The Fiftieth Gate Page 4

  The present pains my father. I can read it on his face, as he struggles to pronounce the words inscribed on his parents’ wedding certificate. ‘Leibush and Hinda,’ he says, as if sounding out the names of the bride and groom will magically restore them to life.

  The newly-weds set up home in Wierzbnik at the centre of the town’s commercial district—the rynek or market-square—Number 20, on the corner edging a hill leading up to the town parish, where they gave birth to four children: Baruch, Yossl, Marta, and Yenta.

  The Wierzbnik Bekiermaszyns.

  I was born in Wierzbnik before the war; I, Yossl Bekiermaszyn.

  ‘Nu? What else do you want to know?’

  VII

  ‘Do you still believe in God?’

  ‘Why still?’ my father answers.

  ‘After everything that happened.’

  ‘I don’t think about it.’

  ‘But is there a God?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t ask questions.’

  ‘How can you not ask?’

  ‘How can I ask?’

  I ask my father how it felt when, after my seventh birthday, I told him I would no longer be joining him for our Saturday lunches at Leo’s Spaghetti Bar. Weekly, we would transgress the Sabbath to commit the double sin of eating unkosher bolognese sauce, accompanied by cheese and a chocolate milkshake. In the privacy of our home, we had always observed the religious commandment to separate meat products from milk ones, even eating our meals on two distinct sets of dishes. Outside our home, it was a different story. God’s law did not seem to enter the restaurants we frequented, although my father loved to eat at a kosher establishment, aptly named Zion, which served East European delicacies of chopped liver and calf’s jelly.

  ‘Voz good,’ he still says when I remind him of those meals.

  My mother’s faith is more instinctive. It communicates all sorts of privileged information; like knowing exactly how much sugar to add to sweeten fish, or which blessing to mutter in the face of disaster. ‘Tradition,’ she sings, whether she is lighting Sabbath candles or preparing bitter herbs for Passover. On our holidays to Surfers Paradise she always insisted on transporting a suitcase of frozen kosher meat. ‘They’re books,’ she would tell the puzzled airport official, followed by words hissed into my ear. ‘See what I do for you? Only a mother would take a frozen cow on holiday.’

  I want to show my father the archives I’ve found from his town in Poland, but he shooes me away.

  ‘Not now, I’m votching “Sale of the Century”.’

  He watches every night, one quiz show after the next, celebrating wins with a clap, slapping his legs for a loss. He will call out ‘shtupid’ if a contestant fails to answer a question, but he does not want to see my archives.

  ‘Maybe if I make a movie of your life, you’ll listen to me.’

  ‘Fecks, fecks,’ he dismisses my efforts to extract facts from his past.

  Yet he is a master of trivia, not the kind that will grant him an appearance on his favourite quiz shows, but minutiae about people.

  ‘In Poland his parents had a business that sold drapery,’ he would tell me while pointing to an old man dancing at a barmitzvah.

  Or, ‘When he came to Australia he had two girlfriends at the same time.’ He nods his head toward a man peering into a delicatessen on Acland Street. ‘Look at him, still not married. Always staring at cakes.’

  My father only approved of my girlfriends if he could identify their family history. ‘I don’t know her grandparents,’ he would tell me in private, implying that this romance was unworthy of my affections. He is lucky with my wife Kerryn. He knew her Polish grandparents, who helped Jewish refugees after the war, her father from a business encounter in the sixties, her mother from the Kadimah club. Everything. He even tells us that our families were born in Polish towns separated by a short horse and carriage ride, which makes me believe that my wife and I were destined to be married somewhere in the cycle of generations. As it happens, only a single school desk separated our lives. No, it wasn’t a childhood romance, even if we spent twelve years of our youth educated in the same Jewish school. But my father would have predicted our marriage had I shown him my schoolday photographs. ‘That’s the one,’ he would have said, pointing to a seven year old girl who now resembles one of his granddaughters. ‘I remember her family from Carlton.’

  My facts from the past are different. He shrugs them off as I regale him with them.

  ‘Shmuel Isser won the election to the Jewish Communal Council in Wierzbnik,’ I inform him.

  ‘Who told you?’ he inquires.

  I disappoint him with details of Polish archives buried in municipal libraries. So instead I try narrating the stories in his own style, dramatising the conflicts and scandals in his community as if I were preparing a script for a television soap-opera.

  ‘Isser was religiously Orthodox,’ I explain, ‘like your own father Leib.’

  In 1932, after sixteen years of authoritarian rule, Isser’s leadership was challenged by a Zionist from a neighbouring village.

  ‘What’s his name?’ my father asks. He speaks in the present tense as if expecting to meet the incumbent chairman in his favourite coffee-shop.

  ‘Wilhelm Gelbtuch.’

  ‘Gelbtuch, Gelbtuch’ he mumbles, ‘not Gelbart, the one who lives off Kooyong Road?’

  He hates not recognising somebody. His unquenchable instinct for sociability, I have always thought, was instilled in him in Auschwitz, where intimacy and friendship were tools of survival. In Melbourne he has the annoying habit of waving at anyone who passes by, and then turning to a member of his family to ask, ‘Who’s he?’ This is followed by an interrogation which ensures that by the end he has surmised everything about the stranger’s life.

  ‘Do you think my father voted for Isser or Gelbart?’

  ‘Gelbtuch,’ I correct him.

  I had thought about this matter too. Leib Bekiermaszyn was certainly eligible to vote for Wierzbnik’s Jewish Community Council. I had constructed a social profile of him from his tax records and communal contributions. In 1928, he paid a meagre two złoty in compulsory synagogue fees, placing him in the lowest ten per cent of the community.

  ‘Taxes, taxes, taxes,’ my father mutters.

  ‘He had no choice,’ I appease my father on behalf of my grandfather.

  ‘He wasn’t rich, he wasn’t poor,’ my father tells me, ‘but I’m sure he was higher than the lowest ten per cent.’

  I tell Leib’s son about the other tax burdens.

  ‘Nu, how much?’

  ‘Two hundred and forty złoty to the State, from an annual turnover of 12,000 złoty and another sixty złoty to the municipality.’

  He contemplates the figures: ‘Not bad, not bad, only two and a half per cent; you could run a good business on that.’

  I steer him back to our discussion on the discord and friction in his town.

  ‘You mean fighting?’ he asks with more interest.

  ‘Wrestling,’ I respond, knowing that my father can rarely resist watching a good fight. Every Sunday afternoon we would settle in front of the television to watch ‘World Championship Wrestling’, cheering and jeering the champions based on their ethnic affiliations. Our favourite, of course, was Mark Lewin, a Jew from New York who could overpower the most ferocious of brutes with his sleeper hold, an intelligent and seemingly magical movement designed to send his opponents to sleep. ‘The shloffer,’ my father would prompt Lewin in Yiddish, as Killer Kowalski or the Nazi villain Waldo Von Erich slumped to the floor, while we all danced a hora around the television set in this staged moment of Jewish glory.

  ‘Gelbtuch won the election,’ I tell my father, ‘but the finances were so badly mismanaged that the community treasurer was beaten up. In the end they had to call in Polish authorities, who dissolved the result.’

  ‘They wouldn’t turn to goyim,’ he protests, ignoring the other fact about internecine violence.

  Goyim was the ge
neric term for Gentile used by my father and others of his generation. It was not used with hatred, but in a matter of fact way to describe the world out there, beyond his Polish shtetl, outside the confines of his closely-knit network of survivor friendships. His Jewish world was a shell which protected him.

  He has lost interest in my archives, so I attempt to recapture his attention with evidence of a scandal brewing in his town.

  After Isser lost the election, I explain, he mobilised nineteen prominent Jews to write a letter of complaint to the Provincial Governor in Kielce.

  He tries reading the document in Polish, with its scrawled handwriting: ‘Od czasu wyboru nowych członków,’ he stutters, but my mother, who is following our conversation, wrests it from his hands and continues reading with greater fluency.

  ‘Od czasu wyboru nowych członków gminy wyznaniowej żydowskiej,’ she announces, as if she were the grand prosecutor of her husband’s town.

  This is what they read together:

  From the time of the election of new members of the Jewish Council in Wierzbnik, we are left as if in an enchanted circle because of the conceited and inaccessible Jew recently elected as Chairman. We do not know what is going on in the community. The public viewing of the list of fee-payers and the budget estimate for 1932 gives us a picture of a wasteful administration which demands continual price increases to cover needless expenses.

  ‘Like a television show,’ my father wryly comments about the intrigue, ‘bad losers.’

  ‘Do you want me to read it again?’ my mother asks. ‘I used to recite Polish poetry when I was a child.’

  During elections, bribes were given, either directly in cash or using the pretext of charity given to the poor for Passover. This was the best time for cheats spreading corruption. We have a letter from one individual, sentenced previously to five years imprisonment for blackmail, demanding 350 złoty for the bribing of thirty voters. These facts are only part of the wider picture of bad intentions and corruption.

  ‘Yossl!’ my mother says accusingly, lifting her head up from the document. ‘What sort of shtetl did you come from?’ Once again we are treated to her stories about the Count of Bołszowce and about Schweller the Jewish dentist and her father the notary. ‘Intelligentsia,’ she croons, ‘the Polish intellectuals, not like in your town where they cheat and bribe.’

  My father is crestfallen.

  ‘I hate to deflate you,’ I tell my mother, ‘but the letter you read out was written by Jews from Bołszowce to government authorities after the 1933 communal elections.’

  ‘No way, no way,’ she protests, but is forced to concede defeat when I show her the Bołszowce seal stamped onto the document.

  ‘Well, at least my father wasn’t accused of anything,’ my mother reflects. ‘He wouldn’t have signed such letters.’

  ‘But he was on the Judenrat,’ my father intrudes.

  ‘No, no, he had no choice. They forced the Jews to appoint leaders to the Jewish Council to negotiate with the Nazis. Times were different then.’

  She had always regarded this fact about her father’s recruitment into the Judenrat—the compulsory Jewish Councils initiated by Heydrich in September 1939—as a source of embarrassment. At the same time, it was the reason for her own survival. She never accepted it when I tried to convince her that membership in the Judenrat Councils was not something to be hidden, that many of the members used their leadership to rescue Jews.

  ‘Just don’t tell anyone,’ she pleads, ‘people might think he used his power to advantage me.’

  I know I have won their interest in my history. I share my discoveries with my parents, throwing facts into their stories based on documents drawn up under the obsessive gaze of Polish overlords:

  ‘The bath-house and cemetery are in good condition, but the synagogue requires repairs such as the installation of a floor, the plastering of walls, the painting of the interior and exterior.’

  And so on: the pedantry, the discrepancies, the reprimands.

  ‘All adjustments are to be made in red pen, all crossings out and scrapings are prohibited.’

  Or the final indictment against Shmuel Isser’s regime in the report of the District Governor to the Jewish Council in April 1930:

  ‘Overly sluggish.’

  ‘Lacking any sort of control over earnings which belong to the public.’

  ‘Employees can’t read and write properly in Polish and do not work in an appropriate way with cash books.’

  ‘Enough, enough,’ my father shouts, returning to his chair in front of the television set.

  ‘Shopping lists, shopping lists,’ my mother supports him.

  The documents are strewn over the floor, dismembered words in Polish, Yiddish, and Ukrainian, bits and pieces of paper from the unedited life of Wierzbnik and Bołszowce before the war.

  ‘Clarify why the earnings from the bath-house are not listed.’

  ‘Forward me the note-pads for the ritual slaughter of turkey and cattle for 1929.’

  ‘Explain why Yankl Bekierman was both the schoolteacher and the administrator last year for which he received double wages.’

  ‘Only 28 calves, 13 ducks, 5 geese and 9 chickens for the general amount of 69.60 złoty are listed for 1929.’

  Details, details. Fecks, fecks.

  I was beginning to see their point of view.

  VIII

  I remember where we lived in Bołszowce.

  ‘This must be the park. No? I played here, I’m sure it was here. Follow me. Somewhere there must be a gate. A path. It leads away from the palace. If I follow this path, it should take me … No, this way. Here. Where I played. The gate, I don’t see a gate. My God how it’s changed.’

  If I went to Bołszowce now I would find my house, yes, because it was in the centre, like a big garden, and there used to be, I don’t know, Thursday or Friday, a market where they sold butter and eggs, all fresh. I remember that we lived in the centre where there was a town hall and park.

  ‘This must be the town hall, where the mayor lived. Look, you can see it must have been beautiful once. I’m telling you, it was a beautiful shtetl. Now you can’t see. You don’t believe me? Look at this building, it’s old now. Imagine how it would have looked. And the palace? Did Dad’s town have a palace? Like from a fairytale. Not like now. When we were here, you knew this was a city for the intelligentsia. Now it’s chickens and poverty. My God, how it’s changed. Nothing. Nothing. Where’s my house? It should be here. I remember it was opposite the town hall. So here’s the town hall, turn this way, and one, two, three, four. Maybe I forgot. We could see the church from our house on the other side. So here’s the church over there. Look, a fairytale. It didn’t look like that then. I remember the priest. When I told him after the war I’m Krochmal, he let us sleep there. So we must be here. This must be our house, where it stood. Here. No, it must be here. The palace. The town hall. The church. Here. Right here. My God. My God, not a thing.’

  If I would see it things will come back to me but it’s been many years and I’ve travelled a lot ever since, sort of like the wandering Jew, and I mix up places I’ve been to.

  ‘Krochmal.’

  ‘Leo and Raisl. A lawyer. Two children. Żydowski. Jews. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes, here the man sold ice cream.’

  ‘See what the lady remembers? She remembers that here was the ice cream.’

  ‘This here is Cała? This is Cała’s house?’

  ‘The shoes, he sold shoes here? Yes, it was here.’

  ‘See, I remember. We were here. Cała lived here, and so we lived, one, two, there, here. On this spot. See? This is the town hall—the Ratusz. Look, the church. So we were here. The door was on this side. I used to play with Cała’s little girl. They sold shoes. And when the first raid came, I hid here. In a hole. Just here. Can you see? It’s behind their house. Was down here. A hole in the ground. And I hid. I had to be very quiet. Was a passage here and we had to be very quiet. But they found
us. They found us here on this spot. I don’t know if they could hear us but they found us and took us away. I was hiding right here. See, near where they sold the shoes.’

  I remember my father’s office, but I don’t remember the name, not the streets. I remember the block; we were going to build a house and in the back of it was a natural well. A spring, where they would draw water. I remember that and that’s where we had our block to build a house. I would remember it—today for sure something is built on it—but I would remember our block by that thing. I would know exactly where we planned to live.

  ‘Here on this corner. This is where my father’s office was. Just here. It was him and a Polish man. Hear, near the Judenrat office. He was upstairs there. This is it. I remember it like today. It was a different place then. Intelligentsia, Poles, and he mixed with the high society. And in this door was Dr Schweller, the dentist. A black day it was. They killed him, and look what happened to their teeth. A revenge. Ahh. Some revenge. To lose your teeth after what happened to us. Look what’s become of this building. I’m telling you, it was once a beautiful town. Can you see it, how beautiful it was? Then here must be our block. In the square, near the office. Look, it’s here. Right here. The well. What do they call it? A studnia. It’s in the same spot. My God, can you believe it? Except it’s not working now. And here was our block. It would have been two storeys high. Like Cała’s house. Two storeys. We were rich then. One of the richest men in town. He lived here better than he did in Melbourne. You never believed me when I told you. Look how big. And in the square. Do you know what it means to have a block in the centre of the square? Next to the well?’