The Glatstein Chronicles

by Jacob Glatstein

  The real meaning of the term Karet, or excision, Reb Levi went on, was precisely this—to be cut off from one’s living parents, from the joy of fulfilling the duty to honor them; and that is also why God gives long years of life to those who honor their parents.

  After they had all left, the wrinkles in Levi’s face became smoothed out. Perl, the maid, fed him a few spoonfuls of oatmeal. His face was serene, as if his illness had been only a pretext, an excuse to get away from his tall wife, his grown children, the outside world in general, as if his illness had given him the repose all restless people pray for.

  “How is your father? Is he still working in the store downstairs? Come closer, don’t be afraid. What are you studying now? Jeremiah?” And soon a verse would flash out like a brightly painted boat on the water. He would take me aboard and steer it this way and that. I was afraid to sail with him too far, for I could see his dead hands, and I feared that he was calling me with them. Nevertheless I went along with him on these trips, my heart pounding.

  At the very moment Reb Levi lay in his father’s house against the white pillows, another man of about his age was lying in a shed in the courtyard of the apartment house we lived in, near the Castle. This shed looked like a dog’s kennel, pieced together of old boards. In the courtyard stood the privies—also wooden sheds—and across from the privies, separated from them by an ill-smelling garbage box and a yard that was freely used by children and even grown-ups who were too lazy to use the dark privies at night, stood the low shed. Formerly it had been used as a place to throw old clothes which even the rag picker had rejected.

  One day when we were just getting up, we heard wild screams coming from that shed. We found a man there, lying on the floor, roaring like an ox. The man’s legs were crippled. He could not raise his hands either, but only thrash about in the straw that someone had put under him. He had a jet-black beard and black eyes, which reminded one of the eyes of a cow. His disheveled hair seemed to cover his entire forehead. Around him pieces of bread were strewn, and next to him stood a bowl of water to which he often rolled himself to take a swallow. This freak was chained to one of the boards in the shed. He rolled back and forth uttering terrible screams, all the more terrible because they were not ordinary human cries but the desperate efforts of a mute to speak.

  No one knew where this wretched cripple had come from. At all events we children never learned who had rented the shed to its strange occupant. Many of the children threw stones at the shed, and this drove the cripple to utter blood-curdling screams. We somehow learned that his name was Zelig, and the children mockingly called him Reb Zelig. We also knew that a woman had undertaken to perform the good deed of washing him and changing his shirt once a month. She also provided Reb Zelig with bread every other day or so.

  I often heard his cries at night. I knew that he was lying all alone in the dark shed, in that ill-smelling courtyard. Eventually, the shed itself emanated such a stench that even we children, ordinarily insensitive beasts, would not go near it. Reb Zelig’s screams grew so unbearable that Yankele the tailor, who lived on the ground floor, and Getzl the baker, who lived in the basement, looked for a way of getting rid of the cripple.

  I often looked through the open door and saw him lying there on the ground. He was so weak now that his roar had become a mere bleat, and his unkempt face looked drained of blood. At such moments I imagined that he was about to open his mouth and speak to me in a familiar language, perhaps even to offer a commentary on the Torah, like Reb Levi when he lay in his nice, clean bed piled high with pillows.

  Several women consoled the unhappy tenants of our apartment house with the thought that there was no point making a fuss, since the poor man’s sufferings were obviously nearing an end.

  I remember both these dying men—the one who was mockingly called Reb Zelig, and the one who was tenderly called Reb Levi—as being with me for days on end. I watched and heard them die, the one in the shed near the privies and the other in his comfortable bed. The one went in silence, the other with luminous words on his lips.

  Two days before Reb Zelig was found lying silent, curled up like an animal, the woman who had looked after him went into the shed and washed him. Lying there helpless, when his face had been washed, he did not look so different from Reb Levi, or any less serene—this body could have been that of the soul which lay in the house of Simon the rich man.

  Reb Levi died the same day as Reb Zelig was found dead. It was clear to me that there was some connection between the mute animal body that had suffered all the tortures of the damned in the dark, stench-filled shed, and the soul which passed on in immaculate surroundings, with words on his lips that were repeated over and over in our city for a long time thereafter.

  Some time after Reb Levi’s death, Father one day brought home one of the essays the great man had left behind. It was written in tiny characters, hardly bigger than pinpricks. Several rabbis came to our house to read it, but afterward they declared with a sigh that instead of illuminating dark caverns, the essay only made the darkness thicker. They feared that Reb Levi had taken with him to his grave the radiance of his spoken words. His writings were no more than the intellectual body of his words; they failed to convey his spirit and his light. “That’s what we always think—that now bright light will at last illumine us and disclose the mystery. But each generation is left in the lurch.” Such was the verdict of a young rabbi with a long, thin nose, a few scraggly whiskers on his chin, and so nearsighted that he had to hold the manuscript up close to his glasses. The hand that held the essay did not tremble, but his head moved right and left with the regularity of a pendulum, racing back and forth over the obscure lines.

  4

  Goldblat was reminiscing about his pupils—those he had set on the right road and who had made good. He ticked them off on the fingers of his right hand, finger by finger. One was a lawyer, the second an oculist, the third had made a fortune, and the fourth was elected deputy to the Diet. When he got to the thumb, he said, well, the thumb had grown up to be a coarse, boorish fellow. Goldblat was ashamed of him. He owned several apartment houses with such miserable, damp basements that God preserve us from ever having to stay in one. It was basements like that he rented out to families of nine or even ten people. Really they should be paid themselves to live in such miserable quarters where the damp cold was penetrating, summer or winter. And then the stench, the crowding, the lifeless eyes that seemed to turn on rusty springs, eyes that never sparkled, and the coughing and the wheezing, the complexions as withered as the skin of a smoked herring. Such poverty—it could darken the most beautiful day in May: were it ever to crawl out of these cellars, it would infect the day with all kinds of disease.

  Whenever you passed one of these buildings, you saw people who had just been evicted. They lay there on the sidewalks looking like rags, the rags they wore indistinguishable from the people. You couldn’t tell whether this bundle of rags was a child or whether this child simply looked like a rag. And the laments and the curses of the evicted! If only one percent of those curses came true, the landlord would be a goner, too. He had so many evictions that it seemed as though this evil man had gathered together all the poor people of Warsaw in his cellars, just in order to be able to turn them out again, one by one. He was a shark, a usurer, and incapable of begetting children.

  “For whom are you working so hard?” Goldblat had asked him one day, gently, when he happened to run into him. All the scoundrel did was to sigh deeply. “Can you believe it? It was a sigh, I’m telling you, that could have moved the stones to weep. Gangsters like that, for all their thick skins, can still shake their heads and sigh. ‘Isn’t it perfectly clear, Mr. Goldblat?’ he said to me. ‘God has punished me, I am alone in the world.’ I took the occasion to suggest that if he cut down the number of his evictions, God might help him. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘a progressive like you, Mr. Goldblat, you should know better than to say such superstitious things!’ You see, it pays him to believe tha
t God is punishing him, and it simply doesn’t pay him to believe that anything can be done about it!”

  The man’s money, Goldblat went on about this former student, had not come from a very pure source. Goldblat didn’t go in for gossip, but everyone knew that his wife had earned all that money, and not in a decent way, either. During the First World War, when the Austrians held Lublin for a time, people made fortunes by obtaining a permit from the authorities to import a carload of merchandise without having to pass customs. His wife was the one who obtained the permits. She managed to make her way up to high-ranking officers, including one general. While her husband stayed at home, she dolled herself up and brought back the permits. The fact is she was a beauty, a very luscious piece. It is said that the officers enjoyed her company a great deal.

  “Even if I spent all night and the next day with you,” Goldblat said, getting up from his chair, “I couldn’t tell you all that has happened to my pupils. For instance, one got himself baptized and became a censor. One day he asked me to come to see him, and I went. I had no choice, though I am afraid of converts. He asked me to translate some difficult Hebrew sentences. He is so dutiful a public servant that he is seized with a panic at the thought that he might let pass something that would displease the Polish government. Of course, he wanted me to believe that his real purpose was to defend Jewish honor, to save Jews from trouble. Perhaps, he said, he was like the famous Daniel Khvolson, who was destined to become a Christian in order to champion Jewish causes all the more effectively.

  “On one occasion when he was drunk, the censor confided to me that he had become a convert out of revenge against Jewish girls. One girl after the other rejected him, complaining that they could not stand the smell of his feet. You can imagine what sensitive noses the pampered daughters of the Jews must have had. The censor complained that they could smell his feet through the shoe leather. So he married a Gentile girl, a quiet creature who never complains. She has given him five children, and not once has she complained about his feet—damn it.

  “Tell you about my pupils? Well, I wouldn’t know where to begin and where to stop. So I’d better not begin at all. But one thing I must tell you. I am no longer what I once was. I shall not deny it, I have become an ignoramus. The little I did know has become fusty, and I haven’t acquired any new knowledge. I am amid strangers, so to speak. All around me people are discussing their problems, forming parties, and so on, but I don’t share any of it or want to. Even my Hebrew has become outdated. Recently I glanced through a Hebrew newspaper, and I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, it was like some sort of hieroglyphics, totally incomprehensible. I wiped my glasses again and again, to no avail. And as for the bit of German I inherited from my father, it was never much. Believe me, when I study now with my hundred-year-old pupil, we understand each other, but the new generation I don’t even begin to understand.”

  Goldblat took off his glasses and began to wipe them. He looked at me with myopic eyes which, without the glasses, seemed to stare in opposite directions.

  “I am too severe with myself,” he said. “That’s my trouble. I am simply poisoning my life, making myself unhappy. I often feel that the bit of useless knowledge I had, I gave it all away to my pupils, and that I have been left with nothing at all. I feel as though I were walking around naked like Adam. Moreover I can’t stop asking why to everything. No matter what happens, even the most trivial thing, I am bound to ask why. The world is topsy-turvy. I can’t make out the pattern at all. Take poverty. Every time I see it, it’s as though somebody had punched me in the jaw. I feel ashamed of being a man. And what do I mean by poverty? Well, I suppose, just knowing that there are people in the world who are dreaming of a bit of cooked food, a warm meal, a crust of bread. I know this has been going on from time immemorial, and the sun rises and sets, and the world marches on and makes a noise, and people fuss about. But it’s unbelievable! A fine world this is, that has not abolished hunger, and yet has the nerve to take itself seriously!

  “You know what,” he said, digging into his beard with two fingers to scratch his chin. “I’ll say good night now. I’ve bored you enough. Tomorrow is another day, and anyhow we aren’t going to change the world in a minute.”

  5

  It was quite late. The Buchlerner hotel was asleep. I walked on tiptoe up the carpeted stairs and tried to find my room in the half darkness. In this way I startled what looked like a two-headed creature. But the creature divided into a man and a girl. The man was the sturdy Gentile who looked after Bronski, the mad student who raved about Egyptian mummies. The girl was the one who helped clear up in the dining room and fed the ducks and the chickens every morning. The man did not run away, but stood there, chin jutting forward, very much the chivalrous male ready to face the music. Or was he merely embarrassed, ashamed of himself? His attitude could even mean that he was ready to fight. As for the girl, she ran barefoot down the corridor, the carpeting muffling her footsteps. She did not sway as she ran, but ran like a boy, briskly, lifting her legs high.

  Then I saw that I was a floor below the one where my room was, the top floor. When I finally got to my door and put the key in the lock, a shadowy figure in slippers came out from another door on the landing. It was wearing something on its head—an old cap, a woman’s bonnet, or a skullcap. The shadow sneaked into my room after me and shut the door. Then he snapped the switch and the room filled with a jaundiced light. My guest and I found ourselves staring at each other in a long greenish mirror covered with fly specks. I recognized the proprietor.

  “You aren’t asleep yet?” I stammered, vaguely frightened.

  “I can’t sleep until my last guest has turned in,” he said. “I’m responsible for the lot of you, you know. That’s the kind of job it is.”

  “Have I kept you up?”

  “Yes and no. I mean you are the last guest to come upstairs but I shall not sleep until everything downstairs quiets down.”

  I listened intently. I couldn’t hear a sound. Did he mean the serving girl and the Gentile? No, I thought, after all it was I who had startled them—and they hadn’t been making a sound.

  “Whom do I have in mind?” Buchlerner went on. “I can guess what you’re thinking. The girl is none of my business. She doesn’t work for me at night. If she wants to have some fun, it’s her own affair. As for the Gentile, what can he do?” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “No, it’s neither the girl nor the Gentile, but the door that the Gentile is supposed to be watching, that’s the room that’s keeping me up.

  “You see, this is Tuesday, and Tuesday night I always have to keep awake. The mad student has to have a lover once a week. A lover—that’s his elegant way of putting it. But whether she is or isn’t a lover, the man looking after him knows what he means and finds something for him in the village.

  “You must realize it’s hard to find a girl who is willing to spend the night with a madman. The whole village knows who he is, and people are simply afraid. So far nothing bad has happened. The Gentile smuggles a girl into his room late at night and watches the door like a dog. If he has a bit of fun in the meanwhile, it doesn’t hurt anyone.

  “But think of my position in all this. To be sure, he always gets her out by dawn. You’re a friend, so it doesn’t matter, but if other people staying here were to learn of this, I might just as well cut my throat. Just put yourself in my place. Nothing bad has happened so far, but who can tell with a madman? The Gentile guard says that he will be responsible. But he doesn’t own this hotel, so what does he care? He only has to slip up once—and what could I do, sue him? In short, Tuesday nights I worry myself to death, and wish I’d never seen the hotel. I pace up and down all night. After a while I feel as though the man downstairs isn’t mad at all, on the contrary, he is perfectly healthy—it’s I who am mad, missing my sleep, listening for every creak and squeak.

  “Good night, sleep well,” he said, “and don’t give any of this another thought. After all, you can
sleep in peace. You don’t own a hotel with mad guests. Oh God in heaven, how I wish I didn’t have to earn my bread in the last years of my life!”

  He tiptoed out of the room, soundlessly closing the door behind him.

  Chapter 5

  1

  “Are you looking for a male or female?”

  I had been so sure I was all alone that for a moment I thought the solitude was jeering at me, I was flabbergasted to see it was Steinman. He was the last person I should ever have expected to run into along this dark wooded hillside, which sloped precipitately upward on the one side and fell off sharply to a ravine on the other.

  Steinman was wearing galoshes that flopped noisily as he picked his way over the damp ground. It sounded as if he were walking through puddles. On his head was a formidably broad black hat, and he wore his overcoat like a cape. He carried a gnarled stick with a carved head.

  “If you’re looking for female company, I can’t help you. But if it’s a man you’re looking for, you won’t find a better one. Not in this neighborhood, at least,” he added with a smile.

  “I must confess that this last remark is not original with me. That’s what the old rabbi of Trisk used to say. He would take his long beard in his hand and exclaim, ‘Oh Lord of the universe, what art Thou waiting for to redeem us? I swear by my beard and earlocks, Thou wilt never have a finer Jew than I am. So why not send us the Messiah right now?’”