Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened

by Hal Niedzviecki

  The bottle gurgles. The Colorist hears swallowing. A belch. Your turn now, old man.

  The Colorist thinks of his wife, of the old apartment. How far they are from him now. And yet, with him, on him, a tint shading every action and event; memory.

  . . . dun, the Colorist finally says.

  His voice quavers, shrinks. He shakes.

  Sand fleas mating.

  Their lives in moments.

  A chesterfield in the Southern exposure.

  A thousand days.

  Bottle of spirits: once clear.

  The space between.

  Mind and imagining.

  The assurance of a cloud.

  Rusting fall forest.

  A first time, a second time, a third and final time.

  Fading to feeling.

  Deserts replaced.

  Cities, beaches, condominiums.

  The twilight.

  Inevitability.

  Transmogrification.

  Petrification.

  God’s pupil squinting into a slit.

  Time’s protection.

  Her arms around me.

  Moth’s wings. . . .

  The Colorist feels the wet soaking through his shirt. Then the sound of boot heels slapping floorboards. The smell of alcohol, cloying rot. His host’s breath.

  And what of mine, the younger man demands, his lips hot on the Colorist’s face.

  The Colorist turns away.

  Fingers sinking into his mottled cheeks. His face forced forward.

  Come on, old man. Don’t be shy.

  You see nothing, the Colorist whispers into the swelling air.

  The Colorist feels hot lips on his own. Biting. Sealing. His nose pinched shut.

  He doesn’t struggle. He has not named an apprentice. He cannot die.

  His eyes water.

  It is morning.

  The Colorist’s wife, the Representative of the Representatives, and the governmental Adjunct enter without knocking.

  The Colorist sits, head slumped. The younger man, dressed in a freshly pressed suit of charcoal black, his hair flowing and disappearing down his shoulders, rises. The Colorist’s wife tries to run to her husband. The Adjunct restrains her. Sands approaches, presses a finger to the side of the Colorist’s wattled neck.

  He’s dead.

  The Colorist’s wife breaks free of the two men and falls over the body.

  The three officials regard the young man in front of them. He is resplendent in shimmering ebony. Behind him, the empty swallow of a sunless morning.

  He came to me, the young man says wonderingly. He named me. And then he —

  The Colorist’s wife: Liar! Murderer!

  The Representative of the Representatives clicks his tongue. The Colorist, he says, cannot die without the naming.

  So it is written, intones the Adjunct.

  The Colorist’s wife digs her fingers into her husband’s drab shirt. She screams. Sands opens his case, extracts a needle.

  The Representative and the Adjunct regard the young man in his startlingly dark suit.

  He named me, the young man says.

  Show us, the Representative demands.

  The young man nods, eyes absent behind dark plastic.

  Dun . . . he begins.

  Displacement

  I.

  When Shlomo’s mother died, alone in front of the television in a city two hours away, he felt a sickness cut through him, a relief, spilling vomit signaling the end to some interior affliction. She had one child and two grandchildren, none of them living near her. But they converged on that strange familiar city — the port of embarkation, the port of arrival, city of hills and a cross on a mountain and the cathedral and the Jewish school set in a square of concrete.

  They buried her.

  And an old man came to the shivah and told the story of Shlomo’s mother in Siberia, how she got pregnant with Shlomo so she wouldn’t have to work in the mines, how, in the middle of winter, she traded her coat for the milk she couldn’t make. Later they all ended up in the same displaced persons camp, their names inscribed on a thousand clipboards, and when the man spoke of the motion of the boat as it lurched out of the old country’s murky harbor on its way to the new world, he abruptly turned to the buffet, coughed in his fist, and said: Ah, herring.

  In the years after the funeral of his mother, Shlomo gets a little fatter and a little fatter. His wife tries to make connections: this to that.

  But he denies them.

  The days don’t pass.

  These are the people they killed.

  Suppose I had not been one of those youngsters still alive in the spring?

  There were birds, I looked up. We were free to come and go, and then, finally, go. We waited. Nothing was like we imagined. You could taste it. After everything, you could taste it.

  Six years old. Falling down, my hands covering my head.

  Everywhere you looked, there were barbs of wire — parallel lines, layers. Soldiers, too, with guns and smiles on their faces.

  In the camp we were skinny and coughed all the time. But it was nothing, the waiting, the coughing, it was nothing. Those first memories of mine, looking into my mother’s eyes and seeing an emptiness, a sour smell, a palm pressed over my face. The feel of the wool blanket as it scratched under my skin. A handful of rain, the mournful groan of a passing train.

  Shlomo graduates class president from Baron Byng then goes on to be top of his class in engineering at McGill.

  He marries and gets a job with the government.

  Shlomo writes a letter to the newspaper, stops when he realizes it’s become twenty pages long. He feels the paper against his wet red fingers. He burns the whole thing in the fireplace.

  For years, he writes letters. Long maddening documents that he is convinced he will send even as they spiral into incandescent ash.

  A morning of frantic scribbling makes Shlomo hungry. He is always hungry. On those long Sunday mornings, he does not have breakfast with the family, preferring to wait until his hunger is interminable, unbearable, a separate shadow entity that stands over him, graying out everything.

  On this particular weekend, the family has neglected to set aside generous portions of their meal to feed Shlomo’s expectant appetite. Or she did it on purpose, Shlomo thinks, imagining his wife urging the children to help themselves to another slice of lox, another bagel, another thick, juicy red slab of tomato.

  Shlomo surveys the contents of the refrigerator. The scraps and gray ends of the smoked salmon. A handful of drying chives plucked sometime during the week from their haphazard herb garden. Shlomo opens the vegetable drawer, searches behind mostly empty containers of juice and milk. No sign of that crimson tomato. Nothing left of the chocolate danish.

  Undaunted, he thinks: I’ll show her. He chops the chives into what remains of the cream cheese. Then, he tosses in the scraps of smoked salmon. He spreads the mixture on a sesame bagel. Takes a big bite.

  Then, he bellows for his wife and children.

  What is it? What? His wife rushes in, convinced that he is finally having the heart attack she has long prophesied for him. Seeing him sitting there slowly chewing, his cheeks bulging with bagel and cream cheese, her suddenly white cheeks flush with anger.

  You have to try this, Shlomo says, spitting crumbs, pointing to his mixing bowl of cream cheese.

  His wife makes a slight gagging sound.

  I’m telling you, he tells her. You should try it. There’s nothing like it. Sky’s the limit.

  She shakes her head. The boys pinch each other, jostle.

  He throws a wooden spoon across the kitchen.

  The boys stare at it, raise their eyebrows.

  Goddammit, he yells. Goddammit.

  Go ahead, his wife says. Have your fit.

  Other weekends, they lock the boys in the back of the wagon and drive to the city lodged in their flesh, a bullet. His mother sits waiting for them, Buddha Bubby hovering over the kitchen tab
le, shabbos candles shrinking into themselves. She kisses everyone on both cheeks, saving Shlomo for last. He eats her soup, the kreplach stuffed with gray brown ground turkey meat.

  Then she brings klops and brisket and potatoes.

  Ma, his wife says, you think there’s enough?

  In the small hot kitchen, Shlomo eats, moving methodically from plate to plate. He’s waiting for someone to die. He’s waiting for his mother to die. The boys wrestle in the living room, stopping only to stuff their mouths with the toffee cubes Bubby keeps in a crystal bowl on the coffee table decorated with their baby pictures.

  The candles melt down to nothing.

  That was a long time ago.

  All spring we waited. The days were empty, nothing to do but line up for bread and soup. Enough for everyone. The ones who were going to die had all died. I felt my arms thicken and my legs no longer trembled when I ran. Nobody spoke of the past. There could not have been a past.

  I followed a group of older boys to the banks of the muddy river. The sky shifted and I felt the first drops of a rain that would last the rest of the season, the downpour not slowing until we sailed for the new world, our mothers clinging to the rails on the deck of the big boat as the fat drops washed us.

  At the river the village boys were playing. They fell silent when we arrived, then moved off. They knew better than to start something. We were like old men in boy bodies, our awkward coltish gestures turned ghastly by the withered skin hanging from our bones.

  We played in the reeds and rain, slowly but methodically, like an army advancing.

  The bank was slick with mud and I fell in.

  Of course, I couldn’t swim.

  When they returned me to the camp, my mother slapped me twice.

  I don’t remember the journey back, but I do remember the water, clinging and warm, wet mud creeping up my churning legs.

  Shlomo performs his function, gets promoted to assistant division head, and they move to a bigger house in the best part of town. His kids grow up, move out, set up house in different cities. In his gleaming, spacious new kitchen he tries different consistencies, flavors, schemes. He tastes, licks the spoon. He envisions a time when cream cheese and bagel will be more popular than the hot dog. He fights with his wife about money, which she’d prefer to save; but to him it’s not about money, it’s about what money can become — a bloated absence, the assurance of meals, the cold plastic of the electric appliance.

  He mixes spinach and garlic and sun-dried tomatoes. Smacks his lips.

  In the lobby after Rosh Hashanah’s shofar proclaims the new year, he is introduced to Harvey Weinstein, itinerant caterer, petty visionary, prolific schemer.

  Oh no, his wife says. Absolutely not. Remember when you loaned that Stuart Abromowitz five thousand dollars?

  That was different, Shlomo says. This is . . .

  What? his wife says. What is it?

  Goddammit, Shlomo bellows. He goes into his study. Slams the door.

  His heart beats. What do we live for? What do we keep dying for?

  He quits his job, doubles up the mortgage, and cashes out their savings.

  Shlomo’s flavored cream cheese is born.

  There was a certain timeless quality.

  Many of the women gave birth.

  Not my mother. She said: One’s enough.

  Nobody cried. Nobody shed a tear. We were free to go.

  II.

  I think, says Harvey Weinstein, we have to be bigger. He opens his arms, as if for a hug. We have to be, he says, more . . . epic.

  Both men wear dress shirts stretched tight over their guts. Before Shlomo heads into the back he wraps on an apron, making sure to tuck his tie away. He likes the feel of it, the concern for hygiene, the sense of authority and knowledge conferred on him — a man in a shirt and tie tucked cleanly into a sparkling white apron.

  Then he makes the rounds, testing, prodding, reprimanding, advising. They had settled on four flavors. But their unprecedented early success led Harvey to announce a brand expansion. So Shlomo launched eight more flavors, including chocolate.

  Yes yes yes! Harvey said when he first heard the idea. Chocolate! Chocolate cream cheese! Brilliant! Think of the market! The Christians! They’ll love it.

  Shlomo flushed with pleasure. Of course! The Christians!

  He wants to clap his hands together, he wants to gather the workers together in the small factory, he wants to make a speech. He’ll tell them about his mother, the way she used to feed him, the way she would only say what was absolutely necessary, just You hungry? Eat. Eat.

  What can he tell them? He watches Pauli stir flecks of grated lox into the white sour froth.

  Shlomo sees the advertising campaign. His face expansive, generous. His arms stretched out on a billboard over the expressway. The caption: You hungry? Eat. Eat.

  The cream cheese thickens. Shlomo watches, gets dizzy, grabs on to himself.

  The Americans joshed with us, gave us bubblegum, shied away from touching our scabby, skeletal fingers. I received a pair of boots that hurt. I swore that I’d never take them off. The first night, when they tried to unlace my boots, I broke away, ran through the open gate. Nobody chased me. I ran like I was being chased. The hunger again, calling me into another world. I stepped into the angry river and sank.

  Underneath the gray current, below the brown mud growing rot-green weeds, was a place I recognized. The sky was a certain kind of blue, like a newborn baby’s eyes. Listen, the birds squawked at me. Pay attention. I did, and my feet, tight in my new boots, carried me through the fields. I went into the stone house. The woman there was my real mother, blond and buxom, always smiling, very chatty. She told me about a unicorn she kept, a present, she said, a special present. I asked to see it. Her glittering smile faltered, then she cupped my suddenly pudgy cheeks in her warm hands and laughed in carousel orbit, Of course, of course, but first, eat!

  What language did we speak to each other? I had no language. God forgive me, I don’t remember.

  So what? Shlomo says to his wife. So what? He waves his hands in the air. He gasps for breath. He’s — out of shape — not altogether fat — there’s just too much of him.

  She turns her back.

  You want to leave us with nothing? she yells. You idiot.

  She is holding the statement from the bank. On the subject of double mortgages and high-interest loans, Shlomo had told her not a word.

  Money is tight, what with the expansion, new flavors, brands, markets. Profit has to go back into the source, reinvestment, the big payoff down the line. But, Harvey assures him. Harvey says: Next year at this time. Harvey says: You just wait.

  Shlomo’s visage appears on the cover of Jewish Entrepreneur Monthly. He accepts an award from the Association of Dairy Innovators–Ottawa Valley Chapter. Supermarket orders pick up. Soon, Harvey says, soon.

  How did you think of it? the Yiddisher Herald Times reporter wants to know.

  Shlomo shrugs modestly. It came to me like a dream. A long time ago. A long, long time ago. It was maybe always with me to do something, something like this.

  The paper runs a picture of him on the front page: Big Dreamer! Meet the man who invented flavored cream cheese.

  You look fat, his wife says.

  Lunch lasted all day. Hams and cabbage rolls and sausages in sauerkraut and mincemeat pies and a chicken surrounded by roasted potatoes soaked in grease and gravy. Each time I thought it was over, she returned with more.

  Dessert was beyond my experience. We lingered over chocolate profiteroles before dipping silver teaspoons into a bright red lingonberry sorbet. I ate slowly but methodically and never became full.

  Can we see the unicorn now?

  A dark cloud came over her face. She was not my real mother.

  Harvey . . . Shlomo says. I’ve been thinking about some of the . . .

  the . . . directions the company is taking. . . .

  Hey, great! The big thinker is here. Mr. Dreamer’s bee
n thinking! Shlom, you know what I say: You do the dreaming, I do the thinking! That’s what makes us such a great team!

  Harv, yeah, I know. But it’s just . . . I’ve been thinking . . . I mean, some of the new flavors . . .

  There’s that word again: thinking.

  I know, but are we, I mean, I was just think —

  Uh uh uh, Shlom, baby! Harv wags a finger. Uh uh uh.

  But the new flavors —

  They’re great! They’re terrific! Everybody loves them!

  Yeah, but, I mean, maybe some of them are too . . . I mean, I guess I just, I thought we would have maybe, like three or four flavors, but the fruit line? I mean, I’m just worried about . . .

  What are you worried about? Shlom, baby, there’s nothing to worry about! You’re everywhere! Just stick your head in a supermarket! You’re the king of cream cheese!

  Yeah, I know, but . . . the fruit line . . . I’m — I mean, pineapple? Banana? I mean, Harv, lichee? I mean, what the hell is a lichee?

  Who cares what it is?! Shlom, they love you! They can’t get enough of you! They eat you up!

  Shlomo sits in his office, the leather chair crisp and creaky beneath him. He checks his watch. It’s quarter to two, Tuesday afternoon.

  Shlomo decides to make a call.

  His son the journalist picks up.

  You’re not at work? Shlomo says.

  I work at home.

  Yeah, Shlomo says. Oh, yeah.

  Dad? his son prompts.

  I don’t know, Shlomo says.

  Dad —

  No — this — it’s nothing. I just wanted to, I’ve been thinking . . .

  About?

  About. About . . . when I was . . . a boy. . . .

  You were a boy?

  Ha-ha. Very funny. So? I’ve been thinking about it.

  What about it?

  After the war, you know, before we came here.

  When you were in a displaced persons camp?

  Yeah, that’s right, I told you that?

  Bubby did.

  She told you?

  Sure, sure she did.

  We never talked about it. You know? We never talked about it.

  You never did?

  The past is the past.

  But even just to —

  The past is the past. That’s the way we felt back then.