by Ilan Stavans
That afternoon, the police investigation met with success. A stranger, his cap covered with medals, crossed a checkpoint on his sled, carrying two suspicious-looking packages under his arms. When asked about what he carried, he replied that they were galley proofs from over there, pointing toward the printing shop with his aerodynamic nose, since he had his hands in his pockets. The policemen exchanged knowing glances and allowed him to infiltrate the place.
Not ten minutes had gone by when the bomb squad arrived and placed an explosive charge among the suspicious packages, blowing them up. A hole the shape of the foundation was left where the printing shop had previously stood. And exactly in the center of that hole were the remains of a sled, a cap covered with medals, and two suspicious-looking packages, somewhat tattered but able to be collated. They contained galley proofs full of foreign-language characters.
The chief of police, fearing a conspiracy, called an expert in ancient languages, who confirmed his worst suspicions. Someone, in 1939 in Poland, was sparing no effort to fire up the minds of the Jews, filling them with nonsense about the future. And what a future! In a few months they expected to reach the year 5700. The chief of police ordered barricades built on the main access roads to the printing shops to prevent the presence of new infiltrators.
The next day, the poor woman was informed of her son’s death in a confrontation with the forces of law and order. Inside the medals on his cap they had found microfilm strips detailing a conspiracy on the part of some Hebrew calendar makers, whose intentions were to sow dissent.
That night, fearing that they had inadvertently sown dissent, the three most important Hebrew calendar makers packed up their bundles, among which were some boxes of brand-new calendars, left their homes in the late hours of the night, and took off to other lands in a chartered ship, the Countess Petrovia—ridden by guilt but never by fear. The passengers obtained refusals of asylum in Hamburg and Oslo, and their ship finally ran aground in Antwerp, where they were interned in a concentration camp as prisoners of war.
Some of the packages were analyzed by cryptographers of the Belgian intelligence service, who determined them to be messages in code from German spies recommending respect for the neutrality of that country.
Meanwhile, in Pinye’s town, the police were able to quell dissent by blowing up suspicious-looking packages, which Shmulik had dropped off at the doorways of various printing shops before his confrontation with the forces of law and order.
When there wasn’t a printing press left untouched, the Hebrew calendar makers met in the barn they were allowed to use as a synagogue to undertake the analysis of their current historical juncture. Might it be that anti-Semitism was happening in their region, they inquired. But a delegate from the Jewish Congress asked them to pipe down, because it wasn’t as if they lived (a) in Germany, where the official policy was to stick a yellow star on every Jew; or (b) in the Ukraine, where the official policy was to drag out the Jews into the main street, chained by the neck, and make them fight the bear while the stationmaster refused to sell them tickets to travel, not even on the roof of the train; or (c) by all means not in Russia, where the czar’s official policy was to deny any participation of the Black Cossacks in the pogroms, while Rasputin went around curing all his children, turned into hemophiliacs by the Jewish conspiracy. Given that anti-Semitism was not an official policy, the best thing was to turn to the local authorities, recommended the delegate from the Jewish Congress while pulling up his lapels, since the heat radiated by the gathering of malnourished bodies could not sufficiently counter the cold that entered through the hole where once the roof had been.
Pinye then told the delegate about the disgrace heaped upon the poor woman. One of her messages had fallen into the hands of the local authorities, with results known to everybody. Her ignorance of her son’s whereabouts had begun to get every printing shop blown up.
“Couldn’t it be that her darling little treasure had been mixed up in some mess?” asked the delegate. “’Cause there are printing shops, and then there are printing shops. It isn’t the same to have an Orthodox printing shop as a progressiver one. Take the Jews of Tarov, for instance. Their schools started to get blown up. But there are schools, and then there are schools. It is not the same to have an Orthodox school as a progressiver one.” They could ask Lubcek, right there in the flesh, how the Jews of Tarov confronted their situation.
Lubcek, the Hungarian, explained to the gathering that the blowing up of Orthodox schools caused the children to go back home, while the blowing up of progressiver schools caused the children to be twice lost. “When they blow up one of our schools,” said Lubcek, the Hungarian, “our children stay home and play all day. They don’t get tired of playing, the little blessings from God: Oh, how they play! Then we feel remorse, we go to the synagogue, the rabbi reads some chapters of the Talmud where the prophets have foreseen that this would come to pass by reason of the sins we have committed, and we rebuild the school in double shifts so that our children are not deprived of their education. The government sends a communiqué, addressed to the noble and suffering Hebrew community, promising a deserved punishment to whoever is held responsible, and Father Zozim, chaplain of the local chapter of the Black Cossacks, comes to the reopening of the facility. On the other hand when the progressiver schools are blown up, all the students go underground, the government uncovers a conspiracy to have the throats of its most distinguished citizens brought to the guillotine, and one of the subversives always ends up murdered at the hands of one of his own comrades so that they can pin the blame on the police.”
The people attending the meeting decided to send a petition to the authorities begging for their case to be considered. After all, they were Orthodox calendar makers, not progressiver.
The calendar makers were met with open arms by the mayor; the blowing up of their printing shops had deprived him of the 20 percent levy on alien activities. The mayor offered them tea with lemon and they all celebrated when he drank it in the Russian manner, clenching a lump of sugar between his teeth. After praising the noble and long-suffering Hebrew community and announcing a new luxury tax to be collected by his son on the first and fifteenth days of every month, the mayor ordered the chief of police to extend any and all necessary protection to the calendar makers. And more.
Regrettably, the overzealousness of the police was detrimental to the activities of commerce; with their eyes ruined by the profusion of searchlights looking for clues in their facilities and their behinds injured by poorly trained guard dogs, the majority of the calendar makers decided to leave in a chartered ship, the Monrovia Duchess. The travelers were able to obtain denials of asylum in Havana and Barranquilla, they crossed the Strait of Magellan, and from there the ship went straight to the Sargasso Sea, where it ended up stranded next to the Cracow Baroness.
Meanwhile, six Hebrew calendar makers who had been unable to take the ship on time with the rest of their colleagues were summoned by the chief of police to his office. On the functionary’s desk was a cookie jar that read “Citizens for Responsibility Fund.” The chief of police said that he had called on them to exhort them to renew their labor. He reminded them that their country was endowed by laws of a profound humanist content, a beautiful tradition went hand in hand with its population, and may God grant them peace. No one was forced to embroider a yellow star on their clothes; nor were they forced to go out on the street to fight the bear, and, moreover, stationmasters allowed Jews to travel on the roof of the train. They were living in the year 1939, this was Poland, and, moreover, the noble and long-suffering Hebrew community expected to reach in a few months the year 5700. The indigenous population thought this difference to be an unfair privilege. Why not try to make the Hebrew calendar gradually come to match the Gregorian one? If they could find a way to bridge that gap, he would be very grateful to them. He appealed exclusively to their sense of duty. Indeed, he considered them to be responsible citizens. Or at least responsible. Discussions
about their citizenship would come later. By the way, any contribution of two hundred, five hundred, or a thousand zlotys was entirely left up to the donors.
The calendar makers, mindful of the appeals from the chief of police, decided at that moment to begin producing calendars with increasingly lapsed dates in order to bridge that gap. The victory of Bar-Kochba continued to be marked, but the massacre of Chmielnicki was abruptly deleted, eliminating in one blow four hundred years of tsuris (misfortune). One of the makers even proposed to follow the suggestion of an expert on Delaporte calendars to limit each month to twenty-eight days. He figured out that this way, in a thousand years the Jews would be able to accomplish a history almost as wretched as that of the Polish people. But the proposal was discarded, since it meant that every year would begin exactly on the same day, obviating the need to make new calendars.
Afterward, the calendar makers began competing with each other to see who could avoid the most years of calamity. For instance, when one of them decided to cancel 1321 because that was the year of the Chinon Massacre, another responded by eliminating with one pen stroke the years 640 and 1096, thus wiping out the campaign of forced conversions in Byzantium and the Crusaders’ massacre in Ratisbon. Each time they were able to eliminate a few years from their calendars, the makers would appear before the chief of police, proudly demonstrating how the gap between the Hebrew and Gregorian calendars was decreasing. “We have already reached 4383, but that won’t be all, that won’t be all,” the spokesman for the calendar makers would inform the chief of police. “It is my belief that, within a short time, we will be able to achieve even less history than the Swiss.”
Clearly, the zeal that went into excising their past would sometimes limit the horizon of the calendar makers, like the time they discarded 1492 to eliminate the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and were left with the Americas yet to be discovered. But the dwindling Jewish community did not complain about such potholes. The calendars had returned happiness to them, and they did not wish to lose it by clinging to historical rigor, for life itself already is full of sorrow.
Meanwhile, the poor woman who had lost her son’s whereabouts in the confrontation, with the force of law and order received 120 zlotys from Nusn, the water carrier, accompanied by a newspaper clipping reporting the strange presence of a man with his hands stuck in his pockets ten minutes before the printing shops were blown up in places as remote as Radom, Kielce, and Pwtrkow. The latest conflagration, said the reporter, had propelled the stranger toward the Monrovia Duchess, a ship scheduled to make stops in Havana and Barranquilla.
Mad with joy, the mother ran to show the clipping to the chief of police, who, upon seeing the reappearance of the likeness of someone who had died in a confrontation with the forces of law and order, searched in the Missing Persons Bureau, removed one name from the list, inserted it in the list of people who had died in a confrontation with the forces of law and order, placed the poor woman’s son in the list where that recently found person had just been, and decided to apprehend the infiltrator dead or alive.
Initially, the chief of police had thought of continuing to quell the pockets of dissent with the help of the bomb squad. But immediately afterward, torn between the need to deal with the purveyors of social schism and the problems of the Internal Revenue Service, he decided to convene the calendar makers and ordered them to immediately report to him the presence of any infiltrator with his hands in his pockets. Furthermore, he informed them that as of that moment, they were to mark the national holidays in their Hebrew calendars, which carried a 10 percent tax on indigenous activities. And until the new collecting office could be set up, they would be able to deposit their tax payment in his personal account.
The Hebrew calendar makers gladly accepted those demands. They had no problem in reporting the presence of infiltrators, since they had been informed that the latest whereabouts of Shmulik’s likeness was reportedly aboard the Monrovia Duchess, near the Sargasso Sea. As for the other part, they were enthusiastic about sharing their calendars with the Polish people, since that could only increase their sales.
However, upon inspection of the indigenous Polish calendars, the makers stumbled upon an unexpected difficulty. It might have been that those calendars were made in poor-quality printing shops, or perhaps it was due to negligence on the part of the historians, but the fact was that the majority of the national holidays coincided with the celebration of some pogrom.
The Hebrew calendar makers were in a real quandary. If they entered the national holidays they would lose all their Jewish clients; if they left them out, the protection offered by the local authorities would cease. Perplexed and undecided, they opted to ask for an appointment to see their protector.
The chief of police received them in his office and told them he was at their disposal. When the calendar makers presented him with their dilemma, the chief of police responded that they lived in a free country. There was no prior restraint, mail was not opened, and there were no laws or suspension of constitutional guarantees, a beautiful tradition went hand in hand with the population, and may God grant them peace. If they wished to continue making calendars without mentioning those dates on which the precious blood of the Polish people had been spilled, well, that was up to them.
That night, five of the six calendar makers tossed their few belongings into their trunks and took off aboard the Moscovia Princess, intending to join their old colleagues. The travelers were denied asylum in Valparaiso and El Callao. Even the Bolivian authorities offered to reject them, despite the fact that their nation lacked any access to the sea. Finally, the ship stumbled upon the Cracow Baroness and the Monrovia Duchess in the Sargasso Sea. The emaciated passengers of the Cracow Baroness and the Monrovia Duchess were transferred to the Moscovia Princess.
After meeting with denials of asylum in some minor ports, the Moscovia Princess ran aground in Antwerp, near the Petrovia Countess. While the combined passengers of all four ships were being interned in a prison camp, the Second World War broke out and they were liberated by the Nazis, who mistook them for Croatians. The calendar makers gathered their dwindling belongings and fled on to France. The war caught them by surprise over there, and they were forced to hide in caves and survive on wild truffles and strawberries. When the liberation took place, they were put in front of the firing squad, first because they spent the years of hardship living like Persian kings, and second because the code messages in their calendars had proclaimed the invulnerability of the Maginot Line, allowing their French patriots to rest on their laurels.
With respect to Shmulik’s mother, every month she continued to receive 120 zlotys through Nusn, the water carrier, during the first two years of the war, and 200 zlotys from the last calendar maker left in town. The only thing that the calendar maker asked for in return was confirmation of Shmulik’s definite absence from the town.
Armed with the newspaper clipping provided by the poor woman, and hoping to stay in business, the calendar maker decided to make use of the infallible recourse of currying official favor by plastering his calendars with previously forgotten national holidays safely distant from the dates of the pogroms. Everyone was happy, especially the Polish people, who for the likes of them had never imagined the existence of so many victories. Nonetheless, even with the greatest of effort, it was impossible to find a full supply of national holidays. Some months had to be fixed by including the Miraculous Apparition of the Virgin. For other months, the calendar maker would add mottos such as “Do not forget that next month we have a bounty of national holidays” or “There are only fifteen days left, how much can two weeks matter when we already have an important national holiday coming up?” But then came a recalcitrant month. There wasn’t a single national holiday that could bring about any popular enthusiasm; nor was there a single Miraculous Apparition of the Virgin, and the next month marked a patriotic victory that had left the nation with 62,500 square miles of unredeemed territory provisionally occupied by German
y and Russia.
The calendar maker thought and thought about it and finally arrived at what he supposed to be a good way to solve this. “Fortunately, as soon as next month’s victory goes by, we will have something to celebrate,” he wrote. But he would not be in any condition to do so.
Conversely, Shmulik’s mother was able to celebrate her reunion with her son. One day she received a letter from Shmulik that announced his return and detailed his odyssey, starting with his escape from the explosions and ending with his arrival in Spain. The first detonation, he explained to his mother, had blasted him a distance from the shop, making it impossible for him to collect his cap filled with medals. After getting away from that place, he had been very busy dropping off Hebrew calendar galley proofs in the doorways of other printing shops, but the explosions kept throwing him farther and farther away, until he ended up without a job. At that moment, he discovered that there was no further purpose in going about with his hands in his pockets. He tried other fields of endeavor, but word had been getting around that his nose was like a magnet for the bomb squad, so he chose to get away, for a while, from everyone he knew. That was the reason he went aboard the Monrovia Duchess. Until things cleared up, the poor woman’s son said the best course of action was to travel, to be at one with nature, to spend each night under a different sky. In order to avoid new temptations, he had decided to begin proofreading captain’s logbooks written in unknown languages. He was particularly interested in ignoring the language used in the logbook of the Flying Dutchman. But the log was sewn together with a grammar of the Bru language, the tongue of an Austro-Asiatic people, and Shmulik had become so fascinated by its complexity that he gave up all suspicion and studied it until he became an expert. Did his mother know that the Bru language had forty-one vowels? Thanks to that newly acquired knowledge, he was able to find out in the captain’s logbook the way to free the ship that had run aground and pilot it over to Amsterdam, where a mine sent them flying through the air. Holding onto a piece of wood, Shmulik had floated all the way to Copenhagen and was able to seek refuge inside a windmill. He now figured that it would take him two more days to reach his hometown. Perhaps, he told his mother, they could get together under the century-old tree.