The City Beautiful

by Aden Polydoros

  “I told you that I was going to write this article. You told me it was a good idea, encouraged me to take notes on it, and then you stole it! You didn’t even care about Yakov at all. This was all about making money for you!”

  He cocked his head, tapping his lower lip as though he found the concept absolutely befuddling. “If I recall, I told you to research it for me. In the role of an editorial assistant.”

  “He was my friend, you bastard.”

  “And that’s why you’re the last person who should be attempting to write this article.”

  “You call this an article? You’ve turned his death into a source of entertainment, into a sideshow!”

  Mr. Lewin gave a laborious sigh, gathering his papers into a pile. “I read your notes. They were incoherent, inarticulate. Absolutely unsophisticated. Your writing might be considered adequate in a backwater shtetl in Russia—”

  “—I’m from Romania,” I snapped.

  “—but it won’t do here in the big city. I’m telling you this for your own good. Stick to being a press boy and fetching sandwiches.” He clucked his tongue. “At least, that’s a job you’re good at.”

  “I’m not typing up this drek,” I said as he thrust the article back into my hand.

  He smiled pleasantly. “Then I suppose I’ll have a talk with the head editor.”

  “Go ahead, and give your stolen article to him, too. Or better yet, jam it up your ass.” Before I could think better of it, I tore the article down the middle, cast the pieces to the ground, and stomped on them. It felt quite liberating. The only thing that would have felt better was if I’d done the same to Mr. Lewin’s face.

  As I was about to say more, from behind me came the harsh rap of a cane striking the floor.

  “Alter Rosen,” a cold voice said.

  I turned slowly.

  The head editor, Mr. Stieglitz, stood in the doorway, his gloved hand curled around the silver head of his cane. “May I have a word with you in my office?”

  I nodded mutely and followed him into the hall, sick with dread.

  Mr. Stieglitz sat down at his desk, his face as cold and expressionless as a memorial bust. He rested his cane against the wall with excruciating slowness and steepled his hands. My breath caught in my throat. I knew what that pose meant.

  My lower lip trembled uncontrollably, and I bit my inner cheek to steady myself, to bring me back into the moment.

  “Mr. Le-Lewin...” I cleared my throat and tried again. “Mr. Lewin stole my—”

  “Alter, when you first came to work here, I sensed a certain hint of, dare I say, truculence,” Mr. Stieglitz said blandly.

  “I don’t know what that means, sir.”

  “Defiance. Disdain.” He raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps you think you are deserving of a better position? Perhaps you think this role is beneath you?”

  “No, sir. No. I’ve always done my job quietly, without complaint. It’s just, Mr. Lewin, sir. I wanted to write an article to bring attention to my roommate Yakov’s death, and he stole my idea!”

  Stieglitz sighed wearily, and all I could think was that he looked like a man readying himself to put down a mad dog. “I am afraid that I have entrusted you with too much responsibility for someone of your age.”

  My heart sank. “No.”

  “You must understand, this is a business. It’s like a machine. It can only run efficiently if all the cogs are in order. I need someone who can be reliable.”

  “Mr. Stieglitz, sir. I am reliable. I’ll do better, I promise.” I ran a hand through my hair, looking everywhere but at him. If I stared at him straight on, I’d burn up. “Please. Please. Don’t do this.”

  He took a thin fold of bills from the top drawer of his desk, licked his finger, and peeled several off. After some consideration, he added in several silver dollars. “This week’s pay.”

  “You can’t do this. Please. You can keep this week’s pay, just let me keep my job. I need it. My family needs it. They’ll starve without me. I’m sorry.” I took a deep breath. “Tonight, I’ll stay two—no, three hours after. I’ll clean all the presses. I’ll do anything.”

  “This isn’t personal.” His voice was calm and evenly punctuated, like the tap of Linotype keys. “And it isn’t just about these last several days. This has been something I’ve thought about for a while now. In retrospect, you were never suitable for this position in the first place.”

  “You bastard, I did everything you asked of me.”

  My words rolled over him without impact. Only when I lifted my head and stared him straight in the eyes did he flinch. A hint of unease passed over his features. That spasm of emotion thrilled me almost as much as it frightened me. It meant that I had gotten through to him.

  He rose to his feet as though aware that remaining seated made him vulnerable. “Will I need to have you escorted out?”

  “No.” I picked up the money, wishing I had the courage to slap him across the face with it. “I won’t make a scene.”

  “Good.”

  I strode through the door, slamming it behind me.

  39

  Life did not wait for the living. I spent the next several hours going from business to business on Maxwell Street, inquiring about work. After the fifth door closed in my face, it dawned on me that come tomorrow, I might finally find out whether Frankie’s description of the textile mills had been true.

  I sat on a tenement stoop and pressed my hands over my face. My eyes stung with the salt of my sweat. I needed only forty more dollars to pay for my family’s passage, minus what Mr. Stieglitz had just given me, but even that felt impossible. I’d never get my mother and sisters here.

  I picked up a chunk of broken brick and squeezed it in my hand until a throbbing ache radiated through my palm. Anger flared like an oil spill inside my veins. I threw the brick down, cracking it in two on the cobblestones. Leaped to my feet and searched the blue sky for proof of God’s presence.

  “Is this what you want, HaShem?” I snarled at the sun, which shone on in indifference. “Damn you. Tell me what you want. Tell me why you’re doing this!”

  There was only silence. Of course there was, because when had He ever answered my prayers?

  I blotted the tears from my eyes and laughed.

  A year of staying on my best behavior, and what had it gotten me? Endless nights holding my breath, too afraid to tell Yakov how I truly felt. Tedious days at a job that I never found satisfaction in. Tending to corpse after corpse, just so I could pretend that hiding myself among the dead would inoculate me. As if that would ever keep the Angel of Death from finding me, when over and over, he always did.

  I was done walking around with my head down and my eyes on the ground. My eyes were wide-open; I finally understood it now. Frankie had been right: this world did not protect the kind or the weak. It devoured them.

  With nowhere else to turn, I went to the tahara house. I made sure to switch out my flat worker’s cap for my yarmulke before I passed through the solid oak doors.

  At this hour, only a few members of the burial society remained in the building to take care of administrative duties and funeral arrangements. I found Lev in the storage room, overseeing a delivery of linen tachrichim with the same stern solemnity he displayed when tending to corpses. I stood to the side, not wanting to disrupt Lev’s business. He stiffened at the sight of me.

  “These will do, thank you,” Lev said to the deliveryman, and dismissed him with a brief wave.

  Once we were alone, Lev came up to me. I forced a smile. “Good afternoon.”

  “Alter, what are you doing here?”

  I moistened my lips nervously, tracing the lines in the tile floor so I wouldn’t have to meet his eye. “My boss let me go.”

  I sneaked a glance at his face. His features were as unyielding as a mask, showing only enough sympathy
to be considered adequate.

  “I see,” he said. “That’s unfortunate. I’m afraid I don’t have time to talk right now. There are two funerals today, and I have Kuna watching over a woman in the other room when he should be digging graves.”

  “I’m not here to talk. I was actually wondering if there were some paid jobs I could do around here until I find work?”

  Although the chevra kadisha was run by volunteers, the mortuary itself was privately owned, in affiliation with the cemetery. I cringed at the thought of becoming a gravedigger, but it was better than searching for work at Chicago’s sweatshops and slaughterhouses. Since most of the work took place in early morning, I could supplement my income with a nighttime job, such as lighting lampposts.

  “We could use a shomer for the woman Kuna is watching,” Lev said. “Just until Mrs. Ephron and the others can prepare her.”

  Shemira, the act of guarding our dead, was one of our oldest burial traditions, dating back to the days when desecration and vermin were true threats. Unfortunately, not much had changed since then, if the Whitechapel Club was any indicator. Unlike washing the dead, payment could be received for shemira, since it was for the benefit of the living.

  “That’s fine. I can do that.” It wouldn’t pay much, but I preferred it to begging. Besides, maybe by the time the women volunteers arrived, Lev would have thought of another job I could do.

  Lev grunted in approval. “Good. Follow me.”

  I walked with him back to the entry hall. When we passed the door that led to the washing room, I thought I heard the soft sound of waves lapping against a shoreline. Impossible, but it made me stop anyway.

  Lev looked back. “Is something wrong?”

  I pinched my inner wrist to ground myself. “No.”

  Following him into the corridor, I tucked in my tzitzis. It was improper to wear the tassels hanging out when in the presence of the dead.

  We entered the room at the end of the hall, a windowless chamber lit by gaslights. A covered body lay on the table.

  Stooped over in the chair in the corner, Kuna, the gravedigger, flipped listlessly through a well-creased book. Dressed in drab black, with his mariner cap pulled low and his dark hair framing his lean face, he resembled a bedraggled crow. He rose as we entered, gave me a solemn nod, and then left the room to continue his duties.

  As Lev followed him out, I sat in the chair and picked up the book Kuna had left. Tehillim. It was tradition to recite psalms when watching over the dead. I turned to one of my favorite passages and read aloud, “‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.’”

  I stopped, frightened by the sound of my own voice. It was lower than I recalled, a dark, smoky timbre.

  I cleared my throat and tried again. “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: Thou anointest my head with oil...’”

  Clearing my throat hadn’t helped. I realized it wasn’t just my voice that had changed, but my pronunciation of the words themselves, the vowels marked by a clear Russianized dialect.

  Cold sweat beaded on my neck. I closed the book without finishing the verse, afraid that if I kept reading, my voice would truly become Yakov’s. And he might tell me things. Things I didn’t want to hear, such as what it was like underground. Like how it felt to decay. Like what exactly Mr. Katz had done to him.

  Yakov’s killer was dead, so why was he staying behind? What did he have to gain from this?

  I shivered.

  Except for another chance at life. A warm body instead of a rotting one.

  As I set the book on the floor, a burst of harried voices rose from deeper in the building. I got to my feet and peeked into the hall.

  Two police officers carried a shrouded corpse bound to a wooden stretcher.

  “Last door,” Lev said, guiding them down the corridor.

  It wasn’t terribly uncommon for the police to deliver. After all, some people we washed died on the streets. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of dread. What if it was Mr. Katz?

  As the policemen passed, the corpse’s hand slid from the shroud’s bindings and dangled limply, already too stiff to sway freely. The arm was slim and sparsely haired, without wrinkles or kidney spots. My mouth went dry. It could only have belonged to a youth.

  The officers brought the boy to the room at the end of the hall. As they came back down the corridor, I leaned out the door.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but who was that you just brought in there?”

  “Just some street kid,” one of the policemen said. “He’s been in and out of our station since he was twelve, the poor brat. Looks like he finally got what was coming to him and pickpocketed the wrong man.”

  “Where...” I moistened my lips nervously. “Where was he found?”

  “Down by Hyde Park.”

  My breath caught in my throat. By the Fair.

  As the men left, they held the door for Mrs. Ephron, the head volunteer for women. She and several other volunteers filed down the hall. I stepped out of the room so that they could take the woman I was watching, and waited until they passed before going to the door at the end of the hall.

  In the other room, Lev leaned over the table, lighting a candle he had placed at the head of the shrouded body.

  “Should I prepare tachrichim?” I asked.

  “No, he will be buried in his clothes,” Lev said, which told me all that I needed to know. The only time a body was buried in its clothes was in the case of murder, to evoke God’s vengeance.

  As Lev stepped aside, I reached out to tuck the arm back into the shroud and froze. The hand had only four fingers. Its right thumb was gone.

  “Is something the matter?” Lev asked me keenly, and I realized that I had my hand still raised, and that it had been raised like that for the last several seconds.

  “N-no.” I lifted the limp arm onto the wooden board and covered it with the shroud. The skin felt fragile and greasy, like waxed paper that had curled in an oven’s heat.

  When I looked back at Lev, he was studying me with a puzzled frown. What did he see in my face?

  “Do we know his name?” I asked, choosing my words carefully. It was a perfectly innocent question. During the washing process and burial, we would refer to the dead by their Hebrew names, and their Yiddish names if we didn’t know the former.

  “Herschel Ehrenreich. Apparently, he’s been well-known to the police for a while.” Lev sighed. “Boys these days. What have we become?”

  My head swam with nausea. Feeling on the verge of retching, I grasped hold of the table to steady myself, drawing in uneven breaths.

  I waited until Lev left the room before approaching the table, my legs slow and uncooperative. It was a violation to uncover a body in this setting, but I didn’t care. I needed to see for myself.

  “Herschel, I ask mechilah from you for any disrespect this might cause you,” I whispered. Slowly, I pulled back the shroud, exposing him to the unforgiving gaslight.

  Tears filled my eyes. Mud and worse stained Harry’s clothes. Dry blood caked the brass Star of David pendant he wore around his neck. His shirt was torn down the middle, as was what lay beneath the shirt. The wound was profane.

  Stumbling back from the table, I clasped my hands over my mouth in a struggle to contain the wave of bile that surged up my throat. I fled from the room, tumbling into—

  —a sunflower field, dead and flooded. The rotting flower petals sloughed off in my fingers as I wheeled forward, sunken to the knees in the muddy water. I caught myself before I could fall.

  Weeping echoed from between the rows. The sky overhead was as filmy white as a corpse’
s eyes, no sun, just a tepid glow from beyond the horizon.

  I stared up at the sky, feeling as though I’d been dealt a dizzying blow. God, no. Why was I back here again? Why wouldn’t this nightmare just end?

  I swiveled around, but there was only the charred building I had glimpsed during my vision at Meir’s. I turned back ahead.

  There was nowhere left to flee. I knew if I ran, the sobbing would pursue me, and the water would thicken into quicksand. I needed to confront this head-on.

  I waded toward the source of the crying. Brushing aside the sagging brown stalks, I entered the next row. Yakov knelt in the water, cowering with his hands over his eyes and his face centimeters from the glistening surface.

  I thought how easy it would be to come up behind him and push him under, hold him down and fill his mouth with mud, the way he must have died. Maybe it would be a mercy.

  “Yakov.”

  He flinched at the sound of my voice and turned around. His bright blue eyes confronted me, as wide and feral as an animal’s. Mud slicked his dark hair, encrusted his cheeks.

  “Why are you still here?” My voice broke. “Mr. Katz is dead. We killed him. We avenged you. So, why aren’t you leaving?”

  Yakov’s features contorted with such rage that my heart stammered in my chest. He bared his teeth at me, eyes flashing.

  “Do you understand me? He’s gone, Yakov.”

  “Dolzhni ubit,” he snarled, rising to his feet. His entire front was slick with muck, as though the flood’s headwaters had flowed from the still chambers of his heart.

  My breath caught in my throat. It couldn’t be. Was Mr. Katz not the killer? And if not, then could Harry’s death have been more than just an awful coincidence, the result of a foolish choice to pickpocket the wrong man? Harry had been wearing his Star of David necklace after all.

  Tears sliced through the filth on Yakov’s cheeks. “Dolzhni ubit!”

  “Yes, but who?” I cried as he strode toward me. “Who do you want me to kill? Just show him to me!”

  His hands curled around my throat before I could say more. I expected his skin to feel clammy and slick, but it was dry. Gasping for breath, I seized hold of his fingers as his grip tightened. Not fingers anymore, not even living flesh. A braided cord of black leather wound around my throat. It was a whip. I lifted my head.