Only then do we look into each other’s faces.
15
Near dawn, Ola finally sleeps. Unable to calm myself, I cross the courtyard to the garage, berating myself all the while for allowing things to go this far. Never while I lived did I place myself in such a compromising circumstance! Not that the opportunities didn’t present themselves. On the contrary, how many times did Siedenberg’s wife send for me in her husband’s name on one slim pretext after another? Usually some far-fetched real estate scheme. I would arrive and immediately be shown into the study by the maid who would return not with Siedenberg but with Rivke, his wife, buxom in a blue or green or purple velvet dress. Fabricating apologies on her husband’s behalf—he has dashed out to this minyan, had been detained at that town council meeting—she would offer me strong Arabian coffee, brandy and mandel bread, and her company as well, until her husband might return. I would extricate myself as delicately as possible, eager not to hurt her feelings, and return to my office where I would kick myself the rest of the day for being such a coward.
The garage is dark and gloomy and I find the pictures of my daughters, as Ola said I would, hidden away in a locker filled with old rags and oily motor parts. Their faces, peering out from behind the glass, are familiar to me and yet utterly unrecognizable. Would I even notice them, I wonder, if I passed them on the street?
But Ola is correct. They are beautiful. My Hadassah, my Edzia, my Sarah, and my Miriam. Surely I would notice them, if only for their beauty, so young are they, and with such clear and open faces.
I remove the photos from inside the frames, my hands trembling, as though I were committing a theft. Once or twice, the glass falls, my hands are shaking so. The sound of its breaking is muffled, mercifully, by a dirty woven rug. Here, too, in the locker, I find pictures of my sons. All but two have sailed away for America. How long has it been since I rode with Elke, my youngest, to the harbor (after he had trifled indiscreetly with a neighbor’s Gentile maid)?
There is also a family portrait. Nine of our ten children surrounding Ester and myself. We were young, we two, children ourselves or nearly, me in a long Sabbath coat, Ester in her black matron’s dress. The little smirk concealing itself behind my beard now makes me wince. Was I so proud, so confident, that I thought I couldn’t be touched?
Most of the pictures slide easily into my pockets. Some are postcards our children had specially made, with their pictures on them, sent from this holiday or that. I stuff my vest and coat with them. The family portrait is large, however, too large for me to carry, unless I crease it, which, of course, I cannot bring myself to do. Instead, I keep it in its frame and will hide it beneath Sabina’s bed, when I get the chance.
“Look, I told you I heard something and there’s glass.”
I have woken Rukasz, my old porter, and his niece. They sleep in a cramped room off the garage. It’s the niece who enters the garage now, wrapped in a quilted horse blanket, sleep in her worried eyes. The sight of her confuses me. She was no more than a small child the last time I saw her, playing in the timber yard, a day or two before my execution. Now, I’m astonished to see a young woman with a heavy bosom elevated by two crossed arms, which she uses to pin the blanket in its place.
Rukasz follows, drunk as usual, in a pair of winter flannels. Stopping behind her, he presses his crotch into her backside.
“Uncle, stop it!” she says, annoyed, parrying him easily. “There’s something out here.”
“How dare you speak to your uncle in such a way!” Rukasz rears up, bellowing like an insulted nobleman.
“Or I’ll have Misha cut it off and feed it to his sergeant.”
“You think that just because you’re sleeping with a Russian soldier or two, you can speak to me this way! I’m your uncle, after all. I’m an old man. Have pity on me,” he says, very nearly cowering in a corner.
She was a hopeless little girl when she came to us. Her dying mother was Rukasz’ half-sister, or maybe his sister-in-law, I no longer remember which. Only with reluctance could we persuade him to take her in, so afraid was he that caring for a child might make him less attractive to me as an employee. Never mind he was a notorious thief as well as a drunkard and a man of petty, habitual violence. Never mind the times I had to bail him out of jail. To his fevered vodka-rotted brain, this bright little girl counted as a mark against him that might one day cost him his job.
“Look here,” she says.
She’s found the broken glass and the empty frames and has knelt to clean them up, carefully putting the pieces in her open hand.
“You see. What did I tell you!” says Rukasz.
“You don’t believe that, Uncle.”
“Can a cat open a locker?” he says. “Can a mouse?”
“Europe would be crawling with them. Poland. They’d be everywhere.”
“I hear him, I tell you. Every night, I swear to you, I hear him.”
“When you’re drunk, Uncle.”
“Of course, when I’m drunk! When am I not drunk? What has that to do with it?”
It’s true, it’s true, I have to laugh. I took my life in my hands each time I sat beside him in our lumber truck.
“I’ve been drunk since I was seven years old, God seeing fit to call me as an altar boy. But in all those years, I never heard a ghost, did I?”
“Until now.”
“That’s it, that’s it,” he says, blinking rapidly.
“It’s rotting your brain.”
“Rubbish!”
“You can’t handle it anymore. You said so yourself. And you’re getting older.”
“The place is haunted,” he screams.
She has straightened up the mess I’ve left, sweeping up the smaller shards, returning the empty frames to the locker.
“Pathetic,” she sighs to herself.
So the old goat has heard me then, has he, on those long nights when I’ve leaned out the nursery window, calling for the Rebbe?
“I should never have taken you in,” he mutters now, peering nervously through the open door, across the courtyard, at the nursery window.
“Pan Skibelski is dead!” she shouts at him. “They shot him years ago! His children are dead! His wife is dead! The Jews are dead, they’re dead, Uncle! You know this! Everyone knows this! Now if you don’t shut up, I’ll have Misha put a bullet through your fat head and you’ll be dead as well!”
16
I run from the garage to the main apartment, tears stinging my good eye, and rush blindly up the stairs to Ola’s room.
“Ola! Ola! I must talk to you at once,” I shout, barging through her door.
“Panie Chaim,” she says, turning, with a wide smile. “Look at me.” Something about her leaves me, for a moment, unable to speak. She is changed, that is certain, although I can’t quite tell how. I stop at her threshold, nearly dropping the framed family portrait, and think to put it on the dresser and then hold it instead, tucked beneath my arm.
“Ola, but what has happened?”
She rushes to me, clasping my hands to her chest.
“I died,” she says, merrily.
“You did what?” I find her impossible to understand.
“I’m dead,” she repeats.
“You died? Ola? But no! When?”
“Minutes ago,” she laughs, covering her mouth with her fingers. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
With a lightness I have never seen, she pulls on new traveling clothes: a high-waisted skirt, a silk blouse with buttons to the side, a smart tweed frock.
“I no longer need my glasses,” she says. And it’s true. She moves easily about the room without them, finding her brushes and her combs, which she packs into a small valise.
“Your mother,” I say. “Shouldn’t someone tell your mother?”
“What happens now?” she asks, all dressed, as if for a sea voyage.
“Ola,” I say, but I’m unable to think clearly. Can this really be my Ola, my worn little tubercular Ola, who stands befo
re me with such bright and gleaming eyes? She, too, seems years older than when I saw her last. Was it really only a night ago? How many years has she been living in my house?
“But you said you had something to ask me,” she giggles.
As I start to speak, a great rumbling fills the air, clipping my words, interrupting them completely. We rush to the window, Ola and I, towards the source of this monstrous sound. A thundering billow of clouds rises darkly from behind the ancient monastery, blocking the sun. As it does, the clouds are shot through with a light that is astonishingly bright, yet we are able to look at it directly, stare at it even, without its burning our eyes. Somewhere, there is music, a jubilant choir of voices. I feel queasy in the pit of my stomach. From the center of the clouds, a blue chariot bursts forth, guided by four fiery horses, each with a lion’s head and wings that span the sky. A small bearded man with a rounded tummy and long curling peyes sits besides his doting mother.
“Oh, look!” Ola shouts, tears in her eyes. “It’s Jesus and Mary!” She no longer shelters her thin body against my bulkier frame, but hangs out the window, gawking.
“Surely not!” I exclaim. That fat mama’s boy with the scraggly beard and the blotchy red face? This nebbish is their god?
“But who else could it be, Panie Chaim?”
The stern-looking woman motions benevolently to Ola, beckoning to her with strong arms wrapped in flowing silken sleeves. The son tries his best to control the horses or whatever they are, but they leap and snort and prance against the floor of clouds.
Ola leaves my gripping hands and balances on the window sill. She steadies herself, grasping the edge of the fading blue shutters. Her shoe becomes tangled in the curtain and she nearly falls.
“Easy, easy,” the woman calls to her.
Looking down, Ola raises a finger, as if to say, “I’ll be fine in a minute, give me a minute.”
“Ola, stop this,” I whisper. “This is madness.”
But she lifts both her arms and closes her eyes and ascends through the sky towards the fiery chariot. Her long skirt billows out and I blush to see her underthings.
“Ola,” I shout after her. “Your bag!”
I lift the small valise she had only moments before packed so carefully, containing her few possessions, and the compass and the telescope.
“I don’t think I’ll be needing it,” she calls back with a hapless shrug.
I watch as the bearded man offers her his chubby hand and guides her into the chariot, where she is received with warm kisses from the matronly woman. The three are seated and turn, one last time, to wave at me.
“Goodbye! Goodbye, Panie Chaim!” Ola cups two hands around her mouth to shout this farewell, then she sits back, squirming happily in her seat.
“Shalom aleichem, Reb Chaim!” the matron calls to me.
With difficulty, the man with the scant beard turns the leonine horses towards the monastery, clutching at his yarmulke to keep it from flying off. Small, winged babies pull at the light-filled clouds, closing them like a curtain. The chariot and its angelic retinue disappear behind the monastery roof and are soon gone beyond our wooded horizon. The sky returns to its normal light. The music disappears. From the west, dark clouds roll in and a heavy rain begins.
I look down at my hands and see that, like a fool, I’m still clutching onto my family portrait. I had forgotten all about it. With a handkerchief, I wipe a bit of motor oil from its glass. Behind me, suddenly, there is a shrieking. I turn to find Ola’s mother wailing over the waxen corpse that lies like a stick figure in her bed. The woman beats her enormous breasts, pulls at her coarse grey hair. Tears build up behind the golden rims of her eyeglasses. These she eventually must remove, allowing the dammed waters to flood across her apple cheeks in little curling streams.
“My baby!” she wails. “My Ola!”
I notice that she is wearing Ester’s good Sabbath dress and the small cameo I bought for her on a business trip one year to Lodz. I peer into her face, trying to discern from it how much time has passed, but its features are too distorted in their agony for that.
A chorus of hands reach out to the Mama from behind, rubbing her shoulders, patting her head. These belong to her family, but she shakes them off fiercely. More relatives crowd into the room, nearly thirty of them. They stand close to the bed, in a thickening knot, like a group waiting for a tram.
“Get them out!” the Mama shrieks. “Out! I can’t breathe!” She throws her heavy body onto the thin corpse of her daughter.
“There, there,” Big Andrzej consoles his wife, punching her lightly on the arm. “Your Ola is with her Jesus now.”
17
I’m drunk, reeling. They’re all at the funeral. I’ve unlocked the liquor cabinet and gone through the bottles they’ve stashed there. Two bottles of potato vodka, one of rye whiskey, one of some sticky sacramental wine. Since I’m not able to drink, instead I relax my tongue and my throat and pour the bitter potions down my gullet. Perhaps I’m drunk only from memory, from the smells. Perhaps I’m not drunk at all. They’ll come home and find the empty bottles rolling around on the floor, in any case. Let them. I don’t care! Have I really been abandoned twice? First by the Rebbe, and now by Ola! Oh, but the misery of watching her ascend to the Heavens in a fiery chariot, accompanied by her false gods, those idolatrous abominations, while our God, the One True God, has left me neglected here below, answering my pleas with His stony, implacable silence!
The mourners have returned. They sit in the parlor, sighing and weeping, groaning, sutured up so tightly in their shiny black clothes that they can barely breathe. Every now and then, one of them mentions the name Ola or the name Paulina. It strikes my ear like a savage insult or a bitter taunt. Their pious little daughter, too good for this harsh world. Well, whose daughter is not! I cannot bear their insipid complacencies another minute. Even now, see how they stretch and yawn, scratching their rumbling bellies before marching off to the dining room, like sleepwalkers. If it weren’t for their intestines, they wouldn’t even know they’re alive.
Neighbors, from the old Kaminski and Goldfaden apartments across the courtyard, have prepared a banquet, a feast. Tureens of chlodnik and kapuśniak and sauerkraut soup, pitchers of clabbered milk, boiled potatoes with skwarki, plates of moonshaped pierogi piled high near plates of pierożki filled with calf brains near plates of kolduny filled with rabbit meat. There are deep bowls of kasha and uszka and plump rolls of coulibiac. A platter here of salted herring with pickled eggs and one there for a roasted pork shoulder with baked apples and potatoes. Someone has poached a carp in a caramelized raisin sauce. There are cabbages with potatoes and couscous, fiery kielbasa and knackwurst, and a fragrant bigos stew. The scent of juniper berries carries all the way down the street! Roasted squab, shashlik, and a cabbage-smothered pheasant are draped across platters along with a rare stuffed goose. For dessert, there are little mountains of sour-cream blinis, great wheels of red Russian kiśiel, twisted sticks of chrust, golden-brown racuszki sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar, raisin-filled babka and a tower of flat piernik cakes.
The sideboard resembles a butcher’s window, the serving table a baker’s shop. Dazed, in polite couples, the many mourners approach the feast, muttering guiltily about life and its irrefutable demands, about the high importance of living, about how Ola, dear lamb, would have wanted them to live, how she would have wanted them to forget all about her, if need be, in order to continue living, to continue filling their bellies and sucking in air, as though there were not enough of it to go around, as though certain lungs must surrender their portion in order that pinker, more fortunate lungs might expand to full capacity! How they sigh and heave, these fatuous dreamers, flaunting the very air in their chests. Their exhalations fill my nostrils with a putrid stench. Oh, the living, how they stink! They stink! They do! They rot but do not decompose. And each day, these walking, stinking, breathing monsters devour whole forests of animals, entire oceans of fish, great farms of ve
getables and to what end? That they may shit and fart and piss their way through another day of violence and indifference. Well, let them pass their lives as someone else’s uninvited guests. I want them out! Now! Out of my house!
I enter the dining room and circle the table. With bowed heads, they’ve finished saying their prayers. “In Jesus’ name,” they pray, “Amen,” praying through the failed rabbinical student they imagine to be God, to the true God, a God they do not know, a God Who hates me, true, it’s true, Who hid my fate from me these many years, when I was rich and felt myself so blessed. This is what You had in store for me? To watch helplessly as a family of Polish pigs sits at my table and feeds itself, as though around a trough, snuffling down the delicacies they’ve stolen from the cellars of my murdered neighbors!
I’ll have no more of it.
Big Papa Andrzej has now stood, so solemnly, to thank all his neighbors for their considerable charities. Piously, he motions to his mourning wife, offering up her thanks as well. He is drunk. Like me. Like me, he’s been drinking since sun up. His wife, that fat horse of a woman, sobs and sniffs at every mention of her poor daughter’s name.
“Ola, Ola, Ola!” I bellow it into her head, not an inch away, so close I can see the stiff hairs growing like foliage inside her plump apricot ears. And out her nose as well. I’ve peeked around the corner of her head for a better look. There’s one curling white hair growing from a wart upon her chin.
The eldest brother rises, also, to offer a toast of thanks to their helpful friends, usurpers of my helpful friends and their houses and their homes.
A Blessing on the Moon Page 5
