No idea, said Rudy. I’m sure he would be here if he knew.
In fact, he was not at all sure of this. The youngest brother, the father — witty and weak and self-absorbed. And a man who was afraid, desperately afraid of — what? Of being ordinary. Of leading a rye and ginger life. Chasing anything that might save him from this, like a distracted dog. A fugitive from the everyday, the commonplace, always searching for a way out.
He’ll turn up soon, said Rudy.
He is far from sure of this either.
The aunt was the formal placement — the mother’s half sister, nineteen years older than her, almost another generation. But a woman whose kidneys were starting to fail, scarred organs slowly breaking down.
I can’t handle her full-time, she said miserably, exhausted by the disease.
The social worker knew enough — too much — about the foster home system to send the child into its labyrinths. So this arrangement would have to work — the aunt during the week, the uncles on the weekend. She did what could be done, the things that were possible. A session on child-rearing, simple advice, checklists on clothing, food, sleeping. The child was the only one who read the lists, though, or tried to — her small finger tracing out the letters she knew until the papers were stained and dog-eared. Hoping that somewhere in there were the clues she needed, the answers to what had happened, how her life had jackknifed so wildly. But she also passed along anything she understood to Gus.
A taciturn man, something that suited them both. He used words sparingly, as if he had only a limited supply, and was storing them for some future use. Instead, he preferred silence, or a range of silences: dusty silences, steep silences, warm silences. A clam, said the social worker to her supervisor. But soon he became used to the child winding around his legs, and developed a clumsy affection for her. Not a man who was a good bet in other ways, though — someone with serial bankruptcies, an instinct for failure.
Raised by your uncles? Nate says in the same tone someone might say: raised by wolves? His voice is dark, slightly hoarse. He is intrigued by this odd household, intrigued as only someone with two card-carrying parents can be.
I raised her, says her aunt. They looked after her.
Anna Rubin. Puffy-faced, her skin floury, her dark eyes circled with shadows. Persistent in her own way, determined that the girl would know something of this other life, that she would have some sense of its latitudes and longitudes.
No such thing as half-Jewish. Don’t let me hear you say that. If your mother is Jewish, you’re Jewish. Halacha. Those are the rules.
Those are the rules, echoed the girl, curled under the woman’s arm.
But her aunt had more to say, much more. A personal mission, built around tzimmes and the ten plagues.
The plague of locusts. The plague of frogs. The plague of water turning into blood.
The girl held up a hand, raising her small fingers.
Only three, she said.
She was a literal child.
A selection of the best, said her aunt.
Behind the scenes, though, her kidneys were silently abandoning their functions, the toxins in her system slowly building. Soon — too soon — it was the uncles during the week, the aunt on the weekend.
Not even a Jewish disease, said her aunt disgustedly, her skin yellow.
No need to tell that social worker, she added.
What do you do when you’re there? Malcolm said once, not so much interested in the girl as the aunt, any possibilities for money.
The child hesitated.
We eat brisket, she said after a minute, the only thing that came into her mind. She had no words for this briny, tender woman, for her kitchen, her houseplants, vines running along mantels, trailing down shelves. For the moth orchids everywhere — windowsills, bookcases — leaning over pots, their grey air roots twisting around them.
Malcolm looked at her uncomprehendingly. The idea that the girl was half-Jewish, the idea of Jewishness itself was so foreign, so baffling to him — to all three of them — that they ignored it. They had an unspoken agreement to treat it as if it were an awkward genetic problem, something that was better left unmentioned. And after a while, she understood that she was not to talk to them about it, that this was something she had — she was — with her aunt.
Is it only for girls? she said to her, early on. Being Jewish?
Who told you that? Full of men. Look at Moses. Look at Einstein. Look at Marvin next door.
Marvin — thinning hair, mild, someone who yawns a lot. Ida’s husband, content to drift in her slipstream. Neighbours.
She’s not the brightest, but she has a good heart. And he shovels my walk in the winter.
And Moses? Einstein? Other neighbours?
Big shots, said her aunt.
That night:
Men can be Jewish, too, she said to Gus, putting her to bed.
He said nothing in an agreeable way.
Look at Moses. Look at Marvin.
More nothing.
She sighed, the world-weary sigh of a six-year-old.
Those are the rules.
···
Half-Jewish. This is unsound genetically as well, she discovers later in biology classes, not a matter of chromosomal halves. Instead, she has a mix of genetic variations, extending in all directions. If some of them mark her as a carrier of Tay-Sachs disease, Bloom syndrome, and an inability to drink milk, one non-Jewish parent will make no difference. This is a mess of a genome.
···
A week after the motion. Nate is sitting on the arm of one of her office chairs, cracking pumpkin seeds in his teeth. Lime, chili, salt — I roasted them myself.
You’re distracting me, she says, although the truth is that she was already distracted. The stay motion has been stalking her thoughts, intruding everywhere. She is waiting for the decision, although this is a wholly pointless exercise — it could be issued tomorrow, next week, or even next month, especially if the judge decides to write extensive reasons, not at all improbable. Still, she feels suspended in the web of this case, in part because she is still possessed by the idea that if they lose, it will be her fault.
Unlikely, says Nate. Although not impossible.
Or that she will be blamed anyway, whether it is her fault or not.
Not quite so unlikely, Nate admits. Give me your hand.
She stretches out her palm, and he leans over and shakes some pumpkin seeds into it.
She studies them absently, and then puts them in her mouth.
But I thought the government didn’t care about the outcome, he says.
It must be a posture of some kind, she says. She still finds it difficult to believe.
Suddenly her mouth is burning, and she grabs for a glass of water on her desk.
How much chili did you put on this? she says, coughing, sputtering, her eyes tearing. You’re a lunatic. You must have a tongue like leather.
You should be hardier, he says, laughing.
She is up now, in search of water, ice, anything.
I brought in some grapefruit sorbet, he adds to her back.
In the tiny office half-kitchen, she spoons up the sorbet, holding it against her tongue, the roof of her mouth, tart, cold.
As she stands there, the case floats by again. Old justice. Louis’s words. What do they mean, aside from a turn of phrase, a flourish? Old justice must be as murky as young justice, whatever that is, whatever it might be.
A skeptic — how could she be anything else? — but she has been at least partly hooked by law, mesmerized, tenet after tenet claiming to make sense out of some particular cluster of circumstances. The doctrine of ripeness. The principle of attractive nuisance. The duty to rescue. The duty to retreat.
Finally, she had thought, finally, she had found the antidote to luck. Luck, that mobster,
that tyrant, doling out favours and cruelties on a whim. Now, instead of luck, there would be justice, the reordering of a thoughtless world. Now she would see these rules in action, they would provide remedies, they would rearrange tragedies and jackpots, if only she could put together cases that invoked them. But the cases are turning out to be muddy, or a series of dubious riddles, the law itself full of weak spots.
She is trying to ignore this, though, she is afraid that otherwise air will begin slowly leaking out of her convictions, that she will start to deflate in some strange, professional way. And she often finds law heady, enthralling in itself, a slow two-step of surmise and conjecture, a string of tales turned into logic. A snail in a bottle. A carbolic smoke ball. A hunted quail.
Another spoonful of sorbet, cold against her tongue, her lips.
Don’t knock luck, her aunt would say. But the mobster had gotten to her anyway, her kidneys terminally failing at fifty-nine.
A restless presence, though.
So almost anything is better than luck. And her clients are such fervent believers in law — at least those seeing it for the first time — she wonders whether they might re-inject her with their hopes. All their convoluted explanations, their frantic optimism — they believe more deeply in law than any judge, any lawyer. But only until the wrong verdict comes down. Then they are astonished by this betrayal.
Not Owen, naturally. Someone with a smooth coating, unflappable. Merely trying to return a man to the country he came from.
An Act for the remitting prisoners with their indictments to the places where the crimes were committed.
Where divers felons and murtherers, upon feigned and untrue surmises, by writ and otherwise, before the King in his bench, and cannot by the order of the law be remitted sent down to the justices of gaol-delivery or of the peace or other justices or commissioners, to proceed upon them after the course of common law: Be it therefore ordained and enacted by the authority of this present parliament, that the justices of the King’s bench for the time being have full authority and power, by their discretions to remand and send down the bodies of all felons and murtherers brought or removed into the counties where the same murthers or felonies have been committed and done.
···
Good God, says Louis, paper in hand.
Don’t sound so surprised, she says, even though she is surprised herself.
You better call the client and give him the bad news.
We won? says Owen, disconcerted for once.
All three of them think: now we have to do the case.
···
She is dreaming a twitchy dream. The man Drozd in his shirt sleeves, his forearms freckled with age, veins standing out on his hands. A maker of bottles, vials, flasks. He is creating loops of molten red glass, twirling them into brilliant arcs.
What are you doing here? she says, puzzled.
Now he is adding orange glass, grey glass, sending them into the air in flowing spirals. The glass is so naked and luminous that it makes her dizzy to look at it.
How do you do that? she says.
What are you making? she says.
Doesn’t it burn your hands?
Of course, says Drozd, but he keeps on turning out the arcs, twisting and folding them, rolling them out again.
She puts out her hand to touch the hot glass herself, and wakes up, the dream disintegrating.
Glass.
Soda ash, limestone, sand.
So hard, so transparent.
So beautiful. So breakable.
Two
Life has improved, comrades. Life has become more joyous.
Josef Stalin
The pig is trussed, lying against the roots of a tree, squealing. Its small eyes are white-rimmed with fear, hooves scrabbling in the dirt. The early winter air is tinged with the smell of hen manure, smoke, split wood.
The man standing in front of the pig pauses, hefting the sledgehammer in his right hand, a bottle of samahon in the other. He is waiting, waiting for something — perhaps a sign of the right moment for death to overtake this animal. He is not squeamish — not at all, he is hard, a hardness that has accumulated layer by layer, almost everything else wasting away, leaving only a stony sediment and a strand of self-pity. This pig? This pig is meat, and only meat. If anything, he takes a certain pleasure in its misery.
He swigs from the bottle, sets it down. Suddenly he hits the pig on the forehead, and the animal sags, motionless, into the leaves. He throws the rope circling its neck over a branch of the tree, and then catches it, pulling it down with the weight of his body. He begins to hoist until the pig is in the air, suspended, and then he lashes the rope to the tree. Now the knife — thin, double-sided. He brushes his thumb across the blade, even though he honed it on an old whetstone in the barn only that morning. There can be no hesitation — the pig is only stunned at the moment, it must bleed out before it dies or the meat will be sour.
Now. He slashes the animal’s throat at an upward angle, through the tough skin, the fat, across the jugular. Blood spurts out, staining its chest, stomach, and then pooling below it. The pig begins jerking convulsively, its legs trembling and twitching. Its heart struggles to keep pumping, then slows, beat by beat, as its brain begins to die from lack of oxygen. A few minutes later, the animal is still.
The man takes another swig from the bottle — he makes the samahon in old milk cans — and looks around as if he expects applause. But there is only his small son, dirty-faced, his hair dark, unkempt. The farmer next door who owns the pig with him will come over soon for the butchering; two of these tiny homesteads needed to buy the animal, to afford the feed. By the time the other farmer arrives, the man will be sullenly drunk, and they will quarrel over the strips of ribs, the loins, the belly, the lard.
Now he waits while the pig drains, the pool of blood staining the snow. In the meantime, the boy — five at the most — builds up the fire under an old oil drum full of hot water, feeding in sticks, then split logs, and finally one end of a whole log, pushing it farther and farther in as it turns slowly to a glowing shell of grey and white ash.
Get moving, barks the man. The child tries to go faster, trying to avoid a kick or a blow, tripping over himself in his haste. As the fire blazes up, steam begins slowly rising from the water in the oil drum, white-fingered wisps curling in the cold air.
When the pig has bled out, the man swings the carcass over the oil drum, into the boiling water. After a few minutes, he hauls it out again, pulls it onto a makeshift table, and he and the boy begin scraping off the hair and scurf.
When most of the bristles are gone, the man steps back and looks at the body, holding the sticking knife in his hand, taking another swallow of liquor.
Bucket, he growls, and the boy runs to bring it over. Then, swiftly, the man slits the animal from throat to hams, pulling out lungs, slippery intestines, the dark liver, the stomach — as fat and curled as a fetus — letting them fall out below. He throws something to a brindled dog, dancing around in anticipation, and then another gulp of the samahon.
Take the bucket, boy. Take out the organs. Pull off the fat.
The boy pulls the bucket over to the table and plunges his small hands into it, separating the warm guts and the organs. Clumsily, he pulls at the lacy caul fat, the connective tissue until he has most of it off.
Now rinse them.
He uses brackish water from the well, he works as quickly as he can — he knows instinctively how drunk his father is, how drunk he will be, and how brutal he is at each stage of his drunkenness. Almost another sense, one finely tuned by fear.
He lives inside the borders of this fear, fear stretches the air around him, softens the ground beneath him. Fear lives in his throat, on his scalp, in the tiny bones of his inner ears. Fear is his gauge, his understanding, his negotiation with the world. His world? A tiny farm, ignored by collect
ivization, a field and a half of barley, potatoes, turnips, a few squawking hens, several goats, an old horse for plowing, the whole of it bare and badly kept. A place where he was working almost as soon as he could walk, digging potatoes out of the sandy dirt. A place where, even at this age, he watches the smallest things, keeps his eyes open, something essential to survival. This watchfulness is not only a matter of detecting his father’s tempers — he is always looking for anything that might be edible, the warblers’ nests with their greenish eggs, the ground holes left by the field mice. Always watching, always listening, straining to understand. A scrawny, wary existence.
···
The woman is screaming, hoarse, ragged screams. She has been in labour now for seventeen hours, her face is white with exhaustion, her hair is damp with sweat. The pain began quickly, a hard, mad pain, but the baby is stuck now, stuck in the birth canal. The neighbour has mixed a tea from black cohosh root to move this child along. She tries to pour sips of it into the woman’s mouth between the screams, but it dribbles down the side of her cheek. Stand up, she says, hoping gravity will lend a hand, but when the next contraction seizes her body, the woman doubles over and falls to her knees. On and on the pain grinds, she twists and turns on the straw-stuffed mattress, the screams turning into rasps.
The neighbour turns to the husband’s mother, who is praying in a desultory way by the wood stove, and lifts up her hands in a gesture of helplessness. The husband’s mother is irritated by this gesture, her uselessness. Muttering to herself, she goes over to the bed, uncovers the woman, and surveys the bloody mucus between her legs. She hesitates for a moment and then pushes her hand deep into the birth canal, grimacing. She can feel the curve of a head, a sharp shoulder, and she grabs on and yanks hard with the next contraction, and the next one and the next. One last pull and the baby slides into the light, his head smeared with the white wax of a newborn.
The neighbour wraps him in an old blanket, and puts him beside the mother. She looks at him, tries to smile, her mouth still twisted from the pain, unable to believe that this torment is over. She whispers to him, and then closes her eyes.
The Singing Forest Page 4