East of Time (7 page)

I belonged to a family of readers. We were all members of the well-known Bronisław Grosser Library, on 68 Zachodnia Street. I would go there two or three times a week, even if I didn't need to borrow or return a book; I just loved the ambience, the company
of books, the soothing voices of the librarians, the readers moving about reverently on tiptoe. I always found a corner, and would sit there with my face hidden behind an old newspaper, pretending to read but actually engrossed in thoughts about fantastical realities and the lucidity of the great masters who gazed down upon me questioningly from the brown shelves brimming with books.

On one occasion I had the good fortune, due to the scarcity of space around the little tables, to sit and overhear a hushed conversation between two well-read men, perhaps scholars, one as thin as a reed with a voice as soft as a mouse's whisper, the other on the corpulent side and rather huskily spoken.

‘Sense and simplicity are the most essential thing about writing,' the thin one remarked. ‘As Chekhov said, one should write so that no reader needs any explanation from the author.'

‘Yes, but we cannot reject intricacy and ambiguity out of hand,' his husky companion replied. This was more to my liking.

‘Of course we can't. The way I see it, however, a book written with simple clarity exemplifies a greater virtue, and therefore makes a more valuable contribution to the restoration of the human spirit—'

‘Speaking of restoration,' the other man interrupted, ‘I just purchased, from an antiquarian dealer, a book of short stories published in the late eighteenth century. Its title-page is torn out, so I don't know who the author was. One of the stories concerns a Christian mission somewhere in the north of South America. Several of its members encounter, in the Amazon jungle, a hungry, injured savage who has never heard of God. They take him in, feed him, and, after restoring his health, teach him civility and the Bible and instruct him in the ways of their God. But one night, as the moonlight spears the savage's
face, he awakens and without a word sets about slaying all the people within reach, screaming: “A curse on you for giving me this god!”'

‘Wait a minute!' the thin scholar exclaimed. ‘Isn't that just a version of the Caliban myth?'

‘I doubt it. Shakespeare's message is all about language, not God. Anyway, my friend, we need to allow for a certain ambiguity on the part of the master, wouldn't you say?...'

Back home at dinnertime I sat in a daze, my head spinning, for I had understood only half of what the scholars had been debating. But when mother placed an extra slice of meat on each of our plates, I came to, and quickly realized that something festive was afoot. ‘What's going on?' I asked.

‘We are honouring our new acquisition,' father announced, and he produced the object in question — a hefty book with solid green covers and lettering embossed in gold. It was the Yiddish translation of Ignazio Silone's
Fascism
.

After reading out the introduction, father slid the volume into place on the improvised shelf of our modest library and, turning to me, said something I shall remember to the end of my days: ‘A slave to books,' he said, ‘is a free man.'

 

 
Comrade Tsap
 

Director of the well-known Scheibler & Groman textile factory and a prominent Communist in our town, Heinrich Tsap was a generous and likeable man. Tall, broad-shouldered, cleanshaven always, and dressed in a grey suit, white shirt and darkgrey tie, there was something summery about him, a lightness even in winter. His wife Friedl, a slender brunette, wore a white silk blouse, with a string of pearls around her swanlike neck. Their intelligent sixteen-year-old daughter Gretchen,
with whom I often played, was like a thin green twig a head taller than I, and to my great disappointment had no breasts.

Tsap wrote a column for one of the leading papers, in which he depicted Hitler as a silly huckster of evil. He was twenty years younger than my parents yet did everything possible to keep the friendship alive, not just out of fondness for my father, with whom he liked to sharpen his wits, but because he was in love with his own secretary Sarah, daughter of a neighbour of ours known as White Haskel. Sarah was a young woman who, in my opinion, would have been any man's nuptial Eden. This girl adored my mother and entrusted her with many intimate secrets. Once, I ‘accidentally' overheard Sarah confide that Tsap had asked her to elope with him to the east, his Land of Hope.

Those were stormy times, and, as it turned out, a preamble to the great catastrophe. Father was quite weary of his restless young friend, who was guilty of ideological promiscuity. Tsap had been an ardent Socialist, an Anarchist, a Syndicalist, and was now a Communist. Perhaps this turbulent searcher was privately jealous of father's unshakeable evolutionist beliefs.

In his discussions with my sedate dad, the exuberant Heinrich engaged the whole corpus of highbrow proletarian sloganeering. Father, in his turn, maintained that one should tirelessly seek the simple word, so that one's message could come across dressed in sobriety and common sense. His composure incensed the young debater.

‘Oh, you and your common sense!' Tsap fired back on one occasion. ‘What has your buddy Léon Blum achieved with
his
non-interventionist common sense?' (This was soon after the defeat of the Spanish Republic.) ‘The problem with evolutionary socialism,' he went on, ‘is that it is perpetually seeking an alliance with the ruling powers, thereby delivering the starving masses directly into the hands of their tormentors!'

‘Your argument,' responded my ever-secure father, ‘is a mythical red balloon, without a shred of historical evidence.'

At this moment the voluptuous redhead Sarah walked in. Naked, I reflected, she could easily have replaced Renoir's blonde bather! Not surprisingly, her entrance immediately changed Heinrich's mood. Impaling her with his gaze, he continued as if speaking only to her. ‘The Jewish intellectual bourgeoisie,' he said, quite softly now, ‘laughed when the huckster equated them with vermin.'

‘Well, what do you expect?' father replied. ‘The nincompoop calls Sigmund Freud a louse.'

‘Oh no, my friend, that's not a matter to be treated lightly.' This time Tsap addressed father directly, his voice betraying emotion. ‘One should never forget Raskolnikov, who, in order to justify murder, managed in his mind to turn a fellow human into an insect.'

In August 1939, as the Land of Hope went into partnership with the huckster, Heinrich Tsap paid us his last visit. I remember how fervently he tried to explain to my father the wisdom of Bolshevik dialectic.

Ten days later, the huckster's agents awoke Tsap at midnight, invited his Friedl and Gretchen to take a spin in their black limousine, and directed Heinrich to join them for a little chat in Radogosz, on the outskirts of our city — where, in the silence of a new dawn, the partners of the land of his dreams relieved Comrade Tsap's body of his gentle, tormented head.

 

 
The Social Worker
 

On the subject of the abovementioned White Haskel, father once told us something of this man's history, and of the circumstances surrounding his first dealings with him.

When, about eight years before I was born, my parents moved into the four-storey apartment block where they would live for thirty-odd years, White Haskel — so called because he had the look of a man soaked in detergent — had already established himself not only as a ‘social worker', but as a respected beadle of the local synagogue.

Haskel always wore lacquered shoes with rubber soles, black trousers with white pinstripes, and a grey coat of English tweed trimmed with velvet; to look the part, he carried a satchel of soft black leather under his arm. He was married to a small, constantly smiling woman — so constantly that her smile might have been affixed as to a billboard. She bore him four decent sons and three beautiful daughters. Needless to say, he was very much admired in our community.

Yet this man, who paraded about the place as a social worker and beadle of a synagogue, was a thief. Not an ordinary thief, mind you — to call him that would be less than precise, because Haskel never stole anything. For that, he had a well-organized team of young pickpockets. He was merely their guru, so to speak, their strategist, who deftly directed operations from a distance.

Like most prestigious thieves in the city of the waterless river, Haskel was in partnership with our very capable police — mainly with the higher ranks, of course. Consequently his gang worked under a fairly secure umbrella. And since their boss, who would not tolerate incompetence, assured them philosophically that from the beginning of time the smart had always capitalized on the stupid, they were not only never troubled by guilt but, on the contrary, were imbued with a sense of professional pride.

One evening, about a week after my future parents had moved into their new one-room flat, father heard a soft knock on the door, a knock as gentle as the thud of a falling snow-flake.
Before he had time to say ‘Please enter', Haskel, a ginger smile on his ruddy face, had crossed the threshold. After they exchanged the customary neighbourly niceties, mother asked the guest if he would take some tea, for which Haskel was warmly grateful. As soon as he ‘discovered' that father was a weaver, Haskel introduced himself as a prominent social worker in town.

A day or so later, the snowflake thud repeated itself on our door and Haskel, his fingers curled around a miniature glass vase, entered the room. ‘You know,' he said to father, placing the little offering in my mother's hesitating hands, ‘textiles are very much in demand these days. People are starved for a good metre of cloth.' He looked around. ‘How about setting up a small factory in your room, it's practically empty anyway. Let's buy a pair of textile machines,' he went on enthusiastically. ‘We'll make a mint. I have some spare cash, and I'm sure you must have a bit put aside, so how about it?' And without waiting for an answer, Haskel deposited a fat bundle of notes on the table.