East of Time (14 page)

There was another remarkable thing about this incident. In the land of my birth, whenever defenceless Jews were being beaten up, you couldn't spot a policeman for miles; yet on this occasion, within seconds the official guardians of the law had descended on our area like a swarm of black mosquitoes, and thus prevented the order-makers from receiving a thorough thrashing.

In a matter of days a rumour circulated that the audacity of those steel fists might force the authorities to close down our homely institution. However, at the last moment it was miraculously saved through the intervention of the altruistic police commissioner, who sagaciously pointed out the brothel's undeniable value and the social function it performed.

Now more than ever I revisit, in my imaginings, my city of the waterless river. I walk for hours through the empty, eerie streets in search of a familiar face that isn't there. The once secretive door of the bordello inn stands wide open and Little Golden Hand sits by a table draped with a red tablecloth. ‘They murdered my Max, and everybody else,' she cries. ‘They're gone... all gone.'

‘Then what is keeping
you
here?' I ask her. ‘Why not leave this desolate place and join them?'

‘Not yet,' she answers. ‘I'm waiting for you to forget me.'

 

 
The Assistant
 

Adjoining the timber yard just along from our block stood a small wooden dwelling. It harboured two shops: a fruiterer and a plumber. The plumber's was perhaps not bigger than three metres by five, yet it contained a workbench, a small table, three chairs and two beds — one for the plumber Zygmunt Szulc and his wife Fernanda, the other for their nineteen-year-old assistant, Meir. This young man was an orphan who had arrived from a nearby township carrying a brown suitcase. Despite his perpetually mournful demeanour, Meir was forever cajoling me (unsuccessfully, I might add) to accompany him on one of his regular visits to a prostitute.

Zygmunt was not actually a plumber, but since he worked with tin and there was no exact Yiddish term to describe his profession, that was how he was known. The Szulces were Jewish, but because of their dark skin, outlandish ways and peculiar solitary existence, we called them ‘the Moors'.

A tall, slender, laid-back fellow in his early fifties, with a pair of hands that reached well below his knees, Zygmunt was a master tradesman in the production of coach-lanterns. Fernanda was in her mid-forties, vivacious, plump, with sweaty skin and fiery eyes; she wore a red scarf on her thick neck, and a huge gold ring dangled from each of her earlobes.

I don't know how, but before long I had befriended Meir, four years my senior, and virtually overnight he became my trusted mentor. In secret, Meir told me that the lanterns he and Zygmunt produced were attached to black coaches belonging to the upper nobility; that sometimes, when a baron, a knight or even a prince pulled in to replace a lantern, he, Meir, would glimpse through the partly-drawn curtains of the coach a beautiful naked young girl lying across the plush seat. This and other graphic accounts, especially those about
Fernanda's nightly doings, set my imagination aflame and enriched my sleep with joyous, uplifting dreams.

One Sunday evening, after a hefty dinner, Zygmunt went to bed and never got up again. Fernanda screamed, slapped his face, pleaded, cried her heart out — ‘Zygmunt, Zygmunt, how can you do this to me!' — but it was all in vain. After the seven customary days of mourning, the assistant took over his master's role, and, like a river diverted by an earthquake, his life assumed a new and much-altered course. Fernanda seemed pleased with his work, as was Meir with her motherly care. While she was serving breakfast one morning, she mentioned matter-of-factly that she intended to increase turnover and bring in more stock, and since the place was quite small she might as well dispose of the unnecessary extra bed. Meir nodded; he had always been an obedient assistant.

However, out of the blue, fate took a snipe at this cosiness, for the industry of wagging tongues forced Fernanda to bid an abrupt farewell to our neighbourhood. As for Meir, I don't know what became of him — perhaps he went the way of many people at that time: to the East. Clutching the same brown suitcase he'd arrived with, the sad orphan with nowhere to go departed from our lives, never to be seen again. But his image still lingers on in the chambers of my fading memory like a bashful smile on a mourner's face.

 

 
Miscarried Revolution
 

Ideologically speaking, our school was Bundist, and distinctly non-Zionist. A return to the land of the prophets was not our dream, but rather to make prophetic the land of our present. And although we were not a religious school, we were all (as father would have said) very much circumcised at heart.

My noble friend Haim, incurable dreamer, his mane of sunburnt hair hanging over his thickly rimmed glasses, who would have given anyone the shirt off his back, was a misfit in either camp. Perhaps it had to do with his idiosyncratic personality, or maybe with his life at home — a sick mother whom I remember as a white moon sinking above a twilit horizon, and a despairing father who couldn't make ends meet.

Haim knew Marx, Engels and Bakunin before I knew the alphabet, though it was not on account of his erudition that he was known at school as ‘The Professor', but because of the spectacles. And yes, our Professor worshipped Marx and his apostles. Once, in the middle of a geometry lesson, he rose up like a stormy red flag. ‘It's not Archimedes' law,' he declared, ‘that should be taught at school, but Marx's sociopolitical
science
— a science that will bring the revolution and inaugurate the benevolent socialist state, which will restore health to all sick mothers and release all working-class fathers from their daily miseries.'

How was Haim — the lover of Jewish history who was pounding on the gates of the impossible — to know, in those heady days of socialist fever, that Marx had been a self-hating Jew whose
Zur Judenfrage
(‘On the Jewish Question'), written in 1843, was to become a handbook for European antisemitism? How, for that matter, was he to know that revolutions change nothing, but merely replace one tyrant with another?

And yet, it was perhaps thanks to his very innocence that he survived. Because at the first sign of trouble in his homeland, Haim — fired with the strains of the
Internationale
, his heart still throbbing with Stalin's exploits — took the road, the one paved with broken glass, to the motherland of his dreams. Alas, how quickly he learnt that a lie can be fashioned into an evil god!

Luckily he came back alive, and time would take care of his feet, frostbitten and bloodied from their misadventure. But the soul of this outrageously, incorrigibly romantic man never stopped bleeding.

 

 
Summer Camp
 

In my early teens I joined the Jewish youth movement known as Skif. The word was an acronym for
Sotsyalistisher Kinder Farband
(Socialist Children's Union); the movement dreamt of a perfect reality, of a world where children would be regarded not merely as children but as young people with equal rights.

Naturally, when we spoke about camp in those days, we had in mind tents and summer holidays — what else? In July– August 1936, while the intrepid freedom-fighters in Spain battled valiantly for their liberty, we, the children of Skif, were enjoying our summer camp in a valley not far from Vilna under the banner
Red Spain
. It was known as Skif's ‘Tenth Socialist Children's Republic'.

This had originally been intended as an international event; we expected Polish and German contingents of Red Scouts to join us, at least in proclaiming our children's state. But as it turned out, the Poles and the Germans were unable to make the journey. Yet we, the two hundred or so Jewish boys and girls, were not deterred, and with tremendous gusto we upheld the international spirit of our Republic. At morning roll-call, we working-class children who spent our days in poverty and squalor stood radiantly in a huge circle, in our blue shirts and red ties, singing:

Take our hands, sisters, brothers,

Raise the flags heaven-high;