by T E. D Klein
This struck me as a shade optimistic, but I didn’t want to risk insulting him. He was obviously an extreme case of the proverbial one-book author.
“Who knows,” he added, with a nod to my grandfather, “maybe we even do the book in Yiddish.”
Grandfather raised his eyebrows and pointedly looked away. I could see that he had heard all this before.
“I gather that it’s some sort of religious tract,” I said, trying to sound interested. “The Puritans used to go in for that sort of thing. Treatises on doctrine, damnation, the Nativity—”
He shrugged. “Is about a natividad, but not the one you think. Is about natividad of man.”
“Ain’t no big mystery in that,” said Coralette. “Ain’t none of us so different from the monkeys and the lizards and the worms. Lawd done made us outs earth, just like the Bible say. Made each and ever’ one of us the same.” Reaching back, she took Father Pistachio’s dictionary and worked a finger back and forth against the glossy surface of its cover. Soon a little roll of dirt and rubbed-off skin, grey-black in color, had accumulated beneath it; whereupon, taking my own hand between her two much broader ones, she rubbed my fingertip against the same surface. The same material appeared, the same color.
“See?” she said triumphantly. “We’s all of us God’s clay.”
I never got to ask Father Pistachio his own views on the subject because by this time three o’clock had passed and the older children of the neighborhood, released from Brandeis High, were accumulating on the sidewalk before us like Coralette’s grey-black matter. My grandfather got unsteadily to his feet just as a trio of teenaged girls swept up the steps, followed by a boy with a pirate’s bandana and the straggly beginnings of a moustache. Not one of them was carrying a schoolbook. For a moment Coralette remained where she’d been sitting, blocking half the entranceway, but then she, too, sighed heavily and made as if to stand. I gathered that this was the usual hour for the group to break up.
“I say farewell for now,” said Father Pistachio. “Is time for me to go upstairs to sleep. Tonight I work a little on my book.” I helped him down from his perch, amazed at how small and fragile he seemed; his feet had barely been able to reach the landing.
“Come on,” I said to Grandfather, “I’ll walk you back.” I told the others that I hoped to see them again. I half believe I meant it.
My grandfather appeared to be in a good mood as we headed up 81st. I, too, was feeling good, if only from relief that he’d adjusted so readily to his new situation. “This life seems to be agreeing with you,” I said.
“Yeah, things are always easier when you got a few friends around. That colored girl is good as gold, and so’s the Father. He may not speak good English, but I’m telling you, he’s one smart cookie. I almost wonder what he sees in me.”
I had to admit it seemed an unlikely friendship: a self-professed scholar—a man of the cloth—keeping company with someone, in Whittier’s phrase, “innocent of books” and of religion, the one equipped with little English, the other with no Spanish at all. What queer conversations those two old-timers must have had!
“You’ll have to come by more often,” Grandfather was saying. “I could tell he took to you right away. And he’s dying to meet Karen.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“I don’t know, he said she sounded interesting.”
“That’s funny, I wonder why he’d…” I paused; I had had a sudden suspicion. “Hey, did you by any chance happen to mention where she works?”
“Sure. She’s with that big publishing outfit, isn’t she? Something to do with books.”
“That’s right. Account books! She’s in the billing department, remember?”
He shrugged. “Books are books.”
“I suppose so,” I said, and let the matter drop. Inside, though, I was wincing. Poor old Pistachio! No wonder he’d taken such an interest in us: the old geezer probably thought we’d help him sell his book! The truth was, of course, that using Karen as an “in” to the publishing world was like trying to break into Hollywood by dating an usher; but I saw no reason to tell this to Pistachio. He would find out soon enough. Meanwhile, he’d be a good friend for my grandfather.
“’Course, he does go on a bit about that book of his,” Grandfather was saying. “He’ll talk your ear off if you let him. Some of the theories he’s got…” He shook his head and laughed. “Know what he told me? That the Indians are a long-lost tribe of Israel!”
I was disappointed; I had heard that one too many times before. It had become something of a joke, in fact, like the Hollow Earth theory and Bigfoot. I didn’t mind Pistachio’s having a few crackpot notions—at his age he was entitled to believe what he pleased—but couldn’t he have been just a bit more original? The long-lost-tribe routine was old hat. Even my grandfather seemed to regard it as a joke.
But typically, he’d gotten it all wrong.
Saturday, June 11
“Is no one safe today,” said Father Pistachio. It was a statement, not a question. “Is the same even for an old man like me. Two nights ago I am followed home by six, seven boys. Maybe, in the dark, they do not see I wear the collar of a priest. I think they are getting ready to push me down, but I am lucky. God, He watches. Just as I am asking myself if it is wise to call for help, a car of the police comes slowly up the street, and when I turn around the boys are gone.”
“Po-lice?” sniffed Coralette. “I don’t have no use for them po-lice. Kids ain’t scared o’them no more, and the law don’t mean a thing. Station’s sittin’ right up there in the middle of 82nd Street, just a block away, and you ever see the house right next door to it? Hmmph! Wouldn’t want no daughter o’ mine livin’ there—not these days. Blocks ’round here ain’t fit for walkin’ down.”
“Aw, come on,” said my grandfather, “that’s no way to talk. Brooklyn’s ten times worse than this, believe me. The way I see it, if you’re gonna sit inside all day you may as well be dead.”
At this moment we, too, were sitting inside, round a greasy little table at Irv’s Snack Bar near the corner of 81st and Amsterdam, sipping our afternoon coffee and talking crime, New York’s favorite subject. Irv and his wife would let the old folks sit for hours, so Grandfather’s friends came here often, especially on weekends, when the stoop of Pistachio’s building was occupied by teenagers. Occasionally the blare of their radios penetrated the snack bar’s thin walls, along with the pounding rhythms of soul music from the jukebox inside Davey’s, just across the street. Saturday nights began early around here, at least when the weather was warm; even at noontime the noise was almost incessant, and continued through the weekend. I don’t know how anyone could stand it.
“My cousin’s step-sister up on 97th, she say things just as bad up there. Say they’s a prowler in the neighborhood.” The metal chair sagged noticeably as Coralette shifted her weight. “Some kinda pervert, she say. Lady downstairs from her—Mrs. Jackson, down in 1-B—she hear her little girl just a cryin’ out the other night, and see the light go on. Real late it was, and the chile only seven years old. She get up and go into the chile’s room to see what happened. Window’s wide open to let in the breeze, but she ain’t worried, ’cause they’s bars across it, like you got to have when you’s on the groun’ floor. But that chile, she shakin’ fit to die. Say she wake up and they’s a boy standin’ right by her bed, just a lookin’ down at her and doin’ somethin’ evil to hisself. She give a holler and reach for the light, and he take off. Wiggle his-self right out the window, she say. Mrs. Jackson, she look, but she don’t see nothin’, and she think the chile be havin’ bad dreams, ’cause ain’t nobody slippery enough to get through them bars… But then she look at the wall above the window, and they’s some kinda picture drew up there, higher than the little girl could reach. So Mrs. Jackson know that what the chile say is true. Chile say she seen that boy standin’ there, even in the dark. Say it was a white boy, that’s what she say, and mother-naked, too, ’cept for somethin�
� he had on over his head, some-thin’ real ugly like. I tell you, from now on that chile gwin’ be sleepin’ wid the light on!”
“You mean to say steel bars aren’t enough these days?” I laughed, but I’m not sure why; we, too, lived on the ground floor, and not so far from there. “That’s all Karen has to hear. She’ll be after me again about moving to a more expensive place.” I turned to Grandfather. “Do me a favor, don’t mention this to her, okay?”
“Of course,” he said. “You don’t want to go around scaring women.”
Father Pistachio cleared his throat. “I would like very much to meet this Karen someday...”
“No question about it,” I assured him. “We’re going to get the two of you together real soon. Not today, though. Today she’s busy painting.”
My grandfather squinted at his watch, a souvenir of his years with the watch-casing firm. “Uh oh, speak of the devil, I have to get back. She’s probably up there already.”
My wife had gotten permission to repaint part of Grandfather’s bedroom wall, as well as a few pieces of furniture salvaged from his former apartment. She was convinced she did such things better without my help, and that I would only get in the way—a belief which I’d encouraged, as I was in no hurry to join the two of them. I much preferred to sit here in the snack bar, eating jelly doughnuts and tracing patterns in the sugar on the table. Besides, there were some questions I wanted to ask Father Pistachio. Later, Karen and I were taking Grandfather out to eat, to celebrate his first successful week at the Manor. He’d told us it would be a welcome change.
“I’m looking forward to a decent meal tonight,” he was saying, as he got up from his chair. He placed an unsteady hand on my shoulder. “These grandchildren of mine really know how to treat an old man!”
Making his way to the counter, he insisted on paying for my doughnuts and coffee, as well as for the Sanka he’d been restricted to since his stroke. “And give me some quarters, will you, Irv?” he asked, laying another dollar down. “I gotta do some wash, spruce up my wardrobe. My grandchildren are taking me out tonight—someplace swanky.” Suddenly a doubt arose; he looked back at me. “Hey, I’m not going to have to wear a tie, am I?”
I shook my head. “It’s not going to be that swanky!”
“Good,” he said. “Just the same, I think I’ll wear the socks with the monograms on ’em, the ones your mother gave me. You never can tell who you may be sitting next to.” He bid the three of us good-bye, nodded to the counterman—“Take care, Irv, say hello to Mrs. Snackbaum for me”—and shuffled out the door.
Irv scratched his head. “I keep tellin’ him, my name’s Shapiro!”
Across the street the music had grown louder. I could feel the throb of the bass line through the soles of my shoes, and the air rang with grunting and screeching. I was glad I’d stayed inside.
Until now I’d avoided bringing up Pistachio’s book. With Grandfather gone it was easier. “I understand,” I said, “that you have some rather novel theories about the Indians and the Jews.”
His face wrinkled into a grin. “Indian, Jew, Chinese, Turk—is all come from the same place.”
“Yes, I remember. You said that’s what you deal with in your ‘Commentary.’”
“Exactamente. Is all there in the Gospel, for those who understand. Thomas, he is very clear, tell you all you want to know. Is through him I discover where man come from.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. Where does he come from?”
“Costa Rica.”
The grin remained, but the eyes were absolutely earnest. I waited in vain for a punchline. Beside him Coralette nodded sagely, as if she’d heard all this before and was convinced that it was true.
“That sounds just a little unlikely,” I said at last. “Man first walked erect somewhere in East Africa, at least that’s what I’ve always read. They’ve got it all mapped out. Asia and Europe were next, and then across the Bering Strait and down into America. That was where the Indians came from: they kept on spreading southward till they’d covered the New World.”
Pistachio had been listening patiently, mumbling “Yes… yes…” to himself as he searched his pockets for nuts. Finding one, he split it apart and studied it with the quiet satisfaction of a man contemplating a good cigar. At last he looked up. “Yes,” he said, “all this I too have heard, from the time I am estudiante. But is all wrong. Is—how you say?—backward. Truth, she is far more strange.”
The old man had gotten a faraway look in his eyes. Coralette pushed heavily to her feet and, mumbling excuses, waddled off upon some errand. I could see that it was lecture-time.
For the next half hour or so, as I sipped at still another cup of coffee, while the music from across the street grew steadily more primitive and the afternoon sunlight crept by inches up the wall, Pistachio gave me a short course in human history. It was an idiosyncratic one, to say the least, based as it was on certain Indian myth patterns and a highly selective reading of some fossil remains. According to his theory, the first men had evolved in the warm volcanic uplands of Central America, somewhere in the vicinity of Paraiso, Costa Rica—which was, by sheer coincidence, his own home town. For eons they had dwelled there in a city now gone but for the legends, one great happy tribe beneath a wise and all-powerful queen. Then, hundreds of millennia ago, threatened by invaders from the surrounding jungle—apparently some rival tribe, though I found his account here confusing—they had suddenly abandoned their city and fled northward. What’s more, they hadn’t paused for rest; as if still in the grip of some feverish need to escape, the tribe had kept on moving, streaming up through the Nicaraguan rain forests, spreading eastward as the land widened before them, but also pressing northward, ever northward, through what was now the United States, Canada, and Alaska, until the more adventurous pushed past the edge of the continent, crossing into Asia and beyond.
****
I listened to all this in silence, trying to decide just how seriously to take it. The whole thing sounded quite implausible to me, an old man’s harmless fantasy, yet like a Velikovsky or a Von Däniken he was able to buttress his argument with a wide array of figures, facts, and names—names such as the Ameghino brothers, a pair of prominent nineteenth-century archaeologists who’d advanced a theory similar to his, but with their own home, Argentina, as the birthplace of mankind. I looked them up the next day in the school library and discovered that they’d actually existed, though their theories had reportedly been “held in disrepute” since the late 1880s.
The name that came up most often, however, was that of Saint Thomas himself. I looked him up as well. His “Gospel” isn’t found in standard Bibles, but it’s featured in the ancient Gnostic version (an English translation of which, published here in 1959, is on the desk beside me as I write). I should add, by way of a footnote, that Thomas has a special link with America: when the Spaniards first arrived on these shores in the sixteenth century they were shocked to find the Aztecs and other tribes practicing something that looked rather like Christianity, complete with hellfire, resurrections, virgin births, and magic crosses. Rather than admit that their own faith was far from unique, they theorized that Saint Thomas must have journeyed to the New World fifteen hundred years before, and that the Indians were merely practicing a debased form of the religion he had preached.
Somehow Pistachio had managed to scrape together all these queer old theories, folk tales, and fancies into a full-blown explanation of the human race—or at least that’s what he claimed. He assured me that none of it conflicted with present-day Catholic doctrine, but then, I doubt he cared a fig for Catholic doctrine; he was obviously no normal priest. It was clear that, like a certain James character, he had “followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods.” I wish now that I’d asked him what order he was from. I wonder if he left it voluntarily.
Yet at the time, despite my skepticism, I found the old man’s sincerity persuasive. Moved by his description of the vast antediluvian city, with its pyrami
ds, towers, and domes, and carried along by the sound of his voice as he traced man’s hasty march across the planet, I could almost picture the course of events as if it were a series of tableaux. It had, I must admit, a certain grandeur: the idyllic tropical beginnings, a civilization sleeping through the centuries of peace, and then, all at once, the panicky flight from an army of invaders and the sudden dramatic surge northward—the first step in a global migration which would see that great primitive tribe break up, branching into other tribes that spread throughout the continent, wave upon wave, to become the Mochicans, the Chibchas, and the Changos, the Paniquitas, Yuncas, and Quechuas, the Aymaras and Atacamenos, the Puquinas and Paezes, the Coconucas, Barbacoas, and Antioquias, the Nicaraguan Zambos and Mosquitos, the Chontals of Honduras, the Maya and the Trahumare of Guatemala and Mexico, the Pueblo and the Navaho, the Paiute and the Crow, the Chinook and the Nootka and the Eskimo…
“Let me get one thing straight,” I said. “You’re telling me that this accounts for all the races of mankind? Even the Jews?”
He nodded. “They are just another tribe.”
So Grandfather had gotten it backward. According to Pistachio, the Israelites were merely a long-lost tribe of Costa Rican Indians!
“But how about family records?” I persisted. “Train tickets, steam-ship passages, immigration forms? I know for a fact that my family came over here from Eastern Europe.”
The old man smiled and patted me on the shoulder. “Then, my son, you have made a circle of the world. Welcome home!”
***
The elevator shuddered to a halt and I stepped out onto the ninth floor. There was an odor of paint in the hall outside Grandfather’s door. I knocked, but no one answered. When there was no response the second time, I pushed my way inside. None of the residents’ doors were ever locked, old people being notoriously prone to heart attacks and fainting spells, strokes, broken hips, and other dislocations requiring immediate assistance. Though the supervision here was generally lax, absence from a meal without prior notice brought a visit from the staff. The previous summer, in a locked apartment in the middle of the Bronx, the body of an old man had lain alone and undiscovered for months until, riddled with maggots and swollen to four times its size, it had literally seeped through the floor and into the apartment below. That fate, at least, my grandfather would be spared.