Coney

by Amram Ducovny

  The next time he appeared, they shared a chocolate soda in a candy store. Catzker promised that her beauty would inspire thousands of lyrical poems. She had found her first slave.

  A week later, on a lumpy bed in a room that smelled of feet, she stayed her nausea while Catzker hurt her terribly. Her blood stained the sheet and caked on her buttocks. He called it the nectar. She ran to the bathroom and threw up.

  It became less painful. Her body was numb, floating like an angel on serene Polish clouds. Catzker, pumping, sweating, stinking, breathing like a mad dog, was a comedy seen from afar.

  Soon it would be time to talk of marriage, escape. But then her nipples hardened and she awoke to nausea. She wanted an abortion, but Catzker would not hear of it. He was in delirium. The child would be the most beautiful the world had ever seen; her all over again. He wanted to ask her parents for permission to marry. She replied that her father would call the police.

  They were married at City Hall with a five-cent ring from Woolworth’s. When they told her parents, her mother made a semicircle over her belly and spat. Her father ripped a patch of hair from his head. Six months later, two days after her seventeenth birthday, Harry Ephraim, named after a dead grandfather and dead uncle, was born.

  Velia passed Bryant Park, turned left onto Fifth Avenue, and blew a kiss to the regal lions who sat like two snobbish doormen on the steps of the 42nd Street Library. Such lions would guard the entrance to her villa in Italy, next to Greta Garbo’s.

  A large, square car stopped at the curb alongside her. Vince, the chauffeur, blocked her path.

  “Get in the car,” he commanded.

  She tried to dodge him. He grabbed her wrists.

  “I’ll scream,” she threatened.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of. My boss just wants to talk to you.”

  “Let go of me this minute!”

  “OK.”

  His grip lightened. She relaxed. Suddenly she was shoved violently and tumbled into the backseat of the car. Her head fell onto a lap. She looked up at the cripple. The car moved forward. There were black shades on the windows. Menter smirked down at her.

  “Wanna give me a blow job?”

  She sat up and moved as far from him as possible.

  “Look at me!” he commanded.

  She did not turn her head.

  She saw his palm coming. She braced, feeding rigidity into her neck, pressuring out her jawbone to create a solid wall on which he would break his fingers. She willed herself to become marble. She swallowed sticky blood. He rubbed his palm. She smiled. She had hurt.

  “Luigi told me you were a tough cunt.”

  “Luigi! What has he to do with this?”

  “Everything.”

  She sagged forward like an old woman overtaken by sleep.

  “Yeah. Luigi liked your hot Jewish pussy. But he’s had enough of it. A kike is a kike, man or woman.”

  “Why does not Luigi tell me this himself?”

  “That’s none of your fucking business. You’re talking to me now, and if you want to keep that sheeny nose of yours breathing, you’ll listen and listen good.”

  He sent a murderer, she thought. Murderers murder. No more problem for the workingman’s friend.

  “What happens now?” she asked.

  “That’s better. Luigi is a soft guy. Personally, I would have thrown you out on your fat Jew ass. But Luigi got you a job with Sam Rolfe of the Fur Union. You can start spreadin’ your legs for him.”

  Yes, like a whore, she thought, passed on.

  “And you never speak to Luigi again.”

  “That should not be too difficult.”

  “Don’t be such an uppity cunt, it ain’t healthy.”

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Coney. Cab service. I think you should suck Vince’s uncircumcised prick for a tip.”

  “I must get back to work.”

  “No, cunt. You never go back. All your shit will be sent to Rolfe’s office.”

  They stopped in front of her house. The chauffeur opened the door. He unzipped his fly. She ran past him, but knew she could never outdistance their laughter.

  CHAPTER

  21

  HARRY WALKED INTO THE FREAKS’ HOUSE FOR A SOCIAL VISIT. THERE would be few betting slips to collect. Saved summer wages had dwindled. Some residents temporarily had left Coney. Lohu and Mohu had joined a carnival that meandered through the South. Olga was in Leningrad with a Russian circus. She had sent Harry a picture of her feeding bears ice cream.

  Those whose appearance permitted had found normal jobs. Otto was a bouncer in a Yorkville bar owned by a cousin. Albert-Alberta, all male and very British, was an elegant host at a Child’s restaurant on Broadway. Jamie, his second mouth bandaged, washed dishes at a Queens diner.

  Jo-Jo had been employed as a shipping clerk at a Garment Center dress house. The boss called him Bow-wow. One day he brought his five-year-old grandson to see his discovery. The child laughed and petted Jo-Jo. He asked his grandfather to make Jo-Jo bark. Jo-Jo refused. The child threw a tantrum. Jo-Jo was fired.

  The story, told him by Jo-Jo, was part of a ritual that had developed over the winter months. Harry, provided with hot chocolate and cake, listened to tales resembling a musical round. The meshing lyrics told of the torment and humiliation endured at the hands of so-called normal human beings, who treated freaks as a permanent sideshow put on earth to provide endless amusement. As common property, freaks could be commanded to perform by anyone—especially drunks—for the pleasure of everyone.

  Jo-Jo told of being forced to put his palms against a bathroom wall and hump a urinal. In a bar, Blue Man’s shirt had been ripped off and the crowd, given pens and pencils by the proprietor, drew blood while covering his chest and back with dirty words. In Jersey City, Olga had been pinned into a barber’s chair and shaved while grimy fingers confirmed that she was a woman. And poor Fifi, pissed on.

  Exempted from the freaks’ condemnation and disgust, Harry felt close, familial. Harry, too, felt at odds with the world, weighted down by layers of weltschmerz and anomie pressed upon him with love by loved ones ignorant of its toxicity on the young. He had been taught a controlling world. which preached capitalistic hypocrisy as God-commanded values and punished heresy by exile, enisling as freaks all who refused to believe.

  In his house, society was the criminal. Lockerman asked: What is a greater crime—to rob a bank or to open one? John Dillinger was a victim, robbing banks before they robbed him. His betrayer, the lady in red, had been duped by the capitalists. At school the bubble gum trading card of G-man Melvin Purvis, who had tracked down and killed Dillinger, invoked hero worship among Harry’s classmates and disgust in him. And above all, Jews, history’s permanent underdog, could find friends only among the oppressed. If not for a less than total disbelief in Bama’s warning of the evil eye, he would have openly proclaimed brotherhood with the freaks.

  Fifi sat on a couch reading. Delicate pince-nez spectacles on her massive face shrank them to a child’s scaled-down replica. She laid down the open book, placed the spectacles on the spine and offered her cheeks for kisses. The soft, heavily powdered flesh smelled sweet but tasted bitter.

  The dining room table had been moved aside. Otto, wearing only shorts, was bent over a heavily weighted barbell. Trickles of sweat navigated his muscles.

  The strongman had appointed himself Harry’s mentor in matters of physical well-being, insisting on a program of weight lifting. The first lesson had been a show of Otto pressing, snatching and curling hundreds of pounds while Harry gasped in admiration. There had been no further instruction, but much talk of the upcoming wondrous transformation of Harry’s body, while Otto kneaded Harry’s nonexistent muscles like a Dust Bowl farmer sifting spent soil. Sometimes Harry’s released flesh bore bruise marks for which the strong man apologized, while stifling a grin:

  “I no know mine strength.”

  The hurt, Harry knew, was Otto’s crazy way o
f expressing friendship and a pat on the back for Harry’s tolerance to pain, a stoicism Otto revered.

  “Hello Harry,” Otto said, grabbing the barbell and thrusting it over his head, while simultaneously executing a skip that placed his left leg in front of his right before drawing them even. Harry applauded.

  “Now you try it,” Otto said, laughing and pointing to the bar that had shaken the house upon striking the floor.

  Harry grabbed an imaginary barbell and imitated Otto, tottering and groaning. Fifi laughed. Otto forced a smile.

  “I ever tell about 1936 Olympics. Hitler shake my hand.”

  Harry knew that Otto revered Hitler and Nazism, but forgave it as one of Otto’s mental tics—an opinion that passed for thinking and assured the strongman that his brain was not void. Harry was certain that Otto liked him. Even so, his expression soured at the pride in Otto’s voice.

  “Harry,” Otto said, creasing his brow, no doubt imitating a German American Bund deep thinker, “Hitler have nossing against you or you people. He want to send dem to homeland in Palestine or Africa.”

  “Otto …” Fifi began, but she might as well have tried to brake a speeding train.

  “It is healsy t’ing to send Jews from Germany. De Germans be healsier and also Jews. Both pure. Is in de Bible, God say to Noah: get two animals of same breed—same breed—to start new, pure world. We obey God, yah Harry?”

  Harry refused to meet Otto’s eyes, but nodded slightly to end the subject. Fifi’s face was impassive, but her body gave off odors. Anger made her sweat. She was furious.

  “Is not time for nap, Otto?” she snapped.

  “Yes,” Otto answered, oblivious to anyone but himself. “Harry, be sure take many naps. Is very healsy.”

  He clamped Harry’s shoulder, tilting him.

  Harry sat next to Fifi. They had not repeated sex. Tacitly, instinctively, they had agreed to lift that moment out of the normal flow of life and to forever share it in Harry’s favorite country: limbo.

  She took his hand and patted it.

  “Otto is crazy like he is strong. But I like him. How you hate ze baby for making kaka in pants?”

  Harry smiled. Because of her appearance, it had taken him some time to realize that she was very smart. She spent the winter reading, and writing notes in the margins of books, like Zadeh.

  She had given him French lessons, using texts far beyond his novice status. After being told the plots, he closed his eyes as she read to him from Nana or Madame Bovary. The soft French voice sang of the heroine doomed by a cruel world. Yet another version of the freak message.

  “’Arry, you have perhaps read this livre. It is called Of Ze Mice and Ze Men.”

  “No, Fifi.”

  “You should read. It is about ze cruel heart. Zis Americain, Steinbeck, know life like ze French peoples.”

  She handed him the book.

  “It’s a funny title,” he said, “it sounds like a fairy tale, maybe where a mouse becomes a prince.”

  She patted his head.

  “You have ze imagination. Not let anyone to take it away. No. I not understand myself. Maybe you help.”

  She opened the book and showed him the frontispiece: The best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft a-gley.

  “What mean that? Is English? Only find gang in ze dictionary. Not make sense.”

  “Maybe it’s about a gang of mice …”

  “No, ’Arry is not one mice in book.”

  “What’s it about?”

  She cocked her head and pointed to Otto’s barbell.

  “Is about man like Otto, but not like also. Otto big, strong, but inside is baby. In book is same, but big difference. In Otto is cranky baby. Strongman in book is baby full of love. World hate so much love. Make angry.”

  “Why?”

  “Because zey cannot love. Zey forget how. Because is easier to hate.”

  “I don’t hate, Fifi, but I don’t think I love.”

  Fifi’s head bolted backward as if struck.

  “Not say that, gosse. Is terrible and not truse. I see love in you. Most certain you love Mama, Papa.”

  “I know I’m supposed to love them.”

  “What you feel for zem?”

  “I’d like to make my mother happy. But I can’t. I don’t think anyone can. I don’t want her to be sad.”

  “And ze Papa?”

  “I like to be with him. I’d miss him if he went away. There is also a friend of his I’d miss and my grandmother. They would miss me too. But it’s not easy to explain. It’s like it has nothing to do with them or me. It’s like we don’t attach ourselves to things about a person, but because the person is always there. It could be anyone else.”

  Fifi lifted his chin which had dropped as he spoke. She stroked his cheek.

  “Pauvre. Is your age of all confusion. Not worry.”

  She lifted her hand. He grabbed at it and returned it to his cheek.

  “Sank you,” she said.

  The front door opened. Albert-Alberta strode snappily into the room, swinging a black walking stick whose silver handle bore a coat of arms. He swatted at Otto’s barbell.

  “I slave all day at Child’s abatoir and come home to this outrage. Where is that muscle-bound moron? And look at you two: Has the photographer left without informing you?”

  Fifi shook her head.

  “Ah, Albert-Alberta. You make happy. Is good.”

  “Yes, jolly old me. Except I was fired today. Can you imagine? One of the customers recognized the half-man et cetera and told the manager, who didn’t believe I had a twin brother-sister.”

  “Merde!”

  “No, Fifi. It shows I am a star. Recognizable. I shall demand a large raise this summer. In any case, the best laid plans of mice and men et cetera.”

  Fifi and Harry straightened and stared.

  Albert-Alberta brandished his stick.

  “Not one step closer. This opens to a sword, usually reserved for unruly Bulgarians. What’s got into you two?”

  “Albert-Alberta, what you say of mice and ze men? You know ze rest about ze gang?”

  “Blimey, I’ve stumbled into the Robert Burns society.”

  She handed him the book

  “What it mean, Gang aft a-gley?”

  “It means that the best plans made by mice and men often don’t turn out as planned. They get screwed up. It’s Scottish, as I am on my maternal side.”

  “But why ze mice and ze man?”

  “Well, old Bobby Burns didn’t mean exactly mice. It’s a contrast, you see. From the weakest to the strongest, the biggest to the smallest, the same applies: What you aim for is not necessarily what you get even if you figure it out real well. Capeesh?”

  “Ze disappointment,” Fifi said, nodding.

  “Yes, Fifi my love, but more than that. It’s that the cards are stacked against you from the start. Deal them out anytime, any way, and you’re a loser.”

  Fifi looked at Harry and shook her head.

  “Is not true. No, is not true.”

  Albert-Alberta shook his head.

  “Fifi love, you sound like Otto when he decides that night is day and would rather walk around like a blind man than admit there is no light. Look at me, you and the rest. Do we have anything to look forward to except being shat upon?”

  Fifi’s fingers curled into fists. She tapped the knuckles against her forehead. The sound was like footsteps.

  “Yes, you right, but for we freaks.” She opened her hands and let them fall onto Harry’s lap. “But not for zis petit. He will do anyzing he want. He will have much love and happy and make for ozer people happy.”

  “I hope so Fifi, but …”

  Harry had put his hands on top of Fifi’s. He intertwined their fingers and squeezed. He inhaled her odor, trying to deposit it in some part of himself where he could reproduce it at will. He wanted her never to leave him.

  CHAPTER

  22

  HARRY WATCHED BAMA STUFF INTO AN IRON
GRINDER CLEANED CARP destined to become gefilte fish. She stepped aside to allow him to tamp down the fish with a heavy wooden block, then grasp the grinder’s handle and turn it to the crunching sound of flesh and cartilage being ripped apart. Wormlike squiggles oozing through the grinder’s tiny holes, falling into a tan ceramic mixing bowl while he breathed as infrequently as possible the released fumes, were the staples of his Friday afternoons.

  Bama was uncharacteristically silent. He thought she might be ill. A few times he had caught her looking at him with sad eyes. Perhaps it was his slight resemblance to Zadeh.

  “I saw the Polar Bears running into the ocean last Sunday,” he said, trying to cheer her. “How come you weren’t there?”

  She did not answer immediately. Instead, she was opening and closing kitchen cabinets to no purpose.

  “I don’t do that anymore. Never again,” she replied.

  “Why?”

  “Never mind, Heshele.”

  She laid her palms on his cheeks. Her movement was jerky as though choreographed by an incompetent puppeteer. Her fingers mashed his nostrils, forcing him to breath through his mouth. He looked into eyes blind to external sight. He felt his breathing threatened by an unearthly force.

  “Bama!” he yelled

  “What? What? What?”

  Her eyes focused. She looked at her hands. Terror spread across her face.

  “Oy, I hurt you. I hurt my precious Heshele.”

  “No, Bama. No!”

  “Forgive me. Please forgive me. I don’t know what I do. If I do, I chop my hands off.”

  He flung his arms around her neck and drew her to him. It is, he realized, the first time I pulled her or anyone to me. They pull me. I wonder if I’m doing it right. She kissed his neck.

  “Forgive me, my precious.”

  He pushed her to arm’s length and flexing his biceps in imitation of Otto’s showmanship, said: “You didn’t hurt me. You made me strong …” He smiled. “Like a Polar Bear.”