I’m confused and can hardly believe that he has created these difficulties for me out of the blue.
*
‘Changing tack.’ Old emotional bonds that I can’t break. In the end, what he’s asking me to do is quite easy. I had settled on the idea of becoming a lawyer. Why? I don’t know. From habit, from being tired of choosing, from lack of interest in a profession – any profession.
With a little effort, I could get used to seeing myself as an architect. A simple matter of mental training.
I wouldn’t have done anything great in a courtroom, and I won’t do anything great on a construction site. But it might not be impossible for me to find there what I certainly would have missed out on: the feeling of serving earth, stone and iron.
It should give me a feeling of fulfilment, of calm. Perhaps the tranquillity I’ve been looking for.
*
No, I can’t do it. I have exams coming up, classes, papers – too much for me to throw it all aside and start anew yet again.
I went to tell Ghiţă my decision, but didn’t find him home, which I was glad of, I have to admit, because, however determined I was to reject his proposal, I was sorry to eliminate all other options with a categorical response. Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée.
I didn’t find him home, and so I allowed myself to keep the door half-open.
*
I’ll do it anyway. I lacked the courage to utter a straight ‘No’, and I put forward all kinds of objections. He disposed of them, one by one.
Isn’t it too late now, in the middle of December, two months after registration?
No, it’s not. He’d take care of it personally. He has good friends in Architecture and can manage it.
Won’t it be too hard for me to catch up with the syllabus? Aren’t the classes too far advanced? Aren’t the exams too near?
No, it won’t be hard. But if it is hard, all the better.
The matter settled, there was nothing left for me to say. I belong to architecture. He shook my hand heartily.
‘You know, I’m pleased we did this. You’ll learn to tread solid ground. Very important in life. You’ll see.’
4
Yesterday’s encounter in the train seems the more miraculous the more I think about it. That short, lively man with darting eyes who twitched oddly when he spoke, as though in the midst of an unsettled dream – that man loaded with parcels in the corner of the third-class compartment – was Ahasverus himself.
As soon as he came through the door, preceded by two suitcases and followed by some three more, and innumerable packages large and small, badly wrapped in tattered newspaper, I felt a sudden rage towards him.
‘Just what I need!’ I’d just been congratulating myself on finding such a good seat, on such a day, in the Christmas holiday rush, in a train overrun by students and soldiers heading for the provinces, and behold our Jewish friend, dragging an entire household behind him, opening the door wide to let in the cold air, pushing my suitcase aside, stepping on my toes, flinging his overcoat over mine and then pressing his way on to the bench between myself and my neighbour, begging pardon with his eyes, though no less tenacious for that in his determination to secure a seat, as guaranteed by his ticket, which he held ostentatiously between his fingers.
Everyone smiled at this comical apparition, and I tried to do the same myself, which took a certain effort, as I pitied him for being ridiculous and was at the same time deeply anxious not to appear friendly to him. I can’t say exactly why, but I felt a strange sense of complicity, which I had an urgent desire to renege upon. I hurriedly sought my diary and acted busy with calculations, suddenly absent from all that was going on beside me. But I monitored my unfortunate neighbour from the corner of my eye.
He had calmed down, secure in the seat he’d occupied, shooting timid glances of gratitude about, carefully assessing each of his fellow-travellers and finally stopping on me. He was still not entirely sure of me, yet offered me the beginning of a cordial smile: a sign he had recognized me.
This suddenly infuriated me even more. It felt that this look, this sense of familiarity, identified me with him, with his silly appearance and awkward presence.
I raised my head and gave him a fierce stare, to make it clear I wanted nothing to do with him. I felt I would die of embarrassment if he spoke to me.
But my hostility didn’t disarm him, and he continued to look at me, nodding his head and blinking frequently.
‘No need to get upset, young fellow. The Jew is a man with baggage. Many troubles, and baggage to match.’
I immediately loved him for these words, and experienced such a wave of shame for how cowardly I had been, towards him and myself, that I felt a need to punish myself, good and proper.
I replied straight off with deliberately exaggerated eagerness, speaking loudly, in order to be heard by everyone in the compartment, so that they’d know that I wasn’t ashamed of this odd old man, to acknowledge that we were friends, that his Jewish accent didn’t bother me, that I wasn’t bothered by his snow-laden boots, that his rude packages didn’t trouble me, that, far from it, I was right at home with everything and had no idea why anyone would consider it comic or want to laugh.
The old man spoke Romanian correctly, with a slight Moldovan-Jewish inflection, so I too deliberately made myself speak with that questioning lilt that comes from Yiddish. This had never happened to me before, but I was determined to punish myself properly, to redeem my earlier cowardice.
I suppose my old Ahasverus understood the game I had fully entered into – his steady, indulgent smile hovered over me like a beam of light from a pocket torch.
‘Forget all that,’ his smile seemed to say, ‘you don’t have to do that on my account. I know you and know you’re not as bad as you wanted to be a moment ago or as good as you’re trying to be now. My journey is long and what do you want me to do with the stones you cast at me or the hands you extend? I, who have time neither to receive them nor respond to them since, well, somewhere out there, far, far away, someone is always waiting for me and I have to travel this path, though my journey may never end.’
He was smiling with this distrust, nodding his head, and I understood that indeed I could do nothing for him, and others could do nothing to him.
He told me his name was Abraham Sulitzer, which disappointed me, since for the symbol to be intact he would have had to have been openly called Ahasverus.
‘What business are you in?’ I asked him. ‘What do you do?’
‘What does a Jew do? I wander.’
He seemed to think that this reply was good enough.
Abraham Sulitzer wanders. That’s his trade. He’s a vendor of Jewish books. In the dozen suitcases, trunks and packages he drags about, he carries all kinds of books: Bibles, Talmuds, commentaries, Hasidic histories, stories from the ghetto, Hebrew poetry, Yiddish literature …
He’s the link between German and Polish publishers and readers in the Moldovan ghettos. He knows every town in Bukovina where books are still studied seriously, all the Bessarabian households where serious thought is given to Talmudic texts, all the neighbourhood synagogues where a problem is still commented on according to Jewish thinking. He has an extensive mental catalogue of all the Jewish manuscripts and publications in the country, knows what town they’re in, and which house. He could close his eyes and tell you exactly who possesses such and such a priceless copy of Megillat Afa by Shabbatai HaKohen, the Lithuanian, a book printed in Amsterdam in 1651. He thinks for a moment and tells you precisely which rabbi, from where, could clarify
the great Talmudic dispute in Barcelona of 1240 or of Tortosa in 1413 …
He knows it all, has accumulated it all there behind that narrow forehead, behind those eyes that blink often and questioningly.
This is the first time I am hearing of these books, manuscripts, authors and issues, strange words, names from other centuries, dates from a history I never guessed at. Abraham Sulitzer carries it all with him, just as alive as it was centuries ago, in the mind of the person who wrote and pondered it. He lives in their presence, in their eternal passion, and it is of no account that hundreds of years have passed over these truths, that the face of the world has altered, and that so much time has melted to nothing: these old lights are still shining, these old passions are still burning.
And Abraham Sulitzer carries them everywhere, in the service of their eternal lives.
I bought from him a Yiddish Bible with photographs, for my grandmother, and a history in German by Şapsă Zwi, for myself. I had the impression that it was hard for him to let them go: he seemed to wonder if they were falling into the wrong hands.
*
A terrible snowstorm. In the morning I tried to go down to the Danube, having heard it had frozen over. I would have enjoyed crossing by foot to the far side, but it was impossible to get down to the docks. Great waves of snow were gusting up from the port and into the town.
I decided to have a family get-together. I gathered the grandmothers – Grandmother and Grandma – around the terracotta stove.
Grandmother is Father’s mother. Grandma is Mother’s. Grandmother is about eighty-five, while I don’t think Grandma is over seventy. She’s younger and livelier: still proud, vain and coquettish.
She was very beautiful in her youth and she knew it. The glory of that time still remains in her clear blue eyes, along with a rather proud and mischievous glint.
She wears a hat of straw and silk, tries a dress on three times and tells the seamstress what she needs done. She frequently checks herself in the mirror and gives herself just a touch of powder when nobody is looking. As Grandfather was a watchmaker and jeweller, she has held on to big diamond earrings, a gold chain and a ruby bracelet from their time together.
She wears them all with an air of importance, clearly flattered at the memory of having been a beautiful woman.
Grandmother, on the other hand, has entered old age resigned to everything, without regrets or lingering vanity. For as long as I have known her, she has had the same simple, decorous black dress with ordinary buttons of bone. White-haired, tired, calm – she’s a storybook grandmother. She speaks the rough country-Romanian of a Muntenian village. She was born here, in this town, in the period of the Russian protectorate and has lived her long life in this county. For years her father worked on an estate in Gropeni, managing the accounts, and later her husband, my paternal grandfather, worked in the port. She has lived in the company of the Danube. When I ask, and have time to listen, she tells of the wonders of the past century, about the city and the townsfolk, and about high society in those years. In particular, she talks about a ball, her first, which must have been a sensation in the life of the town. From a few details she has given me, I suppose it was in 1848, perhaps around the time of the Proclamation of Islaz. And so history and the chronicles of my family are intertwined.
There are some very strange aspects to our family tree. On father’s side, there is at least a century of Romanian life, in town and country, living alongside Romanian neighbours, working with them, mingling with them. For how many tens of years we were here before, or how many hundreds, living as an isolated community, I do not know. But my great-grandfather’s name appears clearly in the census of 1828. Certainly, we cannot speak of a process of assimilation, but I sense a certain resilience in this branch of my family, which must have something to do with the Danube since four consecutive generations have grown up beside it. That great-grandfather of 1828 – Mendel of Gropeni, as he was called – spoke and wrote Romanian, wore boots and a traditional Romanian waistcoat. As for my grandfather, I can still remember his strange look of a boatman when he returned in the evening from the docks. He wore heavy metal-studded boots, his hands were calloused, and he would be white from head to toe from the sacks of wheat and corn which he breathed his whole life, fourteen hours a day, from dawn to dusk. There was something rough and ready about him: something of a boatman, a cart-driver, a day-labourer. On the evenings of holy festivals he also read from some immense Hebrew books, but didn’t read with the same trembling passion I sensed in the other grandfather, Mother’s father. One was an intellectual, the other not, though he too was – they say – well read.
He lived in the fresh air, exposed to the wind, his feet upon rock and earth, gazing at a horizon saturated by pools of water, raising his voice above the rushing river, the sirens of the boats, the rattling of the hoists. A man of the Danube.
Mother’s family, on the other hand, didn’t leave the ghetto until much later. From Bukovina and northern Moldova, they were all people who lived indoors, in lamplight, over books. They have always lived close to the synagogue. From there perhaps they get their black eyes, their long thin hands, the pallor of their cheeks. Their delicate, easily disturbed constitutions are sustained more by their nerves than by bodily strength.
Bad news or a sleepless night or a tense wait devastates them immediately: black circles around the eyes, pale lips, hot cheeks. The toughness of Father’s family seems like coarseness alongside this peculiar glasshouse sensitivity. This explains perhaps the deaf incomprehension that has always divided them, the reckless from the delicate. What’s vigour to one side is boorishness to the other. One side’s sensitivity is the other’s fussiness.
The divide between the Danube and the ghetto.
*
I keep thinking about that great-grandfather of 1828. He must have been born in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution, the American Revolution, Napoleon … Something about his existence strikes me as fabulous and I’ve tried, without much success, to discover details from some elderly aunts who knew him in his final years.
He was born here and lived here all his life. A lifetime working his fingers to the bone, almost an entire century.
One fine day – he was well past ninety – he gathered his things, convoked his children, shared out among them what there was to share, and kept for himself a few gold coins, a few books and maps, which he packed into a knapsack. He said he was leaving. Where to? To Eretz Israel! Home. With whom? Alone.
The idea of a 100-year-old man deciding to do such a thing seems so wild to me that I asked Grandmother a thousand questions to find out exactly what was at the root of this flight. The truth is that he wasn’t running away. It was absolutely simple. The old man just woke up one morning with the idea – and that was it.
They implored him, tried to restrain him forcibly, struggled to make him at least accept an escort to Jaffa – one of his sons would have taken him there and found him a home – all in vain. He would not be swayed. He gave them all he had, put the little he retained on his back and went down to the docks, followed, like in a scene from the Bible, by his sons and daughters and grandchildren, all bewailing him, he alone calm, collected and at peace.
Wintry old man. He died in Jerusalem, a few months after arriving. Grandmother claims he appeared to her in a dream that night, in the white shroud of the dead, saying: ‘Behold, I have died. You will bear a son and you will give him my name.’
That was in 1876. With that information, perhaps it would not be hard for us to find his gravestone someday, if he managed to be buried with
one.
It’s much more likely he lies in an unmarked grave, among other unmarked graves.
Nobody in the family has a photograph of the old man. He refused to partake of such foolishness. A short time before, a German had arrived in town with a complicated machine and installed himself on the corner of the main street. On his way to the docks, says Grandmother, the day he departed, they all stopped there and begged the old man to leave them that small reminder: a photograph. He shook his head, annoyed. No.
*
Had I the time, it would be revealing to trace my family’s migrations on a map. It seems very few of them have moved away.
Though members of my family can be wild, crazy and unstable as individuals, as a group their spirit is slower, more sedentary and tenacious.
Some broke away, left, became lost. The roots remained here, though, their traditions undisturbed, in enduring unity against those who ran off.
I find it significant that our people form two compact groups – my father’s side of the family here, in the bend of the Danube, and my mother’s family up in northern Bukovina. There have been few migrations and even those have been within a very small radius. In any case, the family’s centre of gravity remains constant in each person’s consciousness, and it only requires a family event – a death, a birth, or some trouble – for everybody to come together, either in happiness or alarm, and fall back into line.
All of this makes the escapees all the harder to explain, however few and far between they’ve been.
I’ve heard speak of an uncle who as a youth ran off to Vienna in midwinter by sled, in the last century, after a woman. A vague love story and the only one, I think, in a family of people who are sensual but not passionate in such matters. I’ve also heard of a brother of Mother’s who left for America in 1900. Somewhere in an old album is a photograph of him from that time: his young, almost adolescent face, the bold pioneer’s forehead and, overlying everything, some kind of shadow, or light, foreboding the defeats that were to come.
For Two Thousand Years Page 5