Collected Stories (82 page)

“Tell the story,” I said.

“Eh? Can it be told? Where shall I begin? I promised to tell you everything, the whole truth, but can you tell the truth? Wait, I’ll have a cigarette first. Actually, one of your American cigarettes.”

Leon Bardeles took out one of the packs of cigarettes I had brought him from New York. I had known him over thirty years. I had once even written an introduction for a book of his poems. He was fifty-three or fifty-four and had survived the Hitler hell and the Stalin terror, but he still looked young for his age. He had a head of black curly hair, big black eyes, a thick lower lip, and a neck and shoulders that exuded masculine strength. He still wore a shirt with a
Slowacki
collar, just as in Warsaw. He blew smoke rings and gazed at me with narrowed eyes, like an artist at a model.

He said, “I’ll begin in the middle. I beg you: Don’t ask me for any dates, because when it comes to that I’m completely disoriented. It must have been 1946, or maybe it was still the end of ’45. I had left Stalin’s Russia and gone back to Poland. In Russia I was supposed to go into the Polish army, but I wormed my way out of it. I went through Warsaw and saw the ruins of the ghetto. You wouldn’t believe this, but I actually went looking for the house where I had lived in 1939—maybe I’d find some of my manuscripts among the bricks. The chances of recognizing the house on Nowolipki Street and finding a manuscript after all the bombardments and fires were less than zero, but I recognized the ruins of the house and found a printed book of mine, actually the one with your introduction. Only the last page was missing. I was amazed, but not terribly so. So many incredible things have occurred in my life that I have become completely blasé. If I came home and found my dead mother tonight, I wouldn’t blink an eye. I’d say, ‘Mamma, how are you?’

“From Warsaw I stumbled on to Lublin and from there to Stettin. Most of the cities lay in ruins and we slept in stables, barracks, and in the street, too. They berate me here in Buenos Aires why I don’t write about my experiences. First of all, I’m not a prose writer. Secondly, everything has grown jumbled in my mind, particularly the dates and names of towns, and I’m sure that I’d brew up such a stew of errors that they’d call me a liar and a fabricator. Some refugees were half-mad. One woman had lost a child and she looked for it in ditches, in haystacks, in the most unlikely places. In Warsaw a deserter from the Red Army took it into his head that there were treasures buried beneath the rubble. He stood in the bitter frost and dug with a spade among the bricks. Dictatorships, wars, and cruelty drive whole countries to madness. My theory is that the human species was crazy from the very first and that civilization and culture are only enhancing man’s insanity. Well, but you want the facts.

“The facts, to make it brief, were these: In Stettin I met a woman who literally bewitched me on the spot. You know that I’ve had a good many women in my life. In Russia there was a lack of everything except so-called love. The way I am, no danger, crisis, hunger, or even sickness can rob me of that which is now called a libido, or whatever names the professors dream up for it. It was as far from the romantic love of our youth as we’re now from Jupiter. All of a sudden, I’m standing in front of a woman and gaping as if I’d never seen a female before. Describe her? I’m not good at description. She had long black hair and skin white as marble. You must forgive me all these banalities. Eyes she had that were dark and strangely frightened. Fear was nothing unusual in those days. You risked your life every second. Russia wouldn’t let us out and we were supposed to enter Palestine illegally, since England wouldn’t let us in. False papers were arranged for us, but it was easy to tell that they weren’t in order. Well, but those eyes reflected another kind of fear. It was somehow as if this girl had been dropped on earth from another planet and didn’t know where she was. Maybe that’s what the fallen angels looked like. But those were men. She wore cracked shoes and a magnificent nightgown that she mistook for a dress. The Joint Distribution Committee had sent underwear and clothes to Europe that rich American ladies had donated to the refugees, and she had received this costly nightgown. Besides fear, her face expressed a rare kind of gentility. All this somehow didn’t jibe with reality. Such delicate creatures usually didn’t survive the war. They dropped like flies. Those who made it were the strong, the resolute, and often those who walked over the corpses of others. For all my womanizing, I am somewhat bashful. I’m never the one to make the first move. But I virtually couldn’t tear myself away. I mustered my courage and asked her if I could help her. I spoke to her in Polish. At first she was silent and I suspected that she was mute. She looked at me with the kind of helplessness often seen in a child. Then she replied in Polish, ‘Thank you. You cannot help me.’

“Ordinarily, when someone gives me this kind of rebuff, I walk away, but this time something held me back. It turned out that she came from a Hasidic home and was the daughter of a Warsaw landlord, a follower of the Alexander Rabbi. Deborah, or Dora, was one of those Hasidic girls who are raised in an almost assimilated atmosphere. She attended a private girls’ Gymnasium and studied piano and dancing. At the same time, a rabbi’s wife came to her house to tutor her in prayers and Jewish law. Before the war, she had two older brothers, the elder of whom already had a wife in Bedzin, while the younger studied in a yeshiva. She also had an older sister. The war made a quick mess of the family. The father was killed by a German bomb, the older brother in Bedzin was shot by the Nazis, the younger brother was drafted into the Polish army and killed somewhere, the mother died of starvation and kidney disease in the Warsaw ghetto, and the sister, Ytta, disappeared and Dora didn’t know where she was. Dora had a French teacher on the Aryan side, a spinster named Elzbieta Dolanska, and she saved Dora. How she did this would take too long to tell. Dora spent two years in a cellar and the teacher fed her with her last savings. A saint of a woman, but she perished during the Polish uprising. That’s how the Almighty rewards the good Gentiles.

“I didn’t get all this out of her at once but gradually, literally drawing out word after word. I said to her, ‘In Palestine you’ll get back on your feet. You’ll be among friends.’

“ ‘I can’t go to Palestine,’ she said.

“ ‘Why not? Where, then?’

“ ‘I must go to Kuibyshev.’

“I couldn’t believe my own ears. Imagine, a trip in those days from Stettin back to the Bolsheviks—and to Kuibyshev. The road was rife with danger.

“ ‘What business have you in Kuibyshev?’ I asked her and she told me a story that, if I hadn’t confirmed it myself later, I would have called the ravings of a sick mind. Her sister, Ytta, had jumped from the train taking her to the concentration camp and made her way through the fields and forests to Russia. There she lived with a Jewish engineer who had attained a high rank in the Red Army. This officer was later killed in the war and Ytta lost her mind. She was confined in an insane asylum in that area. Through wild chance, actually a miracle, Dora found out that her sister was still alive. I asked her, ‘How can you help your sister when she is insane? There she at least gets medical care. What can you do for a deranged woman without money, an apartment, or a groschen to your name? You’ll both die.’

“And she said, ‘You are perfectly right, but she is the only one left of my family and I can’t leave her to waste her years away in a Soviet asylum. It’s possible that she’ll get well when she sees me.’

“It’s usually not my way to mix into other people’s business. The war taught me that you can’t help anybody. In essence, we were all walking on graves. When you spend years in camps and prisons and stare death in the face ten times a day, you lose all compassion. But when I heard what this girl proposed to do, I was filled with a kind of pity that I had never felt before. I tried to talk her out of it time and again. I offered a thousand arguments.

“She said, ‘I know that you are right, but I must go back.’

“ ‘How will you get there?’ I asked her, and she said, ‘I’m ready to go even on foot.’

“I said, ‘I’m afraid you’re no less crazy than your sister.’

“And she replied, ‘I fear that you’re right.’

“After all his wanderings and tribulations, the person sitting here next to you gave up the chance to go to Israel, which was to me at that time the most beautiful dream, and I went off with a strange girl to Kuibyshev. It was actually an act of suicide. One thing I found out then was that pity is a form of love and, actually, its highest expression. I won’t describe the trip to you—it was not a trip but an odyssey. I can only tell you that the Reds detained us twice along the way and it failed by a whisker that we didn’t both end up in prison or in a slave camp. Dora behaved in a strangely heroic fashion during the trip, but I sensed that this was more resignation than bravery. I forgot to tell you—she was a virgin and underneath all that despair lay a passionate woman. I was used to women loving me, but this was different from anything I had ever known. She clung to me in a mixture of love and desperation that frightened me. She had an education and in the cellar where she had hidden for two years she had read a whole library in Polish, French, and German, but she lacked all experience. Every little thing frightened her. In her hiding place she had read many Christian books as well as the works of Madame Blavatsky, and occult and theosophic writings that had been left to Miss Dolanska by an aunt. Dora babbled on about Jesus and ghosts, but I had no patience for such things, even though I myself had become a mystic, or at least a fatalist, during the Holocaust. Oddly enough, she combined all this with the Jewishness of her home.

“There was no particular hardship in crossing the border into Russia, but the trains were jammed. In the middle of everything, the locomotive was uncoupled, hooked on to some other wagons, and we were left standing there for days on end. In the cars, the passengers fought constantly. A brawl would erupt and everyone would be shoved out of the wagons. Corpses lay scattered along the tracks. The cold inside the cars was frightful. Some people even rode on flatcars while the snow fell on them. In the closed cars you had to carry a chamber pot or a bottle in which to relieve yourself. A peasant sat on the roof of a car, and when the train entered a tunnel, he lost his head. And that’s how we got to Kuibyshev. All the way there, I couldn’t stop wondering at myself over what I had done. This thing with Dora was no simple affair. I had actually bound myself up with her for life. To abandon someone like that would have been like leaving a child alone in a forest. Even before we got there, we got into all kinds of conflicts, all of which had to do with the fact that Dora was afraid to leave me alone for even a minute. When the train stopped at a station and I tried to get some food or hot water, she didn’t let me get off. She was always suspicious that I was trying to desert her. She would seize my sleeve and try to drag me back. The passengers, especially the Russians, had something to laugh at. A streak of insanity seemed to run through this family; it manifested itself in fear, suspicion, and a kind of mysticism that stemmed from the time when man still lived in caves. How this primitive heritage reached all the way to an affluent Hasidic family in Warsaw is a riddle. This whole adventure that I went through remains an enigma to me to this day.

“We got to Kuibyshev and it seemed all in vain. There was no sister and no insane asylum. That is to say, there was an asylum, but not for strangers. The Nazis destroyed hospitals, clinics, and asylums as they retreated. They shot or poisoned the patients. The Nazi murderers hadn’t reached Kuibyshev, but the hospital was jammed with the heavily wounded. Who in those days worried about the insane? Well, but a woman had told Dora all the details. The Jewish officer’s name was Lipman, the woman was Lipman’s relative, and there was no reason for her to lie. Can you imagine the disappointment? We had endured the whole trek with all its miseries for nothing. But wait, we did find Ytta, not in an insane asylum, but in a village living with an old Jew, a shoemaker. The woman hadn’t invented things. Ytta had suffered from depression and had been treated for it at some institution and after a while they had discharged her. I never learned all the facts, but even those that she told me I later forgot. The whole Holocaust is tied up with amnesia.

“The shoemaker was a Polish Jew, actually from one of your towns, Bilgoray or Janov, an old man nearly eighty but still active. Don’t ask me how he got to Kuibyshev or why Ytta moved in with him. He lived in some dump, but he could patch boots and shoes and there is need for this everywhere. He sat there with his long white beard, surrounded by old shoes in a shack that was more like a chicken coop, and as he hammered tacks or drew the thread, he mumbled a verse of the Psalms. By a clay stove stood a red-haired woman—barefoot, ragged, disheveled, and half naked—cooking barley. Dora recognized her sister at once, but the other didn’t know Dora. When Ytta finally realized that this was her sister, she didn’t cry but started to bay like a dog. The shoemaker began to rock to and fro on his stool.

“There was supposed to be a communal farm, a kolkhoz, somewhere nearby, but all I could see was an old-fashioned Russian village with wooden huts, a little church, deep snow, and sleighs harnessed to dogs and skinny nags, just the way I used to see them in pictures in a Russian-language textbook. Who knows, I thought, maybe the whole Revolution had been only a dream. Maybe Nicholas still sat on the throne. During the war and afterward, I saw many reunions of people with their loved ones, but these two played out a shattering sisterly drama. They kissed, licked, howled. The old man mumbled through his toothless mouth, ‘A pity, a pity …’ Then he turned back to his shoes. He seemed to be deaf.