by Max Gross
The two of them shared a pioneering willingness to fling themselves into the unknown. Yankel—the bastard, the scorned, the orphaned, the crazy—had marched uncomplainingly to Smolskie when the wise men of Kreskol asked him to, and talked his way into journeying to Warsaw when he saw the opportunity appear before him. His willingness to take risks could have overwhelmed many women with a romantic sensibility. Pesha apparently possessed such a sensibility.
Without another word, Pesha threw her arms around Yankel’s neck and kissed him. She quickly scrambled out of the bed and began putting her clothes on. Pesha wiped away her tears and was smiling now.
If only I could report that they made their escape as planned . . .
It would have been a happy ending to this otherwise odd tale. But long ago, the creator of the universe—blessed be his sacred name—declined to write a happy fate for Pesha and Yankel in the book of life. As Yankel was putting his false nose back on, the door burst open. The monstrous Dobrogost—the same guard whom Yankel had planned on doing battle with on more favorable terms—was standing in the doorway, snarling with rage. Curled up along his left hand was a metal chain. In his right hand was a crowbar.
Standing behind Dobrogost was Kasia, arms folded over her breast, a look of seething contempt on her face.
Lord only knows what made Kasia stop by Room 4 and listen a few minutes earlier. She did this, now and then, with troublesome johns. Or troublesome girls. And when she heard the low murmuring of Yankel and Pesha’s conspiracy—and none of the thumps or grunts she expected—she looked through the keyhole and was stunned to find the troublesome boyfriend beneath the hat and mustache she had greeted a few minutes earlier. She didn’t even need to hear the details of their plans to fetch Dobrogost immediately.
The chain came swinging at Yankel’s face first, and a couple of back teeth were knocked out of his jaw.
It took Yankel so much by surprise that he didn’t have the wherewithal to defend himself when the crowbar landed on his chest, breaking three ribs. These blows landed with the same surprise that Yankel had planned for Dobrogost; the winner of this contest was chosen the moment the fight started. But the punishment continued, unabated.
Yankel, splayed out on the floor, was kicked in the gut. He was kicked in the groin. He was kicked in the face and his fake nose flopped over onto his cheek. (His actual nose behaved similarly.) And with a kind of murderous frenzy, Yankel’s adversary brought the crowbar down on his arm and his chest, again and again, until Yankel passed out. When Pesha tried to put herself between Yankel and Dobrogost she was shoved aside, so that Dobrogost could finish his evil work.
As Yankel lay on the floor, the girls of the house—in various states of undress—and three men (one of whom was fully naked) assembled outside the room, and tried to get a glimpse of the carnage. It was so dramatic that one girl who got close shuddered in disgust and strode back to her own room.
When Dobrogost finished the bulk of his torture, he dropped the crowbar and the chain to his side and got on his phone.
“Ling,” Kasia called, and the Chinese woman appeared. “Take Teresa upstairs and don’t take your eyes off her until I get back.”
Forcefully, Ling grabbed Pesha, who was in such a state of shock and disbelief that she couldn’t even scream.
“Nothing to see here,” Kasia said to the other girls. “Go back to business.”
Slowly, as if they were unsure of what they should do, the crowd disassembled.
“Let’s get him to the back door,” Kasia told her henchman.
Yankel’s half-dead body was rolled onto a sheet that slowly turned red with blood as he was dragged through the halls of the cathouse until arriving at the back door. There, Dobrogost and Kasia waited.
After a few minutes, Dobrogost’s cousin Andrzej pulled up behind the building with his van.
Kasia played lookout. When she was certain that the streets were empty, she gave Dobrogost a signal and he hoisted Yankel into the back.
They drove for less than an hour until they were outside the city and away from the highway. When they reached an empty spot along an untrafficked country road, Andrzej pulled over to the side. Yankel was hauled out of the back.
Calmly, Kasia told Dobrogost to retrieve their captive’s wallet. The wallet had a couple of hundred zlotys in cash, no credit cards, and no driver’s license. “Wake him up,” Kasia demanded. Dobrogost did it with two slaps across the face.
“What’s your name?” Kasia asked.
But Yankel was too battered to speak.
“Tell her your name, or else,” Dobrogost growled.
“Yankel Lewinkopf.”
The whispered name meant nothing, as Kasia stared at her victim, wordlessly.
“This is not your first warning,” Kasia finally pronounced. “This is your last. There are no more warnings after today. There is only punishment in the future.”
Yankel said nothing.
“And if you think you’re tough, let me tell you something else: the punishments won’t be yours. They’ll be hers.”
Yankel stirred, slightly.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, young man?” Kasia asked in a voice that was so temperate and untroubled that it sent a quiver down Yankel’s spine. “If I see you again, I won’t hurt you. I’ll hurt her. Believe me, I can make her suffer in ways that you wouldn’t want to picture. Do you understand?”
Yankel nodded.
“I’m not too worried about you,” Kasia continued. “Teresa isn’t going to stay at that house anymore. That’s another thing I’ll make sure of. I have many connections, young man. She will go somewhere far away. And I will make damn sure she never sees you ever again.”
Yankel closed his eyes.
“Do you understand that?” Kasia asked again. “Do you realize that you will never see her again? Not ever?”
Yankel didn’t answer. And for a moment, Kasia considered demanding the final humiliation of making him acknowledge this sad truth, but she continued to stare at him, intently. As if she were trying to place him. And after a moment, her eyes widened.
“I remember you,” Kasia said with a smile. “Karol Bugaj brought you around.”
Kasia’s two henchmen shared a somewhat confused look, as if they weren’t quite sure what their boss was driving at.
“Oh, I know Karol. I know what he does, and I know where he lives,” Kasia said. “That’s something else to think about. We’ll be sure to check in from time to time. We won’t forget about you anytime soon—Yankel Lewinkopf. That much I promise. Now, my advice to you would be to get yourself to a hospital.”
And with that, she slammed the van doors closed, and the vehicle drove away, leaving Yankel to bleed on the side of the road.
Some of this came out during the hearings about Kreskol. Yankel told the Sejm that he had been assaulted two years earlier, and went through a long and painful recovery, which was why he had limped into the hearing room, and why he couldn’t fully raise his right arm anymore. He also said that this had made his career as a baker a daily exercise in pain and suffering. (After the incident described, he took a job in a Krakow bakery. He cobbled together his meager savings for a bus ticket and rented a room in the Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter, which was now largely empty of Jews.) But, by and large, the investigators had little interest in Yankel’s health or well-being. They seemed a lot more interested in the fact that he was getting freebies and preferential treatment when he was a patient at Our Lady of Mercy and that he had seemingly mastered the particulars of the Polish language so quickly.
“You don’t speak in much of an accent,” said Henryk Szymanski, who framed his questions with the sharpest suggestions.
“Thank you.”
“I don’t mean that as a compliment,” Szymanski spat. “What I mean is that’s very suspicious. How did you learn to speak Polish so well if you’d spent your whole life speaking Yiddish?”
Yankel shrugged, not appearing to take his interrogato
r very seriously.
“What else could I do? Nobody speaks Yiddish in Krakow or Warsaw.”
A reasonable-enough response, one would suppose. But it caused Szymanski to go down yet another path.
“How did you get to Warsaw, anyway? I mean the second time you left Kreskol?”
Yankel looked slightly embarrassed by the truth.
“I stowed away in the press helicopter.”
“Excuse me,” said another member of the Sejm, “but how did that happen? Didn’t anybody notice you?”
“I suppose not.”
“How convenient,” Szymanski spluttered.
Szymanski’s modus operandi throughout the hearing was to poke and jab at the rocky, uneven realities of Yankel’s story. He pointed out Yankel’s many instances of luck: from getting a ride with the gypsies, to winding up in the hospital where the doctors were ready to believe his crazy story. And the words “How convenient” were the way Szymanski gave voice to his skepticism.
Next, Yankel was asked how a stranger to Warsaw—someone who had never been to the town before, never paid taxes, and never had any work experience—could have gotten a job and roof over his head so quickly.
Yankel winced, slightly, at this question.
“I got help from a friend.”
One of Szymanski’s eyebrows shot up.
“A friend?” Szymanski repeated. “How could you have friends if you had never left Kreskol before?”
“Somebody I had just met.”
“You just met them?” Szymanski repeated incredulously. “When?”
“That day. The same day I left Kreskol.”
Szymanski stared at Yankel.
“Was this someone you met at the hospital?”
“No.”
“Who was it? What was this person’s name?”
Yankel remembered the promise he had made to Karol years earlier: if anyone asked, he would not mention Karol’s name. It was a promise made on the fly, and it was made before they had become good friends. (And, just to dispel any doubts, no, they had still not spoken since the day Yankel stormed out of Karol’s apartment.)
Moreover, who could say if Karol still remembered having elicited the pledge in the first place? Even in his unsophisticated, rube-like state, Yankel realized that the promise had been extracted to keep Karol’s colleague, Mariusz Burak, at bay—but could Karol really care now? Was there anything Burak could do to damage Karol?
Still, Yankel was not one to abandon a vow lightly. “Just a friend,” Yankel replied. “I’d rather not say his name.”
Szymanski looked as pleased a kitten who had just spotted a mouse.
“I’m afraid that’s not up to you, Mr. Lewinkopf,” Szymanski responded. “You’re obliged to answer our questions.”
“Yes, but I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone his name.”
Szymanski was pleased.
“How convenient.”
I do not wish to mislead anyone as to the importance of these hearings; they were a relatively low-grade affair—at least as far as national consequences were concerned. Some members of the Sejm (notably Szymanski) wanted to remove the subsidies that had been promised to Kreskol. Others did not. Life would undoubtedly go on whether this effort was successful or not.
It was the media attention that these hearings garnered—which reached previously unrealized heights after Dr. Krol’s testimony—that was the truly remarkable thing.
Even in Kreskol we became aware that we were again an obsession for our fellow countrymen—more so than ever before, even if we weren’t getting the same number of tourists. The only visitors now were reporters, eager to learn our take on how things were unfolding.
“Are you worried?” they asked.
The answer varied depending on whom they ran into.
The disparate members of the Sejm had apparently not assigned much importance to the details as Yankel was reciting his testimony, but the reporters in attendance knew a racy story when they heard one. With smutty delight, the Lindauer divorce, the unknown catalyst in Kreskol’s reemergence, was splashed across the pages of the news. “LUST, BETRAYAL, DIVORCE IN ‘PIOUS’ KRESKOL LED TO REDISCOVERY,” read one of the headlines. There were many others of a similar disposition. (Yankel tactfully left out the parts about Pesha’s current profession in his testimony.)
There were no photographs of either member of the divorce party; they were merely described by Yankel. She, the most beautiful woman that had ever bestrode the earth: dark brown hair, eyes of china blue (as one reporter put it); a form and figure that Helen of Troy would find enviable (another reporter’s embroidery).
He was a bulky, muscular, putrid-smelling, fire-breathing brute. (I had never found Ishmael Lindauer to be either bulky or muscular, but this was what appeared in the papers.)
And in the wake of these headlines and the interest in the story, every reporter assigned did their best to find some way of tracking down the mysterious Pesha and the wild Ishmael—even though Yankel claimed (truthfully) not to have the slightest idea where either of them was. One of the reporters on the beat was Mariusz Burak, who had been with Karol on the day they had both helped Yankel escape from Kreskol.
It didn’t take much for Burak (who was watching the proceedings from the press gallery) to figure out which “friend” Yankel had been talking about, and where he had stayed.
As Burak and Yankel had left things several years earlier, Yankel would check in with Burak when he got settled. After a month, having heard nothing from Yankel, Burak came to the conclusion that he had been played for a sucker. He even asked Karol whether he had heard from Yankel or knew anything about where the young Jew had wound up.
Karol merely shrugged at the time.
But by then the idea of doing a report on how Yankel had adjusted to life in the big city seemed a little stale. Mariusz Burak always had a number of irons in the fire at any one time—he proceeded to forget about Yankel. That is, until Yankel resurfaced in this hearing.
“You were less than truthful with me,” Burak said to Karol with a chiding lilt in his voice the next day in the office.
Of course, Karol knew what his colleague was getting at. But given the circumstances, he also felt obligated to make things as difficult as possible for Burak.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Cut the shit,” Burak said. “You know I’m talking about Yankel Lewinkopf. Look, before you start playing all innocent, let me tell you right off the bat: I’m not mad. Well, I’m not too mad. I don’t give a fuck about Lewinkopf. Everybody in the media has his story, so I guess that ship has sailed. What I care about is finding Pesha Lindauer. If you help me out there I wouldn’t see any reason to tell the higher-ups that you were holding out on us. Do you know anything about her?”
Karol didn’t owe Pesha Lindauer anything. He had never met her. And if he thought about her at all, he believed that she was trouble. She had turned his otherwise sensible, innocent friend into a crazy person. Whatever spell she cast over Yankel had—in Karol’s eyes—been done malevolently; she was a predator who discovered vulnerable prey.
I should probably add that after Yankel walked out of Karol’s apartment, Karol was for the first few weeks enraged at the mention of Yankel’s name. He made a clean breast of the whole situation to his girlfriend, Tanya, one night after taking her out to dinner and sounded like a man who had been scorned by a lover rather than a friend.
“Such stupid pride these young guys have,” Karol sighed, looking gloomily into a glass of Merlot. “And such a lack of gratitude. He moved out of my apartment as coldly as if he were saying goodbye to a motel room.”
“Maybe because he’s Jewish he thinks he’s got to prove that he’s got honor.”
“That’s not it,” Karol said. “All young people have pride. Doesn’t matter if they’re Jewish or not.”
Karol didn’t take his eyes off his wine and remained silent for a while.
“This is stupid,” he
finally said. “What do I care about that little punk, right? Here one minute, gone the next. I’ve got more important shit to worry about.”
Tanya nodded, and that was the last Karol would speak of Yankel for a few months. But weird things started happening in Karol’s mind.
He had a dream in which he was being circumcised on a hospital bed by a rabbi in a long black beard. “I’ll do it for Yankel,” he uttered in the bizarre hallucination. He had several other dreams in which Yankel would fleetingly make an appearance and then vanish behind a corner or in a cloud of vapor. When the latest flare-up between the Israelis and the Palestinians appeared in the news, Karol instinctively took the Israeli side, despite the fact that he had never thought seriously about the conflict before, and Yankel certainly had never expressed an opinion.
After a few weeks, he went by the bakery where he had gotten his friend a job and asked if Yankel was in the back. But the owner had no news of Yankel other than that one day he just stopped coming in—not even to pick up his last week’s salary. “That was pretty annoying,” the owner said to Karol. “I thought you said he was a good kid.”
“He is.”
“Well, he could have given me some notice. I had to call Lech in on his day off.”
And then early one Sunday morning while getting into his car to go to the grocery store he instead took a turn onto the highway and drove four hours out of town in the direction of Kreskol.
This was shortly after the road into Kreskol had opened, and the villagers were still excited to see outsiders like him.
Karol bought a basket of raspberries and a scarf in the marketplace, and asked any passerby if they knew Yankel. Only one person understood him.
“Yankel Lewinkopf? Sure, everyone knows Yankel.”
“Have you seen him?” Karol asked, hopefully. “Is he in town?”