by Max Gross
“No,” the villager replied. “He left a long time ago.”
Karol (much to his own surprise) could scarcely contain his disappointment; he found himself unable to speak lest he begin sobbing.
Karol went to the cathouse where he had taken Yankel, just on the off chance that Yankel had returned. Besides, maybe he had gotten the object of his affections out of there. There might be some scrap of information to go on. But Kasia wasn’t there when Karol stopped by—only Ling, keeping an eye on the merchandise like a vigilant shopkeeper. When Karol asked if there was a girl working there named Pesha, Ling seemed genuinely confused. “Who?”
And that was the last Karol spoke of Yankel until the hearing. On occasion, he would spend a few miserable hours thinking about his friend, but he would do his best to turn to other matters. And, with time, he barely thought of Yankel at all.
That is, until one day his baker said to him when he went in to get his morning rolls: “Hey, Karol, isn’t that Yankee in the news? Isn’t he the boy from Kreskol?”
Karol turned ashen, but the baker didn’t seem to notice.
“Wasn’t he from Azerbaijan?” the baker asked.
“Yeah,” Karol stammered. “That’s where he said he was from.”
The baker looked at Karol somewhat perplexed. He didn’t recall their conversation a few years ago word-for-word, but he remembered something about Yankee being a relative of Karol’s. Or something along those lines. But Karol looked so stunned that the baker didn’t feel much like dwelling on the modest deception.
“You haven’t been following?” the baker asked.
“No, I hadn’t noticed.”
Karol’s interest in news was almost exclusively what his assignment editor and the reporters told him to shoot. But that evening he watched the coverage of Kreskol and the hearing, and even read some of the newspaper stories about it.
It was a day later that Burak cornered him in the breakroom.
“What do you say?” Burak asked. “Did Lewinkopf tell you anything that can help us find this Pesha everybody’s been looking for?”
“Yes, he found her,” Karol said.
Burak’s eyes widened.
“He found her?” Burak repeated. And with that reaction, Karol almost instantly regretted what he had just said. It was as if he had sold out his friend. He fervently wished he could take it back.
“Where?” Burak said. “Where is she now?”
“All I know,” said Karol, “is that she was a working girl, if you know what I mean. I don’t know where.”
“A prostitute!” Burak exclaimed. “This gets better and better! What did he say, exactly? He didn’t mention where he found her? A neighborhood? Anything?”
Karol decided that was as helpful as he would be. “No, he didn’t say anything else.” But the damage had been done. Say what you will about Mariusz Burak, he was a dogged reporter and within minutes he was on the line with his sources on the police force. He was looking for a Yiddish-speaking prostitute who had gotten into the racket about three and a half or four years earlier. Brown hair, blue eyes, not too tall. (As per the testimony Yankel had given.) Answers to the name Pesha. Anybody like that fit any descriptions?
“Does she go by any aliases?” one of the bailiffs asked.
“Possibly,” Burak replied. “Come to think of it, almost certainly. They all use aliases, don’t they? But I don’t know for sure.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Burak skipped the hearing that day; he called all his friends in the police department, and when that didn’t come up with anything fruitful, he tried a few women’s health clinics. Then he tried a friend in the prosecutor’s office. Then a couple of kurators he knew. Finally, Burak called a friend who was a bit of a freak, and visited those houses all the time, collecting stories of debauchery and depravity. This friend had the added benefit of being half-Israeli, who spoke a reasonable amount of Yiddish.
“Daniel,” Burak said to his friend, “have you ever met a prostitute who spoke Yiddish? Goes by the name of Pesha?”
“Yiddish-speaking prostitute?” Burak’s friend chortled. “I’ve met two!”
“Oh?”
“One was in Amsterdam. And she wore a big Jewish star—but that was a long time ago. Not the first Jewish star I ever encountered, but the first Yiddish-speaker. Before we started she said, ‘Du bist a Yid?’”*
Burak laughed.
“She was nice enough, that Amsterdam girl. The other was in Lodz last year—the girl said something to me in Yiddish. And that was all she said; she couldn’t speak Polish. But her name wasn’t Pesha—at least I don’t think it was. It was something Catholic. I think it was something like Maria. Or Teresa.”
20
Unrest
Brother Wiernych was mopping the floors of the day room at Saint Stanislaus, a few miles from Kreskol, when he heard her name coming from the television. “Pesha Lindauer.” He dropped the mop and turned.
One can only guess how much he understood of the reporter, Mariusz Burak, who spoke over the footage of Pesha, or if he understood the crawl that appeared at the bottom of the screen which read, “Devout Kreskol Divorcee Made Career as a Prostitute.”
“The latest twist that TVP Kultura has uncovered today in the saga of Kreskol was that the woman whose disappearance prompted the town’s rediscovery is living today in Lodz as a sex worker . . .”
While the anchor spoke, a helpless, frightened Pesha scurried away from a camera crew that appeared out of thin air and began hurling questions at her. She implicitly understood that the ruckus she had somehow been ensnared in was dangerous and fled into a nondescript house for which she apparently had the key, as the camera crew followed closely on her heels. (Subsequent footage of the house showed a first-floor curtain peeking open for a moment, but whoever was looking out was shrouded in shadow.)
The reporter recounted what was known about the investigations of Kreskol to that point; how questions about Kreskol’s authenticity had been raised and were currently being debated by the Sejm; the slim outline of Pesha’s role in the rediscovery, and how Yankel Lewinkopf had given testimony last week about his cushy life at Our Lady of Mercy Hospital; and, finally, he insinuated a connection between Yankel and Pesha.
There was not much more to the story. It appeared and a few seconds later it was gone. The results of the football match between Poland and Northern Ireland were the next story. But Brother Wiernych looked as dazed as if he had just been hit on the head with a hammer.
He remained perfectly still until one of the monks, Brother Konstanty, asked him if he was all right, and he picked up his mop and immediately went back to work.
But Brother Konstanty later said that he had never seen such a look of intensity on the face of the man previously. Or, come to think of it, on any monk before.
The next morning, Brother Wiernych was gone. A lock had been forced on one of the cabinets and some of the bejeweled artifacts were missing, prompting even a man as trusting and passive as the Abbot of Saint Stanislaus to agree it was time to call the police. But there was little that could be done at that point, except to take down a careful description of the gold plate and scale, the silver medals, the laptop computer, and the Seiko watch that had been filched. As for finding the culprit, the police sounded skeptical.
There were no photographs of the man. No previous addresses or known associates. Nobody even knew his real name.
“It won’t be hard to find a man who’s dumb,” the Abbot said, as the interview wound down.
“I don’t think he’s dumb,” injected Brother Bogomil.
“How do you know that?” the Abbot asked, not waiting for the interviewing officer to speak.
“When we shared a room together he would talk in his sleep.”
“What did he say?” the officer asked.
Brother Bogomil considered this for a moment. “Well, it was a couple of years ago,” he finally said. “I was never sure what he was saying. It
sounded like gibberish.”
The Abbot turned red, feeling foolish for not asking enough questions of the monks to know this critical fact.
“There was one word he kept saying over and over again, though,” Brother Bogomil added. “It didn’t sound like a real word to me but he kept saying it. And one night he woke up nearly screaming it.”
“What was it?” asked the officer.
“‘Pesha.’”
When the story of Pesha appeared in the pages of the Crier, it was as though a great dam burst and every pent-up complaint about the loud construction noise early in the morning, to the rudeness of tourists, to larger questions of economic uncertainty, flooded Kreskol.
A group of mothers spontaneously took to the streets and picketed in front of Rabbi Sokolow’s court. Feiga Lutnick, to whom Rabbi Sokolow had not spoken since she became an avowed Katznelsoner, led the protest.
“We will not stand by and let hussies like Pesha Rosenthal destroy Kreskol’s good name!” she cried to the crowd who had answered her call to arms.
The other mothers cheered.
“No Sodom, no Gomorrah!” Feiga cried.
The other women repeated: “No Sodom, no Gomorrah!”
“Purity for Kreskol!”
“Purity for Kreskol!” came the echo.
“Gentiles out!”
Where Feiga got the idea that gentiles should be banished from our town, nobody could say—or, honestly, what the gentiles had to do with the matter at all. Still, this denoted a level of confidence that Jews had not possessed since Roman times—and the historically educated would note how poorly that ended for the Jews. The other ladies unquestionably repeated the chant without stopping to consider the rowdy, radical sentiments within it.
Rabbi Sokolow watched the demonstration with bemusement. He, too, had read the account of Pesha in the Crier and was suitably scandalized—but also immensely sorry for the girl. A member of his flock had strayed; the fact that she had succumbed to a dishonorable fate was something to be pitied rather than scorned. Desperate people do desperate things, Rabbi Sokolow thought. The girl had almost no choice.
The rest of the town, however, was in no mood to be nearly as sanguine.
This piece of news came when everyone’s livelihood was poised on the knife’s edge and signs of disorder were enough to make anyone lash out. The tourism crisis was in full flower and consumed every waking hour of the day since Zbigniew Berlinsky read his outlandish paper. It made many mild-mannered, forgiving Kreskolites snarl at the smallest digression.
Four houses had been under construction when Berlinsky’s accusations against us appeared in the paper. Within weeks, the four families building these domiciles were seriously overleveraged and at a loss what to do.
The first family to stop work on their house—the Coopermans—tried to sell their half-finished mansion in the Hotel District. (The Hotel District consisted at that moment solely of the Kreskol Grand, but the name was extremely catchy.)
“We’re offering an extremely good deal,” Yetta Cooperman would tell anyone whose attention she could commandeer for several consecutive minutes. “We’ve poured more than forty thousand zlotys into it already; we’re willing to let it go for just twenty-five thousand. There’s nothing wrong with it—when it’s finished it will be beautiful. We just need the cash right now.”
But the chill in Kreskol’s financial future was unmistakable, and spending 25,000 zlotys on top of the tens of thousands more to finish construction was a burden no one wanted to endure. “Sorry, Yetta,” she heard again and again.
She adjusted the price down to 20,000 zlotys and then to 15,000 zlotys. Finally she settled on 12,000 zlotys—a figure so meager her voice would catch every time she said it out loud—but even that was considered too steep for a property still under construction.
Finally, the Coopermans spent the last of their savings ordering heavy-duty tarps from Warsaw and covered the site up to protect it from the elements while they waited out the economic storms.
Yetta Cooperman came to Rabbi Sokolow’s house almost every week to bemoan her fate: “How could I have been so foolish to lay out all our savings like that . . . ?” “How could Berlinsky have concocted such obvious lies . . . ?” “When will the tourists be back—they can’t stay away forever, can they . . . ?” There were many similar laments.
The Rabbi tried to be as sympathetic as possible, and even promised her that if anybody came to him asking about finding a new house he would tell them to go to her immediately. But, he warned, she mustn’t expect a surge of visitors anytime soon. The public buses that came into and went out of town were like ghost ships; the drivers would park the massive, empty vehicles at the appointed bus stop, wait the allotted fifteen minutes, throw away their cigarettes, and drive out of town with nary a soul making the passage either way.
“You’re not interested in buying a new house, are you?” Yetta asked, wiping away a tear.
Sokolow turned red. “It’s not for me.”
“I’d even give you the site for ten thousand zlotys,” Yetta said, and began whimpering again when she realized just how pathetic and desperate she had become. “But just for you. Please don’t tell anybody else I’d go that low.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have that kind of money even if I wanted a new house,” Rabbi Sokolow replied, truthfully.
The Coopermans had engaged several draftsmen and carpenters that they had paid handsomely. They, too, were suddenly out of work and unsure of their financial future. As were the draftsmen who were working on the other three houses around town that were mid-construction. They offered to do fix-ups around town for a song. Suddenly, some of the strongest and most capable men in Kreskol were just sitting around their houses, or helping their wives sell goods in the town square.
The unfortunates all came to Sokolow, begging him for advice. “Maybe you should try to learn a different profession,” the Rabbi suggested a little helplessly, but he didn’t know what else he could say.
Reb Zlotowitz, the head of the alms society, reported that there was very little money in the treasury and a sudden spike in charity cases. Sokolow couldn’t believe his ears.
“But how could the treasury be empty?” Sokolow asked. “You said that we had been getting tons of tzedakah!”*
It was certainly true that when times were good the people of Kreskol had been generous. When times were great, however, some of the wealthier families had cut back, opting to save for a big new house rather than give to the needy. In the wake of this financial calamity the wells of charity ran completely dry.
“I’m not going to lie, Rabbi, we spent a lot of money fixing up the mikvah,” Reb Zlotowitz said of a project embarked on the previous spring to retile the bathhouse. “A lot of money. But so much had been coming in lately I didn’t even think about it at the time. I figured we’d replenish the funds soon enough. The timing really couldn’t have been worse.”
This frightened Rabbi Sokolow more than anything.
“How long will we be able to feed the hungry?” he asked.
Reb Zlotowitz shrugged.
Rabbi Sokolow called an emergency meeting with Rajmund Sikorski, who hadn’t visited the town since his testimony before the Sejm and seemed reluctant to come now. “Can’t we do this over the phone?” Sikorski’s translator asked. (A year ago, the first phone tower was erected in Kreskol and a flip phone was generously provided to Rabbi Sokolow.) Rabbi Sokolow was stunned; Sikorski had never turned down an in-person meeting before.
“I suppose so,” Rabbi Sokolow said.
Sikorski listened patiently as Sokolow sketched out Kreskol’s many new problems and his translator rendered the dilemmas back into Polish.
“Under normal circumstances I’d tell you not to worry,” Sikorski said calmly. “But all the funds—and I mean all the funds, social services as well as the special ones earmarked just for you—have been frozen pending the outcome of the investigation.”
The Rabbi was struck
dumb as he listened to the translation.
“I’d say you should ask some of your rich friends in Israel or America, but I fear your reputation has suffered there, too. If they’re not visiting because they think you’re a fraud, they’re certainly not about to cut you any checks.”
Sokolow didn’t say anything as he considered the implications.
“Why do you sound so devastated?” Sikorski broke in before Rabbi Sokolow had the chance to ask anything else. “You always said you wanted us to leave you alone.”
Even before the question was converted into Yiddish, Rabbi Sokolow could discern the glib pleasure in Sikorski’s voice.
And yes, he had to admit that Sikorski had been right. The Rabbi had seen the town grow prosperous without any of the catastrophes he had feared. There were no conversions. There was no sudden laxness in religious observance. (Aside from a few oddballs who were never truly devout or interested in spiritual matters.) There were no outbreaks of antisemitism, at least until the Berlinsky paper. The only real problem was the schism between the Katznelson and the Sokolow Jews. But even that was no great hardship; the sensible Jews of Kreskol were well rid of those insane Katznelsoners.
As visitors from the Orient and South America had come through Kreskol, even a man as restrained in his habits as Anschel Sokolow had begun to fantasize about someday traveling to China or praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Like anything else in life, he came to realize the changes had both advantages and disadvantages. But the longer he lived the new life, the fewer the disadvantages he saw. Until now.
“Goodbye, Rabbi Sokolow,” the translator said abruptly.
The phone had gone dead before Sokolow said, “Wait!”
The protest was neither the beginning nor the end of the public scorn heaped on Pesha. Pesha was spoken about incessantly. The Lindauers were, as one might expect, in an uproar since the news broke and Batsheva Lindauer (wife of Ishmael’s youngest brother, Shmuel) began openly saying to the other women at the marketplace that it was a scandal that a prostitute like Pesha should have run off to the big city, and that her dear departed brother-in-law (to whom she had never been introduced owing to the fact that she had married Shmuel less than two years ago) was left to the wolves.