All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  The Kanada crew had to haul the dead from the cars to trucks. Then they stripped the living and pushed and bullied the infirm who were naked and naked mothers who were delirious, the addled naked and the naked young, and the naked elders into line-ups onto the road that led from the ramp to the crematorium, yelling, “You’ll have a shower, you’ll see, you’ll feel better.”

  After the arrivals had been cleared away, the crew portioned-off all the bread, the marmalade, the meats, and pickled herring they could empty out of broken-open satchels and suitcases. The few men, women, and youngsters who had been cordoned off to the right of the condemned, those Jews selected to live, were sent to the barbers from Zauna who were waiting to shave their heads. They were deloused and given their stripes. Most of the jewels, rings, bracelets, brooches and gold watches ripped out of the piles of clothing were handed over to officers who filched gold for themselves and sent the rest to Berlin to be melted down to help pay for the war.

  After the clearing of the ramp, several of the Kanada crew stretched out under the shade of old chestnut trees that lined the last run of rail track up to the camp, and one of the well-fed crew asked, with sudden concern, “What’ll we do if they suddenly run out of Jews, if the trains stop coming?”

  Herschel’s family was fed into the ovens in the camp. His mother, father, and four girls on the first night, and over the months, his two brothers were burned in the ovens, too.

  One day at dusk, Herschel saw, in the play of falling light, the face of an angel in the smoke rising from the stacks – he was sure it was Ezekiel’s angel, the avenger – but then the face turned to ash.

  He asked an elder, a gaunt rebbe: “If the angels have gone up in smoke, has not God, too?”

  The rebbe, without looking at him, said: “A mensch tracht, un Got lacht.” [1]

  In 1945, on a cold winter’s morning, as Soviet armoured divisions crossed the Vistula River and advanced into Poland, the prisoners in the camp were rousted out of their lice-ridden bunks in the barracks. They were herded onto backwoods roads to begin a long death march west, into Germany.3

  Herschel, losing several toes to frostbite, survived the march.

  Outside Bratislava, after the Nazi surrender, he celebrated his bar mitzvah birthday in the back of a GI troop truck. The GIs were black. One gave him a bottle of Coca-Cola. A rebbe blessed him and said, “God is good.”

  Herschel said, “Beware of the wisdom of fools.”

  “I am not a fool,” the rebbe said angrily, “and neither is God.”

  “And so why,” Herschel demanded, “are the Nazis not dead in their iniquity? Why are we, in our righteousness, dead, like my papa, like my mama, dead?”

  In a squalid displaced-persons camp outside Vienna, Herschel told a Red Cross nurse something an old prisoner had told him: “There are three truths: One, you can only trust life itself by believing lies – ‘Have a shower, you’ll feel better.’ And, two, just as profoundly absent as the presence of God is the absence of privacy – ‘If you are sleeping six starving men to a bunk, never mind the lice, the leg cramps, the snoring, it is the shit…these men shat all over themselves and each other in the night. And just as they never say God’s name, they never speak of this shit.’ And finally, shoes. ‘A man with no shoes is a man who has no future.’”

  Herschel told this to the Red Cross nurse after she had tried to stroke his arm.

  “I don’t want to be touched,” he said. “Nothing frightens me, only human kindness makes me afraid. May Hashem forgive me.”

  He drifted out of the displaced-persons camp and went to Vienna, where he worked for a fence as a runner, carrying gold to be melted down. “Behind everything there is always an oven,” Herschel said.

  He became a small-time fence himself.

  He let it be known: for Herschel, a deal was a deal, a contract a contract. He was unforgiving. He cut the cheek of a young shvindler who cheated him.

  “You’re a hard man,” a buyer from Prague told him.

  “I’m only fourteen.”

  “Even so, you’re a hard man.”

  “I wish.”

  In Toronto, he worked as a masseuse-boy and towel attendant at the Grange public steam baths, and then as an apprentice to Nathan the Fish Monger in the Kensington Jewish market, becoming expert in beheading and deboning huge carp. He stood the fish heads on a rack behind him, the eyes staring, accusing. At seventeen, Herschel, working during the day for Morris Fisch, a furrier on Spadina Avenue, enrolled in night classes at Harbord Collegiate where the other students were nearly all the sons of refugee Ukrainians. For generations, Jews had owned farm lands in the Ukraine and one young man’s family had worked on a Jewish farm. He called Herschel a “Kike.” Herschel spent two nights in jail and was expelled from the school for chopping off the Ukrainian’s little finger with his deboning knife.

  “I wanted to put his finger in with the fish heads.”

  “Such a scandal is what Jews don’t need,” Morris Fisch said. He was the owner of Cadillac Furs, Tribells, a semi-pro basketball team, and a contributor to the mayor’s re-election campaign. He threatened, over coffee with the mayor’s assistant, that if charges against Kerschel were not dropped, he would publicly name a bunch of local Ukrainians as Kapos, black shirts, and war criminals, but he also offered to send Herschel to Israel to work on a kibbutz.

  “For you to make aliyah,” he told Herschel, “to live in the Holy Land, this could be everything.”

  “It could also be nothing,” Herschel told Fisch. “They don’t wear hats in Israel. It’s too hot. They wear stupid caps. Me, I’m from a family of hatters.”

  He showed Fisch a Toronto Star photograph of a hockey crowd in the lobby of Maple Leaf Gardens and said, “Look, a thousand men all wearing hats, fedoras. For the money you’d waste on me in Israel, make me a loan instead for a shop.”

  “You’re going to sell shtreimel?”

  “In Lublin, we were pious hatters. Here, I will be a stylish hatter.”

  “And I,” Fisch said, laughing, “am Alice in Wonderland.”

  Herschel, who had no idea in the world who Alice was, told him what Ezekiel said: “Ki lo echpotz bemos hamis neum Hashem Adonai vehashivu vichu.[2]

  Fisch didn’t understand Hebrew, so he said, “What’s that mean?”

  “It means, ‘Get a new life.’”

  He changed his name to Harry Sable of Harry Sable Hats and opened a small store on Spadina Avenue. After a photograph of the Tribell basketball players wearing pearl-grey fedoras with a black band appeared in the evening newspapers, Morris Fisch and several furriers, sportswriters, hockey players, gonzos, and gangsters became his customers. When, after some three years, the young Catholic bishop – Emmett Carter – who had a reputation for elegance, let it be known in an interview in the Catholic Register that he’d bought a black fedora at Harry Sable Hats on Spadina Avenue, parish priests began, of an afternoon, to drop into the shop. Through the years, he sold hats to skaters in the Ice Capades, to Sammy Davis Jr. when he played the Barclay Hotel, to Sammy Luftspring, the boxer who had become a bouncer at the Brown Derby tavern, to Joe Kroll, the Argonaut quarterback, to Maxie Baker, the gambler, and to Al Rosenzweig, bookmaker, a farbrecher[3] enforcer for loan sharks and the Jewish mob. “I once took a finger myself,” Harry told Al. Harry had met Al at the Victory Burlesque Theatre, next door to his hat shop, when both had gone to see the Miss Sepia Top Hat Colored Girls Review “direct from Chicago.” Harry had said to Al, “There are two ways you can tell about a man. Look at his woman, look at his hat. The man who’s the boss in his bed is to be seen wearing a good hat.” He gave a firm tug to the brim of his fedora.

  Harry and Al became abiding friends, sometimes sharing a Cuban cigar in a smoking room Harry had outfitted for clients above the shop, or they’d meet at Switzer’s across the road from the shop for chicken soup with matzo balls, a smoked meat sandwich, and then a strudel or a cheesecake. They discovered they shared not just an enthusiasm for hand-rol
led cigars but for Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, especially songs by Irving Berlin. Once a month, telephoning from the upstairs smoking room, they hired expensive call girls and listened to Sinatra and Lee on Harry’s collection of 331/3, vinyl long-playing records, and drank schnapps.

  Harry’s other indulgence, which he did not share with Al, was shoes. “The future is mine,” he would say, happily confessing that there was something perverse he didn’t want to know about himself – a man missing half his toes due to frostbite who wanted to own hundreds of pairs of shoes. “I don’t go nowhere but I look good doing it.” He often shopped for shoes with baseball players. “Ball players like hats and they like shoes. On the other hand, jazz musicians, they don’t care what’s on their feet. It’s a thing you can notice.”

  Over the decades, Harry did not move from Spadina Avenue and he did not renovate his shop.

  “Who needs to? Me is me. I’m a fixture. My shop is me. I can change where I live but not my shop. People believe they know me, they do know me,” and he would point to a sign in Gothic script over the door: Beware of the Wisdom of Fools… Harry Knows His Hats.

  Surprising himself in his sixties, he married a young Jewish widow he’d met on a gambling junket to Puerto Rico. After two weeks of being married, he’d asked her why she wore false eyelashes even to breakfast and she’d accused him of being barbaric because he refused to stop wearing a hat at breakfast. “That’s only for alter kockers,” she’d yelled. Once a week, of an afternoon, she went to a tanning salon. “All the time, even in December, she was brown as a nut.” The marriage lasted six months. “She was too much sunlight,” he told Al. “The sunlight got in my eyes. I come from the dark forests. Anyway, sometimes a loss is a gain.”

  As his later years went by, Harry, though successful and secure, had fewer customers. Not many men wanted to wear hats. Very few men wore fedoras.

  “Looking back, it was stylish Mister Jack Kennedy who did it to us,” he said to Al, nodding sagely. “Everything was out in the open, bravado, the big bare-headed smile, so what happens? Kennedy, he’s wearing no hat, so he gets shot in the head…”

  Harry settled into semi-retirement. He took a spacious two-bedroom apartment on north Bathurst Street in a 14-floor concrete slab high-rise (which was really 13, he pointed out to Al, because there was no 13th floor). All the tenants were Jewish: Shoah survivors like himself, ultra-orthodox Hasidim (“hard- core,” he called them), disaffected Israelis, and Jews who’d abandoned South Africa. “I’m in Little Tel Aviv,” he said, “which may or may not be a blessing. But where else should an alter kocker be?”

  His only difficulty was in resettling his parrot. The parrot, a big bird of intense red and green feathers and a bold head, whose cage and perch were in the second bedroom, had been a gift – after Harry’s marriage had failed – from Humberto Escobar, the Puerto Rican third baseman for the Blue Jays. For five years, Humberto had bought Harry Sable hats for himself and for his brothers and cousins in San Juan. The parrot, called Humbo in honour of the third baseman, had lived with Harry for seven years in his duplex flat in the old Annex area. Harry had come to feel enormous affection for the bird. They would sit in the stillness of an hour – at times watching eye to eye – and in these moments of enigmatic silence Harry had taught Humbo how to say the names of concentration camps, and the numbers of their track lines. The squawking of those names gave Harry the only leave for laughter that he’d ever felt in his life about death. On several afternoons, since teaching Humbo the names, he had tried to explain to Al what it was like to see in his memory’s eye a rigid SS officer, immaculate in black, and to hear him squawk Auschwitz, Auschwitz, but Al said he didn’t need to know any more about the SS than he already knew, and what he knew was from the movies. He, too, thought hearing the parrot was hilarious, and so once a week Harry and Al would go for a walk with Humbo on Harry’s shoulder, and sometimes on Al’s shoulder, too.

  “Humbo’s one happy bird,” Harry would say.

  The parrot, however, did not like the high-rise elevators. He became aggressive and even abusive in the elevators, repeating the names of the camps over and over again,

  “Auschwitz, track 29.

  “Belsen, track 16.

  “Treblinka, track 9.

  “Dachau, track 3.”

  Humbo unnerved and outraged many of Harry’s new neighbours.

  One day Harry was riding the elevator up with Humbo. A fat man with slack jowls and very dark, almost black, eyes was riding with them. Harry, out of the corner of his eye, thought there was something familiar about the man, and though he couldn’t immediately place him, he was sure that they had met. Perhaps it was the hat. He was wearing a Harry Sable.

  “Nice hat,” Harry said dryly.

  “Thanks.”

  “Dachau, track 3,” the bird called.

  “Quiet,” Harry said.

  “Belsen, track 16.”

  “Someone might wanta kill that bird,” the fat man said.

  “Do I know you?” Harry asked.

  “Auschwitz, track 29,” Humbo cried.

  2

  Jakov Przepiorko, born before the war in Warsaw, was a street orphan. “Born with soot in his hair,” a policeman said, “bist a draykop.”[4] When asked where he came from, the boy replied, “Out of town.” An old rebbe, known not only in the schools but on the street as an expert on Hebrew grammar and as a mathematician, took him by the arm and asked as they walked toward the cemetery, “Which town?”

  “I won’t tell you,” Jakov said, “so you can’t send me back.”

  “Back?” the old rebbe said, tilting his shtreimel forward. “You don’t fool me. Your mother was a dirty brothel whore in Krochmalna Square.”

  “Children have been swapped,” Jakov said, “Maybe Abel for Cain. Es regnet – Gott segnet.”[5]

  The old rebbe, who came from a family of shtetl horse traders, got him a job tending the horses of several Jewish droshky drivers. Jakov fed, watered, brushed the manes of the horses, and cleaned the pus, caused by coal smoke from household-stove fires, out of the horses’ eyes.

  He also had to oil down and keep pliable the drivers’ leather whips.

  After a month at this work, sleeping on a straw pallet close by the horses so he could steal their body heat, Jakov – following the precise instructions of the rebbe – presented the drivers with a detailed bill. He asked for his money. The drivers rolled the bill up in a ball and refused to pay him.

  “Complain what you want. Tell the rebbe, we’ll whip the shit out of you.”

  He backed away from the stalls, the drivers wagging their whip handles at him. He was grinning and they thought he must be weak-minded. But he was grinning because he had, on every day of the month, been stealing money from them, stealing from the iron box they kept hidden behind the heavy harnesses hanging on the wall of the stable. He had stolen two groschen pieces a day.

  During the month, using the stolen money, he had also begun to lend money, going into Hasidic yeshivas, into the quarter around Krochmalna Street – the street of gonifs, shvindlers, and hoodlums – demanding interest of 25 percent, one groschen to four.

  At the age of fifteen he was in business, carrying a black book, a ledger, that contained a careful listing of the names of his debtors.

  Over glasses of tea he told the rebbe about the droshky drivers and about his black book. The rebbe, drawing his long gabardine around his ankles, said, “Let me tell you about a precious gift we Jews gave to royalty, royalty all over Europe. It’s about mathematics, this gift for money you have, since for you, how to add and subtract is something easy. It was not always so easy, not for us, not for the goyim. Unbelievable it may be now to our eyes, but a thousand years ago when we and the Christians did such calculations as those you are doing in your book, they were written in Latin and Hebrew. You can imagine maybe how it was to keep ledgers, to keep count, let alone compound interest by Latin numbers. Impossible,” and reaching for Jakov’s black book he turned to a
blank page and wrote:

  XXIV

  –IX

  XV

  “Who could conduct business in such clumsiness? Also, it was Christians, not Jews, who were forbidden to travel from place to place. We Jews were free. Free to go one day, free to be expelled the next day. And we took from the Arabs their numerals and added to them our galgal, our little wheel, the decimal point, that allows us to do columns of figures. We became the accountants, the keepers of compound interest and prosperity. We were hated by the Christian traders but treasured by all the great barons and royalty in their courts. No matter the hatred now, do not forget that your gift for money that makes you money is a blessing unto the Jews, a blessing still.” And he laid his hand on the cloth cap covering Jakov’s head.

  “I, too,” Jakov said, “should wear a fur hat, not a shtreimel, it doesn’t have to be only tails but, for sure, a sable hat.”

  Jakov saw:

  A Death’s Head mounted on a stake at a ghetto gate.

  Tanks, flame-throwers, and machine guns.

  And behind the gauleiters and the guns, in the city proper, gutted apartment houses like giant ruined and blackened molars.

  For five years, Jakov – like most Jews in the Warsaw ghetto – had narrowed his shoulders and narrowed his eyes, constricted in his daily business. But he had done well. “I am no fool,” he said. “I know how they dream. They intend to kill us all.”

  At twenty, he was tall, muscular, and agile – very quick on his feet – and brazen: he was curt, crisp, and a successful con man: “I hold one hand out, my fist is in my pocket.”