“A miracle?” repeated Samuel, and stared at her in disbelief. His first impulse was to rush to the synagogue and pray for a blessing for the unborn child. Then he turned on his heel and hurried off to seek counsel from the zaddik Menachem, who was believed to possess profound wisdom and have the answers to all of life’s questions.
“A miracle!” the holy man repeated. He reflected, drew his fingers through his long beard, rose, went to his bookshelf, took out a work of the Cabala, opened it at random, read a few lines, nodded, and then decisively dismissed the theory of a miracle.
“Such miracles do not occur outside of marriage,” he said.
Citing passages of the Torah and other holy writings as well as reciting incantations and many of the different names for God, he succeeded in convincing Samuel that this was the work of the Evil One.
“You yearn for honor, for a grandchild, and instead you receive disgrace and a bastard,” the zaddik told him, mincing no words.
Samuel replied that his shame was great; he scarcely dared to meet the eyes of the pious and righteous people of Chertnow.
“But despite everything, Miriam is my daughter. What should I do?”
Menachem told him to put out his daughter and never to allow the bastard to enter his house.
“One black sheep can be the ruin of the whole herd,” the zaddik asserted. His tone brooked no opposition.
The news spread quickly and there was a great stir. Everyone in Chertnow was indignant. A few loudmouths wanted to teach Miriam a lesson, but the leader of the community refused. It was her father’s responsibility to deal with the matter and to punish her.
PERHAPS IT WAS THE EFFECT on Samuel’s body of the sun and the heat of that summer day. On the morning after he had made it clear to Miriam that she and the illegitimate offspring in her belly would have to leave the house, he complained of pains in his chest and couldn’t get out of bed. His head was burning hot and his mind reeled in confusion.
MIRIAM MIXED goat’s milk with garlic and horseradish and left the concoction simmering in a pot over the fire for half the night; in the morning she gave Samuel a portion of it on his empty stomach. He only shrieked and spat it out and complained at the foul taste.
More days passed. Miriam tried other recipes, but Samuel refused to consume his daughter’s various potions. He became progressively weaker, and his beard, black until very recently, began to whiten. His body had become loose, almost disarticulated, and hung like an empty sack. He lay in his bed, apparently lifeless, left by his neighbors to his suffering. Miriam prepared chicken soup with strong spices, her father’s favorite dish, but he refused to touch it.
One afternoon, for no reason at all, Samuel cast a fierce, hateful look at Miriam, ranted at her, and spat out along with abundant spittle the crudest insults that Yiddish could articulate. “No one escapes his destiny,” he said over and over again, his voice gradually failing. Then he howled that he could see the Angel of Death in the room and the gravedigger who was standing there with his spade ready.
Miriam was alarmed and exhausted. She had watched over her father day and night from the day he had fallen ill.
That night she was seized by a terrible anxiety. Shivering with fever, she listened to the continual buzzing of flies in the room and to the locusts making a din in the dawn. As she fell asleep in the early morning, at the end of her forces, her father’s heart stopped beating.
The ordeal that Miriam endured the next day at the burial service would haunt her for the rest of her life. It wasn’t her father’s death or the isolation that scared her the most; it was the way she was treated, suddenly and with no warning, by people who had known her since she was born.
Even though rain was pouring down that day, everyone in Chertnow came to the ceremony for the peddler. Menachem delivered a sermon of fire and brimstone. He wildly exhorted the people to oppose all evil, for if one gave in to wickedness, confusion would reign in a world that was already falling apart. He warned that the town could wind up in the clutches of Satan and the people were in danger of being wiped off the face of the earth. The community listened to him with deep respect.
The rain made it seem that everyone was sobbing and weeping floods of tears. Everyone except Miriam. She was in control of herself throughout it all, her face calm although her spirit was alarmed. She stood there, isolated, silent and pale in her black clothing, drenched, with no sign of tears and no cries of grief. She only stared down into the grave. People exchanged knowing glances behind her back. The Jews of Chertnow were famous for their generosity, but not a soul among them made a move to comfort Miriam. It was clear to them beyond all doubt that she had dragged her father into his misfortune. She was responsible for his death.
AFTER THE GRAVESIDE CEREMONY Miriam took to her bed. Her mind was full of confused images, there where the darkness of the soul and the desires of the body combined to create the same terrors she had experienced as a child. She wanted to end her life. She went directly to the kitchen pantry and took out a bottle of kerosene. She opened it, but couldn’t bring herself to drink. The sharp smell that filled the whole house nauseated her.
She felt an overwhelming desire to collapse. She wanted to fall down in the street before them all and just lie there on the ground. Dazed by her own weakness, she wept without interruption for three days. Then she prepared to confront the world again.
———
AFTER HER FATHER DIED, Miriam was no longer dependent; for the first time in her life, she was in charge of her own fate. She was completely isolated. She could sense enemies everywhere, and the people all glared at her with wicked, baleful looks. She was afraid of leaving Chertnow but she had no choice. She could not stay. The Jews of her hometown despised her. She was regarded as a sinner, a shameful whore who had driven her father into his grave. Miriam felt sick in her soul, poisoned by their resentment. She packed her few belongings and left the town with bitterness in her heart.
I still find it incredible that the happiness in Miriam’s life lasted only a few hours. To be more specific: from eight o’clock until half past eleven on the evening of March 26, 1897. For those three and a half hours she felt full of life, free, fulfilled, and loved. After that, everything was unremittingly dire. She received a terrible blow from life that cast her into the gutter. She became pregnant, Jasja disappeared without a word, her father rejected her and her unborn child, and then he died.
She felt weighted down by guilt. Everything was her fault. She had given herself to Jasja. The mysterious, perilous urgings of sex had led her into sin. She pledged to herself she would never have another man. She would never again allow a man to come near her.
CHERTNOW IS NO LONGER to be found on the maps. There are two versions of what happened to it.
In the extremely strict orthodox communities of Crown Heights in New York where the zaddik Menachem still lives on in revered memory, people say that his prediction that Chertnow would wind up in Satan’s clutches and be exterminated from the earth was fulfilled because families that fail to live according to the law are doomed to annihilation at the righteous hand of the Lord.
The other version of events is closer to historical fact.
In the autumn of 1942 two heavy trucks transporting men in dark uniforms drove into the large square by the synagogue. The men were Germans, policemen in Reserve Battalion No. 101, fathers of families, too old to serve at the front. All were volunteers. Their profession was racial purification and their history was anything but glorious. They assembled the Jews in the marketplace. The commander made a quick calculation and saw at once that it would take too long to shoot them. The Jews were herded into the synagogue, and the doors were carefully locked and sealed. The battalion leader issued the order to burn Chertnow to the ground. The last of the flames died out thirty-six hours later. Nothing was left but ashes.
MIRIAM WAS A SIMPLE SOUL, a human being on the far edge of existence, invisible to history. She had a story and history of her own, but they le
ft no trace anywhere. Today I’m the only one who even knows that she once existed.
The trip to Budapest, a rail journey through a wasteland, took more than fifty hours. Miriam slept almost not at all and ate even less, for the costs of the burial had used up the few groschen her father had left behind. On the train she sat squeezed between a nun and a portly colonel who tried in vain to engage his fellow travelers in conversation. She gazed out the window, watching the pastures and the trees flying past. The landscape was bathed in sunshine, and the luminosity of the sky was almost unbearable. The sun, the stifling air aboard the train, and the fatigue from her sleepless nights made her vision blur. Her thoughts wandered.
She tried to recall her sister’s face. There must be some way out for me, too, as totally isolated as I am, she told herself. She promised God she would never ever again ask for anything, if only he would guide her safe and sound to Rachel.
On a summer day in 1897—I think it was the tenth of July—Miriam arrived at the Budapest-Nyugati western railway terminal, a colossal temple to architecture designed by the Frenchman Gustave Eiffel.
Budapest had more than a million inhabitants at that time and had established itself as one of Europe’s most vital capitals, unapologetically pretentious, with no qualms about its ambition to surpass Vienna in everything essential—and why not Paris and London as well? People from all across the double monarchy found their way to this pearl of the Danube: Ruthenian peasants, Polish workers, optimistic Jews, Czech cobblers, Austrian bankers, Serbian pickpockets, Croatian pimps with tidy mustaches, and urbane con men. There were also innumerable beauties with rouged cheeks and pink lips, wearing elegant dresses and on the prowl for monocled gentlemen ready to open their bulging pocketbooks to have their fancies tickled.
The city seethed with activity in an air of cosmopolitan elegance. Not for nothing was the Hungarian capital called “America on a smaller scale.”
Its world was new and old at the same time. The air was so charged with possibility that one could hardly breathe. Bright promises were not the only things on offer here. Under the bravely effervescent, carefree life of the city there was a dark side with, in the words of the writer Gyula Krúdy, “no real love, not a single honorable man, and not one respectable woman.”
The train slowed and pulled into the station. Confused and exhausted, Miriam descended at the end of the line from the first train trip of her life into the most intense heat wave of the year. She would take only one more train ride during her long life, forty-seven years later, and that would be in an overcrowded cattle car, back to Poland to a site only a few miles from her birthplace, which became known by its German name: Auschwitz.
Ahead of her now were decades of isolation and hardship in a land steeped in prejudice and injustice, a country where she would never feel at ease or put down roots and would forever remain a foreigner.
All her possessions were contained in a small woven basket. She clutched it hard in her right hand as she left the train. She looked out at hundreds of people on the platform, a completely overwhelming sea of human faces. Some were well cared for and elegant, but most were bedraggled and perspiring in the heat. Young people, workers, women carrying their children, the elderly; all were trying to push their way through the crowd. She stopped dead, filled with dread because she’d never seen so many people. Just as she was about to be swept away by this mass of humanity, she caught sight of a man wearing the uniform of a conductor of the Imperial and Royal Railway. She approached him and asked in a quivering voice where the synagogue was located. Everyone in the city of Budapest spoke German. Almost no one understood Yiddish, Miriam’s mother tongue. The conductor was jovial, however, and even more important, helpful. After several attempts he made out what she was saying, wrote out the address, and sketched a simple map in his notebook. Clutching the page from the notebook, she stepped out into the seething swirl of the big city.
MIRIAM’S FIRST STAGGERING WALK through the streets of Budapest was overwhelming. The city roared, thundered, and hissed like a locomotive. Peddlers cried their wares, newspaper vendors shouted, and crowds surged excitedly in both directions along the endless, wide boulevards. The immense houses looked like palaces with their ostentatious superfluity of decoration and adornments, statues and recesses. She had never seen anything like them, and they made her head spin. Nothing was lacking and everything was displayed in overabundance: jewelers, tailors, fashion designers, hair salons, beauty salons, clothing shops, cafés, restaurants, flower shops, luxurious hotels, and theaters, one unbelievable establishment after another. She stood for a long time before each one along the way, craning her neck and gaping.
The people seemed respectable and elegant—gentlemen in their splendid suits and women in their colorful dresses. But she was struck by the way the handsome women rolled their hips in a manner that the folks back home in Chertnow would have regarded as truly scandalous.
Many decades later Miriam could still recall how unbearably hot it was that day. She made her way unsteadily onward for hours in the oppressive heat, perspiration dripping from beneath her firmly knotted head scarf.
None of those whom she asked for directions was particularly helpful; she felt increasingly worn and sick at heart. Most of all, she felt lost.
She became aware of her ravenous hunger only when she stumbled into a broad marketplace with vegetable stands, butcher shops, and food stalls. She stopped to catch her breath. She felt her heart pounding and her breast heaving. Her nose was assaulted by a great variety of smells: fat and drippings from a stand where two frying pans were sizzling, sweaty bodies, unidentifiable odors of fruit and vegetables. She found every one of assorted temptations on offer at the market intensely appetizing, even though she knew most of the food wasn’t kosher. Her mouth watered as she stared wide-eyed at a fat butcher who had elevated his profession to a fine art, applying his gleaming sharp knife to the elegant art of transforming a length of meat into neatly trimmed slices.
Miriam wandered farther into the city. At a street corner a horse drawing a cart snorted directly in her face and the driver shouted at her to get back. She was so frightened that her knees almost gave way, but she managed to hurry farther along the street.
The streets were suddenly reeking of garbage. She found herself in a part of the city that was ugly and mean, full of tumbledown houses, a poverty-stricken neighborhood where the people were unusually pale.
In one barren street a stubby little girl with a strange face crossed her path. The child greeted her with a simple but serene smile, looking for all the world like a pilgrim who had just reached the gates of heaven after a long journey. Miriam felt a flash of fear and tensed as if she had caught sight of the devil. At home in Chertnow they’d lived near a family with a feeble-minded boy everyone in the town regarded as sweet but hopelessly dim-witted. On the other hand, she had never encountered anyone like that remarkable young girl. Today most of us would say that the child had Down syndrome, but that diagnosis did not exist in Miriam’s world.
The girl took Miriam’s hand in both of her own, as delicately as if she were a porcelain figure. Her gentle touch made Miriam shiver. The girl seemed to be thinking of a secret. She whispered something so quietly that Miriam couldn’t understand her. She pointed upward, toward the pigeons sitting on the roof of the house.
Miriam took this as an evil omen. She suddenly feared for her unborn child. She had absorbed with her mother’s milk the belief that even the briefest encounter with strangers of abnormal appearance could deform an unborn child in its mother’s womb. She pulled away her hand and hurried off as fast as she could manage. When she turned to look back, she saw the girl standing at the same spot, smiling and waving to Miriam and to the pigeons in turn.
Time passed; fatigue overcame her. Her body felt heavy, as if her blood had turned into lead. She couldn’t go a step farther. Thirsty and exhausted, she drifted into a daze. She felt that she was being sucked into the violent maelstrom of the city. She sat
down on the curb, to keep from collapsing outright. Her eyes filled with tears.
A few feet away at the corner of the street a woman stood behind a crude stand, selling vegetables. She must have seen Miriam’s misery, for she came to help. She gave Miriam water to drink. It tasted heavenly, but Miriam did not even have the energy to thank her. She felt all her forces flowing out of her body; she lost consciousness.
IN HER DREAM Miriam had returned to an earlier period of her life in Chertnow and relived some of the horrors of her childhood, particularly including her terror whenever her father would grab her violently by her braided tresses, an anxiety that abruptly ended on the day a neighbor boy with eyes full of malevolence deliberately snipped them off for no reason at all. That malicious act had caused a great deal of excitement in the otherwise tranquil town, but it liberated Miriam and made her life easier. The memory of it made her waken with a start.
She was lying in a bed she didn’t recognize. The pillow was hard and smelled sour. Her back ached, her neck was numb, and she looked around in consternation. She didn’t know where she was or how she had gotten there. She could not remember anything that had happened.
Slowly she sat up in the bed and looked around with bleary eyes. The walls were peeling and the ancient furniture appeared ready to collapse. A candleholder with seven arms stood on a cabinet. There was a sack of potatoes and a kerosene burner. The place smelled of poverty and mildew. How long had she been asleep?
The woman from the market entered the room and smiled at her. “There was once a time,” she said, “when our home was much more beautiful and a great deal cleaner. But it has gotten all too expensive to hire housekeepers.”
She surveyed Miriam, and her face lit up with a friendly smile. Miriam could see that the woman had few teeth left and her face and neck were deeply creased and wrinkled. Her eyes were striking, though, and they danced with happiness. With evident satisfaction she enumerated the seven people who lived in the apartment of one and a half rooms that measured scarcely a hundred square feet.
The Elixir of Immortality Page 52
