The Baker

by Paul Hond

  “Yes, a divorce!” said Emi, rising to his mirth. “We are free to do what we want.” It was becoming clear to Mickey that they were striking a bargain of convenience, but Mickey sensed a real love galloping alongside their practical needs, keeping up, determined to make their union legitimate.

  “But a small ceremony,” he said. Discretion would be best, he thought; none of the pomp and circumstance—announcements in the paper, overflowing banquet hall, eight-piece band, multitiered cake—that attended Joe’s wedding three years ago.

  “And nothing religious,” said Emi.

  Mickey thought about that for a moment. She had a point. Why bring religion into it? Aside from attending shul with Morris on the High Holidays, and loathing every minute of it, Mickey hadn’t a religious bone in his body. But still he wondered about Emi. “What are you?” he said. “I mean, religion-wise?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Unless Marxism is a religion, but I don’t think it is.”

  “Marxism?” said Mickey. “You mean communism?” The word gave him a thrill of international peril; for a moment he was Sean Connery in a hotel room. “Very interesting.” He scratched his head. Morris and Joe would have some opinions about this.

  “Do you know it?” said Emi.

  “Sure,” said Mickey, though in truth he had no real concept of communism, save for its being the Number One threat to world peace—you had Castro, and Ho Chi Minh, you had the Russians and Mao and the radicals running wild at the colleges—but for some reason the idea didn’t really bother him that much. In fact, he felt a stir of excitement at the prospect of shocking his peers.

  “You’re disgusted,” said Emi. She frowned, then reached into the crumple of blankets and pulled up a white nightshirt. She put it on. “You believe in the capitalist dream.”

  “Who, me?” Mickey said. He rubbed his eye. “Never gave it much thought.”

  “My father hated communism with a passion.”

  Mickey had forgotten that she had a family. “What does he do?”

  “He had a textile factory in the suburbs.”

  “But you don’t talk to him.”

  “When I was young,” Emi said, “he threatened to break my hands. It was after my mother died. He thought I wasn’t his. Perhaps he was right.”

  Mickey was at a loss. “I’m sorry,” he said. He sat on the bed and smoothed out the robe over his knees, remembering a promise that he had made to himself after his father’s death: that he’d marry a girl from a large and loving family, so as to provide their children—and Mickey himself—with the tribal abundance that he had longed for even as a child.

  Emi sat down beside him, took his hand in hers. Mickey put his arm around her and held her close.

  “I’m cold,” she said. Her teeth chattered.

  Mickey pulled back the blankets, and without a word they maneuvered their bodies underneath and covered up.

  Emi said, “I like you very much.”

  “It feels good, being next to you,” Mickey said. He held her tight.

  “But I am afraid,” she said. “I’m not ready to be a mother.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “A baby. Especially if it is a boy. I am afraid it will become like my father.” She shivered.

  “Don’t worry,” Mickey told her. “Everything will be okay.” He had no idea if this was true, but his voice seemed to put both of them at ease, for the moment.

  Emi closed her eyes. Mickey watched her for a while, then drifted off.

  The phone rang. Mickey, awakened, reached across Emi and picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Mickey! It’s starting, Mickey! I told you! I goddamn told you!”

  Mickey sat up. “Joe, what’s going on?” There was noise in the background. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in a phone booth. I was in the store, boarding up my windows, and I heard glass. I ran out, and a whole gang was in front of Marv’s place. Listen! Can you hear?”

  There were shouts and ringing alarms and explosions of glass.

  “What the hell’s going on? Joe!” The line crackled, went dead.

  Emi opened her eyes.

  “Joe? Joe!” Mickey slammed down the receiver. “Son of a bitch!” He hopped out of bed and began dressing.

  “What is it?” Emi said. She yawned.

  “Something happened,” Mickey said. “Down at my friend’s store. Looks like there’s trouble.”

  “What?” Emi sat up. “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be back,” he said. He was hardly thinking, but he savored the kiss he planted on Emi’s head, and the look in her eyes that told him she was worried for him.

  “Mickey!”

  “Stay here,” Mickey said. He felt a strange lightness as he skipped down the stairs, a weightlessness, as of a balloon let go.

  He drove all the way down to Pennsylvania Avenue, but instead of turning left on North Avenue to go to Joe’s place, he turned right on a sudden impulse, heading west. It would just take a minute, but he had to do it, had to check on the bakery, it was just a few short blocks away, just beyond the corridor of dilapidated row houses through which he now passed, and the sporadic places of business—Lake Trout, Package Goods, Checks Cashed Here, Afro Cut, Wash and Dry, Sister Eunice Palm Reading and Psychic Consultation—which reflected the “changes” that certain of his customers would grumble about as Mickey rang up their purchases. Mickey noticed that on several windows of the colored businesses the words “Soul Brother” had been spray-painted in large white letters—the only evidence of vandalism that Mickey had yet seen.

  The west side was surprisingly quiet under the cold night sky; the Negroes on the sidewalks moved about in their usual slow, graceful, truculent way, wool caps pulled down tight over their dark heads, eyes flashing. There was a distinct sadness in the air, perhaps an anger, but not a violence; it was hard to believe that just a couple of miles away, Joe Blank was under attack.

  There was the Lerner Bakery, sitting anonymously in its strip of stores. There were no people around at all, nor had his windows been defaced with painted slogans.

  Satisfied, Mickey made a U-turn and sped east. He turned on the radio, and heard a bulletin ordering motorists to avoid the very area to which he was headed, due to “disturbances.”

  Mickey was amazed by the change that had come over him. The Mickey of old, he considered, would have obeyed the warning and done his citizen’s best to cooperate; whereas the new Mickey, the one who was about to marry a Communist and have a kid, the new Mickey kept driving, determined to reach Joe in his critical hour. The new Mickey understood the meaning of loyalty to one’s friends; he didn’t think of the costs. Why else would he be speeding across town, heading into a war zone? What else could this be, if not fierce brotherly devotion, a call to arms in the name of friendship? And yet there was this nagging sense, as he crossed Charles Street to the east side, his knuckles marbled yellow and white on the steering wheel, that he wasn’t so much running toward something as he was being chased, pursued by phantoms into the fires that he could begin to make out ahead: dim flickers beyond rooftops, suggesting furnaces, steel. But of course it was the very opposite of industry.

  Ahead he could see police activity: the intersection at Greenmount Avenue was blocked off by several squad cars, lights awhirl. Mickey could see trash cans burning along the curbs, and on the sidewalk was an overturned car: it lay like a senselessly murdered animal. Scores of Negroes massed in the street, sizing up the meager police presence. The spinning lights of the squad cars suggested a kind of apocalyptic dance floor; the Negroes seemed down to it.

  Mickey cursed aloud and backed up to the next street, exhilarated by the chaos, seeing in it the roar of rebellion, the struggle toward freedom—and saw, too, the gunfire of his own being flash into the darkness of Emi’s womb, kindling fires there, lighting the way to a different life, it didn’t matter what sort, so long as it was different from the one he’d been leading, or rather following, for nearly
thirty goddamned years.

  “Revolution is possible only through violence,” Joe had once read aloud, his eyes burning into the newspaper from which he was quoting some campus rabble-rouser who was paraphrasing Marx. It was intended to get Mickey to understand the importance of obliterating the Marxist enemy everywhere on the globe, and now the phrase came back to him with the eloquence of a homespun truth.

  He drove south two blocks and turned left. A dozen or more Negroes came tearing around the corner on foot; some ran over the tops of cars, and Mickey braked as they passed: they shouted and shrieked, toppling cans, smashing the windshields of parked cars with pipes and sticks. A moment later, several policemen in riot gear came lumbering round the same corner, hurdling the rolling cans, clubs raised, boots clacking with their gasping, ponderous strides.

  They were all coming from Joe’s block. “Jesus,” Mickey heard himself say. “Jesus God.” He backed out of the street and continued south, his thoughts and prayers so feverishly with Joe that he was no longer afraid.

  He drove around the block and stopped at the corner. He looked to the right, and could hardly believe what he saw: two cars were parked on the sidewalk in front of Joe’s store—not pushed there by an angry mob, or abandoned by terrorized motorists, but arranged defensively. In front of this fortress and atop it stood several large Negroes, all holding baseball bats. The words SOUL BROTHER had been painted in white on the store windows.

  Mickey recalled the old Passover story, the one in which the Angel of Death passes over the land and slays every male child, sparing only the ones whose homes are marked.

  Across the street, a few youths were picking over some ladies’ discount apparel that had been dragged through the broken windows of Marv Kandel’s.

  Mickey pulled up in front of Joe’s store. The “guards” were stone-faced. Mickey rolled down his window. “Excuse me,” he said to the man closest to him. “I’m a friend of Joe Blank’s. Is he okay? Where is he?”

  The guard waved him along. Mickey turned his head: the youths in front of Marv Kandel’s were taking a break from their looting to have a look at him.

  “Drive!” said the guard.

  Another of Joe’s men kicked the back of the car. “Joe Blank home,” he said. “Now get the fuck outta here!”

  Mickey stepped on the gas and screeched down the street. Something glanced off his back window; a stone: it left a small seashell impression in the glass.

  Mickey drove faster. Was Joe really home? Mickey wasn’t sure what to make of it.

  Up and down every street small fires burned; fire trucks kept coming toward him, and as they passed he felt the odd sensation of leaving the scene of his own desperate crimes.

  When he returned home he heard laughter in the kitchen.

  “Germapelle Morris,” came a voice.

  “No, no, no. Jzuh.”

  “Juh.”

  “Je m’appelle Morris.”

  “Germapelle Morris.”

  Mickey walked back, cleared his throat.

  “Is that you, Mickey?” Morris called.

  “Who else would it be?”

  “Well, according to the news reports, you could be a big colored fella coming to loot the icebox.”

  Mickey entered the kitchen, where Emi and Morris were seated at the table, drinking coffee. There was a fresh pot on the stove. “Don’t laugh,” Mickey said. “I just saw it for myself, down near North and Greenmount. They’re setting fires everywhere.” Emi, he saw, was wearing a pair of his pajamas; he couldn’t meet her eyes. “To tell you the truth, I’m worried about the bakery.” He took off his overcoat and draped it over the back of a chair.

  Morris waved his hand. “Don’t worry. Our genius governor is calling in the militia. The first smart thing he’s ever done.”

  “Good.” Mickey felt some relief; he had thought of going back to the bakery with a can of spray paint to write SOUL BROTHER on the windows, but was stopped by an unhappy vision of being caught in the act by passersby. Now there’d be no need; the troops were coming.

  “We even got a curfew,” said Morris. “Eleven tonight to six in the morning. I can’t ever remember such a thing.”

  Emi spoke up. “Mickey. What did you see?”

  Mickey didn’t look at her. “Fires,” he said. “And glass.” He felt a chill. “Glass all over the street.”

  “Why the hell were you out in such a mess?” said Morris.

  Mickey had to think for a moment. “I went down to check on Joe Blank—he called, and it sounded—”

  “Joe Blank. He called while you were gone.”

  “He did? What did he say? Where is he?”

  “He’s home,” Morris said. “Wanted to know if we still didn’t want to hire anyone to look after the store. I says to him, ‘That’s what we got federal troops for.’ ‘Suit yourself,’ he says. I says, ‘You want me to pay money to have the foxes guard the henhouse.’ ”

  Mickey sat down at the table. Emi got up and went to the stove.

  “Money,” Mickey muttered to himself. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t afford to pay for any protection—not with the slew of expenses that would be visited upon him in eight short months. He said, “Sid Kandel’s place got hit pretty bad.”

  Morris looked up. “Was Sid or Marv in the store?”

  “No. It was closed already.”

  “And I suppose Joe Blank’s place was as safe as Fort Knox.”

  “Just about,” said Mickey. Emi returned with a hot cup of coffee and set it in front of him. Their eyes met: Mickey detected a kind of nurselike admiration there, as if for his valor, and he did his best to look like a soldier in gloomy recovery.

  She kissed him lightly on the head.

  Mickey shuddered, then looked down into his steaming mug. He saw a ghost of his image there, quivering in the black liquid; he blew lightly onto the surface.

  Emi took Morris’s empty cup. “Encore du café, monsieur?”

  “What’s that?”

  “More coffee?”

  “Wee. Anker doo k’fay.”

  “Très bien, Morris. À bientôt.”

  “Al Biento,” said Morris. He took Emi’s hand and held it a moment too long. “Means ‘See ya soon,’ right?”

  “Très bien, Morris.”

  “Ya hear that, Mickey? Al Biento.”

  Emi smiled at no one in particular and went back to pour more coffee. Morris leaned over and spoke into Mickey’s ear. “Marry this one,” he said, with the same hint of illicit knowledge he used when telling others which horse to bet on at the track. But Mickey could tell that his uncle was still reeling from his French lesson, still drunk on the scent of Emi’s shampoo; it had been a good fifteen years since his wife left him because he couldn’t give her a child.

  The next day, Mickey took Emi to a place a little ways down the road where you could get pancakes made in any style you could imagine, even the French style. On the parking lot of a shopping center less than half a mile from the house, soldiers with fixed bayonets stood at fifty-yard intervals. It was a sunny day, cool, almost a plea from Nature for calm. Through the window of the restaurant, Mickey watched a convoy of military vehicles pass, their headlights shining.

  Strange, he thought, that they were all the way out here, on the edge of the city. Had the rioting spread, or was this a precaution? It seemed unlikely that there should be something other than peace on this Sunday morning; the troops were here with their rifles, their tear gas, and didn’t most colored go to church?

  He looked at Emi, who was examining color photos of the world’s pancakes on the menu, seemingly oblivious to the drama unfolding in the streets. He remembered what Joe had said—how the Communists would be the first to cheer the violence. He had even read a brief article in the paper that morning, saying how Mao over in China was publicly encouraging blacks to “fight on” to victory against the imperialist enemy. Evidently, the Chinese leader considered King a lackey of the U.S. government who had done nothing but suppress the
revolution. The statements out of Peking expressed no regret over what happened in Memphis, and Mickey could only wonder if Emi shared those heartless views.

  “Mickey? Is something wrong?”

  “No.” He looked down at his plate. There was something else bothering him; something Joe had said that had nothing to do with politics. “I was wondering.”

  “Yes?”

  He thought it wise to bring the subject up in a public place, where she was less apt to have an outburst. “Is it crazy,” he said, “for me to wonder if I’m the actual father of—”

  “Yes,” she said firmly. “Of course it’s crazy.”

  She had been ready for this question; her quick response betrayed a knowledge of Mickey’s heart. Mickey let out a self-effacing laugh and shook his head.

  Emi softened and touched his hand. “I understand why you ask,” she said, almost contrite, as though he had done a brave and respectable thing in asking, as though most men wouldn’t have asked, but demanded, and then only between blows. “But you are the only one. It’s true.”

  Mickey nodded. She sounded sincere as hell, and meanwhile Joe Blank had never been right about anything in his life, save maybe for the riots. Screw Joe Blank.

  A middle-aged waitress with gold hair bundled a foot high, a pincushion for pencils, came by and said, “Don’t mean to rush you folks, but we’re closin’ up early. Curfew’s at four o’clock, ‘cordin’ to the radio, and the fella does dishes has to get a bus all the way down Cherry Hill.”

  Mickey checked his watch: it was already after one. Truth be told, he wasn’t even hungry, and could tell by the way Emi was looking at the menu that she wasn’t very impressed with the selection. The French crepes and the Belgian waffles she’d probably had in France and Belgium. She ordered only orange juice, and Mickey did the same.