Read Online A Blessing on the Moon by Joseph Skibell - Free Book Online
Authors: Joseph Skibell
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their insipid complacencies another minute. Even now, see how they stretch and yawn, scratching their rumbling bellies before marching off to the dining room, like sleepwalkers. If it weren’t for their intestines, they wouldn’t even know they’re alive.
Neighbors, from the old Kaminski and Goldfaden apartments across the courtyard, have prepared a banquet, a feast. Tureens of chlodnik and kapuśniak and sauerkraut soup, pitchers of clabbered milk, boiled potatoes with skwarki, plates of moonshaped pierogi piled high near plates of pierożki filled with calf brains near plates of kolduny filled with rabbit meat. There are deep bowls of kasha and uszka and plump rolls of coulibiac. A platter here of salted herring with pickled eggs and one there for a roasted pork shoulder with baked apples and potatoes. Someone has poached a carp in a caramelized raisin sauce. There are cabbages with potatoes and couscous, fiery kielbasa and knackwurst, and a fragrant bigos stew. The scent of juniper berries carries all the way down the street! Roasted squab, shashlik, and a cabbage-smothered pheasant are draped across platters along with a rare stuffed goose. For dessert, there are little mountains of sour-cream blinis, great wheels of red Russian kiśiel, twisted sticks of chrust, golden-brown racuszki sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar, raisin-filled babka and a tower of flat piernik cakes.
The sideboard resembles a butcher’s window, the serving table a baker’s shop. Dazed, in polite couples, the many mourners approach the feast, muttering guiltily about life and its irrefutable demands, about the high importance of living, about how Ola, dear lamb, would have wanted them to live, how she would have wanted them to forget all about her, if need be, in order to continue living, to continue filling their bellies and sucking in air, as though there were not enough of it to go around, as though certain lungs must surrender their portion inorder that pinker, more fortunate lungs might expand to full capacity! How they sigh and heave, these fatuous dreamers, flaunting the very air in their chests. Their exhalations fill my nostrils with a putrid stench. Oh, the living, how they stink! They stink! They do! They rot but do not decompose. And each day, these walking, stinking, breathing monsters devour whole forests of animals, entire oceans of fish, great farms of vegetables and to what end? That they may shit and fart and piss their way through another day of violence and indifference. Well, let them pass their lives as someone else’s uninvited guests. I want them out! Now! Out of my house!
I enter the dining room and circle the table. With bowed heads, they’ve finished saying their prayers. “In Jesus’ name,” they pray, “Amen,” praying through the failed rabbinical student they imagine to be God, to the true God, a God they do not know, a God Who hates me, true, it’s true, Who hid my fate from me these many years, when I was rich and felt myself so blessed. This is what You had in store for me? To watch helplessly as a family of Polish pigs sits at my table and feeds itself, as though around a trough, snuffling down the delicacies they’ve stolen from the cellars of my murdered neighbors!
I’ll have no more of it.
Big Papa Andrzej has now stood, so solemnly, to thank all his neighbors for their considerable charities. Piously, he motions to his mourning wife, offering up her thanks as well. He is drunk. Like me. Like me, he’s been drinking since sun up. His wife, that fat horse of a woman, sobs and sniffs at every mention of her poor daughter’s name.
“Ola, Ola, Ola!” I bellow it into her head, not an inch away, so close I can see the stiff hairs growing like foliage inside her plump apricot ears. And out her nose as well. I’ve peeked around the corner of her head for a better look. There’s one curling white hair growing from a wart upon her chin.
The eldest brother rises, also, to offer a toast of
Neighbors, from the old Kaminski and Goldfaden apartments across the courtyard, have prepared a banquet, a feast. Tureens of chlodnik and kapuśniak and sauerkraut soup, pitchers of clabbered milk, boiled potatoes with skwarki, plates of moonshaped pierogi piled high near plates of pierożki filled with calf brains near plates of kolduny filled with rabbit meat. There are deep bowls of kasha and uszka and plump rolls of coulibiac. A platter here of salted herring with pickled eggs and one there for a roasted pork shoulder with baked apples and potatoes. Someone has poached a carp in a caramelized raisin sauce. There are cabbages with potatoes and couscous, fiery kielbasa and knackwurst, and a fragrant bigos stew. The scent of juniper berries carries all the way down the street! Roasted squab, shashlik, and a cabbage-smothered pheasant are draped across platters along with a rare stuffed goose. For dessert, there are little mountains of sour-cream blinis, great wheels of red Russian kiśiel, twisted sticks of chrust, golden-brown racuszki sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar, raisin-filled babka and a tower of flat piernik cakes.
The sideboard resembles a butcher’s window, the serving table a baker’s shop. Dazed, in polite couples, the many mourners approach the feast, muttering guiltily about life and its irrefutable demands, about the high importance of living, about how Ola, dear lamb, would have wanted them to live, how she would have wanted them to forget all about her, if need be, in order to continue living, to continue filling their bellies and sucking in air, as though there were not enough of it to go around, as though certain lungs must surrender their portion inorder that pinker, more fortunate lungs might expand to full capacity! How they sigh and heave, these fatuous dreamers, flaunting the very air in their chests. Their exhalations fill my nostrils with a putrid stench. Oh, the living, how they stink! They stink! They do! They rot but do not decompose. And each day, these walking, stinking, breathing monsters devour whole forests of animals, entire oceans of fish, great farms of vegetables and to what end? That they may shit and fart and piss their way through another day of violence and indifference. Well, let them pass their lives as someone else’s uninvited guests. I want them out! Now! Out of my house!
I enter the dining room and circle the table. With bowed heads, they’ve finished saying their prayers. “In Jesus’ name,” they pray, “Amen,” praying through the failed rabbinical student they imagine to be God, to the true God, a God they do not know, a God Who hates me, true, it’s true, Who hid my fate from me these many years, when I was rich and felt myself so blessed. This is what You had in store for me? To watch helplessly as a family of Polish pigs sits at my table and feeds itself, as though around a trough, snuffling down the delicacies they’ve stolen from the cellars of my murdered neighbors!
I’ll have no more of it.
Big Papa Andrzej has now stood, so solemnly, to thank all his neighbors for their considerable charities. Piously, he motions to his mourning wife, offering up her thanks as well. He is drunk. Like me. Like me, he’s been drinking since sun up. His wife, that fat horse of a woman, sobs and sniffs at every mention of her poor daughter’s name.
“Ola, Ola, Ola!” I bellow it into her head, not an inch away, so close I can see the stiff hairs growing like foliage inside her plump apricot ears. And out her nose as well. I’ve peeked around the corner of her head for a better look. There’s one curling white hair growing from a wart upon her chin.
The eldest brother rises, also, to offer a toast of
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