East of Time (3 page)

Mr Wolf had a ruddy face and shiny black hair parted in the middle; he wore white slacks, a navy-blue shirt and a pair of gold-rimmed sunglasses. Uninvited, he stretched himself on the edge of our blanket and, chewing on a blade of grass, began to murmur to mother under his breath. Mother smiled and smiled, but wouldn't answer him. He turned up again the next day, and the next. On the third day, mother weakened and responded to his murmurs with half-words that I couldn't understand. When he finally left us, I asked her who this man was and what he wanted. She replied that he was just a wandering pleasure-seeker. What did that mean, I wanted to know. A funny and harmless adventurer, she explained.

Later that afternoon, when we returned to the small room we were renting at the farm, mother asked the farmer for some roses. As she placed them in a vase, I heard her say to herself: ‘The riper the rose, the nastier the bug.'

The following morning we cut short our little holiday. Thinking back, I wonder if it was because my resolute mother feared Mr Wolf... No, I don't think so. What she probably feared more was herself.

 

 
My Sister Pola
 

Are we not the rightful heirs of our parents' virtues and blemishes, the beneficiaries of their spiritual genes? And are we not also infected by the social and political bacteria of our time? My sister Pola was born in the shadow of the Great War, of formidable public upheavals, pogroms, and the Russian Revolution.

At age sixteen, in the city of the waterless river, she joined the KZM, the Communist Union of Youth. Our father, the anti-Communist labour man, was visibly upset. I was present when he spoke to her about the fate of those who fought for her cause, years before Arthur Koestler immortalized N.S. Rubashov in
Darkness at Noon
. But my mercurial sister refused to be deterred by father's grim warnings. ‘Anti-Soviet garbage!' she fired back. She produced from her bag a coloured flyer with a picture of a young, happily smiling
Komsomolec
, whom she dreamt to emulate. ‘
This
is the truth about the Soviet Union,' she shouted triumphantly. ‘Anything else is just Fascist propaganda.' ‘Who taught you that,' father asked quietly, ‘your cell leader?' ‘Yes,' she replied. ‘In fact, he has just returned from Moscow.' Father shook his head. ‘Well, my daughter,' he said, ‘as it is written, you would do well to keep your distance from a fool, so that you don't learn foolish talk.'

At eighteen, Pola was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison for encouraging the workers of Poznanski's textile factory to down their tools, and for distributing leaflets with the following text:

O worker, brother, awake, awake,

See how the east has banished the night;

Comrade Stalin has ignited the flame

And restored to glory your right.

But nothing could discourage my doughty sister from her task. When, at her trial, she was asked her religion, she answered resolutely: ‘None!' Did she have anything to say in her defence, the judge inquired. ‘Yes, your honour. I have been beaten in prison. That's illegal!' The judge ordered her taken away; Pola went on screaming, ‘It's illegal, it's illegal!' For her audacity she received from the court policeman two hefty slaps across her face. She bled, mother fainted; but Pola would not be silenced.

Not long after her release from prison, she married — but the wrong man, who would soon abandon her to save his own skin. And as she was celebrating her little daughter's fourth birthday, the Great Leader, the one who had set the east aflame and for whom she would gladly have died, went into partnership with the arch-enemy of humanity.

Five years later, in a dark cattle-train headed for Auschwitz, I heard Pola sing a lullaby to her sobbing little girl:

Sleep, my darling Frumetl,

Close your dreamy eyes;

Where the lilacs blossom

Are bluer skies
...

Little Frumetl was gassed on arrival.

Betrayed by the man she loved, and by the party she served, Pola left her barrack at midnight and, with arms outstretched as if in supplication, embraced the buzzing wires of Birkenau's electric fence.

 

 
My Sister Ida
 

There was something contradictory about my sister Ida. On the one hand, she was a quiet, unassuming, polite little girl; on the other, a restless, frolicking child, mischievous almost to the extreme. Her history and literature teacher, Yuda Reznik, once told father, presumably in jest: ‘If you won't take her out of school, I'm going to kill myself.' Perhaps, like all the girls in her class, my sister was in love with this charismatic man.

Ida was of slender build but well-shaped, with a wave of auburn hair that danced alluringly over her forehead, her black eyebrows and her deep brown eyes. She carried herself with a pleasing, lingering quietude. Ida passed through our shadowy world like a pale ray of some mysterious hope. But every mystery conceals a story.

She was only fifteen, and just three months from obtaining her school certificate, when her sister Pola's marital life ran into difficulties. Putting aside her own needs and feelings, Ida left the school she loved and her friends there to look after Pola's two-year-old infant girl.

After that, life took a new turn.

Young men were readily attracted to Ida. At the outbreak of war in 1939, as booted hordes from the west descended on the country of my birth, there was the young fine-looking carpenter, the Bundist Grinszpan, who loved her dearly and begged her to run away with him to the east. But Ida shook her head. ‘No,' she told him. ‘I wouldn't leave mother behind.'

Of course, there were plenty of others — among them a fellow who, if not too prudent, was certainly persistent. He kept hanging around, endeared himself to our mother, and finally found a place in my sister's heart. Possibly this changed the course of her life. I know that one shouldn't point the finger, that life is serendipitous; that he who guards his tongue (as it is
written) guards himself from evil. Nonetheless, I believe there are times when even the cruellest truth is preferable to the gentlest lie.

When Ida became pregnant she was barely twenty-two years old. I still recall the duel of eyes as she broke the news to mother, and then father's blunt but pragmatic remark: ‘It's not too late...' For quite a few days, the spirit of the Pharaoh who didn't know Joseph struggled against the spirit of Shifra and Puah. Obviously, however, a foetus was not a sufficient offering to our Almighty — He desired much more.

I vividly remember the unlit carriage of a screaming cattle-train, and Ida hushing her whining little Chayale to sleep:

There once was a king,

There once was a page,

There once was a beautiful queen
...

The lullaby told of the terrible death that befell the royal threesome: the king was eaten by a dog, the page by a cat, and the queen by a little mouse! But the child should not grieve, the song concluded — for the king was made of sugar, the page of gingerbread, and the queen was of marzipan...

We arrived at our destination on a hot August day of barking dogs. There, beneath an unblemished sky, dressed in black and with gloves of white, stood a man called Mengele who was convinced that he was God's deputy.

 

 
Legends
 

Berta Winograd was my form and geography teacher. Nicknamed ‘Petcha', she was a tiny green-eyed brunette, with a scorch mark on her right cheek from an accident while still a
child. Berta always wore a black tight-fitting dress and a string of white pearls around her neck. She was in her early thirties, unmarried, came from a wealthy family, and rumour had it that she refused to be paid for her work. (Schoolchildren often know more about their teachers than about their own parents.)

A million years have flown by since my schooldays, yet time has not erased from my memory Berta's excursions into fantastic landscapes, where we encountered exotic peoples, learnt about their customs and listened to their tales — without leaving our classroom. Berta was a granary of vivid legends. Legends, she would say, were not bedtime stories or lullabies, but evocative fables — echoes of what was real. They were a kind of poetry you had to know how to read, how to interpret allegorically, in order to penetrate their meaning and enrich your life.