by Endre Farkas
He checked his watch and headed back toward Lincoln. He felt uncomfortable going to a party where he didn’t know anyone, not even the host. At least he knew Marianne, he reassured himself. He stood across the street from the building for a few minutes and watched the people entering. The guys all looked like hippies, with long hair, bell-bottomed jeans and army surplus jackets. Some of them had big bushy beards and almost all of them had moustaches. Most of the girls had long flowing hair and wore ponchos over colourful ankle-length skirts.
He removed his tie and stuffed it in his pocket, then took a deep breath and walked up the stairs. No one answered when he knocked, but the people coming up behind him just walked straight in. He followed hesitantly. Everyone was walking around in socks. In a room off the hall, people were throwing their coats and ponchos on a bed, a mattress on the floor. He put his inside-shoes into his mohair duffle coat pocket and laid it on a wooden milk crate that served as a night table.
The apartment was crowded but not loud. Most of the people were sitting on the floor smoking, drinking and quietly talking to each other as strange wailing music played in the background. Smoke snaked through the air. He searched for Marianne and spotted her next to the stereo, swaying. Her black braided hair, bound by a bandana, made her look like an Indian maiden. Her embroidered blouse reminded him of the traditional Hungarian ones he had seen in his mother’s fashion magazines. Her floor-length flowered skirt spread around her like a garden. She seemed to have a thing for roses. Her eyes were closed. He watched her attentively from the doorway. She’s so beautiful, he thought to himself.
He made his way over to her. Not wanting to interrupt her trance-like state, he stood still in front of her.
“Hi, Tommy,” she said, eyes still closed.
“Oh, hi. Uh…How did you know it was me?”
“I sensed your presence.” She smiled and opened her eyes. “I smelled Old Spice. You and Roberto, you jocks all use Old Spice. You’re probably the only one here wearing it. My friends here,” she sniffed the air, “sprinkle themselves with patchouli.”
“Patchouli?”
“Yeah, take a whiff.” She leaned over so he could sniff her neck.
He took a quick sniff and detected an earthy scent. “It’s nice,” he said. He felt nervous being so close to her.
“Do you want something to drink? We have wine or beer. Did you bring anything?”
“Was I supposed to? Sorry, I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, but don’t worry about it, there’s plenty to go around. Come, I’ll introduce you to Naomi.” She took his hand and led the way through the dimly lit room. Her hand held his firmly and felt wonderfully warm.
“Hey, Noni, this is Tommy.”
Yes, she was definitely the girl with the strong opinions, whom the professor jokingly called Socialist Sally. Naomi was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a coffee table, swaying from side to side.
She looked up, took a long deep drag from her cigarette and passed it on. She held the smoke in, smiled and exhaled.
“Hi,” Tommy said.
Naomi and Marianne both giggled. “Yeah,” Naomi said. “Sit.” She patted the floor next to her. Sitting on the floor in his tight pants was uncomfortable. He could feel his balls being squeezed. He tried to adjust them without touching himself. Marianne sat next to him. Someone passed her the cigarette. She took a deep haul and passed it to him.
“No thanks, I don’t smoke.”
“It’s not a cigarette,” Naomi said. “It’s grass.”
He froze, unsure what to do. It was illegal. He could end up in jail. He’d heard stories about people smoking marijuana and having bad reactions. Some, they said, went crazy and others even committed suicide.
“Just inhale and hold it as long as you can,” Marianne said, blowing her smoke in his face. He felt a rush of panic. He didn’t want to get arrested, go crazy, or commit suicide. His parents would kill him. But he didn’t want to look like a chicken in front of Marianne. He took it and sniffed it. It had a smell he couldn’t identify. He looked searchingly at Marianne.
“Hey man, don’t Bogart that joint,” Naomi said.
“Huh?”
“Toke,” Marianne said.
“Huh?”
“Take a drag,” Naomi said.
“Oh.” He inhaled deeply. His lungs felt like they were being seared, like they were going to be ripped from whatever they were attached to. His head felt like it was going to explode. He began to cough. He couldn’t stop.
“Here, man, have some wine.” Someone across the table offered him his glass. “But just sip it.”
“Thanks,” he croaked. His cheeks flushed. He couldn’t speak.
“Take a smaller toke,” Marianne advised him when it came around the second time. He didn’t want any more but wanted to make up for the klutzy beginning. It went down more smoothly, though he still couldn’t help coughing. He teared up and closed his eyes. When he opened them, Marianne was gone. Was he already going crazy?
“Where is she?” he asked nervously.
“It’s cool.” Naomi placed her hand gently on his thigh. “She just went to get you a glass of wine.”
“Oh,” he said, feeling stupid but relieved.
“So how are you feeling?” Naomi asked.
“Aside from the barbecued lungs and a raw, hoarse throat, I don’t feel any different. What am I supposed to feel?”
“Yourself,” Marianne said, handing him the wine.
“Oh.”
“I’m glad you came,” she said.
“Me too.” He glanced around the room. “Thanks for inviting me. But why didn’t you…?” He turned towards her but again she was gone. He searched for her and found her next to the stereo, eyes closed again. She was moving to the music like the snakes that turbaned guys in India charmed with their flutes. Watching her drew him into the music. It wasn’t as monotone as it first sounded. In its repetition, it was getting thicker. He wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but he felt it. Some sort of drumming accompanied it. It wasn’t the rock-n-roll pounding but more of a leathery sound and more complex.
Marianne wove about the room. Her dancing didn’t have the harshness and defiance that it had at El Gitano. Here she was not challenging the world but embracing it. Her arms moved like the wings of a bird in graceful flight and her dress swirled as a cloud of flowers. Others joined her, but none were dancing with each other. Rather they swayed in their own world. It was as if the March breeze coming in through the open balcony door was moving them. And though each seemed to be off in their own world, the dancing resembled a gathering.
“Come. Join,” Marianne called to him.
He smiled and shook his head. He wasn’t a good dancer and he certainly couldn’t move to this kind of music. He felt okay just listening and watching her. But Marianne was insistent, her fingers, opening and closing, reeled him in. They had power over him. As he rose, a light-headed dizziness hit him. He stopped, rebalanced himself and tried again, this time more slowly. He felt a rush of air and a sweet smell envelop him. He sniffed, trying to identify it.
“Incense, sandalwood,” Marianne said.
“Sandalwood?” He had never heard of such a tree. “Is that what they make sandals out of?” They both giggled.
Marianne smiled. She was undulating. He found himself following her movements, awkwardly, stiffly.
“Relax. Let the music move you, not the other way around.” She ran her palms along his cheeks, down to his neck, along his shoulders and arms until she reached his hands and caressed his fingers. “Dance with your soul.”
She stroked him again. He felt the stiffness flowing out of him.
“Dance with your truth.”
He didn’t understand what she was talking about, but her voice and strokes were drawing the stiffness out of him. He felt like he did on the s
occer pitch when he was playing well. He knew where to be and when the ball would arrive at his feet or make contact with his head.
“Dance with its essence.”
He smiled and closed his eyes.
“That’s it,” she said. “You’re a natural.”
It was around midnight when he left. He didn’t want to, but he had told his parents that he wouldn’t be late. The party was still going strong and he wanted to spend more time with Marianne, but he had to catch the last bus. He walked back up to Sherbrooke. Gloveless, with his coat open, he stopped in front of the same art gallery where he had killed time earlier. Killing time, what a violent phrase, he thought to himself. How do you kill time, he wondered. What kind of weapon do you use? Shoe shooters? he said to himself as he caressed his inside-shoes sticking out of his coat pockets. The paintings distracted him from his contemplation. There was something different about them. The abstract one was pulsating. The big target was spinning and the colours were bleeding into each other. It made him dizzy. He turned to the grey one, the almost blank one. It was alive and calming. The greyness had become the morning mist and the tape was the horizon inviting him to go beyond it.
He woke with a severe migraine. He hadn’t had one in a while, and figured it was probably from the marijuana. He wasn’t sure, though, because he’d been having migraines since he was eight, shortly after he was shot. But the doctors who examined him said there was no link between the headaches and the cause of the scar across his forehead.
It had been a strange evening and not only because of the marijuana. They had played strange music. Naomi had told him that the hypnotic music was by Ravi Shankar, a guy from India, and the instrument he played was a sitar. They also played Bob Dylan, whom he had heard before but didn’t like. The first time he had heard “Everybody Must Get Stoned” on the hippie radio station that played album-length cuts, he found Dylan’s voice unmusical. And he couldn’t make sense of the words. But at the party, after he smoked, the song struck him as funny and meaningful. He didn’t get it all, but it made him think. The marijuana seemed to have that effect on the people there. They listened. They spread themselves about the room, lay on the floor or just sat with their eyes closed. And even when they danced, they were listening. He too had closed his eyes when he danced. Marianne was right; it really did help to feel the music.
Late into the night, jazz replaced the weird rock and whiny music. He wasn’t familiar with jazz either. All he knew about it was that it was played by black musicians. He’d never been at a party where jazz was played. Even at Archie’s, the music was mainly happy dance music Archie called calypso. The jazz at Naomi’s party was really sad or, as Marianne called it, cool and mellow.
And the people at the party talked. Not just idle chitchat about sports or movies but serious conversations, stuff that Naomi was always on about in class, about war and peace, Vietnam, the military–industrial complex, capitalism, Marxism, trips to India, going back to the land and hippie communes. They all knew so much. Even their humour was different, more word play than punch lines to dirty jokes. And no one got sick or fighting drunk. Best of all, Marianne seemed to like him, though she seemed to like everyone. And not only had she kissed him on both cheeks, she hugged him too.
8
Tommy’s parents spent every week before the Seder night cleaning the house. No matter how tired she was after a day at their shmata factory, his mother went through each room with the same sharp eyes she used at work to look for a crooked seam or a loose thread. Especially the kitchen. She scrubbed the pots, pans and plates thoroughly, and polished the cutlery, even though they were already gleaming. She emptied cabinets, drawers and the fridge of anything leavened: bread, cake and cookies. She wiped the shelves spotless and swept every nook and cranny to make sure that no crumbs, small spills of flour or sugar remained. And knowing his mother’s obsession with cleanliness, Tommy was sure that that was unlikely.
His father, with his hound dog Hoover vacuum cleaner, made sure that every last non-existent morsel hiding in the wall-to-wall carpets was tracked down and sucked up. Even on non-Passover days, his parents were obsessive about keeping the house clean, but before Passover they became fanatical. Tommy, of course, had his assignment. He had to gather the potato chip bags, chocolate bar wrappers and crumbs from his jacket pockets and gym bag that had accumulated in spite of his mother’s constant dire warnings about cockroaches.
Tommy knew that this compulsion for cleanliness wasn’t only a reaction against their Old World-dirt-floor-and-straw-mattress childhood. His parents had told him that before the war the phrase “Dirty Jew” was everywhere. They heard it from the townsfolk, on the radio, in the newspapers and politicians’ speeches. And it came even more so from their time in concentration camps. Having been forced to live in conditions where typhus and diphtheria were rampant had made them obsessively vigilant.
They were constantly sweeping, washing and wiping. They, like all their survivor friends, were obsessively clean Jews.
Everything for the Seder meal, including his mother’s matzo balls, which his father declared world famous and every year more perfectly round, more perfectly light, more perfectly golden, and the soup in which they floated more roof-of-the-mouth scalding than the previous year, was made from scratch.
“Her chicken paprika, gnocchi, and veal stew are fit for the Messiah when he comes. And what a meshuganah he would be if he doesn’t. But if for some important reason he doesn’t come, we’ll do him a mitzvah and eat his portion too. And thank God himself for the extra helping,” his father said every year.
His mother, always more serious, also replied in her own usual way as she brought out the piled-high dishes from the kitchen. “It’s for all the meals we missed.”
Tommy had waited until the last possible moment to tell his parents that he had invited Speedy, Schmutz and Marianne for the Seder so they couldn’t say no. He knew there would be enough to eat. His mother always made enough to feed an army. There was always a week’s worth of leftovers.
His mother stopped her cleaning. “Why did you want to invite them?” He sensed her tension.
“Because they’re my friends. And they’ve never been over for one of your wonderful meals.” He knew he was laying it on thick, but he also knew that the way to his mother’s heart was through her cooking.
“Won’t they be uncomfortable?”
What she really meant was that she would feel uncomfortable. “They’ve invited me to their houses, so I figured that I should invite them back. And besides, Apu, you’re always saying that they’re nice boys.”
“So, why the sister?”
“She was there when I invited Speedy. I couldn’t not invite her.”
“So, how come you didn’t tell us before?”
“I forgot. It was four months ago.”
His mother gave him a skeptical look but said nothing.
His father, who was more sociable than his mother, said, “Of course it’s okay.”
Tommy hoped it would be okay. Just as he looked at his watch, the doorbell rang. Tommy stiffened. They’re punctual, that’s a good sign, he said to himself.
He wondered which Marianne would show up, the flamenco dancer or the marijuana hippie?
“Welcome. Welcome to my paradise,” his father said as he greeted Schmutz and Speedy with handshakes and Marianne with a two-cheek kiss. Tommy wasn’t sure if he should too but since Marianne leaned in, he did. He introduced the boys and Marianne to his mother, who immediately took charge and led them to the dining room where his aunt was already seated. In the Wolfstein world, you came, you sat, you oohed and ahhed the food, you ate, and only then did you chitchat.
Tommy tried not to stare at Marianne. His mother was not so subtly inspecting her: her soft wavy hair, perfectly parted just to the left, that fell just below her shoulders, her single strand of small pearls against her simple elegant black dr
ess that came to the knee, her black shoes with a trim of white at the bottom whose heels almost brought her to Tommy’s height. His mother was eyeing the accessories and the workmanship on the dress as much as she was examining Marianne. For her, one revealed the other. Tommy couldn’t tell if his mother approved or was worried.
“Boys, you sit together there and you, dear, sit here.” His mother led her to the chair next to hers.
“Thank you,” Marianne said. She looked across the table at Tommy and smiled.
His father took out two yarmulkes from a drawer and handed them to Schmutz and Speedy. “Please put these on for the ceremony.”
His father loved Passover not only because of the meal but because of the ritual, with him seated at the head of the table, the patriarch to whom all listened.
“Beanies,” Schmutz said. “There’s writing on them.”
“It’s from my Bar Mitzvah.”
“Bar what?” Speedy asked.
“It’s a ceremony to celebrate the time when a boy becomes a man,” Marianne explained.
Everybody was surprised at her knowledge of the tradition.
“When did you become a man?” Speedy joked.
“At thirteen,” Marianne said before Tommy could answer.
“When did you become Jewish?” his aunt asked.
Marianne smiled at his aunt.
“Please stand,” Tommy’s mother said. She lit the three candles in the silver candelabra, extended her hands over the flames and drew them inwards three times in a circular fashion. She placed her hands over her closed eyes and prayed. This conjuring act, her quiet recitation of the prayer and almost imperceptible swaying, brought a sacred quiet to the table.