She tore out a handful of grass and put it to her nose, smelling it as though it were flowers. “I like the smell of the earth,” she said. “At first it’s unpleasant, but it becomes as familiar as your own sweat. Do you hear the way I talk? When I was younger, painters and writers talked to me a lot, and now all they said oozes out of me. I wish I could get to the point when I have something to say of my own.
“Yes, I believe it was that gang that spoiled me. They’re wonderful boys, but they’re always on the run and they ran over me. It was too heady an experience for me—too high an altitude. Their talk, their movements, their interests—it wasn’t good for me. Strange thing, with each of them I felt perfectly whole, but the moment they dropped me and I was on my own, I went to pieces. I was a lamp without a light, or worse—a discarded handkerchief. It was all too much for me, I had to develop a protective shield of flippancy if I wasn’t to commit suicide. Oh, I thought of that often. That was when I took everything seriously, but everything becomes a mockery when you’re made to feel like a fool.
“Sometimes, when I become absorbed in my own thoughts, it seems to me that I am looking for a man who’d make me whole again. I’ll never find one.”
She said she had “something very interesting” to tell me. About a year ago, she met a man she thought she could love. How could she tell? Because he made her think about herself, about what she could give him. When she had such thoughts, she usually kept quiet, she explained, for fear that someone else’s voice would come out of her mouth. Whenever words came easily, she was afraid that they were just odds and ends from all the chatter she had heard as a young girl—artists are good talkers.
A year ago she thought that she had actually found the man who would be her life’s companion—she had met him right here in this resort—the man who would take her away from the money, the jewels, and the rest. She had never supposed she’d actually meet such a man, but she’d always kept herself ready for him. In fact, even today she was playing with the idea of being poor again, but she still hadn’t made up her mind whether her child was part of the alien life which had been forced upon her, or whether she must stay with him, rich or poor, happy or not.
The man who had brought a ray of light into her life was a graduate chemist—which for a Jew in Poland meant certain unemployment in his chosen field. He was from an assimilated family, but at the university he began to do some soul searching, partly no doubt because of the way he was abused by his Gentile fellow students. He became a pious Jew, and when she met him at this resort he was among the followers of the rabbi who comes here every year. His skullcap and his pious manner did not deceive her: the moment she saw him she knew she must get to know him. It wasn’t easy, but one day she managed to strike up acquaintance with him when he had gone for a walk by himself.
“He was a real comforter, a professional comfort giver. When I met him he was somewhat confused. He had made up his mind that the Jews were going through a terrible period. Not only were they persecuted but there was no one to console them. So he took upon himself the mission of going from town to town, from village to village, in order to spread the good word, to be a preacher of joy, as he put it. He was a handsome man whose blond beard stubbornly refused to be Hasidic. He still looked like a student. His blue eyes glowed with his faith, and his mouth was warmed by his voice. He knew all the words that gave comfort, and his name had become famous in Jewish communities. When he appeared on a Saturday in a village synagogue, he gave the poor Jewish people a joy they had never known before.”
At the time she met him he was going through a period of doubt. He wondered whether he was not doing the wrong thing, whether, instead of comforting the Jewish people as a whole, it was not his duty to go from door to door, to comfort the people individually rather than en masse in the synagogues. It was a long time before he told her that, and more generally, before he began to share his thoughts with her. She had to work hard. It was a game to her, but different from the one she played with her husband. That game she was sure she would always win. This time she knew she would lose.
“For four months I struggled with him and with myself. All that time I also had to keep an eye on my husband. I suspected that he was suspecting me. My bookkeeping became so complicated that I almost lost my mind. On top of all this I felt that somehow there was a little devil inside me who was making fun of me, laughing himself sick at my expense. I imagined that I was reenacting the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. As luck would have it, his name too was Joseph, and in my eyes he was every bit as handsome.
“There is a little woods outside the village where it’s cool and quiet. Dead leaves lie scattered everywhere and crackle under your feet. The leaves are slippery and the ground is moldy. There are many dead trees in that woods. It was there that we most often sat and talked. He never got close to me, never looked me in the face. I had almost talked myself hoarse before he agreed to so much as sit and talk with me in the woods. I campaigned as if I were a whole army, and he a city under siege. I ambushed him, pursued him, tormented him. At the same time, I felt sorry for him. But I had to do it because I was even sorrier for myself. ‘Saba,’ he would beg me, ‘Saba, I’m afraid of you, you have such hungry eyes, such a hungry mouth, even the words you say are hungry.’”
He often talked to her about the inherent poetry of Judaism, and this opened up a whole new world to her. She had long been surrounded by prosaic, tired people whose lives were anything but poetic. Her brothers were just ordinary Jews, who wore Jewish caps and slippers. Her father had died when she was a little girl. The only bit of poetry in her parental home was heard when her mother blessed the candles Friday evenings, and the words she pronounced were bright and warm. Not so Joseph—he was in love with Judaism, and he spoke about it with such ardor that she understood why he could set the hearts of others ablaze, why he was a comforter.
On one occasion he confided to her that he’d like to go to Germany, that if he could only smuggle himself across the border, he’d go, for it was there that he was really needed. At the same time, he confessed to her that he was filled with such pride when he told himself that he had power to give comfort that he became frightened and tried to punish himself by going without food and sleep, to humble his pride. At such moments she felt that he was a Christianized Jew, that he had too many problems for a Jew. She once told him so, and the next day he told her that her remark had caused him a great deal of pain, that he had been thinking it over and decided that she was right, that he was perhaps an outsider after all, cut off from his own people.
“One day he was very nervous. This is the only pleasant memory I have kept of the whole affair, and it doesn’t amount to much. He was restless, could not sit still, paced back and forth, and finally stammered out that he was about to get married, so as to be more at peace with himself. I understood his restlessness. I felt just like a mother, I understood exactly what was bothering the child, and this gave me a kind of satisfaction. When I saw him so restless, something inside me alternately laughed and wept. ‘Goodbye, Joseph,’ I said to him, ‘goodbye,’ and I spoke to him more tenderly than I had ever dared before. But now I was sure that I had lost him, and that I had lost someone very close to me. He looked at me bewildered. It wasn’t nice of me to be so much more reasonable than he was at this moment. He was as green as the woods around us.
“He left me, and three weeks later he was married. I was as happy as if I had married off my own son. He married a Jewish woman of good family, who brought him a handsome dowry. I am glad that a man like him will not be obliged to work for his daily bread.
“Later I took to going to the woods all by myself and sat in the same place. I scrawled hieroglyphs on the moist ground, and I dreamed that I was getting smaller and smaller, that I was shrinking, so that I took up hardly any space, like when I was a child. I often dreamed this way, too, that I was taking up less and less space in God’s world. I liked to stare at small closed newspaper kiosks and imagine that I lived inside them, or in a tiny cell, all alone. My friend the poet once told me that such thoughts reflect a longing for the mother’s womb. This may be true. Very often I pull the blinds on sunny days and lie in my little boy’s crib. It is small, but I am alone and so close to myself that I can dream the most wonderful dreams.
“In this way I both lose myself and pursue myself, entirely detached from the ordinary daily round. I perform my duties to my husband and child with the little bit of life remaining, like a sleepwalker. My only real contact with myself is my friend the pianist, who used to be as restless as I have become. But today she is very respectable, poised, reserved, and a good housewife. She married money too. She often comes to see me and sits wrapped in a shawl printed with flowers, as though shielding her body from some barbarian assault. She sits with her head on one side, as though she were afraid of something. Her limbs are sharp and bony, like a child’s. She has an open face; I don’t know how it strikes others, but to me it is a map on which I can read all the sinful pleasures of her youth. She sometimes falls asleep in the shawl, and then she looks like a young grandmother, and she smiles in her sleep.
“When I ask her whether she loves her husband and whether she is happy, she becomes impatient with me and says that people don’t speak about such things. She has calmed down, she says, and she tries to convert me to her point of view. You too, she says, should be happy. To have a husband, a child of one’s own—if I only knew how much that means, she keeps telling me, how perfectly sufficient that is to make a life.
“But when she gets up and takes off her shawl of resignation, when she walks about the room, I recognize her old self. As she walks, her elegant legs dance in front of her in the old provocative way, proclaiming with quivers of joy that here is a woman, ready to take and be taken. That is the art of walking—a prelude to the art of lying back.
“Occasionally she speaks of the harmonious life. She has got a brand new idea—the Jewish female, she says, must control herself. Once we perform the rite and take the oath, we must be true wives. Whatever we may have done before, once our husbands accept us, it’s all over and done with. Once we’re married, we must remember that the Jewish home has a firm foundation—one God and one man. Of all people, it’s she who talks that way, she who had so many lovers. ‘I should put you across my knee and give you a good spanking,’ she says, or ‘I should scratch your face,’ and then she becomes as affectionate as a kitten. She takes me in her arms and strokes my hair. I like to tell her at such moments that I am a sick woman. All women are sick, she replies, but when they lead a healthy life they become healthy. The wifely estate is a new source of strength, a new reservoir of youth. ‘You pay attention to what I’m telling you, you little bitch,’ she chides me, ‘If I could settle down, so can you!’”
Finally Saba left me, asking me not to walk her back to the village. I watched her walk down the hill; it had occurred to me to see her home. When she had left I thought about Joseph’s observation that her words were “hungry.”
I had forgotten to ask her who Joseph was. Was he real or had she invented him while lying on her little child’s bed? A starved woman can invent hundreds of things and poison her life with her own imaginings.
And the smaller she grew as she walked down the hill, she seemed also to move more and more clumsily, as though she were walking backward in time, pulling me along with her into some miniature childish world, a frozen wax world prior to speech, a world where yellowed memories were painted bright red.
Then I recalled my first love, Yochevet, or Yochtche, as she was called. She must have been all of six years old when I fell in love with her, and I was much younger. She had pigtails and big black eyes, and always sat on the doorstep of her house, daydreaming. For a long time she refused to take notice of me. I prayed God to make me an acrobat so that I could perform some trick that would force her to look at me, but at that time I found it hard even to stand on my head with the help of a wall to lean on.
I finally conquered her. It was during the Passover holidays: I bribed her with half a
chremzel,
that succulent matzo pastry. After that we would sit together on the stone steps in front of her house, and she told me stories. The things she told me were so implausible that even at that time I realized she was making them up as she went along, although she always swore the most solemn oaths that everything she told me had happened to her personally.
Her stories were of lions, tigers, and bears, about gypsies who steal Jewish children, about devils who play the violin and pull out your soul through a little hole, just like you suck an egg by making a hole in the shell with a pin.
Yochtche also liked to hide with me in a dark cellar where she would always choose the darkest, farthest corner, and tell me the scariest tales. She asked me to put my hand on her heart so I could feel it pounding while she was telling me these stories. It was very agreeable to be scared in the dark with Yochtche beside me. We would emerge from the cellar sleepy-eyed, and we would see many little specks swaying on tiny threads suspended in the air.
Specks were beginning to swarm before my eyes, and I saw that a man was standing next to me on the hill. His face was composed of several recognizable traits. When he turned his glassy eyes on me, he looked like Buchlerner, but in a moment when he stood still his features were those of the girl who fed the chickens and the ducks every morning, speaking Yiddish to them. This composite figure was wearing a caftan, which did not surprise me. I even found it natural that he should be stamping his feet and crying, “ai-ai,”—those particular sounds and no others: “ai-ai!”
I knew why he was wailing like that, poor man, He was assaulting high heaven for the great wrong he had suffered. Weisgelt had starved his youth away, studying the violin. No sacrifice was too much for his father, a military tailor, who spent everything he possessed to get his son the best teachers. And finally the day came when he began to play in public, started the long climb to musical eminence. God was good to him, and his name, Abrasha Weisgelt, began to be seen in the announcements of musical events. Abrasha is to play at the Craftsmen’s Hall, for the Office Workers’ Union, and the Professional Men’s Club—finally, Abrasha is to play with the Philharmonic. He actually made it that far, our own Jewish fiddler, Abrasha the violinist, our Jewish virtuoso. Then, suddenly, just when he had reached the top of the heap, his hands and feet were stricken with paralysis. For ten years he had been lying like that, neither dead nor alive, an affliction to his parents.