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  Across from Szymon lived our caretaker, Stasiek, a small, bald, frisky man, with a pair of eyes as vacant as two muddy puddles, and a big yellow Franz Josef moustache under his red nose. Every Sunday after church Stasiek got drunk, cursed the Jews, beat his wife and dragged her back into his dwelling; after a half-hour of pleading for mercy, she would emerge with a satisfied smirk creasing her sharp features.

  One Easter Sunday, when the sky was a blue, unblemished expanse and the snow was already thawing — though here and there the odd patch still fought for a few more minutes of white life — Stasiek entered the yard looking sombre and confused. He couldn’t work out how it was possible for a pathetic consumptive like Szymon to have crucified the Son of his God. In any case, after downing half a bottle of vodka he decided that the criminal had to pay. Abruptly if unsteadily he burst into the evangelist’s abode and, all the while shrieking ‘Where is God’s killer?’, gave Szymon’s terrified wife Doba and their two children a severe beating. She tried to plead with him: ‘Stasiek, stop it, please, stop it. We haven’t eaten for three days, Szymon is not here, he went out to try to borrow a few groshen to buy us a piece of bread.’ But the caretaker had clearly taken leave of his senses; he was in a drunken, crazy trance, and quite unstoppable.

  Suddenly, Stasiek spotted his intended victim about to enter the unlit corridor. He waited for Szymon in the shadows, then grabbed him from behind by his thin throat. Szymon’s face went blue and black, his bulging eyes seemed to mirror a final prayer, another second and he would be dead. But then a miracle. Out of nowhere Sonek appeared, picked up Stasiek like a chook, whirled him around his head three times, and tossed him like a rag doll out through the open window and into the mud outside. Still utterly composed, Sonek walked out without a word. However, while passing the bruised and bloodied local bouncer, he bent over until his face was almost pushing against Stasiek’s. ‘If I ever catch you touching Szymon with as much as a single finger, rest assured there won’t be anything left of you for the gravedigger!’

  A few minutes later Sonek returned carrying two warm loaves of bread under one arm and a bundle of dry wood under the other. As the fire in the dead stove began to sing, Sonek sat down to break bread with Szymon’s battered family.

  The following Friday, at the synagogue, Szymon imparted the whole incredible saga to a circle of open-mouthed fellow worshippers. When he had finished, one of them asked with a mischievous twinkle, ‘And did you eventually find the proper Shema in Sonek’s mezuzah?’

  Szymon looked up and scratched his head. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘last night I couldn’t sleep, so I sneaked out of bed, quietly got dressed and went outside. It was pitch-black. Almost immediately I noticed a fine sliver of light moving about in the yard, and then I heard a voice that seemed to come from inside it — a voice like the wail of a fiddle. Where are you off to, Szymon? it asked. “In search of Sonek’s Shema,” I replied. And the beam of light answered: Then seek within his heart.’

  A Social Function

  I was fascinated by the inn and bordello that stood like a forbidden secret on the corner of Masarska and Limanowskiego. Although I had attempted to negotiate its threshold many a time, I was always unceremoniously rebuffed, evidently on account of my youth. My lucky break came when one of the damsels who worked there, ‘Little Golden Hand’ (so called because of her professional dexterity), accosted me in the street one day and entrusted me to deliver a verbal message to her fiancé, the underworld boss known as Blind Max, who happened to be on a business visit to the establishment.

  Luckily, when I arrived Max was involved in a poker game, something at which no one would dare to disturb him, so they asked me to sit quietly in a corner and wait until the maestro was ready to appear out of the smoke. With thinly disguised enthusiasm, I agreed.

  While waiting I observed several robust men around the counter; they had beady eyes, short necks and hands like steel shovels, and were downing vodka after vodka. From behind the thin walls I could hear the moans of industrious females and the curses and grunts of husky males. I thought I was caught in a scene from Sergiusz Piasecki’s classic novel, Lover of the Great Bear, where men read the stars like skilled navigators, saw right through a deck of cards with grey eagle eyes, and knew exactly when and when not to draw. Then I imagined women with hefty hips and muscular arms, throwing men ceiling-high and letting them land on their sizzling bellies and roast to death...

  The staff of this specialty house were all Jewish, but its guests — wayfarers, removalists — were a rather multicultural brotherhood. Perhaps it was thanks to the common purpose shared by these two groups that the Jewish customers were tipped off. They learnt that a gang of hooligans armed with knives, sticks and iron gloves was determined, on the coming Green (Maundy) Thursday, to restore ‘holy order’ in our exclusively Jewish quarter. On the appointed day, singing lustily, the hellbent disciples boarded the evening tram that travelled from Bałucki Rynek through the Jewish district. Just before reaching Masarska Street, these hoodlums, holding to an almost military formation, abruptly disembarked — and to their unpleasant surprise were confronted by a forest of Jewish toughs, their steel fists eager for a fight!

  There was another remarkable thing about this incident. In the land of my birth, whenever defenceless Jews were being beaten up, you couldn’t spot a policeman for miles; yet on this occasion, within seconds the official guardians of the law had descended on our area like a swarm of black mosquitoes, and thus prevented the order-makers from receiving a thorough thrashing.

  In a matter of days a rumour circulated that the audacity of those steel fists might force the authorities to close down our homely institution. However, at the last moment it was miraculously saved through the intervention of the altruistic police commissioner, who sagaciously pointed out the brothel’s undeniable value and the social function it performed.

  Now more than ever I revisit, in my imaginings, my city of the waterless river. I walk for hours through the empty, eerie streets in search of a familiar face that isn’t there. The once secretive door of the bordello inn stands wide open and Little Golden Hand sits by a table draped with a red tablecloth. ‘They murdered my Max, and everybody else,’ she cries. ‘They’re gone... all gone.’

  ‘Then what is keeping you here?’ I ask her. ‘Why not leave this desolate place and join them?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she answers. ‘I’m waiting for you to forget me.’

  The Assistant

  Adjoining the timber yard just along from our block stood a small wooden dwelling. It harboured two shops: a fruiterer and a plumber. The plumber’s was perhaps not bigger than three metres by five, yet it contained a workbench, a small table, three chairs and two beds — one for the plumber Zygmunt Szulc and his wife Fernanda, the other for their nineteen-year-old assistant, Meir. This young man was an orphan who had arrived from a nearby township carrying a brown suitcase. Despite his perpetually mournful demeanour, Meir was forever cajoling me (unsuccessfully, I might add) to accompany him on one of his regular visits to a prostitute.

  Zygmunt was not actually a plumber, but since he worked with tin and there was no exact Yiddish term to describe his profession, that was how he was known. The Szulces were Jewish, but because of their dark skin, outlandish ways and peculiar solitary existence, we called them ‘the Moors’.

  A tall, slender, laid-back fellow in his early fifties, with a pair of hands that reached well below his knees, Zygmunt was a master tradesman in the production of coach-lanterns. Fernanda was in her mid-forties, vivacious, plump, with sweaty skin and fiery eyes; she wore a red scarf on her thick neck, and a huge gold ring dangled from each of her earlobes.

  I don’t know how, but before long I had befriended Meir, four years my senior, and virtually overnight he became my trusted mentor. In secret, Meir told me that the lanterns he and Zygmunt produced were attached to black coaches belonging to the upper nobility; that sometimes, when a baron, a knight or even a prince pulled in to replace a lanter
n, he, Meir, would glimpse through the partly-drawn curtains of the coach a beautiful naked young girl lying across the plush seat. This and other graphic accounts, especially those about Fernanda’s nightly doings, set my imagination aflame and enriched my sleep with joyous, uplifting dreams.

  One Sunday evening, after a hefty dinner, Zygmunt went to bed and never got up again. Fernanda screamed, slapped his face, pleaded, cried her heart out — ‘Zygmunt, Zygmunt, how can you do this to me!’ — but it was all in vain. After the seven customary days of mourning, the assistant took over his master’s role, and, like a river diverted by an earthquake, his life assumed a new and much-altered course. Fernanda seemed pleased with his work, as was Meir with her motherly care. While she was serving breakfast one morning, she mentioned matter-of-factly that she intended to increase turnover and bring in more stock, and since the place was quite small she might as well dispose of the unnecessary extra bed. Meir nodded; he had always been an obedient assistant.

  However, out of the blue, fate took a snipe at this cosiness, for the industry of wagging tongues forced Fernanda to bid an abrupt farewell to our neighbourhood. As for Meir, I don’t know what became of him — perhaps he went the way of many people at that time: to the East. Clutching the same brown suitcase he’d arrived with, the sad orphan with nowhere to go departed from our lives, never to be seen again. But his image still lingers on in the chambers of my fading memory like a bashful smile on a mourner’s face.

  Miscarried Revolution

  Ideologically speaking, our school was Bundist, and distinctly non-Zionist. A return to the land of the prophets was not our dream, but rather to make prophetic the land of our present. And although we were not a religious school, we were all (as father would have said) very much circumcised at heart.

  My noble friend Haim, incurable dreamer, his mane of sunburnt hair hanging over his thickly rimmed glasses, who would have given anyone the shirt off his back, was a misfit in either camp. Perhaps it had to do with his idiosyncratic personality, or maybe with his life at home — a sick mother whom I remember as a white moon sinking above a twilit horizon, and a despairing father who couldn’t make ends meet.

  Haim knew Marx, Engels and Bakunin before I knew the alphabet, though it was not on account of his erudition that he was known at school as ‘The Professor’, but because of the spectacles. And yes, our Professor worshipped Marx and his apostles. Once, in the middle of a geometry lesson, he rose up like a stormy red flag. ‘It’s not Archimedes’ law,’ he declared, ‘that should be taught at school, but Marx’s sociopolitical science — a science that will bring the revolution and inaugurate the benevolent socialist state, which will restore health to all sick mothers and release all working-class fathers from their daily miseries.’

  How was Haim — the lover of Jewish history who was pounding on the gates of the impossible — to know, in those heady days of socialist fever, that Marx had been a self-hating Jew whose Zur Judenfrage (‘On the Jewish Question’), written in 1843, was to become a handbook for European antisemitism? How, for that matter, was he to know that revolutions change nothing, but merely replace one tyrant with another?

  And yet, it was perhaps thanks to his very innocence that he survived. Because at the first sign of trouble in his homeland, Haim — fired with the strains of the Internationale, his heart still throbbing with Stalin’s exploits — took the road, the one paved with broken glass, to the motherland of his dreams. Alas, how quickly he learnt that a lie can be fashioned into an evil god!

  Luckily he came back alive, and time would take care of his feet, frostbitten and bloodied from their misadventure. But the soul of this outrageously, incorrigibly romantic man never stopped bleeding.

  Summer Camp

  In my early teens I joined the Jewish youth movement known as Skif. The word was an acronym for Sotsyalistisher Kinder Farband (Socialist Children’s Union); the movement dreamt of a perfect reality, of a world where children would be regarded not merely as children but as young people with equal rights.

  Naturally, when we spoke about camp in those days, we had in mind tents and summer holidays — what else? In July– August 1936, while the intrepid freedom-fighters in Spain battled valiantly for their liberty, we, the children of Skif, were enjoying our summer camp in a valley not far from Vilna under the banner Red Spain. It was known as Skif’s ‘Tenth Socialist Children’s Republic’.

  This had originally been intended as an international event; we expected Polish and German contingents of Red Scouts to join us, at least in proclaiming our children’s state. But as it turned out, the Poles and the Germans were unable to make the journey. Yet we, the two hundred or so Jewish boys and girls, were not deterred, and with tremendous gusto we upheld the international spirit of our Republic. At morning roll-call, we working-class children who spent our days in poverty and squalor stood radiantly in a huge circle, in our blue shirts and red ties, singing:

  Take our hands, sisters, brothers,

  Raise the flags heaven-high;

  Let our freedom song resound,

  Let our voices reach the sky.

  Let our freedom song re-echo,

  Let us walk hand in hand;

  Wherever brothers sing together

  The whole wide world is fatherland.

  I remember the day the floodgates of the sky broke open, and our white tents could not protect us from the sudden turn in the weather. Drenched to the bone, we crammed into a nearby barn, where, clinging to each other for warmth, we burst forth in song. At nightfall, the storm having subsided, each of us took a dry piece of timber from the barn and we sat around the fire to listen to a speaker.

  He spoke late into the night, shaping his every word with great care, and each of his sentences had a vividness, a coherence, that showed beyond doubt how it was all up to us if we wanted to bring to fruition our dream of a perfect reality. As I took hold of my hoped-for girlfriend’s hand, I noticed the full moon’s esoteric smile. In the diary of my mind I quietly noted the special feeling of that moment — a mental note I have never to this day forgotten.

  Traumas

  At the threshold of what would be the last year of my formal education, I had to change schools. I was nearly fifteen. Father couldn’t take any more of my rascally, unruly behaviour and my academic negligence, which practically every week saw him summoned to my principal’s office. Enough was enough, he said, and enrolled me in the local state school for Jewish boys. The change was quite traumatic. On several mornings, walking in a daze, I actually found myself, to my own bewilderment, in front of the gates of my former school!

  My new principal, Szelupski, was a medium-built man with soft brown eyes and a flat, greying moustache under his slightly crooked nose. ‘You have to repeat grade six,’ he told me, politely enough. I asked him why. ‘Because I have no great faith in your Yiddish schooling.’ After adding a few words about my former headmaster, whom he seemed to admire, Szelupski led me into my prospective classroom, where in front of some forty students Miss Maler, teacher of literature and language, set about interrogating me.

  ‘Do you speak Polish at home?’ was her first question.

  ‘No, Miss.’

  ‘Oh, how awful. Do you read Polish books?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered.

  ‘Well,’ said the gentle Miss Maler, who, like most of the teachers at the school, was Jewish. ‘I was led to believe that your school reads only Yiddish books... So tell us, young man, what do you like most in our Polish literature?’

  ‘Mickiewicz,’ I answered, still whispering.

  ‘Excellent,’ she exclaimed, ‘he’s my favourite writer too. And as it happens, he is next on our reading list. Perhaps you would like to inform your new friends which book by Mickiewicz you like best. You might even treat us,’ she continued with an ironic smile, ‘to a line or two from this great work.’

  I don’t know why, but I didn’t respond to the first part of Miss Maler’s request. Instead, I began to recite from memory
‘The Year 1812’, the eleventh book of Pan Tadeusz... and didn’t stop until the bell for recess shook my new teacher of Polish literature out of her state of mesmerized amazement. ‘Is that what they teach in your Yiddish school?’ she asked at last, shaking her well-groomed head.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  As she showed me to my desk, I heard her mutter: ‘If only they would stop speaking that dreadful language at home.’

  After dinner that evening I related the whole episode to my father. He was visibly upset. Obviously, the teacher’s assimilationist sentiments had made him realize that taking his son out of the Yiddish-speaking school had been a mistake. It was now too late to remedy it.

  ‘Why do they dislike Yiddish so much?’ I asked him.

  ‘Well, it’s in the nature of the assimilators. Actually, it’s not the language — it’s the people who speak it they abhor.’

  ‘Would that change if we all spoke Polish?’

  ‘No. Unfortunately, this is an ongoing historical trauma. Such characters are basically ashamed of their own people.’

  Later, as night lost its fear of the dark and the stove died in a whisper, I dreamt that I was back at my old school. The history teacher was praising my work, praising how deftly I had paraphrased a parable of Rabbi Akiva’s:

  On the banks of a sparkling river walks the mighty emperor Hadrian, enemy of the teaching of Torah. He is imploring the Hebrewspeaking fishes to join him, in a celebration of life, on the grassy banks of the sparkling river...

  Karinka

  We belonged to the same movement, Skif. She, at fifteen, was already twenty-five. A blonde with an elongated face, olive skin and deep serious eyes, she was proud and incomprehensibly fickle. A whole universe of boys, including me, was madly in love with her. And Karinka? Possessed of a nonchalant sensuality, she loved us all but cared for none of us.