The City Beautiful

by Aden Polydoros

Officer Rariden glanced up at me. “Have you visited the World’s Fair before?”

  I laughed. Somehow, it struck me as hilarious that this man assumed I could afford the Fair’s entry fee, when I was living crammed in an apartment with three other boys and every spare penny went to my family overseas. Then I realized that now there would be only two other boys sharing the garret room, and a lump built in my throat.

  “What’s so funny?” Officer Rariden asked bluntly.

  A shameful heat crept over my cheeks. I didn’t have the words to answer, so I shrugged and took a sloppy gulp of coffee to avoid saying more.

  Officer Rariden cleared his throat and continued on. My hunger had honed itself into a tight, throbbing knot, but I felt too nauseated to eat the hard mandelbrot-like cookies he offered me with my drink. I didn’t think I’d be able to eat again.

  I took out my father’s pocket watch to check the time, running my thumb over the smooth glass window. Its familiar weight soothed me.

  Sometimes, I imagined that if I wound it backward instead of forward, or perhaps just pressed it to my ear and listened for long enough, I might hear my father’s voice coming from somewhere deep within the chirring cogs. Except it wouldn’t be his warm laughter, but how he had sounded in his final days, after the typhus had gnawed him to the bone. His wheezing, and his indistinct whispers, and the groans of pain and misery.

  Officer Rariden lifted his eyebrows as I slipped the watch back into my pocket. “Do you need to be somewhere?”

  “No. I just...the time.”

  “There’s a clock up there.” He gestured to the wall.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I smiled in discomfort until he continued the interview.

  “How did he die?” I asked, several questions later.

  “Drowning.”

  My breath caught in my throat.

  “We found him in the lagoon, caught in a gondola’s mooring rope.” Officer Rariden sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “His wallet and house keys were in the dirt by the bank. He might have been searching for them in the dark or trying to undo his belt buckle. Then he slipped or struck his head on a low-hanging branch and fell into the water.”

  As Officer Rariden kept talking, my eyes burned. His words floated down to me, hollow and echoing. If what he said was true, Yakov had only been in the water a short while before a patrolman had spotted him. The wall of the lagoon formed a shallow slope, and where he’d fallen in, it had been no more than waist-deep. Shallow enough for him to be revealed in lantern light, but deep enough for him to drown.

  I swallowed hard, telling myself not to cry, don’t you dare cry. It wasn’t like what happened to my father.

  “I imagine he was drunk like most of Chicago,” Officer Rariden continued in a low, bored drawl. “So drunk he didn’t even know where he was.”

  “No. That wouldn’t be like him.”

  It made no sense. How could Yakov be alive one moment, then gone the next? We were practically the same age.

  “Either way, it was an accident,” Officer Rariden said, picking a bit of dirt out from under his nail. “The paperwork has already been filed, and the death certificate has been signed. Since he doesn’t have any living relatives, you’ll have to arrange for someone to pick up the body or it will be taken to the potter’s field at Dunning.”

  “Yakov.” His name lodged in my throat like a stone. “He must have someone stay with him until his funeral, and he needs to be buried as soon as possible.”

  His gaze flicked up. “Do you know of someone who can arrange that?”

  “Yes.” I took a deep breath. “I can.”

  For the last year, I had volunteered at my shul’s chevra kadisha, the society responsible for preparing the dead in accordance with our laws and customs. It comforted me to give others the same burial that my father had been deprived. Until now, I had never personally known those who had passed. I wanted desperately to step back into that role, the role of a stranger. It would have made things so much easier for what I must do next.

  As Officer Rariden led me from his office, a sudden commotion drew my attention to the ground floor. I stopped at the balcony to get a better look.

  “Two months!” a voice exclaimed from below. “Two months, Aaron’s been gone. No telegrams, no postcards. Now another boy is, too, and all you can tell me is, ‘boys, they run off’?”

  The voice was familiar, but it took me a moment to pair it to a name, because the only time I had heard Raizel speak was in Yiddish or German. In comparison, her English was as sharp as a blade, each syllable honed into a serrated edge.

  She leaned over the counter, palms flat against the wood, glowering at the young deputy who had allowed me to use the station’s phone to call work. With his shiny pink cheeks and rail-thin figure, the man didn’t look much older than me or Raizel. He took in her words with a befuddled expression, his cup of coffee forgotten in his hand.

  “Miss,” he began, “you’re going to have to—”

  “So, Moishe Walden then. Did he just run off, too? Nu?” Transitioning seamlessly into Yiddish, she added savagely, “Do you have gefilte fish for brains?”

  The deputy gaped at her as though she’d slapped him across the face. His cheeks reddened. Whether he knew the language or not, the insult was clear in her voice. He cleared his throat and began again, more firmly this time, “Please, miss, uh—”

  “Ackermann, as I told you this Monday and the week before. How many times do I have to come here before you start—”

  He lifted his hand to placate her. “Please calm yourself.”

  “Calm? I’ll show you...” Raizel trailed off when I came down the stairs. As soon as our gazes met, her mouth puckered as if she had swallowed a spoonful of horseradish. Likely, she was remembering the tea incident last week at Mrs. Brenner’s place.

  From the way Raizel looked at me, one never would’ve guessed that we both worked at newspapers. She had devoted herself to the Arbeiter-Zeitung, a German-language worker’s paper infamous for its role in the Haymarket Bombing. I worked the printing presses at the Idisher Ḳuryer, which rarely delved into politics and spent its page space kvetching about community controversies.

  “Is this a police station or a circus?” Officer Rariden snapped, leaning over the second-floor balcony. “If you cannot control yourself, leave. As you well know, we don’t have the resources to hunt down runaway teens. Perhaps your people ought to get in the habit of looking over their own.”

  “Feh!” She shook her head in disgust. “You just don’t care. None of you.”

  I passed her, but she caught up to me at the door and blew upward to stir an errant strand of hair out of her sepia-brown eyes. A union button was pinned to the collar of her simple green dress.

  “Can you believe that schmo? He says that Aaron ran off, maybe freight-hopped to St. Louis or Cincinnati.” Raizel raked a hand through her hair. “As far as they’re concerned, good riddance, one less disobedient worker to worry about. Must be something in the water here, because news on Maxwell Street is that Mrs. Walden’s son is gone, too.”

  “I know.” I exhaled slowly. “Listen, I can’t talk now, Raizel.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute, what are you doing here, Alter? Don’t tell me you were arrested?” She chuckled in disbelief. “You? What did you do?”

  “No. There’s...” My voice broke abruptly, as though I was thirteen again. I tried a second time. “There’s been an accident. Yakov is dead.”

  Her eyes widened. “What did you say?”

  “They found him at the fairgrounds. He fell into one of the lagoons and drowned.”

  “Oh, I—” It took Raizel a moment to find her voice again. “I’m so sorry. I know you two were close.”

  “He was my closest friend here. One of my only ones.” Just saying those words was like clawing open a wound.
I curled my fingers into a fist and dug my nails into my palm. Somehow, pain felt proper; it steadied my voice and soothed my shaky breath. “I need to go. They’ll be taking Yakov to the tahara house, and I want to wait with him.”

  I didn’t know how long Yakov had been lying on the ground after the Columbian Guards had dragged him from the water. But I knew they wouldn’t have recited psalms. They might have smoked in front of him, or sipped from their canteens, or eaten bread and let the crumbs drop carelessly on his body. Even talking about the dead in front of the dead was a violation.

  I didn’t want Yakov to be alone again in the police wagon. He had been left alone long enough.

  3

  As the sun climbed the eastern sky, I gathered with the others in the tahara house’s washing room. There were four of us—Lev, Gavril, Sender, and me. Five if you counted Yakov, who waited for us on a table, under a sheet.

  “Are you sure that you want to do this, Alter?” Lev asked quietly from his place at right of the table. He was the Rosh, the leader and guide. With his neatly groomed white beard and distinguished features, he had the bearing of a holy tzaddik.

  “I need to.” I forced myself to look at the table. “It’s the last thing I can do for him.”

  I couldn’t make out Yakov’s features through the white linen, only the shape of his form. The gaslights cast flickering shadows over the shroud, as though something was moving under there.

  Steeling my nerves, I retrieved the sponge from the porcelain basin at my side. “I’m staying.”

  Lev nodded toward Gavril, who stood at the head of the table. Grizzled and stoic, Gavril drew the shroud from over Yakov’s head.

  Tears prickled my eyes at the sight of Yakov’s familiar features, and my knees weakened beneath me. Just twelve hours ago, he had still been alive. His hand had been warm when he touched me. I bit my inner cheek until I tasted my own blood, knowing that any show of grief would exile me.

  In the last eleven months of volunteering at the chevra kadisha, I had washed old men who perished on the streets, workers killed in factory accidents, and children taken by illness. Yet even the grievous injuries of a man gored by a steer at the Yards hadn’t shaken me like this. They had been a way for me to heal from my father’s untimely death, while this simply ripped apart the scar tissue.

  Taking a deep breath, I dipped the sponge into warm water.

  As we cleaned Yakov’s head, Lev recited from the Song of Songs:

  “His head is as the finest gold; his locks are curled, black as a raven. His eyes are like doves beside rivulets of water, bathing in milk, fitly set.”

  Yakov’s skin held an ashy pallor, his dark hair a stiff bramble. A cloudy film blanketed the brilliant blue of his eyes. There was dirt on his lips, dirt in his hair. A livid bruise necklaced his throat.

  I washed the grime from his cheeks and under his jawline. A scatter of droplets beaded on the bruise, trickling down to gather in the hollow of his neck. The sight of it sickened me.

  They’d found him caught in a mooring rope, Officer Rariden had said, but could a mooring rope really have caused something like this? He must have been heavily entangled, and maybe when the Columbian Guards had tried to tug it off him, the rope had only tightened further.

  “His jaws are like a bed of spice, growths of aromatic plants; his lips are roses, dripping with flowing myrrh.”

  Lev’s deep timbre echoed through the room, his voice as soulful and resonant as when he led prayers as the chazzan in shul. In all my months volunteering here, I had only seen him weep once, when we had prepared a child who he later told us reminded him of his own grandson.

  The face. The neck. The chest.

  “His hands are wheels of gold, set with chrysolite; his abdomen is a block of ivory, overlaid with sapphires.”

  I had always found this verse, which was a metaphor for the glory of God, to be deeply moving. It reminded me that even the dead possessed HaShem’s sanctity and divine beauty and that no manner of defilement could take that away. But with each word that left Lev’s mouth, my grip on the sponge grew tighter.

  I submerged the sponge in the basin to hide my trembling, dismayed by the depths of my rage. My teeth clenched so tightly that pain radiated through my jaw. I wanted to turn to Lev, seize him by the shirt and shake him violently, and scream that this was all wrong. There was no glory or sanctity here.

  Once Yakov’s right side was clean, we covered it with the sheet once more. Next was his left side, the port-wine birthmark that dripped like blood down his muscular forearm, the slim fingers I had once imagined curling around me.

  Using a blunt sterling blade, I scraped away the soot engrained under his cuticles, relics of his job tending to train boilers. Each time, the sheet was lifted only high enough to expose the area we were washing, making it feel as though there wasn’t a whole person beneath the linen, just a puzzle of disembodied parts.

  “His legs are pillars of marble, founded upon sockets of fine gold, his appearance is like the Lebanon, chosen as the cedars.”

  After washing Yakov’s front, we turned him onto his side. The air hissed from between my teeth as the pitiless gaslight shone upon his back. His torso was disfigured by an old burn scar that stretched across his spine and midsection, coiling like a shed snakeskin around his left hip.

  Yakov had always changed into his boilersuit at work, claiming that he didn’t want to soil his street clothes. He wore a long shirt to sleep even on stifling midsummer nights. In the three months he rented our room, I’d never seen his bare back.

  Something happened to me, the scar seemed to say. Something terrible.

  He had told me about the barn fire, but he had never told me that he, too, had been caught in it.

  I immersed the sponge and turned my focus back to the task, trying to pretend the scar wasn’t there. Right. It was no different than the puckering smallpox marks or old surgical scars I found on other bodies.

  Death was ugly, I had learned, but life could be even uglier and unfathomably cruel.

  “His palate is sweet, and he is altogether desirable; this is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.”

  Upon hearing the final verse, the urge to weep pierced me like a knife in the gut. It fully dawned on me, I would never see Yakov again after this. He’d never smile again. I’d never look into these blue eyes again. We wouldn’t be interring him in the Atlantic, but a pauper’s grave was just as permanent.

  Glancing my way, Gavril furrowed his brows. We couldn’t speak while tending to the dead, but his gaze conveyed his worry well enough. I shivered. What did he see in my face?

  As soiled water sluiced down the table legs, we transferred Yakov to a slotted board attached to the pulley system overhead. Some burial societies poured buckets of water over the dead to ritually purify them, but ours had a mikveh built specifically for that purpose.

  Gavril and Sender handled the ropes while Lev and I guided the board to the shallow bath at the other end of the room. I removed the shroud and folded it over my arm as Yakov’s body was lowered into the water.

  The creak of the pulley and the low, strained groan of the rope tore at my nerves. Even the sound of the water sloshing against the bath’s tiled sides became inexplicably abrasive. To maintain Yakov’s dignity, Gavril and Sender turned their faces away, and Lev kept his gaze planted on the ceiling. I began to look away, too, only to find my gaze drawn helplessly to the mikveh once more.

  Centimeter by centimeter, the water claimed Yakov. It crept up his bare skin, his chest, his head. His hair drifted around his face in an inky halo.

  Taking a shallow breath, I drew in the scent of brine, though we were hundreds of kilometers from any ocean and the purification bath was filled with clean rainwater. I couldn’t look away, frozen as still as a pillar of salt.

  “And I will pour upon you pure water,” Lev reci
ted from Ezekiel, “and you will be purified of all your defilements.”

  The glow from the oil lamps failed to reach the bottom of the mikveh. The water grew bluer, darker. Bubbles burst from Yakov’s mouth and raced to the surface. His chest rose. His fingers twitched.

  “—and from all your abominations I will purify—”

  He looked at me.

  “Wait,” I cried, dropping the shroud. “Wait, he’s still alive!”

  I reached for the rope without thinking, trying to seize it from Sender’s hands so that I could haul Yakov up and keep him from drowning. We grappled with the rope, grunting for control. In spite of having the sunless complexion and slight build of a yeshiva student, Sender clung onto the cord as tenaciously as a terrier, even going so far as to bare his teeth. I wanted to throttle him.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Sender demanded, sweat dewing on his brow. “Let go, Alter!”

  “Pull him up, pull him up.” The words flew from my mouth in a savage, breathless chant that I barely recognized as my own. “There’s still time to save him. Damnit, listen to me, there’s still time!”

  As I wrestled for control of the rope, a second pair of hands dug into my shoulders, trying to drag me back. The pulley swayed violently overhead. Raw, distorted sounds echoed in my ears—indistinct shouts, the groan of the ungreased pulley, a heavy thud as the board crashed against the porcelain tiles lining the bath, and the stomach-churning splash of a body tumbling into the water.

  I glanced down at the tub—oh, God, where did he go? Where did he go?—and then Sender gave a hard yank on the rope that tore it from my hands. Palms stinging, I reeled back, the alarmed voices merging into a dull liquid roar. My foot landed in a puddle, and without knowing how I fell, I found myself underwater.

  Bubbles streamed from my lips as I sank deeper into the water. I reached out to touch the mikveh’s walls, but there were only even greater depths and the bitter taste of salt flooding my mouth.

  I thrashed around, heavily disoriented. In a split second, my surroundings had changed. The clean, orderly room of the tahara house was gone, replaced by an endless abyss. Water all around me, water high above me. The dark, churning depths seemed to stretch on for an eternity, while the mikveh should have been no more than waist deep.