It was really true. Mordkhe-Mendl, the total pauper, had become an estate-owner.
“How could that be?” people asked. “Did he rob a church?”
“Maybe he did.”
“And what about Fleischer, the German? Did Mordkhe-Mendl push him out?”
“He must have.”
It was a puzzle and a mystery. The whole town was in an uproar. It wasn’t just strangers who couldn’t make heads or tails of the matter; even the family was at a loss to explain what was going on. People ran out, in the middle of the week, to see the estate for themselves, to make sure that it wasn’t a dream or a delusion.
Even Mordkhe-Mendl’s worst enemies had to admit that it wasn’t a dream. The entire Wyszufka estate, its forests and its meadows, its cattle and its fowl, all now belonged to Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl.
Mother and Father, however, were in no great hurry to join the sightseers. Mother was offended by the fact that neither Mordkhe-Mendl nor Khane had personally come to tell her the good news. Father still refused to believe it, though people continued to congratulate him and a few even began to address him with the honorific Reb, mister, calling him “Reb Leyzer, the estate-owner’s brother-in-law.” But he was in no hurry to take a look for himself. Hadn’t he seen an estate before? Didn’t he already know what the Wyszufka place looked like?
We kept putting off our visit from one Sabbath to the next, from one Sunday to the next, until one day a messenger showed up at our house, a tall Gentile, carrying a whip, who asked if Pan kupiec—Mr. merchant—was at home.
“Why do you want Pan kupiec?”
“Because Pan Dziedzic from Wyszufka requests that Pan kupiec, his wife, and son come visit.”
“Pan Dziedzic?” Father squinted with both eyes. “Who is this Dziedzic?”
“The new owner … what’s his name?”
“Don’t you know the name of your new landlord?”
“I know,” the peasant waved his hand. “What do they call him? Mendl, something like that …”
“Is he the one who just bought the Wyszufka property?”
“That’s him.”
“Some fine Dziedzic, that one.” Father was having his bit of fun. “Are you sure it’s not a mistake?”
“No mistake.”
“But I have no idea who that Dziedzic of yours is.”
“Eh, … you’re pulling my leg. Who doesn’t know Mendl, black Mendl!”
“Oh … that Mendl. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
I had never seen Father in such a jocular mood. Whom was he making fun of? The peasant? Mordkhe-Mendl? Why was he playing dumb?
“Why are you joking?” Mother jumped in. “Your brother-in-law isn’t good enough for you?”
“And what makes you think that he is?” Father shot back.
“So, don’t go see him. Nobody’s begging you.”
Mother’s face was flushed. She put down the dishes with a clatter, and not in their proper place either. She was obviously upset with Father’s contempt for Mordkhe-Mendl.
I also had my quibbles with Father. Why did he begrudge Mordkhe-Mendl his estate? My own father, behaving like this? This was all new to me, and it hurt. After all, I thought, Father never had any brass door handles, so why should he be jealous of others? But in the end, he did go to pay his respects to Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl, successor to Dziedzic, a one-time owner of the estate. We all went, including Ite.
The estate lay along the same road where the wooden hovel that once housed Mordkhe-Mendl stood. Only now did we get a good look at it. It was dark and ramshackle, its walls lopsided. Clumps of cracked, yellow clay, applied to keep out the cold, hung from the small, single window. Two bedraggled children, in shirts too short to cover their little bellies, sat on the doorstep, holding empty tin bowls, scraping hard to get at the last clot of grits stuck to the bottom.
They were strangers, blond children, Gentiles. Not too long ago, Mordkhe-Mendl’s own children used to sit on the same doorstep, themselves scraping the bottoms of their empty bowls. Now they lived on their own estate. How unknowable are the ways of the Lord! And there, just beyond the Russian cemetery, it lay, Mordkhe-Mendl’s estate.
We, his close relatives, were visiting Mordkhe-Mendl for the very first time.
The road we were on was also observing its Sabbath rest, empty of the usual jumble of traffic. Now and then a lone peasant cart would rumble by, either going into, or returning from, town. The peasants watched us as we strolled leisurely along, looking refreshed after the Sabbath afternoon nap. Several of them knew Father and touched the peaks of their caps.
“Niech bendzie Pochwalony … May God bless you.”
“Na wieki wiekow … Forever and ever after.”
The sun looked blankly down, positioned in the sky smack over the middle of the field. Under a poplar tree, in the shade, someone was sitting, head bent, wrapping his leggings. Someone else lay asleep on the grass, warming his backside in the sun. A peasant woman, with two empty baskets at her side, was kneeling in front of an image of the Holy Mother, black and faceless, that dangled from a branch of the poplar. This meant that soon we would be seeing the low, gray wall of the Russian cemetery, its stone surface perpetually wet. It was a strange and cold place. Its crosses were terrifying.
“Over there,” Father stretched out an arm and pointed in the direction of the field. “That’s the place.”
A dark mass loomed in the distance, a forest, perhaps, or an orchard. Every now and then the dark shape opened to reveal a patch of white, flashing in the sun.
“The farmyard’s over there,” said Father, “and that square of white, that’s the palace.”
A palace! That word … it struck a blow to my temples. I had never seen a palace before. I only knew from storybooks that kings and princesses lived in palaces. That my Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl, with his tattered coat, should also be living in a palace boggled the mind. Mother couldn’t believe it, either. Now, at the last minute, she was beginning to have her doubts.
“Mordkhe-Mendl lives in that palace over there?” she asked, obviously bewildered, raising a hand to her forehead.
“Must be. If he’s a Dziedzic, then it stands to reason that he should live in a palace,” Father smiled into his beard.
Well, Father could smile to his heart’s content, but here we were, about to go into an estate with an actual palace.
Is this what a palace looks like? The storybooks tell us that palaces are made of gold and crystal. But for Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl, a palace like this was fine, too. I saw a wide, white-brick structure with tall, shiny windows. The roof was covered with red tiles, and its eaves had a slight, upward tilt, like the brim of a hat.
Lining the way to the white palace, arrayed like soldiers, was a row of tall linden trees, each trimmed to the same height. This is what the fir trees mentioned in the Bible must have looked like. But all that paled beside the magnificent walk leading to the white palace. It was wide and straight, paved with pebbles that crunched underfoot like crusted, hardened snow.
Father strode over the crunching pebbles with a confident step, he was accustomed to such things. Mother walked stiffly, her head slightly raised. It was hard to tell whether this was out of arrogance or astonishment, or simply because she wasn’t used to walking on lordly paths. My sister Ite hung back, sidling along the edge, taking one step forward, two steps back.
Inside the lovely, white house, they must have caught sight of us, for suddenly a door with wide glass panes swung open with easy grace, majestically. There, standing alone on the outdoor stone steps, was Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl, his hands outstretched, dressed in an unbuttoned, flowered dressing gown, his thick, black beard unkempt. He seemed to have grown taller and broader, and he no longer spoke in the tortured tones that always brought to mind chilly rooms and mildewed walls. Now he approached us, speaking in a voice that was not only expansive, but also somewhat pompous.
“A good Sabbath! Look who’s here! Such welcome guests!”
He stuck out his round, little belly, the very model of a man of property. When did he learn to walk with such measured, patrician steps?
Go figure, when even Aunt Khane, who all her life slunk along walls in the same faded tam, was now coming down the stone stairs with mincing, dainty steps, almost a little hop, not unlike Aunt Naomi. Now Aunt Khane was wearing a new wig, black and shiny, with a curl down the front. Her silk dress, with its ruffled sleeves, rustled, like the crunch of the pebbled path to the palace. She called out, “Make way, children, here I come—Khane the estate-owner!”
Mother’s face seemed to lengthen. I didn’t like how she looked. I knew that Mother had decided to make an entrance, to walk in proudly, holding high her soft Warsaw chin. She had expected they would greet her with trumpets and drums, that they would be overjoyed to see her.
Aunt Khane certainly looked the lady, dressed up as she was in a black dress, with a gold brooch at her throat. Where did she find all these fancy things so quickly? And how did she know to wear them with such style?
Mother’s little double chin shrank and a tiny crease flitted across her fair face. Nobody else noticed. But my eyes were ever on the alert. No one knew Mother’s facial expressions better than I.
However, I was mistaken. Aunt Khane was still the same quiet, kindhearted woman she always was, who used to drop by our house early in the morning and sit down on the edge of Mother’s bed as though she were her own sister.
There was nothing rich-lady about her at all. She didn’t come down the stairs with the mincing, dainty steps reminiscent of Aunt Naomi. That only seemed so at first glance. On the contrary. No sooner did she get to the bottom of the stairs than she immediately regained her everyday, poor-woman’s walk. She ran toward Mother with a radiant face, fell around her neck, and kissed her over and over.
“Frimetshi!” she sobbed with joy. “Dearest one! You should live and be well! So, what do you say to all this, hah? Isn’t Mordkhe-Mendl something?”
“I always told you so, didn’t I?” Mother wiped the corner of her right eye.
“Long life to you, my dear sister-in-law. First comes God, then you.”
“May you grow old in wealth and honor,” Mother wiped her other eye.
“Amen, dear God in heaven! And may the Almighty bless you, too, and bring you great wealth and whatever else you wish for. You always said,” Aunt Khane’s voice shook tearfully, “that Mordkhe-Mendl would shake up all of Poland.”
“I know him better than you do, Khane, even though he’s your husband,” Mother replied, with the assurance of the wise.
Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl was walking with Father, arm in arm, like brothers. Indeed, the two brothers-in-law seemed to have reconciled. Mordkhe-Mendl’s business affairs no longer stank. In fact, they now smelled as sweet as Father’s hay. Hearing his name mentioned, Mordkhe-Mendl left Father standing alone and slid over to the women.
“Let’s embrace and kiss, dearest Frimet,” he spread out his arms. “May God bless you, my clever sister-in-law.”
Mother displayed a face full of dimples and Mordkhe-Mendl flashed his white teeth. And though Father was standing nearby, in full view of everyone, Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl locked arms with Mother, as if he were about to dance with her. Mother broke into a trill of laughter. Aunt Khane smiled shyly, piously, somewhat embarrassed. Father’s teeth were clearly visible under his whiskers.
From the way Mother stepped lightly alongside Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl, and from the way she lifted her face proudly to the sun, it was easy to see that she had once actually lived in a house with brass handles on every door.
Father was walking beside his sister Khane. Ite and I brought up the rear, surrounded on all sides by our cousins. There was Borekh, the eldest son, swarthy like his father and with the same pointed eyebrows. There were his younger sisters and brothers, all wearing long velvet jackets, all with shocks of black hair. And then there was Reyzl, Mordkhe- Mendl’s prettiest daughter. Reyzl was fair-skinned, pale, and with a thin blue vein down her forehead. Her face was as round and flat as a plate. She resembled neither Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl nor Aunt Khane. Her real beauty, however, lay in her hair. It was soft and blond, and gleamed like golden ears of corn.
Reyzl and I were the same age. It seemed that her parents were so busy with settling into the estate that they forgot to buy her shoes. She was skipping barefoot across the sharp pebbles, now and then lifting a foot and wincing. Reyzl talked like her mother, slowly, straight from the heart, and with a quiet humility that was, no doubt, due to the earthen floor on which Mordkhe-Mendl and his household had trod all those years.
Now all the children were standing on the broad stone steps leading up to the white palace, where blue glass panes glittered in the doors. Reyzl’s younger brothers and sisters were the first to go in, Ite and Borekh after them. Only Reyzl and I remained outside.
“Mendl, do you like flowers?” she asked me.
“What do you mean?” I said. “I like them, I don’t like them.”
She took me by the hand. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
She led me around the back of the palace, through a thicket of ancient poplars and tall, haughty-looking lindens. She led me further down a black, wet path, smoothly paved, like the walks in our new public park. We came upon a park here, too, cool, shaded, with winding paths and two or three broken benches, on which time had laid a green, mossy deposit.
Reyzl led me still further, almost to the end of the little park, toward an old dilapidated bower, woven from birch branches, where some boxed-in sunlight took an occasional rest.
Reyzl pointed to several narrow flower beds, set around the bower, with rows of plants on frail stems, pushing up from the ground.
“These are flowers,” Reyzl said. “Be careful not to step on them. The red ones over there are roses. They’re still buds, but soon they will be big and beautiful. Over there, are violets.” She pointed to some tiny velvety dots. “Look how blue they are. Have you ever seen such flowers? And those along the edge, shaped like cups, they’re called tulips.”
Reyzl, who usually spoke haltingly, as if she were ashamed of something, now rattled off all the flowers by name. How did she know all this? Who told her?
Barefoot, stepping carefully, Reyzl walked knowingly between the planted rows, placing one foot in front of the other.
“We’ve got our own gardener,” she said, “the one that used to work for the former owner and later for the lady who sold Father the estate. He says that the flowers are his grandchildren, and if not for them, there would be no reason to go on living.”
Reyzl was telling me this, all the while looking at me out of her blue, moist, dreamy eyes. Her look made me feel ashamed of my city breeding, of my lack of special talent. Aunt Naomi’s Mendl could sing. Mordkhe-Mendl’s Reyzl loved flowers. What special thing did I have?
At home, we never had flowers. On our windowsill stood an earthenware pot with long, thick leaves, covered in dust, withered around the edges from age or dryness. From those dusty leaves Father cut the onions to treat his sore foot. Those were the only flowers I ever saw or knew about.
On the other hand, I told myself, what does a boy like me need with flowers? Of what use were they? I knew of no Jewish boys my age who liked flowers. Reyzl, after all, was a girl who had lived all her life by the side of the road, under an open sky and among poplar trees. This must account for her knowledge of flowers and for her love.
Reyzl went on telling me about the different kinds of flowers. She showed me those that she herself had planted and raised. But I had stopped listening. I would rather have been inside the palace, seeing what was going on there.
Just then a voice called out from the distance, “Reyzl! Reyzl!”
“Coming, Mother!” she called back, crimping her nose and taking me by the hand. With her other hand she pointed, saying, “Look, just over there. Do you see? That’s an orchard, with pear trees and apple trees and cherry trees. The best of everything grows there. And it’s all ours. You know that?”
Of course I knew. If it wasn’t theirs, why else would I be here, free to roam around and poke my nose into every corner of the estate? All of it belonged to my Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl, including the flowers over there, the ones that the gardener considered his grandchildren, they too belonged to Mordkhe-Mendl. The best sign of his ownership was our visit, giving us an opportunity to see, and to delight in, his elevation.
Aunt Naomi and Uncle Bentsien had also turned up that Sabbath afternoon. Poor souls, they had to come all the way out on foot. They were already sitting in the white palace, sprawled on soft, old-fashioned armchairs with high backs. Uncle Bentsien was wheezing heavily, wiping thick beads of sweat from his forehead and looking around the room.
There was much to see and many questions to ask. Rooms like those, with such furniture, none of us had ever set eyes on before except, perhaps, Father, who was a frequent visitor to the estates of the gentry.
“These are parlors,” he explained, “with dark, high ceilings that keep the room cool.”
Such parlors also had clocks that didn’t run, standing lifeless in their glass cases on ornately decorated porcelain stoves. They had bleached deer antlers spread above their entrances, and stuffed birds with large glass eyes staring down in wonder and bewilderment.
Over there, perched on an old, heavily carved chest, was an eagle—at least Father said it was an eagle—with a hard, crooked beak that looked like an iron hook.
The eagle crouched forward, its claws dug into the top of the sideboard, its outspread wings spanning half the wall behind it. It looked as if it was about to swoop across toward the window, smash through the glass, and fly off.
Uncle Bentsien, dabbing his sweaty, bald head with a white handkerchief, was scarcely able to conceal his amazement.
“Is that really an eagle?” he addressed Father. “Are you absolutely sure?”
“What then do you think it is? A rooster?” replied Father grandly. “If I tell you it’s an eagle, it’s an eagle.”
Father felt completely at home in these parlors, as if he belonged. He didn’t sit looking humble and hard of hearing, the way he usually did during visits to his exalted sister, Aunt Naomi. Here, he was on familiar ground. After all, he was made welcome in the homes of the landed gentry and had seen similar refinements in their establishments. So what was all this fuss over an eagle? He knew all about such things. He was the expert, entitled to show off his superior knowledge.
We were taken on a tour of inspection, invited to look at tables of reddish-brown wood, oval in shape, with bow legs, their backs braided and plaited. We were asked to admire dressers with split drawers and tarnished gilt pulls.
We were shown another “parlor,” this one square, with three long windows, their well-polished panes letting in the sunlight. Here, the ceiling was white and the floor as yellow as wax, assembled from separate, small squares joined together. The walls were light blue, with a thin gold border just below the ceiling. They were covered with faded tapestries dating back to the days of King Sobieski and depicting thin, elongated dogs, ladies in hoop skirts, and gentlemen in white stockings and white wigs, with a braid down the back. What a bizarre depiction! It must be a masquerade. We all stared in disbelief. What sort of people were these? Why did they make themselves look so ridiculous?
You would think that Uncle Bentsien, a man of the world and a regular visitor to the district governor’s office, would know, but he was at a complete loss to explain the meaning of those tapestries. But Father knew. He said that they were portraits of the aristocrats who, in days gone by, had themselves portrayed like that, just as nowadays we have our photographs taken. Their strange clothes were an indication that they were at a ball, what they called a “carnival,” where the lords and ladies dressed up in costume. I understood Father’s explanation. They dressed up just like we Jews do on Purim. They probably even had a wicked Haman of their own.
Mother, however, crinkled her nose.
“It’s not a carnival,” she said. “It’s nothing of the sort.”
She had once read in a book that this is how people dressed in Napoleon’s time. Even the poorest man among them had such a dog and owned such a white wig.
Uncle Bentsien interrupted, “Well, I don’t care one way or the other. I’d get rid of all that fancy stuff anyway. We’d be better off looking at what sort of beds you have here.”
The beds were really nice, quite different from any to be seen in our town. They were reddish-brown, sat low to the ground, with darkly gleaming corners.
“Believe me,” Aunt Khane turned to Mother, “it’s hard for me to fall asleep in such a bed.”
“One gets used to it,” Mother said, with all the assurance of someone who has slept in such aristocratic beds all her life. “When my first husband—may he rest in peace—was alive, I could have easily afforded such beds. When people came to visit and saw the brass door handles …”
I didn’t hear the rest of what Mother was saying. I was too busy looking around to see whether the doors here also had brass handles. Of course, they did. There they were, on the high white doors, but dangling loosely, looking dull and lackluster. Brass door handles, according to Mother, should shine.
“The place needs a lot of repairs,” Aunt Khane said, somewhat apologetically. “It’ll cost a fortune.”
Whenever Aunt Khane talked about money, it was never less than a “fortune.” She said this calmly, sedately, as though certain that, if not today then tomorrow, her Mordkhe-Mendl was going to bring her that fortune. You never know … anything was possible where Mordkhe-Mendl was concerned.
Uncle Bentsien never stopped perspiring and kept dabbing at his red, bald pate with his white handkerchief. Aunt Naomi, her eyelids half-closed, drawled out in her haughty tones, “Mor-d-khe-Men-n-n-dl.”
“Hah?”
“You were going to tell us how you came to acquire the estate. How?” But Mordkhe-Mendl didn’t seem to have heard her.
“Come,” he said, making a sweeping gesture with his hand and getting up from his chair. “Let’s go outside for a while. You’ve hardly seen anything yet. This estate is a gold mine!”
He ran his left hand through his silky beard, like King Ahasuerus of the Purim story, flung open the glass-paneled door, and ushered his guests out, to show off his impressive possession.
There was certainly something to see, that is, there once might have been, when the estate still belonged to Dziedzic, the old landlord, or maybe even at the time of the last lady-owner. Today, however, there wasn’t much left to look at. By any measure, the estate should, at the very least, have matched the grandeur of the palace to which it was attached. But that, sad to say, was not the case.
On an estate, as is well known, there are stables with horses, cows, and oxen. There have to be pigs and piglets rooting in the farmyard, and hens, roosters, turkeys, and ducks running around. Father said that on a proper estate there should also be two or three peacocks strutting about, their regal tails spread wide, whose every feather bears a picture of the sun and the moon. Their assignment was to call out to all passersby, “There’s an estate here, there’s an estate here.”
Well, not all estate-owners have peacocks, and pigs were out of the question for Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl. But why were there no more than two scrawny horses on spindly legs standing in the stable, and no more than two starved-looking cows, one a white calf with a yellow patch under one eye, the other a black milk cow with a white patch smack across her flanks?
Judging by the size and length of the stable, at one time it must have housed a whole herd of cows. On the opposite wall you could still see the empty cribs, separated by little partitions. The smell of warm cow dung had long since escaped through the holes in the roof and through the two doors, which hung askew on loose hinges. All that remained were the two scrawny horses and the two sorry-looking cows.
At that moment, the milk cow turned her black, moist nostrils toward the guests, turning her head away from Uncle Bentsien’s white, flowing beard. She looked at Father in a puzzled way, as if she’d seen him before. It seemed to me that she was searching for a familiar face. On me she fixed her large, watery eyes, as if pleading with me to chase away the tiny flies that chose the whites of her eyes for their resting place.
I tried to wave my hand in front of the cow’s face, but she turned her head away in annoyance.
“Don’t do that!” I seemed to hear her say. “That’s not what I had in mind. I was thinking that what you see here now is nothing. Once, during her ladyship’s days, I had many, many sisters. Entire families of my kind used to live here, grandmothers, mothers, children. We didn’t share this stable then with angry horses. We had a whole barn to ourselves, even bigger than this stable. When we went out to pasture, we crowded in one behind the other, there were so many of us. Our udders overflowed with milk, enough to flood the entire world. Everything’s different today. We’ve fallen on hard times. Old Dziedzic died somewhere far from here and left a mountain of debts. So his wife started selling off one cow after another, one horse after another. There used to be a flock of sheep as well, big, plump ones. Their wool was for sale at every fair. But before long, there was nothing left to be sold and the estate itself was put up for auction. There were many would-be buyers, both Jews and Gentiles, including the German, Fleischer, that coarse blacksmith who used to crawl over roofs, smearing them with thick, red paint. He hoped to become the Dziedzic of the Wyszufka estate. There was a lot of haggling, a lot of bellowing and bickering. The old lady wept, said goodbye to the farm and to all the farmhands. She paid each one what was owed him, and then let them all go. She took nothing with her, except a bunch of flowers. Now the estate belongs not to that German, Fleischer, but to that one over there, the one with the black beard, the one they call Mordkhe-Mendl.”
That’s what an old, white-haired peasant told us, sucking on a small pipe, as he walked between Mother and me. It was he who’d been talking all along, not, God forbid, the cow …
And there, just as the old peasant observed, was Mordkhe-Mendl, striding in his wide, Sabbath dressing gown. He kept pointing to the left and to the right, with hands that seemed to have grown grotesquely large. When he waved them about, they seemed to encompass the whole broad expanse, together with the forest and the sky.
He told us how he had acquired the estate. He was up against rich landowners who were also looking to buy the property. For nights on end he didn’t close an eye. His head was spinning in circles. What if it all came to nothing? Maybe those landowners would rent him the estate? And maybe this and maybe that? That’s when he decided to make common cause with the German, Fleischer.
But Fleischer also wasn’t born yesterday. He, too, wanted to become a landowner and he was determined to own the Wyszufka estate all by himself, without Mordkhe-Mendl.
So what did Mordkhe-Mendl do? …
What he did, I no longer heard. Reyzl came over to me with a bunch of red and blue flowers which, she said, she had picked especially for me. When I got back to town, I was to put them in a vase filled with water.
Mordkhe-Mendl was going on with his story. When I came closer, I heard Uncle Bentsien ask him, “Nu, what happened to Fleischer?” But Mordkhe-Mendl was so absorbed in reciting the virtues of the estate that he paid no attention to Uncle Bentsien’s question.
He was now leading us out of the farmyard, and once again he made a wide, sweeping motion with his hand.
“Take a look at those fields. Do you see that soil? There’s gold buried there. Did those gentleman owners, those boors, know what they had here? Come, let’s go a little further. I want to show you something.”
We walked on. Ahead of us stretched empty, long-neglected plots overgrown with brambles and dotted with tree stumps. It was obvious that this land hadn’t been worked for a very long time. Father concurred, he couldn’t remember a time when any grain grew here. So where was the great fortune that Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl kept boasting of?
We were walking on soft, slippery mud. A hot, yellow haze hung over the field. Why, then, was the ground so wet? It must be a swamp.
“God forbid!” Mordkhe-Mendl looked up. “It’s precisely this soil, slippery mud that the former landowners here didn’t have enough sense to see was valuable.”
The entire field was, in fact, one large expanse of clay. Mordkhe-Mendl pointed to a deep, square pit filled with puddles of brackish water. Its sides gleamed with shiny, dark-brown clay.
“This isn’t just clay,” Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl said. “It’s oil, it’s meat, it’s food without end.”
From that clay, he explained, he would make bricks and roof tiles, earthenware pots, pitchers, jugs for sour milk, and … what not? Right here he’d put up a chimney. He’d hire Gentiles, potters. There would be such work going on here as the world had never seen.
He reached down into the pit and scooped up a messy handful of the precious clay.
“Take a good look,” he said.
“That’s clay?”
“No, it’s diamonds, not clay.”
He passed a clay-smeared hand before each of our faces. Aunt Naomi squeezed her nostrils with two fingers. Uncle Bentsien gingerly touched the proffering with the tip of his little finger. Father looked at it out of the corner of his eye. Only Mother breathed in the smell of the clay, with a full face.
I wasn’t impressed by that precious clay either. Back in town, in our old house, where Moyshe died, we had once dug a ditch and pitched out the same kind of clay that Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl was now showing us. And Simkhele the bricklayer, who once fixed our stove, also patched it with the same kind of clay. So why was Mordkhe-Mendl making such a fuss?
That Sabbath day he showed us many more things. He took us to the forest, some distance away, which was shrouded in a blue, dream-like mist.
“That forest,” he said, “also belongs to the estate.”
He then led us into a garden with a pond covered in a crust of yellow-green scum that must have been there forever. He would have the pond cleaned, he said, and stock it with fish, carp and pike.
We came to an orchard, but one without any fruit on the trees, because this year there was a crop failure, Mordkhe-Mendl remarked. But under his care, God willing, the trees would be fruitful again.
He showed us everything, even the empty dog kennels.
Later, toward evening, we were treated to cold spinach borsht, along with rye bread slathered in butter. A restful coolness descended on the fields, spreading from the distantly glowing sky and the blue forest. There was a smell of hay in the air. Crickets chirped in the garden. The sound of croaking frogs could be heard all the way from the scum-encrusted pond.
We were sitting outside. The sky was gradually darkening, turning garnet, growing wider and wider, until the eye could no longer take it all in. Now, for the very first time, I could see how many millions and millions of stars there were in the heavens.
Reyzl told me, in a whisper, that every night she fixed her eyes on the largest star, the one over there, imagining it to be an enormous diamond that was about to come loose and drop at her feet. Reyzl was a foolish girl. But it was still better to be sitting here with her than wandering about in our own small, narrow courtyard that always smelled of pigs.
After the havdole prayer, ending the Sabbath, Mordkhe-Mendl sent us back to town in a carriage. It was a tight squeeze and we sat piled one on top of the other. But no one minded. The night that surrounded us on all sides was tender and mild. The air was filled with the fragrance of camomile, mint, and almonds.
Uncle Bentsien lay sprawled across almost the entire width of the carriage.
“Ah, this is so comfortable,” he said with a satisfied sigh, as he stretched his entire stomach. “If dealing with community affairs were only this easy.”
Aunt Naomi cut him short with her sing-song drawl, “Be-e-n-tsii-en!”
He gave a little groan and turned to another subject, saying that, in his opinion, Mordkhe-Mendl was now certainly a personage to be reckoned with. If somebody could come into possession of such an estate, without spending a groshen, then it was no small matter.
“Don’t you agree, Leyzer?”
“Yes, it’s certainly no small matter,” Father answered into the dark. “But I don’t approve.”
“What do you mean, you don’t approve? Didn’t you see it with your own eyes?”
“I did.”
“Nu?”
“There is something unreal about it. The whole thing just doesn’t strike me right.”
“Why?”
“I just don’t like it.”
Well, so Father didn’t like it. Nevertheless, Mordkhe-Mendl got exactly what he wanted.
In no time at all, a tall, round chimney sprung up in the middle of the wet fields of the Wyszufka estate, clearly visible from a distance in town. People threw back their heads, stretched their necks, and pointed up to the sky, like stargazers.
“Take a look. That Mordkhe-Mendl …”
Spirals of black and white smoke, thick and dense, like coiled cotton wool, spewed from the chimney. The smoke hung over the white palace, the garden, the orchard, and over the flowers that Reyzl took such delight in. Peasants coming into town said that the smoke settled on the tops of the poplar trees, confounding the storks, who were forced to find new perches where the smoke didn’t reach.
Next to the white palace Mordkhe-Mendl built a squat, red-brick structure, from which sprouted the chimney, and from which issued all the wares that Mordkhe-Mendl turned out in his hot, tiled ovens.
By now the stately pebbled way to the white palace was a shambles. Pots, in all stages of completion—glazed, unglazed, handleless, without bottoms—lay strewn across the once neat and orderly gravel. On the broad, stone steps on which Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl had stood so arrogantly that Sabbath day, in the rooms with the soft armchairs and the tall, white windows—earthenware of every kind was now scattered throughout, milk pitchers, ewers, the little lidded pots that peasant women use for bringing food to their menfolk in the fields.
Mordkhe-Mendl was determined to get rich, and to that end he kept the pottery going day and night. His workers, parchment-faced, sharp-featured Gentiles with big-veined, gnarled hands, were experienced potters.
They sat bent over their wooden contraptions, wheels with shafts in the middle, like the spindles that spin out yarn. With one foot they worked the treadles, which kept the wheels turning. With their bare fingers they threw the wet clay onto the wheels, shaping the pots and the pitchers.
Spinning rapidly, not pausing for a breath, the wheels turned round and round. The clumps of raw clay spun right along, changing from one moment to the next, now stretched, now contracted. The fast fingers of the potters also turned out dolls and figurines of human shape. Then the potters would caress their creations, stroke them, and wipe them clean, until they were fully formed. They would then cut the figures loose from the wheel with a thin thread, as one would separate a newborn babe from its mother by cutting the umbilical cord.
It would appear that Mordkhe-Mendl was indeed getting rich from his pot-making. The Wyszufka estate acquired another horse, as well as a laddered wagon, in which Aunt Khane, her son Borekh, and daughter Reyzl hauled the finished pots to sell in the market every Thursday morning. But the pots never made it to the larger world, as Mordkhe-Mendl had envisioned. Truth to tell, he did—but one time only—load up a wagon with his wares and sent it off to Lublin, but what was unloaded was a heap of shards, corpses of the pots that had been.
The plan to export merchandise to distant parts was abandoned. Thursday then became the day to which the Wyszufka entrepreneurs looked forward all week long. At the crack of dawn, while man and field were still soundly asleep, they loaded up the wagon and, on empty stomachs, started out for town. At the market, they arranged the pots and pitchers, the bowls and jugs, side by side, like children from the same mother. Customers tapped the vessels with their fingers to make sure they weren’t cracked. They haggled over a groshen, walked away ten times, and once in a while actually bought a pot or a pitcher for a small copper coin.
Here, in the market, standing beside the pots, Aunt Khane no longer resembled the elegant lady of the manor who had come down the stone steps to greet us, wearing a black, silk dress with a gold brooch at her throat. Here, she reverted to the Aunt Khane of old, wrapped in her shawl, with the familiar, squashed tam on her head. The overhead sun had reddened her face. The rain and the wind had roughened her skin. Her hands were blackened, likewise her nose. Her forehead was a mass of deep furrows. As for Reyzl, who never forgot to take along her tulips and roses, her pale skin turned brown. When her face caught its reflection in one of the pots, it looked like two pots laughing at each other, nose against nose.
After each of the Thursdays, Aunt Khane returned home with more than she had taken to market, for when the wagon was unloaded, it was discovered that half of the stock had broken in transit. Coming and going, pots had cracked, smashed, and splintered to smithereens. Aunt Khane’s face seemed to have cracked as well. Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl’s black, silky beard began to show patches of white.
He now had time to show up at our house at the first sign of dawn. He didn’t come, like before, to boast or to make fun of Uncle Bentsien’s office as secretary of the community, but to catch Father at his morning prayers, before he left for the day, and whisper something into his ear. He woke up Mother, who quickly pulled the featherbed up to her chin and, in a lazy, sleepy voice, asked, “What’s new, Mordkhe-Mendl?”
“God be praised, everything’s going well. But I’m done with the pottery. No money there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Too many broken pieces, too much waste. What I need is a brick factory. The city’s beginning to build. Mendl Danziger is building. Yudl the gaiter-maker has bought a lot. All the vacant lots on Beckman Street are being snatched up. Anybody with cash to spare is buying a lot and building. But there are hardly any brick factories around. Bricks have to be brought in from afar and that raises the cost. But if I set up a brick factory on the estate …”
“Of course, of course,” Mother nodded her head. “You’re absolutely right.”
“What do you mean absolutely right,” Mordkhe-Mendl swayed from side to side. “It’s as clear as daylight.”
Yes, it was clear alright, except for the fact that he was short of ready cash, which is why he had come to see Father, to ask him to endorse a loan with his signature. Bentsien, said Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl, had already signed. Yes, that’s right, Bentsien.
Father continued praying, silently mouthing the words. From under his prayer shawl, he threw a blank look at his brother-in-law. He’d heard what Mordkhe-Mendl said, but he didn’t seem to have understood.
“Hah?”
“You see,” Mordkhe-Mendl brought his beard closer to Father’s prayer shawl, “I don’t need a lot, just a trifling amount.”
“What do you mean, ‘endorse’?”
When had Father ever done any endorsing? And was his endorsement worth anything? Besides, he couldn’t write. Didn’t Mordkhe-Mendl know that?
Yes, he knew, but that was a small matter. They would teach him how. Frimet would write out the letters and he would copy them.
A smile spread across Father’s whiskers. “Foolish man, that you are!” he said. “Does my endorsement carry any weight? I’m a poor man, barely able to make ends meet.”
“In that case, you have nothing to be afraid of.”
“I just don’t see the point.”
Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl now appealed to Mother.
“Frimet,” he said, “you’re no fool, just the opposite. Make him understand what’s at stake. He’ll save my life without doing himself any harm.”
Mother signaled him to stop talking, to drop the matter. She would take care of it herself.
That evening, after supper, when Father was already sitting on his bed, pulling off his boots, Mother called out to him.
“Leyzer?”
“Hah?”
“I think you should endorse the loan.”
“What do you say I should do?”
“Endorse the loan for Mordkhe-Mendl. I can’t see what harm, God forbid, can come from it.”
One boot stubbornly refused to come off. Father pulled his mouth to one side and bent over with difficulty. Talking to the tip of his boot, he said, “Frimet, do me the favor and don’t make a fool of yourself.”
“But he’s your brother-in-law!”
“So what if he’s my brother-in-law? He’s a Dziedzic, he owns an estate! What does he need me for?”
“But we could do something to save him!”
“You save him. Who’s preventing you?”
“If only my endorsement meant something, then I wouldn’t say another word. You heard yourself that Bentsien signed for him.”
“So Mordkhe-Mendl says.”
“He wouldn’t tell a lie.”
“God forbid! Only twice a year.”
Father lifted the featherbed, shook it out, and rolled over to the wall. “Call it a night, Frimet,” he said. “You’ll think better in the morning.”
The next morning, Aunt Khane, dark, skinny, her hands bony and veined, came bursting in. She arrived with the first crow of the cock.
“Brother dear!” she panted. “You can see for yourself that it’s a golden business. All we need is a few hundred rubles. You know what?” she added a moment later. “Become a partner yourself.”
“I have no desire to own an estate.”
“But you’re my brother. Haven’t my children gone hungry long enough?”
“And my own children have always eaten their fill?” Father retorted angrily.
“But you make a living, thank God.”
“And they work their fingers to the bone, for strangers!” Father was growing angrier. “They’re servants, that’s what my children are!”
“What, after all, do I want from you? Am I asking you for money?”
“But I don’t know how to write.”
“I’ll write it out for you,” Mother said, “and you can copy it.”
“There’s no hurry.”
Father kept them waiting a week, two weeks. Mordkhe-Mendl and Aunt Khane came to see us many more times. Each time, Mother pleaded their cause. She quarreled with Father, calling him a peasant, a monster. But Father never gave the endorsement.
It was a gray, foggy, windswept day. All night long the wind had been beating against the shutters of our windows. In the morning, no pigeons flew onto the roof to warm themselves. That day there was no kheyder, no school. It was a Russian holiday, the Tsar’s birthday. During morning prayers at the main synagogue the cantor sang “God Protect the Tsar.” Bentsien’s Mendl, in a white collar and black, pressed trousers, stood beside him on the pulpit, sweetly drawing out the notes and adding flourishes. There was a representative present from the city council, an official in a three-cornered hat with silver sides. He was also standing on the pulpit, between the cantor and the rabbi. All eyes were upon him, as though he were the Tsar himself.
Later, at the market, there was a performance of Russian music. All the Jewish shops were closed. It was then that the idea struck me. Why not go out for a bit to the Wyszufka estate?
The ditches on both sides of the road were filled with dry, fallen leaves. The wind carried them aloft, strewing them across the stubbled fields, and whistled through the bare branches of the poplar trees. From the Russian cemetery, the willows answered back in a mournful echo. The road was littered with rubbish and was empty of carts and people.
If it hadn’t been for the Tsar’s birthday and for the fact that I had no other plans for the day, it would never have occurred to me to go out to the Wyszufka estate.
Halfway there, I began to regret my decision and was actually about to turn back, when I encountered a tiny, old Gentile woman coming from the Russian cemetery. She was bent double and leaning on a knobby stick.
She stopped me and said, “Little boy, where are you going on such a windy day?”
“To see my Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl.”
“Who is that?”
“He’s the Dziedzic,” I shouted proudly into her old, wizened face.
“Heh, heh!” the old woman bared two yellow teeth. “Is he really your uncle, that Jewish landowner over there?”
“Yes.”
“There’s no point going there, little boy. The Wyszufka estate doesn’t have a Jewish owner any more. It’s all over.”
She must be out of her mind, I thought. The tiny creature kept staring at me with two round eyes, like an owl’s. I left her standing in the road and continued on my way. Now I was all the more eager to get to my destination, let the wind blow as it may.
The tall, red chimney of the pottery, it seemed to me, had grown taller and redder. There was no smoke coming from the chimney today, but that was no doubt due to the holiday of the Tsar’s birthday, when no one was working.
A raven croaked down from a treetop, another, with a great flapping of wings, took flight from a pile of manure. Suddenly a whole flock of ravens flew in a long line out of the Russian cemetery, filling the air above me with their cries. The black birds were heading in the direction of the Wyszufka estate. Maybe they were flying to a wedding somewhere in the vicinity.
Just as I was nearing the estate, I caught sight of a person walking toward me on the empty road, dragging a cow. Since today wasn’t a market day—this I knew for sure—then in all likelihood the cow was being taken to the slaughterhouse.
A horse and wagon now came into view. The closer I got, the larger everything loomed—the person, the cow, the horse and wagon. I could have sworn it was Mordkhe-Mendl’s cow, for it had that same white patch over its eyes. It seemed to me that the person walking with the cow was none other than Aunt Khane—and so it was!
She was leading the cow by a thin rope. Now I could see everything more clearly. The horse and wagon were the very ones that used to haul the pottery to market every Thursday morning. But that was not Mordkhe-Mendl’s Borekh driving, but a Gentile. The wagon wasn’t loaded with pottery, but crammed with red, puffy bedding. From amid the quilts, a table stuck its four legs skyward, but not one of those reddishbrown tables which stood in the white palace. This one was white and rough-hewn. A bucket dangled between the wheels of the wagon. On top of the bedding sat Reyzl, swaying from side to side, as if she were dreaming. She was holding a bunch of flowers in her hands.
The wagon creaked slowly forward. Borekh, Reyzl’s brother, was walking behind it, as if—forgive the comparison—following a hearse. A younger brother and sister were sitting on the wagon, facing the Wyszufka estate. There were no others to be seen, including Mordkhe-Mendl.
The wind kept tearing through the poplar trees. On the far side of the palace, the flock of ravens was returning from its flight. The black birds circled over the horse and wagon, cawing with abandon. What was the meaning of all this? Was the family moving from the estate?
I stood on one spot, but no one saw me. The cow stared at me through big, tear-filled eyes. Aunt Khane looked at me without seeming to recognize me. Reyzl, flowers in hand, looked down from the top of the bedding, but she didn’t recognize me, either.
“Good morning, Auntie!” I shouted, and made straight for the cow.
Suddenly roused, Aunt Khane looked up and said, “Mendl?”
“Yes, it’s me. Good morning!”
“A good morning, a good year. Where are you going in this wind?”
“To the Wyszufka.”
“No point going there anymore,” Aunt Khane shook her head and slowly shut her eyes.
Her dark face sent a chill down my spine. It seemed as though it was not Aunt Khane talking but the cow, shaking its foolish head.
“It’s all over! No more Wyszufka,” Aunt Khane said, giving the cow a tug with the rope.
The cow shambled on, leaving behind her souvenirs on the road. She mooed and turned her head back toward the white palace and the stable that both had to be left behind.
The horse, plodding on his spindly legs, couldn’t have cared less. He pulled the wagon willingly toward town. He probably thought that today was Thursday and he was hauling goods to the market. But the flock of ravens wouldn’t move on and kept circling over the hapless procession below, crying into the gray expanse, just like that old, bent crone, leaning on her knobby stick.
“The Wyszufka estate doesn’t have a Jewish owner any more. It’s all over!”