Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue

by Mark Kurlansky

  Nusan, who spent his money on nothing, was pleased to be extravagant in mourning, with his crumpled hat and unpressed wool suit soiled on the edges but with the small "100% pure wool" label miraculously remaining white, particularly noticeable as a reprise of the white shoes. The shoes had swirling chartreuse and orange stripes intersecting in unexpected ways above the soles with clear tubing and spiraled cushioning. Nusan's mourning shoes positively glowed in the August sunlight.

  What a perfect day, Nusan thought, to give Nathan the news. Herr Moellen had at last been exposed. During the war, he had been Ober-sturmführer Reinhardt Müller, an SS lieutenant. In 1942, stationed in Naples, he had carried out the execution of an entire family, parents, one grandmother, and three children, for hiding partisans in their house.

  "What was the name of the family?" asked a disheartened Nathan.

  "Scappi. Why?"

  Nathan didn't know why he had asked. Moellen had killed Italians, not Jews. Did the Italians know? The Sals never liked Moellen. Had they known who he was all along? In search of something to say, Nathan asserted cheerlessly, "At least he didn't kill Jews."

  Nusan smiled his hard grin. "He was a lieutenant in the SS. I'm sure he had opportunities to make it up. We know that in 1944, he was working at a little concentration camp in Silesia called Gross-Rosen." He smiled gently. "Such a pretty name—Gross-Rosen. The Catholics got him out somehow. He disappeared, and a pastry maker named Bernhardt Moellen turned up in Argentina applying for a visa to the U.S."

  Nathan was silent. Just a week before, Sarah had insisted on going to "the cookie man." Moellen had shown Sarah chocolate men that had melted in the window in spite of the air-conditioning. Some were standing a little sideways. One had completely lost its head. One had lost a shoulder and one side of a face. One had dropped to its knees. Sarah ate two and wanted a third. Moellen cautioned, "Now you are full of chocolate. You will be like them. When you go outside you will start melting."

  "No, I won't."

  "I think your head will go first, but as you can see, it is hard to predict. Different people melt in different ways."

  So it was true, this gruesome talk that fascinated children was his life, his past, it was the real man, and Sarah was fascinated because, unlike her father, she understood that it was in some way all true.

  Sarah did not melt in the heat as Moellen had predicted. But she insisted for days that she was melting. Nathan, remembering an anecdote about Beethoven cooling himself off, told her that they could do what "old Ludwig used to do." He filled a pot with cold water, and after fluffing his hair out in a vain attempt to resemble Beethoven, he poured half of the water on her head and, while she was still shrieking with pleasure, poured the other half on his head. It did cool them off, and Sarah thought this was great fun and for the rest of the summer regularly asked for a "lug wig" so that she wouldn't melt.

  This man who was part of the sweet and comic life of his little daughter, was he a mass murderer?

  "And what about Viktor Stein? Did you run across someone named Viktor Stein?"

  "Of Viktor Stein I know nothing."

  "It's just a name. The name of somebody he knew—Viktor Stein."

  "A Jew?"

  "Maybe. I might look like him."

  "Viktor ... Viktor .. . Stein. I will look into this. But"—he held up his hand in a gesture like a traffic patrolman—"one more point," he said, studying a dog-eared piece of lined paper with a handwritten list. "Reinhardt Müller was from a small town north of Berlin. His family ran the local Konditerei"

  "Kondtierei," Nathan repeated, as though pretending he had never heard the word.

  "They were pastry makers."

  It was certain that Nusan would be relentless. With tremendous publicity, Moellen would be exposed, prosecuted, perhaps deported. Nathan had to warn them. He had to warn Karoline. She had never been in the SS or killed anyone.

  "Hey, Nathan," said Harry. He seemed very happy. "Let's get some cuchifrito. We'll go get Chow Mein to come with us."

  "I have to do a little work."

  "Working on Tisha-b'Av?" Harry said with mock incrimination.

  "Isn't this a fast day? And what did you want to eat?" Nathan was immediately sorry he had said this. He could see from his father's change in posture that he had taken it as an actual reprimand. "I was joking. I have something I have to do. I'll meet you at the casita in fifteen ... twenty... in a half hour."

  "Okay." Harry smiled, happy again.

  Nathan watched Harry walking up Avenue A with that purposeful Jewish four-beat, singing:

  If that's your idea of a wonderful time take me home

  Take me home

  I want you to know that I'm choking

  From that five-cent cigar that you're smoking.

  You came out with a one-dollar bill,

  You've got eighty cents of it still...

  Up Avenue A went Harry Seltzer.

  And with an even more purposeful step, his son Nathan made his way west two blocks to the Edelweiss Pastry Shop. Bad idea, he realized, and tried three pay phones before going to his copy shop to use the phone.

  "I have to talk to you."

  "It's over."

  "Yes, it is, but I still have to talk to you."

  "I'm getting married."

  Indifference was not going to be easy "Congratulations."

  "No. I am getting married today"

  "Oh. Really? That's so fast!"

  "We have been dating for seven years."

  "Listen, I just need a few minutes."

  "Then we are going on a honeymoon. Won't be back for weeks. Bermuda."

  "Bermuda?"

  "Dickie picked it. Who cares. Leave me alone."

  "It's about your father."

  Through the phone he could hear her breathing. "Okay come over."

  When he arrived at her apartment, he sat down in the chair by the small table and told her. She described Nusan's information as "nonsense."

  "I don't know."

  "I know!"

  "I hope you are right, but you should warn him." Nathan was wondering if Nusan could be wrong. There was the similarity in names, the fact that he was a pastry maker, that he spoke Spanish, perhaps Argentine Spanish. These could all be coincidences.

  "You believe it, don't you?"

  "I don't know. Was his father a pastry maker?"

  "Of course. So was my father. Does a pastry-making father make you a Nazi?"

  "No," Nathan said apologetically. "From a town near Berlin?"

  "From Berlin, Mitte, right in the center. Allied bombing leveled the shop."

  "Am I supposed to feel bad about that?"

  "Who are you to judge?"

  "I don't know. I am just warning you. Who was Viktor Stein?"

  In a whisper Karoline repeated, "Viktor Stein. How do you know about him?"

  "I heard your father mention his name. Who is he?"

  Karoline shook her head, looked confused, sat in a chair by the table. "I don't know He is somebody I used to hear my parents fighting about when I was a child. I don't know."

  "Is he some kind of key to this?"

  "I don't know. I only know that my father is a kind and loving man who adores children and always tries to be a good, responsible citizen. You have known him all your life."

  Nathan was becoming uncomfortable. He wanted to leave. He noted with pleasure that he didn't have to leave the apartment. Without panic, without anxiety, he just preferred to. But he did not know the exit line. "Have a nice wedding"? Or "Have a nice life"? Or "Best to your father the Obersturmführer"?

  While he was sorting out these thoughts, Karoline began to smile. "I can see what you are thinking."

  "You can?"

  She cast a deliberate glance at her lumpy mattressed bed. "A little prenuptial."

  Before either had completely decided what to do, they were in the bed, Nathan thinking that this was the most wonderfully perverse thing they had done yet—even Mordy might not have done t
his—and Karoline trying not to think at all, which was her favorite thing about sex.

  The police were circulating, looking for anyone who had been on Allen near Stanton Street at about six A.M. that morning. Sonia had heard about it when she went out to the pharmacy. She was now staring at her pregnancy test, wondering why there was no blue line. She knew she was, and yet... She could hear the police loudspeaker outside. José Fishman!

  How could she tell Nathan that it was only bad sushi? She never thought anything would make her sick. She grew up in Mexico without ever being sick. Three little pieces of tuna. How was she going to tell Nathan?

  Harry waited for Nathan at the casita. But after an hour had gone by, he and Chow Mein decided to go to the cuchifrito. "I don't know what happened to him," Harry said. Then, brightening, he said, "I'll bet he got mixed up and he's waiting for us over there." But when they got to the little restaurant with the carryout counter and two tables, Nathan was not there. Harry ordered his usual lechón.

  Afterward, he debated about walking home or going to the copy shop to find Nathan. But the weight of the August heat made him long for home. He sang Berlin back down Avenue A:

  My wife's gone to the country, hurrah, hurrah!

  She thought it best, I need a rest, that's why she went away.

  She took the children with her, hurrah, hurrah!...

  He finally got to his building. It was cooling just to enter the lobby. He felt tired and decided to relax on the couch in the lobby before going up the elevator. He whistled and sang: "We may never, never meet again, on the bumpy road to love." He loved that little slide. "But I'll always keep—"

  Suddenly the seersucker fardarter appeared. "I love that song. Cole Porter, right?"

  Harry said nothing as he stiffened, got up from the couch, and went out the door back into the clench of summer. "Cole Porter. Cole Porter," he muttered. "Where do these people come from with this Cole Porter meshuggas? Genug," he said, throwing out his hands. Enough. "Settle this once and for all." Despite the heat, he was soon at the bookstore all the way over by Broadway

  On the way back, he struggled to accept the news that the song had been written by the Gershwins. At least it wasn't Cole Porter. He still had plenty of Berlin:

  Don't do that dance,

  That's not a business for a lady

  I tell you Sadie,

  'Most everybody knows

  That I'm your loving Mose,

  Oy, oy, oy, oy

  Where is your clothes?

  His song was stopped by a sharp blow to the solar plexus. "Oy, oy..." He struggled to continue. He couldn't breathe. He gasped. His arm hurt so badly, he thought he must have broken it. He collapsed to the sidewalk, his cheek scraping along the concrete as he tried to find air. Oh God, lechón, he thought. Jews aren't made to eat lechón. Then he realized that he might be dying and he had never found the magazine. Big Black Booty would be found among his possessions. He groaned out, "Magazine." He could not die with it in his file.

  "Magazine" was the last word Harry Seltzer ever spoke.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Tears

  NUSAN WAS SITTING on the floor, his clothes torn. "I have had ..." He tried to count on his fingers and gave up. "Nobody knows how many heart attacks I have had. But the tokhes oyfn tish is—I never die. No matter what I do, I never die. My brother, my younger brother, dies from his first heart attack. And I am still here. For what?"

  Ruth didn't want him there. She had never wanted him there. But he had a right to be there. He was Harry's brother. She had learned that lesson.

  Nusan's shirt was torn in vertical tears, showing his skin underneath whiter than his yellowed shirt. He had cut deliberate slashes in the lapels of his suit jacket, clean cuts made with scissors. Yet he still did not think to touch the label on his sleeve announcing the purity of the wool. He even cut the brim of his gray hat. A slash in his pant leg exposed a white bony knee. The only clothing spared was the maroon wool scarf—and his bright new running shoes that were for mourning.

  The first day of the shiva, Yankel Fink brought what he called egg knishes, eggs—though Felix thought they were life—being for Jews traditional at the meal after a funeral. Fink's egg knishes were mostly potato and weighed more than gold.

  By the second day, Ruth, wishing to spare everyone the knishes, had made brisket for eighty people. During the course of the day, more than eighty people visited the Seltzers, but only a few of the uninitiated sampled her brisket. There was also herring. She wanted apple strudel, but when she went to the Edelweiss it was closed—out of business. She had asked Nathan to bake something, but he pointed out that Harry hadn't liked his baking. Or his harmonica playing, Nathan thought to himself.

  Nathan was told of his father's death by Mordy who found him while he was walking down First Avenue biting into a sfogliatella. His first thought on hearing the news was that he should stop eating the pastry out of respect. His next thought was how he was supposed to have met his father for lunch and instead was "schtupping a Nazi"—surely that was how Harry would have put it. This led briefly to thoughts of physical pleasure—and before Nathan realized it, the sfogliatella had been eaten. It was a good one, too.

  Nathan was a fortunate man who had reached his late thirties having had little familiarity with death. When Nusan had been Nathan's age, most people he had ever known were dead. Nathan's experiences had been few—that one moment witnessing the violent struggle for life that incongruously preceded Sarah's arrival and now this, this sense that his father was gone, never to return, and he had not said good-bye. When he was in school, he had become close to a student from Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee? He could never remember. After they graduated, she was going back there. And she just left without saying good-bye. Nathan understood. It would have been unbearable for them to have said good-bye to each other. But maybe if they had, he would have forgotten her. Instead he still thought about her, wondered about her, because they had not had an ending. Like Harry and the Polish woman Klara. Now he felt that way about his father. He had left without saying anything.

  Nathan was not sure what he wanted to say to his father or what Harry might have said to him, but he was certain that there was more to be said. How could he be gone with so much unsaid? He never even told him how much he liked his stupid Irving Berlin songs that no one else remembered. But he had always had the feeling that if his father had known what he was thinking, knew who he really was, he would not have approved. Just before the end, that day walking down the street talking about Klara, he realized for the first time that his father was a friend he could have confided in. He could have told him about Karo-line. He would have understood. Here he was now at Harry's shiva. And he was thinking of Karoline. That was the real reason that he couldn't bake something. He couldn't bear baking because it reminded him of her.

  He had been so desperate for a confidant, he had told Mordy But his brother only laughed at the gravity he attached to it. "People do this because they enjoy it," Mordy had said. "Look, I'm sure Sonia has done the same thing."

  "That's what you don't understand," Nathan had argued. "That's why it is so terrible—so unforgivable. Sonia would never do something like this."

  "Well, then you better not tell her," was Mordy's only answer.

  Would Harry have understood that his son was in mourning not for him, but for a relationship with the daughter of an SS officer who didn't want him and had just married someone named Dickie? Would Harry have understood that? Nathan didn't know. He didn't know Harry. He hadn't known Harry, and now he never would.

  It is always the simplest of remarks that are most regretted. Why hadn't he just eaten cuchifrito with his father instead of lecturing him about Tisha-b'Av? Who cared about Tisha-b'Av, anyway? It was just a joke. But Harry had just wanted him along. Karoline—he couldn't go because of Karoline. Would Harry have really understood? Not now, Dad, I have to go see this woman I've been sleeping with to warn her that Nusan is going to have her father
deported because he was an SS officer.

  Three times a day, Litvak and Fink would bring over the group from the shul so the Seltzer sons would have a minyan to say kaddish. Nusan would answer the door and Litvak would say, "May the Almighty comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem." And Mordy, for reasons known only to himself, would shake his head and show the beginning of a smile. Nusan let them in and showed them into the dining room just off the living room where everyone was seated, and they said the prayer for the dead, the rhythmic, rhyming Hebrew chant. "Yis-gadal, yisgadosh..." And when finished, the men would mill around the living room, determining that all of the food was traif and should not be eaten except for Fink's knishes, which they could no longer bring themselves to eat—not even Fink. Then they would pour shots of bourbon into plastic cups, the bourbon they had provided, throw down the whiskey, place the plastic cups back on the table, say a few words to Ruth, and leave. All of which did nothing for Ruth.

  Ruth did not worry about how to get through the day, or the seven days of shiva. But what would she do after that? How could she live in this apartment, in this neighborhood, without Harry? How could she ever walk down Second Avenue again? She would move to another part of town. Maybe up to the Bronx with her friend Esther. No, it was too late for that. Nobody moved to the Bronx anymore. And her sons were here and little Sarah, who had so many important things on her mind and did not allow other people to be unhappy Sarah had a bit of her father, a questioner. She would not remember Harry Strange, he had been there every day of her little life, but she wouldn't remember him— except through Ruth. Ruth could not be far from Sarah. But maybe in a different apartment in a different building.

  Throughout the day, for days, there were never fewer than twenty visitors in the apartment. Musicians of all kinds came. Nathan never realized how many musicians Harry knew. Harry would have loved having them all in the same room. Mordy found a dark-haired, fleshy woman with a music scale tattooed around her round and soft upper left arm. He had spotted her immediately