by Max Gross
They had even guessed which man was causing all this desolation. It was the slight, lean fellow who had arrived at the cathouse a few months earlier. And in that brief period after Pesha was arrested but before her court date, he had been spotted slowly ambling past the house, peering into the windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of something or someone inside.
These theories were cemented when Kasia went around the house and asked each of the girls if Teresa had had any visitors. Or any boyfriends they knew about.
“Why?” one of the girls asked.
“That’s for me to know,” Kasia responded. “I just need to know who she’s been seeing on the sly.”
One of the older girls—a woman named Roza—reported that she had seen Teresa at a coffeehouse with a young man.
“What did he look like?”
Roza pondered this for a moment.
“I’m not sure.”
“Young guy?” Kasia asked. “Very thin? Dark hair? Not too tall? Seemed a bit shy?”
“Perhaps.”
A day later, Kasia took the unusual step of posting a guard outside the cathouse. Not that security details were unheard of in their profession, but when the girls found the muscular Dobrogost and his cousin Andrzej standing outside their house in shifts, they naturally asked Kasia what the rumpus was about.
“Don’t worry.”
“Some psycho that should concern us?”
“You should not be worried,” Kasia said—which suggested that somebody else in the house had reason to be concerned. The only person suspicion fell upon was Teresa, which only delighted the girls more. Not only was Saint Teresa heartbroken, but the man she was mooning over was apparently a psychopath.
Granted, this didn’t quite make sense. If a maniac was lusting for Teresa’s blood, why should she lust over the maniac’s body in return? But none of the girls stopped to fully think it through. The more heartbreaking implication never occurred to them: namely, that this was an instance of two lovers being kept apart by the mistress of their house.
Still, life went on. The guards stayed put in front of the cathouse for the time being. The girls went about their business. And after a while, they remembered why they hated being in Teresa’s company: She was so damned dull. Beautiful, certainly, but dull. And stupid—couldn’t speak a word of Polish. Moreover, they resented her popularity. If a john was shown four or five girls to pick from, he invariably chose Teresa. Some johns began asking for her by name before they had even time to take off their coats.
And while one can delight in an enemy’s misery in short volleys, over time misery has a way of seeping into one’s own mood and altering it. Soon, nobody wanted anything to do with Pesha again.
Pesha stopped eating with the girls at breakfast. In fact, she stopped eating all the food prepared by Luba, the old whore who was Kasia’s second in command. She ate only fruits and vegetables—refusing to even touch a slice of toast.
“You’re going to get too skinny,” Luba told her after a week. “That’s almost as bad as getting fat. The johns don’t trust skinny—especially not these days. They think you got the AIDS.”
After weeks of brooding, agonized silence, a trembling Pesha approached Kasia and told her (in Yiddish, which the crone only half comprehended) that she didn’t intend to work anymore from Friday night to Saturday night, ever again. “The Jews of ancient times said that they’d rather be slaughtered than work on shabbos, and I don’t intend to, either.
“If you don’t like it,” Pesha added with a flourish, “you can kiss my you-know-what.”
Strong words. Strong enough that Kasia realized that she was being challenged. But while Kasia was a wicked woman, she had mastered the finer details of a successful enslavement. She knew how to squelch a rebellion before it got out of hand and when it was not worth the trouble.
Pesha was largely unrebellious. She had gone along with everything forced on her, and—save for this recent episode involving Yankel—wasn’t nearly as problematic as a few other girls Kasia could name. Kasia didn’t see how leaving the girl alone for twenty-four hours per week would be a great strain on her bottom line.
“Fine.”
“And I want to go to synagogue,” Pesha added. “You take me to the nearest one on Friday.”
The second request was more problematic. Kasia recognized just how great an advantage it was that her hostage spoke no Polish. (It took her a week or two before she realized that Pesha’s guttural German was Yiddish, and Kasia didn’t believe it at first. She was under the impression nobody spoke Yiddish anymore.) She had girls who spoke Bulgarian and Ukrainian and Romanian over the years—they were likewise kept in line by the fact that they couldn’t get around if they managed to escape.
The idea of putting Pesha in a synagogue with other Jews seemed like the only way Pesha could possibly break free from Kasia’s grip. That, and this boyfriend that she was suddenly in love with. Neither one could be tolerated.
“I’m sorry dear,” Kasia said—she always spoke to Pesha in endearments, even when she was being cruel. “There will be no trips to synagogue.”
Some observers might have guessed that Pesha was testing the limits imposed on her; seeing how far she could push her mistress before she was pushed back. They would also note that a revival of piety was somewhat ludicrous given her recent history of unwedded carnal activity.
But if Pesha was insincere she certainly acted with newfound religious devotion. When Luba harangued her to eat more she finally barked: “Kosher!” And when a kosher steak was finally produced, she said to Kasia, “It must be cooked separate. Served on separate plates.” She stayed in her room for days on end, merely sat on her bed, murmuring softly the Aramaic prayers she still remembered, and weeping as if she were one of the ancient Israelites banished to the banks of Babylon.
Some of the Friday-night johns felt compelled to say something when they heard her sobbing through the wall. “What’s all that wailing and moaning about?” one of them asked. “You got some creep in there flogging the girls?”
It drove Pesha crazy that she picked up so little Polish.
When anybody asked her a question, she stared. She squinted. She pursed her lips and furrowed her brow. It didn’t do a lick of good. She had no ear for languages, and for a long time this depressed her almost as much as the other harrowing facts of her life.
She could only follow Kasia’s German if she was very careful; Kasia was a spirited cat trotting along a thin, spindly beam—but Pesha eventually caught up. Not so with Polish. Wading through the babel of voices that came out of the mouths of the johns, her fellow whores, and the people on the street was impossible. When she discerned one of the handful of words that she knew—“lazienka,”* for instance—her ears would perk up, but the term would rapidly be lost with all the others. Somebody had mentioned the lazienka . . . but what? Did they need to use the lazienka? Was there a wait for the lazienka? Had the toaleta** in the lazienka overflowed?
She felt very much like a baby. There was so little she could say. So little she controlled. So much discomfort and frustration. Nothing she understood about what the people around her were doing. Everything depended on the whims and kindness of others, and none of the girls ever seemed in the mood to dole out kindness. As such, she constantly felt a desire to throw a wailing, tear-streaked tantrum. But she resisted because the last thing she was willing to do was let the other girls see her upset.
Just as Pesha was sized up and despised by the other girls for her reticence and perceived haughtiness (and the laughable contention that she was boring), she made her own estimation and decided that her fellow prostitutes were rowdy, frivolous, and ugly.
There was a girl who bleached her raven-black hair the color of ripe corn, and had to redye it every week as the roots grew in. She looked ridiculous. She perfumed herself in a revolting floral fragrance. And she kept the music she played in her room at head-splitting volume.
There was another girl whose chest had been
surgically enlarged to such proportions that she looked like a hunchback whose head was screwed on backwards. But the girl believed that she was a great beauty, and traipsed around the cathouse with the countenance of nobility. She treated the other girls with modest upper endowments—Pesha especially—as serfs. (Pesha couldn’t fathom who would find this woman’s enormous mounds of flesh attractive—but after her many months in Warsaw she learned that there wasn’t much in the world that didn’t appeal to one male hunger or another.)
There was a girl who was only four and a half feet tall, whose smallness distorted her soft blond hair, green eyes, and healthy bust to make her eerily childlike. Her squat stature couldn’t help but remind Pesha of Kasia. Her high, infantile voice drove Pesha apoplectic.
There was the gaunt girl named Zofia who kept herself locked in the bathroom for hours doing god-knows-what and who continued to waste away in the preceding months until she looked as bony as a skeleton. Early in her tenure at the cathouse, Pesha accidentally opened a bathroom door and witnessed Zofia injecting a needle into her left arm—a display that shocked Pesha, even if she didn’t truly understand what the girl was up to. But Zofia never forgave Pesha for the judgment implicit in her surprise. Thereafter, when the girl saw Pesha she would give her the evil eye. One time, as they were crossing each other in the hallway, Zofia violently slammed Pesha against the wall, looked her straight in the eye, and hissed: “Zyd!”
It was the first time anyone in the cathouse mentioned that Pesha was Jewish—at least to her. And, up until that very moment, it was not something that Pesha was sure the other girls knew. At least not all of them. The other girls wore crosses, and would disappear for a few hours on Sunday mornings, presumably to attend mass. Perhaps it had been noted that Pesha did not join them. Or maybe someone heard Pesha’s weeping prayers from behind her closed door and deduced that what she was saying was Aramaic. Or, for all Pesha knew, they looked at the architecture of her face and recognized something distinct—from an ancient and despised people. Regardless, this nasty, pallid girl decided this fact could be used in the indictment against her. “Who knows,” it occurred to Pesha, “maybe that’s the reason they all hate me.”
But there was little comfort in reaching this diagnosis, only a greater feeling of solitude.
Her treatment began to remind her of the days when she was still married, and she and Ishmael would sit together in their little hovel in abject silence and mutual disgust. Neither had anything to say to the other. The only thing they could do was pretend that they were alone.
Not that she was very surprised that it had come to that with Ishmael. Shortly before the wedding she told her father and her sisters that Ishmael was all wrong for her. She tried to be as matter-of-fact as possible. “Listen, Papa,” she began, “I know I’ve been fussy. Apparently, a lot of people said this—and they were right. But aside from the first date, there’s been nothing I liked about Ishmael Lindauer. He might be handsome and he might not be too annoying. Fine. But what else is there? If he’s just a big, dumb chair who sits in the corner all day, I’m going to go crazy.”
Her father and sisters told her this was just a case of cold feet and that it was too late to cancel all the plans.
“Men and women are all essentially the same,” said Hadassah. “One is as good as another. Dig a little into this man and you’ll find every quality that you desire. You might just have to coax it out.”
As if Hadassah knew squat about it—or about anything. She wasn’t even married. It was, perhaps, the single dumbest piece of wisdom Pesha received.
Still, she tried her best to make believe her younger sister was right. She remembered that first meeting when Ishmael made her laugh—and none of her other suitors had been able to do that. That was something.
But she laughed only once. Just once. And not since. Was that the reed on which she was to hang the rest of her future? Had she really chosen to overlook the fact that the man was downright gloomy? (As a number of funny people are.) When the marriage contract was signed and the two spent several months in pained, uncomfortable silence, she wondered if this was simply the way young husbands treated their wives.
“How often does Yoshke talk to you?” Pesha decided to ask her older sister, Ruth.
Ruth looked at Pesha quizzically.
“What do you mean?”
Pesha didn’t really need to elaborate; the puzzlement on her sister’s face said enough. No, it was not normal for two married people to sit in their home with nothing to say. You couldn’t shut her sainted mother up for all the borscht in Russia. (God rest her soul.) And for a moment Pesha was embarrassed that it took her a few months to figure this out. She felt the first churning, nauseating sensation that she was trapped.
Still, she tried to make the best of it. She asked her husband about his day. She asked about his brothers. She asked about his father. She asked about the customers at the store. She asked how he liked his gefilte fish. She asked his opinion of the tablecloth she had purchased. She asked about the latest gossip concerning Widow Tischler. She asked about the weather.
“It was fine.”
“They’re fine.”
“He’s fine.”
“They were fine.”
“This way is fine.”
“It’s fine.”
“I haven’t heard anything.”
“It’s fine.”
It was as if this lousy shmendrick* wasn’t even trying! After each curt, stiff answer, he didn’t think to ask anything in return. Not about the house. Not about her father. Not about her sisters. Not about her earrings. Not about the fact that the gefilte fish was particularly free of bones that evening. “What is wrong with the man?” Pesha asked herself. She wondered if her husband had noodles in his head in lieu of brains.
It went on like this for weeks with Pesha trying to tease something interesting out of Ishmael, and Ishmael refusing to play along:
“I heard Freidel Schwartz was sweet on your brother . . .”; “Kalmen Jacobs just raised the price of meat—it’s a fortune!”; “They’re never going to fix the roof of the women’s bathhouse . . .”; “Have you seen Zlata Feldman—she’s grown as fat as a horse!”
One night this culminated in a reprimand from her husband that was sharper and more wounding than Pesha had been prepared for.
“Don’t you ever shut up?”
A slap across her face wouldn’t have jolted her as much.
It is possible that these brusque, unfriendly words could have been spoken in jest. (They were not.) It is also possible that they slipped out in an unguarded moment of honesty and were at least a tactical error. Cruel thoughts can tramp through even the most saintly mind—but the good husbands are the ones who don’t let them linger. However, the look in Ishmael’s eyes bespoke honest-to-goodness opprobrium and annoyance. He meant precisely what he said, and he didn’t care if he damaged Pesha’s feelings.
Pesha’s face turned bright red and she nervously ran her hands over her shoulders, as if to shield herself from further missiles. However, now that he had made this rebuke, Pesha’s laconic husband had nothing more to add. He merely stood up and began undressing for bed.
Instantaneously, humiliation mutated into loathing. Pesha sat quietly in her chair, staring off into an empty corner, as her husband finished his nightly ablutions, turned away from her, and fell into untroubled sleep. And she continued to sit, as hour after hour ticked by, filled with too much rage to undress in front of him, even if he was asleep. She certainly was not about to lie down next to him.
How dare he, she angrily mused to herself. How dare he?! Who did he think he was? What kind of man says bubkes* to his wife for the first three months of marriage and then when he decides to open his mouth he does so with an insult? What was she interrupting that was so damn important that he needed to deliberately go out of his way to bully and chasten her?
Of course, millions of husbands have accused their wives of blabbermouthism without permanently severin
g the marital bond. But this was early enough into their life together that Pesha felt certain underlying assumptions needed to be redrawn—and going to the trouble of amending a first impression makes the adjuster doubly resentful, as one of the sages noted. (I forget which one.) It wasn’t that she didn’t like her husband after that evening. She despised him. It wasn’t that some of her other suitors were cast in a more sympathetic light—all of them were. She thought she was crazy to reject any of them in favor of the mean, boorish creature she wound up with. How did such a thing happen?
She didn’t sleep next to Ishmael the next night. Or the night after. She decided on that first smoldering evening never to touch him again without meaningful concessions and contrition. (However, Pesha was an astute enough reader of character to know that would never happen.)
And while one couldn’t begin to fathom Ishmael Lindauer’s peculiar mind, he, too, sensed that something had changed between him and his wife.
Dinner would be set out for him when he got home, but Pesha had already eaten and refused to share her company with him. She sat in the rocking chair and fiddled with her knitting. The meals she served were much less inviting than previous ones. The carrots were undercooked and hard; the fish was mealy; the chicken was dry and flavorless.
Her duties as a seamstress were likewise treated in a perfunctory, uncaring way.
“Could you patch my trousers?” he asked.
“Leave it on my sewing pile.”
That was the end of the interaction. He would find the trousers in his wardrobe a week or so later, without comment. The effort that she put into them was pathetic.
She busied herself with housework over the course of the evening and usually fell asleep in her rocking chair. She curled up in bed only after he had left for the day.
And even though mutual hatred between man and woman does not always preclude physical intimacy (it is, I’ve heard, sometimes inflamed by it), Pesha was having none of it. She would accept not so much as a handshake from her husband. After a few weeks Ishmael’s patience ran out.