by Mark Helprin
“Well if you really love her, then marry her.”
“I just don’t know.”
“If you don’t know, then you don’t really love her.”
“I do love her. I’m crazy about her.”
“Then you should have no doubts. If she’s the one, really the one, you should know it.”
“Look, Biferman, I don’t see anything wrong with having some doubt before such a tremendous transaction. It’s normal. Why not? And anyway, you never went out with a girl in your life. How would you know?”
“I went out with a girl.”
“What, in high school? I’ll bet you did. You forget, Biferman. There are no girls in DeWitt Clinton. I went there too.”
“You didn’t know me then,” Biferman said angrily, looking more intently at the darkness.
“Do I really need to have known you then? I know you now. I see you on Sunday walking alone in Van Cortlandt Park. I spend forty hours a week within two feet of you. I go home on the same train. I meet you in the morning, rain or shine, on the corner. What is there you have hidden from me, Biferman, what is it that gives you the right to tell me, when finally after so many years of being alone I find someone I think I can love, that I don’t really love her? For Christ’s sake what am I supposed to do, be a perfectionist? I can’t do that. I just can’t do it. I can’t stand being alone. It’ll work out. Biferman, I can’t stand being alone.”
“I can stand being alone,” said Biferman.
“Well then, maybe you’re unhuman. Maybe you’ll spend the rest of your life at that desk and go home every night in the cold to a dark room, and eat every night at Katz’s, and what the hell do you do in the evening anyway?”
“I thought you knew me.”
“Oh, now I know. You’re going to give me a story about a woman you keep.”
“Nothing like that at all.”
“You don’t keep a woman?”
“No.”
“You had a girl then?”
“Yes, I had a girl. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“No, tell me. Please, I want to know.”
“Look you. I don’t know what you think or how you think, but if you’re thinking that being within two feet of me for forty hours a week gives you a good idea of what I’m like, well then I wouldn’t even tell you how much I earn each week.”
“Eighty-six fifty, shmuck. And by the way I’m your only friend.”
“I guess you are my only friend.”
“Yeah. And you know something else, it’s difficult to say, but you’re my only friend too.”
The train came. They boarded without a word and since Biferman could never in the world have shouted what he so badly wanted to say, since Biferman could never in the world have shouted under any circumstance, he was silent during the ride, and he just looked off the track at the sparkling lights on dark bridges, and the little red lights of planes in the sky moving toward Queens and the airports, the flashing of car headlamps, a faraway neon which seemed so much like a jewel in velvet, the thin black trees, and the wind which in some moments he was sure he could see.
At the end of the line, where the subway stops in an orange-roofed building above the street near Van Cortlandt Park, they exited by the appropriate stairs and when they reached the street, cut across an enormous field which seemed like prairie country, or even the steppes of Central Asia in winter, for it was dark and the wind whipped the fine snow in their faces as they walked with heads bent to the stars which might have been the stars of the clear desert or the stars of the sea so bright and beautiful were they, and as they walked they gained confidence for they were away from the city, undefeated, free.
“Harold. When I was in high school I was fond of reading. I still am. As soon as I did not have to go to Hebrew School any more I had time to read. Do you know the bookstore on 231 Street near Broadway?”
“Of course, I pass it all the time. The one with novels and history mainly. Rosens?”
“Yes, Rosens.”
“What about it.”
“Well ... well ... do you know Mr. Rosen?”
“I don’t know him, but I assumed it was a Mr. Rosen who owns the store. After all, it is called Rosen’s Bookstore.”
“It is called, ‘Rosen, dash, Books,’ as in Russia.” bo on.
“God it’s so cold. It’s so cold now.”
“Go on, Biferman.”
“Rosen had a daughter. Her name was Katrina, or Katrin’. Katrina Rosen. She was born in Russia. They didn’t come until after the war. Rosen lost his wife in a camp. He is a broken man. He is my friend. I forgot to say that. He is my friend. I was in high school and I used to go when school let out and buy a book at Rosen’s. I read a book every night. Of course I took from the library, but I would buy a book each week from Rosen and it usually took me about two or three hours in the store to decide which to buy. Rosens daughter, Katrina, worked in the store. She sat on a high stool behind a desk and catalogued books on white cards she put in a file. I was eighteen.
“She was seventeen. And she was a most beautiful, delicate girl. She had red hair which fell to her waist, and the finest white skin, and such beautiful eyes. She was always so delicate, and when I came into the store she turned very red and stared excessively at her cards, making deft meaningless motions with her pen. I pursed my lips when I looked at a book, acting serious and scholarly. I don’t know how I did it for two or three hours at a stretch. Half the time I was interested in the book, the other half was just a game since I thought only of her.
“For three or four months, all during the fall of my senior year, I did not say a word to her, not a word. If I wanted a book I couldn’t reach or had to make an inquiry I asked Rosen himself and he would drag out his ladder or go to the card file, and it would be done. I thought about her all the time. I knew her name because I heard him call her Katrina. ‘Katrina,’ he would say, ‘have you written up the Poliakov book yet?’ or ‘Katrin’, my dear, did Barons Social and Religious come in yet?’ and she always turned very red because she knew I was listening and answered, ‘Yes Father, yes my dear father.’
“I walked in the park each Saturday, dressed as nicely as I could manage, for miles, hoping I would meet her in the afternoon. I never did. Everywhere I went I thought I would come across her but I never saw her outside the store.
“One day I went into Rosen’s, and old Rosen had a cold. He was not there. She ran the store. A carton of Hebrew books had just come in. You know how the old people still buy Hebrew books, and Yiddish. Well Rosen usually handled the Hebrew books, but he was sick, so she had to do it and her Hebrew was atrocious—charming, but atrocious. I began my little game of leafing, trying for the courage to speak to her, until I noticed she was looking all the time in a dictionary. I walked very quietly to the desk, and in the yellow light saw all the books, and a few badly written Hebrew index cards.
“ ‘Tov is with a tet’ I said, and she looked up at me, her face shining in the light.
“ ‘Do you know Hebrew well?’ she said.
“‘Oh yes,’ I said, Very well.’
“ ‘I didn’t think you were Jewish,’ she said.
“‘I am,’ I said.
“ ‘Will you help me?’ she said.
“‘Yes,’ I said.
“‘What is this then?’ She pointed to an underlined passage.
“‘Shir HaShirim,’ I said, ‘The Song of Songs.’
“‘Oh yes, I see it now.’
“ ‘Can you read it?’ I asked.
“‘Not really.’
“‘Try this passage.’
“ ‘I can’t,’ she said, looking at me from very close. We were right next to one another. I translated for her. It was from dalet.
“‘Walk with me from Lebanon, from Lebanon come. Look ... from the peak of Shenir, and Hermon, from lions’ dens, from mountains of the leopards. Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my bride, with one of your eyes, with one chain from your neck...’”
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br /> “And then we were silent, and I looked in her eyes for a long time.
“By the time I left my sleeves were up and I felt entirely comfortable. We had catalogued and shelved all the books shipped in that day. She said: ‘I couldn’t go to Hebrew school most times. I was very sick when I was little,’ and she turned red, so red, as if she were on fire when she said that. ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ I said, ‘I was not so healthy myself.’
“From then on I began to talk to her. I found I could talk to her better than to anyone. We understood one another perfectly. We went to the park in the evening. Right here, right in this spot, in the spring and in the summer, we walked past children playing and the kites were like confetti above us, and the sky was clear blue. We could hear shouts far away on the fields. Everyone was dressed in colorful clothes, and the smoke from apartment buildings was beautiful, curling against that new sky, that fresh sky, and the old people on the benches were a good sight to see. The old people here are such gentle people.
“When I was a freshman at City she was a senior at Music and Art. We went to school and came back together. I knew I would love her all my life. That is why I said what I said to you. Do you remember Peter Aaron? In his house there was a fireplace with gas jets so it was always steady and bright, like the best of wood fires. It never ran down. I loved Katrina just like that. Always bright, never still. Powerful always, never unsteady.
“But Katrina had been very sickly as a child. Perhaps that is why her skin was so white and fine and when she blushed she seemed to be the color of the deepest red velvet,” said Biferman as he looked at the stars, thinking that one of the things he could have been was an astronomer, and they might have lived in a big house, and he could have taken her to look at the moon which in an old-fashioned telescope, he knew, has a bright blue rim. And perhaps as they looked at the moon with its bright blue rim he would have kissed her thin lips and entangled her long red hair in his hands, and held her very close to him making her whiter than even her fine white skin or the white of the moon, and feeling the delicacy of her, the delicacy of Katrina, Katrina Rosen, the daughter of the bookstore man.
“She had been very sickly, Katrina. And when I was a sophomore at City, majoring in History, she got sick again, in November. In the beginning of November she became so deathly sick that her father prayed all the time with tears in his eyes. He raged at God, and shouted in the store, in the street. He was furious at God. ‘God. God. How dare you take from me my wife, and make my daughter deathly sick. There is no God,’ and then he would weep and fall to his knees near the couch, burying his head in the cushion. ‘There is no God,’ he said, and then he said, ‘God, God, God, Lord of Israel, how can you do this?’
“I was young. I am not afraid to say that I enjoyed it in a way. It gave me a chance to care for her, and my love was so much grounded on care; don’t all the Jews love by caring? So as long as she could talk, and read, and listen when I read to her, and learn the Hebrew I was teaching her, it was all right.
“But I cannot begin to describe the panic into which I was hurled when she began to get worse. Rosen knew from the start, but I was only nineteen. He had seen enough in his life to tell him, but I walked through the park, happy like an idiot. The fields right here in the Bronx were so golden, so bright, as if in a foreign place, that I was sure God would not forsake her. If I saw such beauty, how could He not do so? Neither of my parents had died. I had not yet seen a true winter.
“By Christmas Katrina was as white as the snow in the park and she spent most of the day with her eyes closed. She was wasting away and the doctors at Montefiore could do nothing but offer pompous opinions which were all wrong. Her father knew immediately. His wife was turned into potash for some green German field. How could they have fooled him? We sat in silence, Rosen and I, in a delicatessen below the elevated near Montefiore, wondering about the flower, Katrina, who was within the whiteness and sterility of that great smoking red-brick place of death and healing. And then she became red with a fever that never left her. They moved her at last to home. Rosen bought a cot and I lived there. We cared for her almost with a vengeance, day and night. For Rosen it was a vengeance. He was fighting God, a ridiculous little old man, fighting the murderous God of Israel. He had great energy, that old man; he could have made an empire. We all could have made an empire, couldn’t we have, but we were always too busy fighting and loving God, the bastard, God, how I love him, and how I hate.
“I lived there, and while Rosen was at the store I cared for Katrina. I kissed her when she was sick, furiously. I know I shouldn’t have, but I often approached the bed and kissed her, kissed her hot face and held her to me until she sighed and slept. She was weak but she gripped me with all the strength she had, all the strength of a delicate young girl of eighteen who was dying. When I kissed her I was saying to God, ‘God don’t you see how strong she was and how beautiful? Don’t take her. Don’t take her.’
“On the twelfth of January, Rosen was at the store and I was making tea for Katrina. At that time the doctor came four times a day. She was burning. I was making tea for Katrina and the gas stove was buckling and burning. She called me, in almost a whisper, and she said, ‘Aryeh, Aryeh, do you know the lights that Christians have on their Christmas trees, the lights with a column of bubbling water? When you turn them on they bubble after a little while. Please get me some. I think if I see them I’ll get better. I feel better, and I want to look at some light.’
“I became terribly excited. At last she is better, I thought. When I get the lights she will be better. I had faith in omens and I was sure that Katrina would not die, that the lights would be the things which would make her better and restore to her a natural color. It was the first time in months she had said she felt better. The lights I was sure could make her able to walk with me in the park, and catalogue her books at the store, and make love, and run about and laugh as she was so fond of doing. She was wild, Katrin’, just wild the way she would jump around and scream and grab onto me and kiss me as if her life depended on it.
“I went all around Kingsbridge, looking for that type of Christmas light. I couldn’t find it. The merchants said that all Christmas lights had been returned to the factory. ‘There’s no need for them,’ one said. ‘Of course there is,’ I said. ‘No there isn’t. Nobody needs them. It’s January twelfth and nobody needs Christmas lights.’
“So I went to the phone book and called Christmas Tree Light Companies. There are dozens in New York. Only one had a supply. They sent me to their warehouse, on Sedgwick Street in Brooklyn. Do you know where Sedgwick Street is? It’s near the docks, in a tough neighborhood. I was not afraid to go there. I stood in front in the subway and urged it on like a jockey on a horse and I paid no attention to the cold wind. It just made my face red, and I rushed through Brooklyn running in the sleet to Sedgwick Street. It’s a Puerto Rican section, and I smelled arroz con polio from the little restaurants. I went right to the warehouse, near the harbor, which is the sea. The sleet fell into the sea and the sea swayed up against the gray stone wall and sprayed the street, and I entered the place. It was lit by a few naked bulbs.
“A little bald man was yelling at five or six blacks. He was fierce. He cursed them. He abused them. He called them names and gave them precise instructions.
“I ran up to him and took him by the shoulders. He smelled of oil, or perhaps it was from the sea, or a truck fueling outside. I said, ‘My wife is dying. Give me Christmas tree lights, the kind that bubble, and maybe she will be better.’
“He thought I was crazy. He thought I was a madman, especially since I was red and soaking wet and trembling all over. ‘Christmas tree lights?’ he said. ‘All right, how many?’ ‘Just one set,’ I said, ‘one set. Please hurry.’
“He gave me a strange look and then called his men together. ‘You see this boy,’ he said, ‘his wife is dying, so he needs the kind of lights that bubble, model three, you know, who’s gonna get them for him?
’ They laughed. The whole warehouse was steaming, cold, and dark. Shreds of red packing on the floor made the place look like a battlefield where many men had been slaughtered. The oil smoke was choking. Someone must have been clearing a chimney nearby. One finally spoke. ‘I’ll get them,’ he said, ‘I know where they are.’ He was a thin black man. He looked like he was dying himself, from the labor, from the cold, and he ran to a freight elevator. In a minute he was back, smiling and graceful as he ran. He gave me the lights. He said, ‘Take off man.’ The bald-headed man said, ‘Wait, don’t you believe in paying?’ But the other man said, ‘Take off!’ and threw his arm violently outward, toward the door. ‘You don’t got time, go!’ and I left, running.”
Biferman and Harold reached the edge of the park where Biferman was to go one way and Harold the other. They stood in the field still under the stars which in the clear air of blackest night were violent in their cool sparkling. Biferman went on, in the cold wind, as red as he had been in the sleet of that January.
“It took me so long to get home, but when I did I ran all the way from the subway to the Rosens’. I was planning a party. When we were engaged she had worn a dress of black velvet, and when we drank champagne I took her into the hall and we stood by the tricycles, kissing. A little boy came out of another apartment and gasped. Katrin’ laughed although she was concerned that he was so worried.
“I was planning as I ran, a get-well party, even though I had always been afraid of parties. It would be so joyous—to have such a party.
“Rosen was not yet home from the store. I unpacked the lights and tiptoed into Katrina’s room. It was so quiet. I could hear the wind outside but I did not notice the sound of her breathing. I had already plugged in the lights when I realized she was not breathing. I clipped them to a white curtain, one by one, until they were strung out gaily in a chain. There were about twenty of them, a deluxe set. I knew she was not breathing. My plan was to let the lights warm up and start to bubble before I awakened her. I could not hear her breathing, but I pretended that I could, for a long time, until the lights were warm. And when they started to bubble and they cast a beautiful warm light and I could feel the heat from them, a red glow on my face, I said through my tears, ‘Katrina...’ and she did not answer. ‘Katrina,’ I said, ‘Katrina my love ... Katrin’?...I brought you the lights.’ She did not answer.”