Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  ‘Ottynia?’

  ‘That’s where they’ve all gone. To the Rebbe of Ottynia. He’s a holy man, they said, and he will protect them.’

  ‘Even the bochrim from the yeshiva?’

  ‘In Ottynia. All in Ottynia.’ She said it almost in a singsong voice, and smiled at him the way one smiles at stupid people who ask obvious questions. A rifle butt had knocked her teeth out, but it was still the old, detached smile with which she had walked past them when she was the boss, with her scent of violets. ‘I haven’t seen you at work for a long time, Kamionker,’ she said. ‘Have you been ill?’

  In the kitchen, where there were no dishes in the cupboards, he left her his last piece of smoked meat. He had been saving it for an emergency, but now that he knew where Ruben was there could be no more emergencies.

  Ottynia had been on his route, and he had avoided the town just as he avoided, where possible, all places where there might be soldiers. It was only a few kilometres away, back towards Stanislawow. He could be there that evening.

  He passed the Yeshiva, another defencelessly open building.

  A shell had struck the old Jewish cemetery, right in the middle of the graves. Its crater looked like the calyx of a flower, and the gravestones, toppled in all directions, like its petals.

  53

  The family had a better idea of the end of the story, because Ruben had been there and liked to talk about it, with the religious zeal of someone who has personally experienced a miracle. Because had it not been a miracle, a nes min hashamayim, that his father was suddenly standing in front of him in the rebbe’s house. ‘And,’ he said, and however many times he told the story, he always failed to grasp it, ‘at first I mistook him for a stranger, just as Joseph’s brothers didn’t recognise him when they stood before him in Egypt.’ Ruben had become accustomed to speaking in Biblical similes, but his religious sense overall had become much more tolerant. The more certain someone is of his conviction, the less need he has to force it on others.

  Zalman had had no difficulty finding the house of the Ottynia rebbe. It was the most magnificent building in the place, which didn’t mean much, because Ottynia was a poor small town where the people, as the saying goes, could only have Shabbos if everyone borrowed something from his neighbour. Piety alone doesn’t build palaces. But Rabbi Chajim Hager, a son of Rabbi Baruch of the famous Vizhnitz family, was a tsadik, a prince of the Torah, a scion of old scholarly nobility, so his Hassidim took care of him even if they had to go hungry themselves to make their contributions. Unlike almost all the other houses in the town, made only out of wood, the building in which he resided and held court for his devotees was made of stone. It had two further storeys above the ground floor, and the three-cornered gable that had been placed on it like a stage set, was adorned with a Star of David.

  Most of the ground floor was taken up with the room for prayer and study – ‘shul’ in Yiddish, because a pious person is always also a student – and on feast days more than a hundred Hassidim could gather here and still had enough room to throw themselves on the floor in the Yom Kippur prayer.

  Now almost five hundred people crowded into the building. If one needed the Rebbe’s presence even in peace, as a child needs his father, how much more did one need him in time of war? Where else was one to seek shelter?

  For many years the devotees of the Rebbe of Ottynia had come here on pilgrimages, to take advice and blessing from their spiritual leader. They prayed and sang with him, and when the got their bite from the shirayim, the leftovers from the Rebbe’s table, it tasted as delicious to them as the Leviathan to the righteous in Paradise.

  Now there was no more than a bowl of buckwheat groats a day for each of them, and people had stopped leaving shirayim long ago.

  In Ottynia they had always liked to see the Hassidim arriving, because they brought in modest takings. Even the Zionists, who were so proud of their enlightened modernity and secretly mocked miracle rabbis, were happy to rent the pious pilgrims a bed or spanned their thin horses to take them to the station in Kolomea.

  Now there was nothing more to be earned from them. The community’s poor box had long been emptied, and the price of food was rising further every day: people were now asking a whole crown for a single loaf of bread. If it was meant for the trapped Jews, it could easily be twice as much; he who has no choice cannot bargain. The Russian district commander had declared the rabbi’s house a place of detention, and all its residents prisoners. The Jews had destroyed a telephone line important for the war effort, was the official explanation, and that made them all saboteurs. Anyone who tried to leave the building and was caught received twenty-five lashes. Sometimes it was seventy-five, or just as many lashes as it took before the provost’s arm got sore.

  It was not forbidden to enter the house, but no one was permitted to leave. When Zalman knocked at the door, the sentry didn’t stop him, but just laughed and said to his comrade, ‘Look at this, now the calves are coming to the slaughter of their own free will.’ The new arrival was assailed from all sides and asked about news from the outside world. If Zalman hadn’t been so tired, he would happily have lifted the spirits of the inmates with a few hopeful lies. But first he had to look for Ruben.

  He found him in a room in which six people could have lived and in which twenty of the Talmud students from Kolomea were staying. They slept in shifts, none longer than four hours, so that each of them could lie down once in the course of the day.

  Ruben, his sidelocks longer than he would ever have worn them in Zurich, sat by the wall, emaciated and hollow-cheeked, his arms wrapped around his bent knees, had closed his eyes and was rocking his torso back and forth as if praying or weeping. Zalman had to climb over the sleeping bodies to reach him; one sought peace where one could find it, even if a pious person should not lie on the floor, because that is the place for the dead. He knelt beside his son and hugged him, and Ruben opened his eyes and didn’t know who this strange man was, who smelled of smoke and country roads, and who had tears running down his unshaven cheeks. Then he recognised him and moved his mouth in silence, had forgotten how to speak, and when at last he found his voice again, his first words were from a verse of the scripture.

  ‘Pletah gadolah,’ stammered Ruben, words which mean ‘great deliverance’.

  ‘God sent me before you’, Joseph said to his brothers, ‘to preserve you a posterity on the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance.’

  Years later, when Ruben was ordained a Rabbi and delivered his very first sermon, that was the text that he took as his theme.

  ‘Let’s go home now,’ Zalman whispered. Ruben explained to him that they were locked in here and no one could leave the building, but his father just cracked the joints of his fingers and said, ‘A way can always be found.’

  Zalman’s friend, the one whose house Ruben had lived at in Kolomea, had never arrived in Ottynia. Something must have happened to him, no one knew what. It was a time when people just got lost like a handkerchief or a keyring.

  Zalman had come to Ottynia on the Friday, and in the evening he was standing beside Ruben in the prayer hall. They had really had to fight their way in, because even though the Ottynia rebbe was a gebentschter, one of the thirty-six righteous men, his devotees said, for whom God had not destroyed the world, his shul was not the Temple in Jerusalem which, legend relates, grew larger every year to make room for all the pilgrims. They stood shoulder to shoulder, pressed so tightly together that at the end of the Shemoneh Esrei no one could take the three steps back and the forward that are part of the prayer.

  They stood in absolute darkness. They had run out of candles long ago. Above them, a red dot in the void, floated the eternal light.

  Since the Baal Shem, the holiest of holies and wisest of the wise, was freed from the clutches of pirates, all Hassidim greet the Sabbath with the 107th Psalm, in which God is praised for delivering the prisoners and the lost, and letting the hungry sow their fields and plant their vines
once more. ‘And led them forth by the right way,’ the voices sang around Zalman, ‘that they might go to a city of habitation.’ They sang it jubilantly in the darkness of their prayer hall, as if the prediction had already come to be.

  Somewhere right at the front, at the eastern wall, was their rebbe, leading the prayer. The fact that he could not be seen, or heard through the confusion of voices, made him a mystical presence, so unreal and yet as real as the invisible Sabbath bride to whom they all turned as they entered.

  They prayed and sang and would also, in their ecstasy, have danced if there had been room to dance.

  Zalman had never been a pious person. He often said, with a mixture of mockery and resignation, ‘I don’t know if there’s a God, I just know that we are his chosen people.’

  Later, when he told Hinda about this Friday evening in shul in Ottynia, he said thoughtfully, ‘Whether a God exists, I still don’t know. But there’s something there.’

  ‘Lamp down, worries up,’ they said in the Meijer family. There was no Shabbos lamp here that could be lowered over the table and lit, and had there been, there would have been no oil for it. And yet in the darkness of the prayer hall Zalman had the feeling of being able to let go at last, at least for a day.

  The sude, the solemn Sabbath dinner, consisted of a piece of bread and a pinch of salt. Zalman took the olive-sized bite that means one has done one’s duty, and left the rest to Ruben.

  For a few hours they slept side by side on the floor. Zalman had put an arm around his son and inhaled the smell of his hair, as he had done when Ruben had climbed into his parents’ bed as a terrified little boy because there was a storm outside his window.

  A piece of oilcloth was found, which had once been a tablecloth – who needs tablecloths when he has nothing to eat? – and from it he made a long bag with two long straps at either end. He didn’t explain anything, he just said to his son, ‘If you want to say goodbye to someone, do it quickly, because we two are about to leave.’

  In the rebbe’s house, where all the rooms and corridors were full of people, rumours spread quickly, so everyone soon knew that there was a man there, a meschuggener or a gebentshter, who could tell, who said he could simply stroll pass the guards into freedom. Even though no messenger or formal invitation had come, the rumour also knew that the Rebbe wanted to see them both, the tailor Zalman and his son Ruben. Standing in front of the Rebbe and being able to ask him his advice and his blessing was a great honour, but also a formal occasion, at which the rules to be respected were just as strict as at a royal audience. One didn’t present one’s problems orally to the Rebbe, but wrote them on a piece of paper, the kvitel, which mustn’t contain anything but the name of the supplicant, his place of origin, and the matter involved. A sage like the Rebbe of Ottynia needs no explanations, he just understands.

  ‘Ruben ben Hinda and Zalman ben Scheindl,’ they wrote, because in a kvitel you give the name of the mother and not the father, ‘both from Zurich’. As the reason for his audience Ruben gave the first thing that had come into his head at the sight of his father: ‘Pletah gadolah’, great deliverance.

  The Rebbe was the only one in this overcrowded house who still had a room of his own, even if it was no longer the big study room, just the little room to which he had sometimes retreated in the past to get half an hour’s rest. The gabbai, the rebbe’s steward, opened the door to them and let them in.

  Rabbi Chaijim Hager sat behind a table full of books. The first thing that struck Zalman about him was his eyes, because they were so completely different: one wide open and penetrating, the other, with a hanging eyelid, half narrowed as if the Ottynian were seeing through his interlocutor with an admonitory gaze, and at the same time forgiving him for everything again. Only later did he discover that the Rebbe – ‘But he still sees more than anyone else!’ – was blind in one eye. Under his thick grey beard his lips were always somewhat pursed, as if for a kiss or to taste an unfamiliar morsel. He wore the black silk kaftan, but on his head he was not wearing, as he had done on the Sabbath, the shtraiml, the fur beret with thirteen dark brown sable tails, but a stiff black hat, a bowler, of the kind worn by a Galician schoolteacher, or market trader. His hat was pushed to the back of his neck, and the velvet cap was visible on his high, bald forehead.

  The gabbai had closed the door behind him a long time before, but Rabbi Chaijim stared into the distance with his good eye, and didn’t look at them.

  The set the kvitel down in front of him, along with the obligatory coin that the Rebbe would pass on to the poor. A few minutes passed in silence. Only then did he pick up the piece of paper and hold it up to his good eye. ‘Pletah gadolah,’ he read, and spoken by the quiet, but powerful voice of the rebbe the words sounded like a promise. Of course he knew the Bible passage; he was said to know by heart not only the Tanakh with all its books, but also the whole Mishnah. He smiled at them, and when the Rebbe smiles no more bad things can happen to you. ‘It was not you who sent me hither,’ he continued the Bible quotation in Hebrew, ‘but God.’ And added in Yiddish, ‘If someone is sent by God – how can he fail?’ He raised his hand in blessing and sank back into his thoughts.

  That was the whole audience that Zalman and Ruben Kamionker had with the great Rabbi Chaijim Hager of Ottynia. It was time to set off.

  Behind the house, where in more peaceful times the vegetable garden had been, a latrine had been dug, enlarged twice and still too small, and there Zalman knelt down on the dirty boards and, holding his breath, fished out a handful of filth and then another and then another. He did it with his bare hands and filled the oilcloth bag with the repellent mass. He wiped his hands on his son’s trousers – ‘That too has a purpose,’ he said – and then he set about the most difficult tailoring task of his life: he sewed up his bag full of shit, with coarse stitches and in great haste, because it cost him a great deal of effort not to vomit.

  Ruben had to tie the bag around him and pull his trousers over to it. Because the stitch, quite deliberately, was not quite tight, he soon felt the strange excrement running slowly and disgustingly down his legs.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Zalman.

  He put his son over his shoulder, a hunter with a slain deer, walked back through the courtyard at the back and marched resolutely down the long corridor and past the shul, opened the front door, and when the guards blocked his way, bayonets at the ready, he said only one word.

  ‘Cholera,’ said Zalman.

  In the Russian army, too, more soldiers had been killed by this insidious disease than by enemy bullets, and when the soldiers saw the shit running out of the young Jew’s trousers, when they smelled the nauseating miasma and saw his sunken face and closed eyes, they took a step back and then another and let him pass.

  ‘It must have been like that when Moses parted the Red Sea,’ Ruben said later.

  With his son over his shoulder, Zalman walked through the whole of Ottynia. It was only in the little forest, where in the spring you could pick tiny strawberries and in the autumn huge mushrooms, only when no one could see and hear them any more, that he put him back on the ground, took a few steps to the side and threw up. ‘Try and clean yourself as best you can,’ he said, and retched again.

  When Ruben was clean – not really clean, he wouldn’t be able to do that until he could finally take a bath in Czernowitz – when the oilcloth bag was buried under a pile of rotten leaves and there was no longer any sign of it, Zalman opened his now threadbare rucksack, took out his sewing kit and unrolled the scissors from the cloth. ‘They will grow back, but a head doesn’t grow back,’ he said as he cut off his son’s sidelocks. For what he planned it would not have been good to be seen as a Jew.

  They took the way south-east, taking a wide arc around Kolomea, because Zalman wouldn’t have been able to bear seeing his home town as he had found it three days before.

  Their goal was the border with Bukovina, where the front was as well. The way there was easy to find: they only had to t
ake the direction from which the refugees were coming.

  They reached Sniatyn, where they were so close to the armies that they would have heard their guns, except that the Russians had run out of ammunition, and the Austrians were waiting for victory in the West before going back on the attack along with their German allies.

  Compared to what Zalman had already been through, the way to the other side was a pleasant stroll. In this border area there had always been smuggling, and because people have to earn their money even in wartime, a farmer was found who showed them a secret path through the positions.

  The Russians had also overrun Czernowitz, and had only just been driven from it, but there was already proper coffee in the coffee-houses again, and in the hotel they would fill you a tub of hot water for half a crown.

  They bought trousers, jackets and warm coats from an outfitter, not elegant, but clean. The only item of clothing, in fact the only object Ruben had left Zurich with, and which he brought back home, was his arba kanfes with the tzitzits at the four corners.

  The timetable had not yet come back into force, but once a day a train travelled to the capital, with a conductor who was as unfriendly as in the best days of peace.

  In Vienna they ate at Schmeidel Kalisch’s famous kosher restaurant. It was so good that Ruben had cramp afterwards. He was no longer used to rich food.

  Zalman bought a copy of the Freie Presse from a newspaper seller at the station. In Galicia, it said, the Russian troops were not adhering to martial law, but it was only a matter of time before they were driven back to the Steppes from where they had come. Not least for that reason it was extremely regrettable, the author of the editorial wrote, that so many citizens of the Mosaic persuasion had fled irrationally from the country; one should, he wrote, be able to endure a certain amount of hardship in such difficult times. Zalman spread the newspaper out on the empty seat in front of him, put his feet on it and went to sleep.

  When he woke up in the middle of the night Ruben needed to talk to him urgently, right now. He hadn’t yet thanked his father and had been trying to find the right words for hours.