A Blessing on the Moon (19 page)

Shading my eyes with a raised arm, I cannot look into the searing light of their one hundred torches.

They must have been gathering all night, these soldiers and vigilantes, outside my cupboard door. They have waited for me to reveal myself, so they may kill me at my most terrified. If I am crazed and animal-like, I will not fight back, and they can take greater pleasure in the killing.

I roll out of the cupboard, my hands raised, trying not to weep. As my eyes adjust, gradually, I am able to make out forms. I can barely stand on my numbed legs, they fall out from under me. I look around. The bright light of day spills through the many holes in the hotel’s
walls and roof. Nothing is left, but a dilapidated shell, no larger than a barn. There are no fine and fancy grounds, no stables, no greenhouses, no long palatial drives, no fountains and no pools. I’m standing in the middle of a green and sunny field. The air is fresh and fragrant. The birds, indeed, are singing. My eyes search the landscape, but can find no trace of snow. The earth is alive and green, the wind is cool, but pleasant. How long have I lain hidden in my little cupboard, cramped and twisted from fear? It must be early spring. I feel like a sleepwalker who awakens far from his home with no idea how he arrived here. I’m still wearing the hotel’s nightshirt and its ridiculous tasseled cap. Across the field, a black shape catches my eyes, dangling from a tree.

“Rebbe!” I cry out, running to greet him.

But it’s only my old suit, hanging on a branch, blowing in the breeze. Sunlight dapples through the familiar pattern of bullet holes sewn irrevocably into its fabric. I find my old shoes, placed in a knot-hole in the tree’s trunk. Pulling the nightshirt over my head, I knock the tasseled sleeper’s cap to the ground. My naked belly is exposed and I’m dismayed to see that my old wounds have been restored. They are fresh and pustular, no longer covered with shiny scars. Gingerly, I raise my hand to my face and allow my fingers to probe the unnatural depressions and openings there and in the back of my head. I take the clothes off their branches and dress in my old shirt, my old jacket. I secure my old pants around my waist with my worn, familiar belt.

I sit upon the ground, beside the tree. I fold my legs and brace them with my arms.

I close my eyes and see only the ovens and their flames, their blue tongues licking across the bodies of my Ester, my Sarah, my Edzia, my Miriam, my Hadassah, my Laibl; consuming my sons-in-law and their children, Markus, Solek, Israel, Pavel, Pola, Jakob, Sabina, Marek and his daughters; devouring my town as well. Everyone I know, everyone I have ever known, has disappeared into the ash. I have torn my clothes and fallen to my knees, but my grief is insufficient. Were the oceans made of tears and the winds of sighing, still
there would not be tears enough nor sighs to assuage my crumpled heart.

Why was I given a body! I shout this to the Heavens. Why was I restored to my place at the head of my family! Why did You, in Your infinite wisdom and Your mercy, invite me to luxuriate in the Hotel Amfortas, delighting in its gardens and its lakes, only to see every dear thing billow up the kitchen stacks in black and stenchy plumes?

What are You thinking?

For Who Else could be behind such a monstrous affair, from which even the Rebbe’s tender guidance couldn’t spare me. No, it’s impossible to doubt God’s hand. Who but the Almighty could take a shabby house painter and, in a few short years, make him Chancellor of all Germany?

What difference does it make where I go? The sun burns, searing, above me. The long winds wail past. I wander through the woods, dour in thought, heading nowhere, walking in circles. The earth has vomited me out. I mutter to myself like a madman, fetid in her stench. If, as a child, I had been taken aside and told of the poisoned secrets my future hid for me in its coils, I would have fallen into a fever and died immediately.

Am I really expected now to carry on, without even a death to ransom me?

Deep in the forest, I find my rustic traveling sack hanging from a linden tree. The strap is looped across the gnarled blackened branch and the bag rocks slightly in the wind, as though a hand had placed it there only a moment before.

Who keeps playing these tricks on me?

Wearied by my own curiosity, nevertheless I cannot help but peer into the hanging bag. And what do I expect to find there? Money perhaps? Steamship tickets to Buenos Aires? Letters from a distant admirer?

I expect nothing at all.

And so I am not overly surprised to find, exactly as I had left them, the toy compass and the cracked telescope, which I rescued from beneath Ola’s bed. (Dear little Ola, how happy and small her death now seems.) The family pictures are missing, but the ledger is neatly tucked inside. I open its covers and find that its pages have been singed and burnt. The remnants of my careful notes and drawings crumble and fall into the forest carpet. “Will it never end?” I shout this question to the trees.

I often speak aloud these days, sometimes shouting, often not, wishing I had no voice at all, that my thoughts might cease their feverish noodlings through my brain and disappear completely, folding in upon themselves.

I find there is no longer any need for food. I nearly choked upon the pine needle stew I made, more from habit than from hunger, near the river a day or so ago. I had to pick the nettles from my tongue, they clogged my gullet.

I had been dreaming of my mother’s soup, her special recipe, that milky broth served steaming with a swirling ladle from the hotel’s silver tureen. How I long to awaken to the smell of dark coffee and a bite of apricot blintz.

I sleep, beneath a crooked tree, my satchel for a pillow, and awaken in the night to hear weeping not far off.

Rising on an elbow, leaves sticking to my wounds, I strain to listen but soon the crying stops.

“Are you all right?” I call. The words are echoed back, as though I had addressed them to myself.

“Can you hear me?” I shout into the silence.

“Are you all right?”

But there is nothing. Only the sounds of the forest breathing. I brush the twigs and leaves from my face and lay my head again upon the satchel.

And then, unmistakably I hear the words
Chaim Skibelski, is that you?
cutting through the night.

I stand immediately. Searching the darkened forest paths and the pitch black silhouettes of trees, I cup my hands to my mouth and cry, “Yes, it’s me! It’s Chaim Skibelski! I am here!”

But I receive no further answer.

Soon the sky lightens and it is once again bright day. Overhead, an enormous aeroplane, larger than any I have seen, roars through the clouds, shaking the ground beneath my feet. It is long, enormously so, a blazing silver tube flashing in the early light. I thought an army must be approaching, such was the rumbling that preceded its exploding into view above my head.

Perhaps I can say Kaddish for myself.

This queer thought occurs to me as I loll about the ground beneath my tree. There is nothing else I have to do, nothing pressing. I’ve frittered away the last few days, stretched out in a tense indolence, feeling sorry for myself. Were it not for a suffocating grief that occasionally overtakes me, my days would have no shape at all, so encased am I in this hard, metallic gloom.

But why not? Why can’t a soul recite the prayer for the dead over himself and somehow, on his own, effect his way into the World to Come? Our Sages teach us that if a person has no sons, a grown man may be hired to say the prayer on his behalf.

Why can’t I hire myself?

True, I have nothing with which to pay myself, but then, on the other hand, I don’t need much. Immediately, I agree to do the service
without charge. The merit of the deed will be all the greater for this small charity.
So why not, Chaimka?
I urge myself on. And in a twinkling, I am up, revived, and facing east. I feel as energetic as I can remember. I have nothing with which to cover my head, so I place my satchel across the top of my skull, holding its straps underneath my chin, drawing them together like the edges of a shawl.

“Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw,” I chant. “Magnified and Holy be His Great Name!” I put my heart into it, davvening with all my soul. I’ve never prayed so fervently. “May the Maker of Peace in the high places make peace in the small places. For us, for Israel, and for all who mourn. And so we say, Amen!”

The
Amen
resounds through the forests, like a gun shot. I am stirred and awakened, anticipating in the next instant something momentous, something extravagant, something along the lines of Ola’s ascension, but without the gaudy theatricals.

Nothing discernible happens.

I sigh.

Perhaps a subtle change has been effected, but it’s very difficult to tell.

I sit again beneath the branches of my birch and return to the dawdling lethargy I had hoped to shake off with my prayers. Even if it were possible, not to mention permissible, to pray oneself into the World to Come, I know I do not have the stamina to keep at it for the required eleven months. My heart isn’t in it, I have no minyan, and without the moon, who can keep track of the time?

I stretch and yawn and sadly contemplate the sky.

Surely by now, my sons in America know that we are dead. For isn’t the war long over? Surely some survivor or witness has sought them out and knocked upon their doors. Clearing his throat and apologizing for his broken English, surely he has sat at their kitchen tables and been plied with honeycake and coffee by their wives. These he unhappily accepts from a sense of decorum, before telling them of our fates, my sons translating the Yiddish for their children. By now, surely, the coffee has grown bitter and the honeycake stale and tasteless on their tongues. Surely they have thought, with aching hearts, to pray the Kaddish that they owe me!

If not my sons, then
their
sons. Anyone over thirteen will do!

Or are the Gates of Heaven, God forbid, closed? Else, why has no one interceded on my behalf? Can Ester, whose soul I’m certain flew up the smokestacks to the highest realms of Holiness, not put in a good word for me? She, who harmed no one—surely they would listen to her! Will not our daughters plead for their father?

Or have they forgotten me?

How long must I wander, searching the larches for the Rebbe, craning my neck, calling up to the crows, “Excuse me, dear crows, but is my Rebbe there among you?”

“Who?” the birds squawk down, chattering, “Who who who?”

“Dear birds, my teacher, is he there?”

They address my inquiry to their companions, hanging like so many black apples in the neighboring trees, cawing and clattering in their secretive tongue.

“Sorry,” one bird calls down, translating. “No Rebbe here.”

I have taken to walking at night, aimlessly. Too tired to sleep, I thrash through the woods, singing little melodies to myself, guided sufficiently by the stars not to break my neck. Sometimes I sit against a tree or near a lake and hold a small conversation with myself.

“Chaim, Chaim, Chaim,” I sigh.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” I reply, the words escaping, almost like breath, from my mouth.

“And so,” I begin a new point, but I lose myself in thought before I can continue.

Late one night, I inadvertently leave the borders of my forest and find myself upon a road that winds into a small provincial town. For no reason at all, I follow it past farmhouses and churches, over a small hill, across a narrow bridge, and am halfway down Kosciuszki Street before I realize that I am home. I am home. I am standing in my old town, on the outskirts of the Jewish quarter. I have to stop and gawk, so amazed am I to find myself in this old place. It’s hard to say exactly what has changed. Everything seems different. The roads are paved, for one thing, and, certainly, there are more cars parked along the streets. Before, Rosenthal and I were among the few private citizens with our own conveyances, but now they are everywhere, smaller and brighter
than I remember, painted in all the hues of the color wheel, shaped as I have never seen them shaped before. There are no horse carts anywhere, that is new, and many of the old houses have vanished. In their places stand monstrous square buildings, nearly six stories high some of them, made entirely of glass. I get dizzy looking up into their mirrored surfaces. Familiar chestnut trees grow here and there, but the walkways, from the old bridge to the hospital, are lined now with rows of poppies, as red as a Bolshevik’s black heart. Queer boxes dangle from wires stretched above the roads, but the red and green circles in them offer no real light, certainly not enough for a passerby to find his way across them in the dark.

Where once were shops, now people make their homes. Peering through their windows, I see them eating or talking with each other. They sit in groups around large boxes, on one panel of which a grainy photograph seems to be moving. It’s very strange!

Even Ciacierski’s café looks drab inside, with little to offer. A bored woman, the waitress, sits at a dingy table, painting her fingernails.

Most of the street names have changed. The old Talmud Torah sits now on Lenin Street, who could believe such a thing, opposite a large state building stretching from Wigierska all the way to Ciesielska Street! Half of my own Noniewicza is gone, crushed beneath more of these glass monstrosities. It looks as if a new city has been dropped from the Heavens, quashing portions of the old town beneath it, wherever it fell.

It must be very late at night. I cross into my old courtyard. The
apartments are dark, the residents are sleeping certainly, although through one window, I see a bright red dot glowing brighter and dimmer, brighter and dimmer, moving up and down in a curving arch. Someone cannot sleep and is smoking.

From the old Mintz apartment, I hear a series of tinny bells ringing and a groggy voice answers, “Hello?”

Is it possible each apartment now has its own telephone?