SONGWRITER
I was raised in New York, right? Lower East Side. Five-, six-storey tenement buildings where the front stoop is always cracked and, well, you’ve seen ’em – inside the banisters are wobbly and the stairways ain’t making no promises either… And here we lived: our family and hundreds of others just like us. And every parent or grandparent was – it seemed – an immigrant. And, of course, a Jew.
Come the summer, it’d get so hot first the kids then practically whole families would sleep out on the fire escape or the roof, like it was one huge dormitory. Only this old guy that lived under us – ‘Mr Kosilowski’ – would not sleep out. Rarely left the building at all. Spoke maybe fifty words of American and spent his entire days and evenings trying to get Europe on some home-made radio he’d cooked up.
So, one long summer evening this baby three floors above us starts screaming. From seven o’clock on, for hour after goddam hour. ‘Meningitis’, perhaps – who knows? But the mother can’t be persuaded to either take him away or let go of him… First of all people try to ‘understand’. A few of the younger ones start playing basketball down in the yard just to ignore it. Then the complaints begin. Some begin to get nasty, threaten to kill the baby and the mother both. But pretty soon everyone without exception is going kinda nuts…
And then, all of a sudden, crackling with static, going in and out of tune, is the sweetest music you ever heard.
He starts to play an appropriate music – austere but poignant. As he does so:
Mama said it was a tune ‘from the Old Country’. Bullshit. It was no such thing – it was a song-cycle by Schubert – this I learned later – and it was old Kosilowski playing it on his radio, the volume turned way up high… And now – the damnedest thing – suddenly that baby isn’t screaming anymore and ’cos the baby’s gone quiet after all this time so has everyone else – stopped talking, arguing, laughing, cursing. Even the kids down in the yard have just gathered up their ball and gone inside without a murmur… And still the Schubert goes on and before you know it somehow the whole block has gone to sleep for the night like they’ve taken a drug or heard the greatest lullaby in the world.
Later I heard all manner of things – that the kid had died that night, that on the contrary the kid recovered and grew up to be a genius… To me it didn’t matter. All I knew at that moment was the peace, the silence, the awe that fell on those people like showers of rain. I have only one word for it: ‘religious’.