At the onset of the 1930s, my disillusionment with myself reached a stage in which I had lost all hope. If truth be told, I had had little of it to lose. Hitler was on the verge of assuming power in Germany. The Polish fascists proclaimed that as far as the Jews were concerned they had the same plans for them as did the Nazis. Gina had died and only then did I realize what a treasure of love, devotion, faith in God and in human values I had lost. Stefa had married the rich Mr. Leon Treitler. My brother Joshua, his wife, Genia, and their younger son, Yosele, had gone to America, where he would work for The Jewish Daily Forward. Their elder son, Yasha, a lad of fourteen, had died of pneumonia. The boy’s death drove me into a depression that remains with me to this day. It was my first direct contact with death.
My father also died around this time. Even though over forty years have passed, I still cannot go into details about this loss. All I can say is that he lived like a saint and he died like one, blessed with a faith in God, His mercy, His Providence. My lack of this faith is actually the story which I am about to tell.
The status of Yiddish and Yiddish literature was such that there was no way it could worsen. Kleckin Publishing, with which I had been connected, had gone bankrupt, ceased operations. The evening newspaper Radio no longer required my services. The same colleagues who only a year or two before had chided me for working for a bourgeois newspaper, the so-called yellow press, thus helping to feed opiates to the masses, were now trying to peddle their own kitsch at half or quarter price. The disappointment with communism had imbued a good many radicals with Zionist doctrines. My only source of income now was a Yiddish newspaper in Paris which also was on the verge of suspending publication. The checks from Paris kept arriving later and later. Not only couldn’t I keep two separate rooms for my two girl friends, but maintaining even one became harder from month to month.
I owed Mrs. Alpert several hundred zlotys rent, but she assured me each month that she had complete trust in me. I noticed that Marila, the maid, brought me more rolls for breakfast was my only meal of the day.
I corresponded with my brother in New York, but I never complained about my lot. Although my plans depended on my brother sending me an affidavit to come to America on a tourist visa and later helping me to remain there, I seldom answered his letters. Writing letters had always been a burden for me and I envied those who found the time and the inspiration for extensive correspondence.
Others bewailed their lot to me, but I never told them about my troubles. Some writers had become experts at requesting and obtaining various grants and subsidies, but I asked nothing of anyone. Gina, may she rest in peace, had nicknamed me “the Starving Squire.”
I had often seen men chasing after women, pleading for love, a kiss, an endearment. Young and even elderly writers weren’t ashamed to besiege editorial offices imploring that they review their work. They praised themselves and toadied up to the editors and critics. I never could hold out a hand for love, money, or recognition. Everything had to come to me of its own or not come at all.
I denied the existence of Providence, yet I awaited its dictates. I had inherited this kind of fatalism (if not faith) from both my parents. My one consolation was that if worst came to worst, I could commit suicide.
The literary scene in Warsaw, which was so rife with favoritism, clannishness, with “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,” with sucking up to political factions and party leaders and seeking their patronage, found in me and alien element. Even though I felt that a man cannot go through life directly but must muddle through, sneak by, smuggle himself through it, I made my accounting with the divine or Satanic forces, not with the human.
I had drifted apart from Sabina, who had broken with Stalinism and turned Trotskyite. Her brother, Mottel Duck, had done the same. Brother and sister both hoped that mankind would shortly realize that the true Messiah wasn’t Stalin but Trotsky, and that the social revolution in Poland would be led by Isaac Deutscher, not by that obdurate Stalinist Isaac Gordin (who subsequently spent eleven years in one of Stalin’s concentration camps).
As for me, since I didn’t possess the courage to kill myself, my only chance to survive was to escape from Poland. One didn’t have to be particularly prescient to foresee the hell that was coming. Only those who were totally hypnotized by silly slogans could not see what was descending upon us. There was no lack of demagogues and plain fools who promised the Jewish masses that they would fight alongside the Polish Gentiles on the barricades and that, following the victory over fascism, the Jews and Gentiles in Poland would evolve into brothers forever after. The pious Jewish leaders, from their side, promised that if the Jews studied the Torah and sent their children to cheders and yeshivahs, the Almighty would perform miracles in their behalf.
I had always believed in God, but I knew enough of Jewish history to doubt in His miracles. In Chmielnitzki’s times, Jews had studied the Torah and given themselves up to Jewishness perhaps more than in all the generations before and after. There was no Enlightenment or heresy at that time. The tortured and massacred victims were all God-fearing Jews. I had written a book about that period, Satan in Goray. It hadn’t yet appeared in book form but it had been published in the magazine Globus. I hadn’t received a penny in payment. Quite the contrary, I had to contribute toward the cost of the printing and paper.
A person filled with my kind of doubt is by nature lonely. I had only two friends among the Yiddish writers: Aaron Zeitlin and J.J. Trunk.
Aaron Zeitlin was some six or seven years older than I. I considered him one of the greatest poets in world literature. He was a master of both Yiddish and Hebrew, but his enormous creative force was better demonstrated in his Yiddish writings. He was a man of great knowledge, a spiritual giant among spiritual dwarfs. When the Yiddish PEN Club in Warsaw issued my book Satan in Goray prior to my departure for America, Zeitlin wrote the Introduction for it. The printed book, with its Introduction, didn’t reach me until I was already in America.
We were both lonely men. We both knew that a holocaust was descending upon us. I often visited Zeitlin in his apartment on Sienna Street. We even tried collaborating on a book about the mad philosopher Otto Weininger. Sometimes Zeitlin visited me in the furnished rooms I kept changing. He supported himself by writing articles for the newspaper The Express, which occasionally published my little stories.
Intellectually and literarily, we were as close as two writers can be, but we were totally different in character. Zeitlin’s number-one passion was literature, especially religious literature and everything pertaining to it. My number-one passion was the adventures of love, the endless variations and tensions peculiar to the relations between the sexes.
Zeitlin was well versed in Russian, Polish, Hebrew, French, and German literature, all of which he read in the original. He discovered writers and thinkers who had been forgotten with time or had never been recognized. For all his erudition, his poetry remained original. He mimicked no one, since he himself was often greater than those he studied. He was a faithful husband to his pretty but cold wife, whom he had married in an arranged match. He dedicated some of his poems to her. He was immensely grateful that a half-assimilated Warsaw girl, the daughter of a wealthy man, had agreed to wed him instead of some doctor or lawyer more suited to her personality. Oddly, she had a job in the burial division of the Jewish Communal Organization and she didn’t give up this somber post after the wedding or even after she had given birth to a son, Risia. She spoke Polish to the child, not the language in which her husband wrote. I rarely saw the couple together.
There was an unwritten law among the wives of Yiddish writers and of the great number of so-called Yiddishists that their children should be raised to speak the Polish language. My brother’s wife was no exception. The husbands had to accede. Only Chassidim and the poor, especially in the small towns, spoke Yiddish to their children.
My other friend, who was also Zeitlin’s friend, J. J. Trunk, was some twenty years older than I, the son of a rich man, an owner of buildings in the city of Lodz, and the grandson of a famous rabbi whom Trunk’s nouveau riche great-grandfather had arranged to marry his daughter.
These two forebears, the merchant and the rabbi, waged a war within Trunk the man and Trunk the writer. Trunk had a good eye for people and situations. He also had a sense of humor. In later years he wrote a ten-volume set of memoirs, which are of great value as a document of Jewish life in Poland. He loved literature and he was virtually desperate to make a mark as a writer. But his writing lacked something that prevented him from achieving this. We, his friends, knew it. Chekhov once said about some Russian writer that he lacked those doubts that give talent gray hair. Trunk was and remained an amateur, albeit a gifted one. He was too cheerful, too gullible about all kinds of “isms,” too naïve to be a true artist. For the very reason that he came from a rich home he resolved to become a socialist. Yet even his socialism somehow didn’t agree with his character and he had constantly to justify himself to both his party comrades and to us, Zeitlin and me.
Trunk’s wife, Dacha, shared his heritage of wealth and manner. Generations of Polish Jews spoke from the couple’s lips. Their every word, every tone and gesture exemplified Polish-Jewish life-style, a Polish-Jewish naïvete. The husband and wife were as close as a brother and sister, and as distant as a brother and sister can sometimes be. He was fair, blue-eyed, stout. A boyish joy exuded from his eyes along with a youthful mischievousness. Dacha was lean, dark, and her black eyes reflected the vexation of the put-upon wife. Her only consolation in life was books. The Trunks had one daughter—a tall, slim, blond girl resembling the Polish aristocratic debutantes who rode horseback along Ujazdowe Allee and in Lazienki Park. It is perhaps no coincidence that during the Second World War this proud maiden converted and became a devoted Catholic. Her husband, a Christian, died during the Polish uprising in 1945.
Yes, Zeitlin, Trunk, and I were close friends. We published our works in the same magazines and anthologies of which I, the youngest, was occasionally a coeditor. I often visited their homes. But as pressing as my need was, it never occurred to me to ask them for a loan. I had already become a member of the Yiddish Writers’ Club and even of the PEN Club, but I remained boyishly bashful and I never took any of my girl friends there. (Zeitlin never asked me about my private affairs. I did occasionally boast to Trunk of my alleged conquests.) The Trunks were both much older than I, and they considered me a half-crazy prodigy who was here one minute and vanished the next, like one of the demons or sprites I described in my stories. My brother also had given up trying to put my life into some kind of order. After he went to America, I became a riddle even to myself. I did things of which I was ashamed. I waged love affairs on several fronts. They all began casually and they all quickly turned serious and led me into countless deceptions and complications. I stole love, but I was always caught in the act, entangled in my lies, and I had constantly to defend myself, make holy promises, and take vows I couldn’t keep. My victims castigated me with the foulest names, but my betrayals apparently didn’t repel them sufficiently to get rid of me.
It was summer again and the heat engulfed Warsaw. Again I managed to have two residences—this time, one in Warsaw and one in the country, between Swider and Otwock. I still wrote for that Parisian Yiddish newspaper that was about to close, and from time to time I published a fragment of a story in The Express.
I had moved out of Mrs. Alpert’s, but I had promised her and Marila to return at the first opportunity if the room was still available. At the same time I knew that I would never go back since at that time I had already obtained an affidavit to America from my brother and I was waiting for a tourist visa from the American consul. I had also applied for a foreign passport but it turned out that I lacked the required documents. I had a premonition that I would never leave Poland and that all my endeavors were for naught.
The days were long in the summer. It wasn’t until ten o’clock that the last remnants of sunset vanished from sight. By three in the morning, the birds already commenced to twitter in my caricature of a dacha. My girl friend Lena and I both slept in the nude since our garret room was baked by the sun all day, roasting our bodies like an oven. It wasn’t until dawn that some cool breezes from the pine forests began to blow. The entire villa was one enormous ruin. The roof had holes, and when it rained we had to set up buckets to catch the water. The floor was rotted and infested with vermin. The mice had fled for lack of food. For the sum of one hundred and fifty zlotys, we had rented a room for the whole season. Actually, we had the entire house to ourselves, since no one else would move into this building. The doors to all the rooms stood open. The mattresses on the beds were torn, with rusted springs protruding. Occasionally, when the wind blew, the whole house shook as swarms of demons whistled and howled.
Lena and I had grown accustomed to the evil powers. They scampered over the stairs at night, opened and slammed doors, moved furniture. Even though Lena considered herself a hundred percent atheist and mocked me and my writings about the supernatural, she confessed that she had glimpsed phantoms in the corridors. At every opportunity Lena quoted Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin, yet she was afraid to go to the outhouse at night and she used a chamber pot. The reason she gave was that the outhouse was overgrown with weeds and snakes lurked there. We were given a kerosene lamp by the owner, but we seldom lit it, since the moment a light came on, moths, gnats, and other insects entered through the broken windowpanes. Huge beetles emerged from holes and cracks in the floor. I covered the vat of water I brought in each day from the pump, else dozens of drowned creatures would be found floating there in the morning.
I had inherited Lena from Sabina. They were close friends for a time. They had even spent several months together in Pawiak Prison, in the women’s section nicknamed “Serbia.” There, in their prison cell, they had fallen out because Sabina had become a Trotskyite while Lena continued to swear allegiance to Comrade Stalin. Lena had been released on bail and was supposed to stand trial, which had been scheduled months before, but she had jumped bail because new witnesses had been found for the prosecution and she would surely have been sentenced to many years imprisonment.
She had come to me in Warsaw requesting a night’s sanctuary because she was, as she said, surrounded by police spies. I had only one narrow iron bed in my furnished room and she slept with me not just that one night, but for more than two weeks. She called me a capitalistic lackey even as she clamped her lips onto mine. She complained that my mystical stories helped to perpetuate fascism, but she tried to translate some of them into Polish. She swore to me that she had undergone a gynecological operation that had rendered her sterile, but she was already in her fifth month that summer. She said that she wanted to have a child by me even if the world were destroyed the next day. She assured me that the ultimate struggle between justice and exploitation was coming and, if truth triumphed, she wouldn’t need my support. I could go to America if I wanted to escape the unavoidable day of revenge by the Polish masses. The revolution would reach there as well.
It was empty talk. Actually, she wandered through the ruin I had rented like a caged beast. She didn’t have a penny and was in danger of being arrested. Lena came from a Chassidic household. Her father, Solomon Simon Yabloner, was a follower of the Gora Rabbi. He had driven his daughter from the house when she got involved with the Communists. He observed a period of mourning over her, as did her mother, three brothers, and two sisters. Solomon Simon was known as a strong-willed fanatic. When his children did something that displeased him, he struck them, even after they were married. In the Gora study house at 22 Franciszkanska Street, it was said that Solomon Simon had defied even the Rabbi himself. Lena (her true name was Leah Freida) told me that she would sooner hang herself than go back home to her reactionary clan. She was tall for a girl, dark as a gypsy, flat-chested as a man. Her hair was cut short. A cigarette always dangled between her full lips. She didn’t trim or tweeze her thick eyebrows. Her pitch-black eyes exuded a masculine resoluteness and the frustration of one who, due to some biological error, has been born into the wrong gender. She was anything but my type. She had confessed lesbian tendencies to me. For me to associate with such a woman, and to become father of her child, was an act of madness. But I had already accustomed myself to my queer behavior. For some reason unknown to myself, this wild woman evoked within me an exaggerated sense of compassion. Although she said at every opportunity that I need assume no responsibility for her and that I was free to do as my heart desired, she clung to me. She was a coil of contradictions. One day she swore eternal love to me. The next day she said that she wanted to become pregnant because the court would be inclined to be more lenient with a mother. Now that she was a Trotskyite, she hadn’t the slightest urge to do time for having served Stalin.
Our room had a wooden balcony that was rotted and sagging from years of rain and snow. Each time I stepped out onto it I had the feeling it was about to collapse under me. From there I could see the railroad tracks and the pine woods as well as the sanatoriums where thousands of consumptives slowly gasped out their lungs.
That summer only a few of my sketches were printed in The Express and the checks from Paris were delayed for so long that I had lost count of how much was coming to me. Years ago Lena had learned the trade of corsetmaking but for that you needed a special sewing machine, fishbone, scissors, and other paraphernalia.
Our possessions in our refuge consisted of a pot, a pan, some tin cutlery, and several books. The handyman of the villa, a Russian named Demienty, was a drunk. He supplied us with the buckets with which to catch the water when it rained. His wife had left him for another Russian. The landlord had stopped paying him wages. When Demienty wasn’t lying drunk, he roamed through the woods with a rifle shooting hares, rabbits, birds. Someone had told Lena that Demienty ate cats and dogs. The villa was due to be demolished soon and used as a site for a sanatorium.
Lena and I both lived for the present. In order to get through the day—and sometimes the miserable nights as well—I fantasized that I was already dead, one of those legendary corpses which, instead of resting in the cemetery, leave their graves to reside in the world of chaos. I had described such living dead in my stories and now in my imagination I had become one of my own protagonists. Since I was a corpse, I told myself, what need had I to worry? What could happen to me? A corpse could even afford to sin.
As I stood on the balcony that night I figured out my plans for the day. I had no real reason for going to Warsaw and spending the few zlotys for the fare, but I had to see the few people with whom I was still connected in this worst of all worlds. No one in Warsaw knew my Swider address. I had no telephone. I never saw a letter carrier enter this has-been villa. Perhaps the check from Paris had come? Maybe there was an answer from the American consul? Maybe there was a letter from Joshua waiting? It was too early to dress and I went back to bed. Lena was awake too. She was sitting on the edge of the bed smoking a cigarette. For an instant I could see her naked body in the glow of its tip. She asked, “What time are you dashing to Warsaw?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“So early? Well, it’s all the same. Bring me back something to read, at least. Yesterday I finished Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.”
“Is it good?”
“Neither good, nor bad. There is nothing American about this tragedy.”
“I’ll drop by Bresler’s and bring you a whole stack of books.”
“Don’t get lost in Warsaw.”
I was hungry after last night’s meager supper. I was in a mood for fresh rolls, coffee with cream, and a piece of herring, but all we had was stale bread and a package of chicory. The little bit of milk that remained had turned sour overnight. Maybe it’s already time to return to the grave? I asked myself. But somehow, I wasn’t ready yet. Experience had taught me that whenever things grow extremely bad and I think that the end is near, something inevitably happens that seems a miracle. Though I had refuted God I still believed that somewhere in the celestial register accounts were being kept of every person, every worm, every microbe. I did not expect to fall asleep, but I did when I lay down on my torn mattress, and when I opened my eyes the sun was shining.
Lena lit the Primus stove and it began to seethe and stink of alcohol. She boiled water with chicory and handed me a thick slice of black bread smeared with jam. It seemed to me that she took a thinner slice for herself and less jam. Even though she preached equality of the sexes, a trace of respect for the male inherited from generations of grandmothers and great-grand-mothers still reposed somewhere within her. I chewed the stale bread for so long that it began to taste fresh. Even the chicory and water acquired flavor when you drank it slowly. Millions of people in India, China, and Manchuria didn’t even have this. Only ten years or so earlier, millions of peasants had starved to death in Soviet Russia.
There was no point in getting dressed, since the sun had already begun to bake the roof overhead. I had a clean shirt for my trip to the city, but I didn’t want to get it sweaty. A few weeks before I had started a novel for which I nursed great hopes. Joshua had written that the Forward would publish my work if they liked it. Besides, I might be able to sell it to a Warsaw newspaper. But the longer I worked on it, the clearer it became to me that it had lost both its action and form. I tried to describe an ex-yeshivah student who had become a professor of mathematics and later grew senile, became an occultist and a believer in the mystical power of numbers, but I lacked the experience for this type of work. Lena had told me this right from the start.
I had failed in every area. I had actually sabotaged myself and my own goals. I had squandered a lot of energy on this manuscript. Certain chapters had come easily to me—those in which I described the confusion and loss of memory inherent in old age. I often had the eerie feeling that I had been born old and senile. But I knew too little about mathematics and nothing at all about life at a university.
It was too early to go to the station, but I could not spend all morning inside that ruin. Lena accompanied me. I warned her that she might be recognized and arrested and she contended that it would be better for her to be imprisoned. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about a maternity clinic and a place to live after the summer was over. We strolled along in the sand, each preoccupied with his own thoughts.
Lena began to speak to me and to herself:
“In what way is this miserable place better than a prison? At the Pawiak I had a clean bed. I ate better too. Before I had the fight with the girls, I also had more company. Here, hours go by that you don’t speak a word to me. I warned you to put aside that ridiculous novel but you clung to it like a drowning man to a straw. Simply watching you struggle over this damn manuscript is more painful to me than the toughest jail. At times I feel like stopping a policeman and saying, ‘Here I am.’ At least, I’d find a place for my son.”
“How do you know it’ll be a son? It could be a daughter.”
“For my part, it could be an incubus.”
I tried to comfort her by saying that I would take her along to America, but she replied:
“Do me no favors. You can take your America and stick it!”
Finally, the train came and I climbed aboard. Lena turned around to go back. I had to keep reminding myself that I was a corpse, freed of all human anxieties. I was dead, dead, dead! I didn’t dare forget this for even a moment.
After a lengthy wait, the train started off toward Warsaw. The car was empty. Fresh breezes blew in from the resort towns. Some vacationers already lay on folding chairs, sunbathing. In Falenica I saw a Jew standing beside a tree in a prayer shawl and phylacteries, swaying over the eighteen benedictions. He beat his breast as he intoned, “We have sinned … We have transgressed.” At a long table sat yeshivah students while the master lectured, gesticulating and pulling at his yellow beard.
If no check came for me from Paris today, I was through for good. The only way out would be to jump into the Vistula. I received my mail not at my room on Nowolipki Street, but at the home of Leon Treitler, the husband of the former Miss Stefa and the present Madam Treitler.
I was actually going to her. All my mail came at her address. I could have called her long-distance but this was not less expensive than a third-class ticket. I had reached such a stage of isolation where Stefa and a poor cousin of mine, Esther, had become my only contact with Warsaw. Zeitlin and his wife had gone to the Zakopane Mountains for their vacation. J. J. Trunk went to some spa abroad. The Yiddish Writers’ Club was deserted in the summer months.
Leon Treitler lived in his own building on Niecala Street, a few steps from the Saxony Gardens. The apartment consisted of eight rooms. Leon Treitler had read my stories in Yiddish and Stefa had tried translating them into Polish. She knew more Yiddish than she admitted. She no longer called it slang; she had ceased believing in assimilation. The Jews could neither become totally Polish nor would the Poles tolerate this weird minority. Stefa had been insulted several times in Polish cafes when she had gone there with her husband; she had been advised to go back to Nalewki Street or to Palestine. The anti-Semitic writers in the Polish press even attacked the converts. Some of these writers had accepted the racial theories of Hitler and Rosenberg—this at a time when the Nazi press was describing the Poles as an inferior race and maintaining that a number of their best families, such as the Majewskis and the Wolowskis, were descendants of the followers of the false messiah Jacob Frank, an Oriental Jew and a charlatan. There was even conjecture that the Polish national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, was of that breed since on his mother’s side he was a Majewski, which was the name assumed by all the Frankists who converted during the month of May. The Wolowskis, on the other hand, were the offspring of Elisha Shor, one of Frank’s most learned disciples.
Warsaw lay in the grip of a heat wave. I couldn’t wait until I got to Stefa’s to learn whether a letter had come for me and I called her. Telephone service had already made direct dialing possible. I heard the ringing and, presently, Stefa’s voice. Stefa had so utterly rejected the idea of assimilation that she often insisted on being addressed as Sheba Leah, and she called me Yitzchok, Itche, and sometimes even Itchele. She now exclaimed:
“Yitzchok, if you called me a minute before, no one would have answered! I went down to buy a paper.”
“What’s the news?”
“Bad as always. But I have some good news for you. There is mail for you.”
“From where?”
“From halfway around the world—from Paris, from New York, from the American consul. It seems there are two letters from New York. Shall I take a look?”
“We’ll look together.”
“Where are you?”
“At the station.”
“Come over. I’ll make breakfast for you.”
“I’ve already had my breakfast.”
“Either you eat with me or I’ll throw all your letters out the window.”
“Sheba Leah, you’re terrible!”
“That’s what I am.”
I had intended to walk to Niecala Street from the station to save the fare, but I now raced to catch a streetcar. What a few words can do to a corpse, I said to myself. I had come as close to Treitler’s house as the streetcar would take me and I ran the few remaining steps. The janitor knew me. Even his dog didn’t bark at me as he once had. On the contrary, he began to wag his tail when I entered the gate. Each time I paid a visit to this house I marveled at what time and human emotions could accomplish. I could never forget my first meeting with Stefa; how she had questioned me as I stood on the other side of the door; the contempt with which she had spoken of Yiddish and of Yiddishkeit; of how close she herself had been to suicide at that time. Now, Stefa was a rich matron and my Polish translator. A fragment of my novel had been published in a Polish newspaper and, thanks to me, her name had appeared in print for the first time. She had signed herself Stefa Janovska Treitler. Leon Treitler was so proud of seeing his name in print that he arranged an evening in honor of the occasion. Among those invited were Stefa’s former friends from the Gymnasium and the university, several of her relatives, and Leon Treitler’s partners with their wives and daughters. Champagne was drunk and speeches were made. Leon Treitler had bought a hundred copies of the paper and had had one of them framed. I had never before encountered such exaggerated respect for the printed word.
Stefa’s former teacher, who was also present, made a toast and recalled that when Stefa had still been in the sixth grade at the Gymnasium he had predicted a literary career for her. He now prophesied that Stefa would forge a bond between Polish and Yiddish literature. The fact was that he had mistaken me for my brother. Joshua’s novel had come out in Polish after he had immigrated to America and it had received favorable reviews. Oddly, the most virulent Polish anti-Semite, the infamous Nowaczynski, had written a glowing review of this book, Yoshe Kalb. According to his article, my brother had demonstrated the extraordinary extent of Jewish energy in his novel, and how skilled the Jew was at hypnotizing himself and others—also, how the Pole, who was by nature soft, naïve, and weak in character, could easily be influenced by the Jew and dominated by him if he didn’t resist.
The prophesies made by Stefa’s teacher that evening at the Treitlers’ didn’t come true. Outside of that single piece, no other work of mine was ever published in Polish. But a love awoke between Stefa and me that she didn’t bother to conceal from her husband. We kissed in Leon Treitler’s presence. He was one of those men who actually cannot exist without a hausfreund. He often called to reproach me for neglecting Stefa.
Leon Treitler was tiny, with a pointed skull lacking even a single hair. He had a long nose, a sharp, receding chin, a pointed Adam’s apple, and jutting ears. He couldn’t have weighed over a hundred pounds. He dressed like a dandy, loud ties with pearl stickpins, buckled shoes, and hats with a little brush or feather. He had a thin nasal voice and he spoke in ironical paradoxes. He always began the conversation somewhere in the middle—needling and flattering at the same time. He would say, “And even when you’re a famous writer already, must you ignore every ordinary person just because he or she isn’t versed in all works of Nietzsche and can’t remember all of Pushkin by heart? I search for you like with candles and you hide out just as if I were your worst enemy. And even if I am an ignoramus and it’s beneath your dignity to associate with one of my kind, how is it Stefa’s fault? She simply dies of longing for you and you punish her for the fact that instead of marrying a poet she took a moneybags while her true love, that swindler Mark, deserted her with all his diplomas and medals.”
This was Leon Treitler’s style. He nipped and the stroked. One eye winked and the other laughed. Stefa said that he was both a sadist and a masochist. He was crooked in business and was forever tied up in litigation, but he also gave money to worthy causes. Stefa swore to me that just four weeks after their wedding he had begun seeking a lover for her. He had a female secretary who knew all his tricks and who had been his lover for over twenty-five years.
Leon Treitler was different from other people in many ways. He never slept more than four hours out of the twenty-four. For breakfast, he had bread and wine; for supper, cold meat and black coffee. His sexual gratification consisted of pinching Stefa’s bottom and calling her “whore.” He owned a whole library of pornographic pictures.
Stefa said to me once, “What Leon Treitler really is, I’ll never know if I live to be a thousand. At times I suspect that he is one of your demons.”
I rang and Stefa answered. The maid had gone out to market. Stefa had gained some weight but her figure was still slim and girlish. In protest against being constantly complimented on her Gentile appearance, she had dyed her hair brunette, and she wore a Star of David around her neck.
Right there in the corridor we embraced and kissed a long time. Even though she maligned Leon Treitler at every opportunity, I had long since observed that she had acquired some of his mannerisms. She pledged me her love yet at the same time she needled me. Now she took me by the ear, led me into the dining room, and said, “You’ll eat with me even if you’ll stand on your head!”
“Where are the letters?”
“There are no letters. I fooled you. I don’t want you to go off to America and abandon me.”
“Come with me.”
“First eat! You’re as pale as death. They wouldn’t allow a skeleton into America.”
I had assumed that I was full. My abdomen was bloated and I felt something akin to revulsion toward food. But the moment I bit into the first roll, I became hungry. I said, “Do me a favor and give me the letters. I swear I’ll finish everything.”
“Your suit is covered with hair. Wait, I’ll brush you off.”
She carefully plucked a hair from my lapel and examined it against the light of the sun. “A red hair?” she asked. “You told me she was a brunette.”
“It’s my hair.”
“What? You have no hair. It’s not your shade either.”
“Sheba Leah, don’t be silly.”
“You’re getting to be more like Mark every day. All you need is to forge a signature. What is it with me? It seems I attract this kind of man. One lunatic worse than the next.”
“Stefa, enough!”
“You look like death warmed over and you run around with God knows how many sluts. Once and for all I’ll give up all hopes of love. This seems to be my fate and that’s how it must remain. You’re leaving me anyhow. I see everything clearly—you’ll go off to America and I’ll never hear from you again. And even if I do get a letter, it’ll be all lies. Who is the redhead? Red hair doesn’t simply float through Otwock and just happen to light on your lapel. Unless your former wench—what was her name—Gina—rose from her grave and paid you a visit.”
“Stefa, what’s wrong with you?”
“I can endure the worst betrayals, but I can’t stand to be deceived. I told you as soon as we got together—everything yes, but no lies! You swore on your parents’ lives—your father was still living. Is this true or not?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“Who is she? What is she? Where did you meet her? Tell me the truth or I’ll never look at your face again!”
“She’s my cousin.”
“A new lie! You never told me about any cousins. And what about this cousin? Are you having an affair with her?”
“I swear that what I am about to tell you now is the sacred truth.”
“What is the truth? Speak!”
I started to tell Stefa about my cousin Esther, who was six years younger than I. When I came to Bilgorai in 1917, I was past thirteen and she was a child of eight. There evolved between us one of those silent loves that neither participant verbalizes nor even dares to think about. When I left Bilgorai for the last time in 1923, Esther was a girl of thirteen but I was a young man of nineteen teaching an evening course in Hebrew. I had begun to write, too, and was having a platonic affair with a girl. I didn’t even recall shaking Esther’s hand when I left the first time. A rabbi’s son didn’t shake hands with a girl when the family was present.
Years passed and I didn’t hear from Esther. She wrote me only once, when her father, my uncle, died. Suddenly, she showed up in Warsaw, by now a grown woman of twenty-three. She had learned the milliner’s trade. She had read many books in Polish and Yiddish, my stories as well. She had become “enlightened” and had given up religion. She had come to Warsaw seeking a job in her trade, but also with the intention of revealing to me what she had kept concealed for so many years. She had confided the truth to only one girl friend, Tsipele. Tsipele now lived in Warsaw too, and worked as a cashier in her uncle’s stores. Esther and Tsipele shared a furnished room on Swietojerska Street, across from Krasinski’s Gardens.
I presumed that Stefa would interrupt me and call me a liar, as she so often did, but she heard me out and said, “This sounds like a fairy tale out of a storybook, but it seems to be true. What did you do with this Esther? Did you manage to seduce her yet?”
“Absolutely not.”
“What is her hair doing on your lapel?”
“Truly, I don’t know.”
“You know, you know! Wait, I’ll get you your letters.”
Stefa went out, then came back with a stack of letters that she flung on the table. I started to open them one after the other. My hands were trembling. One letter was from my brother. I could hardly believe my eyes. It contained a check from the Forward in the amount of ninety dollars. I had sent my brother one of my stories and he had sold it to the newspaper, of which he was a staff member.
I opened a second letter from America. A known American writer and critic had read my novella Satan in Goray and his whole letter was a paean to this work.
The American consulate demanded one additional document that would be required for the granting of a tourist visa.
The literary magazine for which I both published and served as a proofreader for a time had forwarded a letter from a reader who castigated me for writing too much about sex, saying it was not in the tradition of Yiddish literature.
My brother informed me that as soon as I obtained my foreign passport he would send me the money for the fare.
I had momentarily mislaid the letter from Paris and I searched for it among the others. Soon I discovered that I had inadvertently stuck it into my breast pocket and I now opened it. Inside lay the check for which I had been waiting so long. It was for an amount in excess of a hundred dollars.
I grew frightened by the plethora of good fortune all at one time. “You haven’t earned it,” someone within me exclaimed. Stefa stood there and looked at me sidelong. She asked, “What are you doing—praying?”
“Sheba Leah, you’ve brought me luck.”
“Luck and I are not a pair.”
Stefa accompanied me to the office of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society where they cashed my checks for American currency. The cashier opened a huge safe crammed from top to bottom with dollar bills. Afterward, we went to a bank where my check from Paris was cashed for nearly a thousand zlotys. I had exchanged my elegant and comfortable room at Mrs. Alpert’s for a tiny cubicle on Nowolipki Street rented to me for thirty zlotys a month by a member (or a guest) of the Writers’ Club, a principal of a Hebrew school and author of a grammar textbook. He and his family were away now on vacation and I actually had the entire apartment to myself, but he, M. G. Haggai, came back to Warsaw each week for a day or two and I could never know when he would show up.
It was certainly risky to bring Stefa to such a place, but the danger at her home was even greater. Although Leon Treitler pretended that he didn’t even know the meaning of jealousy, one could never foresee how he would react if he caught us together.
Stefa wouldn’t go to a hotel. Her mother had died, but her father, Isidore Janovsky, was still living and he had a room in a hotel on Milna Street, nearby. He liked to roam through the streets, to chat with other old people in Krasinski’s Gardens, in the Saxony Gardens, or on a bench on Iron Gate Square. Even as Stefa walked with me she kept looking behind. She told me that if her father found out about her behavior, he would have a heart attack. She also had hordes of relatives in Warsaw who envied her good fortune, and who would have loved the chance to malign her. Stefa took my arm, then quickly dropped it. Each time she walked with me in the street she had some pretext ready in case we encountered her husband, her father, or someone from her or her husband’s family.
We walked into the gate of the house of Mr. Haggai’s apartment and climbed the two flights of stairs. Doors stood open. Children cried; laughed, screamed. This was a respectable family building, not one for illicit loves. Before leaving Stefa’s house, I had telephoned here to make sure M. G. Haggai wasn’t at home. But what guarantee did I have that he hadn’t come in in the interval? For renting me the room so cheaply, M. G. Haggai had stipulated that I behave decently. Tenants of the building enrolled their children in his school and I shouldn’t dare do anything to damage his reputation.
I now rang the doorbell, but no one came. M. G. Haggai was surely lounging on a folding chair in Falenica reading the London Hebrew magazine Haolam and enjoying the fresh air. His apartment was decorated with pictures of Zionist leaders: Herzl, Max Nordau, Chlenov, Weizmann, Sokolov. There also hung here a portrait of the pedagogue Pestalozzi. Each time Stefa visited my little room she said the same thing: “This isn’t a room but a hole.”
This time I countered with: “Good enough for two mice.”
“Speak for yourself.”
I was in a hurry, since I still had to meet Esther. I had to stop by Bresler’s Lending Library and select some books for Lena. I also intended to buy food, which was easier to obtain in Warsaw, as well as a small present for Lena. But Stefa had more than once said that she didn’t equate lovemaking with speed. She had to begin with conversation and the subject was always the same: the reason she couldn’t remain true to Treitler—he had always repelled her. He had won her in a moment of her deepest despair. One could truthfully say that he had bought her with money.
Stefa sat down on the only chair in my room and crossed her legs. Her knees had remained pointed although not as much as before. I had already had her many times, but I still felt a strong urge for her, since sooner or later we would have to part. She spoke and from time to time she took a drag on her cigarette.
I heard her say, “If someone had told me five years ago that I would be Mrs. Treitler and conducting an illicit affair with some jargon journalist, I would have considered him mad. Sometimes it seems to me that I’m no longer me but someone else—as if I were possessed by one of your dybbuks.”
Abruptly, she began to study the walls.
“What do you see there?” I asked.
“I’m afraid there are bedbugs here.”
“They sleep by day.”
Stefa started to say something, but at that moment there was a sound in the corridor. That which I had feared had occurred—M. G. Haggai had come home on his weekly visit.
Stefa tensed. Her face twisted momentarily. M. G. Haggai coughed and mumbled to himself. I assumed that he would immediately open the door to my room but apparently he went into the living room. However, he was liable to peek into my room at any moment. It was a miracle that he hadn’t arrived a half hour later.
Stefa put out her cigarette in a saucer to be used for an ashtray. “Let’s get out of here! This very second!”
“Sheba Leah, it’s not my fault.”
“No, no, no! You are what you are, but I had no right to crawl into such a slime. All the evil forces have turned against me. Come, let us go!”
“Why are you so scared? We’re both dressed. I’ve got a right to have visitors.”
“How close did we come to being caught without our clothes? These Hebraists know everybody. Leon’s daughter attended a Hebrew Gymnasium. He might have been her teacher there.”
The door to my room opened and M. G. Haggai stuck his head inside. Outside, a heat wave raged, but he wore his overcoat, a derby (a “melon” as it was called in Warsaw), a high stiff collar, and a black cravat. He had a round face and a gray goatee. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses with thick lenses sat upon his broad nose. He hadn’t even managed to put down the briefcase he was carrying under his arm. Seeing a woman, he recoiled, but soon after he crossed the threshold and said, “Excuse me. I didn’t know you were here and that you had company besides. My name is Haggai,” he said, turning to Stefa. “The name of a prophet among us Jews. But I’m no prophet. I thought that our friend here was away on vacation, not here in the hot city. I must come in every week since I am the principal and owner of a private school and this is the time when the students are being enrolled for the coming term. What is your esteemed name, if one may ask?”
Stefa didn’t respond. It was as if she had completely lost possession of herself. It was I who replied. “This is Miss Anna Goldsober.”
“Goldsober, eh? I know three Goldsober families in Warsaw,” Haggai said. “One is Dr. Zygmunt Goldsober, a famous ophthalmologist. Someone told me he is even more distinguished than Dr. Pinnes, or is it Professor Pinnes? The second Goldsober family has a wholesale dry-goods business on Gesia Street. Their son attended my school. He is already a father himself. The third Goldsober is a lawyer. To which of these Goldsobers do you belong?”
“To neither—” Stefa said.
“So? You are not a Litvak?”
“A Litvak? No.”
M. G. Haggai winked at me. “I have something to discuss with you. If you’ll excuse us, madam, I’d like a word with him alone.”
I followed him into the living room. He slowly removed his hat and coat and put down the briefcase. His eyes, through the thick lenses, appeared unnaturally big and stern. He said, “Your visitor is no Goldsober as you have misrepresented her, and she is surely no miss.”
“How do you know what she is or isn’t?”
“A miss doesn’t wear a wedding ring. You gave me a promise and you haven’t kept it. I don’t want to be your mentor, but you can’t receive such visitors at my house. You’ll have to move out. I’m sorry. When is your month up?”
“At the end of the coming week.”
“You’ll have to find another room.”
“I’ve committed no sin, but if that’s what you want, I’ll do as you ask.”
“I’m sorry.”
I went back to my room and Stefa stood there already wearing her hat and holding her bag, ready to go. She asked, “Why did you pick Goldsober of all names? Oh, that one is a pest. The whole time he kept staring at my wedding ring. What did he say to you? Probably asked you to move. If a grave would open for me, I’d jump into it this minute.”
She said this in Polish, but the expression was pure Yiddish.
We walked in the direction of Karmelicka Street and Stefa spoke, as if to herself: “This isn’t for me. Warsaw isn’t Paris but a small town. My father lives but a few blocks from here. He is liable to come upon us at any moment. He claims to be half blind, but the things he shouldn’t see, he sees well enough. You know what? Let’s head in the opposite direction. Where does this street lead to?”
“To Karolkowa, to Mlinarska, to the Jewish cemetery.”
“Come, let us go there. I don’t want to disappoint my father. He feels that I’ve enjoyed a stroke of great fortune. It’s no trifle to be Mrs. Treitler. The very title makes me nauseous. I envy my mother. She knows nothing anymore. If people knew how happy the dead are, they wouldn’t struggle so hard to hold on to life. The first thing my mother did after my sister died was to use her last few zlotys and buy a plot next to hers. Now they lie side by side. People still go to visit the graves of their parents. They really believe that the dead lie there waiting to be told all the troubles that have befallen those close to them. Here is a droshky …. Hey!”
“Where do you want to go?” I asked.
“What’s the difference? Let’s go someplace. You said yourself that your cousin, or whoever she may be, won’t be home until seven. Today belongs to me.”
“Where do the lady and gentleman wish to go?” the cab driver asked.
Stefa hesitated for a moment. “To Niecala Street. But don’t turn around. Go by way of Iron Street and from there through Chlodna, Electoralna—”
“That’s the long way around.”
“You’ll get double your fare.”
“Giddy up!”
“We should have stayed there in the first place,” I said.
“You had to cash your checks. For me, nothing comes easy. But since you’re going away to America, what difference does it make? To have a maid is to have a spy in the house. I had enough of my parents’ maid spying on me and reporting everything to my mother. If a young man phoned me occasionally, she ran to tell her. She herself was a widow. Her husband died four weeks after their wedding. Strange, she never spied on my sister. Now, I’ve got Jadwiga on my back. She worked for Leon years before he married me. She remembers his first wife and she looks at me as if I had murdered her. His daughters feel that way about me too, as do the neighbors. I’m nothing but an intruder. What will I do after you’re gone? Start an affair with a new liar? Three liars in a lifetime is enough for me. In the morning when I look in the mirror, especially after a good night’s sleep, I see a young person. But when I look at myself in the evenings, I see a broken woman ready for the scrap pile. Mark deserted me physically and shattered me spiritually—that’s the truth. Going to live with Leon Treitler was for me a catastrophe. Then my foul luck directed me to start up with you … You don’t forge promissory notes, but you’re made of the same stuff as he—a timid adventurer.”
“Thanks for the compliment.”
The droshky entered Chlodna, passed the fire station with its huge brass bell, the Seventh Police Precinct, then turned into Electoralna Street, where the Hospital of the Holy Ghost was located. Flocks of pigeons soared over the roofs and perched on the heads, shoulders, and arms of the holy statues. Below, some of them ate from the hands of an old woman. Every street we passed, every building, evoked within me memories of my childhood. The Poles still considered us aliens, but the Jews had helped build this city and had assumed an enormous participation in its commerce, finances, and industry. Even the statues in this church represented images of Jews.
Just as if Stefa could read my mind, she remarked, “We Jews are damned. Why?”
“Because we love life too much.”
The droshky came to Niecala Street. Stefa’s maid, Jadwiga, had left a note in the kitchen saying that Mr. Treitler would be detained at his work and would have dinner with his partner at a restaurant. Stefa had told Jadwiga that she would be eating dinner out, and Jadwiga had gone to visit a friend who had given birth to an illegitimate child and had to stay with it.
Stefa said, “I’m beginning to believe that there is a God.”
“Since He obliges us, then He exists.”
“Don’t be so sarcastic. If He is truly our father and we are His children as the Bible states, He should oblige us from time to time.”
“He is your husband’s father too.”
“That which I’m doing benefits him too. He wants it subconsciously. Where are my cigarettes?”
Stefa had become momentarily cheerful. We hadn’t eaten lunch and she went to the kitchen to fix us a quick bite. She put on a short apron that lent her a particularly feminine allure. I sat down at the kitchen table and reread the letters I had received that morning. I also recounted the money. I told myself that this was one of the happiest days of my life. To avoid it being ruined, I offered up a silent prayer to the God whose commandments I was breaking. Actually, this was what thieves, murderers, and rapists did. Even Hitler mentioned the Almighty in his speeches.
Night had already fallen by the time I said good-bye to Stefa. My wristwatch indicated a quarter to ten. Our mutual desire and our powers had never been as strong as during those long hours. Usually, gratification is contingent upon ennui as Schopenhauer contends, but my satiety that day brought no tedium. Only the worries returned. I had committed a folly in cashing both checks. I was afraid now of being robbed or of springing a hole in my breast pocket and losing my fortune. I no longer had time to visit Bresler’s Lending Library, which was closed by now anyhow. The stores were all closed too and I wouldn’t even be able to buy Lena the delicacies she preferred. There was barely any time left to visit my cousin. What’s more, I had promised Lena to come back early, but I wasn’t sure now whether I could even catch the last train to Otwock, which left at midnight and arrived around 1 A.M.
Thank God, an empty taxi came by. I was only afraid lest the driver should—through some mysterious power—ascertain that I was carrying a sum amounting to over two hundred dollars and try to rob me. The taxi made the trip to Swietojerska Street in five minutes. I climbed the stairs, which were illuminated by a tiny gaslight. On the second floor I bumped into Esther’s roommate, Tsipele. She was going out, probably in order to leave us alone. She wore a straw hat that Esther had made for her. Tsipele had once been my pupil in an evening course in Hebrew I had taught in Bilgorai. She had learned no Hebrew from me, but just the same, she still called me “moreh”—teacher.
I had never done this before, but I kissed her. Her face lay completely in shadow. She exclaimed, “Oh, Moreh, what are you doing?”
Tsipele was blond, taller than Esther, and younger by a year. Esther had told me that Tsipele’s uncle, for whom she worked as an assistant bookkeeper, was in love with her. He gave her money, sent her flowers, brought her candy, and took her to the theater, the opera, and to restaurants. Tsipele’s aunt was suspicious that she was trying to steal her husband away, but Esther assured me that Tsipele remained a virgin. The whole world is either crazy with love or crazy with hate, I said to myself. I knocked and Esther opened the door. Her hair was a dark red, her face densely freckled. We had both inherited our coloring from our Grandmother Hannah, the rebbetzin.
From the day of her wedding at barely twelve years of age, no one, not even Grandfather, had seen her hair, for she shaved her skull. Only her eyebrows were red. Our grandfather, Jacob Mordecai, was a year older than she. As a child he had acquired the reputation of a prodigy. When he was nine he gave a sermon in the house of study and scholars came to debate with him on Talmudic subjects. Grandmother’s father, Isaac, after whom I am named, was a merchant and a man of wealth, who had arranged for Jacob Mordecai to marry his only daughter, Hannah. Grandmother Hannah had a fiery temper and, although her husband became known as a sage and she couldn’t write a Yiddish letter without errors, whenever they quarreled she called him a Litvak pig. This was undeserved, as he had been born in Miedzyrzec, which was in Poland, not in Lithuania.
Our grandparents were no longer living, but their blood flowed in our veins. When Esther spoke I could hear in her words, and even more so in her intonation, generations of scholars, pious women, as well as something that seemed non-Jewish, even typically goyish. Within our genetic cells, the subjugators and the subjugated were forced to co-exist. I had warned myself not to become involved with Esther. I was honest enough to tell her that I had no intention of getting married. I told her about Stefa and Lena as well as of my efforts to settle in America. But Esther had been influenced by the new concepts. She wasn’t engaged to any man. There was no purpose in saving her virginity for someone she didn’t know or who might never turn up. Her female coworkers at the millinery shop all had lovers. Most young men no longer required that their prospective wives be virgins. The situation in the world was desperate, and that of the Jews in Poland especially. So why wait?
Esther and I now lay on the bed and from time to time I glanced at my watch. I didn’t dare miss my train to Otwock! I felt guilty, but I had the consolation that I wasn’t deceiving Esther. We both tried to steal something which belonged to us only. Esther’s face was flushed nevertheless. She told me that she would never forget me and that if she was spared she would come to me in America. I had noticed that Esther too glanced at her wristwatch. Tsipele would be returning shortly.
We said good-bye, kissed at length, and arranged a rendezvous for the coming week when I would absolutely, positively have more time for her. When we were at the door, Esther mumbled, “I hope you were careful.”
“Yes, a hundred percent!”
The gaslight illuminating the stairs was out, which meant that the gate was already closed. I had descended half a flight when I heard Esther’s voice. She called to me to come back. It turned out that in my excitement the roll of bills—all the money I had collected today at the bank and at the HIAS office—had fallen out of my breast pocket.
I seized it and stuck it back in my pocket. “I’m crazy, crazy as a loon!”
I started racing down the stairs in the dark. I had lost some two to three minutes. I would have to wait until the janitor opened the gate for me. I began to search for the bell with which to rouse him. I couldn’t find it. I tapped around like a blind man. Luckily, someone rang the bell on the outside. The janitor was in no hurry to open up, and only after a long wait did he come out of his cubicle, grumbling, as did all janitors I have ever met. I groped in my pocket for a coin with which to tip him, but I couldn’t find one. I was almost sure that I had had coins in both pockets of my jacket. I must have dropped them at Esther’s. The janitor paused and stretched out a hand for my coin, and when I began to apologize, he spat and cursed. I heard him say “Psia krew”—dog’s blood. He opened the gate with a large key and by the light of the streetlamp I saw Tsipele.
“Moreh!”
She made a move as if to embrace me, but I only managed to say “Good night!” I hadn’t a moment to lose now. I ran in the direction of Nalewki Street. I had to catch either a streetcar, a droshky, or a taxi—whichever came first. One taxi passed after another—they were all heading away from the depot, not toward it. The streetcars also ran in the opposite direction. All I could do was run. It was eight minutes to twelve by the time I got to the Gdansk Station. Thank God there was no line in front of the ticket seller’s cage and I quickly bought my ticket. This wasn’t a local train running only between Warsaw and Otwock, but one that ran as far as Lvov. The cars were crowded with passengers, mostly Jewish salesmen and storekeepers from the provinces. Almost every one carried sacks, bundles, or crates of goods. Several coaches were full of soldiers. No civilian passengers were allowed in there. The soliders stood by the open windows and mocked the harassed Jews racing from car to car and dragging their bundles. The second-class cars were occupied mainly by officers.
I squeezed myself into one of the third-class cars as best I could. All the seats were taken. Some passengers read Yiddish newspapers, some chewed unfinished suppers from paper bags, others leaned their heads against the walls trying to catch some sleep. All the faces reflected the fatigue of the Diaspora, the fear of tomorrow. The train was scheduled to depart at midnight, but the clock showed a quarter past twelve and we still hadn’t moved. The car smelled of cigarette smoke, garlic, onions, sweat, and the latrine. Facing me stood a girl with a gold, or gold-plated, Star of David hanging around her neck. She was trying to read a novel by the Polish sex novelist Gabriela Zapolska in the murky light of the gas lamp. Just as I, she had accepted the kind of secular Jewishness that defies all definitions.
This time, the trip from Warsaw to Otwock took not an hour but only half that time. The train stopped there for just a minute and discharged a few passengers. I started off across the sandy path leading to the broken-down villa where Lena waited for me. I had brought her neither food nor travel books, but I had resolved that first thing in the morning I would go to Slavin’s Bookstore and buy her a book and take her to a restaurant.
Otwock, with all its consumptives, was asleep. Inside the sanatoriums’ morgues lay those who earlier that day had breathed their last. I climbed the dark stairs of the house we lived in and every board squeaked beneath my heavy shoes. I opened the door to our room. Our bed stood empty. I called, “Lena! Lena!” and an echo answered. I opened the door to the balcony even though I could see through the glass door that no one was there. I began searching for matches, but I didn’t find them. It was Lena who smoked, not I, and she had probably taken them with her. After a while my eyes had grown accustomed to the dark and I began to see by the light of the stars and that of a distant streetlight. Lena had taken her coat and her satchel. She hadn’t left a note.
I went out onto the balcony and stood there for a long time contemplating the heavenly bodies. I asked them mutely, “What do you say to all this?” And I imagined that they replied, “We have seen it all before.”