by Joël Dicker
At Halloween, children who were misguided enough to ring their doorbell to ask for candies would be greeted by Grandpa yelling, “Bunch of jerks!” He would leave the door open and Grandma would appear and throw a bucket of ice-cold water over them to chase them away, screaming, “That’s shit!” You would see their little disguised bodies running away, crying, soaked to the skin, through the freezing streets of a New York winter, condemned to a bout of flu.
My grandparents had the instincts of people who had known hunger. At the restaurant, Grandma would systematically empty the bread basket into her purse. Grandpa would immediately ask the waiter to refill it, and Grandma would continue her stocking up. Did you ever have grandparents to whom, in a restaurant, the waiter would say, “From now on we’re going to have to charge you for bread, if you keep asking for more”? Well, I did. And the scene which would ensue was even more embarrassing. “That’s shit!” Grandma would fling at him from her toothless mouth. To which Grandpa would add, “Bunch of jerks!” and throw pieces of bread at the waiter’s chest.
The conversations my mother had with her parents consisted mainly of the words “Stop that now!” Or “Behave yourselves!” Or “Please don’t show me up!” Or “At least make an effort in front of Jesse!”
Often, when we got back from their place, Mom would tell me she was ashamed of her parents. But I accepted them as they were.
Our move to Rego Park had involved a change of school. A few weeks after I started in the new school, one of my classmates decreed, “Your name’s Jesse . . . short for Jessica!” It took less than fifteen minutes for my new nickname to spread. And all day long I had to endure taunts like “Jesse the girl!” or “Jessica the chick!”
That day, I came home from school crying.
“Why are you crying?” Grandpa asked curtly. “Men who cry are girls.”
“My classmates call me Jessica,” I said.
“Well, you see, they’re right.”
Grandpa led me to the kitchen where Grandma was making my after-school snack.
“Why’s he sniveling like that?” Grandma asked Grandpa.
“Because his friends are calling him a girl,” Grandpa said.
“Huh! Men who cry are girls,” Grandma decreed.
“You see!” Grandpa said to me. “At least everyone agrees.”
Since I had not overcome my distress, my grandparents made some useful suggestions.
“Don’t just do nothing, hit them!” Grandma advised me.
“Yeah, hit them!” Grandpa said approvingly, searching in the refrigerator.
“Mom doesn’t want me to get into fights,” I said, hoping that would make them come up with a more dignified response. “Maybe you could go talk to my teacher?”
“Talking is shit!” Grandma said definitively.
“Bunch of jerks!” Grandpa added, taking some smoked meat out of the fridge.
“Hit your grandpa in the belly,” Grandma said.
“Yeah, that’s right, come here and hit me in the belly!” Grandpa said enthusiastically, spitting out pieces of the cold meat he was greedily chewing.
I refused categorically.
“If you don’t do it, that means you’re a little girl!” Grandpa said.
“Which do you prefer, to hit Grandpa or be a little girl?” Grandma said.
Faced with such a choice, I said I preferred to be a little girl rather than hurt Grandpa, and my grandparents called me “little girl” for the rest of the afternoon.
The next day, when I got to their house, a gift was waiting for me on the kitchen table. The words For Jessica were written on a pink Post-it note. I undid the wrapping and found a little girl’s blonde wig.
“From now on, you will wear this wig and we’ll call you Jessica,” Grandma said merrily.
“I don’t want to be a girl,” I protested, as Grandpa put it on my head.
“Then prove it,” Grandma said. “If you aren’t a girl, you’ll be capable of getting the shopping from the trunk of the car and putting it away in the fridge.”
I hastened to do as I was told. But once it was done, and I had demanded to be allowed to take off my wig and recover my dignity, Grandma said it wasn’t enough. She needed more proof. I immediately asked for another challenge, which I again met successfully, but, once more, Grandma was not convinced. It was only after two days spent tidying the garage, rearranging Grandpa’s chest of drawers, fetching the clothes from the dry cleaner’s—which I had to pay for with my pocket money—washing the dishes, and polishing all the shoes in the house that I realized that Jessica was no more than a prisoner, my Grandma’s serf.
Deliverance came with an episode that occurred in the parking lot of a supermarket where we went in my grandparents’ car. As we drove in, Grandpa, who was a terrible driver, hit the bumper of a car that was backing out, although not hard. He and Grandma got out to check on the damage, while I remained in the back seat.
“Bunch of jerks!” Grandpa screamed at the other driver, a woman, and at her husband, who was inspecting the bodywork.
“Mind your language,” the driver said, “or I’ll call the police.”
“That’s shit!” Grandma said with her habitual good timing.
Becoming more agitated, the woman now scolded her husband, who was saying nothing, merely passing a finger sluggishly over the scratch to see if the bumper was damaged or if it was just a surface scrape.
“Say something, Robert, dammit!”
Onlookers were stopping with their shopping carts to observe the scene. The Robert in question looked at his wife without uttering a word.
“Lady,” Grandpa said to the driver, “I suggest you look in the glove compartment, maybe that’s where your husband keeps his balls.”
Robert rose to his full height and lifted a threatening fist. “Are you saying I have no balls?”
Thinking he was about to hit Grandpa, I quickly got out of the car, still with my wig on my head. “Don’t touch my grandpa!”
In the excitement, presumably misled by my blonde locks, Robert said:
“What does this girl want?”
That was too much. When would people finally understand that I wasn’t a girl?
“This is where your balls are!” I cried in my childish voice, landing a well-placed punch that made him slump to the ground.
Grandma grabbed me, threw me in the back seat of our car, and climbed in after me. Grandpa, already back in the driver’s seat, set off at speed. Both “Bunch of jerks!” and “That’s shit!” were again heard by the witnesses, who took the license number of Grandpa’s car and did indeed call the police.
Several good things came from this incident. One of them was the arrival of Ephraim and Becky Jenson in my life. They were my grand-parents’ neighbors and I had seen them occasionally. I knew that Becky sometimes went shopping for Grandma and that Ephraim did little favors for Grandpa—when, for example, the changing of a light bulb involved the skills of a tightrope walker. I also knew that they had no children, because one day Grandma had asked them:
“Don’t you have any children?”
“No,” Becky had replied.
“That’s shit!” Grandma had said, sympathetically.
“I quite agree with you.”
But it was soon after the incident in the parking lot of the mall in Rego and our hasty return from the supermarket that my relationship with them blossomed in earnest, when the police knocked at my grandparents’ door.
“Has someone died?” Grandpa asked the two officers as they stood outside on the landing.
“No, sir. It seems you and a little girl were involved in an incident in the parking lot of the mall in Rego.”
“The parking lot of the mall?” Grandpa repeated in an outraged tone. “Never been there in my life!”
“Sir, a vehicle registered in your name and corresponding to the one parked outside your house has been formally identified by a number of witnesses after a man was attacked by a little blonde girl.”
Unaware of what was going on, I came to the door to see who Grandpa was talking to. I had my wig on my head.
“That’s the little girl!” the other officer cried.
“I’m not a little girl!” I said, assuming a deep voice.
“Don’t touch my Jessica!” Grandpa yelled, placing his body full in the doorway.
It was at this point that my grandparents’ neighbor, Ephraim Jenson, made his entrance. Alerted by the rumpus, he came out and brandished a police officer’s badge. I didn’t grasp what he told the other two officers, but I realized that Ephraim was an important policeman. It only took a few words from him, and his colleagues apologized to Grandpa and left.
From that day on, Grandma, who had a certain awe of authority and uniforms from her days in Odessa, elevated Ephraim to the ranks of the just. And to thank him, every Friday afternoon she made a delicious cheesecake, such as only she knew how, filling the kitchen with delicious smells when I returned from school. I knew I wouldn’t get even the smallest portion. When the cake was ready and wrapped, Grandma would say to me. “Take this to them, Jesse. That man is our Raoul Wallenberg!” I would present myself at the Jensons’ and, in handing over the cake, had to say these words to them: “My grandparents thank you for saving our lives.”
Going to the Jensons’ every week as I did, I began to be invited to come in and stay for a while. Becky would say that the cake was enormous and there were only two of them, and, despite my protests, she would cut off a piece which I would eat in their kitchen with a glass of milk. I liked them a lot. Ephraim fascinated me and in Becky I found the mother’s love that I missed, since I didn’t see enough of my own mother. Before long, Becky and Ephraim were suggesting I go with them to Manhattan at weekends, to walk about or visit exhibits. They were getting me away from my grandparents. Whenever they rang the bell and asked my grandma if I could go with them, I had an immense feeling of joy.
As for the little blonde girl who punched people in the balls, she was never tracked down. Jessica disappeared forever and I never again had to wear that hideous wig. Sometimes, in moments of distraction, Grandma would remember Jessica. In the middle of a family meal, with twenty people around the table, she would suddenly declare:
“Jessica died in a supermarket parking lot.”
A long silence would follow. Then a cousin would venture to ask:
“Jessica who?”
“It must have been something that happened in the war,” someone else would say.
And the whole company would assume a grave expression and lapse again into silence, because nobody ever talked about Odessa.
After that business with Robert’s balls, Grandpa decided that I was now well and truly a boy, and even a brave boy. As a reward, he took me one afternoon to the back room of a kosher butcher, where an old man, originally from Bratislava, gave boxing lessons. The old man was the former butcher—the store was now run by his sons—and he spent his days giving the grandchildren of his friends free lessons in boxing, which consisted basically of making us punch stale carcasses while, in a voice with a hint of a faraway accent, he told us about the finals of the 1931 Czechoslovakian boxing championship.
So it was that I learned how every afternoon, in Rego Park, a coterie of old gentlemen, on the spurious pretext of wanting to spend time with their grandchildren, escaped from the family home and came to the butcher’s. They would sit on plastic chairs, wrapped in their coats, and drink black coffee and smoke, while a whole lot of street boys banged away at quarters of meat suspended from the ceiling. And when we were tired, we would sit on the floor and listen to the stories of the old man from Bratislava.
For months, I spent all my late afternoons boxing in the butcher’s, in the greatest secrecy. It was thought I might have a gift for boxing and the rumor attracted lots of old men, with a thousand different smells, who packed into that cold room to watch me, sharing cans of produce from Eastern Europe that they spread on black bread. I would hear them encouraging me: “Go on, boy!”, “Harder! Much harder!” And Grandpa, overflowing with pride, would say to anyone who would listen, “He’s my grandson.”
Grandpa had strongly advised me to say nothing to my mother about our new activity, and I was sure he was right. He had replaced the wig with a brand-new sports outfit that I kept in his house and that Grandma washed for me every evening so that it would be clean the next day.
For months, my mother suspected nothing. Until one April afternoon when the local hygiene service, accompanied by the police, raided that insalubrious butcher’s shop after a wave of food poisoning. I remember the incredulous looks of the inspectors when they came into the back room, to be stared at by a bunch of boys in boxing kit and a whole lot of old men, smoking and coughing, amid an acrid smell that was a mixture of sweat and cigarettes.
“You sell meat that kids have been hitting?” one of the officers asked, unable to believe his eyes.
“Oh, yes,” the old man from Bratislava replied, quite matter-of-factly. “It’s good for the meat, makes it tender. And anyway, they wash their hands before the class.”
“That’s not true,” one of the children whined. “We never wash our hands!”
“You’re out of the club!” the old man from Bratislava fired back.
“Is this a boxing club or a butcher’s shop?” another of the officers said, scratching his head uncomprehendingly.
“A bit of both,” the old man said.
“The room isn’t even refrigerated,” one of the inspectors said in a shocked tone as he took notes.
“It’s cold outside and we keep the windows open.”
The police had informed my mother. But being stuck at work, she had called my grandparents’ neighbor Ephraim, who came as quickly as he could and took me back to the house.
“I’m staying with you until your mother gets back,” he said.
“What kind of policeman are you?” I asked him.
“I work in homicide.”
“Are you important?”
“Yes, I’m a captain.”
I was very impressed. I told him what worried me.
“I hope Grandpa won’t be in trouble with the police.”
“With the police, no,” he said, with a reassuring smile. “But with your mother . . .”
As Ephraim had predicted, my mother spent days on end screaming at Grandpa over the telephone. “Daddy, have you gone crazy?” She told him I could have hurt myself, or gotten punch-drunk, or I don’t know what. But I was enchanted: Grandpa, of blessed memory, had taken me on the road of life. And he wasn’t going to stop there, since, after initiating me into boxing, it was he who, like a magician, brought Natasha into my life.
That happened a few years later, when I had just turned seventeen. I had recently transformed the big room in my grandparents’ basement into a gym where I had my weights and my punching bag. I trained there every day. One day, in the middle of the summer vacation, Grandma announced: “Clear your shitty basement. We need the room.” When I asked the reason for my eviction, she explained that they were generously welcoming a distant female cousin from Canada. Generously, my ass! I was sure they were asking her for rent. By way of compensation, they suggested I move to the garage, where I could continue my exercises amid the smells of motor oil and dust. During the days that followed, I cursed this fat, old, stinking cousin who was stealing my space. I could already picture her with her hairy chin, thick eyebrows, yellowing teeth, and foul breath, dressed in clothes from the Soviet era. Worse still, the day she arrived, I had to fetch her from the station in Jamaica, Queens, where she was arriving by train from Toronto.
Grandpa forced me to take along a placard with her name on it in Cyrillic.
“I’m not her driver!” I said angrily. “Want me to put on a cap while you’re at it?”
“Without the sign, you’ll never find her.”
I left, furious, carrying the sign desp
ite my protests, but swearing I wouldn’t use it.
When I got to the concourse of the station in Jamaica, I wandered through the crowd of travelers, quite lost, and after approaching a few panicked old women who said they were not the disgusting cousin, I was obliged to resort to my ridiculous piece of cardboard.
I remember the moment I saw her. That girl in her twenties, with the laughing eyes, the fine, gorgeous curls, and the sparkling teeth, who came and stood in front of me and read my sign.
“You’re holding your sign upside down,” she said.
I shrugged. “What the hell business is it of yours? What are you, the sign police?”
“Don’t you speak Russian?”
“No,” I said, turning the sign the right way up.
“Krasavchik,” the girl said, laughing.
“Who are you anyhow?” I asked irritably.
“I’m Natasha,” she said with a smile. “That’s my name on your sign.”
Natasha had entered my life.
*
From the day Natasha arrived at my grandparents’, all our lives were turned upside down. The cousin I had imagined to be old and horrible turned out to be a wonderful, fascinating young woman who had come to New York to study cookery.
She upset our habits. She took over the sitting room, where nobody ever went, settling there after her classes to read or go over her lessons. She would curl up on the couch with a cup of tea after lighting scented candles which gave the room a delightful smell. Previously so gloomy, it became the room where everybody wanted to be. When I got back from school, I would find Natasha there, her nose in her papers, and, settled in armchairs facing her, Grandma and Grandpa drinking tea and gazing at her in admiration.
Whenever she wasn’t in the sitting room, she’d be cooking. At all hours of the day or night. The house filled up with smells I had never known. Dishes were constantly being prepared, the fridge was always full. And when Natasha cooked, my grandparents, sitting at their little table, would watch her with fascination and relish the dishes she set in front of them.
The basement room that became her bedroom she turned into a comfortable little palace, papered in warm colors, where incense was permanently burning. She would spend her weekends there, devouring piles of books. I often went down as far as her door, intrigued by what was going on inside the room, but without ever daring to knock. In the end Grandma, seeing me hanging around the house, prodded me into action. “Don’t just stand there doing nothing,” she would say, giving me a tray loaded with a steaming samovar and freshly baked cookies. “Take that and be welcoming to our guest, will you?”
