Over the summer, a great change took place in the tea shop itself.
Without explanation, fewer and fewer young men and their girls started showing up at Khantshe the widow’s establishment. Khantshe herself stopped baking honey cake and no longer took care to see to it that the pitchers and glasses were glistening. There was no more singing, and no freshly pressed cloths on the tables.
It seemed to me that Khantshe and Rukhtshe had had a falling out. I noticed that young Felek, the one with the curling, upturned mustache, no longer sat with Khantshe behind the flowered curtain. He now sat at the table with Rukhtshe and looked into her eyes like at a precious stone.
I was aware that something out of the ordinary was going on. The hatred that not long before I had borne Oyzer was now transferred to that swarthy young man. I hated him a thousand times more. Also, he didn’t know any stikhi. So where did he get the nerve to look at Rukhtshe like that? He was eating her up with his eyes.
Khantshe the widow must also have hated him. In my presence she called him a freeloading shnorer and a louse-ridden wastrel.
“Go to work,” she berated him. “The devil take you!”
The young man laughed with his mouth wide open. He didn’t get angry, didn’t curse back, and said only that if she didn’t stop it, he’d make mincemeat out of her.
In the courtyard it was common knowledge that Khantshe and Felek were at odds. One could hear them screaming and shouting at each other. My mother, however, was of the opinion that, despite their bickering, swarthy Felek would soon be marrying Khantshe.
Mother was right. Early one bright morning, Khantshe went over to Zishe the scribe’s and bought a prayer shawl with a blue silk collar. She made more purchases on Warsaw Street, where there were shops selling lengths of linen for bedclothes. In that same street, she rented a place with a kitchen. After the wedding, she certainly wasn’t going to continue living in the tea shop.
Avreml the furniture dealer installed two pinewood beds and an oaken, mirrored wardrobe.
Khantshe herself, although she was busier than ever, nevertheless seemed calmer in those days, her face beaming.
She had a new suit of clothes made up for her young man, ordered him another pair of gaiters, agreed on a price with Simek the musician, and sent out wedding invitations to all the little soldiers, and to all the young men and their girls who used to frequent the tea shop.
However, suddenly, a day or two before the wedding, after Khantshe had already baked two large, sugar-frosted cakes, and while live carp splashed about in a tub, a calamity occurred.
We became aware of the misfortune in the early hours of the morning. We had just gotten up. Father was at his prayers. The windows revealed a gold band of sky. Mother was walking about in her nightcap, sighing softly under her breath. She wasn’t feeling too well and wanted only to prepare breakfast so she could return to bed.
All was quiet. Suddenly, there was the sound of running on the stairs and of loud voices.
“Who talks that loud so early in the morning?” Mother asked, and took a step toward the door.
But the door burst open by itself, and a woman, a stranger, wearing a kerchief, appeared in the doorway.
“Frimet,” she sputtered in one breath into the room, “go downstairs. Some misfortune has happened to her.”
She didn’t say whose misfortune it was, there didn’t seem to be time. Having delivered her news, the woman ran back down the stairs.
Mother began to wave her hands in the air, like a goose flapping its wings when being chased.
“Woe is me! It shouldn’t happen to us!” she cried out, running around the room in search of something to put on. “Mendl, Leyzer, run downstairs and see what’s happened there.”
Father passed his uncomprehending eyes across an agitated Mother. Either he didn’t hear, or didn’t grasp, what she had said. I, half-dressed, started buttoning my boots quickly and pulling up my suspenders, but, as if to spite me, everything kept falling from my hands.
There was screaming and weeping rising from the courtyard. For certain someone, God forbid, must have died. However, I managed to get dressed and, in a single leap, jumped onto the banister and slid downstairs.
The courtyard was crowded with people. Women and children came pouring out from all the balconies and staircases. Everyone was talking at the same time, asking questions, and pushing into the open doorway of the tea shop.
Khantshe the widow, all disheveled, in a short, white underdress and red slippers with little pompons, rushed about as if she were on fire.
“People! Jews! Have mercy on me!” she wailed, wringing her hands. “They’ve left me with only one undershirt, that thief and his whore. They’ve reduced me to poverty. Woe is me and woe is my life … People, what shall I do?”
She tore at her cheeks, flung open the oaken, mirrored wardrobe, lifted the top of the trunk, and pointed into it.
“All my hard work,” she moaned, “all my bitter toil! Not sleeping nights, not eating, not drinking! That bastard!” She stamped her feet. “That cheap whore! What did you do to your own mother?”
The women and young girls poked their noses into the open trunk, into the empty wardrobe, and asked how such a thing could have happened. Didn’t she have any idea what was going on?
How could she have known, when she was so busy preparing for a wedding? How could it have crossed her mind that that little daughter of hers, that whore, was carrying on with that son of a bitch? Who would have expected such wrath, such a dire decree from heaven?
Khantshe’s face swelled up from all the weeping. She had no strength left to cry out. She sat over the empty trunk, like someone in mourning. Strangers ran to get the police. But before the police arrived, Khantshe tore herself away from the empty trunk and began smashing the white pitchers, the teapots, and the glasses. She tore down the flowered curtain from the alcove and pointed to a rumpled iron cot.
“This is where she slept, that bastard,” Khantshe gasped, as she grabbed hold of the featherbed and ripped it to pieces.
The entire tea shop turned white with feathers. The feathers floated through the open windows into the courtyard, settling on the pump, the balconies, the people. By the time the police arrived, Khantshe lay stretched out on the floor among the feathers and the shards, grieving into it, as one would into a grave.
Poor Khantshe certainly had a lot to grieve about. People said that it wasn’t enough that the swarthy Felek had robbed her and run off with Rukhtshe, but that he had left the widow with a belly as well.
Not a trace remained of the tea shop. Khantshe ran to the chief of police of the district, she even complained to the provincial governor’s office, but the pair had simply vanished into thin air.
There were rumors that they had gone off to Paris. My mother even learned that Felek had sold Rukhtshe into white slavery in Buenos Aires. But Khantshe still couldn’t rest. She wrote petitions to Warsaw, ran to lawyers, until the little building in the courtyard closed down for good.
Nobody wanted to rent it. The clear, polished windows slowly acquired a film of black dust. Someone had torn the handle from the door. Cats crouched upon the roof. Khantshe herself went back to Warsaw.
The courtyard became a wasteland. In the evenings, I could no longer look through the windows into the tea shop.
I no longer had discussions with Oyzer, we never met anymore. But I did notice that he had grown taller, and it seemed to me that he was far too tall for his age. Any day now, he would have a hump, just like his father.
I had nowhere to go. After the misfortune with Khantshe, things also turned gloomy at home. Motl Straw, Father’s partner, stopped coming by for the weekly settling of accounts. There were no accounts to settle. The hay in the meadows had rotted. There was nothing to buy, and no one to sell it to.
Father, as usual, rose at daybreak. He took longer tending to his sore leg and lingered over his morning prayers. We subsisted on burnt soup and soldiers’ black bread.
For the Sabbath, Mother bought some cheap meat, and instead of our usual fish, she served herring.
Autumn set in cold and rainy. The small windowpanes wept day and night. The sound of dripping was heard continuously on the roof.
Mother, dark wrinkles around her mouth, moaned, “What sin did I commit that I should spend my years in this attic? Leyzer, how long do you intend to keep us here?”
I didn’t understand what Mother was saying. First of all, it was she herself who had rented this attic, and secondly, how could Father help it if all the hay in the whole region had rotted and the Russian army was now buying dried hay packed by Russia itself?
We were left without a means of livelihood. When Father went to ask Motl Straw for an interest-free loan, Motl Straw merely shrugged. Where did he have the money, when there was no business?
Father came home that night, crestfallen. Shreds of black padding peeked out from his coat. Mother wasn’t of a mind to mend it. Something kept driving her from the house. In any event, there was nothing to cook, so why should she stay put?
As for me, I was sent home from the shkole.
So Mother sat down and wrote a letter to her rich brother in Lodz. She wrote him that her young son could no longer attend the shkole because she had no money to pay his tuition, that we were freezing to death in the house, and that her husband, Leyzer, wasn’t earning anything. She was, therefore, begging him, her brother, to take pity and to help out in her hour of need.
There was no answer. The shadows in the house grew larger and colder. Sleighs were already out in the streets. Their bells tinkled merrily, calling me down. But I was ashamed to show myself in the street, lest anyone ask me why I was no longer attending the shkole.
On the last day of Hanukkah, before it was time to light the eighth and final candle, the door opened in the early afternoon and the mailman came in, a man with a white, Jewish-looking beard.
“Pani Leyzerova? Money,” he said in three languages, Russian, Yiddish, and Polish.
Mother’s face turned red. I felt something pressing on my chest. That white beard of the mailman could belong only to the prophet Elijah!
The mailman had brought notice, informing us that there was money waiting for us at the post office.
Mother, even though she wasn’t feeling well, rushed over immediately, but it was already too late. They weren’t paying out any more money that day. Nonetheless, Mother returned home in a cheerful mood. At once she lit the stove and prepared some borsht with potatoes, which smelled like wine. The lamp burned more brightly. The moon came to rest over the opposite roof, and the frost on the windowpanes slowly melted.
I could think of nothing else but the money that Mother would be collecting the next day at the post office. I was sure that we had become rich and that we would now be moving into a nicer dwelling. Mother herself had spoken about a new place and about buying me a new pair of boots.
As we sat down to supper, Father maintained his usual silence, eating slowly and staring out the windows.
Early the next morning, Mother hurried to the post office. I was waiting at home with a beating heart. Several times I opened the door and went down the stairs.
As it turned out, Mother’s rich brother in Lodz didn’t send us very much. He apologized, saying that this was a bad time, that he had a daughter to marry off.
Still, my old boots were repaired, the tuition was paid, and Mother bought Father a new overcoat.
“What for?” Father said, passing his tongue from one corner of his mouth to the other.
“You need a new overcoat,” Mother explained.
“But I’ve already got an overcoat.”
“Really! It’s falling apart.”
“N-n-a, I guess it is.”
He slowly laid down the new overcoat and later examined it from a distance, but didn’t put it on. It lay there for several days without anyone coming near it.
Not until the Sabbath morning, when we were changing our underwear, and after Mother had stowed the old, torn coat away, did Father pace back and forth for some time and finally put on the new overcoat.
Something new also happened to me at that time. I don’t mean my repaired boots, nor the paid tuition at the shkole, nor even my new woolen gloves, but something else, for which I had no name as yet.
It may have been Father’s quiet voice, which, ever since I could remember, had never been so quiet. Or it may have been Mother’s tear-filled eyes, when, on a certain weekday, Father helped me into my coat and went with me to the study house, where a pale Jew with green whiskers began to instruct me in the laws of tefillin, the donning of the phylacteries that would mark my entry into manhood.