play. Jastrow told him he would arrange for their return to Rome the day after tomorrow; he had good connections in Cracow, and getting train or air tickets would be no problem at all.
Swerving to avoid the worst holes, the car bounced along a bad tar road. They drove through tiny villages of straw-thatched log houses, painted with strips of blue between the logs. The driver had to maneuver around pigs, chickens, and cattle wandering in the road. Many of the houses were weathered gray, sagging, or toppling; some had no windows; but nearly all had new, or freshly varnished, doors. Close to each village, on a rise of ground, stood a church of wood. In the sun-flooded fields women and men toiled with hand implements or horse-drawn plows. The car passed massive wagons of hand-hewn wood pulled by muscular, resigned horses, and driven by muscular, resigned women and men, their sex indistinguishable except for marks like kerchiefs and beards. No tractor or automobile or any other machine appeared along the way until they came to Oswiecim, a medium-sized railroad town of brick buildings and ide streets, cut in two by a muddy river. Here the car stopped in the main square at the telephone exchange, and Natalie got out with Berel to phone Slote.
Byron strolled around the square in the hot sun, attracting covert looks from the townspeople. He bought ice cream, and the shopgirl took his money without a word. Oswiecim was nothing like Warsaw: a flat town of low, drab buildings, with an air of back-country dislike of strangers. Byron was glad to leave it. Natalie told him as they drove out into level green fields, on a dirt road along the river, that Slote, furious and alarmed, had said uncomplimentary things about Byron’s intelligence, though she had tried to take all the blame on herself. “I think he’s got a case of nerves,” she said. “You don’t suppose he’s afraid of the Germans?”
“Look, it was an unceremonious way to leave him.”
She said, with an odd little glance at Byron, “It wasn’t all that unceremonious. We were together till dawn, you know, talking. He ought to be tired of me.”
“What? I saw you turn in at three.”
“Oh, yes, but then he rang me from the lobby, said he was too exhausted to sleep, or something, and I came down and we went out again.”
“I see. You must be really beat.”
“Strangely enough I feel wonderful. The nap on the plane, and now all this sweet country air! Poland
“Poland a foist-class country.” Berel spoke up in English, stroking his beard. “Strong pipple. Hitler a big bluff. No war.”
Byron’s stay in Medzice remained in his memory forever after as something like a trip to the moon. Though the usual church stood on the usual knoll, the villagers were almost all Jews. Medzice was a cluster of houses on crooked narrow dirt or cobbled streets, some log, some plastered, a few of brick, sloping down toward a flat green meadow and the winding river. About a mile beyond the town, a roofless great house in the style of a French chateau lay ruined on the riverbank. The noble family was extinct, the house was a casualty of the World War, but the village survived.
The Jastrows and their relatives seemed to comprise half of Medzice. They swarmed on Natalie and Byron and marched them joyously from home to home. The dark interiors were all much the same: tiny rooms, enormous stoves, heavy polished Victorian furniture, lace curtains, each house seething underfoot with children ranging from crawlers to adolescents. Wine, cake, tea, hard candies, vodka, and fish appeared on table after table. There was no polite way to refuse. After a while Byron was physically uncomfortable, because there was never a toilet pause. In all the hours that this was going on, he never understood a word that anybody said. It seemed to him that all the Jews talked continuously and simultaneously. Natalie chattered away with these bearded men in dark blouses, breeches, and heavy boots, these unpainted work-worn women in plain dresses that reached their ankles. They all appeared enthralled by her. Outside each house a crowd gathered, joining the conversation through the windows. The visit of the two Americans was obviously one of the grandest events in Medzice since the war.
What a world! No sidewalks, no shops, no movie houses, no garages, no cars, no bicycles, no streetlights, no hydrants, no billboards; not a sound, not a sight to connect the town with the twentieth century, except a string of telegraph poles stretching along the river. Yet Natalie Jastrow was only one generation removed from this place. Dr. Aaron Jastrow, the author of
The sleeping arrangements that night were as novel as everything else. Byron was quartered at the home of the rabbi. This was the outcome of a tremendous argument in which half the population participated, including at one point the village priest, a brown-bearded man who, except for his bare head and black robe, rather resembled Berel, and whose sudden appearance on the scene sobered everybody. The parleying language shifted to Polish, then to German, which Byron well understood. The priest wanted to extend his hospitality to the Gentile American. Berel managed, with a timely word of help in German from Byron, to deflect this offer. When the priest left, both Berel and Byron became the center of jubilant triumph, and the American was borne off to the rabbi’s brick house by an escort of singing, hand-clapping yeshiva boys, led by the bridegroom himself, a pale lad of eighteen or so with a wispy goatee.
Here the rabbi and his wife tried to give him their own bed, but since it was obviously exactly that, the only large bed in the house, a black four-poster piled with huge pillows, Byron wouldn’t have it. This caused another grand parley in Yiddish. The house had a second bedroom containing two beds, and a plank and mattress stretched across two chairs. In this room there were already five tittering girls, who, as the discussion went on, began blushing and roaring with laughter. The idea seemed to be to put Byron into one of those beds. Evidently no decent solution could be hammered out. He ended up sleeping on the floor of the main room, a sort of parlor and dining room combined lined with giant leather-bound books. The rabbi gave him a feather mattress to lie on, and as six of the boys from the Cracow yeshiva shared the floor with him on similar mattresses, he did not feel ill-treated. Indeed, he slept better on the floor of the rabbi’s house in Medzice than he had in Warsaw’s Europeiski Hotel. He found the feather mattress lulling.
He spent much of the next day walking with Natalie around the town and in the fields and along the river, past an old cemetery to the ruined great house. The preparations for the wedding were going forward, so today the family let the visitors amuse themselves. The muddy narrow streets of Medzice — it had rained hard during the night, and the rattling on the rabbi’s roof had increased Byron’s sense of snugness — were filled with an autumnal fragrance of hay and ripening fruit, made more tangy by the smells of the free-roaming ducks, chickens, goats, and calves. Some of the fowl were encountering tragedy, happily strutting in the morning sunshine one moment, and the next swooped down upon by laughing children and carried off squawking and flapping to be slaughtered. In the fields beyond the outlying houses and barns — mostly one-room log structures with heavy yellow thatch roofs — cows and horses grazed in tall waving grass spotted with wild flowers. Water bugs skated on the surface of the slow-moving brown river. Fish jumped and splashed, but nobody was fishing.
Natalie told him she had stayed up half the night talking to the family. Most of what she had heard was news to her. Her father had tended to reminisce more about Warsaw than about his birthplace, and as a child she had been bored by the little she had heard, since she had only wanted to be a true-blue American. In the village, Uncle Aaron and her father were the legendary ones who had made an American success. Aaron Jastrow was variously thought be a great surgeon, an astronomer, and a cancer specialist; “professor” had ambiguous meanings in Polish and Yiddish. Nobody but Berel knew that he had written a famous book about Jesus, and Natalie gathered that Aaron’s cousin was at some pains to keep the achievement quiet. Berel (this was a familiar name for Jochanan, his real name) was the local success. He had begun trading in mushrooms while still student in Cracow, had branched into other exports, and had prospered enough to move his family to Warsaw; but he had sent his son back to the Cracow yeshiva, and had found the boy a bride in Medzice among the second cousins. The numerous Jastrows, like the rest of the villagers, lived by farming and by selling dairy products in the markets of Oswiecim and Cracow.
Clambering around the ruined great house, Natalie went exploring out of sight, broke through some rotten flooring, and fell ten or twelve feet. Byron heard the splintering noise, her shriek, and the thud. He hurried to find her. She lay sprawled like a broken doll, her skirt up around her gartered white thighs. She had landed on dirt and thick grass; whatever the floor here had been, probably parquet or marble, nothing was left of it. Byron pulled down
