Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life (47 page)

“And you believe what your father says?”

“My father knows all the books of the Bible, as well as the Talmud, with all the commentaries. He says it was all written by human beings.”

“And what do you say?”

“I don’t know. My father teaches me Bible. He says that a Jew must know everything. I might not believe in it, but one has to know.”

“And when you are
bar mitzvah
, will you start putting on phylacteries?”

“I don’t know, but my father is teaching me all the laws concerning phylacteries.”

I was aware all along that Oyzer knew much more than I, but why did he keep asking these peculiar questions? Wasn’t he afraid?

“Well,” I said, “if your father knows so much, then let him tell me who created the world.”

“Nobody did,” Oyzer replied. “The world came into being by itself.”

“What do you mean? What thing comes into being by itself?”

“See for yourself.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“If I explain it to you,” he said angrily, “will you understand?”

“Of course I will.”

“Alright then. It was Nature that created the world.”

“Nature?” I was stunned. “What’s Nature?”

“See, already you don’t understand.”

I really didn’t understand, but I wasn’t ready to give in so quickly.

“What about Moses and the Ten Commandments?” I asked.

“Nobody knows if there ever really was a Moses.”

At that moment he grabbed my hand and drew me close. I felt his hot breath on me. He had a look in his eyes that I couldn’t properly describe. This was how somebody going mad must look.

I recalled my late teacher, Reb Yankele of blessed memory, and his teaching of the Prophets. His Isaiah and Ezekiel had certainly been real people. And my other teacher, Reb Dovid—his Moses had come alive before our very eyes. So how could Oyzer have said that Moses never lived, if his portrait hung on the wall of our house, as well as in many other Jewish homes? Besides, who had stood up to Pharaoh? Who had led the Jews forth from Egypt? Who had smashed the Golden Calf? Could an entire world of Jews have gone mad and the only one to remain sane was Oyzer’s father?

I began to be afraid of that man. His hump appeared to me to be a living creature, looking at me with live eyes, laughing into my face.

“Of course,” it seemed to say, “all Jews are crazy. Do you mean to say they’re not?”

Oyzer himself, in my eyes, turned into an angry hunchback. His words tormented me. They took my father and mother from me and deprived me of both this world and the world-to-come. It seemed to me that the Sabbath was no longer the Sabbath, and the holy days no longer holy.

Despite all that, I couldn’t tear myself away from Oyzer. He both terrified me and attracted me, but apart from that, there were often times when Oyzer forgot what his father said and became a friend like anyone else, a boy like all the others. Although he attended the gymnasium and had the exalted status of “student,” he would still come up the stairs to our house on a Saturday night for a game of “Lotto” and, when Mother wasn’t home, to play “Disguise” with me.

That was our favorite game. Oyzer would bring over scraps of colored paper from his mother’s shop. When we spat on them, the color came off and we smeared it all over our faces. We turned our clothes inside out and, with brooms in hand, spread out across our large, disordered room. Oyzer was Moses, I the Israelites, and he was leading me forth from the land of Egypt.

“Come,” he said, “leave Pithom and Ramses and let us go to the land flowing with milk and honey. Enough toiling for Pharaoh! Enough slavery!”

He took me by the hand and said, “Israelites, go cautiously. This is the sea. Don’t fall into it, soon it will split. Look! The waters are already receding to the right and to the left. Come, don’t be afraid.”

We walked into the sea, that is, we stepped across the kneading board lying in the middle of the floor. Once we were safely on the other side, whole and dry, we stood up straight and burst into the biblical song of exultation and thanksgiving, as we watched the Egyptians, with their horses and chariots, drowning.

The game was fun, but often when we played it, I was gripped by an awful fear. At those times, Oyzer’s cheeks turned hollow and the whites of his eyes yellow.

When that happened, I tossed aside the broom, threw off my rags, and shouted in a voice that wasn’t my own, “Oyzer, one shouldn’t make fun. They’re going to burn us and roast us for this in the next world!”

Oyzer, it seemed, was also rather scared. He, too, threw down his broom, turned his cap back to its right side, and stood there, somewhat bewildered, his lips blue, his breath coming in heavy gasps.

We didn’t always disguise ourselves as Moses and the Israelites. At times, Oyzer dressed up as the rabbi, imitating his stiff walk, with his umbrella thrust forward, and as Bentsien, the community scribe, running after him with short, mincing steps. He imitated Aunt Naomi’s Mendl, how he puffed himself up while singing, his cheeks red, his eyes bulging.

I choked up with laughter. It was satisfying to see that Oyzer wasn’t afraid to make fun of the rabbi, of Bentsien the community scribe, of Mendl the boy singer, and even of such a wealthy man as Ruvele Beckerman.

What I liked best was when Oyzer took the blanket off the bed, wrapped himself in it, put one leg forward, and raised one hand. At that moment, his disheveled mop of black hair looked just like a brand-new broom.

Oyzer told me to stand quietly and watch him. Then, as the blood rushed to his neck, he began to declaim loudly in Russian, his chin quivering:

Oleg the seer readies himself,

To take his revenge on the foolish Khazars,

For their brutal onslaught on the villages,

For putting the fields to the torch.

His voice rang out ever louder and clearer. He was no longer declaiming but singing. This wasn’t the same Oyzer, the one who asked wild questions to which he himself had no answers. This was a different Oyzer standing there, taller, older, strange and handsome.

“Do you know what that is?” he asked.

“No, I don’t.”

“It’s
stikhi
… poetry, Pushkin’s
stikhi
. Do you know who Pushkin was?”

“No, I don’t.”

“And Lermontov, do you know who he was?”

“I don’t know anything about them. Teacher Mattias doesn’t teach us any Pushkin or Lermontov, only penmanship.”

“Wait,” Oyzer said, waving his hands. “I’ll recite something for you by Lermontov.”

Once more he put one foot forward, shook his shaggy mop of hair, and again began reciting in Russian, in a haughty, arrogant voice that made me see sparks before my eyes:

Not for nothing was Moscow set ablaze

And captured by the French.

It was a fierce battle,

And not merely a battle …

Again, I didn’t understand a thing. I had the feeling that Oyzer was addressing someone, but I didn’t know who. He was both himself and the unseen stranger. He asked a question and gave back the answer. He parried with himself.

It was only later that he told me that the Lermontov recitation was from a tale about the Emperor Napoleon, who advanced on Moscow with his army, but Russia couldn’t be conquered. When winter came and Napoleon’s soldiers began freezing to death, he was forced to retreat.

Oyzer also told me about the Pushkin of the stikhi, that he had been a member of the royal court, that he had written a story about a golden fish and about someone with the ugly name of “Mazeppa,” and yet another story about the son of an aristocrat called “Eugene Onegin,” and that he was only in his twenties when he was shot dead in a duel.

Oyzer said that when he grew up he’d like to be someone like Pushkin.

I cared nothing for this Pushkin. In any event, I didn’t know who he was. I just enjoyed listening to Oyzer. I now felt closer to him and began to like him. He said he’d teach me all the Russian poems he knew and would bring me the books of someone called Tolstoy, who went from being a count to becoming a simple peasant.

Oyzer knew everything. But I, apparently, wasn’t fated to be his student. A black cat, so to speak, came between us, an unfortunate incident that severed our friendship. Thereafter, it was many years before we again renewed our acquaintance.

I forgot to mention that, in addition to the little ledges and the cubbies, and in addition to the green pump, our courtyard also contained a small, side building that had two windows and a peeling door without a handle.

The windowpanes were black with grime. It was said that a Jew, a watchmaker, had once lived there. He had spent his life peering through a magnifying glass and, while he was at it, every year presented his wife with a male child. But none of those infants had managed to survive for very long. It was said that a heavenly decree had ordained that on the night-watch before the circumcision, the newborn babe should perish. No one knew whether it had been devoured by a black cat or had choked to death between its mother’s breasts. Suffice it to say that a wonder-working rabbi told the watchmaker to move out of the building, because at one time it had served as a brothel.

The watchmaker duly departed. Ever since, the structure stood boarded up, its black, grimy windowpanes looking like two burnt patches on unblemished skin. No Jew or Gentile wanted to move in there. At night one could hear bats rustling inside. Women said that those were the souls of the dead, uncircumcised infants.

Lo and behold! Just when we moved in, this cursed structure came to life.

Strangers arrived and pulled down its door. Carpenters and bricklayers set to work, banging and sawing, singing lustily.

All the neighbors in the courtyard rushed over to look, to see who it was taking their life into their hands by moving in there.

Oyzer’s father stuck his head inside and said that it was perfectly reasonable for people to live there. He would have done so himself, if only to taunt the idlers and the idiots who believed in demons and ghosts.

The workmen toiled day and night and the entire courtyard waited with bated breath to see who the new tenants would be. Maybe Gentiles?

No, not Gentiles.

On a wintry morning, a woman showed up. Her sleeves were rolled up, revealing two bare arms, like kneaded dough, a mixture of flour and milk. This was Khantshe the widow, a youngish woman, not wearing a wig, but with a combed black forelock, the size of a swallow, smack in the middle of her forehead.

People in the courtyard knew who Khantshe the widow was. Her father, a half-blind man, used to patch Hasidic overcoats. Her mother, bent over like a tiny Gentile woman paying respects at a church, used to like buying bargains off peasant carts, haggling until the peasant lost track of the accounting.

Khantshe herself had lived in Warsaw for many years. No one knew what she was doing there. But when Warsaw proved odious, she returned home with a big green trunk on wheels in tow, full of tablecloths and sheets, undershirts and towels, and many silk dresses.

Khantshe also brought with her from Warsaw her fifteen-year-old daughter, who was rumored to be a bastard. That “bastard” had fresh, rosy cheeks, a dimpled chin, and a large mass of dark hair.

Khantshe and her daughter were the reason for all the banging and sawing that had been going on in the cursed little building, for all that pounding on boards and all that singing. It was for them that a new white floor was laid down, the rooms freshly plastered, the doors painted. And on their first night, after the pair had settled in, two bright lamps lit up the courtyard, whose glare was so blinding that the neighbors had to cover their windows with sheets and kerchiefs.

In that cursed little building, Khantshe the widow opened a tea shop. Against one wall she had the workers install a huge boiler with heavy, brass faucets that looked like angry, bowed heads. She set up long, smoothly planed tables and benches, and, before much time elapsed, the little structure filled up with soldiers, young coachmen and their brides, and young men who simply had no other place to go to smoke on the Sabbath.

They slurped tea with lemon, served in fat, shiny, white pitchers, and munched on the big cookies and pieces of strudel that Khantshe had baked herself. They cracked dried pumpkin seeds and sang—songs from Warsaw, Russia, Buenos Aires, and America.

A new world opened up for me and Oyzer. We no longer sat on the green pump, exchanging secrets. Oyzer stopped asking me whether or not I believed in God, or whether Moses had actually existed. He simply had no more time for such questions. Many nights, we stood for hours outside the windows of the tea shop, listening to the beautiful songs from afar.

I didn’t know if Oyzer felt as I did, but in my opinion there was no nicer or better place in the whole world than Khantshe’s tea shop.

It was also quite likely that, in addition to all the songs and the general air of merriment, we liked looking at Rukhtshe, the widow’s young daughter.

I never said anything about this to Oyzer, nor he to me. But while standing at the windows, looking in through the half-drawn curtains, both of us silently searched for that figure whose image floated into our imaginations when we closed our eyes.

“Are you cold?” Oyzer asked.

“No, I’m not,” I answered, tucking my head deeper inside my collar.

“Me neither,” said Oyzer, stamping his feet in the melting snow, and then asked softly, “Can you see her?”

“Yes, I can,” I answered, even more softly, though many times I didn’t see Rukhtshe at all.

“I don’t see anything,” Oyzer said, passing his face across the cold pane in an attempt to find a wider opening in the curtains.

I thought to myself that if only, with God’s help, I could move the curtains just a little aside so as to get a full view of Rukhtshe, I’d be the happiest person alive.

Oyzer expressed his thoughts openly. He said that if he weren’t so afraid, he would have punched in the window and ripped away the curtains.

“The people sitting inside are evildoers,” I remarked. “Wouldn’t they want the windows to be covered?”

However, Oyzer gave me to understand that the curtains had to be kept half-open, otherwise the courtyard would have been left in total darkness.