by Max Gross
“You clean up good,” Karol remarked.
And in the days and weeks that followed, the advice continued. Yankel was advised on how to search for a classified ad, how he should comport himself during a job interview, what the best brand of beer was, why he should always add fabric softener to a wash, why Pepsi was a superior cola to Coke, the reason to keep his wallet in his back pocket (the wallet, a little Velcro item, being another thing Karol added to Yankel’s running bill), and a hundred other things.
Yankel followed Karol’s advice scrupulously.
Karol told him that finding a job would not be easy, but that he would do what he could. “You got any skills?” Karol asked. “Anything you do better than the average shmoe on the street?”
“I’m a baker.”
Karol grinned. “There you go—you’re off on the right foot! I thought we’d have to make you a rent-a-cop or something.”
The next day Karol took Yankel to the bakery two blocks from his apartment, and presented him to the owner.
“This is my cousin,” Karol told the proprietor, after he spent a few moments searching for how he should introduce the young man. “His Polish is okay, but it ain’t great. He’s from . . . Azerbaijan.”
The owner of the bakery smiled. “Is he Catholic, or a member of one of those Russian churches?”
“He’s like us.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said the owner, a middle-aged gentleman with a distinguished gray mustache, extending Yankel a hand. “What’s your name, sonny?”
“Yankee,” Karol answered for Yankel. “That’s what everybody calls him. His nickname is Yankee. Like the baseball team.”
So within his first week in Warsaw, Yankel had found gainful employment. The pay was terrible, and he had to rise every morning at 3:00 if he intended to get the bread ready by the time the bakery opened its doors at 7:00, but it was a start. “Besides,” Karol said, “you’re not in a rush to leave, are you? You can stay with me until you save up a little to get your own apartment.”
And Yankel proved to be an excellent roommate. Eager to make himself useful, he would fold up the bed and replace the couch cushions every morning before going off to work. The sink and the tub would always be clean and free from any stray hairs. And he would start making dinner when he got home from the bakery in the afternoon. Karol would come home to find that his apartment smelled of sweating onions and rendered chicken fat.
Yankel enthusiastically washed the dishes when the meal was over and scrubbed the kitchen down. When Karol discovered that Yankel was washing the dishes by hand he had more advice: “Use the dishwasher, for god’s sake!” And he proceeded to demonstrate the miracle of this device, which Yankel at first refused to believe could do all that labor automatically.
Women and sex were the only things they didn’t talk about in those first few weeks. This was not for lack of trying on Karol’s part—but Yankel never responded when Karol whistled quietly at the derriere of a woman they would pass on the street or loudly at the gams of one they saw on TV. And after observing Yankel turn tomato red and as shy as a church mouse upon mention of the fairer sex, Karol decided not to broach the topic.
But after the two of them had been living together for nearly two months, Karol didn’t come home one night and when Yankel found the apartment empty the next morning, he was worried.
When Karol stepped through the door the next evening Yankel was the closest he had ever been to scolding his new friend.
“Mój Boze,* Karol,” Yankel said, copying one of his cohabitant’s favorite phrases. “Where were you yesterday? I was worried sick.”
Under different circumstances, Karol might have taken the position that this kid had a lot of nerve asking him his comings and goings when he was a guest, living rent-free. But there was little doubting that the concern and relief in Yankel’s face was genuine. (He also thought it might be time to get his friend a phone.)
“Sorry I worried you, kid.”
“Where were you?”
“Tanya,” Karol said with a wink.
For a moment, Yankel thought that his roommate was referring to the great text of Hasidic mysticism, the Tanya, and Yankel had to wonder where this gentile—likable and kindhearted as he might have been—could have heard of this given that Karol’s education and knowledge of the Jews had been limited, to put it politely. (After the haircut, Karol had fixated on Yankel’s scalp for several minutes. When asked later what he had been staring at, Karol admitted that he had been trying to locate his friend’s horns. “You can’t blame a guy for looking, can you?”)
The fact that Karol had said “Tanya” with a wink was even more confusing.
Alas, he was not referring to the Tanya, he was referring to a Tanya, namely a blond, slightly heavy woman who lived on the other side of Warsaw, whom Karol had known for several years and would occasionally spend the night with when they were both feeling lonely. “I guess I hadn’t seen her since you’ve been here,” Karol said. “But she called me at work yesterday. You know how it goes.”
It was clear from the expression on Yankel’s face that he didn’t know how it went. Not in the least. And for the first time it occurred to Karol that his roommate might not just be shy but completely innocent in matters of sex.
It was slightly difficult to believe, given that Yankel cut a surprisingly handsome figure once he stopped wearing his yarmulke and sidelocks, and dressed a bit more normally. Karol had observed women checking him out as he strode past them in the streets.
“You never had a girlfriend—not once?” Karol asked.
Yankel shook his head.
“And you’ve never kissed a girl?”
Yankel blushed before he shook his head.
It was then that Karol advised Yankel to lose his virginity at once. “It’s not like it’s all that difficult,” Karol assured Yankel. “We can take care of it tonight, if you want. I know a place.”
Half an hour later, they were in Karol’s car on their way to the place in question.
The cathouse was in a crummy, run-down part of town, and Yankel grew steadily more anxious as they got closer. Drifters and criminals seemed to be loafing on the street corners, lazily smoking cigarettes, waiting to commit some act of mischief on an unsuspecting, inexperienced party like himself. The sidewalks were salted with broken glass.
Karol pulled up across the street from a molding, scabby building where all the shades on the top three floors were pulled down. The ground floor had a fluorescent-lit commercial space with a red-and-white sign advertising “30 Minute Massage” out front.
“A couple of things to remember,” Karol said to Yankel when he had turned off the engine. “First off, don’t let them charge you more than two hundred zlotys. If the girl says you owe more, she’s trying to hustle you. Second, this is for you.” Karol reached into his pocket and handed Yankel a tiny square of golden foil. “This is a condom. You open it up and roll it onto your dick once you’re hard. Do not take the condom off until you finish. I’m serious about this, brother. God only knows what these girls have. Do not take it off until you finish.”
Yankel nodded, solemnly.
“Don’t look so worried.” Karol laughed, raffishly. “Just remember one thing. You’re the one paying her. If you’re finished in thirty seconds? Trust me, she’s not going to care.”
Yankel nodded again, and tried to smile, but once they were out of the car and headed across the street, he found himself trembling. The words “God only knows what these girls have” didn’t make much sense to Yankel, but they sounded dire, particularly since Karol rarely issued those kinds of advisories.
It all happened very fast; they walked through the massage parlor, with Karol giving a little nod to the Chinese girl at the front desk, and up the stairs to an apartment on the second floor. Within a few seconds, Karol was talking to the short, elfin, middle-aged woman named Kasia with bleached blond hair and a pair of thick glasses that made her eyes seem immense, who ran the catho
use.
“He’s shy,” Karol said. “This is his first time. And he doesn’t talk much. Who can you set him up with who’ll treat him real nice?”
Yankel winced slightly.
“Don’t worry about it,” Kasia said, trying to catch Yankel’s eye, and grinning at him. “We’ll find somebody right for you. Do you have a particular type, teddy bear?”
Yankel had never been called an endearment by anybody except his grandmother, and it caught him off guard. “No,” he said in a voice that came out garbled, as if he hadn’t spoken all day.
She looked him up and down, as a horse trader might examine a prospective stallion, and after a moment grinned to herself. “Teresa,” she finally said. “Oh, I think you’ll like her. She’s my most beautiful girl. And a bit shy herself. Come with me.”
Kasia then waddled like a little duck down a darkened hallway, and found an empty bedroom that she led Yankel into.
“You can leave two hundred fifty zlotys on the dresser,” Kasia said. “Right?”
Yankel nodded, and was left alone in a dimly lit bedroom, perfumed to smell like an indeterminate flower. The room was not much more than a bed, a nightstand, a lamp, and a vanity with an aged chair with faded roses and blue-green vines on the upholstery. The only decoration was a vintage poster of Tahiti hung across from the bed, but the room was dark enough that you could barely make out the beach and palm trees. And for Yankel the action abruptly shifted from happening too fast, to happening so slowly that he could do nothing except examine and reexamine everything he had done leading up to this moment.
A door finally opened, and a girl in a silk kimono glided toward the vanity, taking a seat there without greeting Yankel.
He couldn’t see her face, only the bramble of dark brownish-blond hair that flowed over her shoulders and reached midway down her spine. She was small, which appeased Yankel slightly. For some reason he was terrified that this woman—whoever she was—would be some sort of giantess.
She busied herself rubbing a white cosmetic on her hands as Yankel stared at her. She didn’t seem in any special hurry.
“You should take your clothes off,” the girl said in an eastern accent, which put Yankel more at ease. She, too, was not from around these parts. He had to give Kasia credit; she had found a girl who attracted him.
He peeled off his jacket, T-shirt, sneakers, socks, and jeans and folded them in a neat mound by the side of the bed, lying down in only his white boxer shorts. But the moment his head hit the pillow he remembered Karol’s admonition and sat up, tearing through his pants pockets for the condom. After he found it, he lay back down.
While she was still seated at the vanity, the girl loosed her robe. She looked at herself in the mirror for a few seconds, and then stood up, turning toward her customer.
The girl was beautiful—more beautiful than Yankel could have anticipated.
In the car on the way to the cathouse, Karol had warned him to keep his expectations in check. “These girls aren’t going to be Victoria’s Secret models, if you know what I mean,” he had said. “I’ve been to this place before and the girls are fine. Who knows, maybe they’ve got one or two beauties. But the key word for this cathouse is ‘affordable.’ And while the girls are a little older, they keep themselves up and relatively disease-free. For now you just want to get this whole virginity thing behind you.”
Moreover, Yankel had been somewhat terrified at what these women must look like when he laid eyes on Kasia, the madam of the house, who bore a striking resemblance to Hindelle Greenstein, a dwarfish spinster in her seventies, whom many of the boys in Kreskol believed was a witch, or a troll.
The woman at the front desk in the massage parlor wasn’t much better. She didn’t have any of the exotic beauty of the Orient; her face was moon-shaped and her cheek was dusted with specks of acne.
But this girl was unlike the other two—her figure, though small, was bewitching and flawless. Her skin was fair, as if she were a Saxon princess whose lineage could not be disguised even in the louche, rough-hewn locale where Yankel found her. Her eyes were two blue pools of liquid.
Yankel held his breath as he beheld this vision; he couldn’t quite believe his luck.
But as quickly as his good fortune revealed itself, it fled. The girl took another step toward the bed, and Yankel suddenly sat up straight.
His disappointment was so great that he almost closed his eyes and said nothing. After all, he reasoned, he had already left his two hundred fifty zlotys on the dresser. Nobody would have blamed him much if he put out of his mind previous commitments and obligations. What would happen next would have been strictly between himself and the girl. It was, indeed, very unfortunate that Yankel was a man who had a conscience. And whose conscience governed his actions so ruthlessly.
“Hello, Pesha,” he said in Yiddish. “You’re Pesha Lindauer, aren’t you?”
Now, I imagine that many of my readers might have laughed in disbelief when they read this last passage. Surely some coincidences are not possible. The author of this book—you thought—is no doubt pulling your leg.
Indeed, when I found this out I thought it sounded suspicious, too. What were the odds that of all the brothels in Poland, Yankel should have wound up at the one where his lost compatriot had landed?
More than that, what were the chances that Pesha Lindauer would have become a prostitute at all? Or settled in Warsaw? Or been the girl that Kasia had paired Yankel up with that night? A million to one, at least.
Plus, I felt bad for Yankel Lewinkopf. He must have felt there could be no possible disruption of this supreme moment of experience. The fact that he would have been actuated into carnal matters with someone as beautiful as Pesha Lindauer must have made the fleeting moment all the more joyous, and its dissolution all the more painful. As someone who has laid eyes on a clothed Pesha Lindauer, I can attest that it would have taken heroic powers of self-control and discipline to have stepped away in that instance of vulnerability. And yet, Yankel accepted the fact that luck was not on his side that evening.
Upon hearing these words in Yiddish, Pesha Lindauer collapsed on the bed and dissolved into helpless tears, which were so loud and alarming that within moments the little elf, Kasia, was pounding on the door, demanding it be opened at once. (“We know each other,” Yankel assured Kasia, standing shivering in his gatkes.* “Believe me, I didn’t do anything to her at all.”)
This is not to say that Pesha was sad; if anything, she assured Yankel after she had put her kimono back on and dried her eyes, that hearing his voice had made her happier than anything had in months. They were tears of joy and remembrance.
So they passed the half hour together remembering.
They had not known each other well when they lived in Kreskol. She had been the daughter of a well-off and respected member of the community, and he was a mamzer. Under normal circumstances, they would have nothing to say to each other. When Yankel first greeted her, she did not place him as someone from Kreskol; she was simply shocked to hear the language she hadn’t spoken in six months.
Hearing her name spoken was likewise so astonishing that how the speaker had come to know her name almost seemed incidental.
A few days after Pesha had arrived in Warsaw, Kasia had dismissed the name Pesha with a wave of the hand. “That’s a terrible name for what you’re going to be doing. You don’t want anything too exotic. Something simple. You might also want a saint’s name. How about Teresa?” And Pesha had been known as Teresa from then onward.
But she never grew accustomed to it; when Kasia, or one of the other tarts, would call her she wouldn’t respond. Not out of malice or haughtiness—she just didn’t notice it in the din of words that she barely understood. Some called her “Deaf Teresa” behind her back. Others called her “Saint Teresa” because they assumed she was taking on an air that was too good for a low-priced brothel.
“Who are you?” she whispered, under the choke of her tears, after Yankel had shooed away K
asia.
“Don’t you recognize me?” Yankel said. “I’m Yankel Lewinkopf, the baker’s assistant.”
Yankel had never seen someone so happy to see him. She grasped him close to her and sobbed on his bare chest.
Half-clothed, in the semi-darkness, she told him as much of her story as she could in half an hour.
Pesha’s story began the night before she left town, as she lay awake in bed reflecting on the rabid anger and rage she had seen on her former husband’s face. She decided that the man might be crazy enough to kill her. It was enough to make her want to flee.
Besides, she wondered what kind of fate could be awaiting her once the evil man went through the time-honored ritual of dragging her name through the mud?
She had already gotten a brief glimpse of this. In the weeks before her divorce she had heard the wagging tongues of rivals. The fact that a beautiful girl from a respectable family had stumbled upon a bad marriage delighted the yentas* and busybodies of Kreskol. In the coming weeks these busybodies would no doubt go running to Ishmael to hear what a monster she was. It was supremely unfair.
Once she began thinking of the injustice of it, she was unable to stanch the flow of tears. It was in this moment of helplessness that her father knocked on her door and asked her if he couldn’t bring her a glass of tea.
“No, Papa,” she said—and they would be the last words she would speak to him. She fell asleep a little while later still fully dressed, with only her shoes at the foot of the bed.
Sometime in the night, she awoke. Her face was no longer damp with tears or sticky with snot. She dragged a handkerchief over her cheeks and smoothed the wrinkles out of her dress as she coldly, soberly began weighing her options.
Frankly, she had never been able to understand why more of her fellow villagers didn’t pick up and leave town.
Unlike the rabbis and some of the wealthier members of the community, Pesha didn’t have much undue romanticism about Kreskol. (She was hardly the only one, but that’s another discussion.) While our town might possess a certain natural beauty, and while we were blessed with fertile fields and abundant enough crops, we were for all other purposes poor. And the beauty of a town—day in and day out—can still grow tiresome when it has been lived in every hour of one’s life.