A Blessing on the Moon (7 page)

I look down at my hands and see that, like a fool, I’m still clutching onto my family portrait. I had forgotten all about it. With a handkerchief, I wipe a bit of motor oil from its glass. Behind me, suddenly, there is a shrieking. I turn to find Ola’s mother wailing over the waxen corpse that lies like a stick figure in her bed. The woman beats her enormous breasts, pulls at her coarse grey hair. Tears build up behind the golden rims of her eyeglasses. These she eventually must remove, allowing the dammed waters to flood across her apple cheeks in little curling streams.

“My baby!” she wails. “My Ola!”

I notice that she is wearing Ester’s good Sabbath dress and the small cameo I bought for her on a business trip one year to Lodz. I peer into her face, trying to discern from it how much time has passed, but its features are too distorted in their agony for that.

A chorus of hands reach out to the Mama from behind, rubbing her shoulders, patting her head. These belong to her family, but she shakes them off fiercely. More relatives crowd into the room, nearly thirty of them. They stand close to the bed, in a thickening knot, like a group waiting for a tram.

“Get them out!” the Mama shrieks. “Out! I can’t breathe!” She throws her heavy body onto the thin corpse of her daughter.

“There, there,” Big Andrzej consoles his wife, punching her lightly on the arm. “Your Ola is with her Jesus now.”

I’m drunk, reeling. They’re all at the funeral. I’ve unlocked the liquor cabinet and gone through the bottles they’ve stashed there. Two bottles of potato vodka, one of rye whiskey, one of some sticky sacramental wine. Since I’m not able to drink, instead I relax my tongue and my throat and pour the bitter potions down my gullet. Perhaps I’m drunk only from memory, from the smells. Perhaps I’m not drunk at all. They’ll come home and find the empty bottles rolling around on the floor, in any case. Let them. I don’t care! Have I really been abandoned twice? First by the Rebbe, and now by Ola! Oh, but the misery of watching her ascend to the Heavens in a fiery chariot, accompanied by her false gods, those idolatrous abominations, while our God, the One True God, has left me neglected here below, answering my pleas with His stony, implacable silence!

The mourners have returned. They sit in the parlor, sighing and weeping, groaning, sutured up so tightly in their shiny black clothes that they can barely breathe. Every now and then, one of them mentions the name
Ola
or the name
Paulina
. It strikes my ear like a savage insult or a bitter taunt. Their pious little daughter, too good for this harsh world. Well, whose daughter is not! I cannot bear their insipid complacencies another minute. Even now, see how they stretch and yawn, scratching their rumbling bellies before marching off to the dining room, like sleepwalkers. If it weren’t for their intestines, they wouldn’t even know they’re alive.

Neighbors, from the old Kaminski and Goldfaden apartments across the courtyard, have prepared a banquet, a feast. Tureens of chlodnik and kapuśniak and sauerkraut soup, pitchers of clabbered milk, boiled potatoes with skwarki, plates of moonshaped pierogi piled high near plates of pierożki filled with calf brains near plates of kolduny filled with rabbit meat. There are deep bowls of kasha and uszka and plump rolls of coulibiac. A platter here of salted herring with pickled eggs and one there for a roasted pork shoulder with baked apples and potatoes. Someone has poached a carp in a caramelized raisin sauce. There are cabbages with potatoes and couscous, fiery kielbasa and knackwurst, and a fragrant bigos stew. The scent of juniper berries carries all the way down the street! Roasted squab, shashlik, and a cabbage-smothered pheasant are draped across platters along with a rare stuffed goose. For dessert, there are little mountains of sour-cream blinis, great wheels of red Russian kiśiel, twisted sticks of chrust, golden-brown racuszki sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar, raisin-filled babka and a tower of flat piernik cakes.

The sideboard resembles a butcher’s window, the serving table a baker’s shop. Dazed, in polite couples, the many mourners approach the feast, muttering guiltily about life and its irrefutable demands, about the high importance of living, about how Ola, dear lamb, would have wanted them to live, how she would have wanted them to forget all about her, if need be, in order to continue living, to continue filling their bellies and sucking in air, as though there were not enough of it to go around, as though certain lungs must surrender their portion in
order that pinker, more fortunate lungs might expand to full capacity! How they sigh and heave, these fatuous dreamers, flaunting the very air in their chests. Their exhalations fill my nostrils with a putrid stench. Oh, the living, how they stink! They stink! They do! They rot but do not decompose. And each day, these walking, stinking, breathing monsters devour whole forests of animals, entire oceans of fish, great farms of vegetables and to what end? That they may shit and fart and piss their way through another day of violence and indifference. Well, let them pass their lives as someone else’s uninvited guests. I want them out! Now! Out of my house!

I enter the dining room and circle the table. With bowed heads, they’ve finished saying their prayers. “In Jesus’ name,” they pray, “Amen,” praying through the failed rabbinical student they imagine to be God, to the true God, a God they do not know, a God Who hates me, true, it’s true, Who hid my fate from me these many years, when I was rich and felt myself so blessed. This is what You had in store for me? To watch helplessly as a family of Polish pigs sits at my table and feeds itself, as though around a trough, snuffling down the delicacies they’ve stolen from the cellars of my murdered neighbors!

I’ll have no more of it.

Big Papa Andrzej has now stood, so solemnly, to thank all his neighbors for their considerable charities. Piously, he motions to his mourning wife, offering up her thanks as well. He is drunk. Like me. Like me, he’s been drinking since sun up. His wife, that fat horse of a woman, sobs and sniffs at every mention of her poor daughter’s name.

“Ola, Ola, Ola!” I bellow it into her head, not an inch away, so close I can see the stiff hairs growing like foliage inside her plump apricot ears. And out her nose as well. I’ve peeked around the corner of her head for a better look. There’s one curling white hair growing from a wart upon her chin.

The eldest brother rises, also, to offer a toast of thanks to their helpful friends, usurpers of
my
helpful friends and their houses and their homes.

“While you offer up thanks, why not thank your stars that your true landlords are dead in a pit five versts out of town!” I scream, adding to the silence.

Now all the thanks have been offered and the meal continues. As the Papa sits, I can’t help it, I pull his chair out from under him. A childish prank, I know, but satisfying nonetheless. He tumbles onto the floor, a look of helpless confusion on his face. But because the family is long used to his drunken misjudgments, they show only the slightest concern, helping him to his feet, until I throw the chair across the room. It shatters against my mother-in-law’s mirror, which she gave Ester and me as a wedding gift. The little group of mourners gasps. They cross themselves, leaving their legs unprotected. I take the opportunity to dash around the table, spilling first this plate, then that, onto their open laps. Down the line I go, one after the next. They stand, the food dropping off like clots of mud from their skirts and pants.

I’m on the table now, above their heads, dancing. With every kick of my feet, I send a tea cup sailing to the right and to the left. They crash
and crack against the walls with the light, tinkling sound of someone noodling on a piano. Lifting a platter, I rain squab down upon their heads.

“It’s Ola’s ghost!” someone screams, raising a protective arm. But why would Ola haunt this house? Her greatest wish, when alive, was to flee it.

“No,” says the Papa, sniffing the air. “It’s that crazy yid who used to live here. I can smell him.”

I have jumped to the floor and am about to rip the curtains from their rods, when the drunken old fool leaps upon the table and does a little mazurka of his own, sending forks and knives scattering in all directions.

“Get down, Andrzej!” the Mama screams.

“Look! Look at me!” he sings out. “I’m a dead yid. I’m the ghost of that Jewish yid!” He contorts his face into twisted poses suggestive, I imagine, of my presumed agony. He yodels spookily, like a man whose throat has just been slashed.

Infuriated, I fling whole drawers of silverware from the sideboard at him. They spill over him, each drawer a small cloudburst of silver rain.

“Aha!” he calls, ducking. “I’ve got him angry now!”

In retaliation, he kicks the goose from its platter, sends it flying, once again, across the room.

“Here,” he says, taking wads of bank notes from an inner pocket of his vest. “I’ll buy the house from you, you christkilling yid! Money, that’s all you care about! If that’s what you want, well, here it is!” And
he throws the bills about the room, in loose fistfuls. “If that’s what you want, I’ll buy the house from you! Pan Skibelski, can you hear me!”

Everyone is laughing and applauding him, as he chases round the table. The strain of this sight, however, proves too much for the Mama and she is escorted from the room by two of her daughters. They fill up the doorway, three black ravens clucking their tongues, and disappear into another room.

The old father continues capering on the table, ringed by the bright shiny faces of children and cousins and neighbors all about him on the floor.

“Who are you, Andrzej?” they scream up at him.

“I’m the yid!” he shouts back. “I’m the dead yid!” He leans down, pretending to snatch at them with trembling fingers. “Careful or I’ll seduce you in the night!”

My heart sinks and the bleeding begins. I’m unable to stand, blood streaming from my eyes and ears, out my anus and my chest. I vomit up whole quarts and sit shaken in a corner.

“Who are you, Uncle Andrzej?” the children call to him.

“I’m Pan Skibelski!” he shouts back.

The room is littered with broken plates and food.

Janek from next door brings in another cache of his homemade vodka. The mourners, even the children,
everyone!
helps himself to another drink. Loud music blares from the phonograph. I pant, breathlessly, holding my belly, blood filling my clothes, soaking through, stranding me in a large and growing puddle.

The old father continues dancing, to the general delight, across the tabletop. His hat has flown off and his face is puffy and red. Perspiration flies from each of his black and grey hairs. His voice is growing hoarse. “Look at me! Look at me!” he calls. “I’m the dead yid! Careful or I’ll seduce you in the night!”

I barely stumble up the staircase, clinging to the walls, my sight dimming. Using my hands to steady myself, I find my way to the bathroom and lie there in the rounded tub, tears mingling with the blood dripping from my eye. They trail across my face, stinging my raw and wounded cheek. My legs are splayed and my shoes stick out over the rims. The blood drips back through my socks and runs inside my pant legs and up my thighs.

I am losing consciousness. My arms grapple the sides of the tub, my fingers numbing to their task. I will not be able to hold myself up much longer. For a moment I am terrified I will fall asleep and drown in my own blood. But that is ridiculous. I am already dead. The thought is absurd: a dead man drowning. I laugh quietly and, perhaps because of the awkward position of my body in the tub, some air may have gotten trapped inside my lungs. A small splash of blood explodes from my nose, staining my collar, my shirtfront and my tie.

WHEN I AWAKEN
, my head is pounding, my throat is parched, my eyes burn against a harsh and yellow light.

A candle stands near the sink in a small monument of its own melted wax.

Everything is familiar. The red wallpaper, the unbolted door, the brass faucets. Am I really still
here
? A dull throb pounds behind my forehead. My eye traces a line of pain, following an enormous shadow as it skates across the corners of the wall. The Angel of Death! At last, at last. I attempt to rise, to greet him, to offer my neck for his sword.

WHEN I AWAKEN
again, I notice that I am naked.

“Rebbe,” my eyes focusing. “Is that really you? Are you really back?”

“I’m back,” he screeches. “Of course I’m back. What did you think?” He hops about on the edges of the tub, swooping down to plug the stopper into the drain, the brass chain dangling from his beak.

“Rebbe,” I roar out my heart’s lament. “Why am I not dead!” I can’t help speaking so freely. The sight of him, walking on the lip of the tub, has broken a dam within my heart. I lie back, too weak to move or stand or even sit up for very long.

The Rebbe fills the tub with tepid water, turning the faucets with his beak.

His feathers bristle and he scolds me. “What do you even know about it that you think it should be different? From where do you get such expectations!”

“But how could you just leave me?”

“Chaim, you didn’t get my note?”

“Your note!” I say. “Yes, I got your note. Only how could I read it, scrawled in that pigeon scratch, you shouldn’t be offended.”

“Chaimka,” the jaw of his beak slackens. “That was Yiddish.”

“Yiddish?” I say. Impossible!

The water rises in the tub, seeping through my bullet holes, filling the hollows of my body with its creeping warmth. The Rebbe flaps his wings and remains stationary, for a moment, in the air.

I close my eyes and wait for the water to reach my ears.

The pinkish water drains, in a small swirl, from the tub. The Rebbe carries over a cloth in his beak, one of the towels Ola and I used. I suffer a moment of confusing embarrassment.

He eyes me sharply.

“Rebbe,” I stammer in explanation.

“Wash your face now, Chaimka,” he says. “There’s blood all over it.”

How much does he know? Everything, I suspect.