More Stories From My Father's Court

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  At some point, a week passed and the would-be scholar (which is what the teacher called him) did not show up in cheder. The teacher then sent me and another boy to find out what had happened. Perhaps Kuba was ill.

  We made our way to their house. The family no longer lived on our street but on Gnoyna Street. The apartment steps were dirty, but underneath the dirt one could see the white of marble. I rang the bell and a maid came to open the door. At first she didn’t want to admit us, but Kuba heard us and invited us in. I stood there amazed. The rooms were enormous. Kuba was wearing something I hadn’t seen before; only later did I learn it was pajamas. He was supposedly a little bit under the weather. His throat was red, but he played with his toys and ran about over the waxed floors with the energy of a young colt. His mother yelled at him and the maid scolded him angrily in Polish.

  Suddenly I noticed a man roaming about the house, but it wasn’t the traveling salesman. He was short, thin, with a pale face and blond curly hair. His tie looked more like a noose than a cravat. I asked Kuba who he was.

  “He’s teaching Mama how to play the piano.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Come, I’ll show you.”

  He ran to the piano and began banging on the keys. Tones and overtones filled the apartment. His mother began yelling at Kuba in Polish, and we, the two messengers, wanted to leave, but then she offered us a snack. Each one of us was given a biscuit and a glass of cocoa, as was Kuba, but he was in no rush to drink. He was already sated with sweets.

  Kuba told us about the piano teacher. He could play anything. He was a professor of music and had performed with the Philharmonic. He was also crazy. When Mama did not play well, he plugged his ears with his fingers and yelled and swooshed the sheet music to the floor. Sometimes the teacher took Kuba and his little sister, who was now at school, to the movies, where they showed all kinds of little people on a screen. The piano teacher did not speak Yiddish, only Polish.

  “Is he your uncle?”

  “No, he’s not an uncle.”

  I wasn’t suspicious at the time, but I understood that none of this was kosher. All these things smacked of promiscuity: a piano, a woman without a marriage wig, a man who gave piano lessons to a woman, a little boy who studied in public school and ran around bareheaded in the apartment. I never saw him again—not him, not his mama, not the piano teacher, and not his father, who dragged himself from one Russian fair to another and supported a nice-looking wife, two refined children, and a piano teacher to boot.

  This traveling salesman who told countless anecdotes about others had transformed his own life into an anecdote. But why did he do this? Why did a man get married and then go off to faraway places? Did he have such strong faith in women’s fidelity? Or didn’t it bother him? And why did he need a family whom he saw so rarely?

  A stranger certainly cannot answer this, but I don’t know if even the salesman himself could have explained it. Behind his jokes and tales a different being evidently lived in this man—one with another outlook and other calculations.

  A LAWSUIT AND A DIVORCE

  I’ll admit to you, dear reader, that I don’t care much for dogs. The truth is, I don’t like them at all. To be perfectly honest, I hate them. As far as I’m concerned—and both my grandfathers held the same view—a dog is a mangy cur, a sycophant, a howler, a biter, a bootlicker. What is there to like in a dog?

  And even if I did have positive feelings for dogs, they would have vanished after that lawsuit.

  The door to Father’s courtroom opened and a tall, heavy-set man entered. He wore a gray jacket, gray trousers, and a gray hat. His clothes were flour-dusted. Zanvel was his name, and he was a baker on our street. In the courtyard where the bakery was located, he was often seen walking about wearing only his long underwear, a pair of crumpled slippers, and a conical paper cap instead of a hat.

  Journeymen bakers earned good money, but Zanvel worked in his father’s bakery and was paid better than the others. He had pale skin, blue eyes, and the thick neck and shoulders of a boxer. He kneaded huge chunks of dough, the sort of work that can easily break someone who isn’t strong enough.

  He approached Father’s desk, pounded it with his fist, and said, “Rabbi, I want to start a lawsuit.”

  “Against whom?”

  “My wife.”

  “Sit down. What is it?”

  “Rabbi, it’s either me or the dog,” Zanvel shouted. “There’s no room in the house for both of us.”

  “Who is this dog?”

  “It’s not a person but a real dog,” Zanvel yelled. “She wanted to have a dog in the house—a fire in her kishkes! Ever since she got that dog, she’s forgotten she has a husband. My line of work is hard and backbreaking. I’m a baker, Rabbi. I bake bread so people can eat. All night long I work nonstop in the bakery, but when I come home in the morning, instead of being greeted by my wife, a dog comes bounding toward me. He barks and jumps on me. They say it’s out of love, but I don’t need his love. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were a little puppy. But this dog is like a bear. A wild beast. I don’t want a wild beast in my house. He opens his mouth like a lion. He can crunch a hard bone. When he barks, I have to cover my ears. He makes such a fuss, I’m lucky that he doesn’t bite my nose off. What do I need that for? My father didn’t have a dog.

  “People say that a dog is useful if you live in a village, out in the country—but why do I need a dog in Warsaw? No one’s going to rob me here—I have an excellent lock on my door. Poor people used to come to my house and I would give them what I could: one or two groschen, a piece of bread, a piece of sugar. But this dog drove all the poor people away. I have a charity box hanging on a wall and a Hasid used to come to collect the money, but he stopped coming, too. If we don’t chase the dog away, he’ll end up tearing the hem of someone’s coat. These Hasidim are scared of dogs.”

  “Why does she need a dog?” Father said.

  “Rabbi, you know like I know. No one in my family owns a dog. She began complaining that she’s lonely. You see, we don’t have children and she wants to have a living creature in the house. So I tell her, get a cat or a parrot. At least a bird sings. A parrot speaks. But what does a dog do? Rabbi, I’m ashamed to say it, but she kisses him. She’s always kissing him. I’m not, like they say, jealous. But when I see her kissing him, it wounds me to the core. Rabbi, I work long, hard hours for her—and it’s the dog she kisses. She never stops kissing him, petting him, worrying over his health. He doesn’t eat enough; he doesn’t sleep enough.

  “Rabbi, I told her I’m going to take a piece of iron and split his skull open. So she screams she’ll leave the house. Rabbi, I want to have a rabbinic judgment! I want you to decide which of us is more important—a man or a dog.”

  “What kind of comparison is that, God forbid. Comparing a dog to a man!”

  His wife was summoned. A sturdy woman came in; she had a high bosom, strong arms, thick calves. Her shoes were tattered. She didn’t walk but dragged the soles of her shoes along the floor. She was sucking on a hard candy and one red cheek was pulsating. Boredom radiated from her face.

  “Why do you need a dog?” Father asked her. “The Talmud teaches that a Jew is forbidden to keep a savage dog in his house.”

  “He’s not savage, Rabbi. He’s better than this one,” she said, pointing a short, stubby finger at her husband.

  The argument lasted a long while, and from their wrangling I, a little boy, clearly understood that the woman loved her dog and hated her husband.

  Father finally succeeded in reconciling husband and wife. He apparently convinced the woman to either sell the dog or give him away. But hardly a month had passed and the man returned.

  “Rabbi, I want a divorce.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m the baker who was here once. My wife still has the dog. The rabbi decided then that—”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Rabbi, it’s the same as before. Even worse. She sleeps in
bed with him. If I’m lying, may I drop dead right here.”

  Father sent for the woman once more and—wonder of wonders—she came with the dog. It was a huge pug, fat and thick-legged. From his wideset eyes and flaring nostrils gleamed a rage, a hatred, a contempt for every living creature. The dog barked at my mother. The woman wanted to take the dog into the courtroom, but Mother declared, “There’s a Torah in there.”

  As soon as I entered the kitchen and saw the dog, a mixture of dread and joy overcame me, somewhat akin to the feeling I had when a policeman came to our apartment. I took a piece of bread and threw it to the dog. As he sniffed, it, the brown eyes in his wrinkled forehead seemed to say, I don’t consider dry bread a treat!

  I wanted to pet the dog, but his growl frightened me. This was no dog but a four-legged anti-Semite. Each limb breathed fierce aggression. When Father heard the barking in the courtroom, he too became frightened. He closed the holy book he was studying and began fanning himself with his yarmulke.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “That’s her husband,” replied Zanvel the baker.

  Usually Father attempted to make peace between litigants, but this time he did so merely for appearance’s sake. As bizarre as it sounds, the woman agreed to a divorce. She sacrificed her husband for a dog.

  I don’t remember if the divorce was performed in our house, but the marriage was dissolved. The woman remained in the apartment with the furniture. The street seethed with the news: a dog had driven a man away from his home. The women said awful things about the wife, whispering secrets into one another’s ears.

  One woman who heard the news turned red, exclaiming, “No!”

  “Yes!” the other woman replied, and whispered another secret into her ear.

  “Foo! How’s that possible?”

  “Everything is possible, my dear woman. May she burn in hell!”

  “And I once heard a woman tell a story about a noblewoman who lived with a stallion, a male horse, and they had a baby that was half human and half colt.”

  “What did they do with it?”

  “It died right away.”

  “All of this stems from excessive luxury. Having it too good drives them crazy—a fire in their kishkes!”

  After his divorce, Zanvel went downhill. He started drinking. At night, while kneading huge chunks of dough, he’d sing plaintive tunes, and his voice could be heard throughout the courtyard. The neighbors complained that he woke them up. People wanted to arrange a match for him. All kinds of women flattered him, but he didn’t want any of them.

  “If a dog can drive me out of my house, then I’m really afraid.”

  And he was seen frequenting the tavern on our street.

  The woman with the dog found another man, a fruit dealer, and it was rumored that he would soon marry her. He happened to like dogs. When he visited the divorcee, he brought her chocolates and jellybeans, and a piece of meat or a bone for the dog. If the woman was busy, the fruit merchant would take the dog out for a walk, leading him on a leash. Sometimes he would unleash him and the dog would follow him warily, dragging the leash on the sidewalk.

  An awful thing happened on one of these walks. Zanvel the baker was approaching the dog. He was barefoot, wearing only a pair of white long johns and balancing a cheesecake on his head. Zanvel had ceased kneading the huge chunks of dough at his father’s bakery because he had developed a hernia. Now he was working for a pastry baker, who had sent him to deliver the cheesecake to a café.

  When the dog saw his onetime master and rival, he attacked him with savage fury. The cheesecake fell off Zanvel’s head. The dog bit Zanvel’s foot and Zanvel grabbed hold of the dog’s neck and strangled him. The fruit merchant pulled out a knife and stabbed Zanvel …

  All of this took place within a few minutes. The policeman blew his whistle. Someone telephoned the first-aid squad. On the ground lay the dead dog with bloodshot eyes, a smashed cheesecake, and a bloody human being. The dog’s tongue was black and hung out of his mouth like a rag.

  Soon Zanvel the baker was placed on a stretcher in the first-aid wagon. A medic bandaged his foot and the shoulder the fruit merchant had stabbed. The policeman handcuffed the fruit merchant and brought him to the police station. A janitor took the dead dog away. Barefoot boys and girls and even a few older fellows picked up pieces of the cheesecake and nibbled at them. When the woman, the owner of the dog, heard what had happened, she ran out into the street to bemoan her dog, and perhaps her lover, too. But the women on the street immediately pounced on her, beat her, and pulled fistfuls of hair from her head. There was a wild free-for-all on the street with tempers flaring everywhere.

  You probably want to know, dear reader, how the story ended, and I’ll oblige. The end was that the fruit merchant, after spending a couple of weeks in jail, disappeared. Zanvel the baker lay in the hospital two days and then returned home. He went to console his former wife—and once again a match ensued. Before the wedding the wife swore that she would never again keep a dog in the house.

  Instead of a dog she bought a cage with two yellow canaries and a green parrot to boot. Zanvel the baker resumed working for his father. He no longer kneaded the huge chunks of dough but slid the loaves of bread into and out of the oven. Zanvel’s canaries chirped and sang all day long. The parrot spoke Yiddish. Everything was fine and dandy once again. In my view, heaven and earth had sworn that a dog must not be victorious. And as proof we have the story of “Chad Gadya,” the last song sung at the Passover Seder, where the dog is on the side of justice but the Master of the Universe is on the side of the stick that beats the dog. Because whether just or unjust, a dog should not interfere with our affairs.

  That’s the interpretation attributed to the rebbe, Reb Heschel, who supposedly first told it. And even if he did not, he could have told it.

  NICE JEWS, BUT …

  A couple of times my father judged big lawsuits in his courtroom. A “big” lawsuit usually lasted days, and each side had an arbitrator who served as a kind of lawyer. When businessmen and rich Jews came to us, Father sat in front, the arbitrators on the side, and the litigants a little farther away. They yelled, spoke, argued, wrote numbers on sheets of paper, and smoked cigarettes and cigars. Mother brought in glasses of tea with lemon and biscuits.

  And I would stand behind Father’s chair, listening and watching.

  One lawsuit was particularly complicated because it was never clear who was suing whom. The owner of a store had died, leaving heirs. Partners too remained. The heirs and the partners were in total disagreement.

  The heirs were all modern young men and women. The men wore Western clothing; either their beards were trimmed or they were smoothly shaven. The women wore hats, not marriage wigs. The partners were Hasidic Jews.

  Days passed and it was difficult to ascertain what was going on and why the heirs and the partners couldn’t come to terms and continue running their business. Gradually the cat came out of the bag: the partners were stealing. The heirs, however, did not want to make this accusation at first. They insinuated, asked naive questions. They brought in a bookkeeper, who did not speak to the point but stammered. My father was not fit for such conflicts. He didn’t know his way around numbers. Furthermore, he trusted people. The thought that somebody could be dishonest never occurred to him. In addition, the partners were Hasidim. They spoke of their rebbe. They sprinkled their conversation with Torah learning. They smoked thick cigars and grandiosely blew smoke rings. They all had apartments, wives, daughters, and bookshelves full of holy texts. So how could one be suspicious of such Jews?

  But I, the little boy with the red sidecurls, realized what was going on here. Behind their beautiful words, the heirs were accusing the partners of theft. The partners never clearly denied it but argued, What do you mean? You’re suspecting Jews like us? If that’s the case, then it’s the end of the world! … Words like that should not even be brought to one’s lips! … It’s a desecration of God’s name.

&n
bsp; After a while the matter became clearer. The Hasidic Jews did not steal, God forbid, they just helped themselves. They were giving themselves loans. They took money under all sorts of excuses and chicanery. They had to marry off daughters, send wives to spas, go to spas themselves, and all that cost money. And since the old man who had just died had been a bit senile during the last few years, the young partners had slipped him papers to sign, which he did. They had conspired with the head bookkeeper. They bought merchandise for the store, paid double the cost, then got hefty kickbacks from the wholesalers. True, they didn’t break into safes, but nevertheless they did take money that did not belong to them. They did this cleverly, pre-meditatively, on a grand scale, and respectably, as befitted Hasidim who sat at the head table with the rebbe when they traveled to see him for the holidays.

  When Father finally grasped what was happening, he seemed to shrink into himself. His face fell and became pale; his beard seemed to become knotty. He apparently lost the ability to speak. Instead, he continually sighed. Behind him stood the Holy Ark. Above it, on the ledge of the Holy Ark, two lions held the tablets with the Ten Commandments. All day long the commandment proclaimed: Thou shall not steal!

  Mother brought Father tea, but he let it grow cold. He lit a cigarette, but immediately put it aside. The partners attempted to share an aphorism, a Hasidic commentary, a clever remark made by Reb Heschel, but Father paid scant attention to them. His sad eyes asked, What good are all these beautiful remarks if …if …

  Suddenly one of the heirs lost patience and yelled, “You’re all thieves! Swindlers! Connivers! Crooks!”

  For a while the courtroom was silent. It seemed to me that after these words the world would be torn asunder. But the kerosene lamp continued to burn. Then another heir shouted, “You’ll be led away in chains!”

  A wave of fear came over me. I actually felt my red hair standing up on my skull. One of the partners, a man with a long black beard, called out, “You can talk with such chutzpah, but I want you to know that you can’t do anything to us except sprinkle salt on our tail.”