We were swaying back and forth in the third-class compartment. Uncle Chaimle was pensively looking through the window at the tangled telegraph wires and I was most likely drowsing, looking through the window, and then nodding off to sleep again. The compartment was full of soldiers, apparently on leave—some with crutches, some with heads all bandaged up. One of them asked my uncle what time we were due to arrive in Vienna. He courteously reached for his watch, and was searching for it again when he remembered that it wasn’t there, and furtively glanced at me. I pretended to be sleeping. “About five o’clock,” said my uncle.
This reminded me of that rabbi on the train to Warsaw who was asked the time by a young coreligionist sitting across from him. The rabbi looked at him, and, without answering, wrapped himself up in his coat and went to sleep. In the morning, just before the train arrived at the Warsaw station, the rabbi said, “You asked me the time, young man. Right now it is eight-twenty and we are about to arrive.”
“And why, honored Rabbi, didn’t you answer me last night?”
“Because the road is long, young man, and if I had replied, you would have started chatting with me. Later on you would have asked if I live in Warsaw and at what address. Then one thing would have led to another, and you would have asked whether I have a daughter. And then one fine day you would have dropped by me for a visit and asked for her hand. And I have no intention of marrying my daughter to a person who doesn’t even own a watch!”
I looked again at my dear Uncle Chaimle, who was now taking his turn at a nap. With his big curly reddish sideburns, and his jacket with its large square-checked pattern and an old, stiff bowler resting on his knees, he could have passed for a respectable provincial merchant of wheat or cattle, though he wasn’t one. He wasn’t anything in fact. Without a definite occupation, he was always full of grand new plans that, in the distant future, were supposed to end with a move to America. “The difficult thing,” he used to say, “is actually to land on the hard American soil. After that, everything goes like bread and butter. This isn’t Tarnov for you. This is America!” He based all his hopes on one invention, unknown in our part of the world—the electric vacuum cleaner, all the rage in America. He managed to get hold of some of these items and announced that he was collecting advance orders, but nobody ordered one, not because the merchandise was bad, but because in Kolodetz in the early years of my childhood there was no electricity yet and only our dear emperor knew when they were going to bring it in. Uncle delivered fifty gramophones with funnels and a bunch of records with popular German songs. With the greatest pleasure he would demonstrate the quality of the gramophones to anyone who was interested, explaining that the gramophone as such would raise the culture of our whole native region. He changed needles and records, people gathered to listen, patted him on the back, asked for more and more, until one day Uncle ran out of needles and didn’t have money for new ones. Not a single gramophone was sold, he piled up all the merchandise on some horse cart, and it disappeared who knows where. As far as I remember, his only real financial coup was the purchase of a large quantity of blankets from some military auction. In the dyeing process some mistake had been made and instead of being barracks-type brown, they were a rather dirty violet color with pink spots, but Uncle sold them at an extremely low price. Not too long afterward, and not without the participation of the Mode Parisienne tailoring atelier in Kolodetz by Drogobych, everyone was wearing the same wool suits or caftans of a dirty violet color, with pink spots. I don’t believe this business deal moved my uncle even an inch toward the cherished borders of the United States of America. So, regardless of the financial coup with the blankets, Uncle was soon left without a penny in his pockets, but with a head full of ideas that sometimes brought him some bank note or other with a horribly small number of zeros. In those days, when some naive person in the café would ask to borrow some money, Uncle Chaimle would always reply, “Sure, when I come back from Paris.” “What?” said the other one, surprised. “You’re going to Paris?” And then followed Uncle’s answer: “I don’t dare even think about it.”
Then the ticket inspector passed by and announced that the train was about to arrive in Vienna—the capital of our motherland.