East of Time (5 page)

Not far off is the time

Of freedom and of peace;

It may come late or soon —

That time is not a dream.

On a windy morning of a grey day in 1942, somewhere in the Polish city of Pinsk, a German rope would bring about Yuda Reznik's rude awakening.

 

 
The Violin
 

A professor of mathematics, a man who at times could be totally ignorant of the algebra of human feelings, was headmaster of our school — a school where the heart occupied the centre of all the disciplines. He lived a spartan life, his quarters a windowless cubicle somewhere among the rooms at the back. He'd never married, yet was never short of a wife.

I can scarcely remember him without a cigarette in his mouth, and a violin under his chin. He was a nervous man, a hard man, feared rather than liked. In his sleepless nights he composed medieval cloister melodies, morbid songs which he made us sing.

The skies are black with clouds,

The trees the winds have torn;

Where are you, my brother,

Forsaken, forlorn?

What happened to our headmaster was recounted to me years later by one of his students. After the war he had returned from the Siberian snows to his now desolate town, to his old lightless nook. He dropped his bundle of dry bones on the threadbare straw sack, and fell into a deep slumber.

Suddenly, as if in a dream, he heard the squeak of his door. When he opened his eyes he was surrounded by a group of strange individuals. ‘Who are you, good people?' he asked in some alarm. ‘What has brought you to me, an innocent teacher?'

For a good minute they stood there like men without tongues. Eventually one of them, the oldest, spoke. ‘Sir,' he said, ‘we are your former students, and we have brought back your lost violin.'

At this the spartan fell to his knees. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he found he could not hold back his tears. With quivering hands he accepted the instrument and placed it under his bony chin. And as his fingers began to dance like spider legs on the weeping strings, he invoked once again his descent into the darkness, the place where he felt most at home. At last he was free to explore the meaning of his wretched existence.

Then, all at once, he grew mortally pale. Pressing the fiddle firmly to his heart, he fell back on the straw sack. ‘Thank you,' he said, ‘thank you,' and closed his eyes for ever.

 

 
Juda and the French Revolution
 

At the age of fourteen my schoolmates, even before they had heard or read the history of the French Revolution, were a bunch of Jacobins, each of them a Gavroche at heart, with unequivocal belief in mankind's future and a boundless, passionate commitment to our common cause. So when our circle's political mentor, Juda Kersh, turned up on the fourteenth of July with a radiant face and a red carnation in his meagre lapel, his words to us were like a good fall of rain on fertile soil.

Juda was not what you might call an effervescent or exuberant man — perhaps the scholar in him dampened his spontaneity. He often spoke in a low tone, as if communing with himself, yet he had a marvellous way of inspiring his listeners, and an artful method of transforming events of the past into living experiences.

‘In the last week of April, in the year 1789,' he began (Juda was also a fastidious historian, a great believer in dates), ‘after a stern winter, a hungry destitute crowd of Parisians, en route
to the National Assembly, found their march blocked by soldiers of the Royal-Cravate regiment. When they pelted the soldiers with stones, the latter responded with gunfire, and Paris had been baptised in its first river of blood.

‘Yet it would be a mistake,' Juda continued, with his melancholy smile and his head tilted slightly to the right, ‘to maintain that this incident, or various others like it, brought about the French Revolution. No, it was François Marie Arouet Voltaire's annihilating laughter and devastating irony, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's sombre, sentimental primitivism, which pierced the heart of the rotten Bourbons, and consequently drove Paris to the barricades, where bayonet greeted bayonet, where in the bleeding streets the galvanized French masses, in their red, white and blue cockades, even as they died in battle beneath their red flags, triumphantly proclaimed—' here Juda rose to his full height and, in a voice quivering with emotion, cried out: ‘
Liberté
,
Égalité
,
Fraternité!'

Upon this, he broke out in song:

‘
Allons enfants de la Patrie,

Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

Contre nous de la tyrannie,

L'étendard sanglant est levé
...'

Then he stopped. ‘And yet,' he said, the music still ringing in his voice, ‘to my mind, it was not the words, but rather Rouget de Lisle's buoyant melody which became the beacon of light in men's darkest days.'

Many years later, in a dark ghetto basement, I noticed a green plant climbing a wet wall towards a tenuous crevice of sun. I don't know why, but I felt myself grow strangely tall, and at that moment I thought I spotted the phantom of Juda, his head tilted slightly to the right; and as he pointed his
finger towards the struggling plant, the two of us began, simultaneously, to hum Rouget's eternal, resolute melody of hope.

 

 
Revolt
 

‘The Dawn of Spring', as already mentioned, was an annual event at our school, a concert of musical and dramatic performances which involved the collective enterprise of students and teachers alike. I recall the year we staged
The Strike of the Hens
, a play based on a Sholem Aleichem story, ‘Kapporos', meaning sacrifices. According to an old Babylonian custom, a day before Yom Kippur one ought to sacrifice a hen or a rooster, preferably a white one. Some believed that such an act would absolve that person's loved ones of their sins and safeguard their welfare for the coming year.

In Sholem Aleichem's story, just before Yom Kippur the hens, roosters and the whole poultry world proclaimed a strike. ‘Enough!' they decided. ‘Our life is ours, and we refuse to be sacrificed any longer for some people's fancy.' Well, our teachers quickly detected a sociopolitical moral in the tale; after some deliberation and rewriting, our surreal stage version of the story was born:

Officialdom (in our retelling) was beside itself at news of the strike, and a deputation was dispatched. ‘What do you mean, you refuse to be sacrificed?' they bellowed. ‘Who are you to challenge God's order, to take matters into your own hands?' An obese cleric in a black silk coat and fur cap came forward. ‘Let
me
talk to them,' he told the delegation. ‘I'll show them that anarchy cannot prevail, that everything on earth has been created with a purpose. Theirs is to be sacrificed and nothing will ever change that.'

But the rebellious poultry stood their ground. They sharpened their beaks on the wet blades of grass, ready to attack. Faced with this situation, the shrewd cleric modified his approach. ‘My dear lady hens and honourable gentlemen roosters,' he coaxed. ‘Please state your demands, and if they are within reason we can surely come to a settlement that will satisfy all concerned.'

A representative of the poultry fluttered to the front. ‘We simply refuse to be your atonements,' she explained. ‘We refuse to have our legs bound, to be spun around the heads of your sons and daughters, to be thrown under the table (as your stupid custom demands), and finally to be taken to the slaughterer, then cooked, fried or roasted to reappear on your white porcelain plates — and for what?'

‘For what!' screamed the sweating cleric with the fur cap. ‘Do you mean to say that the slaughterer's blessing as he cuts your throat is nothing? That
my
blessing before I sink my teeth into one of you young hens' juicy breasts is nothing?'

At this the multitude took a step forward. ‘What sort of mockery is that?' they chorused. ‘What sort of fools do you take us for?' Ruffling their feathers loudly, they formed a threatening phalanx. A young rooster pushed his way to the front and, spreading his magnificent white wings like a mountain eagle, shouted: ‘Every comb a red badge of revolt — long live freedom!' And they set upon the officials, pecking at their noses, snapping at their lips and eyes. Shocked and frightened, the delegation dispersed amid a cloud of feathers.