There was a time when I had to make up some pretext whenever I came home late or didn’t come home at all, but gradually Bashele and Shosha became accustomed to asking no questions. What did they know about the writing profession? I had told Leizer the watchmaker that I served as night editor a couple of times a week, and Leizer had explained the facts to Bashele and Shosha. Leizer came by each day and read to them the latest installment of my biography of Jacob Frank. Everyone on Krochmalna Street was reading it – the thieves, the streetwalkers, the old-line Stalinists, and the new-fledged Trotskyites. Sometimes when I walked down the street I heard the market vendors talking about Jacob Frank – his miracles, orgies, and lunacies. The leftists still complained that this kind of writing was an opiate for the masses, but after they finished reading the political news on the front page and the local news on page 5 the masses needed an opiate.
Before I moved into the alcove at Bashele’s she had had the walls painted and installed an iron stove, and thrown out the sacks and rags that had been accumulating for twenty-odd years. Shosha couldn’t be by herself even an hour. The moment she was left alone she was overcome by melancholy. On the other hand, I couldn’t be with her all the time. I had never given up my room on Leszno Street or told my landlords that I was married. True, I seldom spent nights there, but even Tekla had learned that writers are impulsive and confused creatures. She had stopped asking what I did, whom I spent time with, where I dragged around in the nights. I paid my rent and each week I gave her a zloty. On Christmas and Easter I brought her a gift. Every time I gave her something, she flushed, protested that she didn’t need it, that it wasn’t necessary. She would seize my hand and kiss it, as peasants had done for generations.
Because I couldn’t be with Shosha all the time, coming home to her was always a wonder to me. She and Bashele had food ready for me to eat before I lay down – rice with milk, tea with a Sabbath cookie, a baked apple. Each night before coming to bed Shosha washed herself and often washed her hair as well. She discussed with me the latest installment of the Jacob Frank story. How could a man have so many women? Was it black magic? Had he sold his soul to the devil? How could a father have doings with his own daughter? Sometimes Shosha provided the answer: those were different times. Didn’t King Solomon have a thousand wives? She remembered what I had told her when we lived at No. 10.
Basically, Shosha had stayed the same – the same childish face, the same childish figure. Still, changes had become apparent. In former times, Bashele had been the only one to prepare our meals. She hadn’t let Shosha go near the kitchen or entrusted her with the marketing. She only sent her occasionally to the nearby store for a half pound of sugar, a few ounces of butter, a piece of cheese, or a loaf of bread – all bought on credit. I doubted whether Shosha knew the value of coins. Suddenly I observed her bustling about in the kitchen. She accompanied her mother to market in Yanash’s Court. I heard her discussing with Bashele the vegetarian dishes that wouldn’t upset my digestion. This concern for my diet always baffled me. I wasn’t accustomed to anyone’s paying attention to my needs. But to Shosha I was a husband, and to Bashele a son-in-law. It had never occurred to me that Shosha could sew or darn, but one day I saw her darning my socks over a tea glass. She began to look after my shirts, handkerchiefs, and collars, and to take my shoes to be heeled at the shoemaker’s. I couldn’t, or didn’t want to be a husband in the accepted sense of the word, but Shosha gradually assumed the duties of a wife.
When I came home in the evenings I still found her seated on her stool, but no longer surrounded by playthings. Nor did she read her schoolbook any more. Surprises constantly awaited me. Shosha would be wearing shoes with high heels and flesh-colored stockings not only when she went visiting but also at home. Her mother had bought her dresses and nightgowns with lace. Occasionally she changed the way she wore her hair.
Shosha’s interest in my writing increased. The novel about Jacob Frank had come to an end. The new novel, about Sabbatai Zevi, described with much detail the Jewish longing for redemption in an epoch that displayed similarities to our own. What Hitler threatened to do to the Jews Bogdan Chmielnitsky had done some three hundred years earlier. From the day they were exiled from their land, Jews had lived in anticipation of death or the coming of the Messiah. In Poland, in the Ukraine, in the lands ruled by the Turks, and most of all in the Holy Land, cabalists sought to bring the End of Days through prayers, fasts, the utterance of holy names. They probed the mysteries of the Book of Daniel. They never forgot the passage in the Gemara which stated that the Messiah would come when the generation was either totally innocent or totally guilty. Every day, Leizer had to read to Shosha the latest installment and explain to her the references to Jewish law and Jewish history. I heard her say to her mother, ‘Oh, Mommy, it’s exactly like today!’
Teibele still hadn’t found a husband. She had been choosy so long, Bashele complained, that she had become an old maid. Instead of a husband, she had taken a lover, a married bookkeeper with five children. Any day, he was allegedly going to divorce his wife, who was a common piece, but two years had gone by with no divorce in sight. Instead of satisfaction, Teibele provided her mother only with shame.
Teibele would often visit her mother and sister. She, too, liked to discuss Jacob Frank, Sabbatai Zevi, and their disciples with me. She brought small gifts for Bashele and Shosha, and occasionally for me as well – a book, a magazine, a notebook. Her lover was spending more and more nights at home with his wife. He had turned out to be a hypochondriac, Teibele said. He had convinced himself that he suffered from heart trouble. When Bashele reminded Teibele that it was getting late and she shouldn’t be starting for home at such an hour, Teibele said in jest, ‘I’ll lie down with them,’ pointing at Shosha and me. Or she would say, ‘What difference does it make? We’re all doomed anyhow.’
At night in bed, Shosha no longer talked about dolls, toys, children of neighbors she had known twenty years ago, but quite often she spoke of things I cared about. Was there truly a God up in heaven? Did He know every person’s thoughts? Was it true that He loved Jews above all other people? Did He create the Gentiles, too, or only the Jews? Sometimes she questioned me about my novel. How could I be sure of what had occurred several hundred years ago? Had I read it in a book or did I make it up in my head? She asked me to tell her what would occur in the installment tomorrow and in the days after. I began to tell her things I hadn’t yet written. I conducted a literary experiment with her – let my tongue wag freely and say whatever came to my lips. I had read and heard from Mark Elbinger about automatic writing. I had also read in a literary magazine about the kind of literature called the ‘stream of consciousness.’ I could test all this on Shosha. She listened to everything with the same sense of curiosity – children’s stories I had heard from my mother when I was five or six; sexual fantasies no Yiddish writer would have allowed himself to publish; my own hypotheses or dreams about God, world creation, immortality of the soul, the future of mankind, as well as reveries of triumph over Hitler and Stalin. I had constructed an airplane of a material whose atoms were so densely compressed, one square centimeter weighed thousands of tons. It flew at a speed of a million miles a minute. It could pierce mountains, bore through the earth, reach to the farthest planets. It contained a clairvoyant telephone that tuned me in to the thoughts and plans of every human being on earth. I became so mighty I rendered all wars obsolete. When the Bolsheviks, Nazis, anti-Semites, swindlers, thieves, and rapists heard of my powers, they promptly surrendered. I instituted a world order based on Dr Feitelzohn’s philosophy of play. In my airplane I kept a harem of eighteen wives, but the queen and sovereign would be no one other than Shosha herself.
‘And where would Mommy be?’
‘I would give Mommy twenty million zlotys and she would live in a palace.’
‘And Teibele?’
‘Teibele would become a princess.’
‘I would miss Mommy.’
‘We’d come
to see her every Sabbath.’
For a long time Shosha didn’t speak. Then she said, ‘Arele, I miss Yppe.’
‘I would bring Yppe back to life.’
‘How is this possible?’
I elaborated to Shosha the theory that world history was a book man could read only forward. He could never turn the pages of this world book backward. But everything that had ever been still existed. Yppe lived somewhere. The hens, geese, and ducks the butchers in Yanash’s Court slaughtered each day still lived, clucked, quacked, and crowed on the other pages of the world book – the right-hand pages, since the world book was written in Yiddish, which reads from right to left.
Shosha caught her breath. ‘Will we live in No. 10?’
‘Yes, Shoshele, on the other pages of the book we still live in No. 10.’
‘But different people have moved in.’
‘They live there on the open pages, not the closed ones.’
‘Mommy once said that before we moved in, a tailor used to live there.’
‘The tailor lives there, too.’
‘Everyone together?’
‘Each in another time.’
I had gradually ceased being ashamed of Shosha. She dressed better, she appeared taller, I took her to Celia’s, and both Celia and Haiml were enchanted by her simplicity, her honesty, her naïveté. I had taught her how to handle a knife and fork. She spoke in a childish fashion, but not stupidly.
On one visit Celia had detected a similarity between Shosha and her own deceased daughter. She showed me a yellowed photograph of the child and it struck me, too, that there was a certain resemblance. Haiml, who was growing ever more inclined toward mysticism and occultism, played with the idea that the soul of their little girl might have transmigrated into Shosha and that I was actually his and Celia’s son-in-law. Souls weren’t lost. They came back and sought bodies through which to reveal themselves to their loved ones. There was no such thing as chance. The forces that guided man and his fate always united those who were destined to meet.
Elbinger happened to be visiting the Chentshiners that evening and he repeated what he had said about Shosha on an earlier occasion – that he thought she possessed the qualities of a medium. All true mediums that he had met displayed the same primitivism, directness, sincerity. Once, he made an attempt to hypnotize Shosha, and as soon as he told her to, she fell into a deep sleep. Elbinger had trouble waking her. Before leaving, he kissed Shosha’s forehead.
After Elbinger had gone, Shosha said, ‘He is not a person.’
‘What is he?’ Haiml and Celia asked in unison.
‘I don’t know.’
‘An angel? A demon?’ Celia asked.
‘Perhaps from the sky,’ Shosha replied.
Haiml clapped his brow. ‘Tsutsik, this is a memorable evening for me. I won’t forget this evening as long as I live!’
2
This Friday night, as always, I came home to Shosha. I did not keep the Jewish laws, Shosha did not go to the ritual bath, but I yielded to Bashele and pronounced the benediction over the wine on Friday night and on Saturday morning. Bashele prepared vegetarian Sabbath meals for me. She even baked a vegetarian Sabbath stew with kasha and beans and a kugel made of rice and cinnamon. Shosha blessed the candles every Friday before dusk. She put them in silver candlesticks that Haiml and Celia had given us. Two challahs were covered with a cloth that Bashele had embroidered thirty years ago for Zelig. The family also owned a knife with a handle made of mother-of-pearl on which the words ‘Holy Sabbath’ were engraved. That Friday evening Bashele and Shosha ate gefilte fish with chicken, and for me they made noodles with cottage cheese and carrot stew. They put on their Sabbath clothes and dressy shoes. Through the open window I saw the Sabbath candles in other apartments and heard table chants. The simple Jews sang, ‘Peace and light to the Jews on the day of rest and the day of joy.’ The Hasidim sang a cabalist poem by the Holy Isaac Luria, written in Aramaic, about a heavenly apple orchard, a heavenly bridegroom and bride, heavenly bridesmaids and best men – all in highly erotic verses that would shock readers and critics even today. Bashele and Shosha conversed about the facts that food was getting more expensive and that it was increasingly difficult to find a place to hang the wash in the attic. Bashele mentioned with nostalgia the custom of past years to spread yellow sand on the floors before the Sabbath. Peasants from nearby villages used to bring carts of the sand in wooden kegs. They called out their merchandise in the streets. Now this was out of fashion. Today women liked to shellac their floors. Another thing, pious matrons used to go from house to house on Friday and collect challah, fish, and tripe – even cubes of sugar – for the poor. The new generation did not believe in this kind of charity. The Communists came in and asked for money for the Jews in Birobidjan, a region deep in Russia, somewhere at the edge of the world. They said that there was a Jewish land there. Only God knows if they were telling the truth.
‘Mommy, what comes after the edge of the world? Is it dark there?’
Bashele shook her head. ‘You tell her, Arele.’
‘There is no edge of the world. The earth is round like an apple.’
‘Where do the black people live?’ Shosha asked.
‘In Africa.’
‘And where is Hitler?’
‘In Germany.’
‘Oh, they used to teach us all this in school but I could never remember,’ Shosha said. ‘Is it true that in America there is a big Jewish man who must sign every dollar or the money isn’t worth anything? Leizer the watchmaker said so.’
‘Yes, Shoshele. But he doesn’t sign by hand. They print his signature.’
‘On the Sabbath one shouldn’t talk about money,’ Bashele said. ‘There was a pious little rabbi, Reb Fivke, and on the Sabbath he spoke only in the Holy Tongue. He lived on Smocza Street, but on Friday he used to go around with a sack in Yanash’s Court and collect food for the poor. After twelve o’clock on Friday he stopped talking, because Friday afternoon is almost as sacred as the Sabbath. When they gave him alms he just nodded or he mumbled some words in the Holy Tongue. One Friday he didn’t come with his sack and someone said that he was sick in the poorhouse. After a few weeks he came again with his sack, but he had stopped talking altogether. He just went from store to store like a mute man. Someone said that he had had an operation on his throat and they cut out his windpipe. One Friday he entered a butcher shop and the butcher gave him some chicken feet or a gizzard. A man from the burial society – a gravedigger – happened to be in the store, and when he saw Reb Fivke, he let out a terrible scream and fainted. Reb Fivke immediately disappeared. They revived the gravedigger with cold water and by rubbing his temples with vinegar, and when he came to himself he swore a holy oath that Reb Fivke had died, that he had buried him himself. People couldn’t believe it and said that the man was mistaken, but Reb Fivke never came again. Some curious men investigated the matter and they found his widow. He had been dead for months when this happened. I know, because Zelig still used to come home once in a while and the gravedigger was his best chum.’
‘As far as I know, your former husband does not believe in such things,’ I said.
‘Now he believes in nothing. Then he was still a decent person,’ Bashele said.
‘Oh, I will be afraid to go to sleep,’ Shosha said.
‘Nothing to be afraid of,’ Bashele said. ‘Good people don’t become spiteful after death. Just the opposite. Sometimes a corpse doesn’t realize that he is dead and he leaves his grave and walks among the living. I heard of a man who came home when his family was sitting shiva for him. He opened the door and when he saw his wife and daughters sitting on low stools in their stocking feet, the mirror covered with a black sheet, and his sons with rended lapels, he asked, “What’s going on here? Who died?” And his wife, who was a mean shrew, answered, “You!” At that moment he vanished.’
‘Oh, I’m going to have bad dreams.’
‘Just say, “In Thy hands I commend my soul,”
and you will sleep peacefully,’ Bashele advised.
After the dessert, Bashele served tea with Sabbath cookies she baked herself. Then I went out with Shosha on a walk from No. 7 to No. 25; one could walk that far safely even at night. Farther there was danger of being attacked by some hooligan or drunk. On some streets there were Jewish stores that were kept open on the Sabbath, but not on Krochmalna Street. Only one tea shop had its door half open on the Sabbath, and the customers drank tea on credit. Even the Communists were not allowed to pay in cash. Bashele remembered times when gangsters used to attack young couples or newlywed pairs and make them pay a few groschen a week in order not to be molested. But this took place in past years, she told me. At the time of the revolution in 1905 the socialists waged war with the toughs of the underworld, and many thieves, pimps, and racketeers were beaten up. A number of brothels were destroyed and the whores dispersed. The brothels and the thieves came back, but the racketeers disappeared forever.