A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [89]
In a light, spacious room at the front of the house that he rented on a monthly basis and that was known as the Kabinett lived a Polish colonel (polkovnik) by the name of Jan Zakrzewski. He was a boastful, lazy, and sentimental man in his fifties, solidly built, manly, broad-shouldered, and not bad looking. The girls addressed him as "Panie Polkovnik." Every Friday, Itta Mussman would send one of her daughters with a tray of fragrant poppy cakes straight from the oven; she had to tap politely on Panie Polkovnik's door, curtsey, and wish him a good Sabbath on behalf of all the family. The colonel would lean forward and stroke the little girl's hair or sometimes her back or shoulder; he called them all cyganka (Gypsy) and promised each of them that he would wait for her faithfully, and marry no one but her when she was old enough.
Bojarski, the anti-Semitic mayor who had replaced Lebedevski, would sometimes come to play cards with Retired Colonel Zakrzewski. They drank together and smoked "until the air was black." As the hours passed, their voices became thick and hoarse, and their loud laughter filled with grunts and wheezes. Whenever the mayor came to the house, the girls were sent to the back or out into the garden, to prevent their ears picking up remarks that were unsuitable for well-brought-up girls to hear. From time to time the servant would bring the men hot tea, sausages, herring, or a tray of fruit compote, biscuits, and nuts. Each time she would respectfully convey the request of the lady of the house that they should lower their voices as she had a "blinding headache." What the gentlemen replied to the old servant we shall never know, as the servant was "as deaf as ten walls" (or sometimes they said "as deaf as God Almighty"). She would cross herself piously, curtsey, and leave the room dragging her tired, painful feet.
And once, in the early hours of a Sunday morning, before first light, when everyone else in the house was still in bed fast asleep, Colonel Zakrzewski decided to try out his pistol. First he fired into the garden through the closed window. By chance, or in some mysterious way, he managed in the dark to hit a pigeon, which was found wounded but still alive in the morning. Then, for some reason, he took a pot shot at the wine bottle on his table, shot himself in the thigh, fired twice at the chandelier but missed, and with his last bullet shattered his own forehead and died. He was a sentimental, garrulous man, who wore his heart on his sleeve; often he would suddenly burst out singing or weeping, sad as he was about the historic tragedy of his people, sad about the pretty piglet that the neighbor bludgeoned to death with a pole, sad about the bitter fate of songbirds when winter came, about the suffering of Jesus nailed to the cross, he was even sad about the Jews, who had been persecuted for fifty generations and had still not managed to see the light, he was sad about his own life, which was flowing on without rhyme or reason, and desperately sad about some girl, Vassilisa, whom he had once allowed to leave him, many years before, for which he would never cease to curse his stupidity and his empty, useless life. "My God, my God," he used to declaim in his Polish Latin, "why hast Thou forsaken me? And why hast Thou forsaken us all?"
That morning they took the three girls out of the house by the back door, through the orchard, and past the stable gate, and when the girls returned, the front room was empty, clean and tidy and aired, and all the colonel's belongings had been bundled into sacks and taken away. Only the smell of wine, from the bottle that had been smashed, Aunt Haya remembered, lingered for a few days.
And once the girl who was to be my mother found a note there tucked into a crack in the wardrobe, written in rather simple Polish, in a female hand, in which somebody wrote to her very precious little wolf cub to say that in all the days of her life she had never ever met a better or more generous man than he, and that she was not worthy to kiss the soles