Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  “We must be careful not to take advantage of Joe,” the mother said one morning. The father eyed her with pleasure. Her comments tickled him, as did her languid behavior, so different from the energy of the women who bought his tiles. She was indolent and forgetful, but she didn’t crave much; she’d been wearing that red schmatte since their honeymoon. She loved the children in an offhand way—sometimes she called the older boy by the name of the younger, sometimes the daughter by the name of her own sister. “Take advantage of Joe?” he said. “What do you mean?”

  But as usual she couldn’t or wouldn’t say what she meant, just sat smiling at him across the disarray of their dining table. So he got up, kissed her good-bye, and left the apartment. Across the hall he could hear Joe’s calm voice. What do we need with these people? he wondered in a brief spasm of irritation. Didn’t the country have enough trouble? Next time he’d take the toaster to the Bulgarian fixer. Then the mood passed, and he thought maybe Joe could use that flecked jacket he hadn’t worn for years—a bit too vivid for his own complexion; perfect for a yellow man.

  The soprano had friends and acquaintances in the Spanish-speaking community and in the musical one, and she went to a lot of recitals. However, she spent most of her time writing and revising letters to the home she’d left.

  Besides you, Cara, I miss most the peasants. Do you remember how they used to welcome me whenever I went on tour?—crowding around the train, strewing my path with flowers? I miss their flat brown eyes.

  In fact her tours had been flops. In Latin America, trains to the provinces were just strings of dusty cars. Their windows were either stuck open or stuck closed. The soprano traveled with her accompanist—a plain young woman glowering behind spectacles—and the pair were untroubled by admiration or even recognition. But the singer had imagined throngs of fans so often that the vision in her mind’s eye had the clarity of remembrance. She saw a donkey draped with garlands. Her hand was kissed by the oily mayor of a town whose cinema doubled as a concert hall. The mayor’s wife was home preparing a banquet. Many people came to the concert and still more to the banquet, and the floor of the mayor’s rickety mansion rocked with stomping and the room rocked with cheers.

  In this ambitious country there is no peasant, no one to love the earth. The collectives pay mercenaries to farm; the countryside is a fiefdom now. The giants of the desert are gone. I am quoting my neighbor across the hall, a woman of strong opinions.

  The soprano scratched her letters by hand, sitting on her balcony. She spent a week composing each one. For whose sake were those literary efforts? Tamar’s grandmother inquired. Ah, to entertain her best friend back home, the soprano said, adjusting a soft shawl. She owned its replica in several shades—the gray of dawn, the violet of dusk, the lavender of a bruise.

  Nobody cares for singing. We have become a country of string players, all Russian, all geniuses. Then there’s the fellow with a fiddle and a cup who stands outside a big department store. He makes a living, too.

  “Of course I no longer perform,” she’d told Joe.

  “Your speaking voice is music,” he’d said, or something like that.

  Joe grew up in a village by a river. The houses were on stilts. He trained as a pharmacist.

  She imagined him mixing powders crushed from roots. He told her that in some of the villages of his country the pharmacist had to behave as a doctor. “Aided by American Police Corps,” he said.

  “Peace Corps, surely.”

  On the afternoons that she dropped in at the Goldfangers’, she and Joe exchanged tales about high-minded Americans. Then, when she indicated by a tiny droop that the visit was over, he escorted her upstairs to her door.

  Come to me, Carissima. Bring your damned parrot. Come.

  THE WIDOWER OCCUPIED the whole of the top floor. He was sad but alert. Not for him to be left out when other people were getting favors.

  “There isn’t a cab driver in the whole damned city I can trust,” he confided to Joe as they climbed the stairs with the widower’s groceries. “The Arabs? Don’t make me laugh. The Russians are all crooks. That stuff ’s not too heavy for you, is it? Some muscles! Still, you could leave one bag on the landing and then go back for it. And I’ll take the cabbage.” He grabbed a pale head from the top of one bag, as well as the brochure that had constituted his mail of the day.

  The widower was currently a vegetarian. Vegetables are lighter than chickens. Joe usually carried the weekly purchases in one trip, a sack in each arm, like twins. He managed the new television, too.

  “I don’t suppose you play chess,” the widower said one day.

  “I play chess.”

  Soon they were playing two or three evenings a week. If Mrs. Goldfanger was staying home they played after Joe had put Mr. Goldfanger to bed. The widower’s apartment was a hodgepodge of office furniture and supplies for his stationery store, which was also a mess. The two men settled themselves on straight-backed chairs at one corner of a metal table stacked with cartons.

  If Mrs. Goldfanger was going to a concert or a bridge game they played at the Goldfangers’. The widower brought down his board and his chessmen and a bottle of wine and a vegetable pie. Joe provided oranges and tea. The widower set up the game on the living room coffee table. After pie and wine, the widower dragged a has-sock to the table. He spent the evening on the hassock, hunched over the set. Joe sat on the flowered couch. Mr. Goldfanger, sitting wordlessly beside Joe, often fell asleep with his head on his caretaker’s shoulder. At those times, Joe, reluctant to shift his body, asked the widower to move the chessmen for him.

  ON SATURDAY MORNINGS, while Mrs. Goldfanger was attending services and Tamar’s grandmother was reading German philosophy and the soprano was swimming in the Dead Sea with other émigrés and the widower was playing with his grandchildren at his daughter’s house and the Moroccan family, in its best clothes, had pranced off to some celebration, the youngest on Rollerblades—on Saturday mornings, Tamar knocked on Joe’s door.

  “Shall we take a walk?”

  In response Joe posed the question to Mr. Goldfanger.

  Mr. Goldfanger looked warmly at Joe.

  “Tov,” Joe said. His Hebrew was already better than Mrs. Gold-fanger’s, but he was too shy to use it with anyone in the building except the Moroccan children. He spoke English with the adults.

  Joe pushed the empty wheelchair out of the apartment and out of the building. He parked it under the eucalyptus. He locked its wheel. Then he went back inside. Then he reemerged, walking backward, his hands extended with their palms up. Little Mr. Gold-fanger tottered forward, his palms resting on Joe’s. Mr. Goldfanger’s gaze at first did not stray from his own sneakers, but he gradually lifted his eyes until they met Joe’s. The two proceeded to the waiting chair. They executed a quarter turn, and Joe nodded and Mr. Gold-fanger sat down and Joe settled him and then resettled him and took his own position behind the chair and unlocked the wheel.

  “Here I come,” Tamar called from her balcony. She had run upstairs to get a sweater, she said; to grab a book, she said; really to watch the pas de deux from above, like a princess in her box.

  Sometimes they walked to the botanical gardens, sometimes to Liberty Bell Park, and most often to the Goldman Promenade, where they gazed across the forested valley at the walls of the Old City.

  In English laced with Hebrew they talked about Tamar’s future in television newscasting or video production.

  “Of course I will live in Tel Aviv.”

  “I have heard of Tel Aviv. The action is there.”

  They talked about Joe’s past—his island country.

  “Little bits of islands, really. In the shape of the new moon.”

  “Connected?” she wondered.

  “There are bridges. Sometimes you need a boat.”

  “So much water. You must find us dry.”

  “Well… I have heard of the Galilee,” he said, respectfully.

  “Do you have reptiles?”

&
nbsp; “Oh, many lizards.”

  “And jungles?”

  “And jungles.”

  “I’ve never seen a jungle.”

  “Before coming here I’d never seen a desert.”

  If Mr. Goldfanger were asleep in his chair, they might talk about him. In Joe’s opinion, Mr. Goldfanger, despite or because of his in-articulateness, knew more than most people. “The secrets of plants. The location of water underground.”

  “Some ministry would pay for that information.”

  “He is like one of our allogs, grown too old for council duty, but still to be revered.”

  “Allog?”

  Joe thought for a while. “It means a kind of chieftain.”

  “Allog, all’gim,” Tamar said, Hebraizing it. Then she turned it into verbs, passive and active and reflexive. Joe listened patiently.

  “The elderly allog, the wise one,” he said, “is consulted on great questions.”

  “Allog emeritus,” Tamar said.

  Joe was silent again. Then: “I think perhaps you are very clever.” Tamar gave an ashamed whinny. “And the young allog—the one who is still in charge?”

  “He makes decisions for the group. Also he acts as troubleshooter. And a sort of confessor, since the churches are not very helpful anymore.”

  “Is it true that you examine entrails?” she asked quickly.

  “That practice died out when the missionaries came.”

  “When was that?”

  “In the sixteenth century.”

  “JOE WAS EDUCATED BY THE JESUITS,” the soprano said to Tamar’s grandmother. “Another glass of wine?”

  Tamar’s grandmother nodded. “Then he was trained as a paramedic,” she said.

  “Pharmacist,” the soprano corrected.

  A barbed silence followed, gradually softening into a companionable one. There were few jobs for either paramedics or pharmacists on Joe’s little island, the two women agreed when dialogue resumed. Joe’s wife, a teacher, also could not find employment at home. She worked as a housekeeper in Toronto. Each hoped to be able to send for the other, and for the eight-year-old daughter who had been left in the care of her grandparents and was so unhappy with the arrangement that she refused to go to school. “She is on strike,” Joe had said.

  “The classroom,” Tamar’s grandmother observed, “is the crucible of reactionaries.”

  If Tamar ever went on strike her grandmother would enthusiastically undertake to educate her at home, emphasizing eighteenth-century German philosophy. This prospect kept Tamar in school, most of the time.

  BUT SOME OF THE TIME she was repelled by even the thought of her classmates, greedy and self-absorbed … One such day she knocked at the Goldfangers’ door.

  “Surprise!”

  “No school today?” Joe said calmly.

  “No school,” she lied. “Shall we take a walk?”

  Mr. Goldfanger was agreeable. They set out. Tamar suggested that, since it was a weekday and everything was open, they visit one of the downtown cafés where you could browse the Net. Joe said that Mr. Goldfanger would not enjoy that activity. Tamar wondered if he had ever been exposed to it. They were walking while they argued. In the end they just pushed the chair along the busy streets.

  They stopped in a dry courtyard to eat the lunch Joe had prepared. A fix-it shop and a dusty grocery opened onto the yard, and a place that sold ironware.

  “Delicious orange,” Tamar said. “When they did practice hepatoscopy, what did they discover about the future?”

  Joe unwrapped a sandwich and handed her half of it. “The discoveries were about the past—about transformations that had occurred. Just one bite, dear man.”

  “Transformations? What kind?”

  “People into fish. Trees into warriors.”

  Men into nursemaids? She waited, but he didn’t say that. Caretakers into guardians, then.

  “Girls into scholars,” Joe said with a smile. “What a fat book.”

  The fat book was The Ambassadors. She was trying to improve her English reading skills. The first paragraph was as long as the entire Tanach.

  Mr. Goldfanger was beginning to smell. Tamar picked up the debris from lunch and walked with it to a Dumpster in one corner of the courtyard. Her approach flushed a few scrawny cats.

  She turned from the Dumpster and saw, across the yard, that the two men had been joined by a third. The third was a beggar, the kind with a story. She didn’t need to be within range to hear the familiar patter. Wife recently dead. Children motherless and shoeless and without textbooks; was the foreign gentleman aware that children who couldn’t afford textbooks had been known to commit suicide? She drew nearer until she could hear the spiel directly. How impossible it is to find work in this country which gives all its resources to Ethiopians who are no more Jews than you are, sir. Sir!

  Joe was standing now, one hand resting on Mr. Goldfanger’s head. With his own head slightly inclined he listened to the beggar. The fellow wore a junk-pile fedora over his skullcap. He held out his hand in the classic gesture.

  Joe dug into his own pocket for shekels. The beggar put them deep into his long coat. Then he extended his palm toward Mr. Goldfanger. Mr. Goldfanger laid his fingers trustingly on the hand of his new partner.

  “That will be that,” Joe said to the beggar, his Hebrew not at all shy.

  “Sir,” the beggar said, bowing and stepping lightly away.

  They walked home in sweet silence. On the corner of Deronda Street they ran into the Moroccan woman, and a few buildings later the widower caught up with them. In the vestibule they collected the mail. Joe got a letter from his daughter.

  WINTER CAME, and with it the rains. Joe fitted an umbrella to Mr. Goldfanger’s wheelchair. That served for misty or even drizzly days, but when it poured they had to stay inside. They listened to music while Joe cleaned and darned. The soprano loaned them her own two recordings of arias—LPs, not remastered.

  Joe patched a leak for the widower. He fixed a newel. He accepted a spare key to the apartment across the hall and put it into his sewing box. One or another Moroccan child, forgetting his own key, knocked on the door at least once a week. Joe baked cookies while Mr. Goldfanger napped. The kids forgot their keys more often.

  ONE AFTERNOON the soprano stopped in at the Goldfangers’ after attending a string-trio recital. Mrs. Goldfanger was playing solitaire and Mr. Goldfanger was watching her. The soprano sipped a brandy and talked for a while with Mrs. Goldfanger, their voices tinkling like glass droplets. Joe, coming in with a plate of cookies, remarked that the visitor looked pale. The summer will correct that, she told him. She refused his customary offer to escort her upstairs.

  At her own door, about to insert the key, the soprano was seized. She slumped forward; then, with an effortful spasm, she pushed her hands against the door so that she fell sideways and lay aslant, her bent knees touching each other. Her upper body rested on the stairs leading to the top floor. Her head was in majestic profile.

  Tamar saw the legs when she herself drifted upward on her way home from play rehearsal. She didn’t scream. She turned and ran down to Joe’s and beat on the door. Joe opened it. After a glance at her open mouth and pointing finger, he bounded up the stairs, removing his jacket as he ran. Mrs. Goldfanger, needlessly telling Mr. Goldfanger not to move, followed Joe. Tamar followed Mrs. Goldfanger. The Moroccan woman heard the footfalls of this small army and opened her door and started up the stairs, her children surrounding her. Tamar’s grandmother, whose head cold had kept her in bed all day, opened her door. She was wearing an ancient bathrobe with a belt. The widower descended from his flat.

  The Moroccan husband, coming home from work, pushed through the vestibule. He saw at first two open apartment doors, his own and the Goldfangers’. Mr. Goldfanger sat on the flowered couch, finishing off a snifter of brandy, though spilling most of it. The Moroccan husband saw his wife, halfway up the stairs, rising from a nest of their children. He then saw Tamar with her arm aroun
d Mrs. Goldfanger. He brushed past them all. Tamar’s grandmother stood in her doorway, costumed as a Chasid. Now he saw his old flecked jacket in a heap on the floor; now he saw the soprano, flat on the landing where Joe had hauled her. The soprano’s skirt was hiked up and one shoe had come off. A siren wailed.

  They were none of them unused to death. The children had lost a beloved older cousin in a recent skirmish. Television kept them familiar with highway carnage. The Moroccan father had fought in one war, and the widower in several, and Tamar’s parents had also served. During her stint in the army the Moroccan mother had been elevated to assistant intelligence officer, a job she executed skillfully while seeming to laze about. Tamar would be inducted after high school, unless she joined her parents in the States as they urged her to do. Three years earlier her most envied friend had been blown up in a coffee shop. The two old ladies had sat at many deathbeds.

  Joe kneeled over the corpse, attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Then he said she was gone, and cried.

  JOE AND HIS FAMILY changed nothing in the soprano’s apartment. They even kept the shawls. The little girl used them to cover her dolls. She went to the local school. She looked like a daughter of privilege in the plaid skirts of the nuns’ academy she had refused to attend. She played with the Moroccan daughter. She was picking up Hebrew quickly.

  The widower continued his chess matches with Joe. When Joe was working—he continued his attentive care of Mr. Goldfanger—they played as before in the Goldfangers’ apartment. When Joe was at home they played there. Mrs. Joe cooked a spicy stew. After a while the widower inquired as to the ingredients—meat, it turned out, and sweet potatoes, and nuts. After a further while the widower asked for the recipes. His own cuisine took a promising turn.