The Family Moskat (4 page)

He was clean-shaven. His features customarily wore a half-meek, half-contemptuous smile. Meshulam ordered him about like an errand boy. When the two walked together on the street, Koppel would linger a pace or two behind to avoid any implication that he considered himself the old man's equal. Whenever the two rode in Reb Meshulam's carriage, Koppel would sit with the coachman.

If Meshulam addressed him in the presence of others, Koppel would incline his head deferentially. He would take his cigarette out of his mouth and keep his head lowered in a slight bow, the heels of his boots together, military style. He had been a soldier in the Czar's army and it was rumored that during his service he had been a general's orderly.

4

But all this was for outside appearance. The truth was, as everyone knew, that Meshulam did not commit himself to any course of action without consulting his bailiff. The two would often have long talks. The administrators of the houses he owned--his sons included--had to make their accountings to Koppel. People who came for favors knew that in the last resort they would have to depend on Koppel. For years the Moskat sons and daughters had been carrying on a campaign against him, but it was Koppel who had won out. In his quiet way he put his nose into everything: matches for the grandchildren, dowries, philanthropies, communal affairs, even Chassidic disputes. On one occasion when Koppel was sick Reb Meshulam went about in a daze. He hardly heard what was said to him, scolded everyone, stamped his foot, and took refuge in a single answer to all questions: "My bailiff isn't here. Come tomorrow."

When Reb Meshulam made his yearly summer visit to the hot springs, Koppel went along with him, sharing his hotel quarters and taking the mineral waters that had been prescribed for the -16-old man. It was

even said that when the doctors had ordered mud baths for Reb Meshulam, Koppel had soaked in the ooze with his employer. In Karlsbad they strolled together up and down the promenade--here Koppel, instead of lagging behind, walked by Reb Meshulam's side--and talked about business affairs, about the wasters who lost all they had in Monte Carlo, and about the Galician rabbis who were visiting Karlsbad with their elegantly dressed daughters and daughters-in-law. Gossiping tongues said that Reb Meshulam had signed over to Koppel a part of his fortune and had named him in his will as executor of the es-tate. Koppel himself maintained an attitude of subservience toward the younger Moskats. Whenever they came to ask his help in some matter of preferment, he would put on a meek look and say: "Who am I to decide?"

Koppel was with the old man at Karlsbad during the summer when he had met and married the Galician widow. Reb Meshulam had met her at the springs while he was taking the waters and had started a conversation with her, first in an attempt at an elegant Judæo-German, then in the familiar Yiddish.

It pleased him to find that she had the habit of including a few Hebrew words in her conversation; that she wore an orthodox matron's wig--although its elegance disturbed him a little--that her dead husband, Reb David Landau, had been a wealthy brewer in the city of Brody, and that her daughter, Adele, had finished the preliminary college course in Lemberg and had studied in Krakow, Vienna, and Switzerland. Rosa Frumetl was suffering from some sort of liver ailment. She was not staying at a hotel, but in a furnished room in the poorer section of the city.

She was frank to confess that she had very little money.

Nevertheless she conducted herself like a woman of means. Each day she wore different attire. A string of pearls hung about her throat, earrings dangled from her earlobes, and a precious stone glistened from a ring on her finger. She had invited Reb Meshulam to her lodgings and had served him a glass of cherry brandy and some aniseed cookies. There was a pleasant odor of lavender about her. When Reb Meshulam raised his glass to wish her good health she said: "Health and happiness to you, Reb Meshulam. May your blessings increase."

"I've had enough blessings in my time," Reb Meshulam answered in his abrupt manner. "There's only one thing I can look forward to now."

-17-"May God

forbid! What kind of talk is that?" Rosa Frumet! scolded him gently. "You'll live to be a hundred and twenty--and maybe a span more!"

When the idea of marrying Rosa Frumetl and taking her and her daughter back to Warsaw occurred to Reb Meshulam, he was afraid that Koppel would talk him out of it. But the bailiff neither dissuaded nor encouraged him. Meshulam asked him to find out what he could about the widow and he brought back a detailed report. When, after a good deal of hesitation, Reb Meshulam decided to go through with the affair, Koppel attended to all the details. A thousand and one formalities had to be arranged so that Rosa Frumetl should be permitted to cross the Russian-Austrian border. A wedding ring had to be provided, as well as quarters for the married pair, and a rabbi to perform the ceremony. Koppel was as busy as though he were the groom's father. Rosa Frumetl wanted Reb Meshulam to settle some money on her and promise to provide a dowry for her daughter. Reb Meshulam agreed and even put it in writing. Adele went away for a week to Franzensbad, near by, and in her absence the marriage took place.

"The man's a lunatic," elderly gossips declared. "The old lecher."

Reb Meshulam had hoped for a quiet wedding, but it turned out to be a noisy affair. The hall was crowded with visiting rabbis, their wives, sons, daughters, and in-laws; Rosa Frumetl had been quick to make a host of acquaintances. Among the guests there was also a Galician
badchan
, a professional wedding jester, who had stumbled into the place and who at once began to improvise verses, bawdy and impudent, in a mixture of Yiddish, German, and Hebrew. There were all sorts of gifts, the kind that could be bought in the Karlsbad souvenir stores; fancy jewelry boxes, tablecloths, slippers with gilded heels, pens with magnifying glasses at the ends through which one might peer at a pretty colored view of the Alps. The large salon was full of sables, fur-lined silk coats, silk hats, and fashionable millinery. After the wedding ceremony there was a feast that lasted until late in the night, the women gossiping maliciously about the bride, who the day before had been practically a pauper.

"Who knows where good luck will strike next!" they said in their flat Galician dialect. "It took a miracle from heaven."

"She did a quick job on him!"

-

18-"And she plays the saint, too."

But directly after the wedding Reb Meshulam began to come to his senses. The masculine ripple that had awakened in him during his courtship soon flickered and died. In their bedchamber his bride revealed herself to be a broken shell. Under the wig of silken threads her hair was gray, cropped close like sheep's wool.

Around her middle she wore a rupture belt. She lay in bed sighing and talking of her first husband, his learning, his devotion to his daughter, and his manuscripts, which she was so eager to have printed in Warsaw. She wagged on and on about the daughters of the rabbinical dignitaries who were becoming more wanton every day and who, here in Karlsbad, walked around openly with Austrian officers. She sneezed, blew her nose, took valerian drops for her heart. Reb Meshulam got up and climbed out of the bed.

"Enough babbling," he said in a loud voice. "Is there no end?"

For a moment it occurred to him that the best thing to do would be to get himself a divorce right here in Karlsbad, pay her off with a few thousand, and put an end to the comedy. But he was ashamed; he was afraid too that such a course might begin a long-drawn-out business of recriminations and lawsuits. He felt, too, a sort of blind resentment toward Koppel, although he knew in his heart that his bailiff was not to blame. For the more than sixty years that Reb Meshulam had been his own master he had never imagined himself capable of committing such a piece of foolishness. Had he not always carefully pondered his actions before he took a step? He had always arranged things so that it would be the other fellow and not himself who would be the fool.

Let the hotheads do things in a hurry, flounder into impossible dilemmas, reduce themselves to poverty, sickness, disgrace, even death. But now he himself, Meshulam Moskat, had committed an outrageous blunder! What good could this marriage do him? His children would have something to laugh at. Besides, there were the financial commitments; he certainly couldn't break the promises he had made. No, he was not the man to break a promise; his bitterest enemies couldn't say that of him.

After a good deal of brooding he decided to follow the wis-dom of the sages--the best thing to do is to do nothing. All right, what if there was a wife rattling around the house! So far as her dower rights were concerned, he would sign over to her -19-one of his half—

toppling houses; he would see to it that she didn't come in for any grand prize in the lottery. As for his new stepdaughter, there was something about her that set him on edge. She was educated, talked German, Polish, and French. But there was something too tense, too arrogant about her. She seemed to be staring past people, always thinking her own thoughts. No, she didn't fit in with his family, or with his business, for that matter. Besides, he was sure that she was secretly an unbeliever. He decided to arrange a match for her as soon as he got back to Warsaw and to give her a small dowry, not more than two thousand rubles.

"Just wait till she gets to Warsaw," Reb Meshulam said to himself. "Her nose'll come down."

With these thoughts weaving through his mind Reb Meshulam returned to Warsaw. He was not the one to moon over past mistakes. He was the shrewd Meshulam Moskat, the victor in every encounter, not only against external enemies, but over his own weaknesses as well.

A FEW weeks after Meshulam Moskat returned to Warsaw another traveler arrived at the station in the northern part of the capital. He climbed down from a third-class car carrying an ob-long metal-bound basket locked with a double lock. He was a young man, about nineteen. His name was Asa Heshel Bannet. On his mother's side he was the grandson of Reb Dan Katzenellenbogen, the rabbi of Tereshpol Minor. He had with him a letter of recommendation to the learned Dr. Shmaryahu Jacobi, secretary of the Great Synagogue in Warsaw. In his pocket rested a worn volume, the Ethics of Spinoza in a Hebrew translation.

-20-The youth was

tall and thin, with a long, pale face, a high, prematurely creased forehead, keen blue eyes, thin lips, and a sharp chin covered with a sprouting beard. His blond, almost col-orless earlocks were combed back from his ears. He was wearing a gaberdine and a velvet cap. A scarf was wrapped around his throat.

" Warsaw," he said aloud, his voice strange to himself, "Warsaw at last."

People milled about the station. A porter in a red hat tried to take the basket from him, but he refused to surrender it. Though the year was well into October, the day was still warm. Low clouds floated about in the sky, seeming to merge with the puffs of steam from the locomotives. The sun hung in the west, red and large. In the east the pale crescent of the moon was visible.

The young man crossed to the other side of the railing that separated the railroad station from the street. On the wide thor-oughfare, paved with rectangular cobblestones, carriages bowled along, the horses seeming to charge straight at the knots of pedestrians. Red-painted tramcars went clanging by. There was a smell of coal, smoke, and earth in the moist air. Birds flew about in the dim light, flapping their wings. In the distance could be seen row upon row of buildings, their window panes reflecting the daylight with a silver and leaden glow or glinting gold in the path of the setting sun. Bluish plumes of smoke rose from chimneys. Something long forgotten yet familiar seemed to hover about the uneven roofs, the pigeon cotes, the attic windows, the balconies, the telegraph poles with their connecting wires. It was as if Asa Heshel had seen all of this before in a dream, or maybe in a previous existence.

He took a few steps and then stood still, leaning against a street lamp as though to protect himself against the hurrying throngs.

His limbs were cramped from the long hours of sitting. The ground seemed still to be shaking beneath him, the doors and windows of the houses receding as though he were still watching them from the speeding train. It had been long since he had slept.

His brain was only half awake.

"Is it here I will learn the divine truths?" he thought vaguely.

"Among this multitude?"

Passers-by brushed past him, shoving the basket with their feet. A coachman in a blue coat and oilcloth hat, whip in hand, said something to him, but in the general tumult he could not hear -21-what the man

asked him nor tell whether he was speaking in Yiddish or Polish.

A heavy-set man in a ragged coat came to a stop near him, looked at him, and asked: "A provincial, eh? Where do you want to go?"

"To Franciskaner Street. To a hotel."

"Over there."

A legless man rolled by on a small wooden platform. He stretched out his hand toward Asa Heshel.

"Help a cripple," he whined in a singsong. "May the new month bring you fortune."

Asa Heshel's pale face became bloodless. He took a copper coin from his pocket. "And according to Spinoza I should feel no pity for him," he thought. "What did he say about a lucky month for me? Has another month rolled around?"

He suddenly remembered that he had neglected to pray both this day and the day before. Nor had he put on his phylacteries.

"Has it gone as far as that with me?" he murmured.

He picked up the basket and started walking quickly. Another winter. So little time left.

The streets became even more crowded. The Nalevki was lined with four-and five-story buildings with wide entrances, plastered with signs in Russian, Polish, and Yiddish. A world of trade: shirts and canes, cotton and buttons, umbrellas and silk, chocolate and plush, hats and thread, jewelry and prayer shawls. Wooden platforms were piled high with wares. Draymen unloaded crates and yelled out in hoarse voices. Crowds went in and out of buildings. At the entrance to a store a revolving door spun around, swallowing up and disgorging people as though they were caught in some sort of mad dance.