“Ask less. These days that’s the healthy way,” he snapped.
And I stopped asking about just what it was that Esther Katz, on the pavement across the way, opposite the soldiers’ latrine, was there for. I vaguely knew this beautiful and fragile woman, with a man’s haircut, who seemed always to be smoking, even in her sleep. She would appear infrequently around our part of Galicia; they said she was some kind of a lawyer. In David Leibovich’s café she would chat with our people about this and that in Yiddish, with the rabbi she spoke perfect German, and with my teacher Eliezer Pinkus, may he rest in peace, perfect Russian. Floating after her, just like the transparent scarf she was always wrapping casually around her delicate neck, was the rumor that she was, at one time, a French, and at another time, a Russian spy, but she wasn’t. In other years and amid events to which you will be a witness, it turned out that some Jewish Mata Hari she wasn’t, but simply a Bolshevik activist from Warsaw—one of the most faithful and most uncompromising ones, whom the Bolsheviks shot down with the strongest passion—sometimes as Trotskyists, other times as Japanese agents. But this happened much later; you’ll learn about it when the time comes.
As I’ve already told you, I don’t consider myself very smart, but neither am I such a fool as not to figure out the connection between the appearance of Esther Katz and the small printed pieces of paper that spread among the soldiers. To be honest, they contained definitions that were quite disturbing and offensive to our great empire: the holy war, under whose banners we were gathered, was defined as imperialistic, and we, the soldiers of His Majesty, as mere cannon-fodder; and they spoke about the nations that were moaning under the boot of that European gendarme Austria-Hungary and its bloody emperor (I pictured him, that gendarme, as something in between Sergeant Major Zuckerl and the Polish policeman Pan Voitek, and, of course, with the sideburns of Franz-Joseph). And joking aside, the text of these leaflets seemed to me to a certain extent fair, but bombastic and difficult to understand, and some statements downright exaggerated. Not that we lived a rich life and everything was butter and honey; it was just the other way around. Most of us lived modest existences on the verge of poverty, but I don’t remember anyone in our land moaning under anyone’s boots, even less so under the boot of His Majesty—this was pure slander, because he hadn’t even set foot in Kolodetz by Drogobych. Uncle Chaimle on this occasion would have said that this was just a sample of political propaganda per se.
I asked Rabbi Ben-David to elucidate for me the origin and purpose of the leaflets, and he replied again, “Think with your head and not with your mouth.”
I thought with my head and finally I came up with the conclusion that we were standing on the verge of great changes, which would turn our life inside out the way my father used to turn the old caftans inside out, so that they could look—with a little imagination and good will—like new. Flying all the way up here were rumors about the events occurring in Russia, and about a similar mess that was perhaps brewing in our lands too, and in Germany. Sometime before that, like a distant echo from lightning that had struck somewhere beyond the mountains, rumors had reached as far as Kolodetz about some revolt of our sailors from the Austro-Hungarian fleet in Kotor Bay, or as they call it there, in the distant Adriatic shore of Montenegro—Boka Kotorska. But, as I’ve already told you, I wasn’t very interested in politics, while politics itself was showing a growing interest in me. Maybe this was the reason why the people from the military police who came to rummage around under the straw mattresses, through the soldiers’ wooden footlockers and in the pockets of their overcoats, took only me out in front of the line of soldiers stretched out along the iron beds and dug not only in that intimate place of mine to my rear. I was standing there naked and disgraced, I had taken off even the underwear my mother made for me, some soldiers tried to giggle, but their laughter froze in the air like an icicle under the fierce look of Sergeant Major Zuckerl.
“What have you read recently?” asked some important military police hotshot with thick glasses through which his eyes unnaturally protruded.
I gave him a look of childlike innocence. “The Bible.”
“Show it to me.”
Oops, what was I going to do now, since I had no such thing? But Rabbi Ben-David, who was sitting at the end, together with the other field chaplains, saved the situation: “It’s with me—in storage, dear gentleman. I interpret the different chapters for him, because he’s a little slow.”
“This is good. This is very good,” said the military police boss, blessing the endeavor without clarifying what was good—that I was a dimwit, or that I had to have the Bible explained to me. “And what else have you read recently? Some small pieces of paper, leaflets, petitions?”
To pretend to be a fool, in order to survive, is an old Jewish art, comparable only to ancient Greek architecture, more precisely the Parthenon. I said, “We read, as a group, Mister Boss, only the field newspaper. It has everything that a soldier and a patriot needs!”
The boss looked at me through his thick lenses. “Are you a Jew?”
“Yes, sir!”
Apparently he did not believe me, because he lifted up with the tip of his cane that certain little thingy of mine that hangs down under the belly button, and fixed his myopic eyes on it.
His amazement gradually developed into explicit astonishment; he was silent for a while, looked around, thought for a minute, and finally slapped me with satisfaction on the bare shoulder. “All right, get dressed!”
With a triumphant look I searched out the eyes of Zuckerl, but they were forecasting a long and heavy stay with my gun—in the rain. Apparently the sergeant major was disappointed that they did not find Das Kapital under my armpits, or at least a photograph of Lenin or Leo Trotsky with banners flying in the background.
With a look of regret and a little bit of guilt, Rabbi Shmuel Ben-David cast a glance at me and slightly shrugged his shoulders. He had his arms crossed on his chest, in a God-fearing and humble manner, like the other shamans next to him—God’s folks, above suspicion.
TWO
Just in case, Zuckerl hardened the regime and put an end to any sort of city leaves and other caprices, such as visits to the military infirmary, situated in the requisitioned brothel in the small town, in which anyway there were neither whores nor doctors anymore and only our poor doctor’s assistant, who prescribed a dose of salts and disinfection of the bed with carbolic acid for every single thing—from sprained ankle to duodenal ulcer. And just at this moment in my biography, when almost all of our glorious military unit was hit by a, so to speak, epic diarrhea, caused probably by spoiled horsemeat that was quite artlessly imitating veal, and half of our personnel was almost constantly to be found in the latrine—right at this moment I received a letter from Sarah. The envelope had already been opened and then glued back again with brown shoemaker’s glue. I feel shy about telling you, but truth stands above all: I opened the letter and read it over and over again, squatting in the latrine, with tears running abundantly down my cheeks. Here is the moving letter, I don’t want to hide anything:
TO ENFELD
REGIMENT, COMPANY
TOWN OF REGION
MY DEAR ,
I CAN’T WAIT TO TELL YOU THAT TO US IN —HAVE ARRIVED FROM UNTIL THAT DAY , BUT ON THE OTHER HAND !!! DON’T YOU THINK ? AS FAR AS FOOD GOES, WE ARE
BREAD ALREADY COSTS AND EVEN MORE WITH , AND MEAT IS COMPLETELY . KISS MY BROTHER AND TELL HIM THAT
ALWAYS YOURS
,
I was reading the letter squatting, as I already mentioned, under the small windows through which for a long time now you couldn’t see either those folks with the pregnant cow or the relatives of Joshka, and I was crying with deep emotion—not so much because of what was written or scratched in black ink, but because of the unwritten white lines, in which, I had no doubt, she was telling me how much she was waiti
ng for me and how much she missed me, and how nice and mild the fall was in Kolodetz, and how she was dreaming of us sitting in the ravine above the river, and other tender things, which no censor was able to read, much less scratch out.
I showed the letter to Rabbi Ben-David. He carefully looked at it and said, “The political development is good, there’s a lot of scratching out. And the more censored lines there are, the better it will be.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Just before dawn, my brother, the night is darkest. When the censorship gets so thick-witted with panic and fear that it tries to scratch out even the song of nightingales, it means the end is near. Do you get it now?”
“I like this,” I said emotionally, “about the song of the nightingales.”
Moved to the bottom of my heart, I hugged the rabbi, and touched my lips to his graying beard.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “that I called you in public ‘a little slow’!”
“Oh, my God, I’d already forgotten it.”
“Don’t forget it, it’s the truth itself. That business about the nightingales is metaphoric, I didn’t mean it for my sister, and even less so for you. The nightingales sing before dawn, and to try to scratch out such prophecies is a sure sign that the end is near. And now, run to the can, I feel your end is near too.”
But still, I was left with the impression that the business about the nightingales was exactly how I’d understood it, but the rabbi didn’t like to have his sentiments caught in their underwear.
Once again it was Shabbos evening, quiet and, as if by a miracle, with no rain. Gone was the little grass corner next to the barbed wire that had been playing the role, so to say, of a military beys keneses, a place for ritual prayers. Everything had long ago turned into soggy mud, which malignantly squelched under the boots. That is why we, the group of Jewish boys from our company, were sitting on the chopped wood next to the kitchen, and our rabbi was holding open the scrolls of a small sefer Torah, and according to the prescribed custom he was supposed to read the Derasha, a certain passage from the Tanakh. But this time, apparently, Ben-David did not intend to interpret the stories, very instructive in every respect (though we were really fed up with them), of the seven skinny cows that gobbled up the seven fat ones but still remained skinny, because he went straight to the Shabbos sermon:
“There’s news, so don’t notice that I’m pretending to be reading from the Law, and don’t jump up. There is no Austria-Hungary anymore, if you know what I mean. This fall our teachers will not be telling in a smooth singsong about our great empire, but will be stuttering when they have to show the children where exactly the borders of Hungary or Czechoslovakia are, and explain to them the hidden meaning, and whether in general there is any meaning in the fact that Slovenia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Montenegro have gone from the rotten empire of the Habsburgs to another—that of the Karageorgievs. The Russian geography teachers will have to give up the habit of calling Poland our western provinces; in the Baltics, they will take down the Russian flag from the flagstaffs; moreover the Russians themselves will for a long time argue, quite loudly, what color their flag should be—tricolored or red. The old teachers will scratch their behinds when asked about the national affiliation of South Tyrol, Dobrudja, Zibenburgen, or Galicia and whose subjects are the Moldavians or the Finns. History, friends, like a deft card dealer, has shuffled the deck and dealt them again—everything from the beginning again, the game starts anew, the bets have been made and we have yet to see who’s stuck an ace up his sleeve, who’ll get four spades, and who a lonely seven of clubs. This is the law of nature—the strong devour the weak, but their appetite is too big for their digestive system, and because of that they get the runs and acid, which are cured with revolutions. The latter, in their turn, create chaos, and chaos begets new worlds and you hope the world tomorrow will be less shitty than the one today. And so on—till the next deck of cards is dealt, that is—till the next war. It won’t be late—the dragon teeth of revenge are sown in the fertile soil of Europe and will give a rich crop, believe me. Gut Shabbos, boys, and go home in peace!”
All this mess with the promotion of the empire to a skinned cow in a slaughterhouse ended for us on October 28, 1918, with the creation of the so-called “Liquidation Commission” in Krakow, and on November 14 of the same year….
THREE
…Well, that was the day my next historic dream came true, so to speak—one more line from my personal national doctrine and I became a subject of Poland. You’ll die laughing, but I went to war as an Austro-Hungarian, and came home a Pole. Not that I emigrated to another country or, say, ran away to distant lands. No, I came back to my dear old Kolodetz by Drogobych, with that spoiled coquette—the little river in the valley, with the same little Catholic church on this side, and the Christian Orthodox temple on the other side of the river, with the same little white synagogue, which looked like anything but a shrine of Yahweh, and even with the same café of David Leibovich, where once upon a time Liova Weissmann used to show his exciting bits of films. But now this was within the borders of the United, Indivisible, and Sacred Land of Poland, the Inalienable, Ancestral Motherland. Sorry about overdoing the capital letters, I know it’s just the same as overdoing black pepper in borscht, but I’ve got no other means of expressing the historic pathos of the moment when the Germans delivered to us the duly certified new boss of Poland, Joseph Pilsudski, may Adonai put him up there on His right knee.
And here, my dear brother, begin my real troubles with this chronicle, which will lose its native vignettes, pizzicatos, and caprioles and start moving, just like the dusty and monotonous roads of our Carpathian foothills, a little bit upward, a little bit downward, up again, down again, and so on all the way to the horizon, with neither abysses nor dizzying peaks. Which reminds me of the rabbi Ben Zvi, who rented a carriage to take him to the next shtetl. So the rabbi and the driver made a deal and took off. At the first little hill, the driver asked the rabbi to get off and push because the horse was skinny and feeble. So Ben Zvi got down and pushed up to the top. Then the driver asked him to pull the carriage down, and so it went, hill after hill, Ben Zvi was either pushing or pulling, till they reached their destination. In front of the synagogue the rabbi paid the driver and said: “I understand, my dear, why I came here—I have a sermon to give at the synagogue. I also understand why you came here—you have to earn your bread, after all. The only thing I don’t understand is why we took with us this poor horse!”
With this I don’t mean to say that you, my dear reader, are the poor horse, whom I have to pointlessly drag up and down the hilly monotony of life, but if we look at it objectively—well, my apologies, but this is how it seems. Moreover, in the beginning I promised you I would step on two whales, just as the ancients did, one being the First World War, and the other, naturally, the Second. And what do you think is there between those two, I mean not between the two wars, but between the two whales? Water. It’s as clear as day.
On the other hand, though, if you were to take a look at even one little drop of this water through the microscope of my favorite teacher, Eliezer Pinkus, may he rest in peace, you would see that there is only seeming emptiness and that there, in the water drop, it is bursting with such life as you couldn’t find even in the center of Lemberg, which is now Lvov. Amoebas and other one-celled creatures are living their regular but quite intense routines. They get together and reproduce, they look for something or someone to eat up, and there probably are dramatic separations—especially when one paramecium splits up and its two halves will never meet again in life. You can also see even with your naked eye little fish who, seemingly surprised, as if they’d just run into an old acquaintance, are just about to say “Oh!” when in fact they’re devouring a whole company of plankton together with its sergeant major. But don’t start crying with astonishment at the great mystery of Nature; this is the only thing I remember from my biolog
y lessons and in this particular case I’m using it as a metaphor.
Because of the aforementioned reason, I don’t want to bother you with petty details from our life of amoebas and occasionally of fish who seem about to say “Oh!” but just devour you like nothing, if you know what I mean. This is of no interest to anyone and it’s doubtful whether it will wet God’s eye with the moisture of compassion. In this sense I understand and modestly share the outlook of our great teachers and prophets from biblical times, who composed line after line, and manuscript after manuscript, The Book of Books, in our language the Law, or the Torah. They knew where their story should run slowly and widely like a river at high water, and where events, like a wild waterfall, should rush down right before your eyes with astounding velocity. At such places in the Bible, where you don’t even have the time to stop and look around at the surrounding area, my ancient teachers of composition and the description of things take full liberty to walk the road they want, with the big strides of a hundred Roman stadii each. For example: “Adam knew his wife again (you know what they mean, it’s not about a regular acquaintance) and she gave birth to a son and gave him the name of Seth. The days of Adam after he begat Seth were another eight hundred years and he begat sons and daughters. And all the days of Seth were a hundred and twelve years, and all the days of Enoch were a hundred and five years, and all the days of Mahalalel were eight hundred and ninety-five years….” And so on, my dear reader, let me not burden your mind with more examples. I am talking about this big stride of my writing ancestors and prophets, may their memory live eternally and unto the end of time, because they left us writing that is being read over and over again, and everyone interprets it his own way and reads it over again, and like this—one thousand, then two thousand, then three thousand years, not like a newspaper that if it’s yesterday’s, it doesn’t serve any other purpose but to wrap salty fish in it. And please don’t dare, and if you do may God forgive you, cast a shadow of doubt over the truthfulness of this writing, because it contains a lot of wisdom and it’s flowing like the springs of David in the Judaic desert and offers you knowledge for all situations in life. And they’re not shamming, the prophets, seized by God’s inspiration or by the desire to impress you when they’re speaking of people who lived eight hundred or even nine hundred years. If you look at it formally, and from the low point of view of a coldblooded frog, this definitely contradicts science, but I think that in those mighty times of Genesis, thick and strong like a heavy Easter wine, every full moon marked a yearly circle in the life of the oaks and the people, and our human time is measurable with the biblical as the river paramecium with the diamond or the sparrow with the eagle.
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