by Steve Stern
What followed after that didn’t figure in any category of possibility I understood. Because, when the pain had dulled enough to let me draw breath again, I found that my head was cradled against Rachel’s genuflected knees. I heard sharp words exchanged between her and her date: he telling her in effect that she must choose between him and me. “What cornball script are you reading from?” she barked back at him, after which he flung a parting oath and was apparently gone.
Then, before a dozen onlookers who probably assumed I’d gotten what I deserved, she offered an apology. “I’m sorry,” she said, releasing an essence like vanilla roses. The bar had grown silent but for the jukebox playing a rock anthem by Iron Butterfly. “He’s a bit of a hothead sometimes,” she explained.
Despite my acute discomfort, I felt jealous: I wanted to be the hothead. At the same time, humiliation notwithstanding, I was enjoying the humid warmth of her thighs through the thin fabric of her dress. The blood that pulsed so percussively in my temples throbbed as well in remoter parts. I opened wide the eye that wasn’t already beginning to swell shut and asked her, God help me, if she’d ever been mounted by a troll. The cushion of her thighs was abruptly removed from under me as she got hastily to her feet, leaving my head to bounce on the sticky hardwood floor. Seeing that I was still prostrate, however, she relented, and with a charity that surpassed understanding leaned over to drag me upright and back to my feet.
With the drama ended, the bar’s clientele had retired to their tables, while Rachel and I remained facing each other awkwardly in the center of the room. When she released my sleeve, I began to teeter perhaps more than my actual dizziness warranted, so that she grabbed me again to keep me from keeling over. Then, having steadied me, she let go and wiped her palm on her dress as a prelude—no doubt—to washing her hands of me entirely. I started to teeter again. Out of the corner of my good eye I caught sight of Lamar, whose shit-eating smirk I interpreted as a kind of benediction.
“Could you maybe help me across the street?” I asked her, having as I saw it nothing to lose.
“What are you, blind?”
“I live across the street.”
“Nobody lives around here.”
I made a face to suggest that it wasn’t exactly living.
With a put-upon sigh, she fastened an arm round my shoulder and escorted me out of the bar and over the road; then having come that far, she assisted me the rest of the way up the steep flight of stairs to my apartment. My brain was pounding like a tom-tom, my ribs bruised if not broken, but the rubber legs were pure theater. At the top of the stairs I pushed open the unlocked door with a knee.
“Welcome to Xanadu,” I said contritely.
What hit you first on entering the apartment was an odor of gamy clothing so keen it stung the retina. When your eyes grew accustomed to their watering, you could make out the few items of furniture I’d salvaged from sidewalks and dustbins in the vicinity. In fact, the garbage strike had provided me with some odd late additions: a cardboard wardrobe, a slashed bucket seat. For all the radiator’s Gatling-gun clamor, the place remained chilly. There was an unshaded bulb hanging from the concave ceiling, a fleabag mattress on the floor near the windows, and the tumulus of books in the middle of the room. They looked, the books, like a pyre awaiting the burning of a heretic.
Rachel dumped me unceremoniously on the mattress. I fully expected her to disregard my unsubtle groaning and depart, but instead she began to pick her way toward the kitchen. The shush of her stockinged calves brushing against one other was the rhythmic respiration of an angel. She returned with a dirty sock full of ice cubes that might have resided in that ancient refrigerator since the Pleistocene age. She offered me the sock (whose stiffness she may have detected) like you’d dangle a dead mouse by the tail.
“Hold this over your eye.”
I sat on the mattress with my back against the windowsill, amazed at having lured a mortal woman into my digs. Affected though I was, I felt a little like her guilty captor, and as her captor it was my reluctant obligation, now that her duty was done, to let her go. Still she lingered in her tweed coat buttoned to the throat, observing the mound of books like an obstacle she had to climb over to reach the door. She nudged them with the toe of her boot as if stirring embers.
“Is it just a coincidence that so many of these authors killed themselves?” she wanted to know.
I smiled my idea of a dangerous smile. “I like your accent,” I said. “Where are you from?”
Her expression was the perfect mixture of curiosity and disdain. “Are you trying to make conversation?”
Something in her tone of voice opened a tiny porthole of lucidity in my brain, through which I spied my little life in all its squalor. Then the porthole slammed shut and I smiled again, albeit sheepishly.
“I have to go,” she announced abruptly though she continued to study the pile. Then she stooped to pick up a book, the book. “This one looks like somebody’s bound dissertation.”
“Don’t touch it!” I blurted, starting up from the mattress but constrained by my aching ribs.
She dropped it like a live coal.
“It’s a cursed book,” I alleged.
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s … I stole it from the library of a satanist.”
With absolute confidence she assured me, “No you didn’t.”
“He was rumored to perform human sacrifice,” I added. She rolled her eyes and I promptly changed the subject. “So, what do you do?”
Rachel peered at me as if trying to decide what species I belonged to, then shook her head in perplexity. “You’re some piece of work,” she concluded matter-of-factly. Then just as flatly she told me, “I grew up in Larchmont, New York. I came to Memphis on a grant from the Mid-South Folklore Center to research the roots of the Southern Jewish community. Dennis is my fiancé, sort of, and I only stayed with you because I was mad at him. So why am I still standing here in this pesh”—for she’d had some wine this evening—“pesthole?”
Ignoring her question, I submitted, “I’m a Jew,” though the fact had not occurred to me for some time.
“Oh well,” she said, her voice dripping irony, “that makes all the difference.” There was a moment when her eyes narrowed like Lauren Bacall’s, her mind gnawing a thought. Then she seemed to have reached some kind of decision, because she unbuttoned her overcoat, allowing it to drop onto the floor among the empty medicine vials. She began to walk toward me as far as the edge of the mattress upon which she knelt, raising a small cloud of dust. Unclasping a barrette, she shook out her hair so that it spilled like India ink over her forehead and shoulders. She had almost no waist at all. “So you’d like to defile me?” she teased, alluding, I guessed, to my unfortunate pickup line from the bar.
I tried to swallow but it seemed that my Adam’s apple was caught in my windpipe. Watching me, her large eyes grew even wider.
“You’re scared of girls, aren’t you!” she declared, obviously delighted. She shoved me backward onto the mattress, paying no attention to my injuries. “Ouch!” I cried as, laughing, she wrested the soggy sock from my hand and twirled it coquettishly before tossing it over a shoulder. Asterisks of light from the unshaded bulb played in her glossy hair. When she lifted the hem of her dress to straddle me, I saw how the mauve stockings stopped at the top of her tender, goosefleshed thighs. There was a rustling, a fumbling, my heart pumping warm molasses in place of blood. All of creation seemed to have gathered in my pants, which had been shoved to my ankles. Then a mournful cry escaped my lips as my excitement ranneth over.
“Oh dear,” said Rachel, and daintily patted her mouth in a yawn.
I awoke sometime in the night to the sound of the rain tattooing the filmy window. Outside there was neither joy nor peace nor help from pain, while here beneath this sagging roof I held a live woman in my arms. “I will love you till I die,” I whispered experimentally in her ear. Whether she heard me or not I can’t say, but s
he stirred and asked herself sleepily, “What am I doing here?” Then she bolted from the bed dragging the blanket along with her, which left me naked and shivering. Cursing under her breath, she stumbled about the room in the dark retrieving her stray clothing. I hugged my knees to my chest and, recalling the subject of her research project, informed her with some urgency, “This was the old Jewish ghetto.” “It’s called the Pinch,” I said, though she hadn’t asked. “This neighborhood, the Pinch.”
Hesitating, her spectral silhouette framed in the open doorway, she wondered aloud, “What’s your name?” Then on second thought: “Never mind, I don’t want to know.”
When she’d fled the apartment I got up and switched on the overhead light, its harshness turning the room aggressively real. I wrapped myself in the blanket that still carried her fragrance, sat down on the slanting floor, and opened Muni Pinsker’s book to its beginning. Then I started to read for the purpose of gathering information that might interest Rachel in case I should see her again.
2
Welcome to the Pinch
On a sweltering August afternoon in 1911, Muni Pinsker, listing from the weight of his battered grip, entered Pin’s General Merchandise on North Main Street in Memphis, Tennessee. He was bedraggled and bone weary, having journeyed to America all the way from the mica mines of Nerchinsk in eastern Siberia, where he’d been exiled. The store smelled of pickles and kerosene, its floorboards creaking as did the ceiling fans. Shelves spilled quilting and cotton petticoats; sock garters and suspenders hung like limp rainbows on wooden racks. There was a display case containing a regiment of back scratchers, cutthroat razors, and hand-carved briar pipes. Behind a counter stood a shortish man in a waistcoat and apron, with a distinctively hooked nose and coarse, sandy hair. He was closing the drawer of a gilded cash register beside which stood a jar of hard candy, when he squinted over his nickel spectacles at the wayworn newcomer. Then he peered beyond the newcomer at a gangle-shanked character in bib overalls, who had shambled into the store behind Muni. The man grinned a gap-toothed grin, his eyes dull as pearl onions, while the contents of the burlap sack that was slung over his shoulder appeared to be squirming. He shouted something in the native tongue that Muni had only begun to learn and started to empty his sack, out of which tumbled a braided black clump. The clump plopped onto the sawdusted floor, where half a dozen serpents uncoiled and began to slither in all directions like runneling oil.
“Rabbi Eliakum,” called the shopkeeper in a marvelously unexcited voice.
A stout old man with heavy-lidded, bloodhound eyes and a beard like a grizzled gray broom left off inspecting a lightweight union suit to turn around. He studied the snakes a moment as if attempting to discern a message in their undulations, some signal from the glint of their fangs. Then he pronounced in a throaty Hebrew, “Woe unto the man who meets up with a venomous lizard,” and in an earthier Yiddish, “and woe unto the venomous lizard that meets Eliakum ben Yahya.”
Whereupon the rabbi lifted his eyes toward the beaten tin ceiling and passed a palsied hand above the serpents, which abruptly ceased their slithering, becoming ramrod stiff. They were converted in fact into a clutch of perfectly serviceable walking sticks, which the shopkeeper, coming from around his counter, gathered up and dumped into an umbrella stand alongside several other mahogany canes.
The gangling man let loose a hysterical whoop and slapped his knee before exiting the store. The old rabbi, perspiring freely beneath the fur shtreimel he wore despite the August heat, patted his forehead with a folded hankie, said “Good Shabbos,” and departed as well. The shopkeeper turned back to the newcomer, who had fainted dead away.
Muni came to in a kitchen chair in the apartment over the store to which the shopkeeper and his wife had dragged him. The shopkeeper, his brow deeply furrowed, was fanning Muni’s face with a rag, as his wife came forward to offer the young man a cup of tea. Muni stared at the steaming liquid on the table and wondered: Where were you when the wind had teeth? Because that insufferably stuffy kitchen was not conducive to the partaking of hot beverages. Thanking her nonetheless, he drank and the bitterness began to revive him.
“Oy,” he sighed, “iz doos a mekhayeh.” Which, roughly translated, meant: I forgot I was alive.
That was the cue for the shopkeeper to drop into the chair beside him, falling upon Muni’s neck and jerking the young man’s tousled head to his breast. “Your uncle Pinchas welcomes you to the Pinch,” he cried. “Katie, give a keek on my dead brother’s son, Muni Pinsker, that he looks, thanks God, like his mother.”
Muni peered out from his uncle’s headlock at Pinchas’s wife, who smiled a tight-lipped smile, winked a jaunty eye, and tucked a strand of auburn hair fading to gray behind an ear. She admonished her husband to give the boy space to breathe, then spooned some mashed concoction from a pot on the coal-burning range into a bowl which she placed before the wanderer. Almost too tired to eat, Muni took (once his uncle had released him) a few gummy bites out of courtesy, while Pinchas apologized for the scene his nephew had witnessed below. “The goyim, they like to play on us tricks,” he said, though Muni was already vague regarding the reference; his head was much too full of actual memories to admit the inadmissible. “They like to see the rebbe do his kishef, his magic.”
“Magic,” repeated Muni, testing the word on his tongue as if it were also a morsel of food. He made a face as if the word were not to his taste.
Ignoring his wife’s token appeals to give the boy time to gather his wits, Pinchas peppered him with questions concerning his odyssey. But whether from aversion or fatigue, his nephew was frustratingly taciturn in his account: “I walked, I rode, I sailed, I rode, I walked,” he shrugged. “I arrived.” Though he had as yet no real sense of having reached a destination.
Then it was evening and they showed him to the closet-sized room they’d prepared for him, the first room of his own that Muni had ever known. He expressed his appreciation for everything, because he did indeed owe them everything, and collapsed onto the narrow camp bed, but he could not sleep. His heart was still keeping time to his interminable forward progress, and the suffocating heat pressed the air from his lungs with a whine like a squeezebox. Stripped to his drawers, he told himself that his sweat was the arctic rime melting from his bones, but he was ashamed to be thus saturating the clean sheets. He tried to comfort himself with the thought that at last he was beyond the long arm of the czar’s police, but unable to relax, he rose and went to the open window to try and catch a breeze.
The full orange moon above the alley illumined a girl dancing in midair. Muni, however, was not deceived; he was accustomed to hallucination, having seen many things that were not there during the long hibernal ordeal of his travels. But look again and he observed that, rather than treading air, the girl—her dusky hair done up in a loose topknot, the strong limbs visible beneath her flimsy chemise—was bobbing barefoot on a rope. It was a slender, sagging rope, perhaps a clothesline, and the girl was balanced precariously upon it, wobbling a bit under the open parasol she was holding. She was staring at him, eyes wide and mouth open in an astonishment that Muni took exception to, since he was the one that ought to be astonished. Then he remembered that he was nearly naked and dove back into the bed.
“This Pinch is a primitive place and all its citizens pig-ignorant,” Pinchas Pin informed his long-lost nephew over the kitchen table, but Muni was paying scant attention. He’d heard the appraisal often enough over the course of the past few days, and besides, he was busily involved in eating a fresh bialy from Ridblatt’s Bakery. The roll was so warm and fragrant, its texture airy as cobweb, that he might have thought it had a holy component—that is, if he’d still set any store by holiness. “There ain’t no superstition that they don’t accept it’s true,” continued his uncle, speaking mostly in Yiddish for his nephew’s sake, though the English locutions kept creeping in. “They don’t none of them share the progressive views of scholars like me and you.”
Muni
ceased chewing a moment to register the compliment with a wistful smile. There was a time when he might have been flattered to be included in Pinchas’s exclusive circle; his uncle was after all not without a degree of learning. But now this estimation only amused him. Having returned to society after so many years in perdition, Muni no longer knew what views he held. He only knew that it was a relief to stop awhile and catch his breath, even in such a malarial swamp as Memphis, America. For Muni one swamp would do as well as another, and the bite of mosquitoes was a fair enough exchange for the vicious bite of the frost in the taiga east of Irkutsk. Still, Pinchas’s running catalog of complaints was a mixed invitation.
“It ain’t bad enough you got in their sheets the yokels that are scaring the pants off the schwartzes,” he went on, his English edging out the Yiddish until Muni could scarcely comprehend, “but these Yossel-come-latelies, I’m talking now the Shpinker Hasidim, they got yet to go and monkey with the fabric of time. In most places the days of the week that they follow one after the other, but here you get sometimes a Tuesday contains also elements from Monday and Wednesday. You get the minute that stretches like taffy candy to an hour. This is not chronological; it ain’t any kind of logical.”
Muni scratched his scalp in a show of thoughtfulness and felt how his once thick pelt of hair stood up now in stiff licks and patches since his aunt Katie had trimmed it. Though she was technically his aunt, it was hard to think of the tall, comely woman (a head taller than her husband) as a relation. This was due in part to the fact that she was a gentile, in part because she still seemed so girlish despite her years. There was a mischief, if somewhat laced with melancholy, that played about her zinc-green eyes. With such reckless impetuosity had she flicked her scissors through his hair that he feared she might remove the top of his skull like an egg in a cup. Like the yarmulke he’d exchanged for the worker’s peaked cap in his student days. When he glanced in a mirror afterward—his first glimpse into a mirror in recent memory—he saw a stranger whose weather-seared features appeared as if mocked by a crown of cropped liver-brown feathers.
