The City Beautiful

by Aden Polydoros

  Black smoke engulfed the figure standing before me. I struggled in his grip. His chest split down the middle, exposing the flame-filled hollow within him. As the fire spread, his coat sleeves burned away, and his arms began to scale from the heat.

  My knees buckled beneath me. I plummeted through the ground, and landed in the real world. Pain jolted through my tailbone as I slammed into the cold tile floor of the chevra kadisha’s corridor. I tried to rise and fell down again, my hands slippery with sweat.

  Panting, I scooted against the wall, seeking comfort in the unyielding plaster. I reached for my fallen yarmulke, then froze as several red droplets landed on the floor. Hot liquid streamed down my face. I wiped under my nose with the back of my hand. Blood.

  I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall, nauseated with fear and too weak to stand. My throat burned as though scalded.

  Meir’s words echoed in my head: The body cannot sustain two souls. It is like a candle with two wicks.

  I was running out of time. I didn’t know how much longer I had left. But if I went through with the exorcism, I would be severing my only lead to finding Yakov’s true killer. And whoever the man was, he was escalating. Two boys dead within days of each other, and these were just the ones I knew about. I needed to do this, before he killed anyone else important to me.

  40

  Returning to the room, I covered Harry with the sheet. I sat with him while Kuna dug his grave, reading from Tehillim. My voice continued to change, until I felt as though Yakov stood in the room with me, lingering just out of sight. I didn’t care. This was mercy and kindness. This was what it meant to be human. It was the last thing that I could give Harry.

  The sun had begun its descent by the time I returned home. When I reached the third-floor corridor, I was startled to find Raizel and Frankie standing next to my door. They turned as I neared. Frankie smiled, but a dark cloud hung over Raizel’s features.

  My mouth trembled. What could I tell him? How could I even put into words the horror of it all?

  I cleared my throat, and began tentatively, “Frankie, something happened—”

  “I know about the dybbuk, Alter,” Raizel said before I could finish.

  “Why did you tell her that?” I demanded.

  He lifted his hands. “Don’t be upset. It just slipped out. She has that effect on people.”

  “What else did you tell her?”

  “Mostly, I regaled her about my charming personality and impeccable taste.”

  “He’s lucky we weren’t drinking tea,” Raizel said. “Otherwise, it would have ended up on him.”

  I exhaled slowly. So, she knew. That was one less thing I needed to get out of the way.

  “They haven’t found Mr. Katz yet.” A weak smile touched Raizel’s lips. “From what I heard through my friends at the Stockyards and the SLP, the police think he left town. With everything that’s going on, if he is found, it’ll probably be spun as a political assassination. I imagine the police will be visiting the Arbeiter-Zeitung in good time.”

  “Better that than the alternative,” Frankie said.

  There must have been something in my face, because Frankie’s smile slipped from his lips as I stopped in front of him.

  “Alter, what’s wrong?” he asked quietly, placing his hands on my shoulders. He reeled back with a grimace of shock. “Your skin. It’s so cold.”

  “Yakov’s still inside me.” My voice left me in a cracking gasp. “And it’s worse, Frankie. It’s so much worse. I was at the chevra kadisha. Harry is dead.”

  “Who’s Harry?” Raizel asked.

  Frankie stared at me, his face blank. Then he chuckled. “What is this? Some kind of joke?”

  “I was there when the police dropped him off.”

  “That’s impossible. You must be mistaken.” A desperate smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Alter, we saw him last night.”

  Raizel retreated to Mrs. Brenner’s door to give us some privacy. She pretended to be mesmerized by the squashed cockroach lying on the floor.

  “He’s dead, Frankie!” I said.

  “No! He isn’t.” Frankie raked his hand through his hair, still smiling. “You’re confused. That’s all right. It’s the dybbuk. It’s understandable.”

  “No—”

  “Don’t worry. I went down to several shuls on Maxwell Street this morning. I think I’ve found the right rabbi. He’s a Litvak like me. He’ll be able to help you. He’ll get this nonsense out of your head.”

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  His smile shattered. “I... I don’t understand. Mr. Katz is dead.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Mr. Katz is dead,” he repeated.

  “He was a monster, but he wasn’t the one who killed Yakov.”

  He looked from me to Raizel, then back again. A small choking sound came from deep inside of him; he ground his teeth together and stifled the noise. Twisting away from me, he punched the wall, once, twice. I flinched at the grisly crack of plaster.

  “I made sure Harry was treated with respect,” I said quietly. “I stayed with him until the end. I did everything by the book.”

  He struck the wall one more time, only this time with an open palm.

  “He was never alone.”

  Frankie took a deep breath, stepping away from the wall. The scabs had reopened on his knuckles and his fingers were trembling.

  “Thank you,” he muttered, holding his hand against his shirt to staunch the blood.

  Raizel rejoined us. “There has to be something we’re missing. Something we’ve overlooked.”

  “I might be able to help,” a voice said from behind us.

  I turned around.

  Mrs. Brenner stood by her door. As she stepped into the hall, it dawned on me that all this time, she had been ready to lend a hand. Each time she had offered her help, I had turned away. Why?

  Because of my barricades. Because getting close to someone was dangerous, right?

  I was such a putz.

  Raizel swallowed, clearly taken aback. “Mrs. Brenner, we were just practicing our roles for the theater. One of the aid groups is putting on a performance of—”

  “Miss Ackermann, I am appalled by your audacity to lie to me,” Mrs. Brenner said, then clicked her tongue at Frankie. “As for you, young man, I do hope you’ll refrain from knocking another hole in that wall. This building has enough holes as it is.”

  Frankie turned to me, wiping his eyes. “You nearly bit my head off because I told Raizel about the dybbuk, but it certainly sounds like you’ve been hollering it to the entire tenement.”

  “She figured it out on her own.”

  Mrs. Brenner gestured to her door. “Please, come in.”

  I sighed, filing in with the others. Once we were seated and Mrs. Brenner had put a kettle of tea on the small potbelly stove in the corner, she turned to me. “Alter, do you remember the day you arrived here on Maxwell Street?”

  “It was October. Chilly. Right?” I remembered being cold, although I had a feeling some of the chill had been a residue of the night before.

  “Yes, a crisp October morning. It was sunny out, and that’s the strangest thing. Because when you knocked on my door by mistake, you were soaked to the bone.”

  I frowned, puzzled. “No. That’s...”

  “It was just a glimpse. Just for a moment. But I could see it in you. And when you came close, that smell. I knew that smell. It was salt water.” A faint smile remained on her lips, but her dark, intense eyes seemed to pierce right through me. “I call them glimmers. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve seen them.”

  I recalled how cold she had been to Yakov. Every time they had passed in the hall, she had tensed visibly, wrinkling her nose as though he’d carried a terrible stench with him.

  “What
about Yakov?”

  Her mouth tightened into a firm line. “He was burning. Constantly. Sometimes just smoke and sparks, sometimes engulfed in flames. The way you are now.”

  I stiffened. Underneath the table, Frankie took my hand in his.

  “Tell me everything,” Mrs. Brenner said.

  So I did, omitting only the parts that would condemn us—my feelings for Yakov that lingered like a stone in my throat even now, my love for Frankie and our shared history, and the blood that stained our hands.

  “You two should have brought me in sooner,” Raizel said, once I had finished. “You’ve been going about it the wrong way this entire time.”

  Frankie bristled. “How so?”

  “You’re stumbling about like a pair of headless chickens, when you have a witness to Yakov’s death sitting right here.”

  “Oh, of course.” Frankie turned to me. “Yakov, would you be so kind as to tell us who killed you? Give us his name, height, and birth date, please, just so we can be sure.”

  “Enough, you three,” Mrs. Brenner said sternly, putting an end to all bickering. “Alter, you say that he’s shared visions with you. Correct?”

  “They’re more like fragments of memories, and he doesn’t share them. They’re just overflowing from him.”

  “That’s good. From what you’ve told me, it’s clear that Yakov was searching for someone from his past, so if we methodically go through every memory, there might be a clue. Now, let’s start with the first vision you saw.”

  “A burning barn.”

  “And you didn’t think that this was worth telling me until now?” Frankie said in exasperation.

  “Yakov told me that his family died in an accident. That a cow knocked over a lantern while a neighbor was drunk. I just thought...”

  “A cow knocked over a lantern,” Frankie repeated, then chuckled in disbelief. “Alter, this farm wouldn’t happen to have belonged to a Mrs. O’Leary, would it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s how the Great Chicago Fire was supposed to have started,” Raizel explained.

  “But that’s what he said.”

  “Clearly, he blurted out the first lie he could think of.” Frankie sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Are you sure that it was a barn?”

  “Uh, I think. It was made of wood.”

  “Most shuls in the Pale are made of wood, too, because of restrictions on using stone. And if this happened in his childhood, it could have been during the pogroms.”

  My stomach churned. Perhaps the reason Yakov had possessed me was because he had been chasing after the same atonement I had yearned for all along. For surviving when the people close to him had perished. “But why wouldn’t he have told me that? We were close. I thought we were friends. I... I told him about my father.”

  “If you came to a city intending to kill someone, do you really think that you would tell another person of your intentions?”

  I had no answer to that. Sinking back in my chair, I thought of all the signs. Details emerged in my mind like bones dredged from deep water. During my vision of Yakov’s body being dumped into the water, his killer had spoken a language I could understand. I had thought it was German or Romanian, but only now did it occur to me that it could have just as easily been a language that Yakov had known.

  “Yakov told me once that he had studied Russian until he could speak it fluently without an accent,” I said, thinking of the bitter pride in Yakov’s voice when he had told me that. He had emphasized the last part. No accent, so no one would know he was Jewish. “I remember, it seemed...off to me. His uncle taught in Varshe, so you’d think he’d have wanted to learn Polish.”

  There was only one reason for Yakov to learn that language. All along, he had been preparing for this, if not on American soil, then back in the old country.

  “Russian,” I whispered. “The man we’re looking for is Russian.”

  “A Russian pogromist in Chicago,” Raizel said sardonically. “That won’t be hard to find at all.”

  “Did Yakov ever show you what this man looks like?” Mrs. Brenner asked.

  “No. It was dark, and his face... I suppose it’s like what you see when you look at me. Smoke and fire.” I rubbed my face. My eyes were dry and burning. “There has to be a way to communicate with Yakov.”

  “Perhaps there is,” Mrs. Brenner said, rising to her feet. She rummaged through the drawers of her cabinet and returned with a handful of stationery, an inkwell, and a dip pen.

  Underneath the table, Frankie placed his hand on my knee. It comforted me to know he was here with me. I reached down and laid my palm over his, just for a moment, before picking up the pen and dipping it in ink.

  Mrs. Brenner clucked her tongue. “Left hand, dear.”

  I switched the pen to my left hand. I expected it to feel strange, but it was as though I had always held it this way.

  “Yakov, who killed you?” Mrs. Brenner said, after taking her seat.

  I waited for him to take control. A minute passed. Then another.

  “Russian,” Raizel said. “Does anyone know how to say it in Russian?”

  Frankie sighed. “Yakov, kto tebya ubil?”

  Nothing happened.

  “Perhaps if you try writing the question out?” Raizel ventured.

  I tried. After I had finished jotting down the letters in Yiddish, my left hand kept moving, but it was only to repeat the question in Russian. Frustrated, I threw the pen down.

  “This isn’t work—” Red droplets spilled across the paper, as though the ink had turned to blood. I leaned forward, mesmerized. What was going to happen? Would letters magically form from the stains?

  “Alter,” Frankie said breathlessly, his fingers digging into my knee.

  Warmth dripped down my chin. I pressed my hand to my nose and mouth. My palm came back glistening with blood. So much blood. I began to rise, but my knees buckled beneath me and I landed hard on the floor.

  Tremors shook my body with such violence I was unable to rise off my stomach. The toes of my shoes scraped against the floorboards. In the corner of my eye, the walls rippled, first becoming awash with cracking flames, then receding into the churning black waters of the Atlantic. I dug my nails into the gaps between the boards, terrified that the floor might give out beneath me at any moment.

  Hands seized my shoulders. Whimpering, I tried to shake them away, but then a thick cord coiled around my throat. I writhed in a blind panic as the leather strap tightened, cutting off all airflow.

  Frantic with terror, I struggled in the killer’s grip. As I grasped hold of the cord, my fingers closed around warm flesh. My vision swam back into focus.

  I had Frankie up against the cupboards, crouched atop him with my hands around his throat. His fingers ground into my wrist bones as he struggled to pry my fingers off him.

  “Get...off...me,” he panted through gritted teeth.

  Appalled, I released him and settled back on my knees. Then I backed away even farther, afraid to get close to him. “I didn’t mean to...”

  He rubbed his throat. “I don’t think Yakov likes me very much.”

  “It wasn’t you, Frankie,” I insisted as Mrs. Brenner came to my side. I took the damp dishcloth she offered me and wiped at my nose and mouth. “I wasn’t seeing you.”

  “I know.” He didn’t even look angry, just weary.

  “We know it’s not your fault, Alter,” Mrs. Brenner said, righting the fallen chairs.

  “Why won’t he just tell us?” I wiped my hands and laughed in despair, the taste of blood welling with the words. “I don’t understand.”

  “We can’t expect him to write or talk the way he did when he was alive,” Raizel said. “We don’t even know if he is able to think like us anymore.”

  She had a point. Maybe when you were dead, there w
as no such thing as the past or present, only fragments. Maybe, instead of dreaming about burning shuls and burning people, Yakov was trapped on a ship in the Atlantic, watching body after shrouded body—an endless chain of them, really, because wasn’t that how it always worked in nightmares?—get consumed by the waves below.

  “You look like you could use a rest, Alter,” Mrs. Brenner said with a small smile, taking the bloodied cloth back from me. “Why don’t you go back to your room? We’ll discuss this more in the morning.”

  It wasn’t even dark yet, but I was in no state to argue. I allowed Frankie and Raizel to walk me to my room, hating their glances of concern.

  Raizel hesitated at the door. “My parents are probably wondering where I am.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “You can go.”

  She reached into the hidden pocket sewn into the side of her skirt and took out a book bound in brown paper. “I know this isn’t a good time, Alter, but when you have a chance, read it. I borrowed it from a friend at the Arbeiter-Zeitung.”

  My breath caught in my throat as I read the title. Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe. Research into the Riddle of Man–Male Love.

  “You know,” I whispered.

  She gave a rueful smile. “I had my suspicions.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since Mrs. Brenner’s matchmaking dinner. I remember how you wouldn’t stop talking about Yakov. Read it. I don’t agree with all of it, but the author does bring up some interesting points. Perhaps once you’re done, we can discuss it.”

  As she walked off, Frankie and I entered my room. Haskel was sprawled out on his cot in a deep sleep. Sitting on my bed, I flipped absently through the book. It was all in German, and my head ached too much now to attempt reading it.

  Frankie glanced over my shoulder and smiled knowingly. “Interesting.”

  “I thought you couldn’t read German.”

  “Ah, yes, because what in the world could ‘mannmännlichen’ possibly—”