Herzog (23 page)

    Mile. Helene Herzog ... avec distinction.

    His soft prim sister who played the piano.

    On a summer night she sat playing and the clear notes went through the window into the street. The square-shouldered piano had a velveteen runner, mossy green as though the lid of the piano were a slab of stone. From the runner hung a ball fringe, like hickory nuts. Moses stood behind Helen, staring at the swirling pages of Haydn and Mozart, wanting to whine like a dog. Oh, the music! thought Herzog. He fought the insidious blight of nostalgia in New York comsoftening, heart-rotting emotions, black spots, sweet for one moment but leaving a dangerous acid residue. Helen played. She wore a middy and a pleated skirt, and her pointed shoes cramped down on the pedals, a proper, vain girl. She frowned while she played-her father's crease appeared between her eyes.

    Frowning as though she performed a dangerous action. The music rang into the street.

    Aunt Zipporah was critical of this music business. Helen was not a genuine musician. She played to move the family. Perhaps to attract a husband. What Aunt Zipporah opposed was Mama's ambition for her children, because she wanted them to be lawyers, gentlemen, rabbis, or performers.

    All branches of the family had the caste madness of yichus.

    No life so barren and subordinate that it didn't have imaginary dignities, honors to come, freedom to advance.

    Zipporah wanted to hold Mama back, Moses concluded, and she blamed Papa's failure in America on these white gloves and piano lessons.

    Zipporah had a strong character. She was witty, grudging, at war with everyone. Her face was flushed and thin, her nose shapely but narrow and grim. She had a critical, damaging, nasal voice. Her hips were large and she walked with wide heavy steps.

    A braid of thick glossy hair hung down her back.

    Now Uncle Yaffe, Zipporah's husband, was quiet-spoken, humorously reserved. He was a small man but strong. His shoulders were wide, and he wore a black beard like King George V. It grew tight and curly on his brown face. The bridge of his nose was dented. His teeth were broad, and one was capped with gold. Moses had smelled the tart flavor of his uncle's breath as they played checkers. Over the board, Uncle Yaffe's broad head with short black twisted hair, a bit bald, was slightly unsteady. He had a mild nervous tremor. Uncle Yaffe, from the past, seemed to find out his nephew at this very instant of time and to look at him with the brown eyes of an intelligent, feeling, satirical animal. His glance glittered shrewdly, and he smiled with twisted satisfaction at the errors of young Moses.

    Affectionately giving me the business.

    In Yaffe's junkyard in St. Anne the ragged cliffs of scrap metal bled rust into the puddles.

    There was sometimes a line of scavengers at the gate.

    Kids, greenhorns, old Irishwomen, or Ukrainians and red-men from the Caughnawaga reservation, came with pushcarts and little wagons, bringing bottles, rags, old plumbing or electrical fixtures, hardware, paper, tires, bones to sell. The old man, in his brown cardigan, stooped, and his strong trembling hands sorted out what he had bought. Without straightening his back he could pitch pieces of scrap where they belonged- iron here, zinc there, copper left, lead right, and Babbitt metal by the shed. He and his sons made money during the War. Aunt Zipporah bought real estate. She collected rents. Moses knew that she carried a bankroll in her bosom.

    He had seen it.

    "Well, you lost nothing by coming to America," Papa said to her.

    Her first reply was to stare sharply and warningly at him. Then she said, "It's no secret how we started out. By labor. Yaffe took a pick and shovel on the CPR until we saved up a little capital. But you! No, you were born in a silk shirt." With a glance at Mama, she went on, "You got used to putting on style, in Petersburg, with servants and coachmen. I can still see you getting off the train from Halifax, all dressed up among the greeners.

    Gott meiner!

    Ostrich feathers, taffeta skirts!

    Greenhorns mit strauss federn!

    Now forget the feathers, the gloves. Now-was "That seems like a thousand years ago," said Mama.

    "I have forgotten all about servants. I am the servant.

    Die dienst bin ich."

    "Everyone must work. Not suffer your whole life long from a fall. Why must your children go to the conservatory, the Baron de Hirsch school, and all those special frills? Let them go to work, like mine."

    "She doesn't want the children to be common," said Papa.

    "My sons are not common. They know a page of Gemara, too. And don't forget we come from the greatest Hasidic rabbis. Reb Zusya! Herschele Dubrovner! Just remember."

    "No one is saying..." said Mama.

    To haunt the past like this-to love the dead! Moses warned himself not to yield so greatly to this temptation, this peculiar weakness of his character. He was a depressive. Depressives cannot surrender childhood-not even the pains of childhood. He understood the hygiene of the matter. But somehow his heart had come open at this chapter of his life and he didn't have the strength to shut it. So it was again a winter day in St. Anne, in 1923-Aunt Zipporah's kitchen. Zipporah wore a crimson crepe de Chine wrapper. Discernible underneath were voluminous yellow bloomers and a man's undershirt. She sat beside the kitchen oven, her face flushing. Her nasal voice often rose to a barbed little cry of irony, of false dismay, of terrible humor.

    Then she remembered that Mama's brother Mikhail was dead, and she said, "Well-about your brother- what was the matter?"

    "We don't know," said Papa. "Who can imagine what a black year they're making back home."

    (it was always in der heim, Herzog reminded himself.) "A mob broke into his house. Cut open everything, looking for valuta.

    Afterward, he caught typhus, or God knows what."

    Mama's hand was over her eyes, as though she were shading them. She said nothing.

    "I remember what a fine man he was," said Uncle Yaffe. "May he have a lichtigen Gan-Eden."

    Aunt Zipporah, who believed in the power of curses, said, "Curse those Bolsheviks. They want to make the world horav.

    May their hands and feet wither. But where are Mikhail's wife and children?"

    "No one knows. The letter came from a cousin- Shperling, who saw Mikhail in the hospital.

    He barely recognized him."

    Zipporah said a few more pious things, and then in a more normal manner she added, "Well, he was an active fellow. Had plenty of money, in his time. Who knows what a fortune he brought back from South Africa."

    "He shared with us," said Mama. "My brother had an open hand."

    "It came easily," said Zipporah. "It's not as if he had to work hard for it."

    "How do you know?" said Father Herzog. "Don't let your tongue run away with you, my sister."

    But Zipporah couldn't be restrained now. "He made money out of those miserable black Kaffirs!

    Who knows how! So you had a dacha in Shevalovo.

    Yaffe was away in the service, in the Kavkaz. I had a sick child to nurse. And you, Yonah, were running around Petersburg spending two dowries.

    Yes! You lost the first ten thousand rubles in a month.

    He gave you another ten. I can't say what else he was doing, with Tartars, gypsies, whores, eating horsemeat, and God only knows what abominations went on."

    "What kind of malice is in you?" said Father Herzog, angry.

    "I have nothing against Mikhail. He never harmed me," Zipporah said. "But he was a brother who gave, so I am a sister who doesn't give."

    "No one said it," Father Herzog said. "But if the shoe fits, you can wear it."

    Engrossed, unmoving in his chair, Herzog listened to the dead at their dead quarrels.

    "What do you expect?" said Zipporah. "With four children, if I started to give, and indulged your bad habits, it would be endless. It's not my fault you're a pauper here."

    "I am a pauper in America, that's true.

    Look at me, I haven't got a copper to bless my naked skin. I couldn't pay for my own shroud."

    "Blame your own weak nature," said Zipporah.

    "A z du host a schwachen natur, wer is dir schuldig?

    You can't stand alone. You leaned on Sarah's brother, and now you want to lean on me. Yaffe served in the Kavkaz.

    A finsternish!

    It was too cold for dogs to howl. Alone, he came to America and sent for me. But you-you want alle sieben glicken.

    You travel in style, with ostrich feathers. You're an edel-mensch.

    Get your bands dirty? Not you."

    "It's true. I didn't shovel manure in der heim.

    That happened in the land of Columbus. But I did it. I learned to harness a horse. At three o'clock in the morning, twenty below in the stable."

    Zipporah waved this aside. "And now, with your still?

    You had to escape from the Czar's police. And now the Revenue? And you have to have a partner, a goniff."

    "Voplonsky is an honest man."

    "Who-that German?"

    Voplonsky was a Polish blacksmith. She called him a German because of his pointed military mustaches and the German cut of his overcoat. It hung to the ground. "What have you in common with a blacksmith? You, a descendant of Herschel Dubrovner! And he, a Polisher schmid with red whiskers! A rat! A rat with pointed red whiskers and long crooked teeth and reeking of scorched hoof! Bah! Your partner. Wait and see what he does to you."

    "I'm not easy to take in."

    "No? Didn't Lazansky swindle you? He gave it to you in the real Turkish style. And didn't he beat your bones also?"

    That was Lazansky, in the bakery, a giant teamster from the Ukraine. A huge ignorant man, an amhoretz who didn't know enough Hebrew to bless his bread, he sat on his narrow green delivery wagon, ponderous, growling "Garrap" to his little nag and flicking with the whip. His gross voice rolled like a bowling ball. The horse trotted along the bank of the Lachine Canal. The wagon was lettered LAZANSKY----PATISSERIES DE CHOK Father Herzog said, "Yes, it's true he beat me."

    He had come to borrow money from Zipporah and Yaffe. He did not want to be drawn into a quarrel. She had certainly guessed the purpose of this visit and was trying to make him angry so that she might refuse him more easily.

    "Ai!" said Zipporah. A brilliantly shrewd woman, her many gifts were cramped in this little Canadian village. "You think you can make a fortune out of swindlers, thieves, and gangsters. You? You're a gentle creature. I don't know why you didn't stay in the Yeshivah.

    You wanted to be a gilded little gentleman. I know these hooligans and razboiniks.

    They don't have skins, teeth, fingers like you but hides, fangs, claws. You can never keep up with these teamsters and butchers. Can you shoot a man?"

    Father Herzog was silent.

    "If, God forbid, you had to shoot..." cried Zipporah. "Could you even hit someone on the head?

    Come! Think it over. Answer me, gazlan.

    Could you give a blow on the head?"

    Here Mother Herzog seemed to agree.

    "I'm no weakling," said Father Herzog, with his energetic face and brown mustache. But of course, thought Herzog, all of Papa's violence went into the drama of his life, into family strife, and sentiment.

    "They'll take what they like from you, those kite" said Zipporah. "Now, isn't it time you used your head? You do have one- klug bist du.

    Make a legitimate living. Let your Helen and your Shura go to work. Sell the piano. Cut expenses."

    "Why shouldn't the children study if they have intelligence, talent," said Mother Herzog.

    "If they're smart, all the better for my brother," said Zipporah. "It's too hard for him-wearing himself out for spoiled princes and princesses."

    She had Papa on her side, then. His craving for help was deep, bottomless.

    "Not that I don't love the children," said Zipporah.

    "Come here, little Moses, and sit on your old tante's knee. What a dear little yingele."

    Moses on the bloomers of his aunt's lap-her red hands held him at the belly. She smiled with harsh affection and kissed his neck. "Born in my arms, this child." Then she looked at brother Shura, who stood beside his mother. He had thick, blocky legs and his face was freckled. "And you?" said Zipporah to him.

    "What's wrong?" said Shura, frightened and offended.

    "Not too young to bring in a dollar."

    Papa glared at Shura.

    "Don't I help?" said Shura. "Deliver bottles? Paste labels?"

    Papa had forged labels. He would say cheerfully, "Well, children, what shall it be-White Horse?

    Johnnie Walker?" Then we'd all call out our favorites. The paste pot was on the table.

    In secret, Mother Herzog touched Shura's hand when Zipporah turned her eyes on him. Moses saw. Breathless Willie was scampering outside with his cousins, building a snow fort, squeaking and throwing snowballs. The sun came lower and lower. Ribbons of red from the horizon wound over the ridges of glazed snow. In the blue shadow of the fence, the goats were feeding. They belonged to the seltzer man next door. Zipporah's chickens were about to roost. Visiting us in Montreal, she sometimes brought a fresh egg. One egg. One of the children might be sick. A fresh egg had a world of power.

    Nervous and critical, with awkward feet and heavy hips, she mounted the stairs on Napoleon Street, a stormy woman, a daughter of Fate.

    Quickly and nervously she kissed her fingertips and touched the mezuzah. Entering, she inspected Mama's housekeeping. "Is everybody well?" she said. "I brought the children an egg." She opened her big bag and took out the present, wrapped in a piece of Yiddish newspaper (der Kanader Adler).

    A visit from Tante Zipporah was like a military inspection. Afterwards, Mama laughed and often ended by crying, "Why is she my enemy! What does she want? I have no strength to fight her." The antagonism, as Mama felt it, was mystical-a matter of souls. Mama's mind was archaic, filled with old legends, with angels and demons.