Together we scanned a cellar crowded with items, furniture parts, pictures, and an inexplicable blonde wig that took our breath away. We went a little further inside. The dust glimmered in the beams of our flashlights, exposing cobwebs of withered geometry. Effi led us further inside. At the edge of the cellar was a hidden opening, concealed behind two kerosene heaters that stood like eternal guards — reeking sphinxes.
“This is probably going to lead to some secret army headquarters,” Effi decided, in a voice grown weary of secret tunnels. But when we opened the cover we found only a recess, and inside, oddly, two more kerosene heaters. The heaters were guarding heaters. The dust kept billowing out. We cast our flashlight’s glow on a small metal box and opened it, revealing envelopes and pages written in crowded Polish characters. We trembled. These were not our first stolen documents. In the houses in Grandpa Yosef’s neighborhood we got our paws on any available box. But this time we knew — these were secrets. This was a clue to something.
We made our way out and collapsed on the dusty rug, our faces colored with war-paint of soot and dust. We looked at the distant ceiling and did not talk. We saw the room around us enveloped in a frock of dust, but that was not what we were thinking of. In our hands shone the box that contained letters, possibilities. We each pondered separately but our breaths were intertwined, our souls melded. There would be no more Effi — without-a-little-Amir, no more Amir-without-a-little-Effi.
Later, we spent three hours cleaning the house meticulously to eradicate all traces of dust. We unrolled the rug, and restored the overturned furniture. And we stole the box.
The letters were in Polish, in Grandpa Lolek’s handwriting, except for one page. The page at the bottom of the box was written in a different ink in an unidentified, square handwriting, and it had no illustrations of blood-red hearts. We needed someone to translate them for us. We had an entire family of Polish speakers at our disposal but we could not give them the papers just like that and say, Please, translate these letters we stole from Grandpa Lolek’s secret cellar. We hatched a plan to translate the sentences word by word, separately, each word from a different source. We copied the words onto separate pieces of paper (we knew the English alphabet, so the Polish characters did not pose much of a problem). Next to each word we wrote down the name of the person we intended to ask. We were careful not to give any one person a sequence of words or too many words from one letter. We set off on every mission with one word and, in a roundabout way, deciphered its meaning. Each deciphered word was written on a new page. Using this mosaic approach, we slaved with a dedication usually associated with pyramid builders, and slowly created the Hebrew translation of the letters.
There were a few hitches. For example, the stubbornly puzzling sentence, “Life is a roll.” Cross-referencing, enquiries, parsing and assembling, led to the decipherment: “Life is a partnership.” Instead of spółka, partnership, we had copied down bułka, roll.
Some people were dismissed after being found unsuitable — suspicious, questioning. But we did discover a few great talents. Uncle Pessl, for example, whom everyone in the family had always considered — to put it mildly — an idiot, asked no questions, made no enquiries, and was utterly unsuspecting as he sat gobbling down a dish of chicken and providing us with translations of entire sentences.
And then there was Uncle Menashe from Netanya. We came to him and asked about the word brzoza. But Uncle Menashe looked us in the eye and said calmly, “You’ve found a letter in Polish and you’re trying to figure it out. Why work so hard? Bring me the letter, I’ll translate it.”
We held a brief and silent consultation with our eyes. And two days later, with the box on our knees, instead of going to school we were on our way to his butcher shop in Netanya. We sat in Menashe’s shop for a few hours, surrounded by freezers full of meat and slaughtered chickens hanging on the walls like sukkah decorations. He read out loud and translated, no wise-cracks.
What we had found were Grandpa Lolek’s letters to his dancer, Joyce. (He must have written them in Polish and had someone translate them into English for him, keeping the Polish copies himself). The content of the letters was not rewarding — silly love lines, promises, pleas, plans for a life together. For a while we were partners to this mythological episode in Grandpa Lolek’s life. With him, we were left for the Viennese pianist. We sent her pleas. We hoped. We knew in the bottom of our hearts that now, after the war was over, the future belonged to the pianists of the world. But still we tried, even writing poetically, “…you know, battles on the plains are still sadder,” but we did not win back her heart. We lost Joyce. We also lost interest in the letters. We asked Uncle Menashe to skim them, thinking perhaps he might come up with something of interest after all. Then we showed him the last page, written in a different ink, the one without hearts. This page piqued Uncle Menashe’s interest.
“This, you must not talk about!” he ordered. “And put the box back straight away, so no one will know you took it.”
“What is it?” we demanded.
It was a letter from Moishe Finkelstein, a Jew from Bielsko-Biala, dated September 1st, 1939. That was the day the war broke out — the occupation of Poland, the Big Bang. We had found a dark moon orbiting the glowing planet of Grandpa Lolek.
Uncle Menashe made light of the matter: all that had happened was that Grandpa Lolek had received a lot of gold from Finkelstein, which he was supposed to deliver after the war to Finkelstein’s son in America. Half was to go to the son, half to stay with Grandpa Lolek. “And if I know Lolek,” he added, “gold, he didn’t see, Finkelstein’s son. Oh well, not to worry. It’s only money. Believe me, Jews over there did worse things than that.”
“Worse?”
“Nu, it’s not for children.”
We were not Old Enough. But we were reminded of Crazy Hirsch’s yell. Until that day we had not devoted sufficient attention to his recurrent question, “Only saints were gassed?”
We were not Old Enough.
Before childhood could end, we had to fit it all in:
Find out what happened to Finkelstein’s gold.
Understand the important things.
Discover all sorts of things.
Invent something important.
Find a profession for Effi, something that would combine her desire to always be tanned with her hatred of hard cheese.
Descend, finally, into Gershon Klima’s sewer.
Stand facing Hirsch. Without fear.
And for that we had to remain kids. We had to investigate. The tea bags, the mattress, the hidden gold, it all joined into one enigmatic picture of a land begging to be explored. Finkelstein’s moon hovered above us, dimming, shining, dimming, shining, trembling in its orbit. In order to understand the Kepler Laws of this astronomy, we would have to go back into the cellar.
Having no alternative, we landed — two small space-ships with reasonable grades — on Grandpa Lolek’s planet. A search party. Into the cellar. We forced ourselves. Sensing the uncompromising smell of hidden gold within the odor of a-punishment-we-could-not-even-imagine, we positioned ourselves on Planet Lolek. We replaced our deadly fear with a dry sense of purpose. We sorted items, catalogued. Over and over we went down to the cellar, creating opportunities out of thin air, plots hatched behind Grandpa Lolek’s back. One slip and we’d all be exposed. Once in a while, we delved deeper. The forest of dust revealed itself to us, vaults, treasures and all. We found camera parts arranged in towers, the smaller ones on top. Hundreds of neatly rolled mosquito nets. Metal objects that gave light in return for light. Aluminum strips robbed from windows, blinds, closet hinges. A washing machine engine leaning on its side like a sunken ship in the sandy floor. A fan with all its blades broken, like the prop for a bad joke. We found an accordioned roll of barbed wire that we tried, unsuccessfully, to unroll, and had to grow accustomed to it jumping up suddenly every so often, like Archimedes submerged in his bathtub, shouting, “Eureka! Eureka!” but without revealing a thing. Rapidly adapting, we learned to use the barbed wire to rake the cobwebs, forming dusty clumps. We exposed more and more. Empty bottles that always glistened, like a chorus hungry for the light of a flashlight. Empty packing crates. Matted bundles of rubber bands, sticky and crushed. And finally, a mouse on its back with its feet sticking straight up. Its eyes turned golden in the flashlight beam.