Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (7 page)

Behind the wall was a cottage with a red door, where there lived a certain Dobrele, who had just returned from Buenos Aires, a woman with a pious, milky face, wearing a broad-brimmed, black hat. About Dobrele they said that she had turned religious, that she recited blessings over everything, even after hearing thunder. Wealthy landowners, it was whispered, came visiting in carriages and, while dallying with them, she would loudly say her prayers. She also had her eye on schoolboys from the nearby
kheyder
, and on those nights when no landowners’ carriages stopped by, Dobrele would stand outside her door, dressed all in red, grab passing schoolboys, take them inside, and pray with them.

I thought I’d better steer clear of Cobblers Lane and take the promenade instead. There, the snow fell more silently, bluer than in the central market. By the narrow, sharp-spired German church, set among small parks and gardens, a bent figure knelt and, with face touching the feathery snow, made the sign of the cross.

But I was still some distance from Aunt Miriam’s house, near the prison with its high, yellow fence, where a burly soldier in a fur overcoat, shouldering a rifle, paced back and forth. Walking past him was forbidden, so I crossed over to the other side, walked through the prison lane, and only then onto Warsaw Street.

I could have sworn I was heading in the right direction. The way to Aunt Miriam’s was as familiar to me as my own ten fingers. Here was Shimshen-Shloyme’s tavern, and beyond it, the wide Orthodox church, near which there ought to be a red wooden shack where the prison guards warmed their frozen fingers.

But there was no sign anywhere of Aunt Miriam’s cottage. Was it because of the snow swirling around both sides of my face? Suddenly, I saw a tall shape approaching, a hulking figure who seemed to be singing. Singing? How could someone be singing with all this snow pelting one’s face? I soon realized that no one was approaching, no one was singing, but that I must have run into the battered stone wall in Cobblers Lane, staggering past the very door where Dobrele with the pious, milky face lived.

I soon realized that it wasn’t the stone wall, but the fence surrounding the Gentile hospital. If so, Aunt Miriam’s place couldn’t be far off, probably that small structure over there, with the two lighted windows. But I couldn’t see the wooden shed, which clung to the cottage like a child to its mother’s apron, nor the low, round water pump.

I heard the tinkle of a bell, and a sleigh glided past my eyes.

“Little boy, little boy, where are you going? Little boy, little boy, why have you stopped?”

I couldn’t make out where the voice was coming from, whether from the passing sleigh or from Aunt Miriam’s cottage. It reminded me of crazy Mordkhe, who was called “the hook” because of his habit of catching you by the ear, hooking his finger around it, and singing into it,

“Little boy, little boy, where are you going? Little boy, little boy, why have you stopped?”

I had, indeed, stopped … no, I was lying down. It felt soft and warm and the inside of my nose tickled. My eyes grew heavy. Yes, I was lying in bed with my face to Father’s back, but I didn’t seem to smell his hairy body. Instead, there was a different smell, the kind that came from the kosher butcher shops on Fridays. But today wasn’t Friday. That I remembered … of course, I knew Father was hungry. That’s what made me wonder: How come he was already asleep? How could you be hungry and be sleeping at the same time?

I couldn’t possibly have dreamed the ending. It was hot and blue all around me. I lay on a high bed, smothered in a featherbed and a pile of pillows. The burning smell of hot flatirons hung in the air. Above me hovered an old, hollow-cheeked face, topped by a red nightcap

“Take it,” the nightcap said, pushing a large wooden spoon into my mouth. “Take it, Mendlshi. It’s magnesia with almond milk. It’ll bring down your fever.”

At the foot of the bed, shaped like a cross, stood a tall, lean Jew with a little white beard, wearing an unbuttoned vest with dangling buckles. A long, white cotton thread, resembling a wriggling worm, hung from his lips. A tape measure, green with black dots, drooped down from one of his shoulders. Surely, that was a snake crawling down his other sleeve. He passed the thread between his teeth, bit off small pieces, spat them out, and shook his head.

“Swallow it, child, swallow it. N-n-a! Imagine, sending a child out in such a blizzard!”

Now I knew. Instead of ending up at Aunt Miriam’s, I must have stumbled into Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Those old, hollow cheeks, the face that was pushing a wooden spoon into my mouth, belonged to Grandma Rokhl. This was the same Grandma Rokhl who was constantly accusing Mother of not looking after her own children, who day and night sat on a small, wooden chest, gazing through steel-rimmed spectacles containing a single lens and sewing starched white muslin into nightcaps for pious old women. And that tall Jew standing at the foot of the bed was, of course, Grandpa Dovid Froyke the tailor, who usually wore a long, black cape and a stiff yellow hat, was fond of his drop of whiskey, and on Saturday nights could always be found playing cards with his cronies, well into the small hours of the morning.

For all that, Grandpa was a good man, and visiting him was always great fun. Unlike other tailors, he didn’t take orders for kapotes, coats, and trousers, but made uniforms for the students of the Russian high school, the gymnasium, short, dark-blue jackets with a slit down the back, and white silvery buttons, each of which Grandpa sewed on by hand.

He would pull the thread across a yellow piece of streaked wax and, sitting on a high stool, one leg across the other, let the needle fly in and out, as he sang:

In the plowshare lies a blessing,

The true happiness of life …

When he tired of singing about the plowshare, he’d lift his right leg off his left, thread the needle once again, pull it across the wax, and burst into an altogether different song:

My beauty, my life, pure as gold,

Another I threw over,

So you in my arms I could hold.

Grandma Rokhl, sitting on her wooden chest in the corner, would raise her small, sunken face, look at him over her steel-rimmed spectacles, and, in a harsh voice, call out, “Would you stop it with those silly songs of yours!”

“What’s it to you, my dear little wife?”

“Oh, stop it, you stupid fool!”

But Grandpa wouldn’t stop. He’d merely start rocking back and forth, push his needle faster, shake his head from side to side, and, in the singsong voice of someone studying Talmud aloud, say, “If I’m a fool, then what an idiot an old wife like you must be.” And to forestall Grandma’s next retort, he would shake his head even harder and sing out like a cantor on the Day of Atonement: “
Unesane toykef
… Let us tell how utterly holy this day is and how awe-inspiring.”

All was now quiet and white in Grandpa and Grandma’s house. Wedged between the double windows, like filthy down, were clumps of dark cotton wool.
The Gentile visage of Tsar Alexander III, sporting a thick, yellow, fly-specked beard, looked straight down at me from above the narrow worktable.

Grandpa himself was sitting bent over on his high stool, today not singing or making jokes, but applying himself grimly to the task of sewing silver buttons onto dark-blue jackets, and occasionally throwing out a word.

“Maybe we should call that special doctor, the pumper?”

“What good can he do?”

“Who knows? They say he’s an expert.”

“You and your experts. I’ve already sent someone for some pig fat and dried herbs. With God’s help, that’ll make him better.”

But, as it turned out, neither the pig fat, which Grandma rubbed on my stomach, nor the bitter potion she poured down my throat, did me any good, and the special doctor had to be called in.

He thumped his cane on the floor, and screamed at Grandma. I was scalded with boiling hot water, blood was taken from behind my ears and my back. Medicine was forced down my throat, salty, bitter, sweet, until I finally recovered, and for the first time had a good look around. I saw how the wrinkles on Grandma’s face were arranged and how Grandpa’s beard shook.

Mother never showed up.

On the evening—so Grandma Rokhl recounted—when I went searching for Mother at Aunt Miriam’s, I fell asleep in the snow. The janitor at the Gentile hospital noticed something lying in a snowdrift and raised a hue and cry. People came running. To make a long story short, an old woman, who sewed caps at Grandma’s, recognized me and told them to take me to Grandma Rokhl’s. Where else should they have taken me? Mother was nowhere to be found, neither at home nor at Aunt Miriam’s.

That same day Mother had gone off—to Warsaw.

It seemed she had no choice in the matter. A telegram had arrived, summoning her at once. Tsipele, her only daughter, by her first husband, who lived in Warsaw, was about to announce her engagement.

For many years Mother used to send Tsipele big yellow pears, shaped like bells, bars of chocolate, braided butter cookies, and, occasionally, a few rubles. From all those goodies Tsipele had acquired a pair of dimpled, red cheeks, a fine figure, and a bridegroom ready to take her without so much as a groshen for a dowry. How, then, could Mother not go? But how could she have left without saying goodbye? Well, there simply wasn’t time …

Small wonder, then, that Father raged against Mother, against Grandma, and was even angry with me. He knew full well that I lay sick at Grandma’s, but never once did he come to see me. Instead, he sent a boy over to find out how I was doing. Furious, Grandma slammed the door in the boy’s face.

“What does he think?” she shouted at the boy. “Does he think that his son is a bastard? He can’t come here himself? He’s too good for that?”

Grandpa hunched his head between his shoulders and growled into the uniforms he was working on, saying that Father was right. One doesn’t go away, just like that, without so much as a “Be well.”

“But what about the engagement?” Grandma persisted.

“Engagements can be postponed,” Grandpa asserted with authority.

“You’re a fool!”

“And you’re an idiot!”

Whatever the reason, Mother lingered on in Warsaw. The freezing weather continued. Grandma’s high, soft bed, in which the special doctor used to poke my back every few days, was now suddenly empty and made up.

I was now able to drag myself around the room—small, skinny, my face green and gaunt—and to drink the goat’s milk which Grandma brought me, twice a day, all the way from St. Mary’s Street.

Grandpa had turned paler in the course of my illness, though his cheeks acquired a reddish, scorched glow, and his nose, a sharp point. In the morning, while I drank my goat’s milk, he would take a couple of swigs from a small bottle tucked away in a dark corner of the room. He would throw his head back, just like a Gentile, shape his mouth into a circle, and drain the contents down to the last drop.

It bothered me that Grandpa drank straight from the bottle. What then was the purpose of those little glasses standing in the cupboard?

He explained to me that drinking straight from the bottle was just like someone walking in the field on a hot day and chancing upon a cool spring. In those circumstances, would you go looking for a cup? You’d fall on your knees and lap up the water like a billy goat. After all, said Grandpa, show me the plant, the flower, or the animal that needs a cup to drink from. And wasn’t a human being also a kind of animal?

Well, there was some sense in what Grandpa said. Yes, it’s good to drink straight from the spring. Still, one thing puzzled me. Grandpa said that after draining the bottle, his head cleared up and he felt like a different man. He even had proof. If Moses, he said, hadn’t liked a decent drop of brandy, he’d never have been able to lead the Children of Israel out of Egypt.

That same bit of wisdom he also passed on to my teacher, Sime-Yoysef, who had come to visit me during my illness.

Sime-Yoysef, a squat man with a large, hairy face and a pair of black, piercing eyes, pulled a face upon hearing this. Grandpa’s Moses didn’t appeal to him one bit, and he informed Grandpa that in Moses’ time whiskey hadn’t been invented yet.

“What do you mean, no whiskey?” Grandpa stuck his beard out at him. “How could that be? How could the Jews have left Egypt without a drink of whiskey?”

“I tell you, Reb Dovid, there simply wasn’t any!” Sime-Yoysef insisted.

“So what was there?”

“Who knows? Maybe wine.”

“And wine isn’t liquor?” said Grandpa gleefully. “What’s better than a little glass of wine, we should live so long, my wife Rokhl and I.”

“Oh, stop your yammering!” Grandma looked up from her sewing. “What sort of idle chatter is this?”

“What’s wrong with you, Rokhlshi?” said Grandpa. “Can’t a man speak in his own house? You know,” he shifted his small, white beard back to the teacher’s hairy face. “You know, my Rokhl—may she live and be well—likes to take a drop herself.”

“Your enemies should say such things! Look how he’s talking today! Don’t listen to him, Reb Sime-Yoysef. He’s crazy.”

“Only she does it on the sly,” Grandpa pretended not to have heard her. “She even helps herself to a drop in the middle of the night. It’s no sin. An old woman, why not?”

Yes, Grandpa seemed to have changed since I got down from that high, warm bed and the special doctor had stopped poking me on the back.

All day the white, neat room was now full of chatter and song. Grandma sewed her muslin nightcaps. From time to time, she would stick her face into the small pots cooking cozily away on the stove. Grandpa, rocking from side to side with every prick of the needle, would break into occasional song in his high-pitched voice:

If God were to grant me a life full of bliss,

Then wagging my backside would not be amiss.

At that Grandma would lift her steel-rimmed spectacles from the muslin nightcaps and shake her head scornfully.

“An old Jew like you! You should be ashamed of yourself!”

But Grandpa ignored this wifely reproach, sang the song to the end, and at once began another, with a mournful moan: