Thus the dream of a white palace, beautiful flowers, and gold treasure drifted away.
Just as no one knew how Mordkhe-Mendl had acquired the estate, so no one had a clue as to how he had lost it. The talk in town was that the Wyszufka property had never really belonged to him, not a single clump of clay. It was said that there had been violence and swindling, that Mordkhe-Mendl had fooled Fleischer into giving him promissory notes and that Fleischer had no idea what was going on. Only after Mordkhe- Mendl had settled into the estate, and had put up the chimney and began hauling pots to the market, did Fleischer catch on that he’d been taken.
So began a whole new chapter of lawsuits and lawyers. It cost Fleischer thousands, as well as untold effort, but at last he prevailed, procuring a legal document ordering Mordkhe-Mendl and his entire family off the Wyszufka estate.
The upshot was that Aunt Khane and her children, along with the cow, the sole remnant of the Wyszufka glories, moved back once again into a tumbledown shack with a fresh earthen floor.
There were no tapestries on the walls, only streaks of blue lime. No tall, white windows, only four tiny ones with smudged panes. No fancy beds with gold-painted ornamentation, only simple peasant cots without headrests that had been hastily purchased at the Skarszew fair.
Mordkhe-Mendl himself was no longer to be seen in town. The High Holidays came, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Days of Awe, a time of great solemnity, when every Jewish home was caught up in spiritual self-examination. Not even then did Mordkhe-Mendl show up in the synagogue.
Day and night, he stood at the smudged windows of the flimsy shack, never taking his eyes off the road that led to the Wyszufka estate. His unkempt beard had turned completely gray, his eyes reddened. His teeth, once so strong and white, now began to crumble.
The final blast of the ram’s horn sounded, bringing the Days of Awe to an end. The other festivals followed in succession, Sukkoth, the Feast of Tabernacles, and Simhath Torah, the Rejoicing of the Law. But Mordkhe-Mendl didn’t budge from the windows, watching the wagons that were coming from and going to the Wyszufka estate. They were carrying pottery and bricks out and bring building materials in. There was a lot of construction going on there, all without Mordkhe-Mendl.
He was standing at the windows one morning, not yet having said the morning prayers. His son Borekh had already left for town, looking to earn a few gilders. The younger children were still asleep, Aunt Khane had gone outside to milk the cow.
No one knew quite how it happened, but all of a sudden Mordkhe-Mendl’s hands hit the windowpanes, smashing the glass and leaving his hands dripping with blood. His daughter Reyzl was, at the time, hunched over a large earthenware bowl, peeling potatoes. On hearing the glass shatter, she dropped the knife and the potato and leaped up.
“Father! What are you doing?” she cried.
At that moment, Mordkhe-Mendl threw back his head, like a slaughtered beast. He held up his blood-splattered hands, turned them this way and that, swayed like a felled tree still teetering on its trunk, and then dropped full length to the ground. In the course of the fall, his head struck the edge of the table and a black stream of blood gushed from his nostrils.
Aunt Khane was in the midst of milking the lone, meager cow when Reyzl had called out, “Mama, come help!” She didn’t know if that’s what startled the cow, or whether it had sensed some danger on its own. At any rate, when Mordkhe-Mendl’s head unfortunately struck the table, the cow swished its tail right across Aunt Khane’s face. That, Aunt Khane later remarked, was her punishment for leaving her husband alone, unattended.
One of Aunt Khane’s eyes filled with blood. Her face was splattered with mud. The little milk pail overturned, spilling its contents. Only then did she jump up from her stool and begin to run, her heart missing a beat, knowing only that she must somehow save herself.
She saw Reyzl standing at the open door, her cry still frozen on her round mouth. Did Reyzl—God forbid!—hurt herself?
“Oh, woe is me! Reyzl! Reyzl!”
But Reyzl was unable to say a word. She merely pointed into the house. Aunt Khane ran inside. The room was dark. Could the sun have set already? What was happening? Why were the children screaming at the top of their lungs? She looked around and caught sight of her Mordkhe-Mendl sprawled on the floor, his head oddly propped against a leg of the table.
“Mordkhe-Mendl! Mordkhe-Mendl!” She began shaking him by the shoulder.
But at the first touch, Mordkhe-Mendl’s head drooped to one side and slid to the earthen floor. Only then did Aunt Khane see all the blood on his face, his hands, his beard.
She began fanning herself, as if trying to get some air, but her knees buckled under her. Then Aunt Khane, mud-splattered and swollen-eyed, collapsed right on top of her husband, letting out a piercing wail.
But what could be done for poor Mordkhe-Mendl now, lying there like a lump of clay, like a shard from one of his own shattered pots?
People in town said that a vein had burst inside his head. They took it amiss that a pauper like Mordkhe-Mendl should have had such aspirations, of wanting to be an estate-owner, no less. These were the foolish words of those who were jealous of him, who were his enemies. But all this talk saddened Father and darkened his face with grief.
After his brother-in-law’s merciless death, Father’s head sagged closer to his chest. Mother went around for some time with cloths soaked in horseradish, pressed to her forehead. There was an uneasy feeling in the house. Ite had already returned to Warsaw. Aunt Khane no longer dropped in, neither did her children.
Father was silent for days and weeks on end. His dreamy eyes seemed to have grown more bleary. Mother could no longer conceal her grief.
“Such an educated man!” she moaned more than once. “Such a precious soul! All he asked for was an endorsement. What! If you sign an endorsement for a brother-in-law, the world collapses?”
Father was eating his supper. He chewed slowly, without taking any pleasure in the food, not seeming to taste anything. Mother kept on talking quietly, as if to herself, but Father heard every word. He raised his head from the plate, displaying the deep, permanent furrows between his eyes that looked like worms. He swept his eyes across the table, as though searching for something but unable to find it. He didn’t say a word, only let the spoon drop from his hand onto the plate.
“Leyzer!” Mother got up abruptly from the table. “Stop it! Why aren’t you eating? What did I say?”
But Father never finished his supper that night. The chickpeas and dumplings grew cold on the plate. Mother began to cry. Father raced through the Grace after Meals, staring heavily out the black windowpanes.
No one talked about Mordkhe-Mendl anymore. The days were becoming sallow, consumptive-looking. The pigeons on the opposite rooftop stayed hidden in their shelter. At night it always rained. A gutter outside the house dripped incessantly, boring into our brains. In the middle of the night a haunting, drawn-out yawn sliced through the darkness, like a distant train whistle. It was Mother. She couldn’t sleep and lay awake in bed, thinking.
During the day she still walked around with the horseradish cloths pressed to her forehead. She didn’t attend to the fire, she didn’t make up the beds. What with no one dropping in and Father off somewhere in his distant villages, what reason did she have to light a fire or make up the beds?
So the house stayed cold. There was nobody rooming in the kitchen anymore and the bed there stood empty and desolate. The walls gave off a sickly green air of melancholy. The clock ticked away too loudly. The sun never reached the windows, as though it were angry with us.
Mother began to complain.
“What sort of place is this? Why, it’s worse than a cellar. Had I known it would be like this, I would never have set foot inside. I can’t sleep at night. I imagine the door opening at any moment and Mordkhe-Mendl walking in, with his black silken beard and mouthful of beautiful teeth. Such a doer, so educated!”
Mother was talking to herself. Father wasn’t home. She no longer talked in that manner to Father, but instead poured out her bitter, heavy heart to me.
I felt that life was becoming too much for Mother. She received no letters from her children. She had no idea what happened with Tsipele’s marriage plans. She couldn’t go to Warsaw. She couldn’t tear herself away from here. Mordkhe-Mendl had been taken from the world so unexpectedly. The house was drafty. And to top it all, everything reeked from the stench of the pigs.
Our landlord, a Gentile known as Little Sikorsky, had gone into partnership with a butcher and opened a store selling pork, just outside our door. The stench was nauseating, settling sickeningly into our throats. I was frightened by the slabs of white, cold lard hanging in the store’s window, by the long ropes of dried pig intestines, by the signboard that displayed an axe with an ox’s head. Most of all, I was terrified of the bulldog with the murderous face and pendulous jowls, who sat in front of the store, sniffing at the kapotes of passing Jews, baring his teeth, and guarding the dead hunks of pork within.
We had to get away from there. But how? The days were growing grayer and shorter. At this season, where was one to move? People would think us crazy, moving every Monday and Thursday …
But once Mother took a dislike to a place, you could rest assured that we would be moving before long. Mother began to look around, to make inquiries. No one at home had the least inkling, not even I. I should have guessed, however, that something was afoot from the special way she kept looking at the walls and measuring the beds with a length of string. All this was proof that before long a moving wagon would be pulling up outside our door. And that’s exactly what happened.
One gray smoky morning, shortly after Father went out, Menashe Chatterbox drove up with his little white horse and began pushing the wardrobe and the beds toward the door. He had a helper, a noisy fellow wearing his cap with the brim turned to the back. Mother told me to stay in the house and out of the way. Only she was allowed to give the movers a hand. Piece by piece, our few sticks of furniture were loaded onto the cart, which then took us along the promenade and behind the prison, where Mother had rented a new dwelling.
Along the way, old Jews, leaning on their canes, stopped to gape at us, surprised that someone should have decided to move on such a bleak day. Women tending shops, dressed in warm, quilted coats, stepped outside their establishments, shrugging their shoulders and shouting to each other, “She must be a bit crazy, moving on a day like this!”
Menashe’s wagon, tipping to one side, was creaking along as though it were beneath its dignity for it to be carrying such a sorry collection of household belongings on so dreary a day.
But we got to our destination safely. No more cold walls, no more grated horseradish on Mother’s forehead.
The lane that Menashe Chatterbox turned into was narrow and quiet. It was a dead-end street, closed off by a high wooden fence, on whose other side lindens and chestnut trees were visible. There were no other houses on the lane. Along one side rose the yellow-brick wall of the prison. On the other side stood an old, dilapidated hut, a haven for swallows and cats. The prison itself was high and long. Above its rows of small, closely spaced windows, covered with bars, were tin eaves, hanging like knapsacks on soldiers’ backs.
Behind the long, yellow wall, a soldier with a rifle paced back and forth, as regularly as a swinging pendulum. It was forbidden to walk past him or to stop and look at him. The soldier himself looked at no one but kept his eyes fixed on the tin eaves above the barred windows and the nearby hut, also yellow, with blackened windows, where nobody was ever seen going in or coming out.
A single stone step, with tufts of grass around the sides, led to the hut’s entrance, a peeling, brown door without a handle. A dark, gaping hole, covered with a cobweb, was evidence that it must be cold and gloomy inside and draped with more cobwebs.
People told us that a Russian captain had once lived in the hut. He was supposed to have had a young wife, with black eyes and blond hair, who fell in love with a Polish nobleman and ran off with him. The captain was so distraught he hanged himself in this very hut. To this day, no one knew for sure whether or not his corpse had been removed and buried.
None of this scared Mother nor did it stop her from renting in the neighboring building. A low, open gate of whitewashed pickets led into a spacious courtyard, on one side of which stood a long building with many deep-set windows. Behind some of these windows lay our new dwelling.
It was nice inside and bright, with a small kitchen, but no different from any of our other kitchens. However, the main room was so big that you could ride around in it in a rubber-wheeled coach. The room was square, with a high ceiling and two large windows with cleanscrubbed panes looking out onto a garden. To me it looked just like those “parlors” that had belonged to Mordkhe-Mendl in the days of the Wyszufka estate.
Everything here was fresh and new. The floor, like in our old place, was also painted red. Mother said that this was done especially for her at extra cost, and that no other houses in the building had such a red floor.
It was only too bad that we had moved so late in the fall, for the trees outside the clean-scrubbed panes were already bare. A few still bore traces of the quick lime with which they had been smeared in the spring. The fruit trees were wrapped in straw, like warm shawls.
By now the nights were quite chilly. In the mornings the windowpanes were misted over. Winter was coming, but then winter wouldn’t last forever. Summer was bound to follow, when we could throw open the windows, when the trees that were now bare would blossom.
I knew that the summer in this part of town was more beautiful than anywhere else, even more than in the new public park, where boys in long kapotes were not allowed in. That’s why I thought that it was clever of Mother to have moved us here. The courtyard itself was something special. You could drive into it with a carriage or ride in on horseback. You could put in three more tenants and there would still be plenty of space. In addition, there was a garden at one end of the courtyard, set off by a high, narrow picket fence. It was a garden as well as an orchard, with flowers, cherry trees, and currant bushes.
The owner of the property, a gray-haired Gentile lady who lived on Lublin Street, employed a man just to look after the garden. He was old and bent, like a twisted shrub. He walked about with a big pair of shears and a tin watering can, sprinkling and pruning, planting and hoeing. Like the Wyszufka gardener, he too said that the flowers were his grandchildren … Too bad that Mordkhe-Mendl’s Reyzl wasn’t here. She would have known the names of all the flowers, and would have taken such pleasure in them after her exile from the Wyszufka estate.
My new friend Yankl, who lived off the same courtyard, told me that in summer people slept outside, next to the picket fence of the garden. Everybody did so, even the Polish chief prison guard, along with his Russian wife and their young, blond daughter, little Janina.
Yankl and I became friends from the very first day Mother and I moved in. He lent a hand unloading the wagon and exchanged words with Menashe Chatterbox as if they were peers. Yankl was my age, only shorter and leaner, with a face full of freckles. They were sprinkled all over his eyelids, his nose, and even his lips. He was speckled with them like a brown-crusted roll with caraway seeds.
Yankl told me that he’d already been to Warsaw. There he had gone on a boat which passed under a bridge made not of wood but of iron and steel, topped by a latticework of iron, crisscrossed like a Scottish tartan. In Warsaw, he said, he knew someone who owned his own carousel and maybe a hundred street organs, as well as any number of parrots, two white bears, and a collection of extraordinarily colored birds, the likes of which the world had never seen. The owner, Yankl continued, was a Jew. He wore a cap with a shiny leather brim and prayed every day.
Yankl said he wanted to stay on in Warsaw with the carousel-owner, who was prepared to provide him with a street organ, along with two parrots and a white mouse, to go around to the courtyards doing magic tricks. But his father, Yarme the coachman, wouldn’t let him stay. He beat Yankl with a leather belt, tied him up with a rope, and dragged him back home.
It was easy to believe that Yankl’s father was capable of such behavior. He had a pair of shoulders that could shore up a horse and wagon. When Yankl’s father spoke, his voice didn’t seem to issue from his mouth but from a bellows. In fact, it wasn’t a regular voice at all, but more like a growl. The unearthly sound hovered over his large blond whiskers and then disappeared into his matted, yellow beard.
Yankl’s father owned only a single pair of horses. He had had them for years. They were, he would say, the apples of his eye. He talked to them as he would to people, and he worried over them more than he did over his own wife and children.
“The chestnut horse,” he would say, “may he be protected from the evil eye, ate a little more today.” But when he looked at the second horse, a white mare, his yellow beard would break into a smile. “What she needs,” he would say, winking his big, round eyes at his wife, “she should live and be well, what she needs …” And then his voice would trail off.
The white mare was really exceptional, a veritable whirlwind. She had a long, gray tail, tinged with dirty yellow, somewhat sparse, since half of the hair had fallen out. This was clear evidence that she was no longer a young filly. Nevertheless, she had an attractive, long chin and clever, smiling eyes.
Yarme couldn’t stop singing her praises. She seemed possessed by an inextinguishable fire. She couldn’t stay still in one place, as she was constantly kicking and breaking her horseshoes. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would stand up in the stable on her hind legs and begin whinnying uncontrollably, like she had lost her mind.
Next to her in the stable stood Yarme the coachman’s second breadwinner, the chestnut stallion. He was an old horse, full of years and one who, apparently, had already had his fill, as well, of mares. He worked harder than any two younger horses. He had stamina. He could withstand both heat and cold, and could go without eating so long as he was left in peace to stare into space and think. The wild whinnying of his excitable neighbor didn’t bother him in the least, nor did he respond when the white mare laid her long, wet, attractive chin on his old neck and rubbed it gently, whinnying straight into his lost-in-thought face. He simply stood there, as if it had nothing to do with him.
Occasionally, Yarme would grab his whip and strike the chestnut stallion angrily on the legs.
“What sort of a male are you?” he’d growl. “Why do you stand there like a dummy! God in heaven!”
But the stallion took the beating in stride, lost in his thoughts. He remained unmoved, reacting to neither the whipping nor the mare’s yearning cries.
This left Yarme with no other choice than to turn to strangers for help. There was actually someone who could provide the needed service, way out on St. Mary’s Street, an old shriveled-up Gentile, lame in one foot and blind in one eye. He owned a stallion that did nothing but eat and drink and couple with strange horses of the female sex.
My friend Yankl told me that, on that very day, the old Gentile was going to bring his stallion over, and that if I stayed, there would be something worth seeing.
That was on a Sabbath, a particularly windy day. Mother had planned to visit Aunt Miriam but got so absorbed in the book of stories she was reading that she couldn’t tear herself away. Father was asleep under the featherbed, which he had pulled over his head. I had already said the afternoon prayers and was just sitting around, waiting for Yankl to give me the signal to come outside.
I could hear the trees rustling ominously outside the windows. The loose chain of a shutter never stopped banging against the wall. The sky was tinted a yellowish gray and it had just begun to snow.
However, none of that deterred the old Gentile, who showed up as expected with his horse in tow. Yarme the coachman had by then gotten up from his own Sabbath nap and had done with the afternoon prayers. He stepped out into the courtyard in a checked overcoat and gave the visiting stallion a slap on the flank, so hard that the horse gave a start and his legs began to quiver restlessly. Suddenly, there was a whinnying sound from inside the stable. The black, pampered stallion raised his neck arrogantly and, ears trembling, responded with his own thick, masculine whinnies.
Yankl and I had sneaked into the stable a short while earlier, hiding in a corner. The warm stench of horse manure filled the air. It was dark but, if you strained your eyes, you could see everything.
The white mare whinnied once more, looked around with her clever, laughing eyes, resting them on us for a while, as if she wanted something from us.
Just then, the old Gentile, limping on one foot, led in his merry bachelor of a stallion. The white mare no longer whinnied but let out a highpitched shriek. She started panting, reared her forelegs, and then began stamping on a board that lay nearby, all the while tugging frantically at her tether.
The black stallion wasn’t still, either. He tossed his head, releasing a white cloud of steam from his nostrils. I moved closer to Yankl, afraid that the stallion might jump on us and grind us to bits. But Yankl stared straight ahead, eyes all but popping out of his head. He neither heard nor saw me, and I felt him trembling all over.
It was getting hot in the stable. Both horses neighed at one and the same time, as if enjoying a good laugh. The old Gentile released his stallion. The white mare stretched herself out, becoming longer and longer. The stallion reared up on his hind legs and fell onto his victim, sinking his teeth into her neck. The stable filled with the noise of chains rattling and boards splitting under the piles of manure and the cribs of hay. Steam rose from the hides of the two horses, who were both wheezing, as if unable to catch their breath.
Something must have happened to me. My head began to spin. I couldn’t feel my heart beating. My hands grew numb and heavy. Did Yankl take me outside, or what? I sat for a long time in the courtyard, the wind blowing, completely unaware of what went on later in the stable.
I didn’t run into Yankl for several days thereafter. After the encounter with the stallion, the mare stopped whinnying. For a while she also stopped kicking and breaking her horseshoes. But when she started acting up again and the old Gentile returned with his stallion, I no longer had any desire to go into the stable.
It was with these two horses, the white mare and the sorry chestnut, that Yarme made trips to Warsaw twice a week. There, in the middle of the courtyard, stood Yarme’s omnibus, which these two breadwinners pulled, packed with passengers.
The omnibus was big and tall, like Yarme the coachman himself. Its roof, pieced together from old scraps of tin, hung down over the sides in two curved arcs. On the left side, in the middle, the tin covering came to an abrupt halt, so as not to interfere with the door that had been hacked out there, also a window that looked out onto the world. The gloomy window, cracked from the wind and the rain, was stuffed with rags and nailed up with boards.
Yarme the coachman claimed that, from that window, he saw the whole world—haystacks, peasant’s huts, meadows, wooden bridges spanning narrow creeks. He saw small habitations with even smaller Jews, fires burning in villages, crosses on churches, cemeteries, Jewish and Christian.
Friday nights, both summer and winter, one hour before it was time to light the Sabbath candles, Yarme returned home from Warsaw. Filthy and gray with dust, like his two horses, he drove into the middle of the courtyard and cast off his weeklong tossing about in strange inns and eating off of strange plates.
After every trip, Yarme the coachman looked thinner and older. He returned with eyes clouded from lack of sleep. The two horses came back with collapsed ribs.
Nevertheless, though sweaty and sore in every limb, he leaped from his carriage, threw off his hairy, heavy coat, and shouted into the courtyard, “Yankl, where are you? Nu, let’s hurry up. Don’t let the setting sun catch you. Unhitch the horses! Water them! Throw in some fodder! Move, you little bastard!”
Alongside Yankl, there appeared in the courtyard Yarme the coachman’s wife, a woman of about forty, round and plump. All washed and combed in honor of the Sabbath, she greeted her husband with a radiant smile.
“Welcome home, Yarme. Why are you so late today?”
“Who says I’m late?”
“You’re later today than last week, I think.”
“Think what you want, but I’m not any later.”
She helped him drag from the omnibus the few provisions he had brought back from Warsaw, some figs and dates, and a long, hard sausage in a white, moldy casing. She crawled into the omnibus in all her freshly scrubbed girth, warm and clean. Yarme forgot that he was hungry, that it was almost time to light the Sabbath candles, and that he hadn’t even washed up yet. He snuggled up to her and smiled broadly.
“How are you, Golde?”
“Thanks for asking. And how are you?”
“So-so.”
“Did you have a good trip?”
“So-so … Only the mare should go to hell.”
“What’s wrong now?”
“She’s in heat. She’s making my life miserable!”
“Like all females …” Her ample flesh shook with laughter.
“Ha, ha,” Yarme laughed back and, just like that, laid his large hand on her well-filled blouse.
“You know, you’re really some piece …”
“Stop it, you’re crazy.” She moved away a little. “Go in and wash up.”
Yankl—who, I learned, was Yarme the coachman’s son by his first wife—unhitched the horses, watered them, and threw down some hay. In the course of all this, he told me that tonight his father and Golde, whom he called his aunt, would sleep in the same bed, as they did every Friday night.
I helped Yankl wash the omnibus. He showed me how to do it, and he said he would also teach me how to be a coachman. Once I’d learned, we would save up some money and buy a horse and an omnibus. We’d become coachmen ourselves and drive passengers to Warsaw. In Warsaw, he said, he’d show me the boat he’d gone on and also introduce me to the owner of the carousel and the white bears.
Meanwhile, I poured pail after pail of water over the mud-spattered wheels, and Yankl wiped off the spokes with big bunches of straw. I climbed onto the roof and polished the tin patches until they sparkled. Then Yankl and I crawled into the omnibus and lay down on the bunched up straw, still reeking from the sweat of overheated passengers, Jews and Gentiles. Yankl again talked about his aunt who would be sleeping in the same bed tonight with his father, and about faraway, beautiful Warsaw.
As for how things were going in our new place, to tell the truth, Father was angry with Mother, not because of the dwelling itself, but because he’d known nothing at all about her intention of moving out of the old one.
When he came home that night to the old place, at his usual time, he saw that the windows were dark and the door was locked. “Frimet! Frimet!” he called out. But Frimet didn’t open the door. That didn’t bother him, nor was he surprised. It often happened that Mother wasn’t home when he knocked on the door.
However, that night, as he kept knocking, a neighboring door opened and an old woman stuck her head out.
“Pan kupiec?”
“Yes, that’s me. Maybe you know, Pani Marcinowa, where my wife disappeared to?”
“She moved out.”
“What?”
“She moved out early this morning.”
“What? A pox on my enemies!”
“She moved to a place behind the prison.”
“What’s all this about? Behind the prison?”
“How should I know? She asked me to tell you that that’s where the new place is, where Yarme the coachman lives.”
Father later related the incident to all the family, still fuming and filled with reproach. He walked into the new dwelling, barely able to contain his fury.
He arrived hungry, with the chill of the fields across which he had trudged all day still clinging to his beard and whiskers. By then all the furniture had been put into place with the help of Menashe Chatterbox and Yarme the coachman’s Yankl. I had also lent a hand, shoving a log into place in the kitchen, even breaking the glass of the lamp, until everything was finally set up.
When Father came in, Mother rushed toward him, all disheveled, her sleeves rolled up.
“Nu, Leyzer, what do you say, hah? Take a look around. It’s a palace.”
“But why all of a sudden?”
“I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I was choking there.”
“But you could have said something.”
“I didn’t know myself, and besides, maybe you wouldn’t have wanted to move. Anyway, it’s all over and done with. It should be lucky for us!”
Mother spoke quickly, bustling around Father like a guilty person. Father remained standing by the door, the tip of his tongue sticking out of a corner of his mouth. He slid the tip slowly to the other corner, a sign that maybe he didn’t think the change was such a bad idea after all. But still, why couldn’t she have waited for him?
“Who helped set up all the furniture?”
“Everything’s already set up.”
“The beds, too?”
“You can see for yourself.”
“Of course, I see. And nothing was broken?”
“God forbid.”
“And who put the wardrobe together?”
“The same one.”
“Who?”
“Menashe Chatterbox.”
“Oh, him … But he could have broken the wardrobe.”
“But he didn’t, as you can see. Nu, take off your work clothes and wash up. I’ve cooked some liver for you.”
But Father was in no hurry to undress. First he checked the beds, sitting himself down on their edges. Then he fussed over the wardrobe. He opened and shut the doors, shook his head, crinkled his nose, and tried the doors again.
“Why are they so hard to open? What’s creaking? When I put it together, the doors never creak.”
“You’ll fix them tomorrow, God willing. Now go wash up. Go …”
A large, round loaf of bread lay on the table. It was Father’s favorite, his sinful indulgence, you might say. It came from Shmuel-Shaye’s bakery and was sprinkled with caraway seeds and dusted with flour.
Father no longer kept looking for faults. He cut the bread into small squares and dunked them into the brown liver gravy, though he never took his eyes off the wardrobe that Menashe Chatterbox had put together without his approval.