by Max Gross
The next day he oiled a rusty hinge on the door to the linen closet that the Rebbetzin had been complaining about for six months, and treated a recent stain on the carpet (which was usually his wife’s work), and went through his son’s cheder assignments to make sure that Anschel had really and fully memorized the Ark of the Covenant’s cubit dimensions as they were stated in the book of Exodus. (“Two and a half long by one and a half wide,” the boy answered. “I understand.” But when Anschel asked his father the length of a cubit, Herschel Sokolow couldn’t remember.)
Toward the end of the day the Rebbetzin entered his study and told him that he had a visitor: Leonid Spektor. When he heard this, the Rabbi’s face turned crimson.
“Masha Landau said you wanted to see me,” Leonid said.
For a moment, Rabbi Sokolow grinned in grudging respect for Masha’s tenacity, but the grin quickly vanished.
“Leonid,” Sokolow began. “We must talk about the stories you tell the boys.”
Spektor didn’t say anything.
“You’re telling them about your experiences in the concentration camp . . .”
Spektor shook his head. “No, not exactly.” After his initial indiscretion with the Rebbe, Spektor only ever referred to the death camps obliquely. “They’re just stories. Nobody in them is real.”
“Maybe you should lay off,” Rabbi Sokolow said. “I’m getting complaints. Apparently, they’re giving the children nightmares.”
Spektor smiled to himself. “They’re the ones with nightmares . . .”
Rabbi Sokolow couldn’t even meet Spektor’s eye. “Yes,” he said. “Obviously it’s nothing like what you went through, these nightmares. Or, I’m sure, what your nightmares are like now. Obviously not. But these are children, Leonid. They don’t need to think about such things, do they?”
Of course, the boys of Kreskol loved hearing Spektor’s stories. They begged for them. (And Spektor told them well.) Plus, if he were going to truly mount a defense he might point out that it wasn’t as if he forced anybody to listen.
Still, he could understand a mother wanting to protect her cubs from the world’s unpleasantness—even unpleasant thoughts.
“Very well,” Spektor said. In his reckoning, he owed it to his adopted town to live by its customs and precepts. After all, he had been designated a keeper of secrets once—it appeared he would remain so.
A few years before Spektor turned up in Kreskol, the gypsies who staked their claim to our modest corner of eastern Poland gave up on us. Evidently, they finally accepted that we were too cheap (or too poor) to conduct business with. Or, so it would seem, because they vanished.
They missed their regular spring visit. Then their fall visit. Then we stopped seeing them altogether.
The gypsy sojourns were irregular enough that it took more than a year before this was noticed and remarked upon. What happened, some of the merchants of Kreskol wondered? What had we done? The salts and soaps and medicines and other knickknacks that we traded were suddenly no longer available in Kreskol’s marketplace at any price. It proved to be a significant annoyance. But it was also perplexing.
Then, suddenly, the gypsies returned at roughly the same time as Spektor arrived, without explanation.
Although Spektor couldn’t have felt their absence, he was among the happier members of our town to see them. He would be the first to trade with them for aspirin and marzipan. “Do you have any books?” he asked a young gypsy girl the second time he saw the caravan coming through town.
“No,” the girl answered. “But I can get you something. What do you want—which books?”
“Could you get me something by Knut Hamsun?”
“You’ll pay in advance.”
The next time she came through the town she brought an edition of Hunger—but Spektor should have been more specific. The copy she presented him with was in the original Norwegian. (“You didn’t say what language you wanted,” the girl declared. “All sales are final.”)
When trading was finished for the day, Spektor would stop by the gypsy encampment for a few hours, just to chat. “What do you talk about with them?” the Rabbi asked.
“Mostly the war.”
Rabbi Sokolow looked surprised.
“I thought you didn’t like to talk about that.”
Spektor nodded. “I can with them.”
“Why?”
Spektor shrugged, slightly. “They know what it was like. The Germans treated them as roughly as the Jews.”
This particular tribe of Romani was relatively lucky; they had escaped into the forest along the unmarked routes and the Germans never caught up with them. In the aftermath of the war, the tribe took in extended family whose fortunes hadn’t been nearly so charmed. The curly haired girl who brought Leonid his books—whose name was Lavinia—was one such wretch. She had seen her mother, father, and teenaged husband all massacred before her eyes, eventually finding herself in the Jasenovac concentration camp.
“I will never complain again about living in a backwater,” Lavinia laughed to Leonid. “You Kreskolites know what I mean. It was the fact that we were in a backwater that made the Germans not pay as much attention here as they should have.”
“I suppose.”
Leonid was eager to hear what was happening in the wider world and plied the gypsies for news, even as each new development portended some fresh harbinger of doom. He asked the gypsies about the Russians; Lavinia told him anyone expecting they would go back to Moscow now that the war was over was looking pretty dumb. If the Russians themselves weren’t running things, they found flunkies to hold their place in Warsaw, Kiev, Budapest, Prague, Minsk, Bucharest, Sofia, Vilnius, Berlin—you name it. And they were terrible, she added. Almost as bad as the Nazis. Almost.
“It’ll only be a matter of time,” Lavinia said. “They’ll pay Kreskol a visit. And I’m sure they won’t be happy you evaded scrutiny for so long.”
The words were all the more ominous because they spoke to a fear that long ago attached itself to Leonid. He spent his first few years in Kreskol waiting for the dark day when the Bolsheviks would rope the village into a local workers council—or whatever it was they did in Russia.
When he thought too much about these unhappy topics Leonid would escape to the forest; he at least took comfort in the fact that these woods were the great barrier protecting Kreskol from encroachment. He would spend hours walking her trails; collecting her berries and mushrooms; listening to her birds sing in the hot sun, trying not to think of the wicked world.
One afternoon, as Spektor hiked along the path out of town, he came across a dirt road. He followed the road for a few miles until he saw another conjoined road that he had never seen before. This one was paved.
As he stared down the gray strip of asphalt, a red Warszawa* flew past him, leaving a trail of summer dust.
Spektor was too stunned to speak, but after a moment he turned around and ran straight home.
The episode—ephemeral and seemingly benign as it was—was a grave crisis for Leonid Spektor.
He failed to show up at school the next day, and when a boy, Zindel Schumacher, was sent to check on him, the boy believed at first he had left town.
“Reb Spektor?” the boy called, banging on his door to no response.
Just as Zindel was about to return to the yeshiva, a wan, feeble Spektor opened the door still dressed in his nightshirt.
“What do you want?”
The question was posed rudely; there was no attempt to mask his irritation. And Zindel was taken aback. He might have turned around and fled if he hadn’t been instructed to find out what Spektor was up to by the schoolmaster himself.
“Are you feeling all right?” Zindel asked.
Spektor looked more annoyed than before.
“Goodbye, Schumacher.”
Spektor began to close the door.
“Wait, wait!” Zindel shrieked, a little louder than he intended, and his voice echoed in the nearby woods. Spekt
or stopped.
“What?”
“Well,” the boy started, “everybody wants to know how you are.” Realizing that the word “everybody” was vague enough that it might enflame Spektor more, he corrected himself. “The schoolmaster sent me.”
Spektor considered this for a moment, wondering just how short he could afford to be with a proxy of his employer.
“You can tell him I don’t feel well,” Spektor finally said, and moved to close the door again.
Spektor didn’t show up at school the next day. Or the day after. On the third day, the schoolmaster decided to take matters into his own hands. He arrived at Spektor’s hovel near sunset, but when he knocked all he heard was stillness and silence. He went around back to see if Spektor was, perhaps, in the outhouse. But the premises appeared to be deserted.
The schoolmaster wondered if the man was too sick to answer (or, god forbid, worse) and if he shouldn’t break down the door. But just as he was sizing up the slab of oak in front of him and his chances of knocking it down without injury, the man in question appeared out of the forest.
“Nu?”
While Spektor was never the embodiment of good health, the ashen, sickly figure that Zindel Schumacher reported seeing two days earlier had undergone a miraculous transformation. His face was pink and his hair was damp with sweat. His trousers were muddy and his hands caked with dirt. Most peculiar, he carried a pickaxe and shovel in his hands.
“Reb Spektor?”
Leonid turned hangdog.
“Reb Bernstein,” Leonid replied with embarrassment. “It was very good of you to check up on me.”
The schoolmaster didn’t speak.
“Why don’t you come inside?” Spektor moved to open the door.
“No,” the schoolmaster said. “I just came to see if you were ill. But it appears that you are very much all right. I presume I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Spektor looked surprised—as if he had expected the lashing to be much, much worse.
“Yes, of course.” And then, as if he wanted to make the man feel better about treating him forgivingly, Spektor added: “I wasn’t feeling so good this morning.”
However, this was such an obvious falsehood that it only served to infuriate the schoolmaster.
“Good day,” the schoolmaster grunted, and seethed with rage on his way home. He remained in such a state the next morning that he decided to tell Rabbi Sokolow everything.
Other reports trickled back to the Rabbi about Spektor over the course of the next week. While Spektor missed no more lessons at the yeshiva, he exhibited increasingly strange behavior. He was observed walking through the town late at night, carrying the same tools the schoolmaster had seen him with. He purchased a number of lanterns and a pair of gloves at Slotnick’s shop. He was groggy in the mornings and once drifted off to sleep in the middle of a lesson. But oddest of all, he was never home at night; he seemed to vanish into goodness-knows-where.
“What have you been up to?” Sokolow asked Spektor when he summoned him for one of their semi-regular chats.
Leonid just shrugged.
“I’m hearing peculiar things,” the Rebbe said. “That you’ve been not behaving like yourself lately.”
Leonid assumed a puzzled expression. “I don’t know why anyone would think that.” And that was as far as either party would push things.
After a few weeks, Spektor’s behavior returned to normal. His energy was restored in the classroom. There were no more bizarre journeys through town in the middle of the night carrying heavy tools. And whatever anxiety had overtaken him a month or so earlier appeared to have dissipated.
It wasn’t until the next visit from the gypsies that anyone else in town received any suggestion as to the source of this new heartiness and good cheer.
“What happened to the road?” one of the gypsies asked Frayda Siegel, as they were trading scarves for tubes of glue.
“What?”
“The road,” the gypsy said. “It’s ruined. What happened to it?”
The few words of Polish that Frayda spoke were largely devoted to trade. Anything more complicated was almost certainly a lost cause. Besides, she had been taught that when a gypsy asked a question it was in the service of some kind of trickery. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Frayda said.
But there was no duplicity or cunning in what the gypsy woman asked. It was as if the modest dirt passage connecting the paths out of Kreskol with the asphalt-and-concrete highway had been deliberately sabotaged. Someone had planted a row of pine and birch saplings along the entrance to the highway. While the gypsies could still discern where to enter, in another year or two nobody else would. Behind the young trees, another attempt was made at camouflage, with transplanted bushes and logs scattered about, causing the path to blend with the surrounding forest—at least for those first critical meters.
Farther into the woods, trees had been felled, landing smack in the middle of the dirt road, making it impossible to drive a normal automobile through. (Luckily, the gypsies traveled by horse and could maneuver themselves and their carts more dexterously.)
In one notably difficult stretch to navigate, pits and trenches had been dug in the once smooth ground that hardened with the spring rains. It was more modest, perhaps, than the work of General Sherman or Lord Kitchener, but it was nonetheless effective. Only a very determined visitor would bother to traverse this path. Someone had formed a moat around Kreskol. And so it remained for the rest of Leonid Spektor’s life.
10
Saint Teresa
“If you’re still a virgin,” Karol said, “you need to take care of that, pronto.”
In the eight weeks that they lived together, Karol Bugaj wasn’t shy about offering his advice about the world, and what his new pal, Yankel Lewinkopf, needed to do to fit in and conquer it.
On their first morning together, he had started with fundamentals: “You ever use deodorant?” Karol asked. “’Cause I’ve gotta tell you, brother, nobody is going to look twice at you if you don’t smell good.” He then cocked his head and arched an eyebrow in a way to suggest that he wasn’t making the point idly, and he handed Yankel a stick of Rexona. “Just rub it under your arm after you take a shower.”
Yankel’s shower routine got plenty of advice from Karol, too. “You take showers in Kreskol, don’t you?” Karol asked. (We do not, but Yankel didn’t feel pressed to clarify the point.) He gave Yankel a bottle of shampoo and another bottle of conditioner. “You rub the shampoo in your hair, right? You wash it out, then you put in the conditioner but you let it sit there for a minute or so before you wash it out. You get me?”
Yankel nodded, and Karol never stopped giving him advice thereafter.
Karol took Yankel to the Zlote Tarasy,* telling him, “Nobody wears black pants and a button-down shirt. You look ridiculous.” Karol went straight to the Levi’s counter and found Yankel a pair of blue dungarees. “The first thing you need to get is a pair of jeans. You can wear them any day, any time of year. And they go with everything.” When they found a pair that fit, Karol handed the clerk his credit card and turned back to Yankel. “We’ll call this a loan, right?”
Yankel nodded.
“Next stop, we’ll get you some T-shirts. Those’ll come cheap. You might need some more stuff down the line, but this will get you started.” A pair of gray sneakers, a dozen sweat socks, several pairs of boxer shorts, and a toothbrush were added to Yankel’s tab. “Today, I’ll show you around my neighborhood. Tomorrow we’ll start trying to find you a job.”
It would be difficult to say why Karol Bugaj felt generous and protective toward his new charge, but he did. It might have had something to do with the fact that Mariusz Burak had dressed him down when they got back to the TVP offices that first day. “We’re here to report on the news, Karol,” Burak had said when they were alone, and Yankel was waiting in the break room. “We’re not here to make the news. If this guy stays with you then you’ll be part of the sto
ry.” And Burak continued—on and on—until an annoyed Karol snapped, “Fine, I’ll turn him out tomorrow.”
Karol then felt compelled to tell the younger man: “You know, Burak, you can’t talk to me that way. You’re not my boss.”
The next morning the thought of leaving Yankel on the streets to fend for himself was put to rest when Karol told Yankel, “When Mariusz interviews you in a few months about what you’ve been doing, you won’t mention my name, right?”
“Right.”
Karol had a son, a few years younger than Yankel, who lived with his ex-wife in Poznan and whom he was rarely afforded the chance to spend time with and money on, and doing a good deed for a friendly and helpless fellow made him feel fatherly. Yankel showed requisite gratitude and good manners. And he let Karol do as much talking as he liked without filling the silence with his own opinions. These were qualities Karol admired.
After he bought Yankel clothes, Karol drove him to his barbershop. “I’m afraid our friend Mariusz didn’t do much of a job on your hair,” Karol laughed. “And there’s no point in getting you dressed normally if you’ve got that shoddy beard and haircut.”
“What’s wrong with my beard?”
“You ain’t old enough to grow one, kid,” Karol said. “At least not properly. Look at how patchy it is. All peach fuzz. You shave for a year or two and it’ll grow in right.”
When the barber finished the shave, he put down the razor and traded it for a pair of scissors.
“How do you want it?” the barber asked.
“Want what?”
“Your hair.”
Yankel was dumbfounded. “I don’t know,” he finally answered.
“Just make it nice and neat,” Karol said for him.
Ten minutes later, Yankel looked unrecognizable to himself.