Later, all seated at an enormous tish, they order from a menu that includes chicken broth with egg noodles or knaidlach, pancakes and liver, carrot pudding, raisin bread, and strudel, but choose, at Elya’s insistence, only the cheapest roasted groats. And three glasses of tea. Wouldn’t the young sirs like to see the drinks menu? No? The innkeeper, having put on a white jacket, is their server. He has a monopolka, an exclusive right to sell alcoholic beverages, and draws corks from the merchants’ many bottles.
The merchants order meat with potato balls in rich gravy, a speciality of the region, carried in on a pillow.
When their own food arrives, Kiva gazes suspiciously at his plate.
‘Who ordered the clean glass?’ the innkeeper asks. He’s heard the joke. Obviously. Everyone’s heard that joke.
‘What’s this?’ Kiva takes a cautious bite. ‘Meat?’
‘We didn’t order meat,’ Elya tells him.
The meat is salty and sweet, dark and deep.
‘Sausage?’ Ziv opines.
‘Did we order sausage?’ Kiva drops his cutlery.
Elya shakes his head. ‘Too expensive.’
‘They gave us sausage.’
‘I think it’s pork sausage,’ Ziv winks at Elya.
‘Pork!’ Kiva retches. ‘Sausage!’
‘Only joking,’ says Ziv. ‘It’s Jewish pork.’
‘A rabbi always wanted to try pork,’ says Elya. ‘He drives his carriage one night to a distant Polish inn and orders this forbidden food. And plenty of it. Just as the waiter sets down a whole roast pig with an apple in its mouth, the door opens and a group of men from his synagogue enter. They stare at the rabbi in disbelief.
“What kind of farkakta inn is this?” the rabbi greets them, throwing up his hands. “You order an apple and this is how they serve it?”’
The merchants laugh uproariously. And demand another, while Kiva toys with his meal. He will not be consoled. The innkeeper looks on disapprovingly. He resents this spoiled boy. He also resents the food he cooks, the small white jacket he wears, the swelling in his legs and ankles, his itchy skin, dark urine, and pale faeces. Soon he’ll be dead from a fatty liver. Thereafter Kiva spends the evening throwing up. Food. Old schnapps. Bile.
Elya listens to the slack drip of water from the roof of the inn. The rain has stopped. He opens a shuttered window to look out. A kitchen child is pouring slops into a drainage ditch already overflowing. Behind him is a yard piled high with suitcases left by visitors. Left how? Abandoned, forgotten, seized for non-payment?
The room they are sharing is narrow with a low ceiling, heavily beamed. The others go straight to bed. But Elya joins the merchants in the lounge.
Pouring Elya a glass of wine, the Barrel Seller, the Seed Merchant, the Timber Trader, the apostate Smoked Fish Broker and the Painter of Horses discuss business with him as if he were one of them. Mister Seed, who resembles the Uncle, is looking for a blind partner, so-called. He clasps Elya’s shoulders, merchant to merchant. Everyone is going to get rich, he confides. It cannot fail.
‘You can purchase a wagon with the profits,’ he urges.
‘Save your shoe leather,’ adds Mister Barrel, encouraging Elya to invest.
‘You’re nothing without a carriage,’ Mister Timber puts in.
Mister Fish and the Horse Painter nod enthusiastically.
‘Shall we do business?’ Mister Seed enquires.
Elya stares at their shoes. A small deposit will hold Elya’s place. Still he hesitates. He’s a cautious lad. He needs to sleep on it. He’ll decide in the morning.
It’s after midnight. The candles have all burned down to nubs but Elya can scarcely bring himself to leave the company of these honourable men.
‘Once I was just like you,’ Mister Seed says solemnly. He predicts Elya will go far. Finally someone is taking him seriously. Walking on air, Elya goes to bed. But he’s not alone. As he mounts the stairs, he’s followed by the apostate Mister Fish, who thrusts a shiny card into his hands, then disappears.
By the light of the candle nub he carries, Elya looks down at the card and sees a man with a beard and a halo. He is holding a Christian cross in one hand and something Elya cannot make out in the other. He squints but the light’s too dim, the object too small. The patron saint of merchants, Elya assumes, traders, commercial travellers, businessmen, brokers and vendors. He puts it in his pocket.
The card actually depicts Saint Crispin, patron saint of shusters, holding a hammer. If he’d turned it around, Elya would have seen the saint’s martyrdom. He’s tied to a tree, along with his brother, Crispinian, while soldiers tear strips of fleysh from their naked backs. Later their bodies are thrown into a river, millstones around their necks.
Despite Ziv’s snoring, Kiva’s coughing and moaning, Elya sleeps heavily for the first time in days. Only once does he wake, hearing voices whispering outside their room and a creaking door.
‘Bed comfortable, but irritation proceeding from fleas,’ Elya writes in his notebook next morning.
Outside the sun is shining. But when they gather together their possessions, they find Kiva’s gold watch is missing.
‘It was that gonif with the Russian beard! Or that schnorrer with the goatee,’ cries Ziv. ‘Maybe it was the shmuck wearing patent-leather shoes,’ adds Elya. ‘Or the one with the snub-toed boots?’
‘Most certainly it was the apostate Smoked Fish Broker,’ says Kiva.
‘Or all of them together,’ concludes Elya.
Chokey, as if he’s swallowed the point of a shtek, Elya feels a fool. Timber, seeds, barrels and smoked fish rain down on him as if from above. When they confront the innkeeper, they find that all the men have checked out. ‘What do you want me to do,’ the innkeeper grumbles, ‘call the police?’
The police are more feared than Cossacks.
They’re lucky to get away with the shoes on their feet. And the money belt around Elya’s waist. Elya steals a plate from the inn and when they are out of sight, he sails it through the air.
It shatters against a tree.
This is more like something Ziv would do.
Does it make Elya feel better?
It does.
He imagines a plate that would never break. That could be thrown through the air again and again. What would such a plate be made of? He doesn’t know. But children would love it.
‘Homeward,’ cries Kiva.
Kiva thinks they’re going home.
They aren’t.
Lublin may be far away, but with new directions from the innkeeper, they will continue on as if nothing’s happened.
‘You promised,’ Kiva snivels. He’s dragging one leg, coughing and tasting blood. Taut grin, shrunken eyes, dripping nose, Kiva must have a fever because everything seems very bright and far away. He cannot move his neck. Seriously. He opens his prayer book. Brittle curling pages float off on the merest breeze.
There are fallen branches on the road, fallen leaves, fallen nests, dirt, grit, mud of course. The ditches are full of rainwater. The sun turns hazy. A strange grey light. A sour smell. Alongside the road, the ground is soft, giving way beneath every step. They pass a foaming river, a drowned field. The air is thick as tannery glue and the temperature is rising. A tree struck by lightning still burns like a candle.
‘Cough, cough,’ says Kiva. His coughing brings up a quantity of phlegm from fawn to dead leaf, and from dead leaf to burnt cork in colour; the consistency from sappy to gluey, from quick-moving to sluggish. His lungs, like the soft mass obtained from breaking and grinding rags before they are made into paper, inflate and deflate with a wet sound. He coughs violently, then looks around surprised. His sneezes are growing louder too, more desperate, pish trickling down his leg. Elya and Ziv jump away. Kiva is hot. Cold. His liver hurts. Point to your liver, Kiva. They argue about where the liver is. Well, something hurts. He’s told to keep it to himself. There isn’t much anyone can do. ‘But you promised.’ Kiva falls to his knees crying and begging. ‘Are we your enemies that you brought us here? Why bring us here?’ he asks Elya.
‘He needs a doctor,’ says Ziv.
‘A doctor? Is that a joke? Where are we going to find a doctor?’
A doctor brings trouble, as Elya well knows.
‘A woman brags about her son the doctor. “He’s a genius,” she tells her friend. “You must go see him.”
“But there’s nothing wrong with me,” the friend replies.
“Don’t worry. He’ll find something.”’
Elya strains his ears. Hears no laughter.
Taking small, flat steps, Kiva dawdles under the dripping trees. Carry me, he wants to cry. Wishing for a portable folding cot and canvas litter, he struggles on.
‘Let’s just be happy,’ Elya tells him.
Wisps of blue smoke rise in the still air, slowly swirling around them as they draw close to a spot at the side of the road where travellers must have made a fire. But there is no fire. Nor the blackened remains of a fire. Elya kicks the grass.
‘Like the netherworld,’ Kiva opines.
Soon they come upon a small Jewish village. A poor shul and a studyhouse, a market with three stalls. That’s all there is. From one of the stalls they purchase milk, hard grey bread.
‘There may not be any fresh bread until Lublin. But then,’ cries Elya, ‘Lublin bread!’
Ziv glares at him.
Put a sock in it, Elya. Before Ziv chops you one.
Kiva is too ill to glare. He needs to sit down. He drops his knapsack, the water flask when it’s passed to him.
They camp in a muddy field and eat bread boiled in milk, Ziv feeding Kiva like a baby. Panting rapidly, fighting for air, Kiva tries and fails to stand up again. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he cries, growing suddenly limp. Lying flat on the ground and jerking from side to side, his arms and legs going in all directions. It’s almost comical.
Kiva thrashes, then ceases thrashing. They hover over him. Is he dead? As if in the presence of a corpse, they bow their heads. Then he sits up. ‘Adoshem,’ he cries, another pish stain down his trousers. He looks around. Adoshem wielding a flaming sword appears before him, accompanied by a lion who holds aloft the sacred scrolls. Adoshem! At last! Hovering above the trees.
Speaking in a voice that seems to come from a barrel, Adoshem tells Kiva exactly what He wants him to do in exchange for His mercy. And Kiva, without question or hesitation, agrees.
They shake him. And holler his name. But Kiva is no longer sat in a muddy field. He’s hiding in the cave of his own mind with one hundred true prophets; in the cleft of a rock, babbling about the firmament, Adoshem moving upon the waters. Birds escaped out of snares encircle Kiva’s head. ‘No sight is devoid of Him,’ Kiva raves. Then everything goes quiet and Kiva sees Cossacks in the big Mezritsher shul. Is he meshugeneh? Shoes in the cooking pots. Eyeglasses in the gutters. ‘Children,’ he rants, ‘smoked like cigarettes, sold for kopeks; used as pillows, hammers; the Head Rabbi wearing a crown of mud.’
It comes from not voiding, Elya thinks, these visions of Kiva’s. Perhaps if he were to move his bowels.
‘People falling down and dying in the New Cemetery,’ Kiva cries.
He’s totally lost it.
Earlier that summer, Elya and Klara go to the New Cemetery to see Usher. Hottest day of the year so far. Eight o’clock in the morning. Three weeks until he leaves for Lublin. Walking down Brisker Street, lined on either side with thickets bristling with thorns, Elya carries his hat. Already he’s shvitzing. He drops back, letting his mother, in her darkest dress, walk ahead.
The New Cemetery, to Elya’s relief, is deserted. Lately it’s been busier than usual, as those departing for America come to be photographed grouped around a family headstone. No professional mourners at this hour either, falling on the graves of strangers, weeping and wailing for kopeks. Klara nudges him and Elya puts on his hat. They walk between the headstones, Klara in the lead. ‘Look, there’s Yetta Steckler,’ she cries. ‘And Yoshke, you remember Yoshke.’ She greets the departed with little screams of delight. But when they reach their destination, her mood turns sour. ‘Your father’s stone looks smaller than the rest. Didn’t we order large?’
Usher’s headstone, which Klara kisses, is indeed modest, a simple slab compared to those adorned with carvings and lengthy epitaphs.
‘Usher!’ Klara gets down on her hands and knees and calls out his name.
‘Can you get up?’ Elya squirms with embarrassment beside her. He’s not an unfeeling lad, he’s agreed to accompany his mother in order to please her, but her sentiments bewilder and embarrass him. ‘Can we go now?’ He wills her to stand up and act normal.
‘We just got here,’ she says, sitting down and beckoning him to join her. His father’s name, USHER GRYNBERG, is carved deeply into the granite at the top of his headstone, leaving room for the rest of the family.
The cemetery is like an oven. Elya recites Kaddish for his father, praising God and expressing a yearning for His kingdom on earth. ‘Yisgadal, v’yiskadash smey rabba … ’ and so forth.
Is it time for a joke?
‘A man visiting a cemetery notices another man kneeling beside a headstone. “Why did you have to die?” cries the kneeling man.
“Who are you mourning so passionately?” he’s asked.
“My wife’s first husband,” he replies.’
Elya’s mother is stony-faced.
Well, what did he expect?
Three weeks, he thinks.
Elya remembers the joy of finally leaving Mezritsh. He’s had his hair cut in a Polish style and Klara cries when she sees him. On a piece of paper, he writes the name ‘Libka’. Then, before burying it deep inside his knapsack, he kisses it. And the prune pit? Shivering with delight, he puts it into his own mouth, then his pocket. Has he got everything? He shoulders past a basket suspended from the ceiling where baby Zusa once slept, now occupied by the cat. The cat, tipped out of the basket by Elya’s careless shoulder, runs into the oven, still warm from the night before.
Elya hugs Zusa and Rifka. He opens the back door, ducks his head and steps quickly into the alleyway. Then, distracted by her son’s departure, Klara lights the oven without first checking for the cat, who’s consequently burned to a crisp, causing Klara, when she discovers her mistake, to weep all the tears she’s stored up since forever.
If only there were ovens with glass doors.
This is the first of many forgetful accidents Klara will have in the years to come. In time, she’ll forget the words and phrases she knows well, people’s names, and the names of objects. She’ll talk to the air and wander the streets, unable to find her way home.
In 1906, a neuropathologist and psychiatrist called Alois Alzheimer describes a peculiar disease of the cerebral cortex in a lecture to the 37th Conference of German Psychiatrists in Tübingen. Following this, he presents to the German Society of Alienists the results of an autopsy he’s performed on the brain of such a patient, which shows two abnormalities, neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques, also known as senile plaques.
Klara may already have these.
If not now. Coming soon.
Around their campsite, along the everlasting road to Lublin, dusk passes in the wink of an eye and then it’s night. Elya lights a small fire. The damp wood pops and crackles, sending sparks up into the sky, then smoulders and dies.
‘In Herr Doktor’s kitchen,’ Elya tells Kiva and Ziv, ‘there’s a canister of gas hidden inside the stove. When his cook strikes a match and turns a knob, a flame appears on which you could fry an œuf.’
‘What’s an œuf?’
No one knows, not even Elya.
They laugh as if this is a joke. Finally, Elya has told another funny joke and for a moment time stands still. Then Ziv jumps up, Kiva falls down, and everything starts moving forward again and cannot be stopped. Without even a fire, it’s so dark they can’t tell a shovel from an axe; a worker’s pamphlet from a prayer book; a prune pit from a purgative pill. Ziv lights a candle stolen from the inn. The flame flickers although there is no wind. Then Kiva’s coughing again.
The sound puts Elya in mind of his father.
One unseasonably mild January, Elya’s father leaves off his greatcoat. Soon after he develops a cough, occasionally producing phlegm.
Before he takes to his bed, Usher reclines on a chair in the front room, a feather cushion behind his back. ‘It’s good to have a rest,’ Usher tells Klara. ‘Es iz gut.’ He rolls his large shoulders with pleasure, while Elya watches uneasily. His father has never stayed home from work before. Is it like a holiday? Elya doesn’t think so. The cat dabs a paw into Usher’s cold tea, after which, without willing it, Elya’s father falls asleep.
When he wakes, his shirt front is speckled with blood. Farsteysh?
‘No doctor,’ he insists. But a doctor is called. Elya aged ten and Rifka aged seven cringe away, but his brother Fishel, nearly nine, creeps closer to have a look at the instruments in the doctor’s case. Long, short and hooked knives, scalpels and needles. But where are the leeches?
No need to worry, the doctor reassures them. It’s nothing a little rest won’t cure. Herr Doktor, as he likes to be called, having studied medicine in Vienna, removes his pince-nez and, rubbing the reddened bridge of his nose, diagnoses a bacillus, an unwholesome agent invisible to the eye, seeping across the windowsills, through cracks in the walls and up between the floorboards.
‘A doctor comes to see his patient.
“I have some bad news and some very bad news.”
“You might as well give me the bad news first,” says his patient.
“You’re very sick. In fact, you only have twenty-four hours to live.”
“Twenty-four hours! That’s terrible! What’s the very bad news?”
“I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday.”’
‘Is it funny?’ Elya enquires. And you must tell him it is.
Klara, wearing her best dress for Herr Doktor, shows him to the best chair and lets him sit. Usher will be dancing at Rifka’s wedding, Herr Doktor promises with a wink, which is another way of saying he will not just live but thrive. Elya feels like dancing himself. Only the troubling thought that tall Rifka may never marry disturbs this hopeful moment. Then they all line up to shake the doctor’s hand and wish him a good year, a prosperous year. Tears of gratitude in their eyes.
Never wish a doctor a prosperous year.
The next time he’s called, Herr Doktor draws a quantity of blood from Usher’s forearm using a spring-loaded lancet, but there’s no improvement.
‘Herr Doktor gives a sick man five months to live, but he can’t pay his bill, so Herr Doktor gives him five months more.’
How will Klara pay the doctor? How will she dress poor Rifka to procure an advantageous marriage? Any marriage? She considers the butcher’s wall-eyed apprentice. While she worries, the front room fills up with smoke. Gevalt! She’s not been watching the cook stove. She hurries over and removes a pan of water that has boiled dry. ‘Rifka!’ she hollers. ‘Rifka!’ Whatever goes wrong, Rifka is always to blame. Meanwhile, in the narrow passageway outside Usher’s room, the Angel of Death paces, his huge stiff wings scraping against the walls. It’s said that if you watch a funeral procession through the eye of a needle you can see the Angel of Death with his sword, but you better not. Seriously, Elya is told. Don’t!