by Max Gross
It had been more than two decades, and Rabbi Menachem Sokolow had little idea what the man was talking about.
“You haven’t paid your taxes in more than twenty years?” Krzywicki said in disbelief. “How did the Rabbinic Council permit you to get away with that?”
“We don’t have a good relationship with them.”
Krzywicki was silent when he was told this.
“This is serious,” he finally said. “You’d all better start saving up, because I’ll be back with a tax assessment in a few months.”
Rabbi Sokolow nodded, grimly.
Toward the end of the day, Mr. Krzywicki lumbered back to his horse and began the painful process of mounting.
“Easy, Daisy, easy,” he said, trying to calm the animal as he kept trying to swing his leg over the saddle. Finally, the ironsmith and the wood-chopper appeared, and hoisted him over the top.
“Thank you,” Krzywicki mumbled, and as he was about to ride out of town he said to Rabbi Sokolow, “Do you think I can have one more? For the road?”
Another jug of vodka was produced, and as he watched the official gulp the last of it, his brown eyes shining brightly in his doughy face, from the depths of his soul, Rabbi Sokolow felt sorry for Krzywicki even if the man would no doubt be making life difficult in the coming months.
“Thank you,” Krzywicki said again—this time with more fervor than when he had been helped onto his horse.
He rode out of town.
However, it turned out that we could not have been more blessed with a census taker than we were with Krzywicki. He didn’t return with a tax bill—nor did anyone else. It was the last we would hear on the matter of taxes.
It can only be surmised what went on in Krzywicki’s mind after he had been told that Kreskol had been untaxed for years. The best guess is that some scheme unfolded between the time he left Kreskol and when he returned to Warsaw.
He was, as I’ve said, a man of incredible financial burdens. There was no doubt he could use a large influx of cash. And he had the privilege of being one of the few outsiders who had seen Kreskol with his own eyes. Could he have come back to our town with an official decree, saying that we had to pay such-and-such a tax bill, and then simply pocketed the money?
That is the current belief of the Polish government. And it is the one that makes the most sense, in light of his subsequent behavior.
Krzywicki filed an official report with the Central Statistical Office saying that he could find neither hide nor hair of Kreskol—or of Kyrshkow, for that matter.
He did, however, say in his report that he had spoken to several of the local hermits and mountain people who said that the tiny village (of no more than two hundred souls, anyway) had been destroyed during the war.
To quote his report directly: “One forest dweller—who would only give her name as Catarina, who looked about 35 and had two warts on her chin—said that there had been a scuffle between Russian and German troops in the town. This led to a massive fire when artillery hit one of the barns. The Kreskolites, now homeless, all went their separate ways.”
Krzywicki then went on to describe the few ragtag remains of the village, as if he were describing a lost civilization. “There is the half-burned skeleton of a building with a Jewish star,” the report states. “This, no doubt, was the local synagogue.”
It appears that Krzywicki had done something similar with several other villages. Not that he erased any other population centers wholesale, but a decade later—long after Krzywicki had been thrown in a pauper’s grave—during the second census, it was discovered that many of the towns and villages that had been in Krzywicki’s region were undercounted. Suddenly there were great influxes of extra persons. (Moreover, plenty of these extra people had dutifully paid whatever tax bill they had been presented with before Krzywicki’s death.)
It was deduced, therefore, that Krzywicki was in all probability a thief and an embezzler on top of his many other foibles, and that he had eaten and drunk and gambled away the treasure he collected. If he hadn’t succumbed to an early death, Krzywicki would no doubt have made an appearance in our town to collect our taxes the next year.
The people of Kreskol, however, could find no fault with the man. If not for Jacek Krzywicki we almost certainly would have perished in the monstrous German push to the east twenty years later.
Shortly after our rediscovery, there was talk about putting a statue of him in the town square.
9
Geheimnisträger
Providence might have conspired to save Kreskol from the greatest catastrophe, but there was another conscious hand that kept it preserved after the seething war hardened into cold peace. This never made it into the official report about Kreskol but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it here.
The hand was that of one of Kreskol’s residents who died a few years before our rediscovery, unmarried and childless. And he was unique among our citizens in that he wasn’t born in our town and had no ancestral connection, rather, he had the distinction of being the sole transplant to move here before the big rediscovery.
Leonid Spektor arrived more than twenty years after Jacek Krzywicki’s brief ingress in Kreskol’s fortunes. And unlike the typical Kreskolite, he was educated and worldly. He built a small cottage on the edge of the woods and took up in the yeshiva, where he taught Aramaic. Physically, he was short and lithe and his most distinctive feature was a patch he wore over his left eye.
To anyone who asked, Spektor would give private lessons in Polish and Russian and French—telling those who questioned the purpose of this that everyone should know a second language and his fluency in languages had saved his life more than once. (This “saved my life” business was somewhat cryptic, but he never expounded on it.)
While he was willing to teach German on request, he would preface every lesson with the advisory that the only reason to do so was because it was important to know more about your enemy than he knew about you. “Make no mistake,” he would say. “The Germans are our enemy. They always will be. Forever and ever.”
Why the Germans, his students asked, and not the Poles? Or the Russians? Or the Ukrainians? They hated Jews, too.
“Everybody else is a mix,” Leonid pronounced. “I’ve known good, courageous Poles. I’ve known others who were perfect swine. But the Germans are consistently bad. They hate Jews with every fiber of their being. They’re all irredeemable.” He said it with such conviction it seemed fruitless to further contest the point.
Spektor was intimate with the wonders of the modern world that others had merely heard about. Certainly, he had been on a train before—who hadn’t? And, naturally, he had been to the picture shows. (A pastime that the inhabitants of Kreskol didn’t quite understand, despite the pains he took to explain it.) He had once set off fireworks at a fairground and seen gorillas at the Warsaw Zoo when he was a boy. “They’re very manlike,” was his main takeaway.
And Leonid Spektor was immensely popular with his students. Not only did he offer to teach the children languages, he told wild, frightening, dramatic stories to the young boys about what awaited them outside the walls of Kreskol.
“Never did a crueler, more bloodthirsty man stalk the earth than Dieter the Demented,” he would begin, and he would tell the tale of a sadistic German who would tear the limbs off little children, and flay mothers alive, using their skin to make coats and blankets and birdcage covers, and stomp old men to death with his jackboots.
“When old Dieter would find a pretty Jewish girl, he would throw her on the ground with his friends watching, to make sure she didn’t get away. He would tear off her clothes and whip her flesh. And while she was writhing in pain, he would inject her neck with strychnine.”
The boys were almost too afraid to ask what strychnine was, but Spektor forecasted the question.
“Strychnine is a poison. Dieter would just watch as she would contort and turn blue before dying. He and his friends would laugh.”
He told tales of a blond, rotund witch with a chipped front tooth who hunted innocent little boys for sport, locking them up in cages. She would feed them just enough to develop a little tummy and she would cut them up and dump their bodies into a giant cauldron with horseflesh that would bubble into soap. He spun yarns of mad Germans and Ukrainians who drank vodka until they didn’t mind slaughtering anyone who crossed their path, and did so with abandon and joy.
These gruesome, lurid stories tantalized the youth of Kreskol as much as they frightened them. Unlike the folklore that began violently but ended with peace and justice, Spektor declined to sweeten the endings. They reinforced the general perception that the world outside Kreskol was an evil place—but they also aroused a certain morbid curiosity. And whatever lack of realism was inherent in these tales, the youth had the good sense to realize that there was, indeed, something authentic as well.
Their parents, on the other hand, loathed Leonid Spektor and couldn’t understand what was wrong with the fellow. Individually, they made complaints to Rabbi Herschel Sokolow (son of Menachem, father of Anschel) about Spektor, but when they could see that they weren’t getting anywhere, several mothers banded together and visited the Rabbi’s court en masse.
“Yes?” Rabbi Sokolow said upon receiving the redemption coin. “What can I do for you ladies today?”
“Leonid Spektor is filling our sons’ heads with a lot of craziness,” replied Masha Landau, who was designated spokeswoman by the other mothers, thanks to a deficit of embarrassment about what she said and a surplus in the volume of her voice. “All day long all I hear about is ‘Sebastian the Scavenger’ and ‘Rolf the Enraged,’ and how they torture Jews incessantly. My boy repeated this dreck to his sister, and she’s been waking up in tears in the middle of the night for three weeks.”
“I see,” the Rabbi said. “Well, that’s a fairly easy thing to fix. I’ll have a word with Mr. Spektor.”
However, this promise had been anticipated; Rabbi Sokolow had made similar assurances to Baila Franken more than a year ago when she first presented him with the problem.
“I’m not so sure,” Masha replied. “I know a few people in this room have already complained.” (Baila, who was standing right next to Masha, looked sheepishly at the floor.) “Are you really going to talk to him?”
Nobody likes having their word challenged—not even someone as temperate and wise as a great rabbi.
“I hadn’t gotten around to it,” Herschel Sokolow admitted. “As you know, I have many matters to attend to.”
Masha nodded, but as far as she was concerned this argument (also anticipated) was bunk. What matters did the Rabbi have that were so important that he couldn’t have a five-minute conversation where he told Spektor to knock it off? However, Masha knew enough about men to recognize that when they were faced with a task that they had no appetite for, you needed to push them along every inch of the way. “When are you going to talk to him?” she asked.
“Tomorrow,” he answered. “Maybe the day after.”
Nobody knew how or why Leonid Spektor had bewitched Rabbi Sokolow, but it was useless to contemplate whys. It was obvious Spektor could do no wrong in his eyes, even if nobody could understand it. After all, there was something practically misanthropic about Spektor. Shortly after he settled in Kreskol a matchmaker came to see him and said he had a couple of enticing prospects. “Not interested,” Spektor replied, bluntly.
“But you haven’t even met them. I’m talking about real beauties here.”
Spektor frowned.
“I’m not interested in anybody.”
The matchmaker was taken aback. The only thing he could think to say was: “Don’t you want children?”
Spektor shook his head.
“There are enough children in the world. I don’t intend to bring in any more.”
This sounded chilling, especially in the mouth of a teacher who was supposed to be sculpting young minds. The remark made its way back to Rabbi Sokolow. “I’m not his father,” the Rabbi pronounced. “Nobody can tell him what to do or what to think.” And that seemed to be the end of the episode.
But there were plenty of other reasons Spektor was distrusted. He never showed up to shul. Never. Not on Shabbat, not on Tisha B’Av, and not on Yom Kippur. It didn’t seem to trouble the Rabbi in the slightest.
While he was popular with the boys, they, too, recognized something slightly uncanny about the man. Sometimes, in the middle of a lesson, he would stare into the eyes of his pupils and excuse himself. His students would then hear him sobbing and heaving in the next room. When he returned, Spektor wouldn’t breathe a word of the emotions that had whipped and flayed him a few moments earlier.
He spent most of his spare time by himself, but when he did seek the company of others it was largely the scum on Thieves’ Lane, where Spektor could be seen drinking in the tavern. Everyone disapproved, except for Rabbi Sokolow, who again said that he didn’t believe it his place to interfere with the affairs of a grown man.
“Fine,” Masha Landau said. “You speak to him the day after tomorrow. But we want to know what he has to say and if he agrees to keep his yap shut. We’ll be back on Wednesday.”
He was unshaven, bony, ghostly.
Rabbi Herschel Sokolow first laid eyes on Spektor as he was locking up the synagogue for the evening. The stranger was young then, but weathered. He was seated on the last bench near the door, wearing a sooty gray shirt, brown vest, and brown trousers that were held up by twine in lieu of a belt. He looked as if he hadn’t eaten a meal in some time. He wore a patch over his eye, which gave even a grown man like the Rabbi apprehensions that this figure was in some way otherworldly.
“Are you looking for something, friend?” Sokolow asked.
The stranger didn’t speak for a long time.
“I grew up in a place like this,” he said, craning his neck around the synagogue. “Perhaps not quite as rural. But rural. I haven’t even seen a streetcar here.”
The stranger took his cap off to scratch his head and as he did so the Rabbi noticed a sequence of numbers tattooed on his left arm.
An introduction was made. Spektor said he had been wandering along a path in the forest most of the afternoon and he came here just to rest his legs.
“This is the first place I’ve seen that looks like it came away unscratched,” Spektor said.
“Unscratched from what?”
Spektor laughed, until he saw Sokolow wasn’t joking.
“The war, naturally.”
The Rabbi nodded, not wanting to be taken for a fool—but after a moment decided there was no real harm admitting he didn’t know exactly what the fellow was talking about.
“Yes,” Rabbi Sokolow said. “Untouched by the war. Completely untouched. Didn’t even really know about it.” The word “really” was his single scrap of face-saving guile. “Who was it between this time? The Tsar up to his old tricks?”
Spektor’s mouth popped open, slightly, before politely closing. He considered what he would say for a long time before he spoke.
“There is no Tsar,” Spektor finally said. “The Russians got rid of the Tsar thirty years ago.”
Well, it might have been late but that was certainly a development worth hearing about. And given the fact that the man didn’t look as if he was in a hurry to go anywhere, the Rabbi figured he’d do a good deed.
“No Tsar?” the Rabbi laughed. “Well, hallelujah to that. I imagine there’s a good story to go with it. You look famished, young fellow. How about you come with me and the Rebbetzin will rustle us up something to eat.”
“Very kind.”
So the two of them walked through the darkened streets to Rabbi Sokolow’s court. And when the Rebbetzin set down roast chicken, kasha with noodles, pickled beets, and gefilte fish for the table, the stranger lost control of his emotions—to the great discomfort of his hosts.
“Are you all right?” Sokolow asked.
Spektor could only nod, tears rainin
g down his cheeks.
Rabbi Sokolow looked to his wife, who led their young son (and his son’s friend, who had come over for supper) out of the room.
“Forgive me,” Spektor said. “I haven’t had food like this—good food—in a very long time.”
The Rabbi didn’t say anything. He just sipped the glass of wine in front of him and nibbled on several pickled beets as his guest, delicately but ravenously, devoured the entire chicken.
And as his hunger receded, the stranger’s garrulousness expanded. “The Tsar,” Spektor nearly spat. He had been executed in the middle of the night with Tsarina Alexandra, their five children, and several courtiers in Yekaterinburg years before Spektor had even been born, on orders from the revolutionary government. “But I should tell you, as bad as the Tsar was he was a rank amateur in comparison to what came after.”
“Was that what the war was about, then?”
“No,” Spektor said. “Not really.” And he proceeded to relate the story of an Austrian corporal and his war of extermination.
Adolf Hitler had started life as a painter—Spektor explained—a profession he practiced ineptly. He spent much of his young adulthood swept up in the conviction that he was a great man with a historic destiny. And with Germany’s defeat in the Great War (which Rabbi Sokolow didn’t interrupt to ask about) Hitler discovered the deeper purpose of his life: He preached the gospel of Germany, its right to conquest, and the unredeeming evil of the Jews, who, in his convoluted thinking, kept Germany from its unrealized inheritance.
And unlike his fellow novices who fulminated from street corners in Munich, Hitler’s fire and sulfur resonated with an enormous chunk of the public. Grown men and women leaped to their feet with outstretched arms, saluting the man whose wisdom they viewed as godlike.
“Even his looks are something the Germans revere,” Spektor added, “and his looks are objectively weird. Or were. He’s dead now, too.”
Although Spektor’s little town of Bruskevo wasn’t in Germany, the gentiles would crowd around their radios together, and listen approvingly to the corporal as he worked himself into a froth over international affairs and world Jewry. They would leave their windows open and the volume raised so that the unsaved could hear the good word.