The Family Moskat (46 page)

very youth! In his high school there had been a single Jewish student, and the two had been close friends. Then when he went to law school, he was drawn to his Jewish fellow students. Later, when he changed over to the art academy, the few Jewish artists there had brought him into their circle. The Christian students had actually doubted that he was a Catholic, the son of a Polish nobleman. More than once they had said to him: "Hey, you Jew, why don't you go back to Palestine!"

There were times when Yanek hated his dark Jewish eyes, his chestnut hair, and the Jewish mob he so much resembled. He would draw caricatures of Jews, quarrel with his colleagues, act like an anti-Semite. He planned to go and settle in Italy, where the Christians were dark and where no one would throw it up to him that he had a Jewish face. In Poland it was impossible to keep away from the Jews. His father babbled about them day and night. The priest at the church assailed them in his sermons.

His mother complained about them. The Warsaw streets were full of them. Whenever Yanek walked along, some Jewish man or woman would stop him and ask him a question in Yiddish. Day after day he was compelled to make the same embarrassed explanation: "I'm sorry. I'm not Jewish."

Not only did he look like a Jew, he knew, but he had all the qualities the others attributed to the Jews. He shunned fighting, could not stand liquor, suffered from bashfulness and shrinking.

At school he read serious books, avoided athletic sports, visited museums and art shows. In those days he had painted fantastic canvases, strange beasts and foliage. He had studied law to please his father, but from the very beginning he had known he would never enter the legal profession. At art school he was in constant trouble with his professors, who had called him decadent, nihilist, Jew. At twenty-one he had presented himself for military service, but he had been rejected; his heart was bad. When he was driven to visit a brothel, destiny seemed to push him into the arms of a Jewish prostitute. Ever since he had read Kraushar's history of the Frankists, he suspected that he himself was descended from these converted Jews. His grandmother had once told him that his great-grandfather had been a Wolowski, a name that had been adopted by the sons of Elisha Shur.

Numerous times Yanek had decided to avoid all Jews, to forget all about them, but fate balked him. He fell in love with Masha the first time he saw her. His sculptor friend Yasha -296-Mlotek was

doing a bust of her, and the moment Yanek turned his eyes on her he had known she was the one he had always dreamed of. It took only a few words of conversation to put him at ease with her. The portrait he painted of her was the best thing he had ever done.

Everyone admitted that. They had carried on their love affair in the alcove where stood the oven with the twisted chimney pipes, a stack of unfinished canvases, dust-laden frames, and an ancient sofa, its springs broken and the horsehair stuffing bulging out. In the large studio Mlotek would be singing Jewish melodies, full of sighings and wailings. Chaim Zeidenman, a Lithuanian, a former yeshivah student, would be boiling potatoes in their skins and eating them with herring. Felix Rubinlicht would be sprawled out on a couch reading magazines. There was no drinking in the studio, and no quarreling. There was something soulful, something words could not describe, that enveloped all that these Jewish artists did--their work, their talk about art, even their witticisms and shady jokes. The girls who came to the studio also had a queer mixture of freedom and religiosity. Masha had told him about her grandfather, the patriarch Meshulam Moskat, about her father, her uncles, and the Bialodrevna rabbi. She walked with him along the streets and pointed to the houses where they all lived--Nathan, Nyunie, Abram. Whenever he reminded her that they could expect nothing but trouble, he being gentile and she Jewish, she would wave away all fears with a gesture of her hands.

"It's simple," she would say. "Either I'll become a Christian or you a Jew."

Yes, some mysterious power was pushing him toward Jews. His children would be the grandchildren of Moshe Gabriel and Leah, of the blood of Meshulam Moskat. He seemed to be driven to take his walks in the Jewish streets and byways, where before his eyes there swam a strange sea of forms, characters, unusual scenes. Here in this section someone or other was always carrying on a heated debate about religion. Talmudists with long sidelocks spent the nights studying Holy Writ. Chassidim hotly discussed their rabbis and their gifts of driving out dybbuks. Their Zaddiks wandered off into the forests to commune in loneliness with God. Holy men with white beards spent their lives poring over the mysteries of the Cabala. Fantastic youths left their families and went off to Palestine to toil over the draining and restoration of swamp land and sandy wastes, abandoned for centuries. Young -297-girls labored in attic rooms preparing bombs to hurl at Czarist officials. At their weddings these folk wept as though at a funeral. Their books read from right to left. Their section of Warsaw was like a bit of Bagdad transplanted into the Western World. Yanek never tired of hearing about this people who had lived for eight hundred years on Polish soil and had never acquired the Polish tongue. Where did they come from? Were they the descendants of the ancient Hebrews?

Were they, perhaps, the grandsons of the Khazars? What idea held them together? Where did they get those coal-black or fiery-red beards, those wild eyes, the pale aristocratic faces? Why did the peoples hate them with such a bitter hatred? Why were they chased out of land after land? What was the urgent drive that sent them to England, to America, Argentina, South Africa, Siberia, Australia? Why was it precisely this people who had given the world Moses, David, the prophets, Jesus, the apostles, Spinoza, Karl Marx? Yanek had an urge to paint these people, to learn their tongue, to know their secrets, to become part of them. For models he hired their poverty-stricken girls, porters, peddlers. The artists who shared his studio would shrug their shoulders and begin to talk Yiddish to him.

"You've gone crazy," Mlotek insisted. "Your Jews look like Turks."

"You don't know what you're after," Felix Rubinlicht declared. "A real Goyisher kop."

DURING the intermediate days of the Feast of Tabernacles,

Koppel, as usual, arrived at the office at eleven o'clock in the morning. There was not much to do. The tenants were not pay-ing their rents, but there was some income from shops, bakeries, small factories, the scattered interests that were part of the Moskat fortunes. The few hundred rubles a month that did come in Koppel was careful to divide among the Moskat heirs according -298-to their needs.

The largest sum went to Joel, who was desperately ill. The smallest amount went to Abram. And when Koppel had finished with the family's affairs, he turned to the computing of his own business, shifting the beads on the abacus, letting clouds of smoke drift from his nostrils, and humming a current popular song:
It is a secret thing,
This song I have to sing
. . . .

As Koppel sat at the desk which had once belonged to Meshulam Moskat, brooding about notes, interest, mortgages, and valuta, he heard firm footsteps on the stairs outside. He looked around. The door opened and Leah came in. It was raining outside and she carried an umbrella with a silver handle. She wore a caracul coat and a feathered hat. It had been long since Koppel had seen her so festively dressed. He rose from his chair.

Leah smiled. "Good morning, Koppel," she announced. "Why do you get up? I'm not a rabbi. I'm not even a rabbi's wife."

"To me you're more important than a thousand rabbis, or their wives either."

Leah suddenly became serious. "I want you to listen to what I've got to say, Koppel," she said almost angrily. "Are you still of the same opinion? I mean about me."

"About you? You know how I feel."

"And you still have some love for me?"

"I don't have to tell you."

"Then in that case I want you to know I've come to make a final decision."

Koppel turned pale. "That's good news," he said in a stifled voice, the cigarette dangling from his lip.

He quickly recovered his poise, went around the desk to help her off with her coat. Nor did he forget to take her wet umbrella and stand it in a corner. Leah was wearing a close-fitting black satin dress (Koppel had once remarked that the dress al-ways excited him), which emphasized her rounded hips and high bosom. When she peeled off her gloves, Koppel noticed that she wasn't wearing her wedding ring.

"Everything goes your way, Koppel," she observed. "You're a lucky man. Why don't you ask me to sit down?"

"Please, Leah. You're the boss here."

"Really? Some boss! Listen, Koppel, we're no longer children."

-

299-"No."

"And before we do anything foolish we've got to think things out carefully. Last night I couldn't sleep a wink. Just look at my eyes. I thought the whole thing through. There's nothing I've got to lose. Once and for all I've got to get rid of my foolish pride.

But if you have any regrets, Koppel, then I'll not hold it against you. It's not so easy to break up a home."

"I regret nothing. This is the happiest day of my life."

"Then why are you so pale? You look like Yom Kippur before sunset."

"I'm all right."

"Just before Rosh Hashona," Leah continued after a pause, "he went to Bialodrevna and took Aaron with him. He's there yet.

The simpleton imagines that I'll play the part of a deserted wife and spend my time mourning for him. Well, he's mistaken. I'm going to go to Bialodrevna and demand a divorce. Twenty-five years of it is enough."

"I knew all the time that you'd come to your senses."

"How could you know? As long as my father was alive, I was willing to stand for anything. I didn't want to ruin his declining years. I suffered and I kept quiet. I used to lie awake, wet-ting the pillow with my tears, while Moshe Gabriel spent his time at Chassidic parties. He was more at home in Bialodrevna than in his own house. And all the responsibilities were mine--

the household, providing enough money to get along, everything.

The only thing he ever did was to nag me because I saw to it that the children didn't grow up to be useless fools like him. Now I've had enough. For the rest of my years I want to live like a human being, not like an animal."

"A hundred per cent right."

Koppel shook his head decidedly and drew on the cigarette between his lips, but it had long since burned out. He began to search about for a match, feeling in his pockets, rummaging on the desk and in the drawers. The abacus fell to the floor, its wooden disks turning with a humming sound before coming to rest.

"What are you searching for?" Leah exclaimed.

"Nothing. Some matches. Here they are."

"Don't be so confused. For twenty-eight years you've been telling me about your great love. Just the other day you made a -300-whole speech.

But if you've changed your mind, we'll still be friends. A thing like this has got to be gone into with one's whole heart or not at all."

"But, Leah, I don't know why you're talking this way."

"I don't know either. What I want is a clear answer."

"I'm ready to go through with it. You'll only have to give me a couple of days."

"You can even have a couple of weeks. The hurry isn't as great as that. There's only one thing I want. Try not to hurt your wife.

She's got to have enough to get along on--for herself and the children, too."

"She'll never lack anything."

"How do you know she'll accept a divorce?"

"I don't claim to predict anything."

"I see. So what it amounts to is that all these years you've been just talking."

"No, Leah, that isn't true."

"You don't seem very enthusiastic. I suppose that twenty years ago I was younger and prettier."

"To me you're always beautiful."

"This isn't the time for compliments. You needn't think, Koppel, that it's easy for me to take a step like this. I've been up all night, tossing around like a snake. I'm not one of your young women any more. I'll soon be forty-four. People say I'm a smart one, but there's a bit of the fool in the smartest person.

Everybody thinks of you as a swindler and a thief, ready to take away any trick in the deck; but I've trusted you. What are you getting so pale for? I'm not trying to insult you."

"Who thinks I'm a thief?"

"What's the difference? I don't think it."

"I
am
a thief."

Leah's breast ached with a sudden pang. "Who is it you've stolen from?"

"Your own father."

"Are you joking?"

"If everyone says it, I suppose it must be so."

"Koppel, don't be like that. You know how people talk. They'll say anything and they gossip about everyone. It went around that Masha was really your daughter."

"I wish she were."

-301-"Tell me the

truth, Koppel. What's bothering you? If you don't want to break up your home, then let's not start anything. So far the whole thing's a secret."

"It won't be a secret for long."

"What do you mean?"

"Well get married in the Vienna Hall."

"Are you out of your mind? Divorced people marry quietly.

What bothers you? Is it that you're sorry for Bashele?"

"I'm sorry for her, but that won't stop me."

"Maybe you're in love with someone else. You have a dozen women."

"Not even a half dozen."

"I think I'm beginning to understand you, Koppel. You al-ways used to tell me that you had women, but that you didn't take them seriously. Just playing around. But, according to my standards, when a man goes around with a woman for a long time, she's no plaything. I don't know your affairs and I don't want to know them. Forgive me, such things revolt me. But if you're really in love with one of those females, then please, I beg of you, don't make a fool of me. After all, I'm still a daughter of Meshulam Moskat."

"I'm not in love with anybody and I'm not afraid of anybody."