Isaac's Torah

by Angel Wagenstein

  We walked around Vienna. I was carrying Uncle’s small suitcase, and stopped frequently to gape at the houses, the double-decker buses, the trams, the shining carriages, and Uncle would grab my elbow, reminding me that we had to keep going. I’d been thinking, to tell you the truth, that Vienna would look like any city up to its ears in military troubles. Not that you didn’t feel the war at all—there were a lot of officers in the streets and the cafés, sometimes a military patrol would pass by or a truck loaded with soldiers, but the city seemed to me carefree and even joyfully frivolous, something like Uncle Chaimle—though a lot richer.

  Finally we stopped in front of a hotel: “Astoria” was its name if I remember correctly. This wasn’t a building, but a castle, with mythical creatures holding up the balconies and bay windows, a pink marble staircase, and a revolving door of crystal panes rimmed with shining brass. Inside, there glowed—perhaps it was only illusory reflections in the glass—a million lights. Two people in blue and gold uniforms and snow-white gloves, dignified enough for marshals or crown princes, were standing outside, elegantly greeting and seeing off the guests. Two boys also wearing blue and gold, with something like blue pots on their heads, were lifting up and taking down suitcases from the cars, and if I tell you any more, my eyes will start filling with tears of emotion.

  I stood there openmouthed, until Uncle Chaimle gently pushed me. “Come on, go in.”

  “Here?!” I asked, astounded.

  “Well, where else? Isn’t this where we’re going to stay?”

  I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears. Completely dumbfounded, hanging onto the suitcase, I followed Uncle. The marshals and the crown princes looked at us, but didn’t pay any special attention to us—let me add that I was dressed a little provincially but still quite neatly, don’t forget who my father Aaron Blumenfeld was, and that he, according to his own words, had even tailored a red uniform for a dragoon from His Majesty’s Lifeguards.

  Inside things looked even more astounding, with palm trees under the crystal chandeliers, people coming down the broad staircase, which was carpeted in a tender blue, the ladies with tight dresses reaching a little above their knees, smoking cigarettes in long cigarette holders, and the men in tails, exactly like the ones we had in our windows in Kolodetz. Elegant one-armed officers were coming down the stairs, with deep scars across their faces and an empty sleeve tucked under their belts, and monocles. They looked like Germans, and they were floating around proudly like maharajahs on white elephants; it seems that being one-armed with a scar on your cheek was fashionable then. One of those boys with the blue-gold pots on their heads was ringing a bell, and it clanged gently, so as not to startle anyone, and on the small black slate he was carrying around there was a sign written in chalk: “Mister Olaf Svenson.” I think it wasn’t the boy who was Olaf Svenson, but that they were looking for such a person or something like that.

  It would be an understatement if I told you that I was dazed. My throat was dry, it seemed to me at any moment the police would barge in, arrest us, me and Uncle Chaimle, like intruders in a foreign film, or crooks from Kolodetz by Drogobych who had sneaked with sinister intentions into this pink, bluish-golden, aromatic, and exotic world.

  Speaking of crooks, as I looked toward the marble tables at which ladies were drinking coffee with cream and elegantly biting a piece of warm strudel, or important gentlemen were reading newspapers, spread out on thin bamboo holders—I mean the newspapers, not the gentlemen—and next to the tables, on gracefully curved Viennese hangers, hung majestic coats that we had never seen in Kolodetz, I remembered a story that must’ve come from a similar place:

  “Excuse me, are you Moishe Rabinovitch?”

  “No.”

  “The question is about the fact that Moishe Rabinovitch is myself, and right now you are putting on my coat!”

  But I didn’t feel like jokes from Kolodetz, and even less like putting on someone else’s coat. At this moment Uncle Chaimle approached an important-looking personage in uniform. Here I couldn’t immediately orient myself as to who were the masters and who were the servants, because this one, for example, who looked as if he were the owner of a stable of five hundred horses, peered at my uncle from on high, then bowed a little and turned his ear toward him. It seemed that Uncle was talking softly because of uneasiness and had to repeat his question to the ear bent further still. The stable owner raised his eyebrows in surprise, Uncle reached with two fingers in his vest pocket for a tip, but apparently thought twice and with anxious politeness offered him a cigarette. The man looked at the cigarettes with still greater surprise and shook his head in disgust—he was either a nonsmoker or Uncle’s cheap carriage-driver’s smokes completely disgusted him, and I think the second hypothesis more probable.

  All this lasted no longer than my uncle’s two poetic minutes, but to me it really seemed an eternity, until this important fellow gestured with his white-gloved hand somewhere toward the back of the hall. With a triumphant look, Uncle signaled for me to follow him and off we went.

  We passed by windows with perfumes and various unfamiliar kinds of lady’s paraphernalia, and by a glowing glass advertisement, with a mountain view, which invited us to spend the summer in the Tyrol Alps, thank you very much, but I could hardly accept, since a week later I was due to appear Under the Flags.

  Through a revolving door, we made our way into a corridor, in which there were no longer any women with long cigarette-holders and men in tails, but rather, surrounding us everywhere, rushing waiters with trays of coffee and pastry. Beyond them we arrived at an iron door with the sign “Emergency Exit,” and Uncle bravely stepped through. We started climbing down the cement stairway, our footsteps echoing from whitewashed bricks through this empty shaft, down and down to the bottom itself. There was another iron door there, which Uncle cautiously opened, and from there we were met by a blast of heat, the rumbling of pumps, and the hissing of steam. As you may have guessed, this was the boiler room. We walked along pipes and tanks, crossed here and there the puddles of water on the cement floor, until opposite us, all of a sudden, there stood a giant, black from coal and grease, and large as life. He glanced at us, and a moment after the white rose of his mouth dissolved in a joyful smile:

  “Chaimle, brother!”

  Uncle Chaimle gave him a gingerly hug, being especially cautious with his bright-colored, large-checked jacket, then looked at the palms of his hands and said, “This is my nephew Isaac, he’s going to war. And this, Itzik, is my good friend Miklos, a Hungarian and a boiler-room stoker by profession.”

  Chokolom or something like that, said the Hungarian, giving me his big black hand.

  Then we climbed up the little iron staircase, following him, and he ushered us into his room—two beds, gas stove, cast-iron sink.

  We sat by the small table. Mr. Miklos, who was beaming at my uncle, suggested, “You’ll sleep here. How about a beer? The road must’ve made you thirsty.”

  “I could go for a beer,” responded my uncle.

  The conversation was taking place in that strange language that was coined in our beloved Austria-Hungary, and which was used only in interethnic communication, so to speak—a federal Esperanto. Its foundation, or rather its skeleton, was German, but it was invaded impudently by language immigrants of Slavic origin, Hungarian, Hebrew, and even Turkish-Bosnian, who mistreated cases and genders, declensions and participles in a most hooligan-like manner. Yet every ethnic component of the great empire was using its own language, which was visited, of course, by all kinds of other distinguished linguistic guests. Even the Austrians among themselves used a language that they quite frivolously declared to be German, but if poor Goethe could hear them speak, he would hang himself on the first gas lamppost. Quite sometime later, when life put me in closer contact with the indigenous population of this Alpine country, it would’ve been easier for me to pay the tax on a dentist’s practice than to explain to the
relevant tax official that I wasn’t a dentist. In the same way, when they asked Abramovich if he’d had any difficulties in Paris with his French, he replied: “I personally didn’t have any difficulties, but the French people I was talking to—enormous difficulties.”

  While the Hungarian was fussing with glasses, bottles, and so on, my uncle patted me on the hand. “Have anything to say, soldier?”

  “Gotta pee,” I said in desperation.

  Those were my first words since we had come into the marble world of Astoria. I said them in pure Yiddish, if the term “purity” can be used in regard to this amalgam of German, Slavic, and Assyrio-Babylonian.

  SIX

  What happened next is really not proper to tell, so let’s hope Mama never finds out about it. We were in some kind of pub, Uncle and the Hungarian were quite drunk, and there were three women too. One of them, I have to admit, a very pretty girl, strong and white—she looked to me like a Hungarian peasant—kept pouring this Viennese heurige in my glass, young wine that takes the wrong road—not to your stomach, but straight to your head, and I was drinking and drinking it like the last fool. On the small stage a performance was taking place, girls were singing ditties that were not quite decent, lifting up their skirts and showing that thing at the front, and then that thing at the back. And the whole pub was singing, and people were embracing each other, and swaying back and forth to the rhythm of the song—just the way it’s done all over our great empire. There were a lot of soldiers and I was feeling sick from the heavy stink of cigars and wine. After all, you know how it is at home in Kolodetz—the Poles were the ones who drank a bit more, whereas Dad would open a bottle of wine for Pesach and what was left of it he’d carefully cork up until Hanukkah.

  Uncle hugged me and kissed me tenderly on the cheek. Then he announced to everyone: “My nephew’s a soldier! My dear boy’s going to war and he’ll have his baptism by fire. A consecration! A second bar mitzvah!”

  Bar mitzvah, as I told you, marks one’s religious coming-of-age. I don’t know who invented it—Moses, or King Solomon, or King David, but if you ask me, I don’t think thirteen-year-old boys are mature. Anyway, my second bar mitzvah was supposed to make me ultimately mature, I guessed—I’m no fool. Miklos said something in Hungarian to my companion, she grabbed my hand, and dragged me after her, laughing.

  “Where are we going?” I asked in confusion, even though, as I said, I could guess, it’s just that I was shy in front of Uncle Chaimle.

  “Go on, go on, my boy,” he said.

  The Hungarian woman sneaked me in somewhere behind the stage into a small room crammed with furniture, a mirror, wigs, and all kinds of theatrical stuff. She locked the door and sank into the sofa, giggling. It smelled of paint, glue, and perfume.

  “It’s warm,” she said. Flushed and stimulated by the alcohol, she unbuttoned her velvet shirt as if her breasts had been waiting just for that.

  She caught my eyes staring at those white, luscious peasant boobs, took my hand, and put it right there. I was drowning in sweat, and drunk, and my breathing was heavy. Everything in my sight was going double—the girl, the dim lamp at the mirror. I closed my eyes, hugged her, and said, “I love you, Sarah.”

  “I’m not Sarah, I’m Ilona,” she corrected me.

  I looked at her, laughed foolishly, and then the smile left my face. Closing my eyes again and relaxing, I saw Sarah, the greenish-gray sparkle of her eyes, Sarah behind a veil, unless it was the smoke of cigars. She was looking at me reproachfully.

  “Hey, are you feeling sick?” said the Hungarian woman, pushing me slightly.

  I opened my eyes again, they were full of tears, which must have been from the drinking. During the course of my life I’ve noticed that every time I get drunk, I tend to cry.

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked the girl, and slipped her hand down my trousers. She said: “You’re not here, are you?”

  I smiled guiltily, and shrugged my shoulders. By now I really wasn’t there. My soul was away with Sarah.

  SEVEN

  On May 12 of the same year, we were standing in serried ranks, still in civilian clothes, suitcases at our feet, in the well-trodden yard of the barracks. We were not the same any more—familiar and unfamiliar boys from the towns and villages of our dear Galicia, Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, and God knows what else, we were the Reinforcements that His Majesty had summoned Under the Flags. At the end of the line, and a little bit to the side, stood the mobilized clergy. As you’re familiar with the religious hodgepodge of our empire, you’ll believe me when I tell you that in my opinion we were missing only a Tibetan lama.

  To the sound of a brass band, a lieutenant mounted a small wooden platform, appropriately decked with banners and green branches; later we learned that this was Lieutenant Alfred Schauer, or Freddie, as we called him. He had sideburns and a mustache, just like Franz-Joseph. All career officers were trying to look like the father-emperor; there was something quite touching in this. He was, of course, a complete blockhead, I mean not Franz-Joseph but the lieutenant, but this is natural. If he hadn’t been born like that he would’ve become not a lieutenant but a doctor, a seller of frankfurters, or at least he would’ve been grazing cows by the edge of our creek.

  “Boys!” Lieutenant Schauer cried out. “Soon your dream will come true—to lay down your bones in ferocious battle for the glory of our emperor and the might of our dear motherland. Hurrah!”

  To tell you the truth, I’ve never dreamed of laying down my bones for anyone, but the sergeant major—whom one of us soon nicknamed “Zuckerl,” because he was fond of pinching our cheeks in a certain way that left a blue mark just as he would say, with passionate malice, “Bist du, aber, süss,” which meant he had come to really hate you—so this one sergeant major was staring so hard down the lines to see if we were all shouting “Hurrah!” that the lieutenant, I think, was able to see the uvulas in our throats.

  Freddie Schauer then confided to us that things at the front line were going from better to best, victory had never been so near, and it was our high honor to bring it in on the tips of our bayonets. I don’t know much about military strategy, but still it wasn’t quite clear how we could bring it in on the tips of our bayonets—victory, that is, since before it could happen, we were, according to the dream, supposed to lay down our bones in ferocious battle, and so on and so forth. But this apparently was an example of patriotic poetry per se, as my dear uncle would have put it. I’m not sure if I was thinking all that at the time or if these are thoughts from nowadays. Let’s not pretend I was a very bright young man, because it was only later, during this and that war, that I ate enough herring heads, so that these things about the patriotic slogans became clear to me. Do you know that one, about the herrings? Well then, a Pole and a Jew are on this train. The Pole opens his basket and starts eating a fat hen, while the Jew, dirt poor, is eating some bread with the cheapest thing in the world—the heads of salty herrings. The Polish guy asks: “Now, why do you Jews eat so many of these herring heads?” Says the Jew, “They make you really smart.” “Is that so,” said the Pole. “Why don’t you sell me some?” “All right,” says the Jew. “Five heads for five rubles.” The Jew sells the heads, the other one eats them. Sometime later the Pole says: “Why did you charge me one ruble per head when a kilo of herring costs half a ruble?” “Don’t you see,” says the Jew, “how you’re already getting smarter?”

  So my point is that wisdom comes with experience, in other words, with the quantity of herring heads eaten, if you know what I mean.

  Time went by. We were learning combat-by-bayonet—rip-rip, hit the ground, splash in the mud. Halt! Hit the ground! Halt! I’m ashamed to tell you how many times Sergeant Major Zuckerl would come up to me, straight up to me, this mustached turkey had eyes on his ass too, and pinch me so hard my cheek was blue and say, “You are so sweet! Let’s try it now on our own. Hit the ground! Halt! Hit the ground!
Halt!”

  And so on.

  So, there we were, sitting on the little patch of grass. Some soldiers were washing themselves at the sinks, tin soup bowls were clattering all around, the sunset was beautiful, quiet, and red.

  “It’s all stupidity,” said Rabbi Shmuel, “the biggest stupidity and only stupidity. Why am I here, I’m asking you? To guide you and take care of your souls, so that when you die, you’ll go all clean to our God Yahweh, eternal be His glory. The same is supposed to be done by my colleagues—Catholics, Adventists, Protestants, Orthodox, Sabbatarians, and Muslims—to honor the emperor and for the glory of their own God. And what’s the point, I’m asking you? When I know that on the other side of the front line there’s a fellow rabbi who’s guiding our boys—who can tell me now if they’re ours or not ours?—to fight against you, to kill you for the honor of their own emperor and for God, eternal be His glory. And then the war will end, and when the plows begin plowing all through Europe, and your bones come up shining white in the fields, ours and not-ours, all intertwined, then nobody will know for what God and which emperor you died. They say that up to this moment our dear motherland Austria-Hungary has given up more or less one and a half million dead. These are one and a half million boys who will not go back home, one and a half million mothers who will not meet them at the door and one and a half million brides who will not lie happily under them to get pregnant and give birth in peace and kindness. Well, I’m asking you, is the Lord not seeing all this? Or is He drowsing and picking his nose? Or is God too, glory to His name for the eternity of time, a senile old man, who is flattered by the fact that people are dying in His name? I don’t know, my dear brothers, I cannot give you an answer. In any case, I’m thinking: If the Lord had windows, they would long ago have smashed His panes!”