by Yoram Kaniuk
He took me into the dining room. A big table, sixteenth century he said. And straight-backed chairs likewise sixteenth century, from a Scottish castle. On the walls were photographs about three feet square of a woman he said was his late wife. He seemed lonely and we ate almost in silence, surrounded by the huge portraits of his dead wife and tended to by an old manservant whose hands trembled from old age. The food was delicious. We drank wine. He said it was wine from Baron de Rothschild’s cellar. Suddenly this sad man surrounded by his wife twenty times over began smiling and said that a man once approached a sausage seller standing opposite the Rothschild palace and asked him for a loan, and the sausage seller replied, I have an arrangement with Baron Rothschild, he doesn’t sell sausages and I don’t lend money. The servant approached almost without touching the ground and served dessert and then coffee. On my way home I recalled the never-ending theological arguments with Mira who claimed that Christianity began where ethics ended and God began. She said that the Church is a way, and a way is greater than the distance between two points—like life and death in Judaism, where we don’t even have a heaven! A person searches for a way, wanting to reach hope, because he always needs hope. And then I remembered that for her, all that wonderful Christianity had ended up in two cans of hashish.
It was summer. A friend took me out in his red Porsche and put the top down. We went to see a show that Lee was dancing in. It was so hot that birds dropped out of the trees cooked. Half the cars were smoking. A woman outside a fruit and vegetable store was holding a skillet and frying eggs in the heat. The traffic lights had died. The city’s electric grid had shut down. We couldn’t move. Evening began to fall apart. We were in the Porsche at night stuck between thousands of cars, smoking buses, trucks, and they were all trying to move and running into one another. A line of people came out of one of the buildings. They walked slowly, measuring each step, and didn’t say a word. There were maybe a hundred, two hundred people there; old people, young people, women, men. They walked in perfect order. They were holding candles so we could see them and pocket flashlights and they started directing traffic. My friend shone the lights of his luxurious car at them. They explained that they were blind and wanted the drivers to listen to them, and they seemed to move as if they’d been waiting all their lives for this moment. In the oppressive heat, in almost one hundred percent humidity, they unraveled the traffic jam, sending some of us down side streets and some off to the park, not far from there, so people could find a place to sit and shut down their boiling engines. They went from car to car, from bus to truck. Everybody did what they said, the jam was eased and the traffic started moving: slowly, but it moved. The electricity came back on. Thousands of drivers applauded the blind people who made their way back to their building on Broadway and bowed like they were actors. Then it turned out that the monk who’d been Mira’s husband had followed her home and reached a monastery near New York. He had an outdated, naïve, and credulous innocence and though he had only joined the priest-hood because of Mira was still completely unable to renounce his abstinence. Completely by chance I bumped into him as he passed me on Fifty-seventh Street by the Russian Tea Room, and he inquired about Mira and whether she ever talked about him and I said yes. He stared at me. With a certain curtness I asked him why he was still a monk. He looked at me for a long time, thought a little, his sandals were dusty, his hair short, his face pale, and he said in a whispery voice, She’ll never be mine, I watch out for her and the Good Lord helps me. You’ll see the light too one day. God loves you.
Avi Shoes and I had grown up together but we’d never understood one another. The truth is that we liked each other so we didn’t even try to understand. Our relationship was fluid. We’d met in kindergarten. We used to swim together at Gordon Beach. Ever since he was a kid all Avi wanted to do was rest. He was born to go through life in a daze. We enlisted together in 1947 and we fought together. We worked together on illegal immigrant ships. We went around Naples and Marseilles together, and in Yugoslavia through abandoned castles where thousands of shattered Jewish refugees had congregated on the grounds and we rounded them up and led them to the ships. I studied in Jerusalem, I was squatting in the top floor of a monastery while he stayed in Tel Aviv and worked collecting luxury taxes. I never stopped being haunted by the horrors of the war but he forgot it the day it ended. In Paris, not far from the Café de Flore, he met a German girl who sounded crazy and whose name was Martina. We were both there they day they met. We flipped a coin to see who’d hit on her. I won but she was looking at him the whole time I tried. Then he tried and she melted. She’d wanted him even before she was born, she said. She made herself into a chameleon for him. She became whatever he needed. He knew all about chameleons; when he was young, he used to pick them off trees and stroke their heads. Martina said she was in love with him and nobody had ever told him anything like that before. She photographed him in the nude and started literally chewing glass because of him. After some time her glass chewing began to worry him, sometimes blood would drip out of her mouth and he began to hate her and used to hide all his glasses, but he also started feeling rather guilty about her. Maybe because she was German and so he thought he should hate her. Or maybe because he worried that she thought she only needed to love him because he was a Jew. She sometimes even called him “My Jew.” Avi came to America a year later, to get away from Martina, but it was no use, she was determined and followed him. He came to me. Lee couldn’t stand him because he never looked at her and wasn’t interested in her dancing. Martina’s family had a small estate in New Hampshire. Avi Shoes, who didn’t want to see her, suggested that she go to up to the family estate to rest. He began working for a moving company and one Sunday, in May 1956, he had an attack of remorse about the way he’d treated Martina—or so he told me—and decided to visit her. He bought a ticket for White River Junction on the 1:04 train from Penn Station. He went there from the studio I had at the time on Charles Street and went into Rikers to order a sandwich and a bottle of Coca-Cola, and he sat down on a high stool facing the street. He was staring into the street and found himself focusing on the figure of an elderly man walking slowly along. He noticed that the man’s shoelaces were undone and trailing behind him. The man, who began to feel that his dragging laces were hampering his progress, stopped by the window. He found a hydrant that looked like a top hat with a little head, glanced embarrassedly from side to side, put one foot on the hydrant, and tied his laces—with no great success. Avi remembered that a few days earlier, in a dusty toy and games store on Delancey Street, where he’d bought a present for Martina’s nephew, he’d seen a flexible but strong leather strap one end of which was smeared with some sort of weak adhesive that would stick but also come apart again and never dry up. As Avi watched the man tying his laces he thought—and this was nothing new for him, because he was perfectly capable of thinking about a single wave at Gordon Beach for an entire hour, staring at it and following it from afar, and when he’d go on to see a ship on its way into port he’d decide the ship must have caused the wave, though they were two or three kilometers apart, and feel as though he’d solved a great riddle—that if the man had laces made out of the straps he’d seen at the toy store, the man could bring one lace to the other and they’d simply stick together on their own. Avi left the diner, forgot about his train ticket, went to Delancey Street, found the straps he was looking for, bought a whole bunch of them, and then—unable to do otherwise, given his stubbornness—went back to Penn Station anyway, even though he knew he’d missed his train. He called Martina’s brother from the station and said that due to his feelings of moral obligation toward her he would be unable to come. She then began coming to New York, sitting on his doorstep shouting, and in the end he’d take her inside and she’d make noises like greaseproof paper and draw butterflies on his chest and finally something strange and completely inexplicable to Avi burst out from within her and she asked him to give her a child. Avi was vehemently opposed to this.
At this time Yochai who had served with us in the war came to America too. Avi told him about his shoelace idea, which was giving him no peace. He cut the strap into thin strips like laces and played with them, stuck them together, tore them open, experimented, and really, I had my doubts as to whether this was worth all the trouble. Yochai was excited. With the little money they took from their savings they rented a room on Broome Street and immersed themselves in their work for weeks. They started producing strips as thin as laces, which if they came undone and then came into contact with each other would stick themselves together again. Avi Shoes said, It’s a small thing, not like a new jet plane, but something. They went to a shoe store owned by a Jew in Brooklyn who Yochai knew through a cousin he’d met when he first arrived. The shoe-store owner took a shine to them: Israeli soldiers manufacturing shoelaces! It made him laugh, but still, Israeli soldiers, what wouldn’t we do for them! He told the story at his temple and invested five thousand dollars in development. Avi said that one day they’d find a way of sticking the straps to the shoes themselves so that laces wouldn’t be necessary at all. They threaded their way through town, selling their laces from store to store in Brooklyn, then in Manhattan, the Bronx, Coney Island, and as far as New Jersey. To their great surprise, demand increased. Within a few months they were producing thousands of pairs of laces, black and brown and white and red. They employed Israeli students who were saving money to buy electrical appliances before returning home, paying them to go from store to store and sell the laces for a commission.
One day at my apartment Avi Shoes met Mira who’d come to argue with me. He fell for her. What amazed me was the way Boris received him. He didn’t throw him out and didn’t insult him. They spoke the same language: Avi Shoes understood Boris and Boris understood him. He is a shoelace genius, he said, not radio, not television, laces, and that’s what’s wonderful about inventions, it’s more important and more difficult to invent scissors, the wheel, a fork, than another sophisticated bomb! Boris went one better and made Avi some stuff to add to the original adhesive that made it last even longer. Their innovation, the simplicity of the process, did their job for them. Avi registered a patent, not because he really thought that potential big-time competitors would be deterred by it, but he still hoped his business was too small for them to notice. Mira warmed to Avi and began to hate Martina, though hating had never been difficult for her. She didn’t love Avi Shoes, or maybe she did later, but I have no proof, and anyway I don’t understand how Avi Shoes, usually so sharp, could have fallen in love with her. He rented a big loft on Avenue A. The Jewish storeowner who’d invested the first five thousand dollars wasn’t really interested in whether the shoelaces worked or not, but he was happy for his protégés. People always buy shoes, he said, and in shoe stores you don’t make money from laces. But within two months Avi Shoes and Yochai sold thousands of laces and later tens of thousands of pairs all over the United States, and with the help of a friend of Mira’s they embarked on a successful advertising campaign and began exporting. Yochai returned to Israel to marry Aliza, the love of his youth. They’ve got four children and three grandchildren now and live in a moshav near Tel Mond. Yochai invested the money he made in his children and for pleasure he raises parrots and teaches them to talk. Avi forgave Mira for her quiet contempt and admired her malevolent intelligence, and what softened her heart toward him was the fact that he wasn’t scared of her and he said that she was a one-woman theater. Before he sent Martina away again Mira came and slept in the next room and Martina said something nasty and they had a fight. Left with no choice, he hit her, or she hit him. Avi Shoes gave Martina some shares in his company and a considerable sum of money and sent her on a long world cruise from which, he told me years later, she never returned. Lee’s cousin who worked in a shoe factory in Jersey taught Avi to chew leather, smell leather, she taught him about sewing leather, about glue, nails, cutting. He began learning what made Italian shoes so special and what was worthwhile about American production methods. He learned the structure of the reliable American shoe compared with the elegant Italian one. Despite the piles of money he’d made from his adhesive straps he began working at a low salary as a salesman for the big shoe company, First & Co. He worked hard. Mira, who’d left him dangling, didn’t drop him completely. She needed his love as much as he needed her. Avi didn’t care. He loved her simply and with the same honesty that had always set him apart from other guys. He slowly acquired the majority of Furst & Co.’s shares and when he was ready, took over the whole company. Three years after he’d become a shoe salesman, Avi became a shoe giant. He began manufacturing shoes that didn’t need laces that were tied with adhesive straps that were now built into the shoe. Being an Israeli he came up with an idea for buckle-less sandals too, but didn’t neglect the lace business. Whatever happens in the cutthroat shoe-sales business, he said, laces won’t attract too much competition. And indeed, his personal business continued to thrive, and soon he acquired a company that produced elastic stockings and doubled its output. He took over and expanded a boot manufacturing company too, setting up a subsidiary specializing in cowboy boots that he began marketing in ever-increasing quantities in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. In 1958 he headed a concern incorporating some twenty different companies. He lived in the Hotel des Artistes, an old listed building on Central Park.
One day Avi decided he had to find the old man who was tying his laces while Avi watched from Rikers. We sat down in his apartment and he said, Get a piece of paper and write down exactly what I say, it’ll come to me as if in a dream. I concentrated. He closed his eyes and I sat writing down what he said, an imprecise description of a man: white-haired, nice eyes, apparently quite timid, feels a shy sort of discomfort. The Avi he noted the day, the time, the place. The man, Avi recalled, had been wearing somewhat bohemian clothes, out of place in the summer, maybe even corduroy pants? A threadbare coat? And he was wearing a strange watch, something you don’t see too often, it wasn’t even round! An artist? An art lover? A professor? We went to Sotheby’s. I had contacts there and we were given catalogs of rare watches. After a while we became experts in watch collecting. We went through dozens of catalogs until we came across the 1929 Rolex Prince, valued at between seven and nine thousand dollars, which reminded Avi of the watch he thought he’d seen on the old man’s wrist, since when he was working to tie his shoelaces, his sleeve had ridden up. We headed to several antique stores, hidden collectors’ nooks that specialized in old fountain pens, medals, stamps, watches. Stores without signs. After cross-referencing what we’d been told by a number of store owners—who were, of course, not unsuspicious, and each of whom we had to work on for quite a while to gain their trust—we got what we were after. We now had a list of ten people in the city who were known to have bought the 1929 Rolex Prince. True, we thought, the lace-tying man could have inherited the watch, bought it years ago in Berlin, London, or Paris, it might even have been another watch, but Avi said, We’ve got nothing to lose! Something about that man reminded me of a beggar I saw photographed in the New York Post—they found a million dollars hidden under his mattress after he died.
To gain the man’s trust, Avi asked Boris to recommend a rare watch to us. Boris went to the city library, sat there a whole day, and brought back a list of suggestions in which the most significant was an IWC Schaffhausen watch, which he said was the most expensive of all. Our search took a long time and we went through a lot of ups and downs and disappointments—a crazy woman even latched onto Avi at once point, claiming he was her husband—but in the end we heard from one of the salesmen, who decided to try out the old Hebrew he’d learned back in Krakow on us, that there was a gallery owner at the end of Greenwich Avenue whose name was Hauser and who was well known for his abiding love of old fountain pens and watches, and who had a large collection, though he himself wasn’t at all wealthy. From a watch collectors’ store on Eighty-ninth Street Avi bought a Schaffhausen for $90,000 and a Patek Philippe ma
de in a limited edition of three hundred for $49,000 dollars. His Schaffhausen, so we were told, measured seconds, minutes, leap years, non-leap years. It was completely error-free and beautifully designed; built to work without breaking down, gaining or losing time, until 2499! And the expert explained to Avi that inside the watch was a tiny glass tube that should be replaced in 2100—at any IWC Schaffhausen workshop in the world—to ensure the watch’s precise timekeeping for another 399 years and probably more, though obviously there was no scientific proof of the latter, he said. Similar watches, said Boris, had been worn by King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Winston Churchill, Pope Pius IX, Brezhnev, King Ibn Saud, the Sultan of Borneo, and six Japanese tycoons. The best watch in the series cost four hundred thousand dollars.
We arrived at the gallery. Hauser was wearing worn corduroy pants and a corduroy jacket with threadbare elbows. Before seeing our faces he lit up at the sight of the watch and started breathing heavily. Excitedly he mumbled, Amazing! Amazing! A Schaffhauen! A good watch, said Avi. Hauser was wearing a watch but not the one Avi remembered. It later turned out that he had actually been wearing a Cartier Cougar that day—the Cougar was a women’s watch and the company had made only one men’s edition in 1938, which indeed resembled the 1929 Rolex Prince, and was a beautiful old watch in itself. Hauser spoke excitedly about the Schaffhausen as though he were praying. Avi, who didn’t know what to say, asked how much it would cost him to buy all the pictures on the gallery walls. Hauser laughed. But when Avi told him how amazed he was by his 1938 Cougar and that he viewed his Schaffhausen as his greatest treasure—and how if he only had the money he’d buy a 1929 Rolex Prince—the guy suddenly started looking suspicious. But I felt that Hauser was more inclined toward belief than suspicion. You know watches, he said, collectors are a dying breed, today everything is plastic, batteries, no design, Mickey Mouse, and I can guess that you’re no big art maven, so what’s with you and these pictures? I’m a compulsive collector. The pictures are my children. They don’t have much value. Collecting is a disease. In any case, when any of these kids makes it, he leaves me for a bigger gallery.
