A Blessing on the Moon

by Joseph Skibell

  “Landsmen! Landsmen!” I cry out to them.

  “Who’s that?” “Who is that up there?” “Reb Chaim, is that you?” The voices come at once.

  “It’s me! It’s Chaim Skibelski!” I shout. “Is that you, Reb Motche? Who is that?”

  “Reb Chaim, what are you doing out there?” Reb Motche asks me, amazed.

  “I thought I’d visit you!” I say, laughing.

  “You’re alive then? Yes? You survived?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “And the Rebbe?” another voice asks.

  “One at a time, one at a time!” someone shouts thickly.

  “He’s well. He’s alive, God be praised! He’s well.”

  “Chaim?” Yet another voice.

  “Yes, who is it?”

  “This is Reb Elchonon.”

  “Elchonon! Praise God! How are you?”

  “Reb Mendele and I have a question for you concerning trolley fares.”

  “And your family, Reb Chaim,” his daughter Tsila Rochel interrupts him bluntly. “Where are they? We don’t see them here.”

  “In Warsaw. Ester and my daughters are in Warsaw and in Lodz, and also my two sons. The others, of course, are in America, thank God.”

  After the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty, I bundled Ester up and, together, we boarded the train for Warsaw. A city is safer, we thought, bigger, a Jew less conspicuous there. We’ll be with our daughters, and besides, people are more civilized in a city, even the Poles. Unfortunately, we arrived only to discover that she had gone to Suwalk, our Mirki, in search of us! Our trains must have crossed paths, each on separate tracks. Immediately, I reboarded the train to bring her back, only to arrive in Suwalk on the night that the police went round, knocking on the doors where the soldiers slept, telling them where to go in the morning with their guns.

  “Reb Chaim,” someone calls up. “Why are we not in the World to Come?”

  “The Rebbe will explain it when he returns,” I say. “The important thing is to be of good cheer.”

  “Where is the Rebbe, Reb Chaim?”

  I shout into the ground, “The Rebbe will explain everything, everything, when he returns.”

  How can I tell them that the Rebbe became a crow and flew away?

  AT HOME, ANDRZEJ and his cousins are playing cards. A bottle of potato vodka stands in the middle of their green-felt card table. There are small tumblers for everyone.

  “If the yids want the moon,” Big Andrzej says, removing one of my best cigars from between his teeth, “then what’s it to us?” His lips are full and wet and his face, I notice for the first time, is not altogether unpleasant. “Let them keep it,” he says. “They’re the only ones who ever used it. It’s not as if they took the sun.”

  “Now that would be a crime,” his wife says, moving through the room with an armful of dirty plates.

  “But Andrzej,” one of the innumerable cousins looks up from his cards with a disagreeable face. “It simply isn’t fair,” he says. “They have no right to it. What will happen to the tides? And to women’s cycles?”

  The cousins laugh. “And what do you know about women’s cycles, Miroslaw?”

  “Not enough to pump up the tires!”

  “But Miroslaw, look at all they gave us!” Andrzej gestures about the room with two sturdy arms. “And you’re going to begrudge them the moon?”

  “How do we even know they’re the ones that took it?” cousin Stanislaw puts in.

  Andrzej nods and grunts, encouraging the talk. It’s evident he’s enjoying the conversation.

  Jaroslaw replies, “The yids disappear and the moon disappears and you’re telling me they didn’t take it?”

  “Where are the yids anyway?” cousin Zygmunt insists.

  “What do you care?”

  “Maybe whoever took the yids took the moon?”

  “Possible, it’s possible,” Bronislaw murmurs.

  “So? So what? Who cares?” Andrzej barks, dealing out a new hand.

  “But Andrzej, you think they’ll stop with the moon?” cousin Zygmunt says. “Soon they’ll want the stars and then the entire planetary system!”

  “The soldiers have been asking around.”

  “So what do they know?”

  “They may think we took it.”

  “Don’t tell them anything.”

  “The whole thing gives me the creeps,” says Zygmunt and he pretends to shiver.

  “But we don’t use it, Zygmunt!” Andrzej nearly shouts. “It’s a useless little nothing of a planet. There’s no purpose in making a government case!”

  9

  She no longer bathes, this Ola, and barely eats. Her room is locked from the inside and no one knows how she clears her bowels.

  “I’m leaving a pot near the door! Do you hear, Ola?” the Mama calls through the wall but, of course, a reply is denied her. There is no answer of any kind. I’m in the hallway, tapping my palms against the head of my walking stick, curious how the confrontation will turn out. With so much time on my hands, it’s only too easy to involve myself with gossip and trivia and matters of fleeting consequence such as the Serafinski family drama. During my life I gave no time to such things, and now to think that I’m wasting my death on them! But how else am I to fill my days?

  The Mama has given up all hope. She leaves the pot in the hall, and her heavy body trudges down the staircase. A moment later, the door to Ola’s room opens soundlessly and a skinny grey arm slinks through the crack, like a blind eel, to retrieve the copper pot. The smells that escape from the room are overwhelming and I clutch a blood-smeared kerchief to my nose.

  “Is that you, Ola? Are you coming down?” “Let her stay up there until she rots!” “Shhh, Andrzej, shhh, she’ll hear!” “But Mamuśku, her room stinks.” “Both of you, enough! She’ll hear, she’ll hear!” “Let her. What do I care if she hears?”

  Their competing voices rush, as if racing, to the top of the stairs, but the click of the lock on Ola’s door silences the house, leaving only their furtive whisperings to continue on below.

  Stealthily, I creep over to Ola’s door, protecting my nostrils with the cloth, and peer again through the little keyhole. I should be ashamed of myself, and yet my curiosity will not let me rest. What I see unnerves me. The girl is shivering, wrapped in a dirty bedsheet. She sways from side to side in the rocking chair. So thin is she that the light from the windows nearly shines through her greyish skin. Her body contracts into itself, her knees rise up and her elbows lock into her chest. She wheezes like an ancient bellows, coughing up a bloody plug of phlegm. There is slime and feces all about the floor and even on the bed.

  “Enough, Ola! Open the door at once!”

  So mesmerized had I become staring at this hellish sight that I failed to notice the father, Big Andrzej, standing over me, pounding with his clenched white fists against the door.

  “Ola, do you hear!”

  “Murderer!” she shouts.

  “Ola!”

  “Murdering pig!”

  “You’re making yourself sick over nothing!”

  “I hate you, hate you! Do you hear me? Go away!”

  Andrzej leans his heavy bulk against the doorframe, a small craft turned back by the gales of his daughter’s stormy emotions. He opens a hand to pull at his big black mustache. I pity him, I can’t help myself, daughters can be difficult and these villagers are simple people, peasants unused to the spirits of high-strung girls. Cutting wood, milking cows, slaughtering pigs, these are things they think a normal child should be doing.

  “You’re too sensitive, Ola!” her Papa shouts. “Couldn’t stand to see a goose lose its head. Your mother spoils you, it’s true! Filling your brains with such useless rot. Until not even a good thrashing will help. With the others, yes, but not with Ola! No, with you, it had the opposite effect. Each thrashing only made you more sullen and resentful.” He tromps down the stairs in a blue cloud, annoying thoughts buzzing about his head like flies. “But it’s a bruta
l world, God knows!” If only he could be indifferent, he probably tells himself, and soon enough he will attempt, through drink or lovemaking or a good solid fight, to make himself so.

  “Life is too short, Ola, too short and too hard to care about such things,” he thunders at the bottom of the stairs, throwing his arms this way and that in a flamboyant despair. There is something annoyingly theatrical about the family Serafinski, it’s starting to grate upon my nerves. “Blubbering over some silly people who’d do the same to us—yes, Ola, to us—to your mother and to your father and to you—given half the chance!”

  No sound emerges from Ola’s room to answer his petty grumblings, and although I tell myself it is none of my business, the girl concerns me, and so I lay out my handkerchief before her door and am on my knees once again, peering through her keyhole. She’s not well. She needs looking after, this Ola, not taunts and threats and the blistering reproaches they pour upon her head. My brow presses against the cold metal of the doorknob plate and for a moment I have the dizzying impression of staring into the center of a whirling cyclone spinning in a green-grey sea. A pink curtain drops across the image and it disappears. The cyclone reappears almost instantly and I understand that I have been looking not at the sea but directly into a human eye. She’s on the other side of the door, peering out.

  The door opens before I can rise from my knees and hobble away, even though I have my stick to hoist me. I was a large man, with a heavy girth, and nearly sixty besides.

  “So it is you,” she says, standing over me.

  I confess I’m unprepared for the sound of her voice. It enters my ear oddly, as though I were a traveler or an explorer who left his home long ago and meets by chance a countryman who now addresses him in their native tongue. This is the first time since my death that a living person has spoken directly to me. It’s impossible that she can see me, and yet the sorrow in her grey-green eyes, as she gazes over my face, bending down now on one knee and pressing my hands into hers, is enough to break my heart. Embarrassed, I straighten my coat.

  “I am sorry to have troubled you,” I say, attempting to stand, not knowing where to look. “You’re ill. Allow me to apologize and to help you into bed.”

  But she strokes my raw cheek with the back of her stained hand.

  “Look at you,” she says. “So this is what we’ve done.”

  “It’s nothing,” I say. “You’re ill. Let me help you to your bed.”

  But before I know it, she has collapsed and is weeping in my arms. I rock her, like a baby. She’s burning with fever. I sit, my legs folded, on the threshold to her room, murmuring and stroking her softly.

  “Sha, sha, kind,” I say. Hush, hush, little one.

  If only I could remember a lullaby, a nice little tune, then I would sing it to her.

  10

  I carry her to her bed. “I must strip the sheets,” I tell her, searching for a clean spot to lay her down. Unfortunately, there is none, and so I carefully place her into the rocking chair. I hang my coat on a peg behind the door and roll up my shirtsleeves to get to work. She is shivering uncontrollably. The winter sun presses its chilling light against the room’s windows, offering little heat. Despite this, Ola’s brow is flushed with sweat. I can almost hear the bones of her knees clanking together. With the clattering of her teeth and the whistling sighs her quivering chest forces from her lungs, she sounds like a train disappearing down a ghostly track and I doubt that she will live much longer.

  “You mustn’t trouble yourself, Pan Skibelski.” She holds up a nervous arm in protest. It shakes wildly in the space between us. “We are intruders here. We have no rights.”

  “Nonsense,” I say, taking freshly laundered sheets from the linen cupboard in the hall. “I was spying on you. It’s I who had no right and you who must forgive me.”

  She cries again and I pretend not to notice. Instead, I busy myself with the bedclothes, tucking in the corners of the sheets, fluffing the blanket in the air before me, like a magician snapping his magic cape. It settles down onto the bed and I do the same with the goose-down comforter, a gift for my Hadassah’s dowry, which inexplicably disappeared at the time of her wedding. “Ah, so this is where you’ve been hiding,” I say to it, finding it lurking furtively in the bottom of an oaken wardrobe filled with blankets, pillows, and towels.

  I leave the soiled sheets in the laundry basket at the end of the hall. In the bathroom, I fill the sink with steaming hot water, watching my reflection disappear behind the wall of mist that soon coats the mirror’s glass. I drop six white hand towels into the water and then remove them and wring them out, burning my hands. I drape each one over a bare forearm, three on each side. The sensation is not unpleasant. The towels lightly singe the hair on my arms. I carry along a pewter basin into which I will drop each towel after it is spent. In my vest and shirtsleeves, I remind myself of a waiter in a posh restaurant on Warsaw’s Marszalkowska Street.

  Quietly, I open the door to her room. She is curled up in the rocking chair, still, her eyes red, her cheeks drawn, sucking on a thumb encrusted with her own filth.

  “You mustn’t,” I say, removing her hand from her mouth. I rub it with the hot cloth, wiping the dirt away. “Feels good, doesn’t it?” Her body loses some of its tension, and she allows me to move the cloth across her arms. I kneel before her. She places one foot on my shoulder, and I clean the grime from her shins.

  Her crying has stopped and her breathing is longer, deeper, more regular. My hot towel scurries across her bony shoulders and her spindly neck and then into the intricate crevices of her faintly smiling mouth.

  Crossing her arms, she reaches for the hem of her soiled shift, and with one move, raises her hipbone from the seat of the chair, pulling the garment off over her head. I lift a new handcloth from my forearm and quickly smooth it over her flat belly and her equally flat chest.

  Her shivering returns and so I drape my jacket about her thin shoulders, while I look through my daughter’s things for a clean chemise. Half asleep in the middle of the room, Ola stands with her arms in the air. I draw the clean garment over her. She yawns happily as I position her in her bed, then rolls over and is immediately asleep, her body curled into a question mark.

  It is night outside. Incredible that so much time has passed. I gather my things from the room, my coat with its bullet holes, the half dozen white towels, all cold now with a heavy dampness, and I douse the light and shut the door, returning the water bowl to its place beneath the bathroom sink.

  In the nursery, I hang my coat on the back of a miniature chair, lay the towels out to dry across the proscenium arch of a toy theatre. I untie my tie, unlock my cuff links, unbutton and remove my shirt. My big belly is white and round in the starlight. A forest of grey hairs grows across the soft mounds of my chest. I undo my belt and my pants sink of their own weight to my ankles. My arms and legs are long and thin, like sticks. I sit on Sabina’s little bed, remove my underpants and consider my sex. It shrivels and recoils flaccidly into its wiry nest, embarrassed by its own presence in the open air.

  I quickly find my nightshirt and my nightcap, cover my nakedness, bury myself beneath the blankets and pray that soon, God willing, I will sleep forever in the ground.

  Sometime during the night, I am awakened by the pressure of Ola’s body next to mine. She burrows against my belly in the tiny bed. Drowsily, I welcome her under the covers, uncertain exactly who she is. The bed is so small, she must struggle for some time to find a comfortable position. Neither of us is more than a little awake. Her skin is clammy with fever. I sense that if she could, she would hide here, disappearing into me, as though my heavy bulk were a hollow mountain and her restless scramblings beneath the covers an attempt to find the opening of a cave. Finally, she raises her bottom against my abdomen, but because that is not comfortable, she gradually wiggles southward until we are pressed together, with only my stiff erection between us.

  11

  The Mama and Papa are astonished a
t the recovery she is making. Although she is still quite ill, gone are the flaring tantrums, the hallucinations, and the wretched self-abasements. Radiant now with a low fever, Ola lies in the plump white bed, attended to by a coterie of my granddaughters’ rag dolls. Twice daily, her mother scuttles a fat crablike hand, red and raw, over Ola’s brow, then off to church she scurries to thank the virgin mother and her rabbinical son for her daughter’s miraculous recovery.

  Upon her return, she ascends backwards up the staircase, carrying a large tray heavy with crisp hot toast, apple-orange marmalade, and milk-boiled sausages piled high. Ola is all giggles when her mother enters, and I stand unobtrusively in a corner, like a burglar or an objectionable suitor, waiting until I can safely step from behind my curtain. Not that there is any likelihood of my being seen or caught but, still, it’s best that Ola’s conspiratorial winks and smirks pass unregarded behind her mother’s rounded back. If only out of kindness for the poor woman. Why add fear for Ola’s sanity to her already heavy bag of motherly concern? She leaves the room, content and relieved, and I sit, straight backed, in a bedside chair, while Ola picks, in frustration, at her food.

  For her father, Ola has nothing but contempt. He has only to stick his doughy face into the room, mustaches flying, and all the gaiety of a moment before disappears. Ola’s glare is black and her arms are crossed and these are the only answers she gives to his habitual “How’s my princess faring today?” The unfortunate fellow stands in an eternity of silence, half in the room, half out, waiting for her reply. Then his face darkens as well, closing up as tightly as his daughter’s. The family resemblance is never more apparent than in these minutes of stone-faced glowering. He purses his moist lips, runs his tongue along the underside of his large bristling mustache, and mutters, “All right, then,” unable to look at her. “We’ll see you.” And he departs for another day.