“While you offer up thanks, why not thank your stars that your true landlords are dead in a pit five versts out of town!” I scream, adding to the silence.
Now all the thanks have been offered and the meal continues. As the Papa sits, I can’t help it, I pull his chair out from under him. A childish prank, I know, but satisfying nonetheless. He tumbles onto the floor, a look of helpless confusion on his face. But because the family is long used to his drunken misjudgments, they show only the slightest concern, helping him to his feet, until I throw the chair across the room. It shatters against my mother-in-law’s mirror, which she gave Ester and me as a wedding gift. The little group of mourners gasps. They cross themselves, leaving their legs unprotected. I take the opportunity to dash around the table, spilling first this plate, then that, onto their open laps. Down the line I go, one after the next. They stand, the food dropping off like clots of mud from their skirts and pants.
I’m on the table now, above their heads, dancing. With every kick of my feet, I send a tea cup sailing to the right and to the left. They crash and crack against the walls with the light, tinkling sound of someone noodling on a piano. Lifting a platter, I rain squab down upon their heads.
“It’s Ola’s ghost!” someone screams, raising a protective arm. But why would Ola haunt this house? Her greatest wish, when alive, was to flee it.
“No,” says the Papa, sniffing the air. “It’s that crazy yid who used to live here. I can smell him.”
I have jumped to the floor and am about to rip the curtains from their rods, when the drunken old fool leaps upon the table and does a little mazurka of his own, sending forks and knives scattering in all directions.
“Get down, Andrzej!” the Mama screams.
“Look! Look at me!” he sings out. “I’m a dead yid. I’m the ghost of that Jewish yid!” He contorts his face into twisted poses suggestive, I imagine, of my presumed agony. He yodels spookily, like a man whose throat has just been slashed.
Infuriated, I fling whole drawers of silverware from the sideboard at him. They spill over him, each drawer a small cloudburst of silver rain.
“Aha!” he calls, ducking. “I’ve got him angry now!”
In retaliation, he kicks the goose from its platter, sends it flying, once again, across the room.
“Here,” he says, taking wads of bank notes from an inner pocket of his vest. “I’ll buy the house from you, you christkilling yid! Money, that’s all you care about! If that’s what you want, well, here it is!” And he throws the bills about the room, in loose fistfuls. “If that’s what you want, I’ll buy the house from you! Pan Skibelski, can you hear me!”
Everyone is laughing and applauding him, as he chases round the table. The strain of this sight, however, proves too much for the Mama and she is escorted from the room by two of her daughters. They fill up the doorway, three black ravens clucking their tongues, and disappear into another room.
The old father continues capering on the table, ringed by the bright shiny faces of children and cousins and neighbors all about him on the floor.
“Who are you, Andrzej?” they scream up at him.
“I’m the yid!” he shouts back. “I’m the dead yid!” He leans down, pretending to snatch at them with trembling fingers. “Careful or I’ll seduce you in the night!”
My heart sinks and the bleeding begins. I’m unable to stand, blood streaming from my eyes and ears, out my anus and my chest. I vomit up whole quarts and sit shaken in a corner.
“Who are you, Uncle Andrzej?” the children call to him.
“I’m Pan Skibelski!” he shouts back.
The room is littered with broken plates and food.
Janek from next door brings in another cache of his homemade vodka. The mourners, even the children, everyone! helps himself to another drink. Loud music blares from the phonograph. I pant, breathlessly, holding my belly, blood filling my clothes, soaking through, stranding me in a large and growing puddle.
The old father continues dancing, to the general delight, across the tabletop. His hat has flown off and his face is puffy and red. Perspiration flies from each of his black and grey hairs. His voice is growing hoarse. “Look at me! Look at me!” he calls. “I’m the dead yid! Careful or I’ll seduce you in the night!”
18
I barely stumble up the staircase, clinging to the walls, my sight dimming. Using my hands to steady myself, I find my way to the bathroom and lie there in the rounded tub, tears mingling with the blood dripping from my eye. They trail across my face, stinging my raw and wounded cheek. My legs are splayed and my shoes stick out over the rims. The blood drips back through my socks and runs inside my pant legs and up my thighs.
I am losing consciousness. My arms grapple the sides of the tub, my fingers numbing to their task. I will not be able to hold myself up much longer. For a moment I am terrified I will fall asleep and drown in my own blood. But that is ridiculous. I am already dead. The thought is absurd: a dead man drowning. I laugh quietly and, perhaps because of the awkward position of my body in the tub, some air may have gotten trapped inside my lungs. A small splash of blood explodes from my nose, staining my collar, my shirtfront and my tie.
WHEN I AWAKEN, my head is pounding, my throat is parched, my eyes burn against a harsh and yellow light.
A candle stands near the sink in a small monument of its own melted wax.
Everything is familiar. The red wallpaper, the unbolted door, the brass faucets. Am I really still here? A dull throb pounds behind my forehead. My eye traces a line of pain, following an enormous shadow as it skates across the corners of the wall. The Angel of Death! At last, at last. I attempt to rise, to greet him, to offer my neck for his sword.
WHEN I AWAKEN again, I notice that I am naked.
“Rebbe,” my eyes focusing. “Is that really you? Are you really back?”
“I’m back,” he screeches. “Of course I’m back. What did you think?” He hops about on the edges of the tub, swooping down to plug the stopper into the drain, the brass chain dangling from his beak.
“Rebbe,” I roar out my heart’s lament. “Why am I not dead!” I can’t help speaking so freely. The sight of him, walking on the lip of the tub, has broken a dam within my heart. I lie back, too weak to move or stand or even sit up for very long.
The Rebbe fills the tub with tepid water, turning the faucets with his beak.
His feathers bristle and he scolds me. “What do you even know about it that you think it should be different? From where do you get such expectations!”
“But how could you just leave me?”
“Chaim, you didn’t get my note?”
“Your note!” I say. “Yes, I got your note. Only how could I read it, scrawled in that pigeon scratch, you shouldn’t be offended.”
“Chaimka,” the jaw of his beak slackens. “That was Yiddish.”
“Yiddish?” I say. Impossible!
The water rises in the tub, seeping through my bullet holes, filling the hollows of my body with its creeping warmth. The Rebbe flaps his wings and remains stationary, for a moment, in the air.
I close my eyes and wait for the water to reach my ears.
19
The pinkish water drains, in a small swirl, from the tub. The Rebbe carries over a cloth in his beak, one of the towels Ola and I used. I suffer a moment of confusing embarrassment.
He eyes me sharply.
“Rebbe,” I stammer in explanation.
“Wash your face now, Chaimka,” he says. “There’s blood all over it.”
How much does he know? Everything, I suspect.
I douse the cloth in the water and bring it to my face, rubbing the cakes of clotted blood from my chin and the crevices of my cheeks.
I stand and the water plashes from the holes in my body like streams from a fountain. The Rebbe wraps me in an enormous towel that is toasty and warm. It smells like Sabbath bread and soon I am dried.
“Gather your things, Chaimka,” the Rebbe announces
in his piercing squawk. He fluffs up the feathers around his neck. “We leave immediately.”
THE COLOR OF POISON BERRIES
20
The sun finally rises, staining the drifts of snow a salmon pink, the color of poison berries. The Rebbe circles overhead. I grab my winter coat and my rustic traveling sack, and off we go, out the courtyard and onto Noniewicza Street, deserted now in the early hours of this freezing winter day. The houses blindly witness our leavetaking through windows layered in icy sheets, their sills and eaves frosted with pale drifts. I clap my hands together for warmth and search through my pockets for my woolen gloves and a thick woolen scarf. Gifts from my Ester, she knitted them one summer when the doctor forbade her to leave her bed. Which child she was carrying, I can’t recall, but it was a difficult, an impossible confinement.
High above, the Rebbe turns in a great wheel, leaving Noniewicza Street to soar above a crooked alleyway. I hesitate to follow him, glancing one last time towards the facade of my court, my shoes sinking into the snow. How small it appears from this distance, a flat rectangular box, no larger than a coffin. I walked through it, not an hour ago, but surely for the final time, its hallways creaking, its walls breathing softly, seeing it not as it is now, filled to the rafters with drowsing Poles, stacked high in their beds like cords of wood, but as it was then, years and years and years ago, when I first stepped foot into it. A bright and clear morning, that was. The builders had only just completed their work. I had commissioned the entire court, with its apartments and its storefronts to rent, saving the largest apartment for ourselves. I snuck in early to hang mezuzahs on the doorposts, to secure a blessing for the house. Every room was empty and expectant. Here, I thought, we will live.
Not more than an hour ago, before the sun was up, I removed the leather traveling sack from the closet near the front entryway and strapped it across my chest, like a rustic. I hesitated, not knowing what to carry with me. A thought occurs and I step, first in one direction, then in the next, until remembering the photos hidden in my jacket. These, I secure in a pocket of the bag. I worried that the blood might have ruined them, but they dried out quite nicely. Wrinkled, yes, a little frayed about the edges, but no worse, really, for the wear.
In Ola’s room, I kneel against the bed, careful not to awaken her cousins who have claimed it. They sleep, the three of them, embedded in the mattress as deeply as the lice. Running my hand across the floor, I find in the valise beneath her bed, the toy compass and the broken spyglass, which she had so prized. I place them also into the sack. In the kitchen, I steal a loaf of raisin bread, left over from the mourners’ feast, to make a surprise banquet for the Rebbe. Fending for himself, he has surely grown weary of the seeds and worms and other staples of an avian diet. I wrap the bread in paper and, tucking it into the traveling sack, I remember the ledger book hidden in my office across the courtyard. So out the door and into the brisk dark morning, past the timberyard and bare gardens, to the big warehouse. Following its ramp into my office, I dig with my hand into the cushions of the daybed, finding nothing. I ransack the drawers of my desk, scattering their contents, tossing them wildly about, but the ledger isn’t there. A feeling of panic floods my nerves. I kick myself. I should have known better than to leave important documents lying about! I’m forgetting everything!
Utterly dejected, I sit at the desk and notice how unpleasant the cushions feel. Of course! I had hidden the ledger inside the cushion of my chair. At the time, I recall, it seemed the only place. Why? I no longer have any idea.
The Rebbe squawks and I must hurry to catch up with him. I have been daydreaming. We are already outside the Jewish quarter. I’m trailing a thin line of blood in the snow, but otherwise, I feel up to the journey, if a little creaky and stiff in the joints.
The town disappears behind us. You’ll never be back, a voice whispers in my ear. I march beneath a thick mesh of trees. Never, never, never. I sing a little traveling song, to cheer myself. The Rebbe sails overhead on a nearly silent wind.
A thatch of snow grows too heavy for the tree branch supporting it. It breaks and falls with a loud and wooden crack.
21
Our first stop is the pit of buried Jews. How different the place appears in winter, so quiet and so still. It’s difficult even to find the raised mound beneath its many thick quilts of snow.
“Rebbe,” I call up. “If I’m not mistaken, here is where they killed us.”
Although it’s difficult to tell.
The day is gleaming with the sun reflected everywhere in the bright clean snow.
The Rebbe stretches his wings and glides easily to the ground. He lands with such grace, you’d think he’d been a crow his entire life. Because he is light, he doesn’t sink in, like me, but skates across the ivory surface of the drifts, leaving two lines of arrow-shaped clawprints as a trail. His small head bobs rhythmically forward and back, forward and back, in a black blur, and he hunts and pecks through the drifts, searching out our hidden grave.
I watch quietly. I know better than to interrupt him when his concentration is so fierce.
Often, at shul, when his prayers grew especially fervent, those of us near to him had to move away. Otherwise, we might have burned up, God forbid, in the holy fires that surrounded him.
He leaps into the air.
Flying low to the ground, the Rebbe circles the perimeter of the grave seven times, wheeling to the right, then wheeling three times to the left. He screeches out odd phrases of Hebrew and Aramaic, phrases I have never heard uttered in this fashion, nor in this order, and never in a voice so metallic and strange.
I sense a slight trembling beneath my shoes, and soon the earth is shaking madly below my feet. Blocks of shining snowdrifts rise up, as if pushed, and crumble all about. I grab onto a branch to steady myself and accidentally bite my tongue.
“Rebbe!” I shout, spitting out lines of bloody saliva. “The ground is churning!”
But I have lost sight of him.
The air erupts with an agonized groan. I have to cover my ears with my hands, so terrible are its cries. I cower, on one knee, behind a birch tree. Above me, I can hear the Rebbe’s squawking among the mad chatterings of birds as they depart from their nests in frantic numbers.
With a great ripping, the ground splits open like an old pair of trousers.
Inside the circle described by the Rebbe’s flight, first the snow and then the frozen dirt sinks in and falls upon itself, like white and brown sugar being sifted in an enormous baker’s bowl. Puffs of silt rise into the cold air, as though someone had dropped an open sack of flour. The entire world disappears.
“Rebbe?” I say, coughing. “I can’t see anything!”
From nowhere, the Rebbe lands upon my shoulder with such force, he nearly knocks me on my face.
I clutch at my troubled back, trying to straighten up. “Be careful, Rebbe, can’t you!” I say, surprised, and alarming myself with my pique.
He crows, “Well, Chaimka?” puffing up his little chest and seems to arch an eyebrow, although I know that cannot be. He has none. Still, he gestures me forward with his wing.
I hoist myself up on my cane and, not without qualms, hobble nearer to the lip of the opened grave. Through the grey and white marblings of clouds, the sky lets down dusty shafts of light. I wave a handkerchief in front of us, attempting to see through the thickened, grainy air. Moving my feet without lifting them, I probe the ground with the rubber tip of my stick, searching for the drop.
By degrees, the dust settles, and small faces begin to appear behind its thinning veils. The Rebbe and I stand above them at the edge of the decline. Arms raised to block the day’s brightness, they bend their necks to look at us, thousands of ragged men and women, their dark circled eyes blinking against the too-dazzling light. What a curious sight we must make, a tall, heavy man in a dark suit with a black crow perched upon his shoulder. But no less curious are they! Although the harsh winter seems to have slowed their decay, their milk-whi
te bodies show evidence not only of rot, but also of mutilation. I recognize a face or two. It isn’t easy. The soldiers’ lime has eaten into their skins, gnawing deep rouged gashes into their chins, into their cheeks. Their arms, raised, leave black shadows slanting across their pale, disastrous features.
But certainly there’s Reb Yudel the candlemaker. We nod to each other, a silent greeting, and I see that he’s missing an arm.
With a dirty hand, Basha Rosenthal wipes a tear from a lost eye. Her child plays at her broken feet, without its jaw.
Rivke Siedenberg, my old seductress, bravely holds her disemboweled viscera in with two unsteady arms.
A man I can no longer identify uses two pincer-like fingers to delicately extract a worm from the cavity in his blackened cheek. He pulls and pulls at its slithering tail, curling it in loops around his little finger.
“Reb Chaim!” he waves an arm at me. “Greetings!”
My stomach heaves into my throat. I whistle through my teeth, sickened by the stench. I bring a handkerchief to my nose and attempt to nod in reply.
The Rebbe leaves my shoulder and lands upon the arm of a thin man whose greenish skin shows through the tatters in his suit.
“Rebbe?” the man squints through the thick rheum covering his eyes. “Is it really you?”
Joy splits his cracked lips. His teeth are yellow and broken. Those near to him crowd in to be closer to the Rebbe. The greenish man raises the Rebbe, in two hands, for all to see.
“Ah,” he happily drools. “What a wonderful world indeed!”
22
I reach down, bending on my knees, and offer my hand to Reb Elimelech. He scrambles up the side, clinging to my lowered arm. On his feet now, he brushes a colorless hand through the tangles of his long and silvery beard, combing crumbly balls of dirt and frantic insects from inside it. We look into each other’s unbelieving faces, our hands clamping onto each other’s arms, and soon we are hugging and weeping and laughing all at once, although, pressed in against his chest, I can’t help noticing how rotten and decomposed he smells!
A Blessing on the Moon Page 6