East of Time (9 page)

A dismayed Yosl accompanied them to where the gutter separated the cobblestone yard from the pavement. He watched with a pang in his heart as the couple walked slowly away. He was still standing there long after Nacha had disappeared beyond his homely horizon forever.

 

 
Nemesis
 

Reb Nachman the kosher slaughterer, his wife Chana and their buxom eighteen-year-old daughter Reizl occupied the ground-floor apartment of our tenement. Reizl's face was an open letter of adoration — indeed, her beauty had no equal in the neighbourhood. She worked at home as an embroiderer, and since this work demanded good light, Reb Nachman placed her machine at the window, so that the sill became an extension of her working space.

How was Reb Nachman to know that this would put his daughter face to face with a young joiner, the intense union leader Motl, known as Hercules, who shortly afterwards established his own workplace in a neighbouring flat, in a window directly opposite Reizl's? How could Nachman know that it was his daughter who, not unwittingly, ignited the flame of desire
in Motl's heart? Or that one fateful evening, Motl dropped a red rose on Reizl's windowsill?

But Nachman's wife Chana knew. She knew how Reizl secretly took the rose to her bed; how she softly invoked Motl's name in the night, whispering that he was the reason for her existence, murmuring words of eternal bliss while her fingers sought out her private parts.

Chana was not sure how to bring all this to her husband, but she was certain that such a sickness required immediate attention. The moment Nachman finished his morning prayers, she plucked up her courage and, with tears in her eyes, reminded him of all the potential perils that lay in wait for their unmarried daughter. That very afternoon the local matchmaker, Reb Fajvl, paid the family a surprise visit.

‘My dear friend,' the matchmaker began, addressing Nachman, ‘the rich widower Shlomo Levi, who is just forty, is in dire need of a wife and a mother for his two gorgeous little girls. If you agree to have him as a son-in-law, you could wish each other
Mazel Tov
tomorrow.'

Like a flame, Reizl shot up from her workbench. ‘Who sent for you, Reb Fajvl? Who asked you to find a match for me? Please take your proposition elsewhere. I already have a groom — I'll marry him, or no one.'

‘Reizl, Reizl,' her mother cried. ‘How can you shame your old father like this? Amongst our people, it's the parents' choice as to who marries whom.' The girl made no answer; she bit her lip, sat down at her machine and resumed working.

Before I knew it, I had become the lovers' trusted messenger. I read every word they wrote to each other. I can still recall their last communication exactly. ‘Dearest Motl,' she implored, ‘please hurry and rescue me from this disaster, or I'll die. Yours forever, Reizl.' ‘Sweetheart,' he responded, ‘I have just received notice to make myself available at once for military
service. We can't run away as we planned, but on my very first leave we can become husband and wife.'

Meanwhile the wedding preparations were in full swing. Chana and Nachman were overjoyed, and understood their daughter's paleness and moody demeanour as the natural signs of a maiden's pre-nuptial anxiety. It is a task beyond the best of pens, therefore, to describe their pain and desolation when, at daybreak on the appointed morning, they found Reizl's bed empty. Their howls mobilized the whole neighbourhood. To do a thing like this to one's parents, people said, a daughter had to have a heart of stone. What they all overlooked, of course, was that the gentler the heart, the heavier the stone.

Three days went by — though to Chana and Nachman they felt like three long years — and there was no trace of Reizl. In desperation, her mother visited a seer. ‘Go ten kilometres in a straight line from where you live,' the seer advised, ‘then turn right and walk five more. Sit by the lake and wait until the moon comes out. You will hear the song your daughter heard, and you will know.'

Chana went. She found the lake, and sat beside it until the moon emerged. At first she heard nothing. Then, out of the gloom, there arose (she was certain) a distant, beautiful voice:

I am Rusalka, the lake-fairy,

Abandoned alone,

Come to me, Reizl, my sweetheart,

Make my bed your home.

Reizl was buried by the cemetery fence. Although it was raining. there were hundreds of mourners at her funeral. After they had dispersed, I saw a soldier approach the grave. He bent
down and planted a red rose in the moist soil. For a long time he just stood there, like a stone statue, ignoring the downpour. When the sky was about to swallow the last morsel of light, he turned and slowly walked away.

 

 
A Deadly Dance
 

The landscape of my youth, before the curtain fell, had a certain charm, an aura of the impoverished yet playful; but more than anything else there was an aroma of eccentricity. Ours was primarily a land of schism — of Socialists against Communists, of Anarchists against Legislators, of benevolent societies against crooks and exploiters; a land of great loves and betrayals.

Our good-looking Abrasha was a bit of a vagabond, as well as a trained singer, who made his living in winter by playing cards and in summer by singing in the street. He was also a kind of political chameleon, for he seemed to belong to all parties: on election day for our municipal council you could find him on a different corner every hour, preaching a different ideology. Yet this happy-go-lucky individual was much loved, especially by women, mainly mature ones. Young girls, he would say, were nothing but trouble.

Since he was a singer, he equated everything in life with a song. For example, one of our neighbours, Malkale (who happened to be endowed with a rather impressive bosom), he would describe as a filled-out soprano in dire need of a strong baritone. Every morning, after Malkale's husband Mendl had left for work, Abrasha, who was Mendl's brother, would position himself securely outside her window, crooning:

O Dolores, please don't make a fuss;

Let me love you, no one is watching us.

I'm not sure how long this went on, but one night, at about two o'clock, there was a frantic knocking on our door. My whole family woke in alarm, and when father opened the door Mendl fell sobbing into his arms.

‘Mashinka, Mashinka,' he wailed, turning to my mother, Masha. ‘It hurts! It hurts from here to here, from here to here!' He repeated this a hundred times, pointing into his chest. ‘What am I to do? I caught them in the act, in the very act!... You know,' he continued, as mother handed him a cold drink to quieten him down, ‘I asked that bastard brother of mine,
Hey, what do you think you're doing?
And he unashamedly answered,
A tango!
and flew out.'

Mendl fell back in his chair, sweating all over. It was a miracle he didn't suffer a heart attack.

Life in our tenement was full of open secrets. One morning, as Mendl was about to shave his chin, he noticed in the mirror his voluptuous but unreachable wife stepping naked from her bed. This incensed him so much that he hurled a little stool into the looking-glass, and all of a sudden saw himself staring back at himself, fragmented into ghastly triangular shards. Was this the straw that broke Mendl's back? Or was it the fact that he couldn't satisfy his Malkale the way Abrasha did? Hard to say. Obviously he was made wretched by his hatred of a love miscarried, and so this quiet, mild-mannered Mendl became his own monster.

I cannot remember the day of the week, but I can still see the black hearse rolling into our yard, two sombre-looking men sliding the coffin into the vehicle, Malkale's arm hooked firmly into the arm of Mendl's handsome brother, both of them dressed in black, and — under the watchful eyes of our
entire tenement block — walking bowed behind the funeral procession.

The following day was like any other, and yet not the same. Abrasha stopped singing and Malkale didn't stop crying; but it was White Haskel, our very own social worker, who voiced his consoling opinion outside their window. ‘Suffering in the present,' he was heard to advise the grief-stricken lovers, ‘will not expiate the crimes of the past.'

 

 
The Assimilator