Collected Stories (68 page)

I didn’t know what to do with the check. Should I keep it till tomorrow or throw it away? I decided I would give the money to the cashier without it. I tore it to bits and threw them into the trash can.

At home, I collapsed on my bed and fell into a heavy sleep, where I found the secret of time, space, and causality. It seemed unbelievably simple, but the moment I opened my eyes it was all forgotten. What remained was the taste of something otherwordly and marvelous. In my dream I gave my philosophic discovery a name that might have been Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, or a combination of all three. I remembered myself saying, “Being is nothing but …” and there came the word that answered all questions. Outside, it was dusk. The bathers and swimmers had all gone. The sun sank into the ocean, leaving a fiery streak. A breeze brought the smell of underwater decay. A cloud in the form of a huge fish appeared out of nowhere, and the moon crept behind its scales. The weather was changing; the lighthouse fog bell rang sharply. A tugboat pulled three dark barges. It seemed unmovable, as if the Atlantic had turned into the Congealed Sea I used to read about in storybooks.

I no longer needed to scrimp, and I went to the café in Sea Gate and ordered cheesecake and coffee. A Yiddish journalist, a contributor to the paper that printed my sketches, came over and sat at my table. He had white hair and a ruddy face.

“Where have you been hiding these days? Nobody sees you. I was told you live here in Sea Gate.”

“Yes, I live here.”

“I’ve rented a room at Esther’s. You know who she is—the crazy poet’s ex-wife. Why don’t you come over? The whole Yiddish press is there. They mentioned you a few times.”

“Really? Who?”

“Oh, the writers. Even Esther praises you. I think myself that you have talent, but you choose themes no one cares about and nobody believes in. There are no demons. There is no God.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely sure.”

“Who created the world?”

“Oh, well. The old question. It’s all nature. Evolution. Who created God? Are you really religious?”

“Sometimes I am.”

“Just to be spiteful. If there is a God, why does He allow Hitler to drag innocent people to Dachau? And how about your visa? Have you done anything about it? If you haven’t, you’ll be deported and your God will worry very little about it.”

I told him my complications, and he said, “There’s only one way out for you—marry a woman who’s an American citizen. That’ll make you legal. Later, you can get the papers and become a citizen yourself.”

“I would never do that,” I said.

“Why not?”

“It’s an insult to both the woman and to me.”

“And to fall into Hitler’s hands is better? It’s nothing but silly pride. You write like a ripe man, but you behave like a boy. How old are you?”

I told him.

“At your age, I was exiled to Siberia for revolutionary activities.”

The waiter came over, and I was about to pay when the writer grabbed my check. I’m too lucky today, I thought.

I looked toward the door and saw Esther. She often dropped in here in the evening, which was the reason I avoided the café. Esther and I had conspired to keep our affair a secret. Besides, I had become pathologically bashful in America. My boyish blushing had returned. In Poland, I never thought of myself as short, but among the American gaints I became small. My Warsaw suit looked outlandish, with its broad lapels and padded shoulders. In addition, it was too heavy for the New York heat. Esther kept reproaching me for wearing a stiff collar, a vest, and a hat in the hot weather. She saw me now and seemed embarrassed, like a provincial girl from Poland. We had never been together in public. We spent our time in the dark, like two bats. She made a move to leave, but my companion at the table called out to her. She approached unsteadily. She was wearing a white dress and a straw hat with a green ribbon. She was brown from the sun, and her black eyes had a girlish sparkle. She didn’t look like a woman approaching forty, but slim and youthful. She came over and greeted me as if I were a stranger. In the European fashion, she shook my hand. She smiled self-consciously and said “you” to me instead of “thou.”

“How are you? I haven’t seen you for a long time,” she said.

“He’s hiding.” The writer denounced me. “He’s not doing anything about his visa and they’ll send him back to Poland. The war is going to break out soon. I advised him to marry an American woman because he’d get a visa that way, but he won’t listen.”

“Why not?” Esther asked. Her cheeks were glowing. She smiled a loving, wistful smile. She sat down on the edge of a chair.

I would have liked to make a clever, sharp reply. Instead, I said sheepishly, “I wouldn’t marry to get a visa.”

The writer smiled and winked. “I’m not a matchmaker, but you two would make a fitting pair.”

Esther looked at me questioningly, pleading and reproachful. I knew I had to answer right then, either seriously or with a joke, but not a word came out. I felt hot. My shirt was wet and I was stuck to my seat. I had the painful feeling that my chair was tipping over. The floor heaved up and the lights on the ceiling intertwined, elongated and foggy. The café began to circle like a carrousel.

Esther got up abruptly. “I have to meet someone,” she said, and turned away. I watched her hurry toward the door. The writer smiled knowingly, nodded, and went over to another table to chat with a colleague. I remained sitting, baffled by the sudden shift in my luck. In my consternation I took the coins from my pocket and began to count and recount them, identifying more by touch than by sight, doing intricate calculations. Every time, the figures came out different. As my game with the powers on high stood now, I seemed to have won a dollar and some cents and to have lost refuge in America and a woman I really loved.

As happens so often in New York, the neighborhood changed. The synagogues became churches, the yeshivas restaurants or garages. Here and there one could still see a Jewish old people’s home, a shop selling Hebrew books, a meeting place for
landsleit
from some village in Rumania or Hungary. I had to come downtown a few times a week, because the Yiddish newspaper to which I contributed was still there. In the cafeteria on the corner, in former times one could meet Yiddish writers, journalists, teachers, fund raisers for Israel, and the like. Blintzes, borscht, kreplech, chopped liver, rice pudding, and egg cookies were the standard dishes. Now the place catered mainly to Negroes and Puerto Ricans. The voices were different, the smells were different. Still, I used to go there occasionally to eat a quick lunch or to drink a cup of coffee. Each time I entered the cafeteria, I would immediately see a man I’ll call Joel Yabloner, an old Yiddish writer who specialized in the Cabala. He had published books about Holy Isaac Luria, Rabbi Moshe of Cordova, the Baal Shem, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. Yabloner had translated part of the Zohar into Yiddish. He also wrote in Hebrew. According to my calculations, he must have been in his early seventies.

Joel Yabloner, tall, lean, his face sallow and wrinkled, had a shiny skull without a single hair, a sharp nose, sunken cheeks, a throat with a prominent Adam’s apple. His eyes bulged and were the color of amber. He wore a shabby suit and an unbuttoned shirt that revealed the white hair on his chest. Yabloner had never married. In his youth he suffered from consumption, and the doctors had sent him to a santorium in Colorado. Someone told me that there he was forced to eat pork, and as a result he fell into melancholy. I seldom heard him utter a word. When I greeted him, he barely nodded and often averted his eyes. He lived on the few dollars a week the Yiddish Writers’ Union could spare him. His apartment on Broome Street had no bath, telephone, central heating. He ate neither fish nor meat, not even eggs or milk—only bread, vegetables, and fruit. In the cafeteria he always ordered a cup of black coffee and a dish of prunes. He would sit for hours staring at the revolving door, at the cashier’s desk, or the wall where, years ago, a commercial artist had painted the market on Orchard Street, with its pushcarts and peddlers. The paint was peeling now.

The president of the Writers’ Union told me that although all of Joel Yabloner’s friends and admirers had died out here in New York, he still had relatives and disciples in the land of Israel. They had often invited him to come there to live. They would publish his works, they promised (he had trunks filled with manuscripts), find an apartment for him, and see that he was taken care of in every way. Yabloner had a nephew in Jerusalem who was a professor at the university. There were still some Zionist leaders who considered Joel Yabloner their spiritual father. So why should he sit here on East Broadway, a silent and forgotten man? The Writers’ Union would have sent his pension to him in Israel, and he could also have received Social Security, which he had never bothered to claim. Here in New York he had already been burglarized a few times. A mugger had knocked out his last three teeth. Eiserman, the dentist who had translated Shakespeare’s sonnets into Yiddish, told me that he had offered to make Yabloner a set of false teeth, but Yabloner had said to him, “There is only one step from false teeth to a false brain.”

“A great man, but a queer one,” Eiserman said to me while he drilled and filled my own teeth. “Or perhaps he wants to atone for his sins this way. I’ve heard that he had love affairs in his youth.”

“Yabloner—love affairs?”

“Yes, love affairs. I myself knew a Hebrew teacher, Deborah Soltis, who was madly in love with him. She was my patient. She died about ten years ago.”

In connection with this, Eiserman told me of a curious episode. Joel Yabloner and Deborah Soltis saw each other over a period of twenty years, indulging in long conversations, often discussing Hebrew literature, the fine points of grammar, Maimonides, and Rabbi Judah ha-Levi, but the pair never went so far as to kiss. The closest they came was once when both of them were looking up the meaning of a word or an idiom in Ben-Yahudah’s great dictionary and their heads met accidentally. Yabloner fell into a playful mood and said, “Deborah, let’s trade eyeglasses.”

“What for?” Deborah Soltis asked.

“Oh, just like that. Only for a little while.”

The two lovers exchanged reading glasses, but he couldn’t read with hers and she couldn’t read with his. So they replaced their own glasses on their own noses—and that was the most intimate contact the two ever achieved.

Eventually, I stopped going down to East Broadway. I sent my articles to the newspaper by mail. I forgot Joel Yabloner. I didn’t even know that he was still alive. Then one day when I walked into a hotel lobby in Tel Aviv I heard applause in an adjoining hall. The door to the hall was half open and I looked in. There was Joel Yabloner behind a lectern, making a speech. He wore an alpaca suit, a white shirt, a silk skullcap, and his face appeared fresh, rosy, young. He had a full set of new teeth and had sprouted a white goatee. I happened not to be especially busy, so I found an empty chair and sat down.

Yabloner did not speak modern Hebrew but the old holy tongue with the Ashkenazi pronunciation. When he gesticulated, I noticed the sparkling links in his immaculate shirt cuffs. I heard him say in a Talmudic singsong, “Since the Infinite One filled all space and, as the Zohar expresses it, ‘No space is empty of Him,’ how did He create the universe? Rabbi Chaim Vital gave the answer: ‘Before creation, the attributes of the Almighty were all potential, not actual. How can one be a king without subjects, and how can there be mercy without anyone to receive it?’ ”

Yabloner clutched his beard, glanced at his notes. Once in a while, he took a sip from a glass of tea. I observed quite a number of women and even young girls in the audience. A few students took notes. How strange—there was also a nun. She must have understood Hebrew. “The Jewish state has resuscitated Joel Yabloner,” I said to myself. One seldom has a chance to enjoy someone else’s good fortune, and for me Yabloner’s triumph was a symbol of the Eternal Jew. He had spent decades as a lonely, neglected man. Now he seemed to have come into his own. I listened to the rest of the lecture, which was followed by a question period. Unbelievable, but that sad man had a sense of humor. I learned that the lecture had been organized by a committee which had undertaken to publish Yabloner’s work. One of the members of the committee knew me, and asked if I wished to attend a banquet in Yabloner’s honor. “Since you are a vegetarian,” he added, “here is your chance. They will serve only vegetables, fruits, nuts. When do they ever have a vegetarian banquet? Once in a lifetime.”

Between the lecture and the banquet, Joel Yabloner went out on the terrace for a rest. The day had been hot, and now in the late afternoon a breeze was blowing from the sea. I approached him, saying, “You don’t remember me, but I know you.”

“I know you very well. I read everything you write,” he replied. “Even here I try not to miss your stories.”

“Really, it is a great honor for me to hear you say so.”

“Please sit down,” he said, indicating a chair.

God in Heaven, that silent man had become talkative. He asked me all kinds of questions about America, East Broadway, Yiddish literature. A woman came over to us. She wore a turban over her white hair, a satin cape, and men’s shoes with low, wide heels. She had a large head, high cheekbones, the complexion of a gypsy, black eyes that blazed with anger. The beginnings of a beard could be seen on her chin. In a strong, mannish voice she said to me, “
Adoni
[Sir], my husband just finished an important lecture. He must speak at the banquet, and I want him to rest for a while. Be so good as to leave him alone. He is not a young man any more and he should not exert himself.”