by Ezra Glinter
Half an hour after the worker left, the apprentice also left, and his departure was a rather strange event. He had room and board in the family home; he ate and drank there, slept there every night of the week, and suddenly . . .
“Drop by over the holiday!” both girls said, and smiled.
The first two days of the holiday went by. They passed with eating and resting in Passover peace and cleanliness. The workbenches stood covered with bedsheets and old tablecloths, giving off an air of unhappy boredom.
Left to themselves, the family members felt detached from one another, with the melancholy of close kinship. Leyzer, the head of the household and the girls’ father, yawned repeatedly, accompanying each yawn with an “ekkkhh” or “kha-kha-kha.” He seemed to exhale the two-thousand-year exile with each yawn. He’d worked hard before Passover and, recovering quickly, was soon bored with resting. His limbs, used to decades of hard work, ached and longed for movement, and his spirit took no pleasure in idleness. But there was no enjoyment to be had except to relax and eat a good meal. Leyzer was not yet old; he was only fifty-two, and during the holiday he found his mind longingly drawn to the bodies of strange women. His own daughters felt distant and extraneous to him, and he no longer understood what was clear to him on every other night of the year: the sacrifice he had made for his children by not remarrying.
The holiday was already beginning to wear. Having rested and eaten well, the family started to long for regular workdays, for the clamor and banging and new faces of an ordinary day. After lifelong familiarity with the ever-present racket of trade and the workshop, it seemed that something had been silenced, and instead of the peace and stillness of the holiday, they felt only a lull in the workweek. The week had fallen silent. They’d covered it up with bedsheets and tablecloths, and the workbenches were rendered mute and paralyzed.
The girls looked forward to seeing the worker. True, they hadn’t invited him, but they expected him anyway. They were certain he’d come, though they didn’t know the time or day. So they watched for him from morning to night, and waiting made them tense, nervous, and impatient.
On the fourth day of the holiday, two guests arrived: the apprentice and his father. Out of respect for his father, the boy was invited in and seated at the table with his employer and his daughters, which the girls found amusing. They smiled at each other and at the boy, amused to be treating him like a respectable person. On looking him over, they observed quite a change in him. He was wearing a new outfit; his hair was cut and trimmed, his sideburns cut aslant above his ears, and below his sideburns you could see a razor had gone over his cheeks and shaved off all the fuzz. His young shaved cheeks made him look older than his years. Before the shave, you could see he’d had peach fuzz. But now, afterwards, you could see he’d been shaved, and that made him seem older and more masculine.
“If I’d seen him in the street, I’d never have recognized him,” one daughter said.
“Me neither!” said the other.
Surprisingly, they did in fact think something of him; he drew and held their girlish attention, and their vague, unconscious attraction kept them smiling.
The girls set up the samovar. This was the first time the apprentice had been in the house when the girls, and not he, had done the job. He was given the honor of carrying it in, however, and was pleased to have his old job back, since it made him feel more at home. He carried the samovar carefully, at arm’s length from himself and his new suit, and it looked like the samovar wasn’t being carried at all, but that it floated through the air ahead of him, tugging after it the young man: a fresh, new youth in a new outfit. Drawing him to the table, the samovar placed itself in a brass tray, and releasing the young man, it showed itself off: its shape, its boiling and hissing, and the fire and coals beneath.
The girls poured tea and set large and small nuts on the table. The boy perched on his chair, unable to sit still. This was the first time in his life he’d been given the chance to sit at a table and crack as many nuts as he pleased. And because he wanted all of them, not just to eat but also to put in his pockets, he couldn’t take even one. He was as pink as a newborn baby, and his eyes shone as though he’d suddenly entered into a new kind of existence. He felt he was in that house and seeing those girls for the first time in his life. He pondered the fact that he’d seen them many times in their undershirts, with bare arms and breasts, and now they were acting like his presence embarrassed them. And though he thought it more pleasant to see them that way, without blouses, he now felt himself more manly, someone before whom they’d be ashamed to display themselves. That both were now dressed up for the holiday excited him even more, and his whole body, from head to foot, became aroused. Not knowing whether this made him more manly or, on the other hand, more boyish, his self-possession deserted him. Poor thing: he melted like a candle among others, which melts in its own flame and in the heat of those around it. He melted in his own fire and in the girls’ presence.
“Eat, don’t be embarrassed,” said Ettele, the younger daughter, and smiled.
“Is there still a little wine?” Leyzer asked Beylke, the elder.
Yes there was; there were still good things in the buffet, which Beylke hadn’t set on the table. She wasn’t being stingy with the things she hadn’t offered, but she didn’t know what sort of guests the visitors were, so she treated them as she always treated informal visitors, people who dropped in during the holidays and must be given something. And for them, she thought, a glass of tea and a few nuts would do.
Apart from that, Beylke was on edge, annoyed that it was the apprentice who’d come by, not someone else. Despite her displeasure, however, she welcomed the boy as someone who was better than no one. Her situation was like that of a hungry infant, who, instead of a nipple, has a finger put in its mouth. The finger doesn’t soothe the baby’s hunger, but it stimulates the digestion, and sucking on it makes the baby happy. It was like that for Beylke. In some way, the boyish figure represented a man. When he’d appeared on the doorstep, her first thought was that he’d somehow been directed there to make fun of her: that instead of an adult man, this fifteen-year-old boy had showed up in her home, as if the wide, unknown, masculine world had sent him to convey a masculine greeting. Really, though, if she hadn’t already been older than a young girl by five, six, seven, or eight years, she wouldn’t have been offended.
The two men, Leyzer and the boy’s father, sat there with nothing to say. In fact, the boy’s father wanted to talk; he wasn’t there just to exchange holiday greetings, but to get something out of Leyzer for his son. There was no time during the week, so he’d put off the discussion until the holiday. But now he sat silently. He couldn’t just come straight out with his reason for being there, especially on a holiday when he’d been welcomed as a guest.
Leyzer, of course, knew the boy’s father had come to make demands on him; there was nothing new in that, he knew it from the fathers of other apprentices in the past. So Leyzer waited for the other man to speak so he could talk him out of whatever he wanted and be done with it, and then they’d feel more free, and Leyzer would be able to pass time with him as he would with a member of the family. But as long at the boy’s father had something to say, a barrier stood between them. They sat at the same table, Leyzer’s table, like strangers, even worse than strangers, and were silent.
“The holiday’s flying by,” said Leyzer.
“Time flies,” the other man replied, and combed his hairy fingers through his thick rounded beard, trimmed in honor of the holiday.
“Have some nuts,” said Leyzer, “they’re good with tea. And you,” he asked the apprentice, “why are you sitting there like you’re waiting for a handout?”
Ettele scooped a double handful of nuts from the triangular glass bowl, went over to the boy, told him to hold open his jacket pockets, and dropped every last nut inside.
“He’s grown up,” Leyzer said to the father.
Like all bosses, Leyzer knew that t
he matter of wages was at the heart of it all. Simply put, during the last year or two, the young man had grown up, become more mature and adult.
“Yes . . . but what will come of it?”
The apprentice’s father stopped cracking nuts. Breaking the empty shells with his fingers, he got down to business. To the girls, this was even more cheerless than before, and each in turn slipped out of the room. The boy quietly left the table and stood by the window. He stood there the whole time his father and his boss were discussing him and arguing over him, cracking nuts one at a time with bare hands and eating them. Ten minutes later, Beylke came back in. Attracting her attention with a quick smile and a wink, the boy put a nut on the windowsill and cracked it with his forehead. The nut smashed to pieces, and they could see its innermost heart, which looked like a shattered brain.
THE JEWISH PASSOVER ended with the beginning of Easter, and the young Jews who had just been through their own holiday slipped unnoticed into a foreign one. Two worlds and two peoples mixed together, and those who poured outdoors to welcome their holiday had no doubt that that they were the ruling nation. They flooded into the streets with complete freedom and the authority of their beliefs, expressed in religious ceremonies with lanterns and candles. Free and powerful, the Christian crowds dominated the streets with their numbers, and they attracted and absorbed the Jewish “children of freedom” (as it says in the Passover ritual) who, temporarily assimilated and willing to follow, were swept along. Setting aside their own desires and identities as Jews, they mingled with the Christians in their religious celebration, with foreign people in a foreign world.
Among the hundreds of young Jews who mingled with the thousands of Christians were Beylke and Ettele. They’d left home that evening and gone into the street, where they fell in with the stream of Christians—Christians carrying candles which lit each face and the necks of each person to each side, which also seemed, in the light of the candles, to be faces. Like the other young Jews who’d been drawn into the Christian stream, the sisters walked without candles, and they sensed they were exposing their Jewish origins. They carried their Jewish feelings hidden deep within themselves: outwardly they mixed with the thick crowd, but inwardly they felt entirely separate, as if the crowd was not composed of the same kind of human beings as themselves. They were uneasy, but glad to be out of the house; their discomfort masked the tiresome life they led at home, which felt especially tiresome during the holiday and more so now, at its end.
The silence of the now-hushed church bells seemed deliberate. At twelve o’clock, the deepest hour of the night, they would ring out wildly and urgently, impressing upon the gathered devotees that the most important hour of the holy festival had arrived. Now, in the provisional silence, people were quietly filling the length and breadth of the cobbled sidewalks, gravitating to the streets and squares where the churches were located. Near and far, among the streets and houses, stood the churches with their high stone walls, crowned with pediments and crosses. The peaks towered above in the vast, dark air. Beneath them, tall, narrow windows were illuminated with so much light that they didn’t even look like windows, but rather like sheets of bright, living, transparent color, marked into squares by black iron grates. The windows looked like transparent doors with iron grates, forged into a tall, many-storied prison.
Beylke and Ettele were drawn along into one of the churches. It seemed to them both that they’d fallen into an alien, multicolored world: there was so much brightness, so many candles, and so many people. Everything together and each thing separately drew their attention with its frightening strangeness. They wanted to extricate themselves, but there was no opportunity. They were walled in on all sides by a compressed, breathing, and motionless crowd. Everything around them was foreign; even the air was different, Christian: too strange and heavy to breathe.
From some distant place of honor the babbling of the priest could be heard, accompanied now and again by a shrill, shrieking choir. With difficulty, the people surrounding them tried to extend their arms but were unable to cross themselves because they were packed so tightly together; so they piously made the sign of the cross on the foreheads of those standing next to them, almost as if they were crossing their own foreheads.
The two sisters stood pressed tightly against each other, breast to breast. They looked at each other and smiled, finding comfort and familiarity in the other that they’d never felt in their own home: an honest, Jewish comfort.
They got home very late. Their father opened the door for them and lit their way with a candle.
In the house, Passover still lingered. Pieces of matzo and a few Passover dishes lay on the table, stirring sadness and longing, as though an old grandmother had just died. You’d gotten nothing from her during her lifetime and nobody needed her, and yet, now that she’s dead, you’re a bit sorry. The family hadn’t enjoyed Passover at all, aside from lazing about and being bored, but they felt some regret that it was over.
Each sister took a small piece of matzo and bit into it. They didn’t particularly feel like eating, but they ate unthinkingly for comfort and for the love of their own holiday.
The church bells rang, informing the households of Jewish tradesmen that they were surrounded by a widespread Christian world with its Christian life and its hundreds of bells that ring and call, inspiring joy and devotion in Christian hearts. And the Jewish tradesmen felt all the lonelier, even more isolated from the outside world during the Christian holiday: more distant from gentiles than during regular working days, and at the same time more separate from other Jews, especially those who ran their own shops, got their business from the streets, and closed their doors in observance of the Christian holiday.
Under the clang of the church bells, Leyzer arose well before his usual time either on holidays or workdays. He got up early, rested and tired, exhausted and lazy after eight days of rest, too lazy for more rest, and far too lazy to work. He got up for work earlier than usual to give himself an hour’s free time on a regular workday.
Going into the workroom, he stood by the glass door that led to the courtyard. Jaws wide open, he yawned into the rising sun. Its morning light was stirring the workroom and everything in it to life. It shone into Leyzer’s gaping yawn, illuminating a mouthful of neglected teeth, rotted before their time. His eyes, damp from yawning, glittered like glass lenses.
The church bells rang continuously, awakening longing, loneliness, and sadness in his Jewish heart. He looked at the covered workbenches and fleetingly recalled the thirty-five years he’d known them. He’d wanted to leave them at least five times in the past, but couldn’t manage it. One by one, he uncovered the three workbenches and the week was unveiled. Three dirty, blackened workbenches. In uncovering them after this time of separation, it seemed like he’d rejoined something of his own, a piece of his own life. Turning one wheel and then another, he felt as though he were touching a part of himself, a part of himself not much loved but intimate nevertheless. And it seemed to him that the holiday, which had come for eight days and was then gone, was also one of his own, but it was . . . yes, it was like an aristocrat who occasionally condescends to drop in on his poor relatives. After his departure a kind of unhappiness lingers; and when everything returns to normal, the relatives start to resent both his arrival and his departure. That’s how Leyzer felt after the holiday; something both good and bad had come with it, and now, when it was over, everything was the same again, and he felt a longing for both the good and the bad.
Going into the house, Leyzer got ready to pray. He was neither a fanatic nor a freethinker. He prayed because his father had prayed and because he himself had prayed all his life; and also because it seemed that not praying would be the behavior of either an aristocrat or a lout; and also because things weren’t going so well for him that he shouldn’t pray; and finally because he was already getting on in years and, in his old age, it was too late to stop.
Touching the tefillin, 74 which he hadn’t held in his
hands for eight days, 75 it seemed that he was touching the workweek: the week that just then seemed holier than the holiday, holier and more intimate. Laying the cold tefillin on his bare arm, he felt a biting chill go through his whole body, and tightening the leather strap, in the early morning stillness, in the early morning workday after the holiday, among the Passover dishes and other remnants of the holiday which had not yet been cleared out of the room, he began the weekday blessing for laying tefillin:
“Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with his commandments and has instructed us regarding the commandment of tefillin.”
In the room where the Passover things still lay, Leyzer stood in his tallis 76 and tefillin and prayed the weekday prayer in the weekday style, muttering the words rapidly, mechanically, often forgetting he was praying, not paying attention to his own prayer. In the unceasing ring and clang of the church bells, a Jewish unhappiness woke in his heart, and the bells’ clamor inspired him from time to time to pray more earnestly and piously.
The apprentice arrived later. His boss could scarcely recognize him, the boy had changed so much during the eight-day holiday. His lips were plumper, his cheeks redder, and in his old, torn garments, he looked like a living piece of Passover wearing everyday work clothes. He glowed like a bit of early morning, like a bit of spring. Young life and freshness radiated from him. Made shy by the eight-day separation from the household, he lowered his eyes and said, “Good morning.”
Leyzer said nothing about his being so late. He understood, in an indistinct sort of way, that after eight days’ rest, the boy had to be late on the ninth. His very coming to work was a novelty in and of itself, because every other day of the year he didn’t arrive at all; he was a member of the household. Now he was like a worker arriving at work, and that made Leyzer smile.
