“Where did you go?”
“What’s the difference? I went to a cheap hotel and took a room. Gradually everything began to return to normal and I was able to function again. I somehow managed to overcome the nightmarish night and the next morning I caught a plane to London. I had an old friend there, a journalist on the local Yiddish newspaper, who had invited me to come a few times. The editorial office consisted of a single room and the whole paper went under soon afterward, but in the meantime I got some work and lodgings. From there, I left for Buenos Aires in 1950. Here I met Lena, my present wife.”
“What became of the two sisters?”
“Do you know? That’s as much as I know.”
“Didn’t you ever hear from them?”
“Never.”
“Did you look for them?”
“Such things you try to forget. I hypnotized myself into thinking that the whole thing had been only a dream, but it really happened. It’s as real as the fact that I’m sitting here with you right now.”
“How do you explain it?” I asked.
“I don’t.”
“Maybe they were dead when you left.”
“No, they were awake and listening. You can differentiate between the living and the dead.”
“Aren’t you curious to know what happened to them?”
“And if I am curious, what of it? They’re probably alive. The witches are somewhere—maybe they’ve married. I was in Paris three years ago, but the house where we lived no longer exists. They put up a garage there.”
We sat there silently; then I said, “If mass consisted of emotion, every stone in the street would be a skein of misery.”
“Maybe they are. Of one thing I’m sure—everything lives, everything suffers, struggles, desires. There is no such thing as death.”
“If that’s true, then Hitler and Stalin didn’t kill anyone,” I said.
“You have no right to kill an illusion, either. Drink your coffee.”
For a long while neither of us spoke; then I asked half in jest, “What can you learn from this story?”
Haim Leib smiled. “If Nietzsche’s crazy theory about the exhaustion of all atomic combinations and the eternal return is true, and if there’ll be another Hitler, another Stalin, and another Holocaust, and if in a trillion years you’ll meet a female in Stettin—don’t go with her to look for her sister.”
“According to this theory, I will have no choice but to go and to experience everything that you did,” I said.
“In that case, you’ll know how I felt.”
Translated by Joseph Singer
Three Encounters
I
I LEFT home at seventeen. I told my parents the truth: I didn’t believe in the Gemara or that every law in the Shulchan Aruch had been given to Moses on Mount Sinai; I didn’t wish to become a rabbi; I didn’t want a marriage arranged by a matchmaker; I was no longer willing to wear a long gaberdine or grow earlocks. I went to Warsaw, where my parents had once lived, to seek an academic education and a profession. My older brother, Joshua, lived in Warsaw and had become a writer, but he wasn’t able to help me. At twenty I came back home with congested lungs, a chronic cough, no formal education, no profession, and no way that I could see of supporting myself in the city. During the time I was away, my father had been appointed rabbi of Old-Stikov in Eastern Galicia—a village of a few dozen crooked shacks, with straw-covered roofs, built around a swamp. At least, in the fall of 1924 that’s how Old-Stikov appeared to me. It had rained all October, and those shacks lay reflected in the swamp as if it were a lake. Ruthenian peasants, stooped Jews in gaberdines, women and girls wearing shawls over their heads and men’s boots waded in the mud. Clouds of mist swirled in the air. Crows soared overhead, cawing. The sky hung low, leaden, heavy with storms. The smoke from chimneys didn’t rise but drifted downward toward the soaked earth.
The community had assigned Father a semi-ruin of a house. In the three years I was away, his beard, red when I left, had become streaked with strands of white. Mother had discarded her wig for a kerchief. She had lost her teeth and her sunken cheeks made her nose hooked, her chin receded. Only her eyes remained youthful and sharp.
Father warned me, “This is a pious community. If you don’t conduct yourself as you should, they’ll drive us out of here with sticks.”
“Father, I’m giving in. My only hope is that the army won’t take me.”
“When do you have to report for conscription?”
“In a year.”
“We’ll arrange a match for you. God willing, your father-in-law will ransom you. Put aside your foolishness and study the Yoreh Deah.”
I went to the study house but no one was studying there. The congregation, mostly artisans and dairymen, came to pray early in the morning and returned for the evening services; in between time, the place was deserted. I found an old volume on the Cabala there. I had brought along from Warsaw an algebra book and a Polish translation of Baudelaire’s poems.
Abraham Getzel the matchmaker came to look me over—a little man with a white beard ranging nearly to his loins. He was also the village beadle, the cantor, and the Talmud teacher. He measured me up and down and sighed. “These are different times,” he complained. “Girls want a husband who’s a provider.”
“I can’t blame them.”
“The Torah has lost its value in our generation. But don’t you worry, I’ll find you a bride.”
He proposed a widow who was six or seven years older than I and had two children. Her father, Berish Belzer, managed a brewery owned by an Austrian baron. (Before the war, Galicia had been ruled by Emperor Franz Josef.) When the weather cleared somewhat during the day, one could see the brewery chimney. Black smoke sat on it like a hat.
Berish Belzer came to the study house to have a chat with me. He had a short beard the color of beer. He wore a fox coat and a derby. A watch on a silver chain dangled from his silk vest. After we had talked for a few minutes, he said, “I see you’re no businessman.”
“I’m afraid you’re right.”
“Then what are you?”
And the match was off.
All of a sudden the mail brought news from Warsaw. My brother had become co-editor of a literary weekly and I was offered the job of being its proofreader. He said that I could publish my stories there if they proved good enough. The moment I read the letter my health improved. From then on I didn’t cough once during the night. I regained my appetite. I ate so much that my mother grew alarmed. Enclosed with the letter was the first issue of the magazine. It discussed a new novel by Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, and it contained poems in free verse, illustrated with Cubistic drawings. It reviewed a book of poetry entitled A Boot in the Lapel. Its articles spoke of the collapse of the old world and the emergence of a new man and a new spirit that would reappraise all values. It printed a chapter of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, as well as translations of poems by Alexander Blok, Mayakovsky, and Esenin. New writers had appeared in America during the war years, and their work was beginning to be published in Poland. No, I could not while away my days in Old-Stikov! I waited only for the train fare to be sent me from Warsaw.
Now that I was about to return to modern culture, I began to observe what was happening in Old-Stikov. I listened to the women who came to consult Father on ritual matters and to gossip with Mother. We had a neighbor, Lazar the shoemaker, and his wife brought us the good tidings that their only daughter, Rivkele, was marrying her father’s apprentice. Soon afterward Rivkele herself came to invite us to the engagement party. I looked at her with amazement. She reminded me of a Warsaw girl. She was tall, slim, with unusually white skin, black hair, dark-blue eyes, a long neck. Her upper lip drew back slightly to reveal white teeth without a blemish. There was a watch on her wrist and earrings dangled from the small lobes of her ears. She wore a fancy shawl with fringe and boots with high heels. She glanced at me shyly and said, “You are invited!”
We b
oth blushed.
The next day I went with my parents to the party. Lazar the shoemaker’s house had a bedroom and a big room where the family cooked, ate, and worked. Scattered on the floor around the worktable were shoes, boots, heels. Rivkele’s fiancé, Yantche, was short, broad, and dark, with two gold front teeth. The nail of his right index finger was deformed. For the party he had put on a paper collar and dickey. He passed cigarettes to the male guests. I heard him say, “Marry and die are two things you must do.”
Warsaw was in no rush to send me train fare. Snow had fallen and a frost gripped Old-Stikov. Father had gone to the house of prayer to study and warm himself at the stove. Mother went to pay a call on a woman who had slipped on the ice near the well and broken a leg. I sat alone at home, going over my manuscripts. Although it was daytime, a cricket chirped, telling of a story as old as time. It stopped, listening to its own silence, then commenced again. The upper panes of the window were covered with frost flowers, but through the lower panes I could see a water carrier with icicles in his beard carrying two pails of water on a wooden yoke. A peasant in a sheepskin hat, his feet wrapped in rags, followed a sledge loaded with logs and pulled by an emaciated horse. I could hear the tinkling of the bell on its neck.
The door opened and Rivkele entered. “Your mother isn’t here?” she asked me.
“She went to pay a sick call on somebody.”
“I borrowed a glass of salt from her yesterday and I’m giving it back.” She put a glass of salt on the table, then looked at me with a bashful smile.
“I didn’t get the chance to wish you good luck at the engagement party, so I’m doing it now,” I said.
“Thank you kindly. God willing, the same to you.” After a pause, she added, “When it’s your turn.”
We talked, and I told her that I was going back to Warsaw. This was supposed to remain a secret, but I boasted to her that I was a writer and had just been made a staff member on a periodical. I showed her the magazine, and she gazed at me in astonishment. “You must have some brain!”
“To write, what you need most is an eye.”
“What do you write—your thoughts?”
“I tell stories. They call it literature.”
“Oh yes, things happen in the big cities,” Rivkele said, nodding. “Here time stands still. There used to be a fellow here who read novels, but the Hasidim broke in on him and tore them all to shreds. He ran away to Brody.”
She sat down on the edge of the bench and glanced toward the door, ready to spring up the moment anyone might come in. She said, “In other towns they put on plays, hold meetings, and whatnot, but here everyone is old-fashioned. They eat and they sleep, and that’s how the years go by.”
I realized that I was doing wrong to say this, but I said it anyway: “Why didn’t you arrange to marry someone from a city?”
Rivkele thought it over. “Do they care around here what a girl wants? They marry you off and that’s that.”
“So it wasn’t a love match?”
“Love? In Old-Stikov? They don’t know the meaning of the word.”
I am not an agitator by nature, and I had no reason to praise the Enlightenment that had disenchanted me, but somehow, as if against my will, I began to tell Rivkele that we lived in the twentieth century, not in the Middle Ages; that the world had awakened and that villages like Old-Stikov weren’t merely physical quagmires but spiritual ones as well. I told her about Warsaw, Zionism, socialism, Yiddish literature, and the Writers’ Club, where my brother was a member and to which I held a guest pass. I showed her pictures in the magazine of Einstein, Chagall, the dancer Nijinsky, and of my brother.
Rivkele clapped her hands. “Oy, he resembles you like two drops of water!”
I told Rivkele that she was the prettiest girl I had ever met. What would become of her here in Old-Stikov? She would soon begin bearing children. She would go around like the rest of the women in coarse boots and a dirty kerchief over a shaved head and take old age upon herself. The men here all visited the Belzer rabbi’s court and he was said to perform miracles, but I heard that every few months epidemics raged in town. The people lived in filth, knew nothing about hygiene, science, or art. This was no town—I spoke dramatically—but a graveyard.
Rivkele’s blue eyes with the long eyelashes gazed at me with the indulgence of a relative. “Everything you say is the pure truth.”
“Escape from this mudhole!” I cried out like a seducer in a trashy novel. “You are young and a beauty, and I can see that you’re clever, too. You don’t have to let your years waste away in such a forsaken place. In Warsaw you could get a job. You could go out with whoever you please and in the evenings take courses in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish—whatever you wish. I’ll be there, too, and if you want we’ll meet. I’ll take you to the Writers’ Club, and when the writers get a glimpse of you they’ll go crazy. You might even become an actress. The actresses who play the romantic parts in the Yiddish theater are old and ugly. Directors are desperate to find young, pretty girls. I’ll get a room and we’ll read books together. We’ll go to the movies, to the opera, to the library. When I become famous, we’ll travel to Paris, London, Berlin, New York. There they’re building houses sixty stories high; trains race above the streets and under the ground; film stars earn a thousand dollars a week. We can go to California, where it’s always summer. Oranges are as cheap as potatoes …”
I had the odd feeling that this wasn’t I talking but the dybbuk of some old enlightened propagandist speaking through my mouth.
Rivkele threw frightened glances toward the door. “The way you talk! Suppose someone hears—”
“Let them hear. I’m not afraid of anybody.”
“My father—”
“If your father loved you he should have found you a better husband than Yantche. The fathers here are selling their daughters like the wild Asiatics. They’re all steeped in fanaticism, superstition, darkness.”
Rivkele stood up. “Where would I spend the first night? Such a fuss would break out that my mother couldn’t endure it. The outcry would be worse than if I converted.” The words stuck in Rivkele’s mouth; her throat moved as if she were choking on something she couldn’t swallow. “It’s easy for a man to talk,” she mumbled. “A girl is like a—the slightest thing and she is ruined.”
“That’s the way it used to be, but a new woman is emerging. Even here in Poland women already have the right to vote. Girls in Warsaw study medicine, languages, philosophy. A woman lawyer comes to the Writers’ Club. She has written a book.”
“A woman lawyer—how is this possible? Someone’s coming.” Rivkele opened the door. My mother was standing at the threshold. It wasn’t snowing, but her dark kerchief had turned hoary with frost.
“Rebbitsin, I brought over the glass of salt.”
“What was the hurry? Well, thank you.”
“If you borrow, you have to pay back.”
“What’s a glass of salt?”
Rivkele left. Mother looked at me suspiciously. “Did you talk to her?”
“Talk? No.”
“As long as you’re here, you must behave decently.”
II
Two years passed. The magazine of which my brother was editor and I the proofreader had failed, but in the meantime I managed to publish a dozen stories and no longer needed a guest pass to the Writers’ Club, because I had become a member. I supported myself by translating books from German, Polish, and Hebrew into Yiddish. I had presented myself before a military board, which had deferred me for a year, but now I had to go before another. Although I often criticized Hasidic conscripts for maiming themselves in order to avoid being accepted for service, I fasted to lose weight. I had heard horrible stories about the barracks: young soldiers were ordered to fall in muck, to leap over ditches; they were wakened in the middle of the night and forced to march for miles; corporals and sergeants beat the soldiers and played malicious tricks on them. It would be better to sit in jail than to fall into
the hands of such hooligans. I was ready to go into hiding—even to kill myself. Pilsudski had ordered the military doctors to take only strong young men into the army, and I did everything I could to make myself weak. Besides fasting, I went without sleep; I smoked steadily, lighting one cigarette from the butt of the last; I drank vinegar and herring brine. A publisher had commissioned me to do a translation of Stefan Zweig’s biography of Romain Rolland, and I spent half my nights working on it. I rented a room from an old physician, a onetime friend of Dr. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. The street was named after him.
That night I had worked until three o’clock. Then I lay down on the bed in my clothes. Every time I fell asleep I woke up with a start. My dreams had become strangely vivid. Voices spoke to me from all sides, bells rang, choirs sang. When I opened my eyes I could still hear their reverberations. My heart palpitated, my hair pricked my skull like wires. My hypochondria had returned. My lungs felt compressed and about to collapse. The day was rainy. Whenever I looked out the window I saw a Catholic funeral cortege on its way to Powązek Cemetery. When I finally sat down to work on the translation, Yadzia, the maid, knocked on my door and announced that a young woman was asking for me.
My caller turned out to be Rivkele. I didn’t recognize her immediately. She was smartly dressed in a coat with a fur collar, and a modish hat. She carried a purse and an umbrella. Her hair was cut à la garçon, and her dress was stylishly short; it came just to her knees. I felt so addled I forgot to be surprised. Rivkele told me what had happened to her. An American had come on a visit to Old-Stikov. He was a former tailor who said he had become a ladies’-clothing manufacturer in New York. He was a distant relative of her father’s. He assured the family that he had divorced his wife in America and began to court Rivkele. She broke her engagement to Yantche. The visitor from America bought her a diamond ring, went with her to Lemberg, took her to the Yiddish theater, to the Polish theater, to restaurants, and generally behaved like a prospective bridegroom. Together they visited Crakow and Zakopane. Her parents demanded that he marry her, but he came up with all kinds of excuses. He had divorced his wife according to Jewish law, he said, but he still needed a civil decree. On the road, Rivkele began to live with him. Rivkele talked and cried. He had seduced and deceived her. He owned no factory; he worked for someone else. He had not divorced his wife. He was the father of five children. All this came out when his wife suddenly arrived in Old-Stikov and made a scandal. She had family in Jaroslaw and Przemyśl—butchers, draymen, tough fellows. They warned Morris—that was his name—that they would break his neck. They turned him in to the police. They threatened to report him to the American consul. The result was that he went back to his wife and they sailed together to America.