The Family Moskat (45 page)

Whenever Masha went over to Polish, Leah felt lost entirely. She went out of her daughter's room. She wanted to let the door bang behind her, but instead she closed it silently. Later, when she went to Koppel's office, she poured out the whole story to him.

"What do you think of such behavior?" she complained. "She'll heap shame and disgrace on me."

Koppel was silent for a while. Then he said: "If you yell at her she'll move out of the house altogether."

Leah knew Koppel was telling the truth. Masha had hinted more than once that she did not like living on Tshepla Street. It was too far from the tramcar, and too near the Krochmalna. Leah realized that as usual Koppel was not talking idly, that he was weighing and measuring every word.

He sat opposite her at the writing-table that had been Reb Meshulam's. An account book and an abacus lay on it. He talked, puffed at his cigarette, and went over the account books at the same time. He looked straight at Leah and spoke bluntly: "Divorce that rag of a husband of yours and put an end to the whole thing," he said. "We're not getting any younger."

-289-"It's easy

to say. My God, you can imagine the howls that would go up."

"They'll stop some time. They can't howl forever."

Koppel went into the adjoining room and returned with a glass of tea for Leah. She liked her tea sweet, and although sugar had become scarce because of the war, Koppel dropped three lumps into the brew. He always had some cheese cake and buns in the cabinet.

Leah stirred the tea for a long time. "What can I do? Squeeze a divorce out of him?"

"Get rid of him."

"And then what?"

"You know."

"And what about your wife? What'll she do, go begging?"

"She'll be taken care of."

"But--but haven't you got any fear of God in your heart?"

"I'll get over that."

Koppel turned pale as he said this, but he managed a smile.

Leah looked at him doubtfully. She had never been able to make up her mind whether she loved or hated him. When Koppel's eyes bored into her breasts she felt a warm flush and at the same time an unpleasant sensation. She had a desire to spit in his face. True, Koppel vowed his love for her, but he had an eye for other women.

Who knew what kind of life he led, what haunts he frequented?

Whenever he pressed her to live with him without waiting for the divorce, to go off to a hotel with him, or to ride out to some village, a revulsion came over her and she would say: "No, Koppel. I haven't sunk to that level yet."

In the twenty-eight years of their acquaintance she had never really been able to tell exactly where she stood in relation to him. When she had been a girl he had kissed her and sent fervent letters to her.

But after her marriage he semed to have forgotten all about her.

For years she had been kept sufficiently occupied bearing children and attending to her domestic duties. Two of the children she had borne were dead. Later Koppel had begun to pester her again, but quarrels and differences had always broken out between them. He had never succeeded in getting more than a kiss from her, but he had never conceded defeat. The moment the two found themselves alone, he would recite his love for her. He was not one of those men who come to your house, drink ten glasses of tea, and find themselves tongue-tied.

-290-On the contrary,

his tongue was sharp and loose. He had all sorts of nicknames for Moshe Gabriel. He bragged about his power over women. Without any sense of shame he told her how worldly men dealt with easy females. When he left, Leah always felt ill at ease. And since Reb Meshulam's death Koppel had be-come even more presumptuous.

When the war broke out and the tenants stopped paying rent, Leah was entirely in his hands. Whenever she came to him for money, he would say: "What is there in it for me?"

Koppel had a clear plan. He would divorce Bashele and give her a settlement of five thousand rubles. Leah would divorce that oaf her husband, and the two of them would get married. The hell with the rest of them. He wasn't their slave any more; he was the boss, in charge of the estate. He was a man of substance himself, the owner of a couple of houses. He had a good amount of cash; how much he would reveal after the wedding. True, he was in his early fifties, but he was in possession of his full powers. If she didn't delay the affair too long, they might even have children. He would buy a villa in Druskenik; he'd take a trip abroad with her--the war wouldn't last forever. They'd go to Monte Carlo, to the Riviera, to Switzerland, Paris, Berlin, everywhere. His properties and hers together would bring in six hundred rubles a week. For a song he'd buy Nathan's, Pinnie's, and Hama's interests in the estate, and he'd be one of the biggest operators in Warsaw, a second Meshulam Moskat.

"Listen to what I'm telling you, Leah," he urged her. "You and I together can overturn the world."

Koppel was right. Moshe Gabriel was no husband for her. It was an ordeal from beginning to end. But, just the same, how could she pick up, in the middle of everything and at her time of life, and marry Koppel? What would Abram say? Pinnie? Saltsha?

Esther? What would the younger ones say--her own children and her nieces and nephews? My God, all Warsaw would laugh behind her back. They'd sneer at her and curse her and wish her a million plagues. And then how could she go cold-bloodedly about the business of breaking up Basha's home? True, the other was a cow, but after all she was the mother of his children. Surely there was a God in heaven who wouldn't overlook these goings on.

"Well, what do you say?" Koppel insisted. "Let's have it."

-

291-"It's easy enough to talk." "The whole thing can be finished like that."

"And what about all your women? There must be a dozen of them."

"If I can have you, then the hell with all the rest of them."

"I'm not so sure."

Leah took the few banknotes Koppel handed her and went home.

Out in the street Koppel's words kept ringing in her brain. "He's right," she thought. "I'm getting older. Before you know it, nobody'll want to even look at me. Moshe Gabriel is my misfortune. It's his fault that Masha wants to leave the house.

What else should the girl do, with such a
schlemiel
for a father?"

She took a mirror out of her bag and looked at herself. Yes, her cheeks were still youthful, her throat was smooth. But the years would fly by and the blood would cool. She was a stubborn idiot.

She would not permit her life to be ruined by that unworldly lump.

Koppel's words had fired her blood, like liquor. Her heels tapped briskly along the sidewalk. She took a deep breath.

"I'll put an end to it," she said aloud, "this very week."

PAN ZAZHITSKY told his son Yanek that he would never consent

to the youth's marriage to Masha even if the girl was willing to become converted. There was no mistaking Pan Zazhitsky's ultimatum: the day after the wedding he would summon a notary and transfer all his possessions to his daughter Paula. Besides, the family home would be barred to the boy. The old man had a habit of accompanying his talk with constant doodling on a sheet of paper. He was seated at his writing-desk, wearing an old-fashioned morning robe, his bare feet stuck into a pair of slippers with pompons. His few remaining gray hairs were un--292-combed over the bald patch on his head. Beneath his sharp eyes, under the thick brows, flabby pouches were visible. His nose was red and fleshy. His sparse mustache quivered with the restless movement of his lips. As he spoke, an asthmatic cough seized him.

"My son, you'll have to make your choice," he announced.

"It's either your family or this Jewess. That's my last word."

"But why, Father? If she's willing to convert, then shell be one of us."

"I don't want to have anything to do with her. I hate their guts. If you can't find a Christian girl that's to your liking in all of Poland, then--then--"

Pan Zazhitzky could not finish the sentence for a fit of coughing.

His small hands were knobbed and blue-veined. The Adam's apple bobbed up and down in his scrawny neck. While he gasped for breath he picked up a book and opened it. It was a history of Freemasonry, written by some priests.

"What in the devil do they want, these Jews?" he said, half to himself and half to the boy. "For two thousand years everything Christian was unclean for them. If one of us so much as looked at a bottle of wine it became taboo. And now all at once they want to become our brothers."

"Father, that's got nothing to do with Masha."

"They're all the same. From the Jewish Freemasons in France to the scabby brats that play around in the filth in our Polish villages. They've ruined Poland. It's on account of them that I've got this asthma."

"It was Rybarsky who ruined us, not the Jews."

"Quiet, you traitor! I've sacrificed my whole life for you, and you run around with these fakers and their daughters. You paint naked whores. And now you want to bring that filth into your own house."

"Father, watch out for your words."

"What'll you do? Beat me? I'm an old, broken man. But at least I'll die with the pride that I've been a loyal son of Poland, not a Jew-lover. It is they who have set the Germans to destroy our Polish people."

Pani Zazhitzky, the old man's wife, came into the room.

"What's happening now? Here, father, drink a glass of milk.

What are you upsetting him for, Yanek?"

"I'm doing nothing. He just loves to talk and--"

-293-"Well, you

better be quiet, my son. All night he coughs. Can't close an eye. And now you upset him. What a son!"

Pani Eliza Zazhitzky was small and slender, with the typical dark eyes of a Jewess--the reason, probably, that she always wore a heavy crucifix on a string of rosary beads. Her graying hair was gathered back in a Grecian knot. A bunch of keys hung from her waist. She was fifteen years younger than her husband, but her forehead was deeply creased. Ever since they had left their estate in Lublin province and settled in Warsaw she had been ailing. She was in constant terror of thieves, arsonists, bigcity servants who poisoned their employers and stole the family jewels. Each day she carefully read every line in the
Warsaw Courier
, including the advertisements. She also borrowed the anti-Semitic "Two Groszy"

from the janitor. She put a glass of milk before her husband.

"Here, drink, father. It will soothe you."

"Ach, I can't stand all these drinks."

"It's good for your cough. Ah, dear Lord, milk gets dearer by the day. And they say there'll soon be no tea, either."

"Soon there'll be nothing left," Pan Zazhitzky interrupted. "No-body pays rent any more. People have become robbers and thieves I tell you. The Jewish speculators are hoarding all the food, the food that our hard-working peasants produce with the sweat of their brows."

"Yes, yes, it's true. I've been through the Jewish streets and I saw for myself. The Jews stand in front of their stores with their yellow beards and they don't let in a customer. They've got cellars full of flour and sugar and potatoes. Just ask one of them for a pound of flour and he says 'Nothing, nothing.'"

"And your son wants to marry one of them."

"Then let him, papusha. We'll soon be dying anyway. He'll live to regret that he's brought shame on a good Polish name."

Yanek got up and went out. In the corridor he saw his sister, Paula, combing her hair at the mirror. The girl was twenty-one, five years younger than he. She was blonde, with blue eyes and dimpled cheeks. She had finished her schooling two years before and was now keeping company with a wealthy boy, a student at the Polytechnic. Yanek had the tall frame of his father and the dark eyes of his mother, the latter queerly inappropriate to the snubbed Slavic nose. His chestnut-colored hair was thin and set far up on his high forehead. At the academy where he studied -294-painting, his fellow students were in the habit of teasing him by calling him Jew.

"What are you getting all fixed up for? Meeting Bolek?"

"Oh, it's you. Popping up, like a ghost. I thought you'd moved out already."

"Soon."

"Isn't it cold in that pigsty of yours?"

"You'll please be good enough not to call my studio a pigsty."

"My, how sensitive you've got! I saw a notice of the new exhibition in the
Courier
. Your name wasn't even mentioned."

"They'll be mentioning me yet."

"I notice they didn't forget the Jew painters."

"So what?"

"How laconic you've become! What sort of quarrel are you carrying on with Papa? One can hear your yelling all over the house."

"I beg your pardon if we woke you up."

"You'll kill them with your nonsense."

"Shut up."

"And if I don't? You Jewish onion!"

There was a time when Yanek would have slapped the girl's face for such impertinence; but now Paula was too grown-up to be treated so summarily, and besides, Yanek was too much estranged from the household even to carry on a family feud.

Yanek went out of the house. In the courtyard he noticed a Suc-coth booth, which every year had been the cause of much grumbling among the Christian residents of the building. The two Jewish families in the house erected the booth each holiday sea-son, but each time Yanek's father had the janitor take it down. This year, however, aware that Pan Zazhitzky never left his apartment, they had taken advantage of the situation and had put up the symbolic booth. Yanek gazed curiously at the strange construction.

He felt a desire to go inside and see what the thing looked like, but he was afraid that he might be taken for a scoffer. How interesting it would be, he thought, to do a canvas of a group of Jews at their feasting and singing in the holiday booth, the whole scene lit by candles, the women bringing trays of holiday food to their men.

Pan Zazhitzky's house was on Hozha Street. Yanek's studio was on Holy Cross Street. He shared it with three colleagues, all of them Jews. Strange, how his destiny had thrown him close to -295-Jews from his