The Journey Prize Stories 21

by Various

  In the morning it becomes clear that the village has understood our purpose – Christopher’s purpose – when a woman comes to us with food and explains that she will come again later, when the music is to start; she and some others will come to bring Christopher to the music. He must rest till then. Then she takes my hand and leads me away to give me a tour of the village. She takes advantage of shade cast by trees, huts, anything to avoid being in the sun for long. I carefully simulate interest till our last stop, the school, where the lesson is interrupted so the children can sing to me. My guide explains that the song thanks a visitor for travelling from very far to be with them, and when it’s over and the children applaud, she tells me that they are applauding for me. She is looking in my eyes when she says this and then she takes my hand again, speaks to the children, and we walk away. “I told them how very much you liked their song,” she says, and when our eyes meet I cannot tell whether she believes I did, or cares, or is hinting a criticism. She returns me to the hut where Christopher is sleeping. It’s true that I liked the song, or that I would have liked the song if I could like anything, if I had a right to feel anything.

  My guide returns later with two men who have a small wooden cart for Christopher, which he gets into with no complaint, and we go, the cart pulled by one man then another, me walking behind, out of Christopher’s view to limit any challenge to his dignity. He holds the sides of the cart with his arms, to steady himself, but I can tell that his arms too have lost strength, and at intervals his head falls forward and bounces before he raises it again. We walk through the village and down to the lake, along the shore and then back, up through the trees, then the trees give way to a grassy plain, and there are cars, trucks – people have journeyed here from the north. A camp has been set up, and through the camp I follow Christopher in his cart to where a crowd has gathered, and then into the crowd, within view of a low stage, and now in my anxiety and anticipation I would take his hand, and he would look at me and smile, but I can’t and he won’t.

  I can’t describe music the way Christopher can. No band performs more than three or four songs. Members from one band reappear in another. Guitars, drums of all shapes, trumpets, even violins, marimbas or something like them, singers in groups and solo, dancers on stage and in the crowd. Someone brings large hats for Christopher and me, to protect us from the sun. Someone else brings us water. The crowd sings along with some songs, shouts to the musicians between songs, applauds and cheers after the songs. Christopher remains absolutely still in the cart, his face hidden by his hat, and I don’t know whether he is transported and fulfilled, revivified, or as angry as ever, disappointed, defeated, in excruciating pain, or dead … or dead, and in an instant I imagine confronting all the difficulties of transporting his body through all the legs of our journey home. Then he takes a drink of water, and with the motion of his hand I’m staggered with relief and shame. I look around stupidly to see if anyone has noticed, and another song begins.

  Something delays us, and after taxiing we wait a long time for takeoff. Christopher is limp beside me – limp and weak, as though his bones are becoming rubber. I have fastened his seat belt for him, as before I carried his baggage and pushed his wheelchair, helped heave him into a taxi. I review the series of struggles with his weight and his pain back to the moment at the end of the evening of highlife, when Christopher was not angry as far as I could tell, or revived, but only weak, confused, and saying in a hushed voice that he needed to pee. There was nothing satisfying in the apparent dissipation of his anger, and suddenly I was furious that we had arrived too late, that he had missed even the opportunity to be disappointed, and my fury made the world tilt and my vision blur. “Christopher,” I said, trying to imagine a question that wasn’t insulting and banal: “How was the music, was the music good enough, did the music help?” My legs failed and for a moment I had to sit on the ground.

  Finally we take off. Christopher is perspiring and I reach up to aim the air nozzles in his direction. His eyes are closed and I hope he is sleeping.

  I would like to sleep too; I am exhausted, but too many conversations intrude when I close my eyes.

  I plug in the headphones, put them on, and Christopher is telling me, with such enthusiasm, belief and deep, warm authority, about how the Four Diamonds met in high school and got their start at a talent contest. And then the song begins. I take the headphones off and put them on Christopher. His mouth opens and closes, then his eyes open and he turns to look at me to share his surprise.

  To share his surprise, not his anger, and surprise at the song, not at my having given him something. Nothing could be surprising in a gift from me and I cannot be doubting whether he ever was angry; nothing could be more certain. The seat belt sign turns off, a flick of hurt and then relief, like pulling out a sliver.

  I take the headphones back, my timing right to hear Christopher introduce the next song, True Darling, True. The falsetto falters on the highest note, so vulnerable that he sounds achingly like a girl. At the chorus the harmonies drop away, the quartet sings in unison, and Christopher is right, there is something defiant in this a cappella innocence and beauty, something challenging and then enticing. It is as though the song leads me on, rushes me on and over the edge of a cliff, and if I look down I will see where I am and, like a cartoon character, plummet. But if I just listen I will be carried along by the song to its gorgeous end, and then I will hear Christopher again and the ground will be under me.

  DAVE MARGOSHES

  THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON

  There he was in Cleveland. My father liked to use this expression for his life in those days: “I was still chasing the donkey, trying to pin the tail to it.” The donkey had led him away from New York and now, at last, he had his first real job on a newspaper, though it wasn’t quite what he had expected, and he was beginning what he hoped would be a glorious career. If not glorious, then at least exciting, interesting. He saw himself as Don Quixote, the hero of the famous novel he had recently read, tilting at windmills – righting wrongs – not with a lance but a pen. First, though, he had to learn to type.

  And he held in his hands the hearts of thousands of readers. That was his chief concern.

  “My husband beats me and the children. What should I do?”

  A reader had posed this question in a letter and my father considered his answer with gravity. If he advised her to be a dutiful wife and bear what her husband meted out, he might be sentencing her to a life of drudgery, frustration, and pain, and possibly even worse for the children. On the other hand, what if he suggested she leave the man – what sort of life would she and her children face, without a roof over their heads and a source of food, clothing, and protection? Even the middle ground was fraught with danger, he could see: should he urge her to talk to her husband, to try to mollify him, she might instead provoke him into even more extreme acts of violence. Lives might well hang in the balance.

  How to respond?

  It was 1920, and my father was twenty-seven; as he liked to say, he was always a few years older than the century.

  The Cleveland Jewish World – Der Velt – had a grand title, but the paper itself was somewhat less than grand. Its circulation was barely 50,000, just a fraction of that of the big Yiddish dailies of New York City, but it saw itself playing a role just as important in the lives of the Jews of Cleveland and other cities in Ohio, bringing them not just news but education, entertainment, and literature. It was that part that most interested my father, who had been writing a novel and poems, but he was assigned more mundane tasks at first, not the least of which were obituaries. He got a crash course in the history of Cleveland as he succinctly documented the lives of its Jewish residents as they died. “People are dying to get into our pages,” my father’s boss, Everett Heshberg, told him. “It’s the last time most of them ever will. Some of them, the first time too. Treat them with respect.”

  My father’s chief job, though, was as newswriter, another grand title that wa
s somewhat less than it sounded. The World subscribed to the Associated Press newswire, which, of course, came in English. First thing in the morning, Heshberg, who as managing editor was the heart and soul of the paper, went through the overnight dispatches, selecting stories he thought would be of interest to his readers. These included local items of government, politics, human interest, and even crime – the same stories that on that day would appear (or already had the previous day) on the front pages of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which had, in fact, originated most of the local and state AP items. He also selected many stories from Europe, which was still recovering and reorganizing from the ravages of the Great War. Cleveland’s Jews came from many parts of Europe – Germany, Romania, Russia, Hungary, Latvia, Galicia, and elsewhere – and were hungry for news of home, even if they no longer really considered those distant countries their home.

  My father and another young man, who was somewhat senior to him, shared the translation duties, which he enjoyed. The trick was not so much to literally translate as to read the story, absorb it, and write it fresh in Yiddish as if the story was his own. My father was ideally suited for such a task, as he was fluent in both English and Yiddish, and could write quickly, though his two-finger attack at the typewriter was the cause of much amusement in The World newsroom. When he had time to spare, he practised ten-finger typing but it seemed hopeless.

  There was little spare time, though. The World was an afternoon paper, meaning it appeared on the street shortly after noon. My father reported for work at 6 a.m. and wrote news till the 9:30 deadline. Then he turned his attention to the death notices sent in by the Jewish funeral homes. As Heshberg had explained it to him, “Each death represents a life, and each life is a story.” Again, my father’s job was to translate, taking the bare essentials of those lives – the facts provided by the families for the mortuaries – and turn them into interesting stories, occasionally taking liberties.

  “Do not fabricate,” Heshberg counselled, “but bend.”

  This suited my father fine, for he was attempting, as he saw it, to tailor the soul of a poet into the mind of a journalist. Each obituary, in his hands, became a poem.

  News and obituaries occupied almost all of my father’s time – after that day’s paper was put to bed, as the expression went, the process would immediately begin again for the next day’s edition – but they took up only a small part of the paper, which was mostly filled with articles by real writers on all manner of subjects: essays on philosophical and theological subjects, usually written by learned rabbis; treatises on history, civics, and politics; and educational articles that helped the Jewish immigrant community of Ohio in establishing their lives in this new world: how to apply for citizenship, how to get a driver’s licence, the rights of a tenant, and so on. Then there were poems, short stories, condensed novels, literary criticism. This is what my father aspired to write, but he knew he had to earn the right to it. So he was both thrilled and chagrined when Heshberg asked him to write the advice column.

  The newspapers of New York were filled with such columns, which were wildly popular. Abe Cahan, the great editor at The Forward, the Socialist paper, had invented the form, which he called the Bintel Brief, but all the other Yiddish papers had followed, even the religious papers, which at first considered themselves too serious for such a seemingly trivial feature. But readers demanded it. Regardless of what paper they read, they had questions, often much the same ones. Even the English papers, like the Sun and the Telegram in New York, seeing all the fuss, were quick to follow.

  Native-born readers and well-established immigrants, though, were less likely to pose the utilitarian questions of the recent arrivals, so the columns established by the English papers quickly narrowed their focus to the lovelorn. Heshberg made it clear to my father that his column would involve much more than just letters from unhappy lovers. This was just as well, since my father, who was still a bachelor then, was one of the least likely men on earth to give advice on affairs of the heart, as would soon be evident.

  “There should be nothing to it for a smart fellow like you, Morgenstern,” Heshberg said. My father recognized the flattery as a ploy, but he was flattered just the same. “You have the intelligence and sensitivity for the job,” the editor continued. “Just as in the obituaries, every life is a story. Every letter is an opportunity for you to influence those lives. Think of yourself as having a conversation with the readers, a conversation about their deepest concerns, worries, fears. Think of yourself as a rabbi.”

  That was exactly what was frightening my father. The last thing he wanted to be was a rabbi, a calling that his eldest brother, Sam, had followed, but the notion of a conversation with the readers was appealing to him.

  Heshberg had already determined that my father’s own identity, and that of any subsequent writers assigned this task, would be concealed. To this end, he had concocted a fictitious advisor called Yentel Schmegge, a name which, he hoped, would convey a combination of humour and seriousness readers would find appealing. My father would assume the persona of Yentel as he composed replies to the letter-writers. When he tired of the assignment, “after six months or a year,” Heshberg said, another writer would take his place and consistency would be maintained.

  My father agreed to all this – he was relieved that he would not have to put his own name on his replies – and even agreed to Heshberg’s plan to prime the pump during the first days that the column would run, although he objected at first.

  “Make up letters?” He realized immediately that his aghast tone might be offensive to the editor. “What I mean is …”

  “You’re concerned about the ethics of the situation, Morgenstern?” Heshberg looked at him with a frank expression, but he didn’t appear hostile.

  “Well, yes.”

  “Ethics don’t really enter into it, don’t you see? This isn’t news, it’s what in the English papers they call ‘features.’ What if it were a short story or a novel you were writing?”

  “That would be fiction,” my father said.

  “Lies, you mean?”

  “No.” My father hesitated. He recalled a definition of fiction he had heard from a well-known novelist during a heated discussion over coffee at a crowded table at the Café Royale in New York. “Made up, yes, but in the service of truth.”

  “Exactly,” Heshberg said. “You see my point exactly.”

  “I see.”

  “Just make them believable,” Heshberg said. “Don’t worry, in a week’s time your desk will be covered with letters. Real ones.”

  My father thought long and hard, taking long late-night walks on deserted streets near his rooming house, staring thoughtfully into his glass of beer at the nearby tavern. As it turned out, the first few questions and answers he wrote proved to be so sensational they immediately helped make the column a success, but one of them – the very first – also returned to cause my father some discomfort later on.

  For his first column, he wrote this letter:

  Esteemed editor –

  Please help me!

  I am a nineteen-year-old woman, in good health, well proportioned, attractive, or so men have told me. I come from a good, religious family. My blessed parents and my precious brothers and sisters love me. But now they have threatened to disown me!

  I am in love with a Red Indian man, a member of one of the Ohio tribes. He is a good man, educated in a government school, and refined, not a wild savage. He claims that his people are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, that he is a Jew! I have no reason to disbelieve him.

  He knows little of Judaism but he seeks to learn. I love this man and want to marry him and together make a good, devout Jewish family. But my family say he is a charlatan and that I will be dead to them should I follow my heart.

  I cannot give up this man, but I cannot bear the thought of losing my family. What should I do?

  – A distraught reader

  This was followed by a painstakingly careful reply,
written with Heshberg’s admonition in mind: “Avoid extremes. Take the middle ground whenever possible. Provoke but do not enrage”:

  Dear distraught reader –

  Your dilemma is certainly a profound and unique one, though it points to a more universal problem, namely: how shall Jewry interact with the world? Shall we seek to preserve our unique identity, as the Chosen People of God? Or should we attempt to take our part among the larger Brotherhood of Man, in which all are equal?

  This is a question for the rebbinim to ponder and debate, for philosophers, not politicians, and certainly not journalists. It is an old debate, and shows no sign of abating. As to your specific problem, we can only advise you to follow your heart, and wish you well.

  As he’d been instructed, he finished the letter with the words, “With love, Yentel Schmegge.”

  My father stood nervously beside Heshberg’s desk as the editor read his typewritten copy, filled with the inevitable xxxd-over typing mistakes. He raised his head, a broad smile on his usually placid face. He had a thin moustache that was several shades darker than his unruly salt and pepper hair, as if he had run the tip of a pencil back and forth against it a number of times.

  “Brilliant, Morgenstern. Or should I call you Solomon?

  This is the stuff.”