The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  Chess was Varga’s passion. The bar ran midweek tournaments that were dangerous, florid affairs. Tuesday and Wednesday was the topsy-turvy weekend for the workers at Coney who were otherwise kept busy Saturday and Sunday with their shows and professional roles when the rest of New York wanted relaxation and fun. On these uneventful days they took their break from the jaunty, vulgar entertainment world, shut down their bodies and their rides, and became just normal folk with leisure time. Some went into the city for their own entertainment, the art of the museums, the excitement and invisibility of walking amid the thronging masses in Manhattan. Brooklyn absorbed many of the workers back into its massive corners where they sat out on stoops and gossiped about the Island, scrubbed costumes clean and hung breeches with tail-sleeves out to dry. Corporeal deformity and mystery were packed away. Ordinary speech was made, and love; sleep was enjoyed, vigs and bills were paid.

  It was never clear how the chess tournaments got started, it was simply understood that that’s where they were held. Mary and Valerie themselves did not play the game, and the tournaments had been running before they took over the establishment. Since Cy had first started coming to Varga there had been chess gatherings. The game was not played as he had always imagined it to be played, in the drawing rooms of nice houses between fathers and sons, in the expansive high-ceilinged rooms of European manors and estates, to polite, white-gloved applause. It was played viciously and inconsiderately. With expletives and bets. Legend had it a player had been stabbed in the gaming room of Varga over a debate about the origin of the game itself. One man had said China, his opponent maintained India, tempers frayed, a knife appeared and things got crazy. The fight was barely a fight at all, just one sharp stroke that punctured a lung, and Mr China was carted out feet first only two theoretical moves away from the first check of the game. It seemed that intellect and bohemian temper were not exclusive features in Varga. No watches or sand-timers were employed to keep the proceedings moving along – though if a player was taking too long to make a move the opponent was permitted to use psychological tactics as encouragement. Inciting comments, provocative gestures, cigarette smoke blown casually in a face. Frequently the tournaments went on until the early hours of the morning, or into the next day. Riley would have said that it was a canny contravention, the game of princes and goddesses had been well and truly bastardized by a proletariat rabble. Those who did not play often observed the games, catching their breath when a rook swept away a bishop, clearing an open weft-ward path to the unprotected king, and adding to the already flinty tension. If the noise of the audience increased, or news of a queen’s gambit broke, it passed along the rows of spectators, and new onlookers would be drawn from the other rooms, squeezing in to the smoky gaming arena. It was said more games ended in an argument or a skirmish in Varga than with capitulation or a victory move. That was just the way things went.

  There were no two chessboards alike in the bar. They had arrived on the premises from various locations, other incarnations, foreign countries, having seen the world in all its brilliant and bustling and beggarly wonder. They had been sold on markets and in boutiques and in tents and bazaars, or had been made especially for royal children by master carvers. They had been saved from plundering empires and looted from ransacked museums. There were smoked glass boards with polished pieces, others made of varnished wood, pink and cream ivory, jade, woven straw and slate. There was even a bronze board that weighed as much as a human head‚ with a hole in one corner where an emerald had been pried out.

  Players were amateur professionals and minor celebrities from Coney, from all over the city and beyond. Local champions attended with regularity, vying over the top spots. Occasionally a flamboyant character would turn up and draw the attention of the locals, an English shire-man who wore a top hat to compete in because he said it brought him luck, and a Russian who had come over for the world tournament in ’39 and had heard bizarre tales of the Coney Island chess-wars and wanted to see them for himself. There was once an ex-congressman, a motion-picture star, a duke, an African chief. There were the old Europeans who played chess in Prospect Park in the day under the shady trees and in Varga at night, who would not allow their photographs to be taken if they won. There were carnival workers and the inventive, sequitor-minded children of the circus. And then there was Grace.

  – The Lady of Many Eyes –

  Grace had solemn eyes that were territorial and displaced and dark, like the eyes of the children from eastern Europe that had, for the last two years, been arriving in England in droves on the Kindertransport. She was perhaps twenty years too early for those trains and there might have been eyes like hers all over Brooklyn that had arrived there by some stray, unorganized miracle, by their own dogged mobility. Her eyes said that she also arrived young in a foreign country, or on the cusp of two ages, that time when life can be so easily hindered or so easily accelerated at the bidding of a catalyst, holding the hand of someone who may or may not be her father, a man who disappeared into the crowds of the great city shortly after the boat docked and the official checkpoints were cleared. The eyes spoke somehow of abandonment and resolve, and about a new name, eclipsing and clumsy and Christian, which was designed to cancel out bitter history and give her peace but didn’t. They spoke of adoptive parents, early efforts to learn a language that fitted in her mouth like a wrong shape, triumph, for she was determined in that as in all things, and other languages picked up in waiting rooms and on street comers and with the exchange of money. They said something of failed immigration procedures and a leap to the underside of the city without a second thought because she would not ever go backwards in life. And they described how the taste of her homeland’s traditional foods was not quite the same in America, not quite, there was a subtle mistranslation. But when she heard violin music on Brooklyn’s Yiddish radio and those sad male voices lamenting through apartment windows and inside restaurants the city suddenly seemed like a familiar local graveyard, inhabiting the ghosts of her never revealed nation and she could grieve.

  There was an important secret about New York that Grace found out one day, very early on after that brave leap from one civilization to another, lying on the sidewalk with blood coming from her nose and legs. She took a guess at universal human kindness and spoke a very old and very reliant word to a stranger. And a woman she didn’t know spoke the same word back to her and helped her up. The secret was that if the city tipped just so against the light you could see a fine web between corresponding human hearts throughout it, like a spider’s web revealed in the grass on the steppe in the morning dew against the sun. It connected all paths and all peoples with a frail strength that could be traversed if you learned how to move that way. And she learned to tightrope it, like a little spider from home to home, from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, delicately between native tongues and histories and cultures. And the beauty was, if you turned and looked behind you, perhaps you would see that you had spun a separate strand along which others could then follow, adding to the web.

  Cyril Parks swore that he saw all this in Grace’s eyes when he first met her, in the spring of 1940. Beyond that he could only speculate, for she never spoke of an abandoned town’s name, a river indicating the border of two countries on a map, a family crest or lowly shack, or which cruel twist in Europe’s fabric by which cruel empire, monarch or army general’s hand, had wrung her people out.

  Her own troubles travelled down a long way into her, became mature in her voice like something that has churned and changed to a different substance after much motion and time. She slipped between identities, slipped the nets of conversations which would eventually trap her and pin her down. Her heritage was American, it was all she would ever say, slipping the country on like a large overcoat to cover her native dress. She knew the Polish butcher to affectionately call him Tatusiu, she knew her local synagogue Rabbi, the Italians, the Ukrainians, she bought bulk-sized bags of oats and rusk from the Jewish bakery at trade price. Sh
e knew the recipe for the pogácsa which the Hungarian mothers baked in ashes for their departing sons. She would send the men and women and children of southern Brooklyn to Euginio, Oceanic Walk’s resident dentist, saying that he was her uncle, she washed her dresses and headscarves alongside the black women that were domestic servants and the Japanese women and the poorer Jewish daughters at the great concrete and iron sinks of the washhouse because amongst the steam and suds gossip and songs translated into community. In the meat-packing district of the city she exchanged money with middle business men. Most people presumed her to be their own, emancipated but choosing to remain associated, and their presumptions simply made it so. It turned out she had the bad temper of every nation, showing it sporadically and viciously, and she could curse profoundly at anyone of any offending nationality as she could also console and toast and bless. She may have known the songs of the Saracens and the secrets of Cleopatra’s maidservants with their cosmetic confidentialities, the great kings of the Middle East, and every carnival cousin in Russia for all anyone knew about her. Her soul might have been loaned by one of several supreme or subordinate beings. She may have owned the petrified heart of Icarus and the charred harness of his blackened wings. She took to Coney like an otter to the shining, reedy river, had worked there for several years before Cy came to meet her. Those who knew her were not surprised by her choices, though this did little to undermine the irrevocable misfortune of her story.

  They were neighbours. It was four in the morning and Cy was suddenly in possession of some new information regarding one of the tenants of his building – the one from 104, with the doorway smelling of the countryside. Her name was Grace. Her eyes were dark and productive, there were traces of auburn in her dark locks lit by the streetlamp and a piece of straw was sticking up from a roll of hair by her ear like a fashion accessory. She was a remarkable woman, he would soon find out, having a mind that went out like a rider on horseback to meet an enemy, both courageous and negotiating, but ultimately loyal to her own side. Both parties had been on their way home, walking away from the still riotous, still inebriated Island. Cy liked to walk at night when he was tipsy, it gave journeys a mythical feel.

  As he passed by the small park several homeless drunks were sleeping on benches, or shuffling about in the undergrowth. The atmosphere was gestational and insect, creatures in the trees and bushes had woken up after winter from their larvae pods and were making music on their wings and hind legs. The bats above were intent on their business, flailing through the sky towards the presence of water or blood. Unrecognized species were stirring in black corners of the park, cruttering, scuttling, ratching. It was a night of city wildlife, it had something living and restless about it. As if it was ready for her entrance.

  He did not meet her first. He met her horse, drinking furiously from the fountain at the entrance of the park itself, drinking as if it would drink the source dry. It was not startled when he came upon it. It turned its head in the water so that one profoundly placid eye could watch his approach. He had not seen a horse this close since leaving England, not even in the circus at Coney – the tiny, pig-like horses that the midget police department rode. This was a horse of quite larger proportions and in the dim light he could see that it was black, black-brown, or at least dark enough to look like a horse-shaped hole in the slightly lighter street. In fact, as he got closer, he found it was enormous, and it wore no bridlery or tackle. Warm with alcohol and enchanted by the irregular urban vision he moved towards the animal, which then stopped drinking from the old mossy font and raised its head. It snorted gently. It had obviously been positioned in his path for the sole purpose of improving upon his misty, bard-like composition. What better than a horse, the oldest and most trusted other half of ancient human-creature partnerships to petition his imagination? While dogs ran wild on the plains and in forests, horses were carrying warriors into battle, they were tilling the land and guiding pathfinders across perilous sand.

  – Hello, boy, what are you doing out so late at night alone? Where did you come from then? Did you break out of somewhere, clever boy? Did you jump over a ten-foot hedge?

  He put a hand up to its muzzle, rubbed where it was softest, where it felt like a piece of brushed muslin. The horse nosed his ear, snorted again and tugged on his long hair with its dripping, bearded mouth.

  – Oh. He likes you.

  A woman stepped out from behind or underneath the beast, it was not immediately clear, as if from a doorway in the massive creature, and she ran a hand along its lower flanks with familiarity. The gesture stated that this was her horse. She was obviously the owner. Like a lightning conductor she grounded the current of the dream and it brought him round a little from his reverie. She was in any case the antidote to his flight of fancy, her attire was much too plain and modern for one thing. She should have had on a cloak or shawl, something ethereal and medieval, and more fitting with the black horse at night, but she did not. Rather than being elfin or sprite-like she was dressed in a knee-length skirt and leather laced shoes, a plain blouse. There was a coat folded neatly over her arm. Her hair, but for the straw, was tidy, combed and pinned quite fashionably. It was as if she had of late finished typing documents in an office. Mostly it was her manner that evicted the gentle flocking thoughts in Cy’s mind. She had definition. Her hand on her hip and the cock of her head described a psyche impartial to flowing robes and the lore of women in inoffensive or precarious situations. She seemed to change position every once in a while and then hold very still. Her eyes, even in the inadequate light, were each a litany of struggle, strategy, and survival. Cy spent a good few moments reading her life’s history in them and then he pulled his hair free from the horse’s mouth.

  – He’s yours?

  The woman nodded, her eyes narrowing.

  – Mine. I have a horse, but it’s a secret past this street here. I thought perhaps you suspected, living so close by. Perhaps we can be quite noisy, coming in and out as we do? And the building is … indiscreet. Señora Ubago is blind but it is amazing what her sources tell her.

  Her eyes again shifted inwards a fraction while she waited for her answer, as if in assessment, and they reflected a sickle-shape of streetlight. For a moment she had the look of a lawyer laying down a verbal trap for a witness. Or a fox up against a loose board of the chicken shed. Cy stared at her for a moment, not comprehending what she had said and distracted by all that was unrestful and then focused about her. A small gong sounded in his head, neither alarm nor warning nor accompanied by a voice calling an all clear, but heraldic of something, something. She made him want to shake off the haze around his brain and in his present condition, a half bottle of hooch the happier, it was not an easy thing. Evidently his vexation and slowness were easily interpreted.

  – You live in my building. Second floor. The Electric Michelangelo. Works at Coney, drinks in Varga, doesn’t play in the tournaments. English, northern. Doesn’t mind Germans. Doesn’t mind drunks. Doesn’t say much, unless he’s had whisky and is arguing with ghosts.

  She had just reduced him to his basic existence, and addressed his foibles. It was a touch disconcerting, this ability, particularly given that he knew nothing of the woman in retaliation. He suddenly felt very careless, slovenly, and as if he had, ever since disembarking from the Adriatic, been observed closely through spy-glasses or by shady, doorway-concealed officials without his knowledge.

  – I’m Grace. This is Maximus.

  – Oh. Hello. Actually my name is Cyril. Cy. So where do you keep him? Does the building have stables?

  Grace tipped her head to the side for a moment. The horse was nosing Cy’s unkempt locks again.

  – He really likes you. He likes your hair, he thinks it’s his feed. He lives with me. He’s my guardian, better than a dog. I can put him up against a door when the invaders arrive.

  – I don’t really understand. Lives with you where?

  – Prosze. In my apartment, Electric Michelangelo, where el
se, have you seen the mess in the storage rooms? Not always, but sometimes it’s necessary, there is not always room in the circus stables. And I don’t like the way he gets treated down there. They can be cruel and stupid. You cannot put a horse in a stall next to a snow leopard or a lion. They do this and they wonder why he kicks down the door and tramples the side of the enclosure. Fucking idiots. He could have broken a leg. Poor Maximus.

  Her expression did not allow for any doubt that she was telling the truth. And then the last of the thick, addling smoke blew away and Cy remembered the shadow-box menagerie below him on the wall in his first week of residence. And the fecund, agrarian smell in the hallway outside 104 was identified without the use of forensics or snooping guesses and given its correct label. Horse.

  – Good Lord! I thought so. I mean at first I thought I was quite mad to imagine it – I thought I was being a dozy article. It has bothered me since I saw his outline, I’ll confess. How is that possible. Is it allowed?

  – I told you, it’s a secret past this street right here. Señora would telephone the butchers if she knew. I tell her it is the paprika in the stews that smells strong, since she cooks only rice what can she say? But back there the whole world knows. We work in Luna.

  – I won’t tell a soul, you have my word. Bloody hell, nobody would believe it anyway.