Retracing the steps

Hirsch Erlich was my neighbor. When I first saw him , he was unpacking newly-bought pieces of furniture from the back of a truck with the help of his pregnant wife. As he paused to wipe away the sweat from his brow, he noticed me on the other side of the birthing hedge that separated our two properties. He told me later that on that day, I had looked baffled, probably because they had been speaking a language I had never heard before. We shook hands over the hedge while he painstakingly tried to introduce himself in broken English. From our brief and awkward first meeting, I gathered that he had recently emigrated with his wife from their eastern European country fleeing Communism. And there he was, in the heartland of the USA looking suspicious to everyone around and, with hindsight, I am ashamed to admit , he did to me as well. But Hirsch soon quelled the paranoia and became everyone’s best buddy, sharing fishing nights, organizing barbecues for couples who had recently moved in, becoming a better American than any of us.

           We hit it off quickly and I became an intimate friend. I was there when his first daughter was born, sitting on a hard-plastic seat while he was nervously pacing up and down the hospital corridor flicking madly at cigarettes I kept offering to ease the tension. I tagged along when the nurse took him to the large window giving on the nursery where cribs were neatly and orderly arranged. I saw him cry as the nurse on the other side pointed at a small babe whose raven hair she shared with her father. I was back at the hospital with my wife the next day with a freshly-bought bouquet of flowers. When we came inside the room, Hirsh was cradling his daughter in the crook of his arm lovingly smiling to her. The special link that would exist between them was already there, in this small and dimly-lit hospital room. She was looking intently at him with questioning dark eyes trying to probe at her dad.

           It was the same all through her childhood, dredging up questions from an inexhaustible source .She was always looking for answers , wanting to know everything there was to know about her family. It was easy enough to make her mother talk and the child was well-versed on her German ancestry. But it was a different matter with Hirsch. By and by , he became a master at eluding his daughter’s constant badgering. What was his father’s name? Did he have a dog as a kid? What was his house like? Did his mother read him stories before he went to sleep? How did get his tattoo? He would smile and look away, pretend the phone was ringing, swear he saw some strange four-legged creature at the back of the garden, buy his way out with ice-creams and flicks at the town’s theater. She lovingly called him Cagey and as he would evade my questions too , I amiably named him so myself.

           But on his daughter’s coming of age, Hirsch decided to leave Cagey behind. I remember it vividly . It was on her birthday and the young woman was opening her present while the guests cheered at the new summer dresses and the envelopes full of cash she proudly fanned around. However, one envelope caught her eye. It was a nondescript one with only her name in the center but the daughter had recognized her father’s handwriting. There were three plane tickets inside for a city in Poland whose name I cannot spell let alone pronounce. We all wondered who would be the third person , Hirsch’s wife had died two years before from cancer. I was surprised when she read out my name.

           We were packed in a bus on a beautiful summer morning with a pristine blue sky as the vehicle moved along a road flanked by tall dark-green conifers. The three of us stepped out in the warm air and we started following behind, apart from the group taking pictures or listening to the guide. We had our own guide but Cagey was nowhere to be seen. Instead, that day we met Hirschek. He showed us the train station where he and his family had arrived on a cold October morning. The tracks were now overgrown with high weeds as if to conceal them from view. There, on the worn-out wooden plank platforms, was the spot where he last saw his father and grandfather. We moved slowly as Hirschek pointed this way and that as we both respectfully listened to his anecdotes feeding up years of what we felt now had been inappropriate curiosity. But he did not resent it and kept retracing the steps of his early years. He felt the sun was out of place, for him it had always rained there. The mud had always stuck to his stripped cuff pants. The fat kid feasting sureptitiously upon a bag of chips did not belong there. Hunger had been the name of the day back then, Hirschek had been happy to find roots one day he had given to his weakening mother. She had been the only thing that had made sense there, the only scrap of humanity that had not been wrenched from him, her hugs, her soft songs in Yiddish to muffle the cries of the unlucky ones randomly picked up and taken to the houses at the back which spewed dark smoke. We were now approaching them, their red-brick façades blackened by thousands of souls. Hirschek had never believed her when she had told him that the smoke was heaven-bound.

           One thing remained the same though. The persistent impression of silence. Birds did not chirp there, people only whispered, feet trod lightly on the gravel paths lest they should disturb the peace of long suffering departed. Planes crisscrossed the sky soundlessly. Boisterous kids felt its weight in the grave faces of adults which inhibited their capacity for mischiefs. They listened religiously, respectfully ,solemnly. This gut-twisting silence seeped and oozed from every stone, every blade of grass, every barbed-wire fence, every dilapidated barracks as did the tears on Hirschek’s face as his daughter gently walked him back to the bus.