The Family Moskat (90 page)

Manyek, Yppe, and Shosha came to the morgue. Simon would not let Shosha go down the steps to the room; she was pregnant.

Manyek and Yppe went down. There was an overpowering smell of formaldehyde. On tin-covered tables corpses lay under sackcloth. The watchman, a lame man with a growth on his skull, lifted the covering from one of the bodies. It was Koppel, but at the same time it was not Koppel. The face had become strangely shrunken and had acquired a bony yellowness. The ears were white. The nose was pointed like the beak of a bird.

The false teeth had fallen out. The open mouth was like a yawning cavern. A smile hovered in the corners of the eyes. It was as though the corpse were saying dumbly: "Well, now you see. . . . This is what it is. . . ." Yppe began to sob and -593-clutched

Manyek's arm. Manyek lifted the dead man's eyelid. The pupil stared blindly at nowhere.

A few hours later Leah came hurrying into Warsaw. Both families, the Moskats and the Bermans, busied themselves with funeral arrangements. Pinnie went to the offices of the community to arrange for the burial. Leah sat motionless in the kitchen of Pinnie's house. She did not cry, but kept on wringing her hands.

Everything had been a mistake: her divorce from Moshe Gabriel, her marriage to Koppel, the way she had nagged at him and shamed him instead of trying to raise him up and be a helpmeet to him. Now it was too late, too late.

A Jewish funeral procession gathered at the doors of the Catholic hospital. Gentiles stopped and stared at the strange sight. A crowd of mourners and friends gathered. Mrs. Krupnick was there, sobbing aloud and blowing her nose. Regina and Zilka, the Oxenburgs' daughters, were there. Nyunie supported Leah by the arm, in the modern manner. Motie the Red and Leon the Peddler looked on in silence. Lottie kept on wiping her glasses. Aaron, the rabbi, had not come to Praga; he was to join them at the cemetery. Among the mourners there was a gray-haired woman with dark, flat features and Kalmuk eyes. Leah recognized her. It was Manya, Meshulam Moskat's old servant. How she had learned of Koppel's death remained a mystery to Leah.

THE NEWS that a treaty had been signed by Hitler and Stalin

was taken by everybody as the signal for war. Nevertheless Asa Heshel did not believe that the actual convulsion would begin soon. He was staying with Barbara in a village near Babia Gora mountain, at a distance both from Zakopane and from Krakow.

Newspapers were not easily obtainable and there were few radios -594-in the vicinity.

Asa Heshel and Barbara were agreed that the district around Krakow would be the safest. He had sent Hadassah some money and had received a letter in return; she wrote that in Warsaw they were digging trenches and that the city was blacked out at night, but that in Shrudborov nothing had changed. Koppel, the bailiff, had died; Aunt Leah and Masha were planning to leave for America after the Jewish New Year; Lottie was going to Palestine with her brother Aaron. They all sent their love.

On Wednesday morning Asa Heshel and Barbara went to Zakopane. Then they took the bus to Morske Oko and thence proceeded on foot to Charnystav. They spent the night at the inn. On the other side of the frontier, in Czechoslovakia, were the Nazi hordes, but there was no danger of the invasion starting through the mountains. The next day they returned to the village near Babia Gora. It was a warm autumn day, and the peasants were threshing the wheat. A bride and two brides-maids in embroidered dresses went from hut to hut and bowed low at every door, inviting the neighbors to a wedding. Another wedding was just then being celebrated, and before the church stood several wagons decorated with flowers. The yokes of the horses were adorned with branches. Young men in embroidered shirts, with red and green feathers in their hats, played on violins, drums, and tambourines. Others yodeled mountain melodies. In the fields behind the huts old women were digging potatoes. In the clear air one felt one could stretch out a hand and touch the distant mountain; the far-off roads and paths were sharply drawn among the dark rocks.

The peasant woman with whom Barbara and Asa Heshel were staying had made ready for them a supper of red berries with cream. Barbara boiled some water in a caldron and washed her hair. Asa Heshel went into the yard, where a hammock swung between two trees, and lay down. On the other side of the yard there was a steep, fortresslike embankment, and on its summit the pines were ranged like green-clad warriors. The evening sun was hanging low in the sky, gleaming like a red lamp. The mists that rolled about in the mountain clefts took on a fiery color. A falcon was flying over the cliff. In the stillness Asa Heshel could hear the beat of its wings.

During the weeks that he had spent in the country Asa Heshel had gained a few pounds. His appetite was good, and he slept -595-through the

nights. The holiday had brought him into a homier relationship with Barbara than he had ever known before. She played with the idea of having a child by him. They no longer kept separate accounts, but had a single fund. He taught her to cook some of his mother's dishes: browned grits, noodles and chick peas, dough patties boiled in milk. In the afternoons they would go out into the orchard, lie in the grass under a heavy-branching apple tree, and talk of whatever came into their minds. They amused themselves by making combinations of Po-lish and Yiddish words. Sometimes they carried on arguments half asleep. Everything Barbara said added up to the same conclusion: there could be no social well-being without planned economy, and there could be no planned economy without the dictatorship of the proletariat. The first news of the Hitler-Stalin pact threw Barbara into some confusion, but she soon came to terms with it: England and France had by their policies made it inevitable. First they had raised Hitler to power and then they had tried to turn him against Russia. Asa Heshel's arguments, too, had a definite trend: too little was known to make possible historical forevision. As long as people went on breeding without restraint, human beings would fight for land. Besides, who says that there exists a system that can save humanity? And why should human beings be saved?

Thursday night they went to bed early, and Barbara soon fell asleep. Asa Heshel stayed awake for a long time. He did not pull the shutter to, but stared out into the night, which was thickly sewn with stars. Meteors shot across the sky, leaving fiery trails behind them. Silent summer lightning quivered in one corner of the heavens, foretelling a hot day. Fireflies shone and were extinguished; frogs croaked; all kinds of winged insects came fluttering into the room and dashed themselves against the walls, the window, and the bedposts. Asa Heshel thought about Hitler; according to Spinoza, Hitler was a part of the Godhead, a mode of the Eternal Substance. Every act of his had been pre-determined by eternal laws. Even if one rejected Spinoza, one still had to admit that Hitler's body was part of the substance of the sun, from which the earth had originally detached itself. Every murderous act of Hitler's was a functional part of the cosmos. If one was logically consistent, then one had to concede that God was evil, or else that suffering and death were good.

Barbara squirmed. For a while she seemed to stop breathing, -596-as if she were

listening intently. Then her breath became audible again, and in her sleep she put her arm under Asa Heshel's neck. He turned to her eagerly and passed his hand over her body, over the shoulders, the breasts, the curves of the belly. This was a human being that lay close to him, one like himself, the product of countless pairs of males and females, a link in the chain of endless activity, the heir of apes, fishes, and dim creatures that had disappeared without leaving a trace. She too was only an evanescent thing; soon she would return to the melting-pot in which new forms were being prepared. Dawn had set in by the time Asa Heshel fell asleep.

Someone was waking him; it was Barbara. The peasant hut with its whitewashed walls and heavy rafters was filled with sunlight.

The air was fragrant with the odor of fresh milk and newly ground coffee. Asa Heshel spoke angrily: "Why do you wake me? Let me sleep."

"Asa Heshel! The war has started," said Barbara, barely restraining her tears.

Asa Heshel was silent for a while. "When? How do you know?"

"They heard it over the radio. They've begun bombing us."

Asa Hesbel sat up. "So! It's here!"

"We must leave at once."

Outside in the village street there was a crowd of peasants. Most of them had their faces turned upward, scanning the skies.

Airplanes had passed over the village, but no one knew whether they were Polish or Nazi. Now and again someone would peep through the window into the room where the city folk were staying. Barbara pulled the curtain to. Asa Heshel dressed and went out. No trains stopped at the village. They would have to get a lift in a cart as far as Yordanov; there they could catch the local to Krakow. Asa Heshel asked a farmer whether he would take them to Yordanov, but the man shrugged his shoulders: who would be fool enough to risk horse and cart on the road at a time like this? Asa Heshel walked over to the post office; one could sometimes pick up a lift there. The village was in a tumult.

Doors stood ajar. The old people talked earnestly, the young jested. At the post office Asa Heshel ran into a gentile teacher from Zakopane whom he and Barbara had met when they were climbing the Babia Gora. He looked at Asa Heshel astounded.

"What? Are you still here, sir? The Nazis may arrive at any moment."

-597-Asa

Heshel felt his shirt grow clammy with perspiration. "I can't get a horse and cart."

"If I were you, sir, I would set out on foot."

The teacher drew a map out of his breast pocket and with a pencil pointed out the nearest Czech villages on the other side of the frontier. Gadza, Namestovo, Yablunka. There were passes in the mountains through which Nazi tanks could come at any moment.

"Perhaps, sir, you could get me a horse and cart somewhere. I'll pay whatever I have," Asa Heshel said.

The teacher managed it. He decided to go along with them.

The journey to Yordanov would take at least three hours.

Peasants watched the city people as they climbed in. Barbara and Asa Heshel sat on bales of straw; the teacher made a place for himself next to the driver. The horse plodded slowly forward, step by step. Asa Heshel turned his face to the Babia Gora and to the clear sky above its slopes. There came to his lips the verse from the Psalms: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help."

ASA HESHEL and Barbara arrived in Warsaw in stained and

rumpled clothes, in tattered shoes, and without their suitcases. He had grown a beard, and Barbara's white dress had taken on a nondescript color. In their six days of wandering they had gone through bombardment, hunger, thirst. They spent nights in railroad stations and in the fields. They went long distances on foot; they took shelter in ditches. Asa Heshel had come to terms with the thought of death from the very beginning. In one of his vest pockets he kept a razor blade with which he intended to -598-open his veins as soon as the Germans came in sight. Even before they left Krakow, Barbara had argued that it was insane to return to Warsaw. It would be much better, she said, to make for Rzeszow and thence for Volhynia or perhaps even the Rumanian frontier.

But Asa Heshel would not have it. It puzzled Barbara: he, Asa Heshel, the unfaithful husband, the father who had abandoned his children, suddenly became attached to his family. He had no right, he said, to leave Hadassah and Dacha in the midst of all this. His married sister was in Warsaw. Men were leaving their homes and following the retreating Polish army; but he, Asa Heshel, the eternal deserter, was pushing through to the half-beleaguered city.

At one point they had almost agreed to part. In the end, however, they remained together. During the last days of their journey they hardly spoke. Asa Heshel's behavior was odd. In one of his coat pockets he had an algebra book without covers and some paper.

Between bombardments he made calculations in pencil. He was not afraid of danger, he said, he was only bored. And where was one to seek refuge from this chaos if not in the realm of "adequate ideas"? A triangle still contained two right angles. Even Hitler could not change that. In Piotrkow he went looking for a bookstore in the midst of a bombardment. Then he sat on the floor of the station platform, in a crowd waiting for a train, and read. The people stared at him with envy and derision. The general panic had made Barbara less reserved. She entered into conversations with old-fashioned bearded Jews and bewigged Jewesses, in a mixture of Polish and Yiddish. She sought advice, asked favors, and collected all sorts of information. Asa Heshel avoided everyone. His face, which had filled out in the last few weeks, had become haggard again. His eyes were constantly fixed above the heads of those around him, and his newly sprouted beard gave him the appearance of a Chassid. Once, sitting next to Barbara in a ditch near a bombarded station, he suddenly asked: "What do you think of God now, tell me."

"What do I think of Him? You're the one who's always making up accounts with Him."

"He creates easily and destroys easily. He has His own laboratory."

The electric train from Grodzhisk to Warsaw no longer functioned. Asa Heshel and Barbara completed the journey in a truck, and Asa Heshel gave the driver his last ten zlotys. They -599-came into a

darkened city. Here and there they saw watchmen wearing armbands. In the middle of the street there was a trench, with earth piled up on either side. The streetcars were not running, and no droshky came their way. The windows were light-less, and the strip of sky between the houses, deep as in the open country, was thickset with stars. A deaf silence reigned over Warsaw, a strange, unfamiliar silence. Asa Heshel and Barbara got off at Jerusalem Alley and walked down to Marshalkovska Street; then they turned into Iron Street, to go to Barbara's room.

On Zlota Street they came across a bombed house. From it issued an odor of whitewash, coal, gas, and smoking cinders.