The Glatstein Chronicles

by Jacob Glatstein

  Steinman stopped, and his eyes took in the group around him. He looked at each of us in turn, silently. His eyes were sober—or, more accurately, sobered.

  “Ah, ah, little children, little birdies, close your eyes,” he said, imitating the tone of someone telling a story to put a child to sleep. “You’re rocking on your chairs like infants in their cradles, and you’re about to doze off. I suppose you’re waiting for the end of my story, but even if I kept talking for a thousand and one days, the story wouldn’t be finished.”

  “Well, we understand why that Hungarian witch was happy to give you soup for telling her stories,” one of Steinman’s listeners said. “You’re a real healer of the sick. My word, you could cure the hardened arteries of a thousand Jews with your stories.”

  Steinman’s daughter came up and without a word put a pill in her father’s mouth and made him wash it down with a glass of water. Steinman made a face as though he had swallowed something bitter.

  “Have you seen the pill? That’s the end of the story. It’s a good thing you reminded me of Jozefa Kubi. This pill takes me straight to Paradise, where Jozefa is enjoying the pleasure of her husband’s company.”

  “Don’t say such foolish things,” Finkel burst out. “I won’t let you talk like that. We’ll be visiting this place for many, many years, and you’ll keep on telling us your stories.”

  “I suppose you can guarantee that?” Steinman asked with good-?natured mockery.

  “I promise you,” Finkel said, jumping up from his chair. “Just a minute, I’ll tell you something. A pious Jew in Galicia once made a wish that whatever my fated life span might be, I should live ten years in addition. Well, I’ll share this gift with you. I declare before all these witnesses that I’m giving you five years.”

  “Who else wants to give me a present?” Steinman asked. “Five years is nothing to sneeze at. If everybody here were as generous, I might yet live to be as old as Methuselah.”

  “Come, come,” one of the group said to Finkel. “This pious Jew didn’t take your wife into account. She’ll shorten your life by ten years.”

  “That’s a silly thing to say,” Finkel retorted, embarrassed. “But just to set your mind at peace, I’ll tell you that my pious Jew did foresee that eventuality. He promised me that my wife would not survive me.”

  “Why didn’t you say so to begin with? No wonder you can stand your wife. You have something to live for.”

  Everybody laughed at this and there was a general movement of getting up and stretching. At this moment Buchlerner appeared. “Don’t scatter like the chickens,” he said. “We’re about to ring for lunch.”

  “We have to take a little walk, at least—we need some fresh air and exercise,” Steinman objected.

  “All right, you can have a quarter of an hour. That will give you time to walk all over the village, from one end to the other,” Buchlerner said. “While the tables are being set, you can work up an appetite. I warn you that there’s lots to eat, and as you know, I insist that you eat up what I put on your plates.”

  Steinman walked out, followed by his listeners. At first they let him walk ahead, but they surrounded him from all sides, so that people were walking at his right and left, in front and in the back. Suddenly he stopped and said: “If you don’t mind, my friends, if you really don’t mind, let me walk alone with my thoughts. What I told you today brought back so many memories that I must spend some time with them alone.”

  “Ah, of course, of course, we understand perfectly,” all of them cried out in one voice. And they walked away, each by himself. Only Finkel stood still and followed Steinman with wistful eyes. He looked like a big bird craning his neck.

  “Ah, that’s a real man, a real Jew,” he said. “May he live forever!” His eyes were full of tears.

  Chapter 3

  1

  That afternoon and the whole next day Steinman avoided my company. I could see that he was simply running away from me. He was positively hiding. Whenever he saw me walk toward him, he turned away.

  I was surprised, then I realized that it might be just as well. This man was like good wine, and I shouldn’t overdo our intimacy. Perhaps he had some such idea, too, and wanted to give me a rest from his good company, so as not to overwhelm me with attention.

  In the meantime a young woman who said she was a cousin of mine looked me up. She had found out that I was here and made up her mind to visit me. What right she had to call herself a cousin of mine I did not quite see. Actually, the only basis she had for considering me a relative was that a cousin of hers, a man, had married into my family.

  Her name was Saba, she said, short for Sabina, and she recognized me although she had never seen me before. That was because, she said, she was intuitive. This was not the first time she had recognized someone whom she had never seen before. Having told me all this, she walked silently by my side, keeping very close to me. After about ten minutes of this, she began to splatter me with words like confetti. She was young and sad, and there was about her an aura of oversophistication. She was full of aphorisms, about how beautiful it is to be young, about how happiness blooms only to fade away and die, and about how silence is really the graveyard of buried words.

  We walked up a hill. When I sat down, she seated herself a bit lower than me, and looked up at me in silence for a while.

  Then she said suddenly: “You know, if my husband caught me here with you, he’d beat the hell out of both of us. I’d get the worst of it, but he wouldn’t spare you either.”

  Involuntarily, I edged away and was about to get up.

  “My husband is very strong,” she said soothingly, “but after all it wouldn’t do you any harm to act a bit more heroic.”

  I told her that to be a hero was never one of my ambitions. If I were to be beaten up on her account, I would have done nothing to deserve it—such blows are the hardest to bear. She then told me that her husband was far away at the moment, though he had the habit of dropping in on her unexpectedly. He was very jealous of her, and he was always investigating to find out where she went and whom she saw. He even questioned their little boy, who was only five.

  “And is he faithful himself?”

  “You’re joking! He betrays me right and left!”

  To begin with, she said, she must tell me what he looked like. He was twenty years older than she, he had a big bald head and a thick neck with suety folds. He was short but broad-shouldered, and he had disproportionately short legs, even for his height. Those legs of his seemed mere appendages for walking, stuck on to the torso without relation to the rest of his body. He had heavy hands, and when they hit anyone, they hurt. He beat her up regularly, though he pulled his punches. He always made it clear that he could have hit much harder. He looked intelligent, but his features were spoiled by anger. He had keen eyes and a fleshy nose, thick rather than long.

  “He comes from a distinguished family of scholars and businessmen. I too come from a good family, but mine was very poor. He took me as I was, without a dowry, and everyone said I made a good marriage, for the whole town knew I had had lovers. He has never reproached me for this, although it is obvious that this is the cause of his constant suspicions. He is driving me crazy. My maid spies on me and my child spies on me. But, my dear hero, you mustn’t be scared. I have sent both on a little trip, and they won’t be back till tonight.”

  By now I was a trifle more interested. “And how are you making out?” I asked her. “Who is winning—the spies, or you?”

  She did not answer at once. She lit a cigarette very slowly. “May I have as many thousands of złotys as the number of men the spies have missed,” she said. “It’s a kind of game to me. Who’ll get whom? When you’re bored, it’s not a bad game. Everything becomes a matter of strategy, and I’m keen on that.”

  “Well, has he ever caught you?”

  She shuddered. “Bite your tongue off ! God forbid! That would really be my funeral. Many times he has almost caught me, but it’s a
long way from almost to catch. He slaps me around quite often, but in the end it’s always he who turns out to have been wrong. His conscience bothers him when he beats me on mere suspicion.”

  “How long has this game been going on?”

  “About six years. We’ve been married eight years, but the first year I made a real effort to be a good, faithful wife. The second year I learned to outsmart him.”

  “How do you know,” I said, “that I don’t belong to your husband’s staff of detectives?”

  She laughed. “That would be a good joke on me. It would mean I had gone out of my way to get into trouble.” After a pause she added: “Do you know something? It has often occurred to me as I play this game that I’d like to lose once in a while. I am getting quite tired of it, really.” And she went on to say that she slipped most often when she was sad at heart. “And do you know why I speak so openly with you? Because I know nothing is going to happen between us. I have nothing to worry about.”

  Her husband, she said, must now be sweating with worry at his cigarette factory. No matter how hard he works, she went on, it’s nothing in comparison with how he works his employees. A really tough character, her husband. “But I have no right to complain. He showers me with presents—dresses and jewels, and entertainment and pleasure trips, the best candy, the most luxurious furs. I take everything. I’m sure I’m a bad woman.”

  It was in Warsaw, she said, that she had first gotten into trouble. For a year she attended courses at the university. She shared a room with a musician, a girl who played the piano. The girl had had many friends—poets and painters, actors and musicians. She was a wild girl, a real glutton for pleasure, who wanted to try everything once. “And I was a stupid little goose. I fell in love with every man I met, and every man taught me to fall out of love. I was in the harness and out of the harness. To artists love is a pretty casual business. As soon as my heart was torn to pieces, they would get free of me with the greatest of ease. Only one clung to me and was quite serious, but there was a drawback—he was a Gentile, and I couldn’t bring myself to disgrace my parents. To this day he puts my initials in the dedications of his poems. He is a well-known poet. I often remember him, and it helps me to keep my sanity. He was a profound man, and a sad one. He never laughed. What he saw in me I have no idea. I’m empty-headed, I have no mind at all. All I possess is an inborn sadness. Maybe he loved me because of my sadness. He wrote many poems addressed to ‘the sad girl,’ to his ‘melancholy joy.’ He liked to play with words, but it is true that the joys of youth are melancholy.”

  She tore out a handful of grass and put it to her nose, smelling it as though it were flowers. “I like the smell of the earth,” she said. “At first it’s unpleasant, but it becomes as familiar as your own sweat. Do you hear the way I talk? When I was younger, painters and writers talked to me a lot, and now all they said oozes out of me. I wish I could get to the point when I have something to say of my own.

  “Yes, I believe it was that gang that spoiled me. They’re wonderful boys, but they’re always on the run and they ran over me. It was too heady an experience for me—too high an altitude. Their talk, their movements, their interests—it wasn’t good for me. Strange thing, with each of them I felt perfectly whole, but the moment they dropped me and I was on my own, I went to pieces. I was a lamp without a light, or worse—a discarded handkerchief. It was all too much for me, I had to develop a protective shield of flippancy if I wasn’t to commit suicide. Oh, I thought of that often. That was when I took everything seriously, but everything becomes a mockery when you’re made to feel like a fool.

  “Sometimes, when I become absorbed in my own thoughts, it seems to me that I am looking for a man who’d make me whole again. I’ll never find one.”

  She said she had “something very interesting” to tell me. About a year ago, she met a man she thought she could love. How could she tell? Because he made her think about herself, about what she could give him. When she had such thoughts, she usually kept quiet, she explained, for fear that someone else’s voice would come out of her mouth. Whenever words came easily, she was afraid that they were just odds and ends from all the chatter she had heard as a young girl—artists are good talkers.

  A year ago she thought that she had actually found the man who would be her life’s companion—she had met him right here in this resort—the man who would take her away from the money, the jewels, and the rest. She had never supposed she’d actually meet such a man, but she’d always kept herself ready for him. In fact, even today she was playing with the idea of being poor again, but she still hadn’t made up her mind whether her child was part of the alien life which had been forced upon her, or whether she must stay with him, rich or poor, happy or not.

  The man who had brought a ray of light into her life was a graduate chemist—which for a Jew in Poland meant certain unemployment in his chosen field. He was from an assimilated family, but at the university he began to do some soul searching, partly no doubt because of the way he was abused by his Gentile fellow students. He became a pious Jew, and when she met him at this resort he was among the followers of the rabbi who comes here every year. His skullcap and his pious manner did not deceive her: the moment she saw him she knew she must get to know him. It wasn’t easy, but one day she managed to strike up acquaintance with him when he had gone for a walk by himself.

  “He was a real comforter, a professional comfort giver. When I met him he was somewhat confused. He had made up his mind that the Jews were going through a terrible period. Not only were they persecuted but there was no one to console them. So he took upon himself the mission of going from town to town, from village to village, in order to spread the good word, to be a preacher of joy, as he put it. He was a handsome man whose blond beard stubbornly refused to be Hasidic. He still looked like a student. His blue eyes glowed with his faith, and his mouth was warmed by his voice. He knew all the words that gave comfort, and his name had become famous in Jewish communities. When he appeared on a Saturday in a village synagogue, he gave the poor Jewish people a joy they had never known before.”

  At the time she met him he was going through a period of doubt. He wondered whether he was not doing the wrong thing, whether, instead of comforting the Jewish people as a whole, it was not his duty to go from door to door, to comfort the people individually rather than en masse in the synagogues. It was a long time before he told her that, and more generally, before he began to share his thoughts with her. She had to work hard. It was a game to her, but different from the one she played with her husband. That game she was sure she would always win. This time she knew she would lose.

  “For four months I struggled with him and with myself. All that time I also had to keep an eye on my husband. I suspected that he was suspecting me. My bookkeeping became so complicated that I almost lost my mind. On top of all this I felt that somehow there was a little devil inside me who was making fun of me, laughing himself sick at my expense. I imagined that I was reenacting the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. As luck would have it, his name too was Joseph, and in my eyes he was every bit as handsome.

  “There is a little woods outside the village where it’s cool and quiet. Dead leaves lie scattered everywhere and crackle under your feet. The leaves are slippery and the ground is moldy. There are many dead trees in that woods. It was there that we most often sat and talked. He never got close to me, never looked me in the face. I had almost talked myself hoarse before he agreed to so much as sit and talk with me in the woods. I campaigned as if I were a whole army, and he a city under siege. I ambushed him, pursued him, tormented him. At the same time, I felt sorry for him. But I had to do it because I was even sorrier for myself. ‘Saba,’ he would beg me, ‘Saba, I’m afraid of you, you have such hungry eyes, such a hungry mouth, even the words you say are hungry.’”

  He often talked to her about the inherent poetry of Judaism, and this opened up a whole new world to her. She had long been surrounded by prosaic, t
ired people whose lives were anything but poetic. Her brothers were just ordinary Jews, who wore Jewish caps and slippers. Her father had died when she was a little girl. The only bit of poetry in her parental home was heard when her mother blessed the candles Friday evenings, and the words she pronounced were bright and warm. Not so Joseph—he was in love with Judaism, and he spoke about it with such ardor that she understood why he could set the hearts of others ablaze, why he was a comforter.

  On one occasion he confided to her that he’d like to go to Germany, that if he could only smuggle himself across the border, he’d go, for it was there that he was really needed. At the same time, he confessed to her that he was filled with such pride when he told himself that he had power to give comfort that he became frightened and tried to punish himself by going without food and sleep, to humble his pride. At such moments she felt that he was a Christianized Jew, that he had too many problems for a Jew. She once told him so, and the next day he told her that her remark had caused him a great deal of pain, that he had been thinking it over and decided that she was right, that he was perhaps an outsider after all, cut off from his own people.

  “One day he was very nervous. This is the only pleasant memory I have kept of the whole affair, and it doesn’t amount to much. He was restless, could not sit still, paced back and forth, and finally stammered out that he was about to get married, so as to be more at peace with himself. I understood his restlessness. I felt just like a mother, I understood exactly what was bothering the child, and this gave me a kind of satisfaction. When I saw him so restless, something inside me alternately laughed and wept. ‘Goodbye, Joseph,’ I said to him, ‘goodbye,’ and I spoke to him more tenderly than I had ever dared before. But now I was sure that I had lost him, and that I had lost someone very close to me. He looked at me bewildered. It wasn’t nice of me to be so much more reasonable than he was at this moment. He was as green as the woods around us.