Mechel The Provider

Mechel becomes the star in a scene borrowed from the Pied Piper. Children are attracted to the unnatural sounds emanating from his barrel-chest and are transfixed by his balancing act.

The creaking of the wheels makes ruin of my sleep every morning. Try as I might to slip back into my twilight gone, the sandpaper rasping of the delivery cart thrusts me into the real world.

As reliable as clockwork, the annoying squeaks never fail to reach me in the stillness of the dawn, for Mechel, the delivery boy, has set out on his appointed rounds with bags of groceries for the sleepy natives of my island paradise, an island of calm and cordiality in a harsh and turbulent city.

Stumbling to the window, I catch sight of the delivery cart, really an oversized tricycle supporting an odd tin-enclosed wooden box. The wagon lifts to one side, while Mechel is supporting the overloaded end with grunts and muscle strain.

Axle squeals, paroxysms, and labored muscle-wheezing are a poor accompaniment to my half-lidded awakening. But all is forgiven, because Mechel the provider is the source of the cacophony.

Mechel guards his covered wagon jealously. Rain or shine, he inspects the silver-hued exterior for hairline fissures, as if it were his orbital capsule; the thoroughness of this daily ceremony shames the countdown procedures of space-program engineers. After completing his inspection, he drops bags of groceries into its interior as if it were a safe-deposit vault needing no further safeguards. He then climbs aboard, his egg-shaped figure perched on the seat of the tricycle. To watch him pedal his overloaded pyramid away is to marvel at the miracle of the wheel.

As the morning continues, Mechel becomes the star in a scene borrowed from the Pied Piper. Children are attracted to the unnatural sounds emanating from his barrel-chest and are transfixed by his balancing act. His gestures and Atlas-like postures seem to provide endless delight to schoolchildren waiting at their bus stops. When he gleefully raises one of the tots, places him astride the mountain of bags and “blasts off” down the block, a spontaneous chorus of song peals forth from the other children, and the crescendo reverberates off the brownstones of my island sanctuary.

Mechel has his own language — a collection of notes of varying pitches — yet everybody seems to understand him. When he distributes candy to the children he knows from grocery visits, the loving glint in his eye needs no words for amplification. When he bends down so that the children may feel his bulging arm muscles (with the tattooed, concentration-camp number prominently showing), and he ughs and ahs to them, they fully understand. And when they ask him pleadingly, “Give me a ride,” and he delivers, the smiles on their faces need no expressive words.

His delivery knock on the door strains the hinges, and echoes fusillade-like throughout the house. Yet, housewives don’t cringe in fear, but rush to open the door to the overladen courier and offer him a fresh biscuit or a piece of homemade bread. The beat on the door is totally his own, and no housewife hesitates to answer.

Mechel is a mute. He has not said a word for the last 43 years — since that day in the concentration camp when the Gauleiter ordered him to speak up and tell who had “stolen” a bit of food to give life to the starving. Mechel chose not to speak, and after the beatings he sustained, he could not speak even if he had wanted to.

The adults who knew him from that epoch speak about him in hushed tones of reverence and listen today to his every grunt as if it were wisdom eternal. The new generation, unknowing of the past, intuitively accepts him, admires him, and hails his present feats as if reflecting some past heroism.

And Mechel continues bringing food — food for his people … people who now have new families where he has none … people who now enjoy economic success and security, while he has his delivery cart.

The turning wheels grate away with the dawn, and my initial annoyance never fails to turn into solace: Mechel is still providing for his people, when some others have forgotten too quickly.

***

From “A PATH THROUGH THE ASHES” – inspiring stories of the Holocaust Published by ArtScroll/Mesorah Publications Ltd., Brooklyn, NY. (This essay originally appeared in The Jewish Observer – January 1974.)