The Family Moskat (28 page)

No, hold on to yourself. Don't lose your head."

In a lightning burst of comprehension it was clear to him that he had blundered. If he had at least had the sense to gather up the bits of putty and cram them back into the lock! Now it was too late. Naomi must have already come home and telephoned for the police. They'd be waiting for him at his house. They'd put him in chains. They'd take everything away from him. All of Warsaw would sneer at his fall. He'd rot away in prison. He felt a cold sweat all over him. Good-by to Koppel Berman, Meshulam Moskat's right hand, respectable Warsaw householder, the father of decent children. He was Koppel Berman the thief, fleeing in a droshky with the loot he had stolen. Even the driver knew it What else could be the meaning of that queer way he was bend--175-ing his shoulders and inclining his head? Somewhere in the distance he heard a policeman's whistle, long and quavering. They were after him already.

He closed his eyes and waited. This was the end, he thought.

What would Leah say?

He felt a sharp pain in the finger he had pricked. The vein in it was pulsing. He opened his eyes and saw by the light of a street lamp a black spot on the fingernail. A flake of rust must have lodged there.

The droshky came to a sharp halt. A tramcar was rolling by. They were somewhere on Senatorska Street. A cold gust of wind was blowing from the Vistula. He had the feeling that he had suddenly been awakened from a heavy sleep.

5

As the droshky approached the Praga bridge Koppel's nerves quieted down. There was no one after him. Naomi had probably not yet returned to the flat, and nobody had noticed the crumbled bits of putty. It must have been the old man himself who had stuffed up the keyhole long before he took to his bed. And even if somebody did get suspicious, it would certainly be a long time before the police were called in. Koppel wiped the sweat from his forehead. He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and expertly lighted a match in the face of the wind that was blowing from across the Vistula. He leaned against the upholstered back rest of the carriage, stretched out his legs, placed the heavy briefcase on his lap, and closed his eyes.

There was a bedlam of noise on the bridge. Tramcars rumbled on, clanging their bells. Automobiles rolled along; heavily loaded trucks lumbered by. Draymen yelled and snapped their whips.

The driver turned toward Koppel. "Where are we going to, boss?"

Koppel gave him the name of a street a block beyond his own house. The driver flicked his whip over the horse's flanks. Huge clouds, dark and red-tinted, moved swiftly across the sky, now and then revealing a sliver of moon. The droshky went past Koppel's house. Koppel glanced at the entrance; nobody was lurk-ing there. He turned up his coat collar and pushed his hat down on his head so as not to be recognized by any neighbor who might be about. He noticed that in his own apartment only one -176-curtained window was lighted; Bashele was still as sparing of fuel as she had been in the first years of their marriage, when he had earned ten rubles a week.

"Here we are, boss--whoa!" the driver said. Koppel climbed out, gave the man a half-ruble, and watched while the carriage drove off. Then he slowly walked home.

At the door of his own flat Koppel stood still for a moment, listening. He could hear Bashele moving about in the kitchen and humming to herself. Everything was all right. He went inside.

The kitchen was warm. A fragrant odor arose from the steaming pots on the stove. Bashele was bent over the oven. Her figure still had something slim and girlish about it. She had a wide face, watery eyes, and a slight snub nose. She had been a servant when Koppel had married her, the daughter of a peddler. She knew nothing about Koppel's affairs. She was continually busy with cooking, baking, and hunting for bargains. Her only amusement was to gaze at the troupes of jugglers in the courtyard or to listen to the street singers. On Sabbath afternoons she went regularly to visit her sister in Old City. The neighborhood knew Bashele as a faithful wife and a devoted mother. When Koppel chose not to spend the night at home, he would tell her that he had to take a trip for his employer, and Bashele never asked for details. She did not even know that the house they lived in belonged to her husband; Koppel had told her that Meshulam had simply registered it in his name.

"It's a legal business," he had said to her. "Don't go talking about it." And she never breathed a word.

"My Koppel knows how to handle himself," she would say to the neighbors, "believe me."

When he came into the kitchen she was at the stove, her back to the door, but she knew it was he. She knew his step; she had recognized it as he climbed the stairs and she was aware that he had lingered a bit before he opened the door.

"Is it you, Koppel?" she said.

She turned toward him, and the pan she held in her hands almost fell to the floor.

"Dear Father in heaven, you're pale as wax. Worse than a corpse!"

"Who's pale? What are you babbling about?"

"Pale as chalk! Are you sick? Does something hurt you?"

"Nothing hurts me."

-177-"What are you

carrying in the briefcase? It's almost breaking at the seams."

Koppel started. "Has anyone been here?" he asked.

"Nobody. Who should come?"

"Where are the children?"

"Who knows? Running around somewhere, wearing out their shoes."

Koppel went into the dark living-room, the "large room" as the family called it. Without putting on a light he felt his way to his own room. It was here that he sat on the Sabbath to work on his accounts and brood about Leah. He lit a cigarette and then set fire to a taper to light the naphtha lamp. No matter how much Bashele tidied it, the room was always crowded. There was a pair of yellow riding boots that he had never worn; a fishing rod; a saddle; a collection of canes of all styles; three antique wall clocks, which, no matter how carefully they were regulated, never kept the same time. On a table lay a mandolin. On the walls hung a calendar and pictures of emperors, hunters, generals, and opera singers. The air smelled of tobacco and leather. Koppel closed and bolted the door. He opened the briefcase and looked at the banknotes with which it was stuffed. With shaking fingers he took the bundles of money out of his pockets. A single glance was enough to tell him that he had taken much more than he had thought. Most of the banknotes were tied with string or held by rubber bands. One such package was made up of hundred-ruble notes; there must have been close to five thousand rubles in that one alone.

"A treasure!" he murmured to himself.

His voice sounded strange in his own ears. He felt as though some presence were with him and watching him. The flame in the lamp flickered as though a gust of wind had disturbed it. The panes in the windows rattled. Koppel started to count the money, but he kept on losing count. He wanted to moisten his fingertips so that the banknotes would not rustle as he handled them, but his mouth was dry. He stood in the middle of the room and looked around. He ought to hide the money--quickly, as soon as possible.

But where could he put it so that it wouldn't be found by anyone who might come searching for it? A trunk wouldn't do, nor the cornice of the stove. Not even the attic, where the Passover dishes and utensils were stored. Maybe he -178-might be able

to lift a plank from the floor and conceal it there. But that would be an old trick to the police.

He walked over to the mirror and studied his reflection. "Ah, you devil," he said to his image. "You thief." Bashele was right; he was pale as chalk. The hair on his head was wet with perspiration. I'll get sick yet, he thought. I'll ruin everything and everybody. Suddenly he heard the noisy banging of the outside door and the sound of quick steps. "They're coming after me! The police!" He rushed to the pile of money and stretched his arms out over it as though to protect it. Again he felt a burning pain in his finger. There was a loud knock at the door. "Who's there?" he shouted in Polish, but it was Bashele, come to tell him that his meal was ready.

"Why do you lock yourself in?" she asked through the door.

"The noodles are getting cold."

HADASSAH'S DISAPPEARANCE set off an unceasing squabble between her father and mother. Nyunie gave up sleeping in the bedroom; the girl made a bed for him on the couch in the study. He would stay up late, reading a book that described how the earth had been torn away from the sun and cooled off; how the first living things had grown out of the slime and had gone through their generations, microbe, fish, and ape, until man had been fashioned. In comparison with the thousands of millions of years since the solar system had shaped itself out of the cosmic fog, the years in which he, Nyunie Moskat, had been crawling over the face of the earth were no more than a droplet in an ocean of eternity. Where Warsaw was now, there might have been -179---who knew?--

a sea. And in what were today deep abysses, some day great cities might arise. Even the stars and planets could not last forever; they flared up and then they died. The caldron of nature was eternally bubbling and eternally bringing forth new worlds, new species, new ways.

When Nyunie read these words he forgot for a while that he had a sick and disagreeable wife, that his only child had run off, that he had not heard from her for more than a fortnight, that his father was on his deathbed, and that he, Nyunie, had made nothing of his life. For years he had tried to tear himself away from Warsaw and the family and travel, see the world, learn something. But he had remained buried here in Panska Street.

One day was like another; he got up, observed the morning ritual, ate breakfast, exchanged a few words with Moishele, his assistant administrator, about the rent collections--and before he knew it, it was night again and time to go to the Bialodrevna prayerhouse for the evening services. During the day, after his midday meal, he would sleep soundly, but at night he would toss and turn on his pillow, a welter of thoughts passing through his mind. Since Hadassah had gone, Dacha had adopted the habit of speaking in the wailing half-chant of an ancient crone. Every word she said to him was like a pointed barb. Nyunie saw more clearly than ever that his father, together with the
shadchans
, had finished him off for good.

Not a wife--a plague, he thought. A cursed mistake.

In the study Nyunie at least did not have to look at Dacha's soured face and listen to her eternal complaints. He had stopped worrying about Hadassah. "She's smarter than I was," he decided.

"If only I'd had her courage!" He made up his mind that as soon as he heard from her he would send her thirty rubles a month until she had finished her studies at the university. Who knew? Maybe he'd be able to manage a visit to Switzerland himself. What would be so wrong about putting on some of those Western clothes and going in for a little education? Didn't he, too, feel the pull of the wide, free world outside of Poland?

Dacha was not sleeping. She was sitting up in bed, her back against three feather pillows. She had more things to worry about than that idiot Nyunie, spending the night on the couch in his study. Nevertheless she felt affronted. He was not a man, he was a pig, she thought. "His wife gets sick and he runs away. All he's interested in is stuffing his belly." Maybe he was having -180-something to do with women outside. Who could know? With a man--any man--

there was no telling.

It was almost dawn when she dozed off. She awoke at about ten o'clock, more exhausted than when she had fallen asleep. The postman had brought nothing. The girl had disappeared like a stone thrown into a pond. What was the verse in Job? "Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither." Shifra brought in some tea with milk and a roll and butter, but Dacha only drank the warm beverage. She had no appetite. Nyunie had already left the house. Where the empty-headed fool wandered about during the day she had absolutely no idea. He had probably made up with that other fine specimen, that brother-in-law of his, Abram. At noon Dacha was supposed to be at Dr. Mintz's office. He was giving her some sort of electrical treatment and injections of strychnine. He had told her that if she did not watch out for herself she was likely to be in great danger.

"It's not the daughter that bothers me," Dr. Mintz had said.

"It's the mother I'm worried about."

Shifra stayed home alone. She put the afternoon meal on the stove--a piece of beef for herself, a quarter of a fowl for her mistress--and went into the living-room. She sat down, wrapped herself in her shawl, and warmed herself in the rays of the winter sun that shone in through the windows. She pulled her skirts high above her knees to get the warmth of the sun on her thighs, and opened the neck of her blouse, as she had seen the daughters of wealthy families do at their country places. Hadassah's flight had communicated something of a dissolute feeling to Shifra. If girls like that could ape the manners of the gentiles, then why could not she, for all that she was no more than a servant? The telephone rang and she got up to answer it. The call was for her, from someone she had recently met, Itchele, a dray-man. He wanted to take her to the theater on Saturday night. Shifra smiled coyly into the mirror on the wall near the telephone.

"Why do you want to take me?" she asked flirtatiously. "Is it because I'm so good-looking?"

"You know why."

"Go on! You're not interested in me," Shifra insisted, feeling she was carrying on a spicy adventure. "It's that girl in Praga you're interested in."

-

181-"I forgot her long ago."

Shifra had her doubts whether it paid to have anything to do with this latest conquest of hers. It wasn't that he didn't earn a living, but people talked about him. It was said that a girl he was supposed to marry had broken off the engagement and that he hung around with the loafers on the Krochmalna. She had no faith in these smooth-tongued fellows with their polished boots and roving eyes. It mightn't do any harm to go to the pictures with birds of this kind, or to accept a treat at one of the delicatessens.