The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  He scrambled over slippery transverse ridges, inched along shelf-like cornices, threaded clefts between palisades and perpendicular crags; he crossed a jagged penumbral mountain and skirted a gorge scarred by viridian tarns. When the landscape permitted, Muni shod his feet in the klunking racquets the lepers had bequeathed him. Once in a boggy declivity he stumbled upon the timber-sized ribs and tusks of some mired prehistoric behemoth. As he paused to ponder it, he spied through its ark of bones a pair of dogsleds zigzagging down the snow-blown slope he’d just descended. They were likely a party of trappers who, in this country of outcasts, would perhaps welcome a wayworn brodyag. On the other hand, there were bands of bloody-minded peasants who mounted posses in the hope of capturing runaway convicts with bounties on their heads. Rather than wait to find out which they might be, Muni bounded forward, tearing off the hobbling snowshoes in his flight. It was then that the bent pines beneath him, casting off their blanket of snow, stood to attention, and Muni fell victim to the impromptu airborne event that he would later relate to a girl in a tree. A sprung projectile, the fugitive was sent sprawling beneath a cloudbank, sliding over the hatch-marked ice; while behind him the dogsleds crashed into the frozen littoral of Lake Baikal and sank like the chariots of Pharaoh’s army.

  In his pious youth Muni would have viewed the event as an instance of divine intervention, but it never even occurred to him that God’s reach could extend this far. Bruised and aching in every joint, he assessed his situation: his food and equipage were strewn behind him over the steppe and the broad lake he slowly picked himself up from would take days to cross. He’d never make it. But neither was turning back, and perhaps encountering his undrowned pursuers, an option. His salvation, it seemed, was only a temporary reprieve, but still goaded by a kind of residual locomotion, Muni staggered on through veils of pea soup. The wind swirled the snow in filigree patterns over the grizzled plane of the lake, while the ice soughed and yawned like an ancient ship’s rigging. He had no idea how long he’d been walking or in what direction his leaden steps had taken him, though he was aware of having nearly outdistanced his body’s capacity for movement. For all he knew he’d strayed beyond the margins of the known world into some uncharted dimension. It was a notion reinforced by the spectral light, like an orange in a nest of spun sugar, which had appeared just ahead of him. He was drawn toward it, the light becoming beacon-bright, the beacon declaring itself as a metal brazier beside which sat a shaggy character holding a trident.

  He was wearing a fur cap and sheepskin coat fringed with plaited thongs, sitting on what looked to be an oblong drum. He had a flat, squint-eyed face with a complexion like cracked mud, a beard as fine as milkweed floss. As Muni approached, the old man acknowledged him with scarcely a grunt and redirected his attention to the hole he’d carved in the ice. Having ceased his forward motion, the fugitive now felt incapable of budging another inch; weary beyond measure, he plunked himself down beside the brazier, its kettle on the boil. The embers that warmed his cheek also drained him of his last ounce of energy, and seated cross-legged on the obsidian tabletop of the lake, Muni dropped his chin to his chest and fell fast asleep. He awoke after an indeterminate while to find himself bundled in fleece, a steaming cup of tea set before him. He sipped, wincing at the syrupy consistency and taste of tar, but vile as it was, his stomach welcomed the thermal liquid, which left him feeling somewhat revived. He felt buoyant in fact, and weirdly indifferent to his predicament.

  “Do you know maybe the way to Irkutsk?” he asked the old man almost disregardfully, since he suspected there might be no way back to the world from there. At that moment there was the splash of a fish breaking the surface of the water in the hole. The fish—like a transparent bladder, its bones and viscera visible through isinglass skin—was instantly skewered by the fisherman upon his three-pronged spear. Then the old man held it over the brazier, where its sweating essence caused the embers to spit flames.

  “Irkutsk,” the man at last flatly responded, pronouncing the word like a preliminary attempt at a foreign language. Then he showed the chipped sprockets of his liver-brown teeth and let go a hyena laugh. He stripped the flesh of the fish from the bone and tossed the feathery spine toward his guest, who snatched it out of the air and began greedily to suck at the few scraps of meat that remained. Meanwhile the fisherman, still chewing, had dumped the contents of his brazier into the hole, from which rose a roiling cloud of vapor. Unnaturally nimble for his years, he whipped Muni’s fleece out from under him—which sent him tumbling—and tossed it along with the brazier onto a hand-carved toboggan. Having battened down his gear, he started off hauling the toboggan across the ice, using his trident like a pilgrim’s staff. With an instinct perhaps more canine than human, Muni scrambled to his feet and followed.

  As they tramped through ranks of fog dense as waving draperies, the old man never once turned around to look at him, and Muni wondered if his guide was even aware that he had a shadow. He wondered why he should think of the old man as his guide. Every so often the fisherman would pause to consider, as if he’d arrived at some invisible junction; then he would turn so sharply to left or right (according to what internal sextant?) that Muni thought he was trying to shake himself free of his follower. But while it took all his stamina just to keep up with the old man, the fugitive was determined for no apparent reason to hang on.

  In that interminable yellow mist there was neither night nor day nor any way of predicting when the old fisherman would—every once in a very great while—come to a halt. Then showing no signs of fatigue, he would unload the spider-like brazier and sprinkle fish oil over a few foul-smelling pellets to build a fire. He would extract a fat sturgeon from his creel, sear it on his trident, and attack it with slavering bites. A sound he made while relishing the fish suggested articulate syllables: “Ogli” was what Muni heard, and he seized upon it for the fisherman’s name. Then it was Ogli who tossed scraps to his hanger-on, after which he brewed the acrid tea in a tin cup that served double duty as samovar. He would take a sip and nod as he passed the cup to Muni. That the fugitive did not gag was a minor triumph for which he was awarded a degree of refreshment, but the tea also seemed to augment the unreality of his circumstance. Somewhere, he sought to remind himself, there was a body politic; there was a czar and his coterie, complete with mad priest and hemophiliac son; there were Draconian laws and massacres, Jews and revolutionists—all of which seemed illusory to the wanderer at this hyperborean end of the earth. Not that the frozen lake, which knocked and creaked and thundered like distant cannonade, had much in common with the solid earth.

  After his meal the fisherman, his slit eyes lit like phosphor, would commence to beat his drum with puckered fists. The pulse of the instrument felt like a corollary to Muni’s own heartbeat: until he feared that if the beat ceased so would his heart. Ogli’s weather-cured features were made the more grisly by the ruby light of the brazier and the stringy hair that whipped his face. His spindly limbs moved in some spastic approximation of a dance, like a marionette trying to disentangle itself from its strings. When he’d completely encircled his follower, intoning sounds that ranged from guttural to rooster, Ogli would sit down on his drum with a hollow thud. Unprotected from the buffeting winds, eyes closed and body motionless, he would appear to have fallen asleep. Concerned that the old man might be in danger of freezing, Muni would poke him experimentally in the ribs. Then Ogli’s eyes would flash open, and, whinnying with laughter, he would spring from his drum, pack up his goods, and proceed apace, with the drooping fugitive straggling at his heels.

  Maybe it was the stimulus of the bitter tea or the hypnotic effect of the tinkling silver discs sewn to the fringes at the back of the old man’s coat—which, he couldn’t have said—that kept Muni slogging forward. All he knew was that nothing stood between him and being forsaken to an inhuman solitude but this indigenous loon, whose behavior was anything but reassuring. Once, without turning or breaking stride, Ogli opened a flap at the r
ear of his breeches to release a steamy turd, which Muni had to dodge to keep from stepping in. Another time the old man retreated so far into his postprandial trance that no amount of the fugitive’s prodding could bring him around. It was as if his spirit had departed his flesh, leaving behind a body as brittle as a dried-up puffball; if you poked too hard the frame would fold in on itself and crumble to dust. Then awareness returned, and, with his characteristic cackling, Ogli sprang from his drum and continued on his way. Muni followed, lagging farther behind, craving more of the bilious tea for its restorative properties, though the tea had begun to have diminishing returns. When his legs did finally give out, Muni sat down on the lake’s frigid moonstone and waited to die. He’d already lost sight of the old man in the encompassing murk. Now the wind slashed his face like a swarm of razors, penetrating his garments till he shuddered uncontrollably. Closing his eyes, he was almost wistful at having traveled so far to perish so purposelessly. When eventually he opened his eyes again, he saw erected in front of him, as in a grainy photograph, a portable yurt of red felt. Crawling inside he found the fisherman curled under a fur blanket fast asleep. He was snoring, farting, filling the tiny shelter with fulsome odors, but as he also exuded warmth like a furnace, Muni nuzzled against him and was soon asleep himself.

  He was awakened by the naked Ogli leaning over him, chanting a string of gibberish. Having unbuttoned Muni’s coat and shoved his sweater and singlet to his chest, the old man seemed to be performing some kind of surgery: he was digging with crooked fingers in the pit of Muni’s stomach, tickling him as he scooped out what were either intestines or sausage links slathered in sauce. In a tortured pantomime, his loose flesh and genitals flapping, Ogli wrestled with the slimy mess as with a serpent. Assuming he must be dreaming, Muni wanted with all his heart to wake up to some life he could call his own. It was a desire that would not survive the rest of the journey to his destination, where it would take a cataclysm to rouse it again. It would already have ebbed, that deep yearning, by the time he’d scrambled out of the yurt and stumbled into the sandy cove below the forested cliffs above the lake; it would be further dissipated as he gathered the whortleberries and goose eggs he wolfed down in deserted povarnias. What little remained of his fervid desire would dissolve in the churning waters of the Angara, where he boarded the ferry that took him upstream to Irkutsk. Once arrived, Muni would make for the maidan, the thieves’ quarter, to purchase a forged identity card on the black market. The card would cost him more than the phony passport he’d also have to secure. He would get himself shaved and reappareled, his appearance having earned him stares more agitated than those he bestowed in return, so staggering was the experience of being back in the precincts of men. When he rode the train over the Urals, the very concept of desire would become as alien to Muni as Siberia itself, and he would wonder why he persevered: why not make Moscow his terminus and pick up where he’d left off? Even the kulaks were openly advocating rebellion these days. But by then it would be too late to do anything other than continue traveling, paying bribes and crossing borders, booking passage in the steerage section of the SS Saxonia at Bremen, which set sail for the port of New York. There he would pass as if blinkered through its confusion of tongues, then board another train that would carry him across yet another continent, or at least a sizable slice of it, to Memphis, Tennessee.

  But at the moment when he bolted from the yurt, the desire was strong in him to put land and sea between himself and the crazy fisherman. Slipping on the damp ice, he blundered away from Ogli, who was in the process of pulling on his parka over his hoary head. When Muni had emerged from the lifting fog, he turned to see his guide dragging his sledge back into obscurity, trailed by cracks in the ice that was beginning to break up around him. Then the fugitive stepped in the nick of time onto the far shore of Lake Baikal, where it was already spring.

  I was reading to Rachel when I noticed that her eyes were getting heavy, so I flipped ahead in the book until I found the passage. “‘Later on in a bookstore on Main Street,’” I read, “‘a scrawny, hook-nosed lad’”—lad was my own edit as the text said, unflatteringly, nebbish—“‘a lad named Lenny Sklarew chanced to open a fat volume called The Pinch …’”

  Her eyelids fluttered open and she sat up abruptly, unheeding the sheet that had fallen from her breasts (their nipples like tiny berets). “Give me that,” she said, snatching the book away from me to peruse the page. She returned it in a moment with a harrumph. “Lenny, you’re such a card,” she assured me, having apparently seen no reference to her bedfellow in the text.

  “Yeah,” I replied, recalling a caustic rejoinder from some old noir film, “the Ace of Spades.” Then I quickly checked the book again to make sure that I was still there.

  ca.1912–1921?

  In Memphis Muni worked for his uncle Pinchas in his general merchandise and did odd jobs in and around North Main Street. Across the way, at the new Idle Hour Theater, a Keystone Cops two-reeler called Cohen Collects a Debt premiered, and blind Helen Keller spoke on behalf of the Wobblies at the Lyceum off Court Square. A famous evangelist challenged the devil to a wrestling match at a tabernacle erected in Riverside Park, and a black boy, accused of raping a white woman in a Gayoso Avenue brothel, was lynched and dismembered. Muni Pinsker fell in love with the wirewalker Jenny Bashrig, and against every law of decency on or off the books, got her with child. Then he abandoned her to chronicle the history of the Pinch. The history included incidents that took place after the timeless time that was brought about by local fanatics through a regimen of spiritual exercises and prayers. It also included events that preceded and followed that great enchantment, including the fate of the book after Muni had stopped writing it. He wrote with his brain ablaze, as if fueled by the mephitic tea he’d sipped long ago on a frozen lake; wrote in the hope that, in the writing, the task would ultimately reveal to him his reason for pursuing it.

  He described an incident involving the blacksmith Oyzer Tarnopol and his prodigal son Hershel, who was swallowed by a fish. This happened a few years after the father and son had come to the Pinch via the port of New Orleans. They’d come to Memphis because Oyzer had heard it said that the city still maintained a large number of livery stables full of draft horses. These were the horses that pulled the fleets of municipal ice and refuse wagons, and they would require an endless supply of iron shoes. But by the time father and son arrived on North Main Street, they discovered that much of the transport labor had already been mechanized. Moreover, the bulk of the metal work that had been Oyzer’s mainstay in the Old Country was now performed by machinists in factory shops. It was a situation that further aggravated the blacksmith’s already virulent temper.

  His temper had not always been so foul. Back in the village of Hrubeshoyb on the River Wieprz, where his family had dwelled for generations, Oyzer had been a principled householder and good provider; he was a gentle if strict father to his son and daughter and an attentive husband to his wife, the baker Pesha Sarah. But late one afternoon in the month of Nissan, as he and his son returned from a fishing expedition (little Hershel trailing behind him toting a string of spiny-finned perch), Oyzer heard shouting and saw smoke. From below the brow of the hill above the river he could spy the street of the Jews with its shake roofs burning. He watched a gang of peasants overseen by uniformed Cossacks looting shops and torching houses, including his own. He saw them beating his neighbors and worse, and lest his son see it all as well, held the boy down and covered his eyes with a hand. But Hershel did see—through the visor of his father’s thick fingers—what the hoodlums had done to the women (among whom were his mother and sister) who had been dragged into the street. He also observed his father’s terrible fixed expression as they lay on their bellies in the eel grass, and when the cries of the martyrs became unbearable, the blacksmith turned his heavy head toward Hershel and saw that he saw. Afterward he could not forgive his son for being a witness to his cowardice.

  In America, to which th
ey fled after the pogrom, the blacksmith cursed his son along with his failing livelihood. He cursed his neighbors even as they tried to ease his destitution by bringing him small jobs. “Tinker’s tasks!” he groused, when they asked him to repair a damaged sausage stuffer or lard press. In fact, he might have made a tidy living had not his self-defeating temper driven potential clients away.

  To offset their poverty and further stoke his father’s ire (which he preferred to the blacksmith’s neglect) young Hershel took to thievery, stealing tinned victuals and various other essentials from the shelves along North Main. Aware of the hardships the boy endured at the hands of an irascible father, the shop proprietors were likely to turn a blind eye to his petty thefts. There was some tacit consensus that his modest burgling was a kind of insurance against greater encroachments, and there were those who even admired the dexterity of his sticky fingers. Hershel’s father, however, was not grateful for the provisions his son laid in at the forge, serving as they did to emphasize the blacksmith’s inadequacy. But his curses and throttlings did little to discourage the boy. The more he was punished, the more Hershel seemed to step up his delinquent activities, compounding plunder with random pranks. In the end he was more of a nuisance than even the yokels who sometimes invaded the Pinch to bedevil the Jews.

  A day came, however, when something seemed to break in Oyzer Tarnopol. One minute he was at his anvil tapping at the twisted barrel of a toy gun (a dainty job beneath his dignity), the next he let go of his hammer, which caused a minor tremor as it struck the earth. He stood a moment with limp arms, his bullet head sagging as if the thick shaft of his neck could no longer support it, then dropped his considerable bulk onto a workbench. Maybe his sudden lassitude was due to the infernal heat of the forge on that mid-September afternoon, or maybe it was the appearance of Zlotkin, the junkman, so wasted with age that he must have thought he had nothing to lose by invoking the blacksmith’s wrath.