Jakob the Liar (22 page)

Then the Germans walk up the stairs, the clatter of their boots alarming the whole building. A door is slammed. Agitated voices sound confusedly from everywhere, though it would have been better to stay calm. A child is crying.

“Come on!” whispers the old man.

Rosa follows him. In the doorway he hesitates, afraid of the van, but they must pass it if they are to obey the German’s order. “Go on, get going!” says Rosa.

They hurry straight across the road, toward the building opposite where the door is already being opened for them from the inside. The old man sits down exhausted on the bottom stair, groaning as if he had run around the entire block and massaging his chest over his heart. Rosa sees three other men and a woman in the hallway, which is even darker than the first one; she doesn’t know any of them. She looks toward the door, which is of metal; a fourth man, fairly young, is peering out through the keyhole and reports for the benefit of all.

“Nothing yet,” he says.

“Who are they looking for over there?” the woman asks the old man.

“How would I know?” he says, continuing to massage his left chest.

“Does someone special live there?” asks a bald-headed man.

At first he receives no reply; they are all on their way home from work and strangers in this street, until Rosa says softly, “They’ve come for Jacob Heym.”

Who is Jacob Heym, which Jacob Heym? The scout at the keyhole straightens up and asks, “Jacob Heym? Is he the one with the radio?”

“Yes.”

“Nice mess,” he says, without much sympathy, it seems to Rosa. “It was bound to come out sooner or later.”

At that the old man on the stairs flies into a rage, much to Rosa’s surprise; he had appeared to be fully occupied with his fear and his heart. Now his veins are swelling. “Why did he have to be found out, you young pip-squeak? Eh? Why? I can tell you why he was found out. Because somebody ratted on him! That’s why! Or do you imagine it happened all by itself?”

The embarrassed pip-squeak submits to this dressing-down without protest. He bends over again to the keyhole and says after a short pause, “Still nothing.”

The old man summons Rosa to him with a movement of his head and, when she is standing in front of him, moves slightly to one side, so she sits down beside him.

“Do you know him?” he asks.

“Who?”

“That Jacob Heym?” “No.”

“Then how do you know he lives there?” 

“From friends.”

“They’re still inside,” the pip-squeak reports. The old man ponders for a few moments in silence, then says in the direction of the door, “When they bring him out, let me know. I’d like to see what he looks like,” a remark that, right at this moment, Rosa finds in poor taste; then she doesn’t.

“He has taken a great risk,” says the old man admiringly, now back again to Rosa, who nods. And wonders what she will tell Mischa now. Let him scold her all he likes about her visit to her old home, she couldn’t keep that a secret even if she wanted to; the telltale briefcase and ration card would be enough without any confession on her part. But she would rather not mention Jacob; she doesn’t dare face Mischa with that, especially after what’s happening now. And, bitter as it is, she runs no risk if she doesn’t mention her encounter with Jacob: Jacob will be in no position to tell Mischa she’s lying.

“Perhaps he isn’t even at home,” says the old man.

“He is at home,” Rosa says without thinking.

The old man looks at her in surprise, a question already in his eyes, but before he can voice it the pip-squeak calls from the door, “You were wrong — they’re bringing out a woman!”

Let us permit ourselves a closer look and go out into the street. The woman being led away is Elisa Kirschbaum. She is being made to pay for her brother’s incompetence, for the fact that, contrary to expectations, he was unable to cure the Sturmbannführer: it has taken them long enough to think of that.

For some time now, people living in the building have been afraid that events might take such a turn; anyone can put two and two together. Someone had mentioned the hitherto unknown expression “clan liability” in conversation. The very evening of the day the flag at the freight yard was flying at half-mast, Jacob had gone to see Elisa Kirschbaum. He had put it to her that it might be better for her to go into hiding with friends she undoubtedly had, at least for the time being, until it became clear whether the threatened reprisals would actually be carried out. For, however painful it might be, they had to assume the worst for her brother, and if by some miracle he should, in spite of everything, return unharmed, Jacob promised to let her know at once. But she wanted none of all that and told Jacob, “It’s very kind of you, my dear Mr. Heym. But let that be my worry.” As if she still held a trump card that nobody suspected.

Now she is walking ahead of the two Germans, briskly so there can be no excuse for pushing or touching her. And briskly also, as Jacob behind the window suspects, so as not to offer any spectacle to the street, which, although apparently deserted, is full of hidden eyes. The display of concentrated power being exuded by the two men behind her appears excessive for so frail a prisoner. Elisa Kirschbaum stops behind the van without looking around at her escorts. One of them lets down the tailgate, on the inside of which is a narrow step. Just as she is about to put her foot on it the van moves forward, and Elisa Kirschbaum steps into a void and falls onto the street. The van is merely making a U-turn so it can wait on the other side of the street; the driver has already stuck his head out of the window in preparation.

Jacob’s vantage point is not near enough for him to make out the expressions of the participants. People living closer by report later that the Germans had grinned as if at an oft-repeated practical joke. Elisa Kirschbaum gets up immediately, with surprising agility; she is on her feet again, waiting, before the van has completed its turn, for which it has to stop and back up twice. Then she climbs in; it is rather high for her, and in spite of all her efforts she is given a shove. The two Germans also climb into the back, the tailgate is pulled up, Elisa Kirschbaum has finally disappeared behind the dark green tarpaulin. The van drives off, and after a safe interval many of the front doors open. The narrow sidewalks gradually fill up again with people, some silent, some debating, most of them on their way home from work, as we already know, and strangers to this street.

M
eanwhile, according to the radio the Red Army has advanced to the outskirts of the district town of Pry. Pry is not to be compared with Bezanika; anyone can visualize Pry, no one has to ask where in the world Pry is. Pry is exactly eighty-seven miles away from us; most of the local inhabitants know the little town from occasional visits. A few have even lived there and were moved here after the outbreak of the war, for due to its fortunate population structure Pry has no ghetto of its own.

The position of the Russians becomes the subject of an argument. Kowalski has a quarrel with his three roommates, whose names I don’t know. Now, as both the easygoing Jacob and I have good reason to know, it is the simplest thing in the world to disagree with Kowalski, but in this particular case one is inclined to agree with him. The issue is no trivial one: what is involved is that this one man, for simplicity’s sake let us call him Abraham, this Abraham claims that the Russians have already passed through Pry on their way to Mie-loworno. Someone at his factory, let us assume the brickyard, has said so. Kowalski, on the other hand, swears up and down that they haven’t even reached Pry. But Abraham sees no reason whatever to believe Kowalski more than his fellow worker.

“Who’s working at the freight yard?” Kowalski asks angrily. “You or me? Who hears everything firsthand? You or me?”

For Abraham this is no valid proof, presumably because his version sounds so much better than Kowalski’s. Anyone can make a mistake, he says. Nor will he accept the logical objection that whatever this mysterious fellow worker at the brickyard claims to know must, in some way or other, originate with Jacob.

“Or are you suggesting there is another radio?”

“How should I know?” says Abraham.

It might not matter to Kowalski — let Abraham think what he likes, let him be taken in like a naive child by crude rumors — except that somehow he feels partially responsible for the truth. For the radio is, in a way, also his radio, given his long-standing friendship with Jacob, as strong today as it ever was; during the power failure the radio had actually come within an ace of landing in his room. So he patiently explains the long route that Qvery news item has to take from Jacob’s mouth to the factory, via so many people, the dangers it is exposed to along the way, dangers of mutilation and enhancement. How everyone adds something to it, turns something good into something better, which means the news finally arrives, as it turns out, in such shape that even its own creator doesn’t recognize it.

“Anyway, the Russians are on their way to Mieloworno,” Abraham says stubbornly. “Maybe you got it wrong, or he got it wrong. You’d better ask him again tomorrow.”

Kowalski doesn’t ask Jacob tomorrow; excuses for a leisurely chat with Jacob are scarce enough, so Kowalski goes to Jacob then and there.

He finds him in the worst possible shape: weary, apathetic, taciturn. Half an hour ago they took Elisa Kirschbaum away.

“Am I intruding?” Kowalski asks, conjuring a smile that, as soon as he has peered into Jacob’s face, he feels is all wrong.

“It’s you,” says Jacob. After closing the door behind Kowalski, he lies down fully dressed on the bed, where he obviously was already lying before the knock at the door. He clasps his hands behind his head and stares at the ceiling. Kowalski wonders what has suddenly got into him. Only a little while ago, on their way back from the freight yard, he seemed quite cheerful, if the word
cheerful
may be used in these times at all.

“Has something happened?” asks Kowalski.

Happened or not happened: Jacob feels a strange new weakness, alarmingly sudden. Before, on his way down from the attic, where he had gone with Lina, he had had to hold on to the banister. He has tried to account for this new condition with that perpetual hunger, but that could explain only the trembling of his knees, scarcely the origin of that other weakness, equally tormenting, his sense of discouragement. This is what he is now attempting to analyze while staring at the ceiling, trying to dissuade himself from minimizing it; it is too massive and weighty for that. The incident with Elisa Kirschbaum was probably only a small component; it had unquestionably shaken Jacob, but it would be too much to describe it as the experience that robbed Jacob of his courage from one minute to the next. Certainly of greater impact was Rosa’s visit, having to hear Lina defending him with lies, with his own weapons, although even that visit should not be held wholly responsible, for Jacob’s dwindling powers either. It is a number of things coming together from all sides — mainly, perhaps, just contemplating the situation all around. More and more often someone takes you aside and says, Jacob, Jacob, I can no longer believe this will end well, and by the time you have offered one person some modest consolation by way of the very latest news, there are already six other people waiting to tell you the same thing. According to the radio, the Russians are exerting pressure on Pry; God alone knows who they are really exerting pressure on, or who is exerting pressure on them. According to the radio, one should soon be able to see the first artillery flashes in the distance, but day after day all you ever see is the same scene, that repulsive desolation. You will gradually have to consider some withdrawal tactics, for in your enthusiasm you have allowed the advance to proceed at a speed that unfortunately won’t stand up to grim reality.

And Kowalski stands around idly, waiting in vain for an inviting look.

“Do you want me to go away again?” he asks after an appropriate interval, and sits down.

Jacob remembers that he has a visitor; he abandons the ceiling and says, “Sorry, I’m not feeling too good.”

“Has something happened?”

“Yes and no,” says Jacob. “They’ve just taken Kirschbaum's sister away. But apart from that, I’m beginning to feel my age.” 

“Kirschbaum's sister? After all this time?”

 “Yes, just imagine.”

Jacob gets up; his ears buzz with suspicious signals, and these are combined with giddiness and nausea. All he needs now is to become seriously ill. From quite far away he hears Kowalski saying, “Are you all right?”

He quickly sits down at the table; fortunately he begins to feel better. He thinks of Lina and what is to become of her and that it’s preferable to stay well. And when he finally looks at Kowalski he is reminded of a little cardboard sign, a little white sign with green lettering:
CLOSED TEMPORARILY DUE TO ILLNESS
. He got it from Leyb Pachman when he bought the shop from him, together with a lot of other stuff in the inventory. Only once did he ever use it, during all those twenty years spent over potato pancakes, ice cream, and comparatively minor worries, only once did the little sign hang on the shop door. And it wasn’t even a proper illness, Jacob having the constitution of an ox: while trying to repair a stuck blind he had fallen off the ladder and broken a leg. The best health in the world is of no help there. That had been long before Josefa Litwin’s time; she could have been very useful as a nurse, but he was looked after by a wizened old witch from the building across the courtyard. For money, of course, since he had no one else. But as for looking after him, all she did was push the table with his meals close enough for him to feed himself, occasionally empty the ashtray and air the room, and in the mornings straighten the bed. Beyond that, all she did was say, “And if there’s anything else you need, Reb Heym, just call me. I’ll leave my window open.” Jacob took her up on this once or twice, but either she had closed her window or she was as hard of hearing as an old mule. And every second or third evening Kowalski would drop in with a small bottle and express his sympathy for Jacob having to lie there with his leg in a splint, unable to move. Would sit there until the bottle was empty, neither of them being great conversationalists. Jacob thanked God that the fracture healed without complications. A few days longer, and the boredom would have killed him. And shortly after that he threw the blameless little sign into the stove, watching with grim enjoyment as it was consumed by the flames. The threat had such a lasting effect that to this day he has never again had to be confined to bed.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to leave?” asks Kowalski, at the end of his patience and interrupting Jacob’s thoughts.

“Don’t go,” says Jacob.

Kowalski looks at him with raised eyebrows. He has a feeling that Jacob intends to tell him something, most likely nothing good to judge by the past few minutes and the sluggish introduction. Yet all he had in mind was a completely innocent visit, for on his way here he decided not to bother about a confirmation regarding Pry, an error being out of the question — that fellow Abraham must have been hoodwinked by a busybody. He merely wanted to drop by and say hello and talk a bit about the old days and the days to come, with whom else if not with his only old friend, if he doesn’t come to you, you come to him.

“What do you think, Kowalski, how much can a person endure?”

So he wants to philosophize, Kowalski must be thinking. He waits for a clarification of the question, for it to be narrowed down in one direction or another, but Jacob appears to have asked it in quite a general sense. “Well?” he says. “What do you think?”

“If you put it like that,” Kowalski replies, “a lot. An awful lot.”

“But there is a limit.”

“Of course….”

“I’m sorry,” says Jacob, “but I have now reached that limit. Perhaps someone else could have gone on longer, but I simply can’t.”

“What can’t you?”

“I can’t go on,” says Jacob.

Kowalski lets him take his time. He doesn’t know that Jacob is preparing an unconditional surrender, the worst of all admissions. He sees only Jacob’s gaunt face, propped on his hands, maybe a bit paler than usual, possibly a bit more weary, but it’s still the face of that same Jacob he knows better than anyone else. He is worried, because such attacks of melancholy are completely foreign to Jacob; he can be grouchy and quarrelsome at times, but that’s different. He’s never been known to moan; moaning is what all the others do, whereas Jacob has been something of a spiritual comforter. Quite often, whether consciously or not, Kowalski went to him for his own weaknesses to be exorcised. Even before the days of the radio, actually even before the days of the ghetto. At the end of a particularly foul day, after standing from early morning to late evening behind the shop window, watching in vain for customers, or when some enormous bill arrived and he hadn’t the slightest idea out of which pocket it was to be paid: where did he go that evening? To Jacob’s shop, but not because his schnapps tasted any better. It was the same schnapps as anywhere else, besides being illegal because it was served without a license. He went there because afterward the world looked just a bit rosier, because Jacob could say something like “Chin up” or “Things are going to be all right,” with just a bit more conviction than other people. But also because among his scanty acquaintances, only Jacob made the effort to say such things. Kowalski lets him take his time.

Now Jacob starts to speak: judging by appearances, to Kowalski, there being no one else in the room; judging by the words, to a larger audience, that is to say just thinking out loud, into the room, with a wistfulness in his low voice and that new tone of resignation, the last of an extravagant diversity of messages to everyone. That, if their vanishing strength permits it, they shouldn’t be angry with him: the fact is, he doesn’t have a radio, he has never possessed one. Furthermore, he doesn’t know where the Russians are; maybe they will come tomorrow, maybe they will never come, they are in Pry or in Tobolin or in Kiev or in Poltawa or still farther away, maybe by this time they have suffered a crushing defeat, he doesn’t even know that much. The only thing he can say with certainty is that some numbers of days ago they were fighting at Bezanika. How can he be so sure? That’s a whole separate story, no longer of interest to anyone, but at least that is the truth. And he can well imagine how devastating this confession must sound to their ears, so once again his plea for forbearance; he had only acted for the best, but his plans went awry.

Then there is a long silence in the room as if a king had abdicated. Jacob tries in vain to discover some emotion in Kowalski’s face, but Kowalski looks straight through him and sits there like a pillar of salt. Needless to say, Jacob feels pangs of conscience the moment he comes to the end of his speech. Not because of the message itself, which is overdue and could no longer be delayed, but couldn’t he have conveyed it more gently, perhaps tucked in with a Russian retreat, instead of shifting the whole load all at once onto other shoulders, shoulders no broader than his own? Was he sure Kowalski was the right man in whose presence the curtain had to be rung down, Kowalski of all people? If he had heard it from a stranger, or from someone not that close to Jacob, he woujd undoubtedly have taken it for an error or spiteful slander. After a night filled with doubts he would have said to you, “Do you know what those idiots are telling each other? That you haven’t got a radio!” “That’s true,” the answer would then have been, which would also have hurt him but perhaps less so because during the previous night he would have at least considered the possibility. And it could somehow have been arranged like that, exactly like that; it was Kowalski’s bad luck that he turned up this very evening.

“You’re not saying anything?” says Jacob.

“What can I say.”

From unfathomable depths Kowalski brings his smile to the surface; without this smile he would not be Kowalski. He looks at Jacob again. Although his eyes smile less than his mouth, they still do not proclaim the end of all hope. They have more of a sly look, as if this time too, as always, they could see beyond appearances.

“What can I say, Jacob? I do understand you, I understand you very well. You know, I’m what you might call the opposite of a hero, you’ve known me long enough. If I’d had a radio here, I don’t suppose a single soul would ever have heard a word. Or more likely still, fear would have simply made me throw it in the fire, I have no illusions about that. To keep an entire ghetto supplied with news! I would never have gone that far — you never know who else is listening. If I have ever in my life understood anybody, I can understand you now.”