End of the Jews

by Adam Mansbach

  Devon shrugs. “Yeah, I probably will play some bullshit. But what else is new? There he is.” Devon cups his hands toward the balcony. “Sparkplug! Come down here a second, bruh, you gotta meet somebody.”

  The precarious side staircase emits a descending scale of squeaks, and then a man in his late forties is walking up beside them, handsome and scholarly in wire-rimmed glasses and a khaki shirt. A thin white beard sets off his light brown skin; a gleaming Nikon and a light meter dangle from his neck.

  “Presenting Marcus Flanagan,” says Devon with one arm held wide, and Marcus strolls into the shoulder-squeeze embrace. “Better known as Uncle Sparkplug. Also known as the Big Greazy, Old Man River, and Cherokee Slim. Official photographer of the Devon Marbury Octet, Global Youth Jazz Orchestra, and Life. Marcus, this is Nina…Jenkins. Nina ‘Pigfoot’ Jenkins. She’s in your line of work, bruh. Supposed to be bad. We’re going to her crib after the hit to check her work out.”

  Marcus shakes her hand and smiles. “Are you shooting tonight?”

  “Sure is,” Devon answers for her. “Big shoot-out at the opera house tonight. Old Doc Holliday and little Annie Oakley. The future of photography versus the past.”

  “You can ignore him,” Marcus says. “He’s used to it. May I see what you’re working with?”

  Nina unstraps her shoulder bag, glancing at Marcus’s state-of-the-art machine as she hauls out her dinged-up camera. “This was my father’s. Equipment is expensive here, and very hard to get.”

  Marcus hefts it. “I had one of these once. It’ll dig a hole in your shoulder, but it gets the job done.”

  The trombonist watches them a moment, then announces, “I’m going back to warm up. You coming, Pigfoot, or staying here and talking shop?”

  “I think I’ll…” She pauses, playing the phrase back in her head to make sure it means what she thinks it does. “I’m gonna talk shop. I’ll catch up with you in a few minutes.”

  “That’s cool.” Devon turns on his heel. “Give the cats a chance to talk you over.” He steps into the shadows and is gone.

  Marcus hands her camera back. “You a jazz fan?”

  “I’ve never heard anything but ‘Take the A Train’ and ‘Hello, Dolly’ and a Czech group that came to my school when I was ten. My parents played classical at home, and American tapes are hard to get. But I know the photos—Claxton, DeCarava.”

  “Huh. Well, you’re gonna get a crash course tonight. Devon talks a lot of junk, but he’s the best trombonist since J. J. Johnson. Not that that means anything to you.”

  “How long have you been shooting him?”

  “I shot Devon’s birthday party when he turned two. Known his old man since the fifties; used to shoot his band. Devon senior’s a pianist—used to play with Albert Van Horn?” Nina gives an apologetic shrug, and wonders how many more names she’ll have to confess to not knowing.

  “Been traveling with Junior almost three years, on and off. Done Africa, Japan, whole lot of Europe. We’re working on a book together—kind of a travelogue slash photo essay.”

  “Why does he call you Uncle Sparkplug?”

  Marcus snorts. “’Cause I’m the only one out of all these mugs who knows how to fix the bus when it breaks down. Which it invariably does in the middle of the night, in the pouring rain, two hundred miles west of nowhere. And how did you get to be Pigfoot Jenkins, may I ask?”

  “I have no idea what it means. Should I be insulted?”

  “Naw, flattered. That’s some down-home stuff. Means he’s impressed. Of course, you’re also very beautiful.”

  Nina stiffens. He had to say it. In the midst of this totally unrelated conversation, he had to find a way. And she’s supposed to smile like it’s just an aesthetic observation, not a come-on.

  She looks into the wings. “Thanks.”

  Marcus studies her. “I’m sorry.” He tilts his head sideways, puppy dog–style, to catch her eye. “I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.”

  “No, no, it’s fine.” Nina takes a deep breath, prepares to forget about it. “I guess I’m no good at taking compliments.” The smile she gives him is so brief, it looks like a facial tic.

  Marcus nods. There’s a softness to his eyes, like maybe he understands. “Well, Pigfoot, if you start hanging around these jazz musicians, you’ll have to get better at it. That’s a fact and a warning. Listen, I’ll tell you what.” He lifts the camera strap from his neck. “Why don’t you take this for tonight? Give you a chance to try out something new.”

  “Really?” Marcus has wiped the slate clean, and from the look on his face, he knows it. “Thanks. That would be great.”

  “No problem. I’m shooting from the balcony, so I gotta go get ready. You’re welcome to come see my setup, but I’ve got a feeling you’d rather go backstage and get busy.”

  “I’d love to see your setup later.”

  “Sure. We’re going to your pad after the gig anyway, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, all right. See you later, then.”

  “Get some good ones, Doctor Holliday.”

  He laughs and bows. “You, too, Miz Oakley. And hey.” Marcus takes a step closer. “If you go back there and Devon plays you kind of cool, don’t take it personal. Sometimes he touches down to earth, but most of the time he lives up in Devonland.” The photographer taps his temple.

  Sure enough, Devon barely lifts his head to acknowledge her when Nina enters the dressing room. Even with Marcus’s warning, she struggles not to see it as a snub, retaliation for her failure to heed his summons.

  The other musicians take their cues from the bandleader and ignore her, too, but being invisible is to Nina’s advantage. She stashes her own camera in a corner and burns through thirty-six exposures on Marcus’s machine as the men chat, graze a silver platter of sandwiches, and look over mimeographs of a song arrangement the leader wrote on last night’s flight from Budapest.

  “Not because I didn’t think Pipe Man’s charts were working,” Devon is careful to explain, laying a hand on the rotund saxophonist’s shoulder as the pages are passed around. “Just because I wanted to hear some different things.”

  Nina is trigger-happy, heedless of her weekly film rations and determined to emerge from this evening with at least one perfect image. She reloads, then shoots their preperformance prayer circle—a solemn departure from the lascivious loudmouthery of just before, and a ritual so seemingly natural and heartfelt that it makes Nina pang, if only momentarily, for some spiritual life of her own. The men stand silent for perhaps a minute, holding hands, before Devon intones, “Let’s go out and heal some people with our music, brothers. Praise be to God. Amen.” And they disperse, heading for the door.

  Nina lights out first, wanting to capture the procession moving toward her. They pass onto the stage, and she slips down into the empty orchestra pit. From there, she can move in and out of the wings, even travel a circuitous back route up to the balcony.

  The music tells her where to go, dances Nina in a way she’s never been danced before. Devon’s agility on that big, unwieldy, military-looking instrument astounds her—as does the realization that nothing in all that technique is the least bit gratuitous. Even the slightest flick of his wrist serves the sound. The fact that all of them are making it up—within some kind of structure, obviously, she can tell that much, she isn’t completely ignorant—strikes her as wildly heroic.

  Shooting this music makes explicit the relationship between camera and subject, formalizes what Nina’s been doing all along. Everything and everyone she’s ever shot is negotiating time and space, charting a course along dual governing axes. These men dramatize it—stand up there and try to say what they have to in the time allotted by life and by one another, in the space their instruments are capable of occupying and the space they carve collectively away from silence. She can see from their faces that it is a joy and a struggle, no metaphor for life, but life itself. And while they try to get it, her job is to get
them getting it. It’s just like everything else, only more so. Nina feels her thoughts begin to jumble and congeal, and she puts them aside and joins the other seven hundred members of the audience in clapping as the members of the Devon Marbury Octet take their final bows and file toward the dressing room. Her entire film reserve, hoarded over months, is almost gone—vanished without her noticing, like the last hour and a half.

  Devon is the last to leave the stage. He takes a solo bow, and when he walks into the wings, Nina is waiting.

  “So, Pigfoot? What’s up? Was I bullshitting?” He does that little weight-shifting thing of his again, then brings the horn to his lips and puffs his cheeks against the mouthpiece without making a sound: another twitch, or perhaps an exercise. Nina watched him do it half a dozen times before the show.

  “No. You weren’t bullshitting.”

  He blots his lips against the back of his hand, shifts again. On another man, such body language might suggest the need to find a rest room. On Devon, it seems to bespeak an equally urgent desire to find some form of mental engagement.

  “Yeah? I felt like I was bullshitting big-time on ‘Green Chimneys.’ The ballad, too.”

  She wants to tell him how his music really makes her feel and think, but that would be giving him too much. “If you were, you fooled me.”

  “Come on now, Pigfoot,” he chides her, beginning to walk. “You’re supposed to know when somebody is bullshitting.”

  “Wait till I develop the film,” Nina says, keeping step. “Then I’ll be able to tell.”

  He glances over with a smirk. “Yeah, that should reveal plenty about who’s bullshitting.”

  Devon grabs a cup of coffee and a sandwich backstage, then spends the next hour receiving every visitor lined up in the opera house aisle. He shakes every hand, autographs newspapers and programs, squats eye-to-eye with every child musician who’s been brought to meet him. “He is studying piano,” or guitar, or trumpet, their fathers declare in fractured English, and Devon nods and smiles at the kids, asks questions about what they’ve learned. Nina is amazed to see him allow several older children identified as brass musicians to actually hold and blow into his horn. He gives them little tips, corrects or compliments the way they hold their lips, pats his foot delightedly and hollers for any band members within earshot to gather round as a twelve-year-old trombonist struggles gamely through a few choruses of “I Got Rhythm.”

  Marcus appears halfway through the meet-and-greet routine and stands by Nina’s side. “Ambassador Marbury,” he says. Devon, about to pose for a photo with three sleepy-looking children, glances over, grins.

  To each youngster with whom he confers, the trombonist gives a shrink-wrapped cassette tape from a small blue duffel bag embroidered with the words Antibes Jazz Festival 1985. Nina assumes it is his latest album, but when she looks closer, she sees that Devon is disseminating copies of an album called A Love Supreme, by a troubled-looking man named John Coltrane.

  “You might not like it right away,” he warns the children, their faces reddening with shy elation as they turn the unexpected gifts in their hands, “but keep listening to it, okay? Get your whole family to check it out.” Nina translates the sentiment when she sees that it is going unfathomed, which is most of the time, and the parents nod to her and then to Devon as they take hold of their children and back gratefully away.

  “Can I have one of those tapes?” Nina asks when the last fan is gone. She, Devon, and Marcus are waiting outside for the opera house van, which will shuttle them to Nina’s.

  He rubs his hands together in the slight chill. “You never heard A Love Supreme?”

  “I keep trying to tell you, I don’t know anything about jazz. I live here. I have a can of Coke in my bedroom that I saved when I was twelve.”

  Devon shakes his head. “We gotta get you outta here, Pigfoot. Back to your Creole roots.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You sure it’s gonna be cool with your old lady, you bringing home a couple of Negroidal strangers at one in the morning?”

  “I really don’t care.”

  The men exchange a look, a chuckle. “Watch out, now,” says Marcus, shaking his head. “Pigfoot, Junior. Pigfoot.”

  “Pigfoot, Uncle Sparkplug. Little Sister Pigfoot.”

  Nina is enjoying their back-and-forth too much to remain merely a listener. “Hey, pardon my Eastern European ignorance, but do people really still say ‘Negro’? I mean, didn’t it go out of fashion with George Wallace and Bull Connor?”

  Devon arches his back and claps his hands; laughter and breath twirl toward the sky. Marcus turns to Nina. “Hold up now, Pigfoot. Just what could you possibly know about Bull Connor?”

  Nina pretends to scan the cobblestone street for signs of the van, so they won’t see her smile. “I read. There’s nothing else to do. I’ve been through every Life magazine from 1953 to 1968.”

  “No shit. You’ve seen my work, then.”

  “Have I?”

  “I shot Miles Davis for the cover of Life in—what?—’66 or ’67. He’s in profile, playing his horn, with Herbie Hancock in the background.” Marcus models the pose, and Nina glimpses something childlike in his playacting, his desire to be known.

  “I don’t remember that. But some are missing from the library.”

  The van arrives. Nina directs the driver in Czech. Fifteen minutes later, they disembark, and she leads Devon and Marcus up the path to her front door, noting with some trepidation that the light in Rayna’s study is still on.

  “Damn,” mutters the trombonist. “Pigfoot got a serious pad, Sparkplug. We might have to move the band up out of that sad-assed hotel and bunk down here.”

  Nina settles them in the living room with glasses of red wine, then tiptoes upstairs to fetch her portfolio, shutting every door between them and her mother on the way back. When she returns, Devon is browsing the floor-to-ceiling bookcase covering the room’s longest wall, head cocked sideways to read the titles. Marcus is sunken into the plush, dusty couch, swirling the liquid in his glass and assimilating his surroundings with quick, fastidious eyes.

  “So, uh, here it is.”

  The photographer sits up, tabling his wine, and Nina slides in next to him and drops her portfolio atop the newspapers littering the coffee table. Devon lingers at the bookcase, long enough for her to begin thinking he is being very rude, then seats himself on Nina’s other side, knee touching hers.

  She looks at each of them in turn, bends forward to open the cover, then straightens. Marcus and Devon lean into the vacant space. Nina clasps her hands, tries to distract herself by noticing the way Devon’s close-shorn hair spirals out from a point at the crown of his head like a whorl-pattern fingerprint.

  “Mmm.” Marcus studies the image. It is a low-angled portrait of an old woman silhouetted against a troubled sky, her head framed between the storm clouds gathered on each side. Her eyes are closed and she looks totally asleep, except that Nina has caught her in the midst of drumming her weathered fingertips against the top of the wooden table at which she sits.

  “Mmm,” he says again.

  Devon holds his chin in his hand. After a moment, he reaches out and flips the page.

  “Damn,” he mutters, stealing a glance at Nina. She pretends not to see it, and he turns back to the picture. In the foreground is the back of a stout schoolmistress, hair a sloppy bun atop her head. Facing the camera are thirty girls of about ten, looking up toward her or sideways at one another or down at the ground. Two stare directly at the camera. A panoply of sentiments plays on their uncreased faces. Each set of eyes is perfectly in focus.

  “Do you crop?” asks Marcus without looking up.

  “Never.”

  Devon turns the page. They work their way through the portfolio’s forty images in near silence. The men’s respect, once she is certain that is what it is, makes Nina want to cry.

  Devon closes the portfolio with a care that seems almost ceremonious. His cheeks puff quic
kly, then deflate.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” she says, adding a year without even planning to lie.

  Devon’s eyes dart to Marcus’s, then resettle on Nina. “And nobody ever taught you anything about photography?”

  She shakes her head. Devon opens his eyes wide, expels a huge column of air, and looks again at Marcus. “Well, Sparkplug?”

  Marcus frowns down at the portfolio. He seems to be choosing his words with care, as if he’s afraid of embarrassing one of them. “Pigfoot is nice,” he says finally, meeting her eyes for a fraction of a second and then turning to Devon. “She should be studying with a master.”

  “Like you, for instance?” The bandleader flourishes a hand, and the words run into it like a question mark.

  “For instance.”

  “I wish I could. But there’s—”

  She snaps her head in the direction of the stairs. Rayna is walking down them in her nightgown, cardigan, and slippers, reading glasses bouncing off her chest with every step.

  “Mom.” Nina stands. Her guests are on their feet already.

  Rayna gives the men a tight smile as she reaches the landing, then addresses her daughter in Czech. “Nina, it is two in the morning. Who are these people and what are they doing in my house?”

  “Mom,” Nina replies in English, “I’d like you to meet Devon Marbury and Marcus Flanagan. Devon is a jazz musician and Marcus is a photographer. I met them tonight at the opera house. Devon, Marcus, this is my mother, Dr. Rayna Hricek.” She switches to Czech and adds, “They’re very famous artists, Mother.”

  Rayna studies her daughter for a moment, then seems to come to some conclusion. “Good evening.” She offers her hand to Marcus and then to Devon. “Please, sit down. Can I offer you something to eat?” Despite years of disuse, her English has lost none of its fluency.