The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  Following the first few weeks of confusion and disorder, Ashkenazi relaxed somewhat. He adjusted to the new conditions just as he had always adjusted to change. He knew from experience that for every action there was a reaction, a period of adjustment. After all the speeches, slogans, parades, and demonstrations were over, things would return to normal. The workers would go back to their looms, and the bosses would continue to make profits.

  He was practical enough to know that things would never again be as they once were. There were the unions to contend with; the workers had to be granted paid leave, sick pay, disability payments, and other such benefits for loafing. The boss no longer dared speak up in his own factory.

  Ashkenazi didn’t even resent these changes. He didn’t blame the workers for trying to better their lot. Everybody was out for himself. To the victor went the spoils. In their place, he would have done the same.

  What interested him most about the revolution was how he could turn it to his profit. He knew that for all of the workers’ triumphs, they would need manufacturers like him, men of business acumen to run the plants. The problem was how to make money during the interim. After all, what was a revolution but another business problem such as a bad season, a shortage of raw goods or of markets?

  He therefore ignored all the turmoil around him and kept up production. Not as intensively as before, but still at a respectable level, and he stocked his warehouses with goods. He never veered from his routine. He still raced from banks to government offices, conducted business with the new people in charge, delivered war goods, and made profits. He set higher prices to compensate himself for all the losses he had suffered as a result of the revolution, all the holidays, paid leaves, shorter working days, and time spent on speeches, parades, and other such childishness.

  On the whole, the new people were easier to deal with since they didn’t demand bribes as their predecessors had. The only changes Ashkenazi instituted were superficial ones. He no longer had himself driven to work in his carriage but walked or took a cab. He changed his sable coat for an old, ill-fitting sheepskin since he didn’t want to draw attention to himself in the streets, which were filled with rowdy workers and idle soldiers and sailors. And he used his profits to buy up gold and diamonds, which would retain their value no matter who was in power.

  One day a familiar face turned up at the factory. Even though the man wore cheap clothes and a workman’s cap and his beard was already gray, Ashkenazi recognized his old schoolmate at once—Nissan, the rabbi’s son, nicknamed Nissan the depraved.

  For a moment Max’s heart lurched. He was afraid to let Nissan see him lest he take revenge for their past differences. He was likely to denounce him, Max, as an enemy of the working classes. Anything was possible in these trying times. But Nissan proved far less militant than the other speakers. He called on the proletariat to practice solidarity and even to work diligently until order was restored and steps could be instituted to develop the socialist system.

  Ashkenazi felt relieved, and his fears dissipated. He even decided to do the polite thing and court the goodwill of his former opponent. He walked up and held out his hand to Nissan. “Peace unto you, Nissan,” he said in Yiddish, then quoted: “ ‘Friends may meet, but mountains never.’ Do you remember me at all?”

  “Like a bad penny,” Nissan countered with an icy smile.

  For a while the two gazed at each other without speaking; then Ashkenazi broke the silence. “You turned out to be right in the end,” he said, then quoted again, “ ‘Who is wise? He who sees the future.’ So you have triumphed over us.…”

  “We are not yet finished with each other, Mr. Ashkenazi,” Nissan replied in Russian so that the workers could understand. “Keep on producing, accumulating capital, developing the economy. We will presently take it over.…”

  Ashkenazi bowed his head as fear of the man in the shabby clothes overcame him again. “If there were disagreements between us before, they weren’t caused by any ill will on my part but rather by circumstances. Now we have both grown older and wiser. I hope you bear me no grudge.”

  “You behaved as your class must,” Nissan said. “Personal matters don’t concern me. As an enemy of your class I won’t behave any worse than you did, Mr. Ashkenazi. Once we are in charge and have the people on our side, we will take what is rightfully ours and turn the factories over to the people, their true builders and creators.”

  The workers, who had gathered to observe the duel between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, snickered.

  “The workers will always need an astute businessman to guide them,” Ashkenazi countered with a smile. “They won’t be able to run the plant by themselves.”

  Nissan shook his head in hopelessness, huddled inside his threadbare coat, and left in the truck to address workers in other factories.

  Fifty-Six

  THE HOME OF THE DIRECTOR of the Flederbaum mill was dreary and sad. The factory, like all the others in the city, had been standing idle since the German occupation. Everything valuable within it had gone to Germany—transmission belts, boilers, all metal parts. But the worst loss of all was that of the raw goods. The German Raw Material Procurement Department, which the Lodz Jews had promptly dubbed the Robbed Material Procurement Department, had systematically siphoned every warehouse dry, issuing for every item taken vouchers which would be redeemable after the war.

  Occupied Poland was saturated with such vouchers. The merchants and manufacturers stored them in their otherwise-empty safes; the petty merchants, who had had even their door latches removed, kept them inside their Passover Hagadahs or their penitential prayer books; the peasants tucked them away behind their pictures of the Holy Virgin.

  For now the vouchers weren’t worth a plug groschen, but they would be once the lousy Russians, the syphilitic Frenchmen, and the damned English had been properly trounced. For now the population had to make do with stirring marches and portraits of the kaiser and of von Hindenburg, looking like rosy village brides with spiky mustaches.

  Director Ashkenazi’s house, therefore, was steeped in despair and gloom.

  Flederbaum’s sons didn’t even know there was a war on. As usual, they were absorbed in their séances, their divinations and meditations. They spent their time trying to establish contact with their late parents. Crazy Yanka, although by now an elderly woman, was still intent upon her affairs. The older she grew, the younger were her lovers. She took no interest in the factory, and all she and the other Flederbaum heirs did was to press the director for money. Whatever he gave them wasn’t enough. The money dribbled through their fingers.

  But there were no more reserves to be drawn on. The Russian banks in which the firm’s funds were deposited, were out of reach. The Russian bonds and securities lining the factory vaults were now worthless pieces of parchment stamped with the two-faced eagle. The workers massed outside the factory with caps in hand. They gathered like starved wolves that had conquered their fear of man to seek a handout, and nothing the police did would disperse them.

  “Bread!” they howled. “We’re starving!”

  The ersatz bread the Germans issued once a month lasted only through the first week. It looked like clay and tasted even worse. Those with money bought up additional ration cards, both real and counterfeit. The poor lacked even the few groschen with which to buy the bread. And they massed at the factory gates.

  The manufacturers had no recourse but to distribute a little money among them now and then. The commandant himself had informed them that he wouldn’t stand for any unrest in the city. He wanted total obedience, clean streets, and enthusiastic responses to the military marches so that he would get a good write-up from the Berlin war correspondents.

  During the first days of the occupation, Yakub Ashkenazi took none of this to heart. From his remaining resources, he issued cash to the Flederbaums and to the workers and took whatever he wanted for himself.

  His young wife, Gertrud, had inherited her grandmother Priveh’s ex
travagant habits. Fortunes trickled between her bejeweled fingers. She would accept only imported gowns, the costliest furs, the finest jewelry, the fanciest carriages. She would not be outdone by anyone. Like her grandmother before her, she extended soft white fingers to her husband. “More, Yakub, more.…”

  In the years following their wedding, she had proved to her husband that she was indeed Simha Meir’s daughter—a willful, determined woman who insisted on having her way. At first, she had confined these traits to their lovemaking. Although she was desperately in love with her middle-aged husband, hers was a consuming, overpowering love, like that of a black widow spider that devours its mate. She demanded his exclusive devotion. She wouldn’t let him talk to another person, look at another woman, even applaud actresses at the theater. He had to spend every moment with her, think about nothing else but her.

  She estranged him from the people whose company he enjoyed, from all his friends and acquaintances. She was jealous of everyone—male and female alike. In every person she saw a competitor, a rival for his attentions. She considered him her property, and she wasn’t about to share what was hers with another. She was her father’s daughter to her fingertips. She knew of no half measure. With her, it was all or nothing.

  A prisoner of her own passions, who could kneel at her husband’s feet begging to be totally dominated, she still managed to emerge as the dominant force in their marriage. She wasn’t concerned with his moods, his feelings, his needs. She swallowed him alive, drained and enslaved him.

  But with the same zeal with which she had won him, she later discarded him like an orange that has yielded its juice and pulp. She couldn’t focus her interest on anything for long. She required novelty, excitement, new thrills and experiences. Following the early months of physical fulfillment, she began to make impossible financial demands upon Yakub. Her ambition was to become the social leader of Lodz.

  Yakub was himself a spendthrift by nature, but next to her, he seemed a miser. She refused to occupy the house provided for the director and found a palace with carved ceilings, columns, statuary, and a circular driveway. It had been put up for sale by a bankrupt manufacturer.

  She spent all her time renovating and decorating the palace. She squabbled with masons, carpenters, upholsterers. She constantly demanded something new and different. Everything—no matter how sound—had to be remade, rebuilt, repainted. She crawled over scaffolds, raced from shop to shop, buying things, bringing them back, exchanging them, having second thoughts, buying again.

  Yakub longed for her company, but she had no time for him. Her passions were now directed at the palace. When he tried to embrace her, she slid out of his grasp. “Frightfully busy,” she said. “More money, Yakub, more money!”

  Yakub doled out the cash without even counting it. When the palace was finally completed to her satisfaction, the balls, parties, and receptions commenced. There were always people in the house; there was constant music, dancing, drinking, carousal, with Gertrud at the center of it all. She supervised the guest lists, weeded out those of her husband’s friends she considered not important or distinguished enough, and courted people he couldn’t abide—counts, barons, and people of such ilk.

  Now in his middle years, Yakub was ready to settle down. After a wild, tumultuous life he was tired of people, of parties. Gertrud was forever either entertaining or out having a good time. And his money reserves had run dry. The large salary he drew didn’t begin to cover her enormous expenses, and he signed more and more IOUs and ran up enormous debts.

  He didn’t speak of it, but it tormented him when he lay all night waiting for dawn and Gertrud to come home. For the first time in his life he wasn’t able to sleep. He lost his appetite, and his normally jovial spirit grew heavy.

  When she spent an occasional evening alone with him, he was pathetically grateful. Just as she had in the early days of their marriage, she threw herself at his feet and grunted her passion. “Great big hairy bear,” she panted, “eat me up alive.…”

  His masculine pride salved, he talked to her about having a child. “Think how happy we’d be with a little girl with golden curls just like yours,” he urged her.

  He had always yearned to be a father, but he had another, a more ulterior motive. He hoped that having a child would slow Gertrud down, give her a sense of responsibility. She was wild. A reckless passion reflected from her eyes, the same look he had seen in Simha Meir. He was a little afraid of her, and he wanted to subdue her somehow. There was no better way than with motherhood.

  But she wouldn’t hear of it. “You want to saddle me with diapers and swaddling clothes? There’ll be plenty of time for children.…”

  She examined herself in the mirror. The image of the supple, willowy figure brought a look of sly satisfaction to her slightly mad eyes. “Ruin all this with a belly? … Disgusting!”

  Years later, when she was in her thirties, she did give birth to a child—a girl just as Yakub had hoped. By now in his late fifties, his beard more gray than black, he was like a child with a new toy as he played with his little daughter. He stretched out on the floor, barked like a dog, hopped, and danced with the baby, brimming over with paternal pride.

  The mother ignored the child. She didn’t nurse her herself but turned her over to a German nursemaid with breasts like watermelons, while she went back to her parties and balls.

  Yakub was both father and mother to the child. He discussed her care with the nursemaid; he dandled her on his knee; he cooed at her and hugged her. He had lost all urge to socialize. He came straight home from the factory and raced to the nursery.

  He loved his home. He was delighted to be settled, a husband and a father. He yearned for more children. He missed his Gertrud, who had grown even more attractive and womanly. But she had no more time for him.

  She had undergone a complete change of attitude. Even though she herself had pursued Yakub shamelessly, had literally forced him to marry her, she now felt that it had been a sacrifice to marry an older man who was too tired and set in his ways for such a young, fun-loving woman as she. To make up for it, she wanted complete freedom to spend as much money as she pleased, to enjoy the kind of luxury that was her due.

  She held magnificent balls at their palace, high-spirited affairs attended by men and women her own age. Even haughty German lieutenants with dueling scars were invited. They behaved as if they were bestowing a favor upon their hosts by condescending to mingle with Polish and Jewish riffraff. They danced with their hostess and paid her suggestive compliments.

  Yakub shook their hands and made polite small talk even as he seethed with jealousy and resentment. He vividly recalled when the shoe had been on the other foot—when he had been the young man scornful of elderly husbands as he flirted with their gay, lively wives. It had been so enormously amusing at the time; it wasn’t half as funny now.

  He knew women in all their artifice. He knew how much passion and allure they could put into a seemingly innocent dance. He recalled the half smiles, the touches, the winks, the double entendres. He remembered how gratful the young wives had been when he rescued them from their elderly husbands’ company. He recalled the lame jokes the husbands had made in order to save face.

  Now it was happening to him.

  He went to the nursery, sat down in a small chair beside his child’s crib, and listened to her even breathing. His mother-in-law, Dinele, came tiptoeing into the nursery.

  Since her parents’ death she had been left all alone. Her entire fortune lay on deposit in a Russian bank. She hadn’t heard from her son, Ignatz, since the beginning of the war, when he had written that he had volunteered in a French regiment. Silent as a mouse, she lived now with her daughter and Yakub, the only man she had ever loved. As she had all her life, she lost herself in her books, in the lives of the dashing heroes and the gentle heroines. Her only consolation was the child. She fantasied that it was her child—not Gertrud’s—hers and Yakub’s. And she smothered the little girl with kisses.<
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  “Privehshe, my treasure,” she cooed to the little girl, who was named for her great-grandmother.

  Now, even though it was late, she could not sleep. She couldn’t stand the noise and music drifting in from the other rooms, and she went to check on the child. She stood for a moment in the doorway before she saw Yakub. He sat there hunched over, shoulders bent, head bowed, and she felt her heart lurch. She approached on tiptoe and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Yakub,” she said soothingly, “go to sleep. I’ll stay up with the child.”

  Yakub looked up at her with sad black eyes. “No,” he said. “I can’t sleep.”

  “I can’t either, Jacob,” she whispered sadly.

  She had addressed him by his old name, which she remembered from when they had played together in Abraham Hersh’s courtyard in Old City.

  Fifty-Seven

  ALONG WITH THE OTHER REVOLUTIONARIES flooding back from prisons and exile to liberated Russia, the Bolshevik leader too was welcomed with flowery speeches, bands, red banners, and embraces. But the squat man with the naked skull and Tatar features didn’t wax sentimental upon the occasion. He didn’t weep with joy; he didn’t kiss or embrace his comrades. He gazed ironically at the forest of red flags, his bald pate reflecting the gleam of the military trumpets blaring the “Marseillaise” in his honor, and narrowed his slanted eyes at the horde of welcomers, each a distinguished personage of handsome garb and plumage.

  Their speeches left him unmoved. A narrow smile played at the corners of his sly slit eyes as he patiently listened to their cultured voices and waited to douse their rhetoric with cold, sobering logic.

  His voice was as dry as he himself. He spoke in blunt, pithy phrases that conveyed exactly what they were meant to convey. He quoted no poets or martyrs. But he had the one trump card that enraptured the soldiers crowding the speaker’s platform more than all the high-flown oratory.