Laish Read online

  The old men sigh whenever the dealers return from their nightly debauchery. “God Almighty, see in whose clutches we find ourselves!”

  In Czernowitz we halted the wagons in an abandoned square, not far from the Street of the Jews. Our trio—the fiddler, the flutist, and the drummer—burst into wedding songs and old melodies, and a goodly crowd immediately gathered around them. The committee passed around the large copper bowl, and our herald, Reb Pinchas, announced in a strong, deep voice, “Give charity generously to pilgrims. Safeguard for yourselves a place in the world to come.” Reb Pinchas is a Jew who is far from easy to size up. He rises early for morning prayers and he is close to the old men, yet all the same he is not quite as he seems. I have often seen him getting drunk with the wagon drivers. But there is one matter on which everyone concurs: he’s an excellent herald, and he has brought it to a fine art. He is not a whining type of herald; on the contrary, his bearing is proud and erect, and he declares in a forthright way that our pilgrimage is important and vital. If, with God’s help, we should reach Jerusalem, every Jew will reap the benefit. Apart from being our herald, he also enacts in the square the story of Joseph being sold into slavery. Effortlessly changing clothes, Pinchas plays all the parts. As Joseph, he speaks in a youthful and flowery voice; when he is the patriarch Jacob, his voice is old and feeble. Joseph’s brothers speak in deep voices, like peasants. The performances last a full hour, and sometimes even longer. Everyone applauds and fills the bowl with coins. Once Reb Pinchas had a bitter argument with the committee. He claimed that apart from his regular salary, he deserved to get a percentage of what is received from his performances. They rejected his claim: it would be either a regular salary or a percentage. I have seen his performance dozens of times. He always either adds something or takes something away. It’s never the same.

  As I’ve said, in the city all of us are filled with vitality, except for the old men. They know that the business dealings will turn people’s heads, that their good qualities will get corrupted, and that only a disaster will save the convoy from ruin.

  Now that I am no longer tyrannized by Ploosh, my teacher has become stricter with me. After prayers and after I serve the coffee, we sit and study the weekly Torah portion. Old Avraham tries to keep me away from the sights of the city and to instill within me a love of the Hebrew letters. But it really is hopeless; when I’m in the city, I fall under the sway of the dealers. They keep me rushing about from place to place. When my errands have been successful, they give me an extra banknote. Like the rest of them, I could have sewn my savings into my coat, but my teacher will not allow that. And once, when I summoned up the courage and said, “Well, everyone sews money into their coats,” he threw me a piercing glance and said, “Not from bread alone do we live.” Since he said that to me, I am careful never to go to bed with as much as a penny in my pocket. Before going to sleep, I go over to Blind Menachem and empty my pockets. Sometimes I would like to leave a few coins for myself, but this is a fleeting regret, and the transfer is swift and quickly forgotten.

  —

  Czernowitz is a big city, and its lights burn throughout the night. Between errands, I steal away downtown and drift about the streets. They are clean and shiny, and beautiful women proudly stroll along them. If I have a coin in my pocket, I go into one of the cafés and spend some time there.

  “Where were you?” My teacher greets me anxiously.

  “I was doing errands.” I hide the truth.

  “So late?”

  He immediately takes a holy book out from his coat lining and starts to read it with me. It is important that I see the Hebrew letters before I go to sleep. Hebrew letters can redeem; they have the power of a heavenly sign that induces pure sleep.

  “Pure sleep protects the purity of the body, so a man cannot be so easily led astray,” my teacher whispers into my ear. He’s right. Since our arrival in Czernowitz, my sleep has been troubled. Young girls draw me to them with enchanted skeins, and the dealers joyfully brag that it doesn’t count if someone steals from a thief. Sleep weakens me, and I wake up with pounding headaches.

  But strange dreams do not ravage my sleep every night. Once in a dream I saw a young girl. She was tall and beautiful and she said, “Your name is Laishu, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, how did you know?”

  “That’s how it seemed to me. I’m not wrong, am I?”

  “You’re right, my name is Laishu.”

  “I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

  “How come?”

  “My mother told me long ago that there’s a youth in these parts whose name is Laishu. She said it would be easy to find him, for only he has such a name, and I, for some reason, didn’t believe her.”

  My voice was strained. “My name is Laishu—you really can believe me.”

  “If that’s how it is, then I’ll ask my mother’s forgiveness,” she said and disappeared.

  She had been so close to me that I marveled at how she managed to slip away.

  —

  After morning prayers, I serve each old man a mug of coffee. At this time of day, a purity envelops the faces of the old men. They hardly speak, but the few words that emerge have warmth and clarity, and I pray that these moments will linger forever.

  At night, mothers bring their ailing children. There are also the sick, the deaf, amputees, and grown children from whose throats come angry, birdlike sounds. The old men greet them alongside their wagons, converse a bit, and then bless them with fervor. I have seen the power of the old men on several occasions. In Czernowitz they wrought miracles, pure and simple. Everyone respects the old men and lavishes tremendous amounts of love on them. But we don’t know how to honor them properly, we don’t heed them, and we secretly mock them. In vain they shout, “Renounce your ways, you wayward children!”

  In the convoy, this falls on deaf ears.

  12

  Congealed within us there is a deep secret, a secret that I have concealed so far. In a structure resembling a birdcage but built to the height of an average person, a young girl named Mamshe has been shut away for years. She is thin and depressed, and her eyes are sunk deep in their sockets. Most of the day she is curled up soundlessly on the pallet in the cage, but there are days when she sits cross-legged and stares vacantly. At night, mostly on summer nights, she gets up on her knees and screams like a wounded animal. Everyone is chilled by her wretched existence. It is impossible to calm her down. Her screams can go on for hours; sometimes it gets even worse. Three women and a wagon driver now take care of her; when necessary, another wagon driver helps them.

  Mamshe was brought to the Holy Man a month before his death, wild and injured from bites she has given herself. Then and there, the Holy Man decreed that she be taken in. Because she was already imprisoned in a cage, they hoisted it up onto a wagon and covered it with a blanket; she’s been wandering around with us ever since.

  As I’ve said, at first no one could bear her screams, but the Holy Man held firm: she must not be taken back to the town where she was born. He warned us to treat her gently, and to speak to her as one speaks to an ordinary person, as if she understood everything that was said to her. Her hands were to be tied only when there was no alternative. The Holy Man’s injunctions are not always heeded: the women who take care of her say that they sometimes have to slap Mamshe’s face.

  There are also times when she stands quietly, her large eyes radiating an immense, painful sorrow, and you see quite clearly that she has been tortured by evil spirits since childhood. God alone knows why. At such a time, one of the women may go over to her and try to talk to her. It’s useless. The prisoner will throw her a piercing look, as if to say, Why are you disturbing me?, and immediately turn her back and curl up in her bedding.

  Mamshe’s screams used to be even more spine-chilling. But they’ve found different ways to calm her, including drugs, which make her slightly more docile. During the summer nights, from deep inside her thin body, voices emerg
e that send shock waves throughout our camp.

  They have often been on the point of opening Mamshe’s cage and letting her go, but whenever they were about to do it, something went wrong or they suddenly had pangs of remorse, and so she was not released. In Czernowitz, there was a marked change in the intensity of her screams. They cut through the air like a saw. Even back in Sadagora, Mamshe had pounced upon the two women who were washing her, biting and scratching them. At the time, the thinking was that this was just an isolated outburst, but in the days that followed it was clear that she had changed. Her screams grew more and more piercing.

  The people who took her side tried to defend her. “She’ll calm down, she always calms down eventually,” they said. But this time the majority did not support them, and their arguments carried weight. They claimed that her screams would draw the gendarmes, who would certainly waste no time conducting a search and confiscating merchandise, to say nothing of ready cash and who knew what else.

  In a final effort to take care of Mamshe, a doctor was brought in. The doctor, a short, bald Jew with a thin smile that played about his lower lip, tried to examine her with the help of two wagon drivers. She writhed in their hands and was eventually tied up. The results of the examination were not surprising: she was mad and there was nothing to be done.

  “I’ll give her tranquilizers,” said the doctor. But the medicine also proved useless. Moreover, her shouts became even more spine-chilling. A few old men stood by the cage and pleaded with her, promising that if she would stop shouting, they would not only remove the rope from around her hands but would also bring to her every day the sweet gruel that she so loved. But no amount of coaxing worked. Her screams were like cries of pure terror.

  Eventually, there was no choice: it was decided to release her. That evening, two wagon drivers opened the cage. At the sight of the open door and the light that spilled inside, she withdrew and huddled in a corner, let out a few trembling sobs, and covered her head with her blanket.

  “Get out, Mamshe, get out!” The wagon drivers raised their voices. On hearing their shouts, her body trembled and she curled up even more. “Get out!” they kept shouting. Even these shouts could not make her budge. She gripped the bars with both hands. Then they inserted a long pole into the cage. The pole touched her loins, and she got up onto her knees. The tip of the pole must have hurt her, because suddenly, almost as if she had been burned, she dashed out and ran under one of the awnings. The wagon drivers chased after her, but she escaped toward the reeds on the banks of the Prut.

  All night people expected her to return. It appeared as though she was hiding in the undergrowth and eavesdropping. The bonfires blazed and people prepared supper, but great anxiety lurked everywhere. The cage stood open next to the wagon that had carried her. She did not return. And neither did she return the following day. A few old men went over to the reeds and called out, “Mamshe! Mamshe!” There was no response.

  The wagon driver whose wagon had carried the cage, who had suffered from Mamshe’s screams and had harbored an implacable hatred for her, was now walking about looking very angry. Her disappearance had unsettled him, and it was he who turned to Sruel and asked, “Can’t you ask the falcon to find her?”

  “Don’t know how to talk to him,” said Sruel, in the manner of a peasant.

  The previous year a woman had disappeared, one of the quiet ones, and no one knew where she went. For a long time they searched for her in the villages. The dealers bribed the gendarmes and village elders, and they looked for her in barns and ditches. Finally, it was the falcon that discovered her. He circled above, marking the place. To our great sorrow, that was how we found her—quite lifeless.

  “You don’t speak to the falcon?” the wagon driver asked Sruel again.

  “No.”

  “So how does he understand you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Falcons get along with people?”

  “The first time I saw it was two years ago. I held out my hand and it came to me.”

  “Do you call to it?”

  “No.”

  “It comes to you by itself?”

  “It always finds me. If I’m in the camp, it comes to me in the camp. If I’m out in the fields, it comes to me in the fields.”

  “Strange, isn’t it?”

  “Why?”

  “Falcons don’t usually form attachments to human beings.”

  “What can I do?”

  13

  Mamshe’s disappearance cast a shadow over the day. We spoke of her with veiled regret. People wondered how she could be managing all alone among the desolate reeds. They were now convinced that she had understood everything that had happened over the last few days, and that she had not been able to bear her shame. That was why she kept shouting, Mamshe! Mamshe!, which means little mommy. Her shouts at the start of our journey later became her nickname. We had no idea how much a part of us she had been. Her face, red from the welts she carved with her own fingernails; her body, curled up on the floor of the cage; her emaciated legs, which she exposed whenever she went berserk—her entire being clung to us now.

  This time, too, the dealers acted as they always do when there’s an emergency: they paid two retired gendarmes to search for her. For several days the gendarmes wandered about the reeds and eventually returned empty-handed. For some reason, we were now sure that the river had swept her away. This thought was particularly painful, because she was afraid of the water. There were of course the coolheaded dealers who claimed that it was not necessary to get excited. A crazed creature has its own life and one shouldn’t get mixed up in its craziness; it doesn’t think as we do. Perhaps she was fine in the reeds.

  “This is not a Jewish way to speak.” The old men silenced them. “We are commanded to be compassionate.”

  For several days Mamshe’s disappearance hovered over the camp and covered everything we did with silence. Although Reb Pinchas continued with his performances he, too, fell prey to a deep melancholy. Even the wagon drivers, who were used to getting drunk after a day’s work, did not drink to excess and did not let lewd words come out of their mouths. But the urge to trade must be stronger than all else, and in the big city this compulsion was borne on the wings of imagination. From Czernowitz the roads lead to Vienna and to Lemberg; if you turn off into the railway station, you can buy and sell and turn a profit all at once. In Czernowitz, I saw how the dealers were entranced by their imaginations, how luck favored them, and how they soared. But I also saw how they fell, and I saw the pits that they dug for themselves with their own hands.

  I, too, benefit from the turmoil: my pockets are full of coins, some of which I stash away. My teacher, Old Avraham, undergoes torments because I spend most of the day outside the camp and not studying.

  “A life without Torah is wretched,” he drums into me whenever he encounters me. It’s strange, but I don’t feel this way. I work for the dealers and share in their big secrets. I smuggle herbs and cash in my pockets. It’s highly dangerous, but I have learned to enjoy it. The dealers draw me close, and at night I sit with them, drinking coffee and listening to their exploits. When I am in their company, trading seems like a colorful gambling arena. I find it more spellbinding with every passing moment. I sink into a sleep full of dangers, and I survive.

  One night, intoxicated with success, the dealers took me to a nightclub called Lily. As soon as anyone enters, he is given an alcove, a woman, and a bottle of liquor. A heavy pall of cigarette smoke hung over the nightclub. I was given a woman who was not tall and who spoke a German that I understood, with a ring to it that I found pleasant.

  “Where are you from, my dear?” She addressed me in a friendly tone. I recognized the phrase “my dear,” even though it had never before been spoken to me.

  “I live with the wanderers.” I revealed a bit to her.

  “Wonderful,” she said, “for it means that you are a free man. And where are you headed?”

  “We’re traveli
ng toward the sea.”

  She asked and I answered her. I immediately noticed that two of her side teeth were missing, which lent a sort of beauty to her face. Sometimes a defect only accentuates beauty, as with our Gitel, of whom I will say more in due course. She did not tell me anything about herself, and I did not dare to ask. I was enchanted and dumbstruck. My dreams had come true, but I felt my hands were completely numb, my tongue babbled incoherently, and whatever came out of my mouth was ridiculous.

  “And are you Jewish?” She surprised me.

  “Yes.” I laughed.

  “Me, too.”

  That astonished me; she did not look Jewish.

  “The Jews are better, aren’t they?”

  I didn’t know what to answer, so I said, “The Jews are very successful.”

  “True,” she said. “You’ve got it.”

  From what the dealers said, I knew that these women were worse than snakes, that they cheat you and steal right from your pocket. I did not have a thing, and whatever pennies I had, I gave her immediately. She glanced at them and said, “These coins will shine on Maya’s luck. She will look after them and not spend them lightly. Not every day does such a sweet lad come to Maya. She only gets the predators, not the cubs. The cubs are soft and good.”

  I had never before heard such words. There are women in our convoy, but they are embittered, without any charm, and they cast heaviness and gloom on your heart. Sometimes I would hide so I could watch them washing themselves. It was intriguing but ugly. Now I understood why the dealers said that a man should take a woman from among the non-Jews. A non-Jewish woman is a woman; our women only spread gloom and bitterness. Maya, if I can believe her, is a Jewess, but she has no traits that are noticeably Jewish.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked. My question greatly amused her. She grabbed my head, kissed me on the lips, and said, “Tonight Maya is going to ruin this cute one. It is a shame to ruin him, but there’s no choice—he must be ruined. What’s your name? Laish? I’ve never heard a name like it. Who gave you such a name?”