‘Hope costs nothing,’ he replied. It was supposed to be a joke, but he didn’t smile as he said it.
Even if only half of the stories the family would later tell each other had really happened, Zalman must have been through a lot, and been involved in a lot as well. He had set off from Zurich at Sukkot, and it was already November when he arrived at last, via Stryj and Stanislawow in Kolomea.
He had grown up there, and he no longer knew the city.
In front of the station, which lay on the outskirts, a coachman seemed to be waiting for arriving guests, but when Zalman came closer all that stood there was the skeleton of a droschke, just as the whole building was only the skeleton of a station. From here it was two kilometres into the city, and it was a strange feeling for him to have the wide street, where in his day pedestrians, carts and coaches had jostled for space, all to himself.
Kolomea, far in the East of Galicia, had been one of the first cities taken by the Russian troops, and because in the first flush of the new war they wanted to do particularly well, they had organised a real shooting competition with their guns, in which even the Greek Orthodox church had lost its tower. What remained was just a shapeless lump of stone that looked a bit like a stable, and which the Cossacks also used for that purpose in the first days of the occupation. A building in the classical style, which Zalman had never seen — it must have been built after he left — showed no sign of impact, but had been completely burned out.
One walked past it on a carpet of charred scraps of paper; he thought at first that it might have been a library, and only the Hebrew letters under his feet made him realise that this must be the new synagogue that Ruben had described with such admiration in one of his letters.
In Ring Square, the city’s central market, there was no sign of the crammed stalls from which Hutsul peasants in bright costumes once sold poultry and vegetables; only a few starving city-dwellers had lined up spare household utensils in front of them, and waited hopelessly for takers. The windows of the shop buildings all around were boarded up, as if they could no longer bear the sight of their sick city. Most of the shops were shut, only the Righietti patisserie on Kosciuszko Street had bravely kept going. A sign on the door asked the honoured clientele for forgiveness, but ‘for reasons beyond our control’ they were unfortunately unable to serve cakes or coffee.
The people he met avoided his eye. Any stranger could be an enemy or, even more of a threat, someone looking for help. It was more sensible simply not to notice him.
There was no sign of Russian soldiers. The only ones were two sentries outside the Hotel Bellevue on Jagiellonska Street. They had probably set up their headquarters inside.
It wasn’t far to the yeshiva, but Zalman first made his way to Jablonowka, the little alley in the Jewish quarter where his old friend lived, the one who had taken Ruben in. The whole area was filled with a smell of burned wood that had been rained on, and Zalman started running as if, after more than three weeks on the road, every minute suddenly counted.
The alley was undamaged, the one-storey wooden buildings still pressed up against one another, as if trying to keep each other’s spirits up. But the street was silent, more silent than he had ever experienced it before, even on Yom Kippur, when everyone was in the synagogue.
The front doors weren’t locked.
In his friend’s house even the cupboards were open, they had been thoroughly and carefully emptied, the tableware and the linen had been cleared away, and not even chaos had been left behind. The books alone had been of interest to nobody.
Names were written in chalk on tables and chairs, Sawicki, Truchanowicz, Brzezina. Only later did Zalman discover the explanation: the looters, all respectable neighbours, had signed their booty so that when the corresponding space in their own house was liberated, they could calmly come and take it away. There was no particular hurry, as no one worried that the Jewish owners were ever coming back.
Ruben’s suitcase lay on the bed in a little room on the first floor.
Empty.
Zalman sat down beside it and stroked the dark brown cardboard.
When he was standing in the deserted alley again, not knowing who to turn to, a voice suddenly called out his name. It was a thin, old, lisping voice that seemed to come out of nowhere, because he couldn’t see a soul. ‘Kamionker!’ called the voice. ‘Are you not Kamionker?’
In the open window of a house, he only saw it now, there stood an old woman who seemed familiar, but whom he couldn’t quite place. She beckoned him over, and it was only when he was standing in front of her — in this house, too, the doors were unlocked and the cupboards had been completely emptied — that he remembered.
‘Frau Heller?’
Back in the days when he had worked as a young boy in Simon Heller’s tallis-weaving mill, she had been the boss, a woman you took your cap off to when she walked through the workshops, and who had always, Zalman could smell it still, pulled a fine veil of violet perfume behind her. Now an old woman stood in the cleared-out house, even though Frau Heller could not have been all that old. She no longer wore a sheitel, and her scalp, yellow as Torah parchment, shimmered through her tangled grey hair.
‘Why aren’t you in Ottynia with the rest, Kamionker?’ she asked.
She hadn’t lisped before.
The Hellers had never lived in Jablonowka, only ever in a stately manufacturer’s house beside the mill. But she had probably grown up here, and had crept back into her parents’ house after…
Zalman didn’t ask her for her story. He had heard too many atrocities over the previous few weeks.
‘Ottynia?’
‘That’s where they’ve all gone. To the Rebbe of Ottynia. He’s a holy man, they said, and he will protect them.’
‘Even the bochrim from the yeshiva?’
‘In Ottynia. All in Ottynia.’ She said it almost in a singsong voice, and smiled at him the way one smiles at stupid people who ask obvious questions. A rifle butt had knocked her teeth out, but it was still the old, detached smile with which she had walked past them when she was the boss, with her scent of violets. ‘I haven’t seen you at work for a long time, Kamionker,’ she said. ‘Have you been ill?’
In the kitchen, where there were no dishes in the cupboards, he left her his last piece of smoked meat. He had been saving it for an emergency, but now that he knew where Ruben was there could be no more emergencies.
Ottynia had been on his route, and he had avoided the town just as he avoided, where possible, all places where there might be soldiers. It was only a few kilometres away, back towards Stanislawow. He could be there that evening.
He passed the Yeshiva, another defencelessly open building.
A shell had struck the old Jewish cemetery, right in the middle of the graves. Its crater looked like the calyx of a flower, and the gravestones, toppled in all directions, like its petals.
53
The family had a better idea of the end of the story, because Ruben had been there and liked to talk about it, with the religious zeal of someone who has personally experienced a miracle. Because had it not been a miracle, a nes min hashamayim, that his father was suddenly standing in front of him in the rebbe’s house. ‘And,’ he said, and however many times he told the story, he always failed to grasp it, ‘at first I mistook him for a stranger, just as Joseph’s brothers didn’t recognise him when they stood before him in Egypt.’ Ruben had become accustomed to speaking in Biblical similes, but his religious sense overall had become much more tolerant. The more certain someone is of his conviction, the less need he has to force it on others.