We walked in the gayest of spirits toward the subway station—Sophie between us now, her arms linked in ours—and he returned to that grits-and-molasses accent he rendered with such fantastic precision; there was no sarcasm this time, no intent to needle me, and his intonation, accurate enough to fool a native of Memphis or Mobile, caused me to nearly choke with laughter. But his gift was not mimicry alone; what emanated from him so drolly was the product of dazzling invention. With the loutish, swollen, barely comprehensible diction I had heard bubble up out of the tonsils of all sorts of down-home rustics, he embarked on an improvisation so crazily funny and so deadly precise and obscene that in my own hilarity I quite forgot that it all involved those people whom he had been flaying only moments before with unpitying and humorless rage. I’m sure Sophie missed many of the nuances of his act, but affected by the general contagion, joined me in filling Flatbush Avenue with noisy runaway laughter. And all of it, I dimly began to realize, was blessedly purgative of the mean and threatful emotions which had churned up like an evil storm in Sophie’s room.
Along a block and a half of the city’s crowded, easygoing Sunday street, he created an entire southern Appalachian scenario, a kind of darkling, concupiscent Dogpatch in which Pappy Yokum was transformed into an incestuous old farmer consecrated to romps with a daughter that Nathan—ever medically aware—had christened Pink Eye. “Ever git yore dick sucked by a harelip?” Nathan cackled, too loud, startling a pair of window-shopping Hadassah matrons, who drifted past us with expressions of agony as Nathan sailed blissfully on, doing a job on Mammy. “You done knocked up mah precious baby again!” he boohooed in female plaint, his voice a heavenly facsimile—down to the perfect shading of falsetto—of that of some weak-witted and godforsaken wife and victim, blighted by wedlock, history and retrograde genes. As impossible to reproduce as the exact quality of a passage of music, Nathan’s rollicking, dirty performance—and its power, which I can only barely suggest—had its origins in some transcendent desperation, although I was only beginning to be aware of that. What I was aware of, as my wild laughter sprang forth, was that it was a species of genius—and this was something I would wait another twenty years to witness, in the incandescent figuration of Lenny Bruce.
Because it was well past noon, Nathan and Sophie and I decided to postpone our “gourmet” seafood meal until the evening. To fill the gap we bought beautiful long kosher frankfurters with sauerkraut and Coca-Colas at a little stand and took them with us to the subway. On the train, which was thronged with beach-famished New Yorkers carrying huge bloated inner tubes and squalling infants, we managed to find a seat where we could loll three abreast and munch at our humble but agreeable fare. Sophie fell to eating her hot dog with truly serious absorption while Nathan unwound from his flight and began to get better acquainted with me over the clamor of the train. He was ingratiating now, inquisitive without being nosy, and I responded easily to the questions. What brought me to Brooklyn? What did I do? What did I live on? He seemed tickled and impressed to learn that I was a writer, and as for my means of support, I was about to lapse into my silkiest plantation brogue and say something on the order of “Well, you see, there was this nigger—Knee-grow—slave I owned, that was sold... ” But I thought this might provoke Nathan into thinking I was pulling his leg; he might then embark again upon his monologue, which was becoming a trifle exhausting, so I merely smiled thinly, wrapping myself in an enigma, and replied, “I have a private source of income.”
“You’re a writer?” he said again, earnestly and with obvious enthusiasm. Shaking his head back and forth as if with the minor marvel of it all, he leaned across Sophie’s lap and gripped my arm at the elbow. And I did not feel it at all awkward or emotional when his black, brooding eyes pierced into mine and he told me in a shout, “You know, I think we’re going to become great friends!”
“Oh, we’re all going to become great friends!” Sophie echoed him suddenly. A lovely phosphorescence enveloped her face as the train plunged toward sunlight, out of the claustrophobic tunnel and into the marshy maritime reaches of south Brooklyn. Her cheek was very close to my own, flushed with contentment, and when once again she linked her arms in mine and Nathan’s, I felt on cozy enough terms to remove, between my delicate thumb and forefinger, a tiny thread of sauerkraut clinging to the corner of her lip. “Oh, we’re going to be the best of friends!” she trilled over the train’s rackety noise, and she gave my arm a tight squeeze that was certainly not flirtatious but contained something in it more than—well, casual. Call it the reassuring squeeze of one who, secure in her love for another, wished to admit a new-found companion into the privileges of her trust and affection.
This was one hell of a compromise, I thought, pondering the harsh inequity of Nathan’s custodianship of such an exquisite prize, but better even this savory little crust than no loaf at all. I returned Sophie’s squeeze with the clumsy pressure of unrequited love, and realized as I did so that I was so horny my balls had begun to ache. Earlier, Nathan had mentioned getting me a girl at Coney Island, a “hot dish” he knew named Leslie; it was a consolation to be looked forward to, I supposed in the stoic mood of the perpetual runner-up, decorously concealing by means of a languidly arranged hand the gabardine bulge in my lap. Despite all this frustration, I began to try to convince myself, with partial success, that I was happy; certainly I was happier than I had been in as long as I could remember. Thus I was ready to bide my time and discover what might felicitously happen, see what Sundays like this—entwined amid the other promising days of the onrushing summer—would bring. I drowsed a little. I was set softly aflame by Sophie’s nearness, by her bare arm moist against mine, and by some scent she wore—an earthy, disturbing perfume vaguely herbal, like thyme. Doubtless some obscure Polish weed. Floating on an absolute tidal wave of desire, I fell into a daydream through which there rushed back sharp flickering impressions of my hapless eavesdrop of the day before. Sophie and Nathan, asprawl on the apricot bedspread. I could not get that image out of my mind. And their words, their raging lovewords showering down!
Then the erotic glow that bathed my daydream faded, vanished, and other words echoed in my ears and caused me to sit up with a start. For at some point yesterday in that pandemonium of frenzied advice and deafening demand, amid the shouts and muffled murmurs and randy exhortations, had I really heard from Nathan the words I now so chillingly recalled? No, it was later, I realized, during one moment of what seemed now their unending conflict, that his voice had come down through the ceiling, booming, with the ponderous, measured cadence of booted footfalls, and cried out in a tone that might have been deemed a parody of existential anguish had it not possessed the resonances of complete, unfeigned terror: “Don’t... you... see... Sophie... we... are... dying! Dying!”
I shivered violently, as if someone had thrown open at my back in the dead of winter a portal on the Arctic wastes. It was nothing so grand as what might be called a premonition—this clammy feeling which overtook me, in which the day darkened swiftly, along with my contentment—but I was suddenly ill-at-ease enough to long desperately to escape, to rush from the train. If, in my anxiety, I had done so, hopping off at the next stop and hurrying back to Yetta Zimmerman’s to pack my bags and flee, this would be another story, or rather, there would be no story at all to tell. But I allowed myself to plunge on toward Coney Island, thus making sure to help fulfill Sophie’s prophecy about the three of us: that we would become “the best of friends.”
Chapter Four
“IN CRACOW, when I was a little girl,” Sophie told me, “we lived in a very old house on an old winding street not far from the university. It was a very ancient house, I’m sure some of it must have been built centuries ago. Strange, you know, that house and Yetta Zimmerman’s house are the only houses I ever lived in—real houses, I mean—in my life. Because, you see, I was born there and spend all my childhood there and then when I was married I lived there still, before the Germans came and I had to go live
for a while in Warsaw. I adored that house, it was quiet and full of shadows high up on the fourth floor when I was very little, and I had my own room. Across the street there was another old house, with these crooked chimneys, and the storks had builded their nests on top of these. Storks, isn’t that it? Funny, I used to get that word mixed up with ‘stilts’ in English. Anyway, I remember the storks on the chimney across the street and how they looked just like the storks in my book of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm that I read in German. I remember that so very, very plainly, those books, and the color of the outside and the pictures of the animals and birds and people on the cover. I could read German before I read Polish, and do you know, I even spoke German before I spoke Polish, so that when I first went to the convent school I would get teased for my German accent.
“You know, Cracow is a very ancient city, and our house was not far from the central square, where in the middle is this beautiful building that was made in medieval times—the Sukiennice it is called in Polish, which I believe translated in English means the cloth-hall, where they would have a market in all types of cloths and fabrics. Then there is a clock tower there on the church of St. Mary’s, very high, and instead of bells they have actual live men who come out on a kind of balustrade, these men who come out and blow trumpets to announce the hour. It makes a very beautiful sound in the night. Kind of distant and sad, you know, like the trumpets in one of the suites for orchestra of Bach, that make me think always of very ancient times, and how mysterious is this thing of time. When I was a little girl I would lie in the dark of my room and listen to the sound of the horses’ feet on the street below—they did not have too many motorcars in Poland then—and when I would go off to sleep I would hear the men blow the trumpets on the clock tower, very sad and distant, and I would wonder about time—this mystery, you know. Or I would lie there and think about clocks. In the hallway there was a very old clock on a kind of stand that had belonged to my grandparents, and once I opened the back of it and looked into it while it was running and saw a whole lot of levers and wheels and jewels—I think they were mostly rubies—shining in the reflection from the sun. So at night lying there I would think of myself inside the clock—imagine anything so crazy from a child!—where I would just float around on a spring and watch the levers moving and the various wheels turning and see the rubies, red and bright and as big as my head. And I would go to sleep finally with this clock in my dreams.
“Oh, there are so many memories of Cracow, so many, I can’t begin to describe them! They were wonderful times, those years between those wars, even for Poland, which is a poor country and suffer from, you know, an inferiority complex. Nathan thinks I’m exaggerating about the good times we had—he makes so many jokes about Poland—but I tell him about my family and how we lived in a wonderful civilized way, the best kind of life you can imagine, really. ‘What did you do for fun on Sunday?’ he says to me. ‘Throw rotten potatoes at Jews?’ You see, all he can think of about Poland is how anti-Semitic it is being and make those jokes about it, which cause me to feel so bad. Because it is true, I mean it is famous that Poland has this strong anti-Semitism and that make me so terribly ashamed in many ways, like you, Stingo, when you have this misère over the colored people down in the South. But I told Nathan that yes, it is true, quite true about this bad history in Poland, but he must understood—vraiment, he must comprehend that not all Polish people was like that, there are good decent people like my family who... Oh, it is such an ugly thing to talk about. It makes me think sadly about Nathan, he is... obsessed, so I think I must change the subject...
“Yes, my family. My mother and father was both professors at the university, which is why almost all my memories have this connection with the university. It is one of the oldest universities in Europe, it was started far back in the fourteenth century. I didn’t know no other kind of life except being the daughter of teachers, and maybe that is why my memories of all those times are so gentle and civilized. Stingo, someday you must go to Poland and see it and write about it. It is so beautiful. And so sad. Imagine, those twenty years when I was growing up there was the only twenty years that Poland was ever free. I mean after centuries! I suppose that is why I used to hear my father say so often, ‘These are sunny times for Poland.’ Because everything was free for the first time, you see, in the universities and schools—you could study anything which you wished to study. And I suppose that is one of the reasons why people was able to enjoy life so much, studying and learning, and listening to music, and going away to the country on Sundays in the spring and summer. Sometime I have thought that I love music almost as much as life, really. We were at concerts always. When I was a little girl in this house, this ancient house, I would lie awake at night in my bed and listen to my mother play downstairs on the piano—Schumann or Chopin she would play, or Beethoven or Scarlatti or Bach, she was a wonderful pianist—I would lie awake and hear the music faint and beautiful rising up through the house and I would feel so warm and comfortable and secure. I would think that no one had a more wonderful mother and father or a better life than me. And I would think of growing up and what I would become when I was not a child any more, perhaps become married and become a teacher of music like my mother. This would be such a fine life to live, I thought, to be able to play beautiful music, and teach and be married to a fine professor like my father.
“Neither of my parents come from Cracow in the beginning. My mother was from Lodz and my father was from Lublin. They met in Vienna when they were students. My father was studying the law at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and my mother was studying music in the city. They were both very religious Catholics, so I was brought up very devout and went to Mass always and church school, but I don’t mean I was, you know, fanatic, nut. I believed very much in God, but my mother and father they were not, you know, I don’t know what the exact word is in English, like dur—yes, hard, harsh. They were not like that. They were very liberal—even, you could say, almost socialist—and always voted with labor or the democrats. My father hated Pilsudski. He said he was a worse terror for Poland than Hitler, and drunk a whole lot of schnapps to celebrate the night Pilsudski died. He was a pacifist, my father, and even though he would talk about these sunny times for Poland, I knew that au fond he was gloomy and worried. Once I heard him talking to my mother—it must have been around 1932—and I heard him say in this gloomy voice, ‘This cannot truly last. There will be a war. Fate has never allowed Poland to be happy for very long.’ This he spoke in German, I remember. In our house we spoke in German more often than we spoke in Polish. Français I learned to speak almost perfect in school but I spoke German even more easier than French. It was the influence of Vienna, you see, where my father and mother had spend so much time, and then my father was a professor of law and German was so much the language of scholars in those days. My mother was a wonderful cook in the Viennese style. Oh, there were a few good Polish things she cooked, but Polish cooking is not exactly haute cuisine, and so I remember the food she cooked in this big kitchen we had in Cracow—Wiener Gulash Suppe and Schnitzel, and oh! especially I remember this wonderful dessert she made called Metternich pudding that was all filled with chestnuts and butter and orange skin.
“I know maybe it sound tiresome to say so all the time, but my mother and father was wonderful people. Nathan, you know, is okay now, he is calm, he is in one of his good times—periods, you say? But when he is in one of the bad times like the time when you first saw him—when he is in one of his tempêtes, I call them, he start to scream at me and always then call me an anti-Semitic Polish pig. Oh, his language, and what he calls me, words I’ve never heard before, in English, then Yiddish, everything! But always like ‘You filthy Polish pig, crummy nafka, kurveh, you’re killing me, you’re killing me like you filthy Polish pigs have always killed the Jews!’ And I try to talk to him, but he won’t listen, he just stays crazy with this rage, and I have always knew it was no good at such a time to tell him about the go
od Poles like my father. Papa was born in Lublin when it belonged to the Russians and there were many, many Jews there who suffered from those terrible pogroms against them. Once my mother told me—because my father would never talk about such a thing—that when he was a young man he and his brother, who was a priest, risked their lives by hiding three Jewish families from the pogrom, from the Cossack soldiers. But I know that if I tried to tell this to Nathan during one of these tempêtes, he would only yell at me some more and call me a dirty pig Polack liar. Oh, I have to be so patient with Nathan then—I know then that he is becoming very sick, that he is not all right—and just turn away and keep silent and think of other things, waiting for the tempête to go away, when he will be kind and so sweet to me again, so full of tendresse and loving.
“It must be about ten years ago, a year or two before the war began, that I first heard my father say Massenmord. It was after the stories in the newspapers about the terrible destruction the Nazis had done in Germany on the synagogues and the Jewish stores. I remember my father first said something about Lublin and the pogroms he seen there, and then he said, ‘First from the east, now from the west. This time it will be ein Massenmord.’ I didn’t realize completely what he mean then by what he said, I suppose a little bit because in Cracow there was a ghetto but not so many Jews as other places, and anyway, I didn’t think about them being truly different or being victims or being persecuted. I suppose I was ignorant, Stingo. I was married then to Casimir—you know, I was married very, very young and I suppose I was still in this state of being a little girl and thinking that this wonderful life so comfortable and safe and secure would continue forever. Mama and Papa and Casimir and Zosia—Zosia, that is the, you know, nickname for Sophie—all living so happy in the big house, eating Wiener Gulash Suppe and studying and learning and listening to Bach—oh, forever. I don’t understood how I might be so stupid. Casimir was an instructor in mathematics that I met when my mother and father had a party for some of the young teachers at the university. When Casimir and I were married we had these plans to go to Vienna like my mother and father did. It was going to be very much like the way they done their study. Casimir would get this supérieur degree in mathematics at the Austrian Academy and I would study music. I had been playing the piano myself ever since I was eight or nine years old and I was going to study under this very famous teacher, Frau Theimann, who had teached my mother and was still teaching although she was quite old. But that year there came the Anschluss and the Germans went into Vienna. It begun to be very frightening and my father said we were certain to go to war.
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