Everybody seemed pleased with the new quarters, Mother, Father, and, especially, I. Really, was there another place as dry and warm as this?
When summer comes, said Yankl, we won’t know what to do with all the apples and pears, the cherries and currants that grew there. My friend Yankl … who else could tell such wonderful stories about Warsaw? And where else did I have as good a friend as Yankl?
Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before Mother began crinkling her nose. Living behind the prison was somehow not to her liking. She didn’t mean the dwelling itself, God forbid. On the contrary. The place was dry and bright, and she was on good terms with all the neighbors, with Yarme the coachman’s wife, with Itele the flour-seller, as well as with the chief prison guard’s family. What irked her was the approach to the house, the narrow lane behind the prison. She didn’t mind it so much during the day, but once it turned dark, Mother said, she was overcome by a “spooky feeling” that she couldn’t shake off. She never quite explained why nightfall brought on the “spooky feeling,” but I could well imagine.
Yankl had already told me the story of the Russian captain, but it wasn’t the supernatural part that scared me, so much as the story itself. Between the yellow wall of the prison and the abandoned hut where the Russian captain had hanged himself, when night fell, it cast a darkness so deep, you could touch it. In no other street in town, not even in the lane behind the shul, was it as dark as this. To me it seemed that the darkness emanated from the sentry house, the wooden shack which by day served as a place for prison guards to take a break, but at night was a gathering spot for demons.
After dark, the sentry house stood completely untended, for it was then that all the guards went on duty inside the prison. That was when the sounds began and you could hear hoarse groans coming from inside the shack. Sometimes there was loud laughter, and occasionally, the unmistakable gasping of stifled moans.
At first, just after we moved in, I thought that all the moaning and groaning came from behind the crooked bars of the prison windows. It was my understanding that in prison, where the inmates were shackled in chains, at night they were whipped and made to undergo all kinds of torture. Surely such murderers as Sczepka and Sherman, who had slaughtered entire Jewish families and set fire to a dozen manor houses, wouldn’t just be locked up without having to suffer additional, cruel punishment. Later I learned that this wasn’t the case. If there was any torture, we didn’t hear about it.
All the moaning and groaning disturbing the darkness did indeed come from the wooden shack. My friend Yankl explained it all.
“That’s where that whore, Big Yuzhke, has set herself up in business,” he told me in hushed tones, and elaborated. “Her face is pockmarked and all her hair’s cropped short, like those Gentile guys who haul sand.”
The soldiers knew full well where to find Big Yuzhke. They came and they went. They cracked sunflower seeds, spat the shells into the sentry house and at Big Yuzhke, and haggled with her over her price. She herself sat on the threshold of the shack, like a hen on her warmed eggs. She cracked sunflower seeds along with the soldiers, spat the shells back into their Russian faces, and asked, “How much can you pay me, my friend?”
The friend in question must have mentioned too low a figure, for Big Yuzhke hoisted herself up and, in her hoarse, grating voice, shouted, “Go to your own mother, you goddam cheapskate. Go back to pig land!”
It was dark. Whatever took place there later, no one could see. Suddenly, all the tumult came to a halt. Now, new noises took over, sounds of heavy breathing, wheezing, sniffling. The whole lane hummed with the noises. The broken-down house of the betrayed captain, the linden trees, the barred prison windows—all seemed to be breathing heavily, sweating, as if in the throes of a terrible dread.
Woe to the poor soul who had reason to be passing through the lane at that hour. Curses and dirty talk, like the sharp barking of strong dogs, rang out from the cobblestones underfoot. From time to time, a stone hit the opposite fence, occasionally striking the head of a passerby.
“Go to hell!” Yuzhke’s hoarse voice cut through the air like a blunt saw.
A booming Russian voice roared back, “Go to hell yourself! You and your mother!”
We stopped going out at night to avoid the lane. We sat in the dark, rather than run out to the store for a quart of kerosene.
In the morning the sentry house was littered with the shells of sunflower seeds, scraps of stale sausage, and empty whiskey bottles. If it happened to have snowed during the night, the nearby ground bore the imprints of bodies that had rolled around in the fresh snow.
Yankl ran out early every morning to take a look. He was searching for something in the trampled snow. He had a dead expression on his face, with spittle running down his chin.
On such mornings, Yankl scared me. I couldn’t bear to look at his dead face. It seemed to me, too, that he smelled bad.
One day Yankl told me that the day before he had talked with Big Yuzhke. She had offered him some sunflower seeds, patted him under the chin, and said that if he brought her a gilder, she’d take him inside. Now his plan was to save up enough money, sneak out of bed one night, and go to visit Yuzhke in the wooden shack.
I didn’t understand him clearly.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Aren’t you scared?”
“What’s there to be scared of?”
“I don’t know, the soldiers … Big Yuzhke …”
“You don’t know anything,” he said with a contemptuous flick of his wrist that made me feel completely inferior. Really, who was I compared to Yankl? He was acting like a grown-up. And I? After all, didn’t I run away from Hodl? Many times, I had wanted to tell him the whole story, but now that he’d spoke with Big Yuzhke, I was sure he’d make fun of me.
It was no wonder, then, that Mother had taken a dislike to the nice, bright dwelling. Father couldn’t care less. He was told about the goingson in the guard house, about Big Yuzhke and the soldiers. But he never saw it for himself. Whenever he happened to pass through the lane at night, the revelers would call out to him from inside the shack, but the voices never reached his deaf ears.
That was one reason why Father didn’t mind the new place. The second reason was that now Mother was always at home. She wasn’t forever running off to Aunt Miriam’s or Grandma Rokhl’s. Father didn’t have to warm up for himself the scraps of leftover food. He didn’t have to sit alone at the table, like in the former residences, or stare at the four bare walls and the sad little flame of the kerosene lamp.
In the old places, Father had hardly ever laughed. He was always complaining to Mother about being left alone, about having to come home to a cold house. He once told her that it drove him crazy when she wasn’t home.
Mother, however, was afraid to go out at night by herself, to venture forth from the house into the lane. Aunt Miriam had already sent someone over to find out why Mother had made herself scarce. Even Grandma Rokhl had taken the trouble to come by in person to see what was going on. Mother then told her tearfully that she had made a mistake about the new place, that the real prison wasn’t outside, over there behind the house, but right here, inside the house. She spoke in whispers to Grandma, she winked in my direction. She also whispered a lot to Father, although he couldn’t see anything wrong.
“I don’t know what you want,” he said. “What do we need a better place for?”
“What’s so great about this one?”
“It’s warm, it’s dry. What else do you want?”
“I’m telling you, Leyzer, we have to get out of here. It’s a coop, a jail.”
“But you’re the one who found it. Who else is to blame? Who?”
“Had I know it would be like this …”
“You never seem to know …”
Mother didn’t answer. She pursed her lips and turned sullen.
Father sleepily murmured the after-meal blessings. He was tired from the long day’s work. The beds were turned down. He stopped in the middle of his recitation. His head drooped to a side. He gave a start and picked up where he’d left off, then nodded off again.
It was still early in the evening. The hands of the clock showed eight.
At other times, this would have been the hour for Mother to go out to visit Aunt Miriam, when the neighbors gathered to chat and the children played their games. Yitskhok the teacher, who tutored the sons of the rich, was often a visitor. It was homey at Aunt Miriam’s, bright and warm. But between Mother and the delights at Aunt Miriam’s lay a barrier, the dark, accursed lane. It was like a wall, a partition separating one world from the other.
Father was dozing, but mother wasn’t one to turn in with the chickens. She threw a shawl over her shoulders and went over to the chief prison guard’s place, just one door down.
The guard, a Pole who liked to speak Russian, had yellow whiskers and a face lined with creases. He was no yokel. He’d been around in the world and had many stories to relate. A talkative sort, he liked to reminisce about the Russian rebellion and the Turkish war. But most of all, he liked to talk about the murderer Sczepka, who was a prisoner in the jail, shackled in irons.
“They’ve shaved half of Sczepka’s head in prison,” he said, “and one side of his whiskers. He’s so tall that he wouldn’t fit through the door of this room. He used to be a stone-cutter, a tombstone carver of some kind. He used to do jobs at the cemetery, he knew how to carve birds in flight. No one knows what happened exactly, but somehow he teamed up with one of those zhidkes, that Jew Sherman. And from that time on, he became a murderer.”
Sherman was also confined in the same prison. The jailers slashed off half his yellow beard, shaved his head and, like his companion, half of his mustache. Both criminals were to be deported to Siberia come summer, to serve out their sentences of hard labor. Over there, in Siberia, the guard knew for sure, both men would be chained to wheelbarrows. They would eat with the wheelbarrows, sleep with the wheelbarrows, sit down with the wheelbarrows, walk with the wheelbarrows, and, when they died, be buried with the wheelbarrows.
The guard also told us that Sczepka had a wife and two children. The children, he said, had blue eyes and flaxen hair. Whenever his wife and children came to visit him at the prison, Sczepka would burst into tears.
I could have listened to the chief prison guard all day and all night. He had a colorful way of describing things, lingering over every detail. Mother also knew how to tell a story, but she couldn’t compare to the guard. Besides, in the guard’s house, it was warmer than our place, and homier too. There were flower pots on the window sills, and on the wall above the double bed hung a dark picture of the Holy Mother.
Sitting on the other side of the room was the guard’s wife, a tall, blond woman, her hair coiled in thick braids around her entire head. She always looked freshly washed and combed. She smelled of soap and of starched laundry.
She herself was Russian, from a remote district, but she had been living here in Poland for a long time. She had learned Polish and spoke it with a drawl, in incomplete sentences. She, too, liked to tell stories, especially about her native village, somewhere on the banks of the Don River. The river, she said, was bluer than the sky, bluer than the bluest eyes. There was a church nearby with a small dome and gold crosses. The church was also blue. It had a young priest, with a black beard, who had wanted to make her his wife. Had she married him, she would have been the wife of a priest, with everybody paying her their respects. But that’s not what she wanted. The Polish soldier serving in the Russian army, the present chief prison guard, suited her better. She fell in love with him and chose him over the priest.
There were also Jews where she came from, she said, but they were altogether different. They didn’t wear long kapotes, had no sidelocks, and didn’t speak Yiddish.
There was no end to the stories the guard and his wife could tell, but it was getting late. The clock kept marking the passing of the hours. Our empty stomachs began to growl. When the clock struck twelve, we knew it was time to leave.
Back home, the wick of the lamp had burned down almost to the end. Bits of shadows, like pieces of shredded sacks, climbed up the wall. Father’s head rested on one edge of the table. He was fast asleep, worn out from the day’s labors.
The house was dark and dreary. To me it seemed as if the room had emptied out, to make space for Father so that he could better be seen, so that he could sleep with greater ease.
Mother sighed, deeply. “Ah, how sad, how sad!”
Her voice remained hanging in the air above Father’s sleeping head, like a demand for money owed.