Free Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life by Yehoshue Perle Page B

together shifted the wardrobe from the wall, leaving a large, dark patch covered with spiderwebs and dust. The cold, disordered room was strewn with cigarette butts, bent spoons, a wooden, moldy frame for making Hanukkah dreydls, and a pair of the late Moyshe’s stiff, dirty shirt cuffs. When the mirror over the dresser was taken down, a huge spider began to scurry away. It ran up the wall and from there to the ceiling, from which vantage point it could look down on the havoc below.
    Father himself took apart the beds. When the peasant offered to help, Father puckered his lips, revealed two rows of white, healthy teeth, and said in Yiddish, “No need, I’ll manage alone.” Father had always been rather finicky about beds. A bed, he maintained, was like a wife, the touch of a strange man could defile it.
    Mother, her head wrapped in a kerchief, covered in feathers, looking nothing like her Warsaw self, was pouring pots of boiling water over the dismantled bedsteads. We stepped on damp, half-rotted wisps of straw, which stubbornly clung to our shoes. The place reeked of unaired bedding, of the moldering rags scattered under Jusza’s cot. From where the dresser had stood, several squashed sardine boxes—no one knew how they got there—looked up at us.
    All of that stayed behind. Also left behind was the echo that reverberates from corner to corner across the dark emptiness that lingers on in a room after its inhabitants have departed.
    Everything lay on the sleigh in a jumble, ready for the move. The four carved legs of the large table stretched up toward the sky, like a bound calf. The stripped red bedding was jammed into the upturned table. The large mixing bowl and the chipped black pots were shoved into drawers of the dresser. All of this accumulation creaked and glided over the soft, deep snow.
    Father walked on one side of the sleigh, carrying the wall clock in his arms as though—forgive the profane comparison—he was holding a Torah scroll in the Simhath Torah holiday procession. On the other side, Mother was carrying the standing lamp, which was lit only on festivals.
    I sat in the sleigh, facing the street, gripping the tarnished brass candlesticks in my fingers. At my feet stood the mortar and an old flatiron, a gift from Grandpa in honor of my recovery.
    And that is how we arrived at our new home.
    One house stood out on the street from among a row of identical wooden cottages. It was made of yellow brick, with a sloping tin roof. A white cat, whiter than snow, looked down at us from the roof, with quivering whiskers. It stretched its head, no doubt in astonishment, opened its whiskered mouth wide, and gave a great, gaping yawn.
    The sleigh with our belongings had to remain in the street, for the entryway was too narrow and the little courtyard even narrower. There was no pump to be seen. The air was filled with the stench of pigs and the musty smell coming from the row of cubicles on the overhead wooden porch.
    Under that same porch lay our new home. It was smaller than our previous place. The kitchen was painted blue, with a crooked ceiling and thin, crumbling walls. The main room itself was square, with two windows looking out onto the narrow yard, but dark for all that. On the other hand, it had a red-painted floor, which could have been the only reason why Mother decided on this particular place.
    “In Warsaw,” she said, “all the floors are painted red.”
    Father wrinkled his nose.
    “It’s a little dark in here,” his eyes swept across the walls.
    “It’s winter,” Mother apologized. “In summer, God willing, it’ll be brighter.”
    Personally, I liked the new place. It was bare and clean, no stains on the walls, no damp straw all over the floor, and no mice. A red floor, it would seem, keeps them away. No Moyshe was going to die here, and no Jusza was going to disturb my dreams.
    A gray, misty evening filtered into the room. A pair of footsteps could be heard running along the porch. It