And she brought me as a gift a pair of cuff-links that she had inherited from Count Esterhazy—the same Esterhazy who lost eighty thousand crowns in one night and then put a bullet through his head.
It didn’t occur to me to bring my two neighbors together. The truth is that I didn’t invite either one of them. They used to knock on my door, and if I wasn’t too busy I would ask whoever it was to come in, and I would treat him or her to coffee and cookies. Morris Terkeltoyb received Hebrew newspapers from Tel Aviv. When he found a review of a book of mine or even an advertisement, he brought it to me. From time to time, Margit Levy would bake a cake in the oven of the old maid where she boarded, and she would insist on stopping by to give me a piece.
But once it happened that both came in at the same time. Margit found among her papers a letter she had spoken to me about. Morris had discovered a monthly magazine from South Africa that reprinted a sketch of mine. I introduced my guests to each other; though they had been living in the same building for years, they had never met. Margit had become partially deaf in recent months. For some reason she could not pronounce “Terkeltoyb.” She pulled at her ear, frowned, mispronounced the name. At the same time she shouted into Morris Terkeltoyb’s ear as if he were the one who was hard of hearing. Morris spoke to her in English, but she could not understand his accent. He shifted to German. Margit Levy shook her head and made him repeat each word. Like a demanding teacher, she corrected his grammar and pronunciation. He had the habit of swallowing words, and when he became excited his voice was shrill. Without finishing the coffee, he got up and went to the door. “Who is that crazy old woman?” he asked me. He slammed out as if I were to blame for his failure to impress Margit Levy.
When he had left, Margit Levy, who as a rule was exaggeratedly polite with everyone, going so far as to shower compliments on the neighbors’ dogs and cats, called Morris Terkeltoyb an uneducated idiot, a ruffian. Though she knew that I came from Poland, she couldn’t contain her rage and spoke of him as “a Polish schlemiel.” She apologized immediately and assured me that I was an exception. The spots that came out on her cheeks were so red they could be seen through the rouge. She left the coffee I had placed before her. At the door she took both my wrists, kissed me, and pleaded, “Please, my dear, do not let me meet that creature again.”
I imagined that I heard her cry as she made her way up the steps. Margit had a fear of elevators. She had been stuck in one for three hours. Also, an elevator door had closed on her hand, causing her to lose a diamond ring. She sued the building.
After this encounter, I decided never to let one of the two enter my apartment if the other was already there. I had lost patience with both of them. When Morris Terkeltoyb wasn’t boasting of his successes with women or the brilliant offers he got from publishers and universities, he complained about the rudeness he met with from editors, reviewers, officials of the journalists’ union, secretaries of the P.E.N. club. He was accepted nowhere; people were always doing him in. The proofreaders on our newspaper not only refused to correct the mistakes he marked in his stories but they intentionally crippled his text. Once, he caught a makeup man in the composing room reversing lines of type in an article. When Morris protested to the printers’ union, he received no reply. He called Yiddish literature a racket. He accused playwrights of the Yiddish theater of stealing from his stories. He said to me, “You probably believe that I suffer from a persecution mania. You forget that people really do persecute one another.”
“No, I don’t.”
“My own father persecuted me.” And Morris Terkeltoyb recited in a plaintive voice a long monologue that could have been serialized as a dozen chapters on his true-story page. Whenever I tried to interrupt to ask for details, he rushed on with such intensity that there was no way to stop him. He dismissed my questions with an impatient wave of his hand. In the end, his stories left me utterly depressed.
I decided that with all their differences Margit Levy and Morris Terkeltoyb had much in common. Just as he did, Margit mixed up names, dates, episodes. Like him, she accused people who had died years before of innumerable offenses against her. All the evil powers had conspired to ruin Margit Levy. A broker who had invested her money became a devotee of race tracks and squandered her capital. A physician who was supposed to cure her rheumatism gave her an injection that brought out a rash on her body and caused an illness that almost killed her. Often she slipped on ice in winter, fell on escalators in department stores. Her pocketbook was snatched. Once, she was held up in the middle of the day in a street crowded with passers-by. Margit Levy swore that when she went on vacation the spinster who was her landlady wore her dresses and underwear, that she opened her letters, and even helped herself to her medicines.
“Who would use another person’s medicine?” I asked her.
She replied, “If people could, they’d steal each other’s eyes.”
In the summer, I took a long holiday. I went to Switzerland, France, Israel. I left in the middle of August, when my hay fever begins, and came back at the beginning of December. I had paid my rent in advance, locking up my apartment before I left. There was nothing in it for thieves except books and manuscripts.
The day I returned, snow was falling in New York. When I got out of the taxi in front of my building, I was stunned by what I saw. Margit Levy was creeping along on a cane and a crutch, with Morris Terkeltoyb holding on to her arm. With his free hand he was pushing a cartful of food from the supermarket on Columbus Avenue. Margit’s face was yellow from the cold and more wrinkled than ever. She wore a mangy fur coat and a black hat that reminded me of my childhood in Warsaw. She seemed ill, emaciated. Her eyes, too close together, had a piercing expression like those of a bird of prey. Morris Terkeltoyb had also aged. His beaked nose was red, and white whiskers sprouted on his face.
No matter how unusual an event may seem, my astonishment never lasts more than an instant. I approached them and asked, “How are you, my friends?”
Margit shook her head. “The facts speak for themselves.”
Later a neighbor told me that the old maid in whose apartment Margit boarded had given up her place to go to Miami. Margit would have been thrown out into the street. Instead, she had moved in with Morris Terkeltoyb. How this came about my neighbor did not know. I noticed that the name of Margit Levy had been added on Morris Terkeltoyb’s letter box.
A few days after my return, Margit visited me. She wept, mixed German with English, and told me at great length how the selfish spinster had decided without warning to move away, how all the neighbors had treated her misfortune with indifference. The only one who showed humanity was Morris Terkeltoyb. Margit acted as if he had taken her in as just a boarder. But the next day Morris knocked at my door, and from his unfinished sentences and gesticulations it became clear that their relationship was more than that of tenant and boarder. He said, “One gets older, not younger. When you are ill, you need someone to bring you a glass of tea.” He nodded, winked, smiled guiltily and sheepishly, inviting me to come see them in the evening.
I went down after supper. Margit received me as a hostess. The apartment looked clean, there were curtains at the windows, the table had a tablecloth and dishes that could only have belonged to Margit. I brought flowers; she kissed me and wiped away her tears. Margit and Morris continued to address each other as “you” instead of the familiar “thou,” but I thought that I heard Margit forget herself once and use “thou.” They talked to one another in a mishmash of German-English-Yiddish. When Morris Terkeltoyb ate herring with his fingers and started to wipe his hands on his sleeves, Margit said to him, “Use your napkin. This is New York, not Klimontow.”
And Morris Terkeltoyb replied in a typical Polish Chassidic intonation, “Nu, so be it.”
That winter Morris Terkeltoyb had a long spell of sickness. It started with the flu. Then the doctor discovered that he had diabetes and prescribed insulin. He stopped going down to the newspaper and sent his manuscripts by mail.
Margit told me that Morris couldn’t read his own articles in the paper, they contained so many errors. He got palpitations of the heart every time he read one. She asked me to bring proofs uptown for him. I was willing to help, but I rarely had time to go to the paper anymore. I lectured a lot, leaving the city for weeks. Once when I entered the composing room, I saw Margit Levy. She stood there waiting for proofs. She now took the subway downtown twice each week—first to pick up the proofs and the second time to return them. She said to me, “Aggravation does more damage to the health than any medicine can cure.” She also said something that could only have come from Morris Terkeltoyb: “A writer doesn’t die of medical errors, only of printing errors.” Jake, the printer’s devil, tossed the proofs to her hurriedly. Margit put on her glasses and began to look them over. Jake often ran off proofs so sloppily that letters were missing on the margins or lines were missing because the paper was too short to carry the whole column. Even though she didn’t know Yiddish, she seemed to realize that some of the proofs were defective and she went to look for Jake among the humming linotype machines. The boy screamed at her and called her names, she complained when she came back. “Is this the way they treat literature in America?”
Toward spring, Morris Terkeltoyb began to go down to the newspaper again, but Margit had a gallstone attack and was taken to the hospital. Morris visited her twice a day. The doctors found all kinds of complications. They made many tests and took a good deal of blood for them. Morris claimed that American doctors had no respect for their patients; they cut them up as if they were already corpses. The nurses didn’t come when they were called and the sick didn’t get proper food. Morris had to prepare soup for Margit and bring her orange juice. He asked me, “In what way are doctors better than writers or theater directors? It’s the same human species.”
I left New York again for about three months. When I came back in the fall, I read in the newspaper that the Yiddish Writers’ Union was having a memorial evening on the thirtieth day after the death of Morris Terkeltoyb. He had been stricken with a heart attack while reading proofs. Perhaps he died of a printing error. In the evening, I took Margit in a taxi to the hall. It was badly lit, half empty. Margit was wrapped in black. She did not understand the Yiddish speakers, but each time the name of Morris Terkeltoyb was mentioned she sobbed.
A few days after that, Margit knocked at my door. For the first time I saw her without cosmetics. She looked to me like a woman of ninety. I had to help her sit down on a chair. Her hands trembled, her head was shaking, and she spoke with difficulty. She said, “I don’t want them to throw Morris’s manuscripts into the garbage after my death.” I had to give her a solemn promise that I would find an institution which would accept his manuscripts and books, the thousands of letters he kept in trunks and even in a laundry hamper.
Margit lived on for thirteen months. During that time she kept coming to me with projects. She wanted to publish a collection of Morris Terkeltoyb’s best writing, but he had left so many manuscripts it would have taken years to choose among them. There was no chance of getting a publisher. She kept asking the same question: “Why didn’t Morris write in an understandable language—Polish or Hungarian?” She wanted me to find a Yiddish grammar for her so that she could learn the language. Even though she had never read anything he had written, Margit called him a talent, possibly a genius. Another time Margit found a manuscript that looked like a play, and she urged me to offer it to a theater director or to find someone to translate it into English.
Margit Levy spent more of the last two months of her life in the hospital than at home. A few times I went to visit her. She was in the general ward, and her face had changed so much that on each visit I had trouble recognizing her. Her false teeth no longer fit her shrunken mouth. Her nose had become hooked, just like Morris’s. She spoke to me in German, French, Italian. Once, I found her with another visitor—her lawyer, a German Jew. I heard her telling him that she had bought a plot in the cemetery of the Klimontow Society, near Morris’s grave.
She died in January. It was a frosty day and the wind was blowing. Two people came to the chapel—the lawyer and myself. The rabbi quickly recited “God Full of Mercy,” and delivered a brief eulogy. I heard him say, “The privilege of leaving a good name is for villagers only. In a city like New York, a person’s name often dies before him.” Then the coffin was put into a hearse and Margit Levy rode into eternity without anyone to accompany her.
I wanted to carry out my promise to find a place for Morris Terkeltoyb’s packs of manuscripts, but the institutions I called all refused to take them. I kept in my apartment one valise filled with his writings and two albums that belonged to Margit Levy. All the rest the superintendent threw out into the street. That day I did not leave the house.
In Morris Terkeltoyb’s valise I found, to my surprise, bundles of faded love letters that women had written him—all in Yiddish. One woman threatened that she would commit suicide if he did not return to her. No, Morris Terkeltoyb was not the psychopathic boaster I had thought him to be. Women did love him. I remembered Spinoza’s saying that there are no falsehoods, there are only distorted truths. A strange idea ran through my mind: perhaps among these letters I would find one from Isadora Duncan. For a moment I had forgotten that Isadora Duncan did not know Yiddish.
A year after Margit Levy’s death, I received an invitation from the Klimontow Society to attend the unveiling of a monument to Malkah Levy—the Society had given her a Hebrew name. But that Sunday a heavy snow fell, and I was sure that the unveiling would be postponed. Besides, I woke up with a severe attack of sciatica. I took a hot bath, but there was no one for whom to shave and dress. Neither did I miss anyone. After breakfast, I took out Margit’s album, some of Morris’s letters, looked at the pictures, and read the texts. I dozed, dreamed, and forgot my dreams the moment I wakened. From time to time I looked out the window. The snow descended sparsely, peacefully, as if in contemplation of its own falling. The short day neared its end. The desolate park became a cemetery. The buildings on Central Park South towered like headstones. The sun was setting on Riverside Drive, and the water of the reservoir reflected a burning wick. The radiator near which I sat hissed and hummed: “Dust, dust, dust.” The singsong penetrated my bones together with the warmth. It repeated a truth as old as the world, as profound as sleep.
Translated by the author and Herbert R. Lottman
Moon and Madness
OUTSIDE, a thick snow was falling. It had begun at dawn and continued all day long and into the early evening. Then a frost set in. In the Radzymin study house it was warm. A pair of beggars with ropes around their loins sat by the oven roasting potatoes. Jeremiah, an old man, was reciting psalms. He had gone blind but had managed to learn the Book of Psalms by heart. At a long table across from the Ark of the Holy Scroll sat Zalman the glazier, Levi Yitzchok, who suffered from trachoma and wore dark glasses even at night, and Meir the eunuch, a Cabalist, who was known to be sane for half the month and insane the other half, after the moon became full. The conversation turned to pity, and Zalman the glazier said:
“Of course, pity is virtuous, but too much of it can do damage. Not far from our town of Radoszyce lived a Polish squire, Count Jan Malecki, the owner of big estates. Long before the czar had decreed the serfs to be free, the Count called all his peasants to a meeting and said to them, ‘The earth belongs not to me but to those who work it. You’re not my slaves any more. Elect an elder and divide the grounds among yourselves.’ I can see this Malecki before my eyes—a big man, fat, with a red face and with a blond mustache that reached almost to his shoulders. He had no children, but his wife, the squiress, had five sisters and two brothers. They each had many children and Malecki provided for the whole impoverished family. It is peculiar that although he freed the peasants, Malecki himself worked the fields—plowed, sowed, and harvested. He had acquired a machine to cut straw, which he mixed with hay for feeding cattle. He could stand for hours at this machine
working like a hired hand, while his brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law and their brats walked around idly, dressed up as if they were going to a ball. Once, his court Jew, Zelig, asked him what was the sense of allowing the others to behave this way and Malecki answered, ‘Every man should do what he wants. I like to carry the burden, so I carry it. They like to be idle, so they should be.’ By the way, all of Malecki’s relatives indulged in quarrels and calumny. The young ones also stole. His nephews got drunk, walked around with pistols; they went hunting in the Count’s forests and sometimes aimed at one another. The girls played the piano and went to parties. The people in Radoszyce gave the Count a nick-name—Jan Schmatte, which means ‘rag.’
“Since he was not a rebel and never quarreled with anyone, the Russians held no grudge against him and made him the judge of Radoszyce and the whole county. He refused to take a salary. I am told that on the day he became judge the thieves held a banquet. They knew that Malecki would never put anyone in prison. And so it was. When they brought him a thief who defended himself by claiming that his boots were torn, he had a headache, he was penniless, Malecki not only let him go free but gave him a few rubles as well. He was satisfied with a promise from the accused to become honest from that day on. The thugs and pickpockets had something to laugh about.
“There was a man in Radoszyce by the name of Maciek Sokal, and they called him the Lawyer. He was as much a lawyer as I am a doctor. He could barely read. Just the same, whenever someone was on trial he would engage Sokal as a defender. Sokal himself was a swindler, a drunk, a low creature. Before he began to appear in court as a defender, he was known as Sokal the Year-Round Witness. For anyone accused of a crime, he would invent an alibi, come as a witness, and swear falsely. Sokal knew that Malecki was gullible and he taught the criminals how to fool him. Things reached such a state that thieves began to come to Radoszyce from other villages.