“Monsieur, your seat.”
The place card, indeed, reads Chaim Skibelski.
Resigned, I lower myself into the chair and greet the table with a dignified nod.
“Good evening,” I say, too unhappy and shy to look at more than their hands. “I am Chaim Skibelski. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance at this lovely hotel.”
My words tumble, like inexperienced mountain climbers, into a silent abyss. Looks are traded all around the table. There are grins and frowns and kneaded brows. There is something comical, obviously, about my presence here, a stranger left to fend for himself in the midst of this tightly knit family.
Finally, one of the women clears her throat and addresses me, sternly.
“Papa,” she says, “don’t you even know us?”
40
Instinctively, I pat my pockets in search of the photographs I took from our house, but they, of course, are in my other suit, which I abandoned in the snow. I scan the faces at the table, comparing them to my memories of these photos. But why should it be that I can recall their pictures more clearly than my children’s actual faces?
In any case, here they are before me, my daughters: Sarah, Edzia, Miriam, Hadassah. I silently sound their names. How beautiful, how beautiful they are. Sarah, with her dark eyes and her arms folded below her bosom. Her sister Edzia has grown stout. I’ve never seen her so matronly. She waits for me to speak. Mirki suppresses a bold laugh. It is caught, trembling, in her throat. She has her mother’s triangular eyes and her face flashes with delight. What a nice joke they’ve played on me, she is thinking. My littlest one, Hadassah, looks so sad and worried, with her curving nose and her troubled brow.
Their brother Lepke picks at a kaiser roll. A thin, nervous boy, he tears it to bits, without eating so much as a scrap.
My sons-in-law are here as well. Sarah’s Markus, bald and round as the number eight. Edzia’s scrappy Pavel, a little rooster of a man. Mirki’s skinny Marek, as scrupulously elegant as a concert pianist. And Hadassah’s Naftali Berliner, new to the family. They were married less than a year before the war, these two. Now he solicitously holds her small hand, as her searching eyes never leave mine.
I address the table, looking at my useless hands.
“You are telling me that not one of you survived?”
I cringe to hear my words. I did not intend to sound such a harsh rebuke.
“We are sorry, Papa,” says Sarah, and the others murmur in concurrence.
“And your children?” I say, roaring like a lion, despite myself. “Where are my grandchildren?”
At nearby tables, people turn away, trying not to look at us.
“Sshh, Papa, they’re right here.”
“Papa, quiet down!”
The children’s table is next to ours. Solek and Izzie, Pola, Kubuś, and Sabina sit with Mirki’s twin daughters whose names I can’t remember.
They shyly call “Hello, Zeyde” to me, the boys in miniature suits and uncomfortable ties, the girls in wintery frocks, but it’s a solemn greeting, as though they had recently been scolded by their parents on my behalf and are now uncertain how I will treat them.
“Forgive us, Papa,” Hadassah repeats, and her new Naftali tightens his grip on her little hand, signaling her to let him speak on their behalf.
“Papa Chaim,” he says. “There was nothing we could do. They wouldn’t let us run or even bribe them to escape.”
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” I say, raising my fingers in protest. “Let us never mention it again.”
“I came looking for you, Papa,” this from Mirki.
“I know. I know, I heard.”
“In Suwalk, Papa, but there was no one left.”
“You were lucky you got back,” her Marek says.
“And Shmuel and Regina?” I ask.
“In a Russian labor camp,” says Sarah.
“Thank God,” says Edzia.
“Thank God,” I say.
“Behind the Urals,” adds Mirki.
“And they’re alive?”
“They’re alive, they’re alive.”
“They arrested us together,” my Lepke volunteers.
“For illegally crossing the border, Papa Chaim.”
“We had to,” says Lepke.
“Of course. They had to.”
“Of course,” I say.
“There was no escaping otherwise.”
Everyone is talking at once.
“Two weeks we were together, Shmuel, Regina, and I,” Lepke says, tearing his bread into smaller and smaller pieces.
“In a prison in Minsk, they were.”
“But after that, I didn’t see them.”
“And your mother?” I say, looking at them around the table.
“She’s upstairs,” they tell me.
“Dressing.”
“She’s dressing.”
41
We look sadly at one another across the doorframe, not needing to speak, understanding everything at once. Her face is more familiar to me than my own. I watched it grow old, every night, every morning, for most of my life, all but the first twenty years or so. Even now, after looking into it for only half an instant, I must remind myself to see it, to see it fully, and not allow myself to grow so accustomed to its presence that it all but disappears.
“Chaimka,” she says, privately, in a small and nervous gasp.
She is a large, blunt woman, strong and stubborn as an ox. I take hold of her thick arm and she pulls me into her suite.
“Ester,” I say.
In a thin shift, she throws her body, as thick as a small tree, into mine. Nearly crushing me in her grip, she kisses my neck and my face. Her breath is soft and warm and slightly malodorous.
I close the curtains and pour two glasses of brandy. Her suite also has a whale, also filled with food and drink.
“Ester,” I say. “My God! Ester! Let us sit and have a drink!”
“A drink? Chaimka! You’ll ruin your dinner.”
“One drink is not going to ruin anything. Just to celebrate, Ester! Why don’t you sit, like I’m telling you.”
I button the dress she has chosen in back for her and she finally sits primly, although slightly annoyed, her large body on the edge of a stuffed loveseat. She removes the pins from her hat and lays the hat across her bare shins. She accepts the glass, but does not drink from it. I smile at her and throw the liquid back to the very ends of my throat, where it burns pleasantly. I never learned to sip a drink. I pour a second shot and loosen my tie. Holding the bottle in one hand, the small glass in the other, I sit near her, on the loveseat.
“Well,” I say seductively.
“Chaim,” she says darkly, a tone of warning in her voice.
And before I know it, we are crying in each other’s arms. I’m on my knees before her, my heaving belly in her lap.
42
“Come on, Chaimka,” she says, whispering in my ear. “You’re not a baby now.”
She beats my back with her hard fat hand. I look into her face. She has already wiped away her tears. There are wet smudges on her cheeks. “Are we little children, that we should cry?”
This she says and I nod. She is right, of course. We are not children. But a man can still mourn. Or must he be a child for that?
Ester sips her drink and removes her shoes. She stretches out her feet. Lifting first one foot and then the next into her hands, she rubs her toes.
“Such shoes they give me!”
“You’d be more comfortable in your old shoes,” I say, sitting up.
AT THE TABLE, Pavel is demonstrating some point with his hands, moving them closer and closer together with each phrase.
“A town shrinks into a ghetto. A ghetto into a train car. A train car shrinks into …”
But they are too difficult for me to hear, these accounts of their deaths. They are my children, after all, and I feel the need to mourn them, to rip my clothes, to sink to the floor in my grief. But how ca
n I, when they are all sitting before me, eating and laughing, jostling each other with their elbows?
“That’s nothing,” says Markus, and he describes how they drowned him, holding his head in a bucket of freezing water.
“But why?”
“A medical experiment,” he says, and he cannot stop laughing. “Doctors from Berlin to Frankfurt are probably drowning their patients at this very moment, all thanks to me!”
He puffs merrily at his cigar.
“Markus, please,” Sarah scolds him. “People are trying to eat.”
He was always something of a happy vulgarian, although quite good in business.
“That’s right, that’s right,” he guffaws. “Don’t let a little thing like my death spoil your dinner.” And they all laugh with him, but the talk disturbs me.
How is it possible for men to make laws against another man’s life, so that by merely living, he is guilty of a crime? And what kind of men enforce such laws, when they could be out on a clear day, boating or hiking or running to their mistresses instead?
“Chaimka,” my Ester says quietly.
She can read my thoughts, so familiar is she with the patterns they create as they cross my face. And that is all she needs to say, Chaimka, meaning It’s not up to one murdered Jew to solve the problems of the world!
Meeting her eyes, I look again into their familiar triangular shapes. She is uncomfortable in her stiff new clothing. She is bored, with nothing to do. Her large hands tap a fork against the table top. She does not like waiting to be served, but would rather be herself serving, running from the kitchen to the table, with bowls and ladles and bread and knives and dishes for everybody else.
She sighs, heaving her heavy chest, and I fear that I did not love her sufficiently, that I did not give to her the affection that was her portion, as another, more cheerful husband might have done. I was too preoccupied with my accounts and my ledgers, with my shipments of lumber and my forests to buy, with sending this child to America before that army could snatch him away or buying that child from this army when he couldn’t be sent in time.
When I married her, also, I was still grieving over Ida, my first wife. She had died some months before, so small and frail and unable to bring a baby into the world.
“Chaimka!” my Ester repeats.
“Ester,” I say. “I can’t help it. Let me sit here and think. What harm does it do?”
43
The soup arrives in a lion-legged tureen. The waiter, in a sharp white cutaway, places it smoothly in the center of the table. He twirls the black wings of his mustache, which the soup’s steam has dampened, and ladles out a bowl for each of us, the women first and then the men. He never spills a drop as he orbits our table with bowl after bowl, until we are all sitting behind rising veils of steam.
The soup is delicious and warm.
“Mama,” says our Hadassah, “it tastes just like your soup.”
Ester blows on her first spoonful and lifts it to her mouth. She keeps the broth on her tongue for a moment, tasting it completely.
Then, “No, no, sheyne,” she says, swallowing. “I never used such basil. This is how your bubbe made it.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” says Naftali Berliner. “I was thinking that this was my mother’s soup.”
In fact, I myself had the same impression, that the recipe was my mother’s.
“Let me taste,” Hadassah says to her Naftali, and soon bowls are being exchanged around the table. The dead, we tell ourselves, needn’t worry over germs.
And the results of our investigations? No matter what bowl we drink from, everyone’s soup tastes like his mother’s. Only my daughters’ and son’s soup taste the same.
“But they came out of the same pot!” Marek exclaims.
“I watched the waiter dish it out himself!” from Pavel. He wipes his spoon in his napkin and brings it to the edge of the tureen.
“May I?” he says, asking our permission.
“By all means,” we consent. “Go ahead.” And “Please.”
He skims his spoon into the broth and raises its contents to his lips. He blows on it and takes a taste, snapping his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
“It’s my mother’s soup,” he says. “I’d know it anywhere,” tears welling in his eyes.
“But it’s not your mother’s at all,” says Edzia, tipping a spoonful onto her flat tongue. “It isn’t burnt, for one thing.”
“It’s true,” Pavel says to the rest of us. “My mother always burnt her soup. But this soup is burnt as well,” and he points at the tureen, shaking his finger for emphasis.
We repeat the experiment, each dipping our spoon directly into the tureen. Our initial impressions are confirmed. We are each eating our own mother’s soup.
I see her bending over her large pot, my mother. “Go wash,” she scolds. Her face is tense. She’s getting a migraine. “Go wash before the soup gets cold!”
I had always secretly hoped to see her again. One more of the afterlife’s bitter disappointments. Her people were not strong and business-minded like the Skibelskis, but frail and hopeless. And such dreamers! Of her siblings, she was the only one to marry. The others, my aunts and my uncles, busied themselves with storytelling and other useless occupations. Our Lepke takes after this side of the family, unfortunately. In the end, the rough world of family life and trade proved too much for my mother, and she died when I was young, before I had made anything of myself, before I could say to her the things a son wants to and must.
I look up to see that even Markus is crying.
“Pardon me,” I say to the waiter as he ladles another bowl for everyone.
“Yes, Herr Skibelski?”
He pauses in his work, holding the dripping ladle above a starched white cloth.
“This soup,” I say.
“It was to your satisfaction, I hope?”
“Exquisite, yes, excellent,” I say. “I was just wondering.”
“Sir?”
“What do you call it?”
He places one arm on his hip and twirls the ladle flirtatiously.
“For you, Herr Skibelski,” he says, “I’d call it Keila’s soup.”
He smiles like a man caught at some pleasurable taboo.
“Keila’s soup?” I say.
“Yes, sir.”
“After my mother?”
He winks, lifting the tureen from the table.
“Quite a recipe, isn’t it?”
44
My sons-in-law’s names appear on the list for the steam and they are each given a small blue card with their appointment time handwritten upon it. Although he is not interested, my son Lepke also is given an appointment. Only my name is absent from the list.
“There will be other opportunities,” the Maître d’Hôtel mews, scanning the names on his sheets. “Shortly, my colleague Frau Gruber will be here to assist with the women,” and he bustles over to the nearest table.
“It’s quite relaxing, they say,” says Marek, tapping his card with his long index finger.
“By the looks of it, they’ll be running all night,” this from Markus.
“What time are your appointments? Perhaps we can meet and go together,” Pavel peers at his own card and then at the others through small round eyeglasses.
“Not until the middle of the night.”
“Amazing,” Pavel removes his glasses. “The staff must never sleep.”
“Three in the morning?” Markus grunts, looking over Lepke’s appointment card, a cigarette hanging from his lip. The boy holds on to the card awkwardly, as though embarrassed to have hands. “They’ll send someone to call for you. You needn’t worry. They’ll make sure that you’re awake.”
When alive, Markus traveled a great deal for his work and so is familiar with hotels and their ways.
“Once in Vienna,” he tells the table, “I met a remarkable man over dinner, a Herr Goldstein, a real talker, and the two of us stayed up nearly till d
awn, the entire time talking in the lobby. There we were, in two stuffed chairs, while the night staff cleaned all about us!”
45
After the sumptuous dinner and many long speeches, both from the hotel administration and from the heads of our local councils and other civic groups, cigars are distributed and the men are free to smoke.
“I’ve made discreet inquiries,” Marek leans in closer to the table, lowering his voice.
“And what have you found?” Pavel murmurs.
“Nothing conclusive, I’m afraid.”
“You’ve tried bribes?” Markus bellows, despite himself. His voice is always booming. It’s impossible for him to speak softly. Even his whisper is too loud.
“Inquiries into what?” I say. I’m a little drunk, I fear, and still in a stupor from the food.
“Bribes? Of course, I haven’t tried bribes.”
“Why not?”
“We haven’t any money.”
Markus snorts. “What’s money have to do with it?”
“To do with what?” I say. “What are you talking about?”
“Lepke,” says Pavel. “Explain it to your father.”
But Lepke only looks at his chest, his cheeks reddening.
“Leave the boy alone,” says Marek.
If I can’t understand them, what hope is there for Lepke?
“What are you suggesting?” says Pavel to Markus. “That we bribe them with the very items they’ve supplied for us?”
“Among other things,” says Markus, removing his cigar and rolling his tongue inside his mouth.
“I’ve talked to everyone I can. From the Assistant to the Direktor to the chambermaids.”
“Oh, the chambermaids! Now we understand.”
Marek bristles, sweeping his hair back with a long pale hand. “Markus, not everyone lives in the gutter like you.”
“Not everyone is so lucky,” burps Markus.
“But are they hiding something,” says Pavel, “or do they simply not know anything?”
A Blessing on the Moon Page 12