Old Men at Midnight Read online

  She looked at the drawing. “It’s very pretty.”

  “Enjoy it.”

  She went out of the room. I locked the door.

  My mother said to me at supper, “How was your time with Noah?”

  “We talked about Reb Binyomin, the caretaker of his synagogue. And we did the lesson.”

  “What did his aunt say?”

  “He’s having nightmares.”

  My stepfather touched his moustache and shook his head.

  Rachel said, “Mama, look at the deer.”

  My mother said, “That’s really lovely.”

  “It’s good,” my stepfather said. “It’s very good.”

  My mother said, “This is a talented person.”

  Noah came over the next Wednesday. The day had dawned gray and stayed that way. We were about halfway up the inside staircase when Rachel opened her door. She came up to him and said, “This is for you.”

  It was a drawing of a field of gaily colored flowers over which a resplendent sun smiled brightly. The sun covered about half the sky. From its periphery radiated spokes of brilliant light.

  “It very good,” he said delightedly.

  “The sun and all the flowers,” she said. “I drew it in the park.”

  “It’s really beautiful,” I said.

  “And you know what? They’re teaching us how to swim underwater. Isn’t that fun?”

  “Yes, it is,” I said.

  She gamboled past us to the family room.

  We went upstairs. I left the door open. We worked a long time making up for time lost. When he was done he asked for a glass of water and when I brought it he thanked me and drank it. Then he put the glass down on my desk and asked me if I had a few minutes and I said yes. He looked at the open door and I got up and closed it. The tung ting tang ting tang tung of the harp broke quietly upon the room. Then it faded and the room was left in utter silence. From the shadows of the room came the visible presences of my father and Jakob Daw.

  He told me that his brother Yoel and he would go to the synagogue courtyard to meet with their friend Janos, who was about their age, stocky and blond-haired, with cornflower-blue eyes and a ruddy face. “In the back of the courtyard near the fence that separated us from the dense woods was a small area where we could build whatever suited us. Scraps of wood, the lower panel of a door, a discarded sheet or a tarpaulin—made to separate us from the world.”

  He stared at the closed door, then back at me, and went on: “We would sit inside our dwelling and play our games: soldiers and Mongols, Poles and Swedes, cowboys and Indians. Sometimes we would see Reb Binyomin inside, staring up at the walls and ceilings. When he needed Janos’s help to move something he would call him, and sometimes my brother and I, we would help as well. Yoel said to me once, Did you notice how Reb Binyomin moves, how his shoes flip-flop over the trail he leaves, how he’s afraid to advance, he’s an unhappy person. That was Yoel, always in touch with another person’s soul.

  “We used to hold Shabbos and Festival services in the synagogue, and in the small chapel during the rest of the week. Over the months I got to know the interior of the synagogue, the rooms, closets, ladders, labyrinths. The synagogue’s ark and lions and eagles and deer, its ornaments and murals and signs of the zodiac—they were all in very bad shape.

  “And then Yoel one day had this bright idea. Ideas came to Yoel from everywhere. He and I were in the shack, waiting for Janos, when his eyes suddenly took fire behind their thick lenses. His face, which was usually deadly pale, was alive. Noah, he said, why can’t the two of us help Reb Binyomin by working for nothing? I looked at him and then I looked past him at the wooden synagogue. What? I asked. He said, I don’t know what the cost of the materials would be, the paints and glues and oils and varnish. But he did know what the cost of labor would be. Nothing.

  “Over supper that night he told our father, who waved the idea away. Yoel insisted. I sat there listening. Inside me was a feeling that things would not ever be the same. We were both ten years old, but this idea had nothing to do with chronological age. Our father scratched his beard, shook his head. He asked, Why disturb an old man with dreams that you can’t fulfill? You’ll get bored, you’ll give up, you’ll bring him closer to his grave. My mother said that it was only fair to give Reb Binyomin a say in this. My father shook his head and sighed.

  “A few days later my father went over to Reb Binyomin’s apartment. Then Reb Binyomin came to our apartment. It was a rainy spring day. We sat in our living room and my mother served tea and cookies. My little sister was in her room. Reb Binyomin cleared his throat and sipped tea and asked if we really wanted to do this? Yoel immediately said yes, if Reb Binyomin could show us what to do. Reb Binyomin said he wanted to think about it. He got slowly to his feet. Soberly, he shook hands with my father, thanked my mother for her tea and cookies, and left.

  “Immediately, I wondered what I had gotten myself into. Summer was coming. Yoel did not like swimming in the river, did not like going with other boys into the woods, hunting berries, did not like doing children’s things. Yoel longed for fields and meadows, for air smelling of flowers and hay. Yoel loved a Poland free of anti-Semitism, loved it when he could get the three of us to think of university together. He was about ten years ahead of us. Yoel was a dreamer.”

  Noah paused. The heat in the room was hardly bearable but we couldn’t open the window to the even more stultifying heat of the street. In the room below, Mama was putting Rachel to sleep. He passed his hand over his damp face and said he needed to go to the bathroom. I opened my door and he went out and I heard him walking along the hallway.

  I shut my eyes. I must have dozed on my feet. He stood in front of me. He was nearly as tall as I. His eyes and chin had almost lost their triangular look. Black hair beneath a dark skullcap; a white long-sleeved shirt; dark trousers. He said, “You are a very pretty woman, Davita.” He leaned toward me and gently kissed me on my right cheek, and I was deeply flushed and could smell the sweat of his melancholy smile, and it was sad and good. He backed away, not hastily, a kind of rapture on his face.

  “I am going home now,” he said.

  I accompanied him through the hallway and the double wrought-iron doors to the outside.

  After a while I went upstairs and closed my door. The balls of the harp played against the wires. I turned off the overhead lights and moved into the low light cast by the lamp on my desk. I lowered my window shade. I took off my clothes and sat before my notebook in my bathrobe. Purple shadows crossed the room from its disappearing corners.

  4

  Mr. Wolf waved at us with his good arm, and I waved back. “Hot enough for you, Davita?” Noah and I entered the subway and emerged some minutes later and moved along the shaded street into the park. We sat under an oak and did the lesson.

  There were many people moving languidly about. I gazed across the vast green field. When we were done I asked him if he wanted to go out on the lake. An eager look. A nod of agreement. We walked through the grass of the green field to the lake.

  Beached on the edge of the lake were about a dozen rowboats. To the left was a shed against which oars were stacked. A thin man in his early twenties, wearing a T-shirt and jeans and smoking a cigarette, came out of the shed and asked us if we wanted to rent a boat. I said yes and I paid him and climbed into the rower’s seat. Noah, balancing himself carefully, sat down opposite me, his knees wobbly.

  With a shove the man pushed us from the shore and then stood there watching us row away.

  We rowed toward the center of the lake. It was crowded with young couples. The sun was harsh on the surface of the water; people shimmered before my eyes in the feverish air. I saw Noah turn his face uncertainly toward the sky. His eyes blinked in the brutal light and he forced his head toward the fiery sun before he looked down toward the surface of the water. There were largemouth bass and carp and sunfish in the lake, and people were laughing and catching and releasing them. There were sparrows fl
uttering in the air. There were doves and terns too, and I seemed to remember gulls coming from Sea Gate and Coney Island and Brighton Beach, swooping in and settling on the ground, and there were my father and Jakob Daw and Noah and myself, and we were moving toward one of the coves where we were enclosed by shrubbery and tall wild grasses and streamlets with the movement of water against the shoreline. There I rowed into the cove and pulled the oar blades out of the water and rested the handles against the inner sides of the boat.

  My father and Jakob Daw sat visible only to me.

  “Davita, I see no other face but Reb Binyomin. I know my father, my mother, my brother Yoel, my sister. But I do not see them. Reb Binyomin I see. He leaps toward fire and clouds.”

  Pausing for a moment, he fixed his eyes behind me as if that were where Reb Binyomin was. Then he lowered his eyes and looked at me.

  “He had no money for the repair of the synagogue. In the bitter winter of 1934, when the stove went out, he went from one door to the next taking up a collection. A proud man, a lonely man, going from one door to the next with his hand out. That hurt him. From then on whenever he had a panel to fix he kept it to himself. He watched the synagogue fall into slow ruin.

  “The truth was he wanted to depend on us, but didn’t know if he could. We were children! Two children! Well, he had a panel to repair on the wall near the end of the hall, a deer and some flowers. On the first day of the week, he assigned the deer to me and the flowers to my brother. Yoel whispered to me that he didn’t know anything about how to make flowers. I said I would try to help him. Reb Binyomin brought from somewhere little pots of oils, varnish, and glue, and told us what to do.

  “He stood there watching us.

  “That was a terrible moment. From a pencil being used to make a measurement to a color being used to fashion a hue! From despair to darkness. I could feel myself sweating. What a moment!

  “I finished the panel clumsily, resolutely, and then I helped Yoel. My fingers were a mess of color. I wondered how our mother might greet the new synagogue.

  “Reb Binyomin stood watching. Finally a deep vibration came from his heart. It was as if he had waited decades for this breath. He straightened, he closed his eyes, he thanked God, he murmured that something respectable might come of all this. Then he turned away and was gone into the shadows of the synagogue.

  “Those first few weeks, I do not know how we did it. We trudged home from school, ate our food, and then headed for the synagogue. We changed into rags, picked up colors and varnish and glue, and did what Reb Binyomin told us to do. How he worked us! As if we were ten people! First, a line of flora along the edges, then birds and animals. Slowly, he got to talking about himself—not as a caretaker of an old synagogue but as a new person, someone hidden in the midst of all this messy and tangled construction.”

  A boat heaved into view rowed by a teenager, with a girl sitting in the seat opposite him. They spotted us. They came to an angled stop against the shoreline, and slowly and reluctantly rode the stream out.

  “How he got to talking about himself and the synagogues he built before the First World War! He began at fifteen as an apprentice. Bony, hungry-looking. Going from synagogue to synagogue, seeking worthwhile work. He told Yoel and me that the oldest-known wooden building was at Chodorov near Lvov. It was built in 1651. Other wooden synagogues were known from a later time. The more isolated we Jews were from our environment, the more we created a world of our own in the midst of Polish society. And central to that world was the bimah, the sacred raised area in front of the ark, as well as the holy ark itself.”

  Noah halted, peering off into the liquid shadows of the invisible ark. We were bathed in our own narrow band of light.

  “Ah, the ark, the ark.

  Reb Binyomin continued. “ ‘There were many such wooden synagogues at the end of the nineteenth century, and many arks. Those synagogues were built to resemble a house or a barn on the outside so as not to attract attention, but on the inside they were stunning. Lions stood at the side of the ark opening; they recalled the lion ornaments of Solomon’s palace. To the lions were joined deer, a leopard, an eagle. Flower ornaments, birds and animals inhabited the vines and leaves. Fruit, urns, birds, palmettos; a table of showbread appeared on a north wall and the seven-branched lampstand on a south. And the ark, the magnificent ark, in its sumptuous carved frame, stood behind ornamental metal gates, and its lamps, reflectors, and candles increased the majesty of the synagogue. Ah, you don’t know what I mean by that? You will. You will.

  “ ‘I acquired three things: a wife, three daughters, and an uncommon skill with the tools of my trade. At thirty-two, I was given the ark of the wooden synagogue of Kolvel, a new construction to be built from the ground up. Nine years of labor I put into it, all ornamented with legends. Talking fish from the days of the Flood; an elephant with a tower on its back representing strength—’

  “Behind me a door opened and quickly closed. It was Janos. He had come to put wood into the stove. In spite of the spring it was cold outside. ‘It’s raining,’ he said. He looked quickly around and was upset at the fence of silence he encountered. He walked out.

  “Reb Binyomin waited, breathing deeply. Behind us the shadows took on depths of their own. He waited before he began again.

  “ ‘Eleven years later I was given another ark. Can you imagine what an honor that was? Two in a single lifetime! A wooden synagogue is an expression of the carpentry used by the local population in the habit of constructing many of its buildings in timber. But the ark of that synagogue—that is something very special. It is its soul. Eleven years. I oversaw the wall paintings and the ark itself. Eleven years. For this labor I outdid the one in Kolvel. Two arks … If I was ever to have a third …

  “ ‘Then I was brought to Kralov.

  “ ‘The community had one of the oldest arks in eastern Europe, worn from revolution and pogroms. I had been chosen to rebuild it. I settled in the town.

  “ ‘Then the First World War began. I waited. The town languished, deteriorated.

  “ ‘Nearly twenty years later, two twin boys talked me into something foolish and fantastic. Yoel, his eyes alive with ideas. And you, Noah, you could have lived without this. You could continue playing in the woods and the river. But you have the talent. You are Bezalel, you are the first to build an ark out of the wilderness. What marvelous things God puts in our path to overcome. May it be His will!’

  “And Reb Binyomin picked up a brush and added wondrous things to a peacock.

  “We continued with a vine, a bird, an animal. The days grew warm. Then Janos walked in one day, gazed around, and asked if a non-Jew could help. Yoel, splattered with paint, did not wait for Reb Binyomin to respond. He handed Janos a rag and told him what to do.

  “Some of the yeshiva students came over, the ones who are never off from study. They walked in late one night and worked. How they worked! The Labor Zionists arrived one evening, about ten strong. Then the Revisionists and those brazen members of the left, the Bundists, came to lend a hand. They called it ‘Our Wooden Synagogue.’ Even some Hasidim poked their heads inside to see what was going on, and they stayed and worked.

  “What was going on was a synagogue in sudden motion. The last of the Festival holidays came and went. We put up the scaffolding. And from the line of the flora near the ground floor to the signs of the golden zodiac near the cupola, Reb Binyomin played over the synagogue with great authority, a transformed man. The zodiacal plants flowered in the cupola, and it was all lushly painted from floor to ceiling with the colors of flowers and vines, with urns, birds, beasts. From outside, the place was like a courtyard, a plain wooden building of fir and pine with dovetail joints at the corners and interior plank lining. From the interior it was a magnificent wooden synagogue. The measurement was about fifteen square meters. The women’s hall was an annex. There was a special additional winter room, a shelter for very cold weather, plastered to facilitate heating. And there was a woodshop near tha
t winter room.

  “We took the ark out after Succos. Solemnly, we brought it downstairs. He did his work on it in the woodshop. This went on through the winter and spring and through Tisha B’Av and into the month of Elul. Once I went down with Yoel and we watched him as he applied his workmanship to the making of the ark. It was a hot afternoon. His eyes were ablaze but his fingers were cramped. Yoel asked him if there was any way we could contribute to the making of the ark and he had us raise and lower and adjust it and I watched his hands trembling, his fingers gripping the tools, his white-bearded face a tenacious mass.

  “Others came from the villages nearby, to look, some to help.

  “Reb Binyomin, two porters, me, and Yoel set the ark in its proper place three days before Rosh Hashana. We watched as Reb Binyomin raised the Sifrei Torah into their niches, settled lamps, reflectors, candles, fixed the curtains with their new lions against the sumptuous frame near the carved gates.

  “Three days of strange thudding reverberating noises from west of the town.

  “We gathered in the synagogue. The ark poured its beauty upon us. We prayed. We prayed in a new dimension of color, space, and time. The holiness of the place; the sense of the first notes from the shofar; the first harsh call.”

  My father and Jakob Daw were silent.

  “The mysterious stream of strident sound rolled from Reb Binyomin as he gave forth the calling of the notes from the shofar, for he had been given that singular, shattering honor. He put the shofar to his trembling lips. He blew: Tekiah. Shevarim. Teruah.

  “On the second day of Rosh Hashana, in the middle of the morning service, the German army arrived.”

  “What happened to Yoel?”

  “They took him to forest.”

  “What happened to your parents and sister?”

  “They took them all to forest.”

  “And you they took to Auschwitz?”

  “They took about one hundred to Auschwitz. I had a talent they could use. I drawed.”

  “I drew.”