The Family Moskat (3 page)

A candelabrum descended from the ceiling in a cluster of glass prisms. A large Channukah lamp hung on a wall. A seven-branched candlestick, a Menorah, stood on a mantel.

Rosa Frumetl breathed a gentle sigh. "May it witness no evil.

A palace!"

"Ha! It cost a fortune," Reb Meshulam remarked, "and it isn't worth a pinch of snuff."

Abruptly he left mother and daughter alone in the room and went to his study to recite the evening prayers. Adele took off her coat, revealing a white blouse with pleated sleeves and a neck ribbon tied in a bow. She had narrow shoulders, thin arms, and a flat chest. In the light of the kerosene lamp her hair took on a coppery tinge. Rosa Frumetl sat down on a small divan and rested her pointed shoes on a footstool.

"Well, daughter darling," she said in a mournful tone, "what do you say? A paradise, eh?"

Adele threw her a cross glance. "It makes no difference to me, Mamma," she answered. "I'm not staying here. I'm going away."

Rosa Frumetl shuddered. "Woe is me! So soon! But I did it for you. So that you'd be able to stop wandering around."

"I don't like it. I don't like anything about it."

"What are you torturing me for? What is there not to like?"

"Everything. The old man, the house, the servants, the out-landish Jews here. The whole business!"

"What have you against him? With God's help you'll get married.

He'll give you a dowry. We made an agreement."

"I'm not interested in any agreements and I'm not going to get married. This place is too Asiatic."

Rosa Frumetl took a batiste handkerchief from her bag and blew her nose. Her eyes reddened. "But where will you go?"

"I'll go back to Switzerland. I'll study again."

"Haven't you studied enough? Adele, Adele, what will become of you? An old maid--" Rosa Frumetl covered her face with her wrinkled hands and sat still. After a while she got up and -10-went into the

kitchen. Some preparations would have to be made --a bite of food, a place for her daughter to sleep. Careless servants, not to offer them so much as a glass of tea.

The kitchen was large, its main feature an enormous tiled oven.

Copper pots and pans hung from hooks on the walls; kettles stood at either side of a wide fireplace. The room was redolent of freshly baked cakes and cinnamon. Manya, her shoulders wrapped in a red flower-embroidered shawl, sat at a table laying out a deck of cards. Naomi had taken off her apron and put on a coat preparatory to going out.

"Excuse me," Rosa Frumetl said timidly. "This place is so strange to us. Where will we find our rooms?"

"There are plenty of rooms here," Naomi answered in an irritated voice. "There's no lack of 'em."

"Please be good enough to show them to me?"

Naomi threw a doubtful glance in the direction of Manya.

"The rooms used by the last mistress are closed," she said shortly.

"Then maybe you will be good enough to open them."

"They've been locked for years. Nothing's in order."

"Then it will be necessary to put them in order."

"It's too late now."

"At least come and light a lamp," Rosa Frumetl half pleaded, half ordered.

Naomi made a gesture to Manya, who grudgingly got up, took a ring of keys out of the table drawer, and started slowly out. Naomi snatched the keys from her hand and, walking ahead of her, opened the door to one of the bedrooms, a lighted lamp in her hand. The room was semicircular, the wallpaper shabby and beginning to peel. The windows were uncurtained, the torn blinds drawn down. Scattered about were rocking-chairs, footstools, empty flowerpots. There was a large clothes closet with a high cornice and with carved lion heads on its doors. A heavy coat of dust covered everything.

Rosa Frumetl at once began to cough. "How can anyone sleep in all this disorder?" she said plaintively.

"Nobody was expecting anybody to be here," Naomi answered, and put the lamp down on a writing-desk under a wall mirror.

Rosa Frumetl looked into the mirror and took a hasty step backwards. In the cracked, bluish-tinted glass her face had the appearance of being split in two. "Then where will my daughter sleep?"

she said, not addressing the question directly to Naomi.

-11-"There's

another room with a bed in it--but it's more upset than here."

"And we didn't bring our own bedclothes."

"All the bedclothes that belonged to the last mistress--may she rest in peace--are packed away," Naomi said. Her voice called back an echo, as though some unseen presence were bearing witness to the truth of what she was saying.

She went out. Rosa Frumetl, left alone, crossed over to the commode and tried to open it, but it was locked. She tried a door communicating with another room, but that was locked too. The dried-out wood of the furniture creaked. Rosa Frumetl suddenly thought of how her first husband, Reb David Landau, had lain dead on the floor, his feet toward the door, a black pall covering him, and two wax candles burning at his head. Hardly three years since she had buried him and now she was the wife of another man. A shiver darted up her spine.

"It wasn't for me. It wasn't for me. It was for your daughter," she murmured, as though the dead man were in the room with her. "So that she might find a proper marriage. . . ."

Unable any longer to contain her melancholy, she burst into tears.

From the salon came the sound of rumbling bass notes on the piano, like distant thunder, as Adele ran her fingers over the keys. From elsewhere in the flat came the voice of Meshulam Moskat chanting in his study, his tones deep and resonant, for all his close to eighty years.

From outside came the clanging of heavy, sonorous bells, the bells of the Gzhybov church opposite the Moskat flat, the crosses on its two tall towers rearing up against a ruddy evening sky.

3

The word that Reb Meshulam Moskat had married for the third time flew speedily along the streets of Warsaw's Jewish quarter. His sons and daughters, of both his first and his second wives, were struck dumb. There was hardly anything that could not be expected of the old man, anything to spite them, but that he would marry again had occurred to no one.

"An old goat--plain and simple," was the general comment.

The news was debated over and over again and the conclusion everyone arrived at was the same: this was Koppel's work. Koppel, the bailiff and chief factotum, had married off his employer in -12-order to cheat

the Moskat children of their rightful due. In the Chassidic prayerhouses along the Gzhybov, Tvarda, and Gnoyna the story was known even before the evening prayers were over.

There was such chattering that the reader was hardly able to finish the recitation of the service. He thumped on the stand for silence, but the congregation paid no heed. There were neither responses nor murmured "Amens" to the fervent Kaddish of the mourners.

On their way home practically all the worshippers went by way of Reb Meshulam's house. They expected that the Moskat sons and daughters would be hurrying over in a fever of excitement and that the tumult would be heard clear out to the street. But not even a whisper came from the eight lighted windows.

In the almost fifty years since Meshulam's wealth had begun to accumulate, many unusual stories had been told about him. At times it seemed that everything he did had been carefully calculated in advance to confuse the Warsaw merchants and make fools of them. He undertook enterprises that everyone predicted were doomed to disaster; instead they turned out to be gold mines. He bought property on the deserted outskirts of the city, but in no time at all a building boom started and he sold the land for ten times its cost. He invested in stock of companies that were on the verge of bankruptcy, but somehow the stock shot up in value and paid handsome dividends. He was always doing what seemed strange.

Most of the rich Warsaw Jewish merchants were followers of the Chassidic rabbi of Ger, whose repute was mighty among Polish Jewry; Reb Meshulam went on pilgrimages to the modest Chassidic court of Bialodrevna, whose rabbi had only a small following. The Warsaw Jewish community council had wanted to make him an elder, as was suitable for a man of his wealth, but he refused to take any part in civic affairs. When he did stick his nose into such matters, he managed to offend everyone, taunting the wealthy, the learned, and the rabbis, calling them peasants, simpletons, thick-skulled fools. He was one of the few Jewish businessmen who knew Russian and Polish, and it was rumored that he was in favor with the Russian Governor-General. For that reason attempts had been made several times to send him on missions of mediation and conciliation, but he had consistently refused, and had been roundly berated for his indifference. He followed his own way in everything. For breakfast, instead of having rolls and butter and coffee-mostly chicory-like other people, he would gnaw at some cold chicken and black bread. In the -13-Moskat household the midday meal was taken, not at two o'clock, as was the custom in Warsaw, but at five. At first everyone had prophesied that he would come to a fall, as had happened to so many of those who had suddenly grown rich and arrogant. But the years went by and Meshulam did not slip. His wealth grew so great that something like terror began to seize hold of his enemies. Besides, he did not seem to be satisfied with one type of business, but branched out into all sorts of undertakings, so that no one could be sure exactly what it was that he was making his money at.

The things he occupied himself with! He bought lots and built houses; acquired ruins and put them in repair or pulled them down for junk. There would be reports that he had taken over a brick factory or that he had purchased a partnership in a glassworks or that he had bought a forest from some Polish landowner in Lithuania and was shipping lumber to England for railroad ties or that he had taken over the representation of a foreign tannery. For a while Warsaw seethed with the news that he had become a dealer in rags; he had opened a warehouse in Praga, on the other bank of the Vistula, and the ragpickers brought their pickings to him. He also bought bones; they were used to purify sugar. In recent years Meshulam had narrowed his interests; his wealth was so great that it increased on its own fat. He owned houses on the Tvarda, Panska, Shliska, Gzhybovska, Prosta, and Sienna; the buildings were old and half crumbling, but they were packed with tenants. It was rumored that he had a round million rubles in the St. Petersburg Imperial Bank. Whenever the subject was discussed someone would always say: "He doesn't know himself how much he has."

But so far as his children were concerned he had no luck at all. He had to support practically every one of them; he had made them administrators of his various properties and paid them the niggardly wage of twenty-five rubles a week. Of the two wives he had outlived, it was said that he had made their lives miserable. There were various opinions about his philanthropy; some said that he did not give a copper, others that he believed in secret charity. It almost seemed that whatever he did was with a view toward giving evil tongues something to wag about. When anyone ventured to tell him that all of Warsaw cursed him roundly, he would say: "The more curses the better."

He had an office in his home, but the administration of his -14-affairs was

carried on from Gzhybovska Street in a building surrounded by a large courtyard where Meshulam had warehouses and storerooms.

The only tenants were his current or former employees. The courtyard was hidden from the street by a fence and flanked on three sides with old-fashioned buildings, low, with long wooden balconies and outside stairs. On the roofs swarms of pigeons perched. There was a stable where Meshulam kept his carriage horses. One of his Christian employees kept a cow in the yard. The unpaved ground was usually dotted with pools of water. A stranger entering through the gates might have the impression that he was in a small village, with cocks and hens cackling, and honking geese swimming around in the pools. In recent years Meshulam had employed only a few people. Most of the tenants worked elsewhere now, and paid no rent--as a matter of custom and because in any case there would have been no takers for the tumbledown flats. The only ones now employed by Reb Meshulam were Leibel the coachman; the janitor; a bookkeeper, Yechiel Stein, who had become half blind with age; and Shmuel, the carpenter, who was handy at all sorts of manual jobs. There were also a couple of aging gentiles who had once worked for Reb Meshulam and who received weekly pensions of a few rubles.

Meshulam did not employ a cashier. He would take the money that had been collected, put it into his pocket, and then transfer it to his iron safe at home. When the safe was full he would take the notes and currency to the bank, accompanied by Koppel. Several times the accusation had been made that his books were not kept in order and he had been required by the tax offices to make an accounting, but the accusations had come to nothing. Those who had happened to see Yechiel Stein's books reported that his handwriting was like fly tracks and that he needed a magnifying glass to read what he himself had written. Every time Reb Meshulam walked in on the bookkeeper he would boom: "Scribble away, Reb Yechiel! You're a wizard of a penman."

The only one who knew about Meshulam's affairs was Koppel. He was known simply as "the bailiff." But he was more than that; he was the old man's adviser, confidant, and bodyguard. It was even whispered that Koppel, during his service with Reb Meshulam, had become rich on his own account and was now actually the old man's partner. Everthing surrounding Koppel had a secretive quality. He had a wife and children, but none of -15-the Moskat family had ever seen them. He lived in Praga, on the other side of the Vistula. He was fifty or thereabouts, but looked like a young man in his thirties, of middle height and lean, with a dark tanned face, curly hair, and wide-set flashing eyes. Summer and winter he wore a derby hat, pulled low over his forehead, and boots with high uppers. A pearl tie pin was stuck in his cravat. A cigarette always hung from the corner of his drooping mouth, and a pencil was stuck behind his left ear.