I forgot to mention that, in addition to the little ledges and the cubbies, and in addition to the green pump, our courtyard also contained a small, side building that had two windows and a peeling door without a handle.
The windowpanes were black with grime. It was said that a Jew, a watchmaker, had once lived there. He had spent his life peering through a magnifying glass and, while he was at it, every year presented his wife with a male child. But none of those infants had managed to survive for very long. It was said that a heavenly decree had ordained that on the night-watch before the circumcision, the newborn babe should perish. No one knew whether it had been devoured by a black cat or had choked to death between its mother’s breasts. Suffice it to say that a wonder-working rabbi told the watchmaker to move out of the building, because at one time it had served as a brothel.
The watchmaker duly departed. Ever since, the structure stood boarded up, its black, grimy windowpanes looking like two burnt patches on unblemished skin. No Jew or Gentile wanted to move in there. At night one could hear bats rustling inside. Women said that those were the souls of the dead, uncircumcised infants.
Lo and behold! Just when we moved in, this cursed structure came to life.
Strangers arrived and pulled down its door. Carpenters and bricklayers set to work, banging and sawing, singing lustily.
All the neighbors in the courtyard rushed over to look, to see who it was taking their life into their hands by moving in there.
Oyzer’s father stuck his head inside and said that it was perfectly reasonable for people to live there. He would have done so himself, if only to taunt the idlers and the idiots who believed in demons and ghosts.
The workmen toiled day and night and the entire courtyard waited with bated breath to see who the new tenants would be. Maybe Gentiles?
No, not Gentiles.
On a wintry morning, a woman showed up. Her sleeves were rolled up, revealing two bare arms, like kneaded dough, a mixture of flour and milk. This was Khantshe the widow, a youngish woman, not wearing a wig, but with a combed black forelock, the size of a swallow, smack in the middle of her forehead.
People in the courtyard knew who Khantshe the widow was. Her father, a half-blind man, used to patch Hasidic overcoats. Her mother, bent over like a tiny Gentile woman paying respects at a church, used to like buying bargains off peasant carts, haggling until the peasant lost track of the accounting.
Khantshe herself had lived in Warsaw for many years. No one knew what she was doing there. But when Warsaw proved odious, she returned home with a big green trunk on wheels in tow, full of tablecloths and sheets, undershirts and towels, and many silk dresses.
Khantshe also brought with her from Warsaw her fifteen-year-old daughter, who was rumored to be a bastard. That “bastard” had fresh, rosy cheeks, a dimpled chin, and a large mass of dark hair.
Khantshe and her daughter were the reason for all the banging and sawing that had been going on in the cursed little building, for all that pounding on boards and all that singing. It was for them that a new white floor was laid down, the rooms freshly plastered, the doors painted. And on their first night, after the pair had settled in, two bright lamps lit up the courtyard, whose glare was so blinding that the neighbors had to cover their windows with sheets and kerchiefs.
In that cursed little building, Khantshe the widow opened a tea shop. Against one wall she had the workers install a huge boiler with heavy, brass faucets that looked like angry, bowed heads. She set up long, smoothly planed tables and benches, and, before much time elapsed, the little structure filled up with soldiers, young coachmen and their brides, and young men who simply had no other place to go to smoke on the Sabbath.
They slurped tea with lemon, served in fat, shiny, white pitchers, and munched on the big cookies and pieces of strudel that Khantshe had baked herself. They cracked dried pumpkin seeds and sang—songs from Warsaw, Russia, Buenos Aires, and America.
A new world opened up for me and Oyzer. We no longer sat on the green pump, exchanging secrets. Oyzer stopped asking me whether or not I believed in God, or whether Moses had actually existed. He simply had no more time for such questions. Many nights, we stood for hours outside the windows of the tea shop, listening to the beautiful songs from afar.
I didn’t know if Oyzer felt as I did, but in my opinion there was no nicer or better place in the whole world than Khantshe’s tea shop.
It was also quite likely that, in addition to all the songs and the general air of merriment, we liked looking at Rukhtshe, the widow’s young daughter.
I never said anything about this to Oyzer, nor he to me. But while standing at the windows, looking in through the half-drawn curtains, both of us silently searched for that figure whose image floated into our imaginations when we closed our eyes.
“Are you cold?” Oyzer asked.
“No, I’m not,” I answered, tucking my head deeper inside my collar.
“Me neither,” said Oyzer, stamping his feet in the melting snow, and then asked softly, “Can you see her?”
“Yes, I can,” I answered, even more softly, though many times I didn’t see Rukhtshe at all.
“I don’t see anything,” Oyzer said, passing his face across the cold pane in an attempt to find a wider opening in the curtains.
I thought to myself that if only, with God’s help, I could move the curtains just a little aside so as to get a full view of Rukhtshe, I’d be the happiest person alive.
Oyzer expressed his thoughts openly. He said that if he weren’t so afraid, he would have punched in the window and ripped away the curtains.
“The people sitting inside are evildoers,” I remarked. “Wouldn’t they want the windows to be covered?”
However, Oyzer gave me to understand that the curtains had to be kept half-open, otherwise the courtyard would have been left in total darkness.
“Take a good look,” he said. “There are men sitting with girls. I once saw a soldier put his arms around a girl and kiss her. That’s what all soldiers do. It’s in their nature.”
I don’t know what exactly happened to me at that moment, but I began to feel hot. It must have been this heated state that made me say what I did.
“Oyzer,” I blurted out, “would you want to give Rukhtshe a kiss?”
“Have you gone crazy? You think she’s just anybody?”
“God forbid! Who said that? You think I don’t know who she is?”
“You don’t know her at all,” Oyzer replied, with a toss of his head. “She’s something special, not just any girl.”
Oyzer said this with such confidence that it seemed to me that he and Rukhtshe must already have been acquainted—who knows for how long?—that they had spoken, that he had taken her out for walks, maybe even kissed her.
That night I left Oyzer with a heavy heart. Something kept nagging at me, though I wasn’t sure what. Why did Oyzer toss back his head like that? Had he really gone for a walk with Rukhtshe? Had he actually spoken with her? If so, why, then, was he so guarded with me? If he had done all those things, why was he standing at the window and not going inside?
It was all a big riddle to me. The riddle grew larger when Oyzer once asked if he could come with me to the tea shop when I went there on a Sabbath. For Sabbath was when I wielded the power, when it was I who had total say. Sabbath was the day when I was able to get a full view of Rukhtshe, close up.
All this came about because on the Sabbath, after the meal, Mother sent me over to Khantshe’s tea shop for a kettle of boiled water. Oyzer’s mother never had him do this. Firstly, because as a gymnasium student, he had classes on Saturday, and secondly, they had a Gentile maid who did all the cooking and baking on the Sabbath. I therefore arranged with Oyzer for him to return from the gymnasium earlier than usual the coming Sabbath, when I would take him along to the tea shop.
Oyzer hid his books behind the staircase and stuffed his cap into his pocket. We proceeded to Khantshe’s tea shop—Oyzer bare-headed, with his disheveled mop of black hair, I wearing my Sabbath kapote, kettle in hand. Oyzer gave a proud shake of his forelock and remained standing by the door, while I, even though my heart was pounding like a thief ’s, headed straight for the two brass faucets.
Rukhtshe herself did the honors. Tall, with a dimpled chin, wearing a white blouse smelling of Sabbath fruit and honey cookies, she leaned forward, waiting for the kettle to fill up. Young men and girls were sitting at the tables, flushed and excited. Rukhtshe’s mother, Khantshe the widow, was also there, sitting next to a young man and laughing into his face. However, I saw nothing of this, only Rukhtshe’s dark hair and her small, white hands. I also noticed that, while the boiling water was running into the kettle, Rukhtshe turned her face several times in the direction of the door, where Oyzer was standing. Were they winking at each other? Did they actually know one another? My eyes began to burn. As through a mist, I saw a soldier with a closely cropped head shuffling toward Rukhtshe. He must have been drunk, otherwise he wouldn’t have been staggering or have had the audacity to put his arm around her waist and to shove his black whiskers into her face.
“Come here, my beauty,” he said in Russian and laughed, showing his mouthful of teeth, “let’s have your lips.”
I was already holding the full kettle with both hands. It was as heavy as if it were filled with sand, but even heavier was the feeling that gripped my throat. Had I not been so scared, I would have taken the kettle and poured it over the head of that cheap little soldier …
Oyzer must have felt even worse. He was standing by the door, his long face inflamed. He seemed even taller than usual. That was how he had looked the time he recited the stikhi.
I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly there was Oyzer, standing by the boiler, his face as white as the pitchers on the table, his upper lip beaded with perspiration.
“You good-for-nothing!” he cried out in Russian, throwing his arms into the air. “You filthy pig!”
There was the scraping sound of benches being pushed back. Someone gave a long, lazy snort, “Wha-a-t?” and started toward Oyzer and me with bearlike steps. Khantshe grabbed Oyzer from behind and quickly shoved him outside. I tumbled out on my own. Scalding drops of water splashed from the kettle. I barely saw where I was going, afraid that at any moment I might fall, that in yet another moment I’d be burned to death.
Once outside, I couldn’t see Oyzer anywhere. I heard laughter behind me, strange, cackling hoots, which scalded me even more painfully than the splashes from the boiling kettle.
For the rest of the Sabbath I was afraid and ashamed to venture outside. Only at night, after the havdole, did I sneak out.
When I caught sight of Oyzer he seemed to me to have gotten shorter. He told me that he had come to within an inch of strangling that little soldier, and he might still do so. What gave that Lithuanian pig the right to put his arms around Rukhtshe’s waist?
That night Oyzer was given to long silences. His disheveled mop of hair didn’t seem like his own. He told me that he felt sorry for Rukhtshe. Had he the money, he wouldn’t care what anyone said, he would marry her and take her away to a far-off land. Then she wouldn’t have to serve any more tea. He would recite to her by heart all of Pushkin’s stikhi. It would have been so good …
I agreed that it would have been good. But what good would it have done me, being left all alone by myself? Besides, what did Oyzer mean that he wanted to marry Rukhtshe? Was he already of an age to stand under a wedding canopy? How would he earn a living? And what would happen with the gymnasium?
I, too, felt sorry for Rukhtshe. But had I the money, I wouldn’t have married her. It was foolish to talk about that. I would have given it all to her so she could move out of the tea shop and into a nicer street. She could live there, have everything she needed, and that would be it …
But Oyzer said that I was a fool and an idiot. What would she do in her new place, all by herself?
“Do?” I replied. “She’d eat and drink and all will be well with her.”
“Just like it’s written in the Haggadah?” Oyzer sneered. “That’s nothing. The important thing is that somebody love her.”
“Who would that be?” I asked.
“Me,” Oyzer declared, and punched his chest with his fist.
Again I felt a tightening in my throat, an even stronger constriction than on the day when the little soldier grabbed Rukhtshe around the waist. At that moment I could have smacked Oyzer.
“Will you be going for hot water again next Sabbath?” Oyzer asked very softly.
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“Tell Rukhtshe,” he said thoughtfully, “that I’d like to see her.”
“Won’t you be coming with me?”
“No, tell her that I’ll be waiting for her Saturday night on Warsaw Street, next to the prison.”
Oyzer took his farewell and left me sitting all alone on the ledge. He walked away with slow, measured steps, like a grownup burdened by many worries.
There was still a whole week remaining before the next Sabbath. Just counting the minutes and hours up until then could drive you crazy.
In any case, I hardly knew what I was doing. Wherever I went, I was followed by Rukhtshe and Oyzer. I saw them in my open Bible, in my Russian grammar book, in the blackboard, everywhere.
Teacher Mattias tugged my ear even more forcefully and jammed his iron fist into my chin. Reb Dovid began to teach us Hebrew grammar, conjugating verbs: pokadeti … “I remembered,” pokadeto … “you remembered” … I broke my teeth reciting the tables. Oyzer’s words rang constantly in my head.
“Tell her I’ll be waiting for her Saturday night”—pokadeti, pokadeto—“on Warsaw Street, next to the prison.”