Princess of Passyunk

by Bohnhoff, Maya Kaathryn

  Ganady blinked. “A curse? A real curse?”

  “A real curse.”

  “That curse?” He pointed to the burner upon which the cockroach carapace had recently expired.

  “The same. He said—and I quote—’That I should have spawned such an ingrate. May I be accursed for spawning such a child. (‘Spawn,’ was the word the week before.) May your mother, God bless her, be accursed for giving breath to such a child.’ Then he smote his forehead”—she illustrated sonorously, smacking her brow with the heel of her hand—”and cried, ‘What am I saying? We’ve already been cursed, your poor parents, to have such an ungrateful girl. Now, it’s your turn.’ Then he cursed me.”

  Ganady, caught in the middle of reflection that he had never seen anyone smite their forehead, asked: “Just like that? He just said, ‘You’re cursed?’”

  Svetlana tilted her head and shrugged. “Well, not so much. He had Aunt Beyle do it. She’s my mother’s sister. Aunt Beyle’s a witch—at least that’s what Da calls her. One evening he comes home from work with a little box tied up with string, like you might put giblets in. And he comes up to me and says: ‘This is yours until such time as you learn to obey or until a man loves you in spite of your low estate. Only then will you be free of my curse.’

  “So then he hands me this little box. And he crosses his arms and glares at me like so”—she demonstrated—”and says, ‘So open it, already.’“

  She shrugged. “So I opened it.”

  “A cockroach?”

  “A cockroach shell.”

  “Then what? You just—poof?”

  “No. I tossed it out—box, cockroach, the megillah. Then I went to bed, thinking Papa must’ve been at the vodka. And when I woke up, I was in this white room with no furniture and no ceiling. I climbed out and found myself in the alley behind our building and every thing looked very, very big. I was there for a long time. And that’s where you found me. And after a while, I got to come back to this...” She made a graceful gesture at her own body. “But only a little at a time.”

  She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, pressing the silky fabric of her dress against them, and Ganady’s heart all but broke at the look on her face.

  “I guess I really messed up, huh?”

  “Well, the curse was mostly off. I could do something like this once a month when the moon was full, and I could be in your dreams on the Sabbath. But now...you kind of gave the Cockroach Curse a new life.”

  Her grin was lopsided and sad and Ganny wanted to cry.

  “Why a cockroach?”

  She slid off the stool. “Aunt Beyle was reading Kafka.”

  She was moving toward the door and Ganny leapt to stop her. He reached out and put a hand on her arm. Beneath the silky fabric, the flesh was soft and warm, very un-cockroach-like.

  “What can I do?”

  She looked into his eyes, breaking his heart all over again, and shrugged. “That’s up to you,” she said, then added, in Yiddish, “Khop nit der fish far du nets.”

  Before he could respond, she kissed him softly on the lips and slipped out through the kitchen doors.

  He froze for only a second, then pushed through after her. The short hallway was empty. He opened the second set of double doors and peered through into the dining room. Her seat was empty, too.

  He stood in the doorway, bereft, staring at that empty seat, letting the sounds of celebration wash over him until be became aware that someone was standing very near him. Someone short, who smelled of rosewater and lavender.

  “Oh, Baba...” he whimpered.

  “What is it, Ganny?” his Baba asked him. “Where is she?”

  He had no need to ask who she meant. He hung his head. “Gone. She’s gone.”

  “What? What did you do?”

  He certainly couldn’t tell her that. Even Baba Irina could not believe that tale. He swallowed painfully. “She said, ‘Khop nit dir fish far du nets.’”

  He might have expected her to cluck at him, or to pat his shoulder, or to put an arm around his waist and commiserate with him. He did not expect her to smack him with her purse, which is what she did. Hard.

  It hurt.

  “Putz,” she said, and that hurt more.

  As the dining room doors flapped shut in his face, Ganady sighed from the depths of his soul.

  Don’t grab the fish before the net.

  Twenty-One: Klezmer Prince and the Bard

  The wedding took place without a hitch, but without Ganady and Svetlana. Ganady found himself in the unenviable position of being a conversation-stopper; whenever he entered a group of people, all talk ceased so that everyone could turn and look at him with silent but eloquent pity. He now understood fully what his mother had meant about not being able to go to shul because of the weight of people’s regard. It was like being stoned with grapes.

  So, after having kissed both brides and hugged both bridegrooms, he slipped out through the great front doors of Saint Stan’s into the crisp winter afternoon. No one tried to stop him.

  He stood on the broad steps before the sanctuary and looked up at the silver sky and tried to think about what he would do tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that. And he realized, with a jolt of cold surprise, that he had lost the ability to travel through time, even in his own mind.

  He could not look back at what had (possibly) been, at the banquet, and the ghost baseball games, or his clandestine dream-trysts with Svetlana, or finding The Cockroach in the alley. Nor could he look into the future; he could imagine no future at which to look.

  So he moved forward through time with mechanical linearity, one day at a time. He continued to play at The Samovaram, assiduously avoiding Yevgeny’s eyes when they should perchance speak. That didn’t happen often, for Yevgeny was too busy being assistant manager and maitre d’ to speak much, and when he did wish to speak, it was to ask questions that Ganady had no intention of answering.

  He spoke little to his family. He was transparent to his grandmother, a source of sorrow to his mother, an irritant to his Da, and a mystery to his young sister, who simply could not understand why he had not married his wonderful Svetlana and why they could not speak of it.

  Vitaly Puzdrovsky strongly urged his son to come work with him at the machine shop, but Ganady could not bring himself to do it, any more than Lana could bring herself to take an interest in her father’s sausage dynasty. Instead, finding that taverns stayed open into the wee hours of the morning, he lined up some more musical gigs. On Friday and Saturday nights when The Samovaram closed, he went uptown to a tavern called simply The Tavern, and there played until last call.

  On the Sabbath he went late to mass, so as to sleep in and miss the family, and then wandered to Passyunk Square where he would sit on a park bench and try to remember playing baseball here, and meeting Princesses, and breaking a certain window. And sometimes he would dare to go into the alley behind Mr. Joe’s butcher shop and poke through the garbage cans. He surprised a number of cats and dogs and starlings and various insects—even some cockroaches. But not his Cockroach.

  Nights and days passed in a blur, and rumors abounded that Ganady Puzdrovsky, having been left practically at the altar by his beloved, had become as meshuggeh as his old friend Stanislaus Ouspensky. He half-believed those rumors, though he knew them to be true only in part. He had lost many things: Svetlana, the Baseball, his comfortable family ties, his childhood, the whole pattern of his life. Most of all he had lost what magic he had found in this very practical land. There were no more ghost baseball games for him. No time-eddies. No windows to the past. He existed completely outside of time.

  And then, one Saturday evening as he was preparing to go to his regular job at The Samovaram, his Baba Irina stopped him on the front stoop and asked, “Ganady Puzdrovsky, how long are you going to go on like this, eh?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how to stop going on like this. I mean, I don’t know any other way to go on.”<
br />
  She shook her head. “Yutz. Even Prince Ivan figured out a way.”

  He looked at her with a spark of interest, for it seemed years since she’d told him one of her stories. And this one...it occurred to him that he had gotten stuck in the middle of it, and that she had never finished it. An absurd thought—a hope, even—came to him that if Baba finished her story, he might finish his.

  “What did Prince Ivan do?”

  “He moped around just like you for some time. Then, he went on a quest.”

  “I already went back to where I met her. I—”

  “Yes, and so did Ivan. But then he found Baba Yaga.”

  “Baba Yaga—the witch who lived in the chicken hut, right? She’s in a lot of your stories.”

  Baba Irina looked at him archly. “She gets around. Well, Baba Yaga told him that he may already be too late, that the Princess (whose name was either Yelena or Vasilisa the Wise, depending on who’s telling the story) was ready to marry someone else. And she sent him to find a magic Bard. A Bard who knew the story and so was able to give him a talisman to lead him on his quest.”

  “What talisman was that?”

  “A ball of yarn.”

  “A ball of yarn,” he repeated.

  She tilted her chin up and attempted to look down her nose at him—difficult, as he was now so much taller than she. “A magical ball of yarn.”

  He smiled, his hope returning itself to the ashes and slumber. “Thanks, Baba. I appreciate you trying to help. But I don’t know any Bards.”

  “Find one,” she told him and went back into the house.

  oOo

  That night at The Samovaram, the looks cast at him by Yevgeny and Nadia, who worked as a hostess, and all the other Toschevs seemed more weighty than usual. The audience did not seem quite so appreciative of his playing, and he had to own he was not at his best.

  He was relieved when the dinner crowd was finally gone and he was able to count up his tips and pack up his clarinet and leave. He almost managed to get clean away, but Nadia cornered him and invited him to Saturday dinner, and of course, there was a girlfriend of hers from school invited as well.

  Ganady made his excuses—given his performance tonight, he surely must practice tomorrow before he performed again and he really didn’t like to eat just before playing anyway. And of course, Nadia looked at him with an expression that managed to be at once pitying and annoyed and said that he really must get over Svetlana and find someone else, as if a girl who inhabited nighttime baseball diamonds, and who made perfect hearth rugs and galobki and babka, and who pulled pigeons and bow ties out of her sleeves was merely someone, or was easily replaced.

  He went to his job at The Tavern after that, happy to be in the darkened room with its faux red velvet wallpaper and dark wood wainscoting, the air blue with smoke from myriad cigarettes, cigars, and pipes.

  He was readying himself to mount the tiny corner stage when the bar manager, Lek Andropov, came to him looking a bit sheepish.

  “Hey, Ganny...ah...I sort of need your help.”

  “My help?” This was a novel idea. It hadn’t occurred to Ganady that he could be of much help to anyone. “Sure. What do you need?”

  “I promised this friend of mine that I would let his sister’s band try out here—you know, to see how the crowd liked them. And so I...well, I sort of told them they could go on after you.”

  “After me?” Ganady stopped in the act of wetting his clarinet reed. “But I play until closing time.”

  Lek bowed his head and scratched at the back of his thick neck. “Yeah, well, that’s just it, see. The favor. I need you to cut your evening short by one set so that this other band can, you know, try out.”

  Ganady looked at Lek in consternation for a moment, then reflected upon how tired he was, and how it might actually be quite nice to make an early evening of it. Besides, the expression on his boss’ face hinted that there was more to this try out than simply doing a friend’s sister a favor.

  Ganady smiled. “Is she very pretty?”

  Lek’s brown eyes went wide. “Who?”

  “You know who.”

  The reddening of the other mans’ neck was apparent even in the Tavern’s dim and ruddy light. “Kind of. But it’s more just that she’s a musician—a singer—and they have this reputation...” He rolled his eyes. “I was thinking...” He peered at Ganady’s face, then made a dismissive gesture. “Aw, you wouldn’t get it.”

  So Ganady played all but his last set, put away his clarinet, and sat at the bar to have a drink while the ensemble set up. Lek gave him brandy, reasoning that if he was old enough to work in a tavern he must be old enough to sample its wares.

  Besides the female singer, the band had three men of various ages—one looked nearly as old as his own father. He played bass viol, while the two younger men played accordion and bouzouki. The girl apparently sang, although she also brought a clarinet to the stage.

  She was kind of pretty, as Lek had said, though her features were perhaps too angular and her mouth to wide to call her a beauty. Her eyes were her best feature—they were big and dark like a doe’s eyes, and they danced when she spoke to anyone. And her teeth were white and even, if a little prominent. Her hair, which was caught back on the sides with combs, was either dark brown or black, but with a hint of cherry in it. Mahogany, Ganny decided, sipping his drink, like the wainscoting.

  He found himself unconsciously comparing her to Svetlana, the Golden. It was not a favorable comparison, and he felt a little ashamed of himself. After all, she was probably a perfectly nice girl. Or woman, really, for surely she was older than Lana.

  The ensemble took the stage and began to play. The woman was good on the clarinet, Ganny thought, though not as good as he was. But when she sang, there was magic in her voice. She sang stories of love and sorrow and the trials of life.

  He sighed, and drank, and nodded in time to the music.

  “Hey, fella.”

  Ganady raised his head so fast, sparks danced before his eyes. He blinked and the Singer came into focus before him. He realized the music was gone, the room was bright, and men were putting chairs atop the little tables round about.

  She smiled at him. It was not a shy smile, which made it different from any smile he had ever gotten from a girl before. No, not a girl, a woman, he reminded himself.

  “You fell asleep,” she said. “Were we that boring?”

  “Oh...oh, no. I was really enjoying it. It’s just...I play all weekend and I was really tired. I must have dozed off. Got too relaxed, I guess.” He pushed his empty glass with one finger.

  “You must have been having a very interesting dream,” she told him. “You mumbled something about ‘my beautiful cockroach,’ and I thought I’d better wake you before things got worse.”

  “My beautiful Cockroach,” he repeated and suddenly felt like crying.

  “You’re drunk,” said his new acquaintance. “I think I’d better take you someplace to sober up.”

  “I should just go home.” He slid from his barstool and did not stop until he lay propped against its legs, his long limbs sprawled before him.

  The Singer shook her dark head. “You need coffee. And sleep. Probably not in that order.” She put her hand down to help him up.

  He reached up and shook it. “I’m Ganady. Ganady Puzdrovsky.”

  She grinned at him, gripping his hand more tightly. “You’re plastered. Let me help you up.”

  In the end, she had to call one of her bandmates over to help her, for Ganady was quite tall and quite loose-limbed just now. She had him drink one cup of syrupy coffee before they left The Tavern, then propped him against her shoulder and walked him out to the street with Lek Andropov watching dejectedly from behind his bar like a dog who sees a wonderful soup bone carried away by the garbage man.

  She lived in a second-floor walk-up on Chestnut Street. She walked up, he clambered. She sat him at her kitchen table and put a pot of coffee on a hot plate by th
e sink.

  He sat in silence for a while, only able to gaze about. He’d never drunk so much in his life before, and so lacked experience with this rare condition. So he simply took things in: the tiny sink, the equally tiny window curtained in white lace, the overhead light with its colorful (not to say garish) paper shade. The table he sat at was small, and low, his knees pressed against the underside of it. She had put a white and red checkered cloth on it to brighten up the cramped room. There were daisies in a cream pitcher at the center of it.

  It was a poor sort of place compared to his own home, but seemed homey to Ganady. He liked the room. It made him smile.

  The Singer had turned from her hot plate and was watching him. She caught his eye and his smile.

  “Look,” she said, “I’m going to get ready for bed, okay? Do you want I should set you up on my sofa?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sure,” she repeated, folding her arms across her breasts. “That’s what you want—the sofa?”

  “Whatever’s most convenient for you.”

  She shook her head and slipped out of the room through a beaded curtain he supposed must open onto the rest of her apartment. They had come up the back steps directly into the kitchen, so he had no idea what the rest of the place looked like.

  He could hear the rustle of fabric plainly from where he sat and so figured she must be able to hear him. He cleared his throat. “You live here alone?”

  “Yes. About six months now.”

  “I still live at home.”

  “Oh.”

  “With my Mama and Da and little sister and my Baba...uh, grandmother.”

  “Oh,” she said again.

  “I thought you had a brother. Lek mentioned a brother.”

  “Antonin. He lives around the block. That was a condition of me moving out on my own—I had to live close to Nin. That’s his pen name: Nin Koska. I don’t see him much anymore.”

  Ganady reflected that he didn’t see his family much anymore either. “That’s sad,” he said.

  “Well, he’s got a fiancée.”