Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  When Daniel came home that evening, Lieba’s set face and her arms folded across her round body warned him of trouble. ‘It’s Hesiu again,’ she said. ‘That child gives me nothing but tzures. On a sunny day he comes home wet through and won’t say what he’s been doing. You have to do something about him.’

  After the birth of Matus the preceding year, Lieba was finding life more hectic than ever. Hardly a day went by that she wasn’t complaining to Daniel about Hesiu’s ripped trousers, lost caps, skinned knees and scraped elbows. He came home late from cheder, didn’t do his homework, and caused upsets every single day. How was she supposed to run this household and look after ten children when this one took up so much energy and gave her no peace?

  Daniel looked grave. The problem of what to do with his wayward son had been weighing heavily on his mind for some time. Although he had hoped that Hesiu would settle down as he grew older, he was now more unruly than ever and had even started playing truant and writing his own absence notes.

  It wasn’t just that Hesiu rebelled against cheder, as Avner and Jerzy had done. He was becoming a delinquent. Daniel looked at Lieba who was mending yet another pair of trousers the child had ripped. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘If we don’t do something about it, who knows how he’ll end up. But I think I have the solution.’

  Looking up from her mending, Lieba glanced at her husband. Daniel’s jutting brow had grown wider as his hair receded, and his neat beard had gone completely grey, but his gaze was more intense than ever. ‘My brother Samuel wrote to say that he can arrange for Hesiu to go to boarding school at Igru and spend the holidays with him at Shepesvaria. I’m going to send him there,’ he said. Daniel’s two brothers lived in what was then Hungary but later became part of Czechoslovakia. One was a vet, while the other, Samuel, had a big brewery, hotel and restaurant.

  Apart from hoping that their wayward son would become more controllable in a different environment, they must both have looked forward to a welcome break from the constant aggravation. Hungary seemed the perfect solution. Since Galicia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, its citizens could travel freely from one part of the realm to another. Daniel and Lieba, who had property and relatives in Vienna, often travelled to the capital by train as if they were going to another suburb.

  As soon as Daniel began arranging Hesiu’s departure, Lieba started having qualms. Her loving nature, so often swamped by the demands of everyday life, now asserted itself. ‘How will the child manage among strangers? He can’t speak a single word of Hungarian. Who will look after him?’ she fretted. But Daniel’s thinking wasn’t clouded by emotion. ‘You’ll see, in a new school, among different boys, he’ll change for the better.’

  Apprehensive about her son’s reaction, Lieba let Daniel break the news. When his father called him, Hesiu hastily tried to rearrange his crumpled trousers so that the latest tear wouldn’t show. Without hurrying, his father dipped his nib into the brass-edged porcelain ink pot, scraped the excess ink against the side and signed his name at the bottom of his letterhead which said ‘Instalateur für Wasserleitung und Gasbeleuchtung, Krakau’. Water and Gas Installer, Krakow.

  After placing the account on top of a neat stack of papers on his big American desk, Daniel closed the lid and turned to face his son with a concerned expression. While Lieba looked on, Daniel told him that in the new school year, he’d be going to boarding school in Hungary. Hesiu could hardly contain his excitement. At last he’d get away from his strict father and his mother who never had enough time for him.

  He’d lately begun to wonder whether his mother cared deeply about any of her children. One evening, when it was already dark and the courtyard had grown quiet, his little brother Janek still hadn’t come home. Suddenly there was a loud knock on the door. It was the mother of Janek’s playmate Moishe. Her face was white and her words tumbled over one another as she pulled at her grey shawl. ‘My Moishe hasn’t come home yet and I know he’s with your Janek. Let’s hire the town crier together so he can go all over the neighbourhood shouting our children’s names. God willing, perhaps someone has seen them,’ she wailed. Lieba, however, didn’t do as her neighbour suggested. Although she was anxious for her son to come home, her shrewd, frugal mind saw no point in wasting money. Since the two boys had been playing together, presumably they were still together. ‘If her Moishe turns up, our Janek is sure to be with him, so there’s no need for me to pay as well,’ she said.

  As Lieba had predicted, the crier her neighbour engaged soon located both boys who were playing in another yard, so she didn’t have to spend a single groschen, but her cool thinking upset Hesiu deeply. He wished that she’d been as distressed as Moishe’s mother. Being an only child, Moishe was probably more precious to his family, he reasoned to himself. After all, the Baldingers already had ten.

  Hesiu couldn’t wait to get away from his brothers and sisters. As the number of children increased, so did the friction between them. The boys belted each other with savage fury, the girls pulled each other’s hair and told tales, and the babies howled. Even at night Hesiu couldn’t get away from them because he had to share a bed with his younger brother. He often woke up in the middle of the night feeling something hot and wet spreading underneath him. To his affronted nose, it seemed that no amount of washing ever got the cloying ammonia smell of his brother’s urine out of the bedclothes. His older sister Rozia made his life a misery. Because of her poor hearing, Rozia was angry at the whole world, but he always felt he bore the brunt of her frustrations. From the moment he was born, she tormented, teased and picked on him incessantly. Without a kindred soul at home, Hesiu felt lonely and misunderstood.

  To make matters worse, there was always some commotion in the family. If it wasn’t the birth of a new baby, it was the death of some old relatives that constantly required his parents’ attention. Daniel’s mother Ryfka Baldinger had died the previous year. Reminiscing eighty years later in Tel-Aviv, Aunty Andzia recalls that her parents Daniel and Lieba had been playing cards at home with friends when the telephone shrilled. It was a call from Nowy Sacz to tell Daniel that his mother had died. After replacing the trumpet-like receiver, he tamped out his cigarette and, according to Aunty Andzia, never smoked or played cards again, because he felt so guilty that, while his mother lay dying, he’d been enjoying himself.

  Shortly afterwards, Daniel brought his father to live with them in Sebastiana Street, so that he could keep an eye on him. It seemed to Hesiu that his grandfather was older than the universe. My great-grandfather Matus Baldinger was ninety-three years old, a stout old man with a bald head and a long grey beard, like a distinguished looking rabbi. Aristocratic looking, according to Aunty Lunia. He wore a black satin coat and a shirt as white as snow which his devoted granddaughter Berta, who had moved to Krakow to look after her grandfather, used to launder.

  After one year in Krakow, Matus Baldinger decided to return to Nowy Sacz where he died soon afterwards. He was buried in the cemetery there, like the Sanzer Rebbe, and each year, on the anniversary of his death, Daniel went on foot over the mountains to pray at his grave. At the same time, he always left a kvitl, a note of supplication, at the tomb of the Sanzer Rebbe.

  With all the commotion about his grandfather, Hesiu felt even more neglected. It seemed as though there was nobody in that huge family who was interested in him. Not even his oldest sister Lunia, whom he admired from a distance. Lunia had no time for her brother. She had taken her younger sisters Andzia and Karola under her wing. Like my father, Andzia was lost in the middle of this large family. A sharp-eyed little girl with straight dark hair worn in a heavy fringe across her forehead, she was discontented and envious.

  The greatest object of Andzia’s envy was her younger sister Karola who was their mother’s favourite. At the age of four, little Karola resembled a porcelain doll, with her blonde curls, rosebud mouth and eyes the colour of delphiniums. Lunia loved taking her little sister for walks in the Planty Gardens because no-one passed t
hem without stopping to admire her.

  Dressed in the fetching outfits that her mother ordered from Mrs Koralowa, the best children’s dressmaker in Krakow, Karola turned heads in her velvet pelisse with its matching beret. Andzia used to go with them too, but nobody ever stopped to admire her, not even when she wore the same outfit as Karola. Worried in case someone should cast a spell on her beautiful daughter, Lieba always said, ‘Khanaynahora,’ or spat, ‘Pfui, pfui, may the evil spirits not hear you,’ whenever anyone praised the child. Just in case, she tied a red silk thread around her wrist to ward off the evil spirits and covered her little face with a veil.

  Lunia, who always aspired to a life of refinement, almost died of embarrassment every time her mother gave birth to yet another baby. Controlling one’s reproductive ability was one of the hallmarks of educated, modern couples, and it offended Lunia’s sense of decorum that an intelligent woman of middle age, in comfortable circumstances, should continue having babies year after year like an ignorant peasant.

  Lunia never forgot the day she came home from the state school she attended to find her mother soaking her feet in a basin of scalding water. Lieba’s head was in her hands and she was weeping. Although private matters were not discussed in those times, Lunia was perceptive enough to realise that Mamuncia was pregnant once again and was following some folk remedy in the hope of bringing about a miscarriage. It didn’t work, and six months later another child, the tenth, was born. He was called Matus after his grandfather.

  Influenced by her older sister, Andzia also became critical of their father for inflicting so many pregnancies on his wife. Thinking back over her childhood in her sunny flat near Diezengoff Street in Tel-Aviv, Aunty Andzia looks pensive. ‘Father must have had a high sex drive. Otherwise he wouldn’t have had so many children.’

  She immediately regrets voicing that opinion. Now she’s jabbing the air between us with her crimson spear-shaped nail and I can hear Lunia’s voice as Andzia echoes her older sister’s warning. ‘In my opinion, no-one needs this book. Why do people need to know that your grandfather was a plumber? Or that we had to sleep two to a bed?’

  By 1912 the Baldingers had moved to 20 Sebastiana Street. Daniel and Lieba had bought a three-storey block at the better end of the street, near the Planty Gardens, where the professional people lived. According to Aunty Lunia, they moved because Lieba wanted her daughters to live in a more socially desirable area. But soon even that apartment was so overcrowded that they ran out of beds.

  While Matus was a toddler, they put two chairs together to make his bed. Recalling his sleeping arrangements over eighty years later in Paris, Marcel, as he came to be called, puts a large fleshy hand on his large bald forehead and makes his beer coloured eyes bulge in mock alarm. ‘Mon Dieu! You’d better not mention that I slept on two chairs!’ he laughs. ‘Lunia wouldn’t like it!’

  It was at the end of the summer of 1912 that eleven-year-old Hesiu sat on the train bound for Hungary, thrilled to be leaving Krakow behind. He pressed his nose against the window so as not to miss a single detail of the landscape. The countryside resembled a large quilt scattered with clusters of farmhouses. Rich brown potato fields with small white flowers, meadows of rapeseed as yellow as melted butter, and stubbled wheatfields stretched out under a domed sky. How beautiful it was!

  Peasants with brawny arms pitched hay and rolled it into stacks just as their ancestors had done for centuries. Hesiu smiled at the sight of the conical stooks which seemed to stand on the field like legless people. Peasant women with sun-browned faces worked barefoot in the fields with an easy rhythm.

  Sitting beside him was his grandfather, old Abraham Spira, who was accompanying his grandson to Hungary. The stern old man, whom the little boy feared, hardly spoke during the entire journey. The only thing my father could remember his grandfather saying to him in all that time was a rebuke. ‘Turn the peak of your cap down, Hesiu,’ he barked. ‘Only common boys wear their hats like that.’

  When they reached the school, Abraham filled in the enrolment forms, turned on the heel of his well-polished shoe, and left without saying goodbye. Perhaps he was afraid that his grandson would burst into tears. Little did he know that Hesiu was relieved to see his taciturn grandfather stride away. Although he didn’t know anyone and didn’t speak any Hungarian, he felt as though he’d just laid down a heavy burden.

  His new school had a good reputation among Jewish parents in neighbouring countries because the pupils received a good secular as well as spiritual education. Although the headmaster was a rabbi, the school was subsidised by the government and employed non-Jewish teachers as well. The children received kosher food and excellent religious instruction from Rabbi Koppelreich who later became the Chief Rabbi of Hungary.

  Twice every day the Jewish boys attended synagogue, but the rest of the time they studied secular subjects, like children at state schools. To Haydn’s melody, which later became the tune of ‘Deutschland Uber Alles’, Hesiu and the other boys sang the anthem to Kaiser Franz Jozef: ‘May God defend, may God protect, our emperor and our land.’ No-one could yet suspect that God’s support for this obsolete empire was drawing to an end.

  Boys living away from home were billeted with private families, and my father was sent to live with his Hebrew teacher Mr Goldsztain. He was thrilled when he saw the dormitory. A bed all to himself!

  He was even more delighted with the meals. Mrs Goldsztain was a warm-hearted woman who understood that growing boys had voracious appetites. On his first Saturday Hesiu sat expectantly at the long table with the other boys while she served each of them a big slice of cake, overflowing with minced poppy seed, sweetened with plump raisins and spiced with cinnamon. More than sixty years later, the memory of this poppy slice still made my father’s mouth water. The following Saturday he tasted another ambrosial cake, this time filled with chopped walnuts. The cakes were delicious and cut in generous portions but, even more wonderful, you could get a second helping just by asking for it.

  Life in Hungary was full of new pleasures. For the first time Hesiu had his own bookshelf where he could keep his treasures without worrying that someone would grab them. He could play with boys his own age, run outside and play games without getting into trouble. In summer they played soccer on the playing field with a real ball pumped up with air, not a cloth one like in Krakow. There were excursions to nearby villages and hikes into the woods. Nobody thought he was a larrikin.

  During the holidays he stayed with his Uncle Samuel and played with his cousins. Sometimes they sneaked into the cellar and tasted the wine fermenting in the bulging oak casks. The biggest thrill was being allowed to climb aboard the truck in which his uncle delivered his spirits. In 1912 this vehicle was the sensation of the little town, and riding in it with his cousins, Hesiu felt like a celebrity.

  At the end of the first school year, Lieba came to fetch him home for the summer holidays. After not seeing her son for a whole year, her first words were, ‘So, has your maths improved?’ When Hesiu nodded, she started peppering questions to test him. ‘Nine nines? Eight sevens? Six elevens?’ The moment his mother started setting him sums, Hesiu’s confidence melted away and he got them all wrong.

  Lieba looked annoyed. ‘So you’ve been wasting your time here too?’ she said.

  ‘Well, it just comes out differently in Hungarian,’ he mumbled. The moment his parents appeared, things started going wrong.

  Maths had always been my father’s weak point, and I can remember him at seventy, poring over ‘Teach Yourself Maths’ books, determined to master in old age what had eluded him in childhood. When he was five, Lunia had tried to teach him elementary sums without success. If she wrote down 1 + 1 = 2, he could understand it, but when she wrote 1 + 1 = ? or 1 + 2 = ?, he thought that a question mark was a number and couldn’t understand how it could equal two as well as three.

  Mathematical ineptitude must be hereditary because I also had trouble with mathematics, the only subject I’ve ever failed
in my entire scholastic career. For a conscientious student like me, failing a subject was distressing enough, but my father’s reaction upset me even more. His eyes, bluer than ever against his smoothly combed silver hair, glinted with disapproval. ‘You failed!’ he said, and turned away without another word.

  In spite of Hesiu’s poor maths, Daniel and Lieba obviously felt that the school was having a good effect on him, or perhaps his absence was having a good effect on them, because to his delight they let him stay another year. This time his younger brother Izio joined him.

  At the age of eighty-seven in Los Angeles, Uncle Izio takes a few tottering steps down the bare corridor of his boxlike apartment in Woodland Hills and stands there just looking at me. Tears splash down his jowly cheeks. As he wraps his thin arms around me, his frail body trembles with emotion at seeing me after so many years. Later, in a tremulous voice, he explains how he came to join his older brother at boarding school. ‘When I was travelling with my father, taking Hesiu back to Hungary after the summer holidays, I misbehaved, and father said curtly, “I’ll deal with you when we get home.”’

  That was all he said but it was enough. For the rest of the journey Izio squirmed on the hard seat, trembling at the thought of what awaited him when they returned to Krakow. Nothing more was said, but Daniel must have pondered over his fourth son while the lush Slovak countryside flashed past. Izio, who was one year younger than my father, didn’t resemble him in appearance or temperament. He had dark hair, dark eyes which sparkled in his oval face, was sports mad and had an outgoing personality.

  Izio had never done well at school, and as the train clacked over the railway tracks, it occurred to Daniel that a change of environment might benefit him too. As they approached the school in strained silence, Daniel suddenly asked, ‘How would you like to stay here with your brother?’