Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (36 page)

Our horse stopped again.

“Januszew,” Father announced, and climbed down from the cart.

A small archway, supported by four peeling posts, let to the Januszew inn. A lanky Jew with a greenish-gray beard stepped out onto the balcony.

“
Sholem aleykhem!
… Welcome, peace unto you!”

“
Aleykhem sholem
,” Father returned the greeting.

“How are things?”

It was Lozer, the innkeeper. He helped us down from the crumpled bedding and shouted into a dark doorway, “Sore! Sore!”

A young girl, tall and skinny, with blue, scared eyes, emerged, blinking as if she’d just come in from the dark. When she saw who it was crawling out of the cart, she clapped her hands, “Oh, it can’t be!” and rushed back into the black doorway.

Here at the inn they knew Father well, which is why they were so glad to see us and why we were welcomed with such familiarity.

Sore, the lanky Lozer’s daughter, who had earlier run out barefoot to greet us, now puttered about in laced-up shoes and a red blouse. She clicked across the floor on her high heels, setting down bowls of borsht topped with sour cream, a big loaf of bread sprinkled with caraway seeds, butter she had churned herself, and cheese. Would we perhaps like some milk, straight from the cow, or maybe some pot cheese?

“So, you’re off to Lenive?” drawled the lanky Lozer.

“Yes, and I see you know all about it,” Father replied.

“Did you pay a lot for the meadows?”

“Enough.”

“And you think you’ll make a profit?”

“I don’t think we’re going to lose money, God forbid.”

“Really? And how are things in general?”

“As usual …”

Lozer rolled a cigarette of cheap
makhorke
tobacco. After several minutes’ silence, he continued his inquiries.

“Received any letters from your Leybke lately?”

“He doesn’t write very often.”

“When’s he coming home?”

“Around the High Holidays, God willing.”

“Did he at least make some money in the Russian army?”

“How do I know?”

“I know him well, that Leybke of yours,” Lozer exhaled a cloud of smoke. “I hear that he’s a good craftsman.”

“Yes, he could’ve been a master craftsman by now if not for the Russian army.”

“We’ll probably see him when he comes home on leave.”

“Probably.”

Father recited the after-meal blessings. Clusters of flies crawled around in our empty plates. Our young peasant driver had already removed the feed bag from the horse’s ears. The inn lay deep in shadow.

Mother was the first to rise from the table. She opened her parasol and walked away with a haughty air. Throughout Lozer’s exchange with Father she never said a word but kept making wry faces, a sign that she didn’t approve of the discussion.

Only after we had climbed back onto the wagon and settled down again on the bedding, and only after lanky Lozer and his daughter had gone back after seeing us off, did Mother speak up.

“Why was he so interested in news about Leybke?”

“Who cares?” Father shrugged a shoulder.

“Is that his daughter, that skinny girl?”

“Yes, she’s an only child.”

“She’s a real bargain.”

Father stared into the distance. Although the horse had rested up, it still plodded along wearily.

“He has no wife, that Lozer?” Mother resumed her questioning.

“He’s a widower, unfortunately,” Father replied, somewhat absentmindedly, and pointed into the distance.

“Look over there. There’s Lenive.”

“Where?”

I quickly stood up.

“Over there, beyond the poplar trees.”

“How much longer?”

“A good half hour yet.”

I grew restless and got up every few minutes to look. The horse turned off onto a sandy road. The axles of the cart began to creak. Several times our peasant driver doffed his cap as we passed a low, blue-painted post with a statue of the Holy Mother, at whose bare feet lay bunches of withered flowers.

The sun edged behind a barn. As it sank lower, the sky lit up, the color of molten copper. Dogs leaped out from behind fences. Cows came shambling toward us, plopping their large deposits of dung onto the sand. A distant church bell sounded. Thin wisps of blue smoke drifted upward from chimneys. There was a smell filling our noses, of bran mixed with warm, fresh milk.

Father said that he had rented a place for us from a local peasant, a whole, separate dwelling, with two windows and a vestibule. But when we got there, it turned out that the peasant hadn’t expected us that day. The other
kupiec
, that is, Motl Straw, had told him that we wouldn’t be arriving until the following week. But never mind. Since we were already here, we could sleep tonight in his barn. Tomorrow, he said, he’d clean out the hut and then we could move in for the summer.

Mother stood there in total silence, whether from anger or grief it was hard to say. Night had already fallen, but still she hadn’t closed her parasol. Father was furious with the peasant.

“What do you mean, we weren’t expected?” he said. “Didn’t I tell you explicitly that we would be coming today?”

“No, the other
kupiec
told me something different.”

A dog holding a stick between his forelegs looked out at us from its kennel. Two pale children in cotton pants hid behind a wall of the hut and stole curious glances at us.

The peasant’s wife, a young, full-breasted woman, brought out two chairs and wiped them off with her apron.

“Please,” she said in Polish, “sit down.”

She didn’t bring me a chair, but I didn’t mind. Standing up, I could get a better view of the sky and the stars. I had never seen such a black sky, with so many millions and millions of stars.

What did it matter that we’d be spending the night in a barn? To my mind, Mother ought to be pleased. After all, we’d always slept in beds crawling with fleas and bedbugs. Now, for once, we would bed down on freshly mown hay. It would be wonderful. In fact, Toybe told me that there was no greater pleasure than burying your face in fresh hay. It was, she said, like lying in grapes and apples. I didn’t know how grapes smelled. At Aunt Naomi’s, when they recited the New Year blessing over new fruit, it was over grapes, whereas we did duty with plums. Be that as it may, whether fresh hay really smelled like grapes or not, that first night in Lenive, I slept like a log.

When I opened my eyes, I saw blue streaks of daylight. Father was gone. For just a split second I thought I was home and had heard the peasant, who came daily to call for Father, tapping at our window. I sat up on the crumpled hay, still warm from the night, and found myself in a high, dark building, with swallows flying overhead.

Mother sat in a corner, now without her parasol, like a hen tucked into its feathers, holding a strand of hair from her wig in her mouth.

Toybe was stirring nearby, her black head covered more with hay than with hair. She opened her mouth in a wide yawn and stretched out her arms like a cross.

“Did you sleep?” Mother asked, passing a comb through the strand of her wig.

“Sort of.”

“And you, Mendl?”

“I slept very well, Mother.

“You weren’t bitten by fleas?”

“What fleas?”

“Find out and I’ll tell you,” said Mother and, after a brief silence, continued,

“I just don’t know where the night went.”

“You see, Auntie,” said Toybe, “the devil isn’t as black as he’s painted.”

“You may be right, but sleeping every night in a barn isn’t what I’d wish even on my enemies.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” I chimed in.

“With him, everything’s always fine.”

“But we won’t have to sleep here every night,” said Toybe. “The peasant’s going to clean out his things today.”

The peasant was indeed as good as his word. He removed all his bedding, his pots and pans, leaving only the beds, the table, the chairs, and the holy pictures on the wall.

That was utterly repugnant. Over Mother’s bed hung a small oil lamp, which, day and night, lit the dark, silent face of the Holy Mother, with the infant at her breast. Above the other bed, where Father and I slept, hung a brown wooden cross, decorated with black beads. That cross often invaded my dreams. It seemed to come down from the wall and press on my heart. Father was of a mind to tell the peasant to take down those pictures, but Mother stopped him.

“Let it be,” she said, with a frightened look. “That’s the last thing I need right now.”

So, in the mornings, because of the cross and the Holy Mother, Father had to don his prayer shawl and phylacteries outdoors. The two pale children would sneak up behind him and whisper to one another,

“Look! The Jew is praying.”

“So long as a Jew prays,” their mother explained, “it’s a sign you can trust him. Now both of you, scram!”

“What about you? Don’t you pray, too?” those kids once asked me, when no one was around.

“Of course! Every Jew has to pray.”

“Then why don’t you wear a
tsitsele
like your Father?”

They were referring to the fringes on the prayer shawl.

I told them that after I got married, God willing, I’d also wear such a
tsitsele
. They broke out in laughter, and from then on called me
tsitsele
.

I didn’t mind. I understood they were, unfortunately, poor peasant boys and couldn’t begin to understand what a prayer shawl was. On the other hand, they were good kids, with sunburnt faces and scared, blue eyes. We became friends from the second day on. Their names were Pieterke and Janek. Besides, it was fine with me that here Father wasn’t called Leyzer the hay merchant, but
Pan kupiec
, and that Mother sat in the field while the hay was being mowed, reading books.

Here, in the village, Mother was far more respected than in town. Here they looked up to Mother, whom they called
Pani kupcowa
, and considered her an educated lady, whose first husband had been a
feldsher
and who must, therefore, know a thing or two about illness herself.

The peasant women began coming to consult with her. One complained of stitches in her side, another had a cough, or was as yellow as wax. Mother applied cupping glasses, told them to take a pinch of dried, powdered Spanish fly, to rub their sides with lard. The peasant women kissed Mother’s hand, went off, and sent over others. Mother grew prouder and haughtier by the hour.

All this was plain to see. She turned brown from the sun and her warm chin became fuller and rounder. She walked about the village, a tall, stately presence, always with her green parasol open, and always with a white jabot at her neck.

Lenive proved beneficial for me, too, maybe even more so than for Mother.

At dawn, with the sun not yet risen and the roosters crowing their first blaring hymns, Father and I were already stirring, going about the morning rituals of pouring water over our fingernails, hurrying through the blessings, and then heading straight for the meadows.

A white mist hung low over the fields. The masses of grain, greenish-yellow, stood with drooping heads, sleepy and tired. The sun rose over the forest like a huge golden plate. Stable doors opened up, and lazy, rested cows shambled out into the pasture.

Bit by bit, the mist over the fields began to dissolve, like foam. From the low chimneys blue threads of smoke spiraled upward, a sign that large pots of potatoes and borsht were already on the fire.

Lenive was not a large village. It consisted of some twenty huts thrown one against the other, like wet, full sacks. From morning until evening the huts stood empty. All their inhabitants went out to work in the fields. The swish of their sharpened scythes could be heard from afar, cutting this way and that, until the wet grasses fell to the ground, like living creatures suddenly taken ill.

Father said his prayers in the forest. He stood there in his prayer shawl and phylacteries, tall and pale, swaying back and forth against an old pine tree, which probably never before had seen such strange devotions. From somewhere deep in the woods, a cuckoo was calling, with a sound like hollow, secretive tapping. Young, overworked peasant girls raised their heads, leaned on their rakes, and counted the number of trills of the cuckoo’s song. This would tell them how many weeks they’d have to wait to find a husband, how many children God would grant them, and how many more years they were still fated to live.

Soon after midday, when the white-hot sun blazed down on bent-over shoulders, women began arriving from the huts, with little clay pots of food for their menfolk in the fields. Toybe was among them.

Toybe had become even more sunburnt than Mother. Her head was wrapped in a flowered, peasant kerchief. Here, in the village, she seemed to have grown taller and more slender, just like Mother. She arrived in the field barefoot, like all the peasant women, and smiling. Her hips swayed, like a filly’s flanks.

Mother didn’t eat with us. She said that they had a table in the house with a tablecloth, and a fork with which to eat properly, and besides, she simply didn’t like strange, Gentile eyes looking her in the mouth. So she ate at home.

Had Mother asked me, I would have told her that never, in all my life, had I enjoyed tastier food than here in the field, among all the peasants and peasant girls.

The workers put aside their scythes and rakes, sat down by the rows of grain, or in the forest under a tree. The sun glared down into their pots. From deep within the woods came a restrained, sorrowful rustling. Every few minutes a different bird flew by, with different twitterings, while the slow, steady smacking of lips continued.

By the sweat of your brow, shall ye eat bread …

Father, barefoot like the peasants, in an unbuttoned vest, suntanned, with his handsome, grayish-black beard, sat among the farmhands and their women. The peasants crossed themselves, Father murmured a blessing.

Mother came down to the field only after the sun had moved from its zenith. Each day she arrived too late to see the dew on the grass, to hear the cuckoo’s song, to smell the wood smoke rising from the chimneys.

She arrived with her parasol, sat down in the shade at the edge of the forest, and began to read from her storybooks. I couldn’t understand why Mother needed books now. Reading belonged to the winter, when the windowpanes were frosted over and the oven in the kitchen was going full blast.