‘From tomorrow you will have to get by without me. I’m sure Pinchas will help you.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m going to Galicia,’ said Zalman. ‘I am a peaceful man, but this is about my son.’
52
He went to the barber’s, even though it was still Yontif, sat down on the chair with the revolving seat, laid his hands on the arm rests, felt the rustling paper against the back of his neck, took a deep breath, smelled hair water and pomade and soap, blew the air spluttering back out like someone emerging from water, and was ready.
Herr Dallaporta, who had now been in Switzerland for twenty-five years, and whose first shop had been destroyed in the disturbances of 1896, was surprised to see him. ‘Isn’t it Sunday for the Jews today?’ he asked, and Zalman replied. ‘Sometimes you have to work even on Sunday.’ They spoke in Zurich German, one of them with a Neapolitan, the other a Galician intonation. Neither man noticed the accent of the other.
‘The side whiskers,’ said Zalman. ‘They will have to go.’
Herr Dallaporta was an aesthetic person, and had even decorated a wall of his drawing room with a painting of Vesuvius done by himself. Zalman’s magnificent whiskers were a work of art, and one on which he himself had worked for many years, and destroying them struck him as blasphemy. ‘Why?’ he asked, and in a dramatic gesture that could as easily have had a Yiddish as an Italian accent, raised his hands to the heavens. ‘Emperor Franz Joseph does not have finer ones.’
‘That’s exactly why. Only an Austrian would wear such whiskers. And for the foreseeable future it is better if I don’t look like an Austrian.’
He had his moustache trimmed as he had worn it two decades before: bushy and not very tidy. When he came home with his new face, Hinda didn’t recognise him at first, when in fact it was only the old, young Zalman coming back to light. Rachel declared her altered father to be dashing, her favourite word of the moment, and only Lea, who like her grandmother Chanele had a keen eye for what people were up to, said straight away, ‘You’re up to something.’
He told them about his plan, which wasn’t yet a plan, but just an intention – ‘But doing nothing at all would be the worst possible plan’ – and they tried to dissuade him from it. He had been expecting that, and wouldn’t be put off. ‘You of all people must understand this,’ he said to Hinda. ‘Some things are non-negotiable.’
They went on debating with him when he was already packing his rucksack – ‘No, not a suitcase, I’m not going on holiday’ – they went on talking at him as he wrapped his big scissors and his sewing kit in a cloth – ‘You never know what you’re going to need’ – and when he went to the station without knowing where the trains even went, Pinchas and Arthur had turned up and were trying to persuade him that he was risking his life unnecessarily.
‘Unnecessarily?’ asked Zalman. ‘My son is there.’ And he pulled on his fingers until the joints cracked, as one brings a tool that one hasn’t used for a long time back into operation.
There might, the man at the counter said, still be trains for Cracow. But he would rather sell Zalman a ticket to Vienna, a choice for which he had a reassuringly everyday explanation: ‘If there is no connection, we can’t refund the ticket. According to our terms and conditions, acts of war count as an act of God, and then you’d be throwing your money away.’
Zalman bought a ticket to Vienna, one-way. He almost said, ‘If I don’t come back, it would be throwing my money away.’
Pinchas hadn’t really expected to be able to dissuade him from his decision, and now, murmuring a prayer, stuffed a huge piece of smoked meat into his rucksack. It would turn out to be a very precious gift.
‘And where are you going to sleep on the way?’ Arthur asked, as if nothing could be more important.
‘I will build myself a tabernacle. That’s very appropriate, since it’s Sukkot.’
Hinda laughed with him, and it was the hardest thing she had ever had to do for her husband. She managed until his train had pulled away. Only then would she let herself be comforted by her daughters.
Later, when it was all a long time ago, Zalman’s journey into the war became a legend, a heroic family epic that was told over and over again, and smoothed and embellished each time until it assumed the clarity and unbelievability of a saga. Even for his grandchildren, who knew him only as a grandfather who was always ready for childish pranks, his adventures were no more real than their favourite bedtime story about the huge fish on whose back the sailors cooked their dinner.
After his first report, Zalman himself spoke little about his experiences, and was much more silent about the matter than people were used to. When pressed, he always told the same anecdotes, none of which were really fit for proper society. There was the story of the Austrian soldiers who wanted to be sent home, so they swallowed soap, because it gave you diarrhoea that no field doctor could tell from the symptoms of cholera, and the one about the smokers who had no papers to roll their tobacco in, so fished the paper out of the latrine, ‘this one’s clean, this one isn’t.’ The latter became a catchphrase in the family, which was used both during the washing up and the sorting of the laundry. ‘This one’s clean, this one isn’t.’
At the core of the legend there was a real event, and even without embellishment Zalman’s experiences throughout those weeks were adventurous enough.
It began without particular difficulties: the connection from Vienna to Cracow still existed. In his compartment he was the only civilian among Austrian officers, and was therefore looked at with great suspicion. They were already having to transport the refugees in goods wagons in the opposite direction, there were so many of them, and here was someone voluntarily travelling into the thick of it? Lest he be mistaken for a spy, Zalman remembered his time in New York and started talking in an American accent. He claimed to be a correspondent for the Herald, and noted the names of all his passengers for a report he was writing about the heroic Austrian army. The prospect of international fame quickly made the officers forget their suspicion. War has a lot to do with vanity.
The Russians, they explained to him, as insulted as if they had broken the rules of a respectable game by gaining such an unpredicted advantage for themselves, the Russians had advanced on Galicia through the Pripyat Swamps, which according to all the strategic plans were impossible to cross, which meant that they must have been preparing for this conflict for years, which wasn’t fair at all. From Lemberg in Northern Galicia to Czernowitz in Bukovina they had overrun a whole series of towns and quickly made their way westwards. But as a result – the officers said it behind their hands, as if the General Chief of Staff von Hötzendorf had confided it to them in person – all their supply routes were now far too long, and in fact, all the people in the compartment were convinced the Russians, even though they didn’t know it, had won a Pyrrhic victory. Zalman was reminded of the trade union meetings at which, to keep one’s spirits up, one always persuaded oneself that the strike was having an effect, and the fact that the opposition still refused to negotiate was only proof of their weakness.
He agreed with the officers on all points, which was why they considered him an expert in strategic matters, and even asked him how the fortress of Przemysl, trapped and surrounded by the Russians, might best be relieved.
They became such friends that in Cracow they organised a place for him in a medical train which was travelling to a place near Tarnow; the town itself had already been taken by the enemy. The train stopped close behind the front; rifle fire could be heard. The victory procession of the Russians seemed unstoppable, and the inhabitants of the villages in which the hospital tents had been erected were already hanging Russian Orthodox icons on their houses having heard that these were likely to make the Cossacks more lenient towards them: Jesus, Mary and St Nicholas. ‘There were pictures like that on the Jewish houses too,’ Zalman said later, ‘and perhaps they helped. The Russians never got beyond Tarnow.’
He never spoke of how
he had battled his way through the Austrian and then the Russian lines. He only said once to Arthur, ‘I saw more wounded people there than you will ever experience in your practice, and believe me: if someone is clutching his own intestines, and begging you to shoot him to put an end to his pain, your only regret is that you don’t have a gun.’
The only good road would have led eastwards via Rzeszow, Jaroslaw and Przemysl. But because the fortress there, the last Habsburg island, was still resisting and the battles were fierce, Zalman had to seek a route further south, where the landscape became mountainous and there was therefore little to conquer and little to gain. Here on the slopes of the Beskids no great armies had ever clashed, and no decision had ever been made concerning them. Only small units skirmished sporadically there, weary boxers still slugging away at each other even though neither side had a hope of landing the deciding blow.
The war, which was nothing here but a series of bloody assaults, took place among the population; potato cellars served as foxholes, and machine-gunners were hidden in the church towers. There were no clear borders now, large or small. Even the garden fences had disappeared, chopped up for firewood or to reinforce the muddy roads.
The war had swirled up the land just as Mimi liked to shuffle the cards: throwing the whole pack on the bedcovers, closing her eyes and rummaging blindly around in them.
Many families had been torn apart, and if they had been lucky enough to stay together, they didn’t know where to go. Sometimes two groups would meet, each seeking safety in exactly the direction from which the other had just fled. So many refugees were wandering around that with sad mockery they were called ‘the second army’. An individual man in torn and dirty clothes didn’t attract attention here.
The region had always been poor, and the war had made it even poorer. Everything edible had been confiscated against worthless requisition vouchers – ‘to be redeemed when Moshiach comes’ – and the hungry soldiers were digging the last potatoes out of the ground with their bayonets. Anyone who had to retreat, and here, where there was no clear front, that now meant the Austrians and then the Russians again, first blew up all the supplies that they couldn’t take with them, with a charge of picric acid.
Hunger abolishes laws, and every time Zalman wanted to cut off a piece of the smoked meat that Pinchas had given him at the last moment, he had to find a hiding place.
The land was full of beggars, old and new. ‘They were easy to tell apart,’ Zalman said. ‘The practised ones are shameless and look you in the eye when they hold their hand out to you.’
Once, afterwards, he couldn’t remember if it had been near Samok or near Sambor, an experienced shnorrer had attached himself to him for a whole day, an old man who had never been in a battle, but who nonetheless had a whole row of Russian medals for bravery rattling on his chest. In the pocket of his coat, just in case the fortunes of war should change, he had just as many Austrian medals at the ready. ‘People want to be able to feel sorry for someone who’s one of their own,’ was his explanation. ‘In my profession you owe your customers that.’
When Zalman reported on such encounters, everything sounded like a big adventure, but there were lots of things he never spoke about, and which one could only guess from little details, just as an archaeologist assembles a whole culture from a few shards. Thus, for example, he never mentioned a looted manor house, but there must have been one, because once he said, ‘Piano wood burns best,’ and another time, when he already had his own tailor’s workshop and someone tried to sell him some strikingly green velvet, ‘I once used a billiard-table covering like that to stitch lining in the coat of a freezing sergeant.’
The really bad things, and there must have been plenty of those, he kept to himself, or confided them only in Hinda. She alone knew why Zalman never touched a pear for as long as he lived – a dead man had lain under a pear tree, and the rotting fruits had mingled with the rotting body – or why he plunged himself with such commitment into his work for the relief committee. To the others he said only, ‘The Jews will experience nothing worse this century than what has happened to them in Galicia,’ and looked people in the eye as he asked them for a donation.
‘And you never gave up hope of finding Ruben?’ Hinda asked him.
‘Hope costs nothing,’ he replied. It was supposed to be a joke, but he didn’t smile as he said it.
Even if only half of the stories the family would later tell each other had really happened, Zalman must have been through a lot, and been involved in a lot as well. He had set off from Zurich at Sukkot, and it was already November when he arrived at last, via Stryj and Stanislawow in Kolomea.
He had grown up there, and he no longer knew the city.
In front of the station, which lay on the outskirts, a coachman seemed to be waiting for arriving guests, but when Zalman came closer all that stood there was the skeleton of a droschke, just as the whole building was only the skeleton of a station. From here it was two kilometres into the city, and it was a strange feeling for him to have the wide street, where in his day pedestrians, carts and coaches had jostled for space, all to himself.
Kolomea, far in the East of Galicia, had been one of the first cities taken by the Russian troops, and because in the first flush of the new war they wanted to do particularly well, they had organised a real shooting competition with their guns, in which even the Greek Orthodox church had lost its tower. What remained was just a shapeless lump of stone that looked a bit like a stable, and which the Cossacks also used for that purpose in the first days of the occupation. A building in the classical style, which Zalman had never seen – it must have been built after he left – showed no sign of impact, but had been completely burned out.
One walked past it on a carpet of charred scraps of paper; he thought at first that it might have been a library, and only the Hebrew letters under his feet made him realise that this must be the new synagogue that Ruben had described with such admiration in one of his letters.
In Ring Square, the city’s central market, there was no sign of the crammed stalls from which Hutsul peasants in bright costumes once sold poultry and vegetables; only a few starving city-dwellers had lined up spare household utensils in front of them, and waited hopelessly for takers. The windows of the shop buildings all around were boarded up, as if they could no longer bear the sight of their sick city. Most of the shops were shut, only the Righietti patisserie on Kosciuszko Street had bravely kept going. A sign on the door asked the honoured clientele for forgiveness, but ‘for reasons beyond our control’ they were unfortunately unable to serve cakes or coffee.
The people he met avoided his eye. Any stranger could be an enemy or, even more of a threat, someone looking for help. It was more sensible simply not to notice him.
There was no sign of Russian soldiers. The only ones were two sentries outside the Hotel Bellevue on Jagiellonska Street. They had probably set up their headquarters inside.
It wasn’t far to the yeshiva, but Zalman first made his way to Jablonowka, the little alley in the Jewish quarter where his old friend lived, the one who had taken Ruben in. The whole area was filled with a smell of burned wood that had been rained on, and Zalman started running as if, after more than three weeks on the road, every minute suddenly counted.
The alley was undamaged, the one-storey wooden buildings still pressed up against one another, as if trying to keep each other’s spirits up. But the street was silent, more silent than he had ever experienced it before, even on Yom Kippur, when everyone was in the synagogue.
The front doors weren’t locked.
In his friend’s house even the cupboards were open, they had been thoroughly and carefully emptied, the tableware and the linen had been cleared away, and not even chaos had been left behind. The books alone had been of interest to nobody.
Names were written in chalk on tables and chairs, Sawicki, Truchanowicz, Brzezina. Only later did Zalman discover the explanation: the looters, all respectable neighbours, had sig
ned their booty so that when the corresponding space in their own house was liberated, they could calmly come and take it away. There was no particular hurry, as no one worried that the Jewish owners were ever coming back.
Ruben’s suitcase lay on the bed in a little room on the first floor.
Empty.
Zalman sat down beside it and stroked the dark brown cardboard.
When he was standing in the deserted alley again, not knowing who to turn to, a voice suddenly called out his name. It was a thin, old, lisping voice that seemed to come out of nowhere, because he couldn’t see a soul. ‘Kamionker!’ called the voice. ‘Are you not Kamionker?’
In the open window of a house, he only saw it now, there stood an old woman who seemed familiar, but whom he couldn’t quite place. She beckoned him over, and it was only when he was standing in front of her – in this house, too, the doors were unlocked and the cupboards had been completely emptied – that he remembered.
‘Frau Heller?’
Back in the days when he had worked as a young boy in Simon Heller’s tallis-weaving mill, she had been the boss, a woman you took your cap off to when she walked through the workshops, and who had always, Zalman could smell it still, pulled a fine veil of violet perfume behind her. Now an old woman stood in the cleared-out house, even though Frau Heller could not have been all that old. She no longer wore a sheitel, and her scalp, yellow as Torah parchment, shimmered through her tangled grey hair.
‘Why aren’t you in Ottynia with the rest, Kamionker?’ she asked.
She hadn’t lisped before.
The Hellers had never lived in Jablonowka, only ever in a stately manufacturer’s house beside the mill. But she had probably grown up here, and had crept back into her parents’ house after . . .
Zalman didn’t ask her for her story. He had heard too many atrocities over the previous few weeks.
Melnitz Page 57
