East of Time (13 page)

On 18 July 1936, Fascist insurgents who would later be led by General Franco rose up against the legally elected government of the Spanish Republic. Although Spain was a thousand kilometres from our town — where unemployment was a way of life, where little folk were pressed into holes in dilapidated houses by a system that mocked their misery — the temerity of the insurgents threw our neighbourhood into a state of great ferment.

Almost overnight there were demonstrations, meetings, protests, fundraising drives; people greeted each other with clenched fists, shouting
Red Front!
And everywhere, our neighbours' son Lucjan was to be found: tall, dark, handsome Lucjan, reliable Lucjan — alias Luzer, who, forever on the lookout for answers to the intractable question of the wretchedness in our midst, had discovered the Soviet Union. Sitting on the shoulders of two comrades, a red flag in his hand, above a tumultuous, ebullient throng that heaved like a stormy sea, Lucjan sang at the top of his sonorous voice:

In smoke sinks Barcelona,

Flames engulf Madrid,

And sailing over Aragon

A golden moon does bleed.

Madrid is a tower of light,

In the dark a shining beam;

But Italy sends its bombers

And poison sends Berlin.

Some two months later, as the papers brought grim news from the front, we heard that Lucjan, in the company of others like himself, tailors who had never held a gun in their hands, was off to join the International Brigade to fight for Spain's freedom. Lucjan's mother cried. ‘Please, son, don't do this to your old mother.' His father pleaded. ‘Why, Luzer? Why lay down your young life for Spain, what is Spain to you? Have you forgotten what they did to your ancestors, how they murdered us in the tens of thousands, burned us alive in the bonfires?”

But Lucjan was immovable. ‘Yes, father, I do remember. But remembering and dwelling on the past are two different things. Dwelling on past tragedies is self-destructive,' said the young party man, ‘and I, your son, am going to make sure that Spain never reverts to the those shameful times of the Inquisition.'

On 19 May 1939, as General Franco was taking the salute at his victory parade in Madrid, Lucjan, his right arm in a black sling, limped into our neighbourhood and was greeted by the general acclaim of its inhabitants. His head was bowed in sorrow. It was clear that his inner anguish was far more painful than his physical injuries — the knowledge of defeat, and of the Soviet betrayal.

Two years later we heard him speak, perhaps for the first time since his return; and although we were still teenagers we could tell that the words he wanted evaded him, while those that did come seemed inadequate to express the feelings that filled his heart. But the fact that he had fought in the battles we all dreamt of joining created an extraordinary aura around the young Lucjan, an aura which embraced him like a mantle and lent a special credence to his nickname — for after his return, we rarely referred to him other than as ‘The Legend'.

 

 
As the Days Darkened
 

No one knew what had come over Szymon, our consumptive mystic-turned-Cassandra. Out of the blue he started running through the city, waving his hands about, shouting: ‘People, good people! O hear me, you sinners! Our years will be shortened by months, our months by weeks, our weeks by days — and all because the mezuzahs on our doorposts are tarnished. The demon is on his way, he is coming, coming! He'll attack out of lust, with great brutality...' And thus screaming, Szymon would dart like a fiery arrow from house to house, inspecting the
Shema
— the prayer nestled within the mezuzah — at the door of every home in our community.

Szymon's neighbour, Sonek the cartman, who lived in a shed with his wife and little girl, was a man of steel. People believed that Sonek could do with one hand what Samson had done to the Philistines with two. It was reputed that one rainy night, when his horse tripped and broke a leg, Sonek had picked up the beloved mare without blinking, brought her home to the stable, covered her with his own blanket and nursed the animal back to health. Since then he had never sat atop the cart.

Every day Sonek got up before the first spark of dawn, thanked God for his life of plenty and went off to the bakery where he worked as a delivery man. But on the night, the horrible night when the Almighty took his little girl away, Sonek ran out naked into the yard and, throwing his fists at the heavens, shouted: ‘Murderer, murderer! What have You done? What have You done?' From that moment, he became a mocker of religion, a morbid man impossible to be with. Before long, his wife had to leave him and go back to her parents.

Well, to say that Sonek's blasphemous outpourings made him Szymon's mortal enemy would be an understatement.
And the feeling was mutual. Not surprisingly, when Szymon approached Sonek's doorstep, the cartman chased him away with his horsewhip. ‘Sonek!' yelled the fanatical mystic. ‘You'll burn in hell, I promise you!' ‘Then at least,' the other shot back, ‘after my bitter cold life, I'll be warm for a change!' At this, Szymon spat upon the ground, in the general direction of Sonek's feet, and ran off to find another doorstep.

Across from Szymon lived our caretaker, Stasiek, a small, bald, frisky man, with a pair of eyes as vacant as two muddy puddles, and a big yellow Franz Josef moustache under his red nose. Every Sunday after church Stasiek got drunk, cursed the Jews, beat his wife and dragged her back into his dwelling; after a half-hour of pleading for mercy, she would emerge with a satisfied smirk creasing her sharp features.

One Easter Sunday, when the sky was a blue, unblemished expanse and the snow was already thawing — though here and there the odd patch still fought for a few more minutes of white life — Stasiek entered the yard looking sombre and confused. He couldn't work out how it was possible for a pathetic consumptive like Szymon to have crucified the Son of his God. In any case, after downing half a bottle of vodka he decided that the criminal had to pay. Abruptly if unsteadily he burst into the evangelist's abode and, all the while shrieking ‘Where is God's killer?', gave Szymon's terrified wife Doba and their two children a severe beating. She tried to plead with him: ‘Stasiek, stop it, please, stop it. We haven't eaten for three days, Szymon is not here, he went out to try to borrow a few groshen to buy us a piece of bread.' But the caretaker had clearly taken leave of his senses; he was in a drunken, crazy trance, and quite unstoppable.

Suddenly, Stasiek spotted his intended victim about to enter the unlit corridor. He waited for Szymon in the shadows, then grabbed him from behind by his thin throat.
Szymon's face went blue and black, his bulging eyes seemed to mirror a final prayer, another second and he would be dead. But then a miracle. Out of nowhere Sonek appeared, picked up Stasiek like a chook, whirled him around his head three times, and tossed him like a rag doll out through the open window and into the mud outside. Still utterly composed, Sonek walked out without a word. However, while passing the bruised and bloodied local bouncer, he bent over until his face was almost pushing against Stasiek's. ‘If I ever catch you touching Szymon with as much as a single finger, rest assured there won't be anything left of you for the gravedigger!'

A few minutes later Sonek returned carrying two warm loaves of bread under one arm and a bundle of dry wood under the other. As the fire in the dead stove began to sing, Sonek sat down to break bread with Szymon's battered family.

The following Friday, at the synagogue, Szymon imparted the whole incredible saga to a circle of open-mouthed fellow worshippers. When he had finished, one of them asked with a mischievous twinkle, ‘And did you eventually find the proper
Shema
in Sonek's mezuzah?'

Szymon looked up and scratched his head. ‘You know,' he said, ‘last night I couldn't sleep, so I sneaked out of bed, quietly got dressed and went outside. It was pitch-black. Almost immediately I noticed a fine sliver of light moving about in the yard, and then I heard a voice that seemed to come from inside it — a voice like the wail of a fiddle.
Where are you off to, Szymon?
it asked. “In search of Sonek's
Shema
,” I replied. And the beam of light answered:
Then seek within his heart
.'

 

 
A Social Function
 

I was fascinated by the inn and bordello that stood like a forbidden secret on the corner of Masarska and Limanowskiego. Although I had attempted to negotiate its threshold many a time, I was always unceremoniously rebuffed, evidently on account of my youth. My lucky break came when one of the damsels who worked there, ‘Little Golden Hand' (so called because of her professional dexterity), accosted me in the street one day and entrusted me to deliver a verbal message to her fiancé, the underworld boss known as Blind Max, who happened to be on a business visit to the establishment.

Luckily, when I arrived Max was involved in a poker game, something at which no one would dare to disturb him, so they asked me to sit quietly in a corner and wait until the maestro was ready to appear out of the smoke. With thinly disguised enthusiasm, I agreed.

While waiting I observed several robust men around the counter; they had beady eyes, short necks and hands like steel shovels, and were downing vodka after vodka. From behind the thin walls I could hear the moans of industrious females and the curses and grunts of husky males. I thought I was caught in a scene from Sergiusz Piasecki's classic novel,
Lover of the Great Bear
, where men read the stars like skilled navigators, saw right through a deck of cards with grey eagle eyes, and knew exactly when and when not to draw. Then I imagined women with hefty hips and muscular arms, throwing men ceiling-high and letting them land on their sizzling bellies and roast to death...

The staff of this specialty house were all Jewish, but its guests — wayfarers, removalists — were a rather multicultural brotherhood. Perhaps it was thanks to the common purpose shared by these two groups that the Jewish customers were tipped off. They learnt that a gang of hooligans armed with
knives, sticks and iron gloves was determined, on the coming Green (Maundy) Thursday, to restore ‘holy order' in our exclusively Jewish quarter. On the appointed day, singing lustily, the hellbent disciples boarded the evening tram that travelled from Bałucki Rynek through the Jewish district. Just before reaching Masarska Street, these hoodlums, holding to an almost military formation, abruptly disembarked — and to their unpleasant surprise were confronted by a forest of Jewish toughs, their steel fists eager for a fight!