by Steve Stern
I was released from the hospital a couple of days after the slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King, feeling as fragile as Humpty Dumpty. Hobbling on crutches into the April morning, I was assailed by bright sunshine like a hail of thumbtacks, my eyes acutely sensitive since the blow to my head. Pink azaleas and yellow buttercups trumpeted their shrill colors from a nearby park, and I winced from the mordant scent of lilacs. The natural world, it seemed, was in the process of reclaiming the man-made, which looked to me to be in retreat, the city strangely quiet, the traffic sparse to nonexistent; and I, with my pallor and plaster cast, stitches like railroad crossties over the shaved patch on my skull, was a suitably walking wounded survivor of the uninhabited landscape.
My armpits and ribs ached from the pressure of the aluminum crutches as I made my way to the nearest bus stop. I engineered the precarious business of boarding the bus and rode downtown, where I dismounted on Main Street with equivalent difficulty. Negotiating the last few meters from the corner to the Book Asylum, I unlocked the door and swung across the threshold into the semidark. I inhaled the shop’s attar of arcane philosophies, forgotten histories, and baroque tales, and was at once relieved. The tall shelves were ramparts from behind which I could look out onto the armed camp of downtown Memphis, where fatigue-clad Guardsmen with fixed bayonets patrolled the street on foot and in jeeps. I was under siege, which suited my mood, holed up as I was in Avrom’s sanctum while the nation burned. Leaning the crutches against the wall, I lowered myself into my former boss’s chair, then lifted the dead weight of my rigid leg until it rested on top of the desk. Also atop the desk, where I’d left it, was Muni Pinsker’s “history” of the Pinch.
I hadn’t the least temptation to pick it up, or so I told myself, though I poked it like the curious artifact it was. I blew the dust from its cover, then I picked it up, opened it, and pitched headlong into its splashy contents. It was evening in the book, an evening partaking of the properties of dawn, and a wedding was in progress on a flatboat anchored to no particular season in the North Main Street canal. The vessel was “floodlit” by the moon’s reflection on a scattering of seraphic fingernail parings floating on the surface of the water. The canopy, sagging like a pelican’s pouch from the load of children peeking out of its sling, was held aloft by a flock of hoopoes with the heads of sages. Gottlob the jeweler, late as usual, was paddling furiously out to the boat in his leaky tub to deliver the ring. Its stone was cut from a sacred jacinth by means of the Shamir, the worm that had hewn the blocks for the Temple in keeping with the commandment that no iron be used in constructing the altar of God. On board the boat the staid Rabbi Lapidus, a rooster tucked under his arm as a sign of fertility, charged the lovelorn to “be always heartbroken, mein kinder, for only then can you keep evil away.”
A balmy, schnecken-scented breeze emanated from the oven of Ridblatt’s Bakery, under whose awning shuffled a Hasid with his nose in a volume of Talmud. He stepped off the curb and ambled several strides over the water before he realized where he was and promptly sank. A few doors down, Pin’s General Merchandise was dark, a sign on the door announcing CLOSED FOR FENCY YENTZING. Upstairs Pinchas and Katie Pin were in flagrante, while down the hall their nephew, Muni, gleeful in his unwashed underwear, was busy scribbling on the pages in his lap. Behind him stood a silent, ginger-haired child peering over his shoulder in an effort to see what he was writing, and beside the child hovered a scruffy old party in red suspenders, also rubbernecking. To the knobby blades of the old guy’s wilted shoulders were appended a paltry pair of wings, no bigger than a chicken’s, their pinfeathers as spotty as the fuzz on his ill-shaped head. I too was seized by a desire to kibitz and tried to sidle between the little boy and Avrom Slutsky, for the transfigured old gaffer was none other than he. But while the kid stepped aside the old man gave me a sharp elbow to the kidneys, turning to shout, “Gay avek! Get outta here!” The shout, which was familiar as his standard glottal screech, had at the same time the sonorous authority of a bat kol, a voice from on high.
“Awright,” I sulked, “I can take a hint,” and slammed shut the book.
Then I wondered: What just happened? Still reeling from my swift eviction from Muni’s creation, I was neither here nor there; I came back only by gradual degrees to an awareness of 1968, to which I was banished. The shop now appeared to me less like a grotto than a moldy funk hole. If only, I found myself wishing, someone had come along to close the book’s cover while I was reading. Then, while my body remained sitting at Avrom’s desk, a hollow effigy no more substantial than a meringue, my spirit would have been happily trapped in Muni’s pages—where, incidentally, the draft board would never find me …
Such was my reasoning as I turned to withdraw the envelope from the pocket of my leather jacket draped over the chair behind me. I removed the letter, unfolding it with curious anticipation like a map that might give me back my bearings, then entertained a maverick notion: What if I went to war? It was after all a young man’s rite of passage since the dawn of history, to embark on the great adventure and return (if he returned) marked by an awful wisdom and a cauterized soul … And again I thought I heard the strident voice—a tinnitus no doubt prompted by my head injury—crying, “A nekhtiker tog! Are you nuts?”
I took a breath and carefully lifted my hampered leg from the desktop, planted it on the floor, and opened the drawer. A sepulchral odor rose from its interior. I rooted among the clutter of unpaid bills, the yellow fabric Magen David, a worn scrapbook full of buff-brown circus clippings, until I found a box of wooden matches. Striking one, I set fire to the letter.
I watched it burn until the flames threatened to scorch my fingers, then let it drift out of my hand. A flaking black carbon zephyr on orange wings, it lit on the desk atop Muni’s weathered volume, which ignited. A frayed corner of the book cover had absorbed the flame like a wick, and the book was instantly engulfed. I was fascinated to see how it seemed to welcome the combustion. I might have smothered the little blaze with a sleeve, snuffed it out like a candle; it was nothing but a lambent flickering. But instead I watched, interested, as the flames sprawled across the cloth cover, hardly believing the book could be so rapidly consumed. Then the small conflagration spread to some stray volumes on the desk, which proved equally flammable, their sparks rising like blown spores dispersed to the nearby shelves, where a wall of books seemed to have been awaiting its own incineration. In a few seconds the shelves had burst into trellises of efflorescent flame.
I remained transfixed by the sight until the door flew open and a cadre of National Guardsmen charged in, presumably alerted by smoke issuing from the shop. Callow weekend warriors not much older than me, they stormed the premises as if they meant to battle the fire with their rifles; they held kerchiefs over their faces and began to rush here and there at cross-purposes, calling for buckets of water. Close to choking myself, I was nevertheless ignored in the mayhem, still lacking the will to lift myself from the chair. Then one of the tall shelves toppled over, crashing to the floor in a spray of glittering sparks, out of which stepped, God help us, my beatified boss, having apparently followed me from the pages of Muni’s book. His pinions appeared to have grown considerably; covered now in an eider of frothy feathers, they even flapped a bit, fanning the flames. His countenance was more terrible than any of the crabby aspects he’d assumed in life: eyes flashing, hair floating (at least the few strands that were left to him), his scraggly beard curved like a cutlass at its tip. This was not a guardian but an avenging host, who loomed above me in utter indifference to the fact that I refused, despite my dread, to believe in him.
But there was nothing spectral about the talon-like hand he thrust into the desk drawer in front of me, extracting a pair of rusty scissors. He raised them above his head where they hung poised to settle scores with the young shmuck who’d torched his store and betrayed his legacy. I deserve this, I thought, and closed my eyes, still half-expecting I might wake up in my hospital bed. Peeking through my finger
s, I watched in awe as the celestial geezer plunged the scissors not into my heart but my thigh, stabbing through the baggy pantsleg and cutting a seam in the plaster cast. Then clenching the instrument pirate-style in his gums, he ripped the layered plaster, which came apart like an opened cocoon, and liberated my leg. He raised me up by the sore armpits and shoved me toward the door, expediting my forward motion with a well-placed kick.
I stumbled coughing and half-blinded out onto the pavement, where I was greeted again by the unpeopled morning. Behind me the fire roiled, the shop’s dusty front window splintering from the inferno inside as the soldiers beat their retreat out the door. There were sirens in the near distance, men and trucks only minutes away, though I knew they would arrive too late. I wiped my watering eyes with my sleeve and suffered shooting pains throughout my body, an infestation of pins and needles in my game leg, all of which served only to animate me the more. I proceeded in a southerly direction along Main Street, its stores closed and boarded up against looters, the thoroughfare barren but for the odd sentry or armored tank. A phrase came into my head: “The royal road to romance,” which struck me as so comical that I tried a few warmed-over others. “He lit out for the territory with only the clothes on his back.” A breeze fluttered my torn pantsleg in unison with a banner hanging over the street announcing the commencement of this spring’s Cotton Carnival; a flyer taped to a lamppost advertising the Elder Lincoln Memorial Concert at the Overton Park Shell also waved. We flapped—the banner, the flyer, the flitting pigeons, and myself—like flags at a regatta, which somehow increased the hilarity of my circumstance. I had to stop and surrender to a fit of laughter, a whooping fulmination that escaped my seared lungs with a sound like a raucous sneeze.
“Gezuntheit!” came the sublime squawk from behind me. I might have glanced back over my shoulder at its source but instead stayed true to the words I’d spied Muni Pinsker scribbling on the page in his suffocating little room.
“Limping forward again,” he had written, “Lenny never turned around to give a look on the angel with the scissors and the flames. He figured was nothing already but rubble and ashes, the bookshop, like the district a few blocks to the north that they called it the Pinch.”
Acknowledgments
Portions of this book appeared in Fiction Magazine, J&L Illustrated, vol. 3, and jewishfiction.net, no. 14.
My thanks to Fiona McCrae and the very fine people of Graywolf Press, and as always to my steadfast friend and agent, Liz Darhansoff.
STEVE STERN, winner of the National Jewish Book Award, is the author of several previous novels and collections of stories. He teaches at Skidmore College in upstate New York.
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