Old Men at Midnight (23 page)

I stood terrified.

The voice called to me again. “Benjamin, is that you?”

It was Mr. Zapiski.

“Yes.”

“Come here and help me!”

I rushed through the hallway into the parlor. There, with windows sealed and shades drawn, the air was even more stifling than in the kitchen.

“Where are you?”

“I am in the bedroom.”

I hurried across the parlor, bumping my knee painfully against an end table, and cautiously entered the bedroom.

It was a small room, with pale-green walls. A yellowing shade covered the single window. The stagnant air carried scents of medicine and camphor. I saw an old wooden chair, a narrow bed, a worn carpet, an old bureau with a mirror that stood tilted to the right. The room in the mirror looked oddly distended, a grotesque funhouse reflection, walls bare of pictures. Mr. Zapiski lay in the bed beneath a shabby gray blanket, his tall skullcap on his head. On the night table next to the bed were some books and bottles of medication. He lay on a crumpled white pillow, looking forlorn and gasping for breath.

“Benjamin, be so good as to go to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and bring me the bottle with the red label.”

That I did quickly. With a shaking hand, he poured the liquid into a teaspoon, swallowed it down, and lay back on the pillow. I stood staring at him and found that I couldn’t take my eyes off the space in the bed where his right leg should have been but that lay flat beneath the blanket alongside the rise of the left leg.

Some minutes passed and his breathing eased. I had in the meanwhile looked about the room and noticed at the side of the bed his wooden right leg and stared in fascination at the length of wood and the misshapen dark shoe attached to it.

“Benjamin.”

I took my eyes from the leg on the floor.

“Tell your father that I fell in the snow and am hurt.”

I nodded.

“Benjamin.”

He was propping himself up with his arms. The empty space where his right leg should have been gave him the look of half a man.

“Be so good as to give me my leg.”

I hesitated.

“It’s on the floor next to the bed.”

I bent and picked up the leg. An assemblage of wood, straps, grooves. Strangely cold to the touch despite the overheated room. And heavy, awkward. Holding it made my skin crawl.

He took the leg. Straps dangled awfully in the air.

“Now go home, Benjamin, and return in two days knowing backwards and forwards the rules I asked you to memorize.”

I started for the bedroom door.

“Benjamin.”

I stopped and turned. He was still sitting up, clutching the wooden leg with both hands.

“If there are any books you want to read, you may take them with you.”

My face turned hot. I hurried through the apartment without taking any of his books and left the building. The night was bitter cold. As I passed under the trestle a train roared by overhead, its lights flickering and flashing
through the darkness, and I thought I heard over the rhythmic click and clatter of its wheels a high-pitched wail like that of a child crying. But there was no one else in the street.

When I told my father that Mr. Zapiski was ill, he put on his overcoat and hat and rushed out of the apartment.

And now for the conclusion. A grand success it turned out to be, my
rite de passage
. My mother, proud. My father, accepting as his due the congratulations of our clan. My siblings, jealous. My classmates, envious of my ease with text and talk. My teachers, all lavish with praise. Myself, a light-headed turmoil of emotions: pride, joy, smugness, and exultation, as if victorious in—in what? Is this what it’s like to be triumphant in war, I asked myself at one point that day, this climbing soaring surging explosion of emotion? Then what is it like to lose, to be among the permanently wounded, the hopelessly defeated?

As for Mr. Zapiski, he congratulated me, and that pleased me more than the praise of all the others. My anxiety about whose side he and my father had fought on during the Great War soon faded. My mother sent me to him regularly with packages of food, and sometimes my father handed me envelopes with money to give him; but we rarely talked. On occasion he would offer me a book from his library, which I’d return unread. I had discovered other interests: sports, girls. My winter with Mr. Zapiski became an increasingly remote interlude. I had mastered a melody and a grammar that I now put to regular use, for my father insisted that I read periodically from the Scroll of the Law
during services in our little synagogue. I turned into an accomplished reader. People who babbled regularly during prayer would fall silent as I chanted. I became quite adept at dramatizing events like the Creation, the Flood, the binding of Isaac, the Exodus from Egypt. I developed a distinctive panache when it came to reading aloud about the various wars fought by the Israelites during their desert wandering, and in particular the Song of the Sea, which celebrates the drowning of Pharaoh and his army as they pursued the Israelites through the Red Sea. Mr. Zapiski came over to me one day and thanked me for the way I had read the section on the war against the Amalekites. He looked pale, shaky. His eyes were moist. He seemed shabbier than ever.

And then one evening my father announced at our supper table that Mr. Zapiski was returning to Europe.

I was stunned.

Day after day, from the radio and the newspapers, all we heard from Europe was the lunacy of approaching war.

“Why?” I asked.

“He wishes to return to the history he left behind,” said my father, with anger in his voice.

I stared at him in bewilderment.

My mother nodded sadly, as if she understood.

The next day I went to see Mr. Zapiski in his apartment.

About two years had passed since my last lesson. Nothing had changed inside those dim and airless rooms. The creaking linoleum, the worn furniture, the shabby rug, the shelves upon shelves of books about war. He welcomed me in his hoarse voice and brought me into the parlor and
ordered me into the chair with the encompassing seat and protruding springs that I once again felt upon my rump and spine.

“Your mother did not give you anything for me?”

“My mother doesn’t know I’m here.”

He coughed. “Does your father know you are here?”

“No.”

“What is the reason for the secrecy?”

“Is it true that you are going back to Europe?”

He shifted his right leg slightly. “And what business is that of yours?”

I said I was curious.

“Your father has already told you that I am going back. Why do you ask me if I am going back if you already know that I am going back?”

“I wanted to be sure.”

“You wanted to be sure. Why is it important for you to be sure that I am returning to Europe? What do you care what happens to Isaac Zapiski?”

I mumbled a response I can no longer recall.

He was silent awhile. Then he coughed and said, “I see you in the synagogue and in your home, but we never talk. Tell me what you are doing.”

“I go to school, I do sports.”

“Your grades are good?”

“Pretty good.”

“I’m sure they are. What sports do you like?”

“Swimming, running, basketball.”

“What do you like to read?”

“Sherlock Holmes. Books about detectives and stuff.”

“You no longer read my books about war.”

“I don’t like war and I don’t like history.”

He sighed. “This America of yours is not a country that values history. Where I was raised, history was the heart and marrow of a person. I am returning to the inside of myself that the war forced me to leave behind.”

I’ve cited precisely what he said: “I am returning to the inside of myself.”

Then, abruptly, he asked me to leave. He was tired, his leg hurt, he had things to do the following day.

The night before his departure he huddled with my parents in their bedroom, and I heard their voices raised in anger. My mother said repeatedly, “Isaac, Isaac,” and my father seemed beside himself, but they were speaking Polish and I understood nothing.

When they emerged from the bedroom, Mr. Zapiski patted my cheek with a trembling hand, mumbled some words of farewell, coughed, and hurried out, accompanied by my father, who was in the blackest of moods. My mother choked back tears.

The next day he sailed for Europe.

Weeks went by.

A letter arrived. Mr. Zapiski was in Vienna.

I asked my father, “Why is Mr. Zapiski in Vienna?”

“He is trying to get into the university.”

“Will they accept him?”

“Of course not. Austria hates Jews more than Germany does, if such a thing is conceivable.”

“Did you save Mr. Zapiski’s life during the war?”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Did he save yours?”

“He gave me his mask during a surprise gas attack and went to find one for himself but was a minute or two late.”

“How did he lose his leg?”

“When I was carrying him to the aid station a shell landed near us.”

“Was he deserting?”

“What?”

“Was he planning to desert?”

“Where do you get these crazy ideas?” But why the sudden nervous glance at the door and window? And the lowered voice like a reflex, and the abrupt, “Enough curiosity, go do your homework.” He was silent for a moment, looking at me through narrowed eyes. “Listen, I’ll tell you what I told you already. You can’t begin to understand how war binds soldiers together. Only soldiers grasp that. May you never know from it.”

“But why did he go back? Won’t there be another war?”

“He would rather be there in war than here in peace. He went back to catch up to himself.”

I didn’t understand that but felt it might be best to stop asking questions about Mr. Zapiski. A few weeks later, my father announced during supper that the new store he had recently opened was doing well and we would soon be moving to a larger apartment a few blocks away, in a house across from a park. In our language, “a few blocks away” often meant another world.

We would make good use of the added wall space in the new apartment, my father added.

“For what?” I asked.

“For the books.”

“Which books?”

“Mr. Zapiski’s books.”

Mr. Zapiski, it turned out, had left his entire library in my father’s care.

A month after we moved, Germany invaded Poland and the war broke out. We stopped receiving mail from Mr. Zapiski. As time went by and it became clear we might never hear from him again, he literally began to haunt me. Oh, yes, in the old-fashioned way, like a ghost of sorts. I would think of him, see him quite clearly in a waking vision or a dream, wonder if he was still alive, ask myself if he would have appreciated the way I had read trope that morning in the synagogue. With the entire world now at war, I began to read some of the books he had given my father. How orderly they stood on the new shelves in the hallway and eastern wall of the living room in our sunlit apartment. My mother had dusted them; indeed, had insisted on doing the task herself, turning away the help offered by me and my sister. “Go, you do your homework, and I’ll do this.” She labored with light shining from her eyes and memories softening the lines on her face. And so, as I read the books, there was no dust in the bindings and the mustiness was gone. I read books in English and Yiddish, books about the causes, tactics, military operations, and statistics of the Great War; books by and about generals, politicians, ordinary soldiers; books of memoirs and diaries. Why was I so captivated by those books? A youngster beguiled by the gallantry of war? A sudden necessary tethering to the trope teacher? Why? Crucial connections
fail me here. There were two English books that I read with absorption, though not with full understanding, during my last year in a Jewish parochial high school:
Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow
by Rabbi Lee J. Levinger, and
Anti-Semitism Throughout the Ages
by Count Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi. In all my years with my parents, my teachers, my friends, and the trope teacher, no one had ever really taught me about anti-Semitism, no one had sat me down and said: Listen, the world hates us because they say we killed their god; they say we are in league with the devil to destroy the Christian religion; they say we poisoned wells, we murdered Christian babies and used their blood to bake matzos, we loaned money to poor people at very high interest, we’ve been punished by God and made to wander eternally across the face of the earth.

In the book by the rabbi I read:

In the book by the count I read:

And I read:

And I saw illustrations of Jews in the fifteenth century wearing Jew badges; a medieval ghetto set on fire by a mob; Jews before the tribunal of the Inquisition; a synagogue in Palestine looted by Arabs; a middle-aged, balding Jew forced to walk the streets of a Nazi city, wearing a sign that said
Ich bin Jude;
he looked a little like Mr. Zapiski. Was that the world to which Mr. Zapiski had returned? What a confusion rose in me upon reading those two books! And immediately upon graduating from high school, I enlisted in the army. Oh, yes, I could have applied to a rabbinical school and received a draft deferment; or, failing that, waited to be drafted; it might have given me added months with my family. But I was a little berserk by then, decidedly out of control, in flaring rebellion against my parochial-school
world, which I felt stifling me, and bloated with manly visions of fighting the armies of Hitler. And also, somewhere along the margin of my thoughts and feelings, was the insane notion that in Europe I might meet Mr. Zapiski! My decision to enlist in the army was met with grim and silent resignation from my father and a cry of dread from my mother. And from then on Mr. Zapiski became a sort of talisman to me—a creature of magic and enchantment. But that, Davita, is another story. Thank you for the coffee and donuts. I must now bid you good night and look in upon my wife.