1941. Four years before Hurbinek’s death.
There is a lot of fear in Rzeszów on the day when Sofia Cèrmik and Yakov Pawlicka get married. In recent weeks there have been massacres of Jews carried out by the Einsatzkommandos—the SS police batallions—in the small towns close to Debica, only twelve miles to their west, and Przeworsk, further east and near the frontier. Nobody, it seems, did anything to prevent them.
Sofia and Yakov decided they wanted to marry before they met the fate destiny held in store.
Yakov is a mechanic and knife grinder. He looks sturdy, although he is short, and bald and stubborn when it comes to getting what he wants. He had taken over the business after his mother’s eccentric brother, Elias Papoulk, hung himself from the branch of a tree in the birch forest you can make out from Sofia’s bedroom, on the far bank of the Wislok. Elias Papoulk had died a childless bachelor, and Yakov had been working as an apprentice for him.
Yakov has loved Sofia and Sofia has loved Yakov ever since they were adolescents. They have pledged to live happily, “come what may.” They will work together. They will protect each other from all evil. They swear that under the chuppah, the wedding canopy. “You will listen to me.” “I will listen to you.” “You will take my hand.” “I will take your hand.”
After their wedding, they go to live in the same house where the unfortunate Elias lived when he was alive. He had secretly bequeathed it to his nephew before committing suicide. Apart from a workshop with all the tools a mechanic needs, there are around a hundred hens, enough to make a little business from the sale of eggs. “If those German dogs don’t make their lives impossible,” comments Rachel, Yakov’s mother, when someone rhetorically asks about the young couple’s future.
It is an austere wedding: there is hardly any wine although they do have beer and the local mead that is brown and sweet. It is held at the Pawlickas’ house because the Cèrmik’s house has been flooded by the swollen waters of the River Wislok. “Don’t worry about the dowry,” Simon Cèrmik tells prospective father-in-law Samuel Pawlicka. “My daughter’s money didn’t get soaked.” “It’s not your money that will make my Yakov happy.” “No, it won’t be the money.” “He and the lot of us will be happy if those dogs forget us.” “May God will that.” “May He indeed.” Samuel repeats wearily as he looks up at the sky.
While the two men talk, Yakov has started to sing. He sings very well, everybody agrees, his is a powerful, melodious voice. His best friend, Pavel Ramadian, a mustachioed joker from Armenia who came to Rzeszów with his parents to work in the Carpathian woodmills accompanies him on the violin.
Sofia is proud and blushes when Yakov sings. The song he sings speaks of a falcon that flies alone until it falls in love with a pigeon, but the pigeon is afraid and flies far away so the falcon can’t reach her.
Then Pavel sings an impish song to make the women laugh.
There aren’t many guests at the wedding because nobody in the town is in a mood to celebrate. It is not a wedding full of happiness yet there is laughter and a will to live. They all congratulate and hug each other as if wanting to keep at bay the ill omens that give them sleepless nights, and congratulate the families of bride and groom and wish the couple a long life and healthy children who can pray for them when it is time to die.
Few people are actually there, not because the Cèrmiks and Pawlickas are not much loved in Rzeszów—they are families the community appreciates highly—but because over the last year many neighbors have begun to flee further south with all their belongings, toward the Danube, Bulgaria and Greece, and from there to Palestine. Few people attend because few have stayed on.
But those who do come to Sofia and Yakov’s wedding do so to feel they are leading normal lives with their friends, if possible for one last time. They eat with relish the geese reared by Raca and her single sisters. They dig into the tender flesh of roast kid, and trays of aromatic black pudding and devour the desserts—figs with honey, clusters of walnuts and blackcurrants in bittersweet sauce.
They eat to drive away thoughts of when the plague will reach their door. They eat in silence. A silence broken by Yakov’s songs and Pavel’s sad music, Pavel who is drunk and sobbing. “It’s the bride. She is young and beautiful.”
Pavel suddenly climbs onto a chair, and tells the children who are making such a din on tables at the back to be quiet, and offers a solemnly worded toast to the newlyweds. It is a long, poetic toast and he asks them to celebrate this wedding every ten years, all together in bigger and bigger parties. “So that the house may prosper and our souls as well.”
They all raise their glasses but their skin looks gray. Their faces and hands are gray. The smoke from cigarettes and pipes wreathes their faces and makes the gray even grayer.
Yakov kisses Sofia on the lips. Then he puts his mouth close to her ear. The exhausted guests applaud politely. “We will have lots of children and I will love you for a hundred years.” “Yakov, Yakov, I’m sorry, forgive me.” “Why do you say that you are sorry, why do you ask me to forgive you?” “Because I won’t live so long.” “Oh, yes, you will. Somewhere you will live with me.”
4
Thunder
1965. Twenty years after Hurbinek’s death.
Cousin Moritz Pawlicka listens attentively, as he waits on the sidewalk of New York’s Fifth Avenue, to the words being broadcast from the radio of a taxi parked by a fire hydrant. They sound like words recited in Hebrew. He is on his way to work at a newspaper, the New York Post, but stopped to listen to those words because he has suddenly been stirred by a memory from his childhood: he is a child, is in his native Poland with his whole family seated behind the desks in Grandfather Samuel’s school while a storm rages outside. The claps of thunder make the glass panes vibrate. Moritz keeps his fear to himself and pretends, or better still, Ira his father soothes him by affectionately caressing the back of his neck. He gives one hand to his father while the other plays with a button on Uncle Yakov’s jacket. His brand new Aunt Sofia is leaning on Yakov and smoothing his hair sweetly with her hand. It is Passover and they are all listening to the patriarch Samuel Pawlicka reading the Haggadah in his grave, firm voice, though Moritz notices that now and then they try to look out of the corners of their eyes into the street. The diaphanous air seems unthreatening and the clouds he cannot see are turning yellow in the distance. Moritz will never forget that afternoon when he heard the story of the exodus of the Jews to Egypt, although he had heard his grandfather tell that story many times before, because the thunderclaps weren’t coming from the sky but from German canons.
5
Letters
1912. Thirty three years before Hurbinek’s death.
Thomas Zelman is writing a letter to his elder sister, Raca. He is in the English port of Southampton and has embarked on a fashionable liner and it is a rainy day in April. They will set sail in a few hours and Thomas writes under a canopy on the fourth deck, surrounded by people bawling their goodbyes. He is telling Raca in his letter that he has found work in Boston, in the house of relatives who left Rzeszów at the end of the nineteenth century and set up home in America. He will work as a milliner like them. Those same relatives who will welcome him sent him money to purchase a third-class passage on a giant boat that all the newspapers have featured, the Titanic. Thomas Zelman is twenty years old, impulsive and happy. He sends kisses to all the family in his letter. “They will soon be dollar bills,” he says. April 14 is his birthday and he asks Raca to think of him on that day. He will be on the high seas and will do what he can to have a bottle to uncork. He wonders at the end of his letter whether he will get very seasick on the boat. He has never been on board one. However, a new life awaits him. The century promises much and he feels rumbustiously alive as if he were on a never-ending binge. He seals the envelope and is about to go on land to take the letter to a post office but it is too late. Night is falling and they have removed the gangp
lanks and the bands are competing with the din of the horns and howls of passengers under the shower of confetti falling from the main decks. He re-opens the envelope and adds a PS in which he pledges to his sister that he will write to her daily on the boat and will send her all the letters together from America as soon as they reach port.
Thomas Zelman was unable to do that; he froze to death in the sea, on the night of his birthday.
Raca was not to not hear anything about the fate of her brother for a year. She never received letters from him nor imagined that they existed. One day Sofia told Yakov the story of her uncle who went down with the Titanic. She did so when she noticed her fiancé watching when Raca opened a drawer in the sideboard and took out a photo she kissed three times slowly. It was the photo of Thomas her brother that she raised to her lips every night before she went to bed. Nobody ever found out about the letters, and in conversations they mentioned the “American” uncle who died in the middle of the ocean as if it were a fabled story or an unreal, mythical event magnified by the provincial atmosphere in that small community of Rzeszów. For Sofia, imagining her uncle caught by chance in that shipwreck, embellished by the drawings in the magazines that reached their shop thanks to the spice suppliers from Krakow, was as fascinating as a novel, like the Madame Bovary she found so absorbing, or so many books she devoured by herself. Even Simon Cèrmik—who always a skeptic—would finish smoking his cigar talking about his brother-in-law as if he were the hero in an adventure story, whose deeds he exaggerated, but Raca left the room when her husband fantasized over that misfortune. “Don’t allow them to destroy your memory of me,” she heard her brother’s voice say inside her head. And she cherished that strange private space where only the ghost of Thomas Zelman was present.
6
Books
1932. Thirteen years before Hurbinek’s death.
The adolescent Yakov Pawlicka finishes his apprentice’s work in the afternoon in Uncle Elias Papoulk’s knife-grinding workshop and relishes the reading of stories of Sinbad the Sailor in a volume with thick battered covers. It is the only book in the workshop and the only book old Elias has ever read. “Don’t do as I do,” he tells his nephew, whom he sees open the book immediately once he has washed his hands after putting the tools away.
The truth is that young Yakov does read more books, as many as he can from the ones his parents keep in their dining room. “I read more books, but this is my favorite.” “How many books can you read in your life?” “I don’t know, thousands and thousands.” “Will you have the time, with all the work there is to do?” “I will do my work and read at night.” “No, you won’t, because you will have to look after your children, attend to your friends and love your wife.” “I will find the time. I really will, Uncle Elias.” “You will have to read in secret, but you won’t have much time for your secrets, so you will read very few books.” “I will read in secret.” “What else will you do in secret?” “How can I know what life will bring? Can anyone ever know?” “No, of course not, but there will be secret things you do by yourself, with no one else around, like the worm that burrows into the ground. And life will bring you many secret moments, by yourself. What will you do then, read?” “I will read.” “No, you won’t, you will lament, you will lament the fact that you are alive, you will point your fist at the sky and will be unhappy. You will do what I did, when I was knocked over by a cart, when I was your age and I shut myself in my room to suffer the pain by myself, without anyone hearing or seeing, and when my injuries most hurt, I stretched out and waited for death to come, wished it would come. I went four days without eating or sleeping, the bones in my feet had been crushed. Yakov, never be alone. You will end up imagining things and seeing devils. You will sell your soul to one.” “No, uncle, I won’t do any of that. I will read, and will read lots of books.” “I hope they let you, Yakoimele.”
7
Jamaica
1935. Ten years before Hurbinek’s death.
What can Yakov Pawlicka see hanging from a lamppost in Berlin? An ear. But can it be a human ear hanging from a lamppost in Berlin? It is the ear of a Jew. And how does he know? There is a card at the bottom of the post that says “Jew’s ear = Pig’s ear.” They cut it off days ago and stuck it on a hook, then they attached the hook to a piece of string and threw it over the top of the lamp, where it hooked up.
It is the first thing Yakov sees when he leaves the station.
He has come to take a vacation in Berlin, where a German friend of his who was born in Rzeszów lives. His friend’s name is Sigmund. Sigmund what? Yakov can’t remember, or in fact doesn’t know.
Jamaica is Yakov’s dream. He tells Sigmund that in the Café Hannover. He has wanted to go to Jamaica ever since he saw a map of the island on an atlas that belonged to his parents, at school in Rzeszów. The name, Jamaica, seduced him. And the pirate stories his brothers David and Ira told him. He wants to go there in a sailing ship, sail around the island, anchor in Montego Bay, gaze at the horizon from the highest peaks of the Blue Mountains, sleep in Port of Spain.
Sigmund tells him to wake up, that dreams are not the most sensible things in present times, even less so for a Jew. But he doesn’t say the word “Jew” in the café; it wouldn’t be prudent. Instead he says “one of yours.”
When he heard that, Yakov wondered how much of a friend that Sigmund whom he knew from school, but whose family never visited the Pawlicka household could ever be.
A demonstration suddenly erupts around a corner where there are public baths, between the avenue and the street with the Café Hannover terrace. People are carrying placards with stars of David and demanding justice.
Sigmund says it is all very well to have demonstrations like this, but they aren’t realistic, and that one has to go with the flow of history.
The police gathers at the other end of the street and they charge on horseback. The police have swords and long leather nightsticks. The clash is brutal and people scatter everywhere. As they chase after the demonstrators, some police drive their horses into the straw chairs on the café terrace.
Yakov and Sigmund run to protect themselves from the blows the police are indiscriminately delivering to everyone. In the tumult, Yakov is suddenly surrounded by people running who drag him along as they flee in panic. He loses sight of Sigmund in the hysterical avalanche.
Eventually, in that labyrinth of streets, he finds he is alone with another young man of his age. They look at each other in fear, as they hear the sound of horse hoofs behind them, galloping over the street paving stones. Two mounted police approach, flourishing their swords.
The youth signals to Yakov, who follows unflinchingly, not sure what the next step will be. They enter a house whose sinister black door is open and climb the stairs to the first landing. The police rides in on horseback and up the stairs.
The young men are forced to go up to the top, to the fourth landing. The policeman reaches the third but his horse slips, takes fright and rears up, neighing and throwing off the policeman who tumbles down the stairs until he gets caught on a bend. As he falls his saber sticks into his left thigh and he lets out a loud howl. The horse continues its descent and tramples on its rider who writhes in pain.
As they watch the scene unfold, Yakov and his friend also rush downstairs. When he passes by the policeman, Yakov stops moved by fear and pity. His eyes seem to be calling out for help, but when he goes over, the policeman stretches his hand out to grab him by the arm. Yakov then sees hate in his eyes and two swastikas on the sleeves of his uniform.
Yakov manages to break away from the policeman. He is scared when he gets out into the street. He looks to his right and sees two other police on horseback savagely beating the young man who’d been accompanying him. Yakov flees in the opposite direction, but never sees another sign of Sigmund. Nor does he see him in his house when he rushes back to collect his luggage. That same night Yakov took the last trai
n back to Poland.
Why Jamaica? Why those dreams? Does a place called Jamaica really exist? And why? They are questions to ponder in a train travelling across Europe, if you can’t get to sleep.
Ice skating is his favorite sport, for example when the Wislok is frozen and as hard as stone. He’s not sure why, but in that train that first takes him to Krakow and then, many hours later, to Rzeszów, Yakov can only think about two ideas that obsess him, opposed ideas that keep recurring: Jamaica and the frozen river in the city of his birth. “No, Jamaica doesn’t exist, Sigmund, and if it did exist, it wouldn’t serve any purpose,” he would now tell that strange, perhaps cowardly Sigmund if he ever saw him again. But he never would.
8
Fruit
1925. Twenty years before Hurbinek’s death.
Peaches, apples and wild strawberries in a basket at the feet of Sofia Cèrmik. She is surrounded by the loud voices of men who are strange but not hostile—one only has to see her mother’s relaxed face.
She is barely five years old and her mother Raca takes her by the hand while the men continue filling the basket with the fruit from the piles on the stall.
Sofia has never seen fruit. It is something new for her, as to a certain extent is her awareness that it is midday, that the springtime light is darkened by the pollen and dust in the air and that the smell wafting her way is as much from the fresh vegetables as from the rotten. But it’s a lot to ask of someone so young to distinguish between life and death.
The dense, golden sky is a warning that there will be storms in the afternoon, like yesterday. They will collect snails when it dries out, at sunset.
The Birthday Buyer Page 5