The City Beautiful

by Aden Polydoros

“I don’t know. It just stood out to me.” He shrugged. “You followed the same pattern with coffee. I notice these things.”

  “How people drink?”

  “Patterns. Like how you would wind your watch first thing each morning, and you’d count the number of times you did it.”

  The way he said it made me afraid he thought it was peculiar. “It’s how my father taught me. If I don’t wind it consistently, it won’t keep time as well. And if I overwind it, the mainspring might break.”

  He shrugged. “You don’t have to explain it. I just liked it.”

  “I never knew you noticed,” I murmured, gazing into my cup of tea. My own reflection, unspooled and distorted in the dark liquid, was a stranger to me.

  “Those were good times, weren’t they?” Frankie asked, adding a dash of milk to his tea. As he put down the small creamer, his hand touched mine. Just for a moment, but long enough to make my heart skip a beat. Had he done that on purpose? I wanted to think he had only added milk to his tea as an excuse to brush up against me.

  I put my hand in my lap to avoid tempting fate. If he touched me again, all the feelings I’d kept dammed for so long might come rushing to the forefront. I’d want to kiss him. I’d want to tell him how lovely he’d become in the year since I left... And I knew he’d never feel the same way, that it would repel him, disgust him even.

  “Some of them were good,” I conceded, reinforcing my mask. “I’m still not going to come back and work for you.”

  “Yes, you made that abundantly clear,” Frankie said dryly.

  I took another sip of tea, grimacing at the sting in my throat when I swallowed. The throbbing ache worsened by the second.

  “Too strong?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No, the tea’s fine.”

  “Then why the face?”

  Somehow, giving voice to my fears scared me even more than leaving them unspoken. But Frankie had always been honest and blunt, even to a fault, and maybe that was what I needed most now.

  Before I could lose my nerve, I pulled free my ribbon tie and yanked down my collar. Just touching the bruise made me gasp.

  He winced. “Please tell me I didn’t do that.”

  “Not you.” I sighed, shoving my tie into my pocket. “I know you must think I’m deranged, but I’m not. Something is happening to me, Frankie. I thought this was grief, but it isn’t grief. It’s something more. It’s growing inside, and I can’t stop it.”

  Warmth in my palm. Frankie had reached under the table to take my hand, his calloused fingers anchoring my own. He gave my hand a firm, reassuring squeeze. “Start from the beginning.”

  20

  I began by telling Frankie about Yakov’s death, speaking very quietly to avoid being overheard by the other patrons. He made an obvious effort not to interrupt me, but every other minute, he couldn’t help but ask questions.

  “Why do you volunteer at a chevra kadisha?” Frankie asked, when I told him about my work at the burial society. “I thought dead bodies made you squeamish, like when we found that old beggar who froze to death.”

  “They used to, but...” I searched for a way to explain it.

  I had fled in terror from the old beggar’s body because it had been a reminder of my own mortality. And the first time I had washed a body, I had vomited in the alley behind the tahara house until I was coughing up strings of burning bile. But the second time, it wasn’t so bad. And by the fourth or fifth time, I had realized that there was no running from death, when death surrounded us on all sides.

  “I was sick of feeling guilty,” I said at last, as though that explained it.

  “For stealing?” he asked.

  “Yes. No. Look, I just wanted to do something right for once.”

  But it was more than that. I would never be able to give my father a proper burial, but by honoring the dead, I felt like I was rewinding the clock. Making things right again.

  When I reached the part about the Linotype machine incident, I expected Frankie to laugh in disbelief. Instead, he just crumbled a bublitchi between his fingers and gazed distantly into his cup of tea. “You look sick, Alter, do you know that?”

  “You don’t believe me.” A sinking feeling formed in the pit of my stomach. “You think it’s madness.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m just worried about you.” He raised a chunk of cake to his mouth, reconsidered, and set his fork down without taking a bite. He leaned across the table, fixing me with those riveting tawny eyes of his. “Tell me, Alter, how familiar are you with dybbukim?”

  Magic flowed through the winding streets of Piatra Neamţ, if one were to believe the legends. I grew up on stories of holy men parting the river Bistriţa, golems shaped from clay, and, of course, those possessive spirits called dybbukim.

  “Wait, don’t tell me.” I laughed, but it came out hollow. “You think I’m possessed by Yakov’s dybbuk?”

  “Do you have a better explanation?”

  “You’re mad, Frankie Portnoy.” I had wanted someone to talk to, not convince me that I was possessed. In some ways, it was even worse than if he had told me I was mad. “I’m not possessed. This is exhaustion, or it’s a sickness. It has to be. I must have caught something from Yakov and—”

  “Back there. You said, Otstan’ ot menya. That’s Russian.”

  “No, I... I told you to let me go.”

  “In Russian,” Frankie said. “Listen to me. I’ve met someone possessed by a dybbuk.”

  “Let me guess, he’s a boxer, too?” I snarled.

  “No. This was back in Vilne.”

  “You’re mad.” I shook my head in disgust. “You’ve been hit in the head too many times.”

  “Just listen,” Frankie said quietly, laying his hand over mine as I began to rise.

  I could have pushed out of my seat and left the teahouse. I wanted to. But I didn’t move, and a part of it was because the chill had returned to coil in my veins. If this was a dybbuk, it was waking up.

  So, I sat back and drank the fresh glass of tea he made for me, without milk or sugar this time, so that the leaves’ strong, earthy taste lingered like smoke on my tongue.

  “This was back in Vilne, over ten years ago. It was in April, I think, or maybe March. Either way, the first night of Pesach, and it was damn cold. Foggy, too, with a light snow. It was during the Storms in the South, and you know how it can get around that time of year, even in times of peace. You know the fear.”

  “I do.”

  From Good Friday to Easter, my parents had kept us inside, with the curtains drawn and the door barred. For as long as I could remember, it had been a yearly ritual. On the Saturday morning after Good Friday, we would walk swiftly to shul, me holding little Rivka and my mother holding Gittel, because the twins had been infants back then, and infants couldn’t run. No laughter. No playing. Keep your eyes straight ahead and do not speak. My father, he had carried a heavy walking stick with a brass head. But what good could a cane do against guns, knives, axes, a dozen boots and fists?

  When I told Frankie of this, he explained that in the Russian Empire it was even worse. “It’s because of what happened to the tsar twelve years ago. The assassination.”

  “My father told me about that, but he never told me why,” I said.

  “One of the revolutionaries was Jewish, and you know how much people love to blame us for killing Jesus. Apparently, we all killed the tsar, too.” Frankie took another sip of tea. “In Russia during that time, I couldn’t drop a book without making my mother plotz. Anyway, we were having a seder. Just my parents, my aunt and uncle, my younger cousins, and me. I could tell the adults were nervous, and it frightened me. I had a good idea even back then why they were afraid... I just didn’t know the words for it.”

  There were so many words. Pogroms. Beatings. Rape. Murder. Infants torn apa
rt by a mob’s hateful hands.

  “Halfway through the Haggadah, there was a knock on the door, and my father went to answer it. He was a member of our shul’s self-defense league—I suppose, it was from him I got my taste for fighting—and there was talk of a body. A Jewish girl found dead in the snow. My father took me with him. I don’t know why. Maybe he just wanted to prepare me for violence. By the time we arrived, her family was there, and so was our neighbor’s son, who was her betrothed. He must have been our age, and they’d been friends since childhood. I still remember the look on his face. His eyes were dead. There was nothing behind them.”

  I grasped for a connection. “Was she murdered?”

  “I don’t know. There must have been a reason for it though, for what happened next, when he fell down beside her. At first, no one knew what happened. He had fainted from the shock of it, they thought. It was to be expected, seeing her like that, lying in the snow. But then he began talking about how cold it was, shivering even though he was sitting right by the fire. It was all he could think about. How snowy it was the night she died. How dark. His voice grew softer and more feminine, while his toes and fingers blistered on their own as if frostbitten.”

  I shivered, my fingers straying to the tender bruise around my throat.

  “We found him outside in the middle of the night, barefoot and weeping, saying that he couldn’t find his way home. He just wanted to go home. He had to be chained up after that, to keep from wandering. I remember visiting him with my father, two weeks later, in his family home. By then, he would only answer to her name. In the end? Maybe he choked to death like they said. Maybe they choked him to death, and he died with his father’s hands around his throat. Maybe I’m just making this up, bubbeleh, but I guess that doesn’t explain what’s happening to you. So, why him? Why you? Who knows? Maybe it’s just love.”

  My tea had gone cold. I drank it anyway, in several joyless gulps, hoping for a jolt of energy that never came. When I set the glass down, I was unsurprised to find my left hand trembling. My fingers closed around empty space. Curled. Searching for what? A fountain pen? A knife?

  Two weeks. If what Frankie said was true, I just had two weeks left. No. A week and a half before Yakov took over for good.

  “I didn’t love him.” I tightened my hand into a fist, as if that would stop the tremors. It only hid them beneath the skin. “Truly, I didn’t. I... How can you even suggest that? It’s—”

  “Then call it kindness,” Frankie said smoothly. “Call it mercy.”

  Yes, mercy. That would do. I sighed, grasping on to the idea like a life raft. It wasn’t love. It was simply reaching out for a drowning boy.

  “If this is Yakov’s dybbuk, why do you think he possessed you?” Frankie asked.

  Because I fell into the mikveh. Because I never got to say goodbye. Because I couldn’t save him.

  “I don’t know.” I exhaled slowly. “More important, if you’re right, he hasn’t taken over yet.”

  “Then that means there is still time,” Frankie said.

  “Time for what?” A humorless smile contorted my lips. “To write home, say my farewells?”

  “An exorcism.”

  “Easier said than done. Where am I supposed to find an exorcist?”

  “Go to your shul?”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  No matter how well our rabbi thought he could keep secrets, word would permeate through the congregation like the aroma of spice from besamim. The skeptics would call it madness or worse, while the people who believed me might see the possession as a moral failing. I needed to keep this discreet, keep it distant.

  “I might know someone,” Frankie demurred.

  “You?” I laughed, feeling myself teeter on the edge of anger. “Right. I suppose he moonlights as a boxer?”

  “He talks like he’s been hit in the head one too many times, that’s for sure,” Frankie said. “But he was a rabbi once, before he was put in herem. People thought him a tzaddik, if you’d believe me.”

  I highly doubted a Hasidic holy man was hiding in the brick-and-metal heart of Chicago, much less that Frankie, coming from the opposing Misnagdic sect of Judaism, would want anything to do with one.

  “Is this some kind of game to you?” I demanded. “Do you intend to drag me across all of Chicago in search of some disgraced rabbi?”

  This anger I felt wasn’t meant for Frankie, but I wanted to force it upon someone else.

  He took my harsh words the same way he had taken my shove—resolutely, unmoving, with a hint of a cold smile.

  “I have better uses for my time, bubbeleh,” Frankie said, polishing off the rest of his medovik. “Besides, I know exactly where to find him. Whenever the crew comes across anything that looks old or strange or kabbalistic—books, amulets, papers—he takes them off our hands. Pays a damn good price, too.”

  “So, I’m going to get an exorcism from someone who knowingly buys stolen goods? I’m sure that’s going to go perfectly well. Like getting teeth pulled by a grave robber.”

  “Says the former thief.” His smile warmed. “I never said it was a good choice, Alter. But the fact is, you don’t have many choices left. And soon you’ll have even less. In the end, there’s the door. You can walk away. The choice is yours.”

  21

  Darkness blotted out the sky like a gloved hand, snuffing the factories’ smoke trails and bringing a silent calm to the city. I had expected us to root out the exorcist within the shuls and tenements of Maxwell Street, but Frankie surprised me by hailing a carriage that took us to Chicago’s outskirts.

  The carriage lumbered down the road, jolting each time the wheels snared in potholes. I took out my dad’s pocket watch and shifted it from hand to hand. The timepiece’s cool weight comforted me, and when the passing streetlamps permitted, I watched the second hand continue its steady revolution around the porcelain dial. It was reassuring to know that the world had not flung out of orbit, that time passed the way it used to, before any of this.

  As we left the city behind us for untamed swampland, a strange feeling stirred in my gut. My limbs ached, heavy and leaden, and I had to put my watch away in fear it might slip from my numb fingers. I became so cold, I shivered.

  “Are you all right?” Frankie asked, sitting in the seat across from me.

  I rubbed my upper arms, hoping to warm them. “I’m just a little chilly. It’s fine. I’ve been cold all day.”

  “You’re cold?” He furrowed his brows. “It’s practically a smokebox in here. Any hotter and you’d catch fire.”

  The reason for my shivers dawned on me.

  “He knows.” I crossed my arms over my chest and dug my fingers into my shoulders to steady my trembling arms. “Yakov. He knows that something’s wrong, and he’s afraid.”

  Now that I recognized Yakov’s dybbuk for what it was, I could feel him stirring inside of me like a phantom limb. I couldn’t control him or see him, but I sensed he was there.

  My dread only deepened as the carriage pulled to a creaking halt. Once we had stopped jostling, Frankie climbed out and offered me a hand. I ignored it as I stepped onto solid ground. I might have been cold, but I was not infirm. And getting possessed hadn’t robbed me of my dignity.

  Our destination turned out to be an empty stretch of road cut off by a pile of stones and logs heaped in the middle of the path. Lovely. So, if a fallen rabbi who purchased stolen goods wasn’t bad enough, we now had to deal with a swamp hermit on top of that.

  “He must’ve paid really well for you to schlep all the way out here whenever you found something nice,” I said as we entered the marshy gloom. Frankie had borrowed a lantern from the driver, but the kerosene light was weak.

  “He used to live near the waterfront,” Frankie said. “But I suppose it got too noisy for him there. I’ve visited him a couple times since he moved out
here, just to check if he’s still kicking. He threw me out once he realized I had nothing to sell him.”

  We continued walking. The darkness soothed me, making it easier to speak. “Frankie, why are you helping me?”

  “Because I can.”

  “I left you. I abandoned you.”

  “Yes, and when you left, I thought you were dead.” He paused to step over a log, the lantern casting quivering shadows across the dirt. “I knew how much you hated to steal, and I knew that you were suffering, but I never asked you if you were all right. I felt like I’d killed you myself.”

  A heavy lump formed in my throat. “I didn’t know. I didn’t realize how much you cared.”

  “Why did you go that night?” he asked huskily, the lantern light stoking a fire in his gaze.

  “I was scared.”

  A pained spasm racked his face. “Of me?”

  “Of who I had become.”

  It hadn’t been a regular burglary that night, even though Frankie tried to make it sound like one. We worked in teams of two or three, and I knew something was different when Frankie insisted on going into the house alone.

  He told me to keep watch, and for the first few minutes I did. Then I crawled through the window after him, because the thought of Frankie being out of sight made me sick to my stomach. Maybe it was just bad nerves. Nobody wanted to be alone on guard duty, especially not on a crisp autumn evening where the air hung as stiff as a curtain and it felt like anything might happen.

  Frankie knew our target, had been watching him for long enough to know the inside of his house, the inside of his bedchamber. He had ripped open the feather mattress in search of valuables, littering the floor with mounds of horsehair and goose down.

  We were in the middle of raiding the homeowner’s silver—candlesticks, besamim, menorah, kiddush cup, the full works—when the door opened. The man froze at the sight of us, his mouth agape. Brown hair brushed neatly to one side, eyes dark like a shark’s, a hard wedge of a naked chin, his cheeks cleanly shaven. Frankie pulled his gun before the man could speak.