The Glatstein Chronicles

by Jacob Glatstein

  It was warm at home. Father was back now. No one even remembered when he had not been there. As she worked on her embroidery, Mother sang an old lullaby, “In dem beys hamikdesh, in a vinkele kheder,” the widow Zion sits in a corner of the ruined Temple, alone. Little brother no longer crawled on all fours but walked and fell down and got a bloody nose. Grandfather stood by the tile stove warming his hands. And there were now other people living downstairs. That was Sheindele, the whore, who blessed the candles every Friday evening, then put them out, and went to meet her soldiers. The little boy must have grown by then, for the older people were careful about what they said in front of him; yet certain words reached his ears and stayed there like cobwebs.

  Sheindele’s daughter, who had red pigtails, enticed him up to the attic and played with him. She spoke Polish. It was dark and suffocatingly hot in the attic, and it was fun when she clapped her hands and sang a song he did not understand. It was ticklish, warm, and dark, like the attic.

  The young man who was looking back took the boy and his aunt and built a courtyard around them. There was a house, and a meadow in the distance. There were aunts and uncles, and there was even a synagogue. Now the boy was no longer suspended somewhere between his father and mother but was surrounded by a host of friends in the yard, and there were many grown-ups, and acrobats who turned somersaults, men who swallowed swords, strong men who held up heavy doors, balancing them on their teeth, and blind singers led by barefoot boys with old eyes.

  Aie, have you hea-eard, dear friends,

  What occurred in Pe-ters-burg.

  Aie, a building burned to the ground,

  Aie, it was a great misfortune,

  Three poor children burned to death.

  But this was much later, long after the walk to the barracks. This was weeks, months, perhaps years after the first recollection. Many summers and winters had gone by, not just one seasonal alternation—from the cold and dark to the warm and bright. There were the seasons of sunlight, always ushered in at Passover, and there were the seasons of cold and wind always ushered in at Sukkot.

  At this point the distinctions begin to blur. It is not quite clear whether the little boy was swallowed up and lost in the eyes watching him, the eyes of the thin stranger, or whether the young man prowling the East Side had become the little boy, and slept with him through a summer, a winter, a summer, a winter, very often sixteen hours a day.

  An alarm clock roused the grown-ups every morning. They would scratch themselves, mutter, and grumble as they dressed, flushing the toilet again and again. When they had gone, a faint smell pervaded the rooms where they had performed their hasty morning ablutions. A quarter of an hour later the same faint smells were being exuded through the pores of their skins as legs pressed against legs, buttocks against buttocks, in the crowded subways, rickety elevated trains, and overcrowded trolley cars. To the rumble and clank of the morning traffic, to the screech of brakes, he went right on sleeping.

  Because the two had merged, the young boy suddenly found himself in New York. He walked about, looking up at everything. True, now he was no longer accompanied by his aunt. His aunt’s tallow face had by this time lost nearly all its shape. First she married a capmaker who had a daughter by a previous marriage. After she divorced him—he had maltreated her—she married an elderly widower, and this marriage, too, ended in divorce. All these marriages and divorces had so disturbed her that she moved in to keep house for her older sister. She had become even more shriveled up, still tinier, and she spoke less and less often.

  The little boy walked about New York by himself and was surprised that he could understand everything he saw. He smiled to himself and never wanted to grow up. The foreign language felt good in his mouth, and he was perfectly happy to make a fresh start all on his own.

  He attended a precollege cramming school, where he made a brave show of being grown up. The other young men held down jobs, earned their own living, and the girls kept crossing their legs to make him restless until he felt the legs were around his neck, tickling and choking him. But he was well aware that he was still little, that he had not grown up and was very much underweight. He weighed very little more than he had the day he went to visit his father at the army barracks.

  And while the little boy walked about the streets of New York, the grotesquely puny East Side youth, no more than skin and bones, and homesick to boot—little more than a pair of prying eyes—began to play tricks. At will, he could transport himself back to Lublin, every recollection of which he would savor, collect, build into a monument. Or he would use it to invent a whole separate slice of life, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, leaving out no detail of the weather, the time of day, the exact quality of the pinpoint of sunshine piercing the clouds.

  The little boy pretending to be an adult attended the school on the East Side, where tired tailors, shirtmakers, and pocketbook stitchers poured their last ounces of strength into the dream of one day making their way out of the dark sweatshops and climbing one rung higher up the ladder. The gloomy shop itself was in the process of renovation, with added windows, shorter working hours, and a proud, demanding workforce. Next on the ladder stood the podiatrist who removed your corns, and he in turn was looked down upon by the not unkindly pharmacist just above him, while from still higher smiled with yet more assured superiority the dentist, the lawyer, and the doctor.

  Rather off to one side of the ladder where the angels climb, stepping on the corns of the first professional with his little clippers and nail files—angels climbing down while they imagine they are climbing up—stood one teacher with a fat Mephistophelian face who, when he laughed, laughed until his eyes shrank, growing smaller and smaller.

  Afflicted with a Jewish accent, this teacher could not get a job in the city schools. In reaction to this great misfortune, he deliberately exaggerated his accent, vaudevillized it into a kind of Galician–German–English–East Side idiom. He would stand there chanting his Yiddish-English in front of all the ambitious get-aheads, mocking their hopes, their ambitious plans, their careful calculations. Like a very efficient, experienced baker, he would pop a garment worker into the oven, brown him a bit, and then pull him out a pharmacist. He had to move quickly, for time was short, the sweatshop used up your strength, and the years addled your brains. But while he was waiting for his recipe to achieve its work, before the finished product appeared—a man transformed, a new chapter opened in his life—he would stand there and laugh until you thought he would burst, and the whole class would burst out laughing with him. His malice was kindhearted. He would never have gone to the trouble of hurting anyone, though when his students clustered around him, begging for it, his hatred of them was a purely passive hatred.

  He would often speak in rhymed couplets, until the walls of the classroom echoed in rhythm. He taught English history and literature in the singsong chant of a reading from the Hebrew Bible. He really knew English literature, and his clowning helped a great deal to make his lessons stick—to impress them upon the slowest students. Some funny tag made every single bit of information memorable. He made fun of Shakespeare’s heroes, of their loves, passions, and murders; he ridiculed the heroes of history.

  “Did Shylock go to the synagogue and say his prayers before he set out to cut off his pound of flesh?” he would ask his class. It would answer him as one man, “No! No!”

  “Have you ever seen a Jew eating a steak cut out from a living goy?”

  “No!” the class would thunder.

  “Was Shakespeare a great poet?”

  “Yes, sir!” they all answered dutifully.

  “Was Shakespeare a great anti-Semite?”

  “Yes, he was!” the class would answer, shaking with laughter.

  The teacher enjoyed all this as much as his pupils. His eyes grew very tiny when he recounted how one of the Kings Charles cried out to his mother on some historic occasion or other: “Mother! Hand me my rattle, I’m going off to battle!”

  Hi
s wife was a homely woman, and in his spare time he wrote ardent erotic poems which were published in obscure Greenwich Village magazines. His more innocent poems were posted on the school bulletin board. The principal was enough of a businessman to advertise the talents of his teachers, to stress how far out of the ordinary they were. One poem addressed to a girl began: “You are the horse, I am the rider—You are the wave, I am the rower who wields the oar.”

  “What do you want to spend all your time on this for,” he would mock us. “Open a candy store, or sell kiddie clothes! Get married, wear a vest with a watch and a gold chain, make your wife grow a respectable behind.”

  When the bell rang for recess, he would stuff his mouth with chocolate and refuse to answer questions. “I am a strict union man,” he would say, “I don’t work overtime.” And he would go right on chewing, cheeks distended like a child’s.

  Everyone envied him and would have laid money he was going to live two hundred years. They all lost their bets the day he died on the elevated, on his way to school to give us more lessons in laughter.

  At about that time the little boy had a more personal encounter with death; he looked at it sideways so as not to look it straight in the eyes. There was a perpetually tired young man with dark eyes who had flunked his geometry exam five times, but in the end managed to get into college. Perhaps the examiner had felt sorry for him and helped him to get a foot on the next rung of the ladder. They had spent the whole evening walking—the young man and the little boy. The young man planned the life now opening up to him, in the closest detail. He showed his sweetheart’s picture, told how much money he had in the bank. The money would last for exactly two and a half years, and then his sweetheart would help out with her savings. A few days later he was dead of pneumonia. The little boy could not forget his dark eyes, intense with hope. Later he once caught sight of the dead young man’s sweetheart in the street. She was alone, and paced back and forth. He hesitated, wanting to go up to her and tell her he understood how all her planning had come to nothing; he wanted her know that he knew about the bank book and how everything was fixed for two and a half years. But he was afraid to speak to her. Obscurely, he felt that she was in love with death.

  Death even knocked at the thin wall of his tiny furnished room. It was Patsy’s hand on the other side of the wall. Patsy was the imaginary name of a man he never saw. The boy had to imagine a face, a figure, for someone who lived so close to him. He could hear him on the other side of the wall, had heard him sing and moan on his creaking bed. Between his bed and the stranger’s bed stood a wall, a poor wall with the paint peeling off, a hopeless wall like all the walls of all dingy furnished rooms.

  The boy could hear him groan at night, hear him talk in his sleep, but he never laid eyes on him. Perhaps the man was speaking to him through the wall, in the strange terrifying language of the night, when every creaking noise holds myriad terrors and every human cry seems a scream for help.

  One night the man groaned so heartrendingly, and tossed about so wildly on his bed, that the boy was unable to sink back into his own nightmare territory, which all airless, musty furnished rooms turn into when the lights are out. The next morning the whole house was in an uproar. The boy’s neighbor had “taken gas.” He had stopped up every crack, plugged up the keyhole, and stuffed rags around the windows so that no one would smell gas and stop him.

  The policemen slapped his cheeks and pounded him on the back. Their attempts to discover his identity were unsuccessful. The old landlady did not even remember his name.

  “Patsy! Patsy!” The policemen tried to rouse him from the death he had so carefully arranged, inventing a name as soft as his dead cheeks and as hairy as the hairy chest they were kneading. “Get up, Patsy, hurry, or you’ll be late!”

  Patsy, the imaginary man who sang on the other side of the wall and had given up the ghost groaning and tossing on the creaky bed, made no sound. Maybe it was because “Patsy” was not his name, or maybe there had been some secret purpose in his taking his life, and he was resolved not to be called back.

  The coolly deliberate death of the unknown man, the abrupt end of the young man who had worked so hard at his geometry in order to make a new start in life (he was a buttonhole maker), and the sudden stifling of the teacher’s sardonic laughter—all these deaths had gripped the boy mightily, as though to pull him forcibly out of himself and to put some kind of foundation under his feet. He needed a foundation after all—if only one of sadness—for how much longer could he wander around phlegmatically with that original wonderment as if his destination were still the army barracks with his father wearing a soldier’s cap?

  But a dark cloud descended over the world. The little boy decided to postpone his efforts to get ahead in New York, even to postpone adulthood, until his alter ego—the thin young man who had come to America and lately traded perspectives with his younger self—had done with his homesick excursions to Lublin and learned why there had been no letters and how his father and mother, brothers, and little sister were doing.

  He sat in Doctor Tenenbaum’s office and looked into the doctor’s old eyes. How long ago had it been when the doctor had come back from the Russo-Japanese war, a young man with a clipped blond beard and earnest desires to be a healer of the poor? How many years had it been since he had come to our house, looking wistfully out the windows over the yellow-green meadows that spread for miles in every direction? “Air! Air!” he had said on that visit, putting into it all the hunger of children condemned to live in stuffy basements. “You are to be envied. You don’t know how much you are to be envied.” Doctor Tenenbaum had visions so vast that he could not see what was under his nose. He never noticed that before the meadows started his eyes had been offered the spectacle of poor, draughty, rain-soaked rooms, and one privy in the backyard for the entire household.

  But Doctor Tenenbaum had been young then, and now he was old. He sat there in a patched-up coat and comically short trousers, which must have had the cuffs trimmed several times. He was a tiny man, but he looked even tinier when he was sitting down—his feet did not reach the floor. It was said that people in the city had stopped going to him, that rumors about him had been spread so systematically and cruelly that a few months earlier he had been evicted from his apartment. Soon he lost his entire practice. He sat all day long playing chess with retired doctors in a club. Father still consulted him out of loyalty to that other man, the doctor he remembered coming back from the Russo-Japanese war, out of loyalty to the years when Father’s beard had been blond, too, and the doctor took care of the children. Mother had always suffered from one complaint or another, but she rarely paid attention to her own troubles; as for Father, he was sure that there was no illness that could not be sweated out in the bathhouse.

  Now the doctor was sitting on a rickety chair in his shabby office, swinging his short legs, and was saying that there was no hope for her. You could touch it with your hand—a tumor as big as a walnut. By now anyone could feel it, it didn’t take a doctor.

  There was no hope! Not for himself, not for Mother, not for the whole generation of men whose beards had been blond during the Russo-Japanese war; not for any of the mothers in labor at that moment, or bringing up their children.

  No hope—that was the diagnosis of the whole generation. His own wife had died a few years earlier. It was as though he was marching at the head of his army of patients, leading them resolutely down, down, down.

  “You see, your mother is not really suffering from any illness. She is sick with the disease of death. Death is the very opposite of life.” When he said it, he gave his little child’s legs with their tiny shoes a swing.

  The doctor was not saying this to the little boy nor to his alter ego, the East Side companion, but to a third party, one who could scarcely extricate himself from their tangle. He could recognize this third embodiment of himself only in occasional flashes. For instance, whenever he remembered the teacher who had died suddenly on his way to s
chool, what he saw was the figure of Richard Corey. But Richard Corey did not belong, he was sure of it, in the storehouse of the boy’s memories, nor did the young man on the prowl ever notice him in his wandering between Lublin and the East Side. Richard Corey was part of the dream baggage of a third party that had become entangled with the other two precisely because of his efforts to disentangle himself from them—grasping at every straw that would help him achieve clarity.

  It was obvious that the man the doctor had been speaking to was the same man who had just been riding in a droshky, and who could not keep from screwing up his eyes, even though the dusk was darkening. It was like a dream come true. It was just a short ride from the railroad station to his father’s house, but the street was as though paved with miracles. Every stone, every rock, whole mountains and valleys cried out to be noticed, so that it had seemed the drive would never end. But it had lasted only a moment, and he had not captured it all. The sky had indeed been rent open, but his eyes had been closed. Now he was traveling on the other side of his dream. His mother had died on the first side, old friends had come up and spoken to him, the old houses had given him a message, but the droshky went no farther—it had stopped for a greeting, a wink of the eye, a smile, a sad memory, a forgetting—and now it was already leaving again.

  And if he had had the strength, if he could be sure he would be obeyed, he would have begged the driver to take pity, he would have cried with his last strength, “Let me out! Let me out! Stop!”

  The droshky and the driver’s indifferent back were leaving everything behind. A dream may last a whole twenty years, and the moment of fulfillment be only a moment, barely caught hold of, barely glimpsed in the impetuous onrush of time. Now he was already weaving around himself the strands of a new dream, one that devours time and flesh and bones so greedily that it scarcely matters whether you wake up or just keep on sleeping. The dream will dream itself on and on, and gradually your own children, your own grandchildren, one by one will appear in the dream.