In one of the downstairs apartments, in the house where I had my room, lived a drayman who twice a week took passengers to the railroad station in the next town, forty-odd miles away. It took the better part of a whole night or day to reach the station from here.
I soon found great fascination in watching the passengers, men and women, less frequently a child attached to a grown-up, and the general commotion.
Departures were usually in the evening, from the drayman's residence, and tension mounted gradually until the very last moment. Some passengers would come almost a full hour ahead of time, others came late. Sometimes a whole wagon packed with passengers and ready to leave would wait for a single passenger, and somebody would be sent to call for him.
Almost every passenger had trunks and valises in various sizes and shapes, and it took the drayman some time to stack them neatly in the rear of the wagon, to arrange and rearrange the baggage into a semblance of balance. He would then sling a heavy rope around the structure and tie it together, pulling hard in various directions and creating an intricate net of knotted pluses and multiplication signs, to add up and multiply the holding power of the rope.
When the drayman finally climbed into his seat, the horse interrupted his meditations, and the wagon was on its way.
In the sudden silence after the hubbub of passengers and goodbye bidders, I immensely envied the passengers, most particularly if there was a boy among them, assuming with unexplainable certainty that he was going home to join his parents. I thought of the railroad stations and speeding trains in the middle of the night that wrote in sound and smoke long banners in the sky. And I was certain that one of these trains touched on its many stops my own hometown.
And I somehow got it into my mind that I, too, would leave for home
from this very spot. If only I knew when!
At the end of World War I, battles were raging all over Lithuania between various armies: White Russians, red Bolsheviks, splinter forces of Cossacks headed by their generals, retreating Germans, Lithuanian patriots. There were many fronts in a continuous flux. Some cities and towns were captured and retaken by opposite armies several times during the same day.
Rumors about the fate of my school town ran wild. Factual information was meager, and postal and railroad communications stopped entirely. No letters from Mother, no trains going home. And the great uncertainty in my heart, the day of my return home, grew stronger and unanswerable.
In the meantime, learning went on as usual.
One day, about eleven o'clock, the school director rushed excitedly into my classroom, whispered something to the teacher, and left hurriedly. Then the teacher told us:
"Boys, everybody run home quick! The Cossacks are coming!"
With all my strength I ran "home." To the ear of every Jew, child and adult alike, the word Cossack was tantamount to pogrom, especially in times of war. I ran for my life.
As I darted from a side street into the marketplace—I was only about twenty paces away from my room—I stopped short, my heart aflutter. The market was totally deserted, all shops shuttered, as if day turned into night. There was no living soul except a lone Cossack on his horse in the middle of the market. In my breathless fright I saw a blur of white: the Cossack's uniform, his high white fur cap, and his spirited white horse. The Cossack brandished his sword high in the air, flourished it in swinging, cutting motions. All the while he pulled on the reins, and the horse paced back and forth, and turned around several times in a small circle.
I turned back, and through a courtyard in the rear of some houses made it for ‘home." "The Cossacks are here!" I said breathlessly to my landlady and her daughter, and then threw myself, clothed, on my bed.
The pillow was by now my private wailing wall, but strangely enough I did not cry. Quietly I lay there with my face buried in the pillow. I listened to my heart, my breathing, my thoughts—listened with a unique, intense calm. I felt that this was the end, and wished that I could in some way sum up my young life, draw the last line. But my mind was flooded with fright, and not a single discernable thought stood out by itself.
After some time I suddenly felt cold and shivery, and covered myself with my blanket.
As I lay there face down I became conscious of my exposed neck, but I did not pull up the blanket to cover it. Let the Cossacks come! Let them sever my head and cut through, with one sharp swoop, my thoughts, and doubts, and questions, and kill once and for all my endless suffering and my vain and futile longings! . . .
For unknown reasons the Cossacks did not take the town that day, and the following morning we added a prayer of thanksgiving to the regular service
I continued to be desperate for a change, any change that would still the gnawing uncertainty about the duration of my exile. And then, early one morning, suddenly and unbelievably, after weeks and weeks without news from home—Mother came to see me!
There was no way of letting me know in advance
that she was coming. She hired a peasant who, for some money, was willing
to undertake the hazardous journey under the cover of night.
The moment mother saw me, my "room" and bed, she instantly realized the kind of care I had received.
One quick look at my clothing made her decide, as Ba'she did before her upon examining my hair, that I needed a thorough washing, that I needed a bath badly and at once.
Mother asked my landlady to supply her with plenty of hot water. And so, in the middle of the week—not even on a Friday, the traditional bath-day preparatory for the Sabbath—I received the bath of my life.
A basin was placed on a wooden stool in the center of the middle room, the basin in which my landlady used to wash her laundry Mother lifted me, a boy almost ten years old but very small and underweight, into the basin, and in front of my landlady and her daughter, she gave me a vigorous scrubbing. To this very day I retain in the pores of my skin the welcoming pain and touching pleasure of that unique bath.
Shortly after my father's death, when I was about five-and-a-half years old, Mother stopped taking me with her to the women's public bath. Instead, she entrusted me for this purpose to her brother. My uncle used to take me, together with his three sons, to the men's public bath, and he always washed his sons first and me last and in haste.
Now, however, due to the apparently urgent nature of the bath, as well as the fact that Mother did not figure on staying long—she left five girls home in uncertain and troubled times—she did not give a second thought to the question of my age and gender. I, too, did not feel any embarrassment that my mother and two strange women busied themselves with bathing me. Mother was bathing me like a baby, and does a baby know any shame?
After the bath and a quick meal—tea with bread and butter—I went to school. Learning God's word was, after all, the first and only task in one's life, and one did not interrupt it just for the sake of a Mother's visit, not even if it was her first visit in more than a year-and-a-half.
A melody of radiant joy was within me! I told everyone of the great and unbelievable surprise. I was not an abandoned child anymore! Did not Mother come to see me in such difficult and dangerous times and under such extraordinary circumstances? Mother is here! My long and bitter exile will soon end, and in a matter of days I shall be on my way home!