Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (25 page)

During the day she still walked around with the horseradish cloths pressed to her forehead. She didn’t attend to the fire, she didn’t make up the beds. What with no one dropping in and Father off somewhere in his distant villages, what reason did she have to light a fire or make up the beds?

So the house stayed cold. There was nobody rooming in the kitchen anymore and the bed there stood empty and desolate. The walls gave off a sickly green air of melancholy. The clock ticked away too loudly. The sun never reached the windows, as though it were angry with us.

Mother began to complain.

“What sort of place is this? Why, it’s worse than a cellar. Had I known it would be like this, I would never have set foot inside. I can’t sleep at night. I imagine the door opening at any moment and Mordkhe-Mendl walking in, with his black silken beard and mouthful of beautiful teeth. Such a doer, so educated!”

Mother was talking to herself. Father wasn’t home. She no longer talked in that manner to Father, but instead poured out her bitter, heavy heart to me.

I felt that life was becoming too much for Mother. She received no letters from her children. She had no idea what happened with Tsipele’s marriage plans. She couldn’t go to Warsaw. She couldn’t tear herself away from here. Mordkhe-Mendl had been taken from the world so unexpectedly. The house was drafty. And to top it all, everything reeked from the stench of the pigs.

Our landlord, a Gentile known as Little Sikorsky, had gone into partnership with a butcher and opened a store selling pork, just outside our door. The stench was nauseating, settling sickeningly into our throats. I was frightened by the slabs of white, cold lard hanging in the store’s window, by the long ropes of dried pig intestines, by the signboard that displayed an axe with an ox’s head. Most of all, I was terrified of the bulldog with the murderous face and pendulous jowls, who sat in front of the store, sniffing at the
kapotes
of passing Jews, baring his teeth, and guarding the dead hunks of pork within.

We had to get away from there. But how? The days were growing grayer and shorter. At this season, where was one to move? People would think us crazy, moving every Monday and Thursday …

But once Mother took a dislike to a place, you could rest assured that we would be moving before long. Mother began to look around, to make inquiries. No one at home had the least inkling, not even I. I should have guessed, however, that something was afoot from the special way she kept looking at the walls and measuring the beds with a length of string. All this was proof that before long a moving wagon would be pulling up outside our door. And that’s exactly what happened.

One gray smoky morning, shortly after Father went out, Menashe Chatterbox drove up with his little white horse and began pushing the wardrobe and the beds toward the door. He had a helper, a noisy fellow wearing his cap with the brim turned to the back. Mother told me to stay in the house and out of the way. Only she was allowed to give the movers a hand. Piece by piece, our few sticks of furniture were loaded onto the cart, which then took us along the promenade and behind the prison, where Mother had rented a new dwelling.

Along the way, old Jews, leaning on their canes, stopped to gape at us, surprised that someone should have decided to move on such a bleak day. Women tending shops, dressed in warm, quilted coats, stepped outside their establishments, shrugging their shoulders and shouting to each other, “She must be a bit crazy, moving on a day like this!”

Menashe’s wagon, tipping to one side, was creaking along as though it were beneath its dignity for it to be carrying such a sorry collection of household belongings on so dreary a day.

But we got to our destination safely. No more cold walls, no more grated horseradish on Mother’s forehead.

The lane that Menashe Chatterbox turned into was narrow and quiet. It was a dead-end street, closed off by a high wooden fence, on whose other side lindens and chestnut trees were visible. There were no other houses on the lane. Along one side rose the yellow-brick wall of the prison. On the other side stood an old, dilapidated hut, a haven for swallows and cats. The prison itself was high and long. Above its rows of small, closely spaced windows, covered with bars, were tin eaves, hanging like knapsacks on soldiers’ backs.

Behind the long, yellow wall, a soldier with a rifle paced back and forth, as regularly as a swinging pendulum. It was forbidden to walk past him or to stop and look at him. The soldier himself looked at no one but kept his eyes fixed on the tin eaves above the barred windows and the nearby hut, also yellow, with blackened windows, where nobody was ever seen going in or coming out.

A single stone step, with tufts of grass around the sides, led to the hut’s entrance, a peeling, brown door without a handle. A dark, gaping hole, covered with a cobweb, was evidence that it must be cold and gloomy inside and draped with more cobwebs.

People told us that a Russian captain had once lived in the hut. He was supposed to have had a young wife, with black eyes and blond hair, who fell in love with a Polish nobleman and ran off with him. The captain was so distraught he hanged himself in this very hut. To this day, no one knew for sure whether or not his corpse had been removed and buried.

None of this scared Mother nor did it stop her from renting in the neighboring building. A low, open gate of whitewashed pickets led into a spacious courtyard, on one side of which stood a long building with many deep-set windows. Behind some of these windows lay our new dwelling.

It was nice inside and bright, with a small kitchen, but no different from any of our other kitchens. However, the main room was so big that you could ride around in it in a rubber-wheeled coach. The room was square, with a high ceiling and two large windows with cleanscrubbed panes looking out onto a garden. To me it looked just like those “parlors” that had belonged to Mordkhe-Mendl in the days of the Wyszufka estate.

Everything here was fresh and new. The floor, like in our old place, was also painted red. Mother said that this was done especially for her at extra cost, and that no other houses in the building had such a red floor.

It was only too bad that we had moved so late in the fall, for the trees outside the clean-scrubbed panes were already bare. A few still bore traces of the quick lime with which they had been smeared in the spring. The fruit trees were wrapped in straw, like warm shawls.

By now the nights were quite chilly. In the mornings the windowpanes were misted over. Winter was coming, but then winter wouldn’t last forever. Summer was bound to follow, when we could throw open the windows, when the trees that were now bare would blossom.

I knew that the summer in this part of town was more beautiful than anywhere else, even more than in the new public park, where boys in long
kapotes
were not allowed in. That’s why I thought that it was clever of Mother to have moved us here. The courtyard itself was something special. You could drive into it with a carriage or ride in on horseback. You could put in three more tenants and there would still be plenty of space. In addition, there was a garden at one end of the courtyard, set off by a high, narrow picket fence. It was a garden as well as an orchard, with flowers, cherry trees, and currant bushes.

The owner of the property, a gray-haired Gentile lady who lived on Lublin Street, employed a man just to look after the garden. He was old and bent, like a twisted shrub. He walked about with a big pair of shears and a tin watering can, sprinkling and pruning, planting and hoeing. Like the Wyszufka gardener, he too said that the flowers were his grandchildren … Too bad that Mordkhe-Mendl’s Reyzl wasn’t here. She would have known the names of all the flowers, and would have taken such pleasure in them after her exile from the Wyszufka estate.

My new friend Yankl, who lived off the same courtyard, told me that in summer people slept outside, next to the picket fence of the garden. Everybody did so, even the Polish chief prison guard, along with his Russian wife and their young, blond daughter, little Janina.

Yankl and I became friends from the very first day Mother and I moved in. He lent a hand unloading the wagon and exchanged words with Menashe Chatterbox as if they were peers. Yankl was my age, only shorter and leaner, with a face full of freckles. They were sprinkled all over his eyelids, his nose, and even his lips. He was speckled with them like a brown-crusted roll with caraway seeds.

Yankl told me that he’d already been to Warsaw. There he had gone on a boat which passed under a bridge made not of wood but of iron and steel, topped by a latticework of iron, crisscrossed like a Scottish tartan. In Warsaw, he said, he knew someone who owned his own carousel and maybe a hundred street organs, as well as any number of parrots, two white bears, and a collection of extraordinarily colored birds, the likes of which the world had never seen. The owner, Yankl continued, was a Jew. He wore a cap with a shiny leather brim and prayed every day.

Yankl said he wanted to stay on in Warsaw with the carousel-owner, who was prepared to provide him with a street organ, along with two parrots and a white mouse, to go around to the courtyards doing magic tricks. But his father, Yarme the coachman, wouldn’t let him stay. He beat Yankl with a leather belt, tied him up with a rope, and dragged him back home.

It was easy to believe that Yankl’s father was capable of such behavior. He had a pair of shoulders that could shore up a horse and wagon. When Yankl’s father spoke, his voice didn’t seem to issue from his mouth but from a bellows. In fact, it wasn’t a regular voice at all, but more like a growl. The unearthly sound hovered over his large blond whiskers and then disappeared into his matted, yellow beard.

Yankl’s father owned only a single pair of horses. He had had them for years. They were, he would say, the apples of his eye. He talked to them as he would to people, and he worried over them more than he did over his own wife and children.

“The chestnut horse,” he would say, “may he be protected from the evil eye, ate a little more today.” But when he looked at the second horse, a white mare, his yellow beard would break into a smile. “What she needs,” he would say, winking his big, round eyes at his wife, “she should live and be well, what she needs …” And then his voice would trail off.

The white mare was really exceptional, a veritable whirlwind. She had a long, gray tail, tinged with dirty yellow, somewhat sparse, since half of the hair had fallen out. This was clear evidence that she was no longer a young filly. Nevertheless, she had an attractive, long chin and clever, smiling eyes.

Yarme couldn’t stop singing her praises. She seemed possessed by an inextinguishable fire. She couldn’t stay still in one place, as she was constantly kicking and breaking her horseshoes. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would stand up in the stable on her hind legs and begin whinnying uncontrollably, like she had lost her mind.

Next to her in the stable stood Yarme the coachman’s second breadwinner, the chestnut stallion. He was an old horse, full of years and one who, apparently, had already had his fill, as well, of mares. He worked harder than any two younger horses. He had stamina. He could withstand both heat and cold, and could go without eating so long as he was left in peace to stare into space and think. The wild whinnying of his excitable neighbor didn’t bother him in the least, nor did he respond when the white mare laid her long, wet, attractive chin on his old neck and rubbed it gently, whinnying straight into his lost-in-thought face. He simply stood there, as if it had nothing to do with him.

Occasionally, Yarme would grab his whip and strike the chestnut stallion angrily on the legs.

“What sort of a male are you?” he’d growl. “Why do you stand there like a dummy! God in heaven!”

But the stallion took the beating in stride, lost in his thoughts. He remained unmoved, reacting to neither the whipping nor the mare’s yearning cries.

This left Yarme with no other choice than to turn to strangers for help. There was actually someone who could provide the needed service, way out on St. Mary’s Street, an old shriveled-up Gentile, lame in one foot and blind in one eye. He owned a stallion that did nothing but eat and drink and couple with strange horses of the female sex.

My friend Yankl told me that, on that very day, the old Gentile was going to bring his stallion over, and that if I stayed, there would be something worth seeing.

That was on a Sabbath, a particularly windy day. Mother had planned to visit Aunt Miriam but got so absorbed in the book of stories she was reading that she couldn’t tear herself away. Father was asleep under the featherbed, which he had pulled over his head. I had already said the afternoon prayers and was just sitting around, waiting for Yankl to give me the signal to come outside.

I could hear the trees rustling ominously outside the windows. The loose chain of a shutter never stopped banging against the wall. The sky was tinted a yellowish gray and it had just begun to snow.

However, none of that deterred the old Gentile, who showed up as expected with his horse in tow. Yarme the coachman had by then gotten up from his own Sabbath nap and had done with the afternoon prayers. He stepped out into the courtyard in a checked overcoat and gave the visiting stallion a slap on the flank, so hard that the horse gave a start and his legs began to quiver restlessly. Suddenly, there was a whinnying sound from inside the stable. The black, pampered stallion raised his neck arrogantly and, ears trembling, responded with his own thick, masculine whinnies.

Yankl and I had sneaked into the stable a short while earlier, hiding in a corner. The warm stench of horse manure filled the air. It was dark but, if you strained your eyes, you could see everything.

The white mare whinnied once more, looked around with her clever, laughing eyes, resting them on us for a while, as if she wanted something from us.

Just then, the old Gentile, limping on one foot, led in his merry bachelor of a stallion. The white mare no longer whinnied but let out a highpitched shriek. She started panting, reared her forelegs, and then began stamping on a board that lay nearby, all the while tugging frantically at her tether.