by Max Gross
The girl looked a bit older when she was fully dressed. She wore a wooly indigo sweater, a peasant skirt, and long leather boots. Around her neck was a small, barely noticeable gold cross. Her blond hair was tied in a ponytail poised off her shoulder. She didn’t try to hide her genuine cheeriness at seeing Yankel.
For an instant, he wondered if he shouldn’t take off running and find Pesha later. But the girl spoke again before he could act, and the sound of her voice chilled him.
“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me already.” The blond laughed. “I thought you said that you’d never forget me.”
Actually, she had been the one who predicted that he would never forget her, but there was no point arguing.
“Of course I remember you.”
“Good.” She smiled. “I would have been pretty lousy at my job otherwise.”
At the moment, Yankel turned around and saw Pesha coming closer to him, with her eye on the girl.
To her credit, the girl sensed that there was something between Yankel and Pesha, and her friendliness vanished. “Well, good to see you,” she said, “so long.” She quickly turned in the opposite direction, wending her way through the crowd.
But the damage had been done. Pesha likewise sniffed the intimacy between Yankel and the girl. And there was a look of surprise in her eyes, as if she had stumbled upon a burglar sizing up her property.
“Who was that?”
“Nobody. Just somebody who comes in the bakery now and then.”
Pesha continued staring at the girl as she slowly grew smaller and more difficult to locate in the crowd.
“Who is she?” Pesha repeated. “What’s her name?”
“I don’t know.”
“She seemed awfully chummy for somebody whose name you don’t know,” Pesha declared.
Before Yankel could say anything else, Pesha marched into the crowd and swiftly began making her way toward her rival. Had he been thinking more clearly, Yankel might have given chase, but he froze.
It was only a matter of seconds before the commotion blazed up, and Yankel began running through the crowd.
When he reached Pesha and the prostitute, they were circling each other like a pair of feral cats. Pesha, losing any thread of Polish she might have held, was screaming in Yiddish. The prostitute looked frightened and not a little angry. She scowled back in a guttural Polish that Yankel didn’t understand.
“Just who do you think you’ve got your eye on?” Pesha scowled. “You keep your tits to yourself, you goddamn korva!”
The crowd surrounding the two of them was incredulous and fascinated. None of the spectators were sure what this fight was about, precisely, yet both women looked angry enough to draw blood, which enticed nearly everyone in the vicinity. The fact that both women were attractive (Pesha exceptionally so) lent an even greater depth of interest.
Even though she was the less angry of the two, the prostitute was more dangerous, and when she spotted a mason jar at one of the nearby stalls, she picked it up, smashed its top, and waved the jagged glass in Pesha’s direction. Everybody watching took a leap backwards.
The only person who did not scamper away was Pesha. As swiftly as if she had been a trained dancer, Pesha leaped over to one of the nearby tables and grabbed a golf club.
The fervor in this latest act startled her adversary, who was now the one to involuntarily take a small step back. But this extremely minor victory did nothing to allay Pesha’s anger or her heightened state of self-defense. She swung the club at the mason jar, which shattered and left the prostitute’s hand a gushing, bloody mess.
It was at that moment Yankel could not bear any more. He jumped forward and enveloped Pesha in his arms.
“Let it go,” he said. “Let it go.”
The fury slowly trickled away, and Pesha dropped the golf club. All the while, Pesha never took her eyes off the blond harlot, who was now on her knees, cradling her bloody hand. It was as her breathing slowed down that a police officer arrived.
The prostitute’s wound was wrapped in gauze that one of the merchants kept under the table, and she was driven to the hospital by one of the Samaritans who had gathered to watch the scene unfold.
Pesha was handcuffed and taken away.
“Can I ride with her?” Yankel asked the arresting police officer.
“Are you kidding?” the officer smirked, slamming the back door of his squad car in Pesha’s face. He wouldn’t even deign to give Yankel the address of the police station.
11
Poczta
As with any mighty endeavor, the attempt to drag Kreskol into the modern era required the efforts of a great bureaucrat.
The government functionary we found ourselves paired with—Rajmund Sikorski—possessed many of the good qualities that accompany such a title. He was organized. He had great respect for procedure. And he knew the exhaustive checklist necessary to complete before successfully planting a school or a medical clinic in the middle of nowhere.
He spoke to us respectfully and tamed the many negative traits that usually chaperone a bureaucrat.
And like the systematic, intelligent official that he was, Mr. Sikorski realized that this transition would be expedited much more seamlessly if he didn’t have to deal with someone who obviously hated him and was determined to see that his efforts failed—like Rabbi Sokolow.
One afternoon, during his regular bimonthly visit to Kreskol, Mr. Sikorski said through a translator: “I would appreciate it if the next time I came you could bring me a young fellow we could train to become the postmaster of Kreskol.”
A few months earlier, we had been told that after the service road from Smolskie was paved, the first government building to appear in our town would be a poczta. “Many things can come later,” Sikorski explained. “But keeping open the lines of communication between Kreskol and the rest of the province is the first and most essential step.”
“Why do you need one of us to run it?” Rabbi Sokolow asked. “Shouldn’t you get someone who’s done it before?”
“Probably. But an experienced man wouldn’t be better at weaving the post office into the fabric of life in Kreskol. We need someone local for that.”
Which made a certain amount of sense, I suppose.
“Intelligence and self-reliance should be the two most important character traits,” Sikorski continued. “Whomever you pick will need to go to Warsaw for four months of training. So we’ll need somebody who can take an accelerated course in Polish without falling behind. Someone who we can entrust with an important task when he comes back here—making sure that the mail comes in and out of town without problems, and without much guidance from the administration in Szyszki. It’s more difficult than it sounds.”
A moment later, Sikorski added: “I’d pick somebody young over somebody old. Less set in their ways.”
When Sikorski returned, Rabbi Sokolow presented him with Berel Rosen, the young nephew of Esther Rosen who had an equal number of admirers as he had detractors throughout the village.
There were some who said that Berel—with his droopy eyes, round face, sandy hair, and small, wiry body—was an incandescently brilliant young man, whose intellectual abilities were unlike those seen in Kreskol in generations. There were others who said that he was an arrogant, unserious lout, who flaunted the gifts that God gave him and was destined to squander away his life. Both descriptions were at least partially accurate.
But Rabbi Sokolow suspected that Berel wouldn’t have much trouble mastering Polish, or any other training these Poles intended to throw at him. Berel wouldn’t grow homesick and beg the Poles to return on his first shabbos by himself. And he finally concluded that an atheist (which is what Berel Rosen was widely presumed to be) would adjust to the big city better than a more devout candidate.
Berel returned from Warsaw four months after he left, with his beard shaved, his yarmulke nowhere to be found, his trousers and shirts modern, and his knowledge of Polish as quick and breezy as h
is knowledge of Yiddish. And he had a bit more spring in his step, as if he had done marvelous and mischievous things in the time he had been gone.
A day or two after his return, Berel stopped Itcha Bergstrom on his way home from yeshiva and asked for a moment of his time.
“What about?”
“How’d you like to be my assistant?” Berel asked. “I’ll give you five hundred zlotys a week.”
It was an astonishing sum for someone whose family normally cleared less than that in a year.
“Five hundred a week?” Itcha said. “To be an assistant?”
“It’s chicken feed,” Berel said. “A street sweeper makes more than that in Warsaw. But if you want the job you can have it.”
“All right . . .”
Berel reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out ten five-zloty coins that he handed to Itcha. “Here’s an advance on your salary. Meet me at my flat tomorrow morning. Number eight Thieves’ Lane. I’m on the second floor. Wear a clean shirt. Buy a new one if you have to.”
The next morning, bright and early, Berel was buzzing around his rented room like a hummingbird, and Itcha Bergstrom had to struggle to keep up.
“Take a pen and paper,” Berel instructed Itcha, and he presented him with a half dozen blue ballpoint Bic pens (something Itcha had never seen before) and a yellow legal pad. “Write this down.”
Itcha removed the cap from his pen.
“First, we need to make a list of everybody in town.”
This first task would take weeks. Not that our town’s archive didn’t keep records. Like every other village, births and deaths were recorded in due course. But I would be lying if I didn’t admit that these records were treated by most as an afterthought. Sometimes a birth was recorded after the bris. Sometimes it would take place at the bar mitzvah.
“Second, we’re going to need to make a grid of the town. We need to record every address. Everything. From the poorest, shabbiest shack to the grandest mansion, everything must be put on paper.”
“Why?” Itcha asked.
“Because when mail comes through our office, everybody needs to be found easily and systematically.”
It sounded ridiculous to Itcha. Kreskol had done well enough without a postal system all these years. Who would be sending us mail now? But Itcha figured he wasn’t getting paid to argue. So he began canvassing each and every block in the town, mapping every building and writing down its living and dead inhabitants one by one. “You can double-check everything in the town archives after,” Berel instructed him.
Some of the people who answered their doors thought the boy was off his rocker. “You’ve known us all your life, Itcha,” said Yetta Cooperman. “What do you mean by asking me who’s living here?”
“I’m supposed to ask everybody.”
Others, who didn’t know Itcha (or knew him as little as one could in a town of our size), were suspicious.
“Did the Rabbi say you could do this?”
“No . . .”
Before he had a chance to finish, they would slam the door in his face. Itcha learned to simply tell them what they wanted to hear. “Sure,” he said. “The Rabbi said it was fine.”
Itcha had to endure the humiliation of going to the doors of people whose faces he knew, but names he forgot.
“You don’t remember me?” asked one of his mother’s friends.
“Of course I do. But I have to ask everybody. Just for the record.”
And somewhere along the way, Itcha realized that the easiest way to deflect embarrassment on this was to ask everybody the proper spelling of their name.
“Well, of course you should be getting the proper spelling of their name,” Berel told his young charge after Itcha boasted about this ingenious face-saver. “I assumed you were doing that from the beginning. Go back and get the spelling in the Latin alphabet as well as Yiddish.”
Itcha couldn’t help hating his boss for that. But he was raking in too much money to complain.
Besides, Itcha had to admit it was vaguely thrilling to watch Berel at work when he would come back to his boss’s apartment every day at four o’clock and drop off his notes. Berel had an enormous satellite photo of the town, which he had hung on the wall, and he made notes on the glossy paper with markers. Little scraps of square yellow paper were attached to the photo, without glue or safety pins—a modern miracle so unimportant that Berel never felt it worthy of commentary. He simply stood over this map, absorbed in it as if it were a tapestry.
“You have no idea how much better life is outside this backwater,” Berel would tell Itcha when he chose to engage his assistant. “The goyim have basically invented everything. Believe me, Itcha, I’m no slouch. I don’t intend to abandon this job until I’ve put in my time. But I’m certainly envious of Yankel Lewinkopf—he had the right idea.”
After the road to Smolskie was complete, trucks loaded up with lumber, metal, glass, and construction crews began moving back and forth to the designated site of the post office (just outside the walls of town, so as not to create too large a disturbance). Berel would stop by every morning to check on the progress as the trees were cleared; as the foundations were dug up; as the first concrete was poured; as beams were raised and pipes laid.
“When it is finished,” Berel stated, “it will be the greatest structure erected in Kreskol.”
One weekend, a group of eighteen or nineteen American Jews (mostly in their fifties and sixties) who were touring Poland showed up in our town square. They sashayed through the streets like they owned them. “Shalom aleichem,”* they said to anybody who they passed.
One member of their assemblage spoke a Russian-accented Yiddish, and some Kreskolites were polite enough to answer his questions.
And when they arrived in the marketplace, cash in hand, and began buying up whatever trinket they could find to memorialize their expedition, nobody could find reason to complain.
The next weekend, four groups arrived in four separate buses and stormed our marketplace with the animation of Norman invaders.
“What a bargain!” one Polish woman nearly screamed at the top of her lungs, brandishing an ear of summer corn. “I’m coming back here every weekend!”
Some of us blanched when we saw the way these gentiles were dressed. A few of the women wore trousers, like a man. And although it was cool out, several others wore low-cut tops, exposing the cleft between their breasts, and shorts that left their knees and thighs naked for the world to see. The more pious looked away. But by the end of that Sunday, many hundreds of zlotys had been dropped into our economy, and the mood amongst Kreskol’s merchants was along the lines of ebullience. It had been the greatest sales day in anyone’s lifetime—some making as much as six months of their yearly income in a single afternoon.
Shifra Rothstein, who sold out her entire inventory of white summer gloves, went back to her supplier, Motke Weyerhoffer, for two dozen more.
“Two dozen?” Motke said. “When do you need them by?”
“As soon as possible.”
“It’ll take me at least a week.”
Shifra looked disappointed. “Whenever you can. These goyim are spending money like it’s going out of fashion. We don’t have a minute to lose.”
These first fleeting weeks of midsummer were unlike any we had ever experienced before; those who had been skeptical of how our rediscovery would ultimately turn out were suddenly at ease. Rabbi Katznelson’s comment that the female tourists were dressed like a bunch of korvas failed to stir any great sense of outrage. Even those who hadn’t sold anything that day found that the poor flower girls and bagel hawkers unexpectedly had money in their pockets, and were eager to spend it.
The new postmaster was one of the few who saw the dangers lying ahead.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Berel instructed Itcha. “Things are good now, but it will end badly.”
“Why?”
Berel rubbed his chin.
“Inflation,” he finally said. �
�These tourists are buying from us because it’s cheap. Eventually we won’t have anything left to sell them. Try buying a jar of honey when there’s only a dozen pots left in the whole town. The price will rise dramatically.”
How Berel had come by the word “inflation” during his travels was anybody’s guess. Berel was a great talker and a great reader, and the time he had spent in Warsaw was apparently not wasted.
“I thought you were in favor of progress,” Itcha said.
“Of course I am,” Berel answered. “Perhaps I misspoke when I said it would end badly. The ending hasn’t been written. I just think it needs to be managed smartly. One solution would be to inflate prices now, before the economy goes too crazy. But anybody who’s been saving any money will be wiped out.”
Itcha had no idea what his boss was talking about.
The pending economic problems were also foreseen by Rajmund Sikorski, and the rest of the administrators back in Warsaw.
Of course, the contemporary tools for inflating or deflating a currency had little purchase in a place like Kreskol, where few businessmen ever advanced credit and the idea of changing an interest rate, or debt forgiveness, would have no effect.
There were one or two economists who said that no matter what else was said or done, supply would fall, prices would rise, and poor Kreskol was in for years of financial woe. These economists began studying the case of Zimbabwe as a possible model of what our hyperinflated future would look like.
But most blithely dismissed these forecasters as worrywarts. Kreskol’s supply of cheap goods might take a temporary beating, but its potential tourism market was a gold mine. If anything, after a period of adjustment, the town would receive a once-in-a-century economic jolt.
One summer morning—a few weeks before the Poczta opened—the beadle went around town knocking on doors, telling everyone that there was an important meeting that evening at the main synagogue that every head of a household should attend.
Rabbis Sokolow, Shlussel, Katznelson, and Gluck were seated at the bima, and their discomfort resembled that of men waiting to be ransomed. Sitting with them was Rajmund Sikorski, a translator, and a bespectacled Pole in his middle years introduced to us as Professor Filip Pruski.