The Family Moskat (52 page)

Everything was senseless: his journey to present himself for service; the shrieking of these oafs. Who was it he was going to fight for? What did he have to do with the nations and their quarrels?

What did he care about the human race in general?

It was nine o'clock in the morning when the train pulled to a halt at Reivitz, but it seemed to Asa Heshel that it was already late in the day. The station was full of soldiers. Behind the food counter two fat girls fussed around. Arms, swords, and guns were stacked everywhere. Out in the street Ukrainian peasants--

they had Jewish beards, Asa Heshel noticed--loaded sacks of wheat on a freight train on a siding. They were dressed in sheepskin coats, with fur caps on their heads and rags wound around their feet. A tall Cossack in a high fur hat relieved himself openly along the rails. Some peasant women laughed. A small sun, white as tin, shone down from behind the clouds. Asa Heshel remembered that once carts had waited at this station to carry passengers to Izhbitza, Krasnostav, Yanov. Now there was not a single vehicle to be seen. From somewhere a tall Jew appeared with a sack over his shoulder. He had a pockmarked face, a pointed beard, and large melancholy eyes. He walked up to Asa Heshel. "Are you going on from here?"

"I'm bound for Yanov, but I don't see a passenger cart."

"You'd better come with me into town. They'll, God forbid, do you an injury."

Asa Heshel picked up his valise and followed the stranger into the city.

2

The general practice was that after a recruit had taken his preliminary oath he was permitted to go home until the time for the final induction. During that period recruits would say their good-bys to their relatives, gather together the clothing they would need, and put their affairs in order. But this year the military head of the Yanov district gave orders that the Jew-ish recruits were to be kept in the town jail in the interim, mak-ing the excuse that too many of them deserted. The cell Asa Heshel found himself in was on the second floor of the building.

-336-There were a

couple of benches in the cell. There were lumps of clayey bread on the sil of the barred window. Asa Heshel looked out. The window gave onto a large courtyard, in which some Austrian prisoners of war, bearded, filthy, in heavy shoes and ragged uniforms, were working. The talk Asa Heshel heard was a mixture of German, Hungarian, and Bosnian. The prisoners were digging pits, breaking stones, drawing handcarts full of sand and gravel.

Russian soldiers with bayoneted guns kept guard over them.

Asa Heshel wanted to stretch out, but all the benches were occupied. Two youngsters, one fair, the other dark, were playing cards. A recruit was distributing tobacco, which he took out of the uppers of his boots. Between the recruits and the civil prisoners a dispute at once arose. One of them, in a patched jacket, an open shirt, and paste-covered pants, prodded Asa Heshel's shoulder. "Hey, you, clumsy! Got any tin?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Money! Money!" the other explained, rubbing the tips of his fingers against his thumb.

"They took away everything I had when they examined me."

"Hand over the trotters." He pointed to Asa Heshel's boots.

The pale youth came to his defense. "Hey, you, tough guy! Lay off him."

"And what if I don't?"

"If you don't, brother, I'll tap your bung!" He got up from the bench, crouched, and posed his fist against the other's nose.

The other put up his hands. "A brave guy, eh?"

"Hey, boys! What's the argument about?" This was from one of the prisoners who had been sitting and paring his toenails with a penknife. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with the build of a giant. His checked shirt was fastened with a mother-of-pearl collar button. A small mustache sprouted on his lip.

"This specimen here wants to take the young fellow's boots,"

another answered him.

The giant shook his head deprecatingly and turned to Asa Heshel. "Where are you from, youngster?"

"I come from Warsaw."

"From Warsaw, eh? Where did you live?"

"On Shviento-Yerska Street."

"Come over here. Nobody's going to do anything to anyone from Warsaw while I'm around."

-337-It developed

that several of the jail intimates were from War-saw, brought to the prison from Lublin. They crowded around Asa Heshel, asking for news of their familiar haunts: the City Market, Yanash's Court, the city hall, the Old Town. The prisoner who had tried to get Asa Heshel to give up his boots suddenly remembered that he had a mother in Warsaw, somewhere on St.

Boniface Street. One of the others asked Asa Heshel if he wanted a cigarette. He declined.

"So they can hear the firing there already, eh?"

"Yes. At night."

"Yes Russians stink, eh?"

Asa Heshel moved away to a corner of the cell and sat down on the floor. He had not slept a wink the previous night, and he had waited around at the conscription headquarters from early in the morning. He leaned wearily against the wall and sank into an apathetic dullness. He had hoped that some miracle might save him. In his anxiety he had vowed to give eighteen rubles to charity. He had had all sorts of dreams and premonitions. But the higher powers, apparently, were not interested in sparing him.

The cell door opened and a guard ordered the inmates to form in groups of six to go for their meal. Someone pushed Asa Heshel and he got to his feet. With the others he passed through a long corridor and reached a large room with tin-covered tables. He picked up a tin bowl and a blackened spoon and waited while one of the attendants filled the bowl with some sort of brownish stew and handed him a lump of hard bread. The group was marched back to the cell. The prisoners wolfed the food, cursing and joking. The cell grew dark. From the corridor came the sound of cell doors banging. The men huddled closer together, talking and gesticulating. In the semidarkness the faces were vague and weird-looking. One of the men started to recount some story about a wedding match that never came off, and about a wedding ring he never got back.

"Hey, comrades, who wants to play cards?"

A guard brought in a lantern and hung it from a hook on the ceiling. There was an immediate scurrying around, some of the men moving the benches to the sides of the cell, others spreading coats on the floor. Two youths started a game of checkers on a board drawn with chalk on the floor, using lumps of bread as pieces. One of the men started to tell about the prison in Shed--

338-letz and about the political prisoners there. They formed their own governing body. On the first of May they stained a white shirt red with blood and used it as a flag. There was a girl, a consumptive, who was locked up alone in a cell. She had poured kerosene over her clothes and set herself on fire.

"And was she burned?"

"To a cinder."

"Well, anyway, that was better than spending the rest of her life spitting blood."

The lantern was left in the cell for only one hour. After that it was taken away. Again the room was in darkness. Some went to sleep at once, snoring heavily. Others talked, joked, and wrestled. One of the men threw a rag across the room; it caught Asa Heshel in the face. There were apparently women in the adjoining cell; through the walls could be heard female chattering and giggling.

One of the men shouted: "Hey, let's bore a hole through the wall."

"What'll you drill it with?" someone asked.

Another gave an obscene answer, and there was a burst of raucous laughter.

One of the men produced a knife and started to poke at the wall with it. Fragments of plaster began to crumble to the floor. To make sure that the noise would not be heard, some of the men started to sing in loud voices. Asa Heshel stretched out on the floor. He was bitten instantly. He picked a bedbug off his forehead.

Gradually the noises subsided. The prisoners yawned, stretched out, fell asleep. The air became even fouler.

When Asa Heshel opened his eyes, the sky outside the window was scarlet. Flaming clouds floated in the east. He sat up. A bloody braid of smoke ascended from the barracks chimney. A light wind blew in through the broken panes. It seemed to him that God Himself was sighing in the dawn.

-339-

IN THE MIDDLE of the night Adele started up with the

frightened feeling that someone had shrieked something into her ear. Dr. Leon Hendlers, her stepbrother, had told her that she would not be delivered until the end of the month, and she hesitated to wake her mother, even though she was in pain. She began to walk back and forth. The night lamp threw a dim light.

To guard Adele against evil spirits her mother had hung chapters from the Psalms on the walls of the room. Underneath the pillow she had placed the Book of the Angel Raziel. When Adele approached the mirror, she halted, looking at her own reflection. Her belly was round and high. Her breasts were swollen.

Her face was full of pale spots. "I'll soon die," Adele thought.

For the third time she had dreamed that she was dead, stretched out on the floor with her toes turned toward the door.

"Dear God in heaven," she murmured, "have mercy on me.

For the sake of my dear father."

Suddenly she laughed. "How pious one becomes in trouble!"

The pain had lightened somewhat. She lay down again and dozed off. It seemed to her that she was alone with a creature, half dog, half turtle, with a knotted tail, many-footed like a centipede.

Where would such a freak have come from? It was a bad sign.

She made a convulsive movement with her hand and started up again. The child heaved inside her womb. A searing pain cut her back. She managed to get to the door. Her mother was there.

Rosa Frumetl had heard her daughter's groans. She was barefooted, in a nightgown too big for her, her bed cap pushed back on her gray, badly cut hair. Her face was strained and creased. "My dear child! Woe is me! What's the matter?"

"I think it's started."

"I'll call the midwife right away!"

-

340-"No, wait, Mother. Maybe it's too soon."

Mother and daughter began to walk back and forth in the room, their shadows gigantic in the light of the night lamp.

"Mamma, you look sick. Does something hurt you?"

"Only my cares and troubles, daughter. May He whose name I am not worthy to mention help you come through your ordeal. I am already an old woman."

"Shall I get your valerian drops?"

"Ah, my dear daughter! You, with all your sufferings, and you think of me. My pure child."

The door opened and Reb Wolf Hendlers came in. His face was red, his beard round and white. His belly was large and pointed as if he, too, were pregnant. "You're having the pains, eh?

Everything is attended by suffering . . . birth . . . Messiah. . . ."

Early in the morning, on his way to the hospital, Reb Wolf's son, Leon, dropped into the flat. Reb Wolf opened the door for him. Leon was a giant of a man. His face was ruddy, flushed with blood, like a slaughterer's. Over his high forehead a derby was perched. "Well, Father," he boomed in his coarse Yiddish, "how's she doing?"

"How should I know? Go and take a look for yourself."

"I tell you, she'll have triplets yet."

He laughed noisily and went into Adele's room. Without ceremony he threw back the bedcovers and palpated her abdomen.

"Well, how are you feeling?" he boomed. "The curse of Eve is upon you."

"Have you had your breakfast yet?" Rosa Frumetl asked her stepson.

"Six o'clock in the morning! That's when I eat my breakfast.

Black bread and bouillon."

He left abruptly. At the gate he encountered Asa Heshel's mother.

Since Asa Heshel had gone off, she had become emaciated as though from consumption. Beneath the shawl that covered her bewigged head her beaked nose protruded. She was bent over, like an ancient woman.

"Well, auntie, you'll soon be a grandmother," Leon boomed.

"God willing."

"Come on, auntie, straighten your shoulders. You're not a hundred years old yet."

-341-He raced away

with long steps. At the door Rosa Frumetl greeted Asa Heshel's mother. The two women embraced, kissing each other's wrinkled cheeks.

"How is Adele?"

"May God's angels intervene for her."

Finkel stood in front of the wall mirror to straighten her wig.

Rosa Frumetl blew her nose.

"And from Asa Heshel not a word?"

"Disappeared. Like a stone in the water," Finkel answered. Her voice was dry and unmoved; she had no more tears.

She went into her daughter-in-law's room. Adele took both her hands.

"Mother-in-law! You must be frozen!"

She looked at the older woman, and, as always, she felt a sense of astonishment. Mother and son were alike as two peas. The same eyes, nose, mouth, chin, the identical cut of the features.

Finkel even had a tic like her son. Like Asa Heshel she was continually biting her lip. A sort of pious melancholy flowed from her, the generations-old dolor of the Jewish mother, the mothers who bled and suffered so that murderers should have victims for their knives. And was she any different? What would happen to her child? Who could say that in another twenty years there wouldn't be another war?

A sudden shriek was torn from Adele's lips. It was not her own voice. Her loins were ripped, as though with a knife. Finkel started up from her chair and began to wring her hands. Rosa Frumetl, the maid, and the nurse rushed into the room together.

Reb Wolf, hearing the scream, hurried to the telephone to call the midwife. Finkel stayed with her daughter-in-law until she was delivered. Adele shrieked all through the day and half the night.

At three in the morning a boy child issued from her. Finkel looked at her new grandson through tear-filled eyes. The image of his father! Both grandmothers swayed back and forth, their arms about each other. Adele fell asleep the moment the child was delivered. There was a strange smile on her bloodless lips.

Someone awakened Finkel at nine in the morning. After the long watch she had fallen asleep on the sofa in her clothes. There was a telephone call. Finkel did not know how to handle the apparatus.