East of Time (10 page)

On a bright Sunday morning in June, a friend of my father's, a small insignificant-looking free-thinker known as Pinchas the Logician — whose week was made up of seven Sundays — was sitting at leisure in a local park, trying to work out the reason behind the random motions of the celestial bodies. Presently he spotted a figure making its way towards him, and behold, it was his former neighbour Lev Solewicz, who, because of his disgust with the Yiddish language and the people who spoke it, had moved away from our neighbourhood and transformed himself into Leon Solarski.

‘Well, well,' said Leon in his newly adopted tongue, ‘what a refreshing pleasure to see a man who, like myself, has had the courage to reject religious claptrap, long beards, sidelocks, fur hats, and all that.'

‘Quite so, my dear friend,' the Logician replied. ‘And yet I still remain the authentic Jew I have always been.'

‘Really? How's that?'

‘By the very fact that I cry whenever I hear that a Jew like you has been beaten up.'

‘But I am
not
a Jew, not any more,' Leon shot back, indignant. ‘And what's more, I'll soon be converting!'

‘Have a seat, Lev,' said Pinchas in his politest Yiddish, ‘and let me tell you a story.'

At this Leon flared up. ‘Don't you dare call me
Lev
,' he cried. ‘And don't speak to me in your corrupted half-German!'

‘Whoa, hold it, hold it...' The Logician raised his palms, as if offering a truce. ‘Rage is a fool's trade and I don't think you qualify — not yet.' He smiled and continued quietly: ‘So please, join me on this bench and let me tell you a little story. You may find it quite... enlightening.'

Leon sat down reluctantly, checked his watch, and turned to Pinchas with a look of mock-resignation.

‘I knew a man,' the Logician began, ‘who forsook his father's wisdom, his mother's warmth, the fount of hope which had nourished their dreams by candlelight, and he exchanged his parents' ancient truths for a strange new god. Like Adam he stood in a hostile land, stuttering in his new tongue, with hands outstretched, a beggar awaiting a scrap of mercy. He died alone. Nobody walked behind his hearse — except the stonemason, whom he had instructed to inscribe above his tomb an epitaph that would sum up a wasted existence. It read:

A cat dreamt he was a tiger

And dreaming, lost his wits.

He fell asleep in the arms of a tiger

And woke up torn to bits.'

Lev-Leon shook his head. ‘Save your preaching for somebody else,' he said, making no effort to disguise his irritation. ‘I've listened to enough sermons in my time. After I'm gone I don't care what my epitaph says. What matters is life, not death.'

As he hurried off, his last words echoed in the Logician's mind like a rifle-shot.

 

 
The Philosopher
 

Mechel Schiff, my father's friend, would show up every Sunday morning to tell stories and partake of a hot cooked breakfast. The rest of the week he was fed by the Christian Mission, somewhere on Wólcza
ń
ska Street. A stocky, red-headed, blue-eyed chap, who dwelt for most of his life in a dilapidated shed, Mechel was known as
Der Hosenkavalier
because, as he himself put it, ‘I come from a line of fastidious dressers'. At the start of spring, this unemployed philosopher would visit the local market, where for one złoty he would purchase an entire new wardrobe. He would spend 20 groshen on a pair of shoes, 10 on a shirt, 25 on a jacket, and another 5 on socks and a tie; the balance, a whole 40 groshen, he always chose to invest in a pair of
hosen
— trousers, according to him, being the most important item in a man's wardrobe. Then, Mechel, the highly intelligent atheist, was off to the Christian Mission for a free meal.

‘And how was the soup today, Herr Mechel?' enquired the head of the Mission, Johann Mentzeler, who had been trying for years to convert Mechel to the right path.

‘Fabulous,' Mechel retorted. ‘I imagine that is the way they cook in your paradise kitchen, Herr Johann.'

‘That's true, that's true,' Johann jumped up, excited. ‘I'm glad you can finally see a glimpse of the true light.'

‘Sir, I said it merely by way of conversation. But to be quite honest, I must confess—'

‘Yes, that's it!' Johann almost shrieked with joy. ‘Confess! Confess!'

‘—that I am more absorbed,' Mechel continued, ignoring the intrusion, ‘with the economics of
this
world, than with the culinary art of the next. And to be truthful, I must lodge a small complaint: some mischievous devil, I know not of which
denomination, has pinched the traditional marrowbone out of my soup.'

‘Yes, so I see,' Johann replied, blushing. ‘But surely, in order to be happy, one must learn to detach oneself from such trivialities.'

‘Sir — a marrowbone is not a triviality. Not just to me, but even to the most stoutly religious believer.'

Johann was not to be outdone. ‘Ah, well, Herr Mechel. I know that some of your people are such stout believers that they fast every Monday and Thursday.'

‘True, Herr Johann. But that is not an expression of their belief — rather of the lack of it.'

‘Ah, Herr Mechel, dear Mechel, you are so clever! If only you could learn to love God — to understand God — to come to Him...'

‘Of course I can, and I will — but not until such time as a fellow can be locked up behind bars for preaching religion. So that no devil will ever dare to help himself to the marrowbone in my soup, which in their wisdom the gods — whatever their persuasion — have bestowed upon their beloved Mechel Schiff.'

 

 
Yankl Bolshevik
 

It was not by proper given-name and surname that a person was officially known in the territory of our community, but by his or her acquired nickname. For instance, if you were to state that Mr Samuel Haberman had passed away, no one would know to whom you were referring; but should you remark that lame Shmuel had kicked the bucket, a shudder-sigh of recognition and grief would run like an evening whisper through the minds of our tender-hearted citizens.

Yankl Zelmanowicz, father of my school friend Laibush, and the man who had taught us to play Five Hundred (not that I needed any coaching), was known as Yankl Bolshevik. I am not sure that he was ever a true Communist; rather, from his political jargon I would conjecture that he was a member of the legendary SR, the Social Revolutionaries, a party that sometimes resorted to terror — though one should not equate that with the random banditry of more recent times. If, for example, the committee decided to take out a man for murdering his comrades, it had to be that particular individual alone; should the potential victim have even a dog beside him, the assassination would not take place.

Our Yankl had an analytical mind, and he loved to measure everything against his beloved Russian Revolution. ‘You know, children,' he told us once, watching his son Laibush shuffle a worn-out deck of cards, ‘I often recall those monumental October days. History dealt the Russian people a terrific hand, yet some of our major players — like Zinoviev, Kamenev, even the great Victor Chernov, leader of the SR, a man I loved like a father — all of them pulled back at the crucial moment. It needed the ingenuity of an Ilyich Lenin, who took one look and declared: “Comrades, Red is our winning colour. Let's play!”'

Yankl Bolshevik was soaked in fascinating stories — stories of night battles in snowstorms against White armies led by the bloodthirsty Denikin, Kolchak and others. But to me, the most unforgettable of all was the story of Maria Spiridonova's return from Siberia; when he spoke about her, his eyes were aflame with black fire. Perhaps there was something more between him and the legendary great lady of the Social Revolutionaries!

‘I was amongst a thousand men or more,' he would begin, ‘who awaited her on the outskirts of Moscow. As the train, its
face draped with two red banners, came into view, we ran towards the driver, asked him to unhook the engine, and joyously harnessed
ourselves
to her carriage. Beholding that spectacle, Maria, this humble heroine, jumped from the train to haul our load with us; then, at the top of her lungs, she sang out the great opening words of the
Internationale
:

Arise ye workers from your slumbers

Arise ye prisoners of want...

and, like a mighty peal of thunder, a thousand voices responded as one:

So comrades, come rally

And the last fight let us face;

The Internationale

Unites the human race.'

Yankl would spend his Saturday mornings at the barber's. Here, Jews who could hardly make ends meet argued richly and passionately about Sacco and Vanzetti, Hitler, Spain, Mussolini and the war in Abyssinia, the famine in China, and a hundred other topics. A barbershop in those days was a political marketplace, and Yankl was always in the thick of the debate.

Although, in the wake of the Moscow trials, Yankl became a disillusioned man, come May Day he would still stand in front of the barber's — dressed in a black dinner-suit with a red flower in his lapel — and as the procession passed by, he, the old Bolshevik, would shine once more. I saw him taking the ‘salute' during our last May Day parade. He already knew that Russia's revolutionary spirit had been imprisoned in Stalin's gulag, that the children of Ferdinand Lassalle were wearing swastikas, that
Europe was tensed for imminent war. Yet as the
Internationale
burst forth from the throats of ten thousand marchers, his face lit up again with that incredible romantic light. A light that, soon enough, would be extinguished forever.

 

 
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