A Charm of Finches

by Suanne Laqueur

  He was vindicated. Affirmed and validated. He was good. He wasn’t a monster.

  He would never understand why he did what he did next.

  The room jumped in its shoes as Geno erupted, heaving over the table, sending chairs, markers, pencils and sketchbooks flying. Heads turned, residents and staff on their feet as Geno spun around, howling like a ghost.

  Without taking his eyes off Geno, Stef stood up, his hand raised to the crowd behind him, signaling he was in control. He stood still. When Geno fell on his knees, Stef crouched at a careful distance, his mercury layer swiftly falling from the crown of his head and cloaking him. His heart wanted to break. He couldn’t let it. Now more than ever, he had to stand apart from the pain.

  My most important job is going home.

  He squatted on his heels, silent and motionless. Without judgment. Watching the boy weep into his hands and gradually go quiet again.

  “Sorry,” Geno said.

  Stef got a sheet of paper and the pastels. He put them on the floor.

  “Go back to day one,” he said. “Draw you and draw them. Do it right now.”

  Red faced and swollen-eyed, Geno made the big blue mark and the small black ones. He didn’t shove the paper away this time. He held still, a pastel in each open palm. Head bowed. As if waiting instructions.

  “Pick another color,” Stef said. “For you. The most powerful color you can think of. Add it on.”

  Geno picked red and drew around his blue line. A thin border. Then he held the paper steady with fingertips and made the red border thicker. The line gained weight, becoming a skinny rectangle.

  Without prompting, Geno reached for orange next and made a second outline. A perimeter of fire. He hesitated, then drew lines radiating outward. Flames. He took the red again and made scarlet fire in between the orange. He found yellow and made flame tips at the end of each line.

  He pushed the paper away then, but gently. Without anger. He put the pastels back into their slots and rubbed his fingers together.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll clean up.”

  “It’s not important,” Stef said. He tapped the paper. “This is.”

  Elbows on knees, hands steepled over his mouth and nose, Geno looked at himself. Clean, dependable blue encased in fire, looming over the black shadows.

  “It hurt so bad,” he said softly.

  “God, it must have.”

  “And it just went on, and on, and on. I stopped counting after a while.”

  Stef rolled onto his butt, sitting cross-legged. His fists clenched tight but he kept his demeanor soft and neutral. “Can you tell me more?”

  Geno’s fingers reached and start blurring some of the orange and red together. “I was afraid I would die. And then I was afraid I wouldn’t die.” His hand lifted to touch his face, leaving marks of red and orange, black and blue.

  “I don’t think words exist to describe that kind of terror.”

  Geno’s head bowed, his fingers clenched in his hair. “I never had sex before that night,” he said. “That’s what it was like the first time.”

  “That night wasn’t sex,” Stef said. “It was rape. Rape is about power.”

  “God, I want to go home.” Geno sniffed and drew his colored face across his sleeve. He turned the piece of paper over, picked out the red pastel and began to draw a house. The architecture was odd—it seemed to be a shack on miniature stilts. A row of square windows by the roofline and the door smack in the middle of the front wall.

  Stef held the paper steady as Geno took green and made rolling hills, nestling the house within them. Dark brown made a tree, its branches a curved shelter above. Then he took yellow and made light spilling out of the square windows.

  “What is it?” Stef asked.

  “Home,” Geno said.

  “Tell me.”

  “My mother kept her maiden name. Gallinero. It means henhouse. She called me and my brother her little chicks.” Geno drew a long ramp from the high door to the ground.

  “I see it now,” Stef said, fascinated.

  Orange was in Geno’s fingers again, drawing a four-legged figure in the distance. Like a dog with a long, pointed snout. A wolf?

  No. Of course not.

  “Fox,” Stef said.

  Geno exhaled and the orange crayon fell from his fingers back into the box.

  “The fox in the henhouse,” Stef said.

  A little snort made Geno’s chest hitch. “My life as a metaphor, ladies and gentlemen.”

  “Do you feel like he’ll always be in the picture, no matter what?”

  Geno reached and tore the bit with the fox out, crumpling it up. His finger tapped the little coop. “This is one of my safe places. Like the beach. In my dreams, I see this house in the distance. Far away with the light spilling out of the windows.”

  “Who’s inside?”

  “Sometimes my mother.” He swallowed hard. “Sometimes you. Or Jav and Stavroula. Sometimes, though, it’s empty. Or I can’t reach it. It’s up there ahead, calling me and I want to go home so bad. But I can’t get there. Because nobody’s there. Nobody’s left. The road keeps going on and on and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know who’s going to love me.”

  A tremendous sigh, like a tree toppling. Stef let it crash to the earth, at an utter professional loss.

  “Does he love you?” Geno asked.

  Stef blinked. “Who?”

  “Jav.”

  “Yeah.”

  Geno pulled the pad of paper close and tore off a sheet. He pushed it toward Stef. “Draw you guys.”

  “Me and Jav?”

  “Draw love.”

  Stef thought about it. His fingers picked out a couple of pastels. He made simple, broad strokes. A thick, curved ribbon of gold and brown that with a little imagination, could be a man sleeping. He took green and slate blue, and drew a second curve around the first.

  “Which one’s him?”

  “The brown.”

  “You’re the dominant one?”

  “No, it’s not like…” Stef felt himself smile. “Nobody’s the bitch in the scenario. The dynamic shifts, depending on what’s going on in our lives. Something kicked him down recently, so right now it feels like I’m sheltering him. Other times, it’s the opposite.”

  A single, exhaled chuckle through Geno’s nose. “Like when a can of nuts and bolts gets thrown at your head?”

  Stef laughed too. “Yeah, like then. But anyway. That’s what love looks like to me.”

  “I’m really tired,” Geno said. Just like a woman not named Alison said when she stood on the railing of the Queensboro Bridge.

  “You must be,” Stef said. “Go on upstairs if you want. I’ll clean up.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Take that with you.”

  Geno took his paper and got up as if he had broken glass in his bones. “Thanks,” he said.

  “You call me. Anytime. Any hour of the day, I’ll be there. I’ll listen to whatever you want to tell me.”

  A chime on the wind, soft and faint. “Okay.”

  Geno came down to work the Monday morning prep shift. Stav was in the kitchen, so was Micah.

  “What are you doing here?” Geno asked, shaking hands.

  “Seeing if you wanted a new job,” Micah said.

  “Me?”

  “My dough assistant is moving on to other ventures. Stavi says I’m too old to do the work alone.”

  “That is not what I said,” Stav called. “Don’t listen to him, Geno. I made a high recommendation for you.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because it’s a good job for insomniacs,” she said, winking. Then her expression turned serious. “In my limited opinion, G, I don’t think working in bars is the best thing for you right now.�
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  “It isn’t,” Geno said.

  “So, you want to give bagel-making a try?” Micah said.

  “Sure.”

  “Stavi’s right. It’s early morning work. I start at four.”

  “Stavi’s right,” Geno said. “I don’t sleep much.”

  He was a little concerned about handling dough, but hell, that whole weird episode was practically a year ago. He’d be in the company of an old man, not a baby boy. Worst case, if he popped a boner, he could cool off in one of the walk-ins and tell Micah the work wasn’t for him, thanks anyway.

  As it turned out, he took to the task immediately, but adjusting his clock to the new schedule nearly killed him the first week. Up at three-thirty and at the shop by four. Micah was wide-awake, showered and shaved, hair slicked back into its tail. Coffee made and the radio tuned to oldies.

  “You kill the average guy,” Geno said, borrowing Jav’s line.

  Using the five-gallon buckets and a scale, they measured flour, yeast and warm water into the big mixer bowls. Micah added a brown syrupy substance he said was sourdough starter, honey and canola oil. The wire guards of the mixers were lowered and the barber shop spiral hook went into action, pulling liquid into solid, activating the gluten.

  “How’d you learn to do this?” Geno asked, amazed how Micah rarely needed to add an extra dollop of water or scoop of flour to get the correct consistency.

  “My friend Samouel Franco opened this place,” Micah said, adding salt from a small silver bowl. “He came from a long line of bakers. He was the brains of the operation. I just lifted the heavy stuff.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “We were childhood friends in Athens. His was an old Sephardic family. He spent the war hidden in a monastery.”

  “So you learned Ladino from him?”

  “Yes. It’s all his family spoke. And I loved it.”

  “How did you find each other after the war?”

  “Oh, one of those post-war reunions that’s so serendipitous, it’s divine. Six months after my wife and I get to New York, I bumped into Sam on the street. We wept, we wailed, we clutched each other and we opened a bagel shop.” He winked. “We may have gotten drunk somewhere in there.”

  “I know I would,” Geno said.

  Micah turned off the mixer and lifted the guard, indicating Geno should do the same on his batch. History lesson over, he returned to Geno’s education in the art of dough. He was a patient and thorough teacher, giving the why for every how. Putting a dusty white hand over Geno’s to guide him in the rhythm of kneading or shaping a bagel.

  “Don’t be so angry at the dough, habibi,” Micah said. “Knead with kindness or it won’t be kind to you.”

  Micah peppered his speech with Ladino endearments. Besides habibi—an all-purpose word for brother or friend or companion—he called Geno presiado, precious one. Mi corasón. My heart. Querido. Dear boy.

  Geno put kind, tentative hands on the dough. It was tactile and pleasant. Nothing more. No thrumming or weird arousal. He exhaled and relaxed into the work.

  Plain bagels and bagels that were coated—sesame seed, poppy seed, salt, onion—could all go through the machine to be shaped into the iconic rings. These were put on white trays, slid onto the rolling racks and put into the cooler to rise for eighteen hours. Then another batch of dough was made for the bacon bagels. Those could go through the machine, too, but dough that had fruit or nuts had to be shaped by hand.

  “You don’t want to clean raisins out of the machine, corasón,” Micah said. “Sam and I learned that the hard way.”

  To Dean Martin and Rosemary Clooney and Glenn Miller, the men portioned off dough. Rolled it into short snakes, then folded each snake around a hand to make the ring, rolling the edges smooth. Micah could shape bagels two-handed, each identical to the next. Geno’s came out lopsided at first, but he soon got the knack. He enjoyed it. Five hours passed quickly, and when the mixers and machine were immaculate and every surface wiped down, Micah praised him. Stav sent him on his way with a cup of coffee and an egg-and-cheese on a bacon bagel. It was nine in the morning and the rest of the world was just getting to business.

  Slackers.

  By two in the afternoon, he was dying. Too tired to chew his lunch. Nodding off in group therapy and then stumbling to the art room. Looking at Stef with a thousand-yard stare when asked something. Sinking his head onto his hand and then nearly breaking his chin when his elbow slid off the table. “Dude, go back to bed,” Stef said, laughing.

  Within a few days, Geno was hitting the sack by eight-thirty—something he hadn’t done since fourth grade—and he was sleeping. Deep, honest and dreamless sleep with only the occasional Ambien to help him settle down.

  “When it’s the right work, you sleep well,” Micah said.

  Down in the clean, white dough room, Geno asked Micah many questions.

  And Micah told him many things.

  Micah showed Geno a picture of his mother, a dark-haired woman with intense, intelligent eyes. The same prominent brows as her son, but scrupulously groomed. She sat at a desk, hands poised on a typewriter, as she smiled for the camera. The smile was distracted though, as if the work couldn’t wait.

  “She’s beautiful,” Geno said. “Was she a writer?”

  “She taught English, French and German at a high school,” Micah said. “She had an ear for languages. So do I, to a lesser extent. It came in handy.”

  At Haidari, the concentration camp outside Athens, the Nazis tortured Eva Kalo for information on her husband’s whereabouts. They flogged her eldest son Nicolaus in front of her to get her to talk. When that failed, they flogged her to death in front of the camp inmates, making Micah and his younger brother, Christos, watch. Then the Kalo brothers were thrown onto the cattle cars heading to Poland. It was February of 1944. Micah was fifteen, Christos eleven.

  When the boys fell out onto the platform at Auschwitz, Christos was near death. Micah, on the other hand, looked strangely full of life. A Jewish woman on the train had bitten her own lips until the blood ran, then rubbed the blood on her cheeks as a makeshift rouge, adding false vigor to her skin. She took some of the excess and rubbed it on Micah’s face, pinching him into a portrait of health.

  “You can’t save your brother,” she said in Ladino. “Stand up straight. Look strong. They want workers.” She pushed Micah’s filthy hair into place. “You’re handsome. Use it to your advantage and look like a man.”

  Cramped for weeks in a square foot of space, Micah didn’t think he could crawl, let alone stand. Somehow, he locked his knees and threw what chest he had out. When German officers came along, shouting orders to the confused crowd, he translated to those closest to him.

  “You speak German?” one of the SS said.

  “Ja,” Micah said, not making eye contact but not relaxing his posture.

  The officer fingered the green triangle on Micah’s shirt. He took Micah’s jaw in his hand and turned it this way and that. “Schönling,” he said. One of his lower teeth was gold.

  “What does that mean?” Geno asked.

  “Pretty boy,” Micah said.

  Christos Kalo went straight to the gas chambers. Micah marched off to be deloused, have his head shaved and his arm tattooed with number 157701. He was given striped shirt and pants with his number and the green triangle, then marched to a zugangblock, a barracks for new prisoners, where they’d wait until assigned to a work team.

  “Were you fucking terrified?” Geno asked.

  “I felt nothing,” Micah said. “Because feeling wasn’t—”

  “Allowed,” Geno said. “Feeling was illegal.”

  Micah nodded as lowered the spiral hook into the mixing bowl, dropped the wire guard and turned the switch on. “You make your own laws in times of war, habibi.”

  The SS officer with the gold to
oth came to the zugangblock the next day, looking for the griechischen Schönling who spoke German.

  “I was made a Lagerschreiber,” Micah said. “A clerk, if you will. At roll call at dawn and dusk, when prisoners lined up for hours to be counted, I was the one counting. During selections on the platform, when some were sent to the left and some to the right, I counted. That was my day job.”

  He was quiet a long time, rolling rings of dough around his hands. Then he said, “By night I was a pipel.”

  “What’s that?” Geno said.

  “It doesn’t translate literally. It’s a good-looking boy who gets special privileges. Because he’s the property of a kapo. Or, occasionally, he’s the property of a commander.”

  The SS officer was called Heinrich Schultze. He was tall and stern and authoritative, but seemed to lack the streak of brutal sadism so rampant in the Nazi ranks and the kapo underlings. When he smiled, and he often did at Micah, the kindness of the smile seemed genuine.

  “Don’t trust that grinning Arschficker,” one inmate muttered under his breath. “Trust no one in here.”

  That Schultze might be homosexual was a piece of information Micah wasn’t sure what to do with. At fifteen, he already knew some Greek men bedded other men and he knew the rules about such things. The one getting fucked was the object of derision. The one doing the fucking was merely tending to his manly needs.

  Being revolted or squeamish or worried people would think he was a poústis—these were luxuries left far behind in Greece. Micah had aged a decade in a few short months and thrown all useless things like ego away.

  During the horrible days in the camp, in between the roll calls and the beatings and the executions. Through the smell of burning flesh and the smoke always lingering in the air. Through the delousings and the inspections and the constant abuse. Through the weak tea, moldy bread or the warm water with rotted vegetable peels floating through like sewage. Through it all, Micah’s new cunning mind, wired for survival, turned the matter of Schultze over and over.

  As a piece of blackmail, it seemed useless. Homosexuality was a grave offense in the Nazi ranks, but the value of this secret was dependent on Schultze’s nature as a human being. If he was spoiled by power, brainwashed by ideology and no longer in possession of a soul, then…