Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  One day a nice girl came in dragging with her a young woman who for me was the fairest of the fair. Like a goddess in a composite painting by Fra Angelico and Botticelli. She was a little scared, looked spacey, she couldn’t find her body in the place and wouldn’t let her skin brush up against anything. The friend who’d brought her, Libby, had brought her along as a cover, since she was really there out of love for Oved, who didn’t understand a lot about love. Libby’s friend, who as it turned out had never been on the West Side except for when she passed through from the mainland once on her way to the harbor to visit Europe, was named Miranda. One of the waitresses with whom I’d had an affair and who sang Irish and American folk songs said she thought she was pregnant with my child, so I could only steal glances at my love every moment I was able and maybe sit down at her table once in a while. Miranda and Libby came in a few times. Distinguished guests too. The place was a success. But every week we got a statement from the bank that indicated we were losing money. We’d been so busy with building the place up that we’d paid no attention to how much of our money was left. There were the visits by the beat cop, the sergeant, the officer, the representatives of American Jewry with the guns under their coats, and again and again the City Sanitation Department sent emissaries about our two sinks and they said they’d been running a deficit and so needed us to contribute a little more. And the Chinese laundryman got out of hospital but wouldn’t look at us. A friend of mine, Jack Rollins, who after discovering Belafonte and making a career for him was fired in favor of Belafonte’s psychiatrist’s husband, and who became one of the two producers who produced almost all of Woody Allen’s films, discovered a comic duo from Chicago, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and we became friends. They were appearing at the Blue Angel and they appeared at our place too and Mike’s wife began studying Hebrew with me. Elaine May told Yiddish jokes for us and then we found time to visit the bank. We went into the office of the manager of the Chase Manhattan Bank on Ninety-second and Broadway and he offered us cigars and we said no thanks, and he showed us our balance and it turned out that in the three months since the Cellar’s opening our income had indeed been high but our expenses had been higher. It seemed that we owed the bank the sum of ten thousand two hundred and fifty-one dollars, and when we scrutinized our cancelled checks closely it appeared that our friend Bernie—who had even shown up for our opening and cried and sung an old Polish song he’d learned from his mother—had simply been using the Cellar as his own personal checkbook, which the lawyer we hired right away told us was how crooks who’d had their own checkbooks taken away usually operated. They find suckers like you and pay their bills with your money—and that’s what he did, we’d covered his meals in restaurants and clubs like the Hickory House, frequented by people who come from Texas to eat Texas-sized steaks and then pay off Texas-sized tabs, we’d covered his expenses with other crooks, covered his gambling debts, and, all in all, over the past three months, with our two signatures and his, he’d spent thirty thousand dollars, and now we were left with egg on our faces.

  That night Miranda could see I was sad and asked why and I told her and her girlfriend and they sat in silence and wanted to help us but couldn’t. At the time I’d already bought an old Studebaker from Anna-May, one of our beautiful waitresses—I paid sixty dollars for it. I’d stuck the “Shomer” sticker on the windshield and every Irish cop and his mother wrote me a ticket, whether I had it coming or not. So that night I asked the two girls to come for a drive with me—I was scared of being alone with Miranda—and drove as fast as I sometimes did along the road that ran around the city and that late at night you could get away with speeding on because there almost no cars on it. I talked to them—that is, to her—and was close to tears but I held back. The next day, Hanoch, Oved, and I met Bernie and his lawyer at the bank manager’s office. Bernie appeared to be in high spirits. He congratulated us on the place’s success and if it hadn’t been for Oved and me restraining him Hanoch would have made falafel out of Bernie there and then. Hanoch calmed down, Oved sat there like a bereaved bear, Bernie smoked a cigar and tried making us laugh with Jewish jokes. The lawyer spoke. The bank manager spoke. I got up to speak on behalf of the Israeli trio. I raked Bernie over the coals, I said some choice words on the subject of morality and justice and everything I’d learned in my youth in the youth movement, but Bernie went on smiling though I saw tears in his eyes when I talked about his inhumanity. He didn’t reply right away. Oved hissed a few quiet words of hatred. Hanoch sat with his fists clenched. The bank manager was quiet but it was evident that he felt for us. The lawyer tried to maintain objectivity—that is, to give us a definite maybe. Bernie started talking. In velvet tones, with tears now flowing from his eyes, he said he was sorry, but before you take five thousand dollars from a stranger you should check him out. His history was replete with what the police termed fraud and he called business acumen. Nobody has ever said, he said, that I’m an honest man. If I was, I wouldn’t have had five thousand dollars to give to three foreigners so they could open a kiosk for selling Araber patties. To this day they haven’t ever managed to arrest me for what I do, because what I do isn’t always clear to the police, though they did manage, thanks to a dirty judge who got a lot of money from someone, to take away my right to have a checkbook. As clever Israelis who are heroes and the new hope of the Jewish people with Jewish muscles and guns and planes, you should have learned something maybe from the regular Jews who for two thousand years never won a single war, and be a little suspicious when a stranger gives you money in cash and not with a check. Look, I’m terribly sorry that you’re the suckers. You deserve better. You built a nice café with your Arabers. People all over the city are talking about you. Entertainers who get five hundred or a thousand bucks a show appear for free at your place and even the NYPD is proud of you, even Braverman, the vice-chairman of the Jewish Policemen’s Association, claims that you’re really good guys and know how to play by the rules. But—when you needed the money, you found me. And I found you. I had to pay off my debts, so what could I do? You handed over this big checkbook and you handed it over of your own free will without me threatening you. You, the wise guys, the new Jews, what my wife calls “the Sabras,” you signed a hundred and seventy checks up front, so did you think I’d do? Make a donation to local orphanages? Invite you to the 21 Club? Everybody does what he knows how to do best. You know how to do Arabers evenings and coffee, and me, I take, especially if I’m given. I’m a guy who’s got big expenses. You didn’t ask why I wanted signatures on the checks in advance and so, out of respect for your bleeding hearts, I didn’t say why, and look, I’ve got nothing against you, and I can see you’re angry and I even cried earlier when I heard Yoram talking about morals and friends, I don’t have any friends and I don’t believe in friends, I heard that one of your generals said that the only friends he knows are in the Egged bus company, and I’ve been to Israel so for the benefit of my attorney I’ll explain that Egged is a bus drivers’ cooperative, and nobody asked my father what he thought about morals when they killed him at Treblinka. Precisely what morals are you talking about? After the Americans did everything so we’d die over there I had to sneak into this country and marry an American because even after what went on over there they still didn’t want Jews to come over, not only Jews like me but like you as well. Hanoch raised his voice then and told Bernie exactly what he thought of him, but the lawyer stopped him and Bernie looked lovingly at Hanoch and said, I understand you, cupcake. And then there was silence. The lawyer explained that the law was on Bernie’s side. We couldn’t do a thing. He could always claim that he gave you the five thousand dollars in exchange for the checkbook and didn’t know that you didn’t know it was illegal. In the meantime, due to the fact that you gave him your checkbook, the law can’t take it from him unless he tries to obtain a new one without your signatures. And he can’t. So you’ve no choice but to reach an agreement and close the matter. The bank manager started weeping and
touched Oved’s hand and swallowed his own tears and said, This is no way to treat people who’ve worked so hard and haven’t taken a cent, and Bernie said that he certainly agreed with him and with Hanoch and with all of us and that he wanted to make us a generous offer.

  We looked at him in silence and he ransacked his devious brain for the words and said, In any other case, if you were other people and not the people who’ve built a national home for the Jews, I’d demand twenty-five thousand dollars for the return of the checkbook. But—and here his voice became tough, low, slightly disgusted with himself, he looked at us with the eyes of a thief who wouldn’t let anyone steal from him, and he went on quietly—I’ll only take ten thousand, in payments over a year, without interest, but that’s my last word, it was nice knowing you and doing business with you, I’ll leave the checkbook with the bank manager so I won’t be able to withdraw any more money. The quicker you pay, the better, because who knows what might happen if my wife Sophie needs an operation or has to have her teeth straightened or if anything else unforeseen happens, and look, I, out of genuine concern, I even donated money to the Defense Fund in 1947 at the beginning of the war with the Arabs, so I suggest you pay as quickly as possible, and be healthy and strong and may the Good Lord protect you. And he gave a little bow and left.

  We were stunned. We sat there looking at one another. We went back to the café where the waitresses had started setting up for the evening, we prepared the food and went back to work to pay for Bernie’s expensive tastes. Something had broken. Oved said, We’ve beaten a table, not the house. I still had an old newspaper from Pat’s apartment on Division and Canal with an article by Karl Marx that I’d kept for some reason. There was an advertisement from Laconia, Indiana on one of the pages and I thought about Bernie and brought it out and read aloud: A Wonderful Opportunity to Get Rich! We’re going to set up a cat farm in Laconia. We’ll start with a hundred thousand cats. Each female cat has twelve kittens a year. Cat pelts sell at thirty cents each. A hundred people can skin five thousand cats a day. We can expect a daily profit of ten thousand dollars. Now, what do we feed the cats? We’ll set up a mouse farm and start with a million mice. The mice reproduce twelve times more than cats, so we’ll have four mice a day to feed each cat. And what do we feed the mice? The mice will eat the skinned cat meat. This way, the mice eat the cats and the cats eat the mice, and we’ll get the pelts at no cost. Enthusiasm for the Cellar began to die down, although toward the end things started to pick up again and it got more and more popular and there were even people who came to eat an Israeli breakfast: eggs and a finely diced vegetable salad. And local men of Italian extraction came to advise us that they had replaced the Jews, whose numbers were diminishing, and they joked that only dead Jews were real citizens, and said that the mighty Jewish blood had become pudding in the veins of college boys who didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of their forefathers, and from now on they would be our friends, under the same terms but for an extra twenty dollars a week due to the absence of Italian songs in our jukebox. Hanoch said he’d bring some Caruso records. They said, Okay, we’ll check it out. They came back and we played some Caruso for them. They wept and sang along and said it was wonderful, but twenty bucks is twenty bucks.

  Miranda came again, I looked at her, it wasn’t easy. That waitress still thought she was pregnant, the parking tickets for my car cost a fortune, and one night I returned to my apartment from a drive to unwind and had to look for a parking spot for almost an hour. I was tired, I found a piece of paper and wrote on it: I’ve had it. Take the car. Be my guest. I shoved it under the wipers and they took the car and it probably ended up dead in some junkyard, may it rest in peace. Some time after that Libby stopped loving Oved, who was becoming more and more attached to Carole, and I was drunk and called Doctor Brandt and asked him whether it was okay that I’d given Carole Galante to Oved and he said that I could do what I liked with her. My call made him remember old times and so he came by the Cellar and fell for a waitress who looked like a gentle tiger with the eyes of a housecat and was about as elusive as a cat, and he started talking to her about psychological disorders because men and women are always interested in diseases, he said, though women are more interested in what’s above and men in what’s below. They started living together but she went on working because she said she had experience with men and wasn’t taking any chances, which proved wise on her part. Libby stopped coming to the Cellar, but spacey and skittish Miranda still showed up once in a while and gave me her home phone number. Then we sat down for a chat, we three Bernie patsies, and I told my partners that Mr. Ben-Zion who wrote for the Bizron magazine had asked me to write a children’s story for them and said he’d heard that we’d worked with Bernie Cohen and I said we had, and he asked whether he’d told us about his father in Treblinka and I said he had, and he said that Bernie was born in the Bronx and that his father had never been in Treblinka or any other camp. This didn’t help our cause, however, because when I called Bernie to yell at him about it, he explained that everyone knew he was a liar so it made no difference to him whether or not we knew it as well.

  Hanoch and Oved and I were always thinking about falafel and finally Hanoch came up with an idea—after which there was a heated argument about whose idea it was, but today I have no doubt that it was Hanoch’s. The idea was, Why don’t we make frozen falafel like the frozen vegetables they sell at A&P, and sell it as a snack to be served in America as an hors d’oeuvre to guests before a meal or at an event like an art opening. We consulted with my cousin who was a food engineer in Pittsburgh, and he gave it some thought and gave us some advice, Tahini can’t be frozen, he said, but falafel can. We rented a nearby bomb shelter and under Hanoch’s leadership we started setting up a factory where we would manufacture packets of frozen falafel that would only need to be heated in an oven for two minutes and that’s it. We stopped living off of the Cellar and invested in falafels. Oved and Hanoch worked out exactly how long the falafels had to be fried before being removed from the oil and then frozen so that they’d be ready after two minutes or a minute and a half of baking at home. But how would we freeze them? We tracked down someone who agreed to come up with an attractive mold for frozen falafel. In his honor we decided to name the product Chuck Puffs. The packaging, after several failures and adjustments and modifications, looked appealing. Oved and I continued working at the Cellar and hired a girl to help us. Hanoch was busy setting up the factory. Pots and ladles and ovens and attempts to construct a machine that would drop fifteen falafel balls into oil in one go. And what do you do with the used oil, and how many falafel balls can be fried in the same oil before you change the oil, and how do you freeze the balls rapidly—experiment after experiment. We helped with the ingredients and suggested a bit more falafel and a little less coriander, different types of beans, and we argued whether we should use Egyptian hummus or Lebanese and what kind of tahini we should buy in bulk. And the Cellar went on working for Bernie, and Miranda stopped coming, and Jo the singer-waitress stopped talking about her pregnancy, and I couldn’t sleep and I just thought about Miranda. Late at night I’d go with Jo to bars and she’d sing folk songs and there was an Irish bar, or a huge saloon to be more precise, where a girl I once knew also sang, and I was too embarrassed to ask her if we’d had an affair or not, but she and Jo sang together, and Irishmen sat around the tables, waiters brought huge pitchers of beer to each table and they poured it into glasses and Jo sang Irish songs with the girl with whom I either did or did not have an affair, and when they got to “Danny Boy” everyone would sing along in their beery voices, and cops would come and join in and firefighters and students and they’d all cry, and in the end Jo would do the Weavers’ song Pete Seeger was always singing, “Kisses Sweeter than Wine.”

  Avi Shoes, who had sold his entire chain of factories and was laying low, called occasionally and sounded mysterious and said he was working for Mossad and didn’t want to tell me who he was with. Some said he was l
iving somewhere with Rita Hauser. Others said he was living with Mira. Still others said he was with the Bulgarian woman from Israel. They said he was living in the desert in Israel. Or they said he was dead. Or they said he’d become a prophet in Alaska. In the meantime Hanoch finished setting up falafel factory. We decided to start production. We drank a toast to the rich life it would bring us and to what Oved always called getting onto the list, and we figured that this time—albeit without using the Las Vegas system and without using Oved’s Mayan tablets—we would finally succeed. We enlisted about twenty pretty-to-beautiful Israeli students, and they went out to the supermarkets to demonstrate our product and hand out free samples. We bought small electric ovens that cost a fortune, and the girls stood in the stores and showed customers how the packages were opened and how you put the falafel in the oven for two minutes, and the customers tasted and some were impressed, falafel wasn’t very well known in New York in those days, people said it tasted excellent, but after a good three weeks during which we began getting orders from the chains, everything came to a standstill. The stores all returned their stock. Despite their beauty, our students were thrown out of the supermarkets, and my relative, Lieutenant Braverman, came to us in our devastation and told us that we’d always been suckers. You can’t penetrate the market just like that, he said, without capital or connections. The giants don’t like little people who come in small and have the potential to grow and become big. They kill them while they’re still small. And he added that the big guys, next to whom we were not even midgets, didn’t want to wait and see whether we would remain small, they couldn’t wait, they’d imposed a boycott and informed the stores far more elegantly and persuasively than I can tell you that they wouldn’t ship them any more merchandise until they got rid of our girls. I searched high and low for Avi Shoes then because he had experience with being a small fry trying to penetrate into the big leaguers’ market, but he’d vanished, and we sat humiliated, thousands of packages of frozen falafel in freezers we’d obtained at great expense. We sold some of our “collection” to Israelis who smelled blood and bought our stock for peanuts. We were now in even more debt than before. The Cellar continued to operate. Some kindhearted Israelis saw that things were good for us and opened a Café Kassit on Broadway, not far from the Cellar, and learned all the industry secrets from waitresses who had left us, and that was that, the damage was done. We weathered the competition, but barely, and then a pleasant American who had worked with us opened a café in the Village and called it Finjan and sang Israeli songs in an American accent and sold pretty disgusting hummus, and we struggled on, worked day and night, and then Jo said she wasn’t pregnant and I called Miranda.