In the meantime, the years pass. Old age has crept up on Mrs. Groton, and also on me, and Nachtigel, who was at times within reach, no longer roams alone in these parts. In the evenings Mrs. Groton sits and tells me about the days of her youth. At that time the Jews were the uncrowned nobility of Prague. Her first suitor was Jewish, a tall, handsome fellow who would write poems and read them to her. When her parents heard of it, they forbade her to see him, but the poor fellow took a chance and came to ask their permission. They slammed the door in his face. At that time she was young and didn’t dare stand up to her parents. In the end, she married an Austrian and moved to Austria.
The quiet in her house soothes my nerves. Sometimes I imagine I’ll spend my last years here, among the tall trees that cast their long shadows on the earth. Here I will join all those beloved by me. I will not forget the women who showed kindness to me. Something of them lives within me. Even for a woman whom I paid to lie with me for a night, I retain a certain spark. At night, when the trains are empty and the black wind howls through the cracks, I curl up in my coat and think about them and join them once again.
A year ago Mrs. Groton surprised me and said, “No one knows when his final hour will come. I want to give you something very dear to me.”
“Why?” I was apprehensive.
“Because you’re the only one who will preserve it.” She removed the objects from her coat pocket and placed it on the table. It was a thin mezuza, decorated with Hebrew letters.
“That’s a sacred object.” I trembled.
“I’ll tell you something I’ve never revealed to anyone,” she said, bowing her head. “My maternal grandmother was Jewish, and she converted. Before she died she gave this to my mother, who in turn left it to me. Now the time has come to pass it on. I’m giving it to you for you’re a Jew.”
“Not a believing Jew,” I hastened to explain.
“Still, it’s better for it to be with you. This amulet once calmed me.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. But in the past year it’s begun to burden me. A sign that my life is nearing the end, don’t you think?”
“How can I keep this? I have no house, and I wander from place to place.”
“Then to whom shall I leave it?” she asked with both annoyance and authority.
I knew I couldn’t refuse her. In that moment she was a person doing what she had to do, without regret. I nearly said: Only in your house do I sleep without dreams. Where will I rest now? I tried to pay her, but she refused. “If you keep this amulet, that will be my reward.” She seemed to be entrusting me with some mysterious task. I wanted to excuse myself. But when I saw her open face, I didn’t dare say no.
I had planned to stay at her inn another day, but my emotions prevented me. Before I left the house she kissed me on the forehead and wished me a long life. Her face was bright, her gaze pure, and her movements were flawless. Still, my throat closed, and I fled as if for my life.
Now a year has gone by, and once again I am in the station in Pracht. I stand, but my legs won’t support me. I’m afraid to ask what has happened to her. Fear paralyzes me, and I sit in the neglected station swallowing drink after drink, waiting for the next train.
CHAPTER
10
From here on only the express runs, and the distance from station to station is long. I sink into the soft seats and know that this is my home. I have no other. There are, I must admit, also a few pleasant surprises in this motion: a familiar shadow, a sudden scent, sometimes a tune that draws me back, irresistibly, to childhood. When I’m fortunate, I meet one of my rivals on this line. For a while he tries to lose me, but I won’t give in. In the end I trap him in a dark corner.
It turns out that I’m mistaken. He’s not a rival of mine. On the contrary, like me, he is also tracking down Nachtigel. He’s been after him for years. True, in the past year he’s grown weary, begun to sleep a lot, and when things got tough he turned to the Australian consulate and asked for a visa. Now he’s sorry. You mustn’t break a vow, particularly an oath. I tell him of my discoveries and about my comrades, who secretly track him. It turns out that some of them are his partners too. For instance, he knows Mrs. Groton. Like me, he admires her and her humble inn. We have a drink, warm up, and reminisce. His route does not usually overlap with mine, but sometimes he happens into this region. For a few years he lived in Weinberg, but he can’t bear the anti-Semitic remarks anymore. He prefers to live far from the stations. We spoke of Stark, of course. Upon hearing Stark’s name he grimaced and said, “It’s hard for me to stomach Jewish Communists. Their devotion reminds me of the other kind of piety. Let them reform themselves first and then the world.” But why waste words? They no longer exist. They are just shadows, ghosts. We have a task in life: we must find the murderer. After we find him, we can quietly emigrate to Australia.
Incidentally, a few years ago I met Rollman’s nephew on this express. What a resemblance he bears to his uncle. He was on his way to France. Twenty-seven, and all the characteristics of a Jewish Communist were stamped on his face: the flash in the eyes, the determination, the furtiveness. I wanted to stop him for a moment, but he wouldn’t listen. I couldn’t restrain myself and called out, “I knew your uncle Rollman well. I was with him in his final hours. Where are you headed?”
“To Paris.”
“You’re leaving this region?”
“This place is a wasteland. In France there is true labor.”
“Why don’t we have a drink in the buffet?”
“I’m in a rush. The committee is meeting in Paris tonight. Excuse me.”
That brief contact with Rollman’s nephew restored his face and his death to me in a single stroke. Jewish Communists are born with a death wish. First in the underground, then in prison. In the Soviet Union they weren’t executed before they confessed. Still, my father defended passionately everything that was done there. If a comrade challenged the leadership, he would be called before the committee, and there he would confess, admit his mistakes. My mother didn’t speak much. But her mute face said, Nothing will force us to abandon our commitment to reforming the world.
Since I left Stark, his face has not abandoned me. His eyes beckon me from the distance: “Come back, we are a small family, scattered, and we must look out for one another. I did what I could. Now I can do no more. But my faith in a better world has not been marred, even now. We sacrificed the life of the present for the future, and I left this world without resentment. In a few generations people will remember us and say, Jewish Communism was the true Communism. Everyone was devoted, heart and soul, to the end.” Thus I hear his voice. And at night, when the darkness gathers, I see his chiseled features and shrink into my corner because I abandoned him.
In Sternberg the express stops. Some stations make me race straight to the buffet. In others I descend as if they weren’t stations at all, but places enveloped in light, where one must tread cautiously. Sternberg is a medium-sized station, surrounded by warehouses, and in the back is a pleasant, tidy buffet. In that buffet, more than twenty years ago, I discovered my beloved, Bertha. She was a tall, attractive woman who worked at the cash register. At first she tried to avoid my gaze, but that evasion merely confirmed my suspicion: she was one of ours. I told her a few of my secrets. She told me about herself. I learned to love her body and to honor her silences. There was an episode in her life that she would not talk about, but she spoke about the rest freely, even gaily. Her movements were fluid, not those of someone who had been in the camps. At first her movements scared me, but over the years I learned to respect them. I know the limits of devotion, and I won’t ask for more. People like us are bound to many others, living and dead. Do not ask for unnecessary devotion from your fellow man. With this in mind, I proposed marriage to her years ago. I was thirty-five, weary of the trains, and my body yearned for a permanent bed. Bertha looked at me with wide eyes as if to say: Why should we perpetrate that injustice on one another? You must be on
the road, and I need solitude. The candor of her gaze astounded me. After that we saw each other just once a year, at the end of May, actually from the twenty-third to the end of the month. Like all of us, she aged a little over the years, but her fine features did not fade. Her broad smile seemed to say, I won’t allow sadness to overcome me.
If she had accompanied me on my journeys, it would have been easier for me. The night train is gloomy, when all is said and done. We could have enjoyed ourselves together in the stations. True, I have obligations that I must not involve Bertha in, a few matters best left to silence. Yes, it would have been different. I tried to persuade her, but unsuccessfully. A year ago she surprised me and said, “I have decided to return to my hometown, to Zalishtshik.”
“What possesses you?” I trembled.
“I must go,” she said without joy.
“There are no Jews there, only Ukrainians and Poles.”
She had hinted to me before that she was thinking about returning to her hometown. She spoke of longings and obligations, but I saw it as a whim. Once I even scolded her and said, “One doesn’t return to a city that is a cemetery. There’s a limit to the mourning that a person can endure.”
All night long I tried to persuade her that the journey was untimely and dangerous, that she should postpone it. I even promised that I would sell some jewels and travel with her. For a moment it seemed that those words had touched her heart. She gave me a cup of coffee and some cookies, and chatted with me about many things, among them a wanderer who had happened into the buffet. He turned out to be a Jew from Galicia. In the morning he wrapped himself in a prayer shawl and prayed. I knew she was just trying to distract me. The dreadful course was already set in her head.
Still, I tried again to dissuade her from traveling. I spoke about the obligations we have here, about the people who need us, like Stark and Mina, and about the duty to find the murderers and kill them. As long as they live, our lives are not lives. As always, superficial words and words of truth got jumbled together. Now I realize I should have joined her, but then, for some reason, I was sure that my life here had another purpose. I secretly hoped she would change her mind the next morning. But I had not yet grasped the depth of her abyss.
Next day, in the station, as we each waited for our own train, the words fell unsaid within me. Bertha spoke to me as if I were a younger brother, beaten, who has lost his way. Her eyes shone fiercely, like those of a person who no longer fears death.
In the spring I learned that my Bertha had reached Zalishtshik and rented a room from a peasant woman. She spends most of the day on a riverbank, and for now she does not plan to return. This information came from a Jewish merchant who had traveled to Zalishtshik to pray at his ancestors’ tombs. To my question whether she was content, he answered coarsely in a voice that frightened me, “Very content.”
Now Sternberg is no longer Sternberg for me, just a burning space where one must not linger. Still, I step up to the buffet and ask the owner, “Have you heard from Bertha?”
“Not a word.”
I sit on the bench where we used to sit together before and after every trip. Since she left me, my hold on the world has become weaker.
CHAPTER
11
The trip north from Sternberg is like a plunge into cold water. Bertha’s face remains before me. The thought that she is sitting on the riverbank for most of the day, gazing at the water, speaking to no one, that thought—rather, that image—gradually takes on a blue hue. It is a frigid blue, which recalls to my heart columns of silent men bearing heavy packs on their backs. I should have abandoned this circuit and gone to draw her out of her trance. It would have been better for her to throw in her lot with me than to founder as she has done. I say “I should have,” but with me everything is delayed, hesitant. For years I have been bound to this circuit, and now that Bertha can no longer be reached by train, I’m drawn to her all the more.
A year ago, right after I parted from Bertha, on this very line I met a tall woman who could have been her double. She sat across from me reading a book. I instantly felt an attraction. I wasn’t mistaken. One of us. When I turned to her, she made a strange gesture of refusal. It seems she was deaf. I’m not put off by deaf people. I have a close friend, completely deaf, who lives not far from here.
I wrote her a note in my mother tongue: my name and the name of my hometown. She answered in a clear hand, “We are neighbors. My name is Rosa Tag, and I am from Strozhnitz.” Had it not been for her handicap, we would have settled into conversation. On a train conversation can be as good as cognac. Once I spent time with Father in a pigsty not far from Strozhnitz. I did not enter the town itself.
I continued to write, “Where were you during the war?”
“In Siberia,” she answered. I understood: from a wealthy family. When the Russians invaded us in the forties, they exiled the rich to Siberia. Most of them became sick and died there, and the rest froze and returned as invalids. I am fond of deaf women, but it is hard for me to embrace them. For some reason they seem childlike to me, defenseless.
I wrote out Bertha’s name for her, and she answered, “I don’t remember her.” I sat and contemplated her face. Contemplation, I have learned, is a kind of absorption. When I contemplate, my entire being is aroused, as when I hear good music.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t restrain myself. I told her that she was very similar to my friend Bertha, who had just returned to her native city of Zalishtshik. Her answer moved me: “My mother was born in Zalishtshik.”
“Now we’re bound to each other, and not by chance,” I wrote.
“If I had money, I would go back, too,” she answered.
“You must not become addicted to fantasies,” I scolded her. “A fantasy is more dangerous than cognac. A person must do the right thing, without submitting a bill or expecting a reward.”
I trembled at the words that I wrote and wanted to take them back. I hate rhetoric. I remembered that those were my father’s words, he used to recite them to me. Years ago I had grievances against him. Now my relationship with him is calm, and on the platforms I find more and more people like him.
The train stopped in Gruendorf. I kissed her hand in the old-fashioned way. Now I’m sorry I didn’t ask her where she lived. I should have invited her for a meal in the buffet. One does not leave a woman behind without making such a gesture.
I regard Gruendorf as a crossroads. Every time I arrive there, I am filled again with the will to live. Perhaps that is because of my secret comrade, Mrs. Braun, a tall, sturdy woman whose movements are those of a fugitive. Her nervousness attracted my eye at once, and I foolishly asked her, “Where did you pick up those gestures?”
“From my father,” she said.
“And who was your father?”
“A Jew,” she whispered. “But my mother was not.”
Since then we’ve been friends. Her husband, a native of the region, works in the forest, and she manages the buffet. I saw him just once. His face was closed and tense, like that of a man about to bring his whip down on a stubborn animal. Once she revealed to me: He drinks too much.
When she’s in good spirits, she tells me about the war, how she lived in a shack near the sawmill, how she insisted on going to church, and how she prayed every night to an icon. She was afraid of informers, and even now she is frightened. Hatred for the Jews is strong in this region, and even though there is hardly a Jew to be found, everybody talks about them as if they were alive and well.
Years ago, in a moment of grace, I revealed to her that I was tracking down Nachtigel and asked for her help. She knows the region well, who took part in the war and who stayed behind. On Saturday nights and Sundays people from all over gather in her buffet. They argue and get drunk and stir up wartime memories. In time Mrs. Braun also confirmed my hunch, that indeed a man named Nachtigel is sometimes to be found here, and indeed he was one of the murderers. For every scrap of information I pay her or give her a present. Once she co
nfessed to me, “Your gifts are very dear to me. They arouse a Jewish sentiment in me.” I don’t believe her. Lately, I’ve even stopped believing the information she supplies. She, like her husband, has taken to drink in recent years, and since then she has been imagining things. She turns hunches into statements of fact, takes liberties with past and present, and tells me “true” stories that never happened. But it’s hard for me to be angry with her. In moments of abandon, she risks telling me that her loyalty to the Jews is absolute. Although she’s only half Jewish, she feels completely Jewish. She promises me that one day she will leave that accursed region, board an express, and ride straight to Israel.
I know these are fantasies. As soon as she sobers up, she forgets all about them. Still, I enjoy hearing them. Once she turned to me and said, “What are you doing here? I don’t understand you. Here everything is corrupt. Take the first train and go to Israel.”
“And who will kill Nachtigel?”
“I,” she said. “I will do it in your place.”
Whenever anyone mentions Israel, I am filled with gloom. I would very much like to go there, to gather strength. I would then return here fortified. A month in Israel would make me a brave man. It would teach me to get away from the trains and live in the forest. There I would learn to concentrate, to stay on the track, and not to despair. Silence. That is what I need. And that is just what you can’t have on trains. Trains, in the end, are just a tangle of nerves.
This time she noticed me right at the entrance to the buffet and called out, “Here he is, the solace of my soul.” Right away she served me borscht with sour cream and a cheese omelette. She knew I like those foods. I, for my part, brought her a silk handkerchief. She was very pleased with it and started telling me about people and rumors. Among other things, a fact: Nachtigel bought a house in Weinberg that is being renovated.
The Iron Tracks Page 5
