Only in New York

by Lily Brett

  Something about the conversation had not only captivated me – I had followed them to the point where I had ended up blocks away from where I had been heading – but uplifted me. New Yorkers can be so hard-nosed and tough, and yet still be surprisingly innocent, and almost childlike.

  I decided that I was becoming too dour. Maybe I, too, should surprise myself. I am planning to compile a list of possible surprises.

  I am walking through the Deluxe Food Market in Elizabeth Street, in Chinatown. This indoor market is huge. It occupies the length of the block between Mott and Elizabeth Streets. It is always crowded and noisy and full of life. Like Chinatown itself. I love Chinatown. It’s all business. All real life. No Louis Vuitton stores. No Miu Miu, no Marc Jacobs.

  Halfway through the Deluxe Food Market, when I have already decided to give the pork intestine slices and the roasted beef tendons and tongues a miss, and have restrained myself from buying too many of the black-bean buns I love, I see a pair of large legs. They are lying on their own, on a bed of ice. I am not sure what these legs were formerly attached to. They look prehistoric and menacing. Definitely not like your average ingredient for a dinner party. Marinated, pickled or curried, these legs would still look lethal.

  I ask another customer, a Chinese man, if he knows what the legs are. He doesn’t. Two young Chinese girls come up. They stare at the legs and, almost simultaneously, say, ‘That’s gross.’ They don’t know what they are, either. The Chinese man asks the stallholder. I find out that the legs are crocodile legs.

  I look at the two legs again and realise that they are mismatched. They do not come from the same crocodile. This is a bit disconcerting. What could have happened? Were there two mismatched crocodile legs in another market? Or had the missing legs been separated and were now being displayed as single legs? That didn’t feel right, although I don’t really know why I felt that the legs should have been kept together. I mean, they were dead.

  Although the crocodile legs were well and truly dead, something about the legs, particularly the larger of the two legs, still looked alive. The bottom half of the larger leg and its long claws were jet black. This leg looked as though it was wearing an elbow-length glove and was dressed for the opera. The top half of the leg ended in jagged, raw flesh. Flesh that didn’t look properly chopped or neatly butchered. Flesh that looked wrenched from the crocodile’s shoulder. Earlier this year I had shoulder surgery. I felt sad for the crocodile.

  I don’t know that much about crocodiles. I do know they are very sensitive to cold and that they have acute hearing. I had read that female crocodiles could hear their babies calling from inside the eggshell. Crocodiles can lay anything from seven to ninety-five eggs. That’s a lot of babies to listen out for.

  I also know that crocodiles have an enviably low metabolism. They can eat nothing and survive for long periods. They never need to go on a diet. Although, they do have a remarkably lean diet. They eat mostly small mammals, birds, fish, crabs, insects, snails and frogs. There’s not a high-calorie item in this food group. Some crocodiles also swallow and digest stones. The stones, I read, act as a ballast. I think they may also be a laxative, which, as we are regularly urged by health officials to add more fibre to our diets, would be another smart and healthy move.

  Looking at the bloody mess at the end of the crocodile’s leg, I wondered what had happened to the crocodile’s shoulder. I am very susceptible to other people’s symptoms. If I am talking to someone who has a lisp, I start lisping. If I meet a person who has just had gallstone surgery, I am sure I can feel gallstones growing. I take on all of my husband’s symptoms. When he had a sore right leg I limped, and when he had hernia surgery I had a terrible stomach-ache.

  I left the market before my own shoulder, which has healed, started to ache again.

  My father is ninety-eight. He still loves chocolate. I buy him his favourite chocolates at Economy Candy, in Rivington Street. Economy Candy is the sort of store that gives me a headache. It has wall-to-wall chocolate. Chocolate everywhere. I am fixated by the chocolate. I want to buy lots of it. For myself. Instead, I buy it for my father.

  My father eats quite a lot of the chocolate I bring him, almost immediately. While I watch. He no longer bothers to offer me any chocolate. It used to be a source of friction between us, as mostly I said no. ‘You are not the fatty you used to be,’ he would say. ‘You can afford to eat chocolate.’ I haven’t been a ‘fatty’ for decades, but I can easily feel fat. And fear fat. Besides which, I am not visiting my father to talk about my days as a fatty.

  My father migrated to America in his late eighties, to live close to us in New York. He loves New York. He lives on the Lower East Side, among the newer, hip residents and the elderly Jewish remnants of a former era. It is a diverse, vibrant and multicultural area. My father has picked up snippets of Spanish and Chinese.

  He chats to his neighbours and often argues in the street with the odd, Orthodox Jew who tries to persuade him to go to synagogue. ‘There is no God,’ he tells them, time after time. ‘There is no God,’ he says. He should know.

  I’m not sure that being incarcerated in Auschwitz is a recipe for future happiness. But my father is happy. He is really happy. When I ask him how he is, he says, ‘I am as good as gold.’

  I am puzzled by my father’s happiness. He shouldn’t be happy. Different parts of him don’t work as well as they should. So many old people are grumpy and bad-tempered. I can understand that far more than I understand my father’s happiness.

  My father also never complains. When I commented on that, he looked at me as though I was stupid. ‘Why should I complain?’ he said. ‘If I did complain all the time, nobody would want to talk to me.’ That reasoning has never stopped me from complaining, although maybe it should.

  My father is also still an admirer of beautiful women. He loves beautiful women. Particularly if they have an ample bust. A friend of mine, whose cleavage I have always envied, visited my father recently. I called him to ask if he had enjoyed the visit. ‘Yes, I did enjoy the visit very much,’ he said. ‘She has such a beautiful figure. She could be a model.’

  ‘She is also a lovely person,’ I said, wanting to shift the emphasis to my friend’s personality.

  ‘She could be a model,’ my father repeated. ‘With a beautiful figure like that, she could be a model.’ I didn’t want to point out to him that no models today have big breasts, let alone very big breasts. I didn’t want to mention that most models today have no breasts. It would have seemed churlish and unappreciative.

  The next day, my father called me. ‘Am I really ninety-eight?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You are.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he said.

  ‘Dad, you were born in 1916,’ I said.

  He paused. ‘I don’t feel ninety-eight,’ he said. ‘I feel seventy-six or seventy-seven.’

  ‘You look seventy-six,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think I look that old,’ he replied. He is probably right. He looks pretty good.

  ‘Buy me more of that Côte d’Or chocolate,’ he said before he hung up. ‘I like it very much.’

  There was a big old tree not far from where I live in SoHo. I don’t normally feel any sort of attachment to trees, but became fond of this tree. It was supposedly one of the first trees planted in my neighbourhood. In summer I used to sometimes stand under it for shade.

  One day a few months ago, on an early-morning walk, I noticed that something was different. And then it struck me. The tree had gone. I found out that it had been chopped down because it was dying and, after Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, the council didn’t want to risk any more trees falling down in bad weather.

  I felt sad when I heard about the tree. On the whole, I have to admit, I am not crazy about trees. Particularly when there are too many of them. I was in Tasmania, on a book tour of Australia, last year. When Australians talk about Tasmania, each and every one of them talks about the trees and the smell of the clean, c
lear air and how good that feels. I arrived in Tasmania, took one breath of that fresh, crisp, unpolluted air and started coughing and sneezing.

  Tasmania is part of the Commonwealth of Australia and is an island 240 kilometres to the south of the Australian mainland. I had to look up that information as I am geographically challenged. To me, Tasmania has always been the strangely small piece of land floating at the bottom of all maps of Australia. Tasmania may look small, but it is, as I learned, the twenty-sixth largest island in the world.

  ‘You are going to love Tasmania,’ the publicist travelling with me said just before I started sneezing. For the three days that I was in Tasmania, I couldn’t step out into the street without my eyes beginning to water and my nose starting to run. This never happens to me in New York. Carbon monoxide clearly suits me. In smog-ridden Beijing, I walked through the streets with a bounce in my step. In Tasmania, I took anti-allergy medication and headache pills and sniffed and coughed my way through interviews.

  A local press photographer, whom I thought was going to photograph me in a cafe, said he would instead like to photograph me in the park opposite the cafe. ‘I’ll photograph you next to a tree,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t normally stand next to trees,’ I said. He didn’t respond. ‘Trees and me, we don’t really go together,’ I said. He looked at me very strangely.

  ‘Just walk across the lawn and lean against the tree,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t like lawn, either,’ I said. A look of disbelief appeared on his face. I restrained myself from explaining that I have a very bad reaction to insect bites and that all insects find me wildly attractive.

  I gave up and walked across the lawn. The lawn was very wet. My suede boots were instantly drenched. I leaned against the tree the photographer wanted me to lean against. I tried to look as though I was good friends with the tree. The tree was also wet. Drops of water fell on my head turning the curls in my hair into an unattractive and unintended retro afro.

  Trees are not really that comfortable to lean against. They are hard and uneven and can sometimes be sharp. I was sure I looked ill at ease, if not downright ill. ‘Smile,’ the photographer said. I tried to smile but I am not one of those people who have a big, wide smile. My smiles tend to look a bit pursed-lipped. I find it hard to smile for a camera.

  When I eventually saw the photograph, I felt acutely embarrassed. I am leaning stiffly against the tree, with my retro afro, and looking as though I am suffering from haemorrhoids or gout.

  The other night I woke up at four a.m. to an almighty crashing sound. I felt alarmed. I wasn’t panicked. I save my panic for small things. I panic when the New York Times is not delivered. I panic when the forecast is for heavy rain. I panic when my children tell me they have a doctor’s appointment. But in an emergency, I don’t panic. I am calm. In an emergency, I am the sort of person you would, mostly, be pleased to have around. New Yorkers tend not to panic. In an emergency, I am a real New Yorker.

  I got out of bed and walked around. Nothing looked amiss. All the windows were still locked. The furniture was where I had left it. My husband was still asleep. He could sleep through an earthquake. We live in what used to be an industrial building. By New York standards it is a quiet apartment. But because of a lack of insulation, or what my father with his broken English calls isolation, we often hear assorted noises and sounds from our neighbours.

  I quite like hearing sounds of life from our neighbours. Often I find it soothing. During Hurricane Sandy I found it comforting to know that our upstairs neighbours hadn’t fled the city, despite the lack of power or heat or phone lines or an internet connection.

  For those few days I didn’t even feel annoyed when their son started practising the piano. He practises the piano religiously. He plays the same piece every day. He isn’t getting any better. There is no sign of any improvement. Every day he stumbles in the same places and hits the chords with the sensitivity of a cement truck. I have resisted the urge to tell his parents that he is never going to be Glenn Gould.

  I wondered if maybe the crashing noise had come from our upstairs neighbours. But all was quiet upstairs. They would have been running around if anything was drastically wrong.

  I went back to bed, congratulating myself for not panicking. We have a panic button in the apartment. It is connected to a security company. It was a prerequisite of an insurance policy. When the panic button is pressed, the police, ambulance, fire brigade and, possibly, Scotland Yard, are summoned by the security company. I studiously avoid the button. I am scared of it. I can’t stand the noise of the alarm it sets off. The thought of being invaded by the police or the army or navy, or whoever else the security company sends, gives me a headache.

  The next morning I saw what had happened. In my eagerness to check every electrical appliance we owned I had not looked at my study. A bookshelf in my study had collapsed under the weight of twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. The shelf had collapsed on to a set of five figurines. Five musicians – a clarinetist, a drummer, a saxophonist, a tuba player and a piano accordionist – who formed what looked like a klezmer band. They were the only decorative item we owned when I was a child. A violinist went missing sometime in the 1960s.

  I prepared myself to face the crushed remains of this group of musicians. To my astonishment, four of them had escaped unscathed. Not a chip or crack between them. However, the piano accordionist was in trouble. His head was embedded in the shelf. I gingerly turned and twisted the accordionist’s head out of the crater it had created in the shelf. I felt like an otolaryngologist, although I am not sure that head and neck surgeons spend their time prising heads from shelves. I was stunned to see that the accordionist hadn’t even suffered a scratch.

  Many years ago these figurines had survived a large fire in our apartment. ‘They’ve got nine lives,’ a neighbour said to me, when I told her the story. I don’t believe that people or objects have destinies or multiple lives, but if it’s true then this klezmer band has several more lives left.

  In a wildly unexpected and completely unpredictable turn of events, I fell madly in love, in Cologne, Germany. It was the sort of love that makes your heart pound. The sort of love that seeps into your arteries. The sort of love that leaves you smiling at nothing in particular.

  It was May, 2006. I was happily married at the time, but that didn’t turn out to be a problem. My husband is a very reasonable man. And he has always believed in love.

  Cologne is not the sort of city where you expect to fall head over heels in love. It is a beautiful city, but it doesn’t have the drama or the romance of a city like Paris or Havana. Or the excitement of New York. But it was in Cologne that I fell in love. I fell in love with a church. A Catholic church. A church called St Agnes.

  St Agnes is the second-largest church in Cologne. Only the famed Cologne Cathedral is larger. St Agnes is a relatively plain church. Its beautiful but simple lines and its white, vaulted ceiling and pink-hued, stone columns give it a grandeur. Not a grandeur of superiority. St Agnes has an embracing, inclusive and very human grandness.

  It is unadorned and unpretentious with a minimal amount of symbolism or decoration. It also has warmth. A palpable warmth that allows your spirit to float, to soar, to question and to be challenged. A state that feels remarkably like being in love. Being headily in love.

  There was, however, a problem with this love match. I am not a Catholic. I am Jewish. And it gets worse. I am an atheist. A Jewish atheist. Maybe I am not a one hundred percent, wholly committed atheist. Maybe only ninety percent of me is an atheist. Even if only ninety percent of me is an atheist, falling in love with a Catholic church is pretty problematic.

  I was brought up to not believe in God. Not believing in God was like a family mantra. I was born to two people who had each survived years of imprisonment in Nazi ghettos, labour camps and death camps. My mother was seventeen when she was imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto. She had four brothers, three sisters, a mother, father, grandp
arents, aunties, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces. When the war was over, she was the only person in the universe she was related to. Every single person in her family had been murdered. My father’s mother and father and sister and three brothers were also murdered.

  It took my mother and father six months to find each other after the war. They were sent to a displaced persons camp in Feldafing. I was born in Germany, one of the first group of children born to survivors of the Holocaust.

  ‘There is no God,’ my mother said, over and over again, when I was growing up. I grew up in Australia, a country of blue skies and sunshine. It didn’t seem like a place in which it was important to know that it was a godless world. My mother said, ‘There is no God’ at the oddest times, always out of the blue. ‘There is no God,’ she said when she was washing the dishes or hanging out the washing or getting dressed up to go to a bar mitzvah or a birthday party.

  Both of my parents came from religious homes. After the war, religion was a word they both scoffed at. My father, at ninety-eight, still rails at the mostly young, religious Jews who live near him on the Lower East Side, in New York, and who frequently ask if they can accompany him to synagogue.

  And he has kept up his lack of faith in God or an afterlife. I woke up one morning worried by the sudden thought that my father, who bought himself a burial plot in Queens when he moved to New York about a decade ago, might want to be buried next to my mother in Melbourne.

  ‘I don’t want you to spend thousands of dollars to fly me to Australia when I am dead,’ he said, when I asked him about being buried next to my mother. He said it in the sort of severe tone he sometimes used when I was a 15-year-old beatnik.