SOON AFTER DAWN the Bialystok express emerges out of the subways of central Warsaw. A mist rises from the Vistula, unveiling a metropolis stirring into life. Just beyond the city limits a heron perches, motionless, on the banks of a stream. A woman dressed in pink sits astride a motorcycle at a level crossing. A farmer milks a cow on an embankment by the rail tracks; behind him, in the fields, rows of haystacks perspire vapours of gold-dust. Warmth spreads as the carriages are heated by an ascending sun. A moving landscape eases me into stillness. It is as if 1 have always been here, watching from a mobile window, tracing a path along the periphery of ancestral lands.
Open countryside gives way to the fringes of a city. On the outskirts loom high-rise housing estates. The rays of a midday sun mingle with the fumes of industry. The train slows down through a gauntlet of factories and emerges against a long platform drawing into Bialystok station.
A hand touches me gently on the shoulder, an unexpected greeting. I had met Witold’s wife in Warsaw and she had offered me a room in their Bialystok flat. Witold welcomes me and we drive immediately to the centre of the city. A sudden halt, and we are in front of the clock-tower. ‘Give my regards to the town clock’, were the last words my father had said to me when I left Melbourne. But he doubted whether it was still standing. And in a sense he was right. The clock-tower that overlooks the central square is a replica, erected after the War on the site where the celebrated original had stood. In fact the entire central enclave is a replica, recreated brick by brick in a land where memories cling tenaciously and demand to be honoured. Flowers in full bloom pour from balconies. Wooden cottages adjoin tenements that match pre-war appearances. Bialystok is far more ancient and beautiful than I had expected; at least, this is how it appears at first sight.
Witold leads me to a plaque inconspicuously attached to a building facing the pavement. It indicates that here once stood the Great Synagogue of Bialystok. ‘I was over there, on Friday morning, June 27th, 1941’, Witold tells me, as he points to the corner diagonally opposite. The soldiers were annoyed at the nine-year-old Polish boy roaming the streets, hindering their work. They pushed him aside but he stayed, transfixed, as grenades exploded in nearby Jewish neighbourhoods, sending smoke billowing skywards. Menfolk were being dragged from their homes and driven to the house of worship. They were crammed inside, the doors locked and barred, the building doused with petrol and set alight. The intensity of the fumes drove Witold back. He saw windows broken and figures trying desperately to escape, only to be gunned down by the cordon of soldiers surrounding the inferno. The synagogue burned for twenty-four hours. Over fifteen hundred perished in the fire. This was the first Aktion; the day the Nazis entered Bialystok.
The tone has been set for my stay in Bialystok; an inevitable pattern, in fact, determined long before my arrival. Romance and terror, light and shadow, replicas and originals, hover side by side, seeking reconciliation, while within me there is a sense of awe and a silent refrain: I am here, at last I am here; and it is far more beautiful than I had imagined. And far more devastating. Yet, somehow, never have I felt so much at peace.
In 1320 a village is founded on the banks of the Biale by a Lithuanian nobleman, Count Gedimin. When my father tells the story he loves to separate the syllables. Any chance to dissect a word, any chance to take it back to its origins, he seizes upon with relish; for in words, he claims, lies the essence of things. Biale means white. Stok is a Slavic word for river. The kingdom of the White River is where we come from, says father, with one of his Romantic flourishes.
The village of Bialystok is handed down through generations of Lithuanian families until 1542, when the Polish King Zygmund August marries the widowed and childless Lithuanian Princess Varvara, and the lands of the White River become his private fiefdom. Six years later the first Jews settle in the village.
We leap through the centuries. Bialystok becomes entrenched Polish territory and the property of the Branitski family. In 1703 Count Stefan Branitski erects a wooden palace by the White River. Under Branitski patronage a house of worship is built in 1718 and evolves into a synagogue court around which Jewish settlement expands.
Count Jan Klemens Branitski the Second inherits the village from Stefan. As a child I would often gaze at his portrait in the Bialystok photo album, fascinated by his globular head. The Count’s face is a fat full moon. A black toupee forms a perfect crescent on the uppermost rim. A formidable forehead descends beneath the crescent to thick but neatly trimmed brows arching over fiery black eyes. A handlebar moustache extends well past the extremities of the mouth, placed high above an enormous chin that collapses into several folds, rolling in waves across a bullish neck. A velvet cape is draped across a white blouse buttoned high onto the lower rim of the moon. The Count glows with the proud confidence of born rulers. The eyes, however, speak of something deeper, of cosmic visions and universes far beyond a mere village.
Jan Klemens propels Bialystok into the future. Anxious to expand, the Count invites Jews from nearby hamlets to settle and help build a town. In 1745 they are granted equal rights, and in the same year a wooden tower is erected over a municipal hall to be used as a prison for criminals on remand. Under the tower eighty shops are built and divided among Jewish families. Each family is given a key for which they must pay three gold coins — at least, this is how the story is told. We are in territory in which the boundaries between history and legend are thin.
In 1750 the entire settlement is destroyed by fire. Undaunted, the Count supervises the reconstruction of Bialystok. A more solid core of brick and stone emerges, with a new clock-tower — which is destined to become the first sight my father registers, as a two-year-old, dressed in a sailor suit, running beside his mother through the town square.
Count Jan Klemens Branitski dies in 1771 and bequeaths Bialystok to his third wife, Isabella, a sister of Stanislaw Poniatowski, the last of the Polish kings. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Bialystok’s fate is increasingly determined not so much by local nobility, as by decisions taken in distant palaces, in the courts of contending empires eager to feed their voracious appetites for more territory. The ancient Polish-Lithuanian kingdom is dismembered in a series of partitions. Austro-Hungary, Prussia, and czarist Russia scurry off like hungry wolves clutching their share of the spoils.
The pace is fast; the game played for high stakes. Prussia grabs control of Bialystok in the partition of 1795. Napoleonic armies on the march eastwards take over the city for a year. In 1807 it falls into Russian hands. Napoleon recaptures White River territory in 1812. Three years later Czar Alexander the First regains jurisdiction and, for the time being, the ferocious game comes to an end; during the next one hundred years Bialystok is firmly under Russian control.
An invasion of a different kind takes place. The Industrial Revolution finds its way to Bialystok. In 1850 Nachum Minc and Sender Bloch establish the first silk factories, and the city is spun into orbit around steam-driven machines churning out textiles that are exported throughout Eurasia. Bialystok is harnessed to the assembly line, with both Jewish and German entrepreneurs directing operations. A new class of workers emerge, their schedules dictated by machines that permeate the tempo of their lives. Soon after dawn, sirens shriek the start of another working day, a typical day which will last for decades, throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. And thereafter’, adds father, ‘the Biale River was no longer white, but a dirty ribbon polluted by industrial waste.’
In the surrounding countryside there are hamlets and towns where the hand-loom, the craftsman, the peasant, and the shtetl community move at a slower pace. In these settlements there live the families Zabludowski, Probutski, Liberman, and Malamud. Aron Yankev Probutski of Orla marries Chane Esther of Grodek; Bishke Zabludowski of Orla marries Sheine Liberman of Bransk. They are drawn, like so many others of their generation, into an industrial vortex called Bialystok. The lure of the factory, of an expanding city, can no longer be resisted. A young family needs bread, work, prospects for a better life.
Bialystok bursts beyond its boundaries, its outer limits trailing off into wooden cottages. In the city centre, three- and four-storey buildings shoot up in a housing boom during the last decade of the nineteenth century. By 1900 there is a population of 70 000: communities of White Russians, Tartars, Ukrainians, Germans, Lithuanians, Cossacks, Gypsies, Poles, and 40 000 Jews.
Steam power is replaced by electricity. The machines spin faster. Boom is followed by economic bust. Bialystok is on the roller-coaster again. My father is born in the year of the first Russian Revolution. The czarist empire is shaken to its foundations, and in the aftermath there stream shock waves of reaction, pogroms, confusion, and false Messiahs. Floundering empires are again on the prowl, and Bialystok is yet again prey to the wolves. The Great War erupts. The armies of Kaiser Wilhelm capture a city set adrift in a no man’s land between past and future. There is fighting in the streets. Regimes come and go overnight. Europe is frantically sorting itself out. Red Army fights White Army. Poles, Tartars, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians flex their nationalist muscles. Each tribe wants its own territory, while Jews and Gypsies look on perplexed, not quite sure which way the wind is blowing. Mother and father run errands for their families in streets where armies sweep past them running east and west. At night they shelter at home to the sound of sporadic gunfire and artillery.
‘March, march Pilsudski’, is the cry of the hour. In the 1920s the veteran nationalist triumphs and consolidates a reborn Poland. For two decades the infant republic remains poised in an uneasy truce between wars. Bialystok appears to flourish. Schools, secular and religious; houses of worship and study; cinemas and theatres; cafes, choirs, orchestras, and political parties all overflow with patrons, supporters, and fellow travellers. And years later group photos will appear in the albums of a vanished city, portraits frozen into still lives within which, if one looks closely enough, it is possible to discern the tiny face of my mother as a member of the Morning Star gymnastics troupe, or my father on an outing in the forests, with comrades of a youth movement called Future.
It could be said that these are good years: the harvests quite abundant; communal life intimate; love affairs permeated by the scent of forests; couples strolling arm in arm along tree-lined Sienkiewicza Avenue. And yet there are those who are boarding trains for distant ports, slipping away to faraway corners of the earth with a healthy sense of premonition, or just plain luck in having received a visa moments before the city gates are closed. To the west, armies are again assembling, with a ferocious hunger for conquest and territory, and a calculating madman at the helm.
As I wander the streets of Bialystok for the first time I follow primitive maps drawn by my parents, indicating the various neighbourhoods they had lived in. A light rain falls incessantly. A damp veil hangs over the city and keeps me at a distance. A cat sits inside a cottage window in front of a white lace curtain. Pedestrians scurry by under umbrellas and newspapers. More than ever Bialystok seems ethereal, a dream whose texture eludes me.
A fair-haired boy appears at the window and edges in beside the cat. He stares at me with cold suspicion, until I realise that I am confronting him with my sense of disorientation. When I smile, the boy instantly reflects my change of mood. He is joined by a girl of about three, a sister perhaps, and we are drawn, the four of us, into a sort of complicity, a bond of recognition between stranger, boy, girl, and cat. Someone calls from within the house. The children withdraw. The welcoming committee has retreated; but the veil has lifted, and I find myself in Ulitza Kievska, the street where my mother lived in the years immediately after World War 1.
The cobblestones of Kievska glisten under fresh coats of rain. The moisture has subdued their colours into sombre ochres and burgundies. Kievska is a mere hundred metres long, wedged between Ulitzas Grunwaldzka and Mlynowa. Mother had placed her house at number 14, perhaps 13. Number 13 is an abandoned weatherboard. The shutters are closed, except for one which swings in and out with the breeze. Through it I can see rooms scattered with debris, loose floorboards, and broken bottles. Directly opposite is a threestorey greystone building with an arched entrance: number 10. It fits mother’s description, but not the address. Numbers 12 to 16 are non existent. In their place a stone wall encloses a yard piled high with used tyres and car parts. Adjoining the yard is an unkempt garden in which vegetable patches merge with wild flowers, shrubs, and trees. Two Alsatians bark ferociously as I peer over the wall.
A horse-drawn cart turns into Kievska and pulls aside to make way for a car. An elderly couple walk along the pavement, where tufts of grass spring from gaps between the cobblestones. Kievska on this rain-soaked day seems so familiar; yet so downtrodden and desolate, empty of the souls it once housed. Judenrein. A gust of wind catches the shutter on number 13 and slams it back to a close.
Twenty-four hours later the sun soars above the city. The shutters on the cottages of Kievska are flung wide open. The windows frame displays of potplants. Several windowsills are a jungle of ferns and flowers which nestle together, vying like a crowd of eager spectators for a view of the street, where cobblestones smoulder under the sun, a muted blaze of faded reds and light browns.
Kievska is within the Chanaykes, a neighbourhood where impoverished Jewish families were concentrated in a whirl of alleys, narrow streets, and back lanes which still continue to snake and curve into each other like dancing dervishes. I am surprised at how intact it appears, as if history had somehow overlooked this forgotten corner of the world. On days like this, I imagine, the Probutski children, the six sisters and three brothers, would spill into the streets to play in vacant lots strewn with weeds and rubbish. Or perhaps it wasn’t like that at all, and I am merely imposing such a scene on empty sites scattered throughout the neighbourhood like gaps in rows of rotting teeth.
Ulitza Zolta is a dirt path which squeezes off Kievska between several cottages before opening out into a large clearing that resembles an abandoned town square. The Probutski family shifted house in 1920, from Kievska to somewhere in this vicinity; perhaps to the two-storey building which stands apart, overlooking the clearing.
As I enter, I catch the scent of dust and rotting timber. A flight of stairs leads to a balcony which overlooks the square, but I cannot climb up to the attic that I believe my mother may have lived in. The way is barred by an old man who sits in an armchair on the first-floor landing. When I try to speak to him he does not respond. I hand him a note which Witold has written in Polish, explaining that my parents and their families may have once lived here. I am from Australia, the note adds, and I am searching for their former homes. The old man stares blankly into the distance. His head occasionally falls limply to his chest and rolls from side to side while he mumbles incoherently to himself.
As I turn to leave I see a grey-haired lady clutching a shopping bag. She eyes me with suspicion as we pass each other on the stairs. I hand her the note, which she quickly scans. The old lady is unimpressed. I am an intruder.
His apartment is on the second floor of a six-storey tenement; one of several drab grey blocks built up from the ghetto ruins in the immediate post-war years. It is now run-down, cracking at the seams, joints wracked by arthritis. The stairs smell of fried onions and neglect. I am ushered into a sparsely furnished living-room with a single bed, table, and television set on a linoleum-covered floor.
He is rotund and squat, his substantial paunch offset by muscular shoulders that barely contain an outrageous energy which seems always on the verge of bursting beyond the confines of his tight body. He speaks to me with a conspiratorial air, while his hawk-like eyes, full of an ancient suspicion, dart from side to side, always alert, distracted. Buklinski, one of the very last of the Bialystoker Jews, has burst into my life.
Buklinski disappears into the kitchen and dashes back with plates of stewed potatoes and gefilte fish. ‘Imported from Hungary’, he announces triumphantly, jabbing his fingers at the fish. He runs back and forth from the kitchen, and soon the table is laden with bowls of herring, pickled onions, loaves of bread, cheeses, and several bottles of vodka. Buklinski seats himself opposite and commands, in a voice strewn with gravel, ‘Nu? Eat! Is anyone stopping you? Who are you waiting for? The Messiah?’ He speaks a rich colloquial Yiddish laced with earth, fire, and black humour. Looking at me, he muses: ‘A miracle! Our Bialystoker have wandered off to the very ends of the earth in all their dark years, and yet their sons speak Yiddish. A miracle! Nu? What are you waiting for? Eat!’
The vodka flows. Buklinski’s monologue accelerates. He weaves tall stories in a frenzy. ‘I was born on Krakowska, in the Chanaykes, in that very same neighbourhood your mother lived in. We were crammed on top of each other; slept three, four, sometimes more to a bed. We froze in winter, baked in summer, and roamed the streets in gangs of little scoundrels who hunted in packs, seeing with our own eyes everything the heart desired — swindlers and saints, devoted mothers and beggars, prostitutes and yeshiva boys scurrying home, their eyes glued to their sacred books as they bumped into lamp posts. Ah, what a treasure it was to live in Bialystok! Well, my friend, what else could we do but love it? You think we had a choice? Well? What are you waiting for? Eat! Drink! Don’t be shy!’
Whenever one dish is empty, Buklinski dashes back into the kitchen and emerges with reinforcements, plates piled high with cheese blintzes.
‘This is my specialty, which you must eat.’
‘You are like a Yiddishe mama’, I protest.
‘I’m better than a Yiddishe mama. No Yiddishe mama makes blintzes like mine.’
‘But I’m full. I can hold no more.’
‘Full. Shmul. There is always room for more. Eat! I cannot rest until I see you eat.’
Buklinski hovers around the table, restless, imploring, prodding, scolding: ‘Eat! I won’t sit down until you eat!’
Where have I heard these familiar words, the same pleas, this same script? Where have I seen that same intensity, and felt that same tinge of menace in the voice? I have known other Buklinskis. They stood in Melbourne homes, by tables overflowing with food and drink, and talked of hunger and mud.
‘In two things I am an expert’, Zalman would say. Zalman, the family friend, the Bialystoker, the survivor who had brought us tales from the kingdom of night. ‘About two things I know all there is to know. In these things I am a scholar, an expert, a professor. In all other things I may be an ignoramus, but on two subjects I can lecture for days on end and never come to the end of it: mud and hunger. We lived in mud. For six years we were soaked in it. We came to know its subtle changes in texture, from day to day, hour to hour, depending on the amount of rain, the number of wagons and dragging feet that churned it up, the number of work battalions that laboured through it. The ghetto was an empire of mud. And hunger. Hunger had so many nuances, so many symptoms. Sometimes you felt so light, so empty, you could fly. But always it was an infernal ache, a relentless yearning, a search for any possible thing that could be chewed and swallowed. And now I know that a kitchen must be full, and a man is a fool who does not seize a chance to eat…’
But this is no time to philosophize. Buklinski has opened a second bottle of vodka. He is up on his feet, dancing around the table like a boxer between rounds. I try to break into his monologue from time to time, but Buklinski is a bulldozer who flattens me with his manic, domineering, frenzied, suspicious, yet affectionate energy. One moment he has his arms around me, and is kissing my cheeks with joy while exclaiming how good it is to have such a guest, a son of Bialystoker come half-way around the planet, the grandson of Bishke Zabludowski, no less, whom we all knew, and who didn’t know him as he stood under the town clock selling newspapers, telling us what was going on in this twisted world, and now, can you believe it, his grandson has come to us from the very ends of the earth, like manna falling from the heavens. A miracle!
And the next moment he is wheeling and dealing, and claiming all foreigners have a dollar to spare and that money grows on trees over there, while we are stuck here, in this black hole, our friends old or dead, the clever ones gone, scattered over lands of milk and honey, while we, may the devil have such luck, we languish here where there aren’t even enough Jews left for a quorum. So? What would it hurt to spare us a dollar? What harm would it do to give us a little something? And just as I think Buklinski has got me against the ropes he is suddenly off and running again, propelled into the kitchen by a burst of obsessive generosity to fetch a third bottle of vodka, another plate of pickled herring. Nu? What are you waiting for? Drink! Eat!
The room is bursting with heat and words. Buklinski jerks off his jacket. I see tattoos on both arms: a mermaid curls around one forearm, and on the other a muddy-blue clumsily applied number sprawls through a scattering of grey hair. ‘Two years’, he says quietly when he catches me looking. ‘For two years I was in Auschwitz.’ All words grind to an abrupt halt. Buklinski sits at the table, his head propped up on his elbows, his gaze extending beyond me, far beyond the confines of the apartment. Tears, just one or two, replace his torrent of words. They travel crookedly along paths that weave across a face engraved with furrows and troughs, the face of a member of an almost extinct tribe, one of the last Jews of Bialystok.
Buklinski is running ahead, dragging me by the arm. ‘No one knows Bialystok as well as I do’, he repeats for at least the fifth time this morning. In motion Buklinski is a tubby dynamo, fuelled by nervous energy and raw suspicion, trotting on his stout little legs. His stomach, the receptacle for a thousand-and-one meals of gefilte fish washed down by vodka, protrudes and bounces as he drives himself along. Head held high, hooded eyes squinting in the sun, nose sniffing the air, Buklinski nears the streets of the Chanaykes.
‘This is my territory, Ulitza Krakowska. Here I was born. In 1919.’ His words tumble out, breathless, between gulps of air. His fingers stab at the empty space where his house once stood. The Chanaykes is an amalgam of weed-strewn clearings, cobblestoned streets, and rheumatic timber cottages. We are on home turf, and Buklinski is a weather vane registering every slight shift in the atmosphere. His arms swing in one direction, then in another, a stream of anecdotes flowing from his fingers. ‘That was a bordello’, he exclaims. ‘The boss lived upstairs, there, in the garret. I often saw his face poking out of that window, eyeing the customers who used to sneak in through that wooden gate. Fifty groshen it cost for doing it standing up, and one whole zloty for doing it lying down.’
Buklinski is unable to keep still. It is as if the streets are pursuing him and that, if he were to stop for long enough, they could lure him into a web of memories that would soon suffocate him. So he keeps running ahead, with short steps, while conducting a feverish commentary: ‘This was once a prayer-house; that building housed a kibbutz where young pioneers prepared for the Promised Land. Over there stood a Hebrew college; here a Yiddish trade school.’ Occasionally I register a deeper response, jolted by a sudden shock of recognition. The trade school features in my mother’s repertoire of recollections; in this school she had learned to make dresses. ‘Ah! You see? I know where to take you’, Buklinski proclaims triumphantly. ‘I know my Bialystok.’
On Ulitza Slonimska flocks of pigeons swoop down to perch on the window-sills of pre-war buildings. Their grey facades are a patchwork of exposed brick blotches coated with rust. We veer sharply into a narrow alley, to a timber shop-front painted clumsily in a pale blue wash. It leans askew, like a dilapidated shed on an abandoned farm. Inside the workshop Yankel the shoe repairer stands bent over a bench, cutting strips of leather. I am also introduced to Bunim, who is seated by the counter, his shoulders slumped, his head swaying as if in perpetual prayer.
‘Bunim! Get us a bottle of schnapps!’, Buklinski orders. ‘Here! Take these zlotys and fetch us something to drink, something to bite.’ Half an hour later the compliant Bunim shuffles back with a bottle of spirits. We tear chunks from a loaf of freshly baked bread, slice pieces of garlic and sausage, drink glass after glass of spirits, and the room blazes.
‘Aron! Welcome to Bialystok!’, Yankel exclaims after each toast. The room spins about us, a blur of shelves piled high with shoes, pieces of leather, soles and heels, tacks and nails, and workbenches crowded with an array of primitive tools with which to cut and glue, hammer and sew, brush and polish, while Yankel is drinking, working, and proclaiming: ‘Aron! You cannot imagine what it was like!’. This is the refrain to which he constantly returns, as his story unfolds in a workshop saturated with the smell of garlic and sweat. ‘You cannot imagine! We were hunted like animals, swatted like flies. Wives in front of husbands. Children in front of mothers. Aron! You cannot imagine what it was like!’
Yankel’s eyes are sunk deep in their sockets, and nestle behind cheekbones that protrude, stretching taut the layer of beaten skin that clings to its skeletal frame. ‘We ran like frightened hares into the countryside and burrowed under the ground. For two years I hid in my warren. At night I emerged to scavenge. Lice made a home in my flesh. We had a contract: I lived in a hole; they lived on me. Aron! You cannot imagine what it was like!’
This is what it is always like, I am beginning to see, when the last few Yidn of Bialystok gather, as they often do, since they crave each other’s company; together they wax and wane like candles that flicker for a moment into glorious light, and then almost die out, as the flames shrink back into themselves, into indelible memories that will accompany them to the grave. ‘When I came out of my warren for the final time, on a July day in 1944, I saw four Russian soldiers on horseback. The lice were crawling around me, going on family visits. I addressed the captain in Yiddish. He looked at me in astonishment and replied in the same mother tongue: “A living corpse! A survivor! A miracle!” He escorted me to the nearest village where he organised a banquet. 1 ate until 1 was sick.’
Several hours later I walk with Bunim, Bialystok’s most dishevelled son. He shuffles, chin sunk into his chest. Occasionally he glances warily over his shoulders. ‘Someone is always watching, always taking note’, he warns. The Sabbath is approaching, creeping in along deserted streets that have retired for the weekend. The sky is streaked with wafer-thin clouds of mauve and crimson; Bunim is, as usual, close to tears. This is what Buklinski had warned me about: ‘Watch out for him. Just give him a chance and he’ll cry. Ah! Can he cry!’. He was the butt of many jokes that winked between Yankel and Buklinski. ‘Look! It’s coming! The storm is gathering. Bunim is about to cry. Ah! Can he cry!’
‘Don’t make such a noise’, a perpetually anxious Bunim had said when our revelry had begun to shake the floorboards of Yankel’s workshop. ‘It’s not wise for us to attract attention. You must always remember who we are and who they are’, he had added, while motioning towards the window. ‘Bunim is going to cry. It’s coming! Ah! Can he cry!’, replied the merciless duo, dancing arm-in-arm around the work benches.
Bunim’s apartment is lean and bare, and mother Mary peers down at us, a babe with golden locks in her arms. The last shafts of light from a dying day poke into the kitchen, illuminating layers of peeling paint and cracks that thread through the walls like erratic blood vessels.
Bunim slumps into a chair and leans back against the wall. ‘Bialystok is a stranger to me now, the streets are my enemies. I have wanted to leave for many years. One by one my friends have gone. But I must stay because she saved my life. For three years she hid me, fed me, and gave me warmth. So after the war I married her. She prays to an alien God. Christ is her saviour. And I’m not even worth her piss. You see my friend, she saved my life and I must stay with her.’
When Bunim speaks, the words are barely audible. He is almost a non presence, mumbling in the background, as if afraid to register his imprint upon the earth. The permanent red blotches on his cheeks deepen to beetroot in the evening shadows. The silence within the apartment seems to offer solace and relief, and for the first time there is a hint of ease on Bunim’s unshaven face. ‘I knew your grandfather’, he says unexpectedly. ‘Everyone knew your grandfather. A small man. With red hair, a red beard, he ran here and there under the clock-tower, always excited, always darting about like a rabbit. Heint! Moment! Express! Always shouting, selling, waving his arms, earning a few groshen from his newspapers. Heint! Moment! Express!’
Bunim rises from the chair, a sudden flicker of animation in his leaden body, his bloodshot eyes aflame, the words tumbling out rapid fire, his voice reaching above whispers: ‘Heint! Moment! Express! He stood on the corner of Geldowa and Kupietzka, just a block from here. Everyone knew your grandfather. Heint! Moment! Express!’
And, just as abruptly as it has risen, Bunim’s voice trails off into a confused monologue, and his body slumps back into a chair: ‘My father wanted me to be a talmudic scholar. I studied in yeshivas with great interpreters of the scriptures. But she saved my life, and I’m not even worth her piss. Children we could not have. That would have been a terrible transgression, an insult to my ancestors. And Bialystok I could not leave. That would have been a betrayal. After all, she saved my life …’
Everyone has his story; everyone his refrain. Aron! You cannot imagine what it was like! Aron! Do you know what a treasure it was to live in Bialystok? Aron! She saved my life and I’m not worth her piss. Aron! Eat. Drink. What are you waiting for? The Messiah? Aron! Do you know how wonderful it was to live in Bialystok? Aron! Please stay with us a little longer. Aron! Help us leave this God-forsaken hole. Take us with you to the land of milk and honey. Aron! I cannot leave. She saved my life. Aron! Spare us a dollar. What would it hurt to give? Aron! Eat! Drink! What are you waiting for? The Messiah? Aron! You can never imagine what it was like.