Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  After he introduced himself and I told him that his surname was the same as my mother’s maiden name, we were both excited by the suspect closeness that was apparently the product of some obscure longing for the past, which he’d always said was a dead country. We had a drink at the San Remo. The Italian bartender wanted to entertain us and told us not to worry so much because the Pope had recently pacified the Christian world by saying that in the next world there would be no need for sex. I told the detective about Pat. He told me I’d met exactly the right man and that he was part of a national police operation to smash a network of gangsters selling babies and so Pat’s story meant something to him. We went back to my apartment.

  Lee was rehearsing a dance and from the phonograph came the sounds of Bird with his violins and I found the piece of paper I had with all the details I’d once written down about Pat, like the date when it had happened in the hospital, what the lawyer looked like, and which Broadway hotel Pat had stayed at. The sergeant promised to help. I told Avi Shoes who came and went and whose secretaries never knew where he was and where he wasn’t, and he said he’d help too. Mira came and she and Avi Shoes looked up material on Boris because his laboratory had been burned down. At the Atomic Energy Commission they said they’d never heard of Oppenheimer or Teller or Boris. Mira didn’t look her best, she looked like a shadow of the woman she didn’t want to be. She’d completed another master’s degree at Columbia, started teaching medieval philosophy and Renaissance art, and made Avi Shoes’s life a misery; he was possibly the only man—with the exception of Boris—she’d ever loved, or so at least Lee said, and in my wife’s voice there was a touch of longing. The sergeant, my pretend cousin, fell in love with Sandy Sachs who we went along with to meet a medium who claimed he could see thousands of abandoned children all over. Sandy believed in him and we said, What have we got to lose? The sergeant stayed with her and she devoured him like she’d consumed eighty-one other men before him, notwithstanding the two slip-ups that had left her with two sons. The sergeant told Lee about the so-called family connection between him and me and he really did make inquiries and came up with the name of the family that had adopted Pat’s baby. With Avi Shoes’s help I put ads in ten newspapers in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and a few more cities in the South. I wrote: Pat from Division Street. I have news. Call Yoiram (and I added the telephone number). I waited. All kinds of cranks of both sexes called at all hours of the day and night firing poisoned darts of evil and filth and terror at me, and in the meantime I went to the adoptive family’s home with Gandy.

  They were a family from South Carolina who’d come to New York two years earlier because the husband had got a job at the Chase Manhattan Bank. Gandy dressed me up like a clerk and forbade me to utter a sound while he pretended to be a department head in Chase Manhattan’s internal investigations department. It was, of course, on a Sunday when the banks were closed. We were shown into a fine apartment on Lexington and Fifty-something and on the way we saw the El at Third Avenue that was almost dismantled and there were huge heaps of iron piled all around. The dead buildings that had been hidden were still desolate and bent but the sun was now hitting them for the first time in a hundred years and you could see in your mind’s eye their forgotten youth beneath the patina of ugliness caused by the El as the trains passed by their windows for decades. There were all kinds of machers sniffing around, they all knew that property values would soar. The adoptive father spoke in a Southern drawl and sounded surprised, but as someone who’d come from the South and wasn’t familiar with the rules of the game here in New York, he didn’t raise a fuss. To complete the charade, my “cousin” appeared wearing the uniform of an NYPD sergeant. It should be noted, to his credit, that he never deceived anybody because it was all sort of part of his own investigation into the baby trade and it was he who had found the family for us. He reassured the man and his wife, a nice woman who served us drinks and whom I was immediately attracted to, but Gandy saw it and whispered to me to restrain myself, maybe because it was unthinkable for me to end up as Pat’s daughter’s stepfather, and as they all talked the conversation slowly shifted to family and the South and from one of the rooms a beautiful little girl of about five came out and kissed her mother. She and Pat were like two peas in a pod. My heart lurched when I saw her. In the end there was no choice and we told them who we were. The woman looked at us in astonishment and I could see tears coming to her eyes. She said she’d been crying for a long time. She said she hadn’t slept for the past two years. Poor thing, said her husband in a soft, loving voice. One day, she said, I looked at our daughter and saw how little she resembled me and him, and I dreamed about a poor mother somewhere out there who had been forced to get rid of this blonde angel, and all the time I was thinking about the mother’s eyes and what she wears and the color of her eyes and I want to know who she is. The woman said she was a devout Christian although she hadn’t been before, but she’d undergone a spiritual rebirth and now belonged to the Methodist church. Sometimes, at night, she said, I look at the child while she’s asleep and I love her so much and I know that maybe someone is weeping over her right now. She told us that five years ago they’d been looking for a child and somebody had told them he’d heard from an agency that later proved to be nonexistent that they’d found a little girl and then there was a doctor who’d shown them his license and a city official came and they’d legally approved the adoption. I told her about Pat. I didn’t disclose any details, neither her surname nor her place of birth. Just that she was from the South and how she’d wanted the baby after she’d nursed her and how the baby had been snatched. I didn’t say that Pat had searched for her. I didn’t tell them about the cemetery. I said that Pat would surely be happy to know that the girl was living with such a lovely and loving family, and the woman kissed me, and Gandy too, who tried to sell her a drawing, but she said that she didn’t understand modern art, and she even seemed filled with innocent surprise at my long appraising looks, but likewise restrained herself. My sham cousin Braverman—who maybe wasn’t sham and was indeed a third cousin or something, although my mother’s family had only changed its name eighty years ago because my great-grandfather hadn’t wanted to join the Czar’s army—questioned the parents a little further because the parts of the puzzle he was interested in were linked to a big organization that had been trafficking in babies for years.

  Oved, my friend from Los Angeles, arrived from Guatemala and said he’d come through Europe. How, I asked, do you get to New York from Guatemala via Europe? But Oved, like Billie’s flower and fire and love, wasn’t in the habit of explaining himself and didn’t say much. He said he’d gone to Guatemala, seen Mayan statues, a Dutch hotel owner he’d met in Guatemala wanted whores, had given him money to buy Mayan artifacts in exchange for importing whores from Italy. An Italian had provided visas. So Oved or Abu Shalouf bought a dozen whores in Genoa and sent them straight to the airport in Guatemala. He stayed with us and didn’t stop talking about a system for beating the craps tables in Las Vegas. Lee and I were already at the end of our road together and perhaps that’s why we’d only fallen in love with one another then because when you’re falling in love you don’t actually have to love, but in any case we couldn’t live together any longer. My cheating hurt her more now than before, because before there’d been a chance and no love, now there was love and no chance, so it hurt.

  I went down to the Lower East Side because I’d heard that Pat had visited the woman in black at the entrance to the Forward. The paper had already become a weekly, but the woman still sat there erasing the Jews who were left. She admitted that Pat had dropped by and told me, If you’re looking for her keep it to yourself because she doesn’t want to see you, and don’t put stupid ads in American papers unless you really can’t help yourself, and then only in the Forward and in Yiddish. I bought an ad, it only cost a few pennies, and sent a message to Pat. I went to the house at Canal and Division. Most of the Jews had gone, including the grea
t Morom, and now Chinese people lived there.

  The bookseller looked like an ancient butterfly. He was still alive because he was just a bunch of burned paper. He was glad to see me despite his hostility and the woman in black told me it was because not a single other potential customer remained.

  He started talking about his girlfriend from Odessa who’d gone to Eretz Yisroel on the Russland and caught malaria and died, and he’d been told that if she hadn’t gone she could have been a queen of the Jews in America, because they hadn’t had a queen since Pat disappeared.

  I went back home. Lee was doing a scary dance with two tall black dancers who said it was a Watusi tribal dance. That night there was a party at Ruth Sobotka’s, who had already split up with Stanley Kubrick.

  On one side of the huge room stood the male dancers dressed in garish colors, made up and reeking of eau de cologne, hugging and kissing, and on the other side were the women dancers, you could tell they were women by their legs because women dancers—Chinese, African, American, or Russian—all have the same legs, and they looked at each other in despair and there was me in the middle, someone who was neither here nor there. And there was Jerome Robbins, who loved Lee and liked me and who’d made a fortune with The King and I and On the Town and who’d taught me how to save a dime crossing Times Square on the BMT Broadway line and he invited me to paint at rehearsals. For two weeks I sat in City Center and painted for hours every day. What interested me was painting movement and capturing it in the serene frame of a body melting into motion. I painted a world of images, certainly not great art, maybe superficial photographs of the moving human being, and I think I managed to touch or cage the movement itself, and the dancer remained enveloped in the movement, expressing it, part of it. Robbins bought ten drawings from me and so I had a little money in my pocket.

  Oved asked me to accompany him to Los Angeles. A trip of four days and nights was short for him. He’d already been from Los Angeles to Guatemala six times and we didn’t know why somebody would drive for seventeen days along mountain roads just to sell the car in Guatemala and make enough to buy an air ticket back to Los Angeles. He said that this time it would be worth my while because he’d worked out a system and we could get rich. Since I didn’t have anything urgent to do—Lee had had turned into a miniature lioness, wonderfully cute, dancing not only in the studio but also on me and she’d started inventing nonexistent lovers to make me jealous and it worked—I told her I was going with Oved and would come back rich and she said she was starting work with Robbins on a show called West Side Story so in any case she’d be too busy for lovers and especially for a cheating husband. I joined Oved and we went to Detroit by train. He took me to the Lincoln car company. We were given a brand-new Lincoln that we had to drive to Los Angeles. Transporting a car by rail cost the automobile manufacturer four hundred dollars while having the car ferried from Detroit by people like us saved them two hundred, and if you multiply that by a few tens of thousands of cars, said Oved, you can understand that they’re making more on us than we’re making from them. They told us not to hurry. If it rained hard or there was a hailstorm or sandstorm, we should stop right away and let them know. When the car reached Los Angeles the company people would zero the odometer and sell the car as new. They gave us enough money for gas, oil, and routine servicing along the way. All the rest was up to us. We drove slowly. We didn’t hurry. Oved looked for cows. He kissed a brown one. All during that day’s drive he talked about that brown cow, the likes of which they didn’t even have in Gedera. Wait a while, he said, and you’ll see a Casuarina, and in the middle of America there was the tree just where Oved said it would be. Sometimes it rained. We’d stop and watch. He said there was no sight as wonderful and sad and touching—or he didn’t actually say this but mumbled it, and I made gestures in reply to his mumblings to the effect that there was indeed no sight to cause such supreme and moving sadness as torrential rain. At first the wind came from one end of the horizon to the other, fields, trees here and there, and a smokestack or barn or big silo that looked like a fort and a lonely house and car on a long journey, and then the clouds sailed slowly by and fine windblown rain fell and a flock of birds swirled brilliantly in the fire of the sun that flickered briefly between the clouds, and then the hard rain came, buffeted by the wind.

  We drove through breathtaking storms, the sky glowered, and Oved was happy, we saw how a storm built up in the distance and came closer and then the torrent, the wipers were useless, we stopped in small towns whose names the inhabitants didn’t even know. At gas stations we got fed up explaining our accents and where we came from and where that country was and so we said Paris and they said, Paris, Texas? And we said, No, Paris, France, and then they’d remember that they’d read about the Eiffel Tower and the naked girls and we drove on. We called to tell Lincoln it was raining and that there was a sandstorm in Michigan and hail in Iowa and a flood in Colorado. We drove into the mountains, we looked down at huge valleys, and one evening we saw a thunderstorm not far away. Lighting began splitting the heavens in zigzags, thousands of bolts of lighting that together looked like a ballet in half light shooting across the sky and hitting the ground and leaving the night far behind. And after an hour’s driving the sky cleared, there was just the darkness of the desert, and next day we saw a meteorite shower. And I looked and saw the sky slashed. Blackness filled with sparks. We stayed at godforsaken motels. From afar we saw a man plowing in the infinite space. Herds. Horses galloping or nibbling grass. Dusty pickups, and for half an hour it hailed with each hailstone about two inches around. We stopped. The hailstones fell on our heads and fortunately not too far away there was a farm and we got the car under cover and the people were friendly and we drank whiskey and ate stew from which came the smell of winter by a fireplace.

  We reached Utah. A Technicolor movie. We didn’t linger in Salt Lake City but Oved wanted me to see the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints so we stopped. From outside it looked like a temple of kitsch, but we went inside because it was hot and it was supposed to be cool inside. The first Mormon we saw was Shimon from the Florentin Quarter in Tel Aviv who’d worked with Avi Shoes in the luxury tax department in 1949. He was standing with his back to us and talking to a few girls in colored skirts and socks pulled right up. He hadn’t seen us yet and I said, Abu Shalouf, let’s get out of here, all I need is Shimon the Mormon, because Shimon used to be Shimshon and then Simone and he was told that Simone was too Jewish and he decided on Simon but at different times he’d also been Gad and Nimrod and Haimkeh, and when he’d lived on the Lower East Side he sometimes said he was born in New York, sometimes he said Jerusalem, but in fact he had been born in Tel Aviv, in the Shapira neighborhood, though he even claimed to be Swedish once or twice. He had witnessed his father’s murder. His father, Menahem Pritzker, had imported five thousand pairs of shoes from Italy. Back then you were allowed to buy one pair a year with ration points. And crude shoes at that. But here came Pritzker with beautiful shoes. Shiny. The latest styles. In two days he sold five thousand pairs. Then the rains that were supposed to come on Tuesday fell on Thursday and everyone who’d bought the shoes realized they were made of cardboard. A journalist investigated and discovered that Menahem Pritzker had purchased the same shoes from Italy that were put onto corpses about to be buried. So, made of cardboard. So, five thousand angry people, including poor women who had bought the shoes for their lovers, sons, and husbands. Five thousand people looking for Pritzker. On Friday everything was closed and Pritzker was unable to get out of the country in time. Five thousand people were looking for him. Tel Aviv was small. They found him in about two hours. An hour and a half before the Sabbath. And one of them murdered him. And five thousand people minus one knew who the murderer was and they all kept quiet. They were ashamed at being conned. The state was new. It was a Jewish state. History couldn’t know they were fools. They kept quiet. Shimon saw it happen, but couldn’t identify the killer, and in the end he didn’t really c
are. When he grew up he worked on a ship and tried a similar scam in Italy. He took tap water and said it was from the Jordan. Thanks to memories of his father, he got away in time. In America he joined the Episcopalian church, but then said he’d gotten disillusioned, he didn’t say with what, only that he didn’t find the true Jesus there, as if Jesus actually interested him. I’m searching for myself, he said, and then joined another church. Avi Shoes had told me Shimon went to Utah and became a Mormon because they were allowed to have more than one wife, although even one was probably too many for him.

  But by the time Oved came up with a response Shimon had noticed us and smiled as if it had only been a couple of hours since he’d last seen us. He motioned for us to wait and we heard him explaining to the girls how he’d gone to Bethlehem and heard a voice and followed it to the Church of the Nativity and he’d seen Mary and she told him, Shimon, the Mormons see the truth, she said, their Law of Abraham is the true law, and back then I’d never heard of the Mormons, I was just searching, there was a holy man in Jerusalem who was a Mormon and we went to Tabgha and saw Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount right in front of us.