The mouse opened the door to desperation. Finkelstein’s moon was disappointed in us; we had not found wonders or secrets. Not even a note. Only worthless material treasures coated in dust. We hoped for a miracle, hoped to stumble upon a box containing Grandpa Lolek’s confessions, explaining what he had done with the gold, or an incensed communication from Finkelstein’s son demanding to know where the gold was. We looked for envelopes with American stamps, papers written in foreign languages, Polish letters.
In between one descent and the next, we continued to orbit within the gravity of Planet Lolek. We tried to approach the core issue — the gold — with words. Out of the blue, we would ask him about the price of gold. Where did they sell gold? How did you get gold? We talked to him about El Dorado, the mythical land of gold. We talked about golden retrievers and asked him to buy us a golden hamster. We showed him the picture in the Tarbut encyclopedia of the Indian chief whose wife and son fled his cruelty and drowned themselves in a river, and every year he threw gifts of gold into the river to plead for their return. To our surprise, Grandpa Lolek showed no interest in where the river was, how one got there, or how much gold exactly this Indian had thrown in there. He only wanted to know if the gifts had helped, if the wife and son came back.
Again and again we went down to the cellar. And once, as expected, it happened. Just as we were starting to roll up the rug, Grandpa Lolek, who-was-only-supposed-to-be-back-in-an-hour, caught us. In his hand was a glistening new camera and on his face a furious suspicion. “What goes on here?”
I was the first to respond, before Effi. “Grandpa Lolek, my pen got lost under the rug.”
That was practical-Amir, a distant relative of regular-Amir. He was hardly ever seen. Sometimes, at weddings, he would choose the furthest slice of cake from the one Aunt Ecka had touched.
Effi did not cooperate. She should have said, “Yes, the pen,” but instead she stood facing Grandpa Lolek with her hands on her hips and demanded, “We want to know, what did you do with Finkelstein’s gold?”
Eyes met eyes. One look said: more locks, more bolts, fewer guests. Two looks said: have mercy, Sir, take pity on these small children.
Flashes, looks, thoughts, prayers. A breeze passed through us as we stood sturdy as cypress trees.
Finally, “Finkelstein got the gold.” Simply put.
Meaning, no punishment (for now). Meaning, Grandpa Lolek was unaware of his entitlement to punish children when there was no other way out. When asked a question, he answered it.
“Got more than was he deserved,” he added.
“He deserved half,” Effi said, representing the parties in absentia.
“Half?!” Grandpa Lolek came closer, furious.
Effi continued cautiously, “According to the letter…”
Grandpa Lolek sat down slowly on the couch. A mistake. We immediately flanked him on either side.
“Tell us about Finkelstein. How much gold was there? How did you give him half? Was it hard? What happened to Finkelstein?”
Grandpa Lolek put his new camera in his lap and drummed on it with two fingers. Perhaps he was waiting for us to ask about it and forget about unnecessary questions. But he had no choice and so he spoke. He told us the entire story, omitting no detail, as if what we had found in the letter was needless, as if he had always been willing to tell us everything, but hadn’t thought anyone cared to know. He talked at length and also stole in a little bit of Joyce, her umbrellas, the dock, the rain, the damp rose in her hair.
“What do you understood about half? After war, no getting money out of Poland. No doing. Not allowed. And where I buried the gold, to send to America, to the son over there, a lot of money I gave people, so gold will arrive to America good. My head was having shiny with sweat, not with money, until there came for me a telegram that okay, that says to me thank you from Finkelstein the son, that his wife she says thank you also. Half mine, what was left, not so big this half, after the people took for them.”
“And what did you do with your half?”
We hoped to hear that he had kept the gold without touching it. We hoped he would open a secret door and reveal a room full of cobwebs with a stack of pale bars of gold on the floor.
“What I used, when was needed,” Grandpa Lolek said disappointingly.
But we were relieved. “So you weren’t a bad Jew?”
“Bad Jew?”
“Who did bad things in the war…?”
“Who do you think you are, Haim Nachman Bialik?! There is no bad Jew, good Jew. There is alive and there is dead. That’s it.”
Grandpa Lolek’s philosophy. A dogma handed down from on high. Dead Germans, bodies of Anders’ soldiers. All our lives, Grandpa Lolek showered us with sayings coined on that mountain:
“What you take, you have not give back.”
“Hold in your teeth, and not yet is yours.”
“If hit, hit back. No hit, very good. That means, you hit.”
We disagreed. “No bad Jew, good Jew” was too simple. We had stored up enough thoughts of Adella Greuner, Mr. Bergman, Itcha Dinitz. For too long we had become acquainted with Finkelstein, with Crazy Hirsch’s words. Something strong, an evil Jew, had to exist — the opposite of Grandpa Yosef. The war could not have sufficed with bad Germans. We rejected Grandpa Lolek’s philosophy but felt that he himself was becoming purer, not a bad Jew or a good Jew, but rather, our grandfather. We breathed a sigh of relief that flung open floodgates, an eternal, lucid horizon, over which anything could gallop, anything could fly. Spotless light flowed easily. Two little spaceships with reasonable grades could finally let go and Finkelstein’s moon lifted off like a balloon and disappeared. We felt like going out with Grandpa Lolek so he could buy us popsicles, or so we could buy them, whichever — as long as we could sit and lick them and no one would be to blame.
Only a single letter in Polish stayed on its course through space. What had the textile merchant Finkelstein written to his son in America? For many years in the dark, Polish characters concocted a frightening truth. The letter opened with the hackneyed lines, “When you read these words, son, your mother and I will not be among the living…” Then more words, Finkelstein the textile merchant’s explanations of what was about to happen in the world, why he did what he did, and what the son should do.
Today, now that I am Old Enough, I know. Finkelstein realized, days before the war broke out, what the Holocaust would be. His thoughts were lucid, with none of the enveloping mist of illusion. Crystal clear. Even before the Nazis imagined how far they would go, before Adolf Eichmann hatched his ingenious plans, before Hitler conceived the only solution to the world’s troubles, the textile merchant from Bielsko-Biala knew—knew, not guessed — the future in great detail. He sold his business. He instructed his only son to stay in America despite the hardships. He had all his gold fillings removed and forced his wife to do the same. Even before Auschwitz was built, before the incinerators, before the Sonderkommando and the “Kanada” commando that collected belongings from the dead, he had deprived himself of the immediate reasons to send him to his death. He melted down the gold from their teeth, from his wife’s jewelry, from the sale of his shop. Then he waited for an opportunity, for a man to whom he could give the money, someone he could trust who wouldn’t ask questions and would survive the imminent war. On the street in town he met a hardened corporal from the Polish army, a Jew by the name of Feuer, son of the headmaster of the Hebrew Gymnasium in Kielce. Finkelstein the merchant looked the Jewish corporal up and down and knew he had found his man. They settled on the terms. Shook hands. Corporal Lolek Feuer went back to his unit. The next morning, the war broke out, inflicting six years of suffering upon the world. Finkelstein the textile merchant and his wife perished. At a certain point during those years they joined the six million Jews, perhaps in a ghetto, perhaps in a concentration camp, perhaps in a death camp. They may not have been killed as Jews but simply, without ideology, like the ten million other citizens who died in the war. One moment they were human beings, parents of a son in America, and the next — dead.