The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [89]
This state of affairs affects Szlangbaum in a peculiar manner. Only a year ago, he called himself Szlangowski, he celebrated Easter and Christmas, and I am sure the most pious Catholic did not eat as much sausage-meat as he. I remember he was once asked in a café: ‘Don’t you care for ice-cream, Mr Szlangowski?’
And he replied: ‘I prefer sausages, but without garlic. I can’t abide garlic.’
He came back from Siberia with Staś and Dr Szuman, and at once found work in a Christian shop, though Jews offered him better pay. From that time on he has always worked for Christians, and not until this year was he sacked. Early in May he came to ask a favour of Staś.
‘Staś,’ he said humbly, ‘I will drown in Nalewki Street unless you help me.’
‘Why didn’t you come to me before?’ Staś asked.
‘I did not dare. I was afraid they might say of me that a Jew will creep in anywhere. And I would not have come today but for my children.’ Staś shrugged and at once took Szlangbaum on at wages of fifteen hundred roubles a year.
The new clerk set to work at once, but half an hour later Lisiecki muttered to Klein: ‘What in the world stinks so of garlic, Mr Klein?’ Then, fifteen minutes after that, I don’t know why he added: ‘How these swines of Jews creep into the Krakowskie Przedmieście! Why don’t they stay in Nalewki or Świętojerska?’
Szlangbaum was silent, though his red eyelids quivered. Fortunately Wokulski overheard both taunts. He rose from his desk and said in a tone which, I must say, I didn’t like: ‘Mr…Mr Lisiecki! Mr Henryk Szlangbaum was my colleague at a time when things were going very badly. So why not allow him to be my colleague today, when things are somewhat better?’ Lisiecki was embarrassed, realising that his job hung on a thread. He bowed, muttered something, then Wokulski went over to Szlangbaum and embraced him; ‘My dear Henryk, do not take these little things too much to heart, for we here appreciate each other as colleagues. I assure you that if you ever quit this store it will be with me.’
Szlangbaum’s situation at once improved; today the others would sooner taunt (even insult) me than him. But has he found a defence against insinuations, looks and glances?…And all this is poisoning the poor fellow’s existence, so he sometimes tells me with a sigh: ‘If I weren’t afraid my children would become Jewish, I’d go and settle down in Nalewki once and for all.’
‘Then why, Henryk,’ I asked him, ‘don’t you get christened and have it over with?’
‘I’d have done so years ago, but not now. Today, I understand that as a Jew I am only despised by Christians, but as a convert I’d be despised by Christians and Jews alike. After all, I must live somewhere. Anyway,’ he added, more quietly, ‘I have five children and a rich father, whose heir I am…’
This is strange. Szlangbaum’s father is an usurer, but his son, so as not to take a penny-piece from him, stays poor and works as a clerk.
Sometimes I talk frankly about him to Lisiecki: ‘Why do you persecute him?’ I ask. ‘He conducts his house in a Christian manner and even has a Christmas tree for his children.’
‘Because he thinks’, said Lisiecki, ‘that it is more profitable to eat matzo with sausage than by itself.’
‘He was in Siberia, exposed to danger…’
‘Yes, but for profit…And it was for profit that he called himself first Szlangowski, and now Szlangbaum, because his old man has asthma.’
‘You mocked him for dressing up in peacock feathers, so he went back to using his old name.’
‘For which he’ll get a hundred thousand roubles when his father dies,’ Lisiecki replied.
Then it was my turn to shrug and fall silent. It was wrong to call himself Szlangbaum, but Szlangowski was just as bad: wrong to be a Jew, wrong to be a convert…Night is falling: a night in which everything looks grey and uncertain…
Moreover, Staś suffers for this. Not only did he take Szlangbaum into the shop, but he also supplies goods to Jewish merchants and has let several Jews into his firm. Our own people