Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue

by Mark Kurlansky

  A few years back he discovered the Red Sox, a team so determinedly ill-fated that they had allowed the Mets to beat them in a World Series. How else could the Mets have won? There they were, converging on the infield, leaping on top of one another victoriously and improbably, while Nusan watched to the deep-voiced chorus of Ein Deutsches Requiem. Nusan was fascinated by the sight of the somber Red Sox slouching toward their dugout, not even looking surprised. More cursed than even the Mets. Nusan would have switched instantly, except that the Red Sox were not available on New York television.

  Brahms and the Mets were Nusan's summer Saturdays as he sat in the dark in his studio on Rivington, deep notes billowing as the innings went by and the wins and losses accumulated. Still in first place, yes. But Nusan could see the demons waiting. He knew their disguises. He knew a lot about demons.

  That was how Nathan found his uncle when he checked in on Sundays. Sometimes he brought Sarah, who had the only really open relationship with Nusan. Nathan wondered if Nusan ever had children. He had heard somewhere that he had had an entire family before the war. But no one would ever ask something like that—except Sarah, who might say anything. She called him Nussy

  "Nussy you're smelly," she said one day

  And then the rarest of occurrences, a large smile spread Nusan's mustache wide, and his teeth—good teeth—showed. "You're smelly, too, little girl." They both looked delighted with the exchange.

  Visiting Nusan was an opportunity for Nathan. He had not been on a subway since the incident on the F train. Was his condition still there, ready to attack him unexpectedly? He hadn't told anyone about it. Maybe it would never happen again. A brief test was available. The F train again, one stop from Houston to Delancey The ride passed quickly and uneventfully; he had been lost in thought and had forgotten to monitor any signs of impending anxiety.

  Nathan always let himself in to Nusan's apartment. Nusan had given him a key, supposedly so that Nusan would not have to get up to let him in, but Nathan knew what he was really thinking. He wanted Nathan, his namesake, the proof he was dead, to find the body. And every time Nusan opened the door he braced himself, first for the smell and second for the sight of Nusan dead.

  Nusan was always in his chair with his scarf on. If the Mets were playing, an old scratchy record, usually a great classic recording played too many times, would be on and Nusan's pale face would be absolutely blue in the light of the television, possibly one of the last large black-and-white sets in Manhattan. If there was no afternoon Mets game, Nathan would find Nusan in the same chair with a hat on, holding a book inches from his face in the dim lighting.

  Sometimes, if he saw Nusan in the neighborhood, Nathan would hurry over to his empty apartment to clean it up a little bit, in the hope it would attract fewer mice and cockroaches. He had filled the apart ment with poison—poison for rodents and poison for insects. But Nusan had entire drawers of stale food. He had a desk drawer crammed with stale chunks of challah from a hundred motzi.

  After his heart attack, his first documented attack, he refused to change his diet, which alternated between the neighborhood's heavy, fatty Jewish food, heavy, fatty Ukrainian food, and heavy, fatty Polish food. Also someone occasionally left him a bag of bialies. Nor would he move from his six-story walk-up. Moving was Harry's idea. Even the doctors said the stairs were healthy for Nusan.

  "Better people than me have had heart attacks. Why should I have special treatment?" he said. But it seemed the six floors were getting difficult, and he went out less and less frequently. He was getting lonely He was also shrinking back to the weight in the photograph. For the first time since he had moved to America, someone would be able to recognize him from the snapshot in Harry's bedroom.

  As Nathan approached Nusan's door, he noted as he always did that Nusan didn't have a mezuzah. But he had often seen Nusan as he entered the apartment give an almost imperceptible tap on the right doorpost as though touching one. No mezuzah, just this unconscious tap on the blank doorpost where it might have been.

  Nathan braced himself for the smell as he opened the door. It came over him like a bag dropping over his head to smother him, blocking out air and light as he forced himself into the dark room.

  And yet—he could breathe. He was not having an attack. He was just in Nusan's small, dark, foul-smelling apartment. There was a desk and a foldout couch and little more, yet the room seemed full. Nusan had given up unfolding the couch to sleep. A blanket and pillow were crushed in opposite corners. The floor, the couch, the desk, and the windowsills were stacked with newspaper clippings. Nusan was in his chair hunched over a paper, rocking back and forth, his gray hat on his head, looking every bit like a davening Talmudist lovingly reciting a favorite passage.

  But Nathan knew that his head was covered not out of respect, but rather from a strange habit in old age of leaving his hat on. Nathan wondered if Nusan's father, his grandfather whom he had never met and who was one of many relatives who was never spoken of, really did cover his head and read passages while davening back and forth. All that was left was a vague notion of wearing a hat while reading.

  Nor was Nusan's reading material Talmudic. Every scrap of writing in the apartment was on the same subject—Nazis. No one in the family ever took this very seriously until the case in which Nusan had played an important role. It seemed to be his revelation that the factory worker who had been exposed and deported was only one of three Tre-blinka guards who had been let into the United States.

  Nusan had extensive information on all three. Once the case became known, Nusan retreated and let other, better-known figures do the interviews, but he had been the one who followed the trails. In his dark and stinking cave, he was more than a madman. He was a hunter.

  Nusan looked up from his papers, stopping his davening motion as Nathan walked in the door. "You are late."

  "It's three o'clock. I said I would be over in the afternoon."

  "What time is the game?"

  "They're playing the Astros in Texas. It's a late game. Gooden is starting," said Nathan, ready for the question.

  They left the apartment and slowly made their way to a small Ukrainian place where they ate pirogis that were very much like the kreplach they used to eat at Rabbinowitz's—the same tart cheese filling, the same buttery soft noodle covering, and the same feeling in the stomach, as though small rocks were being placed there.

  "Uncle Nusan, do you remember the German pastry shop up in our neighborhood?"

  "I should eat German pastry?"

  Nusan approached the topic with the same feigned indifference with which Pepe Le Moko approached rodents. But Nathan knew he hadn't forgotten. Nusan was cursed with a perfect memory At least from 1940 on. He never talked about before the war. This was one of the problems between him and Harry When Nusan arrived in New York, they had only prewar memories in common and Nusan wouldn't talk about those things. Nathan wondered if Nusan's problem with Harry was that Harry was a prewar memory.

  "Remember, I mentioned the shop one time, the Edelweiss. We used to go there when I was little."

  "With your father. I don't go to German shops."

  "Did you learn anything about the owner?" Nathan asked, almost wincing as he asked it.

  "Of the Edelweiss?"

  "Yes."

  "Why don't you order applesauce with the kreplach."

  "Pirogi. This isn't Jewish. I don't want applesauce. Ever heard about him?"

  "You get sour cream no matter what you say. So it's a waste to order sour cream."

  "It's a waste to order applesauce if you don't eat it."

  "A philosopher Mug vi der velt." Wise as the world.

  "Do you think it would be possible for an SS colonel to be living all these years in the neighborhood?"

  "You have no idea what is possible. You don't want to know. Now you're not eating all your sour cream, either?"

  "Look, Uncle Nusan, this is not an expensive place. I can get you whatever you want. I think people just say
these things because he's German."

  "Because he's German. That's not a good enough reason for you?"

  "No. It isn't. How could an SS colonel get in here? Is it even possible?"

  "How? How? So there's no NCWC?"

  "NCWC?"

  "Aach. What are you asking for? You want to know. Aach, tokhes oyfn tish."

  There it was again. Ass on the table. "What does that mean, Nusan, tokhes oyfn tish?"

  "It means hurry up before the Mets lose without me."

  Nusan would never admit it, but he was grateful for company. But he wanted to watch the Mets game alone, which to Nathan meant being spared nine innings in that apartment. He closed the door behind him, and before he had finished descending the stairwell he could hear the slow, soft moan of the first few bars of the Brahms First Cello Sonata and knew that Dwight Gooden was warmed up and ready to throw.

  As he turned down the last set of cracked marble stairs, hand on the red banister, its ornate designs turned into shapeless blobs from more than a century of regular repainting, it occurred to Nathan that Nusan had left him with a free afternoon—and that he could, if he wanted to, call her.

  He walked out of the dark building to a blinding white heat and carefully approached a pay phone in a little metal box. Since most pay phones on Rivington Street had been beaten to death for their coins, it was not likely that this phone would work. That would be the test. If the phone worked, he would call her. The metal box was covered in the same indecipherable graffiti that marked Nusan's building. Someone had pasted a sticker on the black receiver handle that said, "Eat the Rich." He put the phone to his ear and heard a long steady tone.

  At this same instant, Harry Seltzer was going home, looking forward to his air-conditioning, passing Mohammed's newsstand, singing, "We may never, never meet again, on the bumpy road to love." It felt good to dip down to a baritone voice for the word "love." Chow Mein Vega had insisted the song was Gershwin.

  "No," Harry assured him with good-humored tolerance. "Irving Berlin."

  "Gershwin," Chow Mein insisted.

  "I'm sorry, Chucho, it happens to be Berlin."

  Chow Mein shook his head with enough emphasis to wag his stumpy ponytail. "Gershwin, man. In fact, it's both Gershwins. Words by Ira. From a show called Shall We Dance. It was a movie with Fred As-taire." And Chow Mein started to float his tonnage across the sidewalk in surprisingly graceful Astaire-like steps.

  "You better stick to boogaloo."

  "How about some action, bro'? Loser buys bacalao lunch for two at Rosa's?"

  They shook on it, but the lunch would never take place because Harry would never look it up, fearing that he might be wrong. He wanted to keep the song in his Berlin repertoire just for that dip. He did it again: "On the bumpy road to"—now the dip—"love."

  What was that? He saw something. It was in Mohammed's window. Florence! Florence from Eleventh Street was on the cover of a magazine called Big Black Booty. Harry wondered what that meant, but the cover photo helped clarify. Florence was in a very small, very short red dress, and she was leaning over and looking back over her shoulder. Her booty, if that was the term, was exposed and impressive. He looked carefully at the face. It was Florence.

  He stepped gingerly into the shop, hoping Mohammed would be busy, but he was waiting behind the counter with a toothsome smile. "Shalom, my friend!"

  "Salaam," said Harry, trying to match Mohammed's cheerfulness.

  Harry made his selection quickly: The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, Big Black Booty, and the Forward. He placed them on the counter.

  Mohammed offered him a bag, and Harry, a little too casually said, "No thanks, no.... Well, okay. Put them in a bag."

  "Enjoy them, my friend," said Mohammed, and though Harry searched the notes of Mohammed's voice, he could not find the least shading of a connotation to the simple statement.

  Harry never saw the pages displaying Florence's magnificent, dimpled, big black booty. He took the entire bag of magazines, contraband too hot to examine, immediately into his office room in their apartment and buried them in a file cabinet where he kept tax records. He could never remember exactly where. But he never forgot that it was in there somewhere and that someday a man from the IRS whose every feature, even his socks, would announce that he was "not from the neighborhood" would arrive for an audit and there, in between forms and receipts, Florence's glorious big black booty would flop across the table.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Chocolate Buttercream

  COME OVER," she had said, "I'll showyou all my secrets."

  There was something about Karoline's manner that made Nathan feel that she was toying with him, that everything she did was calculated to manipulate him for her amusement. It was a demeanor that promised abuse and disaster, and he was hurrying up Second Avenue toward it. Even in this heat he could have run. The thought of her gave him limitless energy.

  "Viva la huelga, Nathan," Arnie shouted cheerfully from his sidewalk perch. Arnie in his wool beret on a shadeless block of Avenue A was not noticing the heat this day Arnie never seemed affected by temperature, though his skin was starting to resemble the weathered bricks of tenement buildings.

  Nathan realized that he was acting suspiciously. He slowed down and said hello to Arnie. Then he realized that to act normally, he would have to stroll over and chat.

  Why? Acting suspiciously? Did he think this would end up in a court of law? He picked up his pace again and soon was at the Edelweiss. The shop entrance was on the Avenue A side, but the doorway for the building was conveniently around the corner on the quiet side street. He pressed the button. What should he say? "Hi, it's me," or "Hi, it's Nathan," or ... A loud buzz unlocked the door without the need to say anything. Inside, she was waiting at the top of the stairs barefoot, in a clean white apron, and—Nathan was quickly debating this in his mind—possibly wearing nothing else.

  As though reading his thoughts, she said, "It's a hot day for baking," and she gave him a very light kiss on the cheek that seemed shy—almost embarrassed.

  But surely her naked arms and legs and shoulders and back were a calculated effect. When a woman coifs for a man, no matter how casually she coifs, to the intended target she always looks coiffed—planned, calculated. Otherwise the effort has failed. Women know magic, and their willingness to use it excites. Was she barefoot by chance with perfectly painted toes? If her hair was falling down, why was only one beautiful dark strand draped over a bright blue eye? On the lower back was the beginning of a tattoo, as though to say "If you want to see the whole tattoo, you have to untie the apron." Did she know how the inelegant white muslin of her apron made her skin look that much softer and more elegant?

  She knew. She knew. She knew exactly what he was aching to do as she led him into her apartment with seeming disinterest—and yet still with a touch of a shyness that he was sure was not intended.

  Her apartment was one room, a large studio with a king-size bed in lacy linens on one side. On the other side was a kitchen: professional baker's ovens—five of them, long, deep, and wide and arranged floor to ceiling; a stainless-steel stove, gleaming and spotless; metal racks; a large mixing machine; crock canisters with whisks—some balloon shaped, some elongated. Other canisters had plastic scrapers and spatulas. A wall rack contained knives with gleaming blades. There was a large industrial refrigerator. And there were huge sacks of flour and sugar.

  By her bed were five cardboard cases and a number of wooden boxes.

  "It's the cool side of the room."

  "What is?"

  "Where the boxes are. It's wine. It all belongs to Joey Parma."

  "Joey Parma the cop?"

  She nodded her head in delight. "Look." She sat on the edge of the bed and started pulling bottles out of boxes. She held up a thick green bottle with a vanilla-colored label with maroon lettering—CHASSAGNE-MONTRACHET—and then a white-labeled Aloxe-Corton. "Prefer Bordeaux?" she asked, holding up a bottle with a yellow label that said BOYD CANTE
NAC. "Try a Margaux. Now let's see," she said, sifting through other boxes. "Now here's something," she announced, hoisting a long thin bottle. "From Erbach in the Rheingau. My father would kill for this wine. Oh, it's a Trockenbeerenauslese. My father would kill for much less than this." She looked up at Nathan with a pleasant smile.

  Was she laughing at him? Teasing him? Could she see how much he wanted to have her on that bed at this very moment? "Why does Joey Parma keep his wine here?" asked Nathan, realizing that he might sound a bit jealous.

  "You can keep your wine here, too, if you like."

  How he would have enjoyed walking out on her at this moment, leaving her alone by the bed with Joey Parma's wine. But he knew he wouldn't do that. Worse, she knew he wouldn't.

  "Joey Parma, like you," she said with a small but almost sad chuckle, "has a wife. And his wife would kill him if she knew what he spent on wine. So he keeps it here and comes over and fondles the bottles and every now and then takes one home for a special event, and the wife always agrees that it is a nice wine and has no idea how nice."

  "And you make the pastry here?"

  "No, my father makes it in the back downstairs. I just make special orders up here. Let's get started."

  "Started?"

  "I told you I was going to show you all my secrets. We'll start with a genoise. I love genoise because it seems rich and buttery and solid, but it's light as cotton. Everything is about paradoxes. That's what good baking is. Making paradoxes."

  She put a pot of water on the stove to boil and then took a large tray of eggs from the refrigerator and with fluid and efficient motion, two eggs at a time, one in each hand, opened six eggs, cracking them on the side of a mixing bowl, dumping in the contents, and flipping the shells into a nearby trash barrel. "A little more than two-thirds cup," she said as she jammed a metal scoop in a bin of sugar and tossed some, unmeasured, into the bowl. She grabbed a wire whisk as she carried the bowl to the stove and beat the mixture over the boiling water. Nathan tried to get closer to her and widened his nostrils to detect her scent of butter, but butter was everywhere in the room—or was it she? As she pounded the metal of the bowl with the whisk wires in a circular manner, he watched her entire body moving—and longed for it. "Make it thick and creamy," she said, briefly looking up at him.