The Collected Stories

worldly books. The Russians had left by that time and the Germans had taken over. Then Poland became independent and I was drafted into the army. I helped to drive the Bolsheviks to Kiev. Then they drove us back to the Vistula. The Poles are not too fond of Jews, but I advanced. They made me a top sergeant—
chorázy
—the highest rank you can reach without military school, and after the war they offered to send me to a military academy. I might have become a colonel or something, but the barracks was not my ambition. I read a lot, painted, and tried to become a sculptor. I began to carve all sorts of figures out of wood. I ended up making furniture. Cabinet work—I specialized in repairing furniture, mostly antiques. You know how it is—inlays fall out, bits break off. It takes skill to make the patch invisible. I still don’t know why I threw myself into it with such enthusiasm. To find the right grain of wood, the right color, and to fit it in so that the owner himself couldn’t spot the place—for this, one needs iron patience, and instinct too.
    “Now I’ll tell you why I came to you. It’s because you write about the mysterious powers: telepathy, spirits, hypnotism, fatalism, and so on—I read it all. I read it because I possess the powers you describe. I didn’t come to boast, and don’t get the idea I want to become a newspaperman. Here in America I work at my trade and I earn enough. I’m single—no wife, no children. They killed off my family. I take a drink of whiskey, but I’m not a drunkard. I have an apartment here in New York, and a cottage in Woodstock. I don’t need help from anybody.
    “But to get back to the powers. You’re right when you say a person is born with them. We’re born with everything. I was a child of six when I first began to carve. Later I neglected it, but the gift stayed with me. And that’s how it is with the powers. I had them but I didn’t know what they were. I got up one morning and it came into my mind that someone in our building was going to fall out the window that day. We lived in Warsaw on Twarda Street. I didn’t like the thought—it frightened me. I left for cheder, and when I came home the courtyard was black with people. The ambulance was just arriving. A glazier had been replacing a pane in a window on the second floor, and had fallen out. If such things had happened once, twice—even five times—I might have called it coincidence, but they happened so frequently there could be no question of coincidence. Strange, I began to understand that I should conceal this—as if it were an ugly birthmark. And I was right, because powers like this are a misfortune. It’s better to be born deaf or lame than to possess them.
    “But, no matter how careful you are, you can’t hide everything. Once, I was sitting in the kitchen. My mother—peace be with her—was knitting a stocking. My father earned good money, even though he was a laborer. Our apartment was comfortable, and as clean as a rich man’s house. We had a lot of copper dishes, which my mother used to scour each week until they shone. I was sitting on a low bench. I wasn’t more than seven years old at the time. All of a sudden, I said, ‘Mamma, there’s money under the floor! There is money!’ My mother stopped knitting and looked at me in amazement. ‘What sort of money? What are you babbling about?’ ‘Money,’ I said. ‘Gold pieces.’ My mother said, ‘Are you crazy? How do you know what’s under the floor?’ ‘I know,’ I said. Already I realized that I shouldn’t have said it, but it was too late.
    “When my father came home for dinner, my mother told him what I had said. I wasn’t there, but my father was so astonished he confessed that he had hidden a number of golden coins under the floor. I had an older sister and my father was saving a dowry for her—putting money into a bank was not the custom for simple people. When I returned from cheder, my father began to question me. ‘Are you spying on me?’ Actually, my father had hidden the money when I was in cheder and my mother was out marketing. My sister had gone to visit a friend. He had locked and bolted the door, and we lived on the third floor. He had even been careful enough to stuff the keyhole with cotton. I got a beating, but no matter how I tried I could not explain to him how I knew about those coins. ‘This boy is a devil!’ my father said, and he gave me an extra box on the ear. It was a good