Maybe You’ll Get a Two-Wheeler
I was buzzing unpleasantly as I accompanied Shlomo down the escalator to his throne, as though low-voltage electricity were running through my body. I tried to attribute it to my lack of sleep, but I knew better.
It absorbed enough of my attention that I walked right past Louie. I didn’t register him until he grabbed the long- sleeved shirt that hung open over my T-shirt. Wearing two shirts was my concession to the December weather.
“Hey,” he said. “Too busy with your new friend to have time for me?”
It was probably exactly the wrong thing to say, although he couldn’t have known it. I was so rattled I went on social automatic pilot. “Hey, Louie,” I said. “Louie, this is—”
“Santa,” Shlomo interrupted, and I registered all the kids standing around, staring at him.
“Right,” I said. “It’s Santa. And Santa, this is, um, Louie.”
“I think we met before,” Louie said. “I never forget a face.”
A kid said to him, “That’s Santa Claus, silly.”
“Oof,” Louie said, slapping his forehead. “I remember you. You brought me that bike.”
“How’d he get it down the chimney?” I asked.
Louie stepped on my foot, hard. “You got things to do, Santa,” he said. “Lot of great-looking kids here.” Louie was totally soft on kids.
Shlomo clapped him on the shoulder, laying it on a little thick, I thought, and said, “Be a good boy, Louie, and maybe some year you’ll get a two-wheeler.” He nodded to the thin, green-clad elf standing beside the throne, and the elf began to ring his brassy bell. I waved at Shlomo and tailed after Louie.
“The bell,” he said over his shoulder. “Isn’t that Salvation Army or something?”
“It’s all Christmas, I guess,” I said. “I am so sick of Christmas.”
“Listen to you,” Louie said. “You know what your problem is?”
“A Russian gangster? The fact that someone tried to kill me last night? Being stuck in this mall? That music?”
“You ain’t bought anything for anybody yet. How can you enjoy Christmas if you’re not thinking about giving people stuff?”
“People,” I said.
“You know,” he said, stopping, “there may be a limit to how long I can stand you, so why don’t you give me my money?”
“Sure.” We were on the ground floor, about halfway to part of the former Gabriel’s that now doubled as a bazaar. In front of a deserted shop with a faded sign on the window reading the tot toggery, I turned my back to the passing shoppers and took out the two envelopes Vlad had given me. “Your seventy-five,” I said, handing him one, “and Rodion’s.” The remaining ten thousand sat fatly in my pocket.
“So,” he said. The envelopes had disappeared, although I couldn’t have told you how. “If you was gonna buy something, where would you go?”
“Beverly Hills.”
“Well, you’re not in Beverly Hills. I’m gonna give you one more chance to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Where?”
I reached into my shirt pocket and handed him the gift certificate. “Here,” I said.
He looked at it, then turned it over. “No limit?”
“I’m special,” I said.
Sam, the proprietor of Sam’s Saddlery, had come a long way from Eastern Europe and had brought a lot of it with him. His shoulders were broad, his complexion was waxen, and his back was curved in a way that suggested hours hunched over a workbench. Scars as angular as graffiti—probably a gift of the tools used to cut leather—covered his hands, and he had a high, thoughtful, even professorial forehead beneath a fringe of short white hair that contrasted with dark, deep-set eyes and a noteworthy nose. He nodded when we came in but didn’t get up from the unpainted wooden stool on which he was sitting, a book in his lap. The place was small and not well lit, just a single glass counter and a couple of tables with gloves, vests, and other merchandise on them. More stuff, mainly belts but also some handbags, hung on the wall. The room smelled like new shoes. A little curtain hung across a rear corner, probably masking a storage area.
“What are you reading?” I asked as Louie examined some supple-looking gloves.
He said, “Sienkiewicz. You know him?” There was a dare in his tone.
“No,” I said. “I’ve heard the name, but—”
“Of course you have,” he said, the sarcasm as thick as frosting. “Who has not?” He held the book up, eyebrows raised in a question. The title was in a language that might have been Polish. “May I continue?”
“Sure,” I said. “We’ll try not to bother you any more than necessary.”
From one of the tables, Louie said, “Nice gloves.”
“They’re for a man,” I said. Behind me, I heard Sam turn a page.
“I’m a man,” Louie said. “Should be obvious after all this time.”
“Someone else, you said, remember? The joy of buying something for someone else?”
“They will fit you good,” Sam said. “They are kid.”
“Kid gloves,” Louie said. “Hear about it all the time, first ones I ever saw.”
Sam said, “Nobel Prize.”
I turned back to him. “Would you spell his name?”
“You cannot follow it. Is Polish name, very long, has many consonants.”
“Oh, what the hell. Give it a try.”
“S-i-e-n-k-i-e-w-i-c-z.” It was a challenge, pure and simple.
Louie said, “How much—” but I held up a hand and, uncharacteristically, he stopped.
I said, “Hendrick, something like that?”
Sam pulled his head back an inch or so, as though I’d swung at him. “Henryk.”
“Sure,” I said. “Christmastime. Um, Nero, the arena, gladiators, Peter and Paul . . .”
“Good,” Sam said, nodding.
“Quo Vadis,” I said. “Not exactly Christmas, but the aftermath. Martyrdom.”
“And conversion. And forgiveness.” He closed the book.
“I read it,” I said, “but in translation. Tell me about this.” I held out the gift certificate. “Do you get anything if I use this?”
“Maybe a small smile from the big man,” he said. “An IOU. I could maybe use to patch the wall.”
“Okay,” I said, tearing it in half. “My friend there would like those gloves, and I’d like to buy them for him, and I want the best belt in the place.”
“I have many good belts,” he said.
Louie said, “You’re giving them to me?”
“Sure. It’s Christmas, right?”
“It’s a miracle,” Louie said. “You shoulda seen this guy fifteen minutes ago,”
Twenty minutes later, I’d paid for the gloves and the belt, and Louie had bought another pair of gloves and a nice suede jacket for Alice, and Sam was bagging the things and saying, “Is very different in Poland. Not all spending money and Ho! Ho! Ho! Is waiting, waiting for the miracle. Christmas Eve, we call Wigilia, you don’t know this word, but it comes from Latin, same word as vigilant. You know, like keeping watch? So, waiting and keeping watch. Nobody eats until dinner, but all day long is cooking, so you are hungry, you are waiting. You remember what it is to be hungry and you remember that there are still hungry people in this rich, rich world.” He finished wrapping Alice’s gloves in tissue and slipped them carefully into the bag.
“So we are making the tree, putting the things on the table. Maybe straw in the corners so we think about the manger, the little king in the manger. When we finally sit, my father, he takes oplatek, a little cookie—no, not cookie but biscuit, thin, like at Communion . . .”
“A wafer,” Louie said, and I remembered that Louie was Catholic.
“Wafer, yes, yes. The rich people have them in fancy box, with the baby on them, but in my house my mother make and she cannot draw, so they plain. And my father, he breaks it in many pieces, and the first piece he gives to my mother because the love between the husband and the wife . . .” He made a peak with the straight fingers of both hands. “It is the roof on the home, it protects everybody. The, the home . . .” He broke off and cleared his throat. “Roof protects the home, and the home protects the family, yes? Then the guests and the children get a little bit. It tastes like nothing, like nothing, but it tastes like heaven. It is for peace in the year to come, for to have enough to eat, for the family to have love. We had dogs and cats, and they got some, too.” He neatly folded the tops of the bags and slid them across the counter to us. “Supposed to be, if the dog and the cat eat oplatek on Christmas Eve, then at midnight they will speak the language of people, but you can only hear if your spirit is clear and not dirty.”
“Did you ever hear them?”
“Here I am,” Sam said, spreading his scarred hands. “Do you think my spirit is clear?”
“Looks good to me,” Louie said.
Sam raised his right hand in benediction and said, “Wesolych Swiat. Is ‘Merry Christmas’ in Polish.”
Louie said to me, “You hear that?”
“I did.”
“Can you say it?”
“No,” I said. “But I may eventually mean it.”