The Absent Minded Professor

Chapter 20.

Mister B. was the personification of the absent-minded professor. His daughter Martha became my friend by the time she moved with her family to Czernovitz and registered in our high school. We were about fifteen years old at the time. Both of us exhibited similar interests in a number of areas: literature, languages, politics. Discussions among friends centered around new books that we had read and, of course, a "Weltanschauung," a view of world affairs. In lighter moments, we were often ridiculing our teachers, yet she would top all of our stories with examples of her father’s foibles, habits and his absentmindedness.

She once told about the parade on the 10th of May, the most important holiday of Romania. The schools were marching in the parade and all the teachers were heading their assigned groups. As the hour approached and her father was getting ready and was almost late in leaving the house, he grabbed a hat and ran. As he hastened through the street toward school, all dressed in black suit and tie, people turned their heads and giggled, yet he never noticed a thing. However, when he reached the school yard, students burst out laughing. Somebody asked: " Herr Professor, what’s with your hat?" He removed it from his head and noticed, to his horror, that it was his wife’s hat with a long ostrich feather.

Martha enlivened our chats with many more incidents of this kind. There were good-natured ribbings from his family, which he took in that spirit, for his was a highly developed sense of humor. Yet he was formal and straight-laced and well aware of his social standing. A high-school "professor" was a well-respected member of society and he kept youngsters at a distance, expecting due deference.

In the provincial town, where he had spent his professional working life, many people knew him and respected him. When walking along the street, people would greet him and they would often engage him in conversation and showed respect for his opinions. He was somebody, he was well known, a well-regarded intellectual in that society, a professor, a family man with friends. When he retired and moved with his wife and youngest daughter to Czernovitz, all that was lost—he was a newcomer, a stranger. he moved for the sake of his youngest, who could finish school and go to the university. The older daughters had established themselves in Bucharest and the parents had hoped to remain with one daughter, at home. In the new town, when he would walk along the street, nobody knew him; he had lost his status, he was just a pensioner, an elderly man.

About one year after settling in Czernovitz, his wife became ill and died of cancer within a year. Thus Martha remained alone with her father. Both had a hard time running a household. Poor Mister B., a former teacher of religion, a highly learned man, a person who knew Goethe and Schiller and Heine and other German classics by heart, a lover of Latin and Greek, a scholar of Hebrew texts, a walking literary encyclopedia—a very absent-minded man, impractical, forgetful, always distracted, he missed the gentle but firm leading partner of his life, his wife. In fact, he once remarked that in India, they used to burn the wife on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. According to him, it should be done the other way around. However, this was not our custom and he missed his wife desperately.

He shared small living quarters with his youngest daughter, my friend. As he was advancing in age, he became progressively more forgetful, more distracted and disorganized. For instance, he would search for hours for certain notes, copied from texts or observations on comparative alphabets. I still remember when he would expound on the similarity of the Hebrew aleph, bet, gimel, dalet to the Greek alpha, beta, gamma, delta and would go on to the end of the letters, - omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet and say: etcetera, etcetera. To us it sounded terribly funny to say etcetera after the last letter, but who would have dared to smile and insult the elderly professor?

In the back of my mind I admired him for his literary scholarship, but in daily encounters, he struck as tragicomic and pathetic and painfully lonesome.

In the first days of July, 1941, soon after the German attack on the Soviet Union, our town was occupied by the Nazis. Thousands of our townspeople fled with the Soviets, among them also my friend. Mr. B. remained behind, all alone. A few days after the initial shock, he came by to find out whether I had remained or not. To his surprise, he found me and my parents at home. Thus, some of his anxieties had been relieved, there was a friendly family close by whom he could visit and, of course, I was a kind of replacement or reminder of his daughter. he once expressed his satisfaction in coming to us, by saying: "I come to smell Martha smell. "

Times could not be worse. Practical people could improvise, could make do with very little, somehow. Food was in extremely short supply. This elderly intellectual was incapable of performing practical daily activities: he could not cook or sew or launder, at least, not well. The man suffered daily in his helplessness and lonesomeness. Lucky for him, his landlady, who admired him for his intellectual capabilities, tried to alleviate his plight by making sure his room was heated, his bed was made, his clothes were washed. All these were not easy to accomplish at the time for it was a problem getting a piece of bread or a cake of soap.

As Jews were permitted to leave their houses for only two hours, from ten until noon, he would often come to us during that short interval. My Mother was an understanding, compassionate woman, who helped in her own fashion. Between my Father and the Professor there was little that they could agree on.

Father as a strictly observant, pious Jew who admired certain rabbis, who was a personal friend of some of them; Father kept all the religious observances meticulously, while the Professor was a Zionist, once a delegate from Bukovina at a Zionist Congress in Switzerland. He was proud to have met Nordau and other luminaries of Zionism before the First World Was. He declared himself as "enlightened," a modern Jew, a rationalist, who denounced the belief in rabbis as primitive, keeping some of the traditions as irrational, old-fashioned. He stopped short at declaring chasidim as ridiculous, stupid. Luckily, the two men did not argue much, they tolerated each other, they let each other continue with his own convictions; they did not try to influence one another; it seemed unimportant to argue about differences in outlook on religion, at a time when nobody was sure of living another day, whether chasid, traditional or enlightened; the world around us killed us, without difference, anyway.

Mr. B. did not come to us as my Father’s friend but as a lonely person, who was glad to be welcomed by us; he came to see a surrogate daughter. He used to smoke a lot. Whenever he would sit down in our kitchen, for we kept only the kitchen heated, Mother would offer him bread and jam, tea or coffee. By the time he had finished the hot drink, he lit a cigarette, and warm and satisfied, he would slowly doze off. As the fingers held the cigarette, the ashes would drop on his trousers and, Mother or myself would gently remove the cigarette, for it would reach his fingers and singe them. As time approached to get home at the curfew hour, he would wake up slowly or we would nudge him to get ready to go home.

Once, when he did not come for a week, I walked over to find out what had happened to our old friend. I found him in his room pale and shaken and he told me about his accident. He had fallen asleep in bed and had still been smoking the last cigarette of the day, when he dozed off and put the bedding on fire. His landlady smelled the smoke, walked in and saved him. His mustache, his eyelashes, his eyebrows were singed, his bed and bedding doused in water and his demeanor shaken. Well, he could not give up smoking, but he decided never to smoke in bed again.

Times did not improve; the winter of 1942 to 43 was bitter in every respect. Food was scarce; the deportations of June 42 thinned even more the ranks of our co-religionist and those who had remained in town did not even dare hope to see the end of the war. Just as before, Jews were not permitted to leave their apartments for more than two hours a day and we mostly used the time to sell our last possessions in order to buy some food.

Professor B. never missed saying Kaddish—the prayer for the dead— for his wife on the date of her death. He would go to a synagogue to recite the prayers with a group of ten men, a minyan, a quorum. In the winter of 1943, when it was forbidden for a Jew to be walking the street at any hour other than ten to noon, he left his house before sundown and walked to a place where he knew they had a minyan. No sooner had he walked out of the house, with the yellow star sewn on his coat, when he was spotted by a policeman and arrested.

For about ten days his landlady did not know where he had vanished. Neither did we. There was no way of finding out where a Jew had disappeared. However, ten days later, he came home: thin, dirty, disheveled, a shadow of an old man. The story came to light: arrest, internment in a temporary camp in Sadagura, a small town near Czernovitz. Since the Romanians did not deport at that time, they placed every person caught trespassing the law—according to them— in a temporary camp. They threw all kinds of shady characters: thieves, prostitutes and our Professor into one big hangar. A minimum of food and drink was offered them by their captors; since their crimes were undefined, one day, they sent one or another, home, back to Czernovitz, where they had been apprehended.

Again our old Professor was slowly coming back to his old routines, but he was frightened. He watched the curfew hours meticulously; he made sure to spend more time reviewing his Greek grammar or reading over a Latin text by Cicero or Virgil or practicing English according to the Langenscheidt Method, all in the privacy of his room, alone.

However, he continued to come to us, a place where we felt concerned about his precarious health: an asthmatic cough, forgetfulness and a weakening of his resolve. All the trouble seemed to be going on endlessly and the day he was waiting for—to see his daughter again -- loomed far away. The mood was getting grimmer as the weeks went by in that bitter winter, in January and February of 1943.

One day the Professor came up, climbing the hundred stairs to our fifth floor apartment and smiled broadly, a smile from ear to ear, a blissful joy spread over his usually grim looking face. As he stepped in, we asked: "Has peace broken out? Has the Messiah come? Has Hitler died?" "No, no," he replied "but something nice has happened to me. As I was walking along the street, a woman stopped me and asked: ‘Herr Professor, don’t you remember me?’ "He looked at her somehow bewildered, unable to place her, but she continued: "I am Molly, your Kriminalskollegin (Prison colleague)." "It was nice to see her" he added softly, smiling with a joyful glint in his eyes. I asked him who Molly was and he gently replied: "a prostitute."

At last, walking along the street, somebody knew who he was—Herr Professor.