“You’ve lost nothing. It’ll all return. And don’t even think about going back to Poland. That would be sheer suicide. Good night.”
He left. My brother seldom mentioned the word “God.” He spoke to me like a father. After a while, I switched off the light and quietly went out. Did it make any sense now to go to Nesha’s? I had left her waiting. I could no longer bring myself to dictate to her. I didn’t even know where to begin now that my manuscript was taken away. Still, I went on until I came to her kitchen. No one was there. I began climbing the dark and winding staircase to the third floor. On the second floor, someone called my name. It was that quasi-writer and total politician I had met in Paris, the participant in Stalin’s Peace Conference, Mr. Kammermacher. He confronted me and asked, “What are you doing here?”
I had stumbled upon the worst gossip in the Yiddish literary family. I heard myself say, “I live here,” and I immediately regretted my words.
“Oh? So you have been hiding right here all this time?”
“I just moved in today.”
“You don’t live with your brother?”
“I took a room here to work in.”
“Where is your room?”
“On the third floor.”
“Really? Nesha said the third floor is unoccupied.”
I didn’t answer him and continued up to the third floor. It was dark and I couldn’t find number thirty-six. I stood and waited for Nesha to show up. Meeting that fellow traveler here had complicated everything. He would assuredly inform the writers downstairs that I had moved in here and place Nesha in an embarrassing position. They would begin pestering her as to her reasons for keeping this a secret. They were even capable of coming upstairs to welcome me and encounter me standing here in the dark. I felt around for a light switch on the wall but I couldn’t find one. I tried the doors to the rooms and none of them was locked. I walked inside one of them and tapped around for a light switch. Why hadn’t she had the sense to leave a light on in the hallway or in room number thirty-six? I supplied my own answer: She had been waiting for me there, but after close to an hour had gone by, and I hadn’t appeared, she had decided that I had changed my mind about the whole matter.
My eyes began to grow accustomed to the dark. From somewhere outside issued the reflection of a light and I saw a bed with only a sheet over the mattress, without pillow or cover. I left the door open and stretched out on the bed. If Nesha came, I would hear her footsteps. I needed a rest after all those mishaps.
I had dozed off and a dream of flying took over—I didn’t fly like a bird but I glided in the air, floating in twilight and wondering why I didn’t attempt this before. I knew that mountains, forests, rivers, oceans were stretching out under me, but I had no curiosity to look at them. There was peace in this dusk. Night was approaching like a cloud, lit up by an otherworldly sunset. Thank God, it’s all over, I said to myself. Someone touched me and woke me. It took a while before I realized where I was and who it was rousing me.
Seven
1
A year had gone by. The novel turned out badly but the editor let it run to its conclusion and I managed to save up a thousand dollars. I had ceased writing fiction and supported myself from a short column that appeared every Sunday under the title “It’s Worthwhile Knowing”—“facts” culled from American Magazines: How long would a man’s beard be if he lived to seventy and all the hairs he had shaved off during his lifetime were laid end to end? How much did the heaviest specimen of a whale weigh? How large was the vocabulary of a Zulu? I received sixteen dollars per column and this was more than enough for me to pay five dollars per week rent for a furnished room on East Nineteenth Street off Fourth Avenue, and to eat in cafeterias. I even had enough left over to take Nesha to the movies once a week.
My tourist visa had already been extended twice, but when I applied for a third time, it was extended for three more months with the stipulation that this was the last time this would be done. I had some ten weeks in which to obtain a permanent visa or go back to Poland, where Hitler was liable to march in at any time.
I was connected with a lawyer who was supposed to obtain this visa for me, but the last time I had seen him he had told me frankly that I had nothing to hope for. I was lacking vital documents that the American consul in Toronto would demand—in particular, a certificate of moral character from Poland. I had written Stefa several times and she had made efforts to obtain this for me, but the Polish officials posed difficulties and demanded other documents which I couldn’t supply. I had lost my military status booklet and other official papers. I suspected that Stefa wanted me back in Poland. She wrote me long letters frequently, forgetting to mention the certificate that I asked for. My cousin Esther had gone back to her hometown. My former publisher, who had gone bankrupt, had left Warsaw. I wrote to some others, but they didn’t answer. Who in Warsaw had the time or the strength to stand in lines and to deal with lazy bureaucrats who merely sought an opportunity to say “no,” particularly when the petitioner was a Jew? There remained one solution for me—to marry Nesha. But I had taken a holy vow not to marry on account of a visa, not even if it meant my having to leave America. The reason for my obstinacy regarding this matter is something that isn’t clear to me to this day. I knew a few writers who had done just this and I looked upon them as undignified creatures. Perhaps the incident with my certificate to Palestine, years ago, about the time I met Stefa, had left a bad taste in my mouth. I loved Nesha, but I knew that all the Yiddish writers would know that I had married her for the visa. I was most of all ashamed before my brother. Our parents had raised us to have an aversion toward any kind of sham or swindle. The fact was that this marriage wouldn’t have benefited Nesha either. She might have gone through with it to save me from the Nazis, but it would have represented a sacrifice on her part. Besides, I had told her at the very onset of our affair that I didn’t believe in the institution of marriage. Nor did she have any desire to give her son a stepfather such as I, a pauper, a bohemian who was ten years younger than she. I knew that she had lost faith in me and in my future as a writer.
It had all become routine. Twice a week she came to me in my room up on the fourth floor and although I forbade her to do this, she often brought me food. She warned me constantly that cafeteria food was liable to make me sick. That summer Nesha hadn’t leased the house in Seagate. She had gotten a job as a draper in a woman’s underwear factory in downtown New York City and had rented a walk-up apartment in the Bronx. My room consisted of a bed, a small table that wobbled on the rare occasions when I tried to write on it, one lame chair, and a sink with a faucet that constantly dripped brown water. From beneath the cracked linoleum, cockroaches crawled. At night bedbugs emerged from the walls. Once a month the exterminator came, leaving a stench that lingered for a week afterward. The vermin seemed to have acquired immunity to the poison. But the sun shone here in the afternoons and there was a bathroom in the hall where I could take a bath or shower after ten in the morning when the other tenants had gone to work.
I had lost the urge to write but I still kept a notebook in which I jotted down themes for novels, stories, regimens of behavior which I never followed, as well as ideas about God, “the thing in itself,” angels, ghosts, and beings on other planets thousands or millions of light-years from the earth. I still hadn’t completely abandoned my hopes of uncovering—while awake or dreaming—the secrets of Creation, the purpose of life, the mission of man. I was wasting hours on all kinds of fantasies about megalomaniac achievements. I had a harem of beauties. I possessed a magnetism that no woman could resist. I found the means of freeing mankind from the Hitlers, the Stalins, from all sorts of exploiters and criminals, and gave the Land of Israel back to the Jews. I cured all the sick, extended the life of man and of beast for hundreds of years, and brought the dead back to life.
Going to bed with Nesha was a new experience each time. She would come to me one day a week directly from work, and another day, from her
home in the Bronx. True, she often reproached me for having ceased writing, for being lazy and lacking in practical ambition. She often scolded me for neglecting to visit my brother, who had rented a large apartment on Riverside Drive, and for staying away from the Cafe Royal and the writers’ gatherings and banquets. A young man my age had no right becoming a hermit. Such conduct could lead to madness. But following her lecture and after we had partaken of the supper she had brought or we had eaten at the Steward Cafeteria on Twenty-third Street, we would begin a session of lovemaking which would last for hours, sometimes until midnight.
This woman evoked powers within me I had never imagined I had before. Apparently I affected her in the same way. We fell upon one another with a hunger that astounded us both. She hadn’t lost her husband, she assured me—his spirit had entered my body. He spoke to her out of my mouth, he kissed her out of my lips. I, on the other hand, recognized Gina within her. While Nesha was with me I lost all my worries, all the fears. I called her Gina and she called me Boris. We played with the idea that by some cabalistic combinations of letters we were able to resurrect Boris and Gina for the time of our love game and all four of us indulged together in a mystic orgy where bodies and souls copulated and where sex play and heavenly knowledge became identical. We often vowed to each other to flee to California, to Brazil, to the wilds of British Columbia, and surrender ourselves completely to our passion. Nesha even blurted out that she would leave her son with Boris’s relatives. But as our lust gradually subsided, Nesha told me that she would sooner let her eyes be plucked out than part with her Benny, who was named after her late father, Reb Benjamin, a pious Jew, a scholar. I reminded myself that my weeks in America were numbered. If I wouldn’t or couldn’t marry Nesha, I would be forced to go back to Poland, or try to remain in the United States illegally. But how? And where? And for how long?
Since Nesha had come to me early that day, our love session ended sooner than usual. By ten-thirty, we were already dressed. We walked down in silence the four flights, ashamed of our ridiculous dreams, exhausted from our repetitious raving. Nineteenth Street was dim and deserted. So was Fourth Avenue. Only the cars raced to and fro. I had neglected to deliver my column, “It’s Worthwhile Knowing,” and I had to go to East Broadway this very night and leave it to be set early the following morning if it was to appear on Sunday. Following my fiasco with the novel, I avoided showing my face to the Forward writers and I always dropped off my copy late in the evenings when all the staff members were gone. On the tenth floor, where the typesetting was done, there was a metal box where writers deposited copy that didn’t have to first pass through the hands of editors. For some reason the editor of the Sunday edition trusted my Yiddish.
I escorted Nesha to the subway station and on the way we stopped at the Fourteenth Street Cafeteria for a bite to eat and a cup of coffee. This cafeteria did its best business at night. It had become a gathering place for all kinds of leftists—Stalinists, Trotskyites, anarchists, various radicals and social rebels. Here, they discussed the latest issues of The Daily Worker and the Yiddish Freiheit, articles in New Republic and The Nation. By 11 P.M. one could already get items from the next day’s breakfast: oatmeal, farina, dry cereals, fried eggs with sausage and potatoes. Many of the patrons were Jews, but there were some Gentiles too—men with long hair and beards, elderly socialists, vegetarians, and those who preached their own versions of Christianity or predicted the imminent return of Jesus, who would judge the world prior to its end. Homosexual males and lesbians also made this their meeting place. The harsh glare of the ceiling lights blinded the eyes; the noise of the patrons and the dishes deafened the ears. The air was thick with the smoke of cigarettes. Girls with short hair and in leather jackets à la Cheka smoked, sipped black coffee, shouted the latest slogans from Moscow, cursed all the fascists, social democrats, Hearst, Leon Blum, Macdonald, Trotsky, Norman Thomas, Abe Cahan, even Roosevelt for allegedly supporting the liberals while he actually served Hilter, Franco, and Mussolini.
I had found a table for two in a corner and I brought coffee and cake from the counter for Nesha and cereal and milk for myself. I had gone some thirty-five cents over my budget, but since I was soon to go back to Poland and perish in the hands of the Nazis, what need had I of money? Just as I had been enthusiastic shortly before, so was I seized by depression now. I heard Nesha say, “Don’t be so despondent. Much can be done in these weeks. Uncle Sam isn’t a murderer, after all. You won’t be deported to Poland so quickly.”
“It isn’t Uncle Sam. It’s a single official who decides and does just as he pleases. Someone like that is liable to be a Nazi.”
“I’m sure his decision can be appealed. People wander around here illegally for years. They hide, and later they’re granted legal status.”
“Where could I hide?”
“You’re hiding anyhow. Before they decide to come looking for you, and until they find you, war would break out and you’d be granted legal status. Until then, you might meet an American girl who would really please you.”
“Don’t say that, Nesha, I love you.”
“The main thing is that you remain in America. Come, it’s getting late and I have to get up for work in the morning.”
I went with Nesha to the subway, then took a bus to East Broadway. The night elevator man at the Forward already knew me. He always made the same joke—that I dropped off my column like an unmarried mother disposed of a bastard. A single light burned in the composition room on the tenth floor. The linotype machines that clacked away all day stood silent. I often had the feeling that machines were resentful of man because he compelled them to do things that were against their nature. From the tenth floor I walked down a dark flight of steps to the empty editorial office. There was a box for received mail here with separate compartments for the various staff members. My brother had his own box where letters addressed to me were deposited as well.
I found two letters for me and I stuck them in my breast pocket. By the time I went outside, it was half past twelve. I waited for a bus, but after a half hour it still hadn’t come. I started walking in the direction of Nineteenth Street. I stopped under a lamppost and tried to make out the source of the letters. I couldn’t believe my own eyes—one letter was from Lena in Warsaw and one from Zosia in Boston—one in Yiddish, the other in Polish.
It was too dark on Avenue B to make out the writing, yet I managed to gather from Lena’s letter that she had just gotten out of Pawiak Prison. She had given birth to a son while I was still in Warsaw. She had been arrested a few weeks later. Her comrades took care of the child. She demanded that I send an affidavit for her and the child. Her letter consisted of six densely filled pages. Zosia’s letter was only one page but I couldn’t make out her handwriting by the light of the lamppost. I didn’t walk but ran. My legs had grown unusually light. What a joke! Here I was on the verge of being deported from America and Lena demanded an affidavit from me! And during the worst crisis of my life I had become, of all things, the father of a child born to a Communist, a grandson of my pious father and the fanatical Reb Solomon Simon. What a combination of events and genes!
I had gone as far as Union Square without finding one restaurant or cafeteria where I could read these letters from the beginning to the end. I reached Nineteenth Street and climbed the four flights to my room. I threw myself on my bed and read. For someone the likes of Lena, her letter sounded almost sentimental. She was now a mother and she loved her child. She had named him after a grandfather and had him circumcised even though she considered this an act of barbarity. She had had to somehow make up with her mother. Because Lena had turned Trotskyite and those who kept the child remained Stalinists, they refused to nurse the child of a traitor to the cause. She feared that they might even harm the baby. One could expect the most terrible things from fanatics of this kind. Lena’s letter was full of abuse against Stalin and his henchmen. She praised her mother for having saved the child’s life. Reb Solomon Simon would never h
ave allowed such a child into his house and the grandmother was forced to board it with some indigent woman, a retired nursemaid who was already caring for two other children of political prisoners. Lena’s mother sold her jewelry and bailed Lena out for the second time.
Zosia wrote that she had written to me at my brother’s address in Seagate but the letter had come back. Someone who knew about me had given her the address of the Forward. She was coming to New York City from Boston now for an indefinite period of time and she gave me an address and telephone number where I could reach her—assuming I still remembered her.
My wristwatch already showed three o’clock but I still wasn’t able to fall asleep. I had never wanted to have children, particularly at a time when a holocaust was threatening the Jews, and certainly not with someone like Lena. However, the forces that guide the world always manage to get their way. I tried to convince myself that I felt nothing whatever for this creature, but I pictured it lying in some decrepit room in dirty bed linen, undernourished, weighed down with a heritage from which it could never be free. Lena wrote that he had blue eyes and reddish hair. Thus, he favored my family, not his wild grandfather and uncles with their pitch-black beards and fiery black eyes. I said to myself that already somewhere in his brain were hiding my doubts, my feelings of protest against Creation and the Creator. And would he be a Jew or would Lena raise him to be an enemy of our people? Somewhere within me I begged his forgiveness for bringing him into this mess of a world.
2
I called the hotel and was connected with Zosia. I couldn’t invite her to my wretched room and we agreed to meet at the Forty-second Street Cafeteria, near the public library.
She was a half hour late and I was already preparing to leave when, through the window, I saw her coming. She wore a summer suit and a straw hat. She seemed to me taller, fairer, and more elegant than the last time I had seen her aboard ship. She had apparently achieved some success in America. I went out to meet her and escorted her to my table, where I had left a book and a newspaper along with my crumpled hat. I brought coffee for her and for myself. Zosia began questioning me and, as is my nature, I told her everything: about my failed novel, my affair with Nesha, and the fact that I had only two months to stay in America. Zosia said, “Do anything, but don’t dare to go back to Poland!”
Love and Exile Page 31
