by John Gardner
Chaim laughed, but it was a strange snicker. Of course there was an apartment. He would take them to it straight away. The first month’s rent was already paid. He had seen to that personally, and Louis’ father would meet Mr. Chorat in the morning. In the meantime they would go to the apartment—traveling in a manner little Louis would love. They would ride the El.
“Apart from all the strange happenings of that night, and during the next days, one thing remains absolutely lucid in my head.” Passau raised his eyebrows, his face assuming a comical, almost clownish, appearance. “I remember that I hummed constantly. I hummed to keep the devils at bay, for again I felt the awful wrench of parting with the soil and the blood of my cousins. I hummed several tunes, and they were all marches.”
It was dark: a mixture of magic and confused anxiety for the child. The smell of smoke and steam; the hubbub of the people around them; the sheer crush, and the lights everywhere. New York, at that time, was an exciting place to be: exhilarating without the edge of violence it was to assume in later years.
Riding the El was like rocketing over the city. Louis sat next to a window, nose pressed hard against the glass. Sometimes they were above buildings; on other occasions, the buildings seemed to be running alongside them. He glimpsed the bustle of the city, and lights—more lights than he had ever seen until now: windows shining, and the streets bright as day, with people walking about in their hundreds. There were more horses than he had expected, but he also saw the automobiles and large high cars that he figured were the omnibuses Uncle Chaim had told him about.
“The place I got for you is a few blocks from mine. Nearer the Lower East Side than I wanted,” Chaim said. “Don’t worry, though, it’s only temporary. We’ll soon find somewhere else. There’s a few sticks of furniture, and I’m sure Gerda’ll have the place fixed up in no time.”
Louis felt the tremor of warning go through his mother as the train rocked wildly.
Finally they arrived at the stop Uncle Chaim said was their station. From there they had a long walk. People lounged on corners, and at one point they had to step into the road, to avoid a party of young men emerging unsteadily from stairs that appeared to come up out of the ground. It was a cool night, but men and women sat on steps leading up to bleak, tall and uninviting buildings.
“I shoulda kept my damned mouth closed, Herb. I think what we got is my fault for speaking.”
The child Louis said, “I hope we’re not going to live in one of these awful places.” Of course, they were; and, when they arrived, it smelled—of humanity, and cooking, and staleness. Not as bad as the stink of the ship, but unpleasant.
“On the fourth floor,” Chaim said happily. “Apartment forty-one.”
Gerda groaned, and the long climb made even the mild-mannered Joseph curse as Louis had never heard before. Eventually, they reached their new home—two rooms and a kitchen. “You share a bathroom with the others, down the hall,” Chaim told them.
It was dirty, dingy, and the mentioned few sticks of furniture were just that, a few sticks: a couple of old chairs, a rickety table, two beds—a big one in a small room, and the little one in the room where they were supposed to live. The small room was just large enough to take the bed and very little else.
All hell broke loose. “The linen smells! The blankets are damp! And I’ve no doubt that there’re bugs here,” Gerda shouted.
“Chaim!” Joseph turned on his brother. “What have you brought us to? What is this?”
They started shouting at each other, and Louis felt another fear grip him. “I remember it exactly,” Passau told Herbie Kruger in the present. “It was like an iron hand clutching at my entrails. A horror.”
Yet, something suddenly calmed him. There was a lot of noise in the room, and a great deal of commotion coming up from the street: a rowdy hullabaloo, as though people were fighting all around them, just like his mother, father and Uncle Chaim. But, suddenly, over all the pandemonium came another sound—someone was playing an instrument—a trumpet, he thought.
“There were clear notes, rising and falling in a slow, sad melody and, oddly, that music had a great calming effect on me. Soothing in its sadness. It was as though someone was telling me I was not alone. This is very important moment for you to keep in mind, Herbie.”
“My God,” Gerda shouted at Chaim. “You cannot do this to us. How could you, my husband’s brother, have brought us to this?”
“It’s a whole heap better than the place I had when I first arrived here.” Chaim sounded calm, yet, somehow, unpleasant. “When you have money coming in, and you’ve managed to save a bit, you’ll get something better. You’ll have it like home in no time.”
Chaim was clever—a man who could usually turn things around by deflecting the truth. They would all come out with him. They would eat at a German restaurant. “I’ll also buy groceries for you,” he said with an unctuous smile.
“And things for cleaning,” Gerda demanded.
“To give the devil his due, the meal was good. The first decent meal we had taken for a long while. We came home—if you could call it home—satisfied, warm and, due to my mother, with a new heart.”
“We will make the best of this,” Gerda proclaimed. They had returned with many paper sacks of groceries; loaded also with various cleaning materials. “Tomorrow, I shall make this dungheap fit to live in. I will not set foot outside of the building until this is a home. Louis will help me.”
Chaim had said he would come at seven in the morning, to take Louis’ father to meet Mr. Chorat. They were tired and needed rest. Tomorrow was another day, so Joseph said a blessing on their new home before they all sank onto the hard beds with their unpleasant-smelling blankets and sheets. Bugs or not, they slept.
The next weeks were to bring more chaos, but Gerda spent that first full day scrubbing, washing, sweeping and scouring the apartment.
“I don’t suppose I helped much,” Passau smiled conspiratorially at Kruger. “I have long since learned that it is wise to know very little about drudgery. I have made it a point in life to be sure that someone else cleans things and cooks for one. I always showed, even in those early years, that I had an inability when it came to household chores or being a galley slave over the hot stove.”
Kruger nodded, looking curiously wise. “This, my dear Louis, was always my aim. I used to be sure that I did not even know how to lay cutlery on a table. Unhappily, the sexual revolution came upon us. You would find it much more difficult these days.”
“Ah,” Passau gave a little nod, as if to say, “I was careful not to be young in these days.”
By seven o’clock on that second night, the tiny set of rooms smelled of polish and disinfectant; the linen was clean, there was one of Gerda’s famous kosher meat loaves cooking, together with potatoes and red cabbage, just as her husband liked it, sweetened slightly with apples. When he came into the apartment, however, Joseph Packensteiner looked wild-eyed. He slammed the door and stamped into the little living room, his face a thundercloud and his hands clutching and unclutching like a madman. Louis was even a little afraid of him. Neither Gerda nor the child had ever seen the calm and patient Joseph looking like this.
“Joseph? What is it? Did you bring Chaim back with you? There’s a good meal waiting.” Gerda’s words were hollow, but she tried to appear normal.
There was a long, brooding, silence. When he spoke, Joseph’s voice was almost a whisper. “Until he makes amends,” he spoke very slowly, “my so-called brother is not welcome in this house. Nor will either of you ever speak with him.”
“Frankly, I was very frightened,” Louis admitted now. “His hair was all over the place; his eyes seemed to be crimson with anger. My mother was good with him. Gentle, calm—you know, Herbie, the way women are. They’re good at that kind of thing.”
It all came out while they ate the meal.
“I heard the trumpet again that night. Quite extraordinary, I can hear it now if I put a mind to it. Long clear note
s. Infinitely sad, wistful.” He grinned at Kruger. “Actually, if you listen hard enough you can hear it in my own symphony. The first movement, the trumpet far off, behind the strings. That’s how well I kept it in mind. It was very calming to a little boy with a very troubled heart.”
Kruger remained still. Dimly he perceived the form of Passau’s confession. It might take a long time but, he thought, any reservations the man might have about not telling me everything will dissipate if I give him his head. He will tell, perhaps, not quite all of it, but there will be enough detail to fill in the gaps by hard questioning.
On that second night in America it all came pouring from Joseph as they ate Gerda’s kosher meat loaf—
Chaim was not the great and powerful man he claimed. True, he was employed by Mr. Chorat, who had a small shoe shop, specializing in repairs, but also making shoes to order. The shop was on Catherine Street, quite near to where they now lived, and Chaim was in charge, taking orders and, very occasionally, traveling to places like Chicago where Mr. Chorat had many friends in the Jewish community. The business was good, but there was too much work. Chorat was a fine craftsman, and the little business grew well each year. He helped in the mending and making of shoes, but needed an equally fine craftsman to keep up with the orders. So, it was on the understanding that he would bring back at least one first-class shoemaker, that Chorat had paid for Chaim’s trip back to the village. Once Chaim had netted Joseph, Chorat had agreed to finance the trip for his new assistant’s family.
“I have to sign an agreement which ties me hand and foot to Elijah Chorat for three years.” Joseph spoke the sentence like a curse. “We have given up a peaceful goldmine for a plot of wasteland.”
“But Chaim said …” Gerda began.
“Chaim has big ideas,” Joseph all but snapped at her. The small boy flinched. This was so unlike his kindly papa. “Chaim thinks that, when Mr. Chorat dies—which will be another thirty or forty years by the look of him—he will leave the shop to us. He has no sons, no family of his own. If I had my way we’d all get on the first boat back to Europe.”
“Papa, then why don’t we?” Louis piped up.
Joseph looked at the boy for a long time, then shook his head sadly, saying it could not be done. The authorities would not allow it. Chaim had vouched for them, signed papers on Joseph’s behalf, binding him to Elijah Chorat for a period of three years. “I have no option but to countersign the papers.”
“You are sure of this?” Gerda pounced. “You are sure this isn’t another of Chaim’s tricks?”
Joseph shook his head. “It would appear that it’s all true, and we haven’t the money to take on an advocate. We’re stuck.”
Chaim, acting probably out of easy ambition, had gravely misled Joseph. Isaak had been right to withstand Chaim’s big talk of a huge market, overflowing with riches. They should, it seemed, have all stayed where they were.
Catherine Street, where Mr. Chorat’s store was located, lay on the fringes of the Lower East Side of Manhattan: a sprawling, choked, seething, polyglot area, filled, and overflowing, with immigrants from all over Europe. A large number were from Germany or Austria, and it would have been easy for the Packensteiners to settle for a quiet, if far from luxurious, life among people they could understand.
But Joseph had learned one thing very quickly: Chaim had been right about the central fact in an immigrant’s life. “You had to embrace the country and its ways,” he was always saying to them. Already men and women were using the term “Americanization.” As a start, Joseph told them that very first night, he had enrolled both Gerda and himself in special classes to learn the language. Louis also had much work ahead. Tomorrow he would be starting at Public School No. 1, just down the street. It was also required of him, as a good Jewish boy, to attend a Talmud Torah at least four evenings a week. This was so that he could keep up his Hebrew, and be instructed in the Torah, and the ways of his faith. Louis thought life was going to be very full and, maybe, even dangerous. In the next few days and weeks the young boy felt as though he were setting off to climb the highest mountain in the world. There was so much expected of him, and so much to learn.
Public School No. 1 stood on the corner of Catherine and Henry Streets, and it was the avowed intention of the school board to make this place a simple, if harsh, seat of learning, in which the mélange of nationalities would be arranged and molded into a whole: an American whole.
So, Louis Isaak Packensteiner, an inoffensive, naive, scrawny, waiflike, stunted boy—“I did not fatten out and sprout upwards until my late teens”—was thrown in at the deep end of learning, and within a year, he grew from a non-English-speaking German Jew into one who could easily converse in the new language, including most of the obscenities—learned after class from his grubby playmates.
The beginning was painful, without his mother’s gentle persuasion to guide him. But the end product was an American boy who learned, worked, cursed, fought and swore allegiance to the flag, in his new tongue, each morning—hand on his heart.
His parents took much longer to adjust, though Joseph was speaking a broken, poor sort of English in six months or so. Then, quite fluently—with the aid of his son—within eighteen months. Gerda found it more difficult, and never really spoke perfect English for the rest of her life—continually mixing words and inserting German, or Yiddish, when she became baffled.
For four, sometimes five, nights a week, Louis went down to the basement Talmud Torah on the notorious Hester Street—by day a huge and crowded market, full of mainly Jewish people from a dozen or more countries. Stalls and booths crammed the sidewalks, and out on the street itself—particularly on Fridays, the eve of Sabbath, when most housewives in the area went out to fill their store cupboards.
By night Hester Street was still a lively place to be. Sometimes a shade too lively. Lower classes of women would prowl the sidewalks and rougher men, and even boys, could be seen coming and going from ventures of a dubious nature. Young lads would loiter with girls on the corners. Occasionally there would be fights between rival gangs. Then the predominantly Irish Catholic police would descend and pour out their wrath which fell, in the main, on Jewish locals for whom they had little time.
To start with, Gerda made certain that either Joseph or herself would meet Louis after his study at the Talmud Torah was finished for the evening. More often than not it was Gerda, for Joseph was working all hours and very hard: and not simply at his English, or for Mr. Chorat.
Joseph Packensteiner was planning his future, making many friends among his employer’s best, and most respectable, customers. He hated bowing and scraping but was willing to humble himself for his own ends, and also to see his elder brother’s nose put out of joint. Within a matter of months the word was out that you could get the best shoes or boots, on the most competitive terms, from Chorat’s store. There, they employed a shoemaker who had magic in his hands. This shoemaker, it was also said, was willing to take special orders on the side: work done in his own time.
Joseph, then, would labor late into the night, making the special orders, for which he alone would get credit. That credit would store itself up for future use—once he had completed his term of three years with Elijah Chorat.
Louis knew all this, both from the whispered conversations he overheard between his parents, and from what he felt in his bones. Within six months of their arrival they had moved from the dingy rooms. Not far away, but far enough: uptown Hester Street, where a much larger, four-roomed apartment with its own bathroom had become available for only a few dollars more each month. There, in one of the rooms, Joseph had set up a workbench, on which he kept his own last and tools.
He also managed to get leather from a source of which he would never speak. “To his dying day, Herb, I don’t know where he got the leather. I can only think he did a deal with some little arch-goniff—which wouldn’t surprise me the way my father turned out. But, my friend, I liked things much better once we moved. The ache neve
r left me—cousins, relatives—but, then, it never has. I liked Hester Street. There’s nothing like it today. Nowhere. I found it exciting, particularly after I persuaded Mama to let me come home on my own at night. That’s when it happened. December 1912. A Thursday. Second Thursday in December. How’s that for memory, huh?”
“Memory of what?”
“Herb, I’m talking revelation time here. Like the Christian Paul on the road to Damascus time; like the burning bush; like Moses going into the mountains and coming down with those tablets.”
“Okay, so what was special? What happened?” Herbie realized that, in a blink, the old man’s eyes were now filled with tears. “Just tell me, Lou. Confession time, eh?”
“Sure.” An overtone of bitterness. “Sure, Herbie. If there is a God, then that Thursday in December 1912 was the day he chose to let me know I had a gift. Not just a tiny little talent, but an enormous gift. Maybe I didn’t recognize it then and there. Certainly it pissed me off a bit in the early years. But I learned. Even if there’s no God; no heaven and no hell, it’s all the same. I finally caught hold of that gift and used it. Used it to prise open the world for myself; used it to seduce, murder, steal. I used it like one of those Borgia Popes used the Church. I used it to fuck the world, Herb, and that’s what, eventually, made me into a monster. This bit’s important, and I have it all here.” He tapped his head. “It’s here, locked away. Like other things, it’s never been told, and people don’t even know what I got. What I still got.” He glared at Kruger. “What’s to eat?”
“I made sandwiches. Nice. Good salt beef that Naldo brought and I put in fridge, Lou. You like salt beef?”
“Do whores screw?”
“I get the sandwiches, then, and you can tell me. I’ll …” Then the telephone began to ring. Six times followed by a pause. Herbie started counting … nine … ten … Then it started to ring again. Naldo signaling that he needed to talk. Herbie Kruger picked up; but did not speak.
