A Tale of Love and Darkness (25 page)

Every evening, at ten o'clock precisely, the night express pulled out of Rovno Station, bound for Zdolbunowo, Lvov, Lublin, and Warsaw. On Sundays and Christian holidays all the church bells rang out. The winters were dark and snowy, and in summer warm rain fell. The cinema in Rovno was owned by a German named Brandt. One of the pharmacists was a Czech by the name of Mahacek. The chief surgeon at the hospital was a Jew called Dr. Segal, whose rivals nicknamed him Mad
Segal. A colleague of his at the hospital was the orthopedic surgeon Dr. Joseph Kopejka, who was a keen Revisionist Zionist. Moshe Rotenberg and Simcha-Hertz Majafit were the town's rabbis. Jews dealt in timber and grain, milled flour, worked in textiles and household goods, gold and silver work, hides, printing, clothing, grocery, haberdashery, trade, and banking. Some young Jews were driven by their social conscience to join the proletariat as print workers, apprentices, and day laborers. The Pisiuk family had a brewery. The Twischor family were well-known craftsmen. The Strauch family made soap. The Gendelberg family leased forests. The Steinberg family owned a match factory. In June 1941 the Germans captured Rovno from the Soviet Army, which had taken over the city two years earlier. In two days, November 7 and 8,1941, Germans and their collaborators murdered more than twenty-three thousand of the city's Jews. Five thousand of those who survived were murdered later, on July 13, 1942.

*Menahem Gelehrter,
The Tarbuth Hebrew Gymnasium in Rovno
(in Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1973). The Tarbuth schools were Zionist and secular.

My mother sometimes talked to me nostalgically, in her quiet voice that lingered on the ends of the words, about the Rovno she had left behind. In six or seven sentences she could paint me a picture. I repeatedly put off going to Rovno, so that the pictures my mother gave me do not have to make way for others.

The eccentric mayor of Rovno in the second decade of the twentieth century, Lebedevski, never had any children; he lived in a large house surrounded by more than an acre of land, with a garden, a kitchen garden, and an orchard, at 14 Dubinska Street. He lived there with a single servant and her little daughter, who was rumored to be his own daughter. There was also a distant relation of his, Lyubov Nikitichna, a penniless Russian aristocrat who claimed also to be somehow distantly related to the ruling Romanov family. She lived in Lebedevski's house with her two daughters by two different husbands, Anastasia Sergeyevna, or Tasia, and Antonina Boleslavovna, or Nina. The three of them lived crowded into a tiny room that was actually the end of a corridor, curtained off. The three noblewomen shared this tiny space with a huge, magnificent eighteenth-century piece of furniture made of mahogany and carved with flowers and ornaments. Inside it and behind its glazed doors were crammed masses of antiques, silver, porcelain, and crystal.
They also had a wide bed adorned with colorful embroidered cushions, where apparently the three of them slept together.

The house had a single, spacious story, but underneath it there was a vast cellar that served as workshop, larder, storage room, wine cellar, and repository of thick smells: a strange, slightly scary but also fascinating mixture of smells of dried fruit, butter, sausages, beer, cereals, honey, different kinds of jams,
varinnye, povidlo
, barrels of pickled cabbage and cucumbers and all sorts of spices, and strings of dried fruits hung across the cellar, and there were several kinds of dried pulses in sacks and wooden tubs, and smells of tar, paraffin, pitch, coal, and firewood, and also faint odors of mold and decay. A small opening close to the ceiling let in a slanting, dusty ray of light, which seemed to intensify rather than dispel the darkness. I came to know this cellar so well from my mother's stories that even now as I write this, when I close my eyes, I can go down there and inhale its dizzying blend of smells.

In 1920, shortly before Marshal Pilsudski's Polish troops captured Rovno and all of western Ukraine from the Russians, Mayor Lebedevski fell from grace and was expelled from office. His successor was a crass hoodlum and drunkard named Bojarski, who on top of everything else was a ferocious anti-Semite. Lebedevski's house in Dubinska Street was bought at a bargain price by my grandfather, the mill owner Naphtali Hertz Mussman. He moved in with his wife Itta and his three daughters, Haya, or Nyusya, the eldest, who had been born in 1911, Rivka-Feiga, or Fania, who was born two years later, and the daughter of his old age, Sarah, or Sonia, who was born in 1916. The house, I was told recently, is still standing.

On one side of Dubinska Street, whose name was changed by the Poles to Kazarmowa (Barracks) Street, stood the mansions of the wealthier inhabitants of the city, while the other side was occupied by the army barracks (the
kazarmy).
The fragrance of gardens and orchards filled the street in springtime, mingled sometimes with smells of washing or of baking, of fresh bread, cakes, biscuits, and pies, and scents of strongly seasoned dishes that wafted from the kitchens of the houses.

In that spacious house with its many rooms various lodgers whom the Mussmans had "inherited" from Lebedevski continued to dwell. Papa did not have the heart to turn them out. So the old servant, Xenia Demitrievna, Xenietchka, continued to live behind the kitchen, with her
daughter Dora, who may or may not have been sired by Lebedevski himself; everyone called her simply Dora, with no patronymic. At the end of the corridor, behind the heavy curtain, the impoverished aristocrat Lyubov Nikitichna, Lyuba, still claiming to be somehow related to the imperial family, remained in undisturbed possession of her tiny space, together with her daughters Tasia and Nina; all three were very thin, erect, and proud, and always elaborately got up, "like a muster of peacocks."

In a light, spacious room at the front of the house that he rented on a monthly basis and that was known as the
Kabinett
lived a Polish colonel (
polkovnik
) by the name of Jan Zakrzewski. He was a boastful, lazy, and sentimental man in his fifties, solidly built, manly, broad-shouldered, and not bad looking. The girls addressed him as "Panie Polkovnik." Every Friday, Itta Mussman would send one of her daughters with a tray of fragrant poppy cakes straight from the oven; she had to tap politely on Panie Polkovnik's door, curtsey, and wish him a good Sabbath on behalf of all the family. The colonel would lean forward and stroke the little girl's hair or sometimes her back or shoulder; he called them all
cyganka
(Gypsy) and promised each of them that he would wait for her faithfully, and marry no one but her when she was old enough.

Bojarski, the anti-Semitic mayor who had replaced Lebedevski, would sometimes come to play cards with Retired Colonel Zakrzewski. They drank together and smoked "until the air was black." As the hours passed, their voices became thick and hoarse, and their loud laughter filled with grunts and wheezes. Whenever the mayor came to the house, the girls were sent to the back or out into the garden, to prevent their ears picking up remarks that were unsuitable for well-brought-up girls to hear. From time to time the servant would bring the men hot tea, sausages, herring, or a tray of fruit compote, biscuits, and nuts. Each time she would respectfully convey the request of the lady of the house that they should lower their voices as she had a "blinding headache." What the gentlemen replied to the old servant we shall never know, as the servant was "as deaf as ten walls" (or sometimes they said "as deaf as God Almighty"). She would cross herself piously, curtsey, and leave the room dragging her tired, painful feet.

And once, in the early hours of a Sunday morning, before first light, when everyone else in the house was still in bed fast asleep, Colonel Zakrzewski decided to try out his pistol. First he fired into the garden through the closed window. By chance, or in some mysterious way, he managed in the dark to hit a pigeon, which was found wounded but still alive in the morning. Then, for some reason, he took a pot shot at the wine bottle on his table, shot himself in the thigh, fired twice at the chandelier but missed, and with his last bullet shattered his own forehead and died. He was a sentimental, garrulous man, who wore his heart on his sleeve; often he would suddenly burst out singing or weeping, sad as he was about the historic tragedy of his people, sad about the pretty piglet that the neighbor bludgeoned to death with a pole, sad about the bitter fate of songbirds when winter came, about the suffering of Jesus nailed to the cross, he was even sad about the Jews, who had been persecuted for fifty generations and had still not managed to see the light, he was sad about his own life, which was flowing on without rhyme or reason, and desperately sad about some girl, Vassilisa, whom he had once allowed to leave him, many years before, for which he would never cease to curse his stupidity and his empty, useless life. "My God, my God," he used to declaim in his Polish Latin, "why hast Thou forsaken me? And why hast Thou forsaken us all?"

That morning they took the three girls out of the house by the back door, through the orchard, and past the stable gate, and when the girls returned, the front room was empty, clean and tidy and aired, and all the colonel's belongings had been bundled into sacks and taken away. Only the smell of wine, from the bottle that had been smashed, Aunt Haya remembered, lingered for a few days.

And once the girl who was to be my mother found a note there tucked into a crack in the wardrobe, written in rather simple Polish, in a female hand, in which somebody wrote to her very precious little wolf cub to say that in all the days of her life she had never ever met a better or more generous man than he, and that she was not worthy to kiss the soles of his feet. Little Fania noticed two spelling mistakes in the Polish. The note was signed with the letter N, beneath which the writer had drawn a pair of full lips extended for a kiss. "Nobody," my mother said, "knows anything about anyone else. Not even about a close neighbor. Not even about the person you are married to. Or about your parent or your child. Nothing at all. Or even about ourselves. We know nothing. And if we sometimes imagine for an instant that we do know something
after all, that's even worse, because it's better to live without knowing anything than to live in error. Although in fact, who knows? Maybe on second thought it's much easier to live in error than to live in the dark?"

From her stuffy, gloomy, clean and tidy, overfurnished, always shuttered two-room apartment on Wessely Street in Tel Aviv (while a damp, oppressive September day gradually gathers outside), Aunt Sonia takes me to visit the mansion in the Wolja quarter in northwest Rovno. Kazarmowa Street, formerly Dubinska, crossed the main street of Rovno, which used to be called Shossejna, but after the arrival of the Poles was renamed Trzecziego Maya, Third of May Street, in honor of the Polish national day.

When you approach the house from the road, Aunt Sonia describes to me, precisely and in detail, you first cross the small front garden, which is called a
palisadnik
, with its neat jasmine bushes ("and I can still remember a little shrub on the left that had a very strong and particularly pungent smell, which is why we called it 'love-struck'..."). And there were flowers called
margaritki
, that now you call daisies. And there were rose bushes,
rozochki
, we used to make a sort of
konfitura
from their petals, a jam that was so sweet and fragrant that you imagined it must lick itself when no one was looking. The roses grew in two circular beds surrounded by little stones or bricks that were laid diagonally and whitewashed, so that they looked like a row of snow white swans leaning on one another.

Behind these bushes, she says, we had a small green bench, and next to it you turned left to the main entrance: there were four or five wide steps, and a big brown door with all kinds of ornaments and carvings, left over from Mayor Lebedevski's baroque taste. The main entrance led to a hall with mahogany furniture and a large window with curtains that reached the floor. The first door on the right was the door of the
Kabinett
where Polkovnik Pan Jan Zakrzewski lived. His manservant or
denshchik
, a peasant boy with a broad red face like a beet, covered with the kind of acne you get from thinking not nice thoughts, slept in front of his door at night on a mattress that was folded away in the daytime. When this
denshchik
looked at us girls, his eyes popped out as though he were going to die of hunger. I'm not talking about hunger for bread,
actually bread we used to bring him all the time from the kitchen, as much as he wanted. The
polovnik
used to beat his
denshchik
mercilessly, and then he used to regret it and give him pocket money.

You could enter the house through the wing on the right—there was a path paved with reddish stones that was very slippery in winter. Six trees grew along this path, in Russian they are called
siren
, I don't know what you call them, maybe they don't even exist here. These trees sometimes had little clusters of purple flowers with such an intoxicating scent, we used to stop there on purpose and breathe it in deeply until we sometimes felt light-headed, and we could see all kinds of bright dots in front of our eyes, in all kinds of colors that don't have names. In general, I think there are far more colors and smells than there are words. The path on this side of the house takes you to six steps that led up to a little open porch where there was a bench—the love bench, we all called it, because of something not very nice that they didn't want to tell us about but we knew it had to do with the servants. The servants' entrance opened off this porch; we called it
chyorny khod
, which means the black door.

If you didn't come into the house through the front door or the
chyorny khod
, you could follow the path around the side of the house and reach the garden. Which was gigantic: at least as big as from here, from Wessely Street, to Dizengoff Street. Or even as far as Ben Yehudah Street. In the middle of the garden there was an avenue with a lot of fruit trees on either side, all sorts of plum trees and two cherry trees whose blossoms looked like a wedding dress, and they used to make
vishniak
and
piroshki
from the fruit.
Reinette
apples,
popirovki
, and
grushi
—huge juicy pears,
pontovki
pears, that the boys called by names that are not very nice to repeat. On the other side there were more fruit trees, succulent peaches, apples that resemble the ones we call Peerless, and little green pears that again the boys said something about that made us girls press our hands hard against our ears so we wouldn't hear. And long plums for making jam, and among the fruit trees there were raspberry canes and blackberries and black currant bushes. And we had special apples for winter, which we used to put under straw in the
cherdak
—the loft—to ripen slowly for the winter. They put pears there too, also wrapped in straw, to sleep for a few more weeks and only wake up in the winter, and that way we had good fruit right through the winter, when other people only had potatoes to eat, and not always potatoes even. Papa used to say
that wealth is a sin and poverty is a punishment but that God apparently wants there to be no connection between the sin and the punishment. One man sins and another is punished. That's how the world is made.