by Steve Stern
Hershel Tarnopol hopped excitedly in his patched plus fours beside his bullnecked father, whose volatile temper seemed uncharacteristically restrained this evening. He was carrying a lump of dough the size of a bowling ball, which, without ceremony, he flung toward the murky pond. The dough was still in the air when a huge pewter fish with scales like a coat of mail broke the surface, stretching its mouth impossibly wide to swallow the ball then diving back into the water with a mighty splash. “Mazel tov, Papa!” shouted Hershel, doing a squelchy hornpipe while the blacksmith, slumped in his undershirt, looked as spent as if he’d rolled aside the stone from his tomb.
At a signal from their baggy-eyed rebbe, the Shpinkers released from their slingshots a blizzard of ryebread crumbs that caused an equivalent storm of hungry blackbirds to swoop toward the bayou. “Grandstanders,” sneered Pinchas in disgust, swatting a mosquito at his neck with his open palm. Then his eyes strayed beyond the water to an out-of-step phalanx approaching from the Shadyac Avenue side of the bay. It was in the nature of a counterparade that turned out to be, as they drew nearer, a delegation of local members of the Ku Klux Klan. They were decked out in their Halloween finest, white robes and pointed hoods, several of them carrying a large wooden cross horizontally on their shoulders like pallbearers. Muni’s stomach tensed at the mob’s resemblance to one of those Old Country Easter processions that were often the prelude to a pogrom, but the North Main Streeters retained their holiday mood, seeming if anything more amused than afraid. In fact, they began to make a game out of identifying the men beneath the robes.
“There’s Joe Hankus Munro,” said Mr. Bluestein. “I sold him the sheet he wears that it’s cut on the bias.” It was a signature feature his fellow citizens would recognize, as Mr. Bluestein, the tailor, was also a mohel.
“That one’s Early Dewlily, the chandler, and that’s the druggist Lyle Sugg,” cited Leon Shapiro, asking the assembled to note the quality of the material they wore. “You can’t get from Pin’s Merchandise linen like that,” he boasted for the benefit of chafing his business rival.
Pinchas took the bait: “It’s shmattes compared to the muslin Ernest Poteet that he buys in my store.” He pointed to the silk-trimmed robe with its elaborate insignia at the head of the procession, its wearer daintily lifting the hem to keep it from being soiled.
They continued their sport of spotting the individuals behind their getups, this one by his tumescent belly, that one by his pigeon toes, even as the klavern came to a halt before the Jews.
“Howdo, Ernest,” said the neighborly Sam Alabaster to their leader, who replied, “Hidey, Sam,” before clearing his throat. Then he commenced a formal address to the North Main Street gathering in his capacity as Grand Syklops of the North Memphis Chapter of the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the White Kamelia. It was a mild, moonless twilight, the rustling of the Klansmen’s robes abetted here and there by Hershel Tarnopol, who stole among them lifting their skirts to reveal trousers rolled above hairy calves.
“As the symbol of our struggle to scourge our beloved Southland of the mongrel element that would contaminate our bloodline and pollute the purity of our womenhood,” declared the Syklops, a lawyer, in his syrupy drawl, “and as a warning against their satanic chicanery, we hereby plant the holy standard of Caucasian Christendom.”
A burly fellow in a crumpled white cowl stepped forward with a post-hole digger and punched a hole in the sludge. Then the team of cross bearers inserted the foot of the tall cypress cross into the hole, swiveling it as if turning a giant screw. Still the cross leaned at a precarious angle, and no amount of shoring it up with more mud and stones could keep it from tilting. Making do nonetheless, they doused the cross liberally with a canister of kerosene. One man struck a match and lit a stick of punk, which, at a word from the Syklops, he touched to the base of the cross. Instantly it was ignited, flames climbing the spar and fanning out along the transverse arms until the whole crackling rood was blindingly incandescent. Though it was not yet dark out, the brightness of the blaze banished the rest of the world to its obscurest perimeter. Everyone stood admiring the burning cross, some of the Jews even offering their compliments to the Klan—one of whom had just had his hood snatched by the impish Hershel. Exposed as Hiram Peay, a sleepy-eyed slinger of hash, the man raised his skirts and made stumblingly to give chase.
Then a grumbling was heard among the ranks of the masked intruders, some having grown impatient with symbols, however impressive, and a tension set in between the two opposing camps. Dr. Seligman mopped his brow with a monogrammed hankie and suggested it was maybe time to disperse, which was the cue for Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya to step resolutely forward. He shuffled near enough to the fire to endanger his beard from the sparks and removed a small bone box from his caftan. Opening the box, he took a pinch of snuff, stuffed it into his tuberous nose, and inhaled, after which he sneezed robustly and wiped his schnoz on his sleeve. “Gezuntheit!” chorused his disciples, as flames from the fiery cross shot high into the cobalt sky. The rabbi took another pinch, inhaled it into his other nostril, and sneezed again. “Gezuntheit!” went up like a cheer, and the flames rose even higher. From their vantage on the soggy embankment it seemed to the gathered parties that the conflagration had risen to the height of the clouds, igniting their fleece as surely as the punk had kindled the cross. A towering tree of flame now ascended from earth to the firmament, its trunk funneling like a cyclone that threatened to suck all and sundry into its swirl. Whipped by that incendiary wind, Jews and gentiles alike had to hold on to one another to keep from being swept away. (The exceptions being the lunatic Hasids, who tempted fate by joining hands to dance round the fire.) Soon the cypress cross was completely consumed, its torch absorbed into the billowing clouds that glowed an intense crimson hue before being doused by the night.
There was a general exhalation on the part of everyone in attendance. Some of the Jews muttered a hushed “Aleinu,” while the Klansmen, who may have secretly hoped to provoke just such a spectacle, yipped and slapped their thighs. The entire company seemed to share in the thrill of having witnessed indisputable evidence of an age of wonders.
Then Pinchas leaned toward Muni as if to whisper, though he made certain his voice was in earshot of one and all. “The rebbe,” he scoffed, “a showboat.”
Muni woke the next morning with a feeling akin to bliss. After all, he was no longer shackled to a plank bed alongside a dozen malodorous convicts in the prison barracks east of Irkutsk. Strangely, though, this was the first morning since his escape (had he really escaped?) from penal servitude that he’d been able to fully appreciate the fact. This was not to say he was entirely at peace with finding himself in the bosom of North Main Street on the first day of the Jewish New Year; the religious calendar had long since lost all meaning for him. Nor was he particularly sanguine about the future: measured optimism was his uncle’s department, who followed the doings of every international Jewish or Zionist congress with rapt attention. Muni had no stake in the future. It was just that this morning he was pleased to be waking to a room whose window was not glazed in ice, a room from which he was not harried in fetters into a hellishly cold dawn to mine mica schist. If he’d yet to make his peace with living in the Pinch, where the membrane between what was hidden and revealed seemed exceedingly thin, he was at least grateful to be shed of the past.
Moreover, the work he did for his uncle gave him a certain satisfaction, if only because the labor wasn’t forced. Staying busy kept the memories at bay, and when things were slow around the general merchandise, Muni solicited odd jobs among Pinchas’s neighbors, which he undertook for a little pocket change. He moonlighted for Saccharin’s Buffalo Fish Company, unloading refrigerator cars down at the depot at Poplar and Front, and sorted scrap metal in the overflowing compound of Blockman’s Junkyard. Initially the street had been wary of the gaunt-featured greenhorn, perhaps even a little afraid, for who knew how to welcome an immigrant fresh from the capital of koshmarin, of ni
ghtmares? Of course most had suffered bad dreams of their own; they understood what it took the newcomer to approach them trustfully, and his willingness to work soon put them at ease. Some even began to vie for his services.
On his free evenings Muni sat in a folding chair under the awning outside the store with his aunt and uncle. Now that the High Holidays had commenced, the neighborhood was swelled with the North Main Streeters’ relations, who had traveled to the Pinch to be within walking distance of its several synagogues. After services they too sat out on the sidewalks inhaling the heady aromas of strudel and pastries from Ridblatt’s Bakery. They listened to the gramophone the Widow Teitelbaum perched on her windowsill, playing marches, arias, and tangos such as “Too Much Mustard,” and watched the Shpinker Hasids chasing sparks from the passing trolley.
“Their rebbe tells them that at the Creation the Lord poured into the vessels that form the universe his divine light,” explained Pinchas. “But the light is too powerful for them to contain it, the vessels, so they plotz, kaboom, which scatters sparks throughout the world. These sparks, says ben Yahya, must be recovered and returned to the original source before can come the Messiah. So the nincompoops, they chase every flicker they see.” This included the lightning bugs coruscating in the alleys among clematis and morning glory vines. The Hasids netted them and carried them back to their shtibl above the feed store in pillow slips that flickered from their contents like desultory lanterns.
Muni knew the legend of the breaking of the vessels from his yeshiva days, but it hurt his brain to remember. It was a feeling like when he swallowed too fast the crushed ice in a cherry dope.
Sometimes in the evenings Jenny Bashrig would entertain the street with her wirewalking. Wearing a nainsook nightgown over drawstring pantaloons, her bare toes gripping the cable as the wisps of her midnight hair came undone, she gamboled above the alley between Rosen’s Delicatessen and Pin’s Merchandise. “La Funambula,” she called herself, as she bounced on the braided cord suspended from twin pulleys; she jumped rope and juggled lit candles with fingers that often seemed, at sea level, as if slathered in butter. In the past she’d performed to the Widow’s gramophone standards, but lately she was accompanied by the eldritch music of the Negro Asbestos standing in the alley beneath her. Muni had observed the girl bringing stuffed turkey necks and bowls of bay-leaf stew to the blind fiddler on his corner. From time to time his instrument was heard to echo the notes of the shofar from the nearby Market Square shul. He had even played teasing descants on the solemn “Kol Nidrei” as sung by Cantor Bielski, whose clarion voice rang the synagogue rafters. Some thought it blasphemous that the panhandling black man should ape the sacred music, but none seemed able to stop listening; nobody, with the exception of Pinchas Pin, held his ears.
Having situated his chair alongside the others in the street where the cobbles showed through the worn asphalt, Muni watched Jenny’s feats of equilibrium. In his gut he experienced a queasy sensation whose source he could not at first identify. Was he afraid she might fall? Then it came to him that he was jealous, not wishing to share a performance that should have been reserved exclusively for him.
Then it was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and the businesses along North Main Street were closed until sunset. Muni, having done penance enough in his day, was feeling unquiet, so he wandered south across Poplar Avenue to Nutty Iskowitz’s Green Owl Café. But even Nutty’s louche establishment, its interior papered with posters of main events at the Phoenix Boxing Arena, was emptied of its regular clientele. Its horse-faced proprietor was slumped in a booth, coughing thickly into a handkerchief, while across from him sat a stubble-cheeked gent smugly sipping his beer. Upon Muni’s entrance Nutty launched into a complaint in Yiddish: the goy—he nodded toward the teamster, who emitted a contented belch—claimed it was more than his job was worth to unload the delivery wagon himself. “There’s four bits in it for you,” he offered, “and a plate of trayf on the house.”
Muni was thankful for any respite from his aunt Katie’s cooking.
In the alley behind the café he set to work unloading the beer wagon, whose pair of crow-bait nags stood in their traces nickering and flicking flies with their tails. Alcohol was technically illegal in the city of Memphis, but the dry law was rarely enforced, only when saloonkeepers failed to pay their monthly sops to Mayor Crump’s myrmidons. Muni rolled the heavy wooden barrels backward down a sagging two-by-four ramp from the bed of the wagon, then wrestled them into the hatch of a second incline that sloped into Nutty’s cellar. It was the kind of laborious task to which his body had become habituated during his exile, and while it revived a thousand dormant aches, the work nevertheless soothed his brain. Although it was late September, the summer was making a blistering last stand, and sweating buckets, Muni removed his dank broadcloth shirt. He noted in so doing the similarity of his own to the panpipe ribs of the draft horses—this despite his aunt’s starchy diet—and wondered when he might regain even the meager weight of his student years; though flesh, he reflected, was the least of what he’d lost in his trials. At the bottom of the ramp, Muni rested his hands a moment on his knees. He began slowly to straighten his sore back, when his blood surged from the touch of strange fingers along his spine. Coming sharply to attention, he turned to find himself face-to-face with the fiddler Asbestos.
“Vos machstu! What you doink?”
“Bend over again,” came a husky contralto (though the fiddler’s lips had yet to move) and from behind him stepped the whip-thin Jenny Bashrig. She was wearing one of her formless dun-white smocks, which contrasted rather fetchingly with the shapeliness of her athletic limbs. Gazing at her, however, Muni was still unable to square the ungraceful waitress with the daredevil who danced on a string. “He wants to feel your stripes,” she said.
“Vos ret ir epes?”
“Say it in English,” she urged, as if to encourage his facility with the American tongue—though why should she care?
“What are you talking?”
“He wants to feel the stripes on your back.”
Suddenly Muni was self-conscious, acutely aware of the wounds he’d suffered over the fearful years. The “stripes” she referred to were welts raised by the knout employed arbitrarily by prison guards—the knout being a treated hide thong embedded with metal filings and a hook fastened to its supple end. It inflicted such pain, tearing flesh from bone in strips like peeled bark, that the victim usually lost consciousness by the third stroke. Muni had of course never seen his own wounds, but he imagined them as a sort of topographical map leading back to the torments he’d fled. Sometimes he asked himself if you could judge an escape successful when its itinerary remained etched in your skin.
He continued to look at the girl in utter bewilderment.
“That’s how he makes his music,” she explained, which was no explanation at all.
“Nu?”
Her voice had a hint of the honeyed inflection of a native speaker. “He reads the stripes on the backs of former slaves and makes from them his musical compositions.” She told him he had exhausted his stock of the old freedmen living down around Beale Street and had come to North Main looking for Israelites who still bore the signs of their captivity. “That would be you,” she submitted.
Muni tried to think of an argument against allowing the blind man to fondle his scars. It was some kind of rude violation, wasn’t it? To say nothing of the bizarre proposition that such ugly excrescences could be translated into musical scores. But the girl looked at him so appealingly with her serious, doe-soft eyes that he thought he might be willing to do a thing or two to oblige her. He might do things for her that made no earthly sense. Such as kneeling in the unpaved alley, leaning over the top of a barrel and hugging the plywood staves, as the fiddler’s cool mocha fingers began to describe the marks on his back. The sob that welled up in his chest had nothing to do with physical pain; there was no pain, only a stirring of unwelcome recollections.
“Why is he
called Asbestos?” asked Muni, in a bluff effort to suppress the intensity of his feelings.
This time he was answered by the man himself, chuckling breezily as he spoke: “’Cause I playing as best as I can.”
Later that night Muni was slogging across the frozen surface of Catfish Bayou, following tracks left by the blades of dogsleds, leaning into the biting wind. He could no longer feel his feet, and the numbness that crept up his legs would soon engulf the rest of him; it would stall his progress and leave him to become another changeless feature of the frozen landscape. With each faltering tread his boots fractured the jade-green ice, the cracks sending out branches in all directions, the branches sprouting tendrils until the whole bayou was a lacy fretwork of rupture. Then the entire expanse of the pond collapsed beneath him like a breaking mirror. But instead of plunging into the icy depths, Muni hung suspended, held aloft by a pair of strong arms. He opened his eyes to find himself in the firm embrace of La Funambula. The strains of a nearby violin released splinters of sound that shot across the night sky like comets, their peacocks’ tails showering sparks over the couple below. Muni nuzzled Jenny Bashrig’s spice-scented hair, felt her small breasts crushed against his chest, and was proud to be holding her as staunchly as she held him. Then the music became more tempestuous, and Muni was abruptly aware that he’d been sleepwalking. Fully awake now, he was standing with the flesh-and-blood girl on her tightrope above the alley. A dizzy dread overcame him, and, tottering dangerously, he lost his balance, while Jenny, attempting to steady him, held on to Muni as he fell.