Fire Year

by Jason K. Friedman

I

  The window glowed like a funhouse. Fluorescent tubes placed out of sight illuminated a jumble of tchotchkes on narrow glass shelves. The display was mostly crystal and colored glass, shaped into useful objects like vases and bowls and useless ones like kittens and elves and Uga the university mascot, backed by a mirror in which the cantor could see himself thinking the obvious, that this was a window that invited you to smash it in. At that hour the main street was desolate, darkness stretched between puddles of light under the buzzing streetlamps. And yet this window had light to spare, it flooded you with brightness, filling in wrinkles, obscuring by bedazzling. The cantor had to admit he looked wonderful. With his hat tilted at a rakish angle he seemed charming and prosperous, and no one would know the suffering in his heart. What was in this window was dreck, but it was expensive and the cantor couldn’t have touched it if he wanted to. Worse, the things in the window reminded you of what they ostentatiously omitted, the good stuff inside, the diamonds and silver and gold that Siegel didn’t dare put out for public view.

  The cantor didn’t look in this window much. But he lived in an apartment house downtown, on the shadowy edges of the historic district, and sometimes at night, when he couldn’t sleep, he risked being mugged walking the few blocks here to stare. He never came back during the day, he never went inside—there was no point to this. But window-shopping was free, and the cantor got something out of it that he didn’t understand. The urge to smash in the window wasn’t an angry one, it was more of an impulsion, a force, and impersonal, the way water rushing to find its level says nothing about the water. It was like the filling of a void, a law of nature, and how different really were the forces of destruction from those of creation? The cantor, like any other man, could be but the vessel for these forces, both of which, after all, were divine. As for the cantor himself, it certainly wasn’t to use a mirror that he came here. Though he could see himself quite well, he much preferred looking into the window slantwise, from just the right angle to see these treasures, objects of someone else’s desire, stretch into the backworld of the mirror in an infinity of repetitions. He was reminded of the Ark of the Covenant, with its covers and curtains and veils, its mysteries of time and space.

  Whether the window allayed his suffering or increased it, the cantor suffered from his poverty.

  He had been the cantor of a shul in downtown Baltimore whose congregation got smaller and smaller over the years he was there. It would have vanished into nothing anyway, not having the money to build a big new sanctuary out past the ring road where all the Jews were moving. The cantor did nothing more than abandon a sinking ship, an escape hastened by a flirtation he’d had with a married lady. Nothing had happened—but rumors have a life of their own, and he was the victim of this particular one. He took what he could get, as fast as he could, for he also had alimony to pay to a demon of an ex-wife.

  What he got was a position as cantor at a Conservative shul in Savannah, Georgia, with a decent-sized congregation that wasn’t going anywhere, having already fled the city’s core. The brand-new synagogue was on the suburban south side and looked vaguely like a pagoda; it had a certain flair. But his office was small, and off the junior congregation room. The rabbi’s office was large, and off the main sanctuary. Certain things couldn’t be helped; rabbis were more important than cantors. Still, the contract the cantor signed stunk.

  Whereas the congregation provided a house within walking distance for the rabbi to live in, rent free, the cantor had no such perks. His salary placed him above the poverty line, but just barely. He was paid like a waiter, the management expecting him to hustle for tips. And so like a schnorrer he relied on gifts the parents gave him when he had finished preparing their children for their bar mitzvah ceremonies—but unlike a beggar he wasn’t allowed to ask. Sometimes the parents forgot or didn’t know to begin with. Sometimes they tipped him what they would leave a hotel maid for a single night’s stay—and he had worked with their sons and daughters for months. It was the parents who were tipping him, though the money always was handed over by the bar or bat mitzvah—strange ritual that wasn’t on the shul’s Hebrew school curriculum. The cantor would have liked to suggest, respectfully, that the child actually furnish the money himself. The haul from the big event was always significant—the children talked about it openly, most of them seeming to regard his singing lessons as a financial investment—and so perhaps a certain percentage should be accorded him, perhaps as minimal as ten percent, a tithe as in the days of old.

  But he never made this suggestion. The cantor gave the parents their money’s worth. He polished his shoes until he could see his reflection in them—but other than the white rubber ones he wore on the High Holidays, they were his only pair. The jewels in his rings were fake. His ties only looked like silk, and the matching pocket squares were in fact bunched bits of nylon stapled to the top of cardboard rectangles imprinted with the name and address of his dry cleaner. As for his always-gleaming teeth, he had had his own pulled and these made at the medical college in Augusta, by a student trying for his license. The procedure was more or less supervised, the boy passed; but they weren’t a good fit.

  The cantor had a girlfriend, a Leah Bodziner who came from a village in the district adjoining his own, though naturally they didn’t know each other over there. Now she worked in a location convenient to his, on the other side of the lobby, down a short hall. She was a Hebrew teacher, a widow, a survivor like himself. Her hair was red. Her mode was scorn. The endless number of know-nothings they brought before her did not depress her. Her scorn for these children energized her, it kept her alive. She used it in her teaching and sometimes managed to get through to them, and on those occasions she was happy to see that her scorn was not justified and her efforts not in vain.

  She had grown up in a district famous for its lakes—the cantor, whose own village had nothing distinguished about it, brought up the lakes the first time they met. Lakes! she said. From the time she was a child she had worked with her mother in the market, she had had no time for lakes—she could tell him about pogroms and about mud so deep it could break a wagon wheel, if he was interested. He had never been to the lakes either. But now, when they were together, they went. Their conversations were conducted in three languages, but they went to the lakes in silence. In his apartment or hers they lay on top of each other, sometimes fully dressed, their legs sticking off the bed, various body parts cracking and creaking and crushed, the two of them imbricated like a poorly laid roof. As long as they didn’t talk, they walked through the deep grass, they heard how it buzzed in summer. They held each other for warmth in winter, then put on their skates and flew.

  It was a form of worship that the cantor had for this lady, and though she asked for nothing, he brought her offerings anyway. Because she accessorized only in blue and green, he would have liked to give her opals and emeralds. Instead the rings he gave her were fake, so fake that the stones didn’t even have names. The earrings he gave her dangled with plastic baubles. She was the only woman in the world around whom he was shy, and he was never shier than when he handed over one of these treasures, which he had personally wrapped fancy, as if it had come from Cartier instead of Kmart. When she took it she laughed. She opened the box to reveal its contents and threw back her head and roared, and this confused him, for she immediately put on whatever it was and she always looked marvelous in it.

  The jewels may not have been real, but he took her on the kinds of dates that a banker might have—if, that is, the banker happened to be classy in addition to rich. In the downtown there was an art museum in an old mansion; there was no art in this museum, only furniture, but once a month there was a film. They saw Lawrence of Arabia there, and Doctor Zhivago. Whenever an opera singer performed at the Civic Center the cantor and Leah were there. Sunday mornings they went to the delicatessen and swooned before the case, with its golden whitefish and coral lox, its eggplant salads and bricks of halvah, its ruby meats delivered from Atlan
ta. They tasted this and that and they never left empty-handed.

  They enjoyed themselves, and Leah never realized how much it cost him. The desperateness of his life was a secret to her. At the Civic Center he went the day of the show to get tickets; there were last-minute deals. The balcony was cheaper than the orchestra. Certain seats were behind a column and these were the cheapest of all. So many ways, none of them ending in a very good look at the performer. At least they had a little meat on them, most of these singers, and so a front-row seat was not required. At least they knew how to project, and the acoustics in the auditorium weren’t the worst.

  And then it came time to buy tickets for Beverly Sills, who though she had recently retired was coming to give a benefit performance. Beverly Sills (née Belle Silverman) was a star who gave him and all Jews such naches, he intended to have a good look at her. Half his congregants were certain to be there that night, so if he went at the last minute he might not be able to get tickets anyway—and he wasn’t about to let them see a man who usually sat before them elevated on an altar now sit behind them or blocked by a post.

  And so he went a month in advance. He walked up to the box-office window and saw his reflection in it. He was glad he wore his good checked shirt and put on a tie; his hat was tilted just right. Perhaps the success of his outfit was what made him feel confident enough to say something he didn’t even know he was going to say. He took off his sunglasses and put his face up close to the glass. Inside sat a young girl, blond and very pretty, with dense brown freckles laid like a saddle across her nose. “May I help you?” she boomed through the microphone like the Voice of God Himself, and he took a step or two back. “Yes,” he said. “I would like to purchase your two best tickets to Miss Beverly Sills, the opera star.” He had never asked for the best tickets in his life, he had no idea how much they cost. “Orchestra center, row D at the end?” she asked. “I’ll take them,” he said. “By the way, miss, I am the cantor from Congregation Beth Shalom. Please be kind to apply the clergyman’s discount to my purchase.” “What?” the girl asked. “Clergyman’s discount. For men of God. Like a reverend, my dear.” “You’re a reverend?” “I’m a cantor. That means I sing. I’m like a rabbi who sings. A singing rabbi. My life is devoted to singing the praises of the Lord.” Silently he was praying she wouldn’t bring up Jesus, a popular subject down here that always left him at a loss. Instead she said, “We don’t have a clergyman’s discount, sir.” “What?” he asked with a shocked expression. “I understand you have a military discount,” he said. “Yes, sir, are you a chaplain at Hunter?” “No, but tell me, how many of our fine brave men from the air force base have come to buy a ticket for Miss Sills?” “None that I know of,” she said. “All right, my dear, then might a man of God, while of course not as worthy as one of these fine young men, maybe one of their tickets you’ll give to me? Is two asking for too much—one for me and one for, for the rabbi? Of course I’ll surrender mine if one of these young heroes wants a ticket, for my country I’ll do this, but until then—” “I’ll have to ask my manager,” she said. When she came back she asked, “How many tickets would you like, Reverend?”

  The tickets were free. It was one of the greatest triumphs of his life—but in the box-office window he saw how his forehead was glistening with sweat, and when he got home he had to change his shirt.

  There was also a story behind how he managed to obtain his Sunday morning feasts with Leah, even though the price of nova was out of this world.

  The cantor wasn’t interested in money, just what money could get him, namely respect, both from the community, for this was America, and from Leah herself, whom he would have liked to hear not laughing at all when he handed her a gift. Hear the sweeter laughter of a silence stunned with delight. Leah loved him despite the meagerness of his pocketbook—and so he wanted to reward her with something that truly was worth something, a surprise ending as in a fairy tale.

  With the money he saved from the Beverly Sills tickets the cantor took Leah out to dinner. They never went out to dinner. They couldn’t, for there was no kosher restaurant in town. But recently it had come to the cantor’s attention that the rabbi and rebbetzin had been seen dining at Opal’s Southern Kitchen, a seafood place on the way to the beach. The cantor crossed the hall from his office to the rabbi’s. He entered without knocking, triumphantly confronting the rabbi with the news that he, the rabbi himself, had been caught so flagrantly sinning. The cantor left, however, with news of his own—how to have a kosher meal at a goyishe restaurant.

  The cantor suggested the idea to Leah. He thought she would be shocked by his daring. But before he could explain how it worked, she said, “Why not?”

  They went on a Sunday evening, when all the other Jews were eating Chinese. He asked for their flounder broiled on a piece of aluminum foil. He asked that it be served on a paper plate, he asked for plastic cutlery, he chose the side dishes: baked potato, coleslaw, and corn. A picnic indoors! The food was delicious, and Leah ate every speck of it, including what might have found its way onto her fingertips. There could not have been anything better, he agreed, except possibly what flew by them with distracting regularity, one tray after another, each laden with plates piled with hush puppies and French fries. Now, this was the smell of the Garden of Eden, Leah’s head seemed to be saying as it swerved in the direction of each passing tray, like a light-loving plant toward the sun.

  But of course they couldn’t eat anything fried. They didn’t trust the grease. They saw with their own eyes, the shrimp and scallops and who knew what other kind of trayf nestled up against the fries on the passing plates as they may well have been arranged in the cooker itself, all of it swimming through bubbling oil like some strange school.

  One evening, though, Leah left the table to touch up her face, and shortly after she returned, an order of hush puppies was delivered to them on a paper plate. They were shaped like turds. She popped one in her mouth and the cantor’s blood flooded with a tremendous excitement. He must have looked shocked, for she stuck out her tongue at him.

  “What,” she said, “corn, it isn’t kosher?”

  “How does it taste?” he asked with amazement.

  She closed her eyes and sighed.

  “But what about the grease?” he asked.

  “It’s vegetable grease,” she snapped. “I went in the kitchen and asked. Since when isn’t a vegetable kosher?”

  “But in it they put shrimp, in it they put—”

  “I don’t know anything about that.” She put another hush puppy in her mouth and chewed. “Besides, at five hundred degrees, anything trayf gets killed.”

  “It smells good,” he conceded.

  She shrugged. “Eat it, don’t eat it, do what you want.”

  II

  The cantor saw the young lady around the shul, in the electric hum of the still afternoons. She was beautiful but a mouse. Maybe she didn’t realize her beauty, maybe someone had harmed her in the past. Whenever he passed her in the lobby or noticed her in the main office she looked down and froze in place, like a child making herself invisible by closing her eyes. She was in the Sisterhood and had something to do with the Bulletin. He didn’t know her name. One day she came up to him. Trembling, she told him his voice moved her to tears. He put his hand to his lips, then removed it and whispered, “Then I should remain quiet so that your beautiful eyes remain clear.”

  Then she disappeared. He no longer saw her in the main office, and she wasn’t someone who regularly came to shul. Surely she was in the sanctuary on the High Holy Days, but so was everyone else. Two years later she reappeared, in his office, with a boy. The cantor seated her under a photograph of himself as a young cantor, his first portrait in America, which he had had colored and retouched; the boy he seated under the framed cartoon of The Man Who Burped in Shul on Yom Kippur. He was a good-looking boy, though like his mother two years earlier, he wouldn’t look at you; he too seemed to want to disappear. He was wearing a white T-shirt a
nd black jeans sawed off at the knees; his shoes were leather and black but his socks were white; his hair was a crazy nest of black curls. An interesting style, borrowed partly from an old man and partly from a child. He did not appear to have ever set foot in the sun, though outside, at that moment, if you so much as stepped outside without a hat you would burn up or at least turn shvartz. The kid had got himself up entirely in black and white—but the world happened to be in color, and so he stood out all the more.

  “He speaks perfect Hebrew,” the mother said.

  “Not really,” the boy clarified.

  “And we never sent him to the day school,” she said. “Just from what he learned in the afternoons. He picks it up. He writes Hebrew too. He loves to write—he’s a wonderful writer. He writes stories, he writes poems, he writes song lyrics—just gorgeous. I actually got my associate of arts degree in English, and that wasn’t too long ago. Everybody said what are you going to do with that, and I said, ‘There isn’t any major for being a housewife and mother unless it’s Criminal Justice or Abnormal Psychology!’”

  She was still a beautiful woman. And though she was more talkative than before, she wasn’t really so different—the shyness and the nonstop talking opposite sides of the same coin. She was uncomfortable having a conversation, and when he interrupted to say something, she simply kept on. Finally, the cantor sent the boy out.

  “My dear,” said the cantor. “It’s wonderful to see you again and to meet your son. I used to run into you in the office sometimes.”

  She looked down into her lap and tapped her feet. She looked up and said, “My association with the Bulletin has ended.”

  “I am sorry to hear that. I enjoyed seeing you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The boy must keep you very busy.”

  She shook her head. “The editor and I had creative differences. I won’t name names. Basically, I wanted to write articles and she wanted me to sell ads.”