East of Time (11 page)

Imbued with the spirit of the forthcoming Berlin Olympics, some of our fellow citizens embarked on a new yet generations-old sport: pogroms. The old cry went up:
The Jews!
— no one really knew why. But things seldom appear to people the way they really are, only the way they want them to be, and suddenly the land of my birth began to mushroom with pogroms — many, many pogroms. I will relate only the one I witnessed myself.

A mob of university students, in league with some individuals who were intellectually inept, rushed into the house at Zawiszy 7, home of my school friend Zisza Kliger, who dwelt there in a windowless flat with his younger brother and widowed mother. The soberly irrational Olympians ripped apart the only bedding the Kligers possessed, let the feathers fly all over the street like petals of snow, threw the mother's ever-hungry cooking-pots out the window, and knocked her unconscious into the bargain for trying to protect us.

Warming to their task, they made for the home of my friend Huna Kurbic, who lived next door to the Kligers. Huna's father was a gardener, and the only Jew in the city of the waterless river employed in the public service; he was also an old revolutionary who had fought against the Tsars for the independence of our country, and although hardly in his prime, he would not have let these rascals as much as spit in his porridge. But they quickly overpowered him and gave him a good thrashing, and
for his temerity he was sacked from his job — for planting (as a bitter jest had it) Jewish trees in Slavic soil.

Encouraged by their successes and by the quiet acquiescence of the authorities, and filled with zest to emulate their Berlin contemporaries, our local heroes soon renewed their crusade; they reappeared on the corner of Zgierska and Limanowskiego, where they caught the seventy-year-old Alter ‘Herring' (so called because he dealt in that variety of fish). Two medical students who were part of the gang gave him a proper physical, and to crown their victory they tipped Alter's barrel of herrings into the gutter.

These outbursts and other similar demented deeds and disturbances stirred our town's two organized trade unions into action. Jewish workers, together with an admixture of other men of goodwill, decided to make a stand. The next ‘sports event' was scheduled for Sunday, right after the morning church service. The racial athletes gathered under their party flag on the local marketplace, Bałucki Rynek, fervently intoning their saintly hymn:

To our last drop of blood

We'll defend our People's right

Till we rid our sacred land

Of the ugly Hebrew blight.

Every Jew is a deadly foe

So help us God,

So help us God.

The name of the Almighty was invoked in profound solemnity, with eyes closed.

Haughtily, and in crisp military step, they entered Limanowskiego, my street. But to their bewilderment, they found themselves met by a wall of sternly resolute men armed with
iron bars. For a moment they stood there as if paralysed. And then, hoodlums being by their very nature cowards, they took off in all directions, dispersing like a cloud of dust driven off by a gust of wind.

However — as I would learn later, much later — this dust never actually disappeared. It found shelter and settled, to reemerge all too soon from out of the dark crevices of time.

 

 
The Improviser
 

My little friend, pimple-faced Shmulik, lived with his parents and three siblings in an attic no bigger than an alcove. Shmulik was a born improviser. You'd say a word and he'd come back at once with a rhyme. On top of that, Shmulik had the voice of an angel. He could soften a stone with his singing. The young cantor of our local synagogue believed that we had Shmulik's voice to thank for all the mercies the Almighty bestowed upon us.

But our landlord Motke was of another mind. We kids, he said, were the natural enemies of property, and Shmulik, our ringleader, was the worst of all. Perhaps he was right. Anything on his property that could serve the needs of us kids was fair game. Especially Motke's timber yard, just inside the gateway to our block of apartments.

We were twelve youngsters, seven boys and five girls, between the ages of ten and fourteen. We had our own football team and card club, and the timber yard was our logical hideout. It was there that we played cowboys and indians, fathers and mothers, hide-and-seek; above all, we played cards — for real money.

One day Shmulik, the boy with a thousand pimples on his forehead and the voice of an angel, whose plain-looking thirty-year-old sister would shiver while I explored the topography of
her meagre body, suggested that in order to stage an authentic adventure of the Wild West, it was necessary to light a fire. Well, there was no shortage of firewood in the timber yard; but the moment the smell of smoke seeped into Motke's flat, he came running, waving his arms, brandishing his black-lacquered cane. ‘I'll send you all to prison, you good-for-nothings!' he screamed. ‘Prison, you hear? — that's what I'll do!'

Shmulik the improviser stood his ground. ‘Prison? Prison?' he repeated, like a fiddler tuning his violin. ‘Then allow me, sir,' he announced, effecting a deep bow before the furious Motke. And with one eye closed, tapping his right foot, he began:

From prison to sunny Spain

Shmulik flew in an aeroplane;

I was king of the sea,

No lord was greater than me.

Girls eighteen to the dozen I've had,

Come, pretty maiden, be my bride,

You'll find me talented, and besides

I'm such a well-to-do lad.

On the word ‘lad', Shmulik made another deep bow, took off his hat and held it out. Motke shook his head. ‘Don't you ever dare to enter my timber yard again,' he hissed, then tossed a small coin into the hat and walked off.

But nothing could discourage our Shmulik. Since we had lost access to our timber citadel, he immediately embarked on a search for a new hideaway. His choice was ingenious: the gently tilted tar roof of our block — where Motke had once kept a pigeon coop, where silence listened to the wind, and where our slightly limping landlord was not game enough to visit. Here we would set up home anew.

We climbed up on the roof by way of the loft (our leader alone had the privilege of arriving directly via his attic window) and we celebrated the occasion with a game of blackjack. Needless to say, Shmulik, may his memory be blessed forever, cleaned us out. Once again he bowed his domed head and, hat in hand, gave his bankrupt admirers another performance:

Shmulik is a clever boy,

He may be in rags but he's never coy;

Don't turn your head, don't even blink

Or he'll take your money in a wink.

I still recall the summery September day in 1942 when Shmulik, escorted by the Jewish police of our inverted state, walked ahead of his family towards the cattle-truck that would take them to be ‘resettled'. Shmulik was sad, he looked forlorn — I had never seen him like this. Perhaps he knew intuitively that his career as an entertainer had come to an end.

Years later I had the good fortune to meet up with Shmulik's cantor from the old days, the one who had been so enraptured by his voice. I don't know why people used to say that a cantor is a fool; for as it turned out, this cantor was now a confident, fully accredited rabbi with a long white beard. We were pleased to see one another, but I had barely opened my mouth when he patted me sagely on the shoulder and declared: ‘In everything that happened to Shmulik lies God's hand. How else could he have become the head soloist in our heavenly Father's choir? How else?' he repeated, triumphantly.

 

 
Star-crossed Lovers
 

The four-storey tenement block where we lived was occupied by sixteen families. Every family dwelled in a one-room apartment. Each room had two beds: one for the parents, the other for their four or five children. What better proof of the closeness of our families?

Our landlord Motke — a grey-bearded man who swaggered around with a black-lacquered cane and a white handkerchief in his breast pocket; whose quarters comprised
two
rooms, plus a kitchen, a balcony and a foyer; whose set of gold front teeth established beyond question his enormous wealth — this man was known by everyone as Motke Machinist.

Not that he had anything to do with repairing machines. No. The honorific was bestowed upon him because in his younger years — that is, before he inhabited a residence with a foyer — Motke had been one of the most sought-after safebreakers. Legend had it that he worked only at night, in his socks, and with his eyes closed so as not to look upon his accomplices. Evidently he enjoyed strict solitude.

Motke had a fascinating history. He was a plain-looking, rather morbid man, yet it had happened that Kraindle — the most delectable, the smartest, the best-educated prostitute in the profession, who distributed up front to the needy the money she made on her back — had fallen passionately in love with him.

Motke's parents, however, though no more kosher than he, had refused to have a prostitute, even a noble one, for a daughter-in-law. Motke protested, threatened to hang himself; Kraindle wept, vowed that she would go straight, swore that she knew a doctor who could ‘make it good as new'. But Motke's family, especially his mother, would not hear of it. They soon forced their son to marry the strong-headed Ruchcia,
who by way of a dowry received a fishstall at the market from her father — whom we called Mussolini because he peddled Italian typewriters.

As soon as Kraindle learnt of her defeat she had slit her wrists, and would most probably have bled to death had she not been saved by one of her ever-alert colleagues. Rumour had it that, thanks to her connections in higher circles, she was able to secure a position in the French Foreign Legion...

Meanwhile, every Monday morning Ruchcia would ride in a hired horse-and-buggy to the nearby village, where she bought fish from a young farmer who played the flute. One year, just before the High Holidays, she departed at dusk, never to return.