Fire Year

by Jason K. Friedman

  “Do you keep in touch with this editor?”

  “Absolutely not. I haven’t heard a word from her so I guess she found some other sap to sell the ads. That was really hard work—not that I minded doing it for the shul—but after three years I felt like I paid my dues. I consider myself a writer. A writer wants to write.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m sure you will have your chance, dear. In the meantime go home and write, write your words, write for yourself, that is the most important person, you, yourself, and you. As for the Bulletin, I’m happy to say something—”

  “Oh no! I don’t need that kind of aggravation. If you don’t like me, then I’m not going to beg. She isn’t the first and she won’t be the last. But thank you, Cantor. Thank you so much.”

  Lesson number one. The cantor sat in the back row of the junior congregation room, as he always did with his students, who stood on the altar and sang for him. The cantor chose this row so that they couldn’t see how distracted he was, though there was little chance of that. He seemed completely present—he didn’t close his eyes, he knew how to swallow a yawn or jiggle his teeth to wake himself up—but in his head he was breathing in Leah’s perfume, he was in bed with her or walking round the lakes over there. Now he was in the rabbi’s house, in the living room where you had to take a step down to get to it, except instead of belonging to the rabbi the house was his, and instead of the rabbi’s tasteless tchotchkes, some of them bordering on idolatrous—he had a little sad-faced rebbe he had picked up, along with a crystal candy dish, in a giftshop in the village of Auschwitz—the cantor had done it up the way he liked, with class.

  But there was no sound anymore. The boy must have finished. He stood there in his black clothes as still as a cow and with great dark cow eyes. What this kid, whose father was an accountant, had to be sad about, the cantor didn’t know.

  “Have you picked out your bar mitzvah suit yet?” the cantor asked.

  The boy nodded.

  “And where did you go?”

  “Levy’s in the mall.”

  “Levy’s in the mall. Very nice store, plus I had the Levy boy just last year.”

  The boy saw that next year the cantor would have forgotten his name too.

  “So did you buy a suit?”

  “Did I have a choice?”

  “A comedian! Well, better than a tragedian. Did you buy a nice suit was what I meant.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s okay. What was the mark?”

  “What?”

  “The brand, what brand did you get?”

  “I don’t know. Pierre Cardin, I think.”

  “Pierre Cardin. Pierre Cardin,” the cantor repeated, savoring the beautiful French words. “Pierre Cardin is very nice.”

  The following week, when the mother came to pick up the boy, she came in again. Usually the mothers just waited outside in the car. The cantor invited her into his office, alone, and said, “I’m looking forward to working with your son. And I want to work out something with you on my rate.”

  “Your rate? You charge?”

  “Only for what your dues don’t cover. My dear, most of these boys, they just want to get it over with, they just want, frankly, to have a big party—and I won’t say a little gelt in the pocket isn’t an attraction for some too. I personally have nothing against a party. But when I meet a boy I see really wants to learn, who really wants to be a bar mitzvah, that’s what I like to see. That’s when I don’t want to take anything at all. But normally I take, well—From you I’ll take no more than twenty-five. Of course it’s up to you.”

  She nodded, though he could see she didn’t understand what he meant. What he meant was she could also pay nothing—but he bit his tongue instead of telling her. He watched her face change, he watched it relax. “Thank you,” she finally said.

  “Of course I wouldn’t want to make the other parents jealous.”

  “No,” she said seriously.

  “Good,” he replied. “Then you’ll want to discuss it with your husband, dear?”

  She laughed. “If you can make my son sound like you, my husband will pay anything!”

  The cantor’s face broke into a smile, his big teeth gleamed. He was surprised by how he felt, better than he thought he would.

  One afternoon as the boy was singing, the cantor thought about how long it would take to save up enough for the necklace the saleslady at Siegel’s had shown him. He had finally crossed the threshold of this store, in broad daylight, like any other paying customer. The necklace was a strand of gold hung with an emerald shaped like a teardrop. This image led him to an afternoon rendezvous with Leah, on the salmon-colored recamier in the ladies lounge, a deliciously dangerous fantasy that was spoiled by a honk. But there was no duck before him—just the kid, the strangely outfitted boy of the beautiful woman who, once prompted, couldn’t stop talking about herself. A rude intrusion, this honk, but now the spell had been broken and there was no retracing his steps across the lobby. Even if he could get to the ladies lounge he would find his beloved gone, and who else in her place but Mrs. Fine or some other yenta in the stalls, making another kind of honk.

  “Sing through your mouth,” the cantor heard himself saying. “Not your nose.”

  The boy looked up, perplexed, not by the criticism but by the very fact the cantor was trying to teach him something.

  “I’m not saying you got a beautiful voice,” the cantor said.

  The boy snorted.

  “But try to remember what you are singing.”

  “I don’t really have a clue.”

  “Then I’ll tell you. You are singing holy words. Your voice should sound holy too.”

  “Uh, okay,” the boy said skeptically.

  The cantor stared. “Now, what about standing up straight?”

  Every Thursday he saw the boy, then afterward the mother, alone in his office. The mother: powder, rouge, lipstick, hair, clothes, rings, nails, the smell of a rose. She looked like a vampire, a beautiful vampire, the beautiful victim of a vampire, with strategic places painted red to convey the impression of the living blood that the rest of her appeared to lack. But if she had been bitten, she remained the victim; she hadn’t crossed over. He couldn’t even see her swatting a fly, or he could see her trying but never managing to kill it. For a few minutes she talked, then reached into her beaded pocketbook and removed an envelope. She looked down as she passed it to him. He waited till she looked up and then slightly bowed his head and thanked her.

  The cantor didn’t tell Leah he was charging the boy’s mother. He didn’t plan to tell her when he gave her the necklace either. She never asked him such questions, there was no need to explain—though the fineness of this gift might cause her to wonder. That was okay. As long as she didn’t laugh—even if it was only in the spirit of laughing with him—then she could do whatever she wanted. She could slap him on the toches and it would be fine with him. Even if she asked where the money came from, it would be fine, though he didn’t know what he would say. It was true that having this secret from her was exciting. It wasn’t just any kind of secret, it was, some might say, of a criminal nature. But he chose to think of it as a trespass not much worse than eating the hush puppies.

  It was a question of knowing. He didn’t really know what else was cooked in the grease with each batch of hush puppies, not being in the kitchen himself. He didn’t know that what he took weekly from the mother wasn’t just an advance on a tip he was going to get in the end anyway. Or should get—she was naïve, she probably didn’t know about the tip in the first place.

  “Now, don’t sing down into your book, look at me and sing to me.”

  The cantor was sitting in the front row of the junior congregation room. With each lesson he had moved up a row.

  The boy looked down at the cantor, then back at his book, then down at the cantor again. But as soon as the boy opened his mouth, before any sound emerged, the cantor called out, “Now, if you wouldn’t mind, p
lease, about the accent. Would it kill you, darling, to sound like you come a little closer near Eretz Yisroel? Try to get a little closer to the Mideast than the Southeast. Try a resh, r, rishon, the first, number one, numero uno. Open your mouth a little, smile wide, that’s it, not too much, take the r from the back of the mouth, not the front, rishon, now the shon, not oh, not ohoo, but closer to aw, rishon, rishon, accent on the shon, ri-SHON, not RI-shon, which means what, reshown?, show again?, a car maybe, used?”

  “Nobody ever cared how I sounded before,” the boy said suspiciously.

  “I care.” And as he said it the cantor saw that it was true. “You should too.”

  The boy shrugged. Then he started to sing. He no longer honked, the sounds he was making emerged from his mouth rather than his nose. His Torah portion was set during the travels of the Israelites through the wilderness; it told of the uprising of three men against Moses and how they were swallowed up into the bowels of the earth. The boy sang as if he meant it. He had practiced so many times that he no longer needed to look at the words. The boy closed his eyes when he sang, and the cantor had the unexpected sensation of tears welling up.

  Now when his girlfriend popped into the cantor’s head it was as an unwelcome distraction. Not only did he no longer indulge these fantasies, he tried not to think of her at all during his lessons. But this was hard to do, because he had calculated he would have the money to buy the necklace around the same time that the boy had his bar mitzvah ceremony. The first time he had walked into Siegel’s, the cantor could have walked out with the necklace. Siegel was not one of his congregants, he attended the Orthodox shul—and yet he came over and personally offered the cantor a discount, he suggested layaway, he did everything in his power short of handing over the necklace for free. To all offers the cantor said no. He asked only that the necklace be set aside until he could afford to pay for it in full, which turned out to be the end of June, when the boy would become a bar mitzvah as well.

  The necklace was like something growing in secret, underground, blind and tuberous and dark; while the bar mitzvah the cantor was cultivating in full sunlight. But on the surface his life looked the same as it had before he started taking money from the boy’s mother. He was on a first-name basis with the girl at the symphony box office, he pulled his strings to obtain the Sunday lox—the old tricks still worked, so why not use them? He even continued to bring Leah costume jewelry from Kmart. He wasn’t trying to throw her off the scent, he didn’t think there was a scent.

  But he was wrong.

  “So what’s the matter with you?” she asked him one night.

  They were sitting at Opal’s before their empty plates.

  “Why do you ask?” he said.

  “Because you didn’t eat a hush puppy. Not one. I ate all yours. I’m not complaining.”

  She was green as the forest, blue as the sea, red as fire and clay. She was a fantasia of primary colors, all the elements that make up the creation. Her lips glistening with grease only accentuated her strange earthy beauty. He pictured the necklace hanging amid all this splendor and found it unnecessary.

  “I was thinking what next after the hush puppies.” The cantor looked around, then said, in a whisper, “Shrimp?”

  “Maybe!” she exclaimed, to his horror.

  But she was teasing. She must have been. She must have liked confusing him.

  “For you it’s not a temptation,” he said. “For me—”

  She looked at him as if he were mad.

  He wanted to tell all—that he had crossed over into transgression, that maybe this refusal of the hush puppy, this one step backward, would somehow set him back onto the right path. But then Leah would really think he was crazy.

  “Okay, so don’t eat the hush puppies,” she finally said. “If you’re hungry, take another piece of corn instead.”

  The food sat in him like a weight.

  Afterward, they went back to her apartment. But as much as they tried—without a word between them—they couldn’t get back to the lakes.

  With still three weeks to go, the boy was prepared. He was never going to be a Caruso but he sounded as good as he was going to get. And who really cared how he sounded when he read Hebrew so well, when he sang with such heart and soul? So one day the cantor asked the boy to take a seat alongside him on the altar.

  “We never talked about your parsha so much,” the cantor said. “You’re giving the drash, you have something you’d like me to listen to? Maybe some idea you have in your head? Don’t tell the rabbi, he’ll say this is his territory, but between you and me—”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” the boy said. “Waiting for something to come to me.”

  “Because I have an idea. If it was me giving the drash—if they ever let a lowly cantor give one, I mean, which they never would—I think I would say something about miracles. Don’t believe what they say in the movies. There aren’t really so many miracles in the Torah. It’s not every bar mitzvah that gets one.”

  The boy smirked.

  “The earth opening up, the fires of hell, whoa, that’s some miracle,” the cantor said.

  “Yeah, it’s like an earthquake except it targets, like, three people.”

  “More. Their families too.”

  “Excellent,” the boy said.

  The cantor felt an anger rising up. “Why do you talk like this, you, my boy?”

  “Because I don’t believe in miracles.”

  “With all due respect I don’t believe you. I hear you, every week I listen to you sing. I don’t believe you don’t believe in miracles.”

  The boy shrugged. “I want to believe in miracles. I could really use one at this point. I could probably use more than one.”

  The cantor felt a little afraid to know what the boy was talking about.

  “But when was the last time a miracle happened?” the boy asked.

  “You mean you have never seen one,” the cantor replied.

  “No, I haven’t. And no one else has either.”

  “Some have,” the cantor said. “I have.

  So the cantor had something left to teach after all, and in fact it was one of the things he had been hired to teach. The bumpkins on the Board had encouraged him to tell his story—his story!—to anyone who asked, of any age, especially his bar mitzvah students. But the cantor didn’t feel he was being compensated properly for one position, much less two; and besides, everyone knows a bird in a cage doesn’t sing.

  The boy looked at him.

  The cantor started to sing.

  “It was in a tree,” the cantor said. “I was in a tree. It was a nice sunny day. The sky was blue. And then it started to rain.”

  The boy had the confused, guilty look of someone who’s being reprimanded without knowing quite why.

  “And that’s it,” the cantor said. “The man pointing the gun at me put it down. He shouted something at his dog and the two of them went away.”

  The air conditioning clicked on.

  “This was long ago,” the cantor said.

  “And just because he didn’t want to get wet he didn’t shoot you?” the boy asked.

  The cantor’s chilling smile socked the boy no less than Miss Bodziner’s curselike answers to his questions in Hebrew class. “You wanted he should shoot me?” the cantor asked.

  “No!” the boy said. “It’s just, I mean, he was a Nazi and all.”

  “You think it’s better to get wet than to let someone live? Let me tell you, I understand perfectly this man. It’s a wonderful thing to want to stay dry, to me it makes a perfect sense. I also would choose to stay dry than to, God forbid, murder a Jew, if given the choice. For this reason I personally carry my umbrella with me at all times, even on a sunny day. Do you trust the weather report? Not me!”

  And this didn’t seem like such a joke, the cantor with his hair slicked back and sprayed in place, with his always shined shoes, no, he wouldn’t like to get wet.

  III

 
The constellations in heaven wheeled toward the appointed moment when the holy words must be read, when these particular ones must be read, while at the same time, underground rivers of lava tumbled and crashed, forging in their beds gold and precious stones. Everything happened at the same time, the entire universe heading toward a single moment of revelation, all according to the divine plan. Speeding toward the moment—time moved faster the older he got, the cantor was familiar with this, but never had it moved with such delirious speed. Although man was but a speck of dust in the universe, he too was part of the divine plan, a humble actor in it.

  He was a cantor, he walked out onto a stage and sang before an audience. He was only the most obvious actor in the plan, perhaps the only one aware of his role. But everyone had a part to play! The boy’s mother came onstage and said, “You’ve done wonders for my son, Cantor. I used to worry, I really did, I worried about everything, even those shoes he wears with the white socks, I heard someone say it meant he was, well, you don’t want to know what they said! I mean I asked, I guess I deserved to hear what they had to say, I must have wanted an answer or I wouldn’t have asked. Ridiculous, isn’t it, I mean who cares? And I’ve been thinking about what you were saying, that if I want to be a writer I should just go home and write instead of waiting for someone to ask me to write—or let me write. I don’t need anyone’s permission—I don’t know why I thought I did.”

  She handed over the envelope with the check and now it was the cantor who looked down.

  His girlfriend came on and said, “Please, we are all we have here, in this place of poisonous swamps and killing heat and stupid children and flying roaches and bloodsucking bugs, we must hold each other and love each other and not be so sad.”

  They were out of character and as a result that much more convincing, the cantor thought as these sweet words poured into his ears, and so why couldn’t he get that window out of his head, why couldn’t he shake his desire to smash and smash and smash?

  The boy came on and, with his sad eyes closed, sang.