The Story of a Life (4 page)

Aunt Regina hated Orthodox Jewish rituals. For years Uncle Felix had tried to change her mind. Once a Jew arrived
at the estate in traditional garb. When she saw him, she began shouting hysterically, as if the house had been infiltrated by ghosts.

After Aunt Regina’s death, Uncle Felix changed, becoming increasingly withdrawn. Sometimes he’d come into town and sit in our drawing room and drink lemon tea. Father and Mother adored him. We knew he was knowledgeable in many fields, but his knowledge wasn’t flaunted, and he was never opinionated or full of himself. He would bring me special toys and talk to me as if I were already grown up, because he had a theory that children are endowed with a keen sensibility and natural intelligence and that they should be listened to. He could back this up with Latin idioms and quotes from the Talmud.

Once I heard him say to Mother, “What a pity the Jews don’t know what an incredible culture they possess. If they knew, they’d cry like children.”

When he came to the city, he would stay at our home. The hotel that he loved had gone bankrupt, and he couldn’t stand any others. Whenever he had an opportunity to come to town, he’d bring us some precious item from his collection. Mother would scold him, but Uncle Felix argued that no man knew when his time will be up, and that he preferred to distribute his valuables among those he loved and while he was still alive. I was given a lovely antique Italian violin. Uncle Felix had tested my hearing and pronounced, “Excellent hearing. You deserve a violin.”

For my part, I promised to practice every day for at least three hours.

EVEN MY UNCLE was not aware of how prescient he was: the situation deteriorated from month to month. At first he
fought with the thieves and robbers; when he was told that the robbers were actually in cahoots with the police, he pitted himself against the police. But the moment the official responsible for the region sided with the rabble-rousers, Uncle Felix had no choice but to load a truck with his household belongings and come to the city. He stored his things in our large warehouse and leased out his estate for next to nothing.

Uncle Felix lived near us in a rented apartment and would come see us once a week, sometimes twice. He no longer wore the splendid suits that he used to wear on the estate. Instead, he wore casual clothes that added a charming touch, complementing his silver hair. I never heard him complain or blame anyone. If Aunt Regina was mentioned, a slight cloud would pass across his forehead. Although they were very different, they had been close. It was not without amazement that my mother would point this out.

My uncle transferred most of his art collection to us. The pictures changed the appearance of our house; it began to look a little bit like a museum. My mother was extremely proud of the collection and invited the few friends that we had to come see it.

Uncle Felix kept his equanimity even when life became very hard. A Ukrainian estate landlord, an old acquaintance, wanted to hide him on his estate, but Uncle Felix refused. During the ghetto days, he lived with us in one room. The precious collection was with us, but we didn’t know how to save it. Finally, my uncle handed it over to the director of a local bank, who promised to keep it safe until the bad times were over. He came to collect the packages one night, a tall man with large hands. I knew we would never see this treasure again.

Winter came and packed us even more tightly together.
There was no firewood for heating, and no water. Uncle Felix, who had been an officer in the Austrian army, kept his erect bearing even during those dark days.

Afterward, on the deportation march, for the entire length of the long route through the heart of the Ukrainian steppes, Uncle Felix helped to bury people so that they wouldn’t become carrion for the birds of prey. He himself died of typhus in a barn, and Father, who wanted to bury him, couldn’t find a spade. We laid him upon a pile of hay.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1937, my mother and I traveled home on a night train. I don’t know why we left our vacation home in the village in such haste. We traveled in luxury, in a first-class compartment that was half empty. Mother read a book, and I leafed through a picture album. The mingled smells of cake and tobacco wafted into the compartment, and it was pleasant to flick through the album and to gaze around. Mother asked me if I was tired, and I said that I wasn’t.

After that the lights were dimmed. Mother closed her book and dozed off. For a long time, I listened carefully to the tiny noises that rustled in the car. Then, from a dark end of the car, a tall and buxom waitress suddenly appeared. She squatted right down on her knees, looked at me, and asked what my name was. I told her.

“And how old are you?”

For some reason, this question amused me, but I told her I was five.

“And where are you going?”

“Home.”

“A beautiful boy, bound for a beautiful city,” she said. Her words didn’t make me laugh, and yet I laughed anyway. In the midst of this, she held out her two large palms and said, “Why don’t you give me your hand? Wouldn’t you like to be my friend?”

I put my hands on her open palms. She kissed them and said, “Beautiful hands.” A strange pleasantness flowed through my body.

“Come with me and I’ll give you something good,” she said, holding me tight as she swung me upward. Her breasts were large and warm, but the height made me dizzy.

At the end of the car, she had a cubicle. The cubicle contained a folding bed, a small dresser, and a closet.

“Come, let’s find something nice for you. What would you like?” she asked, and put me down on her folding bed.

“Halvah,” I said, for some reason.

“Halvah,” she said, quite taken aback. “Only peasant children eat halvah. Children from good homes like the taste of more delicate things.”

“What?”

“I’ll show you right now,” she said. Holding both my feet, she quickly took off my shoes and socks and crammed my toes into her mouth. “Tasty, very tasty,” she said.

The touch was pleasant but made me shiver a bit. “Now let’s give this handsome young man something very tasty,” she said, and took a bar of chocolate out of her little purse. The chocolate—a cheap brand wrapped in simple paper, whose brand name was Healthy and Tasty—was a byword for cheapness and vulgarity in our home.

“Don’t you want to taste it?”

“No,” I said, and laughed.

“It’s very good,” she said, taking off the wrapping and showing me the brown bar. “Taste it. I like this chocolate.”

“No, thanks.”

“So—what chocolate do you like, my spoiled little sweetie?”

“Suchard,” I told her truthfully.

“Suchard. That’s fancy chocolate—chocolate without taste. Chocolate should be heavy and full of nuts.”

She immediately lifted me up again, swung me around, and squeezed me to her large body. “Suchard is chocolate for the rich, but it’s chocolate that’s finished too quickly. Now, we like lots of chocolate. You see?”

I didn’t understand, but I nodded as if I did.

“When does the train stop?” I asked for some reason.

“It’s the express. The express stops only at the last stop, and the last stop is Czernowitz,” she said, baring her square teeth and continuing to stroke the soles of my feet.

“Nice?” she asked.

“Very,” I couldn’t help telling her.

“I’ll keep you amused until the morning,” she said, and laughed. And as she was kneading my body, kissing and pinching me, the door of the tiny room opened, and there stood Mother at the doorway.

“What are you doing here?” Her eyes opened wide.

“Nothing at all; we’re playing. Erwin was bored and wanted to play.”

“Erwin never gets bored,” my mother corrected her.

“You were sleeping and Erwin got bored. One shouldn’t let a handsome little boy like Erwin get bored. True?” She turned her face to me. Mother for some reason didn’t take her eyes off me. She wasn’t angry, but her pinched smile bespoke suspicion.

“Have you been here a long time?” Mother asked. Now I knew that something was amiss. “Let’s go,” she said, holding out her hand.

“Erwin is a very clever boy,” the waitress said, trying to win Mother over.

“But not careful enough.” Mother couldn’t restrain herself.

“Both wise and careful, I swear to you.” The waitress spoke like a peasant woman.

Mother didn’t react. She pulled me decisively toward the corridor.

“What did you do?” she asked when we were almost at our seats.

“We talked.”

“You should be more careful.”

“Why?”

“Because these kinds of people don’t know the meaning of boundaries.”

The train moved on. The first light of dawn tinted the dark clouds with a rose-pink hue. Mother didn’t speak. Her face became more and more closed off from me. There was no doubt now—she was angry.

“Mother.”

“What?”

“When are we getting home?”

“In a while.”

“And Father will be waiting for us at the station?”

“I expect so.”

I wanted to placate her, so I said, “Seven times seven is forty-nine.”

On hearing this, she hugged me.

“Next week I’ll know the entire multiplication table, I promise.”

No one was urging me to learn the table by heart, but I apparently thought that this would make Mother happy.

“But you should be more careful.” She hadn’t forgotten my sin.

Father was waiting for us at the station. I ran up to him. He tossed me in the air and kissed my cheek.

“How was the trip?” Father asked gently. “Not bad,” said Mother dryly. “Were there delays?” “No.”

“What more could one ask?” said Father, in the tone he seemed to have adopted of late.

NINETEEN THIRTY-EIGHT was a bad year. Rumors were rife, and it became clear that we were trapped. My father sent telegrams to relatives and friends in Uruguay and Chile, he even tried to obtain a visa to America, but it was useless. Nothing went smoothly anymore. People who had previously been welcome in our house, or who were trusted business partners or childhood friends, suddenly behaved as if they didn’t know us or were transformed into enemies. Despair lurked everywhere. It was strange, but even then there were the blind optimists in our midst who interpreted every turn of events for the good; they could show, with considerable panache, that the might of Hitler was illusory, and that Germany would eventually return to what it had been before. They argued that it was only a question of time. Feeling that the ground was burning beneath our feet, Father knocked on every possible door.

In the spring, we learned that Grandfather, my mother’s father, had contracted a fatal illness, and that his days were
numbered. Grandfather took it calmly. His moonlike gaze seemed only to grow more owlish and penetrating.

One night he told my mother, “This separation between the living and the dead is an illusion. The transition is so much easier than people suppose. It’s only a change of place, going up a level.”

On hearing that, my mother cried like a baby.

GRANDFATHER’S DAILY ROUTINE was not altered in the least. In the morning, he’d leave for prayers, and on his return from the synagogue, he’d have a bite to eat, sitting on the veranda. For him, sitting out on the veranda was a sort of preparation for his daily study. Sometimes he would keep the same book next to him for many days, and sometimes he’d change it, but there would never be more than one book on his table at a time.

Father rushed from place to place, and when he came back in the evening, his face would be somber. My mother tried to please him by making his favorite dishes. After the meal, he’d sit on the sofa, his eyes closed, drowning within himself.

Death hovered everywhere, but not in Grandfather’s room. There, the windows would be open and the curtains would waft in the breeze. From time to time, my mother brought him a glass of tea with lemon. Grandfather would thank her and ask her about something, and my mother would sit by him. It was easy to see that he loved his daughter, and that having her near him made him happy.

Everyone attempted to hide the state of his health from Grandfather. They also tried to hide what was going on around us. But Grandfather knew everything, and he didn’t allow confusion or muddle to govern him. He spoke of death just as he used to speak of any long journey he was about to
take. When Grandmother was alive, she would try to get him to pack another coat or another sweater, but Grandfather loved light suitcases, and that was his argument now as well: The road isn’t long, and there is nothing to fear.

Once a day I would go in to see him. He would stroke my head, show me the letters in the book he was studying, and tell me a short story, a fable, or a parable. Once he told me one that I could not understand. When he saw that I had not understood it, he said, “Not important, the main thing is to appreciate this morning.” Even this was beyond my understanding. Nonetheless, it has remained with me to this day, like a pleasant riddle. Sometimes it seems to me that Grandfather didn’t belong with us, but had come to visit from other regions—he was so different.

That spring, he was still living in the village where he, his father, and his father’s father had been born. Initially, he had refused to abandon his farm, but when his condition deteriorated and he needed hospital treatment, he agreed to come to the city. My mother cleared out a room for him and went to fetch him in a carriage. And so he came to us.

From the moment of his arrival, Mother changed completely. Her face grew longer; she now made her way frequently and anxiously from the kitchen to his room. Grandfather asked for nothing, but Mother knew exactly what he needed. When Mother served him plum compote, his face would light up for a moment. It had always been one of his favorite dishes.

In the morning, he’d stir, get up, and go out to pray. His faith was apparently stronger than his body, which was weakening. Mother often tried to persuade him not to go to the early-morning prayers in the synagogue. But he would not agree, not even for her; going to these prayers seemed to summon fresh reserves of strength from his body. He’d return full of wonder.