One day, when we accidentally discovered that the woods were where Crazy Hirsch lived, our blood curdled. We were too afraid to go back for a whole year. We made enquiries. Learned the facts. Pictured the hut he had built himself, with its wooden fences and the light coming from a little window. The next year there was a suffocating journey to the edge of the woods. Trembling steps. A darkening world, the scent of panic. More and more steps, until our surrender. We could not find the hut. In subsequent journeys we went deeper, further. Finally we found the hut. We fled with beating hearts and wild breath and footprints — that was what we thought about: the footprints, which would lead Crazy Hirsch all the way to Grandpa Yosef’s if he chose to follow us. We went back, our breath ragged, our courage compelled. We erased the footprints and made others, leading the soles of our shoes to Brachaleh’s empty house, to Gershon Klima’s house — no one would dare harm him. And the year after that we went back to the woods and took up our games again, steeped in the knowledge that Crazy Hirsch’s hut was right there, a gentle pattering of absolute terror, a suffocating veil descending upon our recreational pleasure.
When Crazy Hirsch suddenly appeared in the middle of the neighborhood, we would freeze as we waited, lifeless, for him to find an appropriate place to scream his question:
“Only saints were gassed?”
Then he would leave and we would breathe again. Children again, as usual, but those skeletal seconds before he left, long as the bones of a whale, exposed us to the true nature of the neighborhood. The character of the people. The family. The real truth. Stripped of the houses, the gardens, the paths, the trees, the sun, we clearly saw the people among whom we were playing. The dim message that could not be deciphered with words or with entries from the encyclopedia, like “tropical forest,” “first aid,” “the Stone Age.” For a moment we comprehended the real figure, the one morbidly pushed into a corner. The dwellers of these little houses, tied to one another in a wondrous braid. Elderly gods, sitting on the Olympus of a senior citizen neighborhood, spinning plots of flesh and blood, determining the fates of us mortals. They were free of weak spots. Afraid only of the mailman, oddly affected by his shiny cap. Dining on ambrosia out of faded crockery. Orbiting through zodiacal constellations. From the early sunrise of Mrs. Kempler in her window, through Grandpa Yosef’s route to synagogue, to the sunset of Adella Greuner’s face as she waited in the evening breeze behind angry drapes, rolling in the image of a burning comet, yelling, “Kalman, vi geystu? Vi geystu?” Anonymous shouts discharged from dreams, shooting stars ineligible for wish-making. Grandpa Lolek like furious Apollo in his Vauxhall chariot, untouched by the suffering, a mischievous Pan in the forest of the miserable. And Neptune, Gershon Klima, his own brother, ascending from the water, a miracle being torn from its axis. The marching fire, Uncle Mendel, judging every being. And young Narcissus, crazy Itcha Dinitz. Saintly and amiable, walking to the grocery to the beat of an African drum, discovering new lands every day. Nobel laureates behind closed doors, sealed off geniuses living on pills. Their illnesses were picturesque, sprouting out of nothing. They went to the Sick Fund, that barn of pills, to ask the Pharaonic clerks to fill their prescriptions from the huge dark bottles on the upper floors. (We never got anything from the interesting bottles. No matter what disease we managed to catch we were always given syrup taken down nonchalantly from the lower shelf. The pitchers of pills, the wonders of the high shelves, were only for the patched up old people in slippers and layers of robes. And for Feiga, sometimes, there was even a trip behind the cabinet for a secretive pharmacists’ huddle, and a little bag that emerged from the darkness full of yellow pills that we once tasted and which Effi promptly threw up; I did not.)
These prematurely old people waiting mutely on benches at the Sick Fund, spinning their memories around and around, were aqueducts that carried life and memories. Afterwards, at home, they philosophized quietly in their rooms, men and women of ideas (some were modest, having only one idea). Dam-builders, forest-choppers, mountain-climbers, gold-miners, land-birthers. A multitude of gold and wine-like light in impenetrable eyes — only memories could light sparks in those eyes. Crinoline dresses danced tenderly to the sounds of the radio at Adella Greuner’s. The margosa trees dripped with barren fruit that turned yellow as it fell. Only the yard of Gershon Klima, his own brother, was blessed with a massive Indian bombax. Feiga also had a tree by her window, a mad poinciana whose branches groaned in the wind. As if her real demons were not bad enough, in the rain she imagined devils hanging from the stems of the leaves.
The Holocaust extended its reach beyond the neighborhood. Traces of Shoah lurked in the most surprising places, like the little shops where Dad went to order wallpaper or buy light bulbs. He often took me with him to Attorney Perl’s hardware store on Yonah HaNavi Street. Apart from buying plaster or little boxes of screws, it was a place where you could talk, ask questions and watch Attorney Perl at work. People used to stand with their elbows on the counter and gaze at the wall behind Attorney Perl, which was a patchwork of small metal drawers, each containing its own peculiar occupants: nails, screws, nuts, bolts, hooks, latches, washers, rubber bands. Attorney Perl would be up on the ladder in his blue smock, scaling the length and height of the wall like Spiderman, filling the customers’ orders. Words cannot adequately convey the splendor of his motion. The slowness. The precision. His serene voice enquiring from above, “I’ve only got half-inch ones. Will they do?” Clinging to the wall as he moved up and down, right and left, Attorney Perl would descend for a brief moment to hand over the goods and take the customer’s money. Then up the ladder again to retrieve something from another metal drawer. Measure out the contents. Wrap the correct amount in a small paper bag. Climb down. Deliver the goods.
Attorney Perl was born in 1900. Before the war he was a practicing attorney. In his town of Stanislaw, near Lvov, he was known even among the goyim as an expert in business, commerce, and property law. His voice echoed beautifully through the courtroom, as if the dimensions of the space had been designed precisely for his vocal chords. Had he not been Jewish, he might have been appointed a judge in Lvov. At the beginning of the war he lived in the Bochnia ghetto, in the same house as Dad’s family, 7 Leonarda Street. Then he was sent to Auschwitz, and later to work in Dora-Mittelbau. This camp, with its tender, womanly name, is hardly mentioned in Holocaust stories because very few of its inhabitants survived. Attorney Perl would have been lost too, if he hadn’t found his way to one of the Dora-Mittelbau satellite camps, where he operated Obersturmführer Jürgen Licht’s puppet theater. After the war, he came to Israel. His days in the camps had not only left the attorney barely more than skin and bones, but had also rendered him skeptical of the validity of the law. So he opened a little hardware store. But even after all those years, even to people who knew nothing of his aborted career as a lawyer in the courtrooms of Lvov, when he called out from up top, “Coated or uncoated, the nuts?” he still exuded a stifling sense of eminence. People answered cautiously. Put their hands to their chins. Pondered.
Sometimes he would take Dad and me into the little chamber behind the wall of drawers. He would tell his assistant, “Yakov, mind the store for a while” (his assistants were always called Yakov), and take us to the back room. There, to my surprise, was a mirror image of the store. On the reverse side of the wall was another wall of drawers, containing the store inventory. The space below the counter looked just like its front-end counterpart. But the width of the chamber was different, and I soon noticed other dissimilarities, including a black-and-white photograph of a woman, a tea kettle, two fountain pens, and a book in Latin.