The Family Moskat (25 page)

He climbed the stairs and rang the doorbell. Zosia opened the door.

Abram handed both bunches of flowers to her.

"Is your mistress home?"

-

155-"Not yet."

He put his arms about her and embraced her ardently, bending his head down and pressing his mouth to hers.

"God save me, you're a piece all right," he mumbled in Yiddish.

"Your lips taste like paradise."

"What are you saying? What are you doing to me?"

"Shut up, you unbeliever! You forbidden morsel! God damn the whole tribe of Esau!" And he began to kiss her on the mouth again, fervently and desperately.

8

Asa Heshel and Hadassah walked back from Praga. As they crossed the bridge, they could see the Vistula still and frozen, its surface covered with snow. Off in the distance a small figure was plodding across the ice; it was difficult to make out whether it was a grown-up or a child. To their right, across another bridge, a locomotive pulled a train of red freight cars. Birds circled above them. There was a smell of smoke and a touch of the coming spring in the air. The ancient buildings on the Warsaw side of the bridge peered at them with their irregular rooftops, turrets, balconies, and thickly set rows of windows. It seemed to Hadassah that she was seeing these sights for the first time, as though it was she who was the provincial, and Asa Heshel was showing her the glories of the great city.

They wandered through Old City, into alleyways Hadassah had never seen before, the sidewalks so narrow that it was difficult for the two to walk side by side. Householders drew water from old-fashioned outdoor pumps. The shop fronts were covered with iron bars. Some of the buildings had bricked-in windows.

Streetwalkers sauntered near the unlit street lamps.

Near the Freta, Asa Heshel suggested that they go into a coffee house. They were the only ones in the place. The window was made up of varicolored panes of glass. Hadassah began to talk about her cousin Masha, the daughter of her Aunt Leah, who, in spite of the objections of her father, Moshe Gabriel, had taken courses at the university. "She hasn't spoken to him for years,"

Hadassah said. "Anyway, he's practically a stranger in the household. Peculiar, isn't it? No one in the family is really happy." She took a sip of coffee, looked at Asa Heshel, and raised the cup to her lips again. "Why can't I tell him all I am think--

156-ing?" she wondered. "What is it that stops me?" Asa Heshel sat silent, his head bent, his face pale. "I've got to get over it," he was thinking. "I've got to get rid of this cursed timidity."

For all their new-found freedom, the two still talked in broken phrases, their eyes averted. What, after all, had really been decided? All their talk about Switzerland--was it more than idle conversation? The whole idea was too simple to have any real substance. Could they seal their destiny as easily as this, in a half-empty coffee house on the Freta, in a wintry twilight? When Asa Heshel looked at Hadassah, it seemed to him that she was entirely too fragile ever to be his wife and that he was too uncouth ever to please her. Back of it all there must be a trick somewhere, an error that at the last moment would arise to negate everything. Through his mind fled a patchwork of strange thoughts, vague and childish. He did not know why, but ever since his adolescence he had been haunted with the obsession that he would never be able to bring himself to any intimacy with a woman and that his wedding night would be a humiliation.

Hadassah stole glances at him. She had not slept all night, the sofa at Klonya's house had been so bumpy. She had got up when it was still dark, and the demarcation between the events of the now and yesterday was misty. She was still amazed at the change his new clothes made in Asa Heshel's appearance. She kept thinking about her Uncle Abram's mystifying remarks. She felt certain now that the love she had so long awaited had at last arrived. But it had come in a welter of complications she had thought existed only in books. Why on earth should she run away? Her mother would die of grief. "I must have lost all feeling of responsibility," she thought. Aloud she said: "But, God in heaven, we know each other so little!"

"We must have known each other before, in another incarnation," Asa Heshel answered.

"Do you really believe that?"

"The soul is eternal."

Through the varicolored pane the setting sun cast a red glow on Asa Heshel's face. There he sat, opposite her, proud, yet somehow humble, full of secrets she could not know, and ready--so it seemed to her--to disappear out of her life as suddenly as he had entered into it.

The evening was coming on when they left the coffee house. They passed the prison at the corner of Nalevki and Dluga and -157-went along

Rymarska Street and the Platz Bankovy. On the Iron Gate Square the street lamps were already burning. A cold wind came from the direction of the Saxon Gardens. Tramcars rolled along. Crowds of people thronged the market stalls. Hadassah held Asa Heshel's arm tightly as though afraid she might lose him. Farther along, at the bazaars, stallkeepers presided over mounds of butter, huge Swiss cheeses, bundles of mushrooms, troughs of oysters and fish.

The torchlights were already ablaze. They passed a slaughterhouse. Floodlights blazed in the building. Porters with hoses were swishing water on the stone floor. Slaughterers stood near blood-filled granite vats, slitting the necks of ducks, geese, and hens. Fowl cackled deafeningly. The wings of a rooster, its throat just slit, fluttered violently. Hadassah pulled at Asa Heshel's sleeve, her face deathly white. A little farther on, in the fish market, stood tubs, barrels, and troughs. In the stale-smelling water, carp, pike, and tench swam about. Beggars sang in quavering voices, cripples stretched out stumps of arms. Away from the glare of the lights inside, the darkness of the court was intensified. Asa Heshel and Hadassah walked a little way along Krochmalna Street and emerged on the Gnoyna. A cold wind swept along the street. Hadassah began to cough.

"I'd better go home now," she said. "I suppose I'll have to face them. When shall I see you again?"

"Whenever you say."

"I'll telephone you at Abram's tomorrow, early, about ten o'clock. The day seems to have gone by so quickly."

"Since I met you time has become even more illusory."

A droshky stopped near them. Hadassah climbed in. She nodded her head toward Asa Heshel and touched her fingers to her lips.

He returned the gesture awkwardly and then hurried away.

At Abram's house he climbed the steps to the apartment and opened the door with the key Hadassah had given him. It was dark and cold inside. He turned on the electric light and went into the study. He lay down on the sofa and closed his eyes. How rich the day had been! He had thrown off his provincial garments; he had been with Hadassah. His life was beginning. The only problem was--where was there room for love in a world built on hatred and destruction? Until that question was answered, life had no meaning. He had started to doze off when the telephone rang. Should he answer it? Maybe it was for him. No, -158— that was impossible. Yet somehow the feeling persisted that the call was for him. He lifted the receiver. It was Hadassah, to tell him that she was thinking of him and that she would call him in the morning. She spoke in a hurried voice. She started to say something else, but then he heard the click of the receiver; her mother must have come in.

Asa Heshel went over to the window. There had been an intensity in her voice that shook him. He knew now that the decision was made. There would be no retreat.

February 3
.--It is now midnight. Papa's sleeping. Mamma has just gone to bed. Only I cannot close my eyes. Everything around me is beginning to seem so strange. I never dreamed that the day would come when I would long for the Panska, our courtyard with its refuse boxes, our old-fashioned apartment, and my own room, where I have so often been sad and lonely. Yet I have started to long for them even before I leave them. The last few nights I have been dreaming that I am already in Switzerland. How foolish one's dreams can bel I imagined that the peaks of the mountains were made of gold. Eagles flew back and forth in the air, huge as human beings. My dreams are so strange. I seem to be talking all night long with someone. Sometimes I imagine that Asa Heshel and my Uncle Abram are one and the same person.

February 4.
--He seems so pale. He says he isn't afraid and that he is ready for anything, because anyway everything has been predestined. He is really a fatalist, like Pechorin. But I can tell he is afraid. It is too bad that he is so young. I always wanted my "knight on a white horse" to be at least ten years older than I.

For myself I have no fear at all, though sometimes I'm sure -159-that I am

making a mistake and that everything will end in disaster.

Something inside me--a spirit or another self--wants to lead me to perdition. I remember that other self from my childhood.

February 5
--Yesterday I spent several hours with him. We walked in the Saxon Gardens. We stood by the pond where swans paddle in the summertime. Now it is ice-covered. Boys and girls were skating, gliding and cutting all sorts of fancy figures. We went into the Alley of Roses. He wrote my name on the snow.

Sometimes he is gay and carefree. But then he gets morose. He looks so well in his new clothes. We talked about Weininger's
Sex
and Character
; he agrees with Weininger that woman has no soul.

How foolish it all is!

We took the tramcar to the Zlota. He wanted me to go up to Abram's apartment with him, but I told him that a respectable girl doesn't go into an apartment alone with a man. He was very resentful. Actually I was afraid we might run into Stepha. And the janitor knows me, too. But later I did go up with him; we decided that if Stepha came in I would hurry out through the rear door. It was all so embarrassing.

He didn't put on the light. We sat for a long time on the sofa in Uncle's study and talked. He is so full of contradictions. And he's so pessimistic. He says that the world is a jungle and that morally man is lower than the beasts. He talks with so much conviction that I feel like crying. I
have
to believe in Man, and in an almighty God, and in love, and in the soul. If I didn't I simply would not be able to go on living.

While he was sitting so close to me in the darkness, I had the feeling that he was much older--thirty or forty years old.

Let him destroy all my illusions, I don't care! It is so good to hear his voice. I am sure that his faith in mankind will be restored. In Switzerland we'll recover our ideals together. We are young, we love to read and discuss things. What else matters?

When I think that I might have given him up for Fishel, my flesh crawls.

We kissed for a long time. He said I was the most beautiful girl in the whole world. Was he sincere? Sometimes he is so naïve, like a child of seven. Enough for now. I am very happy.

The middle of the night
.--What will happen if our secret is discovered? What if I get sick? How tragic to build one's happiness on chance. Before I went to sleep I read Tolstoy's
My Confession
.

-160-He says that

man must develop within himself a love for all mankind. Then I would have to love everybody--Shifra, Koppel, my stepgrandmother, Adele, my former mathematics teacher, Mie-chislav Knopek, and Zeinvele, the
shadchan
, too. Can a human being really attain such a love?

My dreams give me no rest. The moment I close my eyes I see fantastic visions, flowers of all colors--I hear bells ringing.

Sometimes I imagine that the whole world's on fire. What is it that's going through this poor brain of mine?

I'm sitting on the edge of my bed, and everything inside me is in a tumult.

February 8.
--I had to promise Mamma and Papa that I would consent to be engaged to Fishel in two weeks. Of course, I deceived them, poor souls. My Uncle Abram is playing a strange role--he is talking me out of my "adventure"--but at the same time he is helping us. He is trying to get a subsidy for Asa Heshel; there is a sort of fund in the Jewish community here for poor students. It looks to me like plain begging. Uncle is getting ready to travel abroad. How wonderful it would be if the three of us could be together in the Alps. Mamma is very weak; her face looks yellow. She looks at me as though she knew instinctively that I was preparing to leave.

Gina has got a divorce from that fanatical husband of hers. I suppose she will get married to Hertz Yanovar very soon. They'll probably go to Switzerland, too. There'll be a whole group of us there.

February 11.
--Klonya and I and Asa Heshel went together to the moving pictures on Iron Street. He simply couldn't understand what he was seeing. We had to explain everything to him.

I have the feeling that everything that is happening is also a sort of cinematographic play. Nothing seems real, neither life nor death. I wonder what he is thinking of at this moment. Sometimes it seems to me that he isn't one person, he is several persons in one.

February 12.
--I have an idea that Mamma knows everything. But she doesn't say a word.

At night.
--I went to a jeweler's on the Chlodno and asked how much he would give me for my rings. When I was standing at the counter and he was examining the rings through his magnifying glass I suddenly realized that I was preparing to do something that would affect my entire life.

-161-Why has Papa

become so strange to me? He has begun to smoke cigars and he spends his time solving chess problems from the newspaper.

They're starting to get the house ready for the engagement ceremony. The rabbi from Bialodrevna, Gina's father, is going to be there. They all take it so seriously while I, the heroine of the story, am getting ready to run away. It's like a comedy at the Letni Theater.

February 14.
--My throat hurts me. I coughed all night. I'm afraid I have some fever. I'm to meet him today, but who knows whether they'll let me go out of the house. It's snowing. There's a droshky at the gate. The janitor is sweeping the entrance with a long broom. The weathercock on the roof of the building opposite is turning back and forth. I'm reading Zeromski's novel
The
Labors of Sisyphus
. I went into the kitchen and watched Shifra draining and salting the meat on the salting board. It is Thursday today--the day when the mendicants go from door to door. I gave an old man ten groszy and he wished me health. He said it twice and thumped with his staff on the floor. I know it is all so simple and ordinary, but to me it was unusual.