The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  At that the apparently moribund peddler reared up one more time. “Give to me for a blessing Katie’s hand,” Pinchas rasped, “and it wouldn’t leave from this life in despair mayn neshomah, my soul.” Then seemingly spent from the effort the words had cost him, he fell back again onto the soggy quilt, his eyes rolling into his head. He flopped a moment, twitched, then lay still.

  Katie spoke for the priest’s ear only, “If it’s a crime to wed us, sure it’s the greater not to honor his dying wish.”

  With his face still screwed up in thought, Father Farquhar could be heard quoting various opposing church canons to himself. At length he confessed, “Thishishmost irreggaler,” as Katie advised him to take another sup off the sponge. He did so and shuddered like a palsy, after which the scales seemed to have fallen from his glassy eyes. “Leave ush make haste then,” he announced, “for the lad’s essence is already in his teeth.”

  “Bollocks!” sputtered Cashel, dropping his bulk into a chair beside the deal table. “You’ll put the heart crossways in me.” Behind him Phelim Mulrooney, muttering “Feck the lot of yer,” took the occasion to slip out the door. But Father Farquhar, having turned toward the patriarch, was now become the voice of reason: “It’s the one vow they’ll be making this evening,” he stated, his speech surprisingly lucid, “for the nuptial bed of this marriage will be the grave.” A momentary grin rent his wadded face. “Then the relict may go to her second husband as pure as from her father’s side.”

  Cashel threw up his hands in a gesture of defeat. “Marry him, then bury him,” he grumbled. “Then somebody make me my supper.”

  The priest rubbed his palms together. He was evidently energized by the prospect of presiding over a wedding rather than administering the viaticum once again, though the distinction here was admittedly a fine one. Swiftly he dispensed with the baptism, splashing the peddler’s face with brackish water from the chipped basin the girl had provided. “I baptize you in the name of the Father …,” et cetera. Katie had hauled Pinchas to a sitting position, his back against the splintered boards, but before she’d finished patting dry his snuffling features with her apron, the curate had moved on to the nuptials. He was asking the bride and groom if they had come of their own free will to give themselves to each other in marriage. Would they raise their children according to the law of Christ and his church? Here Pinchas was aware of having entered a degree of apostasy beyond anything he’d known to date. All religions were opiates of course, but some residual sense of the magnitude of this particular trespass seemed to rankle in his vitals; it might take one of Katie’s sodium clysters to purge it. But what was he thinking? Love was the physic that dispelled every ill sensation the body was prey to.

  Father Farquhar was saying, “Do you, Kathleen”—he looked to her sire, who grudgingly supplied “Fiona Aoife”—“Kathleen Fiona Aoife Keough, take as your lawful husband”—the bride provided the peddler’s name—“to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in s-sickness”—his tongue tripped over the word—“or in health, to love and to cherish till death do you part?”

  She did, and Pinchas’s heart became a living flame. When the priest repeated the formula for the lovelorn peddler, he replied with a resounding “I do!” Much too resounding in fact, because his sudden robustness awakened a shuffling skepticism among the witnesses.

  Next came the exchanging of the rings, and Cashel objected to Katie’s transferring the ring that once belonged to her mother from her own finger to the sheeny’s extended digit. She ignored her father even as she pressed upon the peddler a curtain loop brought by her hapless ma from Ireland in anticipation of curtains that never materialized. Pinchas encircled her finger with it like a quoit. Then Father Farquhar proclaimed, “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder,” and the pale groom, lifting his bride along with him, rose up from the bedding with a self-congratulatory “Mazel tov!” He pulled her to him and kissed her full on the lips, the contact banishing—just as he’d expected—all fear.

  It was a banishment on the heels of which the newlyweds themselves were soon to follow. For Cashel was also standing and, even as the gawking Tighe exclaimed “A bleedin’ miracle,” shouted, “We’re played for patsies, lads!” Thus rallied, they would have set upon the peddler in a body had not his defiant bride stood between the groom and his assailants.

  “It’s too late, Da,” said Katie, radiant in the assurance of her new estate. “Deny him and it’s myself you’re denying as well.”

  “So be it!” her father roared.

  It would not do in any event to murder the Jew in front of a holy man, however dissolute he might be. That could wait. And if in the meantime the Keoughs lost their appetite for homicide—since their father’s death soon after from fever or drink would dampen the brothers’ bloodlust—they might satisfy themselves with malicious pranks; though the pranks themselves would diminish in cruelty and decline into habit with the years, when it became clear that nothing was going to drive the peddler from the neighborhood.

  Not that Pinchas hadn’t wanted to take his bride far away from that festering slough. During the time he’d spent as the guest of her family, the Pinch had become nearly deserted: a handful of hollow-eyed survivors still reeled and debauched in the streets, though in their halting danse macabre they were already three-quarters ghosts. Some slept, for convenience sake, in coffins rather than beds. But the peddler had no money for travel, and the roads around Memphis were anyway barricaded, the bridges burned; refugees from the city had been shot on sight. Thrust into the night with no more than the clothes on their back—and Pinchas’s borrowed at that—the newlyweds clung to each other, their eyes smarting from the carbolic acid dumped into the seething Bayou, its surface mantled in dead fish. Of course there were other parts of the city where the houses were built of stone, where crape myrtles bloomed and people died in their beds, but there was no place among those for a pauper and his disinherited bride. And in any case, Katie surprised her new husband with her stubborn refusal to stray from what she called home.

  “But Katie, ziskeit,” Pinchas had demurred, as admiring of her iron will as he was daunted by it, “the Pinch is geshtank, a shitcan.”

  “Then we’ll fill it up with Easter lilies,” she assured him.

  They found shelter on their wedding night in the Court Street Infirmary, where the mortally ill squirmed under mosquito netting like weevils trapped in spiderwebs. Their bridal banquet was brined cabbage ladled from a tin dinner pail by a nun. In the morning, turned out on account of their good health, they took up what they assumed would be temporary quarters in an abandoned tenement above a boarded-up saddlery on Smoky Row. (They would remain there, but for a brief excursion into the Underworld, for the remainder of their days.) It was in that apartment, in an iron bed vacant of corpses, with the tar barrels still smoldering beneath their window, that they finally consummated their marriage. That’s when Pinchas discovered, to the delight of his ardent bride, that he was the victim of a persistent satyriasis. It was a condition that left the couple unable thereafter to rid themselves of a bashful self-consciousness in each other’s company. (At least until, after the decades of their failure to conceive, Pinchas began to lose courage and heart.) Their heady pleasure in one another, plus whatever they managed to scrounge in their forsaken district, was nourishment enough during the period of their honeymoon.

  Nor had Pinchas used up his fund of ingenuity in winning Katie, but was inspired to a further audacity in his desire to provide for her. When the first frost signaled the beginning of the end of the epidemic, he prevailed upon the Lowenstein brothers, whose wholesale dry goods business occupied an entire city block, to extend him a line of credit. Despite their distaste for the unwashed Ostjuden in general, the staid merchants were impressed by this one’s initiative and drive; and the immigrant came away with an inventory of railroad boots and brass-studded denim pants, silk ribbons, thimbles, combs, and almanacs.
Equipped with two sixty-pound packs, strapped fore and aft to steady his balance, Pinchas staggered out to travel the Delta roads; though not before his wife, easily her husband’s equal in resourcefulness, had culled from his stock a selection of mourning goods: black-trimmed calling cards, black crepe. She placed these items in the unboarded window of their squatted building at prices low enough to lure a few hearty souls into the ravaged neighborhood. By progressively lightening her husband’s load before each of his forays, Katie built up the business over time to the point where it was no longer necessary for the toilworn Pinchas to go peddling anymore.

  By then the city had once again begun to show vital signs. The din of steam compressors, train whistles, and trolley bells could be heard even from the blighted North Main Street. Cotton bales replaced the caskets stacked along the carious wooden sidewalks, which were themselves replaced with stone, and the stagnant channels of Catfish Bayou were transformed into covered culverts. The Negroes, who had been the city’s unsung guardians during the fever, were sent back to their prior squalor, and while people of quality never really returned to Memphis, the streets were made safe enough for decent folk to promenade. Meanwhile Katie’s clever husband had gotten wind of a legal provision called adverse possession: it seemed that, by paying taxes on a property whose owner had vanished, the squatter might assume the right to ownership himself. Moreover, the bankrupt city was happy to encourage the resettlement of an area it had essentially written off, just as the state had written off the city by repealing its municipal charter. Weaned from his dependence on the Lowensteins, Pinchas now purchased discounted goods straight from the factory warehouses. As proprietor of Pin’s General Merchandise—he’d dropped a syllable from his name to give it an American zing—the former peddler set about making improvements, knocking down clapboard walls to resurrect them in mortar and brick.

  He was not alone in his effort to revive the neighborhood; others also arrived to take advantage of the rock-bottom real estate deals. One of the first was another itinerant peddler, who upon encountering Pinchas declared in Yiddish, “Tie me by all four limbs but put me among my own!” Sighing over the quaintness of these wandering Jews, Pinchas felt obliged to inform him that he himself was meshumed, an apostate, living in an unholy union with a gentile woman.

  “So long as you got your health,” replied the peddler, Mose Dlugach by name, hardy and quite well fed for a traveling man. A little wary of welcoming competition, Pinchas warned him that the town was prone to frequent bouts of pestilence. Doffing his homburg to scratch his pate, the peddler had offered a humble solution: “If I will sell shrouds, then no one will die.”

  He opened a secondhand shop at the corner of Winchester and North Main and sent for his family in Szeged as soon as he was able. More followed, dispersed after widespread pogroms in the wake of the czar’s assassination: a wife joined her husband, a brother his sister and brother-in-law, and so on, until the Pinch was reconstituted as an East European ghetto–style enclave in the heart of the South. Ultimately the neighborhood earned the seal of approval from the city fathers, who viewed their Hebrews as a solid mercantile class. This attitude endured despite the street’s eventual invasion by a gang of fanatical Hasids, whose riotous spiritual exercises resulted in a rending of the fabric of time.

  ca. 1880–1911

  Not long after North Main Street was paved and the bridge over the river completed, after an Otis hydraulic lift was installed in the Cotton Exchange and a Negro shot for accepting a job as a postal clerk, the merchant Pinchas Pin received a letter from a niece in the Old Country. It seemed that, during a peasant rampage in the village of Blod, his brother had been murdered, his body left to marinate in a barrel of kvass. His sister-in-law, having witnessed the atrocity, lost her wits and had since been confined to an asylum in Dubrovna, where she died soon after of disregard. What’s more, in an unrelated incident his brother’s son Muni, arrested for Bundist activities, had been deported after a yearlong imprisonment to a labor camp in the Siberian wastes. Pinchas didn’t know whether it was the news itself or the way the news underscored his utter estrangement from his family that disturbed him the most. In his agitation he was especially moved to learn that his nephew, whom he’d understood to be a pious yeshiva boy, had become a militant revolutionary. The nephew’s fate piqued his uncle’s conscience, aggravated as it already was by the compromise of his youthful ideals for the sake of a livelihood. While no special request was included in the communication—it simply stated that, as a surviving relation, he ought to be informed—still Pinchas believed he might be in a position to help the lad. He appealed to the North Main Street Improvement Committee, which in turn made the case to the congregation of the Market Square Synagogue, a place Pinchas seldom set foot in. Nevertheless, prayers were said and a collection taken up (if a bit sanctimoniously), and the funds, converted to rubles, were stitched by the tailor Bluestein into the lining of a cheviot topcoat.

  In a cold katorga compound, below the entrance to a mica mine somewhere east of the town of Nerchinsk, Prisoner 71640 (conspiracy, fifteen years) received a parcel in the mail. This was unprecedented. A trustee had dropped the parcel in his lap in the mess hall, its postmark indecipherable, its contents fairly spilling out of the tattered brown paper. It contained some tins of currant jam, sliced pineapple, and sardines, all of which were promptly snatched up by covetous convicts. Under the cans, however, was a folded topcoat of some lightweight gunmetal material wholly unsuited to the glacial climate. Nevertheless, as no one bothered to confiscate it, and as it signified his persistence in the thoughts of someone beyond the Siberian immensity, the prisoner pulled it on over his worn quilted jacket. Another layer of insulation wouldn’t hurt. But in a week the coat had become a haven for lice; a sleeve, caught in the gears of the ore separator, was ripped to shreds and the tails burnt when he backed against a cast-iron stove. It made him look like a clown, the coat, though clownish was a countenance the prisoner found it convenient to exploit once the lining fell out.

  In order to take a dump in the sulfurous latrine, you had first to tamp down the shit that protruded from the holes in the planks laid over an otherwise open trench. The shit was packed so hard and tight beneath you that it tickled your ass as you sat, and there was seldom any available wastepaper to wipe with. Still, such moments were among the few that afforded the convict any respite from the harsh routine. This was the prisoner’s situation as he sat with his pants around his patchy boots, idly meditating upon a loose thread at the hem of his topcoat. Intending to snap it off, he wound it around a finger and gave a tug; then the stuttering thread opened a seam from which fell, along with some cotton batting, a number of thin glassine envelopes. The envelopes, when he leaned over to inspect them, seemed to contain Russian currency in various denominations. The prisoner finished his business with an efficient grunt; then swiftly, before anyone else entered the jakes, he stooped to gather up the packets, stuffing them into his pockets along with a letter that was similarly wrapped.

  It took his being sentenced to isolation for some trivial infraction of the rules before he found the privacy to read the letter and take stock of his fortune. The isolation cell was a miniature stone dungeon in which one could neither fully stand nor lie down, but its narrow grille admitted the light of a summer during which the night seemed never to fall. The sunlight illuminated a wall emblazoned with religious graffiti painted by inmates with powdered feldspar and beryl from the mine, so that the cell, despite its constriction, had the air of a shrine. By this brightness the prisoner was able to read the letter’s greeting, in its homey Yiddish script, from one Pinchas Pin of North Main Street, America: “Honored Nephew, please find enclosed the means by you I’m sending to come …” But the body of the letter made no more sense to him than did its opening salutation. He read it again, until the language began to stir in his entrails the beginnings of what felt like a symphonic episode. The jarring music, however, communicated not one jot of meaning to his slugg
ish brain. Moreover, he ached in every joint and fiber from hunkering in such cramped quarters, and his fingers, stiff as claws from the years of wielding the shovel and pick, could barely count the rubles in their envelopes. Once more he read the letter: “… the means by you I’m sending …,” until it struck him that “you” was he, Prisoner 71640, né Muni Pinsker. Then the music, converted at length into words, woke up his fears from what he’d hoped was their perpetual slumber.

  Escape? Who escaped? There was Shishkov the sharper, found frozen in a fetal attitude not half a kilometer from the camp; and the patricide Alyosha, who was torn apart by sled dogs in sight of the watchtower, his agony backlit by the setting sun. There was Osip Katzenelenbogen, a political, who made it as far as the bank of the swollen Lena, where he was caught and returned to the camp to run a gauntlet of his fellow convicts. Their anger was stoked by the starvation rations they’d received as a collective punishment during the time following the zhid’s attempted flight. In the end his already decalcified bones were shattered and Osip was left to drag his broken body between the barracks and the mineral sluice for the brief balance of his days. But the fact remained that Pinchas Pin of North Main Street, America, had sent a parcel to his nephew Muni, a human being. Tahkeh, how could you tell?—when he was harnessed by day to a horse collar that rubbed blood blisters on his scrawny chest as he hauled a cartload of ore up a slanted shaft. He breathed air that was either so cold that it crackled like paper or scorched your sinuses with its reek of excrement and carbonic acid. He never cared whether he was eating bugs or pearl barley in the soup they called “shrapnel,” and his teeth were as loose in his gums as headstones in mud. His body was so inured to filth that scrubbing himself in the bathhouse drew blood. Once he’d helped a fellow hide a convict who’d dropped dead of heart failure, so they could share in the extra rations for the three days it took the putrefying corpse to betray them. But on the other hand, he was light-headedly surprised, this Muni Pinsker, to find himself still alive in another summer, when the snow had retreated far enough to reveal the arsenic green moss underneath.