by Steve Stern
He had the conviction that so long as he took care of Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr, the tzaddik would take care of him. Meanwhile he starved, though occasionally some sympathetic old baba yaga would scuttle forth from her kennel to spare him a stale pierogen or a potato as soft as a powder puff. These he would dine on for days, storing the leftovers under the burlap in the refrigerated casket to extend their relative freshness. Lightheaded from hunger, Salo sometimes daydreamed: The river he had just been ferried across (for the price of reading scripture aloud to an illiterate ferryman) was the lost Sambatyon, on the other side of which lay the land of the immortal red-headed Jews. Or had he strayed off the map of the known world entirely and crossed the border into Sitra Achra, the kingdom of demons, which was beyond God’s jurisdiction? But even as he indulged them, Salo recognized such notions as merely the shades of dead fancies, lingering vapors of the bubble-brained boy he had been only a short time ago. Moreover, with every meal he missed, a bit more of his vestigial baby fat melted from his bones, and although there were no available mirrors, Salo could feel that he was becoming somebody else: He was a young man transporting a sacred burden through a menacing winter landscape, the hero of his own unfolding story, who had no need of encumbering himself any longer with superstition and grandmothers’ tales.
Sometime during the third week after the departure from his native shtetl, Salo came across a thickset peasant in sheep pelts shambling along the road, clutching one end of a rope that trailed over his shoulder. At the other end of the rope was a noose that circumscribed the neck of a woman whose haggard features—nose protruding like a cucumber from the folds of a ragged shawl—identified her as a suffering Jewess. Salo’s first impulse was to nod deferentially to the peasant and pass by. The journey had taken a toll: His empty belly whistled to rival the flatus of his rattle-boned mare, and his feet ached as if he were trampling glass; to say nothing of how the relentless cold froze his brain. But prey to a stronger urge than self-preservation, Salo addressed the man in the Polish he’d heard since birth, and scarcely recognized his own brash voice.
“What’s that you got there, friend?”
“Are you blind, friend?” said the peasant, giving the salutation a hostile emphasis as he continued to walk on.
At that Salo gripped Bathsheba’s bridle to halt her, and turned to inquire in as diplomatic a tone as he could muster, “Beg pardon, but has no one challenged your right to the woman?”
The peasant abruptly paused and turned about, bristling, his flat face as flushed as a purple onion. “I found her in the village of Plok,” he barked. “She’s mine.”
“Who’s arguing?” said the young man, conciliatory, then gently submitted, “But isn’t she, excuse me, a human being?”
The peasant peered at Salo as if he were a half-wit. “I knew she wasn’t a goat.”
Salo grinned, deciding to try another tack. He cleared his throat and assumed an attitude he thought of as strictly business. “So what’ll you take for her?”
The peasant cocked an ear. “Is she for sale?”
Shrugging what he supposed was a mercantile shrug, Salo replied, “Everything’s for sale, friend.”
The peasant screwed up his doughy features thoughtfully; here was a language he understood. “Fifteen zlotys,” he said at length, “and she’s yours.”
It was an astronomical sum, which the peasant was of course aware of, but Salo continued to keep up his end of the bluff. He sucked a tooth and gave the woman a once-over as if to assess her value. Then he was surprised to find that her spindly frame and sour face, furious despite her oppressed situation, engendered in him a mellow throb of desire. Here was a new sensation and, vibrating like a plucked fiddle string, Salo marveled at the range of passions the wide world afforded. He turned his head to spit an imaginary plug of tobacco.
Meanwhile the peasant had begun to eye the weathered casket in the bed of the wagon. Salo followed his glance, anticipating what would come next: how the man would ask to see what was concealed in the box, and Salo would comply to encourage further negotiation, after which the peasant would promptly cross himself and make tracks along with his captive. To avoid this eventuality the young man blurted, “Tell you what I’ll do,” and offered a straight swap. “This fine brood mare for your broken-down hag, what do you say?”
The peasant was caught off guard. He looked first suspiciously at Salo, then swiveled his head from the mare to the woman, as if torn between the audacity of such an offer and a horse-trading impulse he couldn’t resist. “Which is more broke down?” he wanted to know.
“Why, just look at her,” said Salo, beginning to find his stride. “What use can you expect to get from her? A few months, a year at the most, and she’s finished—you’ll dig her grave. Whereas, the mare will probably outlive you.”
The peasant was incredulous. “The nag is more decrepit than the hag! It’s already glue. Besides,” with a simper that invited Salo’s collusion, “women are better for fucking.”
Uncomfortable with this turn in the conversation, Salo nonetheless rallied. “Are you crazy? The woman’s bones will snap like matchsticks, while the mare will bear you a fresh foal every year.” He was himself a little unclear as to the implied paternity of the foals.
“I’m crazy?” The peasant could scarcely believe what he was hearing.
“That’s right,” said Salo. “You would settle for a moment’s pleasure with a tainted female whose pox I can sniff from here”—he was conscious that even in harness the woman was seething—“when you could enjoy the years of prosperity that only a good draft horse can provide?”
Amazingly, the peasant was beginning to waver, though he stiffened again when Salo began to lay it on a bit too thick, making claims for Bath-sheba’s thoroughbred bloodline. In the end, though, the youth moderated his tone, and the yokel, making a great show of reluctance, accepted the deal, handing over the tether in exchange for the reins of the unhitched mare. Once the bargain was struck, however, the peasant began to gloat, saying “Good riddance” to the woman as if he had suckered Salo all along: He had out-Jewed the Jew. Watching the man leading away his father’s gangle-shanked jade, her tail raised like a mophead as she dropped a load in the muck, Salo felt sorry for the animal; her fate would not be a happy one. But life, though harsh, was full of unexpected gifts, and pleased with what he deemed (despite the peasant’s response) a successful transaction, the young man turned to face his prize.
She spat at him, at first actual sputum, then a venomous stream of execrations: “Shtik drek! Gruber yung! I pish in the milk of your mother!” But Salo, as he endeavored to remove the taut noose from around her neck, took no offense. If anything, he felt a pang of nostalgia for the curses his father used to heap on his head.
“A finsternish, may your testicles soon toll your death knell!”
Then even as she continued spewing bile, she took up the traces, without prompting or inquiring as to what the coffin contained, and began to help Salo pull the wagon along the furrowed road. In the name of her martyred family and herself, Basha Puah Bendit Benchwarmer’s, she denounced her rescuer as she did the God of Abraham for his discourteous treatment of Jewish daughters. She lamented her lost dowry—which had consisted of some pewter spoons, a milch cow, and an Elijah’s chair—and reviled the world that had deprived her of her due. Enjoying the music of her waspish tongue, Salo wondered how she might look with a little meat on her bones, though he expected that her raw bones would always shun flesh. But vinegar-pussed harridan that she was, at least a decade older than he, she was still a woman, and having never spent time in the society of women, Salo was greatly excited, his loneliness dispelled.
Warmed though he was by her litany of complaints, the young man begged leave to interrupt. “I respectfully submit,” he said with a bashful formality, “that for the sake of decency we should marry as soon as we can.”
Snarling as she resolved never to forgive him for the humiliation of having been traded for a h
orse, and for all the future offenses she anticipated in his miserable company, Basha Puah ungraciously accepted Salo’s proposal.
THEY WERE WED on the roadside beneath the tattered canopy of Salo’s prayer shawl by a beggared Galitzianer rabbi in exchange for a glimpse of the Boibiczer Prodigy, of whom the rabbi had heard rumors in his travels. He’d heard that the Prodigy was encased in an immense blue sapphire, and was duly disappointed. For a witness there was the rabbi’s dolt of a son, and in the absence of a goblet they made do with Salo’s mother’s silver thimble, which the groom stomped into the brittle mud with his heel. Nights on the road, the newlyweds slept wherever they could: on the splintered floor of an abandoned tollhouse, in the rafters of a sawmill with an ice-locked water wheel, and once, when they were stranded between shtetlakh, in the open wagon beside the cold casket, where they clung to each other desperate for warmth. And although Salo’s termagant bride never left off upbraiding him—“From one degradation into yet another you thrust me!”—she was pregnant by the time they reached Lodz.
The city, which he’d journeyed so long and endured so much to reach, had assumed a golden aspect in Salo’s mind. But the swarming Jewish district, called the Balut, rather than populated by saints, was a home to ragpickers, organ grinders, professional cripples, prostitutes, and thieves, to say nothing of the legion of slogging automata employed in the silk mills and dye houses that bordered the banks of the sulfurous Warta River. The smoke from the factories hung a mauve miasma over the city, collecting in the twisting lanes of the Balut, whose citizens wore its permanent fetor in the folds of their clothes. Their working children, like human bobbins unspooling, trailed home sticky threads from the cocooneries, their pockets spilling caterpillars that continued to spin fantastic Jacob’s Ladders in the attics of their dilapidated abodes. Slush steamed in the arcaded streets from the excrement of horses and the blood of the slaughtered animals that hung in shop windows or lay cloven and splayed across merchants’ stalls. Malodorous sink that the ghetto was, however, you couldn’t have proved it by Salo Frostbissen, who exulted in its carnival atmosphere, an attitude that incensed his wife all the more.
Nor was she impressed that Salo’s reputation had preceded their arrival in the Jewish quarter, where a number of pious souls had gathered hopefully about the horseless wagon. They touched their prayer shawls to the rebbe’s box, then kissed them as if the casket were a portable shrine, declaring that Salo’s having survived the journey with the rebbe intact was a miracle, proof of the tzaddik’s powers even at rest. Basha Puah, who had abused her husband throughout their travels for the bootlessness of his burden, let alone the added insult of having enlisted her assistance in conveying it, had thus far refused even to look inside the casket. Of a practical turn of mind, however, she was not above suggesting that those who wanted to take a gander might pay for the privilege. But Salo’s stubbled head was a little turned by his hero’s welcome, and while he feared that overexposure might diminish the rebbe’s sanctity, he nevertheless revealed Eliezer ben Zephyr to anyone who asked. The dividends came in any case: Zalman Pisgat, proprietor of the turreted brick icehouse in Franciszkanska Street (beside which Yosl’s was nothing, a hole-in-a-hill) requested the honor of installing the Prodigy in the bosom of his business; meanwhile the charitable members of the Refugees’ Aid Society promised to locate some “cozy little nest” for the newlyweds. For a time it seemed that the orphaned bride and groom would be treated as dignitaries, the toast of the ghetto, and Salo, still caked in the shmutz of the road, basked in their triumphant entry into Lodz: It was the storybook finale to a great adventure. But as the misery of the quarter was in no way mitigated by his advent, and its citizens’ short spans of attention were recalled to their daily woes, the son of the King of Cholera and his refrigerated tzaddik were soon forgotten, Salo’s notoriety failing to survive his first week in Lodz.
They were installed in cheap lodgings in Zabludeve Street, a windowless cellar habitation that Salo praised for its favorable comparison to his father’s grotto (it was certainly as dank and cold) and his wife cursed for the claustrophobic crypt that it was. Moreover, Zalman Pisgat’s gratitude for having been allowed the mitzvah of preserving the frozen rebbe was also short-lived. He did, however, offer Salo the position of night watchman, though not without strings attached: A portion of Salo’s wages would have to be exacted weekly to compensate for the rebbe’s storage fee. That Salo willingly acquiesced to what amounted to his indenture, that he didn’t toss the block of ice containing the holy man into the river and have done with it, were crimes Basha Puah added to the lengthening list of her husband’s infamies. Salo was himself a little disappointed that his fame had so swiftly subsided, though he chided himself for his vanity. And after a spell in Pisgat’s icehouse, dispersing shadows with a hurricane lamp as he navigated the crystal palisades under the glazed eyes of dead oxen, salmon, and hares, he was again reconciled to old Eliezer’s unending incubation. He was content to spend his nights, between tours of the hyperborean premises, sitting vigil in his role as the saint’s custodian, prepared to wait till hell itself froze over for the rebbe to hatch from his ice chrysalis.
So what if the ghetto was a pesthole in which he and his hatchet-faced bride lacked a pair of groschen to rub together, where they dined on hot water afloat with limp cabbage leaves and relieved themselves in a courtyard privy whose odor brought tears to the eyes? The Balut, in its unsleeping activity, was by Salo’s lights a tonic to all who dwelled therein. And besides, didn’t he enjoy the best of two worlds? By day he was a four-square householder who, with his expectant wife, fulfilled the commandment of marriage and multiplication; while at night, in retreat from the roiling streets, he was the solitary guardian of a legend that became more burnished the more it faded into memory.
For her part Basha Puah fulminated against their lot with every breath she took, cursing her husband’s irrepressible spirits, though she was herself galvanized by the ghetto’s raucous atmosphere. Despite her violated sense of entitlement, which she never ceased from registering with God and Salo, she was an enterprising woman. By the time their celebrity had expired, she had managed to parlay nothing into a couple of turnips and eggs, which she peddled in the Franciszkanska Street market—battling the other wives over coveted locations—for the price of another couple of turnips and eggs. Then a day came when she sold an egg at a profit and used the surplus capital to increase her inventory. Eventually, by shrewd reinvestment in the produce the peasant farmers sold wholesale from the wallow of their wagonyard, she established a modest pushcart business; she sold vegetables and eggs whose freshness her husband extended by storing them in the icehouse overnight. In a matter of weeks her market stall was a going concern, and full of admiration for his eruptive wife’s industry, Salo helped her as best he could, though it meant that he seldom slept. He carted merchandise from the wholesalers to the marketplace and shlepped to and from the bakery the boolkies Basha Puah rolled at home and left to rise like inflating airships on top of the neighborhood oven. For gratitude Salo received his wife’s habitual grousing that he was always underfoot. She also chafed at his solicitude with regard to her inconvenient condition, which she refused to let hamper her labors or leaven her poisonous tongue.
Then the twins were born and Basha Puah cursed the incontinence of her own womb, which she threatened, if her husband did not cease his mawkish cooing and fawning over the infants, to stitch shut. She savaged the mustachioed midwife for her complicity and Salo for having saddled them with more mouths to feed. Euphoric nonetheless, Salo bankrupted his expanded family by laying in schnapps and spongecake and inviting every ganef and teamster in their putrid trough of a street to witness the circumcision. He named the boys, in the face of his wife’s indifference, Yachneh and Yoyneh after his ill-fated father.
Even as she carried them dangling from either udder to her market stall, Basha Puah excoriated the twins for their rapacious appetites. “Fressers, you suck like leeches and bite like
asps!” Rascals that no one ever bothered to distinguish from each other, they were running wild in the unpaved alleys of the Balut before they were weaned. Early on they learned to ignore their mother’s threats and jeremiads, or rather—following their father’s blithe example—to be amused and even tickled by the lash of her tongue. From the first they were conspicuous for their cheek among the swarms of marauding ghetto urchins; they were foremost in teasing the blowsy whores who graced the windows and doorways of Žvdowska Street, and in tormenting the mendicant amputees till their flaring tempers enabled them to sprout latent limbs and give chase. From hanging about the slaughterhouses and tanneries, they brought home new varieties of noxious odors, and vile language that rivaled even their mother’s. They rode the obsolete mill wheels and were baptized in the seething river that bubbled with acids like a sorcerer’s retort. Basha Puah charged her husband to discipline the young savages, but in his eyes the boys, high-spirited and reckless, did no real harm. Besides, when did he have the time to be more than a benign spectator to the progress of his sons, whom (like everyone else) he’d never troubled to try and tell apart? He did attempt, for the sake of form, to see to it that they attended a local cheder, but the old melamed Yankl Halitotsis was unable to keep them (or their peers, for that matter) confined to an airless study house during the day. They were forgiven their truancy by their father, who harbored his own unpleasant memories of the village kloiz. To placate his wife, however, Salo assured her that, when they were old enough to appreciate him, he would introduce the twins to the Boibiczer Prodigy, whose aura had a moral effect on any Jew that beheld him. Basha Puah called him every manner of fool, then accused him of being a wanton beast as well for making her pregnant again.