by I. J. Singer
Certainly, he was capable of a love affair. Women weren’t all that choosy—especially when it came to a wealthy and important man.
The more she brooded about it, the more she grew convinced that her suspicions were correct. The same husband to whom she hadn’t devoted a moment of thought in years now consumed all her waking hours. He suddenly acquired a vast importance in her eyes. And the larger he grew in her estimation, the lower her own self-esteem fell.
What need did he have of her, an aged, withered woman, when he could have all the fresh young girls he wanted? No wonder he didn’t come home. Maybe they even joined him in mocking and laughing at her, his wife? …
She felt a stabbing in her breast. It was her first experience with jealousy. This was no longer a novel, but real life, and the pain was keen and urgent.
For a while she tried to persuade herself that he wasn’t deceiving her but that something had happened to him to keep him away from home. She got out of bed and sat up listening for every sound. She peered through the windows into the dark night, starting at every ring of the gate bell, every knock on the door, every footstep in the courtyard. She even telephoned the factory, but no one answered. She let the phone ring many times, then hung up in despair.
She went into her daughter’s bedroom to seek a little comfort, but Gertrud, too, wasn’t home. She was out seeking gaiety and laughter wherever it could be found in the dank, smoky city. Dinele went back to her bed and lay awake until the first factory whistles pierced the foredawn air.
Forty-One
IT WAS INDEED A WOMAN who had estranged Max Ashkenazi from his home, but not the young beauty Dinele envisioned—rather a homely, hardly alluring elderly widow.
Following the fiasco with the army contract, Max felt a sense of terrible failure and dejection. He had planned to use the profits from the deal to buy up all the available Huntze stock in one shot, thus giving him the majority of the shares and making him the chief officer of the firm, the culmination of his childhood goal. Now he was right back where he had started. And what was particularly galling was the fact that the opportunity had been so timely. The barons had, if anything, grown even more profligate, and they flooded their director with stock to be disposed of on the open market.
Max didn’t release the stock into the open market but bought it himself and stacked it in his safe, row upon row. He totaled the certificates again and again with a deep sense of frustration. If not for the unionists and their “revolution,” he would be King of Lodz now. He had been forced to pay enormous indemnities for his failure to meet the army contract. That and lawyers’ fees, court costs, and bribes had put a large dent in the firm’s assets, and his enemies in the plant gloated over his setback and denounced him in letters to the barons.
The fiasco had set his timetable back considerably. It would take years to undo the damage, and time, Max knew, was his worst enemy. The years flew by, and the prize still eluded him. He could wait no longer. He had to show Lodz, especially now that his brother had once more bested him in such spectacular fashion.
It started with a divorce. His sickly, bitter wife could no longer go on living with Yakub. Each time her relatives tried to restore peace and to reunite her with her husband in Lodz, she ran back to Warsaw after only a couple of weeks, corroded with jealousy and resentment toward his women, his robust appetite, his roaring good health. She was barren, besides, and even though he never reproached her for this failure, he fondled every child he met, much to Perele’s discomfiture, for she was even jealous of children.
What irked her most was when he played with his little niece, Gertrud. Although the brothers were estranged, their wives had remained friends. Even before they had become sisters-in-law, Perele and Dinele had been distantly related, and each time Perele came back to Lodz, Dinele, her mother, and her daughter came to visit her often.
Gertrud clung to her uncle Yakub. He provided her with the affection she should have gotten from her father. He bought her the prettiest dolls and toys. He drove her in his carriage, made the horses gallop, even let her hold the reins.
Slim, blue-eyed, with copper ringlets that trembled with her every move, with warm, plump, smooth arms and hands, she was the carbon copy of her mother from the time she and Yakub had played in the Ashkenazi courtyard. In Gertrud Yakub saw the girl everyone predicted would become his bride, and he carried her piggyback, as he had carried her mother so many years ago.
Dinele and Perele looked on with apprehension. Intuitively they sensed that there was something more to the game than was apparent between the uncle and niece. She was already thirteen, but she kissed and fondled him like a hysterical child and passionately cried, “Uncle, I love you so!” Whenever she saw him, she threw herself in his lap and embraced him, and he responded with hot, juicy kisses.
Dinele understood that in effect it was she Yakub was kissing, that in his love for the daughter he expressed his feelings toward the mother, not as she was now, but as she once was, and this both pleased and distressed her.
“Gertrud, you should be ashamed!” she admonished the girl. “At your age I was already engaged, and here you are acting like a child.…”
“Yakub, maybe you’d stop already!” Perele suggested bitterly. “I can’t stand the hullabaloo.…”
After the others left, she berated him viciously. “What you do behind my back is one thing. But when we’re together, act like a husband.”
Yakub was puzzled. “Can’t I even play with a child? With my own niece?”
“We know these nieces already,” Perele grunted, and retired to her bed fully dressed.
After years of such a relationship they divorced. Max gloated. Yakub wouldn’t be getting even a groschen of the huge Eisen fortune. No one would come to his aid now when he again brought his sales agency to the brink of ruin. His seven years of plenty had ended. All he would be left with after the years of debauchery and carousal would be his carriage whip.
But it didn’t happen quite this way.
Maximilian Flederbaum’s notoriously wild daughter, Crazy Yanka, who had already gone through three husbands, suddenly fixed her eyes on Yakub and launched another of her reckless, impetuous affairs.
Lodz chortled over the madcap heiress’s latest escapade. The whole town knew of her insatiable appetite for new lovers, but this time people questioned her choice. Although she herself hadn’t converted like her sisters, she was as close as one could come to being gentile with her snobbish, aristocratic ways, and people wondered why she had taken up with Yakub, who not too long ago had still worn the long gabardine of the orthodox Jew.
“It’ll last from Monday to Thursday,” the Lodz wiseacres said. “Another of Crazy Yanka’s flings.…”
But while it lasted, she rode with her new flame boldly through Lodz. Yakub whipped the horses into a gallop, while the heiress clung to him with a great show of affection and even kissed him brazenly, as only someone of her reputation could do.
Lodz relished this latest bit of scandal. It was bandied about in homes, cafés, stores, and factories. Even the seamstresses talked of it at their machines. A wedding was imminent, people said. And the news was brought to Max Ashkenazi by gleeful merchants who knew of the brothers’ feud.
“He’s a real go-getter, Mr. Director,” they unctuously reported. “He’s fallen into a fat bowl of gravy this time, your brother has.…”
Max stopped up his ears. “I haven’t the slightest interest in it,” he lied. “Shall we get back to business, gentlemen?”
Inside, he churned. The news of his brother’s latest triumph wouldn’t let him eat or sleep. He didn’t know if the affair would end in marriage—he wouldn’t even allow himself to consider such a possibility—but Yanka had installed Yakub as director of her father’s factory and even moved him into the palace.
Old Flederbaum was seriously incapacitated. A disgruntled worker had stabbed him in the head, and by the time they pulled him away the damage had already been inflicted. Half of the
old man’s body was paralyzed, and he was confined to a wheelchair. Naturally he could no longer run the factory.
The responsibility fell to his children, but they weren’t up to it. The daughters had converted and moved to Warsaw, and their husbands wouldn’t consider coming back to Lodz, that filthy center of Jewishness, which they had managed to escape. The sons, on the other hand, were borderline lunatics steeped in occultism, mysticism, and sorcery and surrounded by priests, monks, and fanatics of every persuasion.
The only one with any sense was Yanka, but her sexual adventures left her no time for anything else, least of all business. Nor was it the custom in Lodz for women to run large commercial enterprises. She, therefore, entrusted the entire operation to Yakub Ashkenazi in order to spite her relatives and friends for whose refined tastes Yakub was too much the Jew.
Yanka always relished doing the unusual, something that would set people’s tongues to wagging and shock them. But beyond that, she wanted Yakub to be always available when she wanted him, whether on the factory office couch or in her palace bedroom.
Yakub turned over his sales duties to subordinates and took over the operation of the Flederbaum mill.
Max Ashkenazi turned a poisonous green when he heard the news. How many more times would his lazy lout of a brother show him up? What had Yakub ever done to deserve such luck? Was being a human stud sufficient reason for such ample rewards?
Logic couldn’t explain it. Was it some sort of black magic? There was even talk of a marriage. Flederbaum’s entire fortune would fall into Yakub’s lap. What other heights might his brother not attain? He was the only sane person in a palace full of lunatics, the only one with any sense of business, meager as it was. He was yet liable, God forbid, to become King of Lodz!
A sense of dread came over Max. For all his assimilation, he clung to a belief in a Providence. Was it Yakub’s destiny always to get the best of him? If only he had gotten such a chance! He would have sent all those crackpots abroad to play with their ghosts and spirits. He would have seized the whole ball of wax for himself and become King of Lodz.…
No, this was too much to bear. To have the wine spill just as the cup reached his lips? … He could wait no longer. He needed a lump sum with which to buy up the controlling share in the firm, and he would get it.
A plan was hatching in his mind. It too involved a woman, but far from one like Crazy Yanka. In the course of his travels through Russia, he had had occasion to do business with a woman in Kharkov. She was a widow, no longer young, but a millionairess and childless, living all alone. She was big, lumpy, coldly rational, as tough and hard as any man. Her employees at her sugar works trembled at the sight of her.
Whenever Max came to see her, she received him very warmly and hinted that if she were married to a man of his acumen, she would entrust all her holdings to him. He had never taken these veiled invitations seriously, but her words made a deep stir within him now. With a fortune of this size, he could achieve his goal immediately. He would become King of Lodz.…
At first, the notion seemed bizarre, outlandish. But the more he mulled it over, the less ludicrous it appeared. His married life had been a farce. Dinele never so much as offered him a kind word, much less a trace of respect or recognition. To Lodz he was a giant; to her he was a nothing, a gnat. Was this the life he was so terrified of giving up?
And what did he have from his children? Their mother had reared them to despise him. She had planted the seeds of rebellion within them. His son was an idler, a wastrel. He took completely after his lazy grandfather, that dunce of a Haim Alter. Getrud was no better—a runaround who only followed her wildest impulses. What pleasure had he, their father, ever garnered from either of them?
True, he was already along in age, and people would talk, but what did he care about others? A person was obliged only to do what was best for him. Once he was master of the factory, King of Lodz, people would grovel and fawn before him like dogs.…
As for Dinele, he would settle a sum on her—a much more generous sum than she had brought with her as her dowry. He would either give her a lump settlement or pay her alimony, and he would see to the children’s needs as well. He would pay his son’s tuition as long as he remained in school, and he would marry off his daughter and once and for all get her out of his hair. They were no longer youngsters. They had to make their own way. When he was their age, he was leading his own life.
Still, it wasn’t so easy for him to make up his mind about his wife. He had no inkling how to begin, what steps to undertake toward a divorce. Had she been unfaithful or lax in other ways, it would have been easy. But she was as inoffensive and dutiful as ever. Lately she had displayed more devotion toward him than ever before in their marriage. And if truth be told, he was still in love with her, even though not as desperately as before.
But soon he pushed aside all doubts and hesitations. He reexamined his life from the day he had moved into Haim Alter’s house until the present. He summed up all the pluses and minuses, and it came out wholly one-sided. He had never enjoyed any kind of family life. He was like a stranger in his own house. Like a mendicant, he had to beg his wife for every crumb of happiness or take it by force. Now that she was older, she had suddenly decided to be nice to him, to call him by his chosen name, to play up to him and ask that they conduct a normal household with friends, company, and the like.
But it was too late for that. Now the advantage was his. A man in his forties was in his prime; a woman in her forties was over the hill. No, she hadn’t done anything to earn his goodwill. It would have been different if she had provided him happiness until now. Then it would have been incumbent upon him to stick with her for the rest of her life. Marriage was like any other enterprise; there had to be equitable behavior from both partners. But to be made a fool of all these years and repay it with kindness and consideration? This wasn’t Max Ashkenazi’s way.
He gave himself up to self-pity. For years he, the yeshiva student, hadn’t been good enough for her. Now she, the old bag, wasn’t good enough for him. He could get the prettiest, the fanciest women. Lodz was his for the taking. Not that he would become a libertine like his swine of a brother. He, Max, would follow a respectable course and take a wife who didn’t waste her life on stupid novels but who respected his business acumen, who understood the ways of the world, who was herself a woman of means. And he would attain the goal he had striven for from childhood—he would become King of Lodz.
As always, once he had made his decision, he didn’t waste a moment but launched a furious effort to get things moving. He began by deliberately staying away from home and sleeping night after night at his apartment. This, he knew, was the right step. It was better to establish distance between himself and his wife. A woman made a man weak and a slave to his foolish desires. By maintaining a distance, the brain functioned with greater clarity and efficiency.
“Frightfully busy!” he replied each time Dinele phoned him at the factory.
Her calling and his indifference provided him enormous satisfaction. It was sweet revenge for all the years of neglect and deprivation to which she had subjected him.
Soon he began making frequent trips to Kharkov to court the Widow Margulit. Max’s fingers already itched for her millions, but she was in no hurry to open her groaning strongbox to him. Tough and as resolute as any man he had encountered, she insisted on proceeding in businesslike fashion. Yes, she esteemed him greatly, she had the highest respect for him, but she had to look out for her own interests. She could have married any number of men, but she needed a husband who was dependable, solid, with an excellent business sense, a man of impeccable reputation, to whom she could entrust her entire fortune without a qualm. Ashkenazi met all these qualifications but one—he was married, and until he was free, there was no point in pursuing the matter.
Max took apparent offense. “Don’t you trust me, my dear Madam Margulit?” he asked with a show of deep hurt.
Mrs. Margulit tried to exp
ress all the tenderness she could summon on her coarse, mannish face. “I trust you implicitly, but you of all people know that everything in this world must be done in correct fashion. Business and friendship don’t mix. We are no longer children. We can wait. First the divorce, then—”
“I’ll do it!” Ashkenazi cried, rising up on tiptoe, as he always did when making a big decision.
Coming back to Lodz, he went straight to the mill. That same evening, after he had caught up with his work, he called in the company lawyer and consulted him about obtaining a divorce.
“Did you ever sign a community property agreement?” the lawyer asked.
“Fortunately, no.”
“That simplifies matters,” the lawyer said, and instructed Max on how to proceed.
Max wrote his wife a letter in which he very matter-of-factly summed up the facts. Their marriage of some twenty-odd years had obviously been a failure, and he hoped it could now be terminated on friendly terms. He was ready to provide for her and for the children. All she had to do to expedite the matter was inform him as to what arrangements she wanted.
He reread the letter several times, signed it, and gave it to Melchior to deliver.
That night he went to bed pleased with himself and filled with anticipation for the future. He dreamed that he was King of Lodz and that the whirling smoke from the chimneys formed a crown for his head.
Forty-Two
RAGE, HUMILIATION, AND WOUNDED PRIDE exploded within Dinele Ashkenazi upon reading her husband’s letter. “Gertrud!” she shrieked at her daughter, who was sleeping off a late-night party. “Get up and come in here—now!”
Gertrud staggered in in her nightgown, her eyes heavy with sleep. She found her mother in a half faint, the letter at her feet. “What is it?” she asked in fear.
Her mother pressed her temples where the blue veins bulged beneath the skin. “Read it!” she said, indicating the letter.