along the legs.

“This horse is a real pleasure,” he said. “I hate to be on the road late at night. Not that I am a coward, I’m not afraid of robbers, and if it’s necessary to punch someone in the jaw, you can rely on me. I can take on anyone.”

The stillness of the evening was setting down over the black dirt of the road. It seemed that our carriage was catching up with a greater and darker stillness than appeared at any given moment from a distance. The western sky was turning fiery with strident reds and glittering yellows over patches of blue so subtle that it seemed to have been purged of dross, and only the very purest essence remained. On a hilltop a clump of trees still held a bit of gold reflected from the sun we could no longer see.