East of Time Page 2

  Not long after her release from prison, she married — but the wrong man, who would soon abandon her to save his own skin. And as she was celebrating her little daughter’s fourth birthday, the Great Leader, the one who had set the east aflame and for whom she would gladly have died, went into partnership with the arch-enemy of humanity.

  Five years later, in a dark cattle-train headed for Auschwitz, I heard Pola sing a lullaby to her sobbing little girl:

  Sleep, my darling Frumetl,

  Close your dreamy eyes;

  Where the lilacs blossom

  Are bluer skies...

  Little Frumetl was gassed on arrival.

  Betrayed by the man she loved, and by the party she served, Pola left her barrack at midnight and, with arms outstretched as if in supplication, embraced the buzzing wires of Birkenau’s electric fence.

  My Sister Ida

  There was something contradictory about my sister Ida. On the one hand, she was a quiet, unassuming, polite little girl; on the other, a restless, frolicking child, mischievous almost to the extreme. Her history and literature teacher, Yuda Reznik, once told father, presumably in jest: ‘If you won’t take her out of school, I’m going to kill myself.’ Perhaps, like all the girls in her class, my sister was in love with this charismatic man.

  Ida was of slender build but well-shaped, with a wave of auburn hair that danced alluringly over her forehead, her black eyebrows and her deep brown eyes. She carried herself with a pleasing, lingering quietude. Ida passed through our shadowy world like a pale ray of some mysterious hope. But every mystery conceals a story.

  She was only fifteen, and just three months from obtaining her school certificate, when her sister Pola’s marital life ran into difficulties. Putting aside her own needs and feelings, Ida left the school she loved and her friends there to look after Pola’s two-year-old infant girl.

  After that, life took a new turn.

  Young men were readily attracted to Ida. At the outbreak of war in 1939, as booted hordes from the west descended on the country of my birth, there was the young fine-looking carpenter, the Bundist Grinszpan, who loved her dearly and begged her to run away with him to the east. But Ida shook her head. ‘No,’ she told him. ‘I wouldn’t leave mother behind.’

  Of course, there were plenty of others — among them a fellow who, if not too prudent, was certainly persistent. He kept hanging around, endeared himself to our mother, and finally found a place in my sister’s heart. Possibly this changed the course of her life. I know that one shouldn’t point the finger, that life is serendipitous; that he who guards his tongue (as it is written) guards himself from evil. Nonetheless, I believe there are times when even the cruellest truth is preferable to the gentlest lie.

  When Ida became pregnant she was barely twenty-two years old. I still recall the duel of eyes as she broke the news to mother, and then father’s blunt but pragmatic remark: ‘It’s not too late...’ For quite a few days, the spirit of the Pharaoh who didn’t know Joseph struggled against the spirit of Shifra and Puah. Obviously, however, a foetus was not a sufficient offering to our Almighty — He desired much more.

  I vividly remember the unlit carriage of a screaming cattle-train, and Ida hushing her whining little Chayale to sleep:

  There once was a king,

  There once was a page,

  There once was a beautiful queen...

  The lullaby told of the terrible death that befell the royal threesome: the king was eaten by a dog, the page by a cat, and the queen by a little mouse! But the child should not grieve, the song concluded — for the king was made of sugar, the page of gingerbread, and the queen was of marzipan...

  We arrived at our destination on a hot August day of barking dogs. There, beneath an unblemished sky, dressed in black and with gloves of white, stood a man called Mengele who was convinced that he was God’s deputy.

  Legends

  Berta Winograd was my form and geography teacher. Nicknamed ‘Petcha’, she was a tiny green-eyed brunette, with a scorch mark on her right cheek from an accident while still a child. Berta always wore a black tight-fitting dress and a string of white pearls around her neck. She was in her early thirties, unmarried, came from a wealthy family, and rumour had it that she refused to be paid for her work. (Schoolchildren often know more about their teachers than about their own parents.)

  A million years have flown by since my schooldays, yet time has not erased from my memory Berta’s excursions into fantastic landscapes, where we encountered exotic peoples, learnt about their customs and listened to their tales — without leaving our classroom. Berta was a granary of vivid legends. Legends, she would say, were not bedtime stories or lullabies, but evocative fables — echoes of what was real. They were a kind of poetry you had to know how to read, how to interpret allegorically, in order to penetrate their meaning and enrich your life.

  During the fifth year of my studies, in the third month of the year, on the second day of the week, Berta, who never needed to raise her voice to quieten her students, made her way into the classroom with a strange, almost secretive expression on her face. I was thirteen at the time, yet I haven’t forgotten — or am imagining that I remember — the green glint in her eyes, her measured walk, the blend of dignity and mystery she projected.

  ‘The philosopher Chuang Tzu,’ Berta began, ‘dreamt that he was a butterfly. When he awoke, he didn’t know whether he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly that was dreaming it was a man.’

  Suddenly the door opened. Our nervous principal, accompanied by a bald inspector who kept harassing our school, looking for excuses to close it down, burst into the classroom. ‘And what are we teaching here today?’ sneered the representative of the government’s education board, which regarded our school as a nest of future subversives.

  ‘The humanity of a butterfly,’ Berta replied in a whisper.

  ‘Hm,’ said the educator. ‘Perhaps we should try something else — mathematics, for instance. Students! Pencils in hand, open your exercise books,’ the intruder ordered. ‘Now, given that there are 360 degrees of longitude, and fifteen of these equal one hour, what time would it be in Moscow, if it is twelve noon in London?’

  The class froze: I could taste the tension on my tongue. Then, almost in unison, a forest of twenty young hands shot up to answer the challenge. All of them had the correct answer! The inspector could scarcely conceal his astonishment.

  Berta, discreetly removing a white lace handkerchief from her sleeve, managed to stop a tear of triumphant joy from falling to the floor.

  Phantasm

  A certain mystery surrounded my teacher of natural science, ‘Miss Lazar’ Melman. Her olive skin, her pitch-black eyes, her Flamenco body-talk and her voice — like the rustling, silky pages of a book of psalms — betrayed, at least to me, a Marrano background, maybe even that of a royal Castilian.

  One evening in March 1935, a group of five students, including me, were invited to the Melmans’. They lived a few doors from my family, in a sparsely decorated apartment, and we were meeting there to discuss our form’s contribution to the forthcoming concert, ‘The Dawn of Spring’, a festive affair staged annually by the children of our school.

  I was elated, convinced that my inclusion by Miss Lazar was no accident. Making my way to her door, I felt everything within me rejoicing. Perhaps she would permit me to sit next to her, to touch her arm — why not? Unfortunately my joy was shortlived. As I crossed her threshold I beheld a scene with which I simply could not come to terms. My teacher, the descendant of a possible Castilian prince, was a housewife, standing in her kitchen and cooking soup! To make matters worse, her husband, who taught Jewish Antiquity at our school and was known to his students by the uncomplimentary nickname ‘Shmelke’, shamelessly addressed her in the familiar second-person.

  I believe Miss Lazar read my thoughts, for on the very next morning she managed to restore, in my eyes, her aristocratic Iberian image.

  ‘Science
,’ began Donna Lazar, right at the start of her lesson, ‘can both assist and destroy nature. Permit me, dear children,’ she continued, looking directly at me, ‘to illustrate this with an old Spanish folktale.

  ‘There was once a young flower that grew in a village. It had not been cultivated in any garden and it grew on the fringes of the season, a startling indigo blossom. A curious scientist arrived to study it; he conducted some experiments to determine its character, but the flower soon withered away. Although this happened many, many years ago, the local peasants still swear that, come night, they can hear the flowers of the village weeping...’

  I must admit that at the time I could not understand the fable. Much later, I realized that my teacher’s story was a Ladino song of our past and our bygone future.

  My First Poem

  Spring in the city of the waterless river, where the grey had not yet displaced the blue. Rhythmic clatter of horses, their rich golden dung on the cobblestone roads. Rumble of iron-shod wheels on wooden carts laden with an abundance of farm produce. Gardens of budding lilac.

  Enveloped in such evocative tranquillity, I made my solitary way to school. I was just a boy. How was I to know that all of this was but the transient smile of a landscape which was destined to pass from the world forever?

  The morning’s first lesson was poetry, a compulsory subject in our school. All students had to know the classics by heart. My Spanish lady, in her ever-tight white-cage blouse, entered the classroom in the company of a tall man wearing a black cape, a white linen shirt fastened with a burgundy cravat, and a grey fedora — which, as he took it off, released a black waterfall of curly hair that cascaded down over his high pale forehead.

  ‘Children,’ said my Castilian princess as we remained standing, ‘I want you to meet the great poet, Moyshe Broderzon, who has agreed to talk to us about the art of writing prose and poetry.’

  Although Broderzon addressed us in the simplest language, I am not sure if we — or at least I — grasped everything he said. ‘Good writing,’ he explained, ‘is a meeting of heart and mind, of storm and calm. Here the sun may set and rise at the same time, a rose may blossom and instantly wither away. But always remember, children: the beauty of language is priceless, but never, ever, sacrifice wisdom on the altar of beautiful words.

  ‘I once walked past a bronze statue,’ Broderzon continued. ‘It was the statue of a nameless poet. His face was like a letter in a lost tongue, and he stood there with his mouth open, as if needing more air. And on his pedestal was engraved the following short poem:

  Youth is great and daring,

  A stand against the world alone;

  But a twig in a storm will outshine

  A plant nursed quietly at home.’

  That evening, while the flame in our kerosene lamp incited the shadows to wrestle, I secretly took my fountainpen from my schoolbag, then watched as the ink began to flow. I wrote:

  Three horses, three horses, white eagles,

  Escaped the warmth of the king’s stable

  And flew into the face of the winds,

  To dance in the heart of a fable.

  At midnight, as the last ember died in our stove, my Spanish lady paid me a visit. With quivering hands she took my poem, and on her smile I erected a castle.

  Awakening

  Yuda Reznik, who taught me Yiddish literature, was a short man with thick curly hair and black laughing eyes. He always wore a skimpy tweed jacket which remembered his barmitzvah days, and a red tie that could have doubled as a shoelace. He was no saint, but one had to be blind not to see the halo of the song of I. L. Peretz about his head:

  I’ll swim around in the light

  On a zephyr undisturbed;

  Let no cloud obscure the sky

  But the earth.

  There wasn’t a female student in our class who wasn’t in love with him — and who could blame them, for he was a charmer. And a bridegroom of our language. There is more universality in Yiddish, he would say, than in Esperanto; more modernity in the old traditions than in the latest innovations. His comments on writing were phenomenal. Tell only half of what you know. Remember: a story without a shadow is a sad tale. It is not the first line of a story but the last which provokes the reader...

  His lectures were a feast of poetry, mirage and fable. When he spoke, reality was vanquished and succumbed to myth, while reason won a Pyrrhic victory over emotion. Above all there was Peretz, father of modern Yiddish literature, who lived in every fibre of Reznik’s being.

  In 1939, as Europe reached a political boiling-point, as social democracy licked its wounds after the fall of the Spanish Republic; a day or two before the first of May, when we would celebrate international brotherhood (ours being a Bundist school), Reznik fronted the class in a new navy-blue jacket with the anti-Fascist badge on his lapel. He produced a book of working-class poetry and began to read. I cannot recall the poet’s name but the last four lines of the poem are still with me:

  Not far off is the time

  Of freedom and of peace;

  It may come late or soon —

  That time is not a dream.

  On a windy morning of a grey day in 1942, somewhere in the Polish city of Pinsk, a German rope would bring about Yuda Reznik’s rude awakening.

  The Violin

  A professor of mathematics, a man who at times could be totally ignorant of the algebra of human feelings, was headmaster of our school — a school where the heart occupied the centre of all the disciplines. He lived a spartan life, his quarters a windowless cubicle somewhere among the rooms at the back. He’d never married, yet was never short of a wife.

  I can scarcely remember him without a cigarette in his mouth, and a violin under his chin. He was a nervous man, a hard man, feared rather than liked. In his sleepless nights he composed medieval cloister melodies, morbid songs which he made us sing.

  The skies are black with clouds,

  The trees the winds have torn;

  Where are you, my brother,

  Forsaken, forlorn?

  What happened to our headmaster was recounted to me years later by one of his students. After the war he had returned from the Siberian snows to his now desolate town, to his old lightless nook. He dropped his bundle of dry bones on the threadbare straw sack, and fell into a deep slumber.

  Suddenly, as if in a dream, he heard the squeak of his door. When he opened his eyes he was surrounded by a group of strange individuals. ‘Who are you, good people?’ he asked in some alarm. ‘What has brought you to me, an innocent teacher?’

  For a good minute they stood there like men without tongues. Eventually one of them, the oldest, spoke. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘we are your former students, and we have brought back your lost violin.’

  At this the spartan fell to his knees. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he found he could not hold back his tears. With quivering hands he accepted the instrument and placed it under his bony chin. And as his fingers began to dance like spider legs on the weeping strings, he invoked once again his descent into the darkness, the place where he felt most at home. At last he was free to explore the meaning of his wretched existence.

  Then, all at once, he grew mortally pale. Pressing the fiddle firmly to his heart, he fell back on the straw sack. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘thank you,’ and closed his eyes for ever.

  Juda and the French Revolution

  At the age of fourteen my schoolmates, even before they had heard or read the history of the French Revolution, were a bunch of Jacobins, each of them a Gavroche at heart, with unequivocal belief in mankind’s future and a boundless, passionate commitment to our common cause. So when our circle’s political mentor, Juda Kersh, turned up on the fourteenth of July with a radiant face and a red carnation in his meagre lapel, his words to us were like a good fall of rain on fertile soil.

  Juda was not what you might call an effervescent or exuberant man — perhaps the scholar in him dampened his spontaneity. He often spoke in a low tone, a
s if communing with himself, yet he had a marvellous way of inspiring his listeners, and an artful method of transforming events of the past into living experiences.

  ‘In the last week of April, in the year 1789,’ he began (Juda was also a fastidious historian, a great believer in dates), ‘after a stern winter, a hungry destitute crowd of Parisians, en route to the National Assembly, found their march blocked by soldiers of the Royal-Cravate regiment. When they pelted the soldiers with stones, the latter responded with gunfire, and Paris had been baptised in its first river of blood.

  ‘Yet it would be a mistake,’ Juda continued, with his melancholy smile and his head tilted slightly to the right, ‘to maintain that this incident, or various others like it, brought about the French Revolution. No, it was François Marie Arouet Voltaire’s annihilating laughter and devastating irony, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sombre, sentimental primitivism, which pierced the heart of the rotten Bourbons, and consequently drove Paris to the barricades, where bayonet greeted bayonet, where in the bleeding streets the galvanized French masses, in their red, white and blue cockades, even as they died in battle beneath their red flags, triumphantly proclaimed—’ here Juda rose to his full height and, in a voice quivering with emotion, cried out: ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité!’

  Upon this, he broke out in song:

  ‘Allons enfants de la Patrie,

  Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

  Contre nous de la tyrannie,

  L’étendard sanglant est levé...’