The telephone rang and Celia, who had been sitting silently in the easy chair mulling over her own thoughts, lazily stretched out her hand to the small table on which it stood. She drawled in that singsong used in Warsaw exclusively for telephone conversations, ‘Haiml? Why so late? I thought you’d call earlier … What’s that? … Everything is fine. Haiml, we have a guest – our young friend came for lunch … No, I called him. If he wants to put on airs, I’ll be the one to give in. Who am I, a simple housewife, and he a writer, a playwright, and who knows what … Yes, we had lunch and I persuaded him to stay to dinner … Oh, he has a famous actress now, young and probably pretty, too. What does he need with a woman my age? How is your father? … So? Good, let him take his medicine … Tomorrow? When tomorrow? On the twelve o’clock train? … Good. I’ll meet you at the station … What else do I have to do with myself. A whole day went by yesterday and no one rang me. So I swallowed my pride and called him … Who? To direct? Don’t talk nonsense. He knows as much about theater as I do about astronomy … You mustn’t laugh at me, but a Gentile director would understand the thing better than one of our boors. They at least have studied and seen theater … Morris? I haven’t heard from him at all. He has forgotten us, too … Oy, Haiml, you’re one of those types, all right … You want to talk to him? I’ll give him the phone. Here he is!’
Celia handed me the receiver. The phone had a long cord. Everything in this room was arranged to avoid effort. I heard Haiml’s voice, which sounded even more thin and shrill than when we talked directly.
‘Tsutsik! How are you? I hear you’re working on your play. Good, good. It’s high time a young person wrote for our theater. The world goes forward, but we’re still stuck with Chinke Pinke, and Dos Pintele Yid. Each time Celia and I go to the Yiddish theater we vow it’s the last. Well, but not to go is no achievement, either. Our conservative Zionists have renounced the diaspora. All good fortune, they say, will come about in Palestine. But let’s not forget that Palestine was only our cradle. We should have grown up in those two thousand years. By ignoring the exile they help bring about assimilation. You were kind to spend time with Celia. Who can she entertain herself with? She has nothing to say to the women in our circle. With them, it’s always the same – this dress, that dress, this hat or the other. All gossip. Don’t be in any hurry to leave. Don’t be bashful … Did you say jealous? Nonsense! Who was it said that when people rejoice in one another they exalt the creator, too. When I married Celia and even long before, while we were still engaged, I was terribly jealous. If she so much as spoke or smiled at another man I was ready to trample the two of them to dust. But I once read in a Hasidic volume that when one has a harmful trait and overcomes it, it can completely reverse itself. Today I know that if you really love a woman, her friend can be your friend, her pleasure your pleasure, her ecstasy your ecstasy. Tsutsik, I still want to say something to Celia. Be so good as …’
I turned the receiver over to Celia and went off to the room the Chentshiners designated as the library. It was dark there except for the reflection of light from a window across the street. I stood and asked myself, ‘Are you happy now?’ I waited for an answer from that deep source called the inner being, the ego, the superego, the spirit – whatever its name – but no answer came.
Celia opened the door. ‘What are you doing in the dark like a lost soul? We have no secrets from you.’
I could not find words to reply to her, and she said, ‘How can I begin an affair when I’m seriously thinking about suicide? There are people who at a certain age come to a natural end – all words spoken, all deeds done, and nothing remaining but death. I used to get up each morning with hope. Today I no longer expect anything.’
‘Why, Celia, why?’
‘Oh, I don’t fit in anywhere. Haiml is a decent person and I love him, but before he even opens his mouth I know what is going to come out of it. Morris is the very opposite, but you never know where you stand with him. He lives close to desperation. You’re too young for me, and unstable. I have the feeling that you won’t be staying here in Warsaw long. One day you’ll simply pick up and disappear. Morris told me that Sam Dreiman wants to take you to America.’
‘He’s a big talker.’
‘Such things happen fast. If you have a chance to escape from here, don’t wait. We’re caught between Hitler and Stalin. Whichever invades the country will bring a cataclysm.’
‘Why don’t you leave?’
‘Where to? I don’t see myself in America.’
‘What about Palestine?’
‘Somehow I don’t see myself there, either. It’s a place we’ll be transported to on a cloud when the Messiah comes.’
‘You believe this?’
‘No, my dear.’
Four
1
Spring arrived early this year. By March, the trees were abloom in the Saxony Gardens. My play wasn’t ready, but even if it had been, it was too late to present it. By May all the affluent families went off for the summer to Otwock, Swider, Michalin, and Jósefow. The play wasn’t the only problem. Sam Dreiman had had trouble obtaining a theater. So the première was put off until Succoth, when the Yiddish theaters regularly commenced their season. Sam Dreiman had advanced me another three hundred dollars, which I reckoned would carry me through until fall. He was considering renting a summer home on the Otwock route and I would be assigned a room there to work on the play under Betty’s supervision. Sam confided to me that even as he sat in Warsaw doing nothing, he was earning several thousand dollars each and every week.
He said, ‘Take as much as you need. I won’t spend it all in any case.’
By now, I was on a first-name basis with Sam and with Betty, and they both called me Tsutsik. Yet I knew that everything depended on the play. Sam Dreiman often used the word ‘success.’ He kept warning me that the play must reach audiences both in Warsaw and in New York, where he still planned to take it, along with me, its author.
He said, ‘I know the Yiddish theater in America like the back of my hand. What else did we immigrants have except the theater and the Yiddish paper? Each time I came from Detroit to New York, I never failed to enjoy an evening in the theater. I knew them all – the Adlers, Madam Liptzin, Kessler, and Thomashefsky, not to speak of his wife, Bessie. They spoke plain Yiddish – none of that gobbledygook you hear in the art theaters, where they bore the crowds to death with propaganda. People come to the theater to enjoy themselves, not to revolt against Rockefeller’s millions.’
Betty and I had already kissed, both in front of Sam and behind his back. When we sat over the manuscript, she would take my hand and put it on her knee. Feitelzohn’s contention that the instinct of jealousy was becoming vestigial like the appendix, coccyx, and male breasts seemed to hold as true for this couple as for Haiml and Celia. Sam Dreiman smiled and kidded me good-naturedly when Betty kissed me. He often left us alone and went off to play cards with his acquaintance at the consulate.
Feitelzohn went there as well. Recently he had lectured on the subject ‘Spiritual Vitamins’ at the Writers’ Club, and he was preparing to launch a series of soul expeditions. A friend of his, the hypnotist Mark Elbinger, had come to Warsaw from Paris. Feitelzohn told me remarkable facts about this man. He could hypnotize his patients over the phone or merely by telepathy. He was also clairvoyant. He had held séances in Berlin, in London, Paris, New York, and South America. He was supposed to take part in the soul expeditions.
Since Sam preferred to play cards rather than to spend his time looking around for a summer place in the still empty resort villages in the Otwock region, he sent Betty and me to find a suitable villa. Sam planned to arrange that the rehearsals of the play take place there. Feitelzohn had promised to hold soul expeditions on ‘the loin of nature.’ At the Table of the Impotent there was even talk of an orgy to be organized by that famous master of revelry, Fritz Bander.
One day I met Betty at the Danzig Railroad station. She bought tickets for us, and we wait
ed in line together. It smelled here of beer, sausages, coal smoke, and sweat. Soldiers carrying full field packs waited for a train and passed the time downing huge mugs of beer that a girl drew from a keg. Her cheeks were red and she wore a tight blouse over her bosom. The soldiers joked with her, talked smut, and her pale-blue eyes smiled half in arrogance, half in embarrassment, as if to say, ‘I’m only one – you can’t all have me.’
The newspapers talked of how modern the German Army had become, fully mobilized and equipped with the latest weapons, but these Polish soldiers looked just like the Russian soldiers in 1914. They wore heavy greatcoats and the sweat poured from their faces. Their rifles appeared too long and too bulky. All of them were doomed to be massacred, yet they made fun of the Jews in the long gabardines. One even tugged at a Jew’s beard, and they could be heard hissing,‘Źydy, Źydy, Źydy.’
I hadn’t been in a train for years. I never traveled second class, always third or even fourth. But here I sat on an upholstered bench with an American lady, an actress, and looked out at the brick-red buildings of the Citadel, whose roofs were covered with earth and overgrown with grass. This ancient fortress was supposed to defend Warsaw in case of attack. It also contained a prison. The train rode out onto the bridge. The Vistula gleamed, and a strong breeze blew in from it. The sun reflected large and red in the water, and although the hour was long before sunset, a pale moon appeared in the sky. We rode through Wawer, Miedzeszyn, Falenica, Michalin. There were memories connected with each of these stops. In Miedzeszyn I had slept with a girl for the first time – only slept and done nothing else, since she wanted to preserve her virginity for her husband. In Falenica I had delivered a lecture that turned out to be a fiasco.
We got off in Swider, one stop after Jósefow, where Haiml and Celia had their summer house. A real-estate broker was waiting for us at the station. We waded through the sand until we came to a villa that appeared to me the height of luxury, with verandas, balconies, flower beds, even hothouses, all surrounded by woods. Betty seemed so eager to get rid of the broker that almost immediately she handed him a deposit of two hundred zlotys. Only then did we learn that the house had no lights, there was no linen for the beds, and the nearest restaurant or coffee shop in the neighborhood was kilometers away. The summer hotels were not open. We had to return to Warsaw and wait for the contract to be drawn up and sent to Sam Dreiman. The broker, a little man with a yellow beard and yellow eyes, seemed suspicious of our intentions. He said to us, ‘It’s too early. The nights are cold and dark. The summer is not here yet. Everything has its time.’
From a hut a janitor came out with two barking dogs. He asked the broker to give back the keys to him. We were advised to go back to the station, because at this time of year the trains did not run frequently. But Betty insisted that she see the river Swiderek and its waterfall, which the real-estate broker in Warsaw had spoken to her and Sam about. As we walked, a blast of icy wind brought winter back to us. In a matter of minutes the sky became overcast, the moon disappeared, and a mixture of driving rain and hail hit our faces. Betty spoke to me, but I could not hear her in the clamor of the wind. We had reached the Swiderek River. The beach stretched before us wet and empty. The low waterfall tumbled with a thundering roar. The narrow stream shone strange and mysterious and two large winter birds flew along the surface, all the while screeching warnings, one to the other, not to get lost in the stormy twilight. Betty’s straw hat lifted itself into the air and landed on the bank across. Then it started to roll and turn somersaults; it vanished in the shrubs. Betty clutched with both hands at her disheveled hair as if it were a wig, and she shrieked, ‘Let’s go! The demons are after me. It’s always like this when a spark of happiness lights up my life!’
She threw her purse on the sand, put her arms around me, and, pressing me to her, hollered, ‘Keep away from me! I’m cursed, cursed, cursed!’
2
Winter returned for a while, and Betty put on her sable coat once more. Then spring moved in for good. Warm breezes blew from the Praga woods through my open window, carrying with them the fragrance of grass, blossoms, and newly turned earth. In Germany, Hitler had solidified his power, but the Warsaw Jews had celebrated the festival of the exodus out of Egypt four thousand years ago. That day I didn’t go to Betty at the Hotel Bristol. She came to me instead. Sam Dreiman had gone to Mlawa to attend the funeral of a cousin. Betty refused to go with him. She said to me, ‘I want to enjoy life, not mourn the death of some strange woman.’ She was again dressed in a summery outfit – a pale-blue suit and a straw hat. She brought me a bouquet, and Tekla took it and put it in a vase. I had never heard of a woman bringing a man flowers.
The spring wouldn’t let us work. Birds flew past the open window with cries and twitters. We left the manuscript on the table and went to the window. The narrow sidewalks swarmed with pedestrians.
Betty said, ‘Spring in Warsaw makes me crazy. In New York there is no such thing as spring.’
After a while we went down into the street. Betty took my arm with her gloved hand and we strolled aimlessly. She said, ‘You always speak of Krochmalna Street. Why haven’t you ever taken me there?’
I didn’t answer immediately. ‘That street is completely bound up with my youth. For you, it won’t be anything more than a dirty slum.’
‘Just the same, I want to see it. We can go by cab.’
‘No, it’s not so far. I can’t believe myself that I haven’t been back to visit Krochmalna Street since I left there in 1917.’
We could have gone by way of Iron Street, but I preferred to walk to Prezejazd and there to turn south. On Bank Place we stopped momentarily before the gate of the old bank with its heavy columns. Just as in my boyhood, carts of money were being trundled in and out, guarded by armed police. Źabia Street was still the millinery center, with rows of windows showing hats that were modern and hats worn only by older women – hats with veils, nets, ostrich plumes, wooden cherries, grapes, and hats with crepe for those in mourning. Behind the iron fence of the Saxony Gardens the chestnut trees were scattering their blossoms.
There were benches on Iron Gate Square and weary passersby were sitting in the sunshine. God in heaven, this walk was wakening in me the enthusiasm of a boy. We stopped before the building called Vienna Hall, where wealthy men had weddings for their daughters catered. Below, among the columns, women still peddled handkerchiefs, needles, pins, buttons, and yard goods of calico, linen – even remnants of velvet and silk. We came out onto Gnoyna Street and my nostrils were assailed by the familiar odor of soap, oil, and horse manure. In this neighborhood were the cheders, studyhouses, and Hasidic prayer houses where I had learned Torah.
We reached Krochmalna Street and the stench I recalled from my childhood struck me first – a blend of burned oil, rotten fruit, and chimney smoke. Everything was the same – the cobblestone pavement, the steep gutter, the balconies hung with wash. We passed a factory with wire-latticed windows and a blind wall with a wooden gate I never saw open in all my youth. Every house here was bound up with memories. No. 5 contained a yeshiva in which I had studied for a term. There was a ritual bath in the courtyard, where matrons came in the evening to immerse themselves. I used to see them emerge clean and flushed. Someone told me that this building had been the home of Rabbi Itche Meir Alter, the founder of the Gur dynasty generations ago. In my time the yeshiva had been part of the Grodzisk house of prayer. Its beadle was a drunk. When he had a drop too much, he told tales of saints, dybbuks, half-mad squires, and sorcerers. He ate one meal a day and always (except on the Sabbath) stale bread crumbled into borscht.
No. 4 was a huge bazaar, Yanash’s Court, which had two gates – one leading into Krochmalna and the other into Mirowska Street. They sold everything here – fruit, vegetables, dairy, geese, fish. There were stores selling secondhand shoes and old clothes of all kinds.
We came to the Place. It always swarmed with prostitutes, pimps, and petty thieves in torn jackets and caps with visors pu
lled down over their eyes. In my time, the Boss here had been Blind Itche, chief of the pickpockets, proprietor of brothels, a swaggerer and a knife carrier. Somewhere in No. 11 or 13 lived fat Reitzele, a woman who weighed three hundred pounds. Reitzele was supposed to conduct business with white slavers from Buenos Aires. She was also a procurer of servant girls. Many games were played in the Place. You drew numbers from a bag and you could win a police whistle, a chocolate cake, a pen with a view of Cracow, a doll that sat up and cried ‘Mama.’
I stopped with Betty to gape. The same louts, the same flat pronunciation, the same games. I was afraid that all this would disgust her, but she had become infected by my nostalgia. ‘You should have brought me here the very first day we met!’ she said.
‘Betty, I’ll write a play called Krochmalna and you shall play the leading role.’
‘You’re a great promiser.’
I didn’t know what to show her next – the den in No. 6 where the thieves played cards and dominoes and where the fences came to buy stolen goods; the prayer house in No. 10 where we used to live, or the Radzymin studyhouse in No. 12, to which we later moved; the courtyards where I attended cheder or the stores where my mother used to send me to buy food and kerosene. The only change I could observe was that the houses had lost most of their plaster and grown black from smoke. Here and there, a wall was supported on logs. The gutters seemed even deeper, their stink even stronger. I stopped before each gate and peered in. All the garbage bins were heaped high with refuse. Dyers dyed clothing, tinsmiths patched broken pots, men with sacks on their shoulders cried, ‘Ole clo’s, ole clo’s, I buy rags, ole pants, ole shoes, ole hats; ole clo’s, ole clo’s.’ Here and there, a beggar sang a song – of the Titanic, which had gone down in 1911, of the striker Baruch Shulman, who had thrown a bomb in 1905 and been hanged. Magicians were performing the same stunts they had in my childhood – they swallowed fire, rolled barrels with their feet, lay down bareback on a bed of nails. I knew it couldn’t be, but I imagined that I recognized the girl who went around shaking a tambourine hung with bells to collect coins from the watchers. She wore the same velvet breeches with silver sequins. Her hair was cut like a boy’s. She was tall and slim, flat-chested, her eyes were shiny black. A parrot with a broken beak perched on her shoulder.
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