by Steve Stern
He was having such difficulty speaking now that I thought I should leave him alone; there was no point in pretending that I didn’t know what he meant, but I still needed him to give me the news in no uncertain terms.
“In the book”—he coughed again raggedly—“that you took it already hnh from mayn gesheft.”
I could have said I’d taken any number of volumes from his business, but I was ready to stop playing dumb. “I thought you didn’t read it.”
“So hnh I lied.”
“Lied that you didn’t read it or lied that ‘it is written’?”
“What’s the difference?” he burbled. “What you got hnh hnh better to do?”
It wasn’t the first time he’d accused me of purposelessness, but he should understand that things had changed: I had plans, or at least plans to make plans; I had a girl and was in no mood to accept a life sentence of dismal seclusion in a cave of outré books. Did he think that, because he’d been where he’d been and was going where he was going, his words had some special gravitas? His flesh was yellow cheesecloth, his breathing the sound of oil in a skillet, and I wished a nurse would come forward to insist I leave the patient alone to get his rest. I fiddled with a control that raised the angle of the bed in the hope it might take some pressure off his lungs, and tilted a glass of water to his parched lips.
“Look.” I sighed regretfully, while my heart knocked at my ribs with a clenched fist. “I appreciate the symmetry and all. You check out, so to speak, and bequeath your business to a poor aimless soul whose life then acquires meaning and direction. But this is your program,” I said, sorry to have raised my voice, “not mine. Besides, what’s so important about your farkukteh business that it should survive?”
Avrom uttered something so faintly I had to put an ear to his lips in order to hear.
“Pishn zolstu mit grine verem,” he breathed, his chest whistling like a nightingale; and glad of an opportunity to show off how my education had progressed under his patronage, I translated, “You should go and piss green worms.”
Satisfied that his benediction had been duly received, he closed his eyes, squeezing them shut. “Go already. Zanone’s got the key.”
As he relaxed into raspy snoring, his dentures slipped from his gums, further collapsing his face. I picked them up with a tissue and dropped them into the glass of water, which magnified them like some monstrosity preserved in formaldehyde. Unnerved by their frightful grin, I turned back to their toothless host and promised (though he was beyond hearing) to bring him books. I knew of course that for Avrom his books were less about reading than insulation; I’d have to bring back enough to build him a house, or a tomb.
Since it was after Asylum hours I locked the door behind me, a safeguard against the cops and outlaws who had probably lost interest in me anyway. I threaded the warren of shelf-worn volumes and ducked into the little cell at the rear of the shop, where I flung myself down on Avrom’s sagging bed. It was a single bed, the one he must’ve slept in since the war, its covers disarranged, the fusty sheets gone snuff-brown with age. In homage to the old man I tried to put on the loneliness of his posthumous existence; certainly I was no stranger to loneliness. But who was I kidding? Even lying there across his crumb-strewn bed flanked by the chimney-like stacks of books, I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be Avrom. For that I would have had to enter his past as far as Avrom had retreated from it. I would have had to let go of a girlfriend I wanted to believe I would lay down my life for, even if she regarded me as no more than a curious detour on the way to marrying her lawyer.
It was in any case cozy in Avrom’s back room with its rust-ringed wash-stand and cheesy odor. The toilet gurgled behind a paint-peeling door in imitation of the absent occupant’s clotted breathing; the lightbulb with its squiggly filament dangled over the bed like a teardrop containing a tiny hanged man. There was an old Bakelite radio on a shelf above the bedstead. I switched it on to a staticky local station, which announced along with the news of Memphis State University’s tournament loss to Tulane that Dr. Martin Luther King and members of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference were en route to the city. It’s a mean-spirited, inhospitable town, Memphis, I imagined telling the reverend: be advised. Then I took up the book with its crimped spine and tatty binding, and opened it to the joker card I used for a marker.
In the Russian bathhouse on Jackson Avenue between North Main and Front, Saul Plesofsky, his gravid belly concealing his parts like an apron, was pouring another bucket of water over a red-hot topaz the size of a honeydew. Shimmying among the ghosts released in the outpouring steam, the zaftig Einhorn sisters began to lose their towels. Meanwhile Mr. Blen, leaning over his pharmacy counter, gave the dyspeptic Feivush Metzker, in lieu of the usual bicarb, a powder made from the horn of the ram caught in the thicket on Mount Moriah. In his optical shop around the corner Milton Chafetz was fitting the Widow Teitelbaum with a pair of spectacles whose lenses were ground from the Tzohar, the stone radiating the primordial light that preceded the creation of the sun. The glasses, Mr. Chafetz assured the widow, would allow her to see objects at a distance of five hundred years.
12
Before the Revolution
In time Muni Pinsker had become so accustomed to having his needs attended to—his latkes delivered, his chamber pot scrubbed and returned—that he seldom looked up from his writing. Had he bothered, he might have noticed that a cradle on curved wooden rockers had been placed in his little room, and in it an infant lay sleeping. Sometimes the baby would wake up bawling, and Muni might be briefly distracted from his scribbling. But since his chronicle also included the tale of a child born late to Pinchas and Katie Pin, its cries were largely absorbed into Muni’s narrative—as much absorbed in the composition as they were calmed by the tender attentions of its parents. Lately Muni’s scribbling had accelerated, which is not to say that the scribe anticipated the story’s end: a story that took place simultaneously in parallel epochs could only be resolved in infinity. Besides, if he stopped telling stories about the street mired in timelessness, the lives that inspired those stories might be curtailed. Then the Pinch itself might no longer exist, or at best revert to what it used to be. Still, Muni’s scribbling acquired momentum, his pen careening across the water-scalloped pages as if he were writing downhill. Though occasionally, when a baby’s whimper or its mother’s cooing caused him to lift his head from his work, he might think his project was sheer mishegoss.
Then Muni would shrug and resume his account of Hershel Tarnopol relating to the leaderless Shpinker Hasidim the revelations he’d received during his tenure in the belly of a fish. Not to be outdone, the Hasids boasted how they’d employed the seventy divine names to build an invisible bridge over the North Main Street lagoon. Muni chronicled how Mickey Panitz, a lonely bachelor, was baited into a wrestling match with an angel of a lower order, but when Mickey prevailed, the angel, a poor loser, refused to bless him. He was consoled, however, by the Widow Teitelbaum, who practiced on him seductions described to her in a dream by Potiphar’s wife—techniques that happily succeeded with Mickey where they’d failed with Joseph. Meanwhile a klatch of North Main Street wives had inaugurated a Ouija craze, appropriating a high priest’s Urim and Thummim for their oracle. There was the fad among the kids of raising murexes, the snail that produces the Tyrian purple for prayer shawls, whose trails graffitied the sidewalks in rococo designs. Mrs. Alperin administered a clyster filled with honey from a hive in the inverted tree to her husband, whose voidance stank thereafter of Paradise, and Mrs. Cohen sold out of her stock of a material so fine-spun that thirty yards of it could be concealed in the closed palm of one hand.
The seasons, like the years, were experienced as a palimpsest: the spring that the Anshe Mishneh Synagogue was converted to a nightclub coincided with the summer of the Confederate reunion; the winter evening the mob burned Ida B. Wells’s printing press overlapped an afternoon when Elvis, his pegged pants upheld by a hairline belt, stepped out
of Lansky’s on Beale, and the first breeze of autumn failed to disturb a hair on his oleaginous head. There was the cloudy day in February when Lenny Sklarew (whoever he was) opened a book in a shop on Main Street and read a passage in which a guy named Lenny Sklarew opens a book in a shop on Main Street …
Muni recorded what was happening in the neighborhood and its environs, and what happened was whatever he wrote, or so he believed. Once, pausing to take a forkful of the potato boxty Katie had left beside his bed, he observed in the doorway a bowlegged toddler. The waddling child had, thankfully, his mother’s face and auburn hair (crested a little like an orangutan’s), and was waving a mother-of-pearl teething ring. Another time, shifting from his bed onto the chamber pot that Katie swabbed out each morning, Muni looked up to see an auburn-haired little boy in a Dutch suit staring back at him with starry eyes. He noted also that the thunder mug he hunkered over was putrid and filled to overflowing, and that his hair, which Katie had kept cropped short, was thick as turf and grown over his ears; his beard was bristly, his writing hand with its fingernails like pincers cramped to paralysis.
The pages of his narrative lay in a heap on the floor at the foot of the folding cot. They included, along with tales of the pharmacist Blen, the blacksmith Tarnopol, and the Widow Teitelbaum, the tale of the young Muni Pinsker—who once (Muni read from a random page scooped from the helter-skelter pile) sat in a latrine in Siberia where a frozen coprolite tickled his bony behind. This was the same Muni whose father (on pages yet undredged) had carried him as a tot wrapped in a lint-white tallis to the cheder run by Yozifel Glans, whom the students called Reb Death’s Head. It was a horror, that little school, where the Death’s Head wielded his quirt indiscriminately, as likely to punish the boys for their pride of accomplishment as their inattention. He flogged them doubly on Passover that they might know how the Israelites suffered under Pharaoh’s lash. But against all odds Muni flourished there, conceiving a deep-felt affection for his alef-bais and proving himself a precocious scholar.
Shortly after his bar mitzvah he was sent to a more reputable cheder in the nearby market town of Tzachnovka—where he slept on the hard study house benches—and thence, after some years, to the far-famed yeshiva in Minsk. The yeshiva was located in the basement of the Water Carrier’s Synagogue, where Rabbi Yeshayahu, the renowned Chazon Ish, was in residence. He was a very old man who sat stock-still at his lectern, his blood-rimmed eyes closed in meditation or sleep; no one was ever sure which. (Indeed, days passed when he seemed to show no vital signs.) But while the Chazon Ish gave little actual instruction, Muni was undiscouraged; still girded in the sanctity of his studies, he was inspired by the saint’s venerable presence to delve ever deeper into the texts of the Law. It was also during this period that, half-starved and light-headed from his dependence on so-called eating days, the student was occasionally distracted from his exegesis of some halakhic perplexity. Then he would undertake to write sacred verses of his own, and sometimes, in the absence of a Death’s Head to scourge his vanity, fancied himself a youthful David composing a cycle of original psalms.
Muni might have thrived indefinitely in that austere environment had it not been for his study mate, Yoysef Tsentsifer. Yoysef was a spindly lad with a pronounced Adam’s apple and curly hair that lifted his skullcap as boiling water lifts a samovar lid, but his mole-gray eyes were fierce. He had a maddening habit of concealing socialist tracts behind a volume of the Bava Batra and, worst of all, making disparaging remarks about the Chazon Ish. While he knew it was probably pointless to attempt to engage the youth in the kind of rapid-fire dialectics that defined the Talmudic method, Muni nevertheless felt duty-bound to try.
“According to Rabbi ben Yona in Tractate Hagigah,” he might begin, “the chicken, since it does not chew its cud, ought to be considered unkosher. So why does Rava insist in Tractate Avot that the bird is pareve, neither meat nor dairy?” But Yoysef would merely counter with unanswerable questions of his own: “What is the status in a minyan of a man born with the head of a toad? Why may you not share your prunes with a victim of gonorrhea?”
At length, addressing him above the hermeneutical drone of the academy, Muni had asked his mate, “Yoysef, with all due respect, what are you doing here?”
Making as if to shuckel over a portion of scripture, Yoysef replied in a prayerful singsong, “I’m marking time till the revolution.” Then he indicated with his downy chin their neighbor Naftali Blinken, who he said was doing the same. “In the meantime he operates for the Jewish Workers’ Union an underground press. And Pesach Kvitko, him with his falling-down britches, he distributes pamphlets in the back alleys of the Bog when he’s not studying Russian at night. Wolf Kipnis over there is organizing already in the factories, and little Anshel Twersky, that’s tripping over his ritual fringes, belongs to the HaShomer Defense League and is preparing to make aliyah to Palestine …”
The litany continued until Muni was convinced that all his fellows were leading double lives; they merely used the yeshiva as a safe harbor while fomenting the overthrow of the established order. Muni Pinsker was perhaps the only authentic student in the school. Yoysef promised he would have his guts for tefillin if Muni breathed a word of what he’d been told.
The awareness of his solitary lot, however, only contributed to Muni’s sense of self-worth. It scarcely bothered him that, other than the exasperating dialogues with his study mate, he had such scant commerce with his own kind. Loneliness and even the chastity that stoked his pimples and an irritation below the belt—these were conditions that further dramatized the martyrdom to his studies, and could also be exploited to good advantage in fables and poems. (The current involved a wonder child who, following a recipe from Sefer Yetsirah, pours oil on water to consult with the sages of old.) Such was his hubris, in fact, that Muni believed his compositions had attained a level of accomplishment that demanded an audience. There were a number of Jewish presses in Minsk that published a variety of texts ranging from the fanatically religious to the outright blasphemous. But was his “work” really ready for a popular reception? After all, no eye but his own had ever viewed his productions. What he needed, Muni decided, was a reader he could trust, one who wouldn’t simply flatter his efforts. Presenting his poems to the implacable Chazon Ish would be like placing an offering before a waxwork; nor did any of the rabbi’s rigid assistants inspire confidence. Then Muni lit on the idea of showing his work to Yoysef Tsentsifer, who was as close to an intimate as he had in that dreary city. Yoysef would certainly have no qualms about giving him an honest appraisal.
Since Yoysef’s attendance at the yeshiva was intermittent at best, several days elapsed before Muni encountered him outside the synagogue’s recessed entrance. The Water Carriers’ shul, as if embarrassed by its hulking stone eminence, appeared to be sinking below the level of the streets. It squatted on the edge of the central market, whose square on that unusually sunny morning was rowdy with hucksters, brokers, and market wives. Pigeons warbled, geese honked in their cages; a Cossack in a crimson tunic, saber flashing at his hip, plied the crowds astride a velvet-flanked stallion.
“Pardon me,” Muni urbanely accosted his mate, “but would you mind taking a look at these?” He held out a nosegay of irregular pages.
Raising an inquisitive brow, Yoysef plucked a single leaf from the bunch, some of which fluttered free. Muni scrambled to retrieve them while assuring the other that he could read the work at his leisure, but Yoysef insisted on reading a few lines there and then. Having done so, he smiled a sidelong smile and returned the page to Muni. Then he took a stiff page of his own from inside his jerkin, unfolded it, and handed it to the poet. To himself Muni read:
She saw it all and she’s a living witness,
The old gray spider spinning in the garret.
She knows a lot of stories—bid her tell them!
A story of a belly stuffed with feathers,
Of nostrils and of nails, of heads and hammers,
Of men
, who, after death, were hung head downward,
Like these, along the rafter.
A story of a suckling child asleep,
A dead and cloven breast between its lips,
And of another child they tore in two,
And many, many more such stories
That beat about the head and pierce the brain,
And stab the soul within thee, does she know.
The tag at the bottom of the printed broadside identified the lines as an excerpt from Bialik’s “City of Slaughter.” Muni’s heart was still thumping when he looked up questioningly from the verse.
“What’s the matter, Pinsker?” asked Yoysef. “You never heard from Kishinev?”
Of course he’d heard of Kishinev, and Gomel and Durashna; massacres of Jews were nothing new under the sun. They were acts of God, were they not, and little could be done to deter them. “There have always been pogroms,” Muni submitted, irked that his own verses had been so summarily dismissed. “They’re eternal as”—he felt suddenly compelled to say—“the Covenant.”
At that Yoysef laughed so heartily that he had to hang on to the bill of his cap. He made to turn away but, on second thought, hauled off and socked the young poet in the jaw.
Muni lay on the granite flags ogled by a fishwife or two, while a gust of wind disseminated the pages of his literary oeuvre. They wafted over cabbage bins and settled in baby carriages, one page plastering the face of a legless ikon artist until he scrunched it up in his fist. Not long after that Muni got word of a disturbance in his hometown of Blod. During Passover, fueled by the usual rumors of ritual murder and goaded by the police, the peasants had gone on a rampage. In a letter full of rhetorical flourishes composed by Reb Death’s Head himself, the student was informed that his parents and sisters had suffered tragically at the hands of the barbarians. Estranged as he was from his family, Muni borrowed a few rubles from the academy fund and traveled to his native province. The wretched huddle of wooden houses that comprised the shtetl looked as if they’d been picked up in a whirlwind then dropped in a heap on the barren ground. Citizens were bandaged like mummies, leaning on pokers and hobbling in splints. Once arrived, Muni discovered that his younger sister, Puah Lippe, had been defiled before the eyes of his mother, who’d lost her wits. His hapless father had been missing since the outbreak of the violence, but on the very eve of Muni’s return his body was found fermenting in a barrel of kvass.