Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (22 page)

“Mendl, do you like flowers?” she asked me.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I like them, I don’t like them.”

She took me by the hand. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

She led me around the back of the palace, through a thicket of ancient poplars and tall, haughty-looking lindens. She led me further down a black, wet path, smoothly paved, like the walks in our new public park. We came upon a park here, too, cool, shaded, with winding paths and two or three broken benches, on which time had laid a green, mossy deposit.

Reyzl led me still further, almost to the end of the little park, toward an old dilapidated bower, woven from birch branches, where some boxed-in sunlight took an occasional rest.

Reyzl pointed to several narrow flower beds, set around the bower, with rows of plants on frail stems, pushing up from the ground.

“These are flowers,” Reyzl said. “Be careful not to step on them. The red ones over there are roses. They’re still buds, but soon they will be big and beautiful. Over there, are violets.” She pointed to some tiny velvety dots. “Look how blue they are. Have you ever seen such flowers? And those along the edge, shaped like cups, they’re called tulips.”

Reyzl, who usually spoke haltingly, as if she were ashamed of something, now rattled off all the flowers by name. How did she know all this? Who told her?

Barefoot, stepping carefully, Reyzl walked knowingly between the planted rows, placing one foot in front of the other.

“We’ve got our own gardener,” she said, “the one that used to work for the former owner and later for the lady who sold Father the estate. He says that the flowers are his grandchildren, and if not for them, there would be no reason to go on living.”

Reyzl was telling me this, all the while looking at me out of her blue, moist, dreamy eyes. Her look made me feel ashamed of my city breeding, of my lack of special talent. Aunt Naomi’s Mendl could sing. Mordkhe-Mendl’s Reyzl loved flowers. What special thing did I have?

At home, we never had flowers. On our windowsill stood an earthenware pot with long, thick leaves, covered in dust, withered around the edges from age or dryness. From those dusty leaves Father cut the onions to treat his sore foot. Those were the only flowers I ever saw or knew about.

On the other hand, I told myself, what does a boy like me need with flowers? Of what use were they? I knew of no Jewish boys my age who liked flowers. Reyzl, after all, was a girl who had lived all her life by the side of the road, under an open sky and among poplar trees. This must account for her knowledge of flowers and for her love.

Reyzl went on telling me about the different kinds of flowers. She showed me those that she herself had planted and raised. But I had stopped listening. I would rather have been inside the palace, seeing what was going on there.

Just then a voice called out from the distance, “Reyzl! Reyzl!”

“Coming, Mother!” she called back, crimping her nose and taking me by the hand. With her other hand she pointed, saying, “Look, just over there. Do you see? That’s an orchard, with pear trees and apple trees and cherry trees. The best of everything grows there. And it’s all ours. You know that?”

Of course I knew. If it wasn’t theirs, why else would I be here, free to roam around and poke my nose into every corner of the estate? All of it belonged to my Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl, including the flowers over there, the ones that the gardener considered his grandchildren, they too belonged to Mordkhe-Mendl. The best sign of his ownership was our visit, giving us an opportunity to see, and to delight in, his elevation.

Aunt Naomi and Uncle Bentsien had also turned up that Sabbath afternoon.
Poor souls, they had to come all the way out on foot. They were already sitting in the white palace, sprawled on soft, old-fashioned armchairs with high backs. Uncle Bentsien was wheezing heavily, wiping thick beads of sweat from his forehead and looking around the room.

There was much to see and many questions to ask. Rooms like those, with such furniture, none of us had ever set eyes on before except, perhaps, Father, who was a frequent visitor to the estates of the gentry.

“These are parlors,” he explained, “with dark, high ceilings that keep the room cool.”

Such parlors also had clocks that didn’t run, standing lifeless in their glass cases on ornately decorated porcelain stoves. They had bleached deer antlers spread above their entrances, and stuffed birds with large glass eyes staring down in wonder and bewilderment.

Over there, perched on an old, heavily carved chest, was an eagle—at least Father said it was an eagle—with a hard, crooked beak that looked like an iron hook.

The eagle crouched forward, its claws dug into the top of the sideboard, its outspread wings spanning half the wall behind it. It looked as if it was about to swoop across toward the window, smash through the glass, and fly off.

Uncle Bentsien, dabbing his sweaty, bald head with a white handkerchief, was scarcely able to conceal his amazement.

“Is that really an eagle?” he addressed Father. “Are you absolutely sure?”

“What then do you think it is? A rooster?” replied Father grandly. “If I tell you it’s an eagle, it’s an eagle.”

Father felt completely at home in these parlors, as if he belonged. He didn’t sit looking humble and hard of hearing, the way he usually did during visits to his exalted sister, Aunt Naomi. Here, he was on familiar ground. After all, he was made welcome in the homes of the landed gentry and had seen similar refinements in their establishments. So what was all this fuss over an eagle? He knew all about such things. He was the expert, entitled to show off his superior knowledge.

We were taken on a tour of inspection, invited to look at tables of reddish-brown wood, oval in shape, with bow legs, their backs braided and plaited. We were asked to admire dressers with split drawers and tarnished gilt pulls.

We were shown another “parlor,” this one square, with three long windows, their well-polished panes letting in the sunlight. Here, the ceiling was white and the floor as yellow as wax, assembled from separate, small squares joined together. The walls were light blue, with a thin gold border just below the ceiling.
They were covered with faded tapestries dating back to the days of King Sobieski and depicting thin, elongated dogs, ladies in hoop skirts, and gentlemen in white stockings and white wigs, with a braid down the back. What a bizarre depiction! It must be a masquerade. We all stared in disbelief. What sort of people were these? Why did they make themselves look so ridiculous?

You would think that Uncle Bentsien, a man of the world and a regular visitor to the district governor’s office, would know, but he was at a complete loss to explain the meaning of those tapestries. But Father knew. He said that they were portraits of the aristocrats who, in days gone by, had themselves portrayed like that, just as nowadays we have our photographs taken. Their strange clothes were an indication that they were at a ball, what they called a “carnival,” where the lords and ladies dressed up in costume. I understood Father’s explanation. They dressed up just like we Jews do on Purim. They probably even had a wicked Haman of their own.

Mother, however, crinkled her nose.

“It’s not a carnival,” she said. “It’s nothing of the sort.”

She had once read in a book that this is how people dressed in Napoleon’s time. Even the poorest man among them had such a dog and owned such a white wig.

Uncle Bentsien interrupted, “Well, I don’t care one way or the other. I’d get rid of all that fancy stuff anyway. We’d be better off looking at what sort of beds you have here.”

The beds were really nice, quite different from any to be seen in our town. They were reddish-brown, sat low to the ground, with darkly gleaming corners.

“Believe me,” Aunt Khane turned to Mother, “it’s hard for me to fall asleep in such a bed.”

“One gets used to it,” Mother said, with all the assurance of someone who has slept in such aristocratic beds all her life. “When my first husband—may he rest in peace—was alive, I could have easily afforded such beds. When people came to visit and saw the brass door handles …”

I didn’t hear the rest of what Mother was saying. I was too busy looking around to see whether the doors here also had brass handles. Of course, they did. There they were, on the high white doors, but dangling loosely, looking dull and lackluster. Brass door handles, according to Mother, should shine.

“The place needs a lot of repairs,” Aunt Khane said, somewhat apologetically. “It’ll cost a fortune.”

Whenever Aunt Khane talked about money, it was never less than a “fortune.” She said this calmly, sedately, as though certain that, if not today then tomorrow, her Mordkhe-Mendl was going to bring her that fortune. You never know … anything was possible where Mordkhe-Mendl was concerned.

Uncle Bentsien never stopped perspiring and kept dabbing at his red, bald pate with his white handkerchief. Aunt Naomi, her eyelids half-closed, drawled out in her haughty tones, “Mor-d-khe-Men-n-n-dl.”

“Hah?”

“You were going to tell us how you came to acquire the estate. How?” But Mordkhe-Mendl didn’t seem to have heard her.

“Come,” he said, making a sweeping gesture with his hand and getting up from his chair. “Let’s go outside for a while. You’ve hardly seen anything yet. This estate is a gold mine!”

He ran his left hand through his silky beard, like King Ahasuerus of the Purim story, flung open the glass-paneled door, and ushered his guests out, to show off his impressive possession.

There was certainly something to see, that is, there once might have been, when the estate still belonged to Dziedzic, the old landlord, or maybe even at the time of the last lady-owner. Today, however, there wasn’t much left to look at. By any measure, the estate should, at the very least, have matched the grandeur of the palace to which it was attached. But that, sad to say, was not the case.

On an estate, as is well known, there are stables with horses, cows, and oxen. There have to be pigs and piglets rooting in the farmyard, and hens, roosters, turkeys, and ducks running around. Father said that on a proper estate there should also be two or three peacocks strutting about, their regal tails spread wide, whose every feather bears a picture of the sun and the moon. Their assignment was to call out to all passersby, “There’s an estate here, there’s an estate here.”

Well, not all estate-owners have peacocks, and pigs were out of the question for Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl. But why were there no more than two scrawny horses on spindly legs standing in the stable, and no more than two starved-looking cows, one a white calf with a yellow patch under one eye, the other a black milk cow with a white patch smack across her flanks?

Judging by the size and length of the stable, at one time it must have housed a whole herd of cows. On the opposite wall you could still see the empty cribs, separated by little partitions. The smell of warm cow dung had long since escaped through the holes in the roof and through the two doors, which hung askew on loose hinges. All that remained were the two scrawny horses and the two sorry-looking cows.

At that moment, the milk cow turned her black, moist nostrils toward the guests, turning her head away from Uncle Bentsien’s white, flowing beard. She looked at Father in a puzzled way, as if she’d seen him before. It seemed to me that she was searching for a familiar face. On me she fixed her large, watery eyes, as if pleading with me to chase away the tiny flies that chose the whites of her eyes for their resting place.

I tried to wave my hand in front of the cow’s face, but she turned her head away in annoyance.

“Don’t do that!” I seemed to hear her say. “That’s not what I had in mind. I was thinking that what you see here now is nothing. Once, during her ladyship’s days, I had many, many sisters. Entire families of my kind used to live here, grandmothers, mothers, children. We didn’t share this stable then with angry horses. We had a whole barn to ourselves, even bigger than this stable. When we went out to pasture, we crowded in one behind the other, there were so many of us. Our udders overflowed with milk, enough to flood the entire world. Everything’s different today. We’ve fallen on hard times. Old Dziedzic died somewhere far from here and left a mountain of debts. So his wife started selling off one cow after another, one horse after another. There used to be a flock of sheep as well, big, plump ones. Their wool was for sale at every fair. But before long, there was nothing left to be sold and the estate itself was put up for auction. There were many would-be buyers, both Jews and Gentiles, including the German, Fleischer, that coarse blacksmith who used to crawl over roofs, smearing them with thick, red paint. He hoped to become the Dziedzic of the Wyszufka estate. There was a lot of haggling, a lot of bellowing and bickering. The old lady wept, said goodbye to the farm and to all the farmhands. She paid each one what was owed him, and then let them all go. She took nothing with her, except a bunch of flowers. Now the estate belongs not to that German, Fleischer, but to that one over there, the one with the black beard, the one they call Mordkhe-Mendl.”

That’s what an old, white-haired peasant told us, sucking on a small pipe, as he walked between Mother and me. It was he who’d been talking all along, not, God forbid, the cow …

And there, just as the old peasant observed, was Mordkhe-Mendl, striding in his wide, Sabbath dressing gown. He kept pointing to the left and to the right, with hands that seemed to have grown grotesquely large. When he waved them about, they seemed to encompass the whole broad expanse, together with the forest and the sky.

He told us how he had acquired the estate. He was up against rich landowners who were also looking to buy the property. For nights on end he didn’t close an eye. His head was spinning in circles. What if it all came to nothing? Maybe those landowners would rent him the estate? And maybe this and maybe that? That’s when he decided to make common cause with the German, Fleischer.

But Fleischer also wasn’t born yesterday. He, too, wanted to become a landowner and he was determined to own the Wyszufka estate all by himself, without Mordkhe-Mendl.