The Time of the Uprooted (18 page)

Then one day when he and Bolek were returning from a visit to Yasha in the hospital, he ventured to bring it up, but in a roundabout manner. “I have a story to tell you,” he said. “The other day, this poor unhappy young man, nephew of a journalist I know, came over to me in a coffee shop. He wanted my help on a matter that to him seemed serious. His fiancée believed him to be a writer, and to preserve the illusion, he wanted me to write a book for him. Otherwise, there’d be no wedding, and therefore no happiness, no reason to go on living. I knew about his situation; they weren’t actually engaged, not officially, but he was miserable about it nonetheless. I asked him if he’d ever tried to write anything. Yes, he had tried, a few scribbles here, a few poems there, like everyone, but it was all worthless. Would he show them to me? I asked. He blushed and insisted he’d rather keep them to himself. ‘Now listen,’ I said to him. ‘Go home and write something. It can be about anything, but preferably about the doubt and anxiety that you’re experiencing. When you’re ready to show it to me, I’ll be ready to read it.’ ” Gamaliel stopped, then, lowering his voice, added, “When you’re ready to talk, I’ll be there to listen.”

Bolek nodded his assent. They spoke no more till they parted.

One morning a few weeks later, Gamaliel received a call from Bolek, asking if by any chance he was free.

“Of course,” Gamaliel replied. “Where and when do you want to meet?”

“In Central Park, by the Seventy-second Street entrance, at one o’clock.”

“Shall we have lunch together?”

“No, not today,” Bolek said.

“Very well. I’ll be there.”

Bolek was waiting when Gamaliel arrived at the meeting place. They shook hands. “Let’s walk,” Bolek said. They walked in silence along a path leading to the lake. People passing by were talking about the coming elections, the various candidates. Bolek’s thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. Gamaliel wondered, Has the time come? Will he finally get it off his chest?

Central Park was teeming with people who, at lunchtime on this August day, instead of looking for a table at a crowded restaurant, had brought their sandwiches to the park; they picked up conversations where they had left off the night before, swapped gossip, and made plans. Workers on their lunch hour, students cutting their summer classes, shop girls yearning for a magical flirtation, wide-eyed tourists, artists in search of inspiration—all were admiring the work of Creation and ready to applaud its Creator.

“Let’s sit,” said Bolek, pointing to a bench well away from passersby. He gazed at Gamaliel, who was wondering how his friend would go about explaining his erratic behavior. “Listen to me, but don’t look at me, all right?” Gamaliel made a gesture of agreement.

“It’s about a murder.” Bolek stopped to see Gamaliel’s reaction, but the latter swallowed and said nothing.

“Yes, I’m going to tell you about a man’s death. It’s on my conscience.” Again he paused, and again Gamaliel remained silent.

“I’m from a shtetl in eastern Poland. Did you know that? The name of the town was Davarowsk. My father was a rabbinical judge and my mother was descended from a great Hasidic dynasty. She took care of the household. We were eight children, four girls and four boys. I was the youngest, also the most rebellious. My brothers, all outstanding students, were planning on careers in the world of the yeshiva, while I spent my days playing, daydreaming, deceiving my teachers. Now I regret it, as you can well imagine. How I must have made my poor father suffer! He was so affectionate with me, the
mezinekl,
the baby of the family: He never punished or scolded me, never even let me see his disappointment, his frustration. Naturally my older brothers envied me, like Joseph’s in the Bible. I could make up any kind of story; I could go anywhere, and get away with it. My father was convinced that one day I’d straighten out and find the right way, the path that led to God, the God of Israel. I heard him say it more than once to my mother when she told him she was upset and worried about me. Years went by. The child grew up. The adolescent matured. Then history began to shake the foundations of our protected and protecting home before it destroyed it entirely. The future wore the hateful face of German power. I was fifteen. You know what happened next. You know it in your bones; you lived it in your own way. The black posters, the first decrees, the insults and public humiliation, the laws that reduced us to subhumans, to insects or microbes. The yellow star, the ghetto, the hunger, the disease, the executions, the roundups, the transports into the unknown. And I, who was young and vigorous, watched my father lose his authority and my mother her grace. At first, my brothers and sisters had the good fortune to be working in German enterprises. They were protected by their identity cards, whose colors were forever changing. As for me, I went into hiding. From time to time, I and some other youngsters would slip out of the ghetto at night to get bread and eggs and potatoes, which we’d buy from peasants at an exorbitant price or in exchange for a piece of family jewelry. Only then, when I saw how happy this made my mother—or rather, how proud she was that on this night she could feed her family, could serve a decent meal—did I come to realize how sad she must have been most of the time, how useless she must have felt for lack of being able to do her duty as wife and mother.

“Lady Luck seemed to smile on me one Thursday night, but it turned out she was setting me a trap. I’d succeeded in filling my sack with food, vegetables, eggs, and two entire loaves of bread—an offering from above for the Sabbath. I was expecting to be greeted as a hero or even a savior. I was still on the Aryan side, not far from the wall, waiting for the right moment. Then my hopes collapsed, and so did I. German soldiers and Polish police burst like a flash of lightning from the nearby streets and surrounded the ghetto like a noose of steel and death. A human wall—or rather, an inhuman one—now encircled the wall of stone and barbed wire. There was no way I could sneak through one of the usual openings. I was heartsick with anxiety at being separated from my family and ashamed of still being free. I wondered if I should come out of my hiding place and give myself up— not to help my people, for I knew I couldn’t do that, but to be with them. No. Bad idea. There was still a glimmer of hope: Surely my parents were in their shelter. My brothers and sisters could get by on their own—you learned fast in the ghetto. Not our parents. Old and bewildered, they were in constant danger. That’s why I had managed to find them a spot in a well-furnished bunker, at our neighbors’. The shelter was well closed off, safe from prying eyes. Dogs could have uncovered it, but the Germans were using them only rarely during that summer of 1942. They found that their voices and rifle shots were sufficient to impose their will over ours. I was convinced that the enemy could not enter my parents’ hideout: That’s why I stayed where I was. At least that’s what I believed at the time. Now I’m not so sure. There are times when I wonder if I wasn’t just scared. This notion haunts me: Didn’t I just want to stay alive, as if I were standing outside what was happening? Wasn’t I just using the bunker as an alibi so I could survive for a week, or even a day, by abandoning my parents when they were about to enter into eternal darkness? I no longer know. Sometimes at night, I see myself back in the ghetto, with them, part of the crowd being driven into the forest. I wake up sweating and shaking and I rub my eyes with my fists to keep from seeing.

“My parents, my beloved parents, so poorly protected, so poorly loved! I saw them when dawn came. They were with Reuven, my oldest brother, and his family in a crowd of hundreds of haggard men and women, hemmed in by heavily armed and helmeted SS men, driven along by policemen wielding clubs. As in a nightmare, I wanted to cry out at the top of my lungs so loudly that I’d move heaven and earth and the hearts of men, shout, It can’t be! It can’t be! The Germans couldn’t have found my parents’ bunker and also the one where Reuven and his small family were hiding. But then what were they doing there in this crowd of dazed people? I saw my father, Reuven to his right, my mother to his left, awkwardly holding to his sides his prayer shawl and his phylacteries—they were his pride and joy, treasures that had belonged to the great Rebbe Pinhas of blessed memory— fiercely determined not to let go of them. And my mother, and my sister Hannele, holding back her tears—I saw them, too. Or at least I thought I could make them out in the pale yellow light of dawn. I could see the fear and pain on their discomposed features, while they were herded toward the neighboring forest. Toward the common grave that the young ones, and therefore my brother Reuven, would have to dig out of the hard, dry soil.

“That’s the last time I saw them. The last time I was close to them, though separate. But I still see them as I’m speaking to you.

“Don’t look at me, Gamaliel. I don’t want you to also see them.”

The rays of the August sun were playing hide-and-seek in the foliage of the trees. Some noisy kids, their faces shining with pleasure and pride, were shoving one another and struggling vigorously over a ball as if it were a rare and precious trophy. On the lake, lovers were gently rowing, savoring the fleeting moment, seeking to hold it and make it last. Gamaliel watched them a while, glanced at the children, gazed up at the cloudless sky. He was obeying his friend’s injunction not to look at him. Bolek was breathing hard; he was fighting his past, chastised by a horde of demons.

“It’s been fifty years to the day,” he said in a monotone. “The ninth day of the month of Av. You know as well as I do that it commemorates both the first and the second destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, first by the Babylonians, then by the Romans. My parents were always afraid of the day; they believed it brought bad luck, that it belonged to the enemy. We’re supposed to fast on this day in observance of our people’s collective mourning. Back then, we fasted in our home. Now? This will surprise you: I still observe the fast. Not because of the First or Second Temple, but because of the Third, also in ruins, and I feel it burning inside me. Did you know the Germans carefully chose that date to attack our people, to annihilate our priests and pilgrims, our old people and our children? I didn’t know it at the time. They’d studied Jewish history and were turning it against us, following the logic of implacable hatred, the logic of Evil and Death. Similar operations were staged that day in dozens of ghettos. Treblinka, Chelmno, and Auschwitz were already up and running. For us, the forest was the end of the line.

“One woman managed to escape from the mass grave. She was wounded but had been protected by the corpses piled up around her, as if she’d been saved to be a messenger. She came to the ghetto. She told her story. I heard her. She looked like a madwoman. Half of her hair was torn out or burned off. Most of all it was her eyes; she had practically no eyelids left. Her eyes were scorched and staring and bulging out of their sockets. She spoke in a blank, colorless voice. She described the executions; she listed the names and recited their last prayers. She spoke like some soulless machine made of cold metal. It would not have been so hard to bear if she’d sobbed, if she’d gone into hysterics. Only once did I hear her change her tone of voice. That was when she described my father’s death—no, it was the last moments before it. Like the others, he’d been ordered to undress. But he took out his prayer shawl and wrapped himself in it. The Germans yelled at him to take it off; he didn’t hear them. They cursed and threatened him, but he was impassive. Poor Reuven entreated him: ‘Father, why suffer more? Aren’t we going to sanctify the Name of the Lord? Must we have the tallith to do that?’ And my father replied, ‘Yes, my son, we will show the world and its Creator that we are still able to fulfill this great, this very great mitzvah. Few indeed are those in our history who have been privileged to fulfill the commandment of Kiddush Hashem, and that is why I must wrap myself in the tallith. . . .’ That was the one time the woman seemed to come out of her trance and display some emotion. Her face was white as chalk as she reported my beloved father’s last cry—‘Shma, Yisrael! Hear, O Israel!’—as he tumbled into the grave. That cry,” Bolek added, “it must have been heard to the ends of the earth, and beyond, in the heavens above, to the seventh heaven, and beyond. . . . It was fifty years ago to the day,” he said again.

Gamaliel had never seen his friend in such a state. Other than his occasional moodiness and fits of depression, Bolek had always seemed the picture of strength and steadfastness. He let nothing bother or offend him. He didn’t react even when someone bored or irritated him. He would just move on and change the subject with no more than a frown and a shrug of the shoulders. At times Noémie, always mischievous, would take him to task. “Do you have ice water in your veins? Don’t you ever lose your temper? Don’t you sometimes want to break a plate over someone’s head? Mine, for example?” Bolek, pretending not to understand, would reply, “The plate didn’t do anything to me, so why should I want to break it?” Feigning desperation, Noémie would call the whole world to witness. “My dear husband is impossible. You can’t even pick a fight with him!” But on this day, the person beside Gamaliel was a man who had been flayed alive.

How long had they been there, sitting on that bench, close by the lake, where the children were amusing themselves tossing pebbles to make nonexistent fish jump from the water? A mother scolded them. The children, a dozen boys and girls, didn’t seem bothered by her. Maybe she wasn’t a mother—not one of theirs, at any rate—but just a strict nanny. She watched over them with a cold, unsentimental eye.

“I remember every detail of that dawn,” said Bolek, resuming his account. “The first rays of the sun were casting a filthy yellowish light over the town. Sounds of footsteps on the pavement. Thick shadows retreating in a deliberate manner, as if in a ballet. And my father, my poor father, his back bent, as if he were bearing the weight of centuries on his shoulders. And my mother, I remember her face: Never had I seen her look so sweet.”

Gamaliel wanted to steal a glance at his friend, but he had promised not to look at him. Why was Bolek so insistent on not being observed? Was he afraid of giving himself away, of bursting into tears? Or of taking his confession too far? Hadn’t he said he had a murder on his conscience? Was he referring to the death of his family? Gamaliel decided for the time being to keep his promise to just listen.