Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  At night we continued applauding for Max Gordon and launched numerous performers on their careers. Later, maybe after a year, we’d already made a name for ourselves as claqueurs, and were invited to a show by Billy Strayhorn, the sweetest of men, who was Duke Ellington’s arranger and wrote my favorite song, “Lush Life,” and who was short and gay, and like Gandy had gone to Paris and come back right away. He was a composer and had a pained smile and died young, but was doing Ellington’s arrangements then and writing songs like “Take the ‘A’ Train.” He and Duke worked together at the Paramount Theatre on Times Square, appearing with his band during the intermission between two movies. Duke asked Strayhorn to bring us along because the career of Frank Sinatra who was performing with him then was taking a near-fatal nosedive. The audience hated him. He’d left his wife and people jeered at him because he’d been cheating on her with Ava Gardner. After taking a break, full of sorrow and fear, he was trying to make a comeback. We went to the theater. Backstage we saw Sinatra with a contemptuous but defeated expression on his face. He gave us shots of rye and a plate of spaghetti with meatballs and Duke played. Duke had about two hundred suits backstage that he would change every hour, and after he’d finished playing he introduced Sinatra and invited him to come on stage. We applauded and the audience got up and left the theater shouting, Get off, Frankie. Sinatra was shocked. He sat backstage and didn’t talk to us. He knew we knew that Duke had done him a favor and he was ashamed. We were the most professional claque in town. Between acts Gandy took me to the Palace, he brought overalls, we put them on, went backstage where he found a wooden beam that we carried inside like we were stagehands and we saw a performance by Judy Garland. We went back to the Paramount and saw Sinatra working hard. Sweating. Hurting. Crushed. Trying not to give in. One night Sinatra was sitting with his head between his knees, swearing like a soldier. He’d arrived angry. Furious. He wanted to kill. His lips were clenched, his hands were trembling, he looked like a washed-up boxer. I could tell his mind was going back to the jungle he’d come from. The ghetto. I knew that this time he’d come to win. To wipe out the backstabbing sons of bitches who’d once respected him and now came just because of Duke and cursed at him for two-timing Nancy. He stood there. We clapped. He shot us a scornful look. By the second or third number we could see him getting back the killer instinct he’d had when he was a kid; hunched and thin as a beanpole, he suddenly straightened up and his eyes glowed with anger and disgust and he was filled with power. He fought like a matador. Sang like cowboys fight in the movies. He didn’t sing, he fucked them senseless. He conquered them. And Duke, who was listening, turned pale, passed up his set, and stood wordless backstage. We stopped clapping, tears streamed down Sinatra’s cheeks, he knew he’d won, the catcalls subsided, the people who’d got up to leave came back and sat down, he was like a boxer who’d been given one more chance to win or die in the attempt. He killed them. They started shouting and clapping. He finished his set and didn’t wait for the applause, he shot one disparaging look at the audience, smiled a tiny smile, exited, and despite the applause did not come back. He didn’t pay us that night. Or offer us a drink.

  At the Village Vanguard I met a couple of Israeli artists, Ilka and Aviva, who’d made an impression on the New Yorkers. Ilka, who had a wooden leg, played the panpipes and had a beautiful bass voice like Chaliapin. Aviva played the tambourine and sang with him and they were extremely popular. They invited me to a party thrown by a friend of theirs who lived at Sammy’s Bowery Follies, which was the Ziegfeld Follies for amputees, the obese, people with sixteen fingers, dwarfs, female vocalists who’d lost their voice. A big room under the Third Avenue El. The trains passed noisily overhead and rattled the windows. American folk singers like the Weavers and Martha Schlamme sang Hebrew songs as well as English and Ilka accompanied them on his pipes or with his bass voice lowered even more. In a corner sat the most fair-skinned naked girl I’d ever seen. Her skin was transparent. You could see the white flesh beneath it. She sat there examining her left big toe with exaggerated interest. Aviva saw me looking at her and said, That’s Pat, a real character. I moved closer while she made a big effort not to notice me and once she did she asked if I thought her big toe was pretty or was it too thick, and added in a sweet Southern drawl, Ah want the truth now, Ah don’t want y’all talking behind mah back. I said that, first of all, I could see her back through her transparent stomach, and furthermore I wasn’t an expert on big toes, but relative to mine hers was pretty. She asked me to take off my left shoe. I did. She asked me to take off the sock. I did, and she looked at my big toe for a long time and said in a tear-choked voice that I was a liar and that my big toe was far prettier than hers and that this wasn’t fair. Ilka sang, “So perish all Thine enemies, O Lord,” and she joined in that bellicose song and to my surprise she knew the words, and then she asked me who I was and why. I explained that I was a painter and after about an hour I told Aviva in Hebrew that I was going to move in with this wonderful creature if only she’d put some clothes on, because I love it when women undress for me. Pat smiled and asked what I’d said and I translated and she said, I think that perhaps in light of the situation and the beauty of your left big toe, I’ll take a chance. My apartment is no palace, though. Pat was tall, her face was pale and as though shrouded in a pinkish veil and her hair was golden, but there was a hint of asymmetry to her, maybe a spark of innocent yet mocking playfulness, which made her not a cover girl but more beautiful than she first seemed. More beautiful than dazzling. She got dressed and we slowly walked to her house on the corner of Division and Canal. An old, bleak building. Subway trains passed every few minutes shaking the sidewalk and, I later discovered, the building as well. It was clear that we’d be going upstairs together. She said it was important that I know that a month and a half earlier there’d been one unpleasant night with a guy whose body she’d wanted to hate, and he’d raped her and she got pregnant and as she’d already had three abortions she couldn’t risk another one.

  On the way to her railroad apartment that had four old interconnecting rooms, she told me I should know right off the bat that she’d sold her unborn baby to a company and every week a doctor who didn’t speak but just examined her would come by and give her instructions, medicine, and vitamins, and that the company mailed her a regular surrogate fee. She spoke slowly, pulling the words from a mound of cotton wool, they dripped from her mouth and stuck together in a whispered incantation and remained suspended there between her and the listener for about a hundredth of a second and only then were heard. Her words were always a kind of a shroud being cut through with a delicate knife for dissecting butterfly wings. Her place was unheated. It was winter and cold. In the kitchen that was the train’s caboose there was an old gas stove and she put on the kettle. All the rooms contained remnants left behind by previous tenants: wobbly stools, couches, on the window ledge an empty vase with a few withered flowers that disintegrated to dust when I touched them. A broken black piano and on it a pile of Herald Tribunes from the previous century. In one I found an article on the fastest ship in the world, which traveled from New York to San Francisco in only one hundred and eighty-three days, and I also found articles on the mills in Liverpool by Karl Marx. Somebody had left behind a faded ballet slipper. A small piece of cardboard with an old photograph of a soldier stuck to it and the inscription, “Waste Helps the Enemy.” There were dried-up cacti, two naïve paintings of little girls that looked like sleeping dolls. Through one window you could see a wall of wooden planks plastered with a gigantic, flaking Alan Ladd movie poster, concealing behind it a derelict movie theater, and next to the poster someone had scrawled, “There is Life Before Death.” From the window of the second room you could see the bridge arching over to Brooklyn and part of the road leading to it and in the distance you could see the bridge spilling onto the other bank. In the middle, under the bridge, was a small island bisected by it. As I looked out a man led by a huge dog passed below. Pat stood behind
me and laughed at him through my hair. The dog peed on some shreds of the poster torn up by stray cats and the guy yelled, That’ll show you, Alan, you big shot! and he looked up at the window and waited and Pat called to him in her flowery voice, See you tomorrow, honey. The man was pleased and stroked his dog lovingly and it growled happily at the window. The cold went right to our bones. Every few minutes the building shook as the A Train passed underneath. The apartment cost eighteen dollars a month because Pat wanted to save. The only possible place to be was in bed. We got into it and I didn’t emerge until hunger got the better of me. I went downstairs, five floors, and found myself in front of stores selling tefillin and mezuzahs. Taleisim Tefillin Mezuzahs Bar-mitzvah Sets. Mantelich für Torahs. Hebrew Books and Taleisim, Silk or Wool, 59 Cents. Prayer Books. Kosher Market. And next to another movie poster featuring Myrna Loy, her eyes scratched out by cats, was a sign: God Bless America. In the small grocery the shopkeeper looked at me and said, Ah, you’re the Jew from upstairs? And you’re called Yoiram? Yoram, I replied. He said Yoiram and shalom aleichem and what would the princess from upstairs like? And I said he should give me whatever she usually bought and he did and asked, And Yiddish, you know? I said no. A goy, he said. Listen good, the first time and only the first time it’s for free, but don’t go getting any ideas. Apart from the usual stuff he also gave me some pickled herring wrapped in newspaper and an old woman came into the store with a small bunch of flowers and said, That’s for the goya. She’s sweet, eh? Not far from there stood the Yiddish Forward building, the tallest one around.

  When I got back I found in a corner of the front hall, hidden in a semi-basement, a small Hebrew bookstore with a Hebrew sign. Outside there was a bookstand with Agnon’s Thus Far; The Travels of Dr. Yoffe in Eretz Israel, 1865; Moses Montefiore’s Debates with Philanthropists, Warshawsky Press, Warsaw. Inside sat a man in a threadbare corduroy jacket. Gloomy and sullen he sat under a lamp covered with dead flies. I looked around. In an Ashkenazi dialect he said, The flies had a milchumeh, a battle against the flypaper, and the flypaper won. Hörst du? The Mayor wanted to clean up the filthy city. We cleaned up and the filth came back. The Mayor came and I told him, we’re fighting but the dirt is winning, eh? You murderer of Hebrew. I asked why he called me that, and he smiled the most bitter smile I’d ever seen. It was two years since I’d seen Hebrew books and I wanted to buy one but he said that there were enough bookstores in Tel Aviv, and that the Sephardic Hebrew we spoke in Israel was a whore. I’m telling you that this is the last time I’m talking to you because you’re Arabs. How do you know that’s the way they spoke in the Bible? Barbarians, reading Bialik in Sephardic pronunciation as if that’s really Bialik? And then, after he’d got over his outburst he said I could take a book from the stand outside because they were cheap ones he wouldn’t sell me, but would give me as charity. He said, I’ve got a son who’s married to an American in Chicago, a doctor, so what, can I go to Eretz Israel now? Great writers used to live here, would you care to know who? Leibush Kolodny who wrote wonderful feuilletons, who reads them today? Yechiel Rabinowitz, who wrote The Golden Crown, and the poems, oy, the poems, “From beneath the gray roofs of my heart…” I make a living from Talmuds and Torahs and siddurim, but I won’t sell them Simchas Torah flags with the apple and the candle. Goyim…People had gathered at the entrance to his shop. One of them, who introduced himself as a hatter and had soft facial features, said that the bookseller was like all haters of Modern Hebrew and that’s why he wouldn’t sell me books. The hatter explained in Yiddish that the bookseller was shouting in English since he didn’t want to waste any more honest Hebrew on me and added, Listen, everybody’s got a country, every Zulu’s got a country. Every dreck has got a country. The People of God don’t have a country. We have the Messiah. We are the old people in the kindergarten of history, and if the Holy One, blessed is He, had wanted a Jewish state he would have established it long ago. I went upstairs, told the story to Pat, we got into bed, we ate in bed and I heard a toothpaste commercial on the radio. I got up shivering with cold and painted her with what remained of my oil paints. I went for a walk north to Eleventh Street and looked at the prison roof. Gandy came to have a chat because he’d heard about Pat and said he’d seen her from a distance and she was beautiful. I said thanks. A woman shouted because she thought I was somebody else, an old woman spat as she passed me, I can’t remember where the time went or who I was in the story. Across from Pat’s apartment on the same floor lived the author Morom Morom who was known as “The Great” and it was said that his real name was Kuty Hayerushalmi and perhaps he wrote Morom or Morom Morom wrote him. He saw time in reverse, told what would be in the past, and didn’t always remember what was in the future. He lived with a young woman whom he taught Hebrew in Canaanite script and used to bring me milk because he thought I needed all my strength for a goya like Pat and he informed me in writing that he wanted to recruit me to the People’s Salvation Army he had been working on setting up for twenty-two years. The building shook every few minutes and it took a while to get used to this. Without warning a new poster appeared on the wooden wall across the street: “Camel Cigarettes—More Doctors Smoke Camel—Top Quality Cigarettes,” and then I received my draft papers. Not for the People’s Salvation Army. I didn’t have an American passport or a Green Card. I went to the recruiting office in Manhattan and was taken inside. They checked my papers and sent me for a medical. There were thirty young guys naked and shivering and a doctor examined us one after the other. He was escorted by a brawny sergeant major who refused to smile. The doctor reached me and looked at my leg and examined my left eye. What’s this? he asked. I was wounded, I replied. Where? In the war, I said. Which one? In Israel, in 1948. Against the Arabs? Yes, I said. He ordered me to get dressed. I stood there fully dressed next to a line of naked scarecrows whose testicles hung shaking like jelly and the sergeant major said, This man’s a military hero. This is how I want you in Korea. Not like dishrags. Look at him. He was badly wounded yet he’s volunteering. I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to tell him that I hadn’t volunteered at all. The doctor was surprised and asked, Is this recent surgery? I told him I’d just been operated on again here in New York. The sergeant major saluted me and I was sent home with a 4-F form and Pat laughed and asked me to show her how it all went. It was cold and I stripped in front of the Southern doll who lay sprawled on one of the many armchairs. She watched and suddenly burst into tears. I asked, Why are you crying? If you’d been drafted and got killed in Korea I would have killed myself, she said. There was something primordial about Pat, as if she were linked directly to the beginnings of the world. I knew it didn’t sound right, but when I told her as much, she wept to hear that stupid sentence of mine, overjoyed, and said she remembered being born and that she’d looked back at the place she’d emerged from and said, It’s a pity I’m not going back in there. On the radio someone was singing “Hello young lovers, wherever you are.” I’d walk down Delancey Street and find everything I’d left behind and hadn’t dreamed I’d ever leave in Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market and nobody spoke English except the Irish cops. In a movie we watched on Second Avenue W. C. Fields said that any man who hated dogs and children couldn’t be all bad. Pat disagreed but Gandy, who’d come for coffee, concurred and said that kids devour dogs and vice versa. I asked where and he said, You’ll see, here it’s dog-eat-dog. The whole country was mobilized against the Reds. They were constant warnings about an A-bomb dropping on the city. An evil bomb. Not like U.S. bombs. People were starving because they’d been kicked out of their jobs. There were flags everywhere and people in the street would stop just like that and sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” and I read One Lonely Night by Mickey Spillane who was the most popular writer at the time. The legendary Mike Hammer said: “I killed more people tonight than I have fingers on my hands. I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it…They were Commies…They were red sons of bitches who should have died long ago…They never thought that t
here were people like me in this country. They figured us all to be soft as horse manure and just as stupid.” People built bomb shelters and every street held drills to prepare for the final blow.

  Pat’s story is Pat herself. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama where her father was the Ford Motor Company’s head representative. Pat was destined to be a Southern belle. The scent of magnolias was infused into her blood along with needles of love. At seventeen she fell in love with a colored yard boy. They made love a few times. She brought him gifts she stole from the house. They were caught. His head was cut off with a grub hoe and Pat saw the head fly into the river. As she told this story her eyes filled with tears but she smiled too like someone recalling a terrible but beautiful memory. I ran to the river, she said, and the severed head had a sweet smell. They threw her out of the house. She traveled north and met a circus. Wearing a short skirt she worked with the elephants, then arrived in New York. She hadn’t learned a thing in the South except for being beautiful and elegant so she could marry a Southern gentleman, and so she became what was known as a call girl. She made good money although she mostly talked dirty to her clients, most of whom were businessmen visiting New York, and in her soft whispery Southern drawl told about how they could fuck her and how she would suck them and how they’d screw her hard, and her soft, melodic, well-bred voice and her girl-next-door looks all made for a pleasant evening and her clients would get excited and come and be satisfied without ever penetrating her. One day her father showed up. He wasn’t happy when he saw her. He went downstairs, bought a red coat, and gave it to her. Didn’t say a word. He looked at her with passionate grief and slammed the door behind him. She wore that coat all the time. And even today, fifty years later, when I close my eyes and try to envision her, I still see the red coat set off against her white face and the impish smile of a mischievous, sad, but naïve virgin. She was chronically late and was well liked by the Jews on her street. Whenever a minyan, a quorum of ten men, was needed to say Kaddish, she’d go from store to store collecting hapless males and drag them to the house of the deceased. She liked taking me to the Yiddish Forward building. There was a big notice board at the entrance with obituaries. Old people, sometimes couples, men wearing berets and occasionally yarmulkes, would slowly falter up to read—purely by chance, of course—about friends who were gone, and they’d nod their heads: Ah, she’s died too, and look, that funny Mishke’s gone as well, he’s not so funny now. Pat made friends with the woman who sat in the lobby; her face was almost crystalline, as though it had been molded from a mixture of wax and marble. She wore a black dress. Her nose was thin and a huge gold Star of David hung from a chain around her neck. She sat at a table with a big book and crossed out the names of the dead who appeared on the notice board from the Forward’s subscription list, since in any case the children would call tomorrow and cancel the subscriptions themselves. She took pride in beating them to the punch but was sad that subscribers had died. She said that if she wanted she could really tell those children off—in racy English spiced with Yiddish. She sat there, grim-faced, suffering like a suffocating fish as she bore witness to the sinister plague of Jewish mortality, and seemed both sad and proud. The number of readers was steadily dwindling. The Yiddish Theater on Second Avenue was already about to give up the ghost. Pat herself was a champion mourner for the dying Jews and she’d sometimes attend the funerals of people she’d never known and drag me along too. People loved her innocent beauty and the obscure fears she gave rise to; a kind of remorse for something they knew nothing about. Most of the Jews called her Ruth. For the owner of the Hebrew bookstore on the first floor, the death of every Yiddish reader was also—despite his pain at the death of another Jew—a personal victory. He liked to describe—not to me, because he wouldn’t speak to me—but to Pat on my behalf, all those reporters with their rakish berets, their pencils tucked behind their ears, looking for scoops among the Jews who had in any case dropped dead thanks to Yiddish and that profane Sephardic Hebrew—they were all scandal-chasers and looked ridiculous. Before the Angel of Death had so much as twitched, he told her, it was Eretz Yisroel that killed them. He said that the women in the Yiddish newspaper building were knitting sweaters for the dead. I could see that the woman in black was silently outraged about this seeming epidemic, but whenever the old man looked at her she just smiled and measured him with her hands as if preparing him for his coffin. She said that when she saw somebody become bent and bowed and small, she always thought, He’s measuring himself to fit the grave, and she had to smile affectionately at him. Once, the man’s teeth fell out. Right onto the Book of the Dead. She kissed the book after she’d placed his teeth back in his mouth and continued burying her Jews in silent protest. Pat said that if Yiddish died in America, New York would become Calcutta. Pat introduced me to Herzl Jungerman who was said to be the oldest and best-known journalist on the paper. He’d come in every morning, enter his office, go over the paperwork, and write the obituaries. The dead had already been measured while alive, so it was no great effort. When Pat first introduced us I noticed he was measuring me too. Height. Eye color. Date of birth? he asked. Place of birth? Tel Aviv. Aha, they die over there too. His entire life he’d measured people for their obituaries, said Pat, and the people who passed him in the hall were scared of him and hid. You could see the Manhattan Bridge from her apartment too. From both sides of the river the Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola billboards were waging the war of the century right under our noses.