Zellig Bach A Child's Longing for Home
8  Thursdays: the Baker's Three Daughters
 

My Thursdays were in the home of a baker. The family lived in a cellar—several steps below the sidewalk level was their shop; beyond it their apartment, and to its right the bakery.

The whole family—father, mother and their three grown daughters—toiled practically day and night.

I rarely saw the baker, as he worked at night and slept, with many interruptions, during the day, and I never went into the bakery. During my meals, however, I could almost always hear the sound of crackling flames in the oven, and,through the dining-room archway, their yellow-red-orange reflections upon the walls. In my imagination I saw the oven as a big, open-mouthed, insatiable monster, with flaming tongue, and the baker doomed to feed him night and day.

The shop of the bakery, nearest the street, was always filled with the fragrance of fresh bread. Here worked the baker's wife and their three daughters.

The loaves were big and customers' orders were always for a portion of a loaf. Pieces from the loaves would be cut by hand, various sizes according to the sale of the moment, and then placed on one of the plates of the scale, which hung suspended from the ceiling.

The shop was open all day long and late into the night.

Housewives carefully descended the several steps from the sidewalk, holding onto the railing. Children ran down the steps, almost sliding into the shop. In tightly closed palms they would hold ready-counted change. Standing on their toes they reached the top of the counter, put down the change and said: "Mother sent me for a quarter of a pound of bread."

I was fascinated by the baker's scale since my young life seemed to me so frequently to be hanging in the balance.

The two shiny metal plates of the scale, even when not in the act of calculating weight, rarely stood motionless, as if doomed to a constant state of indecision. Caught in a triangle of chains, each plate forming the base of an imaginary up-ended cone, the two plates were united at the top by an axletree, which held them at once together and apart. And so, fated by an outside force to separation, without diminishing for one instant their belonging to each other, the plates of the scale were together in their apartness, always hanging in the air, as a unit ambivalent at every move, forever doubters . . .

The meals here were heartily prepared and wholeheartedly served. Here, too, as on most of my other "days," I ate alone, because everyone in the family was busy. But I greatly enjoyed the fresh and wholesome fare, and the affectionate way the baker's family treated me.

The baker's daughters waited on me, any one of the three who was momentarily available. They did not fail each time to ask me how it tasted, and to offer, with smiling, welcoming faces, second helpings.

All three must have been in their early twenties. They had round faces, laughing eyes, and cheeks aglow with a natural healthy color. I did not know whether their facial radiance came from the constant heat of the bakery, or from their happy dispositions. They always looked fresh, like their father's golden-brown loaves of bread. After a while I started to think how lovely it would have been to have them as "sisters."

In the secrets of my heart I decided to "adopt" them, as I did "adopt" in a similar secret way Mr. Gurevitch, of my Mondays, and his three daughters.

I had thus extended in my longing heart the fantasy of my "adopted" family—a father and six sisters, for good measure one more than the actual number. . .
 


My evening hours were the saddest of the day. I missed vividly the evenings at home, when the whole family used to gather around the table in the dining-room. If I closed my eyes for a second I could conjure up the whole scene: the shiny samovar on the table with its constant hum, a warm invitation to a glass of steaming, fragrant tea; and my five sisters laughing, never giving a thought to their only brother, alone and forsaken . . .

In school I was showered with praise all day long. It made me happy, since to me it was the only proof that I was living up to the promise of my future. But this happiness did not last all through the evening after dinner. I would find myself all alone in the world.

The school was, naturally, for boys only, and most of the pupils were about my age. With but a few exceptions, these were local children, and they, of course, had their homes. Only two or three children were from out of town, like myself, but their room and board were paid for by their parents, and so they had all their meals—every day all week long—in the same place, at the same table. I was the only child in our school to be treated like the majority of the adult students in the Yeshi've proper, and thus my "eating days" was considered by everyone an honor and distinction. But I did not care for the honor, nor for the distinction. I missed—beyond words, beyond pleading—my Mother and sisters. I missed home. I hated to go to the stark windowless room which Esther had obtained for me, as I could not conceivably consider it home. The two young men, students of the Yeshi've, who slept on iron beds in the same room, were much older than I was. We had nothing in common, except that stifling air at night. I saw them only late in the evening, when they went to bed, and in the morning when they left.
 


My small bed, like a child's crib, was the only tiny corner in the entire world where I could retire with my thoughts, queries and hurts. Sometimes I would go to bed early to be even more by myself, as if this were possible. It was my only shelter from the world, and I would escape there to seek my own warmth and to construct, in secrecy and silence, my bitter-tasting consolations.

Or I would spend long, lonely, late hours walking in deserted streets, listening to the sound of my steps on the wooden sidewalks, to the beating of my heart, to the questions in my mind. I thought constantly of God, as I had been taught. I tried hard, with the intensity of which only a child is capable, to give this thought total, absolute exclusivity. Yet no matter how hard I tried not to allow any other thought to enter my mind—I compassionately implored God to support me in this endeavor—I could not help thinking also of Mother.

I thanked God for watching over me, and for the good people who were feeding me, albeit like a little beggar, every day in a different home. And I was especially grateful that in His wisdom He had made the order of the days, and that after Wednesday, a "day" on which I almost starved, He made Thursday, a "day" of abundance and plenitude, abounding with basic bread for health and the continuation of life, as well as with the comforting affectionate smiles of the baker's daughters . . .