A Curable Romantic (13 page)

I folded my hands and cleared my throat. Father’s talk had included no pictures, no charts, no helpful graphs or diagrams of any kind — he hadn’t so much as sketched anything in the air with his hands while he spoke — and I could imagine the sexual act only as well as I could, which is to say not at all, or rather
as through a glass darkly
(BT Vevamos 49b).

“No, Father,” I replied. “Thank God, everything has been sufficiently explained.”

He sighed again, apparently in wild relief.

And the boy grew and the Lord blessed him
(Judges 13:24), he said, as a way of dismissing me.

For many years afterwards, this conversation comprised the entirety of my knowledge on the subject.

IT SAYS MORE
about our town perhaps than about our father that he was not considered the least bit odd there. On the contrary, he was counted among Szibotya’s principal citizens. O Szibotya, what a strange little town you were! Its streets were muddy whether it was raining or not, and the town square was rhomboidal. We faced east in our synagogues, as tradition demanded, aware that Mother Russia had imposed herself there between the Holy One and ourselves, like an imperial censor, and few of our petitions, we suspected, were being let through. Rumors of violence on the eastern horizon sent paroxysms of fear through our little town, and fire was a problem as well. Every few years, Szibotya burned to the ground, and every few years, for reasons that defied logic, we rebuilt it again.

The market was a shambles: moist barrels of glazed-eyed fish suffocating
slowly; chickens, alive one moment, dead the next, their necks slashed, their feathers ripped out by gossiping matrons; legless men in wheel-barrows begging for crusts and, when crusts were scarce, for crumbs; porters sleeping on their boxes, shielding their eyes with their hats, their hands thrust into the mouths of their shoes, their most valued possession.

And there was nothing more terrifying than a visit to the tailor’s shop. Zusha the Amalekite was the most frightening man I’d ever known. Because his big beard crept nearly to his eyes, I couldn’t look him in the face. His hands were strong enough to break a boy in two, and his breath, which he expelled from his mouth in labored grunts, smelled as though field mice had been sucked into his lungs and died there. When, on his knees to measure an inseam, he placed his head next to mine, death seemed not only the inevitable but also the preferable consequence.

In Russia, it was said that Zusha had kidnapped boys from one town to serve in the army as the next town’s quota, and when the first town paid him, he thanked them by stealing their children to serve as a third town’s recruits. He’d made a small fortune in this way but he lost it all in bribes, fleeing from the tsarist police. Everyone knew the story: when his daughter, Frume-Liebe, slept with a Russian captain and had gotten herself pregnant, Zusha refused to let her see a doctor. Worse, when her time came, he tried to kill the baby, strangling it with a shoestring, and he would have succeeded, too, if his wife, Beyle, hadn’t restrained him. Refusing to speak to her father ever again, Frume-Liebe denounced both of her parents to the authorities before running off with her lieutenant and abandoning her child. Stuck with the baby, a brain-damaged girl they called Ita, Zusha and Beyle raced across the border and returned to Szibotya, where Ita sat now each day in Zusha’s shop on a high stool doing absolutely nothing. There was no point in sending her to school or in teaching her to cook, everyone agreed. She was an idiot first and last. Why, she could barely speak and only repeated whatever anyone said to her, but she had no idea what she was saying.

my mother greeted her, upon entering Zusha’s shop.
Shalom aleykhem.
(It was my mother’s task, of course, to take me to Zusha’s for my wedding clothes.)

“Lech … umm … shlom,” Ita repeated in her halting voice.

“You’re looking well, Ita.”

“Uhr … ‘ooken … wuuh.”

As Ita tried to repeat my mother’s words, growing flushed at the prospect of a conversation, I hid behind her skirts, waiting for the terrible interview to end. Unlike with my father, conversation for my mother had nothing to do with the littleness of man in the face of God’s terrible greatness. Talk was for her, instead, a way of bringing everyone closer to her. Large-boned and strong, she broadcast her affection everywhere she went, her words like love letters addressed to “Whomever It May Concern,” and it was no different with Ita.

“Have a good Shabbos, Itale,” she said, touching Ita’s sticky hands.

“Gud … Szpass … ‘uhn.” Ita nodded and drooled, et cetera, et cetera. Her face was flatter than it should have been, and her eyes didn’t focus, and when she breathed, a harp of snot vibrated inside her nasal passages. Because of Ita, I learned from an early age to keep immaculate care of my clothing. Adults commented upon it as though it were an oddity, but I would have done anything to avoid coming into Zusha’s shop.

“Ah, so, this is the young man who’s getting married then, eh?” Zusha barked out. Mother pretended not to hear him when he added, “Oh, yes, the whole town’s buzzing with the news!”

I’D FALLEN INTO
bad company, you see.

One afternoon, when I’d exhausted his stock without finding anything of interest, Avrum the Book Peddler asked me to stay behind. Perhaps he’d sensed my intellectual dissatisfaction — by age ten, the mandatory piety of my education had begun to bore me — or perhaps without my realizing it, when we were speaking, I’d pronounced some secret word that identified me to him as a fellow maskil. Whatever the reason, when his other customers wandered off to pray the afternoon prayers, Avrum made no attempt to hide his true feelings from me.

“Ah, just look at them, Yankl,” he said, biting into his pipe stem, “running off to beg the Master of the Universe to do all the things He put them on this earth to do for one another.” He shook his head, and I found myself shaking my own. Those little blackened figures scurrying
across the town square appeared to me for the first time as benighted and pitiable creatures of limited intellect and daring, and I wondered how I’d never seen them before in this light.

“You like to read,” Avrum said. Though it wasn’t a question, his tone demanded some sort of confirmation, and I nodded in reply. “Good. I thought so. A smart boy like you. Well, for a smart boy like you, Avrum has a special trove of books. Or didn’t you know about Avrum’s special trove?”

He spoke in such a way that anyone passing by would neither hear what he was saying nor suspect it was of any special concern: just a boy and a peddler. Perhaps the child’s mother had sent him to invite the man home for a meal or to pick up a special order. Avrum glanced over the swayback of his horse and combed the mare’s mane until he was certain no one was watching us. Then raising the plank that served as a seat on his wagon, he brought out from beneath it a handsome traveling pouch.

“These might be of interest to you, who knows?” he said, handing me a couple of books and a number of pamphlets. For a boy like me, it was like finding a buried treasure. Still, I was unsure if I could accept them. “No, no need to pay for them,” he said, “if that’s what you’re worrying about. If you enjoy them, good. If not, return them to me, no harm done. But there’s only one thing.” He attempted to make his face appear as benign as possible but succeeded only in making it seem sinister and cunning. “You might not want anyone to know what you have here. Your father, for example, or anyone with authority over you, your mother, for instance, or your teachers. We understand each other, yes? There’s a new world coming, Yankl, but it isn’t here quite yet.”

A new world! I knew these words could mean only one thing: the coming of the Messiah, the return of Israel to its national borders, the restoration of our holy Temple.

“Pah — no!” Avrum frowned, coughing out a puff of smoke. “That’s the
old
new world, Yankl! I’m speaking of the
new
new world.”

He gazed over my shoulders at the horizon behind me where, I imagined, he could see the light of this new world dawning, although it was
already almost dusk. Instead, he straightened up and said, “However, I see that your father has come to pray, and you’d better go join him.”

“Oh, and Yankl!” he said, grabbing me a little too roughly by the collar. “This remains just between ourselves, correct? That’s a good friend. Just between ourselves. That’s right. Now go!”

I crossed the square, stopping to hide the books and the pamphlets in the coal bin on the far side of the old Beis Midrash. When I entered the synagogue flushed and out of breath, Father pierced me with his customary look. It was as though each time he saw me, he had to remind himself who I was; and when he remembered, his mood darkened considerably. I returned to the coal bin after dinner, and thus began my second education as over the next year or two Avrum supplied me with all sorts of books — Lilienblum’s
The Sins of Youth
, Luzzatto’s
Samson and Delilah
, Pseudonym’s
History of a Family.
This last title was so inflammatory, Avrum told me, that its author couldn’t even sign the novel with his true name and had to use the name of an ancient Greek philosopher who’d been executed by the government for his controversial views.

“Just like Jesus,” Avrum said, spitting. “May his name be blotted out.”

AS I SAY
, this was my second education. The first began when I was only three.

When they told me I had to go to school, naturally I assumed they were joking, that it was some new game Mother had invented. My sisters will pretend to take me to this “school,” to this cheder: a
room
— they couldn’t even think up a proper name! — where they’ll pretend to abandon me; I’ll cry and they’ll return; they’ll dry my tears and, once again, when they’re baking or sewing or cooking or cleaning, I’ll be passed, like a newborn duckling, from one of their laps to the next. I was willing to play. But no, they assured me, it wasn’t a game; every little boy had to go to school. “Then let me be a girl like the rest of you!” I cried, resisting so fiercely they had to pry my arms from Gitl’s neck and carry me, kicking and screaming to this cheder. Clearly, I’d done something wrong. This
room
, as they called it, this school, was obviously a punishment of
some kind. And I wasn’t the only malefactor apprehended at whatever misdeed had sent me here. No, six or seven other boys, their dirty faces broadcasting blank stares, sat around a long wooden table, where we were all forced to read from books when anybody with any sense could have seen that none of us knew how!

I looked up at our keeper, Reb Sender. He had a thick black beard and bushy black eyebrows, but his crinkly face seemed kindly. If I behave myself, I remember thinking, Reb Sender will set me free, because unlike the other boys, who (it didn’t take much imagination to see) really
were
savages, I didn’t belong here. Surely Reb Sender will realize a mistake has been made in my case, surely he will send me home, if I show myself agreeable and compliant, and if I uncomplainingly learn to decipher those ugly black squiggles in the thumb-smudged books he kept thrusting beneath our noses even after we’d given up resisting and it was clear our spirits had been broken.