by Edie Meidav
What? You want-a to go in? For some reason I think speaking fake Italian will make the kid understand me but jargon or nor, my lunkhead makes his needs known, pulling at me. I have to admit, whole thing cute in the way I used to find my pet ferret until it kept skittering onto the ground where it hunched up and ran away to bilge on my landlord’s floors and I had to let it out to predators that still play haunt around our dry riverbed.
So the boy and I go in to the museum. Because it is close to closing, the lady guard who never stops telling you about her hemorrhoids if you give her two-thirds a chance stands there as if shocked seeing me, the old runt, there with some company for once. She holds her tongue and nods, meaning we go in free of charge, my dink knowing he’s in on a good deal, staring at both of us like I might also be the one give permission to stroke that ancient piano. She looks around before she nods yes.
But then my jesus, the noise the ballhead squeezes out of the box, able to pull from that cranky eighty-eight something I guarantee no one in a million years heard this side of town or ever, I’m talking St. Martin and Academy and Westminster and who knows what else, no fooling. Not like I haven’t been around music, and let me not go on about it but let’s say in my head also played some song from childhood about a sprout of his planting and I thought fiddle if this boy is not righteous. Because for once I am not being cheated. Seems the boy is made from some other place, like an angel lying on the mattress I fix up for him at home later, the bed made by stuffing shirts into the too-big suit my uncle left me when he died. Boy humming, staring at the ceiling, and I know I should take him poking around, playing wherever he wants to, not to make coins multiply but because of nature. Screw the cost of lessons or books and whatever bits people might lift.
You’re an odd case, I tell him.
He turns and in the half-glow glimmers toward me.
Don’t mind the ants, I say, but my voice makes what I meant to say as a question come out more a command.
He gives out a little bark and then stares back like someone declared us in a contest until his eyelids shut the way an alligator’s do, a fact I know on authority from my childhood being left for hours at the zoo by my own uncle.
Next day I’m of two minds, due to call at Old Skintyflint’s around eleven to see if he wants me to plaster menus over a different zone but by the time the boy and I wake it’s almost 10:30 and I want the day to play differently.
My boy’s in the same shirt and pants I found him in, I’m muttering to him something about new clothes and we’re walking toward the cafeteria where you can pour milk from the coffee area without anyone giving a flying ham. Sugared milk and also a bun from the salad area and you are set far as breakfast. I think: Do I bother schooling him in this? But then we’re just in and smooth as you like, he takes the milk and bun like a little gentleman and sits with me outside where no one will bother us and I’m thinking how we look to passersby. Like a father with his bigheaded son, uncle and nephew out carousing, or social worker with his foreign charge out on some special plebe outing?
What happens is we’re sitting there and the boy is happy dipping his bun when our usual police siren goes by wailing, the boy quick in covering his ears but in such pain he knocks the milk so it drenches my one good pair of pants. The siren gone as soon as it started but the boy is sorry on my behalf, trying to sop up the stain with his shirt, cringing like he’s afraid I’ll beat him which rips my tongue out.
Big head or not, the boy whimpers in the tiniest voice.
So I take him to the enormous toy store, not knowing how to handle extras and stalling for time, a place I’ve always loved. Back of my head thinking isn’t it just a matter of time before I hand my boy off to some rich old lady with unstained hands who knows exactly how to handle unwanted charges? Some blameless old biddy who’d use educated tones with the social workers who will then place him in some good family where they have proper bedtime and nutritious mealstuffs and the thought of this so weirdly squeezes saltwater out my eyes, I don’t notice at first the boy again seating himself but this time at the little kids’ piano against the wall.
I imagine my ex-girl tugging at me and saying Luther, don’t be a fool, let the urchin play, leave him right there, but again I’m listening to what this kid pulls out of those keys and me, I’ve been a sucker for music my whole life, could stand all day listening to a guitar player on the street only starting to tune, what can I say, and this boy’s stuff a thousand times better than anything.
People in the store seem to agree, meaning I’m not a fool. Some biddy of the sort I was imagining leaving my little dink with nods approvingly at me: You started him on lessons young? I just nod and take all credit, and though a small crowd has gathered around him, people not even checking phones or watches, just hypnotized by my little snake charmer, wheels are starting to spin and I’m thinking: Well, he could get us out, right?
I mean, it was not really me thinking it, more a certain voice visits me.
After, I pat his back a little too hard, saying you did good and he smiles but less because he understands and more I think because he recognizes I’m a good papa duck and he can lighten up about basic survival.
I take him to Austerlitz Hall, our main performance hall, a non-blight that brings bigger city types to watch shows, but the only one around is the tired old guy with a bookie shade on manning the ticket booth.
Think we might speak with the manager?
Manager? guy says, coming out of a coma.
You know—and here I can’t keep up my aping of someone more confident—someone in charge of performers?
Beside me the boy is doing a little one-two step on duck feet, his torso big and almost manlike, I notice for the first time, like some kind of swimmer, but his legs are short. No wonder he has a hard time in life, all that talent squeezed upward.
Concert manager? Half the bookie’s teeth smile.
Clearly the pair of us happen to be an odd sort coming around at one in the afternoon on a day there’s no concert but the bookie decides to bestir himself enough to put in a call to someone. Yes, okay, alright, he says, glancing down at us, go on up to the second floor.
We push into that rich space and I mean it is rich for someone who has never been. I can taste how upmarket the cigarettes smoked in here would be, resting on my lips, burnt and delicious. Ghosts crowd the space, ladies in perfume and swank men spilling cognac into the rug’s curlicues.
On the round marble stairs going up, the boy’s small and awkward suddenly. You’ll see, I promise him, and he does that little hopeful glimmer like he understands, at least better than that awful whimpering cringe.
To make your time short: the concert manager hears the boy and knows from the first strokes the scoop. The boy’s maybe our century’s original prodigy, some kind of Russian gone missing on his country’s tour. You don’t read the papers? Someone trying to get him out of the country. Manager thinks it best to get him to immigration and plot out amnesty. This kind of talent, a kid only seven, could be a search warrant out. You better flee, says the manager. Boy’s name is M. N., that’s all that’s worth knowing, you probably should hightail it out yourself, we’ll handle it all.
If I haven’t found a lady or anyone else to share life with, I did have a couple of fighting male betta fish in a glass jar for a while until they ate each other, fact the pet store didn’t tell me about, you need to keep them separated from their impulses, and then you could say I probably knew for the last time responsibility’s never worth the suffering. Sure there was a time when things could have changed for me but to get back to my boy, did I walk down those stairs with tail between my legs? I did. This old wannabe of me, still in Half End, has some tales to tell. Don’t mind my new job, these last years serving as companion for rich old ladies, not out in the world where they need someone in coachmens and cavalry twills but inside where they need someone who doesn’t mind them sipping grog while he rubs a foot with lavender talc until they fall into their snores.
But tonight my M. N. is playing Austerlitz. In the posters he stares down his swallowtails, now himself a big broad man. If the wall fell years ago, at least I have not and memory’s long. Of course I’m going, unfolding a few bills from between the perfumed scarves of my latest lady and shining my shoes till they look like big blocks of licorice.
Since Goa died of a bad heart years ago, I can’t ask him to come. Being as it fell to me to clean up his earthly belongings, I got not only his secret holdings but his suits, though only the one with the most solid color fits.
In the mirror I pull myself straight, imagining being there in a few hours, listening to my lunkhead, now older, playing, and what an airplane that might all be, the music like the life you were meant for shooting off into the sky. I like to think that if he stands and speaks some bad English to the people of Half End, he might halfway include me. This might be the case when, concert over, my eyes drenched, drizzle to full-on storm, I can’t stand for the encore and be just one more beast clapping together with everyone in the hall. And then I pull myself together into what matters and get myself out before there’s any slightest chance in the world a person could spot me because out is my paradise—out may be horrendous but out is where I know to stay.
THE CHRISTIAN GIRL
That morning, I was not exactly spying on the Christian girl taking her bath outside in the strange area my father had rigged up for her, because though he had managed to persuade the women of the house to let this young girl live with us and eat with the children, this girl who helped us for some vulnerable reason everyone protected which I didn’t understand, no one let her bathe where the women did or use the same small chamber pot, since both her bathwater and waste were to be poured out elsewhere and so avoid any mixing with ours. In this way we stayed apart: otherwise her muslin dresses and water-harshed hands were ours, her apples, jokes, and tendrils of hair escaping her bun. Because of this tender reason that had to be sheltered, she had her own place to sleep and bathe. If you stood on the hill just above at the right hour when no neighbor was around, you could see the care she took, placing the animal-fat soap she used, different from ours, on the stone wall my brothers and I dedicated ourselves to dismantling.
She had a way of undoing her hair with a kind of trick so it fell down around that snub face, followed by a bit of shadowy movement through the slats. While watching her, I could not help my own little body-trick starting to perform on its own and could not also help the feeling she knew. Discovery! Or almost and so I panicked, dislodging a piece of rubble toward where she bathed.
To see her through slats was not so different from how she first appeared among us, stepping down the path, wearing a brown dress of a kind we had not seen, something that might have been made from potato sacks and then belted. Never had I seen a person like her, so soft and foreign yet accessible and not hidden away.
Our mother was proper, a person cited often for properness, and though I understood this meant her airs were great and that many failed in their liking, they always spoke of her refinement—all that meant she could read French, Russian, Polish, German, Hebrew, her skirts sheaths long as this education, high-waisted black affairs with tiny complicated buttons up near her waist that fascinated me, the entire sheath of it making it impossible to imagine having come from that concave belly, with only those mysterious buttons offering the hint of a clue. During that time, my mother did not walk so much as sweep through our house, two levels, with an assortment of aunts and others upstairs, but if I watched her swishing too much, a little rush of something flooded my chest, as if I had just punched a pillow and only air puffed out.
My job as the youngest was to warm the beds of each of the women at night before they entered, what they always laughed about: That is what he is good for, little Henryk, I heard them saying, he’ll make a good bed warmer, though I never wished to pursue that laugh, one more item adults left in their wake, stealing your attention and then vanishing like a particular small fluff of goose feathers I was sure kept following me everywhere in life and not just when the women beat our pillows on stultified summer afternoons.
My father scared me, a big man respected in the town for his great timber enterprise which in retrospect now seems just a bit of land outside town where he judiciously planted trees and cut them. He called himself captain of the enterprise, an odd, un-Jew-like thing to do for many reasons, I later understood, mainly because Jews did not usually get to own land, but my father was tall, half soldier and half tree, and perhaps this broad-shouldered stance got him favors not granted to others given the pride in his bearing which made him tell anyone he trusted enough that he was descended from a line of rabbis all the way back from the Baal Shem Tov and before that the Maharal of Prague and Rashi and someone they loved to discuss named Dreyfus in the town of Troyes all the way back to a humble sandal-maker in second-century Palestine.
That order I never got straight, I just heard the names so often they whined an incantation. Once my father beckoned me alone to his study, really more a cramped alcove behind the stairs, there to take out a copper box in which the crumpled papers of our genealogy remained, the papers that followed us from town to town, all the sites our grandparents had needed to leave, Lucca and Troyes, Girona and Algiers and Casablanca, with some hint of what the adults called rape either in Africa or among the Cossacks infiltrating the family line before we ended up in our town with its pretty spires and wild forest in which my father’s grandfather, blessed be his memory, had seen our future. With him had come the rest of the family and so we settled into a street in the shadow of the church tolling the hour.
Other families arrived as well and from among them my father chose my mother for being the best of the herring, as he said, from among those his own parents had wanted for him, a dark narrow woman with a beak-like nose you can still see casting such shadow in photos, the knowing in her eyes a predictor of prudent values which might spread grace over the large family my father wished to have carry forth his line.
That our mother bore him three boys seemed a good promise at the start. You are so lucky, people said, the family business will work out with sons, and my father’s prospects were good, especially since he knew to take unpopular stands in the community such as the moment when someone wanted to dig a well far from the gentiles and my father stood up and said if we are building a well it should be for everyone, not just Jews, in this way doing what he could to shine the reputation of our community, but what did I know, little pisher as the aunts called me, but I overheard everything, how in our town gentiles were more tolerant, leaving one another space, and how especially here Jews bothered to master the foreign language in their homes if not at cheder. True we did keep to our own butcher and baker but apart from that, if you walked the weekday marketplace, you could see everyone, including my mother, sidling through narrow corridors eyeing apples, cabbage, beets with the same scorn, and everyone had the same rough hands roaming through beetle-ridden onions.
My mother had a way of walking like a sentinel through any crowd, an exquisite sight whenever I was lost and looked to find her, her movements bearing a certainty to which you could cling, the angle of her nose such that she never seemed to stop judging. When she smiled it was not as it is with some people, the sun cutting through, but rather more a quick evaluative flash, nothing to rest or bask in for long, hers more a winter sun.
And this may be part of why the Christian girl did something to me as I watched through our one window. She made her way down the small rutted path where my older brothers sometimes hid, their favorite barricade from which they threw stones to chide me for walking up to the road so late in the morning. I was always late, the youngest and dreamy besides, and in their frustration, because I made them late for cheder, they threw pebbles. Not that they were the most eager students once we got to the one-room schoolhouse for boys where we bunched around the table made from my father’s timber learning to read the book from every physical angle, like the fa
mous story of Hillel who got cold lying on the snow-covered roof and looking through a hole because he wasn’t rich enough to study and hence learned the alphabet upside down, or maybe it was Akiva, this was how my young mind made all stories one, especially those involving threats of discomfort. Not eager students, my brothers, just allies and bullies who loved the act of getting themselves orderly, glossy, and bundled up to get to cheder on time, a place I knew to feel fortunate about since our mother had the habit of reminding us that we had the luck of education only because people liked giving favors to our father, a man who thought himself lucky to employ Jews and gentiles alike, seeing no distinction in who got to be ennobled by manual labor as he liked to say. In his neat shirt, laboriously ironed by one of the women in our house with the heavy steam iron, he nonetheless had the air of a messy scholar, misbuttoned or bearing telltale splotches, sawdusted from where he had kneeled to assist one of his men on the lumber cart bearing logs. So many giant striking trees he had cut down before their prime. As he liked to tell us, the key is choosing the moment just before and then you bring the logs to the larger market in the capital. In everything he did lived instruction, the kind of lesson I should heed, especially that a man could be larger than his surroundings and the stateliness with which you carry yourself makes all the difference.
So that when the Christian girl was making her way down the path, because I was the dreamy one prone to marveling, I saw her first. For a second, with the selfishness the others liked to accuse me of as well as whatever gave me the nickname of Cloud, I watched her rather than go run and tell anyone, which means I lacked any sense of decorum. Mainly because her face had a sweetness I had never seen, a roundness, both her snub nose and mouth twisted to the side under some light in the eyes that asked if you were in on some joke. Only later I learned the light came from a sympathy ready to spring up at all the unfairness of life.
