“My family,” I say, “where are they?”
“Herr Jude,” one baker says, “don’t be such a fusspot.”
“Not another step closer or I’ll slice at least one of you!”
The mixing blade shines like a scimitar below the electric lights. I stand my ground, holding its point in the air between us. At a loss, the many bakers turn their mustaches in the direction of the head baker, who beams jovially at me, his cheeks like two fat roses, his eyes crinkling into merry circles of delight. His walrus mustache is as white as marzipan.
“Herr Jude,” he says, a clucking laughter in his throat. “I must bake. Do you understand? Surely you don’t wish to be the only Jew left in God’s blue world?”
“Where is my family?” I say.
“Herr Jude,” he demurs.
“I demand to know!”
His clear blue eyes look warmly at me over the tops of his flour-dusted spectacles. The glass is square without supporting frames.
“Gentlemen,” he says to his staff. “Tell Herr Jude where his family is.”
“They have taken the steam,” says the first assistant.
“We have baked them,” volunteers a second assistant and there is no mistaking the pride with which he says this.
“They have been in our ovens,” says a middle baker, with equal pride.
“May we give you a guided tour?” one of the apprentices offers with a frank and open face, making all the others laugh.
I’m a risible figure, I know, in my nightshirt and my tasseled hat. Nevertheless, as they come for me, I slash out with the mixing blade, slicing one of the apprentices across the bridge of his nose, tearing at his flesh. The young boy cries out in pain, bringing his hands to his face. My efforts produce a moment’s hesitation in the advancing cohort. With new anger, the bakers trip over the spilled pots and pans I kick in their way. I send wheeled breadracks rolling towards them and limp hurriedly down the hallway, past the high stacks of flour sacks and back out the servants door. Someone has set off an alarm, it bellows and blares. I pause long enough in the dark stairwell to slide the mixing blade through the long handle of the door, forcing it into position and preventing it from being opened from the other side. Immediately, someone in the kitchen pulls against it, pounding on its hollow metal. The mixing blade works as a jam, but there’s no telling if it will hold, nor for how long. My candle has long since burned out and I must scurry up the staircase in total darkness, holding the long hem of my nightshirt balled up in one fist so that I don’t trip over it again and again. Because of the irregularity of the stairs, I bang my shins and knees anyway. At the top of the landing, I stick my head cautiously into the corridor. The alarm is sounding even louder here, on the hotel’s second floor. Lights flash on and off. Excited shouts come from somewhere deep inside the ballrooms. Booted footsteps clatter through the hallways. Near the laundry room, I notice a small maid’s pantry. The door, cut into the wall, must be no more than two and a half feet in height. From the stairwell, I hear that the bakers have broken through my temporary jam and are now ascending the stairs. Their jovial threats, which they bark out in a teasing, pleasant way, echo through the chamber. With both retreat and advance cut off, I open the small maid’s pantry and conceal myself behind a rickety fence of broom and mop handles, pulling the door to from the inside. There is no inner knob, only the quarter inch of screw that fastens the knob to the other side of the door’s thin wood. The pantry is small. There is no way for me to get comfortable. I half lie atop water buckets and detergent bottles, terror filling my body with an electric pulse. Outside, the drumming of footsteps and a tangled chorus of voices pass my door at intervals. Whose voices and whose steps, I can in no way discern. Because, at some point, the sounds grow fainter and more distant, I assume my ruse has worked. Still, I daren’t move or even attempt to shift my body, lest some slight sound reveal my whereabouts. A small duster has been poking me in the spine. One leg and an elbow tingle and grow numb. My mouth is dry and I am barely able to suppress the cough that is beginning at the bottom of my throat. The darkness, too, is intolerable. I wave my hand before my eyes, but can see nothing. My neck aches and when I move it, it pops audibly. If they’ve stationed some watchman or guard in the hall, the sounds from my neck would probably be indistinguishable from the creaking of the hotel walls. Perhaps he begins to slumber, this guard, nearly as uncomfortable as I am. Perhaps he misses his bed. Perhaps he misses his wife and children. His feet grow numb and his mind begins to wander. He’d rather be farming. His cows need milking. He doesn’t understand what he’s doing, sitting here in an empty hotel, waiting for me to cross his path so he can shoot me and go home. I might as well let him. How long can I continue to hide in this way, folded in half, inside this little pantry? If I turn myself in, it would be from sheer boredom. I laugh at the idea, forgetting to stifle it. There’s no telling the time. Could it possibly be morning? I imagine I hear birds singing. Surely it is morning. I can’t hide forever. I’m only human. It would be different if I had a friend or a helper on the outside, someone who knew where I was, someone who brought me food or scraps of information, someone who could whistle a secret tune when it was safe to venture out. The man who is watching me, this watcher who I have thought about throughout this long night, perhaps he is a man whose secret sympathies lie with me. One can never tell. Perhaps he has been thinking of me as well at his station, during his long vigil. Maybe I could charm him into aiding me. Perhaps he will hide me in his barn, send his children out to me with food. They will cover me with hay if the soldiers come. At any rate, I’m suffocating in this little closet. I need to move. I cannot take it any longer. “All right, all right!” I shout. “Enough! I will surrender!” And with one foot, I kick open the cupboard door. The air rushes in. I am blinded by an intense glare.
Shading my eyes with a raised arm, I cannot look into the searing light of their one hundred torches.
They must have been gathering all night, these soldiers and vigilantes, outside my cupboard door. They have waited for me to reveal myself, so they may kill me at my most terrified. If I am crazed and animal-like, I will not fight back, and they can take greater pleasure in the killing.
I roll out of the cupboard, my hands raised, trying not to weep. As my eyes adjust, gradually, I am able to make out forms. I can barely stand on my numbed legs, they fall out from under me. I look around. The bright light of day spills through the many holes in the hotel’s walls and roof. Nothing is left, but a dilapidated shell, no larger than a barn. There are no fine and fancy grounds, no stables, no greenhouses, no long palatial drives, no fountains and no pools. I’m standing in the middle of a green and sunny field. The air is fresh and fragrant. The birds, indeed, are singing. My eyes search the landscape, but can find no trace of snow. The earth is alive and green, the wind is cool, but pleasant. How long have I lain hidden in my little cupboard, cramped and twisted from fear? It must be early spring. I feel like a sleepwalker who awakens far from his home with no idea how he arrived here. I’m still wearing the hotel’s nightshirt and its ridiculous tasseled cap. Across the field, a black shape catches my eyes, dangling from a tree.
“Rebbe!” I cry out, running to greet him.
But it’s only my old suit, hanging on a branch, blowing in the breeze. Sunlight dapples through the familiar pattern of bullet holes sewn irrevocably into its fabric. I find my old shoes, placed in a knot-hole in the tree’s trunk. Pulling the nightshirt over my head, I knock the tasseled sleeper’s cap to the ground. My naked belly is exposed and I’m dismayed to see that my old wounds have been restored. They are fresh and pustular, no longer covered with shiny scars. Gingerly, I raise my hand to my face and allow my fingers to probe the unnatural depressions and openings there and in the back of my head. I take the clothes off their branches and dress in my old shirt, my old jacket. I secure my old pants around my waist with my worn, familiar belt.
I sit upon the ground, beside the tree. I fold my legs and brace them wi
th my arms.
THE SMALLER TO RULE BY NIGHT
55
I close my eyes and see only the ovens and their flames, their blue tongues licking across the bodies of my Ester, my Sarah, my Edzia, my Miriam, my Hadassah, my Laibl; consuming my sons-in-law and their children, Markus, Solek, Israel, Pavel, Pola, Jakob, Sabina, Marek and his daughters; devouring my town as well. Everyone I know, everyone I have ever known, has disappeared into the ash. I have torn my clothes and fallen to my knees, but my grief is insufficient. Were the oceans made of tears and the winds of sighing, still there would not be tears enough nor sighs to assuage my crumpled heart.
Why was I given a body! I shout this to the Heavens. Why was I restored to my place at the head of my family! Why did You, in Your infinite wisdom and Your mercy, invite me to luxuriate in the Hotel Amfortas, delighting in its gardens and its lakes, only to see every dear thing billow up the kitchen stacks in black and stenchy plumes?
What are You thinking?
For Who Else could be behind such a monstrous affair, from which even the Rebbe’s tender guidance couldn’t spare me. No, it’s impossible to doubt God’s hand. Who but the Almighty could take a shabby house painter and, in a few short years, make him Chancellor of all Germany?
What difference does it make where I go? The sun burns, searing, above me. The long winds wail past. I wander through the woods, dour in thought, heading nowhere, walking in circles. The earth has vomited me out. I mutter to myself like a madman, fetid in her stench. If, as a child, I had been taken aside and told of the poisoned secrets my future hid for me in its coils, I would have fallen into a fever and died immediately.
Am I really expected now to carry on, without even a death to ransom me?
56
Deep in the forest, I find my rustic traveling sack hanging from a linden tree. The strap is looped across the gnarled blackened branch and the bag rocks slightly in the wind, as though a hand had placed it there only a moment before.
Who keeps playing these tricks on me?
Wearied by my own curiosity, nevertheless I cannot help but peer into the hanging bag. And what do I expect to find there? Money perhaps? Steamship tickets to Buenos Aires? Letters from a distant admirer?
I expect nothing at all.
And so I am not overly surprised to find, exactly as I had left them, the toy compass and the cracked telescope, which I rescued from beneath Ola’s bed. (Dear little Ola, how happy and small her death now seems.) The family pictures are missing, but the ledger is neatly tucked inside. I open its covers and find that its pages have been singed and burnt. The remnants of my careful notes and drawings crumble and fall into the forest carpet. “Will it never end?” I shout this question to the trees.
I often speak aloud these days, sometimes shouting, often not, wishing I had no voice at all, that my thoughts might cease their feverish noodlings through my brain and disappear completely, folding in upon themselves.
57
I find there is no longer any need for food. I nearly choked upon the pine needle stew I made, more from habit than from hunger, near the river a day or so ago. I had to pick the nettles from my tongue, they clogged my gullet.
I had been dreaming of my mother’s soup, her special recipe, that milky broth served steaming with a swirling ladle from the hotel’s silver tureen. How I long to awaken to the smell of dark coffee and a bite of apricot blintz.
I sleep, beneath a crooked tree, my satchel for a pillow, and awaken in the night to hear weeping not far off.
Rising on an elbow, leaves sticking to my wounds, I strain to listen but soon the crying stops.
“Are you all right?” I call. The words are echoed back, as though I had addressed them to myself.
“Can you hear me?” I shout into the silence.
“Are you all right?”
But there is nothing. Only the sounds of the forest breathing. I brush the twigs and leaves from my face and lay my head again upon the satchel.
And then, unmistakably I hear the words Chaim Skibelski, is that you? cutting through the night.
I stand immediately. Searching the darkened forest paths and the pitch black silhouettes of trees, I cup my hands to my mouth and cry, “Yes, it’s me! It’s Chaim Skibelski! I am here!”
But I receive no further answer.
Soon the sky lightens and it is once again bright day. Overhead, an enormous aeroplane, larger than any I have seen, roars through the clouds, shaking the ground beneath my feet. It is long, enormously so, a blazing silver tube flashing in the early light. I thought an army must be approaching, such was the rumbling that preceded its exploding into view above my head.
58
Perhaps I can say Kaddish for myself.
This queer thought occurs to me as I loll about the ground beneath my tree. There is nothing else I have to do, nothing pressing. I’ve frittered away the last few days, stretched out in a tense indolence, feeling sorry for myself. Were it not for a suffocating grief that occasionally overtakes me, my days would have no shape at all, so encased am I in this hard, metallic gloom.
But why not? Why can’t a soul recite the prayer for the dead over himself and somehow, on his own, effect his way into the World to Come? Our Sages teach us that if a person has no sons, a grown man may be hired to say the prayer on his behalf.
Why can’t I hire myself?
True, I have nothing with which to pay myself, but then, on the other hand, I don’t need much. Immediately, I agree to do the service without charge. The merit of the deed will be all the greater for this small charity. So why not, Chaimka? I urge myself on. And in a twinkling, I am up, revived, and facing east. I feel as energetic as I can remember. I have nothing with which to cover my head, so I place my satchel across the top of my skull, holding its straps underneath my chin, drawing them together like the edges of a shawl.
“Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw,” I chant. “Magnified and Holy be His Great Name!” I put my heart into it, davvening with all my soul. I’ve never prayed so fervently. “May the Maker of Peace in the high places make peace in the small places. For us, for Israel, and for all who mourn. And so we say, Amen!”
The Amen resounds through the forests, like a gun shot. I am stirred and awakened, anticipating in the next instant something momentous, something extravagant, something along the lines of Ola’s ascension, but without the gaudy theatricals.
Nothing discernible happens.
I sigh.
Perhaps a subtle change has been effected, but it’s very difficult to tell.
I sit again beneath the branches of my birch and return to the dawdling lethargy I had hoped to shake off with my prayers. Even if it were possible, not to mention permissible, to pray oneself into the World to Come, I know I do not have the stamina to keep at it for the required eleven months. My heart isn’t in it, I have no minyan, and without the moon, who can keep track of the time?
I stretch and yawn and sadly contemplate the sky.
Surely by now, my sons in America know that we are dead. For isn’t the war long over? Surely some survivor or witness has sought them out and knocked upon their doors. Clearing his throat and apologizing for his broken English, surely he has sat at their kitchen tables and been plied with honeycake and coffee by their wives. These he unhappily accepts from a sense of decorum, before telling them of our fates, my sons translating the Yiddish for their children. By now, surely, the coffee has grown bitter and the honeycake stale and tasteless on their tongues. Surely they have thought, with aching hearts, to pray the Kaddish that they owe me!
If not my sons, then their sons. Anyone over thirteen will do!
Or are the Gates of Heaven, God forbid, closed? Else, why has no one interceded on my behalf? Can Ester, whose soul I’m certain flew up the smokestacks to the highest realms of Holiness, not put in a good word for me? She, who harmed no one—surely they would listen to her! Will not our daughters plead for their father?
Or have they forgotten me?
“Who?” the birds squawk down, chattering, “Who who who?”
“Dear birds, my teacher, is he there?”
They address my inquiry to their companions, hanging like so many black apples in the neighboring trees, cawing and clattering in their secretive tongue.
“Sorry,” one bird calls down, translating. “No Rebbe here.”
I have taken to walking at night, aimlessly. Too tired to sleep, I thrash through the woods, singing little melodies to myself, guided sufficiently by the stars not to break my neck. Sometimes I sit against a tree or near a lake and hold a small conversation with myself.
“Chaim, Chaim, Chaim,” I sigh.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” I reply, the words escaping, almost like breath, from my mouth.
“And so,” I begin a new point, but I lose myself in thought before I can continue.
59
Late one night, I inadvertently leave the borders of my forest and find myself upon a road that winds into a small provincial town. For no reason at all, I follow it past farmhouses and churches, over a small hill, across a narrow bridge, and am halfway down Kosciuszki Street before I realize that I am home. I am home. I am standing in my old town, on the outskirts of the Jewish quarter. I have to stop and gawk, so amazed am I to find myself in this old place. It’s hard to say exactly what has changed. Everything seems different. The roads are paved, for one thing, and, certainly, there are more cars parked along the streets. Before, Rosenthal and I were among the few private citizens with our own conveyances, but now they are everywhere, smaller and brighter than I remember, painted in all the hues of the color wheel, shaped as I have never seen them shaped before. There are no horse carts anywhere, that is new, and many of the old houses have vanished. In their places stand monstrous square buildings, nearly six stories high some of them, made entirely of glass. I get dizzy looking up into their mirrored surfaces. Familiar chestnut trees grow here and there, but the walkways, from the old bridge to the hospital, are lined now with rows of poppies, as red as a Bolshevik’s black heart. Queer boxes dangle from wires stretched above the roads, but the red and green circles in them offer no real light, certainly not enough for a passerby to find his way across them in the dark.
A Blessing on the Moon Page 15
