The Family Moskat (84 page)

The apartment that Hadassah rented cost very little money. In the summer she and Dacha were able to gather plenty of wood for the stove, as well as mushrooms and berries. The wives of the peasants of the neighboring farms sold milk and eggs for next to nothing. The house had a garden attached to it; Hadassah planted vegetables and raised a few chickens. The school that Dacha attended was over a mile distant, but the child did not have to walk there alone. The owner of the house, a Russian, had three daughters, and all the children went to and from school together. Hadassah had brought all her funiture and books from Warsaw. She had installed a radio and a phonograph. Asa Heshel contributed fifteen zlotys a week to her support, and her father gave her an additional ten. She managed, too, to earn a few extra zlotys out of her knitting.

On sunny days she sat on the veranda, on a folding bed, the kind used in sanatoriums, sun glasses shielding her eyes, either reading or knitting. When the weather was cold she spent all day in bed. Dacha helped with the household chores when she got home from school. The Russian family had taken Hadassah under their wing. The oldest of the girls would bring in water, heat the oven, and scour the floors. In exchange Hadassah would embroider dresses and scarves for her. The landlord's wife would keep coming in and going out all day, looking for a chance to be -554-of some assistance. She was in the same position as Hadassah; Vanya, her husband, went off to Warsaw for weeks at a time, leaving her completely alone. It was rumored that he had a mistress there, the wife of a former Russian major. The villa, which was the remains of a prewar estate, consisted of perhaps eighty acres, but the soil was sandy, the buildings run down, and the well a forbidding distance away. The Russians who came there for the summer months paid only a third of the rates charged in Otwotsk. The woman never ceased talking about her uncle, the tax-collector, who had been shot by the Bolsheviks; of the officers with whom she used to dance when she was a young girl; and of her husband, Vanya, the charlatan, who was good only for eating, drinking, sleeping, and carrying on with females.

Whenever he came home he beat her; she would walk about with blackened eyes. He would stretch himself out on his bed and sleep the day away. Or he would take a gun and go off with his dogs for a day's hunting. Once in a while when he came back with a hare, the family would have a chance to eat some meat.

The woman was envious of Hadassah. True, Hadassah's husband was certainly not a devoted mate, but still in comparison with her man he conducted himself like a gentleman. When he came out on a Saturday morning he always had a gift for Dacha.

And he didn't beat Hadassah, or curse her, or disgrace her in front of others. He sat quietly under a tree and read a book. He played games with the children. His clothes were clean and neat.

His face was always carefully shaved. He never failed to greet her and exchange a few polite words, or to bring some magazines from Warsaw to her older daughter. He would throw himself into the spirit of the children's games, climbing trees, chasing after the goat, pushing the swing. He sometimes brought out the ax and, in his clumsy city manner, chopped cords of wood for the use of both families. Then he would lie down in the hammock that stretched between two pine trees and read and make notes with a little pencil.

Sometimes, on Saturdays, other visitors besides Hadassah's husband came--Hadassah's friends and relatives, Klonya, Masha, Stepha, Dosha. Then the place was lively. The women would bring gifts for the children, chocolates, cakes, little hats and aprons, toys and delicacies, all packed in fancy wrappings and boxes. Rooms had to be prepared for the guests, and there was -555-never any argument about price. The women were all over forty, but they looked young and stylish. Klonya and Stepha, true, were a bit on the fat side, but Hadassah, Masha, and Dosha still kept their slender figures. When they played ball in the garden, one might have thought that a group of young things was running around.

It was only when one looked at them more closely that the gray strands in their short-cut hair and the tiny creases at the corners of their eyes could be noticed. Hadassah's husband had a bald spot at the top of his pate and his tall form was slightly bent. Still, Hadassah swore that he had the same figure she had known in the youth of nineteen.

Each of these ladies from Warsaw had her own habits. Right after eating, Dosha Moskat would put on a pair of glasses and settle back to read a book or a magazine, turning the pages rapidly and seeming to swallow the lines. She kept on reading until it was time to take the train back to Warsaw. Masha devoted her attention to the children. She told them stories, asked them riddles, and taught them sewing. Her Polish intonation was strangely clear and distinct, like an actress's. Stepha would eat heartily, and the moment she was through would stretch out on a couch and fall asleep. Hadassah and Klonya would join hands and go off for long walks. Vanya's wife knew the history of each one of them. All of them except Klonya had the same grandfather, a certain Meshulam Moskat, a millionaire. Their stories were quite clear to her, yet it was difficult to understand these Jewesses and the way they lived. They smoked cigarettes, went in for serious discussions, laughed without any percepti-ble reason, and quarreled over matters that really should have had no interest at all for women. They talked about the Jewish problem, Palestine, religion; gave their opinions about books they had read, throwing Yiddish words and phrases into their Polish speech. Their dark eyes glowed. They powdered and rouged their cheeks and stained their carefully manicured fingernails. The other people of the neighborhood always felt a sense of discomfort when this Warsaw group descended on the house. It was useless for the gentiles to have moved away from Otwotsk; the Jews had followed them, bringing with them their bigcity garrulousness, their luxuries and sophistication, the scents of their cosmetics. After every one of their visits they would leave behind them a generous sum of money; nevertheless, Vanya always muttered and growled when he saw them -556-coming. He would hide and keep away till they had gone. He would stretch out on his bed in his knee-length boots, smoking, yawning, and spitting. "Why doesn't Hitler come?" he would demand of his wife. "He'll smoke 'em out, as true as God loves me."

"What, you lazy glutton?" his wife would answer. "What good'll Hitler be for you? He'll take away the only goat you've got left. The Germans will do what they did the last time--loot everything and everybody."

"So there'll be one goat less. They'll confiscate the Jewish hotels and they'll wind up in Christian hands. Things can't go on like this forever."

"It would be better for you to bestir yourself and see that your family doesn't die of hunger. The Jewish husbands turn over their earnings to their wives, and you spend every grosz on your whores."

"Shut your mouth, or I'll shut it for you," Vanya would answer. "You'll find the same end they'll find."

ASA HESHEL, along with everyone else, feared what would

happen: the Hitler war and the Nazi pogroms. It was not necessary to be a strategist to see the way the wind was blowing. The Nazi wolf was howling at Poland's door. The Jews in Poland were abandoned and helpless. Asa Heshel thought every day of getting away from the country. He had had a chance to get to Palestine, and there had been the possibility of fleeing to South America or Australia. But the days had passed by and he had done nothing. In all this confusion his own immediate life took on the pattern he had long wanted. Again, as in his younger years, he lived alone. He was rid of Hadassah's complaining and Dacha's illnesses, rid of servants and visitors, debts -557-and taxes.

David had gone off to Palestine and Asa Heshel was no longer called on to provide for him. Asa Heshel's mother was dead and her body lay in the cemetery on the Gensha. (He had even neglected to put up a stone on her grave.) So now he sat back and took some degree of comfort in the calm that was preceding the storm. For the small room he rented from a family on Novolipki Street he paid fifty zlotys a month. He ate in restaurants. His situation at the school had improved somewhat.

He was able to spend money on decent clothes and could afford to buy some books. True, he had not become a professor of philosophy. He had not re-evaluated old values or created a new system. But the need to ponder on the eternal questions was still with him. He would sit up until two in the morning playing with all sorts of intellectual speculations. If Spinoza was right, that inadequate and confused ideas arise from as real a necessity as adequate and clear ones, and nowhere in the world of ideas is there anything positive that can be called false, then there is value in continuing to ponder. In God every idea is true.

Through his window he could see the sky, the stars, the planets, the Milky Way. That white mistiness that he now gazed at had emanated from those heavenly bodies thousands of years ago, in the time of the patriarch Jacob, or when the Pyramids had been built. How strange it was to be here, in a room on the fifth floor of a building on Novolipki Street, and find oneself in contact with the eternity of the cosmos! How strange to reflect that the same laws which controlled the sun and the moon, the comets and the nebulæ, also governed life and death, Mussolini, Hitler, every Nazi lout who lustily sang the Horst Wessel song and howled for Jewish blood to spurt from the knife.

From reflections on the universe Asa Heshel went over to his own affairs. Hadassah had moved herself into a wilderness.

Death was all she talked about whenever he went to visit her.

Dacha was growing up wild and undisciplined among the gentile girls of the neighborhood. There was probably nothing she did not know now. And she went about with gentile boys. Who could know what a child like that might not do? Asa Heshel had tried to assure himself more than once that it really made no difference at all whether a girl married or lived with a man, whether she had to do with a Jew or a gentile. Nevertheless, he worried.

David was in a kibbutz in upper Galilee, surrounded by Arabs. It was impossible to move away from the place with--558-out carrying a gun. Adele became sick whenever one of his letters was late. Dinah's husband, Menassah David, had abandoned the last vestige of responsibility. If Asa Heshel didn't give Dinah some money, there was none at all. It was at least something to be thankful for that Barbara didn't need his help.

When, years before, he had spent that night with Barbara at the home of a Polish woman Communist, he was sure that it would be the first and last time. There had been a warrant out for Barbara's arrest. She had talked about going back to France, or maybe getting into Russia. But she had stayed on in Warsaw and he was still her lover. Her father was dead. The Comintern had liquidated the Polish Communist Party. Some of the party members were in prison and some in the concentration camp of Kartuz Berez. Some had gone over to the Right Socialists and some had deserted the movement altogether. But Barbara, apparently, had remained a functionary. She took trips away from Warsaw. She led a conspiratorial life. She was registered as a bookkeeper in a button factory on Orla Street. She dressed elegantly. She avoided all radical meetings and subscribed to the reactionary
Warsaw Courier
. She even attended the Evangelical church every Sunday. In her bookcase at home there was not a single work on politics or sociology. On the small table between the two windows of her room was the Bible that had belonged to her father, with a gold cross stamped on the cover.

She was rigidly methodical. When she was in Warsaw she would phone Asa Heshel in the morning promptly at a quarter past eight, and they would meet at seven o'clock in the evening at a designated restaurant. Each paid his own way; that had been the arrangement between them from the beginning. When they went to a cinema or to the theater Barbara refused to allow Asa Heshel to pay for her ticket. On most of their evenings together they went to her room after eating. The room had a private entrance.

Barbara would turn on the radio and puff at a cigarette. After a while she would turn the radio off. They would sit opposite each other on soft upholstered chairs that she had inherited from her father and look at each other intimately, yet strangely. Barbara had a habit of beginning their conversations with: "Well, what has the accused to say?" Or she would ask: "Well, what have you accomplished today for the counterrevolu-tion?"

"I've done my honest share," he would answer.

-559-Barbara would

smile, showing her elongated teeth. The two of them had agreed many times to avoid any political discussions, but they often found themselves deep in a dispute. Always the argument wound around the same question: did people know enough about human history to be able to predict its course? Asa Heshel maintained that since not all of the factors were known, it was impossible to foretell any outcome. The idea of a kingdom of freedom stood in opposition to the concept of causality. Questions of justice had no place in a system where each body could be moved only by another body. The concept of equality was at variance with all biological factors. Barbara would listen to him, getting up now and then to pump fuel into the Primus stove. His words questioned the foundations of everything she believed. But just the same it was more interesting than the constant debates of the comrades she met at care. fully concealed meeting-places. She would say to Asa Heshel: "Then what's left? To lie down and die?"

"Death isn't the worst thing in the world."

"A very positive approach, I must say."

She would begin to pace back and forth, throwing side glances at him as though she could still not believe that an anti-Marxist, a former yeshivah student, was actually her lover. He talked like a fascist, but he sipped at his tea with all the mannerisms of the Chassidic youths. He bent his shoulders, bit his lips, grimaced.

Sometimes he would seem to her like an eighteen-year-old, and then he would take on the appearance of an old sick Jew. He did not conceal from Barbara that he went to see Hadassah or that he still saw his first wife, Adele. When she thought of him during her stays away from Warsaw, he seemed to have more substance and actuality than when they were together. When she had yielded to him that night, years before, the whole thing had seemed to her like one of those pieces of thoughtless-ness that one might commit in days of indecision, between one love and another. Yet it was partly because of him that she had stayed on in Poland, that she had not married, that she had be-come a professional party worker, always ready for whatever dangerous task might be demanded of her. And now things had come to a pass where another World War seemed imminent. What would happen to her then?