Jakob the Liar (6 page)

Naturally Mischa is a bit shocked — that much force wasn’t really necessary — but he can’t be offended now. The force, after all, had to assume some form or other. He can’t sit down with a stony face, arms crossed on his chest, waiting for an apology. He could wait a long time for that. He can, and he does, remove all doubts: the moment has arrived, his plan worked — no one is going to ask now why he took so long.

“Jacob Heym has a radio.”

Another short silence, a few glances exchanged, the shirt — still too big — floats unnoticed to the floor. It’s all right to believe one’s own son-in-law. At last Rosa throws her arms around his neck; he’s waited long enough for that. Over her shoulder he sees her father sitting down exhausted and covering his deeply furrowed face with his hands. There will be no discussion; there is nothing to say. Rosa pulls his ear to her mouth and whispers. He doesn’t understand, the old man still has his hands in front of his face, and Mischa looks at her inquiringly.

“Let’s go to your place,” Rosa whispers again.

A brilliant idea, she has taken the words out of Mischa’s mouth; today one inspiration follows on the heels of another. They tiptoe out of the room with exaggerated care, the door clicks shut, no one hears it. Outside, it is already getting dangerously dark.

T
hen Frankfurter is alone with his wife, without witnesses. All I know is how it ended. I only know the outcome, nothing in between, but I can only imagine it to have been something like this.

His wife finally gets up, at some point. She wipes away her tears, no longer those of the marriage proposal, or she doesn’t wipe them away. She goes to her husband, quietly, as if not wanting to disturb him. She stands behind him, puts her hands on his shoulders, brings her face close to his, which is still covered with his hands, and waits. Nothing happens, not even when he lowers his arms. He stares at the opposite wall, and she gives him a little nudge. She is looking for something in his eyes and cannot find it.

“Felix,” she may have said softly after a while. “Aren’t you glad? Bezanika isn’t so far away. If they’ve come that far they’ll come as far as here too.”

Or she might have said: “Just think, Felix, if it’s true! My head’s in a whirl, just think! Not much longer now, and everything will be just the way it used to be. You’ll be able to perform again, on a real stage, I’m sure they’ll reopen the theater. I’ll be waiting for you beside the bulletin board next to the porter’s lodge. Just think, Felix!”

He doesn’t answer. He gets up from under her hands and goes over to the cupboard. Perhaps he looks like a man who has come to an important decision and doesn’t want to waste any time in carrying it out.

Frankfurter opens the cupboard, takes out a cup or a little box, and finds a key in it.

“What are you going to do in the basement?” she asks.

He weighs the key in his hand, as if there were still something to be considered, possibly the matter of finding the right moment, but the sooner the better. Nothing is the same anymore. Perhaps he tells her now what he has in mind, taking her into his confidence while still in the room, but that’s unlikely since he has never been in the habit of asking for her opinion. Besides, it makes no difference when he tells her; it won’t change anything, the key is already in his pocket. So let us assume that he closes the cupboard without a word, walks to the door, turns around, and says only, “Come.” They go down into the basement.

In these houses of the poor one would formerly never have set foot: the wooden stairs are worn, they creak abominably, but he walks close to the wall and on tiptoe. She follows him uneasily, also softly, also on tiptoe — she doesn’t know why, just because he’s doing it. She has always followed him, without asking; often she has only been able to guess what was to be done, and it wasn’t always the right thing.

“Won’t you tell me now what we’re doing here?”

“Sssh!”

They walk along the narrow basement passage; no need to tiptoe here. The next-to-last cubicle on the right is theirs. Frankfurter turns the key in the padlock and opens the wire door in its iron frame, which is no good as fuel and so is still there. He goes in, she follows hesitantly, he closes the wire door behind her, and there they are.

Felix Frankfurter is a cautious man. He looks for a piece of sacking or a sack with holes that he can tear or, if there is no sack, he takes off his jacket and hangs it across the door, just in case. I imagine that for a moment he puts his finger to his lips, closing his eyes and listening, but there is not a sound. Then he goes to work on the little pile filling one corner of the space, a little pile of useless stuff, a small heap of memories.

At the time they received the notice, they spent two days with their heads together considering what they should take along — apart from the prohibited things, of course. The situation was very serious, no doubt about that; they didn’t expect it to be a paradise, but nobody had any definite knowledge. Mrs. Frankfurter thought in practical terms, too practical for his liking, solely of bed linen and dishes and things to wear, but he was reluctant to part with many items that she regarded as superfluous. Such as the drum on which at a highly successful performance he had announced the arrival of the heir to the Spanish throne; or Rosa’s ballet slippers from the time when she was five years old, to this day almost unworn; or the album of carefully pasted-in reviews in which his name is mentioned and underlined in red. Give me one good reason why I should part with them: life is more than just eating and sleeping. The problem of transporting them? In great haste he bought a handcart, at an exorbitant price, for at that time prices for handcarts shot up overnight, and now the little pile fills a corner of their basement.

He lays aside one item after another, his wife watching him silently, seething with curiosity: What is he looking for? Maybe for a moment he studies the framed photograph of all his fellow actors at the theater, his portly figure over on the right, between Salzer and Strelezki, who in those days wasn’t yet so well known. But that’s not what he’s looking for; if he did study the picture, he puts it aside again and goes on reducing the pile.

“That Jacob Heym is a fool.”

“Why?”

“Why! Why! He heard some news, marvelous, but that’s his affair. Some good news, very good news in fact: then he should just be glad and not drive everyone else crazy with it.”

“I don’t understand you, Felix,” she says. “You’re not being fair to him. Surely it’s a great thing for us to know about it. Everybody should know about it.”

“Women!” Frankfurter says angrily. “Today you know about it, tomorrow the neighbors know, and the next day the whole ghetto is talking about nothing else!”

She may nod, surprised at his fury. But so far he’s given no reason at all to reproach Heym.

“And all of a sudden the gestapo knows!” he says. “They have more ears than you think.”

“Oh, Felix,” she interrupts him, “do you seriously believe that the gestapo needs us to find out where the Russians are?”

“Who’s talking about that! What I mean is, all of a sudden the gestapo knows that there’s a radio in the ghetto. And what will they do? They’ll immediately turn every street upside down, house by house. They won’t give up till they’ve found the radio. And where will they find one?”

The pile has been leveled. Frankfurter lifts up a cardboard box, white or brown, in any case a cardboard box containing the reason for a just and valid death sentence. He opens the lid and shows his wife the radio.

She may give a little shriek, she may be horrified, certainly shocked; she stares at the radio and at him and is at a loss.

“You brought our radio along!” she whispers and folds her hands. “You brought our radio along! They could have shot all of us for that, and I knew nothing about it.… I knew nothing.…”

“Why should you?” he said. “Why should I have told you? I’ve trembled enough alone, and you’ve trembled enough even without a radio. There were days when I forgot it, simply forgot it, sometimes even for weeks at a time. So one happens to have an old radio in the basement and stops thinking about it. But whenever I did remember I would start trembling, and I’ve never been reminded of it as I was today. The worst part is that I never listened, not a single time, not even in the early days. Not so that you wouldn’t notice — I simply didn’t dare. Sometimes I wanted to; my curiosity would almost get the better of me. I’d pick up the key, and you remember how from time to time I’d go down to the basement. You would ask me what I wanted down there, and I told you I wanted to look at photos or read the old reviews again. But that was a lie; I wanted to listen to the radio. I would go down into the basement, hang something across the door, and didn’t dare. I would sit down, look at the photos or read the reviews, just as I’d told you, and I didn’t dare. But that’s all over now!”

“I had no idea,” she whispers to herself.

“That’s all over, once and for all!” he says. “You were right all the time, it was useless stuff, I don’t need it anymore. There’ll be nothing left, nothing to suggest a radio. Then let them come and search.”

He takes the radio apart, piece by piece, probably the only radio in the hands of any of us; without much fuss he destroys it. The tubes are trodden to dust, an indestructible piece of wire is wound as a harmless cord around a box, the wooden casing is put aside piece by piece and will have to wait a few weeks before being burned. At this time of year any smoking chimney is suspect, but that’s no great tragedy: wood is wood, after all.

“Did you also hear them say that the Russians have almost reached Bezanika?” Mrs. Frankfurter asks in a low voice.

He looks at her in astonishment.

“Didn’t I tell you I never listened?” he may have answered.

M
ischa enters his room with Rosa, and that is a whole story on its own. If it is a story when somebody must be lied to in order to make her a little bit happy, that’s what happened with Rosa; if it is a story when bold ruses must be employed and fear of discovery is present, and there must on no account be any slipups, and one’s expression must remain solemn and innocent throughout; if all this yields a serviceable story, then Rosa’s going with Mischa to his room is also a story.

In the middle of the room is a curtain.

Fayngold is the name of the man sleeping in the other bed, it’s because of Isaak Fayngold that they have to go to all this trouble, even if he couldn’t care less. He’s wiped out with fatigue anyway every night, he’s over sixty and his hair is snow white; he really does have other worries, but go ahead and do what you like. At first only the wardrobe had divided the room; to Mischa this seemed enough and to Fayngold more than enough, but for Rosa it hadn’t been sufficient. She told Mischa that, even if Fayngold is deaf and dumb, he still isn’t blind, and the moon shines so brightly into the room, and in any case the wardrobe is too narrow. Mischa cheerfully removed the piece of cloth from the window and fastened it to the ceiling beside the wardrobe. Now the moon could shine in more brightly than ever, but not for Fayngold. The main thing was that Rosa was reassured.

Fayngold is no more deaf and dumb than I or Kowalski or anyone else who knows how to use his ears and tongue, but for Rosa he is as deaf and dumb as a clam. It was clear to Mischa from the start that Rosa would not set foot near his bed because there was another bed next to it with a strange man in it; the understanding landladies and the discreet little hotels with their hall porters who tactfully look the other way and ask no questions — these can be found only in some other town. He knew that under the circumstances she could only say no, she’s not that kind of girl, that’s out of the question. Neither is he that kind of fellow. But if renunciation is to be the ultimate option, there is still ample time for brooding. No one can fault him for that, and Mischa did plenty of it.

One blessed night he was lying awake in bed thinking of Rosa, with Fayngold about to fall asleep in the other bed, and Mischa began to tell him about Rosa. Who she was and how she was and what she looked like and how much he loved her and how much she loved him, and Fayngold merely sighed. That’s when Mischa confessed his burning desire to have Rosa with him for one night.

“By all means,” Fayngold answered, without going more deeply into the problem. “I don’t mind. And now, do let me go to sleep.”

Mischa didn’t let him go to sleep. He explained to Fayngold that the point was not whether Fayngold agreed but whether Rosa agreed. Also that he hadn’t mentioned Fayngold to her, he hardly dared to, and if they didn’t come up with a solution, presumably nothing would come of the whole idea. Fayngold switched on the light and stared at him for a long time.

“You’re not serious!” he said in a shocked whisper. “You can’t expect me to hang around in the street until you’re finished. Have you forgotten the regulations?”

Mischa didn’t expect any such thing, and he hadn’t forgotten the regulations either. He was simply looking for a solution, which was nowhere in sight. Fayngold switched off the light and soon fell asleep: it’s not we who must come up with something, but Mischa, all by himself.

After an hour or two Mischa woke Fayngold, patiently put up with his abuse, and then told him his idea. As Mischa has said, Rosa will never spend the night with him if she finds out that there is another man in the room, regardless of whether he’s twenty or a hundred. If Mischa doesn’t tell her, maybe she will come, then she’ll see Fayngold, so she’ll leave again and never forgive Mischa. No matter which way you look at it, the only solution is for Fayngold to remain in the room and yet be as good as not there.

“You want me to hide?” was Fayngold’s weary response. “You want me to spend night after night under my bed or in the wardrobe?”

“I’ll tell her you’re deaf and dumb,” Mischa announced.

Fayngold protested; for days he bitterly resisted the idea, but eventually Mischa managed to convince him of the urgency. At night a person can’t see much anyway, and if she is also sure that you can’t hear anything, we should be able to manage. So with distinctly mixed feelings Fayngold gave his consent: If it means so much to you. And ever since then, for Rosa he has been as deaf and dumb as a clam.

For Mischa, though, there was another worry: from a few hints dropped by Fayngold he became aware that Fayngold had once been listening. True, Rosa hadn’t noticed anything and Fayngold had kept his mouth shut, but he must have heard a thing or two not intended for his ears. After all, when two people lie in each other’s arms, quite a few words are spoken that are not meant for other ears, and it was very embarrassing for Mischa. Since then he has been studying Fayngold’s sleep, often deliberately lying awake to listen to the pitch of his breathing and snoring. No one has ever heard himself sleep; no one can imitate his own sleep. A person can imitate sleeping as such but cannot know anything about his own sleep. And Mischa knows what Fayngold’s sleep sounds like: he could swear, he says, that he knows it in every detail. And during the rare nights when Rosa is with him, Mischa always first listens intently as he lies beside her, and only when he is quite sure that Fayngold is asleep behind the screen does he begin to caress her and kiss her, and Rosa forgets her disappointment and stops wondering why he has kept her waiting so long.

On one occasion something terrible happened: while deeply asleep, in the midst of a confused dream, Fayngold suddenly began to speak, clearly audible individual words, ignoring the fact that deaf mutes must be deaf and dumb in their sleep too. This woke Mischa, whose heart almost stopped beating; he looked anxiously at Rosa, who lay asleep in the moonlight and merely turned her head from one side to the other. He couldn’t call out, Fayngold, shut up! He could only lie there motionless and hope, and luckily Fayngold stopped his fantasizing before there was a disaster. Dreams last for only a few seconds, people say, and it never happened again.

So much for the miniature comedy. All in all, we see that some bold paths have led Rosa to this room, right beneath these covers, not merely straight down one street, then a turn to the left and a turn to the right. Mischa has found a way, Fayngold has cooperated, Rosa is happy to be here.

She is lying on her back, I know, her hands under her head, tonight as always, even though that’s a bit selfish since with a big fellow like Mischa the bed has more than enough to cope with: he has to make do with the edge. There she lies, a faraway look in her eyes; the evening, the most wonderful yet, is over. They have already whispered their sweet nothings into each other’s ears. Although Fayngold is deaf and dumb, they always whisper, as people do who lie as Rosa and Mischa do now. They would whisper even on a lonely island, if, that is, it were absolutely necessary to speak. The night is far advanced; the mute Fayngold has long since been asleep behind the screen of wardrobe and curtain. The hot weather and the news must have worn him out: tonight he was only a brief impediment. After only a few minutes Mischa was satisfied with the sounds coming from the other side and could lavish his entire attention on Rosa.

Rosa gently nudges Mischa, her foot against his foot, persisting until he is sufficiently awake to ask her what’s up.

“My parents will be living with us, won’t they?” she says.

Her parents. They had never come as far as this room. There had always been only the night when Mischa and Rosa were lying together and making love — that particular night and no other. All the following ones were yet to come, and there was no use wasting time thinking about them. But now that the parents are here, let’s look briefly at what may one day happen, let’s peek through the hole in the curtain. Her parents are here, along with an idea of what the future may hold; they can’t be thrown out, Rosa is adamant.

“They won’t be living with us,” says Mischa in the darkness.

“And why not? Do you have something against them?” Rosa raises her voice — these are not matters that demand to be whispered — raises it so rebelliously, perhaps, that Fayngold might wake up, but of course she never suspects this danger.

“Good heavens, is that so important that you have to wake me up in the middle of the night?”

“Yes,” says Rosa.

All right. He props himself on his elbows. She can pride herself on having finally chased away his sleep; he sighs, as if life wasn’t already difficult enough.

“All right. I have nothing against them, nothing whatsoever. I really like them very much indeed, they won’t be living with us, and now I want to sleep!”

He heaves himself onto his other side, a minor demonstration in the moonlight: their first tiff. Not yet a real quarrel, merely a foretaste of everyday worries. A few silent minutes pass during which Mischa notices that Fayngold has woken up.

“Mamma could look after the children,” says Rosa.

“Grandmas always spoil children,” says Mischa. “And I don’t know how to cook, either.” “There are books.”

Now she sighs, Let’s quarrel later, we’ll have all the time in the world. Rosa has to lift her head slightly because he is pushing his reconciling arm under it: now a kiss to make up, then finally back to sleep. But she can’t simply close her eyes and run away. What she sees she sees: we’ve been waiting a long time for this glimpse into the future. When they knock, when they are standing in the doorway, those Russians, good morning, here we are, now we can start, by that time it’s too late, we can’t wait till then to decide, we must know by then what has to be done first and what next. But Mischa wants to sleep, and Rosa can’t. So many things are mixed up; at least some of them should be straightened out. Important matters will somehow take care of themselves; people of consequence who’ll take care of those are sure to show up. Let’s start with our own little affairs, no one’s going to look after those for us.

From pondering, Rosa progresses to whispering. First of all there’s the question of the house, one we’d feel comfortable in, but we might also discuss something other than the house, if you can think of anything, anyway let’s begin with the house. Not too small, not too big, let’s say five rooms, that’s not asking too much. Now don’t start yelling, that much one can ask for, we’ve been modest long enough. There’d be one room for you, one for me, and two for my parents. And a children’s room, of course, where they can do what they like, stand on their heads or scribble all over the walls. We would sleep in my room, we don’t need a special bedroom, that would be giving away space that would be wasted during the day. We have to think in practical terms too. When we have guests we could sit in your room: a sofa in the middle of the room, that’s quite modern, a long, low table in front of it and three or four armchairs. Though I don’t want too many guests, just so you know right now. Not because of the upheaval, that’s no great problem, but I’d rather be alone with you. Maybe when we’re a bit older. And no one’s going to tell me how my kitchen should be. It has to be tiled, that’s always clean and attractive. Blue and white is what I like best. The Klosenbergs used to have a kitchen like that, just like that, I can’t imagine a nicer one. The floor covered with pale gray tiles, on the wall shelves for plates and jugs and ladles, and there must also be a little shelf for all those spices. Nobody knows how many spices there are — saffron, for instance. Do you have any idea what saffron is used for? That it makes cakes and noodles yellow?

The rest of it I don’t know since just about here my informant Mischa finally fell asleep, in the midst of all the spices. Perhaps Fayngold could have told me more about this particular night, perhaps he lay awake all the way from basement to attic, but I never asked him.