A Blessing on the Moon (16 page)

“This soup,” I say.

“It was to your satisfaction, I hope?”

“Exquisite, yes, excellent,” I say. “I was just wondering.”

“Sir?”

“What do you call it?”

He places one arm on his hip and twirls the ladle flirtatiously.

“For you, Herr Skibelski,” he says, “I’d call it Keila’s soup.”

He smiles like a man caught at some pleasurable taboo.

“Keila’s soup?” I say.

“Yes, sir.”

“After my mother?”

He winks, lifting the tureen from the table.

“Quite a recipe, isn’t it?”

My sons-in-law’s names appear on the list for the steam and they are each given a small blue card with their appointment time handwritten upon it. Although he is not interested, my son Lepke also is given an appointment. Only my name is absent from the list.

“There will be other opportunities,” the Maître d’Hôtel mews, scanning the names on his sheets. “Shortly, my colleague Frau Gruber will be here to assist with the women,” and he bustles over to the nearest table.

“It’s quite relaxing, they say,” says Marek, tapping his card with his long index finger.

“By the looks of it, they’ll be running all night,” this from Markus.

“What time are your appointments? Perhaps we can meet and go together,” Pavel peers at his own card and then at the others through small round eyeglasses.

“Not until the middle of the night.”

“Amazing,” Pavel removes his glasses. “The staff must never sleep.”

“Three in the morning?” Markus grunts, looking over Lepke’s appointment card, a cigarette hanging from his lip. The boy holds on to the card awkwardly, as though embarrassed to have hands. “They’ll send someone to call for you. You needn’t worry. They’ll make sure that you’re awake.”

When alive, Markus traveled a great deal for his work and so is familiar with hotels and their ways.

“Once in Vienna,” he tells the table, “I met a remarkable man over dinner, a Herr Goldstein, a real talker, and the two of us stayed up nearly till dawn, the entire time talking in the lobby. There we were, in two stuffed chairs, while the night staff cleaned all about us!”

After the sumptuous dinner and many long speeches, both from the hotel administration and from the heads of our local councils and other civic groups, cigars are distributed and the men are free to smoke.

“I’ve made discreet inquiries,” Marek leans in closer to the table, lowering his voice.

“And what have you found?” Pavel murmurs.

“Nothing conclusive, I’m afraid.”

“You’ve tried bribes?” Markus bellows, despite himself. His voice is always booming. It’s impossible for him to speak softly. Even his whisper is too loud.

“Inquiries into what?” I say. I’m a little drunk, I fear, and still in a stupor from the food.

“Bribes? Of course, I haven’t tried bribes.”

“Why not?”

“We haven’t any money.”

Markus snorts. “What’s money have to do with it?”

“To do with what?” I say. “What are you talking about?”

“Lepke,” says Pavel. “Explain it to your father.”

But Lepke only looks at his chest, his cheeks reddening.

“Leave the boy alone,” says Marek.

If I can’t understand them, what hope is there for Lepke?

“What are you suggesting?” says Pavel to Markus. “That we bribe them with the very items they’ve supplied for us?”

“Among other things,” says Markus, removing his cigar and rolling his tongue inside his mouth.

“I’ve talked to everyone I can. From the Assistant to the Direktor to the chambermaids.”

“Oh, the chambermaids! Now we understand.”

Marek bristles, sweeping his hair back with a long pale hand. “Markus, not everyone lives in the gutter like you.”

“Not everyone is so lucky,” burps Markus.

“But are they hiding something,” says Pavel, “or do they simply not know anything?”

“About what?” I say. “Know what?”

“Chaim,” sighs Pavel, “forgive us—”

Marek interrupts him. “It’s just that some of us aren’t content like you to follow a grackle halfway across Europe without even so much as asking where we’re going!”

“A grackle?” I say. The word is unfamiliar to me.

“Jackdaw, grackle, whatever.”

“But the Rebbe isn’t a grackle,” I say. “He’s a crow.”

“Exactly my point!”

“Marek,” warns Markus.

“Papa Chaim,” says Pavel, “he doesn’t mean any disrespect.”

But Marek snorts disdainfully and crosses his long arms against his slender chest. “Don’t I?”

They are modern young men, these three. Zionists, Bundists, freethinkers for all I know.

“If it were up to him,” sneers Marek, “we’d all be traipsing after crows.”

Marek, I’m told, was even once a member of the Communist Party, although Miriam refused to confirm or deny this when I confronted her.

“Marek, leave it alone,” Hadassah calls from their side of the table, listening in and standing up for her father. She’s not afraid of an elder brother-in-law. At times, I worried she was much too attached to me and that was what kept her from marrying.

“He may be a crow, Marek,” I say, “but at least he survived!”

“So he survived? So what?”

“Did being a man help you when it came to that?”

“Marek, Chaim,” says Pavel. “All we want to know is where we are and what will happen to us here.”

“Then you’ll have to bribe people to find out,” bellows the rotund Markus.

“Markus, for God’s sake, keep your voice down!” Marek hisses. “People are listening!”

“But isn’t it clear?” Lepke pipes up in his weak and quavering voice. We can barely hear him.

“What’s clear?” his brothers-in-law ask, smirking with their heads together, like conspirators.

So shy, he cannot look them in the face, Lepke pinches at his chin, taps his thumb against his teeth and then dries his wet nail across his lower lip.

“That we’re in the World to Come,” he says. “Isn’t it clear?”

It’s strange. He’s a sweet boy, our Lepke, but if you didn’t pay close attention, you might forget that he is here. Because his mind is vague and he isn’t a sharp businessman like the others, no one credits what he says. Also, he cannot meet their gazes or stand against their thundering retorts. He’s too polite to contradict them. And so, instead, he folds up into himself and disappears.

“Spare me your fairy tales!” cries Marek.

“What’s so fantastic about it?” says Lepke.

“All this nonsense they cooked up to enslave us, these rabbis!”

“But is it so far-fetched,” says Pavel, “given our situation.”

“Look,” booms Markus. “If there is a Paradise, do you actually think they’d let Jews into it?”

My sons-in-law blather on, lost in the thickening cloud of their cigar smoke. It floats about their heads in grey and fuzzy plumes.

I sit back and freshen my mouth with water. Of course, if this were the World to Come, wouldn’t all the dead be here and not just the recently murdered? As I say, I had hoped to see my mother. And I had heard, for instance, that one encounters Adam and Abraham and, very usually, the prophet Elijah, none of whom are here. Otherwise, surely, they would have been called upon for speeches.

Perhaps Marek is right and all the promises were not promises, but lies. The memory of my murder is so distant that I have to remind myself that it happened at all. Still, I died, of this I’m sure. But somehow I survived and my body has been restored to me, as good as new, or very nearly. How can Marek explain this?

“An electromagnetic malfunction of our brain stems, perhaps,” he says, tamping his cigar. “I couldn’t really say.”

Preposterous!

Still, it doesn’t explain the absence of my mother, or of Ida and our child.

“Papa, does it matter where we are?” this from Hadassah. “At least we’re together.”

“That Marek,” I say to her, under my breath. “What do you think? Was he truly a Communist?”

“Papa, don’t,” she says, looking away and refusing to answer. Has her sister sworn her to secrecy?

“You can tell your father,” I say.

“No, Papa,” Mirki cuts in. “He was never a Communist. Now are you satisfied?”

“Then why must he think like one!”

Our daughters and their husbands decide to stay up and move to the bar for late-night drinks.

Ester and I excuse ourselves and take their children up to bed. I hold Pola’s and Sabina’s hands, while Mirki’s twins search through my pockets for hidden treasures.

“You won’t find any,” I say, but when they open their small, tight fists, each holds a round candy wrapped in a colorful wax paper.

“Well, well, well,” I say. “I’m full of surprises.”

“Only one each!” Ester snaps. “It’s your bedtime.”

She walks with Kubuś and Solek and Izzie. They escort her through the hallways like three gentlemen strolling with a dignitary through the streets of a capital city. They are talking, but quietly, almost formally. Their days of needing a grandmother’s smothering sweetness have passed.

We arrive at their rooms, and after a thousand hugs and five hundred goodnight kisses, we leave the smaller ones in the charge of their older cousins and their siblings.

“Kubuś, you’re oldest, remember,” my Ester warns sternly.

“Goodnight, Zeyde,” they call to me.

The hall is quiet.

I take Ester’s arm and lead her to the lift, where the liftboy is drowsing on his stool. We allow him to sleep, his hands folded loosely in his lap, a bead of saliva on his chin.

Not knowing exactly what I’m doing, I pull the levers myself.

“Chaim, stop, stop. You’ll get us killed!”

But after the initial jolt, the box moves fluently, although not to the proper floor.

“What are you doing?” Ester hisses, afraid to disturb the sleeping boy. “Chaim, you need to wake him!”

“Hold on, hold on,” I say. How difficult can this be?

I have no idea which floor we’re on. I look through the meshed door, to orient myself, and there she is. At least I think it’s she.

Already in motion, my hands slip the levers into place, somewhere electrical connections are made, and our box rises, clanging, through its chutes, before I can get a second look.

“Ida?” I whisper to myself.

“I am sorry, Herr Skibelski, but there is no one here by that name.”

“Then perhaps she is registered under her maiden name.”

I am jumping from foot to foot before the registration desk, so nervous and excited am I at the prospect of seeing her again.

“In either case,” the concierge says, closing his book, “I cannot give out the information you desire. Not all our guests wish to have their privacy disturbed. When you said her name was Skibelski,” he digs at the wax in his fleshy ear, “I could at least assume she was a relative of yours, but now …” he hesitates.

“Kaminski is her maiden name,” I plead.

“I understand that,” he says, crossing his arms, “but I really cannot help you.”

Before I can protest, a light is illuminated behind him and a buzzer sounds.

He turns back to me, looks me in the eye, although not unkindly.

“Excuse me, Herr Skibelski, I am called away to a staff meeting, where I will be for a goodly half hour.”

He knocks a curled fist lightly against the registration book, twice.

“Our guests are registered in a rough alphabetical order,” he says and he straightens his coat, pulling at his shirtcuffs, so that they are even. With a dismissive nod, he takes his leave.

“Thank you,” I say, calling at his back.

“For what?” he turns imperiously.

“For nothing,” I say, shrugging.

“Exactly, Herr Skibelski, exactly. For nothing,” and he is gone.

Casually, I lean my arm against the desk. The lobby is all but empty. Here and there are couples, mostly men, conversing over nightcaps. I think of Markus and his friend Goldstein, talking in Vienna until dawn. A few waiters move sleepily from the bar to the lobby, ferrying drinks.
No one is watching me, and so, with a tense nonchalance, I turn the thick registration book, so that it is facing me. Small tabs, embossed with letters of the alphabet, line the edge of its pages. I open the book to
K–L
and scan with my middle finger through its various entries.
Kaufman, Klein, Kalovski.

“Excuse me, sir,” the voice is so close, I nearly jump, dropping the book from my hand, as though it were on fire.

A waiter holds his round tray vertically beneath his arm. There are circles of perspiration from sweating glasses dotting its cork surface.

“May I bring you a drink or some food?” he inquires. “Our kitchen will be closing shortly for the night.”

“Thank you, no,” I say, feigning insouciance. “I told a friend I’d meet him here.”

“Very well, sir.”

“This is the registration desk, isn’t it?” I am overdoing it perhaps.

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“I wasn’t sure, you see. I thought perhaps I was at the wrong port.”

“This is the registration desk,” he says.

“Something must be detaining him.”

“Your friend?”

“Certainly my friend,” I say.

“I could have him paged for you.”

“Paged?”

“If you wish.”

“But that’s not necessary.”

“It’s no trouble, sir. I’d be happy to do it.”

I can’t tell if he is merely being helpful or if he actually suspects me. I notice that my palms are sweating.

“Fine,” I say. “Of course. A page. What an excellent idea.”

At least this will get rid of him or so I think. I cross my arms and fold my hands under, concealing them.

The waiter removes a small notepad from his hip pocket, and a stubby pencil.

“His name?”

“Pardon me?”

“Your friend’s name.”

“You want my friend’s name?”

“I’ll need it for the page.”

My mind goes blank. “Of course,” I smile. The only name I can think of at the moment is my own. “Chaim Skibelski.”

“Skibelski?”

“My friend’s name is Chaim Skibelski.”

“Very well.”

He clicks his heels and bows slightly. Wheeling around, he traces his way through the lobby.