The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  Yankel watched the rage in her face dissolve quickly into the shock of betrayal. As her cheeks colored, Yankel ran his hands over his own face, as if he were too ashamed to show himself without some covering.

  Neither of them spoke. And Pesha’s eyes moved from Yankel to the table before she finally broke the silence.

  “Oh.”

  The word hung malevolently in the air for a long time. In its understatement, it summoned both Pesha’s surprise and agony effectively. And after the word completed its devastation, Yankel could merely put his head down on the hard wooden table between the two of them and whimper, “I’m sorry, Pesha. It was before I knew you were here.”

  The rest of their interview proceeded along its preordained path. There was recrimination, disbelief, and anger—none of which was spoken out loud—that was only broken by Pesha with one-word answers to his questions, until Yankel told her, “They say they’re going to set bail tomorrow. I’ll be back.”

  Pesha didn’t answer him.

  “The bail will be expensive—more money than I have,” Yankel continued. “Thousands of zlotys.”

  “I don’t want your money.”

  These words carried more devastation. Yankel’s face turned white with sickness, but Pesha refused to look him in the eye.

  “Well, I’ll be back tomorrow,” Yankel said.

  But it would be the last words Pesha would exchange with her suitor for a very long time.

  When he arrived at the police station the next morning, with Karol by his side (having made a long and tortured confession of everything that had happened since he met Pesha that night in the cathouse), the bailiff told them that the assailant had no desire to see him, and would not accept his money for bail.

  “What happens now?” Yankel asked.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” replied Karol.

  Yankel felt obligated to sit around the police station for the rest of the day, in the hope that he might pry out some nugget of information. “I think you’re wasting your time,” Karol replied after they had sat for an hour in the waiting area. “If she doesn’t want to see you, she doesn’t have to. You’ll just be waiting around here for nothing when you could be working.”

  Yankel looked crushed to be handed such a sober assessment.

  “And I’m afraid I can’t wait around here all day with you,” Karol said, a little too cheerfully. “I’ve got to get to work. Got a job to keep and an ex-wife to support. You know what I mean, right, sport?”

  Still, Yankel could not bring himself to exit until lunchtime, when the female officer who had been eyeing him carefully all morning ordered him to pack it in and leave. “Why are you still hanging around here?” she barked. “Get lost.”

  Yankel stood and backed away, spending another hour standing outside staring at the station before giving up and returning to the bakery. Nonetheless, Yankel appeared again the next day and was told that Pesha had been summoned to the court the afternoon before, with bail set at 10,000 zlotys, and a trial set for two months hence.

  “She was bailed out,” the male officer on duty told Yankel. “She’s not here anymore.”

  Yankel was surprised to hear that.

  “Bailed out—by who?”

  The officer looked Yankel up and down, and apparently decided that there was no harm in telling him.

  “A lady dwarf.”

  Yankel went to the cathouse straight from the station.

  The same moon-faced Oriental—whose pimples had only gotten worse in the months since Yankel had last seen her—waited for him in the massage parlor with a foreboding curl on her lips.

  And while Yankel certainly stumbled through the past few days, not sure what words or actions would best secure entrée to the object of his desires, he had enough foresight to have emptied the shoebox under his bed of all the money he had been saving for a future apartment before he left Karol’s apartment.

  “I’d like to see Teresa,” he told the Chinese woman.

  She said nothing.

  “Please.”

  Even though this gatekeeper was breathing heavily, she tried to maintain a casual affectlessness about her—as if she found this interloper more boring than worrisome.

  “I don’t know Teresa.”

  Yankel didn’t argue with her. Instead he pulled roughly half of the money he had brought with him out of his pocket and presented the girl with it. “Please,” Yankel said.

  She stared quizzically at the crumpled, clammy notes before her, not daring to touch them.

  “Your money no good.”

  Instantly, he put the other half of his savings before her.

  Raising the ante caught the girl’s attention. And, for a moment, she stared at the bills and wordlessly looked as if she was counting them to herself.

  “You don’t have enough” was all she responded—and the way she jabbed the word “you” made Yankel wonder whether she meant that he was the kind of poor, scruffy tramp who would never be able to bribe her enough to reverse previously purchased loyalties, or he had simply failed to produce the requisite ransom.

  “How much do you want?” Yankel asked.

  But the girl had lost interest in the conversation. She picked up the glossy magazine on the desk in front of her and began leafing through its pages, stopping at a list of skincare tips. Her next words were spoken with none of the tripping hesitation or Asiatic inflections of her previous speech:

  “Fuck off.”

  Oh, how Yankel suffered. He had no intention whatsoever of allowing the woman whom he loved so passionately to slip away. He returned the next day with all the cash he could borrow from his boss—telling him, through a stream of hot, humiliating tears, that his girlfriend had been arrested and that he would pay him back as soon as he could—and presented the Chinese girl with 7,000 zlotys. But she was having none of it.

  “Don’t you come back here” was all she said, not bothering to look at the money for nearly as long as she had the previous day. “You come back, you regret it.”

  When Yankel returned the next day (this time with an extra 3,000 zlotys he had wheedled out of Karol), a muscular fellow in a white T-shirt and jeans, with a blond crew cut, stood outside the massage parlor, arms folded across his chest, as if daring Yankel—or any other troublesome character—to proceed across the threshold.

  Yankel stood for a very long time across the street, observing his adversary. And while Yankel possessed the valiant impulse to charge headfirst into the fray—come what may of the consequences—he was also no clod. He could see that this figure had been planted there because he was twice his size. Each arm swelled out of the sleeve of the sentinel’s shirt as immense and solid as a tree trunk. It was one thing to sacrifice oneself when the chance of success was slim; certain death was another matter altogether.

  After a few moments the sentinel caught sight of Yankel, and turned his bulk toward him.

  The two stared at each other for several long minutes, the minotaur taking the full measure of Theseus, before deciding that he did not have anything to fear. Any struggle between the two would end with Yankel’s defeat. But the menacing look in the sentinel’s eyes did not abate. After a few minutes, Yankel decided he’d better leave and come back when he had some kind of plan.

  Passion makes a point of muddying the thoughts of those it seeks to infect, and Yankel spent many fruitless weeks trying to come up with a scheme to see Pesha, without any success.

  His first thought was simply that he must be persistent; every afternoon, when work was finished for the day, he should visit the cathouse and wait for an opportunity to reenter, or see the cherished object of his affections take in the afternoon air—but every day he saw the blond sentry standing guard.

  Sometimes a different sentry would be posted outside—another big Pole, who looked similar to the first one, except he had longer hair and a wider nose.

  The second sentry in fact looked so like the first that Yankel wondered if the two men weren’t bro
thers. Yankel got a bit closer to this one, but when the brute said, “What do you want?” he shook his head and said, “Nothing,” before striding off.

  After more than a month, Yankel accepted that these two guards might be permanent fixtures, and that if he expected to see Pesha again he needed an alternate strategy.

  “Why don’t you send her a letter?” Karol asked, quite sensibly.

  Yankel spent the next week composing and recomposing a letter in Yiddish for his beloved.

  The letter was, I am told, not the words of a natural writer. (The original has been lost, so I can’t quote it precisely.) It totaled almost fifteen pages, and was used to wallow in its own titanic misery; Yankel detailed how unhappy he was without Pesha, and how sorry he was to have done anything to hurt her. The prostitute—whose name, he honestly attested, he did not even know—meant nothing to him. He begged Pesha to send word of herself, even if it was just to let him know that she was all right, and how her legal case was proceeding. He unthinkingly addressed it to “Pesha Rosenthal Lindauer”—but a week later it was returned to him unopened.

  The next day, he sent another, leaner letter, which he addressed to “S. Teresa” asking only that she meet him for coffee at their appointed spot, at the usual time. This letter was not returned, but when he showed up at Trzmiel on Monday the café was empty.

  He showed up the next day—and every day after, for the next two weeks—but Pesha never revealed herself or sent word.

  Again, the only solution he could come up with was persistence, and he wrote more letters, day after day, to S. Teresa, in which he detailed (somewhat numbingly) his misery and his longing.

  Karol disliked seeing his friend in such a state. He begged Yankel to come out with him during the normal Saturday-night crawls around the neighborhood pubs, but Yankel refused all offers. “Listen, old man,” Karol began one of his talks over the dinner table, where they both sat before a microwaved turkey and mashed potato dinner, “I feel it’s only right to wise you up a little bit . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “The worst person in the world you could fall in love with—and I mean the very worst—is a whore.”

  Yankel looked up, insulted more by his friend’s choice of the word “whore” than the suggestion that he had been played for a fool.

  “I wouldn’t say anything if she were an undertaker, or worked in the sewers. But, let’s be honest here, Yankel, don’t you think you’re kidding yourself? Do you really think that a woman who sells her body by the hour is someone to pour your affections on?”

  “Don’t call her a whore,” Yankel replied. “She was kidnapped.”

  Karol considered this a moment before he advised his friend: “You shouldn’t believe everything everybody tells you.”

  Words to live by, certainly, but not words that Yankel could take to heart at that moment. If anything, they set Yankel’s fevered state of mind ablaze with anger; and in an instant, his friend became an adversary. Karol was a man looking to poke holes in his deepest desire. A man who clearly thought his avowed enemies owned the better part of the argument. “You know what, Karol,” Yankel said, dropping his fork loudly on the tin tray in front of him, “I can find Pesha on my own. I don’t need help from you.”

  And with his pride suddenly swollen, ready to burst, Yankel added:

  “I don’t need any help from you at all anymore. In any matters. I’ll be on my way. Tonight.”

  Karol tried to talk his friend out of any rash action, but Yankel was having none of it.

  “I have money now,” Yankel said simply when asked where he would go. “I’ll find my way. You needn’t worry yourself.”

  Karol pleaded with Yankel to be sensible, following him as he went to the drawer he had been allocated, and began stuffing socks, T-shirts, and underwear into the white plastic garbage bags Karol kept stocked in the kitchen. “Where will you go?” Karol asked. “Where will you sleep?”

  “It’s not your concern,” Yankel replied simply.

  The packing was done quickly. As he was leaving, Yankel offered his host his hand—which Karol grasped urgently and used as a last occasion to talk his friend out of leaving.

  “I’m sorry,” Karol said. “I didn’t mean anything about your girlfriend. I’m sure that what she went through was hell. Really, Yankel. My deepest apology. Please don’t go.”

  Yankel nodded, but his pride was stronger than his feelings of fellowship.

  “Thank you,” Yankel said. He opened the door and looked back at his erstwhile friend one last time. “No hard feelings.”

  And without another sound, Yankel was gone.

  18

  Eruption

  It was difficult to ascertain what exactly happened to Pesha in those dusky weeks, but a faint sketch emerged.

  First there was a court date, although little came of it. Pesha arrived in a dark blue cotton dress that a more sophisticated woman probably wouldn’t have worn to a formal hearing. Her lawyer was an older Pole who told the court that his client had no criminal record, was a respectable seamstress living with a friend, and had gotten into the fight when she believed her victim had run off with a gold bracelet her mother had given her.

  “Your honor,” Pesha’s attorney said, “my client doesn’t defend her behavior. She throws herself at the mercy of the court. And, while the fact that my client mistook Ms. Bilas for a thief is certainly no excuse, she simply thought she was recovering her property. Obviously this was a mistake. She’s an immigrant who could not speak Polish well enough to address Ms. Bilas properly.”

  The court had listed Pesha’s name as Teresa Mularz. The prostitute she had assaulted was named Ada Bilas.

  And while Ms. Bilas had told the arresting officers that she expected the full weight of the law to fall on her assailant, the luster came off her rage over the course of several weeks.

  The bailiffs (some of them, anyway) knew Ada Bilas. And when the court clerk scheduled the trial for five weeks hence, one of the bailiffs merely scoffed: “Two hundred zlotys says Ada backs out at the last minute.”

  There was wisdom in this prediction. The week before the initial hearing, Pesha’s lawyer visited Ada Bilas at her Srodmiescie address, and after he departed Ms. Bilas called the prosecutor’s office and said that she was no longer certain that she wished to lodge a complaint.

  “From what I understand,” Pesha’s lawyer continued, “the complainant doesn’t even hold a grudge anymore and accepts that this was all a misunderstanding.”

  The judge looked up from his papers at both Pesha and Ada Bilas, sitting two rows behind her, as if he were trying to piece together the real story behind their brawl.

  “Where is your client from?” the judge finally asked Pesha’s lawyer.

  “Kazakhstan.”

  “They don’t teach people to get a cop when they think someone’s been pilfering their jewelry in Kazakhstan?”

  “I’m sure they do, your honor,” Pesha’s attorney replied. “From what I understand she’s from a very rural town. But, of course, you’re right. Even someone from there knows you don’t take the law into your own hands. There are no excuses. She’s very sorry.”

  Again, the judge shuffled through his papers. Documentation (forged documentation, but realistic enough to deceive a careful bureaucrat) was provided stating Pesha’s alias and the village in Kazakhstan from where she supposedly hailed. A note from the bailiff’s office attested to the fact that she had no previous criminal record in Poland.

  The prosecutor was asked if, indeed, the complainant had withdrawn the charges. “Yes,” the prosecutor replied.

  “Do you wish to proceed with the case?”

  “No, your honor.”

  The judge took another moment to look over the documents in front of him and then—sensing something amiss—asked a question that caught Pesha’s otherwise steely defender off guard.

  “Why does the defendant have a Polish name if she’s from Kazakhstan?”

  The defense
lawyer turned to Pesha for a long moment, hoping, perhaps, for some assistance from his heretofore mute client before deciding to consult a folder on the table in front of him instead.

  “I believe her father was from Poland,” the attorney finally replied, without looking up at the judge. “Which is why she came back here.”

  It certainly sounded suspicious, but there were other cases to get to that day. And while this judge (himself a former prosecutor) could no doubt strip away more inventions and unplanned contradictions, curiosity has its limits.

  So that was that. Pesha was returned to her freedom, at least in the eyes of the law. She arrived back at the cathouse with no further impediments from the court other than a promise to check in with a kurator* once a month for the next six months.

  Back at the cathouse the other girls eagerly anticipated her return—but then, they had sought out news of Pesha and her travails ever since the incident at the market took place.

  Not that they had changed their opinion of her; they all thought that Pesha was haughty, and haughtiness was one of the higher sins in their line of work. But there is no question that they each shared a certain shameful pleasure in seeing a snobbish woman get her comeuppance. The idea that Pesha—who never drank, who never took drugs (not even a puff of pot), who never complained and never even spoke to any of them—was brought low by a savage outburst of violence was too rich not to be thoroughly enjoyed.

  “How’s your case going?” they would ask malevolently, even though Pesha never knew enough Polish to answer. (Besides, she didn’t need to. The expression on her face said it all.)

  The girls had also more or less figured out the original source of Pesha’s misery. Pesha had spent the past few weeks in the run-up to her court date trailed by the nimbus of grief that every woman can recognize. She would break into tears at unemotional moments of the day. She would stare at a coffeehouse menu that she kept in her bedside table, as if it were a sacred totem of her past. (“Probably something she saved from one of their dates,” one of the girls correctly surmised.) She looked more revolted than usual by the cadre of johns who shared her bed.