by Max Gross
When she was still a child Pesha had even briefly hatched a plan to make an escape to Krakow after she had quarreled with her mother. The catalyst for this argument had been relatively insignificant—a chore the seven-year-old Pesha hadn’t felt it necessary to complete—but the subsequent silence and mutual disappointment between parents and child lasted for days. Pesha had bestowed on her parents a curse, and vowed to leave town at first opportunity. She packed a bag, which she left under her bed, and waited for the house to fall asleep. When she was certain that her mother and father would not be woken, she quietly tiptoed through the house and then to the edge of town before she lost her nerve at the loud hooting of an owl. She moodily returned to her room.
Now the idea of abandoning Kreskol without a word to anybody seemed not only possible but her only conceivable salvation.
Naturally, there were a few considerations. Her father, for one. He was old, and old men do not recover from the loss of a daughter so easily, even one who has left home of her own volition. (But, as Pesha asked herself, would a good father wish that his daughter’s future should be steeped in unhappiness?)
Second, there were her sisters to think about, the youngest of whom was unmarried. She wondered what this would do to Hadassah’s chances of finding a husband if the matchmakers concluded that the Rosenthals were trouble. But she waved this concern away, too. Hadassah would rise or fall on her own.
Finally, she would have been a fool if she hadn’t worried at least a little about how she would transport herself to Warsaw, or Paris, or America, or wherever she wound up. And the more she thought about it, the greater the realization that it was this obstacle more than any other that kept the emigration rate low—nobody would take a chance going through the woods unless they absolutely had to.
But she discarded this last objection as well. How big could Poland possibly be? How long could she really be expected to wander the woods before she found something? Perhaps it was a gamble, but if her only alternative was an unhappy life in Kreskol, she was willing to spin the wheel. She needed to leave that night. Right now. If she slept on the idea, she would talk herself out of it.
She packed very little; a shawl, a scarf, a locket that her mother had given her before she died, a kitchen knife to defend herself in the wilderness, and nothing else. She made the bed before she departed (more out of a sense of habit than anything else), and took what was left of a kugel out of the pantry.
The town was fast asleep and she was in such a hurry to be gone before the fishermen or farmers awoke that she didn’t even remember to write a farewell note or give herself one last look as she walked into the woods.
A week later—as she faced starvation and dehydration, and had been chased by wild animals (although whether the bear in question was actually chasing Pesha or caught up in his own affairs is a matter of interpretation)—she still refused to turn around and go back the way she came. “The woods were terrible—terrible,” she told Yankel. “But the idea of turning around and going home sounded much worse. I was fool enough to think that death would be preferable.”
“I know the feeling,” Yankel said, quietly.
“But that first week was the worst of it,” Pesha continued. “It was on either the seventh or eighth day out of town that I came upon a farmhouse, and the farmer gave me a lift to Lublin.
“I can tell you. It was a pain-in-the-you-know-what getting him to take me. I didn’t speak a word of the language. And he certainly didn’t speak any Yiddish. But the fellow liked what he saw when he looked at me. I don’t blame him—I got a look at his wife, and she was no beauty queen. Not by a mile. So I started saying ‘Bialystok’ and ‘Warsaw’ and ‘Lublin,’ and he got the idea that I wanted a cart to take me to one of those places. He couldn’t resist the idea of being alone with me all the way to Lublin.”
This might have been where Pesha, who was always a wily creature, figured out that she might be able to capitalize on her looks.
The farmer’s wife put up a fuss. She could see the dangers of letting her husband drive two long hours to Lublin with a woman like Pesha in the passenger’s seat, but I suppose she didn’t like the idea of keeping the homeless Jewish beauty on the farm, either. Her permission was reluctantly granted, and the two of them took off in a pickup truck. (Which held its own astonishment for Pesha until it gradually melted into the scenery of the world outside Kreskol.)
“He tried some funny business on me,” Pesha continued. “I suppose if I had a wife who looked like her, I might have tried something too. But just before we reached Lublin, he put a hand on my knee. And when I didn’t say anything right away, he tried to reach a bit farther up—but that was too much. I pushed him away, which, I should add, nearly made him crash the car. And I began crying hysterically. I’ve never seen a man look so scared. He begged me to quiet down—at least I think that’s what he was begging.”
She next told Yankel about a hungry day spent meandering around Lublin, rummaging through garbage cans for something edible, when there was a knock at the door.
“Time.”
“I’m sorry, Yankel,” Pesha said. “But I’m a working girl and she’s the boss. You have to go, or I’ll have to give her another two hundred zlotys.”
Yankel nodded.
“I’d like to see you again,” Pesha said, when Yankel was almost fully dressed. “Not as a customer. I’d just like to see you. Talk to you, you know. Are you free tomorrow?”
“I get out of work at one.”
“That’s perfect,” Pesha said, grinning. “Why don’t you meet me here at two? I’ll leave your name with the girl out front. She’ll show you right in.”
Even though Pesha was smiling, she looked slightly—ever so slightly—embarrassed. As if the wideness of her grin masked the fact that Yankel had paid for a service she had not provided. At least, this was how Yankel interpreted it. He also decided she wouldn’t have mentioned “another two hundred zlotys” if she wasn’t feeling at least a little guilty.
Just before he left, Pesha stood up and kissed him on the cheek.
“I guess I didn’t have to worry about it being over in thirty seconds,” Karol nearly shouted, when Yankel was back in his car, unable to contain his laughter. “I can’t believe it—you stud!”
“Yeah,” Yankel said with a snort.
“Took to it like a duck to water, didn’t you?” Karol said, and he gave Yankel a strong jab in the shoulder. “You son of a bitch, you! You son of a bitch!”
“I suppose so.”
“I’ll bet the girl wasn’t much to look at. Well, as I told you, these places are not the best ones out there.”
“No,” Yankel said. “She was beautiful.”
“Son of a bitch!” Karol howled. “Goes to a cheap little whorehouse for his first time, and he scores a hottie! Tonight’s your night, kid!”
As much as he yearned for a little quiet to contemplate all that had happened in the last hour, Yankel had to admit that Karol’s enthusiasm was infectious. And Yankel knew that even though he would have to embroider and embellish all sorts of details about the experience, he didn’t have the heart to let down his friend, who was so happy for him.
“So, how was it?” Karol asked as he started the car. “Did it match your hopes and dreams, kid?”
Yankel considered this for a moment.
“It was,” he answered, “beyond belief.”
She was waiting for him outside the cathouse, as she had been warned not to invite the gentleman back unless he was a paying customer. They took a tram to a café that Pesha knew called Trzmiel, which had a wood-paneled sitting room and a nice view of a garden.
They shared a mania for coffee. Karol had given Yankel his first cup a few weeks earlier, which he had sweetened with two overflowing lumps of sugar and lightened with milk. Yankel declared it to be the greatest, most delicious drink he had ever tasted; he also said that it made him feel crisper, more energetic, as if could run clear across Warsaw without losing a beat.
“Don’t drink too much,” Karol warned. “Too much is not good for you. It’ll fuck up your heart and your blood pressure.”
But it was an admonition that never stuck. He drank cup after cup and when he found his head swimming, and his heart racing, his immediate cure was more coffee. A few weeks later, Karol noticed that Yankel was never without a mug in hand.
“Christ, Yankel. How much do you drink?”
“Seven cups a day.”
“That’s way too much,” Karol said. “Slow it down. If you can do with three cups a day, you’d probably be fine.”
Pesha discovered coffee fairly early during her tenure in Warsaw, and agreed it was some sort of miracle drink. Although Pesha also felt that Coca-Cola and Red Zinger tea were miracle drinks, too. “You’re not supposed to put sugar in it,” Pesha warned Yankel as he reached for three white cubes. “Put this in—it tastes the same.”
Pesha tore two yellow packs of sugar substitute into Yankel’s mug.
And after they had sorted their various drink orders, along with Viennese cream cakes and butter cookies (both of them had independently reached the decision that a leveret-like kosher diet was impossible to keep in the big city), they would spend hours talking.
Pesha continued on with her saga, which she mostly got through on their first meeting.
After two days of searching through the rubbish bins of Lublin, she spotted Kasia at the Glowny Dworzec Autobusowy.*
“I had thought of Hindelle Greenstein, too!” Pesha laughed. “In fact, for a moment, I thought it was Hindelle. I almost said ‘Hello’ to her. But the hair was not right. And those glasses.”
The middle-aged Hindelle lookalike had her eye on Pesha as well. She had been sitting with another girl when she stood up, whispered something in the girl’s ear, and crossed the bus terminal to ask Pesha a question in Polish. Pesha said nothing. The dwarf tried the question in Russian and then German. The German didn’t sound right—but it sounded somewhat recognizable. The question ended in the word “hungrig,” which sounded close enough to a query she would recognize.
“Yes,” Pesha said, and a tear shone in her eye. “I’m very hungry.”
“Armste!”* Kasia exclaimed. “Poor dear!”
As if she were her mother and not a complete stranger, Kasia grasped Pesha close to her bosom and patted her on the back, like she was burping an infant.
The other girl—a waifish blond, who looked roughly the same age as Pesha and even more tense and frightened by her surroundings—was summoned with a wave of the arm and the three of them (along with three suitcases and handbags) plopped down at a German restaurant nearby.
“You know how you feel on Yom Kippur, after a day of fasting, when everything tastes better?” Pesha asked Yankel. “When you think you know what butter tastes like, but you taste a little butter on a bagel and you realize that you’ve never really tasted butter before?”
“I suppose.”
“That’s what that meal was like. Every morsel was better than anything I had ever tasted before. There was veal schnitzel, potato salad with dill, sauerkraut, and potato rolls. The beer was served in frosty glass mugs—I drank three of them that day. And as we sat there—Kasia, the girl Yulia, and me—Kasia kept on talking. ‘Poor girls,’ she said. ‘Poor, mistreated girls. You’d think the world would treat us better in this day and age. But no. Not at all. We’ve always got to look after each other, because no man is interested in helping us. The men of the world are out for themselves.’ After she said that to me in German, she would turn and say the same thing to Yulia in Russian. I’ll tell you, Yankel, when an angel swoops down and feeds you when you’re hungry, and spends an hour talking to you in a language you somewhat understand—well, you’re straining to understand—and when she appears to care for you and your well-being and invokes the common bond of sisterhood . . . Maybe I was naïve, but I was desperate.”
Yankel nodded.
“‘I would like to help you,’ she said. ‘When I see a young girl off on her own, mistreated, something in me cries out. I want to help.’ I suppose it sounds really silly to hear secondhand.”
It is an old story, certainly. Even in the backwoods of Kreskol, we had heard stories of white slavery. But I suppose that we all thought that the seduction would be handled by a slick male—none of us would have been on guard against an equally canny woman.
Kasia handed both girls a flier in Polish—which neither woman spoke—showing two happy, laughing girls sitting on bunk beds in what appeared to be an enormous dormitory. One of the girls, smiling and dimpled, had blond hair that had been braided into two golden ropes. She was being embraced in a sisterly way by a redheaded girl, with smoky brown eyes and a slightly more mischievous smile.
“She said, ‘I run an organization for girls.’ I don’t remember what she called it. Something like ‘The Warsaw Young Women’s Foundation.’ But it sounded official. And, I’m a little ashamed to admit this now, but I thought the fliers were impressive. They looked bona fide. Like it required more time, money, and effort than a con artist would dole out. But she told me that it helped young orphans—or, not orphans as such, but women who had no money and no place to go—get on their feet.
“Who would question such good fortune, Yankel? What was I supposed to do? Tell her to mind her own business? How could I do such a thing? She seemed the answer to a prayer. And besides, you saw what she looks like. She’s nothing more harmful than a little dwarf! Who could be hurt by a dwarf?”
The three women got up from their lunch and boarded a bus for Warsaw, and all the while, Kasia switched back and forth from German to Russian, telling both girls what they could expect when they came to live in her dormitory. The girls all cooked together, they did chores together, and they also had things like movie nights together (which Pesha didn’t understand), and something that Kasia called “Queen for the Day,” in which once a week one lucky girl wouldn’t have to do any chores, and would have the other girls waiting on her hand and foot.
“‘Naturally, the place doesn’t pay for itself,’ Kasia told us. ‘While we never charge any of the girls any money, you are expected to contribute some labor to our endeavor. We are engaged in a number of businesses that we need staffed.’ Of course, I said, I would do anything to help out. It was only fair. ‘That’s good, Pesha,’ she said. (She still called me Pesha then.) ‘That’s very good. Well, don’t you worry. We’ll find something for you.’”
And from the way Pesha told it, she hadn’t been so badly treated that first week.
Kasia had the run of several houses and apartments around Warsaw, and for the first few days she left Pesha and Yulia alone in an apartment in a remote section of town. There were twin beds in one of the rooms, and a television in the living room. The refrigerator was stocked with milk, Swiss cheese, eggs, butter, a loaf of rye bread, and a few apples and tomatoes.
“I’ll come back tomorrow with some extra groceries, but you can make do with this for today, right?” Kasia had said.
Both girls nodded.
After Kasia left, Yulia turned on the television, which had the effect of entrancing Pesha. “How does it work?” she asked Yulia—but Yulia didn’t understand the question and didn’t look particularly impressed by the miracle unfolding before her.
Yulia wasn’t impressed by much. She never looked at anything in the apartment except the television. Her arms were bruised, scratched, and dried over, and for a moment Pesha wondered if the poor girl had also been lost in a forest. Pesha made an attempt to ask her about these scratches, but the girl showed no interest in engaging her. Pesha could never decide whether the girl was rude or wasn’t going to bother trying to communicate in a language she didn’t understand. Either way, Pesha stopped trying.
But before it got dark Pesha told Yulia that she wanted to go out for a walk and explore the neighborhood.
She didn’t walk more than a handful of blocks from the apartment, but she was away for almost two hours. She passed
a flower shop and admired the African daisies. She stopped in an eyeglass store and examined a pair of Louis Vuitton sunglasses. At the perfumer, the girl behind the counter spurted a little Chanel No. 5 on her wrist and told her (in the Polish that she didn’t understand) that it smelled of rose and jasmine.
“Oh, I remember what that was like for the first time,” Yankel told her.
Pesha’s eyes suddenly met his, and she smiled.
“Yes,” she said with a light laugh. “You’re the only one who knows what that’s like.”
She and Yulia lived together in the apartment for four days before Kasia arrived and said that she was taking Yulia to a dormitory in Praga Polnoc. When Yulia said goodbye, Pesha wasn’t especially sorry to see her go. (Whatever good qualities she might have been hiding, there was no question that Yulia was painfully boring.)
The next morning, Kasia came for Pesha, too.
“Kasia seemed changed,” Pesha said of that encounter. “She had been so friendly on that first day—so understanding and generous. Now she was all business. ‘This is a special apartment, Pesha,’ she said. ‘We keep you here for a few days to get your sea legs, but you can’t stay here forever. You have to go to another dorm with the other girls. And this is where we’ll figure out a work schedule. So get your things and let’s go.’ But I was a good sport. Of course, Kasia. Anything you say, Kasia.”
She was taken to the cathouse where Yankel would later discover her. She was given her new name—Teresa—and introduced to the other girls, none of whom were especially friendly. The rooms were dingier than the ones where she had been staying, and Pesha was frightened by the dirt and grime. But she was also aware that she was living on charity and determined not to kick up a fuss.
“I’ll leave it to the other girls to get you up to date on how things work here,” Kasia said. “But just settle in for now.”