The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  All heads turned to watch a downed sycamore sailing past at a respectable clip. It was straddled by Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya’s band of fanatics making for their Commerce Avenue shtibl. The rabbi himself, seated like a bosun astride the roots at the stern, exhorted his disciples manning brick trowels to put their backs into it. No sooner had they passed than a thickset creature caked in mud and brandishing a rod and reel came splashing along the street from the northern end. Children squealed: how many golems had the quake set free? But their parents assured them that this one was only the blacksmith Tarnopol emerged from the quicksand around Catfish Bayou.

  All that afternoon and into the evening the Pinch was a hive of industry to which Muni gladly lent a hand. Boats sailed into the inlet at Auction Street, where the farmers sold live chickens and potatoes by the bushel in the muddy wagonyard; then laden with fresh cargo, the boats sailed back to the busy port of North Main. A bucket brigade transferred water from a working pump above a horse trough in front of the No. 7 firehouse. Wriggling fish were snatched from the ooze of the largely drained bayou and brought to Mr. Saccharin and his minions to be pickled and smoked. In lieu of coal the wood from fallen lintels and windowsills was broken up and fed to cookstoves cobwebbed in soot. The population organized by lantern light, like a squadron of will-o’-the-wisps, a kind of triage with regard to the crooked structures themselves. With whipsaws donated by Hekkie’s Hardware they cut down the cottonwoods growing in the backyards and alleys, some of whose trunks were already split from the quake. They hewed the scrub locusts that the tremors had caused to twine like cadeucei. With them they boarded up and buttressed the walls of the canted buildings, left them leaning on crutches like wounded soldiers.

  Though working after dark had its hazardous element, the neighbors were not fearful in the least. For one thing, they were aware of being aided in some of the riskier tasks by shadowy figures holding ladders and even driving home nails—that is, when those same bantam creatures weren’t removing the ladders from under them and hammering their thumbs. They were also aware of an access to unusual energies and, despite their swag bellies and duodenal ulcers, a shared capacity for physical exertion forgotten since their distant youth. In the morning they would review their handiwork and find that it lent the street an extemporaneous aspect, like the crazy town constructed by the legendary fools of Chelm. But tonight they were conscious only of the theatricality of their labors, as if they were at once the perpetrators and spectators of their actions. It was a consciousness they took with them to their beds—which slid along the sloping floors of foundered apartments—where they slept a righteous sleep above the moonlit lagoon.

  Having spent himself in strenuous activity along with the others, Muni had also surrendered to a well-earned slumber, though he’d lain awake for hours on his cot. From his off-kilter room over the store he was still able to hear the hammers and saws (though their noise had altogether ceased) and the fiddle. Retiring for the night, he had himself witnessed the fiddler Asbestos emerging from the security of a floating steamer trunk, whose lid sprang open to release a mordant music. Not without a nod to melody, the blind man’s fiddling remained a grave counterpoint to the evening’s chimerical atmosphere. But while it might once have taunted him, tonight Muni thought the music was rather catchy; it bore him up the way it had Jenny in her rope-dancing days. Strange that he’d scarcely thought of the girl during his labors, as he dangled light-headedly from the shaky scaffolding he was helping to erect. Only at the brink of sleep had he recalled that he was a young man in love, dwelling in an extraordinary land. It was a condition he perceived as a memory even as the experience unfolded.

  He was awakened by her tapping at what was left of the window sash. Opening his bleary eyes, he rubbed them until he was certain that he saw what he saw: Jenny standing again in midair. Her onyx-black hair was slipping out of its twist, her white cotton shift slightly billowing, her dark eyes possessing depths beyond sounding. But rather than bouncing on a rope, this morning she swayed a bit jerkily from side to side. When Muni had bundled himself in his sheet and shuffled still half-asleep to the window, he saw that her coltish legs appeared to have grown overnight to an inordinate length. There were many things he supposed he would have to get used to in this curious new order.

  “Kiss me?” she invited, and though he hesitated an irresolute beat—for when had he waked to such a proposition?—it never occurred to him that he could do other than oblige. Poking his head out the window, Muni tasted her lips, hungrily as it happened, their saltiness reinvigorating the living current between them. Catching his breath, he looked down to see the twin tupelo poles extending from beneath her shift into the sodden alley below. Stilts. Resourceful girl, she must have manufactured them during the night. “Funny thing,” she said, reeling a little herself from the embrace. “It’s a new day but also the same one as yesterday. How can that be?”

  Muni nodded at the assertion and knew it was true. That it was also impossible seemed somehow irrelevant. He made a mental note to ask his uncle to explain the phenomenon, as Jenny beckoned him to climb on board. “You nuts?” he wanted to know, which she confirmed. So he asked her not to look (though she did anyway) as he dropped the sheet in order to pull on his shirt and pants over his drawers. Then he clambered gingerly across the jagged window ledge onto the lyre-like curve of Jenny’s back. With his feet he discovered the pegs on which her own bare feet rested and clasped his hands around her firm waist, amazed that such an unprecedented act should feel so natural.

  “Shouldn’t we be afraid?” he wondered.

  “What’s to be afraid?” Then she took a giant step pretending to stumble, which made Muni yip with fright.

  En route she offered him a poppyseed pastry dug from the pocket of her shift, which he scarfed up with gusto though it was stale. All his appetites, it seemed, were wide awake. The street from their tottering elevation had the quality of appearing both authentic and illusory, the familiar buildings in their unplumb incarnations utterly strange. Old North Main Street was at the same time itself and a fanciful stage version of itself, its properties bolstered up and likely to fall apart at any moment. But the players, as they went about the business of attempting to salvage their goods, most of which were unredeemable, appeared unconcerned with the imminent collapse of their shops and homes. Several sailed the coppery lagoon in their makeshift vessels to no particular purpose, all of them clearly in a holiday mood.

  The Days of Awe were still weeks away, but the quake and its dramatic aftermath had enforced, for better or worse, an interlude from the ordinary run of things—and there seemed to be the conviction at large in those irrigated streets that time was stalled. Of course there was as yet no real evidence beyond the stopped clocks that such a situation obtained. Yesterday morning had advanced into afternoon, afternoon ebbed into evening, and there was every expectation the same pattern would recur today. In fact, the exquisite clarity of this morning’s robin’s egg sky was the looking-glass image of the day before. It was safe to assume that the world beyond Poplar Avenue persisted as usual, commerce along the river was uninterrupted, and society east of Alabama Street adhered to its seasonal calendar. But the Pinch, no longer landlocked, was quarantined (it was generally agreed) by a species of time that had relinquished its linear progress.

  Today (which was Monday?) could also be said to contain other Mondays, and Wednesdays, other years. Uncle Pinchas had early on advised his nephew that time was prone to a certain elasticity in the Pinch, due to the cabalistic meddling of the crackbrained fanatics in their midst. And this morning, as Muni and Jenny tramped on stilts through the altered landscape, they passed into and out of odd patches—beneath the shadow of a bridge ramp that trembled from vehicles passing overhead, past saddled horses tethered at a trough in front of a galleried saloon—that did not conform to the current scene. That scene involved whole families filling striped pillowslips with sand from the boils that had erupted around the bottomless pit in the park;
these they piled in front of the shops to make embankments that would confine the lagoon to a canal no wider than the street itself. Some of the sandbags they transported by raft to the bayou to construct a dike across the initial breach. They worked, Muni’s neighbors, with the steadfast diligence of pyramid builders, though their labors seemed also to partake of equal parts make-believe.

  “Jenny,” said Muni who needed her compliance, “we’re having fun, no?”

  “You,” replied Jenny with feigned irritation, all the while manning her stilts like a natural extension of her legs, minus the limp, “you wouldn’t know fun if it bit your hiney. Anyhow, after a flood doesn’t usually come cholera and dysentery? So how is it we got instead a seagoing jamboree?”

  Indeed, some of the neighbors navigating the channel could be heard shouting to one another in half-baked nautical terms. They cursed like sailors as they slung more bags atop the pillowcase parapet, behaving in their newfound swagger as prodigally as their offspring, whose summer vacation from school was now indefinitely extended. Some of the children, having captured the rebbe’s headless golem, were using its hollow corpus as a flotation device, though it continued to show signs of a twitching animation. Others gawked at the play of their reflections in the shop windows, which had acquired irregular features such as halos and donkey heads. In his exuberance Muni took the liberty of nibbling Jenny’s ear, prompting laughter that resulted in a dangerous wobbling. Self-conscious, he looked about to see who might have observed them, though a couple canoodling on stilts above standing water scarcely constituted a special attraction on such a morning.

  They had taken a turn around the lagoon and arrived back at the entrance to Pin’s General Merchandise. There Muni slid down the twin poles onto the rampart, picked the splinters from his palms, and waded into the broth that engulfed the store. Above him Jenny abandoned the stilts to step through an upstairs window. Inside, Uncle Pinchas, pants rolled to the knees, was bailing water with a brass cuspidor. He seemed to be making headway, since the previously boggy depth was diminished to a shallow sludge.

  “Nu, Uncle,” said Muni, but Pinchas scarcely acknowledged him. He tried again with a jovial Old Country greeting, “Uncle Pinchas, how fares a Yid?”

  Pinchas paused in his activity to give his nephew a look through moisture-beaded spectacles. Apparently satisfied that the young man was as addled as the rest of his community, he said with a grim defiance, “How do you think?”

  Muni took in the bowed walls and blistered counters already smutted with fungus, the warped glove cases and scrap albums fat with scalloped pages the proprietor was trying to flatten with C-clamps. Few commodities remained unspoiled: the dry goods were drenched, sacks of spuds sending runner-like eyes through their burlap—though (Muni found himself thinking) wasn’t a ravaged business finally incidental in the scheme of things? Why did his uncle seem so resistant to the general levity? Pinchas had exchanged the cuspidor for a box of lumpy corn starch, which he began sprinkling over his dripping inventory as a de-humidifyi ng agent. Muni gently grasped the arm that shook the box. “So, Uncle,” he said, “explain me again what happened.” For hadn’t he always relied on Pinchas to make sense of this singular neighborhood? And perhaps in explaining, his uncle would snap out of his mood.

  “What can I tell you?” he said. “The Pinch is the place where things that don’t happen, happen. So maybe what happened, it ain’t exactly takink place.”

  Which hardly qualified as an answer. When Muni continued to gaze at him expectantly, Pinchas sighed and said, “Come upstairs.”

  Over weak tea at the kitchen table Pinchas gave his nephew a further account of the pernicious kibitzing of Rabbi ben Yahya and his zealots. “The Shpinkers, they don’t know from ruination and revelation the difference. They starve themselves and make their mikvah in ice water; flog themselves bloody and twist like pretzels their joints when they worship. They dress up in French underwear the holy scrolls and pray like demons in heat until what’s above spins out from its axis and collides with below.” He bumped his chafed knuckles together in illustration. “Then comes the cataclyzz: the earth opens and out pours the creatures from superstition, and time don’t flow anymore but sits still like a stagnant sump. This they call mashiach tseyt, Messiah time, which it will herald Messiah himself. Everything is prepared for his coming. That’s what they believe, the meshuggeners.”

  “But what do you believe, Uncle?” asked Muni.

  Pinchas removed his spectacles, squeezed the hump at the bridge of his nose. “I believe my Katie is ill.”

  It was then that Jenny entered from the bedroom damp-eyed and distraught.

  “I called in Doc Seligman,” continued Pinchas. “He didn’t even need to look at her; he knows already she’s sick. I’m crying hospital, but the doc says, ‘You tell her; to me she don’t listen.’ Anyway, he says, she’s better off now at home. What she’s got, a hospital can’t cure it.”

  Muni asked if his uncle had sought a “second opinion,” a phrase he’d heard bandied about.

  “I got already from Seligman a second opinion, and a third.”

  It made a kind of cloudy sense that the hospital had been ruled out, now that the Pinch had become an essentially isolated province, but why had Pinchas so readily accepted Katie’s condition? “But Uncle,” his nephew protested, though before he could press the issue further, he was distracted by Jenny, who, standing at his shoulder, had begun softly to sob. Muni turned to her, perplexed, since this drama surrounding his aunt seemed so fundamentally out of tone with the character of a burnished new world.

  Still he made a point of visiting his bedridden aunt. Her hair, bleached of its carroty essence, was the gray of rain-washed shingles, her pallid flesh interlaced with blue veins like marble. Her eyes, with their gas-green flame virtually extinguished, were a milky opalescence. Seeming embarrassed by the depredations of her accelerated aging and the cloying odor she exuded, Katie nevertheless rallied the strength to tease him with the neighborhood gossip.

  “Nephew and Jenny sitting in a tree,” she intoned, “k-i-s-s …,” the letters dissipating in a throaty aspiration.

  Unpleasant as it was, Muni was grateful that she gave him an audience, since almost all others, Pinchas included, were forbidden to enter the sickroom.

  “Seligman says Katie is with me a shlecht vayb, a shrew, so that I won’t miss her when she’s gone,” confided Pinchas from the kitchen chair that had become the seat of his distress. “But I know better.”

  “What do you know, Uncle?” asked Muni, who could barely stand to linger indoors while outside the people carried on like skylarkers in Eden. He was hardly paying attention when Pinchas replied, “I know that she punishes me.”

  This gave his nephew pause. “Beg pardon,” he respectfully submitted, uneasy to find himself gainsaying his uncle, “but isn’t it Aunt Katie that’s the victim?”

  “She punishes me,” continued Pinchas, oblivious of Muni’s challenge, “because I’m not anymore with her a man.” It wasn’t a confession that Muni would have invited, but his uncle wasn’t done. “What’s the point if we can’t make together a baby?”

  That the couple were well past their childbearing years seemed the least of what was wrong with Pinchas’s argument. “I don’t think that from spite nobody dies,” Muni offered with a great lump in his throat.

  “You tell that to my Katie,” called Pinchas, for his nephew, who’d heard all he could bear to, was already halfway down the stairs.

  Dr. Seligman came and went with his syringes and gentian blue vials, and Jenny was also much in attendance. She brought herbal infusions from the Widow Teitelbaum and soups from Mrs. Rosen, which the patient seldom touched. (The deli was operating out of the Rosens’ upstairs kitchen, Mrs. Rosen lowering baskets of borscht and sandwiches into the passing boats from her fire escape.) When Pinchas poked his head into the bedroom, however, Katie spat a string of Irish curses until he withdrew, though he hung on in the doorway suffering her abuse
like a warm spring shower.

  But despite his aunt’s progressive emaciation Muni still couldn’t find it in himself to feel sorry for her. This, he knew, was unconscionable: she was after all the wife of the man who’d rescued him from affliction, and didn’t he venerate her gentle person as well? Hadn’t they both been in his eyes—that is, until his uncle disabused him—the very model of domestic harmony? But the giddy climate of North Main Street was unfavorable to your common-variety pity; it was an atmosphere that argued against even the remorse you might feel for not feeling pity. And anyway Muni thought his aunt was beautiful in her languishing: wasting away became her like a cameo on an ageless sepulcher.

  That’s how things stood in the old neighborhood: nobody and nothing was so base or inessential that they lacked some aspect of the sublime. Every gesture, from scrounging for foodstuffs to caulking rust buckets and emptying water closets with a sieve, seemed to take its place in the grand narrative. Viewing the scuttled street from an upstairs window, Muni would recall the concept of neshomah yeterah, the bonus soul the faithful are granted on Friday nights. He remembered how, back in his childhood cheder in Blod, even their sadistic old melammed would wax rhapsodic when speaking of Shabbos: how the Sabbath was a palace in time whose architecture contained both the immemorial past and the promised future. Now the Pinch seemed to occupy a perpetual Sabbath that encompassed a past as distant as Muni’s childhood and then some. Every action echoed a chiddush nifla (Muni remembered the phrase), some wondrous event.