Otto stood up and flexed his biceps which rose like a camel’s hump from the hem of his short-sleeved shirt.
“Ach,” he said, pointing to Albert-Alberta, “this call itself man. A man has strength. You say you half-woman. I say you all woman.”
Albert-Alberta nodded and replied: “Ergo of no possible use to you.” He sang: ‘Tell me Lord Montague, How many hairy assholes did you screw? Was it one or ninety-two? Oh, tell me, Lord Montague.”
Fifi applauded vigorously, requiring her to extend her arms so that her palms could collide beyond her breasts.
Harry slowly lifted his head and, receiving no reprimand, swiveled his neck.
Lohu raised his hand and shook it like a schoolboy bursting with the right answer.
“I pity all of you,” he said.
His brother added: “All of you understand nothing.”
The others took no notice, except for Albert-Alberta, who made the sign of the Cross, and whispered:
“Buddha two, Jesus nothing. But it’s a great match, folks.”
“But we forget our guest,” Fifi said. “’Arry, you like Otto do strong trick for you?”
Harry remembered Mike Mazurki in a movie.
“Could you tear a telephone book in two?”
Everyone laughed. Fifi patted him on the head.
“Mon petit, zat is wonderful. Alors, Otto, our guest make request.”
“Zere is no book in zis shithouse.”
Albert-Alberta ran to the foyer and returned with a Brooklyn phone directory. He bounded up to Otto, bowed low and, sweeping his arm grandly in the style of a Shakespearean fop, laid the book on his lap. Otto, staring straight ahead, spread his knees. The book fell to the floor.
Jo-Jo slid off his chair, disappearing under the table, and surfaced back at his seat holding the book. He opened it and, whelping with strain, tore it in half along the binding, Everyone but Otto applauded. Tensing his biceps, the strong man said:
“Yah, yah, is funny. Now we go out and lift cars.”
“Why is to be ashamed of trick? If not tricks, how we make living?”
Otto chomped on his cheeks.
“’Arry, écoute, Otto, he can tear book like in show. But he is like chef. He need time to bake book in oven. Zen is très simple.”
“Lie,” Otto shouted.
“Fifi,” Jamie said, rolling his eyes, “you promised us the Boze Art today.”
The room froze. Harry thought of the wax museum. Fifi patted Harry’s head.
“Alors, porquoi pas, ze boy needs education. I explain:
“’Arry, in Paris, once in ze year, we have Beaux Arts Ball. All étudiants of ze arts invited. At midnight all doors locked and each must remove clothes. Of course one can depart before midnight, but who do such faux pas? The doors locked till six matin. Not even gendarmes can enter, and ze étudiants amuse zemself with much pleasure. I tell mes amis zis and they have envie for Beaux Arts even more zan once in year. You go with us. Zere is no harm, mon petit, I promise. Because you ze one vrai étudiant here, you have honor to disrobing moi, la reine.”
She turned her palms in a lifting motion. Otto tugged her to her feet. The others savagely tore at their clothes. Shirts, underwear and socks flew and floated over agitated inmates of a madhouse.
Olga, on all fours and gasping like a breath-starved football player, wiggled while accepting leisurely strokes from a kneeling Albert-Alberta, whose hands conducted a symphony orchestra. Spotting Otto sitting sullenly, he pointed to the twins, joined at the hip by what resembled a large fish scale, who were masturbating each other, as if a coxswain were setting a frenetic beat, and shrieked:
“Take a lesson from them, Otto!”
Jamie, seemingly guided by an enormous erection, came to a kneeling rest before Olga, who licked his penis with a pitted tongue.
A lion roared. Olga collapsed.
“Glad to have been of service,” Albert-Alberta said, turning his conducting to Lohu and Mohu, who were watching parabolas of semen land like disabled parachutes.
Fifi moved in front of Harry. She was about his height. A white cotton blouse hung loose over a pleated blue ankle-length skirt. Her bare feet, astonishingly small, seemed inadequate to their task.
“Alors, gentil gosse, is not polite to refuse hospitality. Disrobe me and you, zen do as you wish. No harm will come.”
She placed his hand on the top button of her blouse. He unbuttoned her. His penis was stiff. Otto, behind her, removed the blouse. She wore no brassiere. Her skirt fell. Her hand on his head guided him to his knees. He tugged her pink panties to her ankles. She kicked them away. His eyes were level with a tiny patch of blond pubic hair barely visible against the milky dunes of flesh. The odor of Woolworth perfume burned his nostrils like the vaporized mists Bama unleashed to cure his cold.
“Now remove you clothes. Ze règles of fête.”
Harry piled his clothes before him like a sandbag. His erection throbbed with virginal ecstasy of finally knowing, but nausea claimed his stomach.
Fifi turned a sweating face toward Harry, shut her tiny blue eyes, and nodded understanding.
“Such fear, mon petit, is only life. You do not wish, you may go now, if zat please you.”
Harry grabbed his clothes and ran through laughter. He was desperate to wash. On the steps, wearing only his knickers, he finished dressing. The door opened. Fifi, nude, held out the betting slips. Her other hand gripped his bike.
Harry stretched out his hand to accept the papers. Fifi squeezed it gently.
“Not forget ze cheval, brave knight.”
He caught his bike as it bumped down the stairs.
IN THE CHERRY TREE: JANUARY 16, 1937
Aba: American boy, tell me about America.
Harry: It has forty-eight states.
Aba: Is it the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Harry: Yes.
Aba: Then explain to me, American boy, why, a few days ago, the American government said that Americans cannot fight against Hitler in Spain.
Harry: But Hitler is in Germany.
Aba: He is also in Spain.
Harry: What is he doing there?
Aba: There is a civil war in Spain. He is helping one side.
Harry: Is it like the American Civil War? Are they fighting to free the slaves?
Aba: That is almost true. They are fighting so there will be no slaves.
Harry: I think I understand. If Hitler’s side wins, it will be like the South won the Civil War, and all the black people in Spain will be slaves.
Aba: The white people too.
Harry: But white people have never been slaves.
Aba: At the Passover Seder, do we not say: “ We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt”?
Harry: Yes … You know, Aba, I never thought about that because I knew the whole story, and the Jews are the ones who are winning all the time. Moses is like Joe Louis. He knocks out Pharaoh in every round.
Aba: You like Joe Louis.
Harry: Oh, yes. I listen to his fights on the radio, and the next morning on the way to school I stop at candy stores to look at the big picture of him standing over the man he has knocked out which is always on the back page of the Daily News.
Aba: The Daily News is a fascist newspaper. It is on Hitler’s side.
Harry: Then I must not look at its pictures of Joe Louis?
Aba: No, Heshele, look to your heart’s desire, but know that on the front page Joe Louis is knocked out.
CHAPTER
9
STANDING ON THE PEDALS OF HIS BIKE, PUMPING AND ROCKING VIOLENTLY, Harry measured speed by the pain of the cutting wind. He flashed over the grave of Dreamland and skidded onto the sand beneath the boardwalk. Carrying his bike to the ocean’s edge, he eased into a prone position and submerged his face in the lapping residue of once-surly waves. The frigid salt water stung his eyes and pricked his skin. The scourging, he hoped, would unclog his mind and allow it to answer questions that were lodged there.
>
Why had he wanted to bury his head in Fifi’s sweating breasts?
Why had he wanted to bite her pubic hair?
Why, during his panicked flight from the room, had he cursed himself for the loss of Fifi’s stinking mystery?
Why, in a world that encompassed many worlds as different from each other as day from night, did freaks, poets, dwarfs, his mother, his father, share a common obsession?
He remembered a joke he had overheard his father tell:
The grandmother of a large family dies. The grandfather, who worshipped her, is grief-stricken and dazed. The family, sitting shivah at home, notices that the grandfather has disappeared. Alarmed that in his confused state he may have wandered off and come to harm, they frantically search for him. He is discovered in a bedroom atop the young housemaid.
“Zadeh,” the family screams, “how could you?”
The grandfather replies: “Oy, in such a terrible time, do I know what I’m doing?”
Harry tried to visualize his grandfather in that position, but couldn’t get his clothes off. He laughed. Another question relieved him of the unanswerable ones: Was his grandfather crazy and, if so, how did that affect his own sanity?
Lifting his head from the water, he looked toward the twenty-five-yard-long fishing pier that jutted into the Atlantic from Steeple Chase Amusement Park. There, memory placed his grandfather, whose resemblance to Albert Einstein provoked double takes, standing beside seven-year-old Harry.
Though twenty feet above the nearest water, Zadeh wore hip-high rubber boots. He was furiously reeling in a line. When the hook breached, it might hold a bait worm, but nothing more. Zadeh had never had caught a fish.
Harry began a sanity inquiry.
Zadeh worked as a tanner in a leather factory, a trade he had learned in his native Poland. The profession was temporary, to be endured only until the world recognized his stature as a Talmudic scholar. His approach to fishing was properly Talmudic: If idiots can catch, surely I can. The premise was lost on the ignorant fish.
He escalated the battle, drafting seven-year-old Harry as aide and purchasing sophisticated rods, reels and lures. The fish were unimpressed. He became a nuisance to anyone on the pier with a catch in a bucket.
“What bait you use?” he would demand.
“Worms.”
“Special?”
“Worms is worms.”
“How far you cast?”
“Who knows?”
“You got a favorite spot?”
“Where they’re biting.”
Eventually his Talmudic mind informed him that Harry’s baited hook alongside his presented a choice that confused and immobilized stupid fish. He ordered Harry to withdraw his line, but to stand poised to plunge a gleaming scaling knife into a catch. It was now eight years that Harry had been at the ready but never challenged, for which Harry was thankful, because neither he nor Zadeh had the vaguest idea of how to clean a fish.
The end of the first nibbleless day set the pattern for all subsequent catchless expeditions. Lifting his eyes to the heavens, Zadeh gloomily conceded by reciting Goethe’s rhymed German: “Man thinks and God laughs.” He then leapt up, brought the heels of his boots together and added: “Sometimes man can laugh at God.”
At a fish store specializing in just-caught fish, Zadeh bought the last laugh.
Appropriately bloody catch in bucket, they had insisted that Bama immediately clean and fry the hard-won prize. None of them particularly liked fish, but they were no less vengefully ravenous than cannibals at the flesh of captured enemies.
The last bite cued a bowel movement lecture, followed by the lecturer’s long absence that taught by example. When Zadeh, glowing with health, returned from the bathroom, he would head for his desk and open his Old Testament. Harry would pull up a chair beside him.
Zadeh maintained an unblinking stare while reading the black Hebrew letters of the Torah, moving his head, rather than his eyes, from right to left. Harry considered those fixed eyes as unfathomably powerful as Buck Rogers’s ray gun.
Soon Zadeh would sound a salivaless expectoration and reach for his shiny, black Waterman pen, whose circumference nearly matched the fat Upmann cigars he sometimes smoked. Unscrewing the cover and jabbing the point downward to loosen the flow of ink, he would launch a closed-mouthed vibrato growl of disgust for the offending passage. The fourteen-carat gold-plaited nib then glided along the margins of the Torah, leaving hairline strokes of blue ink which at first seemed a meticulously copied musical score but, when completed, formed a perfectly even block of a midget Hebrew army commanded to attention. The error set right, he would again spit it out and swivel his head in search of the next abomination.
When turning a page, Zadeh would bid it good-bye with an exasperated “Enough already.” This habit had alerted Harry, at age ten, to his family’s general failure to draw distinctions between the animate and inanimate. His father, reading Freud, would mumble, “Thank you.” His mother praised or cursed her mascara brush. Bama’s intimacy with the evil eye empowered her to chase it from the room by brandishing a straw broom and cursing.
His father explained that Zadeh and Bama and perhaps to a lesser extent, his mother, were victims of Polish romanticism, an aberration which drew no distinction between fantasy and reality. The results could be as relatively benign as electing of the concert pianist Paderewski Poland’s first president, or as life-threatening as centuries of insistence that Poland could subdue Russia.
The explanation had shed sense on some of Zadeh’s eccentricities: when he came across a picture of Stalin in a newspaper, he would obliterate him with a punch that put a hole in the paper, then brush his right palm over his left to bid good riddance to the Russian tyrant. Or the time in a local candy store when Harry, age twelve, had been drawn to a large group surrounding the pinball machine and egging on the player with: “Go get ’em, Pop.” On tiptoes, Harry had watched Zadeh barking commands in English and Yiddish to the silver balls as they collided with the bumpers.
Playing pinball was a sop to Zadeh’s passion for gambling. Lacking funds, he usually was relegated to kibitzing. More than one black eye had confirmed the stupidity of some who resented his advice.
Eventually he had been picked up in a raid on a gambling casino. Bailed out and brought home by Bama and Harry’s parents, he ignored their questions, fuming over the duplicity of the number 16, which had lied to him.
“Sixteen,” his mother repeated, adding with a derisive laugh. “Wasn’t that the age you said I was too young to go out with boys? Some lucky number.”
“Leah,” Bama shouted, “you must not speak to Mr. Fishman that way.”
“Mr. Fishman, Mr. Fishman, can’t you call him anything else? He’s your husband, my father, for Christ’s sake.”
“In Warsaw …” Bama began, but deferred to her husband, who abandoned the number 16 and pointed a stiff finger at Harry’s mother, arcing it through the air like a pendulum.
“You must never say that name. How do you know who is listening?”
“Say something to him!” his mother yelled at Harry’s father. “You’re a big mind, a writer, maybe he’ll listen to you.”
Harry’s father long ago had certified his in-laws as insane. He avoided them whenever possible, cautioning Harry: “If you listen to a madman long enough, he starts to sound sane.”
“Velia,” he pleaded, moving toward his coat, “I must go to the paper. Europe is about to blow up.”
“Oh no you don’t! Europe can blow up tomorrow. Say something. The next time he’ll go to jail for God knows what.”
“That’s better,” Zadeh complimented his daughter.
“Listen, Fishman”—his father’s overly sweet voice had reminded Harry of a Coney Island barker buttering up a mark—“do you think it is wise for a Talmudist like yourself to be in the company of people who go to such places?”
“Catzker, don’t be too quick to judge. There are Kabbalists among them.”
&
nbsp; “Of course,” his father agreed, pursing his lips at received valuable information, “there are Kabbalists everywhere. But the others … it is not right for a man like you.”
“Catzker, you call yourself a writer and you know so little. There are not Kabbalists everywhere. If there were, the world would be on the verge of heaven. Is that what you are telling me?”
“Surely not. Let us forget the Kabbala. Let us speak of the police. If they do not want these games to go on, don’t you think you should obey them?”
“Obey the police? You are crazy. They are goyim. Do you ask me to agree with goyim!”
“But many of those who were arrested with you were goyim.”
Zadeh found this a telling point. He stroked his chin, analyzing. His father claimed triumph by grabbing his coat.
“Aha,” Zadeh shouted, “spies!”
“Papa,” his mother said, “they are going to put you away one day. Where, I don’t know.”
“In the cemetery, of course.”
Bama chased the evil eye with her fists.
And there was chess, which was not exactly relevant evidence. Or was it?
Zadeh had taught chess to four-year-old Harry, who had picked up the game in a couple of sessions. Bama had proclaimed him a prodigy, feeding him candy as he sat on two telephone books across from Zadeh, who was oblivious to everything except plotting a winning strategy.
The prodigy’s chess game, however, had a chronic failing. When Zadeh captured Harry’s first piece, a pawn, he proudly placed it along the edge of the board on his side of the table. The isolated warrior appeared so lonely and forlorn that Harry was impelled to provide it with company. As quickly as possible, he would position another piece in fatal jeopardy. The bizarre moves raised Zadeh’s suspicion that a subtle trap was in progress. He would study the board for as long as ten minutes, searching for the intent of the bold sacrifice, until deciding that it was just an idiotic blunder, and pouncing.
After being beaten in every contest during his fourth year, Harry began to cry in defeat. Three years later, cured of his lonely-pawn syndrome, but still having experienced only hot tears over a chessboard, Harry won his first chess game, not against Zadeh but a schoolmate, who succumbed to a four-move checkmate. Much to Harry’s disappointment, his victim did not cry, but merely shrugged his shoulders and said:
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