by Herman Wouk
“Any idea how we get to Cracow?” Byron said.
“That bus must go there,” Natalie said.
A brown-bearded Jew standing alone and erect at the gate, in a long dark coat and a wide flat dark hat, drew near, touching his hat with his hand. “You excuse? Americans? Jastrow?”
Natalie regarded him dubiously. “Why, yes. You’re not Berel?”
“Yes, yes. Jochanan Berel Jastrow.” He broke into a broad smile. “You excuse, poor English. Speak you Dytsche? Français?”
“Français, un peu,” and she switched into French. “How did you know we’d be on this plane? Well! Byron, this is Uncle Aaron’s cousin, my father’s cousin. Byron Henry is a good friend of mine, Berel.”
The two men shook hands, and the Jew smoothed his long gray-flecked brown beard, scanning Byron’s face. Berel Jastrow had a broad nose, heavy eyebrows, and surprisingly blue deep-set eyes with an almost Tartar slant. His glance was incisive. Byron felt that Jastrow classed him in a second or two as a Gentile, though probably a friendly one. “Enchanté,” Jastrow said.
He led them to a rust-pitted car on the other side of the shed. The driver was a scrawny man in a light sweater and a skullcap, with a little bright red beard. After a parley in Yiddish they set off. Natalie explained to Byron that they were going straight to Medzice. The Jastrow family was agog to see her, and Cracow was twenty miles the other way. They regarded it as a wonderful omen that the American cousin was falling on them from the skies the day before the wedding. Natalie had telegraphed to Jochanan Jastrow, Medzice, saying she expected to arrive today. But she had not mentioned the plane, scarcely expecting that the wire would reach him.
“Mais pourquoi pas? La Pologne n’est pas l’Afrique,” Berel interjected, brightly following Natalie’s English. “Cest un pays tout à fait moderne et civilisé.”
Byron found it decidedly peculiar to hear clear good French spoken by this figure out of a ghetto painting or play. Jastrow told him he would arrange for their return to Rome the day after tomorrow; he had good connections in Cracow, and getting train or air tickets would be no problem at all.
Swerving to avoid the worst holes, the car bounced along a bad tar road. They drove through tiny villages of straw-thatched log houses, painted with strips of blue between the logs. The driver had to maneuver around pigs, chickens, and cattle wandering in the road. Many of the houses were weathered gray, sagging, or toppling; some had no windows; but nearly all had new, or freshly varnished, doors. Close to each village, on a rise of ground, stood a church of wood. In the sun-flooded fields women and men toiled with hand implements or horse-drawn plows. The car passed massive wagons of hand-hewn wood pulled by muscular, resigned horses, and driven by muscular, resigned women and men, their sex indistinguishable except for marks like kerchiefs and beards. No tractor or automobile or any other machine appeared along the way until they came to Oswiecim, a medium-sized railroad town of brick buildings and wide streets, cut in two by a muddy river. Here the car stopped in the main square at the telephone exchange, and Natalie got out with Berel to phone Slote.
Byron strolled around the square in the hot sun, attracting covert looks from the townspeople. He bought ice cream, and the shopgirl took his money without a word. Oswiecim was nothing like Warsaw: a flat town of low drab buildings, with an air of back-country dislike of strangers. Byron was glad to leave it. Natalie told him as they drove out into level green fields, on a dirt road along the river, that Slote, furious and alarmed, had said uncomplimentary things about Byron’s intelligence, though she had tried to take all the blame on herself. “I think he’s got a case of nerves,” she said. “You don’t suppose he’s afraid of the Germans?”
“Look, it was an unceremonious way to leave him.”
She said, with an odd little glance at Byron, “It wasn’t all that unceremonious. We were together till dawn, you know, talking. He ought to be tired of me.”
“What? I saw you turn in at three.”
“Oh, yes, but then he rang me from the lobby, said he was too exhausted to sleep, or something, and I came down and we went out again.”
“I see. You must be really beat.”
“Strangely enough I feel wonderful. The nap on the plane, and now all this sweet country air! Poland smells delicious. I never read that in a book.”
“Poland a foist-class country,” Berel spoke up in English, stroking his beard. “Strong pipple. Hitler a big bluff. No war.”
Byron’s stay in Medzice remained in his memory forever after as something like a trip to the moon. Though the usual church stood on the usual knoll, the villagers were almost all Jews. Medzice was a cluster of houses on crooked narrow dirt or cobbled streets, some log, some plastered, a few of brick, sloping down toward a flat green meadow and the winding river. About a mile beyond the town, a roofless great house in the style of a French château lay ruined on the riverbank. The noble family was extinct, the house was a casualty of the World War, but the village survived.
The Jastrows and their relatives seemed to comprise half of Medzice. They swarmed on Natalie and Byron and marched them joyously from home to home. The dark interiors were all much the same: tiny rooms, enormous stoves, heavy polished Victorian furniture, lace curtains, each house seething underfoot with children ranging from crawlers to adolescents. Wine, cake, tea, hard candies, vodka, and fish appeared on table after table. There was no polite way to refuse. After a while Byron was physically uncomfortable, because there was never a toilet pause. In all the hours that this was going on, he never understood a word that anybody said. It seemed to him that all the Jews talked continuously and simultaneously. Natalie chattered away with these bearded men in dark blouses, breeches, and heavy boots, these unpainted work-worn women in plain dresses that reached their ankles. They all appeared enthralled by her. Outside each house a crowd gathered, joining the conversation through the windows. The visit of the two Americans was obviously one of the grandest events in Medzice since the war.
What a world! No sidewalks, no shops, no movie houses, no garages, no cars, no bicycles, no streetlights, no hydrants, no billboards; not a sound, not a sight to connect the town with the twentieth century, except a string of telegraph poles stretching along the river. Yet Natalie Jastrow was only one generation removed from this place. Dr. Aaron Jastrow, the author of A Jew’s Jesus, the full professor of history at Yale, the urbane friend of the archbishop of Siena, had lived here until his fifteenth year, and had looked like one of these pale, skinny, studious boys in big black skullcaps and ear curls! Byron could not imagine what these people made of him, but they were fully as cordial to him as to Natalie, substituting smiles and gestures for the talk with which they flooded her. (The next day Natalie told him that she had identified him as her protector, an American naval officer sent along by Uncle Aaron. They had accepted this without question, since anything Americans did was equally unlikely and shocking and marvellous.)
The sleeping arrangements that night were as novel as everything else. Byron was quartered at the home of the rabbi. This was the outcome of a tremendous argument in which half the population participated, including at one point the village priest, a brown-bearded man who, except for his bare head and black robe, rather resembled Berel, and whose sudden appearance on the scene sobered everybody. The parleying language shifted to Polish, then to German, which Byron well understood. The priest wanted to extend his hospitality to the Gentile American. Berel managed, with a timely word of help in German from Byron, to deflect this offer. When the priest left, both Berel and Byron became the center of jubilant triumph, and the American was borne off to the rabbi’s brick house by an escort of singing, hand-clapping yeshiva boys, led by the bridegroom himself, a pale lad of eighteen or so with a wispy goatee.
Here the rabbi and his wife tried to give him their own bed, but since it was obviously exactly that, the only large bed in the house, a black four-poster piled with huge pillows, Byron wouldn’t have it. This caused another grand parley in Yiddi
sh. The house had a second bedroom containing two beds, and a plank and mattress stretched across two chairs. In this room there were already five tittering girls, who, as the discussion went on, began blushing and roaring with laughter. The idea seemed to be to put Byron into one of those beds. Evidently no decent solution could be hammered out. He ended up sleeping on the floor of the main room, a sort of parlor and dining room combined, lined with giant leather-bound books. The rabbi gave him a feather mattress to lie on, and as six of the boys from the Cracow yeshiva shared the floor with him on similar mattresses, he did not feel ill-treated. Indeed he slept better on the floor of the rabbi’s house in Medzice than he had in Warsaw’s Europeiski Hotel. He found the feather mattress lulling.
He spent much of the next day walking with Natalie around the town and in the fields and along the river, past an old cemetery to the ruined great house. The preparations for the wedding were going forward, so today the family let the visitors amuse themselves. The muddy narrow streets of Medzice—it had rained hard during the night, and the rattling on the rabbi’s roof had increased Byron’s sense of snugness—were filled with an autumnal fragrance of hay and ripening fruit, made more tangy by the smells of the free-roaming ducks, chickens, goats, and calves. Some of the fowl were encountering tragedy, happily strutting in the morning sunshine one moment, and the next swooped down upon by laughing children and carried off squawking and flapping to be slaughtered. In the fields beyond the outlying houses and barns—mostly one-room log structures with heavy yellow thatch roofs—cows and horses grazed in tall waving grass spotted with wild flowers. Water bugs skated on the surface of the slow-moving brown river. Fish jumped and splashed, but nobody was fishing.
Natalie told him she had stayed up half the night talking to the family. Most of what she had heard was news to her. Her father had tended to reminisce more about Warsaw than about his birthplace, and as a child she had been bored by the little she had heard, since she had only wanted to be a true-blue American. In the village, Uncle Aaron and her father were the legendary ones who had made an American success. Aaron Jastrow was variously thought to be a great surgeon, an astronomer, and a cancer specialist; “professor” had ambiguous meanings in Polish and Yiddish. Nobody but Berel knew that he had written a famous book about Jesus, and Natalie gathered that Aaron’s cousin was at some pains to keep the achievement quiet. Berel (this was a familiar name for Jochanan, his real name) was the local success. He had begun trading in mushrooms while still a student in Cracow, had branched into other exports, and had prospered enough to move his family to Warsaw; but he had sent his son back to the Cracow yeshiva, and had found the boy a bride in Medzice among the second cousins. The numerous Jastrows, like the rest of the villagers, lived by farming and by selling dairy products in the markets of Oswiecim and Cracow.
Clambering around the ruined great house, Natalie went exploring out of sight, broke through some rotten flooring, and fell ten or twelve feet. Byron heard the splintering noise, her shriek, and the thud. He hurried to find her. She lay sprawled like a broken doll, her skirt up around her gartered white thighs. She had landed on dirt and thick grass; whatever the floor here had been, probably parquet or marble, nothing was left of it. Byron pulled down her skirt and lifted her to a sitting position. She was conscious but stunned, and greenish pale. In a minute or two her color returned, and life and amusement flowed back into her eyes. She shook her head. “Ye gods, I really saw stars, Byron. I thought I’d broken my silly neck.” She put her head on his shoulder. “Glory, what a scare. I’m all right, help me up.”
She limped; her left knee bothered her, she said. She took his arm with an abashed grin and leaned on him. Byron had tried to keep her from climbing the decayed staircase, and the grin was her only apology, but it was enough. He was worried by the injury, and still angry over her casual disclosure that she had been with Slote until dawn the day before. However, to have this girl leaning on him, in a sunlit orchard full of apple scent by a river, seemed to Byron almost all the pleasure he wanted in the world. Just holding her like this was sweeter than any delight any other girl had ever given him. Whatever it was that made a girl desirable—the enigmatic look in the eyes, the soft curve of a cheek, the shape of a mouth, the sudden charm of a smile, the swell of breasts and hips under a dress, the smoothness of skin—Natalie Jastrow for Byron was all composed of these lovely glints, all incandescent with them. That she stemmed from the strange Jews of Medzice, that she was, by all evidence, the mistress of a dour man ten years older than himself, that she was only a solid and human girl—indeed very heavy, leaning on him and limping—with a stubborn streak and some unattractive, almost coarse tomboy bravado: all these drawbacks just made her Natalie Jastrow, instead of the perfect girl he had been dreaming about since his twelfth year. The perfect girl had in fact been a blonde, and something of a sex fiend, like the dream girls of most boys. She was gone now, and this prickly Jewish brunette held her place. And here they were alone on a riverbank in south Poland, in golden sunshine, a mile from any house, amid apple trees laden with ripe fruit.
“This will be slow work, getting back,” she said.
“I can try to carry you.”
“What, a horse like me? You’d rupture yourself. I’m fine if I keep my weight off it. It’s just such a bore.”
“I’m not bored,” said Byron.
They passed an old abandoned scow half full of water. “Let’s use this,” he said, tipping it to empty it out.
Natalie appreciatively watched him heave up the scow unaided. “No oars,” she said.
“We can float downstream.”
He guided the scow with a long rough plank that lay in it, using the plank as a rudder and as a pole. The river was very sluggish, almost oily, calm and brown. Natalie sat on the bow edge of the scow, facing Byron, her shoes in the seeping water. She said as they floated past the cemetery, “That’s where all my ancestors are, I guess. The ones that aren’t buried in Palestine.”
“Or Egypt or Mesopotamia,” Byron said.
Natalie shuddered. “I don’t know. It’s a godforsaken place, Briny.”
“Medzice?”
“Poland. I’m glad Grandma and Grandpa got the hell out of here.”
He banked the scow near the village. She climbed out and walked slowly, not limping. There was no doctor here, she said, and she didn’t want to generate a crisis around the injured American cousin. She would have her knee taped in Cracow tomorrow. None of the villagers noticed anything the matter with her.
Byron tried to find out the war crisis news. There was one working radio in Medzice, and several broken-down ones. The priest had the working radio. The rabbi told Byron, in Yiddish tortured into a barely comprehensible kind of German, that the last broadcast from Warsaw had been encouraging: the Prime Minister of England had gone to his country home for the weekend, and the crisis seemed to be passing. “Henderson, Henderson,” the rabbi said. “Henderson talked to Hitler.” And he winked shrewdly, rubbing one hand over the other to pantomime a money deal.
The wedding made Byron wish over and over that he were a writer and could record it; a Jew, and could comprehend it. The mixture of solemnity and boisterousness baffled him. In his training, decorousness was the essence of a wedding, except for the shoes-and-rice moment at the very end, but the Medzice Jews—though arrayed in their best, the women in velvet dresses and the men in black satin coats or formal city clothes—did not seem to know what decorum was. They crowded, they chattered, they burst into song; they surrounded the veiled, silent, seated bride and discussed her vehemently; they danced, they marched here and there in the houses and in the streets, performing strange little rites; one and then another stood on a chair to speak or to sing and the guests wildly laughed and wildly cried. The pallid bridegroom, in a white robe and a black hat, looked on the verge of fainting. Byron accidentally learned, by offering him a plate of cakes at the long men’s table where the American visitor sat in a place of honor beside the groom, tha
t the weedy boy had been fasting for twenty-four hours, and still was, while everybody around him continuously ate and drank with vast appetite.
Byron, eating and drinking with the rest, and feeling very good indeed, was not sure for hours whether the marriage ceremony had or had not taken place. But near midnight a sudden gravity fell on the guests. In a courtyard, with the bright moon and a blaze of stars overhead, in a series of stern and impressive acts—including solemn incantations over silver goblets of wine and the lighting of long tapers—the bride and groom were brought together for a ring ceremony and a kiss, much as in a Christian union, under a hand-held canopy of purple velvet. Then the groom ground a wineglass to bits under his heel, and jubilation broke out that made everything before it seem staid and pale.
Byron almost became the hero of the evening by putting on a black skullcap and dancing with the yeshiva boys, since there was no dancing with the girls. All the guests gathered to clap and cheer, Natalie in the forefront, her face ablaze with fun. Her knee healed or forgotten, she joined in the girls’ dances; and so she danced, and Byron danced, inside the house and outside, far into the morning hours. Byron scarcely remembered leaving the bride’s home and falling asleep on the feather mattress on the floor of the rabbi’s house.
But there he was when a hand shook him and he opened his eyes. Berel Jastrow was bending over him, and it took Byron a moment or two to recall where he was and who this man was, with the clever, anxious blue eyes and the long gray-streaked brown beard. All around him the yeshiva boys were sitting up and rubbing their eyes, or dressing. The girls were hurrying here and there in their nightclothes. It was hot, and the sun was shining into the room from a clear blue sky.
“Yes? What is it?” he said.
“Der Deutsch,” the Jew said. “Les Allemands.”
“Huh? What?”
“De Chormans.”
Byron sat up, his voice faltering. “Oh, the Germans? What about them?”
